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FACING PAGE 2. THE JURA RANGE FROM THONON, HAUTE SAVOIE 9

THE LAKE OF GENEVA

Whether you feel sympathy, or not, with Calvin, the theologian, who gave us, at not more than twenty-eight years of age, the epoch-making Christian Institutes, or with Calvin, the inflexible governor, who helped to put to death poor Michael Servetus outside the city wall of Geneva, on the garden slopes of Champel, you can hardly fail to realize at least some transient flicker of interest when you contemplate, beneath its solitary fir-tree, and hard by a clump of box, the small, white, oblong stone--it is less than a foot long, and marked simply with the initials J. C.--that is supposed to mark the grave, in the old crowded cemetery near the Plaine du Plainpalais, of Jean Calvin, the politician and man. The cemetery itself is a little hard to find, for it lies hidden away in a commonplace back-quarter of the city, in a part that is far removed from all that is brightest, and most cosmopolitan, and therefore most familiar, in Geneva. Nor, even when you find it, is this grave of Calvin obvious, lost, as it is, amongst a thousand other tombs which rise in some disorder from amidst an inextricable tangle of daisies and long rank grass, of lady's-smock and dandelions. As happens almost always in old burial-grounds in Scotland, there is here an eloquent lack of Christian symbols: Catholics are buried here as well as Protestants, but the spirit of iconoclasm is none the less supreme--plenty of broken columns, of import purely Pagan, but never, I think, the Cross, lest it savour of superstition. This, too, was Wordsworth's experience in the burial-ground at Dumfries:

"'Mid crowded obelisks and urns I sought the untimely grave of Burns."

Yet here, in this half-forgotten old graveyard, where Calvin was laid to rest when not quite fifty-five years of age, at least there is none of that nightmare horror that broods over Knox's cenotaph in the Necropolis at Glasgow. Calvin and Knox! We group the two in fancy when we stand here in this silent spot, on the edge of that same Geneva--how transfigured to-day in outward aspect not less than in mental outlook!--where Knox once ministered for more than a year in the little church of the Auditoire, and where Calvin once ruled with a rod of iron. At any rate this sombre old burial-ground, when so much else in the Geneva of to-day is almost aggressively gay and modern, is surely not unfitted for the last repose of a spirit so austere, and of logic so relentless. And this is what is written above the entrance: "Heureux ceux qui meurent au Seigneur. Ils reposent de leurs travaux et leurs oeuvres les suivent."

Calvin, indeed, is inseparably connected with the greatest moment in Geneva's history. His rule for nearly a quarter of a century of this little city state is chosen by Lord Morley in his Romanes lecture at Oxford in 1897 as an outstanding illustration of what can be accomplished by moral forces in the absence of giant armies and big guns. It is impossible, in fact, to think of historical Geneva without thinking of Calvin, though Calvin himself was by birth a Frenchman, and hailed from the sleepy little city of Noyon , in the department of the Aisne. Rousseau, on the other hand, though Genevese by birth, seems to belong more properly to the French Revolution, and to France. The tall, white tenement where the future author of the "Contr?t Social" lived as a child may still be seen in the St. Gervais quarter, on the right bank of the river, at the junction, if I recollect rightly, of the present Rue Rousseau with the Place de Chevelu, in close proximity to a modiste's establishment and to a shop for the sale of fishing-tackle, and virtually, if not wholly, within sight and hearing of the music and blue swiftness of the Rhone. Actually, however, he was born in his maternal grandfather's house, which has since been pulled down, in the Grande Rue, towards the summit of the hill that is crowned by the Cathedral, in the high-town of Geneva. The old workman's quarter of St. Gervais is perhaps seldom visited by Englishmen, though everybody skirts it, perhaps half-a-dozen times a day, as they traverse the very modern Rue du Mont Blanc on their way to the main railway station, or to the splendid new H?tel-des-Postes. Yet its eighteenth-century streets--this is possibly their date--are at least as full of interest, and are certainly far more typical, than the Parisian-like blocks of new houses that front the modern quays. If you want to realize the aspect of old Geneva properly, before the advent of the railway and the hordes of modern trippers, you should study the curious model now preserved in the splendid new Mus?e d'Art et d'Histoire, in the Rue des Casemates. Then it had no front, in the ordinary sense, towards the lake; and the islands in the Rhone were laden with quaint old tenements. Moreover, the whole city was then surrounded by a ring of many-angled fortifications in the familiar manner of Vauban.

