A Little Swiss Sojourn | Page 9

street,
which wandered out into the country on the levels of the Rhone, where
the mountains presently shut in so close that there was scarcely room
for the railway to get through. What finally became of the highway I
don't know. One day I tried to run it down, but after a long chase I was
glad to get myself brought back in a diligence from the next village.
[Illustration: "They helped to make the hay in the marshes"]
The road became a street and ceased to be so with an abruptness that
admitted nothing of suburban hesitation or compromise, and

Villeneuve, as far as it went, was a solid wall of houses on either side.
It was called Villeneuve because it was so very, very old; and in the
level beyond it is placed the scene of the great Helvetian victory over
the Romans, when the Swiss made their invaders pass under the yoke. I
do not know that Villeneuve witnessed that incident, but it looks and
smells old enough to have done so. It is reasonably picturesque in a
semi-Italian, semi-French fashion, but it is to the nose that it makes its
chief appeal. Every house has a cherished manure heap in its back yard,
symmetrically shaped, with the projecting edges of the straw neatly
braided: it is a source of family pride as well as profit. But it is chiefly
the odor of world-old human occupation, otherwise indescribable, that
pervades the air of Villeneuve, and makes the mildest of foreign
sojourners long for the application of a little dynamite to its ancient
houses. Our towns are perhaps the ugliest in the world, but how open to
the sun and wind they are! how free, how pure, how wholesome!
On week-days a cart sometimes passed through Villeneuve with a most
disproportionate banging over the cobble-stones, but usually the walls
reverberated the soft tinkle of cow-bells as the kine wound through
from pasture to pasture and lingered at the fountains. On Sundays the
street was reasonably full of young men in the peg-top trousers which
the Swiss still cling to, making eyes at the girls in the upper windows.
These were the only times when I saw women of any age idle.
Sometimes through the open door I caught a glimpse of a group of
them busy with their work, while a little girl read to them. Once in a
crowded café, where half a hundred men were smoking and drinking
and chattering, the girl who served my coffee put down a volume of
Victor Hugo's poems to bring it. But mostly their literary employments
did not go beyond driving the cows to pasture and washing clothes in
the lake, where they beat the linen with far-echoing blows of their
paddles. They helped to make the hay on the marshes beyond the
village, and they greatly outnumbered the men in the labors of the
vintage. They were seldom pretty either in face or figure; they seemed
all to have some stage of goitre; but their manners were charming, and
their voices, as I have said, angelically sweet. Our pasteur's wife said
that there was a great deal of pauperism in Villeneuve, "because of the
drunkenness of the men and the disorder of the women;" but I saw only

one man drunk in the streets there, and what the disorders of the
women were I don't know. Possibly their labors in the field made them
poor house-keepers, though this is mere conjecture. Divorce is
theoretically easy, but the couple seeking it must go before a magistrate
every four months for two years and insist that they continue to desire
it. This makes it rather uncommon.
[Illustration: Cattle at the Fountains]
If the women were not good-looking, if their lives of toil stunted and
coarsened them, the men, with greater apparent leisure, were no
handsomer. Among the young I noticed the frequency of what may be
called the republican face--thin and aquiline, whether dark or fair. The
Vaudois as I saw them were at no age a merry folk. In the fields they
toiled silently; in the cafés, where they were sufficiently noisy over
their new wine, they talked without laughter, and without the shrugs
and gestures that enliven conversation among other Latin peoples. They
had a hard-favored grimness and taciturnity that with their mountain
scenery reminded me of New England now and again, and gave me the
bewildered sense of having dropped down in some little anterior
America. But there was one thing that marked a great difference from
our civilization, and that was the prevalence of uniforms, for which the
Swiss have the true European fondness. This is natural in a people
whose men all are or have been soldiers; and the war footing on which
the little republic is obliged