The Spell of Switzerland Part 13

We had plenty of time to go there. We could see its towers and spire high in the driving clouds, and its roof, which reminded me of a Western political-convention hall. Considering that it was built so early as the Tenth Century, it ought to have the deepest historical interest. Probably the Emperor Conrad, who founded it, would probably hardly recognize it, so much has it been altered since his stormy life closed. No wonder he wanted a cathedral in those Alps which he was for ever crossing. As soon as he got out of sight down in Italy his German subjects revolted; then when he had returned and punished them the Italians would try to throw off his yoke. Life was not smooth for him either as King of the Germans, or as Emperor of the Romans or as ruler of the Burgundians, but five years before he died he saw his cathedral consecrated. Something happened to it a couple of hundred of years later (about the middle of the eighteenth century): it was probably enlarged. Then its Romanesque style of architecture was made ridiculous by a Corinthian portico.

A Corinthian portico, being Greek, perhaps was not theoretically so out of place if Don Gregorio Seti was right in telling us that "Saint Peter's Church was in ancient times dedicated to Apollo, as is to be seen in some very old inscriptions."

[Ill.u.s.tration: SWISS MEDIAEVAL CARVINGS.]

We went into the venerable edifice and my nephew suggested that I had better initiate myself first of all by sitting down in the sacred chair that once belonged to John Calvin. If there had been any risk of inoculating myself with his grim and forbidding theology by sitting in the seat of the Calvinists, be sure I should have refrained. Calvin was a wonderful man, but at heart a tyrant. He could not endure contradiction. Jerome Bolsec found that out when he got the better of him in his argument on predestination: "You make G.o.d the author of sin," said he, "for you say in your Inst.i.tution, 'G.o.d foresaw Adam's Fall and in this Fall the ruin of all mankind; but He willed it, He ordered it and predetermined it in His eternal plan. G.o.d willed that the Israelites should worship the golden calf and that men should be guilty of the sins that they commit every day.' G.o.d being a simple and changeless Being, how can He be in accord with Himself, since in Him are two things contrary, Will and Not-will? How can He order and forbid the same thing? On the other hand, if the Will of G.o.d is the substance of G.o.d Himself, it is the cause of the sins committed by men; consequently G.o.d is the author of evil."

Calvin tried to creep out of the dilemma by saying:--"I have said that G.o.d's will as a supernatural cause is the necessity for all things; but I have declared at the same time that G.o.d does what He does with such justice that even the wicked are constrained to glorify Him."

Bolsec, who could see no equity in such a justice as that, would not give in and Calvin used his power to exile him. He was forbidden to return under pain of being whipped through all the squares of the city.

It is wonderful what an influence and for so long a time was exercised by Calvin. Certainly during all the years while the fortifications stood and the gates were shut at night no one dared contravene the strict regulations which his theocracy enjoined.

There are other famous people buried in the Cathedral of Saint Peter.

Near the main entrance is a tablet commemorating Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne, the Huguenot adviser to Henry IV who spent the last twenty years of his life in Geneva and died there in 1630. He was the grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, wife of a poet and wife of a king.

We noted the black tombstone to Cardinal Jean de Brogny who built the lovely Gothic Chapelle des Macchabees, now excellently restored. "Anno 1628," says our friend Signior Seti, "was interred Emilia of Na.s.sau and sometime after the Princess her sister, both Sisters to the Prince of Orange, Emilia being Wife to Don Antonio, King of Portugal, who was banished by the Spaniards. In another Chappel lies the Body of the Duke of Rohan, buried in the year 1638 in a most magnificent monument built by the Dutchess, who was laid there also near her husband in the year 1660, as their son Tancred was in the year 1661."

Perhaps the "magnificent monument" is the black marble sarcophagus, but the statue of the duke who was leader of the French Protestants and fell at the battle of Rheinfelden is modern--the work of Iguel.

His "Dutchess" was the daughter of the famous "reformer of finances,"

the Duc de Sully, whose great scheme for an International Amphyctionic Council supplied by the fifteen Christian States of Europe seems to have fore-shadowed the modern Interparliamentary Union.

By rare good fortune some one was practising on the excellent organ.

Whoever it was played a prelude and fugue of Bach and a brilliant piece which I recognized as by Saint-Saens.

On our way back from the cathedral we swung round by the English Garden and the National Monument with its two figures representing symbolically Helvetia and Geneva. Like most such colossal sculptures the farther away one gets the better it looks: that may be carried to its logical extreme! Then we crossed the long Pont du Mont Blanc but his Majesty was wholly hidden in the clouds. There were people fishing, however, just as they have always fished from the beginning of time. What says Signior Seti?--"Fishing in the Lake of this City is very considerable both for the profit and pleasure; they commonly take trouts of four score pound weight at twelve ounces the pound and in the Middle of the River opposite it the Town preserve their fish alive for use on two little deal board houses made for that purpose. In the Summer time it is a very pleasant recreation to go a Fishing here and both strangers and Citizens mightily delight in it."

