A Ride on Horseback to Florence Through France and Switzerland. Vol. 2 of 2
by Augusta Macgregor Holmes · English · Gutenberg #46686 · 598,056 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: A Ride on Horseback to Florence Through France and Switzerland. Vol. 2 of 2
Author: Augusta Macgregor Holmes
Release date: August 25, 2014 [eBook #46686]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A RIDE ON HORSEBACK TO FLORENCE THROUGH FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND. VOL. 2 OF 2 ***
A
RIDE ON HORSEBACK
TO
FLORENCE
THROUGH
FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND.
DESCRIBED IN A SERIES OF LETTERS
BY
A LADY.
“I will not change my horse for any that treads but on four pasterns:
he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn
of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes; he is the prince
of palfreys; his neigh is like the bidding of a monarch, and his
countenance enforces homage: nay, the man hath no wit that cannot from
the rising of the lark to the lodging of the lamb vary deserved praise
on my palfrey.”—SHAKSPEARE, _King Henry the Fifth_.
_IN TWO VOLUMES._
VOL. II.
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1842.
LONDON:
Printed by WILLIAM CLOWES and SONS,
Stamford Street.
A ride on horseback to Florence
CONTENTS
OF VOL. II.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
Page 1
RIDE to Chillon—Castle of La Tour du
Peil—Chastellar—Chillon—Attentive gendarmes—Oubliettes—Destiny
of their inhabitants—Salle de Justice—Torture room—Eating hall
with its fleurs-de-lis—The dungeons—The beam—The interment in the
lake—Bonnivard—His misfortunes—His prison—The first pillar having
its own story—Sketches on the wall made by a captive—His
escape—Drowned in the attempt two months before Bonnivard’s
deliverance—Alexander Dumas’ name above that of Byron—The English
amateur’s painting—The fat gendarme—A bad Bonnivard—Our
determination to inhabit Chillon—Changed by thoughts of
powder—Fanny our conductress—Ludlow’s house and tomb—Contrast
between Protestant and Catholic cantons—Bulle—The bony hand holding
a crucifix—The Counts of Gruyères—Fines paid for crimes
perpetrated—The banner of Berne—Laws of the Simmenthal—The Bernese
attacking Gruyères—Count Pierre’s danger—Plague described by
Boccaccio—The Flagellans—The murdered Jews—Last of the Counts of
Gruyères—Leaving Bulle—Fribourg—Battle of Morat—The lime tree—A
monument of the young messenger—Berthhold, founder of Fribourg—Line
drawn between plebeian and noble—Bridge—Organ
CHAPTER II.
29
Canton of Berne—Village where the Swiss troops obtained a victory over
the French force in ’98—Berne—Bears in all forms—Their revenues
diminished—Their new baptism—Foundation of Berne—Rodolph of
Erlach—Laupen—Rodolph chosen guardian of orphans of the Count of
Nidau—Murdered by his own son-in-law—Cathedral—Monument to Duke
Berthhold—His wife’s execution—Charles Louis of Erlach massacred by
his own soldiers during French invasion—Treatment of Berne by the
French—Thun—Privileges—Castle of Thun—The brothers—The
banquet—The murder—The “pension”—An acquaintance—The sketcher in
haste—A Marseilles story—Spietz—The golden manor—Adrian of
Bubenberg—His saving Morat—His embassy—His return as a
minstrel—Unterseen—Unspunnen once the property of the Eschenbach
family—Walter of Eschenbach—Confidant of the parricide Duke
John—Murder of the Emperor Albert—Vengeance of Queen
Agnes—Walter’s son spared—Walter a shepherd—Lauterbrunnen—The
cascade—Grindelwald—A buried chapel in the glacier—The Harder—The
grave of an only son—Return to Thun
CHAPTER III.
74
Leave Thun—Zweizemmen—The wrong road—Château d’Œx—Gruyères—The
Préfet’s ball—Anniversary of the Virgin’s leaving school—Vevay—The
patient Griselda’s obstinacy—The exploit—Villeneuve—The Valley of
the Rhone—St. Maurice—The Theban legion—The Valais—The village
buried—The Rhone overflowed—Former inundation—The old villager
saved—St. Bernard—Story of its founder—Martigny—Riddes—Sion—The
prelate’s murder—The family of the Rarons—The Mazza—Raron
persecuted—Demands the aid of Duke Amedée—His castle burned—His
wife driven forth—His revenge—The cretins of Sierre
CHAPTER IV.
106
Rhone overflowed—Baths of Louëche—Tourtemagne—Visp—Ravages of the
Rhone—Madonnas placed to stop its further rise—Glys—Brieg—Ascent
of Simplon—Ganther—Gallery of Schalbet—The toll-gate—Hospice—The
Barons of Stockalper—Village of the Simplon—Broken
road—Algaby—Gorge of Gondo—Fanny too near the edge—Gap in the
road—Part of gallery carried away—Opportune aid—Arrival at
Gondo—Broken road near Isella—Accident during the storm—Remnant of
a carriage—The douanier’s aid—An auberge—The military post—My
consolation—An amiable hostess—Good company in a quiet kitchen—A
French gentleman expecting murder—An Italian vetturino—The Juge de
paix and his interested verdict—Torrent or bedchamber—Our hostess’s
supper—Departure—First difficulty—Road completely swept
away—Impossibility of advancing—A lady and her guide killed—Way
over the Trasquiera—Fanny aiding her conductor—A painful path—A
draught of water—Top of the mountain—Inhabitants—Milk and
apples—Fanny’s leap—Danger of Grizzle—Descent—Bridge
gone—Torrent forded—Gallery of Crevola—The broken
column—Arrival—Our friend’s welcome—Domo d’Ossola
CHAPTER V.
156
Vogogna—Country overflowed—The ferry—Isola
Madre—Baveno—Innkeeper—Isola Bella—Ground made in
1670—Arona—Castle of St. Charles of Borromeo—Castle of
Angera—Frescoes in its ruined halls—History of St. Charles of
Borromeo—Early habits—Resides in his diocese at Milan—Strives to
reform the church—Attempt to murder him—A miracle—His conduct
during the plague—Life of St. Anthony—Who cured the young pig—St.
Christopher, who was twelve feet high—The Ticino—Amusement on board
the ferry—The commissary—Sesto Calende—A charge—Somma and Julius
Cæsar’s cypress—Castle of the Visconti—Birthplace of
Teobaldo—Elected Pope when in the Holy Land with Edward the First of
England—Otho Visconti founder of his family’s grandeur—Gallerate—A
threatened beating—The Lord’s Supper on the auberge wall—The
robber’s seven towers—Battle between the Visconti—Unwarranted
preference shown by a ghost—Murder in the castle at Milan—The
murderer poisoned by his wife—Rhò—Milan
CHAPTER VI.
185
The Duomo—Our host’s advice—Joseph the Second—Tombs—That to the
memory of Giovanni and Gabrielle de’ Medici, designed by Michael
Angelo—Chapel of St. John—St. Bartholomew—Tomb of Otho, archbishop
of Milan—Crucifix carried by St. Charles of Borromeo—Antique
altar—Burial-place of St. Charles—La Scala—Opera ballet—The
Brera, once monastery of the Umiliati—Paintings—The old
castle—Arms of the Visconti—Prerogative preserved to himself by
Giovanni—The parricide—Filippo Mario—His innocent wife
executed—Carmagnuola Filippo’s general—Forced by his injustice to
change of party—Suspicions of his new masters—His
execution—Francis Sforza—His youth—His name’s origin—Jane of
Naples—Imprisoned by her husband—Set free—King James a monk of St.
Francis—Forte Braccio—Sforza’s death—Arena—Roman ruin
CHAPTER VII.
211
Leaving Milan—La Bicocca—Francis the First—Francis Sforza—Black
Bands of Giovanni de’ Medici—Lautrec—An intrigue—Samblançay—The
king prisoner—Samblançay falsely accused—Condemned to be hanged at
Montfaucon—His death deferred till dark, in expectation of the
king’s relenting—His last words resembling Wolsey’s—Lodi—The
Austrians—Imprecations—The serenade—Doubts as to the
road—Piacenza—A thirsty douanier—The cathedral—Alberoni—A
bell-ringer—The Farnese—Pier Luigi’s murder—Statues on the
piazza—Alessandro—His son Ranuccio—His danger in youth—His
escape—His cruelty—His treatment of his son—Borgo St.
Donnino—Maria Louisa—Castel Guelfo—Origin of names of Guelph and
Gibelline—Parma—Madonna in the stable—A lamp serving two
purposes—A procession seeking a criminal—Cambacérès—Ariosto—A
robber’s love of poetry—Correggio—Modena—The countess Matilda—The
Emperor Henry the Fourth—Canossa—Three days unsheltered in the
court-yard—Rubiera—Modena
CHAPTER VIII.
243
Pic de la Mirandole—Castel Franco—Bologna—A bad inn left for La
Pace—Its mistress—Statue of Pope Julius the Second—St.
Petronio—Mistake of a learned man—Charles the Fifth—Here crowned
King of Lombardy—King Enzio—His peasant-love—His twenty years’
captivity—The origin of a name—The towers—Accademmia—St.
Cecilia—The cathedral—Temple dedicated to Isis—Papal troops—A
capitulation—Cholera—An Italian hospital—French soldiers—The
procession barefoot—The well-attested miracle—The
Appennines—Lojano—The Pellegrino—Filigare—Pietra Mala—Strange
properties of its fire and cold spring—Fruit—Montecarelli—St.
Antonio’s grapes—Palazzo Borghese—Hôtel du Nord—Jerome Bonaparte’s
cook—Piazza della Santa Trinità—Spot occupied by the Palazzo degl’
Uberti left vacant—Recording escutcheons—The Saviour, king of
Florence—The Loggia—Galleria de’ Medici—Piazza del Duomo—The
Baptistery—Work of Ghiberti at twenty years old—Chains of the gates
of Pisa—A funeral
CHAPTER IX.
274
The Duomo—Its interior—Michael Angelo’s farewell—Vasari—Congress
of artists convoked—A dome of pumice stone—Brunelleschi turned
out as a madman—The egg—His colleague Ghiberti—His feigned
illness—The difficulties divided—Height of the dome—Giotto—The
Campanile—Pietro Farnese—His gilded mule—Dante—Condemned to be
burned at the stake—Peter of Toledo-Conrad the traitor—The
sacristy—The Pazzi—Julian murdered—Salviati hanged in his
cardinal’s robes—Seventy executions—The artist nicknamed Andrea
of the Hanged—The baptistery—The withered elm restored—The story
of Joseph—John the Twenty-third from pirate become pope—Palazzo
Riccardi—Gardens of Lorenzo—Michael Angelo—The Strada del
Traditore—Lorenzino—The duke Alessandro—Made unpopular through
his vices—The plot—Anecdote told by Benvenuto Cellini—The
rendezvous—The murder—Lorenzino assassinated in turn—The
Galleria—The Palazzo Pitti—Cosmo—His sons’ quarrel—The eldest
killed by his brother—The father’s revenge—His wife
poisoned—Duke Francesco and Bianca Capello—Her story and death
CHAPTER X.
311
Boboli Gardens—Buondelmonte—Ponte Vecchio—Santa Croce—Palazzo
Borgo—Tombs—Michael Angelo’s monument—Died the year Galileo was
born—Machiavelli—Alfieri—Galileo dying the year in which Newton
was born—Chapel of the Pazzi—San Lorenzo—Monument of Cosmo, Pater
Patriæ—Michael Angelo’s Day and Night—Contradictory
employments—His reply to a verse addressed to his statue—Cappella
dei Principi—Santa Maria Novella—Cimabue’s Virgin—Cappella de’
Spagnuoli—Portraits of Petrarch and Laura—Turned out by a
friar—Pietre Dure—Our guide again—Sarcophagus of the Gran
Duchessa—Shut up in a private oratory—Let out by a
priest—Cascine—Palazzo Vecchio—Small tower-chamber prison of
Cosmo—Savonarola—His prediction of Lorenzo’s death—The
confession—The anathema—Trial by fire—The heavy rain—Savonarola
executed—The Appennines—Birthplace of the Maréchale d’Ancre—Tre
Maschere—Fog—Rain—Lojano—Crosses—Bologna—Grizzle’s attack on
the kitchen—Miss Kemble—Modena—The ducal stable—The stuffed
charger—Parma—The five saints canonized in May—Their claims to
canonization
CHAPTER XI.
349
La Steccata—The Teatro Farnese—Its magnificence—Its ruins—Would
contain 9000—St. Jeronimo—Sir Thomas Lawrence—Alti Relievi—The
overflowed Po—The infant saved—Placentia again—Misery of
Piedmontese—Voghera—Tortona—Plains of Marengo—The wrong
road—The Tanaro overflowed—Asti—The Angelo and its
reception—Moncaglieri—The vow, and the Virgin, who resembled a
Duchess—The old Italian gentleman—Victor Amedée’s abdication—The
old man’s arrest—His death at Moncaglieri—Susa—Its
waterspouts—A chimney on fire—Mont Cenis—Fog and snow-storm—A
postilion’s wonder—Danger of tourmente—Lanslebourg—A thick smoke
and ill scent—Modane—Lesseillon—St. Michel
CHAPTER XII.
387
St. Jean de Maurienne—A tradition of two fingers—Story of a
procession of bears at Henry the Second’s passage—Peculiar
customs—Baptism—Funerals—Aiguebelle—La Carbonaria—Chambéry—Road
by the Mont du Chat—A valley of the Rhone—Pierre Châtel once a
monastery—Bellay—Murder committed by a notary—A peculiar
race—Pont d’Ain—Cathedral of Brou—Its foundress and her
motto—Bourg—Fair-time—An aubergiste—Montrevel—We are taken for
part of Franconi’s troop—Tournus—Chalons—Arnay le
Duc—Vermenton—Joigny—A poor traveller—The chapter of
Sens—Montereau where Jean sans Peur was murdered—Melun—Paris—Fanny
CHAPTER I.
Ride to Chillon—Castle of La Tour du
Peil—Chastellar—Chillon—Attentive gendarmes—Oubliettes—Destiny
of their inhabitants—Salle de Justice—Torture room—Eating hall
with its fleurs-de-lis—The dungeons—The beam—The interment in the
lake—Bonnivard—His misfortunes—His prison—The first pillar having
its own story—Sketches on the wall made by a captive—His
escape—Drowned in the attempt two months before Bonnivard’s
deliverance—Alexander Dumas’ name above that of Byron—The English
amateur’s painting—The fat gendarme—A bad Bonnivard—Our
determination to inhabit Chillon—Changed by thoughts of
powder—Fanny our conductress—Ludlow’s house and tomb—Contrast
between Protestant and Catholic cantons—Bulle—The bony hand holding
a crucifix—The Counts of Gruyères—Fines paid for crimes
perpetrated—The banner of Berne—Laws of the Simmenthal—The Bernese
attacking Gruyères—Count Pierre’s danger—Plague described by
Boccaccio—The Flagellans—The murdered Jews—Last of the Counts of
Gruyères—Leaving Bulle—Fribourg—Battle of Morat—The lime tree—A
monument of the young messenger—Berthhold, founder of Fribourg—Line
drawn between plebeian and noble—Bridge—Organ.
16th.
We dined at one, in company of some gentlemanly Swiss and French
officers, and started at three for Chillon, passing on our way the
hamlet La Tour du Peil, and catching a glimpse as we rode by of its
ruined ancient castle, pillaged and burned by order of Berne, in
punishment for having allowed the passage of foreign soldiers to
Lausanne, where lay the camp of their foe, Charles, duke of Burgundy.
Vevay suffered for the like fault, being plundered also, and of the two
towns five hundred men were massacred.
There is nothing lovelier than this road, winding along the flank of
the mountains, here rich with wood. We passed Clarens, beautiful as
Byron’s description, hiding among its own trees, and straggling up the
hill side from the shore. The noble old castle of Chastellar on its
solitary mound, and the peaked stone spire of Montreux seeming to lean
against the forest, above which the Dent de Jaman stands, cold and
barren,—all the way the lake shining below, with the stern rocks of
Meillerie opposite, and the Alps closing the valley. The heat was
excessive; and the small vineyard flies so tormented our horses that
D——’s taste for the picturesque had well nigh vanished, when a bend
in the road brought us beneath a high bank, covered with old
walnut-trees, and opposite the rock on which Chillon stands, with its
towers and tall keep, the most picturesque of feudal castles. We
crossed the covered wooden bridge, where the gendarmes stand, smiling
welcome; and the horses consigned, each to the care of two, and left in
a dark stable to be dusted with walnut branches, we were sufficiently
tranquil as to their comfort to follow our guide, who was the wife of
the concierge. She led across two courts, and opened a heavy prison
door; it was “out of the sun and into a grave.” I obeyed her injunction
to hold fast her hand, when, having scrambled over rubbish, and through
partial darkness, she drew me to the brink of a square hole, and
pointed down a depth of eighty-six feet. It was one of the fearful
oubliettes, whose existence here was unknown till about fifteen months
since. Grown accustomed to the dim light, we could distinguish a coarse
woollen rug, now laid on the brink, but which was found below serving
as shroud to a skeleton. The victim died from the fall, or was left to
perish. In the same court-yard is the entrance to another, which was,
at pleasure, dungeon or place of execution. Its depth is sixty and some
feet; and from the top of the square opening descend three steps, the
commencement of a stair which goes no farther. The condemned was
lowered to the bottom, and his food administered in like manner. If
death was decided on, he was forgotten, as there was no other
communication with the living world.
A few steps lead to the salle de justice. The dryness of the air and
thickness of the walls has so preserved all within, that the curious
wooden ceiling, supported in the centre by pillars, which retain traces
of paint, remains; and the planks of the floor were only exchanged for
pavement, when, on the threats of France, the caissons of the Canton de
Vaud were assembled here. At one end of this hall is a small room with
a door, on a now closed staircase, near the wide chimney. At the other
is the salle de question. A pillar of wood, to which the prisoner was
bound, still stands,—as does a beam above it, pierced with holes for
pulleys, and a portion of the old ropes hanging from them. A second
beam, which supported a wheel on which the wretch was tortured, (tied
by the arms with weights to the feet,) crumbled down a few months ago.
The pillar is seared with the red-hot irons employed in the torture;
that by burning being continued during three-quarters of an hour, with
intervals of five minutes; if it induced confession, the private stair
from the small chamber conducted the condemned to the potence in the
dungeon below. The door has been walled up, on account of the vicinity
of the powder magazine. Our guide led to the eating-hall, which was the
kitchen also. The capitals of its pillars were ornamented with
fleurs-de-lis, she said, when a count of Savoy conducted hither his
bride, a daughter of France, perhaps Bonne de Bourbon, who married the
green count Amedée the Sixth, about 1355. The two carved oaken chests
with their curious locks, at the bottom of the room, are of the same
date. The view from these windows is beautiful beyond praise, and there
is “the little isle—the only one in view,” lying in the lake like a
floating basket of flowers. Our last visit was to the dungeons: the
first is the most modern, and least sad, as its loopholes are longer
and less narrow. On one of the sills they form in the thick wall sat a
Swiss girl, the light falling on her picturesque dress, touching her
smiling face and bare arms,—she animated the dim prison house. Between
this first dungeon and that of Bonnivard, there is one smaller and
darker, though light enough for its destination: for a few moments’
stay allows the eye to distinguish, crossing a space between its
pillars, a heavy beam, whose upper part is, in several places, deeply
worn by the ropes which, upholding heavy weights, were bound round it;
and a few paces behind, the steps of the narrow stair which conducts to
the fatal door of the justice hall. The opposite wall, against which
the lake ripples or foams in its various moods, has a square cavity,
now closed with stones; the bodies of those who died unheard and unseen
were cast forth there, and beneath the waves which told no tales. A
narrow portal opens on the dungeon where Bonnivard lay. I think I
reminded you before that he was prior of the abbey of St. Victor, a man
of pure life as well as courage, who exhorted the Genevese to reform,
and censuring the vices of the catholic clergy generally, as well as
their bishops in particular, was betrayed by false friends to the duke
of Savoy, whose anger he had above all excited, by urging an alliance
between Fribourg and Geneva. One of these friends received for reward
his rich priory. He was two years in prison, and set free and
reinstated in his benefice by Pierre de la Baume, bishop of Geneva. He
by force took possession of the property of which he had been deprived
in Savoy, which, notwithstanding his affection for Geneva, was his
country. The duke besieged him in his château of Cartigny, which,
unable to defend long, he was forced to fly from, and saw himself
almost wholly deprived of his revenues. The town of Geneva granted him
a pension, and sustained him in his adversity; and the irritated duke,
desirous only of obtaining possession of his person, granted him a
safe-conduct with a view to lure him on his territory. Bonnivard,
expecting no treachery, profited by the circumstance to visit his
mother, sick and old, at Seyssel; and intending to go thence to
Lausanne, he was seized on the Jura, and dragged to Chillon. The first
two years of his detention he passed in comparative liberty; but
Charles the Third visiting the castle, he was cast, by his order, into
the vault below the level of the lake, where are
“The seven pillars of Gothic mould.”
