Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland Part 3

'Je termine en vous presentant mes respectueuses salutations. Vous noublierez pas ce que vous mavez promis'[22]St. Georges, le 24 Juillet, 1864. _Dimanche_.

'JULES MIGNOT.'

Instead of three francs the quintal, Mignot had previously told me that he got four francs, delivered at Gland, and five at Geneva. His ordinary staff during the time of the exploitation was ten men to carry and load, and two to cut the ice in the cave.

It was a matter of considerable importance to catch the Poste at Gimel, and the two Swiss groaned loudly on the consequent pace, unnecessary, as far as they were concerned, for the Poste was nothing to them. As a general rule, the Swiss of this district cannot walk so fast as their Burgundian or French neighbours, unless it is very much to their interest to do so, and then they can go fast enough. A legend is still preserved in the valleys of Joux and Les Rousses, to the following effect. While the Franche Comte was still Spanish, in 1648, commissioners were appointed to fix the boundaries between Berne and Burgundy, on the other side of the range of hill we were now descending, and they decided that one of the boundary stones must be placed at the distance of a common league from the Lake of Les Rousses. Unfortunately, no one could say what a common league was, beyond the vague definition of 'an hour's walk;' so two men were started from the sh.o.r.e of the lake, the one a Burgundian and the other a Swiss, with directions to walk for an hour down the Orbe towards Chenit, the stone to be placed half-way between the points they should respectively reach at the end of the hour. It was for the interest of the Franche Comte that the stone should be as near the lake as possible, and accordingly the Swiss champion made such walking as had never been seen before, and gained for Berne a considerable amount of territory. There was no such tragic result in this case as that which induced the Carthaginians to pay divine honours to the brothers whose speed, on a like occasion, had added an appreciable amount to the possessions of the republic.

At length we reached the point where the roads for Gimel and S.

Georges separate, and there, under a glorious sapin, we said our adieux, and wished our _au revoirs_, and settled those little matters which the best friends must settle, when one is of the nature of a monsieur, and the others are guides. They burdened their souls with many politenesses, and so we parted. The inclemency of the weather was such, that the people in the lower country asked, as they pa.s.sed, whether snow had fallen in the mountains, and the cold rain continued unceasingly down to the large plain on which the Federal Camp of Biere[23] is placed. Here for a few moments the sun showed itself, lighting up the white tents, and displaying to great advantage the ma.s.ses of scented orchises, and the feathery _reine-des-pres_, which hemmed the road in on either side. All through the earlier part of the day, flowers had forced themselves upon our notice as mere vehicles for collected rain, when we came in contact with them; but now, for a short time, they resumed their proper place,--only for a short time, for the rain soon returned, and did not cease till midnight. Not all the garden scenery about Aubonne and Allaman (_ad Lemannum_), nor all the vineyards which yield the choice white wine of the Cote, could counterbalance the united discomfort of the rain, and the cold which had got into the system in the two glacieres; and matters were not mended by the discovery that _Bradshaw_ was treacherous, and that a junction with dry baggage at Neufchatel could not be effected before eleven at night.

There are some curious natural phenomena in this neighbourhood, due to the subterranean courses which the fissured limestone of the Jura affords to the meteoric waters. Not far from Biere, the river Aubonne springs out at the bottom of an amphitheatre of rock, receiving additions soon after from a group of twenty natural pits, which the peasants call unfathomable--an epithet freely applied to the strange holes found in the Jura. It is remarkable that the way seems to stand at different levels in the various pits.[24] The plain of Champagne, in which they occur, is unlike the surrounding soil in being formed of calcareous detritus, evidently brought down by some means or other from the Jura, and is dry and parched up to the very edges of the pits. The Toleure, a tributary of the Aubonne, frequently large enough to be called a confluent, flows out from the foot of a wall of rock composed of regular parallelopipeds, and in the spring, when the snows are melting freely, its sources burst out at various levels of the rock. Farther to the west, the Versoie, famous for its trout, pours forth a full-sized stream near the Chateau of Divonne, which is said to take its name (_Divorum unda_) from this phenomenon. Pa.s.sing to the northern slope of this range of the Jura, the Orbe is a remarkable example of the same sort of thing, flowing out peacefully in very considerable bulk from an arch at the bottom of a perpendicular rock of great height. This river no doubt owes its origin to the superfluous waters of the Lake of Brenets, which have no visible outlet, and sink into fissures and _entonnoirs_ in the rock at the edge of the lake. Notwithstanding that the lake is three-quarters of a league distant, horizontally, and nearly 700 feet higher, the belief had always been that it was the source of the stream, and in 1776 this was proved to be the fact. For some years before that date, the waters of the Lake of Joux had been inconveniently high, and the people determined to clean out the _entonnoirs_ and fissures of the Lake of Brenets, which is only separated from the Lake of Joux by a narrow tongue of land, in the expectation that the water would then pa.s.s away more freely. In order to reach the fissures, they dammed up the outlet of the upper into the lower lake; but the pressure on the embankment became too great, and the waters burst through with much violence, creating an immense disturbance in the lake; and the Orbe, which had always been perfectly clear, was troubled and muddy for some little time. The source of the Loue, near Pontarlier, is more striking than even that of the Orbe.[25]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: A point common to the two sections, which are made by planes nearly at right angles to each other.]