Not then, but at another time, I amused myself watching the dozens of washerwomen by the riverside, in booths roofed over and closed at the ends--leaning forward on their bare arms and spending more time gossiping in their terrible dialect or watching the little boats flying by. The Billingsgate of a Genevan _blanchisseuse_ is not so melodious as the notes of a Vallombrosan nightingale, but it has a picturesque quality all its own.

As it was still raining we decided not to go out after dinner. But in spite of the rain I confessed to myself that I liked my first sight of Geneva and cherished a sneaking regret in my heart that Will and Ruth had not chosen their residence there instead of locating at Lausanne.

Any place that is cheerful in a rain-storm is the place for me, and I thought Geneva actually smiled through her tears, if I may so express myself.

CHAPTER XIII

SUNRISE AND ROUSSEAU

The weather showed unusual good humour by clearing in the night.

Geneva woke up to bright sparkling sunshine. I went out before breakfast, indeed before sunrise, on the bridge, and had a most glorious view up the lake and up to the very summit of Mont Blanc.

White as sugar, it lifted its aerial head into the azure--a solid cloud which looked as if it might at any moment take wings and fly away. A well-informed policeman told me the names of the other peaks: L'Aiguille du Midi, nearly a thousand meters lower than the crowning height: La Dent du Geant; Les Grandes Jora.s.ses (from that same word, _joux_, meaning rock); Les Aiguilles Rouges; La Mole, contrasting with the sharp peak of the Aiguille d'Argentiere, rightly suggesting silver. If any one is satisfied with a distant prospect of mountains, his eye would never weary of that glorious sight; but there is an attractive power in the great mountain-ma.s.ses. They beckon, they say:--"Come to us; we want you; you are ours."

[Ill.u.s.tration: LES GRANDES JORa.s.sES.]

That is, however, a wholly modern conception. If in the old days human consciousness felt the call, heard the summons, it was with the horror with which a bird feels the impulse to fly into the serpent's jaws.

Not so many years ago the popular imagination filled the ravines of the higher mountains with other terrors besides the frost. Dragons haunted caverns; with bated breath men told of having seen the dance of Wotan on the Diablerets, or of having heard fiends playing nine-pins with great stones which, when they missed their mark, went dashing and crashing down into the valleys. What herdsman would dare approach the Grotte de Balme, that cavern, hollowed out in the limestone rock, where dark-skinned fairies, with no heels to their feet, but with long, rippling hair, lured young men to their destruction! There was the spectral ram of Monthey; there was the three-legged horse of Sion; there was the giant ox of Zauchet, with glowing horns and flaming torch of a tail; there was the blue-haired donkey of Zermatt. Down from the mountains to Neuchatel there used to come a ghost, wearing a cloth dripping with blood, and vanishing toward the lake. It was that of the widow of Walther, Comte de Rochefort, publicly accused of forgery and beheaded in 1412. The sight of her presaged a conflagration.

The Lord of Grimmelstein killed a doe and her fawns and was condemned to hunt through the mountains--one of those famous Wild Hunts which are accompanied by terrible tempests, and overwhelming snows.

There was a herd of chamois tended by dwarfs. Woe to those hunters who killed too many!

As in Schiller's poem, the gazelle climbs to the ruggedest top of the naked precipice with the huntsman close behind and, just as he is about to fit the arrow to the string, the ancient Spirit of the Mountain, the good Genius of the trembling creature, appears to him:--"Earth has room for all to dwell--Why chase my belov'd gazelle?"

At the entrance of the Rhone into the lake there used to be low banks and wandering islands. Here dwelt the nixies and their queen, Finetta of the White Hand. She wore lilies in her golden hair. Any one who saw her was sure to die within a year.

That most delightful and poetic and enthusiastic of mountain-climbers, Emile Javelle, made friends with the guides and herdsmen, and was for ever eliciting from them avowals of their belief in spirits and dragons. He says that any night pa.s.sed among the good herdsmen of Salanfe, under the Dent du Midi, will be rich in old tales, and he thus relates the legend of the Monster of the Jorat:--

"The herdsmen tell me that formerly (some even think they can recall the time) there dwelt on the Col du Jorat, a monster, a dragon, in fine an animal of unknown species and horrible aspect, who guarded the pa.s.sage of the Col by night. He had already claimed many victims and the boldest hunters dared not attack him. Night having fallen, he descended from the glacier. He reigned over the whole mountain, and woe betide the man who approached the Jorat.

"One day, at last, a man of the Rhone valley had been condemned to death. He possessed uncommon strength and boldness. Pardon was offered him on condition that he should fight the monster and succeed in destroying him. He accepted, climbed up to Salanfe, waited for night and mounted the path of the Jorat. It is said that the battle was terrible; but the man was victorious and tranquillity was after that restored to the pastures of Salanfe."

