A Little Swiss Sojourn | Page 3

with a paper of gingerbread which
they had bought at a jeweller's. I do not know why this artist should
have had it for sale, but he must have had it a long time, for it was
densely inhabited. Afterwards we found two shops in Villeneuve where
they had the most delicious petits gâteaux, fresh every day, and nothing
but the mania for unattainable grapes prevented the first explorers from

seeing them.
In the mean time the party of the second part had found the pension--a
pretty stone villa overlooking the lake, under the boughs of tall
walnut-trees, on the level of a high terrace. Laurel and holly hemmed it
in on one side, and southward spread a pleasant garden full of roses and
imperfectly ripening fig-trees. In the rear the vineyards climbed the
mountains in irregular breadths to the belt of walnuts, beyond which
were only forests and pastures. I heard the roar of the torrent that
foamed down the steep; the fountain plashed under the group of laurels
at the kitchen door; the roses dripped all round the house; and the lake
lapped its shores below. Decidedly there was a sense of wet.
The house, which had an Italian outside covered with jasmine and
wistarias, confessed the North within. There was a huge hall stove, not
yet heated, but on the hearth of the pleasant salon an acceptable fire of
little logs was purring. Beside it sat a lady reading, and at a table her
daughter was painting flowers. A little Italian, a very little English, a
good deal of French, helped me to understand that mademoiselle the
landlady was momentarily absent, that the season was exceptionally
bad, and that these ladies were glad of the sunshine which we were
apparently bringing with us. They spoke with those Suissesse voices,
which are the sweetest and most softly modulated voices in the world,
whether they come from the throat of peasant or of lady, and can make
a transaction in eggs and butter in the market-place as musical as
chanted verse. To the last these voices remained a delight, and the
memory of them made most Italian women's voices a pang when we
heard them afterwards.
V
At first we were the only people in the house besides these Swiss ladies
and their son and brother, but later there came two ladies from
Strasburg, and with them our circle was complete at the table and
around the evening lamp in the drawing-room. I am bound to say for
the circle, outside of ourselves, that it was a cultivated and even
intellectual company, with traits that provoked unusual sympathy and
interest. But those friendly people are quite their own property, and I

have no intention of compelling them to an involuntary celebrity in
these pages, much as I should like to impart their quality to my
narrative. In the Strasbourgeoises we encountered again that pathos of
an insulted and down-trodden nationality which had cast its melancholy
over our Venice of Austrian days. German by name and by origin,
these ladies were intensely French in everything else. They felt
themselves doomed to exile in their own country, they abhorred their
Prussian masters, and they had no name for Bismarck that was bad
enough. Our Swiss, indeed, hated him almost as bitterly. Their
sympathies had been wholly with the French, and they could not
repress a half-conscious dread of his principle of race nationality,
which would be fatal to Switzerland, one neither in race nor religion,
but hitherto indivisible in her ancient freedom. While he lives this fear
can never die in Swiss hearts, for they know that if he will, he can, in a
Europe where he is the only real power.
Mademoiselle sat at the chief place of the table, and led the talk,
imparting to it a flavor of humorous good sense very characteristic. The
villa had been her father's country-house, and it abounded in a scholar's
accumulations of old books in divers languages. She herself knew
literature widely in the better way that it was once read. The memories
of many years spent in Florence made common Italian ground for us,
and she spoke English perfectly.
As I wish to give a complete notion of our household, so far as it may
be honestly set down, I will add that the domestics were three. Two of
them, the cook and the housemaid, were German Swiss, of middle class,
who had taken service to earn what money they could, but mainly to
learn French, after the custom of their country, where the young people
of a French or Italian canton would in like manner resort to a German
province. The third was Louis, a native, who spoke his own patois, and
found it sufficient for the expression of his ideas. He