[Footnote 22: The dimensions of the two caves, and of the various ma.s.ses of ice.]

[Footnote 23: The Cartulary of Lausanne states that the wealthy village of Biere received its name from the following historical fact:--In 522, the Bishop of Lausanne, S. Prothais, was superintending the cutting of wood in the Jura for his cathedral, when he died suddenly, and was carried down on a litter to a place where a proper _bier_ could he procured, whence the place was named Biere.]

[Footnote 24: The most curious pit of this kind is the _frais-puits_ of Vesoul, in the Vosgian Jura, which pours forth immense quant.i.ties of water after rain has fallen in the neighbourhood. The water rushes out in the shape of a fountain, and on one occasion, in November 1557, saved the town of Vesoul from pillage by a pa.s.sing army. This pit is carefully described by M. Ha.s.senfratz, in the _Journal de Physique_, t. xx. p. 259 (an. 1782), where he says that Caesar was driven away from the town of Vesoul, which he had intended to besiege, by the floods of water poured forth from the _frais-puits_. I know of no such incident in Caesar's life, though M. Ha.s.senfratz quotes Caesar's own words: the town of Vesoul, too, had no historical existence before the 9th or 10th century of our era. There is also a pit near Vesoul which contains icicles in summer, and may be the same as the _frais-puits_, for the old historian of Franche Comte, Gollut, in describing the latter, mentions that it is so cold that no one cares to explore it (pp. 91. 92).]

[Footnote 25: See p. 122.]

CHAPTER V.

THE GLACIeRE OF THE GRaCE-DIEU, OR LA BAUME, NEAR BESANcON.

The grand and lovely scenery of the Val de Travers has at length been opened up for the ordinary tourist world, by the railway which connects Pontarlier with Neufchatel. The beauties of the valley are an unfortunate preparation for the dull expanse of ugly France which greets the traveller pa.s.sing north from the former town; but the country soon a.s.sumes a pleasanter aspect, and nothing can be more charming than the soft green slopes, dotted with the richest pines, which form the approach to the station of Boujeailles. It is impossible for the most careless traveller to avoid observing the ill effects produced upon the trees on the south side of the forest of Chaux, by the crowded and neglected state in which they have been left, and the wet state of the soil. The branches become covered with moss, which first kills them, and then breaks them off, so that many tall and tapering sapins point their heads to the sky with trunks wholly guiltless of branches; while in other cases, where decay has not yet gone so far, the branches wear the appearance of gigantic stags' horns, with the velvet; and when a number of these interlace, the mosses unite in large dark patches, giving a cedar-like air to the scene of ruin.

Up to this point, an elderly Frenchman in the carriage had been extremely offensive, from the evil odour of his Macintosh coat; but in answer to a remark upon the improvement which the railway would effect, by providing ventilation for the forest, he gave so much information on that subject, and gave it so pleasantly, and had evidently so good a knowledge of the topography of Franche Comte, that his coat speedily lost its smell, and we became excellent friends.

It is a tantalising thing to be whirled on a hot and dusty day through districts famous for their wines, the dust and heat standing out in more painful colours by contrast with the recollection of cooling draughts which other occasions have owed to such vineyards; though, after all, the true method of facing heat with success is to drink no wine. At any rate, the vineyards of Arbois must always be interesting, and if the stories of the Templars' orgies be true, we may be sure that the chapelry which they possessed in that town would be a favourable place of residence with the order; possibly Rule XVI. might there be somewhat relaxed. 'The good wine of Arbois,' _la meilleure cave de Bourgougne_, a judicious old writer says, had free entry into all the towns of the Comte; and when Burgundy was becoming imperial, Maximilian extended this privilege through all the towns of the empire. A hundred years later, it had so high a character, that the troops of Henri IV. turned away from the town, announcing that they did not wish to attack _ceulx estoient du naturel de leur vin, qui frappe partout_;[26] and the king was forced to come himself, with his constable and marshals, to beat down the walls, in the course of which undertaking his men felt the vigour of the inhabitants to a greater extent than he liked. It is said that when he had taken the town, the munic.i.p.ality received him in state, and supplied him with wine of the country. He praised the wine very highly, on which one of the body had the ill taste to a.s.sure him that they had a better wine than that.

