GENEVA

A. AND C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON

SUNSET ON MONT BLANC FROM ABOVE GENEVA

GENEVA

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

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1908

v

ix

1

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—2the 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 the3 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 the4 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 as5 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 tallow6 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.

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 scheme7 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.’

89

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.

10 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.

THE LAST SNOW ON THE WOODED SLOPES

Presently, owing to religious dissensions, Fribourg withdrew from the alliance. Berne, however,11 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.

13

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 methods14 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 ‘the members of the religious Orders ought to be set to work in the fields, that the saints were dead and done for, and that it was nonsense to pray to them, seeing that they could render no assistance.’ So we read in Bonivard’s ‘Chronicle’; but, even so, Geneva was not quite prepared to receive Farel with open arms. He was haled before an ecclesiastical court, and accused of preaching the Gospel in an inappropriate costume—‘got up like a gendarme or a brigand.’ One burly monk gave him a ‘coup de pied, quelque part,’ and the monks collectively proposed to throw him into the Rhone; and, though the laity protected him from clerical violence, the Syndic ordered him to quit the town within six hours, as an alternative to being burnt alive. He went, and three years passed before he returned and triumphed in a theological disputation held in the great hall of the Couvent de la Rive.

The result of that disputation was, as has been written, that ‘religious liberty was taken away15 from the Roman Catholics and given to the Protestants.’ The celebration of the Mass, so recently a solemn duty, now became a high crime and misdemeanour; and the victorious Reformers proceeded, like the French anti-clericals of our own day, to the expulsion of monks and nuns. The first to go were the Sisters of the Convent of Sainte-Claire, founded in 1476 by Yolande, wife of Duke Amadeus IX. of Savoy and sister of Louis XI. of France. We have a full account of their ejection from the pen of one of them, Sister Jeanne de Jussie, afterwards Lady Superior of a convent at Annecy.

17

The Sisters had long been exposed to annoyance by Reformers of the baser sort. One such Reformer, having occasion to call at the convent on some municipal business, had insisted on washing his hands in the holy water, and had boasted, when he got outside, that he had been privileged to kiss the nuns all round—‘a foul lie,’ says Sister Jeanne, ‘for he did not even attempt to kiss any one of us.’ Another Reformer had preached against them, declaring that they ought to be ‘turned out and compelled to marry in accordance with the commandment of God’; and the congregation had been so impressed by the discourse that the younger men among the worshippers had climbed up on to the convent wall, and sat there singing amorous songs for the edification of the inmates.

No official action was taken, however, until after the conclusion of the disputation above referred to,18 though then it followed quickly. Fifteen Reformers, including Farel and Viret, called at the convent, declined the invitation to say what they had to say through the grating, but threatened to force the door if they were not admitted. The door was opened to them, therefore, and all the Sisters being summoned before them in the chapter-house, Farel ‘spoke in terms of vituperation of the holy cloister, of religion, of chastity, and of virginity, in a way that went to the hearts of the poor Sisters.’ The others kept silence, but Mère Vicaire protested, interrupted, and screamed. Our narrative proceeds:

‘She stationed herself between the Sisters and the young men, saying:

‘“Since your preacher is such a holy man, why don’t you treat him with respect and obedience? You’re a pack of young rascals, but you won’t make any progress here.”

‘Whereat they were all indignant, and exclaimed:

‘“What the devil is the matter with the woman? Are you mad? Go back to your place.”

‘“I won’t,” she said, “until these young men leave the Sisters alone!”’

So Mère Vicaire was put out of the room; and the preacher resumed his discourse on the institution of matrimony. We read that ‘when he19 referred to the corruption of the flesh, the Sisters began to scream’; and that when he spoke of the advantages of married life, the Mère Vicaire, who was listening at the key-hole, began to batter at the panels, exclaiming: ‘Don’t you listen to him, my sisters; don’t you listen to him.’ So, after labouring at the conversion of the Sisters from ten o’clock in the morning until five o’clock in the afternoon, the Reformers retired discomfited. A crowd of three hundred persons was waiting for them outside the gate, prepared to offer marriage to any nun whom they might have persuaded to accompany them; but they came forth alone, the last to leave being thumped on the back by a nun who desired to hurry his departure.

It transpired, however, that one of the Sisters—‘the ill-advised Sister Blasine’—had been converted by the Reformers’ arguments. The other nuns tried to detain her, but the citizens broke into the convent and fetched her out in triumph, and also insisted that the convent should provide her with a dowry and pay her damages for the disciplinary whippings inflicted upon her during her membership of the Order. It was the culminating outrage. The nuns decided to leave Geneva, and the Lady Superior applied to the Syndic for an armed escort.20 The request was granted, and the ‘dolorous departure’ began. Three hundred soldiers were turned out to see the Sisters safely across the bridge over the Arve, where the territory of Geneva ended. It was the first time since their taking of the veil that they had been outside the convent walls, and some of them had spent all their lives in the cloister and grown old there, so that they were in no fit state to travel thus on foot. Let Sister Jeanne tell us what befell them:

GENEVA FROM THE ARVE

‘Truly it was a pitiful thing to see this holy company in such condition, so overcome by pain and toil that several of them broke down and fainted by the way—and that on a rainy day and in a muddy road, and with no means of getting out of their trouble, for they were all on foot, except four invalids who were in a cart. There were six poor aged Sisters, who had been for sixteen years members of the Order, and two who for sixty-six years had never been outside the convent gate. The fresh air was too much for them. They fainted away; and when they saw the beasts of the fields, they were terrified, thinking that the cows were bears, and that the sheep were ravening wolves. Those who met them could not find words to express their compassion for them; and,21 though the Mère Vicaire had given each Sister a stout pair of boots to keep her feet dry, the greater number of them would not walk in boots, but carried them tied to their girdles, and in this way it took them from five o’clock in the morning until nearly nightfall to reach Saint Julien, though the distance is less than a league.’

23

Stories such as those related above make it clear that rowdyism was likely to be the note of the Reformation at Geneva so long as Farel remained at the head of ecclesiastical affairs. With all his fiery zeal for Gospel truth, he was no better than a theological demagogue; and what Geneva wanted at the moment was not a demagogue, but a disciplinarian. Calvin supplied that need. He was a Protestant wanderer over the face of the earth, and he came to Geneva on his way from Italy to Strassburg. Farel, who had come to know his own limitations, called upon him in his inn, and prevailed upon him to stay and help him to keep order in the town, and, in particular, to help him to suppress certain Libertines, or Friends of Liberty, who had been protesting that the Reformers had no right to ‘require the citizens to attend sermons against their will,’ and demanding ‘liberty to live as they chose without reference to what was24 said by the preachers.’ Calvin, after much hesitation, consented, and so a new era began.

It was not the work of a day. Calvin began energetically enough, admonishing Bonivard for undue familiarity with his servant-maid, standing a gambler in the pillory with a pack of cards hung round his neck, imprisoning a hairdresser for making a client look too beautiful, and endeavouring to throw ridicule upon conjugal infidelity by obliging an offender to ride round the town on a donkey. But the recalcitrants fought stubbornly for the right of living as they chose. The people who wanted to live dissolute lives allied themselves with the people who wanted unleavened bread to be used for the Holy Communion; and the coalition was powerful enough to get Calvin and Farel first forbidden to meddle with politics, and then ordered to leave the town within three days.

They were no sooner gone, however, than they began to be missed. The disorders, rampant during their absence, became intolerable, and there was some danger that the Duke of Savoy might see his way to take advantage of them. A majority of the citizens came to the conclusion that strict regulations were to be preferred to insecurity, and they sent ambassadors to Calvin, inviting him to25 return, and to ‘stay with them for ever because of his great learning.’ He agreed to do so, and they voted him a small but sufficient salary, and gave him a strip of cloth to make him a new gown. In return, he drafted for their acceptance a new and original constitution, whereby the morals, and even the manners, of the community were placed under ecclesiastical supervision. That was the famous Theocracy, established in 1541, which seemed to John Knox to make Geneva ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles.’ A recital of a few of the enactments, taken from a contemporary translation entitled ‘The Laws and Statutes of Geneva,’ will be the most simple means of presenting the picture of the social life of the town under the regime:

‘The Laws and Statutes of Geneva.

‘Item, that none shall play or run idly in the streets during the time of Sermons on Sundays, nor days of prayer, nor to open their shops during the sermon time under pain without any favour.’

‘Item, that no man, of what estate, quality, or condition soever he be, dareth be so hardy to make, or cause to be made, or wear hosen or doublets,26 cut, jagged, embroidered, or lined with silk, upon pain to forfeit.’

‘Item, that no Citizen, Burger, or Inhabitant of this City dareth be so hardy to go from henceforth to eat or drink in any Tavern.’

‘Item, that none be so hardy to walk by night in the Town after nine of the clock, without candle-light and also a lawful cause.’

‘Item, that no manner of person, of what estate, quality or condition soever they be, shall wear any chains of gold or silver, but those which have been accustomed to wear them shall put them off, and wear them no more upon pain of three score shillings for every time.’

‘Item, that no women, of what quality or condition soever they be, shall wear any verdingales, gold upon her head, quoises of gold, billiments or such like, neither any manner of embroidery upon her sleeves.’

THE BAY OF MEILLERIE

‘Item, that no manner of person, whatsoever they be, making bride-ales, banquets, or feasts shall have above three courses or services to the said feasts, and to every course or service not above four dishes, and yet not excessive, upon pain of three score shillings for every time, fruit excepted.’

27 ‘Item, that no manner of men shall go to the baths appointed for women, and also women not to go to those that be appointed for men.’

‘Item, that no manner of person do sing any vain, dishonest or ribaldry songs, neither do dance, nor make masques, mummeries, or any disguisings in no manner or sort whatsoever it be, upon pain to be put three days in prison with bread and water.’

‘Item, that all Hosts and Hostesses shall advertise their guests, and expressly forbid them not to be out of their lodging after the Trumpet sound to the Watch or ringing of the Bell (which is at nine of the clock), upon pain of the indignation of the Lords.’

‘Item, that all Hosts and others shall make their prayers to God, and give thanks before meat and after upon pain of forty shillings and for every time being found or proved, and if the Hosts or Hostesses be found negligent and not doing it, to be punished further as the case requireth.’

‘Item, that none do enterprise to do, say, nor contract anything out of this City that he dare not do or say within the same concerning the Law of God and Reformation of the Gospel, upon pain to be punished according as the case requireth.’

29

Such was the constitution in theory; and, if we want to see it at work, we have only to turn to the Register of the Consistory, in which we may read how the citizens were punished for peccadilloes. One woman, we find, got into trouble for saying her prayers in Latin, and another for wearing her hair hanging down her back. One man was punished for wearing baggy knickerbockers in the street; a second for offering his snuff-box to a friend during the sermon; a third for talking business to a neighbour as he was coming out of church; a fourth for calling his cow by the Scriptural name Rebecca; a fifth for likening the braying of his donkey to the chanting of a psalm. There was also the case of a workman whose property was confiscated because he did not relieve the indigence of his aged parents; of a child stood in the pillory and publicly whipped for throwing a stone at its mother; of a mother imprisoned30 for carelessly dropping her baby on the floor; and of a young lady solemnly arraigned on the charge of casting amorous glances at a minister of the Word.