The first column has a story of its own, for a wall of separation, now
thrown down, divided it and a space of twelve feet square from the
prior’s prison, forming one which enclosed a young man, his companion.
On the walls are a few figures, in the costume of the time, rude but
spirited sketches, the work of his long leisure; they are fresh still.
Attached to the pillar is the portion of the broken ring which held his
chain, and an iron bar of his loophole was sawed through, to allow room
for the passage of a human body. Long toil, and the use of some
instrument left him inadvertently, severed the fetters and opened the
path; but he reckoned on his powers of swimming, forgetting they were
paralyzed by the space and air of a dungeon—he plunged into the lake,
and rose no more alive. Bonnivard was delivered two months later; it
was in March, 1536. Chillon remained the last possession of Savoy in
the Pays de Vaud. Confiding in its strength, her garrison’s boats
insulted all who were not subjects of Duke Charles, and haughtily
rejected the truce proposed to the Bernese by the emperor’s ambassador.
The Bernese army besieged it on the land side; the troops and artillery
of Geneva armed barks on the lake; the garrison was forced to
surrender, and Bonnivard set free. His pillar, retaining its iron ring,
is the second in order; the floor of rock round, worn by the uneasy
pacing of four years: on the column, among more perishing names, is
that of Byron. I noticed that of Alexander Dumas, so high above, that
to engrave its enormous letters he must have mounted a ladder. The
space on either side the range of columns which support the roof’s
groined arches, forms a sombre aisle, the inner wall left as nature
made it, irregular masses of living rock; that towards the lake
intersected with a few narrow loopholes high from the ground, which are
rather slits in the stone, so small that in the morning it is a dark
vault, and only when the beams shine low they come “creeping over the
floor.” At sunset, however, “the imprisoned ray” is not “dull:” for, as
if it acquired force from its concentration, it falls like a streak of
fire on the pillars and blocks of stone. As we saw it, the effect was
splendid, but partial, as at the extreme end an artist was sketching by
the light of candles, being otherwise in perfect obscurity. It is to
carry his materials that the young Swiss, whom we saw as we passed
again, comes daily. Last summer, an amateur, an English gentleman,
visited Chillon with the intention of painting not only the dungeon,
but Bonnivard! for this purpose he chose a gendarme of spare habit,
having a long beard and sallow face, chained him to the pillar, and
commenced his work, saying, “vous bon Bonnivard.” He could not, as you
may suppose from the specimen, explain himself in French; but Monsieur
Chéri (a strange name for a captive prior) understood his signs made
with money, and submitted with fortitude to lie robed and fettered on
the rocky floor. One day, unfortunately, a feeling of pity came over
his comrade in the court-yard above, and he descended to relieve him,
thinking to divide the duty, and that one might do as well as the
other, seeing both were gendarmes. The new comer was a healthy, very
young man, stout and beardless, unlike the studious prior, who had
eaten black bread in small quantities, and probably abstained from
shaving six years. The pallid gendarme feeling, like him he
represented, the blessing of freedom, sprang up in delight; and the
amateur, in despair, when the fat man assumed the chain, could only
hold his first prisoner fast, stamp his foot and shake his head at the
other, and repeat all the French he knew, “Lui, bon Bonnivard, rester;
vous aller, pas bon Bonnivard!” He grew at last so angry that my
conductress, who had, she said, almost expired with laughter,
interfered, and Chéri once more cast himself at the foot of his pillar.
As we went out, she mentioned the circumstance of having two English
ladies “en pension.”
D—— looked up in intense delight, the horses were in a good stable,
the gendarmes would make admirable grooms. Our best fare might be fresh
eggs, it was true, but what signified our dinner compared with the
advantages of a view of the lake, with the “Isle’s tall trees;” of
walking from the oubliettes to the torture chamber, and resting under
the potence, and in Bonnivard’s dungeon, a lodging of three chambers,
looking on the lake, which we should hear “ripple night and day.” We
told her we would come in the spring, when we should have repassed the
mountains, and she looked rather surprised and very much pleased at the
sudden wandering of our senses.
Arrived at the stable, we were confirmed in our resolve, by seeing the
gendarmes obeying orders; one holding a horse’s head, another shaking a
bough, in the places where we had left them, like the warriors in the
Belle au Bois dormant. As I mounted Fanny, the châtelaine asked
permission to touch my hand, and unaccustomed, I suppose, to see ladies
on horseback, said it would be “amusant” to have us there; so we rode
away.
Arrived on the brow of the hill, we looked down on the romantic castle,
and my eye lighted on the chapel roof. “Dear me,” said I, looking at
D——, “the powder magazine!”
“Humph,” said D——, looking down in turn.
“Is there any danger?”
“There might be;” and thereupon we both commenced enumerating all our
memories held of powder mishaps; till at last I began to think I might
fear to order dinner, from dread of some mischance in the chimney, and
to ride Fanny, lest her shoes should strike fire against the stones of
the court-yard. We talked the _pour_ and the _contre_ the whole way,
and arrived at the most perfect indecision.
We had a splendid view of a stormy sunset, of golden lake and
blackening mountains, and when we reached Vevay, night had completely
closed, and we, who had never seen the road till that afternoon, were
puzzled. Fanny was not so; she assumed her wisest manner, wound through
the crooked streets, and stopped at the stable of the Trois Couronnes.
17th.
Rain all day, detaining us within doors; we hope to leave the 20th for
Berne and Fribourg.
We walked this evening up the steep road which leads to the church of
St. Martin, as its terrace has a view no one should fail to see before
quitting Vevay. The church is simple and pretty, of the thirteenth
century. Ludlow’s monument, raised by his widow, is within it, built
against the wall; Broughton’s tombstone forms part of the pavement
near. The former’s memoirs, in which he so prides himself on his crime
as regicide, were first published at Vevay, where he lived under the
protection of the magistrates of Berne.
When William the Third ascended the throne, he returned to England, and
to London, but finding it possible that he might still be held there in
the light of an assassin, he thought it more prudent to return to
Vevay. He was seventy-three when he died; his house is still shown, and
the inscription he engraved above its doorway,
“Omne solum forti patria,”
was effaced but a short time since.
18th August.
We left Vevay late, taking the road which passes through Bulle to
Fribourg, being counselled against that by Romont. Even this is far
from a good one for horses, being for a considerable distance a painful
succession of hills, paved and steep, but from which the views are
beautiful, back to Vevay and the lake, and down the precipices to the
valley, where the Vevayse flows between deep and wild banks.
Arrived at the Châtel St. Denis, with its old castle on the mound, we
could observe the contrast between the Protestant and Catholic cantons,
even between the habitations which lie on either side the frontier,
scarce a stone’s throw apart. This is the first village of the canton
Fribourg, and for the first time we saw heaps of manure piled before
the cottage doors, with the tame pig rooting in them. As it was a
holiday, the peasants who passed us were in their gayest costume, the
men with their full coloured waistcoat sleeves, the young girls with
their hair braided across their brows, and the black riband dividing it
from the enormous mass behind, for they wear their own tresses plaited
over a foundation of wool, which gives them an unnatural bulk; but as
they are commonly fresh and good-looking, not absolutely unbecoming. A
few ancient ladies, dressed after this fashion, looked far less well.
With all this attention to toilette, the poverty and dirt of the
dwellings whence they issued was melancholy. They have here a character
more entirely Swiss, as the lodging of the family and the cow stable
are under the same roof, and the warmth of the cattle being necessary
to the poor, to whom it often supplies the place of fuel, only the
richer proprietors run a partition between. It is seldom that even the
first few feet from the ground are built in stone. Fire, when it
occurs, is awfully destructive, their roofs, chimneys, and walls all
wood, and that intended for fuel piled against the planks outside,
probably for the sake of warmth, as the wind whistles through every
cranny.
The plain which extends from the top of the long hill to Bulle is
covered with rich pasture, stretching thence up the mountains, and
dotted with chalets.
It is a most picturesque town; the old brick building, with its high
tower, and small turrets with pointed roofs, is the castle of Bulle,
now the prefet’s residence. The Cheval Blanc, where we stopped, is a
good inn, and the view from the windows lovely, even in Switzerland.
There was nearly opposite, a little to the left, the castle tower and
its heavy walls, gilded by the sunset,—the road below, which wound on
towards Gruyères; its cottages with their galleries and jutting roofs,
and outside stair, advancing or retreating on either side, and between
green trees, their background a mountain range, whose pine forests were
blue in the distance; beyond a copse in the plain, (shining in the sun
also,) the town and ancient castle of Gruyères crowned one hill to the
right; a second rose abruptly behind it, wooded and in shadow; and
stretching darkly and far away behind and beyond them, the mountains,
which peak above peak shut in the valley of the Simmenthal.
While D—— was employed in superintending the evening comforts of
Grizzle and Fanny, the good-natured fille d’auberge was my guide
through the streets to the chapel of the Capucin convent, which has a
strange altar, I think of gilt crockery, and a pulpit whose effect is
peculiarly horrid, as out from it projects a solitary arm, in a Capucin
sleeve, whose bony fingers hold a crucifix.
While our dinner was preparing, for nine o’clock to-night, (those who
ride a journey keeping irregular hours,) D—— and myself strolled
towards Gruyères, along the winding road as far as the wooden bridge
which crosses the torrent of Trême, near the tower which bears the same
name, and was an outpost of the lords of Gruyères. The castle is
interesting from its age and extraordinary preservation.
The precise origin of the Comtes de Gruyères is unknown; but Müller
says they were rich and powerful even in the eleventh century. The
mountain which rises behind the castle is called La Tine, and the
Saarine foams and roars among the dark pines of its defiles. Its early
possessors depended for their revenues on agriculture only; their wars
were with the wolves, and their proudest conquests the cultivation of a
desert. The younger branches of their house owned as their inheritance
the forest-castle of Mont Salvans, and a few mountain pastures: they
lived in company of their knights among their herdsmen, and with a
simplicity resembling theirs; and from the height on which their
château of Œx still stands watched over and protected their vassals.
After the battle of Laupen, and when peace had ensued, the counts,
impoverished by the wars, were constrained by their need to part with
various rights and privileges. In 1341 Count Pierre mortgaged for ten
years to the inhabitants of Gruyères the duties they were wont to pay
on each head of cattle, those on forage, cheese, and butter, and also
the receipt of the fines paid for crimes perpetrated in the forest.
Three times at this period did Berne revive the feud with Gruyères.
The Count Pierre above-mentioned, deceased, left the administration in
the hands of a namesake, whose connexions in the Simmenthal rendered
him sufficiently powerful there to manifest the old hatred of his house
to the seigneur of Weissenburg, citizen of Berne. The greater part of
the Simmenthal was under the count’s protection; but many of its farms
and châteaux belonged to the lords of Weissenburg and others, having
been built by their ancestry. Count Pierre of Gruyères marched against
Weissenburg; Banneret Peter Wendschaz commanded the Bernese against
him. At that spot of the Simmenthal there are heights which narrow the
passage, and the Bernese, who had strayed to plunder cattle, received a
sore punishment for their lack of foresight. The banneret himself,
fighting with the courage of despair, surrounded and overpowered,
collected his failing strength for a last effort, hurled the banner of
the republic above the heads of his assailants, and died consoled,
because it was unprofaned by the touch of a conqueror: the Bernese
mournfully bore it within their walls.
The peasants of the Simmenthal enacted laws for their own territory;
that on fines showing a chivalrous spirit which did them honour. As it
was presumed that the offended might defend himself against a blow, the
offender was fined one livre only; the man who uttered abuse was fined
four, and he who falsely gave the lie in a judge’s presence, ten
livres, since it was considered most difficult to guard against slander
and calumny.
Required by their allies of Fribourg to march with them against the
sire of Grumingen, vassal of Gruyères, the Bernese gladly answered to
the call, and seized on his castle, though he sued for peace. The count
and his knightly companions were wont to pursue their chivalrous sports
on the green meadows which stretch beneath the castle. The count’s
attendants had dispersed themselves in a wood not far distant, and in
the copses which surround the Tour de Trême, when the men of Berne and
Fribourg, with a force superior to his own, surprised the count himself
in the oak-tree meadow. Pierre fought with the heroism of his antique
race, but the numbers had well nigh overpowered him, when two of his
vassals, Clarembold and Ulric Bras de fer, resolved to save him at all
hazards, flung themselves before his person, favoured his retreat, and
guarding the narrow defile through which he had passed, kept his
enemies at bay, till the count, who had hastily sounded his war-note
and gathered his scattered troop, spurred back to the charge, put the
assailants to the rout, and many of them to the sword. To Clarembold
and Bras de fer, who covered with blood hailed his reappearance and
joined in his attack, he accorded privileges and franchises, which he
extended to their posterity. Their memories are still honoured in their
village of Villars sous Monts.
Soon after this, in 1349, ushered in by fearful earthquakes, broke out
the plague described by Boccaccio, which desolated Europe and Asia.
According to the general belief, a third of the population of
Switzerland died; the churchyards were filled to overflowing, and the
victims buried in unconsecrated ground, and without religious rites,
which priests were wanting to perform; whole regions were left desert,
and lordships abandoned and unclaimed by friend or foe. Struck with
terror, men strove to avert the scourge by the various and horrid means
prompted by fear and fanaticism. It was then that numerous travelling
societies, the Flagellans, wandered from canton to canton, inflicting
blows and torment on themselves, for the sins of the world. Where they
passed, the excited people devoted to death a number of Jews, innocent
of all crime; it is well known that at Kybourg, the more enlightened
Duke Albert was forced against his will to deliver three hundred to the
flames; that at Bâle they were all driven into a wooden house, and
burned with it; while at Constance and at Eslingen, in the synagogue,
the despairing people inflicted death on themselves.
The vassals of Gruyères, unflinching in battle, attached and faithful
to their lords, had obtained from them so many and important
privileges, either as reward for their services, or in barter for the
sums of money their necessities demanded, as to become almost as free
as the most democratic states of Switzerland. But for their insatiable
ambition, the counts of Gruyères might have been the happiest of
mortals; but they looked from their tall towers on the height, less to
rejoice in their possessions than to mourn that they saw their
boundary. Not being kings themselves, they strove to find consolation
in rendering themselves necessary to royalty; and they led their
vassals from their flocks, and mountain pastures, and calm homes, to
fight in foreign quarrels, and in climates so different from their own,
that those sunk victims to the change who had been spared by the sword.
Count Michel of Gruyères, who died in 1570, was the last of his line.
He was one of that brotherhood of La Cuiller, who quitted their own
lands to ravage those of Geneva. He had commanded their army, forced
many of his vassals to serve under their banner; and also sold yearly,
and for several years, five hundred men to the French armies in Italy.
They had rendered good service to the king of France, but Henry the
Second, under various pretences, refused to pay the immense sums he
owed to Gruyères; and Michel saw his country depopulated in vain, his
debts accumulating, though he had received a large loan from his
neighbours and sold his subjects a portion of his lordly privilege,
till at last, persecuted by his creditors, and notwithstanding his
carelessness of their welfare, mourned by his devoted vassals, he
abandoned the inheritance of his fathers, which he saw before his eyes
divided between the two cantons, and concealed his shame and sorrow in
the castle of a relative in Burgundy, where he died poor and without an
heir.
19th August.
So unwell this morning as to fear durance vile at the Cheval Blanc,
but, being determined to go if possible, set off at three. I had hoped
our road lay beneath Gruyères, but it led through the streets of the
town, and thence for a considerable distance across rich meadows, their
green pastures spotted with chalets; farther on they are divided by
pine forests, the road skirting or passing through them, the sunshine
reposing on their verdant glades, or playing among their old trunks, or
excluded where these have been felled and supplied by multitudes of
young stems crowded in nature’s extravagance. The hedges were gay with
wild pinks and woodbine, and on the sides of the road were strips of
green and rivulets for Fanny’s feet. We left on the right a gorge,
through which the Saarine flows, commanded by a noble looking ruin. The
peasantry here are almost German, and therefore perhaps a milder and
more amiable race than the French or Genevese. They issued from their
cottages and ran from their work in the fields to see us pass by, but
always took off their hats and wished good evening. The clouds had
threatened rain, but the wind, which whistled in the firs, blew it over
us and left only a fine stormy sky above the mountains, partly hiding
their white heads, while the sun was brilliant in the valley. As we
passed the meadows where the cows were grazing, and the little cowherd
lay almost hid in the clover, we thought of Lord Byron’s praise of the
bells; their tones, differing and harmonizing, tinkled sweet music.
Nearer Fribourg is a fair view into the gorge from the road, which
hangs over it where a sweep of the Saarine makes almost an island of a
tract of pine grove, and a suspension bridge has been flung from the
peninsula to the shore. An avenue of fine trees leads into Fribourg, of
which the first view with its dim mountains and most golden valley, is
more striking than that of any town I have seen as yet, from the
magnitude of the mighty chasm, over whose very edge the houses seem to
hang giddily high above the torrent, and the feudal watch-towers, which
guarded once, and are still ranged along the winding of its opposite
shore. The far famed bridge was not visible, but we could see that now
in progress, crossing the gorge of the Gotteron, which issues from the
Saarine. In its present and unfinished state it hangs in an awful curve
over the abyss, like a thread for a fairy rope-dancer.
The avenue passed, the road becomes precipitous, and scarcely, on a
dark night, safe we crossed a bridge, and rode beneath an ancient gate
to enter the old town. The houses which line the streets, narrow and
ill-paved, are curious and of great age, as are the quaint fountains;
at the summit of whose gilt and painted columns figure grotesque saints
and Virgins. After various windings we reached this hotel, the
Zahringerhof, which should be chosen for its situation and view, as it
is close to the bridge and built on the very edge of the chasm.
20th August.
Stayed at Fribourg, a cold day broken by hail-storms, and passed it in
walking over the town and along the narrow valley of the Gotteron. Not
far from the hôtel on the Place, and opposite the town hall, which is
built on the site of the palace of Duke Berthhold, is the venerable
lime-tree, planted, according to tradition, the 22nd June, 1476, the
day of the battle of Morat.
The young soldier who brought the tidings was a native of Fribourg; he
had been wounded in the conflict, and feeling he grew weaker as he
approached the town from fatigue and loss of blood, and that his shout
of victory waxed too feeble to be heard, he gathered a bough as he
passed, and waved it over his head in token of rejoicing. Arrived at
this place, where the townsmen were assembled, he faltered forth his
news and sunk down to die. They planted on the very spot his lime-tree
branch, and it lived and grew his monument, and is now so old, that the
decaying branches are rested on the four stone pillars and wooden
trellis-work which surround it; there is an express order to tie no
animal near, but it is dying of extreme age, and will hardly outlive
another winter.
Berthhold, duke of Zahringen, was imperial governor of Zurich,
landgrave of Burgundy, and lieutentant of Œchtland and Lausanne. By his
command ancient villages were surrounded by walls and free towns built,
behind whose fortifications the peasants of the empire, who united
themselves to the inhabitants, might rest in peace and security. The
love of change, the hope of gain, but above all of liberty, quiet, and
order, aided in peopling these towns. The duke, as hereditary governor,
and because the high roads and bridges were everywhere property of the
feudal lord, taxed each house, and levied a duty on all merchandise;
and also, when a subject died without heirs, inherited a third of his
possessions. The citizens were tried by twelve or twenty-four of their
own body, presided, over by an “avoyer” elected yearly, and sentence
pronounced in accordance with the facts proved by a sufficient number
of witnesses. Each townsman was, during his life, master of his own
property, and it fell to his widow in case of his demise. The whole
town took care of the orphans. The feudal lord could neither force a
man to become a citizen, nor prevent an inhabitant of his town from
departing if so pleased him; but freemen and serfs sought therefore the
more willingly within it a safeguard from the dangers consequent on
dispersion; and the serfs were considered free if during the first year
their master failed to claim them and prove their servitude by the
affirmation of seven relatives. When the lord of the city required
their presence, they were bound only to journey to a distance whence
they might return to sleep in their own homes.
In the year 1178, Berthhold the Fourth, whose father and uncle had set
the example of encouraging these establishments, chose the village
built along the precipices of the Saarine, and founded his town of
Fribourg partly on a territory belonging to the abbey of Payerne, but
mostly on his own land, and with the aid and counsel of various barons.
It became inhabited; boasting freedom, but certainly not equality, for
the nobles, as yet unused to citizenship, kept the line of demarcation
so strongly marked as even to fix on a separate place of burial, and,
in consequence of this, six hundred years passed without so confounding
distinctions, as to give one language to the town on the shore, and
that on the crags above it—German being the dialect most in use among
the inhabitants of the former, while their fellow-citizens spoke French
only. This is no longer the case, but in 1794, when Müller wrote, many
who lived in the one spot were unintelligible to the other.