If the actual birth-place of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Grande Rue has perished, no better piece of luck has befallen the house, at No. 11, Rue des Chanoines , in which Calvin, as recorded by an existing tablet, resided from 1543 to his death in 1564. To find authentic associations with Calvin we must pass into the former Cathedral, now the Protestant Church of St. Pierre, where is still preserved a chair on which he is said to have sat to preach. The Cathedral itself, however, is his truest monument, for in this he constantly preached, and in this he delivered judgment. This last is a grand old Romanesque pile, with transeptal towers like those at Exeter; but sadly disfigured externally by an atrocious, Classical, eighteenth-century west front. This, with its Corinthian pillars, might be well enough elsewhere, but is quite out of keeping, like the west front at F?camp, in Normandy, with the older work behind. It must also be acknowledged that here, as at Lausanne, the austere Calvinistic furniture is wholly out of keeping with an interior that was obviously intended for elaborate Catholic ritual. In a very odd position, at the south-west corner of the nave, is the striking fifteenth-century Chapel of the Maccab?es that was built in 1406 by Cardinal Jean de Brogny, who was Bishop of Geneva between 1423 and 1426. The curious name is met with again as far away as Amiens, and may possibly derive from "macabre," the Chapel of the Dead: Brogny, indeed, is said to have built this chapel with a view to his own future interment. In the body of the church there are really several points to notice, though at first its general aspect is repellently cold and bare. In the chancel and south nave aisle remain a number of old stalls with misericordes, one of the last of which is unexpectedly carved with a frog. Other stalls have canopies, apparently much restored, the backs of which are sculptured with figures of Prophets and Apostles, greatly recalling those in the not far distant French cathedral of St. Claude. Included among the rest are David and the Sybil, who was credited with prescience of the coming birth of Christ:

"Teste David cum Sybilla."

In a chapel on the east of the south transept is the tomb, with a modern statue, of Duke Henri de Rohan, the Protestant leader, who was slain at the battle of Rheinfelden in 1638. The church has, of course, been stripped of its ancient coloured glass, for we can hardly suppose that Calvinistic Geneva of the sixteenth century lacked its local "Blue Dick" or its incorrigible William Dowsing; but luckily two splendid windows have somehow escaped, and are now in safe possession in the Mus?e d'Art et d'Histoire. One is a large figure of St. John the Evangelist, and another of St. Julian or St. James-the-Less. Preserved in the same collection are two fifteenth-century bench-ends, and a fragment of broken stall canopy, that come also from the Cathedral.

Immediately round the Cathedral, on the crest of the old acropolis, clusters most of what is still left in Geneva of the ancient city state. City state, in truth, it was, rather than capital, like Sion or Berne, of a canton: the territory, in fact, of Geneva was always insignificant, and merely a civic adjunct--a hundred odd square miles, or so, of suburban orchard, or garden. The Canton of Geneva, in short, was subordinate to the city, and never the city to the canton. "Quand je secoue ma perruque," said Voltaire, "je poudre toute la R?publique."

Of ancient municipal buildings, perhaps the most interesting is the H?tel-de-Ville, which exhibits a picturesque Renaissance staircase or inclined plane. Opposite is the old Arsenal, with its outside paintings--a feature that is typically Swiss. We have noticed already the sites of the old houses that were associated respectively with Rousseau and Calvin in the Grande Rue and the former Rue des Chanoines. At the foot of the latter thoroughfare, in the Rue de la P?lisserie, and also marked by a tablet, is the house in which George Eliot resided between October, 1849, and March, 1850. From near the apse of the Cathedral we may descend steeply to the low town along the shore of the lake, either directly, by the Rue de la Fontaine, or, more indirectly, by a network of little streets that cluster round the mediaeval church of the Madelaine. The Rue de la Fontaine in itself is worth a visit, with its tall, old, shabby tenements, like those in the old town at Edinburgh. I forget from what fountain it gets its name; but Geneva, like other towns in Switzerland--like every village in fact--is full of them. None, that I know, has the character, or quaintness, of some of those at Berne; but the pretty Swiss custom of decorating them in summer with growing flowers may be noted here with gratitude and pleasure.

The modern splendour of Geneva, to which we descend almost reluctantly from the old, grey, upper city on the heights, if certainly very modern, is also certainly very splendid; and leaves us with the impression that the front towards the quays, with its gardens, and palatial hotels, and gigantic caf?s, is one of the brightest, and gayest, and most animated scenes anywhere to be met with on the Continent. Moreover, it offers at least one point, where the Rhone, like an arrow from the string, suddenly discharges itself from the blue placidity of the lake, and storms in triumphant volume through the openings of the bridges to swirl past the little tree-shaded Ile-de-Rousseau and the other islands that lie behind it, where even the quiet lover of Nature, to whom gay throngs of all sorts are abhorrent, may feed his soul as completely with splendid, natural spectacle as anywhere among the torrents and glaciers of the remotest and most secluded valleys in which this magnificent stream has origin, and from which it descends in thunder, but never in purity like this, to traverse the whole Canton of the Valais from end to end, and to repose at length in quiet in the lake. To lean across the west parapet of the Pont-du-Mont Blanc at Geneva, and to gaze down into this deep volume of absolutely transparent and deep ultramarine water that shoots forward with Alpine strength and lightning-like rapidity, and is only broken into sheets of seething, delicately sky-blue foam at the point where its majestic impetuosity is arrested by the dams of the electric works, is to come face to face with just such a combination of natural force and loveliness as is nowhere, I think, to be found in Britain, and perhaps at few spots in the Alps. The extraordinarily deep-blue colour of the Lake of Geneva, and of the Rhone where it first emerges, and before it is polluted by the influx of the grey and glacier-stained Avre--till the last state of the Rhone, below Geneva, is no better than its first, above Villeneuve--has been the subject of comment and learned inquiry, but has never, unless I mistake, been satisfactorily explained. Most other Alpine lakes, whether in Switzerland or Italy, are deep, or emerald, green: and emerald, or deep green, are the strong rivers that discharge from them--the Linth from Zurich, or the Reuss at Lucerne, or the noble Aar that lends grace to Thun. Tennyson tells us how Guinevere and Lancelot rode together in the may-time woods