Not everybody, of course, approved of such elaborate interference with liberty. The Friends of Liberty resisted it as long as they could, and their methods of resistance were not passive. They set their dogs at Calvin; they openly ridiculed him; they came drunk to church and brawled. But Calvin was a match for them. Pierre Amaulx, who said of him that he ‘thought as much of himself as if he were a Bishop,’ was compelled to apologize, bareheaded, in public; and all those who tried, as Calvin put it, to ‘throw off the yoke of the Gospel’ came to a bad end. One of them, Raoul Monnet, was beheaded for inviting young men to look at indecorous pictures; and the party was ultimately broken up as the result of a row in the streets. They were very drunk, and were threatening certain of the Reformers with violence, when Syndic Aubert, hearing their noise, came out and faced them in his nightgown, carrying his staff of office in one hand and a lighted candle in the other. Thus attired and equipped, he placed himself at the31 head of the watch, summoned the soldiers to his aid, and put the rioters to rout. Some of them were killed in the scuffle; others were captured, tried, and executed; while the remnant escaped into the country, where, for a period, they eked out a precarious existence by means of highway robbery.

From that time forward Calvin’s supremacy was undisputed. The principal use which he made of it was to burn Servetus; but that is a thorny branch of the subject into which it is better not to enter. Our modern Calvinists do not, indeed, hold that Servetus deserved to be burnt, but they do sometimes maintain that Calvin did no great harm in burning him. There might be some risk of putting them to confusion if the topic were pursued; and this is not a controversial work. We shall be on safer ground if we turn aside to consider Calvin’s services to the State as an educationist.

33

In Old Geneva education had been neglected. Emperor Charles IV. had offered the citizens a University in the fourteenth century, and the offer had been rejected for fear, it was alleged, lest the students should behave uproariously. The first public school was not opened in the town until 1429. It lasted for about a hundred years, and then fell upon evil times during an epidemic of the plague. The head master ran away from the contagion, and the City Council ordered the building to be closed, on the ground that the children were knocking it to pieces. Then, in 1535, after the Protestants had gained the upper hand, the École de la Rive was established in the convent from which the Cordeliers had been expelled. The first head-master was Antoine Saulnier, a Dauphiné Reformer, and his prospectus ran as follows:

‘In our school the lectures begin at five o’clock in the morning and continue until ten, which is34 our usual dinner hour. The ordinary curriculum consists of instruction in the three most excellent languages, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, not to mention the French language, which, in the opinion of the learned, is by no means to be despised. We hope that, the Lord helping us, the time will come when we shall also teach rhetoric and dialectic.’

EVIAN LES BAINS, HTE. SAVOIE

Calvin, however, wanted something better than the École de la Rive. He found a means, therefore, of founding a University, and placed Théodore de Bèze (of whom more presently) at the head of it as Rector. It was, at first, as Mark Pattison clearly proved in his ‘Life of Isaac Casaubon,’ little more than a grammar school, culminating in a theological college; but it soon expanded, and is still expanding. Nowadays, indeed, housed in commodious new buildings, it furnishes instruction in almost every imaginable branch of knowledge, and specially favours studies of a utilitarian character; but the original programme was confined to the humane letters, the funds for the maintenance of the institution being raised with difficulty, and by means of ingenious fiscal devices, hardly to be held up to the imitation of modern fiscal reformers.

35 One device was to ear-mark for the University chest all the fines imposed upon law-breakers. Those who gave short measure in the market, and those who spoke evil of the magistrates, were alike mulcted in the interests of learning; the heaviest contribution was that exacted from a bookseller convicted of having charged an excessive price for a copy of the Psalms of David. A second method consisted in summoning all the notaries of the town before the Council, and instructing them, when any citizen called them in to make his will, to impress upon the testator the desirability of bequeathing something to the University; the result was a total gain of 1,074 florins, including 312 florins from Robert Estienne, the printer, and 5 sous from a poor woman in the baking business. A third contrivance was to suppress a public banquet, and require the cost, estimated at 100 florins, to be handed to the University authorities.

In this way the University—such as it was—was started, with class-rooms for the scholars and apartments for the professors, who were allowed to supplement their incomes by taking boarders. Everything was poorly done, however, and nobody appears to have been comfortable. Complaints of one sort and another are recorded, in large numbers,36 in the Register of the Council. For one thing, there was no heating apparatus, but ‘the teachers used to keep up charcoal fires at their own expense, and require every pupil to pay something towards them.’ For another thing, there was no glass in the windows, and we read that ‘as to the request of the Principal that glass windows shall be placed in the class-rooms, it is decided that this shall not be done, but that the scholars may, if they like, fill up the apertures with paper.’ The teachers, too, were constantly expressing dissatisfaction with the accommodation provided for them. As early as 1559 we have one of them applying for a more commodious lodging, on the ground that ‘God has called him to the estate of matrimony.’ A little later we come upon this note:

‘Claude Bridet requested permission to lodge above the Tower, where M. Chevalier, lecturer in Hebrew, used to live, for the sake of his health, and because the lower ground is damp. Decided that he must be satisfied with his present apartment, and that the place to which he refers shall be kept for someone else.’

In spite of discomfort, however, hard work was the order of the day. A letter has been preserved from M. de Bèze, the Rector of the University, to37 the parent of a pupil, in which he says: ‘I fear I shall be able to make nothing of your son, for, in spite of my entreaties, he refuses to work more than fourteen hours a day.’ The ordinary curriculum did not call for quite such persistent application as that, but was, none the less, sufficiently severe.

The day began, at 7 a.m., with prayers, roll-call, and lessons. At 8.30 there was half an hour’s rest, during which the pupils were instructed to ‘eat bread, praying while they did so, without making a noise.’ From 9 to 10 there were more lessons, terminating with more prayers; from 10 to 11 the scholars dined; from 11 to 12 they sang psalms; from 12 to 1 there were further lessons, inaugurated by prayer; from 1 to 2 there was a quiet time devoted to eating, writing, and informal study; from 2 to 4 there was a final instalment of lessons; and at 4 there was punishment parade in the great college hall.

The punishments were mainly corporal, and were inflicted so frequently that the milder professors protested. ‘The daily fustigations,’ said Mathurin Cordier, ‘disgust the children with the study of the humane letters; moreover, their skins get hardened like the donkeys’, and they no longer feel the stripes.’ It should be added, however, that the38 stripes were not so often inflicted for neglect of the humane letters as for misbehaviour in church. The children had to attend three services every Sunday and one every Wednesday, in addition to the frequent daily prayers at school. They talked and played, as children will, to the scandal of their elders, and they played truant whenever they saw a chance. It must be admitted to be an indication of imperfect discipline that these peccadilloes were often solemnly reviewed before the Town Council, instead of being summarily dealt with at a Court of First Instance in the head-master’s study. The Councillors, however, showed no sentimental tendency to spare the rod. They might fine offenders whom their police caught in the streets when they ought to have been availing themselves of the means of grace; but they also very generally turned them over to the scholastic authorities to be whipped. A typical case is that of two lads who were caught playing quoits on the ramparts during the hours of Divine service on a Sunday morning.

THE GLACIERS DES BOSSONS, CHAMONIX

‘Resolved,’ runs the entry, ‘to hand them over to M. de Bèze, that he may cause them to be given such a fustigation as will prevent them from doing it again.’

39

It does not appear that the fustigations at first formed brilliant scholars. The University was, for a long time, more famous for its professors than for its pupils. Few learned men, at that period, were regarded as prophets in their own countries; and a goodly proportion of those who were so regarded had to emigrate for fear of being stoned. Many of the fugitives settled at Geneva, and taught there; and the readiness of the welcome accorded to the men who were considered suitable may be illustrated from the career of Andrew Melvill, the Scottish scholar, who subsequently reformed the Scottish Universities, and went to profess theology at Sedan. Andrew Melvill had been teaching in a college at Poictiers, and the town had been besieged by the Huguenots. Then—

‘The siege of the town being raised, he left Poictiers, and accompanied by a Frenchman, he took journey to Geneva, leaving books and all40 there, and carried nothing with him but a little Hebrew Bible in his belt. So he came to Geneva, all upon foot, and as he had done before from Dieppe to Paris, and from that to Poictiers; for he was small and light of body, but full of spirits, vigorous, and courageous. His companions of the way, when they came to the inn, would lie down like tired dogs, but he would out and sight the towns and villages, whithersoever they came. The ports of Geneva were carefully kept, because of the troubles of France, and the multitude of strangers that came. Being therefore inquired what they were, the Frenchman, his companion, answered:

‘“We are poor scholars.”

‘But Mr. Andrew, perceiving that they had no wish for poor folks, being already overlaid therewith, said:

‘“No, no; we are not poor! We have as much as will pay for all we take as long as we tarry. We have letters from his acquaintance to Monsieur de Bèze; let us deliver those, we crave no further.”

‘And so, being convoyed to Beza and then to their lodging, Beza perceiving him a scholar, and they having need of a Professor of Humanity in the College, put him within two or three days to trial in Virgil and Homer; wherein he could acquit41 himself so well that without further ado, he is placed in that room of profession; and at his first entry a quarter’s fee is paid him in hand. So that howbeit there was but a crown to the fore betwixt them both, and the Frenchman weak-spirited and wist not what to do, yet he found God’s providence to relieve both himself and help his companion till he was provided.’

There follows a picture of Melvill’s life in the city:

‘In Geneva he abode five years; during the which time his chief study was Divinity, whereon he heard Beza’s daily lessons and preachings; Cornelius Bonaventura, Professor of the Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Syriac languages; Portus, a Greek born, Professor of the Greek tongue, with whom he would reason about the right pronunciation thereof; for the Greek pronounced it after the common form, keeping the accents; the which Mr. Andrew controlled by precepts and reason, till the Greek would grow angry and cry out:

‘“Vos Scoti, vos barbari! docebitis nos Græcos pronunciationem linguæ nostræ, scilicet?”

‘He heard there also Francis Hotman, the renownedst lawyer in his time. There he was well acquainted with my uncle, Mr. Henry Scrymgeour,42 who, by his learning in the laws and policy and service of many noble princes, had attained to great riches, acquired a pretty plot of ground within a league of Geneva, and built thereon a trim house called “the Vilet,” and a fair lodging within the town, all which, with a daughter, his only born, he left to the Syndics of the town.’

43

Calvin died and was buried with his fathers—not before it was time, in the opinion of a good many of his critics—and was succeeded in the dictatorship by Théodore de Bèze, whose name is commonly latinized as Beza.