'You keep it, perhaps,' was the royal rebuke, 'for a better occasion.'

Henry had a great opinion of this wine; and the Duc de Sully states, in his Memoirs, that when the Duc de Mayenne retired from the league against the king, and came to Monceaux to tender his allegiance, Henry punished him for past offences by walking so fast about the grounds of the chateau, that the poor duke, what with his sciatica, and what with his fat, at last told him with an expressive gesture that a minute more of it would kill him. The king thereupon let him go, and promised him some _vin d'Arbois_ to set him right again.[27]

The present appearance of the town, as seen from the high level followed by the railway, scarcely recalls the time when Arbois was known as _le jardin de n.o.blesse_, and Barbarossa dated thence his charters, or Jean Sans-peur held there the States of Burgundy. Gollut[28] tells a story of a dowager of Arbois, mother-in-law to Philip V. and Charles IV. of France, which outdoes legend of Bishop Hatto. Mahaut d'Artois was an elderly lady remarkable for her charities, and was by consequence always surrounded by large crowds of poor folk during her residence at the Chatelaine, the ruins of which lie a mile or two from Arbois. On the occasion of a severe famine in Burgundy, she collected a band of her mendicant friends in a stable, and burned them all, saying that '_par pitie elle hauoit faict cela, considerant les peines que ces pauvres debuoient endurer en temps de si grande et tant estrange famine_.'

There is a Val d'Amour near Arbois, but the more beautiful valley of that name lies between Dole and Besancon, and, as we pa.s.sed its neighbourhood, my friend with the Macintosh informed me that as it was clear from my questions that I was drawing up a history of the Franche Comte, he must beg me to insert a legend respecting the origin of this name, Val d'Amour, which, he believed, had never appeared in print. I disclaimed the history, but accepted the legend, and here it is:--The Seigneur of Chissey was to marry the heiress of a neighbouring seigneurie, and, it is needless to add, she was very lovely, and he was handsome and brave. A lake separated the two chateaux, and the young man not unfrequently returned by water rather late in the evening; and so it fell out that one night he was drowned. The lady naturally grieved sorely for her loss, and put in train all possible means for recovering her lover's body. Time, however, pa.s.sed on, and no success attended her efforts, till at length she caused the hills which dammed up the waters to be pierced, and then De Chissey was found. A village sprang up near the outlet thus made, and took thence its name Percee, or, as men now spell it, Parcey; and the rich vegetation which speedily covered the valley, where once the lake had been, gave it such an air of happiness and beauty, that the people remembered its origin, and called it the Valley of Love. It is a fact that Parcy was not always so spelled, for n.o.ble Constantin Thiehault, Sieur de Perrecey, was a witness to the treaty for the transference of a miraculous host from Faverney to Dole in 1608, and old maps and books give it as Perrecey and Parrecey indifferently. The De Chisseys, whose names may be found among the female prebends of Chateau-Chalon, with its necessary sixteen quarters, filled a considerable place in the history of the Comte from the Crusades downwards, and known as _les Fols de Chissey_, the brave[29]

and dashing, and witty De Chisseys--qualities which no doubt were possessed by the poor young man for whom the fair Chatelaine drained the Val d'Amour.

As we drew nearer to Besancon, each turn of the small streams, and each low rounded hill, might have served as an ill.u.s.tration to Caesar's 'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a battle, there was always a _proximus collis_ for the conquered party to retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of gra.s.s-land between their foot and the stream.

The Frenchman knew his Caesar, but he put that general in the fourth century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the indelible result of extracting the princ.i.p.al parts of his verbs, and the nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of small boys. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besancon, and was greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him Caesar's description of his native town. He wholly denied the amphitheatre with which one of our handbooks has gifted it; and this denial was afterwards echoed by every one in Besancon, some even thinking it necessary to explain the difference between an amphitheatre and an arch of triumph, the latter still existing in the town. The Jesuit Dunod relates that the amphitheatre was to be seen at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the ruined state in which the Alans and Vandals had left it after their successful siege in 406. It seems to have stood near the present site of the Madeleine.

