William Beckford

Revisit the trees on the summit of Saleve.—Pas d’Echelle.—Moneti.—Bird’s-eye prospects.—Alpine flowers.—Extensive view from the summit of Saleve.—Youthful enthusiasm.—Sad realities.

I had long wished to revisit the holt of trees so conspicuous on the summit of Saleve, and set forth this morning to accomplish that purpose. Brandoin an artist, once the delight of our travelling lords and ladies, accompanied me. We rode pleasantly and sketchingly along through Carouge to the base of the mountain, taking views every now and then of picturesque stumps and cottages.

At length, after a good deal of lackadaisical loitering on the banks of the Arve, we reached a sort of goats’ path, leading to some steps cut in the rock, and justly called the Pas d’Echelle. I need not say we were obliged to dismount and toil up this ladder, beyond which rise steeps of verdure shaded by walnuts.

These brought us to Moneti, a rude straggling village, with its church tower embosomed in gigantic limes. We availed ourselves of their deep cool shade to dine as comfortably as a whole posse of withered hags, who seemed to have been just alighted from their broomsticks, would allow us.

About half past three, a sledge drawn by four oxen was got ready to drag us up to the holt of trees, the goal to which we were tending: stretching ourselves on the straw spread over our vehicle, we set off along a rugged path, conducted aslant the steep slope of the mountain, vast prospects opening as we ascended; to our right the crags of the little Saleve—the variegated plains of Gex and Chablais, separated by the lake; below, Moneti, almost concealed in wood; behind, the mole, lifting up its pyramidical summit amidst the wild amphitheatre of glaciers, which lay this evening in dismal shadow, the sun being overcast, the Jura half lost in rainy mists, and a heavy storm darkening the Fort de l’Ecluse. Except a sickly gleam cast on the snows of the Buet, not a ray of sunshine enlivened our landscape.

This sorrowful colouring agreed but too well with the dejection of my spirits. I suffered melancholy recollections to take full possession of me, and glancing my eyes over the vast map below, sought out those spots where I had lived so happy with my lovely Margaret. On them did I eagerly gaze—absorbed in the consciousness of a fatal, irreparable loss, I little noticed the transports expressed by my companion at the grand effects of light and shade, which obeyed the movements of the clouds; nor was I more attentive to the route of our oxen, which, perfectly familiarized with precipices, preferred their edge to the bank on the other side, and by this choice gave us an opportunity of looking down more than a thousand feet perpendicularly on the wild shrubberies and shattered rocks deep below, at the base of the mountain. In general I shrink back from such bird’s-eye prospects with my head in a whirl, and yet, by a most unaccountable fascination, feel a feverish impulse to throw myself into the very gulph I abhor; but to-day I lay in passive indifference, listlessly extended on our moving bed.

Its progress being extremely deliberate, we had leisure to observe, as we crept along, a profusion of Alpine flowers; but none of those gorgeous insects mentioned by Saussure as abounding on Saleve were fluttering about them. This was no favourable day for butterfly excursions; the flowers laden with heavy drops, the forerunners of still heavier rain, hung down their heads. We passed several chalets, formed of mud and stone, instead of the neat timber, with which those on the Swiss mountains are constructed. Meagre peasants, whose sallow countenances looked quite of a piece with the sandy hue of their habitations, kept staring at us from crevices and hollow places: the fresh roses of a garden are not more different from the rank weeds of an unhealthy swamp, than these wretched objects from the ruddy inhabitants of Switzerland.

My heart sank as we were driven alongside of one of these squalid groups, huddled together under a blasted beech in expectation of a storm. The wind drove the smoke and sparks of a fire just kindled at the root of the tree, full in the face of an infant, whose mother had abandoned it to implore our charity with outstretched withered hands. The poor helpless being filled the air with waitings, and being tightly swaddled lip in yellow rags, according to Savoyarde custom, exhibited an appearance in form and colour not unlike that of an overgrown pumpkin thrown on the ground out of the way. How should I have enjoyed setting its limbs at liberty, and transporting it to the swelling bosom of a Bernese peasant! such as I have seen in untaxed garments, red, blue and green, with hair falling in braids mixed with flowers and silver trinkets, hurrying along to some wake or wedding, with that firm step and smiling hilarity which the consciousness of freedom inspires.