The two men had always worked well together; but they differed widely both in their antecedents and in their dispositions. Calvin, a theologian from his earliest years, had had no hot youth, no unregenerate days. Monsieur de Bèze, born of a good old Burgundian family, had been a man of the world before he became a man of God; before he versified the Psalms he had written verses which his enemies described as indecorous; when he enrolled himself among the Reformers, the first person whom he had to reform was himself; for, though there does not seem to be any truth in the statement of the Jesuit Maimbourg that he had a44 love-affair with the wife of a tailor, there is no denying that he had betrayed a young woman of humble birth under promise of marriage, and had allowed four years to elapse before fulfilling his promise. Moreover, he kept his high spirits when he settled down to virtuous courses; and his fellow-citizens were so delighted with his jollity that it became a saying in Geneva that it would be better to go to hell with Beza than to heaven with Calvin.

YVOIRE, HTE. SAVOIE

As a man of letters M. de Bèze was principally occupied with theological controversy, and, as has been said, with the production of his metrical version of the Psalms of David; but his contributions to religious disputation sometimes took the form of farce and burlesque. He was part author of a satire entitled Cuisine Papale, and devoted his great gifts to the composition of a rollicking drinking song, in which a certain burner of heretics thus bewails the loss of his nose:

45

Let that suffice. It is rather vulgar fooling; but to have omitted all mention of it would have been to give an imperfect impression of the Reformer. He owed some of his influence with the vulgar to the fact that he knew how to descend to their level; and he needed all his influence, for he had to guide Geneva through perilous times. There was a terrible epidemic of the plague; innumerable fugitives from the Massacre of St. Bartholomew took refuge in the town; there was a long war with Savoy.

In the case of the plague the difficulty was, as it always had been at Geneva, to compel the doctors and the clergy to do their duty to the sick. A note in the Register of the Council shows us how, in the days before the Reform, the monks had envisaged their obligations. The canons of the cathedral, it there appears, passed the following resolution:

‘In view of the fact that the plague is suspected to exist in the town, the reverend fathers vote46 themselves a month’s holiday from the duty of residing there and attending to the services; their stipends, in the meantime, to continue to be paid.’

The month’s holiday, we also gather, was subsequently extended to a year, with the same liberal stipulation as to emoluments; and after the Reformation we find the Protestant clergy displaying an equal timidity in the presence of the disease. The entry concerning them runs thus:

‘The ministers appeared before the Council confessing that it was their duty to go and offer consolation to the sufferers from the plague, but that not one of them had the courage to do so. They begged the Council to overlook their weakness, seeing that God had not given them the grace to brave and overcome the peril with the intrepidity required—always excepting Matthew Geneston, who is quite willing to go, if the lot should fall upon him.’

M. de Bèze, one is glad to know, was made of sterner stuff than these weak brethren. Not only were the sick properly visited during his term of office. Precautions—fatuous, but well meant—were taken against the propagation of the disorder. The Register of the Council is full of references to47 them. Sufferers were ordered not to open their windows; convalescents were enjoined to carry white sticks when they went abroad, in order that they might be recognized and avoided; it was forbidden to eat fruit or to take a bath, as this was believed to be a means of catching the infection. We have a note on hospital reform. It was ordered that male and female patients should be treated in separate wards, in order that certain scandals might be prevented. We find a doctor reprimanded for doing his duty negligently. ‘The Sieur Bauhin, plague-doctor, is ordered to see his patients in their houses instead of being satisfied with having them brought to the window for a consultation.’ Finally, we read that ‘the Council, at the request of the Ministers, orders all the citizens to frequent the sermons with assiduity, in order to turn away the wrath of God which would appear, from the continuance of the plague, to be violently aroused against the town.’

Then, while the plague was still lingering, came the news of the dreadful doings of St. Bartholomew’s Day. Merchants from Lyons brought the tidings, predicting the speedy arrival of the victims who had escaped the butchery; and preparations were made to entertain them hospitably. M. de48 Bèze dispatched pastors to greet them at the frontier, and preached a sermon on the situation, bidding the citizens decree a special day of prayer and fasting—the Jeûne Genevois, which is still observed, though as an occasion of junketing rather than of abstinence.

On that occasion, however, the Genevans were very far from junketing. They did indeed fast and pray; and on the first day of September the arrival of the long train of fugitives began. They were truly fugitives rather than immigrants; that is to say, they had fled empty-handed, travelled in hourly terror of their lives, and arrived in a state of utter destitution. Let it be added that there were 2,300 of them, and that contemporary statistics show that there were in Geneva, at that period, only 1,200 householders. Imagining the sudden influx of 2,300 paupers into a town of the size of Sandwich, one begins to realize the economic situation thus created. To realize it completely one must further remember that Geneva was already on the verge of bankruptcy; and that a collection, for the benefit of the fugitives, which realized 4,000 livres, so exhausted the resources of the town that the proposal to make a second collection had to be abandoned.

49 Severe economy was naturally the order of the day. The only recorded example of public extravagance during this period is an order that, as the chairs in the Council Chamber were too hard for the comfort of the Councillors, they should be padded; and even this outlay may have been due to a desire to find work for those who needed it. On the other hand, the indications of distress are numerous and startling.

One such indication is furnished by the report of a debate of the Venerable Company of Pastors. It was proposed that a deputation should wait upon the magistrates ‘to inform them how scantily they provide for their clergy in times when everything is dear, the fact being that even ministers with no families but only wives to support are absolutely unable to live upon their salaries.’ But the proposal was rejected on the ground that the magistrates were already aware of the distress of the clergy, and could do little to help them, and that it would never do for it to be said that the clergy had applied for increased emoluments at a time of general impoverishment. ‘It is better,’ the resolution continued, ‘to endure our sufferings, leaving it to God to relieve them when it seems good to Him; but if any of our brethren are too hard pressed, they50 may declare their condition to the magistrates, and ask assistance from them privately.’

Still more sorrowful was the case of the immigrant pastors from France, who had no wages. The magistrates distributed a certain amount of money among them, and advised them that, as no more was likely to be forthcoming, they would be wise to lay out a part of it in learning a business or a trade. Their reply is worth preserving:

‘For several weeks,’ they said, ‘their position had been very painful; they felt their indebtedness to the Genevans the more acutely because no one reminded them of it; and they had decided to do with as little as possible to eat until the spring, when they hoped to have better news from their own country.’

LA ROCHE, HTE. SAVOIE

51

The situation righted itself by degrees, with the help of subscriptions from other Swiss cities; but then there was another deadly peril to be faced. The pretensions of Savoy were not yet extinguished. The Duke was still determined to capture Geneva, whether by violence or by stealth, believing that the act would be equally advantageous to the Church and to himself. Two attempts to ‘rush’ the town in time of peace—once by means of soldiers who were to enter concealed in barges laden with wood, and once by means of armed men disguised as muleteers—induced the Council to meet and resolve to ‘ask the advice of God and M. de Bèze’; and, from 1589 onwards, there was open war, in which 2,186 Genevans held their own against 18,000 Savoyards.

The atrocities committed by the Savoyard soldiers were numerous and terrible. We read of one prisoner of war being skinned alive; of52 another who, with his feet amputated, was driven about on a donkey with his face to the tail, and then flung on a dunghill to die. We also read of peasants being hung up to be roasted alive over the fire-places in their own cottages. It is not wonderful that the Genevan soldiers held that this sort of thing gave them the right to retaliate, at least by pillaging, when they gained the upper hand. The wonderful thing is that, when they did pillage, M. de Bèze called them to order, and was listened to. He told them that they were degrading Geneva to the level of a brigand’s cave, and bade them make instant restitution of the plunder which they had taken from the peasantry. It is recorded that they obeyed him, and there could be no better proof that M. de Bèze was a strong man.

These hostilities came to an end in 1589, owing to the intervention of Henri IV. of France; but the peril was not conjured. Baffled in the field, Duke Charles Emmanuel fell back upon treachery, and planned the adventure known to history as the Escalade. It is the most notable episode in all the Genevan annals. Fragments of scaling-ladders, kept as memorials of the ignominious failure of the enterprise, are still proudly exhibited in one of the town museums. The story must be told at length.

53

The time was December, 1602. Duke Charles Emmanuel had secretly crossed the mountains, and established his head-quarters at Etrembières; a sufficient army had been quietly mobilized; there were 800 Savoyards, 1,000 Spaniards, 400 Neapolitans, and 4,000 Piedmontese at Bonne, La Roche, Bonneville, and other places near Geneva. The Duke had also been at pains to allay suspicion by assuring the Genevans, through his agents, that he desired nothing more than to be on friendly terms with them. But at midnight of December 12 he set his troops in motion.

A storming-party of some two hundred men led the way, under the command of M. Berlonière, who had extreme unction administered to him ostentatiously before he started. The main body of 4,000 men was to follow under Lieutenant-General d’Albigni. Acting on information received, the storming-party struck the Corraterie54 rampart at a point where there was no sentinel on the look-out for them. They carried with them faggots and hurdles to help them over the moat, ladders that could be dovetailed together to scale the rampart with, and axes and crowbars for breaking down or forcing gates. A Scotch Jesuit, named Alexander, gave them his benediction as they climbed, and handed to every man an amulet which purported to guarantee him in the first instance against being killed, and in the second instance against being damned eternally if he were killed.

Fortune at first smiled upon their efforts. They succeeded in attaining the rampart unobserved, and kept quiet, waiting for d’Albigni and the dawn. A single sentinel whom they met was slain in silence. But presently a small company of the watch passed by upon its rounds. Upon these, too, the soldiers flung themselves, and most of them were quickly pitched over into the moat. One gun went off, however, and one man managed to escape. He was the drummer, and he ran along the rampart, drumming as he went, as far as the Porte de la Monnaie. It was enough. The alarm was given. The invaders saw that they must fight in the dark, instead of waiting for the dawn. ‘Vive55 Espagne!’ they shouted. ‘Ville gagnée! Tue, Tue!’ and dashed down into the streets, expecting d’Albigni and his 4,000 men to follow them.

But this was what d’Albigni and his 4,000 men could not do. Chance—or the hand of Providence—had interfered to save Geneva. A message to say that the city was as good as captured had already been sent off to the Duke of Savoy at Etrembières; and the Duke was dispatching couriers to announce his victory at all the Courts of Europe. But it happened that the Genevans at the Porte Neuve loaded a cannon to the muzzle with chains, and any other old iron that came to hand, and fired it in a direction parallel with the rampart. Had the aim been bad, Geneva would have fallen that night beyond a doubt. But the aim was good, and the shot broke the ladders into pieces, so that no one could climb by them any more; and there was Lieutenant-General d’Albigni with his army helpless in the moat, while the storming party was caught in a trap within the walls. The citizens snatched up their weapons, and hurried down, half dressed, to give them battle in the dark. Their pastor, Simon Goulart,A who wrote a jubilant56 description of the episode, declared that he himself would have been delighted to join in the affray if only he had had a coat of mail. A worthy woman, who was making soup for an early breakfast, flung the scalding fluid, saucepan and all, out of window on to the heads of the intruders. Other missiles were showered upon them from other windows; while the number of armed men who faced them in the open steadily increased. In the end, after inflicting upon the Genevans a loss of seventeen killed and twenty wounded, they were swept back into the moat, leaving many dead and thirteen prisoners behind them.