Javelle explained the reluctance of the mountaineers at climbing to the upper heights by this universal belief in supernatural powers, and he explained the belief in these supernatural powers by their very familiarity with the strange phenomena of the mountains:--"They see the boulders come rolling down from the cliffs, the avalanches breaking off from the heights and dashing down to demolish their chalets--in the heights originate the storms; and there also they hear those mysterious crackings of the glacier. It is not strange that such phenomena should be explained by them in legends."

Their imagination, too, is shown in the various names which they confer on the Devil. He is Lo Grabbi, the Miser; La Beta Crotze (Bete-a-griffe), the beast with claws; Le Niton, the Tricky One; Lo Tannai, Cavern-haunter; L'Oze or Lo Maffi, the Sly One; Lo To-frou, the Always Abroad. One of his a.s.sistants is the Nion-nelo (Nul-ne-l'entend), who hides behind trees and jumps out to scare horses. The Diablerets are the very stamping-ground of dwarfs, gnomes, and dragons. When a pinnacle is doomed to fall, they quarrel as to its direction. At Rubli these supernatural beings are called _gommes_: they guard mines; at night they are seen as meteors going from place to place.

Whence came the great heaps of stones, as for instance at the foot of Jolimont? We know that these vast ma.s.ses, often of a different kind of rock from that characteristic of the locality, were brought down by glaciers; but the ignorant peasants attribute them to Satan, who, of course, was intending to crush some Christian church with them, but, perhaps through catching sight of a cross, was compelled to drop them.

Some of these stones are of enormous size--the Plowstone, for instance, which rises almost twenty meters (sixty feet) above the ground between Erlenbach and Wetzweil and has been traced to its original source in the canton of Glarus.

But there is one more than twice as big at Montet, near Devent, and when, later, we were going over the Monte Moro pa.s.s, we saw one near the Mattmark See which it is estimated contains two hundred and forty thousand cubic feet of Serpentine. Clever old Devil to get rid of his burden! The Swiss Government now prohibits breaking up these blocks of stone for building purposes. This was due to the initiative of the Swiss Scientific Societies.

Forbes, in his "Travels through the Alps of Savoy," gives a very good description of these ma.s.ses of rock as seen at Monthey, overlooking the valley of the Rhone:--

"We have here a belt or band of blocks--poised, as it were, on a mountain-side, it may be five hundred feet above the alluvial flat through which the Rhone winds below. This belt has no great vertical height, but extends for miles--yes, for miles--along the mountain, composed of blocks of granite of thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty feet to the side, not a few, but by hundreds, fantastically balanced on the angles of one another, their gray weather-beaten tops standing out in prominent relief from the verdant slope of secondary formation on which they rest. For three or four miles there is a path, preserving nearly the same level, leading amidst the gnarled stems of ancient chestnut-trees which struggle round and among the pile of blocks, which leaves them barely room to grow: so that numberless combinations of wood and rock are formed where a landscape-painter might spend days in study and enjoyment."

The very Pierres de Niton which entered into the foreground of the picture which I was contemplating have been traced to the Saint Bernard, and it is estimated that it took a thousand years for the glacier to bring them down from that height and deposit them in what is now the lake.

As I stood there I was especially led to think of the influence that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is supposed to have exerted in stimulating people to enjoy the grander aspects of Nature. Literature, before Rousseau's time, has little to say of the beauty of mountains. They were regarded with annoyance as obstacles, with terror as filled with dangers. Joseph Addison, speaking of the Savoy Alps, says they are "broken into so many steeps and precipices that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror and form one of the most irregular, mis-shapen scenes in the world."

I am not sure but Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who became Baron d'Aubonne, from the name of his estate near Geneva, does not deserve priority.

After he had ended his travels in the Far East and had decided to settle in Switzerland he wrote his friends in Paris of his choice:

"Friends, I have long been looking for a country-house where to end my life in tranquillity.

"Now you would doubtless choose France; it is the loveliest country in the world; no other approaches it.

"Gentlemen, France is a charming, delightful country, I agree with you, ... but my heart and my eyes are in Switzerland.

"'What! That country of ice and sterile mountains, whose inhabitants would not have a quarter of the subsistence necessary for them, if other countries did not support a large part of its inhabitants!'

"You know Switzerland very well, as I can see. Gentlemen, such as it is, for me it is the loveliest country in the world."

It was one of the boasts before Rousseau's time that a seigneur's place should have no view. Both Madame de Genlis, in Voltaire's lifetime, and James Fenimore Cooper, fifty years after the great Frenchman's death, noticed the fact that the view from Ferney was quite cut off by shrubbery, evidently showing that he cared little for it. Madame de Stael, though she was sympathetic enough with Rousseau, cared little for natural scenery. When some enthusiastic visitors were praising the beauties of Lake Leman she exclaimed:--"Oh for the gutters of the Rue de Bac."

But, after all, it is only fair to give Rousseau's own words, his invitation to the world to come to Switzerland and share with him these marvellous scenes. They are eloquent words, indeed! Nor did they fall on unheeding ears.