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GENEVA




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OUR LIFE IN THE SWISS HIGHLANDS

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[Illustration: SUNSET ON MONT BLANC FROM ABOVE GENEVA]




  GENEVA

  PAINTED BY
  J. HARDWICKE LEWIS &
  MAY HARDWICKE LEWIS
  DESCRIBED BY
  FRANCIS GRIBBLE

  [Illustration]

  LONDON
  ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
  1908




Contents


              CHAPTER I
                                   PAGE
  OLD GENEVA                          1


              CHAPTER II

  THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE             9


              CHAPTER III

  THE REFORMATION                    13


              CHAPTER IV

  THE EXPULSION OF THE NUNS          17


              CHAPTER V

  THE RULE OF CALVIN                 23


              CHAPTER VI

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE THEOCRACY       29


              CHAPTER VII

  THE UNIVERSITY                     33


              CHAPTER VIII

  PROFESSOR ANDREW MELVILL           39


              CHAPTER IX

  THÉODORE DE BÈZE                   43


              CHAPTER X

  WAR WITH SAVOY                     51


              CHAPTER XI

  THE ESCALADE                       53


              CHAPTER XII

  AN INTERVAL OF QUIET               61


              CHAPTER XIII

  REVOLUTIONS                        65


              CHAPTER XIV

  LITERATURE AND SCIENCE             71


              CHAPTER XV

  SAUSSURE                           77


              CHAPTER XVI

  MEN OF LETTERS                     89


              CHAPTER XVII

  SONGS AND SQUIBS                   93


              CHAPTER XVIII

  RELIGIOUS REVIVAL                  95


              CHAPTER XIX

  ROMANTICISM                        99


              CHAPTER XX

  LATER MEN OF LETTERS              105


              CHAPTER XXI

  VOLTAIRE                          107


              CHAPTER XXII

  VOLTAIRE AND THE THEATRE          111


              CHAPTER XXIII

  VISITORS TO FERNEY                119


              CHAPTER XXIV

  COPPET                            123




List of Illustrations


   1. Sunset on Mont Blanc from above Geneva.  J. H. L.   _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE
   2. L’Église de la Madeleine, Geneva.  M. H. L.                      6

   3. The Last Snow on the Wooded <DW72>s.  M. H. L.                   10

   4. Geneva from the Arve.  M. H. L.                                 20

   5. The Bay of Meillerie.  J. H. L.                                 26

   6. Evian les Bains, Hte. Savoie.  M. H. L.                         34

   7. The Glaciers des Bossons, Chamonix.  J. H. L.                   38

   8. Yvoire, Hte. Savoie.  M. H. L.                                  44

   9. La Roche, Hte. Savoie.  J. H. L.                                50

  10. The Castle of Etrembières, Hte. Savoie.  J. H. L.               56

  11. Nyon Castle, looking across the Lake to Mont Blanc.  J. H. L.   62

  12. Montenvers and Aiguilles Verte and Dru.  J. H. L.               68

  13. The Jura Range from Thonon, Hte. Savoie.  J. H. L.              74

  14. The Aiguille and Dôme du Goûter, Mont Blanc.  M. H. L.          80

  15. The Statue of Jean Jacques Rousseau on the Island in the
        Rhone, Geneva, from Hôtel des Bergues.  J. H. L.              90

  16. The Head of Lake Annecy, Hte. Savoie.  J. H. L.                 96

  17. Nernier, Hte. Savoie.  M. H. L.                                100

  18. The Chateau de Prangins.  M. H. L.                             110

  19. A Vaudoise: Summer.  M. H. L.                                  120

  20. The Tricoteuse: Winter.  M. H. L.                              128




CHAPTER I

OLD GENEVA


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: L’ÉGLISE DE LA MADELEINE, GENEVA]

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




CHAPTER II

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE


In the first half of the sixteenth century occurred the two events
which shaped the future of Geneva: Reformation theology was accepted;
political independence was achieved.

Geneva, it should be explained, was a fief of the duchy of Savoy; or
so, at all events, the Dukes of Savoy maintained, though the citizens
were of the contrary opinion. Their view was that they owed allegiance
only to their Bishops, who were the Viceroys of the Holy Roman Emperor;
and even that allegiance was limited by the terms of a Charter granted
in the Holy Roman Emperor’s name by Bishop Adhémar de Fabri. All
went fairly well until the Bishops began to play into the hands of
the Dukes; but then there was friction, which rapidly became acute.
A revolutionary party--the Eidgenossen, or Confederates--was formed.
There was a Declaration of Independence and a civil war.

So long as the Genevans stood alone, the Duke was too strong for them.
He marched into the town in the style of a conqueror, and wreaked his
vengeance on as many of his enemies as he could catch. He cut off the
head of Philibert Berthelier, to whom there stands a memorial on the
island in the Rhone; he caused Jean Pecolat to be hung up in an absurd
posture in his banqueting-hall, in order that he might mock at his
discomfort while he dined; he executed, with or without preliminary
torture, several less conspicuous patriots. Happily, however, some of
the patriots--notably Besançon Hugues--got safely away, and succeeded
in concluding treaties of alliance between Geneva and the cantons of
Berne and Fribourg. The men of Fribourg marched to Geneva, and the
Duke retired. The citizens passed a resolution that he should never
be allowed to enter the town again, seeing that he ‘never came there
without playing the citizens some dirty trick or other’; and, the more
effectually to prevent him from coming, they pulled down their suburbs
and repaired their ramparts, one member of every household being
required to lend a hand for the purpose.

[Illustration: THE LAST SNOW ON THE WOODED <DW72>s]

Presently, owing to religious dissensions, Fribourg withdrew from the
alliance. Berne, however, adhered to it, and, in due course,
responded to the appeal for help by setting an army of seven thousand
men in motion. The route of the seven thousand lay through the canton
of Vaud, then a portion of the Duke’s dominions, governed from the
Castle of Chillon. Meeting with no resistance save at Yverdon, they
annexed the territory, placing governors (or _baillis_) of their own
in its various strongholds. The Governor of Chillon fled, leaving his
garrison to surrender; and in its deepest dungeon was found the famous
prisoner of Chillon, François de Bonivard. From that time forward
Geneva was a free republic, owing allegiance to no higher power.




CHAPTER III

THE REFORMATION


The Reformation occurred simultaneously with the political revolution;
and the informal historian, who is under no compulsion to take a side,
is inevitably impressed less by the piety of the Reformers than by
their uproarious behaviour. Their leader--the ringleader in their
disturbances--was Farel, a hot-headed Frenchman from Gap, in Dauphiné.
He hounded the people on to wreck the churches; he invaded the pulpits
of other preachers without invitation, and confuted them therefrom; he
once broke up an ecclesiastical procession, and, snatching an image
out of the priest’s hand, threw it over the bridge into the river.
Moreover, as was natural, he included among his devoted followers many
evangelists whose zeal was, like his own, conspicuously in excess of
their discretion. Of one of them, Pastor Malingre of Yverdon, it is
recorded by a contemporary chronicler that ‘his methods were not very
evangelical--he used to crown the Roman Catholic priests with cow-dung.’

Reform was already in the air when Farel came to Geneva to preach. The
new doctrine had been bruited abroad by pedlars from Nuremberg, who ate
meat on Fridays, and expressed the opinion that ‘