University of Virginia Library

112. LETTER CXII.

The water of Lake Leman looks very like other
water, though Byron and Shelley were nearly drowned
in it; and Copet, a little village on the Helvetian side,
where we left three women and took up one man (the
village ought to be very much obliged to us), is no
Paradise, though Madame de Stael made it her residence.
There are Paradises, however, with very short
distances between, all the way down the northern
shore; and angels in them, if women are angels—a
specimen or two of the sex being visible with the aid
of the spyglass, in nearly every balcony and belvidere,
looking upon the water. The taste in country-houses
seems to be here very much the same as in New
England, and quite unlike the half-palace, half-castle
style common in Italy and France. Indeed the dress,
physiognomy, and manners of old Geneva might make
an American Genevese fancy himself at home on the
Leman. There is that subdued decency, that grave
respectableness, that black-coated, straight-haired,
saint-like kind of look which is universal in the small
towns of our country, and which is as unlike France
and Italy, as a playhouse is unlike a methodist chapel.
You would know the people of Geneva were
Calvinists, whisking through the town merely in a diligence.

I lost sight of the town of Morges, eating a tête-à-tête breakfast with my friend in the cabin. Switzerland
is the only place out of America where one gets cream for his coffee. I cry Morges mercy on that
plea.

We were at Lausanne at eleven, having steamed
forty miles in five hours. This is not quite up to
the thirty-milers on the Hudson, of which I see accounts

in the papers, but we had the advantage of not
being blown up either going or coming, and of looking
for a continuous minute on a given spot in the
scenery. Then we had an iron railing between us and
that portion of the passengers who prefer garlic to
lavender-water, and we achieved our breakfast without
losing our tempers or complexions in a scramble.
The question of superiority between Swiss and American
steamers, therefore, depends very much on the
value you set on life, temper, and time. For me, as
my time is not measured in “diamond sparks,” and
as my life and temper are the only gifts with which
fortune has blessed me, I prefer the Swiss.

Gibbon lived at Lausanne, and wrote here the last
chapter of his History of Rome—a circumstance
which he records with an affection. It is a spot of no
ordinary beauty, and the public promenade, where we
sat and looked over to Vevey and Chillon, and the
Rocks of Meillerie, and talked of Rousseau, and
agreed that it was a scene “faite pour une Julie, pour
une Claire, et pour un Saint Preux,” is one of the places
where, if I were to “play statue,” I should like
to grow to my seat, and compromise merely for eyesight.
We have one thing against Lausanne, however—it
is up hill and a mile from the water; and if
Gibbon walked often from Ouchet at noon, and “larded
the way” as freely as we, I make myself certain
he was not the fat man his biographers have drawn
him.

There were some other circumstances at Lausanne
which interested us—but which criticism has decided
can not be obtruded upon the public. We looked
about for “Julie” and “Claire,” spite of Rousseau's
“ne les y cherchez pas,” and gave a blind beggar a sous
(all he asked) for a handful of lilies-of-the-valley,
pitying him ten times more than if he had lost his
eyes out of Switzerland. To be blind on Lake Leman!
blind within sight of Mont Blanc! We turned
back to drop another sous into his hat, as we reflected
upon it.

The return steamer from Vevey (I was sorry not to
go to Vevey for Rousseau's sake, and as much for
Cooper's), took us up on its way to Geneva, and we
had the advantage of seeing the same scenery in a different
light. Trees, houses, and mountains, are so
much finer seen against the sun, with the deep shadows
toward you!

Sitting by the stern, was a fat and fair Frenchwoman,
who, like me, had bought lilies, and about as
many. With a very natural facility of dramatic position,
I imagined it had established a kind of sympathy
between us, and proposed to myself, somewhere
in the fair hours, to make it serve as an introduction.
She went into the cabin after a while, to lunch on cutlets
and beer, and returned to the deck without her
lilies. Mine lay beside me, within reach of her four
fingers; and as I was making up my mind to offer to
replace her loss, she coolly took them up, and without
even a French monosyllable, commenced throwing
them overboard, stem by stem. It was very clear she
had mistaken them for her own. As the last one flew
over the tafferel, the gentleman who paid for la bierre
et les cottelettes, husband or lover, came up with a
smile and a flourish, and reminded her that she had
left her bouquet between the mustard and the beer-bottle.
Sequitur, a scene. The lady apologized, and
I disclaimed; and the more I insisted on the delight
she had given me by throwing my pretty lilies into
Lake Leman, the more she made herself unhappy,
and insisted on my being inconsolable. One should
come abroad to know how much may be said upon
throwing overboard a bunch of lilies!

