Towns which expand too fast and become too prosperous tend to lose their individuality. Geneva has enjoyed that fortune, and has paid that price for it.

Straddling the Rhone, where it issues from the bluest lake in the world, looking out upon green meadows and wooded hills, backed by the dark ridge of the SalÈve, with the ‘great white mountain’ visible in the distance, it has the advantage of an incomparable site; and it is, from a town surveyor’s point of view, well built. It has wide thoroughfares, quays, and bridges; gorgeous public monuments and well-kept public gardens; handsome theatres and museums; long rows of palatial hotels; flourishing suburbs; two railway-stations, and a casino. But all this is merely the faÇade—all of it quite modern; hardly any of it more than half a century old. The real historical Geneva—the little of it that remains—is hidden away in the background, where not every tourist troubles to look for it.

It is disappearing fast. Italian stonemasons are constantly engaged in driving lines through it. They have rebuilt, for instance, the old Corraterie, which is now the Regent Street of Geneva, famous for its confectioners’ and booksellers’ shops; they have destroyed, and are still destroying, other ancient slums, setting up white buildings of uniform ugliness in place of the picturesque but insanitary dwellings of the past. It is, no doubt, a very necessary reform, though one may think that it is being executed in too utilitarian a spirit. The old Geneva was malodorous, and its death-rate was high. They had more than one Great Plague there, and their Great Fires have always left some of the worst of their slums untouched. These could not be allowed to stand in an age which studies the science and practises the art of hygiene. Yet the traveller who wants to know what the old Geneva was really like must spend a morning or two rambling among them before they are pulled down.

The old Geneva, like Jerusalem, was set upon a hill, and it is towards the top of the hill that the few buildings of historical interest are to be found. There is the cathedral—a striking object from a distance, though the interior is hideously bare. There is the Town Hall, in which, for the convenience of notables carried in litters, the upper stories were reached by an inclined plane instead of a staircase. There is Calvin’s old Academy, bearing more than a slight resemblance to certain of the smaller colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. There, too, are to be seen a few mural tablets, indicating the residences of past celebrities. In such a house Rousseau was born; in such another house—or in an older house, now demolished, on the same site—Calvin died. And towards these central points the steep and narrow, mean streets—in many cases streets of stairs—converge.

As one plunges into these streets one seems to pass back from the twentieth century to the fifteenth, and need not exercise one’s imagination very severely in order to picture the town as it appeared in the old days before the Reformation. The present writer may claim permission to borrow his own description from the pages of ‘Lake Geneva and its Literary Landmarks’:

‘Narrow streets predominated, though there were also a certain number of open spaces—notably at the markets, and in front of the Cathedral, where there was a traffic in those relics and rosaries which Geneva was presently to repudiate with virtuous indignation. One can form an idea of the appearance of the narrow streets by imagining the oldest houses that one has seen in Switzerland all closely packed together—houses at the most three stories high, with gabled roofs, ground-floors a step or two below the level of the roadway, and huge arched doors studded with great iron nails, and looking strong enough to resist a battering-ram. Above the doors, in the case of the better houses, were the painted escutcheons of the residents, and crests were also often blazoned on the window-panes. The shops, too, and more especially the inns, flaunted gaudy sign-boards with ingenious devices. The Good Vinegar, the Hot Knife, the Crowned Ox, were the names of some of these; their tariff is said to have been fivepence a day for man and beast.

‘The streets, being narrow, were also very generally crowded, and were particularly crowded in the evenings. From the stuffy houses—and even in these days of sanitation a really old Swiss house is sometimes stuffy enough to make the stranger gasp for breath—the citizens of high as well as low degree sallied to take their pleasure in the street. The street was their drawing-room. They stood and gossiped there; they sat about on benches underneath their windows. Or some musician would strike up a lively tune, and ladies of the highest position in society—the daughters and wives of Councillors and Syndics—attired in velvets and silks and satins, would dance round-dances in the open air. For all their political anxieties, these early Genevans were, on the whole, a merry people.

‘But—let there be no mistake about it—they made merry in the midst of filth and evil smells. On this point we have unimpeachable information in the shape of a rescript issued by the Chapter of the Cathedral after conference with the Vidomne and the Syndics. The Chapter complains that too many citizens dispose of their slops by carelessly throwing them out of window, and establish refuse-heaps outside their front-doors—a noisome practice which still prevails in many of the Swiss villages, though no longer in any of the Swiss towns. It is also complained that nearly every man has a pig-sty, and lets his pigs run loose in the streets for exercise, and that there is an undue prevalence of such unsavoury industries as the melting of tallow and the burning of the horns of cattle. One can imagine the net result of this great combination of nuisances. In a city of magnificent distances it might have passed. Bayswater, at the present day, lives in ignorance of the smells of Bermondsey. But in Geneva, when Geneva was almost as small as Sandwich, one can understand that the consequences were appalling to the nostrils of the polite. The fact that the city was so overrun with lepers and beggars that two lazar-houses and seven hÔpitaux—or casual wards, as one might say—had to be provided for their reception, adds something, though not perhaps very much, to this unpleasant side of the picture.

‘Our ecclesiastical rescript further proves that while the Genevans were a merry and a dirty, they were also an immoral, people. It records that they are unduly addicted to the game of dice, and that the outcome of this pastime is “fraud, deception, theft, rapine, lies, fights, brawls, and insults, to say nothing of damnable blasphemy”; and it ordains that any man who “swears without necessity” shall “take off his hat and kneel down in the place of his offence, and clasp his hands, and kiss the earth”—or pay a fine of three halfpence if he fail to do so. Then it proceeds to propound an elaborate scheme for the State regulation of immorality, forbidding certain indulgences “to clergymen as well as laymen”; and requiring the Social Evil to wear something in the nature of a Scarlet Letter to distinguish her from other women.’