It was a great satisfaction to find that the Frenchman had himself visited the glaciere which was the object of my search, and was able to give some idea as to the manner of reaching it, for my information on the subject was confined to a vague notice that there was an ice-cave five leagues from Besancon. As so often happened in other cases, he advised me not to go to it, but rather, if I must see a cave, to go to the Grotto of Ocelles,[30] a collection of thirty or more caverns and galleries near the Doubs, below Besancon. Seeing, however, that I was bent on visiting the glaciere, he advised me not to go on Sunday, for the Cardinal Archbishop had ordered the Trappists at the Chartreuse near not to receive guests on that day; while Sat.u.r.day, he thought, was almost as bad, for nothing better than an omelette could be obtained on days of abstinence. Sat.u.r.day, then, was clearly the day to be chosen.

The first sight of Besancon explains at once why Caesar was so anxious to forestall Ariovistus by occupying Vesontio, although the hill on which the citadel stands is not so striking as the similar hill at Salins, and the engines of modern warfare would promptly print their telegrams on every stone and man in the place, from the neighbouring heights. The French Government has wisely taken warning from the bombardment by the Allies, and has covered the heights which command it on either side with friendly fortifications, in which lie the keys of the place. Historically, Besancon is a place of great interest. It witnessed the catastrophe of Julius Vindex, who had made terms with Rufus, the general sent against him by Nero, but was attacked by the troops of Rufus before they learned the alliance concluded between the two generals. Vindex was so much grieved by the slaughter of his troops, and the blow thus struck, by an unhappy accident, at his designs against the emperor, that he put himself to death at the gates of the town, while the fight was still going on.[31] The Bisuntians claim to themselves the glory acquired by the Sequani, whose chief city Vesontio was, by the overthrow of Julius Sabinus, who a.s.serted that he was the grandson of a son of Julius Caesar, and proclaimed himself emperor in the time of Vespasian. The Sequani proceeded against him of their own accord, and conquered him in the interest of the reigning emperor; and he and his wife Peponilla lived hid in a tomb for nine years. Here two sons were born to them; and when they were all discovered and carried to Rome, Peponilla prettily told the emperor that she had brought up two sons in the tomb, in order that there might be other voices to intercede for her husband's life besides her own. They were, however, put to death.[32]

To judge from the style of the hotels, Besancon is not visited by many English travellers; and yet it well repays a visit, providing those who care for such things with a full average of vaulted pa.s.sages, and feudal gateways, and arcaded court-yards, with much less than the average of evil smell. There are gates of all shapes and times--Louis-Quatorze towers, and fortifications specially constructed under Vauban's own eye; while the approach to the town, from the land side, is by a tunnel, cut through the live rock which forms a solid chord to the arc described by the course of the river Doubs. This excavation, called appropriately the _Porte Taillee_, is attributed by the various inhabitants to pretty nearly all the famous emperors and kings who have lived from Julius Caesar to Louis XIV.: it owes its origin, no doubt, to the construction of the aqueduct which formerly brought into the town the waters pouring out of the rock at Arcier, two leagues from Besancon, and was the work probably of M. Aurelius and L. Verus. Local antiquaries a.s.sign the aqueduct to Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, apparently for no better reason than because he built a similar work in Rome. The arch of triumph[33] at the entrance to the upper town has been an inexhaustible subject of controversy for many generations of antiquaries, and up to the time of Dunod was generally attributed to Aurelian: that historian, however, believed that its sculptures represented the education of Crispus, the son of Constantine, and that the name Chrysopolis, by which Besancon was very generally known in early times, was only a corruption of Crispopolis. Earlier writers are in favour of the natural derivation of Chrysopolis, and a.s.sert that when the Senones lost their famous chief, the Brennus of Roman history, before Delphos, they built a town where Byzantium afterwards stood, and called it Bisantium and Chrysopolis, in memory of their city of those names at home.

The Hotel du Nord is a rambling old house, comfortable after French ideas of comfort, and rejoicing in an excellent cuisine; though it is true that on one occasion, at least, _haricots verts a l'Anglaise_ meant a ma.s.s of fibrous greens, swimming in a most un-English sea of artificial fat. It is a good place for studying the natural manners of the untravelled Frenchman, who there sits patiently at the table, for many minutes before dinner is served, with his napkin tucked in round his neck, and his countenance composed into a look of much resignation.