The clouds gathered, and we had some hopes of a
storm, but the “darkened Jura” was merely dim, and
the “live thunder” waited for another Childe Harold.
We were at Geneva at seven, and had the whole pop
ulation to witness our debarkation. The pier where
we landed, and the new bridge across the outlet of
the Rhone, are the evening promenade.

The far-famed jewellers of Geneva are rather an
aristocratic class of merchants. They are to be sought
in chambers, and their treasures are produced box by
box, from locked drawers, and bought, if at all, without
the pleasure of “beating down.” They are, withal,
a gentlemanly class of men; and, of the principal
one, as many stories are told as of Beau Brummel.
He has made a fortune by his shop, and has the manners
of a man who can afford to buy the jewels out of
a king's crown.

We were sitting at the table d'hote, with about forty
people, on the first day of our arrival, when the servant
brought us each a gilt-edged note, sealed with an
elegant device; invitations, we presumed, to a ball, at
least. Mr. So-and-so (I forget the name), begged
pardon for the liberty he had taken, and requested us
to call at his shop in the Rue de Rhone, and look at
his varied assortment of bijouterie. A card was enclosed,
and the letter in courtly English. We went,
of course; as who would not? The cost to him was
a sheet of paper, and the trouble of sending to the
hotel for a list of the new arrivals. I recommend the
system to all callow Yankees, commencing a “pushing
business.”

Geneva is full of foreigners in the summer, and it
has quite the complexion of an agreeable place. The
environs are, of course, unequalled, and the town itself
is a stirring and gay capital, full of brilliant shops,
handsome streets and promenades, where everything
is to be met but pretty women. Female beauty would
come to a good market anywhere in Switzerland. We
have seen but one pretty girl (our Niobe of the steamer)
since we lost sight of Lombardy. They dress
well here, and seem modest, and have withal an air of
style, but of some five hundred ladies, whom I may
have seen in the valley of the Rhone and about this
neighborhood, it would puzzle a modern Apelles to
compose an endurable Venus. I understand a fair
countrywoman of ours is about taking up her residence
in Geneva; and if Lake Leman does not “woo
her,” and the “live thunder” leap down from Jura,
the jewellers, at least, will crown her queen of the
Canton, and give her the tiara at cost.

I hope “Maria Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs” will
forgive me for having gone to Ferney in an omnibus!
Voltaire lived just under the Jura, on a hill-side, overlooking
Geneva and the lake, with a landscape before
him in the foreground that a painter could not improve,
and Mont Blanc and its neighbor mountains,
the breaks to his horizon. At six miles off, Geneva
looks very beautifully, astride the exit of the Rhone
from the lake; and the lake itself looks more like a
broad river, with its edges of verdure and its outer-frame
of mountains. We walked up an avenue to a
large old villa, embosomed in trees, where an old gardener
appeared, to show us the grounds. We said
the proper thing under the tree planted by the philosopher,
fell in love with the view from twenty points,
met an English lady in one of the arbors, the wife of
a French nobleman to whom the house belongs, and
were bowed into the hall by the old man and handed
over to his daughter to be shown the curiosities of the
interior. These were Voltaire's rooms, just as he
left them. The ridiculous picture of his own apotheosis,
painted under his own direction, and representing
him offering his Henriade to Apollo, with all the
authors of his time dying of envy at his feet, occupies
the most conspicuous place over his chamber-door.
Within was his bed, the curtains nibbled quite bare
by relic-gathering travellers; a portrait of the Emperess
Catherine, embroidered by her own hand, and presented
to Voltaire; his own portrait and Frederick the
Great's, and many of the philosophers', including

Franklin. A little monument stands opposite the
fireplace, with the inscription “mon esprit est partout,
et mon cæur est ici.” It is a snug little dormitory,
opening with one window to the west; and, to those
who admire the character of the once illustrious occupant,
a place for very tangible musing. They
showed us afterward his walking-stick, a pair of silk-stockings
he had half worn, and a night-cap. The
last article is getting quite fashionable as a relic of genius.
They show Byron's at Venice.