Taking one of the steep streets, which is paved in steps as a stair, we
walked to the massy roofed wooden bridge, across which the diligence to
Berne travelled before the new one was built, the descent and ascent
occupying about an hour. From between its heavy wooden work you have a
good view of the suspension bridge, 174 feet above the bed of the
torrent, and which, though so much longer than the Menai, for its
length is 905 feet, appears of so much lighter construction; from this
spot the Zahringen hôtel seems a real castle in the air. We crossed the
Saarine, and turned to the left, and under an old archway of Duke
Berthhold’s time, which forms the entrance to the gorge of the
Gotteron. It is a lonely and beautiful glen, sunk deep between wooded
crags which barely allow room for a path way beside the stream, which
bounds brightly on, flashing in the sun, while it turns the heavy
wheels of rustic mills, as if glad of its own usefulness; and farther,
where the valley is less narrow, winding through the small green
meadow, and among the picturesque wooden cottages, as if seeking repose
near those it has toiled for. In the spring, the quiet river becomes at
times a destructive torrent, uprooting tree and dwelling. About
Fribourg cretinism exists, and among the elder peasantry the goitre is
common—we saw in the glen one poor idiot, who howled and gibbered as
we went by.
Dined in company of a French family—the elder hope just issued from
the Jesuits’ college, a disagreeable specimen of their training, with
large black hands and unpleasant habits. In the evening went to the
cathedral, which in itself is only gaudy, but whose organ and organ
player are most wonderful. Listening to the higher tones, it was
difficult to persuade myself that I did not hear a chorus of sweet
voices, and its “storm” did not resemble an earthly instrument touched
by a mortal hand; it was like “nothing but thunder,” and solemn and
awful, as it rolled along the aisle’s dusk in the evening.
CHAPTER II.
Canton of Berne—Village where the Swiss troops obtained a victory over
the French force in ’98—Berne—Bears in all forms—Their revenues
diminished—Their new baptism—Foundation of Berne—Rodolph of
Erlach—Laupen—Rodolph chosen guardian of orphans of the Count of
Nidau—Murdered by his own son-in-law—Cathedral—Monument to Duke
Berthhold—His wife’s execution—Charles Louis of Erlach massacred by
his own soldiers during French invasion—Treatment of Berne by the
French—Thun—Privileges—Castle of Thun—The brothers—The
banquet—The murder—The “pension”—An acquaintance—The sketcher in
haste—A Marseilles story—Spietz—The golden manor—Adrian of
Bubenberg—His saving Morat—His embassy—His return as a
minstrel—Unterseen—Unspunnen once the property of the Eschenbach
family—Walter of Eschenbach—Confidant of the parricide Duke
John—Murder of the Emperor Albert—Vengeance of Queen
Agnes—Walter’s son spared—Walter a shepherd—Lauterbrunnen—The
cascade—Grindelwald—A buried chapel in the glacier—The Harder—The
grave of an only son—Return to Thun.
21st August.
Left Fribourg for Berne, and was disappointed in the road, which
presents a long series of endless hills, and (as heavy clouds, which
brought us several hail-storms, hid the white mountains) less
interesting than those hitherto travelled.
At the limit of the cantons of Berne and Fribourg, where the river
Sense separates them, the country is wooded and beautiful, but of a
mild character and resembling England. The name of the village is
Neunneck; and here, on the 5th of March, 1798, the same day on which
Berne surrendered to another column of the French army, two thousand
Swiss, commanded by Colonel de Grafenried, defeated the French, drove
them across the Sense, killed or wounded fifteen hundred of their men,
and took eighteen pieces of cannon. They made no prisoners, but marched
up the mountain with fixed bayonets, and forced the enemy from all his
positions. They lost themselves 173 soldiers, and great numbers were
wounded.
We exchanged here the seeming poverty of the canton Fribourg for the
air of happiness and riches peculiar to this. The peasantry appear a
civil and kindly race. The females wear dark dresses and black velvet
caps, whose broad wired lace worn far back from their sunburnt faces
looks like the outspread wings of a hornet. The entrance to Berne is
not on this side (that of the plain) striking. A long avenue leads to a
handsome gate flanked by two modern bears; for the bear is omnipresent.
Armed cap-a-pie on the column of one fountain, on another standing as
esquire beside the figure of Duke Berthhold, forming a procession on
the clock-tower, which in his time guarded the outer wall, marking in
effigy the butler at the inn, and in _propria persona_ inhabiting the
town ditch outside the Aarberg gate, where four of the fraternity live
on (alas!) diminished revenues, for the property bequeathed them
towards the close of the last century by a bear-loving old lady, and
which, it is said, had accumulated to 70 millions of francs, was seized
by the French in ’98, and with the remainder of the town-treasure, and
the bears themselves led away captives, were transported to Paris. In
insult to the conquered, the animals received fresh names, and the new
one of each was inscribed on his travelling caravan, being that of a
_magistrate_ of Berne!
It was in 1191, when the great barons of the Alps and the most powerful
lords of Burgundy leagued their forces against Berthhold the Fifth,
lieutenant of the empire, either, historians say, in hatred of his
equitable administration, or in jealousy of his still increasing sway,
that he inclosed as small towns various villages for his own and his
vassals’ security; and seeking out another spot under the protection of
the imperial franchise, equally distant from all his enemies, and
unsuspected by his partizans, he chose a hamlet called Berne, built on
a peninsula formed by the rapid Aar, when it rushes from the lake of
Thun; and, about a month after he had defeated the leagued lords in one
of the high valleys, surrounded it with a ditch and walls. Many knights
and nobles took up their residence there; among the rest, Rodolph of
Erlach, of an ancient Burgundian house, and whose descendants have
seven times given chiefs to the republic, and twice saved Berne from
ruin. The laws were similar to those of Fribourg.
In 1338, the year in which the emperor Louis of Bavaria convoked the
diet of Frankfort to discuss the affair of his excommunication, 147
years after the foundation of Berne, when she had no protector and few
allies, the counts and barons of Œchtland, Aargau, and Burgundy, urged
on by the emperor, projected her destruction. The lords of the house of
Neuchâtel, the counts of Kibourg, and Pierre of Gruyères and others,
assembled in the castle of Nidau, whither, notwithstanding her alliance
with Berne, came ambassadors from Fribourg, to say that the injuries
they all suffered had a common origin, that Berne strove to level the
nobles to the condition of the populace, and it being vain to essay by
partial attacks to set bounds to her audacity, it would be well that
united forces should raze her city to the ground.
Berne acted nobly and calmly—she besought no foreign protection, but
said, in a conference which took place between her delegates and the
feudal lords, that “to peace she would sacrifice all save justice.” She
summoned Fribourg to a diet held at Blamatt, reckoning on the memory of
their common founder and long friendship; but her deputies received no
token of peace or amity, and Berne felt she was abandoned. During this
time, 700 lords with the coronet on their casques, 1200 armed knights,
3000 horsemen, and more than 15,000 foot, were gathering against Berne.
Laupen, which is also on the Sense, four miles lower down than
Neunneck, besieged by the allies, had demanded and obtained succour
from Berne. The Bernese were themselves embarrassed in the choice of a
general; of the brave knights and citizens who surrounded the avoyer of
Bubenberg, none esteeming himself capable of a command on which
depended the fate and liberty of their descendants; and while they
still sate irresolute in council, Rodolph, knight and castellan of
Erlach, son of Ulrich, under whose command many still living had
conquered the leagued nobles at Donnerbuhel forty years before, rode
armed into Berne.
He was at the same time guardian of the young count of Nidau and
citizen of Berne. To conciliate his will with the fidelity he owed his
suzerain, he represented to his ward, that to serve the cause of the
nobles against his fellow-citizens would injure his interests beyond
reparation; and the young count, as in reply he scornfully bade him
join the ranks of his peers, said, “With two hundred coroneted casques,
and a hundred and forty knights devoted to my banner, it is indifferent
to me to lose a man.”
Erlach replied coldly, “You have called me a man, Sir Count; I will
prove to you that I am one.”
When he had dismounted and appeared before the senate, the sight of him
reviving the memory of Donnerbuhel and his father, he was named general
by acclamation, and the avoyer placed the banner of the republic in his
hand.
As he stood holding it, he addressed the citizens:
“I have fought with you,” he said, “in six battles, where our numbers
were always inferior, and always victorious. Discipline is a sure means
of conquest, and without it courage is of no avail. You, artisans, who
are freemen, and obey unwillingly, you can remain free only by learning
obedience to those to whom it is due; without absolute authority I will
not be your general. I do not fear the foe; with God’s aid and yours we
will drive him back, as when you were led by my father.”
The people of Underwald and of Soleure were the sole allies of Berne.
Alms were distributed, solemn vows and processions made, during the
brief time which intervened. One night, by the light of the moon, the
general gave the troops the signal to depart. They were in all about
six thousand. The women and children, who remained on the summit of the
walls to watch and to pray, followed them with their eyes till they
could distinguish them no longer, over the unequal ground and in the
doubtful light. Descending thence they sought, the poor the churches,
their superiors the private oratories of their mansions, and remained
the livelong day in prayer; while the avoyer of Bubenberg, and others
of the senate’s oldest members, remained sitting in council, to provide
at all events for the city’s safety.
Rodolph of Erlach led on his troops in the most perfect order, taking
up his position, about mid-day, at a short distance from Laupen on a
height, and flanked by a forest. Several of the knights of the opposing
army, which was encamped in sight, rode forth from the ranks to survey
the Bernese, and kept up a conversation of mingled raillery and bravado.
The young count of Nidau augured differently of the result: “I shall
lose land and life to-day,” he said, “but I will sell them dearly.” In
the attack, the rear guard of the Bernese, composed of inexperienced
troops, was seized with panic, and fled. Erlach, to whom the news came,
said gaily, “Victory is ours, friends; we have lost the clog of
cowards!” and dashing forward, heading the young men he had assembled
round his own person, the flower of Berne, he broke through the masses
of the enemy’s infantry. Thenceforth the fortune of the day was no
longer doubtful. The young count of Nidau fell one of the first, and
the Bernese army, returned from the pursuit, kneeled down to offer up
thanksgiving on the field where it had conquered, and according to
custom passed the night there; the following morning saw its triumphal
return to Berne.
Diebold Baselwind, the priest who had harangued them before the battle,
marched first; behind them were borne the banners and arms of the
fallen, and Rodolph of Erlach, contented with reviving his father’s
fame in his own, deposed his sovereign authority.
The count of Nidau had left two young children; and their relatives of
the house of Neuchâtel, too feeble themselves to defend the lordship,
feared with reason to confide it to a foreign prince. Their conduct
speaks the highest praise of the knight of Erlach. They employed the
mediation of the bishop of Basle to pray that he, “whose integrity was
as well known as his valour, would receive as his charge the orphan
boys and the lordship of Nidau.” He accepted the trust; a peace was
concluded between Nidau and Berne, and the dead count’s sons, Rodolph
and Jacques, enjoyed undisturbed the inheritance of their brave father.
Time had gone on, and the castellan of Erlach, grown an aged man, lived
at Reichenbach, a solitary spot on the shores of the Aar, which had
also been his father’s residence. He had two sons, and a daughter
married to the esquire of Rudenz.
One day of the year 1360, when he had employed, as was his wont, his
domestics in his fields and gardens, and sate in his halls with no
company save his dogs couched on the floor, and his sword of the battle
of Laupen suspended from the wall, his son-in-law came to seek him. He
was a dissipated and reckless man, and as they conversed together, high
words ensued on the subject of Margaret’s marriage portion. The knight
was white-headed and feeble; and as he reprimanded Rudenz with dignity
and gravity, his son-in-law started from his seat, seized the sword
which hung near him, and plunged it into the old man’s heart.
The howling dogs pursued him to the forest, whither he fled, and when
the news got wind, there was neither noble nor citizen who did not rise
in arms to pursue the parricide. He died shortly, but in what manner is
not known.
This is a long digression, but the ride through the sombre streets of
the old town calls to mind the man who was named its irreproachable
hero. The date of the most ancient mansions now standing is of 1405, as
in that year the entire city then existing was destroyed by fire,
saving, however, the three massive towers, that of Duke Berthhold, the
prison, and Christopher’s tower, in the principal street of Berne.
The town has a gloomy aspect, with its low arcades resting on heavy
masonry. The streets have a deep dangerous ruisseau flowing down their
centre, bound by stone. I feared that my starting Fanny might break a
leg, by slipping down. We rode to the Faucon, which has, I believe
deservedly, the reputation of being one of the best inns in
Switzerland; but we had left Fribourg late, and lingered on the way,
and consequently found it full. The Couronne was a bad substitute; the
house is three hundred years old, and has objections attendant on its
worm-eaten wood and dirty old age, which I advise you to avoid; the
more so as its master is the first Swiss I have seen who unites
incivility with high charges. We paid the strangers’ homage to the
citizen bears, who are comfortably lodged without the Aarberg gate. The
largest received our visit in his bath, a stone bason, into which he
waddled on our approach, and remained while we stayed, staring hungrily
at us, up to his neck in water.
From the bears we walked to the cathedral, which stands on the terrace
above the Aar, looking down on the range of aristocratic buildings
which skirt it, their possessors’ coats of arms sculptured over their
portals, and their gardens sloping to the water, and on the range of
Bernese Alps, rising grandly in the distance, but half hidden to-day by
the heavy clouds.
This shady platform is raised one hundred and eight feet above the Aar,
yet into its wall was inserted a marble slab, recalling a singular
accident on the 25th of July, 1654. A young student, amusing himself
with his companions, vaulted on a horse which was quietly feeding under
the trees, and being a spirited animal, started violently away, and,
terrified by the shouts of Weinzapfli’s comrades, sprang with him over
the low parapet. The horse was killed on the spot, but the student, who
fell in soft garden ground, and only broke his arms and legs,
recovered, and became a pastor.
The minster is a fine Gothic building, and was commenced, in 1420, by
the son of the architect who built the famous tower of Strasburg.
The monument, surrounded by gaudy armorial bearings, was raised by the
town to Duke Berthhold the Fifth, in 1600. He was the last of the line
of Zæringen, for he had been left a widower early, with two young sons,
and contracted a second marriage with a countess of Kibourg. Either to
ensure the inheritance to her own future offspring, or won by the
jealous nobles to be their accomplice, this fury in human shape
poisoned the two children of her husband. Her guilt once proved to him,
neither the tenderness he had once felt for her, nor the thought that
by accusing one so nearly allied he tarnished the glory of his house,
could arrest the outburst of his paternal agony. In the year 1217 she
perished by the hands of the executioner; and Duke Berthhold, unwilling
to form another alliance after one so fatal, felt it a consolation that
in his person would close the misfortunes of his house.
Occupying a place in the aisle opposite that which contains Duke
Berthhold’s monument, is a long catalogue of names inscribed on marble
tablets; those of the brave men who fell in 1798, vainly resisting
foreign invasion.
The saddest fate was that of Charles Louis of Erlach, a man who, like
his ancestors, had deserved the esteem and love of his fellow-citizens.
Before the revolution he had served France, and was named field-marshal
at the moment of the French invasion in 1798. He had hurried to his
native town, and, like his great predecessor, been named by acclamation
general of the forces; but the then existing government was timid and
irresolute. Accompanied by eighty of his officers, like himself members
of the council, he presented himself before it the 24th of February,
and, by his energy and arguments, revived its hopes and raised its
courage. He was endowed with full powers to act as he should see fit as
soon as the yet unconcluded truce should expire. He left the city to
decide on the measures to be taken, but, even as the moment for their
execution arrived, received the order to suspend hostilities. The
government had abdicated its powers. Marshal Brune’s policy had sown
division in the senate as well as among the troops. Berne yielded
almost without resistance; and Erlach’s soldiers, blinded by suspicions
artfully instilled, and maddened by despair, massacred him in the
village of Wichdorff.
The treasure of the republic, accumulated through so many generations,
was seized on by Marshal Brune without even the formality of an
inventory taken. The Directory, informed of the omission, and in a case
of this sort placing little confidence in its general, despatched a
courier extraordinary with positive orders that it should be repaired.
A kind of list was in consequence hastily made by the marshal s
command, and himself wrote to the Directory—
“Vous verrez par l’état, dont je vous envoie copie, que les sommes
trouvées dans le trésor cadrent _à peu près_ avec les régistres.”
The most moderate calculation, for into it private losses and
depredations cannot enter, computes the losses of Berne (city and
canton) at forty-two millions of francs. It was asserted that of this
Brune had appropriated to himself the golden medals of the Hôtel de
Ville, twenty-two carriages, and above three hundred thousand francs in
specie!! This treatment of Berne followed close on assurances of
support and amity, for while the marshal’s forces were yet unassembled,
and before Schaumbourg’s reinforcement had arrived, France, through her
commissary, declared that she desired her neighbour’s freedom and
happiness only, and that, as soon as a government sufficiently
democratic should be established, the independence of Berne would be
respected, and the French army withdrawn.
23rd August, Thun.
Left the Couronne with its discomfort and dirty stables. A steep
descent leads to the bridge, beyond which run at right angles the two
roads, one leading hither, the other to Zurich, beneath noble avenues.
We had a lovely day and ride through a happy looking country, wood,
pasture and mountain, and passed through a village, where the laugh of
all the lookers-on from the windows saluted me as I rode Fanny in and
through a clear pond, far deeper than I thought, but out of which we
got to our honour.
Approaching Thun, the country is romantic and most beautiful. It was a
warm fine evening, and the old dark castle, now a prison, on the
height, with its peaked roof and four towers flanking it, and the
church by its side, stood out from a bright sky.
The Aar, which issues from the lake about a mile further, winds below,
rapid and blue as the Rhone. We crossed it on a covered wooden bridge,
and skirted the town, passing ancient gates and massive towers, and the
once fortified wall, to arrive hither.
The Pension Baumgarten stands on higher ground than the Hôtel Bellevue,
backed by wooded heights, to the foot of which its park extends; and
the rooms opening on flower-gardens look on the Aar, winding through
rich meadows, with scattered houses, and a grey feudal tower on the
near shore; and the Stockhorn, with its strange sharp peak projecting
above; and the massive pyramid of the Neisen beyond; the wreaths of
vapour floating along the side of the first serving its forests for
pedestal or canopy. On the right rose the castle; and to the left, far
away in the opening, the Jungfrau and her attendants, looking with the
blush of that sweet evening on them, I thought even lovelier than Mont
Blanc.
The rights of “bourgeoisie” attached to Thun make poverty almost
impossible, and its inhabitants are therefore less laborious than in
other parts of Switzerland; each citizen possessing a right of pasture,
building timber, and firewood, besides a yearly sum of money drawn from
the surplus revenues of their flourishing and unexpensive country. By a
strangely egotistical rule of the law-makers, these advantages attach
exclusively to the males, so that a female orphan left unmarried, or a
widow without a son, might find herself suddenly destitute, and
dependent on strangers’ charity.
The service of the English church is performed every Sunday by an
English clergyman in the Swiss church. No prospect can be more
beautiful than that from the churchyard of Thun. The wall is built on
the very edge of the precipitous hill it half circles; round and along
it, from distance to distance, are what elsewhere I should call
summer-houses, open stone edifices, on whose benches the inhabitants of
Thun sit in the shade, enjoying the glorious and varied views over each
side of the valley. A winding road, passing beneath an ancient gateway
and a stair of irregular steps, leads up the height on which the church
stands. The castle is but a few paces from it, on the platform of the
same hill: among its annals is written a bloody tale of family feud.
When the last duke of Zæringen, who had refused to become an emperor,
was interred in 1218 at St. Pierre in the Black Forest, his large
possessions were divided. Ulric of Kibourg, his brother-in-law,
inherited those situated in Burgundy; Berne and Zurich solicited and
obtained from the Emperor Frederic the Second the title of free towns;
and when the news, so long desired, reached Lausanne of the failing of
the line of Zæringen, (the fall of the founder of Berne twenty-five
years after its foundation,) the Bishop Berthhold of Neuchâtel convoked
together the chapter, knights, and citizens in the court of the church
of Notre Dame, and, solemnly cursing the memory of the deceased duke,
who had once made war against him, he gave (solemnly also) the advowson
of the bishopric into the hands of the Mother of God for ever!!
In the year 1332, Hartmann, count of Kibourg, possessed, with the
lordship of Thun itself, that of various villages surrounding it, as
well on the mountains as on the green plains through which flows the
Aar. Among these were Berthoud, Landshut, and other property of
allodial tenure. Thun and Berthoud, governed according to the sage
customs of their territory, had extended their limits by reason of
their increasing population. The avoyers of the count pronounced
judgment in accordance with a municipal code which even himself
respected. The richest and most ancient of the nobility thronged his
court and were his brothers in arms. When Hartmann of Kibourg died, his
widow, the countess Elizabeth, allowed an overweening influence to Senn
of Münsigen, a nobleman whose domains lay in the neighbourhood, and who
through her favour had become director of her councils. Her sons,
Hartmann, heir of Kibourg, and Eberard, were youths, and the eldest,
who hated his brother, used every means to conciliate Münsigen’s favour
to himself, and to prejudice him against Eberard, at that period
studying at Bologna, the cradle of all science then existing, at an
expense of sixteen marks yearly. Owing to his brother’s influence, this
remained undefrayed; and, having vainly besought its payment, Eberard
returned to his paternal castle to claim the portion left him by his
father.