The waiters are for the most part shock-headed boys, in angular-tail coats well up in the back of the neck, who frankly confess, when any order out of the common run of orders is given, that a German patois from the left bank of the Rhine is their only extensive language. One of these won my eternal grat.i.tude by providing a clean fork at a crisis between the last savouries and the _plat doux_; for the usual practice with the waiters, when anyone neglected to secure his knife and fork for the next course, was to slip the plate from under the unwonted charge, and leave those instruments sprawling on the tablecloth in a vengeful mess of gravy. Chickens' bones were there dealt with on all sides as nature perhaps intended that they should be dealt with, namely, by taking them between finger and thumb, and removing superfluities with the teeth; and French officers with wasp-like waists, and red trousers gathered in plaits to match, boldly despised the sophistication of spoons, and ate their vanilla cream like men, by the help of bread and fingers. The manners and broken French of the stranger formed an open and agreeable subject of conversation, and the table was much quieter than a Frenchman's _table d'hote_ is sometimes known to be: on one occasion, however, all decorum was scattered to the winds, and the guests rushed out into the court-yard with disordered bibs and tuckers, on the announcement by the head waiter of a '_chien a l'Anglaise_, not so high as a mustard-pot,' which one of the company promptly bought for twenty-four francs, commencing its education on the spot by a lesson in cigar-smoking.

It frequently happens in France that _cafe noir_ is a much more ready and abundant tap than water, and so it was here; notwithstanding which, the bedroom apparatus was most comfortable and complete. The chambermaid was a boy, and under his auspices a sheet of postage-stamps and a lead pencil vanished from the table. When it was suggested to him that possibly they had been blown into some corner, and so swept away, he brought a dustpan from a distant part of the house, and miraculously discovered the stamps perched upon a small handful of dust therein, deferring the discovery and his consequent surprise till he reached my room. It was curious that the stamps, which had before been in an open sheet, were now folded neatly together, and curled into the shape of a waistcoat-pocket. He was inexorable about the pencil.

No certain information could be obtained in the hotel respecting the glaciere; so an owner of carriages was summoned, and consulted as to the best means of getting there. He naturally recommended that one of his own carriages should be taken as far as the Abbey of Grace-Dieu, and that we should start at five o'clock the next morning, with a driver who knew the way to the glaciere from the point at which the carriage must be left.[34] Five o'clock seemed very early for a drive of fifteen miles; but the man a.s.serted that instead of five leagues it was a good seven or eight, and so it turned out to be. This glaciere may be called a historical glaciere, being the only one which has attracted general attention; and the mistake about its distance from Besancon arose very many years ago, and has been perpetuated by a long series of copyists.

The distance may not be more than five leagues when measured on the map with a ruler; but until the tunnels and via-ducts necessary for a crow line are constructed, the world must be content to call it seven and a half at least. The man bargained for two days' pay for the carriage, on the plea that the horse would be so tired the next day that he would not be able to do any work, and as that day was Sunday, the great day for excursions, it would be a dead loss. It so happened that the charge for two days, fifteen francs, was exactly what I paid elsewhere for one day, so there was no difficulty about the price.

We started, accordingly, at five o'clock. The day was delightfully fine, and in spite of the driver's peculiarity of speech, caused by a short tongue, and aggravated by a villanous little black pipe clutched between his remaining teeth, we got through a large amount of question and answer respecting the country through which we pa.s.sed. Of course, the reins were carried through rings low down on the kicking-strap, ingeniously placed so that each whisk of the horse's tail caught one or other rein; and then the process of extraction was a somewhat dangerous one, for there was no splashboard, and the driver had to stow his legs away out of reach, before commencing operations. The landlord of the inn at Muhlinen, on the road from Kandersteg to Thun, has a worse arrangement than even this, both reins pa.s.sing through one small leather loop at the top of the kicking-strap; so that when the horse on one occasion ran away down a steep hill in consequence of the break refusing to act, the man in his flurry could not tell which rein to pull, to steer clear of the wall of rock on one side, and the unfenced slope on the other, and finally flung himself out in despair, leaving his English cargo behind.

There has evidently been at some time a vast lake near Besancon, and the old bottom of the lake is now covered with heavy meadow-gra.s.s, while the corn-fields and villages creep down from the higher grounds, on the remains of promontories which stretch out into the plain. The people are in constant fear of inundation, and the driver informed me that in winter large parts of the plain are flooded, the superfluous waters vanishing after a time into a great hole, whose powers of digestion he could not explain. The villages which lie on the sh.o.r.es, as it were, of the lake, rejoice in church-towers with bulbous domes, rising out of rich cl.u.s.ters of trees, and the early bells rang out through the crisp air with something of a Belgian sweetness. Farther on, the road pa.s.sed through glorious wheat, clean as on an English model farm, save where some picturesque farmer had devoted a corner to the growth of poppies.