THE CASTLE OF ETREMBIÈRES, HTE. SAVOIE

‘Misérable butor, vous avez fait une belle cacade’—‘Blockhead, you have made a pretty mess of it’—was Charles Emmanuel’s greeting to d’Albigni when he heard the truth; and with that he mounted his horse and rode away to Turin, without even troubling to hear the fate of his prisoners. These, it should be added, were all beheaded in the course of the next day; while the heads of those who had been killed were collected and spiked, as57 an ornament to the ramparts and a terror to evil-doers.

M. de Bèze, who was now an old man and very deaf, had slept through the fighting undisturbed, and knew nothing of it until his friends told him the story the next morning. Though he had now retired from the active duties of the pastorate, he dressed himself and went down to the Cathedral of St. Pierre, where he mounted the pulpit stairs and called upon the congregation to sing Psalm cxxiv.—the Psalm which begins:

‘If the Lord Himself had not been on our side, now may Israel say: if the Lord Himself had not been on our side, when men rose up against us.’

The Psalm which ends:

‘Our soul is escaped, even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler: the snare is broken, and we are delivered.

‘Our help standeth in the name of the Lord: who hath made heaven and earth.’

It was the old Reformer’s last public appearance—and a fitting one, giving as it does the last dramatic touch to the most dramatic incident in Genevan annals. He lived until 1605, but he was growing feebler and feebler. He suffered from no actual malady, but it was obvious to all that the58 light was flickering out. His intellect, however, was clear until the last, and the picture of his last days, drawn by his biographer, Antoine La Faye, recalls Bunyan’s picture of the Christian pilgrims waiting in the Land of Beulah for their summons to cross the river to the shining city.

The Venerable Company of Pastors in conclave resolved that no day should be allowed to pass without at least two of their number paying him a visit. For the rest he found his pleasure in reading grave and pious colloquies and sermons, and particularly in those words of Augustine: ‘Long have I lived; long have I sinned. Blessed be the name of the Lord!’ And, at the last, ‘without pain, and without a struggle, all his senses, as it seemed, failing him simultaneously, in one single instant, he gave back his soul to God, his bodily pilgrimage having lasted eighty-six years, three months, and nine days, and forty of his years having been spent in the holy office of the ministry.’

‘M. de Bèze,’ La Faye continues, ‘was a man of sturdy build, conspicuous beauty, and health so vigorous that he often said that he did not know the meaning of a headache. He displayed high talents, accurate judgment, a tenacious memory, and remarkable eloquence, while in courtesy of59 manner he was second to no one. In view of the great gifts thus recited, and his great age (though these are things less to be regarded than his learning and his piety), many used to speak of M. de Bèze as the Phœnix of his time.’

61

M. de Bèze was succeeded in the Presidency of the Venerable Company of Pastors by Simon Goulart—the warrior whom we have seen excusing himself for not fighting against the Duke of Savoy on the ground that he had no coat of mail. In his new office, however, Simon needed no armour, for the period from the Escalade of 1603 to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was quiet and uneventful. The great name of the epoch was that of Jean Diodati, Milton’s friend, the theologian who pulverized the Arminians at the Synod of Dordrecht. Other names are those of Trembley, Tronchin, Turretini, and Calendrini; and there is not a name among them which need detain us. The town was at peace with its neighbours; commerce and industry flourished; and the ecclesiastical discipline gradually lost its grip upon the city, or was, at least, restricted to a narrower field of usefulness. We hear of a good many new62 sumptuary laws, but we also gather that many of them were only a means of accentuating class distinctions, and that there was a growing difficulty in enforcing them. We find persons burnt alive for witchcraft at the beginning of the period, but not towards the end of it; we hear of doubts diffusing themselves as to the efficacy of torture in extracting the truth from witnesses; and we find even heresy dealt with less rigorously than of old. A heretic who was sentenced to be ‘strangled in the usual manner’ had the sentence, without difficulty, commuted into one of ten years’ banishment.

NYON CASTLE, LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO MONT BLANC

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes inevitably brought a fresh flood of immigrants—1,450 in a single week, 800 in a single day—but Geneva was by no means disposed to welcome them so hospitably as in the time of M. de Bèze. Seventy years of prosperity had sapped some of the primitive virtues of the people; they had conceived a dread of foreign competition, and of the pauper alien, even though the pauper alien was an exile for conscience’ sake. Their disposition was rather to seek excuses for passing the pauper aliens on, and make them chargeable upon the hospitality of their Swiss allies, or of the Germans or the Dutch. To some extent they succeeded; but a considerable number of the63 immigrants settled in the town in spite of the political disabilities imposed upon them, and soon became a source of trouble. All through the eighteenth century—or at all events from 1707 until 1794—there was intermittent political turmoil. A detailed account of the agitations and disturbances hardly falls within the scope of such a work as the present; but it may be as well to sum them up, and describe their general character.

65

The Transvaal troubles which culminated in the South African War may furnish an analogy which will help to make the situation clear; the story being, in fact, a long story of acrimonious relations between Burghers and Uitlanders. The Burghers were, in the main, the descendants of the families already possessed of the rights of citizenship in the half-century following the Reformation; the Uitlanders were the descendants of immigrants who had settled in the city since that period. The Burghers enjoyed political rights, and the Uitlanders did not; the gulf between the two classes was only occasionally passed by an exceptional Uitlander whom the Burghers considered ‘fit.’ By degrees, however, the Uitlanders became more numerous than the Burghers, and a form of government which had been a democracy became an oligarchy, in which many of the most intelligent and reputable citizens had no voice.

66 For a time the system worked well enough, or at all events worked without any outward signs of friction; but throughout the eighteenth century friction was constantly occurring, and insurrections, described by some historians as revolutions, broke out at intervals. There were revolutions of sorts in 1707, in 1737, in 1766, in 1782, and in 1789, with minor revolutions intervening. The recognized mode of composing the troubles was to invite the mediation of foreign Powers, and more particularly of France. The first step of the French mediator was generally, as we shall see, to demand that a theatre should be opened and a company of comedians installed in it for his diversion. But he also mediated, the result of his mediation being to arrange a compromise between the rival claims. Each compromise did something to improve the position of the Uitlanders; but no compromise really removed their grievances or satisfied their claims.

This brings us to the date of the French Revolution, which, as was inevitable in the circumstances, had its very audible repercussion at Geneva. The doctrine that ‘all men are equal before the law, and ought to enjoy the same political rights,’ was seed which fell there upon a fruitful soil. As might67 have been expected, French methods of propagandism were imitated, and Jacobinical clubs were formed—the Sans-culottes, the Montagnards, the Marseillais, the Égalité. The clubmen constituted a party known as the Égaliseurs, or Equalitarians, and demanded a new constitution, based upon the principle of the sovereignty of the people, and the admission of all Uitlanders to the full rights of citizenship. On the night of September 4, 1792, there was a rising. The gates of the town were seized; the members of the Government were arrested; a Provisional Government was proclaimed, with the mission of drafting a new constitution on the approved democratic lines.

So far, so good. But the account of what follows reads like a burlesque of the revolutionary proceedings across the frontier. The workmen left their work, and paraded the streets in red caps, singing revolutionary songs. The extremists banded themselves into a society styled ‘the Tanners,’ pledged to ‘tan,’ or assault and batter, the aristocrats, whom they called Englués, or Stick-in-the-muds, whenever and wherever they met them taking their walks abroad. Nor did such informal acts of violence suffice. The next step was to arrest all the aristocrats who had not fled from the68 town, lock them up in the Grenier de Chantepoulet, and improvise a revolutionary tribunal to judge them.

MONTENVERS AND AIGUILLES VERTE AND DRU

The proceedings of the tribunal were conducted with true republican sans-gêne. The judges sat on the bench in their shirt-sleeves, with their pipes in their mouths and their pistols in their belts. Happily, however, as if they were half conscious that their proceedings were farcical, they were less murderous in their sentences than their French models. Though 600 aristocrats were condemned, the majority of them escaped with sentences of fines, imprisonment, or exile, and the death sentence was only passed upon seven of them. The seven were shot by torch-light at the Bastions; and then the people began to be horrified by the atrocities which they had perpetrated. There was a reaction, a counter-revolution, and a great ceremony of reconciliation in the cathedral. The leaders of the rival factions shook hands in the presence of the assembled populace, and swore to forgive and forget and work together thenceforward for the good of their common country. They kept their oaths, and all promised well until the French Directorate cast covetous eyes upon Geneva, found a pretext for its annexation, and made it the69 capital of the new department of Leman. It remained French until the last day of the year 1813, when Napoleon’s misfortunes gave the citizens the opportunity of throwing off the yoke, and they sought and obtained admission to the Swiss Confederation.

71

It has been remarked as curious that the Age of Revolution at Geneva was also the Golden Age—if not of Genevan literature, which has never really had any Golden Age, at least of Genevan science, which was of world-wide renown. The explanation probably is that these Genevan revolutions, over which the Genevan historians have spilt such a quantity of ink, were not such very important matters after all. So far as one can make out, the graver of them were hardly more grave than the Peterloo massacre, while the less grave hardly attain to the gravity of the Bloody Sunday Riots. A man of letters who took part in one of them on the losing side might suffer unpleasant consequences. He might have his writings burnt by the common hangman, as Bérenger’s were; he might be driven into exile, as were de Lolme, who went to London, where he wrote his famous work on the British Constitution, and d’Ivernois, who went to Paris72 and became one of the most pungent critics of republican administration and finance. Such things might happen, and in many cases did. But there were no such violent or such continual disturbances as need take up the whole of a literary man’s time, or prevent him from getting on with his work.

The period, at any rate, is one in which notable names meet us at every turn. There were exiled Genevans, like de Lolme, holding their own in foreign political and intellectual circles; there were emigrant Genevan pastors holding aloft the lamps of culture and piety in many cities of England, France, Russia, Germany, and Denmark; there were Genevans, like François Lefort, holding the highest offices in the service of foreign rulers; and there were numbers of Genevans at Geneva of whom the cultivated grand tourist wrote in the tone of a disciple writing of his master. One cannot glance at the history of the period without lighting upon names of note in almost all departments of endeavour. The period is that of de Saussure, Bourrit, the de Lucs, the two Hubers, great authorities respectively on bees and birds; Le Sage, who was one of Gibbon’s rivals for the heart of Mademoiselle Suzanne Curchod; Senebier, the73 librarian who wrote the first literary history of Geneva; St. Ours and Arlaud, the painters; Charles Bonnet, the entomologist; Bérenger and Picot, the historians; Tronchin, the physician; Trembley and Jallabert, the mathematicians; Dentan, minister and Alpine explorer; Pictet, the editor of the Bibliothèque Universelle, still the leading Swiss literary review; and Odier, who taught Geneva the virtue of vaccination.