"Over sheets of hyacinth That seem'd the heavens upbreaking thro' the earth;"

but to sail on a sunny day on the waters of Lake Leman is to sail on the perfect blue of heaven itself.

This exquisite phenomenon then, which has been compared with the tender, suffused blue that is seen when looking down into the depths of a crevasse, has never been accounted for, though theories are not lacking in profusion. And not only is this nascent river the most beautifully coloured and transparent thing on earth--every pebble at the bottom is visible through I dare not guess how many feet of depth--but its surface is also the most lustrous in the world. Even at night, when the moonlight glances on its water, or at least the electric lights on the promenade and bridges, this quality of lustre, and to some extent of colour, still remains proudly visible, when other rivers, if still lustrous, would be black. In daylight, too, this bridge is a pleasant spot to linger on, not merely for joy of the crystal depths below, but for joy of the scene above. Nowhere, I think, is Geneva seen to better purpose than hence: to the left the towers of its ancient Cathedral, high on their crowded hill above the stream; in the centre, the Ile-de-Rousseau, with its picturesque clump of trees; and to the right, above more old houses, the long blue wall of Jura, lofty enough and abrupt enough wholly to hold the eye, till, turning with an effort, we cease to sigh for Jura, because there, though at greater distance, are the altogether more dazzling splendours of the Alps.

From Sixt we ascend through forest by the side of the rushing stream, through a landscape that is enlivened with as many splashing waterfalls as greeted Ulysses and his companions with their music when they came to the afternoon land of the Lotos Eaters. A little below the Eagle's Nest, the pleasant summer home of the late Mr. Justice Wills, the forest virtually ceases, and the road ends altogether; and thenceforward on to Chamonix we have only a mountain track, or mule-path, which mounts at first abruptly by a series of sudden zig-zags, but afterwards for an interval keeps a leveller upland route across wild and desolate pastures that lie round the big mountain tarn known as the Lac d'Anterne, beyond which rise in superlative grandeur, for more than two thousand feet, the giddy, sheer rock precipices of the strangely named T?te-?-l'Ane. All this is very splendid, and every inch of going pleasant; but I have brought you all this distance for a single point of view that bursts suddenly into vision, without warning or preparation. Suddenly, as perhaps you are getting a little tired, or finding the landscape a trifle monotonous, literally almost a single step brings you to a little break in the ridge of the opposite hill, whence the whole majestic chain of Mont Blanc--not only the monarch himself, but his whole range of attendant satellites and regally shattered aiguilles, from the Aiguille du Tour, on the left, to the Aiguille du Gouter, on the right--leaps splendidly into view--such a vision of splintered crags, and snows of dazzling, unsullied purity, and dark hollows of sullen glacier, and plinth of green pasture and forest, as certainly you will not find anywhere else in the Alps, nor, for ought I know, though the scale may be bigger, among Andes or Himalayas. Nor does all this magnificence here rise, as it rises when seen from closer and more familiar quarters, from the Fleg?re or the Br?vent, directly from the foreground of the rather shabby Vale of Chamonix, with its electric railways to Argenti?re and the Montanvert, and with its unspeakable vulgarity of an aerial flight, or whatever they call their piece of villainy, up the pinnacles of the Aiguille du Midi, and with Chamonix itself in the centre, a mass of obtrusive roofs; but here it springs heavenward from above, and beyond, the long, dark ridge of the sombre Br?vent itself, which serves in its comparative humility at once for measure and foil; whilst immediately below us are the dark, unpeopled depths of the upland valleys of the Diosaz and its tributary streams. Around is utter solitude, and wherever the eye can penetrate; and in front this unspeakably splendid chain, revealed in a single second, and viewed in its total length. A man would perhaps do well, who wishes to appreciate to perfection this sovereign of Alpine hills, never to approach it more closely than this crest of the Col d'Anterne.