Here, as elsewhere, potatoes did not grow in ridges, but each root had a little hillock to itself; an unnatural early training which may account for the strange appearance of _pommes de terre au naturel_.

Anyone who has driven through the morning air for an hour or two before breakfast, will understand the satisfaction with which, about seven o'clock, we deciphered a complicated milestone into 14 kilometres from Besancon, which meant breakfast at the next village, Nancray. The breakfast was simple enough, owing to the absence of b.u.t.ter and other things, and consisted of coffee in its native pot, and dry bread: the milk was set on the table in the pan in which it had been boiled, and a soup-ladle and a French wash-hand basin took the place of cup and spoon.

A cat kept the door against sundry large and tailless dogs, whose appet.i.tes had not gone with their tails; and an old woman kindly delivered a lecture on the most approved method of making a ptisan from the flowers of the lime-tree, and on the many medicinal properties of that decoction, to which she attributed her good health at so advanced an age. I silently supplemented her peroration by attributing her garrulity to a more stimulating source.

When we started again, it was time to learn something about the scene of our further proceedings, and the driver enunciated his views on monks in general, _a propos_ to the Convent of Grace-Dieu, the Chartreuse at which we were to leave our carriage, and obtain food for man and horse.

The Brothers, he said, were possessed of many mills, and were in consequence enormously rich. Among the products of their industry, a liqueur known as _Chartreuse_ seemed to fill a high place in his esteem, for he considered it to be better--and he said it as if that comparative led into an eighth heaven--better even than absinthe. I had an opportunity of tasting this liqueur some weeks after, a few minutes below the summit of Mont Blanc, and certainly no one would suspect its great strength, which is entirely disguised by an innocent and insidious sweetness, as unlike absinthe as anything can possibly be: impressions, however, respecting meat and drink, and all other matters, are not very trustworthy when received near the top of the Calotte. It has lately been found that the worthy Brothers of the Grande Chartreuse have been systematically defrauding the revenue, by returning their profits on the manufacture of this liqueur at something merely nominal as compared with the real gains. I could not learn whether the ceremony of blessing each batch of the liqueur, before sending it out to intoxicate the world, is performed with so much solemnity at Grace-Dieu as at Gren.o.ble; and, indeed, it rests only on the a.s.sertion of the short-tongued Bisuntian that the manufacture is carried on at all at the former place.[35]

Having communicated such information as he possessed, the man seemed to think he had a right to learn something in return, and administered various questions respecting customs which he believed to prevail in England. He evidently did not credit the denial of the truth of what he had heard, nor yet the a.s.sertion, in answer to another question, that English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English are a sad and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made of this parasite by young people in the country at Christmas-time. Instead, however, of being thereby impressed with our national liveliness, he looked with a sort of supercilious contempt upon a people who could require the intervention or sanction of anything external in such a matter, and turned the conversation to some more worthy subject.

At length we pa.s.sed into a pleasant valley, with thrushes singing, and much chirping of those smaller birds, in the murder of which, sitting, consists _le sport_ in the eyes of many gentlemen of France. Up to this point, nothing could have been more unlike the scenery which I had so far found to be a.s.sociated with glacieres; but now the country became slightly more Jurane, and limestone precipices on a small scale rose up on either hand, decked with the corbel towers which result from the weathering of the rock. It was the Jura in softer as well as smaller type, for all the desolate wildness which characterises the more rocky part of that range was gone, and there were no signs of the grand pine-scenery, or needle-foliage, as the Germans call it; the trees were all oak and ash and beech, and the rocks were much more neat and orderly, and of course less grand, than their contorted kindred farther south. The valley speedily became very narrow, and a final bend brought us face-to-face with the buildings of the Abbaye de Grace-Dieu, striking from their position--filling, as they do, the breadth of the valley,--but in no way remarkable architecturally. The journey had been so long that it was now ten o'clock; and as we were due in Besancon at five in the evening, we put the horse up as quickly as possible, in a shed provided by the Brothers, and set off on foot for the glaciere, half an hour distant. About a mile and a half from the convent, the valley comes to an end, the rocks on the opposite sides approaching so close to each other as only to leave room for a large flour-mill, belonging to the Brothers, and for the escape-channel of the stream which works the mill. This building is quite new, and might almost be taken for a fortification against inroads by the head of the valley, especially as the words _Posuerunt me custodem_ appear on the face, applying, however, to an image of the Virgin, which presides over the establishment. The monks have expended their superfluous time and energies upon the erection of crosses of all sizes on every projecting peak and point of rock, one cross more sombre than the rest marking the scene of a recent death. As I had no means of determining the elevation of this district above the sea,[36] I made enquiries as to the climate in winter; and one of the Brothers told me, that it was an unusual thing with them to have a fall of snow amounting to two joints of a remarkably dirty finger.