It is obviously impossible to dwell at length upon the careers of all these eminent men. As well might one attempt, in a survey on the same scale of English literature, to discuss in detail the careers of all the celebrities of the age of Anne. One can do little more than remark that the list is marvellously strong for a town of some 30,000 inhabitants, and that many of the names included in it are not only eminent, but interesting. Jean André de Luc, for example, has a double claim upon our attention as the inventor of the hygrometer and as the pioneer of the snow-peaks. He climbed the Buet as early as 1770, and wrote an account of his adventures on its summit and its slopes which has the true charm of Arcadian simplicity. He came to England, was appointed reader to Queen Charlotte, and lived in the enjoyment of that office, and in the gratifying74 knowledge that Her Majesty kept his presentation hygrometer in her private apartments, to the venerable age of ninety.

Bourrit is another interesting character—being, in fact, the spiritual ancestor of the modern Alpine Clubman. By profession he was Precentor of the Cathedral; but his heart was in the mountains. In the summer he climbed them, and in the winter he wrote books about them. One of his books was translated into English; and the list of subscribers, published with the translation, shows that the public which Bourrit addressed included Edmund Burke, Sir Joseph Banks, Bartolozzi, Fanny Burney, Angelica Kauffman, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Augustus Selwyn, Jonas Hanway, and Dr. Johnson. His writings earned him the honourable title of Historian (or Historiographer) of the Alps. Men of science wrote him letters; princes engaged upon the grand tour called to see him; princesses sent him presents as tokens of their admiration and regard for the man who had taught them how the contemplation of mountain scenery might exalt the sentiments of the human mind.

THE JURA RANGE FROM THONON, HTE. SAVOIE

Tronchin, too, is interesting; he was the first physician who recognized the therapeutic use of75 fresh air and exercise, hygienic boots, and open windows. And so is Charles Bonnet, who was not afraid to stand up for orthodoxy against Voltaire; and so is Mallet, who travelled as far as Lapland. But space forbids any long examination of their achievements. The most that one can do is to illustrate the epoch by narrating the events of one career; and the career selected must of necessity be that of the man of whom his contemporaries always spoke, with the reverence of hero-worshippers, as ‘the illustrious de Saussure.’

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Horace Benedict de Saussure, who, like so many eminent Genevans, was of French extraction, was born in 1740. Nominally, his work in life, entered upon at the age of twenty-two, was that of Professor of Philosophy at the Geneva University; but his real work, continued almost until his death, was that of the explorer, student, and exponent of the mountains. Some time before the end he was able to boast that he had crossed the Alps by eight different passes, made sixteen other excursions to the centre of the range, and travelled in the Jura, the Vosges, and the mountains of Dauphiné. His marriage—he married young—by no means hindered him from climbing. Madame de Saussure indeed objected, quite failing to understand his readiness to forsake the comforts of the hearth in order to revolutionize the science of geology. But he put his foot down in a letter which may perhaps be78 read with profit by other ladies besides her to whom it was addressed:

‘In this valley, which I had not previously visited, I have made observations of the greatest importance, surpassing my highest hopes; but that is not what you care about. You would sooner—God forgive me for saying so—see me growing fat like a friar, and snoring every day in the chimney-corner after a big dinner, than that I should achieve immortal fame by the most sublime discoveries, at the cost of reducing my weight by a few ounces and spending a few weeks away from you. If, then, I continue to undertake these journeys in spite of the annoyance they cause you, the reason is that I feel myself pledged in honour to go on with them, and that I think it necessary to extend my knowledge of this subject, and make my works as nearly perfect as possible. I say to myself: Just as an officer goes out to assault the fortress when the order is given, and just as a merchant goes to market on market-day, so must I go to the mountain when there are observations to be made.’

Nor was it only in the domestic circle that de Saussure could put his foot down if required. In one of the Genevan revolutions—that of 1782—79he also showed his mettle in an energetic fashion. He was a magistrate at the time, and one day, when he came down to the Hôtel de Ville, he found that the popular party had risen in revolt, and seized the building. The rioters requested him to take his place, and exercise magisterial functions on lines which they would dictate. When he refused, they arrested him, but released him on the following day. Then, hearing that they proposed to search his house for arms, he decided to resist. He, Trembley, the mathematician, his family, his servants, and his dog, constituted the tiny garrison. They barricaded the doors, stationed themselves at the windows armed with muskets, and successfully defied a gang of revolutionists who came to blow them up with hand-grenades. His assailants were reduced to threatening to murder his friends if he did not surrender; and it was only this final menace that brought about the capitulation of the Genevan Fort Chabrol.

Our business here, however, is not with the politician, but with the traveller and the man of science. His widest celebrity is no doubt due to his famous ascent of Mont Blanc. If he was not the first man to climb that mountain, he was, at any rate, the first to believe that it could be80 climbed. Bourrit, as late as 1773, had written of ‘the absolute impossibility of attaining to its summit.’ De Saussure, as early as 1760, had offered a reward to anyone who could find a way to the top, and undertaken to pay a day’s wages to anyone who tried and failed. The reward was not claimed until twenty-six years later, when Jacques Balmat got it. When the way was found, de Saussure, though now forty-seven years of age, at once made haste to follow it. His ascent—the third—was accomplished on August 3, 1787; he published a short pamphlet, giving an account of it, in the course of the same year.

THE AIGUILLE AND DÔME DU GOÛTER, MONT BLANC

The climb was, beyond question, a great feat for a philosopher of forty-seven, and it brought the name of de Saussure under the notice of thousands of people who would never otherwise have heard of him. A still greater feat, accomplished a little later, was the camping out, for something over a fortnight, on the Col du Géant. But it is not upon either of these feats that de Saussure’s real fame reposes. He is reckoned among great men partly because he was the first student of geology who knew his business, and partly because he is the only Alpine writer of his period whose works have stood the test of time.

81 The geologists who preceded him fall into two classes. There were the mere fossilizers, who had about as much claim to be considered men of science as have the stamp-collectors of the present day; there were the theorists who geologized, so to say, in the air, threw out hasty generalizations from their studies, and thought it beneath their dignity as philosophers to correct these hypotheses by the further observation of phenomena. De Saussure combined their methods. His life was one long, patient study of geological phenomena. But he collected in order to collate; his aim was always to see the part in its relation to the whole, the particular in its relation to the general; and he had a fine contempt for the amateurs who collected fossils in the same spirit in which they might have collected pottery or bric-à-brac.

‘The one aim,’ he wrote, ‘of most of the travellers who call themselves naturalists is the collection of curiosities. They walk, or rather they creep about, with their eyes fixed upon the earth, picking up a specimen here and a specimen there, without any eye to a generalization. They remind me of an antiquary scratching the ground at Rome, in the midst of the Pantheon or the Coliseum, looking for fragments of coloured glass, without ever turning82 to look at the architecture of these magnificent edifices.’

The most remarkable thing, however, is that de Saussure, being a geologist, should have been a stylist. He certainly never meant to be one. He would never have written a book merely to show his skill in word-painting; his one purpose in writing was to communicate discoveries of importance. At the time when Bourrit was making himself famous by his picturesque descriptions of the Alps, the greater man wrote to him modestly: ‘I too have an idea of publishing something on the natural history of these mountains. It is with that end in view that I have been studying them for so many years.’ And in the introduction of his great work, he apologizes for what seems to him the baldness of his style: ‘More practised in climbing rocks than in polishing phrases, I have attempted nothing more than to render clearly the objects which I have seen, and the impressions which I have felt.’

It was an apology offered without affectation or false modesty. It announced a departure from the literary fashion of the day, which was to write of the mountains in the language of high-flown sentiment. Rousseau had set the fashion; Ramond83 de Carbonnière, the philosopher of the Pyrenees, was ready to carry it on; de Luc and Bourrit were doing what they could. De Saussure wished to announce himself as the disciple of none of these, but as the plain man who had made a careful study of his subject, and wished to be heard because of what he had to say and not because of his manner of saying it. He hardly understood that he was, in the full sense of the word, a man of letters—a literary artist. That is a point which has since been settled in his favour by his readers.

He might easily have written a treatise that would have been invaluable to specialists and intolerable to everyone else. Guided by a sure instinct, he preferred to write the narrative of his journeys, taking the reader, as it were, by the hand, making him his confidant, showing him his discoveries in the order in which he makes them, and so luring him on to take an interest in a subject generally accounted dull. And, though his first care was always to observe, and to collate his observations, with a view to the advancement of learning, there always was in him something of the poet, which must out from time to time, temporarily giving the go-by to the man of science.

One finds this vein of poetry in the writings of84 most men of science—naturally, seeing that they used gifts of imagination differing from those of the poet only in being disciplined and chastened, and ready to submit to the thraldom of the established fact. Sometimes, indeed, the vein of poetry has interfered with business, as in the case of the ingenious Scheuchzer, who laid himself out to prove that there were dragons in the Alps, or, in a less degree, in the case of Buffon. But, whether it interferes with business or not, there the vein of poetry almost always is. Such old men of science as Conrad Gesner, and such modern men of science as Huxley and Tyndall, have shown us with what striking effect it can be worked. It is because de Saussure worked it so well that his writings still live, though, regarded merely as textbooks, they have long since been superseded.

The humanity of the man is continually flashing out at us in the reflections and anecdotes with which he illustrates the manners of the strange peoples in the strange places which he visited. Sometimes it is a flash of humour, as when he inquires the motives that impel men to be chamois-hunters, a trade that never pays. ‘It is the dangers,’ he concludes; ‘the constant alternation of hopes and fears, the continual emotion thus85 engendered, which excite the hunter, just as they excite the gambler, the soldier, the navigator, and even, to a certain extent, the naturalist of the Alps.’

Sometimes it is a touch of pathos, as in the story of the old woman of Argentière whose father, husband, and brothers had all perished, within a few days, from an epidemic:

‘After she had given me some milk, she asked me where I came from, and what I was doing there at that season of the year. When she knew that I was from Geneva, she told me that she could not believe that all the Protestants were to be damned; that God was too good and too just to condemn us all without distinction. Then, after reflecting for a moment, she shook her head and added: “But what is so strange to me is that of all those who have been taken away from us, not one has ever come back. I,” she went on, with a look of pain “have wept so for my husband and my brothers, and have never ceased to think of them, and every night I implore them to tell me where they are, and whether they are happy. Surely, if they existed anywhere, they would not leave me in this doubt. But perhaps,” she went on, “it is because I am not worthy of this favour. Perhaps the pure and86 innocent souls of those children there”—she pointed to the cradle as she spoke—“are conscious of their presence, and enjoy a happiness that is denied to me.”’