His relatives treated his demands with derision, and himself as a young
man who might indeed possess rights but who knew not how to uphold
them. One night, after a hunting or hawking party, the brothers had
arrived at the castle of Landshut, which is some leagues from Berthoud,
and Eberard, fatigued with exertion, slept by Hartmann’s side too
soundly to be at first aware of his treason. Hartmann bound him as he
lay, and sent him, thus secured and half naked, under a strong guard,
to Rochefort in Neuchâtel, Comte Rodolph of Neuchâtel being his wife’s
father. Arrived at his destination, Eberard accepted, perforce, for
arbitrator between their differences Duke Leopold of Austria. Leopold
pronounced that Hartmann should remain sole lord of the entire
patrimony; that Eberard should inhabit the castle of Thun, and of the
two hundred marks he received from his benefices as canon of Strasburg
and Cologne yield three parts to his brother to defray the debts of
their house. To this sentence the prisoner was obliged to subscribe,
and all the nobility of the lordship of Kibourg assembled by invitation
in the castle of Thun to celebrate the reconciliation of the brothers.
As the defrauded young man sate with them at the banquet, Count
Hartmann and the favourite, Senn of Münsigen, applauded each other
unconstrainedly on the success of their schemes: “Belike,” said the
former, alluding to Eberard’s inexperience and easiness of belief, “my
brother may need a tutor to teach him to sign our peace.”
Eberard had many friends among the guests, and this and other sarcasms,
which reached their ears, raised their choler, long restrained,—and
some started from the banquet and drew their swords. A fearful tumult
arose instantly. The furious guests, dividing themselves into two
parties, rushed madly at each other, and Hartmann was killed by chance
and in the obscurity on the steps of the tower stair. It was unknown
whether the instrument of this involuntary murder was Eberard in
person; but at the moment when the citizens of Thun, who, attracted by
the extraordinary noise, had armed in haste, rushed up the hill to the
castle to know its cause, the body of Count Hartmann, flung by some
violent hand from a window of the castle, made them an awful reply. The
greater number at once turned and fled; the few who lingered were taken
prisoners as a measure of precaution; and Eberard, giving orders to
close the gates, sent ambassadors to Berne, offering to become, himself
and those of his house, citizens of her city for ever, and to cede to
her, with a portion of his remaining possessions, the fief of Thun. The
Bernese marched thither without loss of time, took possession with
little difficulty, and confirmed the count in the place of power
occupied by his ancestors, on condition of his paying them a
contribution of one mark yearly.
August.
We have of late borne with some days of Swiss rain, unintermitting from
morning to night. A _pension_ has one disadvantage: for its inmates
depend not on their own resources, but on the forced companions of its
breakfast, early dinner, and long evening. We are fortunate in an
agreeable party, particularly so in the acquaintance of an English
clergyman and his charming young wife, who, with her rosy children
round her, forms the prettiest picture imaginable. The _vie de pension_
consists in breakfasting, in irregular order, between eight and twelve;
dining at three, which interferes sadly with excursions or occupations;
drinking tea at eight; talking till ten; and going to bed to
re-commence on the morrow. This is bearable during sunshine; but when
we are shut up in bad weather, and deprived of our home occupations,
with torrents falling all day, and the moon shining at night in the
valley on so dense and white a fog that I at first took it for the
lake, which is a mile off, as has been the case the last few days, we
form in groups, and have recourse to a _leetle_ scandal (as I once saw
it written), which commences in the kitchen among the scourges thither
imported by the victims, their masters, and steals by degrees among
ourselves, where it sometimes finds somebody
“To point a moral or adorn a tale.”
And should we all be good naturedly-minded and charitable to our
neighbours, we pounce upon the cookery, and wonder that Madame
Rufenacht should be so niggardly an old personage, and how long will
last her dynasties of hard ducks and bony pigeons. An addition to our
circle, and an improving one, arrived to-day, in the persons of a
gentleman and lady from Marseilles, and whose conversation induced us
to let the poultry die and be served up in peace. I was amused by his
account of their passage on board the steamer, from Geneva to Lausanne.
Of the party was a lady speaking French imperfectly, and sketching with
remarkable assiduity, as she went along, notwithstanding the velocity
of the boat’s motion. Monsieur R——, though not professionally so, is
really an artist; the lady was a sketcher,—like one who described to
me that he never made more than two perpendicular and three horizontal
lines for any view, filling up the vacuum after; or like another who,
having sketched the falls of the Rhine, showed them to a lady, who
exclaimed—“Oh! that is the beautiful field we just now walked through,
and the stile we jumped over.”
This lady had united to a very faint idea of their geographical
position a strong desire of bearing away in her album drawings of all
the mountains in Switzerland; and the young French gentleman could not
resist the opportunity for amusement: he had been her interpreter
already. Mont Blanc, she heard all voices echo, and used her pencil in
haste. The Buet, with its white round head, was in sight also, and the
lady said in an interrogatory tone, “Mont Cenis, Monsieur?”
“Oui, Madame,” said her deceiver gravely, and she hurried to mark down
the shape of the mountain, and write under it “Mont Cenis,”—extract
the leaf from her book, and with due care lay it in her portfolio. She
looked about again.
“Mont Pilatre, Monsieur?” said she, forgetting that Lucerne was not
there; and pointing to the Voiron,—
“Bien loin, Madame; bien haut,” said the artist, and a cloud above the
Voiron was again marked down, and inscribed Mont Pilatre. The steamer
was passing Coppet, and Monsieur R—— pointed out the château, giving
it its proper name.
“Ha!” said the lady, cutting her pencil, “Coppet château, Madame Staël.”
“Oui, Madame, voilà;” but alas! for the sketcher; below the château on
the lake shore is a square house, with a chimney at each end of its
ignoble roof, and three prosaic-looking windows. It was this she
believed to be Corinne’s cradle. The drawing was completed in a minute:
two upright lines for walls; two ears for chimneys; three blacker
strokes for windows; and under all, Château Coppet. You should have
heard him describe the complacency with which she drew a bit of the
Salève for Monterosa, and the gratitude with which she parted from him
who had shown her
“More things in heaven and earth,
Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”
An anecdote Monsieur R—— repeated last evening, of a member of the
national guard of Marseilles, was too amusing to avoid telling you in
my turn:—
Just after the revolution of 1830, troops disembarked from Algiers,
bringing with them a large treasure, destined for Paris; it was to
leave Marseilles under an escort of the national guard, as the lower
orders were still in a state of excitement, which might render its
passage hazardous.
The person who commanded the escort had our acquaintance under his
orders, and Monsieur R—— was rather surprised, on entering the
suburbs, to hear himself and his comrades ordered to the rear, while
the waggon with its load of specie went, pioneer fashion, first. He
asked the reason:—
“You see,” said the commandant, (a stout peaceable man,) “that our
charge being at some distance from us, in case of its being attacked we
shall have notice of it before the offenders reach ourselves.”
“Therefore we had better ride to the front, and be ready to meet them.”
“Not at all; we should be deprived of discretionary power, being only
six; by remaining behind, we can best judge whether the attacking force
matches our own, or is too strong; and may, at our choice, advance or
retreat for reinforcement.”
The escort staid in the rear and the convoy travelled in safety.
Monday.
Notwithstanding the assurances of the whole pension, that all cascades
are alike,—that wood, water, and mountain may grow familiar to
weariness; notwithstanding melancholy prognostics of misfortunes, which
may happen to the horses,—and fine weather, which may not last for our
journey to Italy, I have insisted on seeing the Staubbach; and to
Interlaken, or rather towards Interlaken, we rode last Wednesday, for
we were hardly a mile away when the mist closed around us, obscuring
the view from the higher ground over the lake and towards Thun, which
is so lovely in sunshine. D—— proposed turning back, but we were
averse to seeing the whole contents of Baumgarten shake their heads at
our discomfiture, as they had done when foretelling it ere we started.
We took refuge instead under a pear tree in an old woman’s garden, an
agreeable situation, in which we remained an hour, watching the
torrents which concealed everything else a dozen paces from us: and as
the bad weather did not set in as violently as it sometimes does in the
mountains, took advantage of each clearer half hour to proceed, and of
the shelter the road afforded when the rain returned.
In this manner we arrived, not very promptly, opposite Spietz, whose
old castle is romantically placed on a promontory, near the road and on
the lake shore. It belonged to the lords of Bubenberg, and went by the
name of the Golden Manor. One of its most noted possessors was Adrian
of Bubenberg. In the year 1470 he had been deputed to the court of Duke
Charles of Burgundy, and received by him with esteem and affection. On
his return he remained attached to the Burgundian party, inasmuch as he
believed a continued peace with Burgundy beneficial to Berne.
Hagenbach, however, had been seized and executed; and Charles’s fury
venting itself not merely in menaces against Switzerland, he named his
officer’s brother to fill his vacant place, with orders to cover the
county of Ferrette (the part of Alsace which joins Switzerland) with
flames and blood. This fresh violence restored to Nicholas Diesbach,
the zealous partizan of France, the credit he had lost with his
countrymen. He sought to renew the treaty of alliance with Louis the
Eleventh; but aware that Adrian of Bubenberg’s influence would be
exercised on the opposing side, found means to exclude him from the
council, and taught the people rather to take umbrage at his pride of
birth and dignity of bearing, than to remember the part he had acted.
Under various pretexts he was exiled to his Golden Manor of Spietz; but
when, in 1476, Charles of Burgundy advanced, determined to commence the
campaign by the conquest of Morat, at the head of sixty thousand men,
the Bernese recollected their banished avoyer, and, recalling him to
their councils, implored that he would take the command of the force
destined to garrison Morat. The senator, who had ever sought to avoid a
perilous war, did not hesitate to draw his sword in one become
inevitable. He demanded only implicit obedience, and seeing that the
greater portion of the inhabitants were ill disposed, he proclaimed
that the first who showed fear or irresolution would be punished with
death! He also adopted measures which had been already, on other
occasions, successful, separating friends and relations; placing some
within the town, and of others forming part of the force destined to
repulse the besiegers. Wise, active, and courageous, calm amidst
danger, Bubenberg’s conduct and skill saved Morat, to whose fate seemed
bound that of all Switzerland, and to him chiefly did Louis the
Eleventh of France attribute the victory. Twelve Swiss deputies, Adrian
of Bubenberg at their head, were despatched to the French court, and
received with royal magnificence. The following year the conqueror of
Morat returned on a mission connected with the succession to the throne
of Burgundy. The object of his embassy had altered gratitude to
coldness—esteem to hatred; faithful to his own high character, firm
and incorruptible, when Adrian of Bubenberg saw his colleagues won and
wavering, he disguised himself as a minstrel, and returned alone to
Berne; this was in 1478. He died there the following year.
The barony of Spietz afterwards belonged to the family of Erlach, which
counts among its members Rodolph, conqueror of Laupen, murdered by his
son-in-law, and Charles Louis, massacred by his misled soldiers when he
came to defend Berne.
From Spietz the road lately made skirts the lake almost the whole way,
and rather nervously, as there are neither barriers towards the water
nor retreat towards the rock, which has been blasted to leave a
passage, and round whose base it winds. As Fanny’s habit of starting
rendered the meeting of cart or carriage perilous, we cantered along
while the way was free, and to distract her attention from the rivulets
and small cascades dashing down to her feet. Arrived at the extremity
of the lake, the rain fell in earnest; despite our cloaks it threatened
drowning: the mists were sufficiently opaque for Ossian to rest his
heroes on; and the dim grey water which stretched below, melting into
and confounded with them, looked mysterious and beautiful, as a single
gleam of pale sunshine struggling through the vapour just touched the
Neisen and descended to rest on the surface. Unterseen was ten minutes
nearer than Interlaken, and, though we had heard the hôtel called a bad
one, the dripping manes and drooping tails of our horses prayed
movingly for the nearest shelter. We took the road along the bottom of
the lake, and arrived among the dark wooden houses, some of which bear
date of two hundred years ago. The accommodation at the inn was better
than I had expected; but, considering we had come thither for pleasure,
our object was not altogether accomplished, as we sat alone at supper,
faintly lighted by two candles at the end of the large gloomy room, the
storm beating against the windows and the wind whistling under the
doors. Our bed-room looked on the church, backed as it is by the steep
sides of the Harder, to which the clouds clung,—threatening an
inauspicious close to our explorings; and the most musical of German
watchmen woke us every hour during the night chanting them and an
appropriate rhyme in his fine deep voice. Called as we desired, and the
car ready, the state of the weather, as we breakfasted shivering in the
same large room, looked by no means promising, and the barometer had
continued sinking pertinaciously. Not choosing, however, to ride back
to Thun, as we had ridden from it, in rain and fog, and our object
unaccomplished, we preferred driving in their company to Lauterbrunnen;
and leaving our horses with strict charges to the stable servants, we
started rather silent and rather sad in that chill morning at seven,
over the four picturesque bridges, which, crossing the Aar, divide
Unterseen from Interlaken. From one of these there is visible between
the nearer mountains a view of the Jungfrau, splendid in fine weather.
She looked mournfully through the wreaths of heavy vapour like a
captive through her prison bars: by degrees the mist rolled away, and
we could admire Interlaken, where you know D—— was prevented passing
part of his summer by the unfavourable description given by ——. I
should prefer it even to Thun, for its green plain nestles more closely
under the hills. The pensions are built on the same line, but apart;
with a mountain back and mountain view, their gardens surrounding them,
and a noble avenue of old walnut-trees extending the whole length they
occupy. The road to Lauterbrunnen winds through shady lanes and crosses
meadows of Swiss verdure, and then lies beneath wooded hills, on the
summit of one of which rises Unspunnen, the castle of Byron’s Manfred;
a square and a round tower, from the top of one of which spring two
slight trees, being all remaining. The marriage of the baroness Ida of
Unspunnen with Eschenbach of Wadischwyl bare to the latter’s house her
father’s lands of Unspunnen, she being his only child, and Oberhofen
her maternal inheritance.
An illustrious ancestor of this Eschenbach, but more as poet than
warrior, though for his military exploits he was armed knight by Count
Poppo of Henneberg, was Wolfram; the year of whose birth is not known
with certainty, but who lived when the emperors of the house of Swabia
had roused in Germany a love for poetry, which had grown to passion:
and the verse of its votaries had a depth and brilliancy which in no
way foretold the coming barbarism of the fourteenth century. His life
passed in the wanderings of a troubadour from court to court, admired
and honoured, as he retired to the home of his forefathers but a brief
time ere he died. A zealous patron of letters and his friend was the
Landgrave Hermann of Thuringe, at whose court of Wartbourg (the most
romantic of mountain castles) congregated the wisest and wittiest of
their time. In the year 1207 six noble minnesingers entered the
poetical lists there; Hermann and his fair wife distributing the
prizes, while Nicholas Klingsor, famed for his love ditties, as well as
his knowledge of necromancy and astrology, presided as judge, summoned
for that purpose from Hungary. The general voice hailed Wolfram
conqueror; but Klingsor, whom he had unwittingly offended, in vengeance
adjudged the palm to his friend Henry of Ofterdingen. His superiority
was, however, fully acknowledged by the poets of Swabia, with all of
whom he was on terms of intimacy, and who styled him sage and master.
His genius was varied,—for he was called the Homer and the Ariosto of
his day. Among the works his astonishing fertility left to found his
fame on, is a species of drama, entitled the Combat of Wartbourg,
containing the six pieces recited by himself and his five troubadour
companions in 1207 at the court of Thuringe.
A hundred years later lived Walter of Eschenbach, comrade and confidant
of the parricide Duke John of Swabia.
When the latter’s father, Duke Rodolph, died, leaving him a boy, the
Emperor Albert sent for him to court, and held his patrimony in his own
hands as the orphan’s guardian. The minor, become of age, demanded his
birthright, which Albert, under various pretexts, refused; and the
young man, exasperated by each succeeding subterfuge, urged on by the
mockery of his partisans, who nicknamed him Duke sans duchy, and the
fear that his uncle might intend his utter spoliation, employed as
mediator the bishop of Strasburg.
He begged that the emperor would at least yield to his nephew some
castles with their domains, belonging to his paternal inheritance; but
Albert once more evaded a direct reply, speaking of giving Duke John a
command in his meditated expedition against Bohemia, and of
satisfaction when the wars were done.
The bishop returned from his embassy, the young man heard its issue in
silence, breaking it only to observe, “the hand which grasps my
birthright menaces my life.” Quitting his reverend adviser, he sought
without further delay the companions of his pleasures, who in more
serious moments were his counsellors also: these were Ulric of Palm,
Rodolph of Wart, and Walter of Eschenbach.
The 1st of May, 1308, there was held an imperial banquet at Stein, at
which Albert’s sons and Duke John sate. By the emperor’s command
wreaths of flowers were brought, with which the children and
disinherited prince were alike crowned. There was some allusion, some
remark made, as to these diadems being sufficiently weighty for the
brows which sustained them, to which John listened gloomily. The
banquet concluded, the emperor mounted on horseback to proceed to
Rhinsfeld, whither the empress had gone some days before. His suite was
composed of the unpopular favourites, Landenberg and Waldsee, his
cousin the count of Hohenberg, and others of his nobles and vassals.
Pretexting a fear of overloading the boat, arrived at the river Reuss,
John and his party found means to separate Albert from his followers.
He rode slowly and a little in advance across the broad ploughed lands
which stretch beneath the hill and castle of Habsburg, the territory of
his ancestors, conversing with the knight of Castelen.
Suddenly riding up to his side, Duke John exclaimed, “Receive the wages
of fraud,” and plunged his lance into his throat; at the same moment
Balm ran him through the body, and Walter of Eschenbach clove his skull
in twain with a back stroke of his sword.
Rodolph of Wart stood motionless, and Castelen fled. Duke John and his
friends, terrified as by some unexpected crime, gazed at each other for
the last time, and rushed in various directions from the scene of their
murder; Albert had fallen bathed in his blood, and insensible. His
suite, congregated on the opposite shore of the river, witnessed the
assassination, and fled in fear from their dying master. A poor young
woman passing by saw and ran to raise him from the ground; he breathed
the last sigh in her arms: twice he essayed to open his eyes, and at
the third effort to do so, died.
Duke John took refuge in the solitudes of the Alps, and wandered some
days in the forests which surround the abbey of Einsilden. Disguised as
a monk, he travelled thence to Italy, where he threw himself at the
pope’s feet, and as a favour obtained from him permission to hide
beneath the cowl his remorse and friendlessness. The remainder of his
days passed in obscurity as an unknown monk, it was believed in the
convent of the Augustines at Pisa; and the blind man who sat begging in
the market-place of Vienna, was, it is thought, as he asserted himself
to be, son of John the parricide.
Rodolph of Wart, accomplice but not actor in this tragedy, had sought
protection with a relative, the Comte de Blamont, who, for a sum of
money, betrayed him to Albert’s survivors. He was married to a noble
lady of the house of Balm, who was fondly attached to him. Having
implored his pardon vainly on her knees, before the Empress Elizabeth
and her daughter Queen Agnes, she determined on affording him the
consolation of her presence when condemned to be broken on the wheel:
his sentence was executed. His torments, ere they ended his existence,
lasted three days and three nights, during which his unhappy wife
remained kneeling near him in tears and prayer, taking neither food nor
drink.
It was said by some that he had been wholly innocent, and even unaware
of the meditated murder; he solemnly asserted it while his broken limbs
were stretched on the wheel. When he had expired, his widow rose,
travelled on foot to Bale, and died. Ere yet Rodolph was taken, Duke
Leopold had entered his domains in arms, put all his domestics to the
sword, and razed the castle of Wart to the level of the ground. Jaques
of Wart, his innocent brother, reduced to beggary, lived the remainder
of his days in a poor cabin of Neflenbach, a village founded by his
ancestors.
Farwangen, the chief among the castles of the lords of Balm,
capitulated; but Duke Leopold and his sister Agnes, queen of Hungary,
widow of King Andrew, caused sixty-three nobles and many other warriors
to be conducted to the forest, and beheaded there in her presence. It
was then that Agnes, as their blood streamed round her, said, “I am
bathing in the dews of a May morning.”
When the castle of the house of Eschenbach (whose name has induced me
to linger so long on this story) was taken, and all the vassals of
Walter had been massacred, the soldiers of Agnes, and herself also,
were attracted by the faint cries of an infant in its cradle, whom the
shouts and shrieks of the assailants and their victims had fearfully
roused. The boy was so beautiful as to interest even Agnes, hard and
cruel as she was, till she discovered he was Walter’s son, when she
commanded that he should be put to death also; and her officers had
much ado to shield this one life from the fury which had exterminated
before all those who protected it. Yielding at last, she commanded that
he should renounce the name of Eschenbach, and be called
Schwartzenberg. It is probable that the child did not grow to manhood,
for his father was last of his line.
