 | The headsman, or, The Abbaye des Vignerons |  |
INTRODUCTION.
Early in October 1832, a travelling-carriage stopped
on the summit of that long descent where the road
pitches from the elevated plain of Moudon in Switzerland
to the level of the lake of Geneva, immediately above
the little city of Vévey. The postilion had dismounted
to chain a wheel, and the halt enabled those he conducted
to catch a glimpse of the lovely scenery of that remarkable
view.
The travellers were an American family, which had
long been wandering about Europe, and which was now
destined it knew not whither, having just traversed a
thousand miles of Germany in its devious course. Four
years before, the same family had halted on the same
spot, nearly on the same day of the month of October,
and for precisely the same object. It was then journeying
to Italy, and as its members hung over the view of
the Leman, with its accessories of Chillon, Châtelard,
Blonay, Meillerie, the peaks of Savoy, and the wild
ranges of the Alps, they had felt regret that the fairy
scene was so soon to pass away. The case was now
different, and yielding to the charm of a nature so noble
and yet so soft, within a few hours, the carriage was in
remise, a house was taken, the baggage unpacked, and
the household gods of the travellers were erected, for th
twentieth time, in a strange land.
Our American (for the family had its head) was familiar
with the ocean, and the sight of water awoke old
in Vévey as a housekeeper, before he sought a boat.
Chance brought him to a certain Jean Descloux (we give
the spelling at hazard,) with whom he soon struck up
a bargain, and they launched forth in company upon the
lake.
This casual meeting was the commencement of an
agreeable and friendly intercourse. Jean Descloux,
besides being a very good boatman, was a respectable
philosopher in his way; possessing a tolerable stock of
general information. His knowledge of America, in
particular, might be deemed a little remarkable. He
knew it was a continent, which lay west of his own
quarter of the world; that it had a place in it called New
Vévey; that all the whites who had gone there were not
yet black, and that there were plausible hopes it might
one day be civilized. Finding Jean so enlightened on
a subject under which most of the eastern savans break
down, the American thought it well enough to prick him
closely on other matters. The worthy boatman turned
out to be a man of singularly just discrimination. He
was a reasonably-good judge of the weather; had divers
marvels to relate concerning the doings of the lake;
thought the city very wrong for not making a port in
the great square; always maintained that the wine of
St. Saphorin was very savory drinking for those who
could get no better; laughed at the idea of their being
sufficient cordage in the world to reach the bottom of the
Genfer See; was of opinion that the trout was a better
fish than the fêrà; spoke with singular moderation of
his ancient masters, the bourgeoïsie of Berne, which,
however, he always affirmed kept singularly bad roads
in Vaud, while those around its own city were the best
and observant man. In short, honest Jean Descloux
was a fair sample of that homebred, upright commonsense
which seems to form the instinct of the mass, and
which it is greatly the fashion to deride in those circles
in which mystification passes for profound thinking, bold
assumption for evidence, a simper for wit, particular
personal advantages for liberty, and in which it is deemed
a mortal offence against good manners to hint that
Adam and Eve were the common parents of mankind.
“Monsieur has chosen a good time to visit Vévey,”
observed Jean Descloux, one evening, that they were
drifting in front of the town, the whole scenery resembling
a fairy picture rather than a portion of this much-abused
earth; “it blows sometimes at this end of the
lake in a way to frighten the gulls out of it. We shall
see no more of the steam-boat after the last of the month.”
The American cast a glance at the mountain, drew
upon his memory for sundry squalls and gales which he
had seen himself, and thought the boatman's figure of
speech less extravagant than it had at first seemed.
“If your lake craft were better constructed, they would
make better weather,” he quietly observed.
Monsieur Descloux had no wish to quarrel with a
customer who employed him every evening, and who
preferred floating with the current to being rowed with
a crooked oar. He manifested his prudence, therefore,
by making a reserved reply.
“No doubt, monsieur,” he said, “that the people who
live on the sea make better vessels, and know how to
sail them more skilfully. We had a proof of that here
at Vévey,” (he pronounced the word like v-vais, agreeably
to the sounds of the French vowels,) “last summer,
—they say he was a captain in the marine—had a vessel
built at Nice, and dragged over the mountains to our
lake. He took a run across to Meillerie one fine morning,
and no duck ever skimmed along lighter or swifter!