Truly a wonderful passage to find embedded in a valuable and solid treatise on geology. Ramond never surpassed it though he laid himself out to do so, and—in his earlier works, at all events—never allowed geological considerations to stand in the way of sentiment.

It is sad to relate that, after having made himself known to all Europe as ‘the illustrious de Saussure,’ the pioneer of geological discovery fell upon evil days. But so it was. His health broke down; in 1794 he began to have paralytic strokes. His fortune—the greater part of it, at all events—was lost through the collapse of securities during the French Revolution. He was on the side that suffered most in the political disturbances which the Revolution engendered at Geneva.

In the midst of those disturbances, his father-in-law, Charles Bonnet, died, and de Saussure, himself almost to be reckoned a dying man, was called upon to pronounce his public eulogium. But the disturbances made it necessary for the ceremony to be postponed. A letter in which Madame de87 Saussure narrates the incident gives us a clear impression not only of the day, but also of the times of which the day was representative.

‘Yesterday,’ she writes, ‘I spent one of those days of emotion which do not affect us the less because we ought to be getting used to them. The people took up arms by order of the Committees of the Clubs. The gates were shut, the cannon rumbled along the streets, screaming women leant out of their windows to look. In the evening the town had that military air which you have sometimes seen in it—the streets full of armed citizens with flaming torches, patrols challenging the passers-by—and all this lasted till two or three in the morning; whereas to-day, everyone is at his shop, his café, or his office. And this tumultuous day had been selected for the celebration of the memory of the most peaceable of citizens—your uncle, Charles Bonnet.’

And so, amid such sorry scenes, the end approached. De Saussure sought relief and health in travel. He took the waters at Plombières, but without any good result, and died early in 1799, the great Cuvier pronouncing his eulogy before the Institut de France.

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We have spoken of the literature of science. In the literature which is an art, and an end in itself, Geneva never excelled; and if we look for reasons, we can find several.

The first difficulty was with the language. French came to the Genevans as a foreign tongue at a time when their men of learning wrote Latin and their populace spoke a Savoyard patois; and, even to the present day, few of them avoid a certain provincial awkwardness in the handling of it. Anyone who wishes to see the proof has only to compare the Journal de Genève with the Gil Blas or the Figaro. The few stylists whom Geneva can claim have generally been of French extraction, like Marc Monnier, or have lived abroad, like Rousseau and Madame de Staël. A far more typical Genevan writer was Charles Bonnet whose perplexing circumlocutions swamp his elevated sentiments and effectively prevent his books from90 being read. There is also, of course, Amiel; but even ‘Roulez, tambours’ is tolerably obvious; while the trail of the cliché lies even over that famous ‘Journal Intime’ which Mrs. Humphry Ward translated.

Another difficulty was the vexatious censorship exercised by Town Councillors, whose views of literature were parochial. Even Agrippa d’Aubigné, with all his fame and merit, was pursued by their suspicions both during his lifetime and after his death. The printer of one of his works was imprisoned and fined for issuing from his press a book alleged to contain ‘much impious and blasphemous matter which scandalizes well-conducted persons’; while, after his decease, his papers were sent for, to be inspected by public officials. ‘Anything composed by the defunct,’ it was decided, ‘during his residence in this State must be suppressed, but anything composed on other territory may be restored to his heirs.’ Literary decorum may have been insured by such measures; but they were not calculated to encourage originality, and it is not surprising that we search Genevan annals in vain for distinguished literary names.

THE STATUE OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ON THE ISLAND IN THE RHONE, GENEVA, FROM HOTEL DES BERGUES

The name of which the Genevans are proudest is91 probably that of Rousseau, who has sometimes been spoken of as ‘the austere citizen of Geneva.’ But ‘austere’ is a strange epithet to apply to the philosopher who endowed the Foundling Hospital with five illegitimate children; and Geneva cannot claim a great share in a citizen who ran away from the town in his boyhood to avoid being thrashed for stealing apples. It was, indeed, at Geneva that Jean Jacques received from his aunt the disciplinary chastisement of which he gives such an exciting account in his ‘Confessions’; and he once returned to the city and received the Holy Communion there in later life. But that is all. Jean Jacques was not educated at Geneva, but in Savoy—at Annecy, at Turin, and at Chambéry; his books were not printed at Geneva, though one of them was publicly burnt there, but in Paris and Amsterdam; it is not to Genevan but to French literature that he belongs. And when Jean Jacques has been named, there remains no other Genevan citizen of letters worthy to be mentioned in the same paragraph. So that branch of the subject may be left.

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Perhaps it is in song and satire that Geneva has done best. ‘Roulez, tambours,’ is not the only Genevan song that has passed the Genevan frontier; and Geneva, in fact, has always been ready to burst into song, whether serious or sarcastic, in connection with the topics of the day. The Reformation itself was heralded by satirical verses. A species of burlesque entitled a ‘sottie’ was, in those days, a favourite form of entertainment. The general character of these compositions may be gathered from the following scrap of dialogue, contained in one of them, between the Physician and the World:

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The flood-gates of poetry were opened afresh by the failure of the Escalade. Even the octogenarian M. de Bèze composed a song on that occasion:

Other poets followed the pastor’s example by the score. For years—for decades even—they mocked in verse at the enemy whom they had put to shame. When, at last, they were silent, the revolutionary movement of the eighteenth century produced its harvest of squibs; and then we come to the Restoration, and the religious revival known as the Réveil, which also produced considerable literary repercussions.

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‘Réveil’ is Swiss for Revivalism. The movement was the Genevan analogue of our Wesleyan Methodism, though it did not begin till more than five-and-twenty years after John Wesley’s death. The originator of it was the Scotch evangelist, Robert Haldane. He came to Geneva, made the acquaintance of the theological students, and was surprised and shocked.

‘Had they been trained,’ he writes, ‘in the schools of Socrates or Plato, and enjoyed no other means of instruction, they could scarcely have been more ignorant of the doctrines of the Gospel. To the Bible and its contents their studies had never been directed. After some conversation, they became convinced of their ignorance of the Scriptures, and of the way of salvation, and exceedingly desirous of information.’

The young men fell into a habit of dropping in upon Mr. Haldane, at all hours of the day and96 night, to talk over the mysteries of revealed religion. He decided to organize his efforts for their evangelization, take them in classes three nights a week, and expound the Epistle to the Romans. His influence over them was the more remarkable because he was, at first, obliged to converse with them by means of an interpreter. And he had remarkable men among his pupils: Adolphe Monod, of Paris; Félix Neff, the Alpine missionary; and Merle d’Aubigné, the historian of the Reformation. A friend, too old to be his pupil, and already of his way of thinking, was Cæsar Malan, the hymnodist.

THE HEAD OF LAKE ANNECY HTE. SAVOIE

The movement thus inaugurated was, it may be presumed, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. No doubt it was well for the old-fashioned Calvinists to be shaken out of their old-fashioned formalism, and taught to regard religion, not as the placid and docile acceptance of a theological code, but as the special experience of the individual soul. The history of religion is the history of such reactions against formalism; and, on the whole, they make for progress. But revivalists, being only human after all, have, like other people, their besetting sins. They are prone to hypocrisy, to spiritual pride, to sour austerity, to the passing of97 uncharitable judgments on their neighbours, and to the unwarranted assumption of the right to cast the first stone at sinners.

These vices of the revivalists attracted the attention of that section of young Geneva which was not absorbed in the contemplation of their virtues. They disliked to see them stand at the corners of the market-place and, for a pretence, make long prayers. They took the same line towards them as was taken towards Calvin and Farel by those earlier Friends of Liberty who demanded permission to ‘live as they chose without reference to what was said by the preachers’; and they chiefly expressed themselves in verse. They formed a club—the Caveau Genevois; and though the waters of oblivion have swept over most of their writings, they were the choice spirits of the Geneva of their time, and one of them has left us a graphic word-picture of their meetings:

‘Our gathering, to which every member was expected to contribute a new song or a new air, took place irregularly, and in various places. Sometimes we met on the beautiful banks of our lake, at Cologny, on the terrace of the Hotel du Lion d’Or. We used to come home arm-in-arm, larking and singing, good friends and jolly fellows,98 ready to begin again those charming scenes which politics never troubled, and in which music, poetry, and joy—those crowns of harmony and loyal friendship—reigned alone.’

And one at least of their songs still lives—the song written by J. F. Chaponnière, which opens thus:

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About 1830 the Caveau Genevois broke up. Some of its members were dead, some had left Geneva, some were growing too old for poetry, and some were going in for politics. But as the old school faded away, a new school—the Romantic School—was dawning. Poets arose who acknowledged Lamartine for their father and Victor Hugo for their elder brother. They are not really important, but Marc Monnier, in ‘Genève et ses Poètes,’ has made them intensely interesting. The greatest poet among them was Etienne Gide, Professor of Law at the University. Most students of French poetry have by heart that song of his which runs:

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NERNIER, HTE. SAVOIE

Another notable man—more notable as a man than a poet—was Petit-Senn, who lived to a101 patriarchal age and was a member of all the literary groups in succession. He is sometimes spoken of as a Genevan Voltaire; and he resembled Voltaire in living a little way out of the town, yet in touch with its intellectual life, and receiving the homage of a constant stream of admiring pilgrims; but he is even better entitled to be styled the Genevan Mæcænas. Possessed of something more than a modest competence, he opened his purse freely to the poorer poets, not only relieving their necessities, but paying for the publication of their works. His ‘Miliciade’—a satire on the amateurishness of the Genevan army—had an immense success when he gave a reading of it in a concert-hall; and his ‘Bluettes et Boutades’ are short sentences generally worthy of being ranked with epigrams. We may cull a few of them:

‘In the eyes of the world, however one may have made one’s money, one has done better than if one had lost it.

‘The egoist weeps over the story of a shipwreck at the reflection that he might himself have been on board.

‘We are more ready to do justice to the dead than to the absent.

‘Some of the sins of youth are so agreeable that age repents of them only in order to have an excuse for recalling them.

‘When a friend asks you for money, consider which of the two you would rather lose.

‘The most lucrative kind of commerce would be to buy102 men at their real value, and sell them at their own valuation.

‘If hypocrisy were to die, modesty would, at least, have to go into half-mourning.

‘Let us respect white hairs ... especially our own.’

Petit-Senn and Etienne Gide were the poets who remained in their city. It is characteristic of Genevan literary history that the others sought their fortune abroad. Trop grand poisson pour notre petit lac was presumably their motto, though they were not fish who cut any very striking figure in the lakes to which they repaired. Charles Didier was the one of them who succeeded best. He took long walking tours in Italy, glorified the carbonari, pictured the meetings of their secret societies in the style of ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ and ultimately acquired something of a literary position in Paris, where he was numbered among the friends of George Sand. Imbert Galloix also went to Paris, but fell into destitution there. Nodier helped him. ‘I send you,’ he wrote, ‘the half of what I have in the house. It is the first time that I blush for my poverty.’ Petit-Senn also sent him money, for which he appealed in a very pathetic letter; but he died—a pitiful figure, reminding one of Chatterton—at the age of twenty-one. Others of the company were Henri Blanvalet, who for twenty years was103 private tutor to the Frankfort Rothschilds—truly a sorry position for a poet; and André Verre, who went to Russia to teach in a girls’ school, and ultimately edited a newspaper in Buenos Ayres. None of them count. They were merely echoes of the louder voices heard in the French cénacle.