Walter of Eschenbach sent to his wife the deeds of the property she had
brought him as her marriage portion, became a shepherd, and lived as
one, in the county of Würtemberg, thirty-five years. He made himself
known only when at the point of death, and was interred with the pomp
due to the dignity of the ancient family which in his person closed. On
the spot where the emperor was murdered, the Empress Elizabeth and
Queen Agnes founded the monastery of Kœnigsfelden the high altar being
built on the very place where he expired.
No one crime was ever succeeded by so many in pretended expiation. All
who bore the same name with any of the guilty; all who had ever had
connexion with them; all found within the prescribed domains, were
sacrificed without pity. The accomplices not taken were put to the ban
of the empire, their marriage vows dissolved, their friends commanded
to avoid their presence, their enemies permitted to free themselves of
their lives, their lands adjudged to the empire.
Agnes having founded the convent, ever averse to communion with the
world, hard, cold, and cruel, though only six-and-twenty, enclosed
herself within its walls, distributing alms, practising fast and
penance, and performing the most humble offices. It was in vain however
that she strove to attract to Kœnigsfelden the old brother Berthold of
Offtringen, who had been a knight and warrior, and lived as a hermit on
the mountain: “Woman,” he said, “you serve God ill while shedding
innocent blood, and founding monasteries with the fruit of your rapine;
only on goodness and mercy doth he look with favouring eye.”
The road having passed Unspunnen, skirts a wild stream in an enchanting
glen, the White Lutschine, which waters the valley of Lauterbrunnen. On
entering the village of Zweylustchinenr the mountains open to leave a
way to Grindelwald, and through the chasm rushes the sister torrent,
the Black Lutschine, a picturesque bridge crossing the place where meet
these troubled waters.
Our road lay straight before, made beautiful by the varied forms and
tints of the bold rocks which are the belt of the White Lutschine, and
the dark and vivid green of pines and beech, which rise among the
crevices, or from the strangely shattered summits of these crags,
stained brown and grey, like genius springing from and brightening
poverty.
Somewhere hereabouts, where there is barely room left for the car
between rock and river, one of the former, projecting over the path
sombre and sternly, once shadowed a fratricide. Of the tradition I
heard only that the murderer was a powerful noble, who after his crime
left in remorse his castle to ruin, and his lands to the first invader,
and died in his wanderings.
The valley continued to narrow till we had surmounted the ascent to the
first houses of Lauterbrunnen. On the left was the rock of Hunenflue,
having the form and regularity of a bastion. Before us we saw the
Jungfrau, who had dropped her veil, demanding I suppose the sun’s
homage on her maiden brow, which he yielded soon after, but not until
we had seen the Staubbach,—alas! without its iris.
The fall is on the right hand, about a quarter of a mile from the
Capricorn, where we left our conveyance. The new hotel, which bears its
name, and is built closer to it, commands the best view, saving that
from the mound beneath it, which, in its deceitful neighbourhood,
appears a hillock, but whose steep side I climbed with difficulty, and
was puzzled to descend with sober step. We offered due reverence to the
cascade, arriving ancle deep in the rivulet, from the plank made
slippery by its spray; receiving a bath on the before-named mound,
where the voice of the water was so loud we could not hear our own; but
certainly not aware that in its spring of eight hundred feet it
sometimes brings down stones to break its admirers’ reveries. The late
rains had increased its volume and grandeur, and therefore perhaps
lessened its resemblance to the tail of a white horse in the wind. In
the winter it forms a colonnade of ice.
Along the wall of cliff which bounds this side of the valley, are other
falls of equal beauty, though less fame. The Jungfrau and Wetterhorn
close its extremity, and up the mountains, on the stream’s opposite
shore, the green pastures stretch nearly to the summit, dotted with
chalets to receive cattle and herdsmen, some seeming too high for human
foot to rest on. These and the poorer houses of the village, which is
scattered over the valley, are built of whole pine trunks, rudely
mortised at the corners, a hole left for door and window, and the heavy
stones laid on their roofs of bark, that the wind may not whirl them
away.
The more aristocratic dwellings have the sawn planks which form their
walls carved and ornamented, the open balconies of elaborate
workmanship, and below the jutting roof inscriptions graven to recall
the name of the owner, and the year and day in which the work was done,
and generally some blessing, in quaint rhyme, on building and builder.
We had not intended a visit to the glaciers of Grindelwald, but the day
growing fine and the road thither tempting us as we approached the
bridge, our resolution altered. The narrow road winds along precipices,
high above the Black Lutschine, and till it brought us within sight of
the glaciers, with the domes and spires of snow which shoot up above
them, I thought less interesting than the way to Lauterbrunnen. The two
glaciers are well seen from the inn windows and its garden. The
Mettenberg separates them, the Wetterhorn forming the boundary of that
nearest Lauterbrunnen.
The places occupied by these seas of ice were once, according to
tradition, fertile valleys, for in one of them was discovered a buried
chapel and a bell, bearing the date 1044. From the arch of an ice
cavern in this upper glacier issues the Black Lutschine; green
pastures, with wild flowers and strawberries growing at their edge, are
here on a level with the masses of ice ever encroaching, like death
advancing to grasp childhood.
In 1790, the innkeeper of Grindelwald, crossing the glacier while
driving a few sheep home from the mountains, slipped down a crevice,
and found himself laid, with a broken arm only, beneath a vault of ice,
and beside the torrent. Guided by the dim light which crept through the
fissures, he followed along its edge, and issued through the arch into
the world; he was still living when Ebel wrote.
The clergyman who in 1821 explored the glacier between the Mettenberg
and Eigher, met with a similar accident, but which ended fatally. He
fell to a depth of seven hundred feet, and his body, recovered after
twelve days of vain attempts, lies buried in the cemetery of
Grindelwald.
We dined in company of a most hungry and silent young German, and
returned to Unterseen; the drive back lovelier than you can conceive,
for in the place of mist we had sun and shadow; the torrent sparkling,
and the distant snow blending gold with rose colour.
The horses were found in safety, Grizzle demanding oats with the
impatience and attitudes of a wild beast. It is mournful to shut
oneself within a lonely room in a strange inn. I walked, while the
light remained, up the flight of steps which, just opposite our hotel,
lead to the church, whose grey tower has the Harder for background. In
the churchyard was something sadder than solitude,—the tomb of an only
son, who perished, aged twenty-two, in the precipices of the Harder;
rose trees were cultivated on the turf, and a bench placed opposite,
where sits his mother, who, for the last ten years, has every summer
made a six weeks’ pilgrimage from her far home to his grave.
We drank tea at one table of the enormous room, while a noisy Parisian
party from the Rue St. Martin, or thereabouts, supped at the other, a
young man of the family throwing cakes in the air and catching them in
his mouth after the manner, he said himself, of the bears of Berne;
there are various modes of seeking instruction when travelling: and a
lady, large and red-faced, informed her companions, for our benefit,
“how the douaniers had complimented her on her black eyes, and how they
said they were a rarity in Switzerland!”
Rising early, we left Unterseen by the old road, which passes through
Interlaken and along the rocky bank of the river. In admiration of the
lake all the way, and having enjoyed a lovely ride, and seen, without a
cloud to shroud them, the whole range of snow peaks with romantic names
which surround the Blummis Alp and Jungfrau, we reached Baumgarten
early, and rejoiced in exchanging the solitude of the dark old inn for
the society of Mr. ——, his pretty wife, and her gay children.
CHAPTER III.
Leave Thun—Zweizemmen—The wrong road—Château d’Œx—Gruyères—The
Préfet’s ball—Anniversary of the Virgin’s leaving school—Vevay—The
patient Griselda’s obstinacy—The exploit—Villeneuve—The Valley of
the Rhone—St. Maurice—The Theban legion—The Valais—The village
buried—The Rhone overflowed—Former inundation—The old villager
saved—St. Bernard—Story of its founder—Martigny—Riddes—Sion—The
prelate’s murder—The family of the Rarons—The Mazza—Raron
persecuted—Demands the aid of Duke Amedée—His castle burned—His
wife driven forth—His revenge—The cretins of Sierre.
Left Thun the 9th, at eleven, as we waited till the morning fogs, which
have now grown dense and cold, rolled up from the valley. The last bad
weather, which to us brought rain, laid a light covering of snow on the
mountain summits, which the natives say is a favourable sign. Madame
Rufenacht remains a desolate widow. Madame R. and Mrs. H—— left
(wisely) some hours before us, as the mist no sooner rises than the
heat becomes intense. The road was for some distance that we had ridden
towards Interlaken; it turns off where the river Kander comes dashing
along its stony defile, and beneath its covered wooden bridge, to the
lake. Our route skirted its precipices, and is very lovely where, at
the entrance of the valley of the Simmenthal, the wooded base of the
Niesen and the Stockhorn’sr crags leave barely space for the road and
the torrent, which a one arched bridge spans. We found at Erlenbachr
Mr. ——, who was to be our companion on this day’s journey, and, to
our regret, this day’s only; as he is light-hearted and light-footed,
all annoyance, and most fatigue, finding him invulnerable. Near the
village was an extensive horse and cattle fair, through which, without
the assistance of his mountain pole and his hand on her rein, it would
have been difficult to guide Fanny unharmed, particularly as, when they
stood “betwixt the wind and her nobility,” she took a sly opportunity
of biting two four-footed plebeians. Weissenburg is picturesquely
situated beside the torrent. We crossed it a few steps further on a
wooden bridge, where horses pay a toll of a batz each, which the
receiver, in her fly cap, ran after us to levy. The path to the baths
winds up the hill on the right hand.
Further on, the river forms a pretty cascade, boiling and bounding over
its stones below the precipitous road. Stopped at Zweizemmen,
twenty-seven miles from Thun, a village of wooden houses with a wooden
inn, and nothing to eat. It was unfortunately too late to go further,
as the horses were the only individuals passably lodged and in any
degree fed. With the exception of a damp, limp loaf and a plate of
nuts, our supper presented an uneatable variety, and I was obliged to
confess that I had left comfort behind when I preferred the romantic
route of the Simmenthal to that by Berne and Fribourg. A quantity of
wearing apparel, very far from new, hung round my bed-room, which the
servant, with German phlegm, said “could not derange me as I lay in
bed,” and I had some trouble to get removed in consequence. These
wooden mansions are like a sounding board, for, while I was dressing
this morning, I heard distinctly, as if she had been in the room, a
lady in the next admonishing her daughter, and D—— and Mr. ——
conversing at breakfast below; forming a tower of Babel colloquy. We
had such coffee as the French call _eau trouble_, its few grounds
floating to the top; and dismissed the unborn chickens presented for
eggs. Our acquaintance parted from us here, hiring a car as far as
Château d’Œx, whence he was to take the footpath to Vevay across the
Dent de Jaman. We started after him, and on the wrong road, no one
belonging to the Wooden Crown attempting to set us right. Over blocks
of stone, and by a way which grew steep and narrow as a mule-path, we
toiled debating whether we had mistaken, or this was indeed what the
natives called a passable bridle-road. I asked a peasant at a cottage
window, “Is this the road to Saanen?” “Ya,” said the dame composedly,
pointing her hand with the stocking dangling from it to the sharp
ascent scattered over with lumps of crag large enough to break a
horse’s leg.
Looking down in despair, we could distinguish another road far away on
the other side of the torrent and the valley. “Is that the road to
Saanen?” I shrieked to a man who was driving a goat.
“Ya, ya.”
“And this we are going?”
“Ya.” So seeing no further information likely, we led the horses down
this stone ladder in search of the new road, returning to the village
which it skirts without entering; leaving me a hope that its completion
will in no way serve the abominable Wooden Crown of Zweizemmen. It is a
grand work, a broad splendid causeway for a long distance cut along the
face of the rock several hundred yards above the torrent, but without
the semblance of a parapet, a circumstance of which Fanny’s starts
often reminded me. It crosses the stream a dozen times over handsome
bridges built of stone. One of the principal of these is yet in
progress, and a young German at work on the road pointed to the steep
sheep-track which dips suddenly down to the torrent’s edge, and a
narrow path which followed its windings. Not much liking the itinerary,
we asked whether horses might not pass over, but the German, who spoke
a little English, saying, “Peoples, only peoples,” down obediently we
went, passing under the bridge, and pausing in the loveliest ravine in
the world, with its clear rushing water and mountain sides covered with
pines, those near us brilliant in light and black in shadow; and the
faint mist shedding a blue tinge over the further and higher forests;
the bold arch flung over at a considerable elevation, still surrounded
by its wooden framework, and all the workmen, variously and
picturesquely attired, crowding to the edge to look down on the
apparition of Fanny pawing in the water. Continuing to follow its
banks, there being neither guide nor finger-post, we crossed a wooden
bridge, without rails, broad enough for one horse at a time, and high
enough to break our necks perfectly. The glen and the path grew
narrower, till at last we came on a party of workmen, whose cart, laden
with stones, completely blocked our passage, and the horses, which we
tried to force into the water, refused to stir, inasmuch as they did
not know its depth, and the crags it foamed over were visible.
The cart, from which the horses had been taken, was immoveable, despite
the united efforts of the civil Germans—rather a fortunate
circumstance, as, on asking the question, we found we were not likely
to arrive that way at Saanen. One of the men left his work to conduct
us back to the bridge without parapets, and up a narrow, slippery, and
perpendicular road, ranging over the admired ravine, which happily
brought us to a level with the new bridge, and beyond it on the way to
Saanen, to which unpicturesque place we arrived by a short cut, for
once successful.
At the next village, we left the Canton Berne for the Canton Vaud.
Before entering the latter at Rougemont, from another stone bridge, we
saw a lovely assemblage of torrent and mountain—one range all snow,
the rest with a robe of green pastures and a crown of pine forests. Fed
the horses at Château d’Œx, a commanding feudal situation when it
belonged to the lords of Gruyères, perched on an eminence in the plain,
backed by wild crag and mountain.
The road crosses the Saane and enters a narrow pass called Latine.
Montbovon, the village which Lord Byron mentions, is here in the Canton
Fribourg, and from it ascends the mule-path to the Dent de Jaman. Our
own road was far from safe, and at present almost impassable for
post-carriages, as for a considerable distance between the rock and
precipice there would be no room to pass. We fortunately met only two
carts, and had some trouble in leading our horses by, as there is no
protection on the side of the precipice; the road rises and falls
continually, cut through the rock and the pines, and high over the
torrent. It continues thus for some miles, the stream and valley then
widen, and grow calmer in their beauty. No one along these new roads,
undivided by league-stones, has an idea of distance. We were told two
leagues for the last fifteen miles, and we were weary and the sun low
when we came in sight of Gruyères, and admired its old castle and town
high on the hill, below which we wound. On the authority of the
Baumgarten, having reckoned on twenty-five miles, we found we had
ridden forty-two. As the last faint light was disappearing, we crossed
the last stream with its border of pines, and near the watch-tower of
Trême, built on a rock, with an arch by its side and dirty habitations
round, and, to my extreme satisfaction, arrived at the Cheval Blanc;
and little Fanny, recollecting her bed of a month ago, walked straight
to the stable-door.
We had our old room opposite the castle, and the inn yclept hôtel de
_la Mort_, a most ill-omened name.
Three of the castle windows were feebly lighted, and I heard, on
inquiry, that the préfet gave a ball; but not choosing to pay the fine
levied here, as well as at Geneva, on entertainments during undue
hours, the six young ladies and fifteen gentlemen who formed the
company were invited to dance from five to ten!
It was fête at Bulle, and everybody tipsy in honour of it. I heard it
was the anniversary of the Virgin Mary’s quitting the convent in which
she had been educated, to marry St. Joseph.
Wednesday, September 11.
Arrived at Vevay, the day having been as burning as that on which we
left it a month ago. The horses gave a strange proof of memory,
insisting on stopping at a fir wood, where we then rested them in the
shade. Persecuted by the small vineyard flies and musquitoes, of which
we were free in the mountains, wearied by the horses kicking the whole
length of the steep paved hills, we were glad to reach the Trois
Couronnes, where we found our Thun acquaintances and the letters we
expected, but must wait for the baggage.
16th September.
We intended leaving Vevay last Friday in company with Mr. and Mrs.
H——, but Griselda the patient having with great reluctance allowed
the putting on of three shoes, so positively insisted on kicking the
farrier and his assistant from the off hind leg, that having called her
_rosse_ and _démon_, and sworn considerably, they gave up the idea,
leaving her with three new shoes and a hoof with none. This was an
impediment to the journey quite unlooked for, and rather disturbed our
equanimity. Saturday, D—— bribed the farriers back, and after
breakfast and goûter they returned to look at her and to talk, and at
four o’clock the business seemed still far from completion, when one
bethought him of tweaking her nose. This operation, with the aid of two
pushing her side, one holding her leg, and the fifth shoeing, proved
successful. Little Fanny, seeing her comrade surrounded to be
sacrificed, shrieked a melancholy neigh, as she was tied in the corner.
The gold was drunk merrily, and the exploit of the five has been so
exaggerated by dint of telling it, that I should think the conquest of
the grey horse would remain, for all future travellers’ advantage,
inscribed among the “fastes” of Vevay.
The rain has fallen in torrents during three days; this morning was
fine, and the road enchanting; we passed again old Blonay, and
Chastellar on his hill, and Clarens with her foot in the water, and the
peak of Jaman above the spire of Montreux, the mountains not like those
of the Simmenthal, everywhere dark with evergreen pine, but their sides
feathered with summer leaves, and the spiral fir-forests, only far
above, pointing against the blue sky.
Arrived at the narrowed road, and the high grey crag opposite Chillon,
Fanny walked to the drawbridge, and but for the mist in the valley of
the Rhone rising gradually and threatening, we should have paid it one
visit more. The view of the castle is far grander from the shore than
lake, as its uniformity is broken by the three massive towers and the
keep which surmounts them, and it wears the sober grey which should be
the livery of a feudal castle. We suspect the wall towards the lake of
having been lately whitewashed, and the republicans have daubed thereon
an enormous device, inscribed Liberté and Patrie.
As we wound along the road towards Villeneuve, beneath the old walnut
trees, we turned to see it and the prisoners’ isle, till D——, who
accuses me of always admiring scenery backwards, cricked his neck. The
tiny habitation has no business on the island; the mountain breeze
should only blow over the three tall trees and the flowers of gentle
hue.
Villeneuve is an abominable hole: its inns of the Croix Blanche and
Lion d’Or looking equally uninviting. Bidding here good-bye to the
lake, we enter the valley of the Rhone, wild and muddy, with his
eighty-four tributary streams, already received in his passage through
the mountains. L’Aigle is a charming village, hid in the hills. Bex is
not, in my opinion, situated quite so prettily, but the inn has a
prepossessing appearance.
A peasant pointed out the way to the Salines, which lie in the mountain
behind, but of them you must ask descriptions elsewhere, for it just
then began to rain heavily, and we put on our cloaks, bound for
Martigny. St. Maurice stands, its castle on the crag, above the road
from Geneva, where a fine bridge crosses the wild Rhone, its one arch
flung from the Dent de Morcles on the further side, to the Dent du Midi
on ours. Before us was a little fort, thrown up by the Swiss in 1832,
to defend this already well closed pass. I thought it one of the most
striking spots I had seen in Switzerland. You know the legend, that
here in the year 302, the Theban legion was massacred by command of the
Emperor Maximilian, and the place called St. Maurice, from the name of
the chief of these martyrs, who refused to abjure Christianity. When we
had crossed the bridge, the grandeur and the beauty merged in the muddy
street of this most filthy town; the contrast between the Vaud we had
left and the Valais we had just entered, marvellous, considering that
the separation is a bridge seventy feet long. Manure heaps before the
doors, and pigs revelling in them once more; and the hideous goitre,
and more hideous cretin, telling at every step their tale of
unwholesome filth and misery. One passed us with the usual vacant grin
and dead eye, and uttered a yell which startled the horses; the
wretched object wore a petticoat, and we could not tell whether it were
male or female.
Leaving the Rhone to our right, and now again passing numerous crosses
and chapels, and votive offerings, which deprecate its fury, we came at
no great distance to a most desolate spot, where the road for a
considerable way crosses a tract covered only with gravel and crags, in
melancholy disorder. Among the rubbish is a roofless cottage, almost
buried. We were told that the bursting of a glacier in 1835 caused this
desolation; a torrent of mud descended from the Dent du Midi, floating
on its surface the blocks of stone which ruined the valley, sacrificing
no lives, as its progress was slow, but overwhelming fields, orchards,
and houses. It skirts the road for the length of nine hundred feet, and
is the saddest sight imaginable; we were glad to exchange it even for
the low barberry bushes which, with their pendent fruit, like coral
branches, cover a soil which seems to produce little beside.