A few minutes dragging beyond the tree just mentioned, we reached the bold verdant slopes of delicate short herbage which crown the crags of the mountain. We now moved smoothly along the turf, brushing it with our hands to extract its aromatic fragrance, and having no longer rough stones to encounter, our conveyance became so agreeable that we regretted our arrival before a chalet, under a clump of weather-beaten beach. These are the identical trees, so far and widely discovered, on the summit of Saleve, and the point to which we had been tending.

Seating ourselves on the very edge of a rocky cornice, we surveyed the busy crowded territory of Geneva, the vast reach of the lake, its coast, thickset with castles, towns, and villages, and the long line of the Jura protecting these richly cultivated possessions. Turning round, we traced the course of the Arve up to its awful sanctuary, the Alps of Savoy, above which rose the Mont-Blanc in deadly paleness, backed by a gloomy sky; nothing could form a stronger contrast to the populous and fertile plains in front of the mountain than this chaos of snowy peaks and melancholy deserts, the loftiest in the old world, held up in the air, and beaten, in spite of summer, with wintry storms.

I know not how long we should have remained examining the prospect had the weather been favourable, and had we enjoyed one of those serene evenings to be expected in the month of July. Many such have I passed in my careless childish days, stretched out on the brow of this very mountain, contemplating the heavenly azure of the lake, the innumerable windows of the villas below blazing in the setting sun, and the glaciers suffused by its last ray with a blushing pink. How often, giving way to youthful enthusiasm, have I peopled these singularly varied peaks with gnomes and fairies, the distributors of gold and crystal to those who adventurously scaled their lofty abode.

This evening my fancy was led to no such gay aËrial excursions; sad realities chained it to the earth, and to the scene before my eyes, which, in lowering, sombre hue, corresponded with my interior gloom. A rude blast driving us off the margin of the precipices, we returned to the shelter of the beech. There we found some disappointed butterfly catchers, probably of the watch-making tribe, and a silly boy gaping after them with a lank net and empty boxes. This being Monday, I thought the Saleve had been delivered from such intruders; but it seems that the rage for natural history has so victoriously pervaded all ranks of people in the republic, that almost every day in the week sends forth some of its journeymen to ransack the neighbouring cliffs, and transfix unhappy butterflies.

Silversmiths and toymen, possessed by the spirit of De Luc and De Saussure’s lucubrations, throw away the light implements of their trade, and sally forth with hammer and pickaxe to pound pebbles and knock at the door of every mountain for information. Instead of furbishing up teaspoons and sorting watch-chains, they talk of nothing but quartz and feldspath. One flourishes away on the durability of granite, whilst another treats calcareous rocks with contempt; but as human pleasures are seldom perfect and permanent, acrimonious disputes too frequently interrupt the calm of the philosophic excursion. Squabbles arise about the genus of a coralite, or concerning that element which has borne the greatest part in the convulsion of nature. The advocate of water too often sneaks home to his wife with a tattered collar, whilst the partisan of fire and volcanoes lies vanquished in a puddle, or winding up the clue of his argument in a solitary ditch. I cannot help thinking so diffused a taste for fossils and petrifactions of no very particular benefit to the artisans of Geneva, and that watches would go as well, though their makers were less enlightened.

LETTER II.

It began to rain just as we entered the chalet under the beech-trees, and one of the dirtiest I ever crept into—it would have been uncharitable not to have regretted the absence of swine, for here was mud and filth enough to have insured their felicity. A woman, whose teeth of a shining whiteness were the only clean objects I could discover, brought us foaming bowls of cream and milk, with which we regaled ourselves, and then got into our vehicle. We but too soon left the smooth herbage behind, and passed about an hour in rambling down the mountain pelted by the showers, from which we took shelter under the limes at Moneti.