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One would be tempted, if space permitted, to say something of the later literary luminaries of Geneva: of Amiel, the ‘virtuous Don Juan,’ as his friends called him, who, after living rather a futile life, acquired posthumous fame through his ‘Journal’; of Cherbuliez, the novelist, once very popular, though now somewhat out of fashion; of Marc Monnier, the sparkling and versatile father of Dr. Philippe Monnier who has inherited his wit; of Toepfer, author of ‘Nouvelles Genevoises,’ described by one critic as ‘a sort of Swiss Ally Sloper,’ and by another as ‘a sort of Swiss Max O’Rell, with just a dash of Mr. Barlow’; of Emile Javelle, who climbed the Alps diligently and wrote of them poetically; of MM. Eugène Ritter and Albert de Montet, the pillars of historical research in French Switzerland. But space does not permit. What106 little space remains is claimed by certain distinguished strangers who have shed lustre upon Geneva by living in the neighbourhood. We must visit Voltaire at Ferney, and Madame de Staël at Coppet. Let the patriarch come first.

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Voltaire was sixty years of age when he settled on the shores of the lake, where he was to remain for another four-and-twenty years; and he did not go there for his pleasure. He would have preferred to live in Paris, but was afraid of being locked up in the Bastille. As the great majority of the men of letters of the reign of Louis XV. were, at one time or another, locked up in the Bastille, his fears were probably well founded. Moreover, notes of warning had reached his ears. ‘I dare not ask you to dine,’ a relative said to him, ‘because you are in bad odour at Court.’ So he betook himself to Geneva, as so many Frenchmen, illustrious and otherwise, had done before, and acquired various properties—at Prangins, at Lausanne, at Saint-Jean (near Geneva), at Ferney, at Tournay, and elsewhere.

He was welcomed cordially. Dr. Tronchin, the eminent physician, co-operated in the legal fictions108 necessary to enable him to become a landowner in the republic. Cramer, the publisher, made a proposal for the issue of a complete and authorized edition of his works. All the best people called. ‘It is very pleasant,’ he was able to write, ‘to live in a country where rulers borrow your carriage to come to dinner with you.’ Yet his desire to ‘score off’ the ministers of religion, who no doubt struck him as pretentious persons of sluggish intellect, soon set him at loggerheads with his hosts.

The first trouble arose in connection with the article on Geneva published in the encyclopædia edited by Diderot and d’Alembert. It was in the course of a short visit to Voltaire that d’Alembert gathered the materials for that article. He was encouraged, and afforded every facility for pursuing his researches, alike by the ministers and by the magistrates. ‘He is the curiosity of the town,’ a contemporary letter-writer declared, ‘and it is quite the fashion to go and call on him.’ In particular he was entertained by the clergy, and talked theology with them after dinner. Their views were broad, thanks to the influence of that eminent theologian, Turretini; probably their views were broader after dinner than before. At all events, the encyclopædist drew them out to his satisfaction,109 with the result that, when his article appeared, and the divines made haste to read it, it was found that their theological position was expounded in the following startling paragraph:

‘There is less complaint of the advance of infidelity at Geneva than elsewhere; but that is not surprising. Religion there—unless it be among the common people—is reduced to the worship of one God; a certain respect for Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is, perhaps, the only thing that distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism.’

This in the city of Calvin. It was as though the encyclopædist had stirred a hornets’ nest. To change the metaphor, the fat was in the fire, and the flame blazed up at once. The Consistory met and appointed a Commission ‘to consider what were the best steps to take in the matter.’ The Commission deputed Dr. Tronchin to try and obtain an apology and retraction from the offending author; and Dr. Tronchin applied to Voltaire for help. Seeing that Voltaire had already written to d’Alembert congratulating him on his success in arousing the ‘murmurs of the synagogue,’ this was not a very hopeful step. Voltaire, in fact, had inspired the statements which he was now asked to110 invite his collaborator to withdraw. He temporized, enjoyed the fun, and tampered with the truth, to keep it up. He protested that he knew nothing about the article; that he wanted nothing but a quiet life, for himself and for everybody else, including ‘Trinitarians, Unitarians, Quakers, Moravians, Turks, Jews, and Chinamen.’ He also, in the friendliest manner, warned his correspondent that, if d’Alembert were pressed too hard, he might, instead of apologizing, prove that the things which he had said were true.

THE CHATEAU DE PRANGINS

‘Retractation,’ he wrote, ‘was all very well for St. Augustine; but it will not do for him. I know his character. If your complaints get too loud, he will quote a certain catechism by your Professor of Theology, wherein it is said that revelation is “a thing of some utility,” and wherein there is no single word about the holy, adorable, and invisible Trinity. When he establishes that he has not disclosed a secret, but has only publicly taken cognizance of an opinion publicly expressed, you will be slightly embarrassed.’

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Another bone of contention was found in Voltaire’s passionate devotion to the theatre. His tastes were shared by the ‘advanced’ set at Geneva; but the divines, in spite of their broad views on matters of dogmatic theology, still held narrow views on the subject of the drama. Dramatic performances, whether public or private, were not allowed upon Genevan soil; while performances given close to the frontier, on the territory of Savoy or France, caused the ministers many searchings of heart.

There had been such performances shortly before Voltaire’s arrival—in 1751—at Carouge and Chatelaine, and the Consistory had passed a resolution on the subject. It had decided to exhort the members of the Council to keep their wives away from the entertainments, and to exhort the professors to warn the students—and more particularly the candidates for Holy Orders—not to attend them.112 Afterwards, hearing that the daughters of some of the pastors had visited the theatre in defiance of their admonitions, they had passed a further resolution to the effect that this state of things gave ground for reflection—qu’il y a lieu d’y réfléchir.

Such was the public opinion which Voltaire braved; and his first attempt to brave it was not very successful. Soon after his arrival he arranged a salle de spectacle inside the city walls, and organized a performance of ‘L’Orphelin de la Chine.’ The Consistory growled out a hostile resolution, and he dropped the enterprise, but proceeded to educate opinion from a safe distance; that is to say, he set up his theatre at Lausanne, and wrote insinuating letters about its management to his friends among the Genevan pastors. We have Gibbon’s testimony to the fact that this theatre ‘refined in a visible degree the manners of Lausanne’; and we have a letter in which Voltaire gives the pastor, Vernés, sound reasons for coming to witness the performances.

‘In your quality of minister of the Gospel,’ he writes, ‘you might very well be present at the rendering of a piece taken from the Gospel itself, and hear the word of God from the mouth of the Marquise de Gentil, Madame d’Aubonne, and113 Madame d’Hermenches, who are as worthy women as the three Magdalens, and more respectable.’ And he adds: ‘At the first representation we had all the ministers of the Holy Gospel in the Town, and all the candidates for Holy Orders.’

It was a pretty good beginning; but there was still to be trouble and controversy before the educational process was completed. In this field, as in the field of theology, d’Alembert, with his encyclopædia article, stirred Camerina. He said that it was a pity that comedy should be neglected in such a centre of civilization, but added that the thing that the Genevans dreaded was not the demoralizing influence of plays, but the dissolute behaviour of players. And he suggested that this difficulty be got over by means of stringent regulations as to the conduct of comedians. By this means, he said, Geneva might have both good morals and good theatres, and derive as much advantage from the one as from the other.

For the moment it looked as though this ingeniously ironical proposal would escape attention, the theologians being too excited about their impugned orthodoxy to notice anything else. Rousseau, however, saw it, and decided to reply to it, and in due course launched his ‘Lettre sur les114 Spectacles.’ Being himself a dramatic author of some note, he was not an ideal champion of the cause which he represented; but in the stir caused by his intervention no one seems to have thought of that. His rhetoric made just as lively an impression as though his actions had always been in keeping with it. The Genevans took sides; and Voltaire—as though for the express purpose of giving them something tangible to fight about—established a theatre close to their gates, outside the jurisdiction of their magistrates, at Tournay.

The battle raged furiously. To this period of Voltaire’s sojourn belong most of his bitter sarcastic sayings about Geneva; his reference to ‘the little church of Calvin, which makes virtue consist in usury and asceticism,’ and his famous epigram containing the lines:

Abuse of Jean Jacques also abounds in his letters at this period. Jean Jacques is a ‘blackguard’; Jean Jacques is in league with two rascally Calvinist priests, and ‘has the insolence’ to say this, that, and the other thing; Jean Jacques is115 ‘valet to Diogenes,’ who ‘has played in vain the part of an addle-pated idiot’; if Jean Jacques comes to Ferney, he shall be stuffed into a barrel, and presumably rolled downhill—which proves, even if it proves nothing else, that, when philosophers fall out, they are apt to wrangle in much the same language as less intellectual people.

Yet, on the whole, Voltaire was steadily winning the victory. The Council, it is true, forbade the citizens to attend his theatre; but little attention was paid to the prohibition, and among those who disregarded it were included many of the Councillors themselves. ‘Being unable,’ as Petit-Senn wittily put it, ‘to remove the danger, they bravely set out to share it’; and the philosopher chuckled:

‘I am civilizing the Allobroges as well as I can. Before I came here the Genevans had nothing to amuse them but bad sermons. I am corrupting all the youth of the pedantic city. I make play-actors of the sons of Syndics. The clergy are furious; but I crush them.’

After a while, moreover, his evangelistic efforts received support from an unexpected quarter. In 1766 there were certain political disturbances in the city, and ambassadors were sent from Berne, Zurich, and Paris, to assist in composing them.116 Voltaire suggested to the French ambassador, M. de Beauteville, that he should request admission to the city for a company of comedians to amuse himself and his suite. Life at Geneva being duller than he liked, M. de Beauteville adopted the suggestion. The comedians were introduced; a theatre was arranged for them; and Voltaire could chuckle again. The divines thundered. ‘Children,’ they declared, ‘will be badly brought up; domestic discords will trouble families more and more; young men and young women will occupy themselves with nothing but comedy and vainglorious display; the love of pleasure, vanity, and pride will be their favourite emotions; indecent familiarities and libertine behaviour will take the place of modesty and chastity.’