Shortly before reaching the waterfall of the Sallenche, we found that
the Rhone had broken his usual bounds, and overflowed the narrow
valley, more muddy in his rapid course than ever. The rain had ceased
falling, but the mists lingered and deepened, and the clouds lay
ominously low on the dark bare mountains. The fall is the finest I have
seen, from the volume of its foaming water, and the violence with which
it leaps from crag to crag through the ravine it has hollowed till it
makes its last bound of one hundred and twenty feet, and from the basin
which receives it, the spray mounts like steam. As, excepting the
elevated causeway on which we stood, the whole expanse was here
inundated, the broad sheet of water under it, and blackness of the
crags surrounding, with a rare tuft of green here and there, but mostly
naked and shattered, added to the grand melancholy of the scene, the
vale of the Rhone might form a fit picture of the valley of the shadow
of death.
Farther on a covered bridge, we crossed the Trient, a narrow but wild
torrent, descending from the Tête Noire, and issuing from the black
mouth of the stony gorge which opens barely enough to vomit it forth.
The rain recommenced, and we saw through the mist the round tower of
the castle of La Batie, once a stronghold of the bishops of Sion, built
on the summit of a solitary rock, not far from Martigny; between it and
the town we crossed the Dranse, where it flows to swell the Rhone.
Arrived at the hotel de la Poste we were kept waiting a long time for
the worst of all meals, served up in a picturesque vaulted hall, where
fire and candles only made darkness visible. We cut up the doubtful
meat only in mercy to the next comers. I imagine this has been a
convent, from the open pillared galleries which run round the old
house, and the corridors and private stairs, and rooms like cells.
A black line drawn along the outer wall of several houses in Martigny
recalls the height to which the waters rose in the inundation of 1818,
when the masses fallen from the glaciers of Getroz into the valley
first formed an obstacle, behind which the waters of the Dranse,
stopped in their flow, accumulated to a lake, and at last yielding to
the mighty pressure, gave passage to the scourge, which in an hour and
a half had swept over the eight leagues which divided it from Martigny,
having borne away all that stood in its path; the bridge of Mauvoisin,
ninety feet above its ordinary course, three hundred habitations, and a
forest.
It is wonderful that its column rushed, without touching, past the
village of Bauvernier, emitting a vapour like the smoke of a
conflagration. It went on to tear from their foundations eighty houses
at Martigny; its surface covered with the bodies of drowned cattle, and
human beings, despite their warning, taken unawares.
One wondrous instance of preservation occurred in the person of an old
man, aged a hundred years: there was a high mound, formed of the wrecks
cast there by the former inundation of 1595. He would have been too
feeble to climb it for safety; he stood there by chance when the
roaring destroyer rushed by, circling round, without wetting the sole
of his foot, as if it respected the monument of its former power.
This morning, 17th of September, started early as we conveniently
could, the innkeeper having told us, for our comfort, that the overflow
of the Rhone has cut the road between Sion and Sierre, and stopped the
diligence. The monks of St. Bernard have a convent here, and when the
climate has undermined the health of their brothers on the mountain,
they are relieved from hence.
The monastery of the Great St. Bernard is distant but a ten hours’
journey; we intended going thither, but feared to over-fatigue our
horses, yet I wished it much, from admiration of these self-made
martyrs, and also from the romantic story of the founder. The castle of
Menthon, for I must tell you this story, is built on the height which
overlooks the lake of Annecy, in Savoy. An heir was born to its noble
possessors on the 15th of June, 923. From early boyhood his taste and
studies were unsuited to close intercourse with the world; and grown to
a man, he resisted gently but firmly, the will of his family, who had
chosen for his wife the heiress of the house of Dwingt.
As he was the only hope of their line, the sole seedling of their
falling tree, his parents entreated and pressed him earnestly, and the
youth consented at last, unable to deny them longer. The marriage
morning came, the fair young bride was adorned, and the guests
assembled, for there was to be feasting at the castle of Menthon. As
the hour for the ceremony drew nigh, it became matter of marvel that
the bridegroom should so long remain absent. His chamber, where he had
not slept, and the domains of Menthon, were searched vainly; Bernard
had fled. The wedding guests, one by one and whispering, departed, and
the maiden, ere yet she was a wife, was left a widow.
Years went by; the heiress was no longer at Menthon, she had probably
formed a more auspicious alliance, and the desolate father and mother
had no son seated beside them near the hearth of their hall. They had
called up hope till despair came in its place, and believing him dead
at last, they set forth on a pilgrimage, not to the shrine of a saint,
but the feet of a living man, whose self abnegation and holy life had
become the discourse of Christendom.
Travelling by slow journeys, they arrived through the snows at the
summit of the mountain, where the solitary lived in the hospital he had
founded, compassionating the dangers which awaited travellers from
France and Germany to Italy. They found a man old before age, worn with
fatigues and hardships, and knelt before him to ask his blessing, and
to beg he would say masses for the peace of their son’s soul. The monk
knew them, for their old age had altered less than his youth: and while
he blessed them tremulously, they knew his voice, and started from his
feet to fall on his neck and bless him also.
He had fled from the wedding feast to the city of Aosta, where he
received holy orders and became archdeacon of the cathedral. He had
preached at the peril of his life, in the heathen Alpine valleys, and
rooted out idolatry; thrown down the statue of Jupiter still worshipped
on the mount Jou, the little St. Bernard, and founded hospitals on each
of the mountains which now bear his name, instituting for each one a
congregation of monks. He told his past life and his vocation to the
parents who had found him; they wept together, and then they parted, as
was his will, they to return to their lone castle of Menthon, to pray
for its exiled heir; he to bury himself once more in the tomb he had
selected, and forget if he could that he had seen forms and re-awakened
affections which drew him back to the world.
St. Bernard preached in the Alpine valleys forty-two years, and
afterwards in Lombardy, whence he travelled to Rome; he died at Novara
and was canonized.
It is not surprising that the country about Martigny should be
unhealthy; the road from this to Riddes, two posts and a half, is
raised along the centre of a marsh, now overflowed by the Rhone; the
valley produces here only rushes and rank-grass, which feed the thin
cattle scantily, and stunted birch trees, and unprofitable barberry
bushes, and a kind of furze with a red berry. It seems a fitting
habitation only for the frogs, which croaked and jumped by myriads from
the wet bank to the muddy stream as we rode along. The unfortunate
peasants scarce look like human beings. I did not see two with throats
undeformed by enormous goitres. Cretins abound in the valley, and those
not belonging to the idiot tribe have an expression of abjectness and
misery not much higher in the scale. They are mostly of dwarfish
stature, and the women wear the small straw hat with turned-up brim,
ornamented with brilliant ribands of gold and silver tissue, which show
off in all their ugliness their unwholesome complexions and ill-formed
features. At Riddes the Indian corn is cultivated again, and near
Riddes to the right is a fine view of chasm and torrent, a castle above
and hamlet beside, breaking the sadness of the drear valley and barren
mountains. Farther on are pretty villages, surrounded by fine old
walnut-trees and pastures, green as those of the Simmenthal. In a field
we rode by were hay-makers busy; a woman called to desire I would
approach and show my strange figure. I answered, at a like pitch of
voice, that I had not time, and we left merriment behind us.
It would be difficult to fancy a finer grouping of crag, river, and
valley than approaching Sion. The Rhone to the right; the peaked
mountains rising before two crowned with castles; to the left, highest
and grandest, Tourbillon; on the right, Valerie. The first ruined, but
nobly; turret and tower and battlement standing as in the fine old age
which succeeds a strong manhood. Below, as we approached the fortified
wall, which, flanked by its look-out towers, surrounds the city, we saw
the third castle of Majorie, once the residence of the governors of the
Valais. Behind the town, on another and almost inaccessible crag, is
the ruin of the castle of Seyon, of which time, and siege, and fire
have left small remains.
In the year 1375, Wischard of Tawell was bishop of Sion, and had
governed the republic of the Upper Valais, under circumstances of
difficulty, during thirty-three years. This prelate had so well merited
the affection of the people, and the confidence of the neighbouring
districts, that he was named the Count of Savoy’s lieutenant-general in
the Lower Valais. He had attained extreme old age, when one day while
celebrating mass in his castle of Seyon, arrived with his suite his
nephew Baron Anthony of Thurn Gestelenbourg,—whom his high alliance
and extensive domains rendered one of the most important of the nobles.
He had some difference with his uncle respecting the hereditary fief of
the mayoralty of Sion, purchased by the bishop, and to whose rights and
revenues he put forth claims which the old man would not acknowledge.
The dispute grew warm and loud: whether the baron of Thurn was, in his
own person, guilty of what followed, is a fact disputed. Those who
excuse him assert that his furious vassals, uninstigated by his
example, laid violent hands upon the bishop: even while he held his
breviary, despite his feeble resistance and prayers for mercy, he was
thrust forth to the abyss from a window of his rock-founded castle. His
subjects, who loved, rose to avenge him at the news of his murder.
Peter, baron of Raron, his brother and other nobles, either did not
partake in the general opinion of Anthony’s guilt, or allowed party
spirit to deafen them to the claims of country and the cry of nature.
Brieg, Leuk, Sierre and Sion vowed to avenge their lost lord; and,
first taking several castles, met the assembled nobles near the bridge
of St. Leonard, and gained a signal victory. The baron of Thurn vainly
sold to Savoy his domain of Gestelenbourg. The Valaisans became its
masters. The baron of Brandis, a powerful noble of the Simmenthal,
through his mother, who was a Weissembourg, marched his vassals to aid
Anthony. His ill-placed friendship cost him his life, and his dispersed
troops sped homeward by the mountain passes. It was then that the
village of An der Leuk, in the upper Simmenthal, left without defence,
as its men had marched to battle, was entered by a detachment of the
Valaisans, who threatened pillage. The mountain women, bred to
hardships and danger, having their children and their children’s
property to guard, seized on what arms had been left behind, and with
the energy of roused lionesses rushed forth and drove back the enemy.
Anthony of Thurn, forced to quit the country, lived the remainder of
his days at the court of Savoy. About the year 1416, the Valaisans
complained that no account had been rendered of his male fiefs, (he
died without heirs in 1404), and expressed fears that these also would
fall into the hands of the all-grasping Rarons. These barons of Raron,
as the nobles of most ancient date and largest possessions, were the
sole persons whose power counterbalanced that of the bishops of Sion,
till the heir of the house was named to the bishopric at the time his
father held a post of importance, and the opposition ceased to exist as
soon as its cessation placed the whole authority in the hands of son
and father.
The jealousy thus excited was increased by Raron’s character and the
personal dislike it roused. By no means a hard or bad man, his chief
offence towards his country seems to have been his contempt for their
coarse habits and lack of culture, and a predilection for the house of
Savoy. What these habits were may be inferred from a list of laws
passed by the nobles, magistrates, and citizens in council, when his
power was at its zenith. They commanded “that men should be stationed
to enforce the cleansing of the sewers, to prevent their overflow; that
no foul linen should thenceforth be washed in water destined for the
town’s consumption, nor manure allowed to accumulate before the
habitations, and that the high street should be swept at least once a
week.”
The dislike to Raron increased from a report which spread, that, after
the invasion and conquest of the valley of Ossola by the Swiss troops,
the baron had been heard to say, that “had he been opposed to them
there, not one would have returned.”
Offended by this speech, they dispatched to Berne, of which city he was
burgess, the landamman of Unterwald, to demand full satisfaction for
words which, as they affected their honour, could not be passed by
unnoticed. Berne replied, that since she had vainly demanded the baron
of Baron’s aid in an expedition to Oltingen, she had abandoned him to
his own guidance.
The resentment of the Valais gave henceforth its own colouring to every
action of the Raron family, and in particular to its alliance with
Savoy. On a day when the inhabitants of Brieg had assembled, to give
loose to their ever-increasing discontent, a few Savoyard soldiers
arrived in the village from the Simplon pass. They seized their arms,
maltreated and drove them forth, exclaiming that their presence would
be no longer borne with in the Valais.
The authors of this outrage, for their own protection, raised the
country by means of an expedient derived perhaps from some gone-by
custom. Assembling friends and comrades, they bare at evening a large
log to a place where grew a young birch tree which they rooted up. They
carved the stump into the rude semblance of a human figure, and placed
it in the centre of the branches, entangling them with thorns and
brambles, to represent suffering justice encompassed by the trammels of
tyranny; and in proof of their determination to free her, each drove a
nail deep into the stem of the birch tree. They bound the figure, thus
encircled, to a tree on the high road (it was called La Mazza), and
lingered near the spot to mark what might follow. Those who came that
way at dawn stopped also, and there soon gathered a multitude, as yet
in expectant silence and passive. At last one advanced and unbound the
“Mazza,” and placed himself at its side in the centre of the crowd.
Several voices next apostrophized her, demanding what injuries brought
her thither, and treating her silence as the effect of fear caused by
an unjust power.
“If,” they said, “there be in this assembly one man who loves his
country sufficiently to be the Mazza’s questioner, let him advance!”
An instigator of the scene stepped forth:—
“Mazza,” he said, “they are sworn to aid thee: whom dost thou dread? Is
he of the race of Silinen; of the houses of Henn or Asperling?”
The figure, and the man who had stood beside her from the first,
remained motionless; and the speaker continued to enumerate the noble
names of the Valais with as little success as before.
“Is it,” he said at last, “the baron of Raron?”
The wooden figure was bent low to the ground in signal of assent.
“You mark her complaint,” rejoined the orator; “you who will succour
her raise the right hand.”
A large majority obeyed; a near day was appointed; and the news was
sent from village to village, “that the Mazza was about to visit the
captain-general, the bishop, and all the partizans of the Raron.”
The plot succeeded throughout; neither the lustre of their ancient
name, nor the favour of a foreign prince, nor the first dignities of
the land united on their heads, prevented the various districts of the
Valais from planting on the appointed day, and by unanimous consent,
the ill-omened Mazza before all the unfortified castles of Raron and
his partizans. The multitude forced a way, and pillaged from vault to
battlement. Had Raron remained in the country, he too, doubtless, would
have fallen sacrifice to the Mazza. He had gone to Berne, there to
renew his treaty of co-citizenship, and obtained, on the conditions of
resigning his place of captain-general, and leaving Bishop William to
his own resources, a promise from the Valaisans to persecute him no
farther.
He believed that (his foes appeased) time might restore to him the
power he had exercised in days past; but there was nothing which those
enemies so dreaded, and they worked on the passions of the
already-excited people, till rising again they marched on and destroyed
his castle at Sierre,—took a fortress, held by the bishop, at
Leuk,—and besieged Beauregard, which, built on a rock, had long seen
beneath its sway and protection the valley of Ennfisch, whose fertile
meadows stretch to the very foot of the Alps of Aosta.
Raron returned to Berne; but Berne was occupied wholly with the affairs
of Frederic of Austria, and feeling that to the bishop and himself
hesitation might be fatal, he demanded for both the aid of Savoy.
Amedée the Eighth, created duke by Sigismund, charmed to find a pretext
for interference, commanded Amedée of Challant, then in Chablais, to
leave it with sufficient force, and take under his own protection and
out of the bishop’s hands, the castles of Majorie and Tourbillon. On
his side the baron of Raron victualled his strong hold of Seyon,
conducted within its walls his wife and children, the Bishop William,
and all the aged and infant members of his house, charging with its
defence his most tried and brave vassals. A numerous and staunch
garrison held Beauregard, and the heat of that burning summer aided its
efforts by paralyzing those of the besiegers, till at last conquered by
famine and forced to open their gates, the soldiers as they marched
forth saw lighted behind them the flames, which, consuming the castle,
illuminated the entire valley. The insurrection became so serious, that
Amedée of Challant, fearing for Chablais, concluded a truce, which
peace soon followed; but although the baron of Raron had placed sole
confidence in the duke of Savoy, the latter, when renewing his ancient
treaties, made no stipulations in his favour, delivered to the bishop
neither Tourbillon nor Majorie, ceding both for a sum of money to the
chapter. The Valaisans pillaged and destroyed them: Seyon remained
alone; the riches of the Rarons were plundered; their power had
departed. His courage only remaining to support him, the baron again
entered Berne, and appeared in its assembly with none of the splendour,
but more than the dignity of past years: he was received as its citizen
once more. Meanwhile the forces of the Valais besieged Sion, determined
on the total ruin of Wischard of Raron. The negociations between Berne
and the Valais grew stormy: the latter insisting on the surrender of
the castle, but consenting to let all within it go free. The lady of
Raron, profiting by the permission, came trembling forth,—slowly
treading the steep way, followed by the Bishop William, her younger
children, and a long train of menials. It was then that Seyon fell. The
multitude thronged thither, bearing torches, and its noble halls were
sacked and fired.
Sion had abjured all respect towards this illustrious family, and the
unhappy lady, who, born in luxury, had long been the spouse of these
countries’ most powerful lord, descending the heights of the Valais,
and traversing the Pays de Vaud in the haste of fear with her
melancholy train, repaired to Berne. Her husband, listening to his
angry passions only, while the debate concerning his cause was still
pending, sought the Oberland, and gathering round his banner all the
brave youth of Frutigen, the Simmenthal, and Saanen, marched at
nightfall from the latter village, and along a narrow valley, which
bears the name of Gsteig. The dawn was hardly red on the mountains when
they climbed the steep paths of the Sanetsch, near the great cataracts;
and appearing before Sion at the dinner hour of its inhabitants,
mastered their resistance easily. In the course of some hours Sion was
reduced to a few streets, the remaining space it had occupied a mass of
smoke and flame, and the troop, when it had ravaged the surrounding
lands three days, returned by the way it came, having hardly lost a man.
The negociations between Berne and the Valais were succeeded by war; to
put a stop to which, the neutral cantons interfered, and at last,
through the mediation of the duke of Savoy, it was decided that
Wischard of Raron should be reinstated in his lordships, and receive as
indemnity for his losses the sum of 10,000 florins. Yet,
notwithstanding this, Wischard of Raron died far from his own land; his
opulence, his noble name, his chivalrous virtues availed nothing to one
who had neglected to conciliate the affection of his countrymen, and
their caprice cast down an authority which rose no more.
Entering the town, a dirty street leads to an inn of unprepossessing
appearance. We passed on to the left, winding half round the base of
the crag on which stands Tourbillon. We passed a picturesque monk in
his robe of brown serge, with a fine face and shaven crown; and a
squinting specimen of the same species, who, I think, chose the cowl
that it might serve for veil at need, he drew it so closely over his
face when I asked him a question.
As we slowly descended the road which skirts the Rhone, we could long
look back on this romantic castle, dark on its shadowed crag, while the
sun made a sheet of silver of the swollen river, which spread beyond
its natural shores, forming islets and peninsulas innumerable, circling
round the peaked mounds, which, varying in height from fifty to two
hundred feet, their crags gay with vegetation, crowd the valley,—first
created, Ebel says, by the violent Rhone cutting a deep passage among
the rubbish and ruins cast in his bed by the earth—avalanches of the
mountains; and increased by that driven along at each succeeding flood.
They look as if a portion of chaos had been left when the rest was
softened into a world.
Riding without shade under the craggy hill and over the river, we
followed vineyards for some distance, and as the branches hang within
reach, and we were hot and thirsty, I did not keep my hands from
picking and stealing, and we went on, refreshed by roguery, till we had
nearly met with merited retribution: for at a place whence the Rhone
had just retired, his slime left on the road made such perilous footing
for some hundred yards, that our horses had several times almost
brought us down with themselves, which there would have been
unpleasant, as we should infallibly have rolled into the river. At the
entrance of Sierre we passed the ruin of its demolished castle, one of
those belonging to the ill-fated Raron. Found the Soleil infinitely
better than the Poste at Martigny, and cleaner than report describes
the inn at Sion. The number of cretins at this place is fearful, and
you must see them to feel their degradation, and ours, that beings, so
below brutes, should indeed belong to our species—large heads and old
faces on the frail bodies of children, and with the weak limbs of a
cripple,—goitres, of an enormous size, swelling the throat and hanging
over the strangely-formed chests, and sometimes all the faculties
wanting—the ear deaf; the tongue dumb; the eye having no “speculation”
in its glare; and the enjoyment to lie rolling in filth, or basking in
the sun, like some unclean animal. As I stood at the inn window, three
of these wretched creatures appeared in the place below; they were
attracted by a part of my dress, and staid grinning at me, demanding
it, after their manner, with signs and inarticulate sounds. I could
have ascribed to their colourless and withered countenances neither sex
nor age. The peasants treat and speak to them kindly; but I doubt their
considering now, as in darker times, the presence of one of them in
their families a blessing; and such as are free from the curse ascribe
it to the extreme dirt, if not of the present, of past generations. The
water of Sierre is unwholesome, and drunk cold produces instant
hoarseness.
The diet of the Upper Valais is sitting here; the diet of the Lower
Valais at Sion: it is curious that the two districts divide the
possession of the latter town.
CHAPTER IV.