In America, I suppose, if you stand in the centre of the Michigan shore of Lake Superior, you can no more make out Canada across the water than a man can make out Normandy though he strain his eyes for ever from Selsey or Beachy Head. A lake, in fact, may be so big that it ceases, for all landscape effect, to be a lake at all, and becomes merely an inland sea. Perhaps the most beautiful lakes of all are those of such modest dimension--yet more than mere ponds or tarns--that you can comprehend their total shore-line from some eminence on their bank, as Buttermere, for example, is comprehended from the slopes of Red Pike, or Loch Lomond, very nearly, from the summit of Ben Voirlich. The Lake of Geneva, from this point of view, is much nearer Buttermere than Lake Superior; but still, in a sense, not whimsical, but real, must be reckoned as much too big. And not only this, but its basin also is a hotch-pot of different kinds of scenery, and of different ranges of hills. It is encradled, as a whole, neither in Alp nor Jura, but lies rather in a plain between the two. It's head, indeed, penetrates superficially into the lower Alps of Vaud; whilst the greater Alps of the Valais, and in particular the noble Dent-de-Morcles, and the yet nobler Dent-du-Midi, guard its upper waters at such a distance that, though really far removed, they appear as we approach to rise almost from its margin, and form an immediate and splendid setting for its reaches above Evian and Vevey. Its southern shore, again, is bordered fairly closely, for almost its whole length, by rugged Alps of Savoy that open behind Thonon to admit glimpses even of the far-away snows of Mont Blanc himself, revealed in crowning majesty beyond the valley of the Dranse. So far, indeed, Lac Leman may be fairly claimed for Alpine; but turn to the opposite shore, and we must tell another tale. From Geneva towards Lausanne the background is formed, though at considerable distance, by the south-east escarpment of the Jura, whose long, level-crested wall of limestone rock--exactly like the long limestone wall of the Pennine hills above the Vale of Eden, or of Mendip above the marshes of mid-Somerset--affords the strongest contrast in the world to the abruptly pointed, opposite, Savoyard summits of the Dent d'Oche or Pointe de Grange, though not without analogy, near the city of Geneva, in the hog-backed ridge of the Grand Sal?ve, which might almost belong to Jura itself. Moreover, this ridge of Jura, which at Geneva itself is not more than some ten miles or so away from the lake, gradually, after Rolle, or Aubonne, in its straight course towards the north-east, trends farther and farther from the lake, which here begins to curve towards the south, so that part of the north shore of the lake, between Rolle and Lausanne, actually abuts on neither Alp nor Jura, but terminates, rather tamely, on the great central plain of Switzerland. Geneva, however, though thus diverse in setting and scenery--for the hill forms of the Alps, to go back again for a moment to our familiar home comparison, are as widely different from the hill forms of the Jura as are those of English Lakeland from those of the opposite Pennine chain--is superbly simple in shape. It is, in fact, an almost perfect crescent, or half moon , the convexity of which is turned towards the north, whilst its concave face embraces the hills of Chablais, or Savoy. It follows that, in order to appreciate Geneva as a whole, so far as this can ever be achieved in the case of so big a sheet of water, it is necessary to view it from the high ground, and from the vineyards, above Aubonne or Lausanne, which command, more or less imperfectly, both curves of the bending lake. It follows again that Geneva, with this form of extreme simplicity, exhibits none of the mystery and surprises of such highly complex lakes as Lugano or Lucerne: everything here is exceedingly straightforward, and depends for its effect, not on continually new grouping of interlocking ranges of hill, but on the gradual majestic unfolding of a short series of dignified scenes.

It will be gathered from what has already been said that, for the greater part of its length, the finest shore views of Geneva are commanded from its north, or convex, margin, looking south across splendidly broad stretches of water--opposite Thonon, where it is nearly at its broadest, almost exactly eight miles--to the grandly marshalled Alps of Chablais that tower above the opposite shore. To look northward from this opposite shore, across the water to the Jura and Central Plain, is to contemplate quite a different lake, and one of less superlative degree. It so happens, again, that the north shore is the more interesting of the two, by reason of the succession of ancient and picturesque towns, such as Nyon, Rolle, Morges, and Aubonne--to say nothing of partially modernized Vevey, and of almost wholly modernized Lausanne , or of castles like Vufflens and Chillon--that stud its immediate shore, or lie barely a trifle inland. The best way, no doubt, to appreciate Geneva is to sail again and again up its gracious sheet of blue; yet no one who has leisure will repent a quiet pilgrimage, best made I think on bicycle, to the villages and towns along its north bank.