But this warning was uttered in vain. Voltaire had triumphed; and though he was now an old man, nearing his eightieth birthday, he enjoyed his triumph to the full. A picture of the patriarch at the play is graphically drawn by a letter-writer of the period:

‘Not the least interesting feature of the spectacle was Voltaire himself, leaning his back against the wings in full view of the audience, applauding like a man possessed; now beating the floor with his117 walking-stick, now interjecting exclamations such as “Couldn’t be better!” “By God, how good!” and now directing the flow of sentiment by lifting his handkerchief to his eyes. So little could he control his enthusiasm that, at the moment when Ninias quits the scene to brave Assue, he ran after Lekain without considering how he was breaking down the illusion, took him by the hand, and kissed him at the back of the stage. It would be difficult to imagine a more ridiculous burlesque; for Voltaire looked like an old man out of a farce, dressed in a bygone fashion, with his stockings rolled up over his knees, and only able to keep himself on his trembling legs with the help of his stick.’

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While Voltaire was vexing the citizens of Geneva, he was also enjoying the veneration of all educated Europe, and even of educated America. He corresponded regularly with at least four reigning sovereigns, to say nothing of men of letters, Cardinals, and Marshals of France; and he kept open house for travellers of mark from every country in the world. Those of the travellers who wrote books never failed to devote a chapter to an account of a visit to Ferney; and from the mass of such descriptions we may select for quotation that written, in the stately style of the period, by Dr. John Moore, author of ‘Zeluco,’ then making the grand tour as tutor to the Duke of Hamilton.

‘The most piercing eyes I ever beheld,’ the doctor writes, ‘are those of Voltaire, now in his eightieth year. His whole countenance is expressive of genius, observation, and extreme sensibility. In the morning he has a look of anxiety and discontent;120 but this gradually wears off, and after dinner he seems cheerful; yet an air of irony never entirely forsakes his face, but may always be observed lurking in his features whether he frowns or smiles.... Composition is his principal amusement. No author who writes for daily bread, no young poet ardent for distinction, is more assiduous with his pen, or more anxious for fresh fame, than the wealthy and applauded Seigneur of Ferney. He lives in a very hospitable manner, and takes care always to have a good cook. He generally has two or three visitors from Paris, who stay with him a month or six weeks at a time. When they go, their places are soon supplied, so that there is a constant rotation of society at Ferney. These, with Voltaire’s own family and his visitors from Geneva, compose a company of twelve or fourteen people, who dine daily at his table, whether he appears or not.... All who bring recommendations from his friends may depend upon being received, if he be not really indisposed. He often presents himself to the strangers who assemble every afternoon in his antechamber, although they bring no particular recommendation.’

A VAUDOISE: SUMMER

It might have been added that, when an interesting stranger who carried no introduction was121 passing through the town, Voltaire sometimes sent for him; but this experiment was not always a success, and failed most ludicrously in the case of Claude Gay, the Philadelphian Quaker, author of some theological works now forgotten, but then of note. The meeting was only arranged with difficulty on the philosopher’s undertaking to put a bridle on his tongue, and say nothing flippant about holy things. He tried to keep his promise, but the temptation was too strong for him. After a while he entangled his guest in a controversy concerning the proceedings of the patriarchs and the evidences of Christianity, and lost his temper on finding that his sarcasms failed to make their usual impression. The member of the Society of Friends, however, was not disconcerted. He rose from his place at the dinner-table, and replied:

‘Friend Voltaire! perhaps thou mayest come to understand these matters rightly; in the meantime, finding I can do thee no good, I leave thee, and so fare thee well.’

And so saying, he walked out and walked back to Geneva, while Voltaire retired in dudgeon to his room, and the company sat expecting something terrible to happen.

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A word, in conclusion, about Coppet!

Necker bought the property from his old banking partner, Thelusson, for 500,000 livres in French money, and retired to live there when the French Revolution drove him out of politics. His daughter, Madame de Staël, inherited it from him, and made it famous.

Not that she loved Switzerland; it would be more true to say that she detested Switzerland. Swiss scenery meant nothing to her. When she was taken for an excursion to the glaciers, she asked what the crime was that she had to expiate by such a punishment; and she could look out on the blue waters of Lake Leman, and sigh for ‘the gutter of the Rue du Bac.’ Even to this day, the Swiss have hardly forgiven her for that, or for speaking of the Canton of Vaud as the country in which124 she had been ‘so intensely bored for such a number of years.’

What she wanted was to live in Paris, to be a leader—or, rather, to be the leader—of Parisian society, to sit in a salon, the admired of all admirers, and to pull the wires of politics to the advantage of her friends. For a while she succeeded in doing this. It was she who persuaded Barras to give Talleyrand his political start in life. But whereas Barras was willing to act on her advice, Napoleon was by no means equally amenable to her influence. Almost from the first he regarded her as a mischief-maker; and when a spy brought him an intercepted letter in which Madame de Staël expressed her hope that none of the old aristocracy of France would condescend to accept appointments in the household of ‘the bourgeois of Corsica,’ he became her personal enemy, and, refusing her permission to live either in the capital or near it, practically compelled her to take refuge in her country seat. Her pleasaunce in that way became her gilded cage.

Perhaps she was not quite so unhappy there as she sometimes represented. If she could not go to Paris, many distinguished and brilliant Parisians came to Coppet, and met there many brilliant125 and distinguished Germans, Genevans, Italians, and Danes. The Parisian salon, reconstituted, flourished on Swiss soil. There visited there, at one time or another, Madame Récamier and Madame Krüdner; Benjamin Constant, who was so long Madame de Staël’s lover; Bonstetten, the Voltairean philosopher; Frederika Brun, the Danish artist; Sismondi, the historian; Werner, the German poet; Karl Ritter, the German geographer; Baron de Voght; Monti, the Italian poet; Madame Vigée Le Brun; Cuvier; and Oelenschlaeger. From almost every one of them we have some pen-and-ink sketch of the life there.

This, for instance, is the scene as it appeared to Madame Le Brun, who came to paint the hostess’s portrait:

‘I paint her in antique costume. She is not beautiful, but the animation of her visage takes the place of beauty. To aid the expression I wished to give her, I entreated her to recite tragic verses while I painted. She declaimed passages from Corneille and Racine.... I find many persons established at Coppet: the beautiful Madame Récamier, the Comte de Sabran, a young English woman, Benjamin Constant, etc. Its society is continually renewed. They come to visit the126 illustrious exile who is pursued by the rancour of the Emperor. Her two sons are now with her, under the instruction of the German scholar Schlegel; her daughter is very beautiful, and has a passionate love of study; she leaves her company free all the morning, but they unite in the evening. It is only after dinner that they can converse with her. She then walks in her salon, holding in her hand a little green branch; and her words have an ardour quite peculiar to her: it is impossible to interrupt her. At these times she produces on one the effect of an improvisatrice.’

And here is a still more graphic description, taken from a letter written to Madame Récamier by Baron de Voght:

‘It is to you that I owe my most amiable reception at Coppet. It is no doubt to the favourable expectations aroused by your friendship that I owe my intimate acquaintance with this remarkable woman. I might have met her without your assistance—some casual acquaintance would no doubt have introduced me—but I should never have penetrated to the intimacy of this sublime and beautiful soul, and should never have known how much better she is than her reputation. She is an angel sent from heaven to reveal the divine goodness127 upon earth. To make her irresistible, a pure ray of celestial light embellishes her spirit and makes her amiable from every point of view.

‘At once profound and light, whether she is discovering a mysterious secret of the soul or grasping the lightest shadow of a sentiment, her genius shines without dazzling, and when the orb of light has disappeared, it leaves a pleasant twilight to follow it.... No doubt a few faults, a few weaknesses, occasionally veil this celestial apparition; even the initiated must sometimes be troubled by these eclipses, which the Genevan astronomers in vain endeavour to predict.

‘My travels so far have been limited to journeys to Lausanne and Coppet, where I often stay three or four days. The life there suits me perfectly; the company is even more to my taste. I like Constant’s wit, Schlegel’s learning, Sabran’s amiability, Sismondi’s talent and character, the simple truthful disposition and just intellectual perceptions of Auguste,B the wit and sweetness of AlbertineC—I was forgetting Bonstetten, an excellent fellow,128 full of knowledge of all sorts, ready in wit, adaptable in character—in every way inspiring one’s respect and confidence.

‘Your sublime friend looks and gives life to everything. She imparts intelligence to those around her. In every corner of the house some one is engaged in composing a great work.... Corinne is writing her delightful letters about Germany, which will no doubt prove to be the best thing she has ever done.

‘The “Shunamitish Widow,” an Oriental melodrama which she has just finished, will be played in October; it is charming. Coppet will be flooded with tears. Constant and Auguste are both composing tragedies; Sabran is writing a comic opera, and Sismondi a history; Schlegel is translating something; Bonstetten is busy with philosophy, and I am busy with my letter to Juliette.’

THE TRICOTEUSE: WINTER

Then, a month later:

‘Since my last letter, Madame de Staël has read us several chapters of her work. Everywhere it bears the marks of her talent. I wish I could persuade her to cut out everything in it connected with politics, and all the metaphors which interfere with its clarity, simplicity and129 accuracy. What she needs to demonstrate is not her republicanism, but her wisdom.... Mlle. Jenner played in one of Werner’s tragedies which was given, last Friday, before an audience of twenty. She, Werner, and Schlegel played perfectly....

‘The arrival in Switzerland of M. Cuvier has been a happy distraction for Madame de Staël; they spent two days together at Geneva, and were well pleased with each other. On her return to Coppet she found Middleton there, and in receiving his confidences forgot her troubles. Yesterday she resumed her work.

‘The poet whose mystical and sombre genius has caused us such profound emotions starts, in a few days’ time, for Italy.

‘I accompanied Corinne to Massot’s. To alleviate the tedium of the sitting, a Mlle. Romilly played pleasantly on the harp, and the studio was a veritable temple of the Muses....

‘Bonstetten gave us two readings of a Memoir on the Northern Alps. It began very well, but afterwards it bored us.... Madame de Staël resumed her reading, and there was no longer any question of being bored. It is marvellous how much she must have read and thought over to be130 able to find the opportunity of saying so many good things. One may differ from her, but one cannot help delighting in her talent....

‘And now here we are at Geneva, trying to reproduce Coppet at the Hôtel des Balances. I am delightfully situated with a wide view over the Valley of Savoy, between the Alps and the Jura.... Yesterday evening the illusion of Coppet was complete. I had been with Madame de Staël to call on Madame Rilliet, who is so charming at her own fireside. On my return I played chess with Sismondi. Madame de Staël, Mlle. Randall, and Mlle. Jenner sat on the sofa chatting with Bonstetten and young Barante. We were as we had always been—as we were in the days that I shall never cease regretting.’

Other descriptions exist in great abundance, but these suffice to serve our purpose. They show us the Coppet salon as it was—pleasant, brilliant, unconventional; something like Holland House, but more Bohemian; something like Harley Street, but more select; something like Gad’s Hill—which it resembled in the fact that the members of the house-parties were expected to spend their mornings at their desks—but on a higher social plane; a centre at once of high thinking131 and frivolous behaviour; of hard work and desperate love-making, which sometimes paved the way to trouble.

If only one had space to go into the details of that love-making! But that is a subject which would need a much larger book than this to do it justice.

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THE END

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