Rhone overflowed—Baths of Louëche—Tourtemagne—Visp—Ravages of the
Rhone—Madonnas placed to stop its further rise—Glys—Brieg—Ascent
of Simplon—Ganther—Gallery of Schalbet—The toll-gate—Hospice—The
Barons of Stockalper—Village of the Simplon-Broken
road—Algaby—Gorge of Gondo—Fanny too near the edge—Gap in the
road—Part of gallery carried away—Opportune aid—Arrival at
Gondo—Broken road near Isella—Accident during the storm—Remnant of
a carriage—The douanier’s aid—An auberge—The military post—My
consolation—An amiable hostess—Good company in a quiet kitchen—A
French gentleman expecting murder—An Italian vetturino—The Juge de
paix and his interested verdict—Torrent or bedchamber—Our hostess’s
supper—Departure—First difficulty—Road completely swept
away—Impossibility of advancing—A lady and her guide killed—Way
over the Trasquiera—Fanny aiding her conductor—A painful path—A
draught of water—Top of the mountain—Inhabitants—Milk and
apples—Fanny’s leap—Danger of Grizzle—Descent—Bridge
gone—Torrent forded—Gallery of Crevola—The broken
column—Arrival—Our friend’s welcome—Domo d’Ossola.
18th September.
Left Sierre early, and found, when but a short distance on our way,
that the damage done by the Rhone had not been exaggerated. We crossed
it on a bridge, and beyond, in lieu of the road which had been there,
found a broad and deep deposit of the river, which had broken and swept
it away. Three hundred workmen are employed since the overflow, and, as
none of our party could swim, we stopped to inquire at which part it
might be fordable. One of the men came good-naturedly forward to lead
Fanny, and in and to her shoulder in water we went, Grizzle following,
and arrived safe at the opposite shore. Rode fast up the hill to dry
ourselves, leaving our friend grinning at his fee, and shaking himself
like a gay poodle. The route here turns through a pine forest, a wild
and beautiful way, St. Bernard and the range of brother Alps behind.
The Gemmi, to the left, topped with snow, and the Rhone at its foot,
and, on our right, cliff above cliff,—not cold, white, or grey, but
rich with tints warm and beautiful; and fir woods below them and around
us, covering the peculiar and conical mounds. A tract of forest on one
of these had been burned, probably by lightning or inadvertence, and
the scathed and blackened trunks stood like the plague-stricken among
their green fellows. The road skirted the river, still on our left, and
we saw opposite, on the mountain, a romantic village with an old
turreted castle, to which conduct a wooden bridge, sinking ominously in
its centre, and a steep winding road. It commands the noble gorge in
the grey rock, through which rushes the Dala river, and the Gemmi
surmounts it in turn. This is the village of Louëche, and its famous
baths are about nine miles higher in the mountain. I might give you an
account of these hot springs, which flow at five thousand feet above
the level of the sea, but that I think I might weary you. They must be
of extraordinary efficacy, as the cold of morning and evening at
Louëche does not impede the cure, though snow sometimes falls there in
July; and crowds frequent them notwithstanding their inconvenient
position and the total want of comfort, often of necessaries, in the
dilapidated wooden dwellings which receive the sick. It is strange that
the water which at its source will harden an egg and scald a fowl, and
in which one cannot, from its extreme heat, plunge the hand, so soon
loses this quality, that it may be received in a glass and immediately
swallowed without annoyance.
Near Tourtemagnen, where there is a strange looking inn, but I hear
comfortable notwithstanding, the beauty of the country wholly
disappeared, for the road ran among pools and marshes—the melancholy
cows standing to their knees in water to eat the high coarse grass
which half grows, half floats, around—the few trees which have
attained any size bent and blasted by the searching wind; the wretched
stunted women, who would be prodigies of ugliness even without the
goitre, were digging in the mud for the unwholesome potatoes which grew
there.
The day had grown cold and foggy, and lighted sadly the late ravages of
the Rhone—painfully visible; as its widened bed now dry once more
swept over meadows and fields of Indian corn, and left, on its retreat,
desolating heaps of stones and sand. We passed here and there a
shattered mill and a ruined habitation—the owners mostly standing idly
and hopelessly on the bank—a few striving to combat with misfortune,
and reap the rotting harvest; or at least collect the logs flung to
their feet on the shore—relics of bridges broken and scattered in the
contempt of the waters they had spanned for a time. We compared it to a
land visited by a curse;—the struggle seemed so unequal between
earth’s frailest race and her heaviest disasters.
I think it is after passing a village of some miserable huts called St.
Pierre, that it improves for a space—green pastures once more
ascending to the pine forests, and neater wooden houses covered, for
the first time, with trained vines. The peasants seemed miserable as
ever, ragged, and famished, but a spice of coquetry remaining through
it all, for the outwork of broad riband with a tinsel border eternally
trimmed the low crown of the felt hat.
With the exception of this and one other portion of better land, the
marshes stretch to Visp, and the thick air is impregnated with miasmas.
Visp is built where the valley parts itself in two distinct branches.
The one, down which rushes the torrent which gives its name to the
village, leading to Monterosa; but it is the Haneck and not Monterosa
whose white mass, seen from this spot, terminates the defile of the
Moro. The Visp is here broad and rapid as the Rhone, yet this place,
situated near their junction, is filthy as all villages in the catholic
cantons,—their united streams cannot wash the blackamoor white.
After traversing the streets, our road wound grandly and perilously
round the base of rocks blasted for its formation; but this portion
passed, we were again amidst the marshes, and between Visp and Glys the
overflow of the Rhone has done most damage, as it is hereabouts swollen
by numberless tributary streams—most turbulent vassals. Our horses
sank above the fetlock in soft mud, which covered the whole face of the
valley: Indian corn and pumpkins floating on its surface. The ground
floors of the deserted cabins were flooded, for through this desolate
tract wound a stream whose deposits made pools deep and broad; and
planted in the mud, or half drowned in the water, were several small
wooden crucifixes and Madonnas, placed there to deprecate its further
rise.
We passed through Glys, in whose church lie buried Georges of Flue and
his twenty-three children. At the entrance-gate stands the Virgin Mary,
the iron glory round her head resembling the snakes of Medusa; and over
the portico is a painting of the heavenly Father, extending his mantle
over multitudes of the faithful, who look like deformed children,—the
native artist drew, alas! his inspiration from the goitre-afflicted and
the cretin. The last bridge which we crossed over the Saltine leads
directly to Brieg, and at the window of the hôtel de la Poste we saw
the pretty face of Mrs. —— looking out to greet our coming. The pine
log fire blazing in the wide hearth was agreeable this chill evening,
and her voice and laugh aided to dispel the impressions left by the
dull air of that desolate valley. There are rumours of the
impossibility of crossing the Simplon, of roads injured and bridges
broken by some recent storm—the postmaster’s son has been sent hence
to verify their truth, and we wait his fiat.
September 19th.
It is decided that we are to go, the courier from Sierre having passed
through Brieg at daybreak with news that the road is open.
September 21st., Domo d’Ossola.
After two days’ silence, I write again to give you a recital of
adventures which have befallen us wayfarers. Our friends and ourselves,
with the rest of the party assembled at Brieg, left after breakfast,
and we hardly said good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. H——, in whose company we
were to dine at Domo d’Ossola. The morning was cloudy and cool,
changing to the loveliest of days. Half a mile above Brieg we passed
the covered bridge which crosses the Saltine, and is the first of the
works of the mountain, for it is on the direct road, which begins from
Glys, but is seldom taken, as there is no inn there. At this spot they
join, and the ascent grows steeper, turning away from the Glytzhorn,
which bounds the valley on the right, towards its comrade the
Breithorn. Our horses, at a walk, soon left behind the posters and
heavy carriages, and we passed beneath a hill, at whose summit is a
Calvary, the stations conducting thither peeping whitely out among the
thick dark firs. The valley of the Rhone looked beautiful below, Brieg
in the plain, the tin globes which surmount her minaret-like steeples
shining in the sun as if his rays had kindled so many stars; behind the
town and the high bridge which spans the Saltine, dashing towards the
Rhone, arose the mountains—parted by the deep and narrow cleft whence
the river issues; and again above these were the glaciers, their forms
half concealed by the vapours which, as we ascended, partially veiled
the range of Bernese Alps also, but made our road the lovelier;—where,
skirting the precipice from the depths of the gorge through which the
Saltine foams, they rose curling thin and delicate as the smoke from a
cottage chimney, or, lying at our feet for a few moments, impenetrable
as a floor, slowly opened to show the torrent, glittering among its
black crags, and the green forests, all dew and sunshine. At several of
the windings of the road, now steep but always smooth and broad, and
almost always protected, we again hung over what seemed a miniature of
Brieg and the valley as far as Tourtemagnen, till arrived at a certain
height, it runs nearly on a level along the edge of the ravine of the
Ganther to the bold bridge at its extremity. Beneath its arch, from the
rocks which back it, rushes the torrent, forming a cascade in its leap,
where in winter roll the avalanches. Crossing this bridge, we returned
on a parallel line with that we had already gone on the opposite side
of the valley: we could distinguish the carriages some miles behind.
The route ascends thence in steep zigzags to Berisol, a post-house and
poor inn.
Fanny sometimes started at a pine trunk fallen on her path, or a cow
feeding above us with its tinkling bell, or obstinately refused to pass
some unfamiliar object, such as the poor priest who, book in hand, was
summoning a dozen white goats from the pinnacles on which they were
perched feeding, and who came bounding from crag to crag at his call.
At such times, to distract her attention, we cantered along through the
sunshine and sweet air, acknowledging its influence, for on the broad
road there was little danger; it is certain the mind has less energy,
and the body feels more fatigue, on the plain. Somewhere hereabouts we
crossed a bridge of planks without parapets, not dangerous however.
Here also a stream gushes from the rock, and passes under to foam and
lose itself among the pine trees,—some standing to fringe its shores,
others, broken by its force, lying at its feet to do it homage. It is
one of the sweetest glimpses on the Valais side of Berisol. The last
named place consists of two houses, connected by a roof which crosses
the road; and here we passed more carriages, ourselves proud and
rejoicing in the lesser weight which enabled us to desert them all.
Continuing to mount higher, our way became more wild till we had passed
the pine region, and the crags were clothed with rhododendron only,
whose blossoms lent beautiful tints to the far mountain side. Here and
there we saw a solitary tree broken by some avalanche, or raising
boughs withered and whitened by the ungenial climate. But the sterility
is almost total near the Gallery of Schalbet, the first which we
traversed: it is hollowed through a rock which obstructed the passage
of the road, here cut along the verge of the precipice and edge of the
bare mountain, narrower and without barriers.
From the fifth refuge, which immediately follows this cavern of
ninety-five feet long, to the summit, is the place of peril in the time
of tourmentes and avalanches. I looked with some attention to the snow,
which, lately fallen, had accumulated thick and far above our heads,
and to the track of the avalanches, now marked by stream and torrent,
which rush down the chasms uttering their ominous roar, repeated and
prolonged by all the mocking echoes of the mountain. We were beneath
the glaciers of the Kalt Wasser, and, to afford adequate protection to
the road they threaten, two houses of refuge, three galleries, and an
hospital, have been erected within a brief distance. The second of
these galleries passes beneath one of the mighty falls, and our horses
started to find themselves wet with its spray, as, carried over the
roof, it dashes down before one of the apertures which light it.
The longest of these glacier galleries has been blasted through the
living rock, within which it turns, and damp and cold it is as a
dungeon—the water distilling through the fissures in its roof, forming
in winter long needles of crystal, but now dropping mercilessly on our
heads, changing the soil to a sea of mud; and the draught of air
striking a chill so penetrating, that to save the horses from harm, we
trotted them the one hundred and thirty feet which form the length of
this gloomy cavern.
A little further, we passed the sixth refuge, which is the toll-gate
also. The receiver, who came running out, found time to tell that he
had served in the Hanoverian guard, and fought at Waterloo, and also to
cheat us of two francs per horse, the toll amounting to four for the
two. It was twelve o’clock, he said, so that we had ascended in three
hours, for here is the cross which marks the highest point of the road.
It continues bare and wild; but down in the meadow, which seems rather
to produce a kind of moss than grass, there are scattered a few
wretched cottages; heaven knows what the inhabitants exist on. The
hospice founded by Napoleon, and at present occupied by a few Augustine
monks, is a fine-looking building without, but desolate and unfinished
within. We were saluted as we rode by two of the lonely brothers, who
were wandering on the irregular hillocks which surround it, bare of
bush or verdure, surmounted by the unchanging snows. In the broad
valley below our road, shut in by rocks naked as itself, rises on a
mound the square six-storied building, or rather tower, which served
for hospice ere this was instituted. A few cows were standing before
it, chewing the cud—“of sweet and bitter fancies” it must have
been,—for there appeared nothing to swallow bodily. It is said that
the old barons of Stockalper were in the habit of sending hither their
children to preserve them from the baleful influence of the air of the
plain: it still belongs to a proprietor of the same name.
From this place the road commences and continues to descend. We were
among green and living things once more, and the milder temperature
restored to activity that worst of all species of crawling fly which
had already so persecuted our horses in the ascent, and,
notwithstanding my long apprenticeship in fly murder, consequent on our
ride, resisted all efforts to kill, being cased in armour, till I
adopted suffocation, and therefore, for the benefit of future horse
travellers, recommend that they be pressed between finger and thumb
until death shall ensue.
Crossing a torrent on a bridge, at last, about two leagues from the
summit, we entered the most dirty village of the Simplon, where we had
decided to stop only to feed the horses, who were well able to end
their day’s journey at Domo d’Ossola: it is built on a knoll above the
rapid stream, commanding an unproductive valley. The houses, built in
stone, take mellow and picturesque tints from the moss and lichens
which clothe them, and winter lasting here during two-thirds of the
year, the small garden, which each possesses, is cultivated almost in
vain. The clearing of the snows and the transport of merchandise (for
it has been calculated that at least two hundred horses pass weekly in
the severe season) supply to its hardy inhabitants, the profit more
easily won in other regions, preserving from the misery which would
seem their doom. Traversing courageously heaps of manure and pools of
abomination, D—— accompanied the horses to the stables, while I
walked into the inn opposite, before which stood a collection of
English and other carriages, and on the steps, in discussion or
dispute, discomfited gentlemen and villanous-looking Italians. The
house was crowded to overflow, a circumstance which appeared to improve
neither its attendance nor the politeness of its landlady: for when I
asked the last-mentioned fat personage for some refreshment, she handed
me to her sharp-faced, thin daughter, who left me on the stairs, saying
the salle was at the top, and disappeared, promising to ask the cook if
he had anything to eat, which she said she believed he had not, owing
to the immense influx of guests who had come thus far, unapprized of
the road’s real state, and stayed from the impossibility of proceeding.
As she did not come back, I found my way through corridors innumerable
to the kitchen, and stood opposite the cook and his company of
marmitons. Perhaps he felt mortified that the uninitiated should
perceive the nakedness of the land, devoid of both food and fire;
certainly he received me unamiably, proffering only a foot of raw beef
sausage, and being sulky when I declined it; informing me that it had
been five times the length, and all the remainder of the guests had
been very glad to eat it raw. When I assured him, that although it
might serve his house to spare fuel, it by no means suited me, he
produced two shining slices of ham and a piece of bread, the last in
the house; he said he had sent to Domo d’Ossola for more, and I
returned in triumph to the eating-room, a little marmiton carrying the
hot ham and dry crust behind me. I found there several disconsolate
groups, and as companions in misfortune we were in five minutes
acquainted: there were two American gentlemen, who from their accent I
thought Irish, and from their kind politeness afterwards made me feel
that Mrs. Trollope’s recital was not always fair; and an amiable
English family, about to turn back, the extortion of the Italians who
in the morning had asked 500f. for transporting their carriage, now
raising it to 1000. The Americans had determined on going on, though
every one assured them it was wholly impossible, and D—— said we
might follow where they went: so, having given our horses proper
repose, we mounted them again,—our new acquaintances having the start
of us by about half an hour. For some distance the road was good and
smooth, the first awkward-looking portion we approached being where it
bends backward like the coil of a snake, beyond the village. The light
carriage had passed; for close to the edge of the precipice were the
marks left by its wheels, and as we led our horses over we agreed that
the damage had been probably exaggerated, and we should want no guide.
The gallery of Algaby, 115 feet long, conducted us from the more open
space to the gorge of Gondo. In 1814 it was converted to a military
post, and its entrance is half closed by a wall, pierced with loopholes
to defend the pass. It is the most savage of stony glens: no sunshine
in its recesses, for the cliffs rise to a height of more than 2200
feet; no vegetation, except you can call such the broken line of firs
here and there seen on the tops of the bare black crags, so nearly met
overhead, that
“The wanderer’s eye may barely view
The summer heaven’s delicious blue”—
their fragments lying in the stream, which frets against and over them
with a roar so deafening, that we could not hear each other’s voices;
as sometimes (I speak for myself), awed by the silence of all saving
nature, we rode along a narrower road, guarded only by far severed
granite posts, unconnected by pine trunks, advancing like a cornice on
the edge of the rock and over the abyss,—proving, it is true, that the
work of man has been mighty; but also showing, by the masses of crags
scattered like chaff, and the rush of unnumbered waterfalls, which
might bring destruction with them from the mountain top, how easily his
skill may be baffled. Fanny’s sudden fright at one of these had very
nearly closed my journal: while, in consequence of her starts, Grizzle
placed outside as a bulwark, we were walking our horses, a sharp turn
brought us suddenly on one of these cascades, bounding down a cleft in
the rock and crossing the road, she swerved violently behind Grizzle
and towards the edge, which of course she did not see, as her bright
eye was fixed on the waterfall. The curb-stone was slippery with the
spray, and we were within a foot of it; so close that I said, “We are
going over;” but at the same time, from instinct, struck poor Fanny
with all my force, and the pain made her bound forward, and pass the
peril. D—— looked pale and frightened, it being one of the cases in
which aid was impossible: I had not time to be afraid. The Ponte Alto,
a superb bridge, which, with two enormous crags for support, spans the
Doveria, conducts the road to its opposite shore. The still narrowing
gorge is at every step more deep sunken and wild, almost resembling a
cavern. We had passed a break on the road of small consequence, and had
again commenced remarking on Italian exaggeration, when we arrived at a
gap, some forty feet wide, cut by the rise of the Doveria. Hid in it
were a few men, rather examining than repairing what would have
required fifty. To our surprise we saw the marks of the carriage-wheels
on the soft earth,—it had been dragged in and out again. We led our
horses down the steep, the men significantly pointing to some holes
through which we might have sunk too far,—and Fanny, whose rein I
held, pulled me gallantly up on the other side. At the wooden bridge
which, some steps farther, again traversed the torrent, we found our
American acquaintances, tying up their pole which had broken there. We
exchanged a few words: on their side promises of help, if help were
needed, and thanks on ours, and a portion of undamaged road led us to
the gallery of Gondo, 683 feet long, (according to guide-books),
blasted through the rock, whose mass stood forth to bar the way: the
two vast apertures, made towards the torrent, formerly lighted it but
feebly, but this was not the case to-day,—for a part of its rocky roof
and wall had been carried away also. Issuing at its mouth, we came, to
my surprise, and not, considering my late adventure, to my pleasure, on
the bridge, which immediately after crosses the superb waterfall of
Frascinodi thundering down its immense volume from the high glacier,
and along the hollow of the cliff below the arch with a spray which
blinds and a roar which deafens, falling into the deep gulf, where,
struggling among the crags, groans, as if in pain, the Doveria.
Having ridden down the abrupt descent which immediately follows, ere
the bending of the road concealed this view, we turned to look at it
once more. It is that of which we have so often seen drawings, the
noblest in the Simplon: the graceful stone arch—the tall rocks and the
chasm—the fall and the torrent,—and where the foam was not, the water
in the basin it has hollowed in the crag, of that pale clear green seen
in the crevices of a glacier.
Before reaching the village of Gondo we again passed the carriage, but
were soon stopped ourselves by a ruined piece of road which, though
dangerous to horses’ knees only, was exceedingly embarrassing, as D——
could not lead two; and I found that, even without the care of Fanny, I
was fully employed in keeping my footing while scrambling up and down
the mounds of crag and loose stones, and through the stream which,
shrunk and quiet now, had done this damage. I tried my skill
notwithstanding, and arrived at the top of the first heap, whence Fanny
refused either to slide or jump into the water; and we were very much
in the situation of statues on a pedestal, when our kind
fellow-travellers arrived to my aid, altering Fanny’s determination,
and in consequence Grizzle’s, who will not stir a step unless she leads
the way.