This pilgrimage we hope to make presently; but for the moment it will be as well to turn our attention to the two gay watering-places of Evian and Thonon , and to penetrate a little deeper up the valley of the Dranse to the roots of the rocky mountains that form so grand a background to the lake as viewed from the castle terrace at Nyon, or from the cathedral porch at Lausanne. Neither Thonon nor Evian need detain us long; for, though each has a nucleus of ancient town, each is now rather overwhelmed by its vast and fashionable modern hotels. Respectively they lie to the west and east of the Dranse, which, descending in three separate streams from the highlands of Savoy--the Dranse proper, the Dranse d'Abondance, and the Dranse de Morzine--here pushes out in united delta into the lake. Thonon is the capital of the old Savoyard province of Chablais, and has actually, in excuse of its modern pretensions, a set of chalybeate springs. Evian, however, with water containing bicarbonate of soda, is much the quainter and pleasanter, in its ancient parts, of the two; has also the great advantage, in comparison with Thonon, of being situated farther to the east, and thus commanding nobler views of the mountains above Vevey, and towards the head of the lake; and lastly is distinguished for its pleasant, tree-shadowed promenades by the actual water-side , whence you see across the blue expanse the white houses of Lausanne, clustered in profusion on the sunny slopes of the opposite shore, or twinkling in the twilight with a million electric lamps. No one should quit either Evian or Thonon without making first an "inland voyage" up the valley of the Dranse to visit the quaint little mountain villages of Abondance and St. Jean d'Aulph . At Abondance is a small monastic church, with a picturesque cloister, that dates in its inception from as early as the sixth century; whilst at St. Jean are the very pretty ruins of a little Cistercian abbey that is remarkable in more than one direction--its possession of a triforium and some foliated capitals--for its unusually early departure from the usual architectural severity of the early Cistercian rule. The valley of the Dranse d'Abondance is refreshingly green and pastoral, and is bounded in places by magnificently rocky hills; but it is only towards its head, beyond the Chapel of Abondance, and before reaching the low pass that leads to Morgins in Switzerland, that the sudden apparition of the splendid Dent-du-Midi--pre-eminently entitled, notwithstanding its comparatively low height , to rank in point of form and truly Alpine aspect amidst the giants of the Alps--lifts the whole landscape in a moment to the level of Alpine sublimity. Abondance, though much frequented by French families in summer, has absolutely nothing of the modern fashionable spirit that is rather too apparent at Thonon or Evian-les-Bains. Its inns, though comfortable enough for those who are not unduly fastidious, are still genuine mountain hostelries; and the type of French family life, though possibly wholly bourgeois, that may be studied here in August is amusing and piquant indeed, in contrast with the rather dull banalities of much more fashionable watering-places, such as Vichy or Aix-les-Bains.

We come at length to that north shore of the lake which already we have noted with critical preference. We shall penetrate no longer amidst royally wooded hills, nor linger on mossy banks by the side of impetuous mountain streams. Our immediate natural environment, on the contrary, will now be comparatively dull; but by way of compensation we shall have always across the water, provided the day be clear, the massed and tumultuous grouping of those stern and shapely mountains of Savoy, which hitherto we have inspected, in the three secluded valleys of the Dranse, by sample and parcel only . Moreover, instead of fashionable Thonon, and perhaps still more fashionable Evian, we have now in rapid succession a series of villages and small towns, along the actual margin of the lake, that are mostly of very old-world aspect, and often of some historical regard. We shall begin, however, by deserting the actual littoral for a short digression inland over the frontier into France, to visit one of those two or three great literary shrines that are connected with Lac Leman, and are not without interest to the student of the French Revolution and of modern thought.

From Geneva to Ferney Voltaire is a pleasant jaunt of about five miles. There is a steam-tramway along the road, but this hardly detracts from its agreeable rurality, which is remarkable, as we first quit Geneva, for its number of good and old-fashioned residences, and especially for the abundance and luxuriant growth of the timber along its borders, which is more English-like in character than one usually finds in France. Ferney consists of a single long street of white houses, backed, as we approach it, by the long blue wall of the Jura, towards whose foot we have been steadily advancing ever since Calvin's Geneva was left behind. From Calvin's Geneva to Voltaire's Ferney is a journey, long indeed in the history of human thought, but quickly enough effected on bicycle or foot. The ch?teau where Voltaire lived from 1759 to 1777 lies towards the head of the village, and was built, like most of the village, by the philosopher himself. Unhappily, it is shown only in summer, and then only on a single afternoon in the week; but as it is said to have been greatly altered since Voltaire's residence--though his bedroom still remains--little, perhaps, is missed, especially as the front of the house is well seen through the iron gates at the end of the public drive, as well as the little chapel to the left that he raised to the honour of God: "Deo Erexit Voltaire." Whatever view may be formed of Voltaire's religious and ethical opinions, undoubtedly there are aspects of his life to be praised. It was at Ferney that he caused to be educated, under his superintendence, the grandniece of the dramatist Corneille, whom he had "rescued from extreme want," and whom he endowed with the proceeds of an edition of her ancestor's works that he himself was at pains to edit. It was at Ferney, again, that he interested himself so passionately in denouncing the breaking on the wheel of poor Jean Calas by the Parliament and priests of Toulouse. English poets, no doubt, have conspired to present his character in a very unfavourable light. His contemporary, Cowper, writes of him:

whilst Wordsworth styles his "Optimist," or makes his "Wanderer" style it:

"this dull product of a scoffer's pen, Impure conceits discharging from a heart Hardened by impious pride."