At the mill, the path turns up the steep wooded hill on the right, and leads through young plantations to a small cottage near the glaciere, where the plantations give place to a well-grown beech wood. Here my conductor startled me by announcing that there was 20 centimes to pay to the farmer of the cave for entrance; an announcement which seemed to take all the pleasure out of the expedition, and invested it with the disagreeable character of sightseeing. The poor driver thought, no doubt, with some trepidation upon the small amount of _pour-boire_ he could expect from a monsieur on whom a demand for two pence produced so serious an effect, and it was difficult to make him understand that the fact and not the amount of payment was the trouble. When I ill.u.s.trated this by saying that I would gladly give a franc to be allowed to enter the glaciere free, he seemed to think that if I would entrust him with the franc, he might possibly arrange that little matter for me.

The immediate approach to the glaciere is very impressive. The surface of the ground slopes slightly upwards, and the entrance, from north to south, is by a broad inclined plane, of gentle fall at first, which rapidly becomes steep enough to require zigzags. The walls of rock on either side are very sheer, and increase of course in height as the plane of entrance falls. The whole length of the slope is about 420 feet, and down a considerable part of this some gra.s.ses and flowers are to be found: the last 208 feet are covered more or less with ice; though, at the time of my visit, the furious rains of the end of June, 1864, had washed down a considerable amount of mud, and so covered some of the ice. There were no ready means of determining the thickness of this layer of ice, for the descent of which ten or eleven zigzags had been made by the farmer. In one place, within 24 feet of its upper commencement, it was from 2-1/2 to 3 feet thick; but the prominence of that part seemed to mark it out as of more than the average thickness.

Even where to all appearance there was nothing but mud and earth, an unexpected fall or two showed that all was ice below. Whether the driver had previously experienced the treacherousness of this slope of ice, or whatever his motive might be, he left me to enter and explore alone.

The roof of the entrance is at first a mere sh.e.l.l, formed by the thin crust of rock on which the surface-earth and trees rest high overhead; but this rapidly becomes thicker, as shown in the section of the cave, and thus a sort of outer cave is formed, the real portal of the glaciere being reached about 60 feet above the bottom of the slope. This outer cave presents a curious appearance, from the distinctness with which the several strata of the limestone are marked, the lower strata weathered and rounded off like the seats of an amphitheatre of the giants, and all, up to the sh.e.l.l-like roof, arranged in horizontal semicircles of various graduated sizes, showing their concavity; while at the bottom of the whole is seen a patch of darkness, with two ma.s.ses of ice in its centre, looming out like grey ghosts at midnight. This darkness is of course the inner cave, the entrance to which, though it seems so small from above, is 78 feet broad.

The glaciere itself may be said to commence as soon as this entrance, or perpendicular portal, is pa.s.sed, and thus includes 60 feet of the long slope of ice, from the foot of which to the farther end of the cave is 145 feet, the greatest breadth of the cave being 148 feet.

Immediately below the portal I found a piece of the trunk of a large column of ice, 7 feet long and 12 feet in girth, its fractured ends giving the idea of the interior of a quickly-grown tree, in consequence of the concentric arrangement of convergent prisms described in the account of the Glaciere of S. Georges. The wife of the farmer told me afterwards that there had been two glorious columns at this portal, which the recent rains had swept away.

Excepting a short s.p.a.ce at the foot of the slope, and another towards the farther end of the cave, the floor was covered with ice, in some parts from 3 to 4 feet thick: of this a considerable area had been removed to a depth of 2 1/2 or 3 feet, leaving a pond of water a foot deep, with bottom and banks of ice. The rock which composes the true floor rises at the farthest end of the cave, and the roof is so arranged that a sort of private chapel is there formed; and from a fissure in the dome a monster column of ice had been constructed on the floor, which, at the time of my visit, had lost its upper parts, and stood as a hollow truncated cone with sides a foot thick, and with seas of ice streaming from it, and covering the rising pavement of the chapel. Without an axe, and without help, I was unable to measure the girth of this column, which had not been without companions on a smaller scale in the immediate neighbourhood. At the west end of the cave, the wall was thickly covered for a large s.p.a.ce with small limestone stalact.i.tes, producing the effect of many tiers of fringe on a shawl; while from a dark fissure in the roof a large piece of fluted drapery of the same material hung, calling to mind some of the vastly grander details of the grottoes of Hans-sur-Lesse in Belgium: down this wall there was also a long row of icicles, on the edges of a narrow fissure. The north-west corner was very dark, and an opening in the wall of rock high above the ground suggested a tantalising cave up there: the ground in this corner was occupied by the shattered remains of numerous columns of ice, which had originally covered a circular area between 60 and 70 feet in circ.u.mference.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIeRE OF GRaCE-DIEU, NEAR BESANcON.]