The carriage was dragged over with a difficulty which several times
made me fear that our acquaintances and those with them would have been
forced along with it into the Doveria: for it required the united
strength of all to preserve its equilibrium along the narrowed way, now
barely the width of its wheels. It tottered several times on the
slopes, and it made me dizzy to see the men on the verge opposing to
its weight their own, where a false step would have cast them below to
be mangled among the stones of the rapid torrent. Another and worse
obstacle waited us at the entrance of Gondo: for here the stream, which
descended from the mountains, was still three feet deep, and its
violence made the crossing it a work of danger; though with the aid of
our friends we accomplished it, scrambling over piles of smooth rock
and rolling stones, and through the water. The carriage was taken off
its wheels, as no vehicle made with human fingers could have passed
here; and the poor post-horses, who, no care bestowed on them, had
hitherto picked their own way, could go no farther. We therefore
proceeded alone to Gondo, a melancholy village of a few cabins and a
chapel, and a strange building of eight stories, with barred windows,
which I certainly should rather have supposed a prison than an inn
belonging to the family of Stockalper. Could we have imagined that it
boasted common accommodation, as Artaria assures it does, we should
have remained there to pass the night, being wet and weary; but
deceived as to its destination, we applied at an inn some steps
farther, and after screaming at the entrance of the dark corridor till
we had roused every cur in the neighbourhood, a solitary woman
appeared, to say that this was not, as we had fancied, Isella; that she
had neither bed for ourselves, nor food for our horses, and we must go
on, and should do well to make haste as the evening was closing and
there was a “cattivo passo.” Fortunately for us (our friends being no
longer within call) at the frontier of the Valais and Italy, where on
the left to mark it there is a humble chapel on the crag, and on the
right poised above the torrent a colossal fragment of fallen rock, we
found some good-natured douaniers, who assured us of the impossibility
of passing Isella, and the difficulty of even arriving there, and
offered to accompany us, a proposal we gladly accepted as the evening
was growing dusk, and my hand was almost useless in leading Fanny over
such ground as we had been treading.
At this place, between the frontier and Isella, on the 15th, the day of
the storm, a carriage was passing under the torrents of rain, and the
postilion, who, fortunately, was of the mountains and on his guard,
walking at the heads of his horses, saw above, symptoms of the coming
earth avalanche. He had time to shout to the travellers to descend and
to cut the traces, when it came rushing down, the carriage was swept
into the Doveria with its luggage, and instantly shattered to atoms:
for the largest remnant rescued, a portion of the coach-box, was placed
as a memento on a rock by the road-side, and is hardly longer or
broader than a man’s hand.
Our difficulties had now seriously begun. Isella was in sight, but
between it and us a space of the road for about two hundred yards had
been swept away, leaving in its room piled rocks and masses of stone,
which had been its foundation; a torrent, not very deep but furious in
its rapidity, was boiling down, crossing these, and had already
hollowed a bed athwart the ruin. The douaniers came up to assist as we
stopped in dismay and discouragement. How the horses got over, and
without fall or stumble, is to me a matter of wonder; they scrambled
over the rocks and jumped down descents, and struggled through the
water, and up the high mound of loose stones, which yielded beneath
their hoofs, doing honour to their blood and race.
I had been so completely wet before that, but that the force of the
stream was well nigh enough to lift me off my feet, I should have
preferred it to the plank thrown over by some Samaritan.
At Isella, however, we were, passing the custom-house, which I had
hoped might be the inn, being a building of decent exterior, to arrive
at the most miserable auberge ever owned by even Italian masters: a
wretched shed on one side for stable, the sharp air blowing in on our
wet horses, no groom to dry them, and filth for a bed; straw so rare,
that it was sold by the pound, at an inconceivable price. A poste of
“carabinieri reali” joined the inn on the other side, and this was my
consolation, for while D—— was watching our poor four-footed
companions eat such hay and oats as this place afforded, with apparent
satisfaction, I made my entry, mounting a ladder-like stair which
several Italians were descending, one of whom held his candle in my
face, as I passed him on my way to the kitchen, where I found (a red
handkerchief tied above an assassination-looking face) a most furious
Italian woman, distributing spirits, by the light of one tallow candle,
to a band of lawless looking personages, who were shouting and swearing.
As nobody made way for me, I asked mine hostess for a room, to which
she said, “Patienza;” and having assuaged the thirst of all her
dark-faced customers, she set herself to stirring a caldron full of
some ill-scented mixture on her hearth.
On my applying for attention once more, she said, with a toss of her
head and spoon, that I must wait, as she had not time to mind me; and
as I was really afraid of offending her, I took a seat, which a
douanier who was smoking by the fire offered me by his side, and sate
close to him, placing my confidence in his presence, and the vicinity
of the carabinieri.
The turbulent party round my landlady continued to drink and to smoke
till I could hardly see them through the cloud. As my courage rose and
the atmosphere grew stifling, besides that I was weary of the Swiss
Italian of my companion, I got up to see if, till D—— should have
left his horses, I had, by passing through the open door, a chance of
more humanized society, or at least of none. To my extreme pleasure, on
the balcony I found an old French gentleman, with his son and grandson,
who had arrived some hours before ourselves. They hailed the addition
which we and the Americans, who were on their way, would make to their
party, for the old man said they had stopped only because they could
get no further, as he in his own person had doubts of his hostess, and
thought it would be as well that we each should know the other’s
sleeping apartment, to afford help reciprocally, “dans le cas,” he
added, “que nous soyons assassinés!”
His son was complaining bitterly of an Italian vetturino, who, when on
starting he agreed for a certain sum to conduct his passengers to
Milan, already knew the state of the road, as the 13th and 14th the
storm had been raging on the Italian side, though its greatest fury was
on the 15th. Under the Kaltwasser glaciers a sudden gust of wind had
overturned his carriage, absolutely on the verge of the tremendous
precipice. The poor pale boy had shown great courage, and even the
horses and carriage received no injury.
Arrived at the first impediment beyond the Simplon inn, the voiturier
very truly asserted he could go no farther, but also insisted on his
fare as far as Milan. The point had been referred for arbitration to a
juge de paix, whose interference the French gentleman demanded, and the
Italian consented to abide by; but when the former arrived in his
presence, he found him washing dishes! He was an aubergiste, and
unusually busy from the influx of travellers, brought by untrue
accounts of the road, given as far as Vevay by postilions and
innkeepers; of course he gave his verdict in favour of the vetturino.
D—— and the American gentlemen arrived together, the carriage of the
latter left till morning at the other side of the broken road, between
it and Isella, where it had been benighted, so that its imperials and
portmanteaus were carried over in the dark to undergo the inspection of
the douane. The landlady signified to me that it was now her pleasure
to conduct me to my chamber, therefore with due docility I followed
through the kitchen, where the troop drinking at the long table had
been increased by those who aided in the transport of Mr. C——’s
carriage, and up another break-neck flight, at the top of which was a
closet with two beds, over a part of the before-named kitchen,
therefore reaping the full benefit of its merriment, and disputes, and
tobaccoed air.
She first informed me, that one bed only could be placed at my
disposal, as other travellers might arrive; and when I objected to this
arrangement, named with great coolness the price she, as monarch of the
mountain, had assigned to it, it being her best apartment, chosen _per
respetto per me_. I said very politely, being in awe of her, that I
thought her terms high, adding in the most amiable tone I could assume,
that I had seen turn back all the travellers now at the Simplon, and it
was likely the inns would be ruined along the road, as its reparation
would not be commenced till spring.
In reply to this, she said she had no time to listen to my
conversation, and I had better make my mind up; adding, I suppose by
way of aiding me in the effort, “E là il torrento; si prende o si
lascia,”—“Take it or leave it, there is the torrent;” and as this was
very true, I resigned myself, for there indeed was the torrent, roaring
below like a wild beast before his fatal bound, and not only the
torrent, but no bridge, it had been swept away, and there was none,
barring a plank, as an Irishman would say, which had been flung
slopingly across from rock to rock, high above the Doveria, as a
communication between the inn and custom-house and the few hovels on
the opposite shore, which formed the rest of the village of Isella.
There were no stars, and the faint lights which glimmered in a few of
these cottages were all I could distinguish through the darkness, and
the sound of the angry stream almost covered the noise of the company
below. I asked my amiable companion for some hot water, wishing to
neutralize the effect of the cold baths I had undergone to the ancle in
the course of my day’s travel, to which she said, “A chè serve?” and
that she could not attend to whims; and when my patience, long on the
wane, deserted me, sent me some by her squinting brother, in a broken
coffee cup, so that seeing the remedy I had meditated was not
attainable, I drank it.
Our next suffering was supper, and here again we excited our hostess’s
ire by ordering eggs in the shell, as the only incorruptible kind of
food, instead of sharing the greasy liquid and nameless ragouts which
it pleased her to serve up before our companions. Her ill-favoured
brother waited on us, the old French gentleman asserting he looked like
a wretch quite ready to murder when his sister should have robbed; an
opinion which must have flattered him if he understood French, but it
was decided he did not, though I thought he grew a shade more hideous
during the physiognomical study. After regretting that all travelled
without arms, and determining to try any pass in the morning rather
than stay there, we retired to our apartments. To obviate the bad
effects produced by the stifling size and dirt of ours, I tried to
admit the air, but the casement was merely fixed in its place, and had
no hinges, so that having deranged its economy, I had some trouble in
restoring it and keeping it fast by help of the broken chair. To speak
the truth, I had intended to lie awake till day, a design which I
thought the noise and the bad bed rendered easy to accomplish, but
fatigue was stronger than the resolution, and after a few moments I
forgot that the door would not shut, lost the impression of resting my
feet on ground which gave way under them, which had pursued me like the
motion of a ship after a voyage, and slept far more soundly than I
should have done in my own bed and home. The Princess Bacciochi
occupied this same chamber two days before me—I pitied her.
We were on our uncleaned horses at seven, our kind hostess, with “a
laughing devil in her sneer,” asserting she should see us again, and
one or two of the carabiniers smiling confirmation of her hope of
plunder. It was a cold misty morning, and we started without breakfast,
there being nothing at the inn. I believe the beauty of the scenery was
almost lost on us, yet Isella is beautifully situated, and the
uniformity of crag and pine forest is broken by the brighter green of
fruit trees as well as by masses of beech, which here clothe the
mountain. The gallery of Isella, a few paces below the village, is
picturesque in form as in situation, for it is rather a deep archway,
and the jutting rock it traverses is supported by a gigantic and
naturally formed column. Looking back, we could see Isella and our
place of durance through the frame the dark rock made. A bend in the
road the next moment concealed both, exhibiting an obstacle at our feet
which seemed fatal to further progress. It was evident the Americans
had passed, but they had no horses with them, and one of the thousand
streams in which the melted glacier had descended to swell the Doveria
had here brought down an avalanche of stones, and piled them to form
its banks. The broken road before Isella, though of greater extent, was
far less difficult of passage. D—— with his grey got first over, and
one of the men, roused to good nature, advanced to hold her while he
returned for Fanny; but I had half slipped, half jumped the descent in
search of the best mode of bringing her without danger, and the little
creature sprang lightly down after me as if she had been on her native
turf. Grizzle was far less intelligent, and difficult to lead through
the foaming water, but neither even stumbled. I got my first footpath,
increasing the sensation of shivering, perhaps produced by starting in
a mountain fog with fast unbroken.
We proceeded perhaps a hundred yards without obstacle, followed by
several cantonniers, telling us we went in vain, and a sudden turn we
again made proved it was indeed hopeless, showing not now the remnant
of a road, but the place it had occupied, for not a vestige
remained—it was difficult to believe it had been there. The length of
this gap was about half a mile. The Doveria had partly changed her
course, and left some distance from her opposite bank dry; and dashing
against this with doubled violence, had formed a wild bay inclosed,
opposite us, by a far advancing promontory, round whose foot the road
had circled, but which now rose perpendicularly from the water; on this
side, by the same road, broken like a branch, and between both swept
angrily over the ruins, unwilling its trophy should prove its barrier.
Our American friends, whose carriage waited here, about to be carried
over piece-meal, came up to consult with D——, and leaving the horses
in my charge, they set forth together to inspect what might be done;
for the cantonnier en chef offered to take his men there, and construct
a path three feet wide, along which horses might be led before night:
it was now near nine o’clock, we had already lost two hours.
I watched D—— (having taken his first plunge from the high ground we
stood on to the water) scramble through the foam and rocks, clinging
to, or climbing over them, here ten to twelve feet high, and keeping
near as possible to shore on account of the depth and strong current,
crawl up the precipice to a cottage which had been left unharmed, when
the earth cracked and fell from around and under it. This, my companion
the cantonnier said, was easy to accomplish; the difficulties were
beyond, and, the path having traversed the jutting point, they were
henceforth invisible. I sate on my horse employed in fancying their
nature, till I again saw D—— returning by his inconvenient footway,
poising himself on the slippery rocks, and arriving to my surprise
without limbs broken. Some of the men had already gone to cut this
path, which was to be widened ere nightfall, but D—— said it would be
impossible to travel; even supposing there should be a space of three
feet between the upright wall of earth and the precipice, which goes
down to the Doveria, inasmuch as there was a rapid descent, and where
it ceased, a sharp turn, so that a horse hurried down could scarcely
fail to be precipitated into the torrent.
One of the ruined spaces we had already traversed, a German gentleman
with his lady, and a guide leading her mule, had attempted to pass on
the 18th, a day before ourselves. The animal slipped on the verge, and
the guide, in his effort to save the lady, was dragged over also. Her
body, for she was killed on the spot, was recovered and carried to
Isella, that of the unfortunate man was swept away. This was a warning;
we proposed to ford the torrent, thus circling round the base of the
mountain where it was shallow, but the men, whose aid we demanded,
treated the idea as madness, and refused positively, we therefore paid
the cantonnier en chef for his trouble, and turned our horses’ heads
towards the Simplon inn; for, discouraging as it was to seek again
obstacles once surmounted, to do so seemed the one thing possible. As
we turned, disconsolately thinking of the wearisome valley of the
Rhone, and the long detour we must make by Geneva, a young officer of
carabinieri, with whom we had been in conversation before, and a
priest, came up to accost us. There was a way, he said, which might be
just passable, over the Trasquiera, he had gone it once in search of
deserters; but a guide to lead Fanny was indispensable, and none was to
be had. Chance served us well, for as we were looking about with but
faint hope of seeing one, (all the cantonniers being gone to their work
a mile away, and no one walking there for pleasure,) came up a young
man, to whom the kind priest immediately applied, asking him for what
recompense he would accompany us across the mountain, and to Domo
d’Ossola: he said seven francs, but that he did not know the way; and
our embarrassments would have recommenced, but that the Paroco summoned
his young brother, a pretty slight boy of twelve, who knew all the
paths and precipices within five miles round. The Trasquiera almost
hangs over Isella, and the zigzag path up its side commences from the
broken road we had crossed after leaving the village that morning. Over
this our poor horses were led again, and bidding good bye to the priest
and officer, we commenced our ascent, the boy leading the way, Fanny
climbing like a goat and pulling up the guide, who, having never
touched a horse’s rein before, rather hung by it than was of service;
D—— supporting Grizzle, who was very frightened and awkward, and I
bringing up the rear, and though they were obliged to pause every ten
steps for breath, often at a distance; as the weight of my habit
encumbered me, and this path is not even used by mules, and by the
country people rarely to drive their cattle to the pastures, as there
is a better on the other side the mountain. For the first five minutes
we went on trusting it would improve; after the first quarter of hour,
because to turn became almost impossible, the track being at no part
more than two feet broad, and winding in zigzags along the extreme
verge above a torrent, which, though neither so broad nor deep as the
Doveria, would, as Mercutio said, “serve,” and besides formed like an
irregular stair of steps of stone two and three feet high, small and
pointed, broad and smooth. I often used hands as well as feet, catching
at rocks and roots. Poor Grizzle went sorely against her will; only the
boy and Fanny, who were far a-head, seemed to enjoy it.
As the road grew steeper and I found I must have both hands free, I
took off the skirt of my habit and laid it over the latter’s saddle,
thinking at the time I never saw a prettier object than her little
thorough bred form in the guise of a packhorse, but stepping on with a
demeanour as dignified as if she had been at a review in the Champ de
Mars. The path now became absolutely vertical, and the more difficult
from its being over smooth loose ground. As we had dined lightly the
day before and not breakfasted this, even on a cup of water, I have
perhaps an excuse for the giddiness and fear produced by exhaustion,
which took momentary possession of me, and certainly brought with them
my only real danger, for worn out by the scorching heat and harassing
walk, I felt unable to climb higher, too giddy to look back, and unable
to sit down, as the ground from its excessive slope afforded no
support, and I was afraid of slipping in a minute from the height I had
passed three hours in attaining. I believe I was going to scream, but I
thought better of it, and seized a pine branch and arrived at the
stones and safer ground before D——, who had therefore left Grizzle to
her fate, could arrive to help me. Here was the first chalet, but it
was locked, left by its owners, who were gone to the high pastures, and
we were disappointed in our hoped for draught of water. There was a
spring, the boy said, half an hour’s walk farther, so we rested a few
minutes and then went on patiently, though it was twelve o’clock and we
were parched with thirst, and mountain air, renovating as it is, will
not supply the place of all things. We were now in a tract of pine
forest, and at its steepest part found our way barred by half a-dozen
Italian woodcutters, who were felling the trees, one of which lay
across our path. D—— said afterwards he expected a worse adventure
here, for we had a large sum in gold about us, and the odds were in
their favour, besides that the ground was of such nature, that a push
would have been sufficient to settle matters without trouble. The
Italians were, however, better than their countenances; they opened
their dark eyes wider in wonder at the apparition of English horses
there, but dragged aside the pine; and when I, who had struck my foot
against some roots and could get no farther, called to them to give me
“la mano,” good naturedly pulled me up, each consigning me to the broad
black hand of his comrade, so that I arrived at the summit of the mound
with more ease than accompanied my climbings heretofore. After this
followed a few steps of what the guide denominated plain. The direction
of our road had changed, and now too high above the unseen Doveria to
hear its roar, we looked through vistas of pines to those of the
mountains on its opposite bank, seeming a continuation of these forests
without a symptom of the abyss between. We toiled on some time longer,
D—— casting back at me looks of pity, and I trying to smile, though I
should have been puzzled to say for what. We found too juniper berries
and hips and haws, and shared them after the manner of the babes in the
wood, but the delight was the spring, at which we arrived at last,
trickling from a rock. D—— bent the top of his hat into a hollow, and
out of this cup we drank, I do not know how many draughts, but
certainly the best in our lives; for my own part the relief it afforded
seemed to dispel all fatigue, and we went on merrily, though our path
lay across the bed of a torrent, which, though hardly flowing, had
still sufficient water to make slippery its smooth shelving stones,
polished like marble by its passage.
The ascent continued, but it was no longer rapid, and half an hour
brought us on the mountain pastures at the summit, and among the
chalets. We saw nobody; the priest’s brother said it was not the hour
for finding milk, so there was nothing to be done but to lie down on
the short fine grass, irrigated by a hundred rills, and let the horses
drink from them, and drink ourselves out of the palm of our hands. The
guide murmured for the fiftieth time “paese del Diavolo,” and the boy
laughed at me. Though he had knocked at one of these habitations and
found no one, he was fortunately wrong as to the absence of all, and
the wondrous sight we indeed constituted there, attracted some of the
half wild mountain women, good looking and picturesquely attired with
bright kerchiefs on their heads, and cloth leggings instead of
stockings on their feet, coarse brown jackets and blue cloth petticoats
with a deep crimson border.
The first who issued from the dwelling seeing the perseverance with
which I drank out of my hand from the mountain stream, came smiling to
offer a long ladle, which was an admirable substitute. An old woman
seeing, I suppose, that I looked pale and faint, plunged her hand into
a long pocket and drew forth two apples. We accepted them with great
gratitude, and asked if we could get some milk; it really was not the
hour, but several of the good natured creatures set forth different
ways in search, and our first benefactress, who had left us for a
moment, returned, this time her apron quite full of the small sweet
apples, and with her half a dozen companions came close to watch us eat
them, and say “povero” and “poverina” every minute. They asked the
guide and the boy fifty questions without obtaining satisfactory
answers, for they spoke a patois, which neither clearly comprehended.
For my own part, Giuseppe’s Swiss Italian was bad enough; the boy spoke
purely, for he was from the shores of the Lago Maggiore, but of this
not a word in ten was intelligible to me. I understood, however, that
the horses were even more than ourselves the objects of their
curiosity. Their admiration was unwearied; they walked round them and
clapped their hands, and laughed to see them eat and drink, repeating
some of the few Italian words they knew, “Oh la bella bestia, la bella
bestia,” and that they had never seen a horse before. How far this is
possible to people, who, though on a mountain, are but three hours
removed from the most frequented road in Europe, I leave you to decide.
The guide confirmed it; the women, he said, were employed all the
summer on the pastures and in making cheese, which the men carried for
sale below, and in the season when the snows fell, which at this height
happens early, they spun their own wool and lived inclosed in their
mountain village. Certainly the men were less primitive in their
manners than the women, and also less prepossessing in appearance.
Several, when the females gone in search of milk returned, came in
their company inspecting us with less merriment but more attention. We
began to think it would be unwise to
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