It is fair after this to recall what is said by Mr. Lecky: "The spirit of intolerance sank blasted beneath his genius. Wherever his influence passed, the arm of the Inquisitor was palsied, the chain of the captive riven, the prison door flung open. Beneath his withering irony persecution appeared not only criminal but loathsome, and since his time it has ever shrunk from observation, and masked its features under other names. He died leaving a reputation that is indeed far from spotless, but having done more to destroy the greatest of human curses than any other of the sons of men."

From Ferney we return to Switzerland, and the shores of the lake, at Versoix, which impresses one disagreeably as dusty and untidy, though the Duc de Choiseul in the eighteenth century destined it as a rival to Geneva. "A pier was built," says Murray, "a Grand' Place laid down, streets running at right angles were marked out; but beyond this the plan was never carried into execution. Hence the verses of Voltaire:

"'A Versoix nous avons des rues, Et nous n'avons point de maisons.'"

From Coppet on to Nyon the way is well enough, with the azure levels of the lake for companion on the right, and with Jura, of a darker blue, like a rampart on the left. Nyon, placed pleasantly just short of the point where the lake broadens suddenly from about three to about seven miles by a huge expansion to the south, and thus at the termination of the so-called Petit Lac, whose littoral we have hitherto followed from Versoix, and less closely from Geneva, is one of those delightful old towns--Rolle and Morges belong to the same category--that lend such grace and character to the Swiss shore of the lake, and have such delightful inland parallels at Aubonne, Morat, and Moudon. Morat, I suppose, though it lacks the glorious lake, and the majestic distant snows, here still visible, of Mont Blanc, must carry away the palm as a triumph of pure mediaevalism; but, Morat put aside, there is hardly another small town in Switzerland so wholly delightful as this in its charm of situation, or so rich in varied combination of artificial and natural grace. High above the quays rises the old sixteenth-century castle, the residence of the Bernese bailiffs at a time when Canton Vaud was a mere appanage of Berne, though Geneva still succeeded in maintaining her independence. You may reach it from the shore by a multiplicity of ways--directly, by one of the narrow lanes that climb steeply from the lake; or, less painfully, by the broad terrace walk that rises gradually westward below the old town wall, through avenues of tortured plane-trees of the familiar foreign type, to the pleasant Promenade des Maronniers, with its growth of vigorous chestnuts, and its splendid prospect of lake and mountain. From here, or from the sister terrace that lies to the south of the ch?teau, the opposite hills of Chablais are now become noble objects: not merely Mont Blanc himself, always and insistently a king, but lesser rocky heights that lack only summer snow--the Dent d'Oche beyond Evian, the Pointe de Grange and the Cornette de Bise on either side of Abondance, and the pinnacled Roc d'Enfer--to justify as attendant squires to their great and peerless king. On the way between the two terraces is passed the parish church, in part, I think, of the fifteenth century, but with traces of Romanesque. The castle itself, on its sovereign brow, is picturesque enough, with its round towers at the corners , and its extinguisher, or pepper-pot, turrets--which are found again in Scotland, who borrowed so industriously from France, but never, I think, in England--and with its curious wooden galleries in an additional courtyard to the east. Inside is the town museum, with some lake village antiquities of the Bronze Age, in addition to the usual banalities of stuffed animals and birds: it is perhaps just worth visiting when the door is open, but hardly when you have to get the key.

Morges is another quaint old town, with yet another quaint old castle, and with a glorious view of Mont Blanc, seen in this case in long perspective up the valley of the Dranse, which opens deeply through the heart of the Savoyard mountains on the opposite shore of the lake. It is worth while landing here for a few hours, if only to mount the slopes behind the town, deep with wood and orchard, to the noble old castle of Vufflens, which is perhaps the best of its class in Switzerland. Seen from the surface of the lake--and it is seen thence conspicuously--this has a very modern look, and suggests that the whole building has been grossly over-restored. You never doubt, in fact, that the place is still inhabited, and most likely furbished up to the point of loss of interest. You approach with heavy heart, but are pleasantly surprised to find only part of the pile still occupied, apparently as a farm, whilst the whole is quite unspoilt. The plan is widely different from that of Nyon or Chillon , and absolutely unparalleled by anything in Britain. Tower-houses were still built in England as late as the fifteenth century--Tattershall in Lincolnshire is a prominent example--but these were not really keeps; and they were primarily meant, not for places of refuge in the last resort, but principally for residence and comfort. The great fourteenth-century donjon at Vufflens, on the contrary, is plainly intended for defence not less than the Tower of London in the eleventh century, or than Rochester keep in the twelfth. Moreover, this enormous tower--it is one hundred and sixty feet high, and thus again without equal or rival in England, though formerly surpassed by the great cylinder at Coucy-le-Ch?teau in France, which was actually about two hundred feet--is girt about its base with four lower towers, or satellites, as though for extra strength: the whole is very grim and menacing. It is built of yellow brick, and everywhere heavily machicolated. The vaulted kitchen, towards the basement, has a very striking fireplace, with a vine pattern running round in a deeply hollowed moulding. A vice, or spiral stair, ascends in the thickness of the south wall, which is thickened out to hold it in the form of a circular turret. Most of the roof is modern; but the visitor should notice the heavy wooden shutters that close the big, segmental-headed openings for hurling stones or shooting arrows, and that run on wheels in wooden troughs, so that a man might discharge his missile and immediately close the aperture ere the enemy could reply. The view, of course, is magnificent, and would alone repay the climb, unless the visitor happens to be giddy-headed. To the south of this great tower lies an open courtyard, and to the south of this, again, is the dwelling-house, or palace. This planning, in my experience, is unique; but there seems to be something like it at the great country castle of the Bishops of Lausanne at Lucens, which forms so conspicuous and delightful a feature on the hill on the west side of the valley of the Broye between Moudon and Payerne, in that delightful central vale of Switzerland that is perhaps so seldom visited, yet combines such unexpected charm of pleasantly pastoral landscape with such wealth of old-world interest as we find at Avenches , Morat, and Estavayer.