Here we should have drunk our tea in peace and quietness, had it not been for the incursion of a gang of bandylegged watchmakers, smoking their pipes, and scraping their fiddles, and snapping their fingers, with all that insolent vulgarity so characteristic of the Rue-basse portion of the Genevese community. We got out of their way, you may easily imagine, as fast as we were able, and descending a rough road, most abominably strewn with rolling pebbles, arrived at the bridge d’Etrombieres just as it fell dark. The mouldering planks with which the bridge is awkwardly put together, sounded suspiciously hollow under the feet of our horses, and had it not been for the friendly light of a pine torch which a peasant brought forth, we might have been tumbled into the Arve.

It was a mild summer night, the rainy clouds were dissolving away with a murmur of distant thunder so faint as to be scarcely heard. From time to time a flash of summer lightning discovered the lonely tower of Moneti on the edge of the lesser Saleve. The ghostly tales, which the old curÈ of the mountains had told me at a period when I hungered and thirsted after supernatural narrations, recurred to my memory, in all their variety of horrors, and kept it fully employed till I found myself under the walls of Geneva. The gates were shut, but I knew they were to be opened again at ten o’clock for the convenience of those returning from the Comedie.

The Comedie is become of wonderful importance; but a few years ago the very name of a play was held in such abhorrence by the spiritual consistory of Geneva and its obsequious servants, which then included the best part of the republic, that the partakers and abettors of such diversions were esteemed on the high road to eternal perdition. Though, God knows, I am unconscious of any extreme partiality for Calvin, I cannot help thinking his severe discipline wisely adapted to the moral constitution of this starch bit of a republic which he took to his grim embraces. But these days of rigidity and plainness are completely gone by; the soft spirit of toleration, so eloquently insinuated by Voltaire, has removed all thorny fences, familiarized his numerous admirers with every innovation, and laughed scruples of every nature to scorn. Voltaire, indeed, may justly be styled the architect of that gay well-ornamented bridge, by which freethinking and immorality have been smuggled into the republic under the mask of philosophy and liberality and sentiment. These monsters, like the Sin and Death of Milton, have made speedy and irreparable havoc. To facilitate their operations, rose the genius of “Rentes ViagÈres” at his bidding, tawdry villas with their little pert groves of poplar and horse-chesnut start up—his power enables Madame C. D. the bookseller’s lady to amuse the D. of G. with assemblies, sets Parisian cabriolets and English phaetons rolling from one faro table to another, and launches innumerable pleasure parties with banners and popguns on the lake, drumming and trumpeting away their time from morn till evening. I recollect, not many years past, how seldom the echoes of the mountains were profaned by such noises, and how rarely the drones of Geneva, if any there were in that once industrious city, had opportunities of displaying their idleness; but now Dissipation reigns triumphant, and to pay the tribute she exacts, every fool runs headlong to throw his scrapings into the voracious whirlpool of annuities; little caring, provided he feeds high and lolls in his carriage, what becomes of his posterity. I had ample time to make these reflections, as the Comedie lasted longer than usual.

Luckily the night improved, the storms had rolled away, and the moon rising from behind the crags of the lesser Saleve cast a pleasant gleam on the smooth turf of plain-palais, where we walked to and fro above half an hour. We had this extensive level almost entirely to ourselves, no light glimmered in any window, no sound broke the general stillness, except a low murmur proceeding from a group of chesnut trees. There, snug under a garden wall on a sequestered bench, sat two or three Genevois of the old stamp, chewing the cud of sober sermons—men who receive not more than seven or eight per cent. for their money; there sat they waiting for their young ones, who had been seduced to the theatre.

A loud hubbub and glare of flambeaus proclaiming the end of the play, we left these good folks to their rumination, and regaining our carriage rattled furiously through the streets of Geneva, once so quiet, so silent at these hours, to the no small terror and annoyance of those whom Rentes ViagÈres had not yet provided with a speedier conveyance than their own legs, or a brighter satellite than an old cook-maid with a candle and lantern.

It was eleven o’clock before we reached home, and near two before I retired to rest, having sat down immediately to write this letter whilst the impressions of the day were fresh in my memory.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY SAMUEL BENTLEY,
Dorset Street, Fleet Street.

ITALY;
WITH SKETCHES OF
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “VATHEK.”
THIRD EDITION.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,
Publisher in Ordinary to His Majesty.
1835.