He was not a man to take advice from a Swiss boatman,
for he had crossed the line, and seen water spouts and
whales! Well, he was on his way back in the dark, and
it came on to blow here from off the mountains, and he
stood on boldly towards our shore, heaving the lead as he
drew near the land, as if he had been beating into Spithead
in a fog,”—Jean chuckled at the idea of sounding in
the Leman—“while he flew along like a bold mariner, as
no doubt he was!”
“Landing, I suppose,” said the American, “among
the lumber in the great square?”
“Monsieur is mistaken. He broke his boat's nose
against that wall; and the next day, a piece of her, big
enough to make a thole-pin, was not to be found. He
might as well have sounded the heavens!”
“The lake has a bottom, notwithstanding?”
“Your pardon, monsieur. The lake has no bottom.
The sea may have a bottom, but we have no bottom
here.”
There was little use in disputing the point.
Monsieur Descloux then spoke of the revolutions he
had seen. He remembered the time when Vaud was a
province of Berne. His observations on this subject
were rational, and were well seasoned with wholesome
common sense. His doctrine was simply this. “If
one man rule, he will rule for his own benefit, and that
of his parasites; if a minority rule, we have many masters
instead of one,” (honest Jean had got hold here of a
converted against themselves,) “all of whom must be
fed and served; and if the majority rule, and ruled
wrongfully, why the minimum of harm is done.” He
admitted, that the people might be deceived to their own
injury, but then, he did not think it was quite as likely
to happen, as that they should be oppressed when they
were governed without any agency of their own. On
these points, the American and the Vaudois were absolutely
of the same mind.
From politics the transition to poetry was natural, for
a common ingredient in both would seem to be fiction.
On the subject of his mountains, Monsieur Descloux was
a thorough Swiss. He expatiated on their grandeur,
their storms, their height, and their glaciers, with eloquence.
The worthy boatman had some such opinions
of the superiority of his own country, as all are apt to
form who have never seen any other. He dwelt on the
glories of an Abbaye des Vignerons, too, with the gusto
of a Vévaisan, and seemed to think it would be a high
stroke of state policy, to get up a new fète of this kind as
speedily as possible. In short, the world and its interests
were pretty generally discussed between these two philosophers
during an intercourse that extended to a month.
Our American was not a man to let instruction of this
nature easily escape him. He lay hours at a time on
the seats of Jean Descloux's boat, looking up at the
mountains, or watching some lazy sail on the lake, and
speculating on the wisdom of which he was so accidentally
made the repository. His view on one side was
limited by the glacier of Mont Vélan, a near neighbor of
the celebrated col of St. Bernard; and on the other, his
eye could range to the smiling fields that surround Geneva.
magnificent pictures that Nature ever drew, and he bethought
him of the human actions, passions, and interests
of which it might have been the scene. By a connexion
that was natural enough to the situation, he imagined a
fragment of life passed between these grand limits, and
the manner in which men could listen to the never-wearied
promptings of their impulses in the immediate
presence of the majesty of the Creator. He bethought
him of the analogies that exist between inanimate nature
and our own wayward inequalities; of the fearful admixture
of good and evil of which we are composed; of
the manner in which the best betray their submission to
the devils, and in which the worst have gleams of that
eternal principle of right, by which they have been endowed
by God; of those tempests which sometimes lie
dormant in our systems, like the slumbering lake in the
calm, but which excited, equal its fury when lashed by
the winds; of the strength of prejudices; of the worthlessness
and changeable character of the most cherished
of our opinions, and of that strange, incomprehensible,
and yet winning melange of contradictions, of fallacies,
of truths, and of wrongs, which make up the sum of our
existence.
The following pages are the result of this dreaming.
The reader is left to his own intelligence for the moral.
A respectable English writer observed:—“All pages
of human life are worth reading; the wise instruct; the
gay divert us; the imprudent teach us what to shun;
the absurd cure the spleen.”
| The headsman, or, The Abbaye des Vignerons | |