I mention these places with less reluctance, though certainly not on the shores of Lac Leman, because they may all be easily visited from Lausanne, and to some degree may even be thought connected with it--Lucens, because the Bishop-Princes of Lausanne had here a noble hunting-seat; Moudon, because its lovely thirteenth-century church is supposed to exhibit close analogies to Lausanne Cathedral; and Avenches, because this was actually the seat of the Bishop's stool before this was translated to Lausanne by Bishop Marius in 590. Lausanne itself is now a city of very modern aspect, stretching with its villas in the usual straggling Helvetic fashion--in contrast with the neat compactness of France: Neuch?tel and Bienne are other bad examples--for a distance of nearly eight miles along the gentle slopes of Mont Jorat that impend above the lake, and presenting, as seen from the water, a long line of clustered white houses , crowned by the lofty tower of its beautiful cathedral of Notre Dame. This is a purely residential city, and gives one the same impression as Milan of superabundant prosperity and wealth. These factors, indeed, have proved its ruin--I mean, of course, aesthetically--for the Swiss have of recent years remodelled it so drastically that soon, one is afraid, there will be nothing ancient left save here and there a church, preserved like flies in amber. In every direction are fine new streets, with splendid new houses and blocks of tenements. The result, no doubt, will be very magnificent; but Morat is more to my taste, or Payerne. Certain old quarters of B?le have thus recently been levelled, and Neuch?tel is now almost wholly of modern aspect. A city, no doubt, belongs primarily to the people who inhabit it; they have to live their lives in it, and consult their own convenience; but at least one may be permitted to hope that this sort of civic madness will not hastily lay criminal hands on Geneva, or Berne, or Fribourg.

Eastward from Lausanne, the hills, now foot-stools of the Alps, drop more immediately to the actual margin of the lake than any yet encountered from Geneva to Lausanne. From top to bottom they are richly dotted with vineyards, with hardly a green field in between; and everywhere among these vineyards, on the slope of the hillside, are innumerable little white villages, with their mellow red-brown roofs, clustered at frequent intervals round a central parish church. Opposite, as we advance, the prospect of distant Alps grows more and more magnificent, as the view opens deeper and deeper, beyond the head of the lake, into the great valley of the Rhone. So we come at last to Vevey, the second town of Vaud, from whose pleasant quay, with its lines of young chestnuts and planes, in the neighbourhood of the March? pier, is got what is perhaps the last good littoral view, as we journey in this direction, of the glorious head of the lake, without base suburban admixture to disguise and disfigure the foreground. The March? itself is open to the lake, but enclosed on its other three sides by old-fashioned brown-roofed houses, among which stand out prominent the picturesque open arcades of the Market House, and above which, on the hill, though backed itself by charmingly wooded lines of higher hill, rises the tower of the old town church. To the left, as we look eastward, is the prettily timbered promontory of the Tour de Peilz , which luckily shuts out the long line of villas past Clarens and Montreux; and beyond this, again, the gaping valley of the Rhone opens in unrivalled magnificence deep into the bosom of now considerable Alps, guarded on the left by the sharp, horn-like precipices of the noble Dent-de-Morcles , and on the right by the still nobler, boldly cut, square summit of the Dent-du-Midi . The view is one of simple magnificence, not of such involved and complicated hill forms as we contemplate with a different kind of pleasure from the quays at Lucerne, but compounded only of a few grand elements. The lights are always changing on this stupendous mountain range; now the distant hills are intensely blue, now purple, or red, in the sunset; now their summits stand up sharply in an unbroken summer sky, now their edges are blurred by fleecy white clouds, or obscured by golden mists,

"curling with unconfirm'd intent,"

but never static for a moment, or less than unearthly and beautiful.