The three large ma.s.ses of ice which rendered this glaciere in some respects more remarkable than any of those I have seen, lay in a line from east to west, across the middle of the cave, on that part of the floor where the ice was thickest. The central ma.s.s was extremely solid, but somewhat unmeaning in shape, being a rough irregular pyramid; its size alone, however, was sufficient to make it very striking, the girth being 66-1/2 feet at some distance from the ice-floor with which it blended. The ma.s.s which lay to the east of this was very lovely, owing to the good taste of some one who had found that much ice was wont to acc.u.mulate on that spot, and had accordingly fixed the trunk of a small fir-tree, with the upper branches complete, to receive the water from the corresponding fissure in the roof. The consequence was, that, while the actual tree had vanished from sight under its icy covering, excepting on one side where a slight investigation betrayed its presence, the ma.s.s of ice showed every possible fantasy of form which a mould so graceful could suggest. At the base, it was solid, with a circ.u.mference of 37 feet.

The huge column, which had collected round the trunk of the fir-tree, branched out at the top into all varieties of eccentricity and beauty, each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid bar of frosted ice, with graceful curve, affording a point of suspension for complicated groups of icicles, which streamed down side by side with emulous loveliness. In some of the recesses of the column, the ice a.s.sumed a pale blue colour; but as a rule it was white and very hard, not so regularly prismatic as the ice described in former glacieres, but palpably crystalline, showing a structure not unlike granite, with a bold grain, and with a large predominance of the glittering element. But the westernmost ma.s.s was the grandest and most beautiful of all. It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty, resembling a family group of lions' heads in a subdued att.i.tude of grief, richly decked with icy manes. Similar heads seemed to grow out here and there from the solid sides of the huge ma.s.s. The girth was 76-1/2 feet, measured about 2 feet from the floor. When this column was looked at from the side removed from the entrance to the cave, so that it stood in the centre of the light which poured down the long slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice brought it to pa.s.s that the whole seemed set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid blue, the effect of light penetrating through the ma.s.s at its extreme edges. The only means of determining the height of this column was by tying a stone to the end of a string, and lodging it on the highest head; but this was not an easy process, as I was naturally anxious not to injure the delicate beauty which made that head one of the loveliest things conceivable; and each careful essay with the stone seemed to involve as much responsibility as taking a shot at a hostile wicket, in a crisis of the game, instead of returning the ball in the conventional manner. When at last it was safely lodged, the height proved to be 27 feet. I had hoped to find it much more than this, from the grandeur of the effect of the whole ma.s.s, and I took the trouble to measure the knotted string again with a tape, to make sure that there was no mistake. The column formed upon the fir-tree was 3 or 4 feet lower.

I have since found many notices of this glaciere in the Memoirs of the French Academy and elsewhere, extracts from which will be found in a later chapter. These accounts are spread over a period of 200 years, extending from 1590 to 1790, and almost all make mention of the columns or groups of columns I have described; but, without exception, the heights given or suggested in the various accounts are much less than those which I obtained as the result of careful measurement. The latest description of a visit to the glaciere states a fact which probably will be held to explain, the present excess of height above that of earlier times.[37] The citizen Girod-Chantrans, who wrote this description, had procured the notes of a medical man living in the neighbourhood, from which it seemed that Dr. Oudot made the experiment, in 1779, of fixing stakes of wood in the heads of the columns, then from 4 to 5 feet high, and found that these stakes were the cause of a very large increase in the height of the columns, ice gathering round them in pillars a foot thick. So that it is not improbable that the largest of the three ma.s.ses of the present day owes its height, and its peculiar form, to a series of stakes fixed from time to time in the various heads formed under the fissures in the roof, though nothing but the most solid ice can now be seen. It would be very interesting to try this experiment in one of the caves where, without any artificial help, such immense ma.s.ses of ice are formed; and by this means columns might, in the course of a year or two, be raised to the very roof. Further details on this subject will be given hereafter.