I have spoken deliberately of this grand view from the quays at Vevey as the last good littoral view that one gets of the lake as one continues on one's journey eastward from Lausanne, or Ouchy, to Chillon. The littoral, in fact, from Vevey as far as Chillon is now virtually a continuous line of huge, flaunting hotels, restaurants, villas, and tea-rooms: not even the French Riviera between Cannes and Mentone, which I take to be the second vulgarest spot in Europe, has forfeited so entirely its original character, or, from the scenic point of view, been so utterly ruined. The line of devastation, it is true, is luckily very thin; and though the hills above Montreux and Territet are themselves loaded at frequent intervals with monster hotels, and laced in every direction with a perplexing network of lifts and mountain railways, it must frankly be confessed that to look at this five-mile-long string of pleasure towns from a distance--as, for instance, from those windows of Chillon Castle that project farthest into the lake--is a much less trying test of temper than to contemplate the glories of the head of the lake with Territet or Montreux for foreground. The destruction of these odd five miles of natural loveliness--and such natural loveliness--forms part of a fierce denunciation by the late Mr. Ruskin, which those who hardly think at all will probably think extravagant, but which seems to others entirely just: "You have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva." Clarens, indeed, was formerly a place of such exquisite loveliness that Rousseau chose it as the ideal dwelling-place for the heroine of his "Nouvelle H?lo?se." "Allez ? Vevey," he says in the fourth book of his "Confessions," "visitez le pays, examinez les sites, promenez-vous sur le lac, et dites si la Nature n'a pas fait ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St. Preux; mais ne les y cherchez pas." Nor was Byron, coming here in 1816, any less enthusiastic. "I have traversed," he writes in a letter of June 27 of that year to Mr. Murray--"I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with the 'H?lo?se' before me, and am struck to a degree that I cannot express with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their reality. Meillerie, Clarens, and Vevey, and the Ch?teau de Chillon, are places of which I shall say little, because all I could say must fall short of the impressions they stamp." And Byron himself, with the "H?lo?se" in recollection, addresses Clarens in the third canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," in the stanzas beginning--

"Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love!"

which Sir Edward Bridges pronounces "exquisite." Yet not the natural beauty of Clarens itself--

"'tis lone, And wonderful, and deep, and hath a sound, And sense, and sight of sweetness; here the Rhone Hath spread himself a couch, the Alps have reared a throne"

--nor the associations with Rousseau and Byron, could save this "little nook of mountain ground" from being sacrificed to the dictates of a thoughtless and idle fashion. "You have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva."

One is glad indeed that the famous Castle of Chillon, with which we must now conclude our perambulation of the north shore of the lake, and the little walled town of Villeneuve, which now, however, notwithstanding its name, seems ancient and venerable indeed in comparison with this gay modernity that pulsates at its doors, should lie just beyond the limit of this land of ruined Edens, and should thus restore us to the right mood in which to take farewell of the Lake of Geneva. Chillon is far from the finest castle, considered merely as a building, in Switzerland , nor, in fact, is it even the most beautifully situated . Its chief curiosity of site is the immense depth of water that lies immediately below its walls, which is sometimes said to have been "fathomed to the depth of 800 feet, French measure"--

"Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls: A thousand feet in depth below Its massy waters meet and flow; Thus much the fathom-line was sent From Chillon's snow-white battlement;"

but it is due neither to its value as a specimen of military architecture, nor to its charm of situation, nor to this marvel of subterraneous precipice, that Chillon maintains the extended reputation that renders it perhaps the most visited and best known of all the many famous castles of the world. Its cult is rather due to its association with Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon," which was written, as we have seen, in the old Ancre Inn at Ouchy in the short course of a couple of days in 1816. Byron himself has entitled this a "fable," and it has certainly little or nothing to do with the historical Bonnivard, who was certainly imprisoned here for six years, between 1530 and 1536, but was released in the latter year, and subsequently became a Protestant, and married four wives in succession! Byron, however, in the last six lines of another poem--the "Sonnet on Chillon"--has paid a stately tribute to the actual Bonnivard, which will be recalled with interest in the striking, half-subterranean dungeon in which he was confined for more than four years of his captivity:

I do not know whether these footmarks are still visible, or, indeed, were ever visible; but if we choose to imagine them--Bonnivard was chained to the fifth pillar from the entrance--we shall not do much amiss. At least it would be better thus to err on the side of imagination than to imitate the English lady of whom Byron complained when he visited Chillon, not for the first time, on September 18, 1816, that he met her on his return fast asleep in her carriage--"fast asleep in the most anti-narcotic spot in the world."

INDEX

Abondance, 37 Chapel of, 37

Aiguille du Gouter, 29 du Midi, 23, 30 du Tour, 29

Anterne, Col d', 30 Lac d', 29

Argenti?re, 30

Aubonne, 48

Avenches, 53

Avre, River, 13, 24, 27

Bellegarde, 13

Beza, Theodore, 21

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