The Spell of Switzerland Part 4

The superiority of the Protestant debaters resulted in converting some of the opposite party, and the establishment of the Academy of Lausanne was the direct outcome of this debate, which was declared in all respects favourable to the Reformers.

The day after the decision was rendered, a crowd of bigots broke into the cathedral, overturned the altars and the crucifix, and desecrated the image of the Virgin. Workmen were paid for fifteen days at the rate of four and one sixth sous a day to clear Notre Dame of its altar-stones. And yet Jean Francois Naegueli (or Nageli), when he took possession of Lausanne, had promised to protect the two Christian faiths.

It is a question whether one would rather live in those days under the easy-going regime of the superst.i.tious Catholics or under that of the stern, forbidding bigotry of the Protestants. Geneva could not endure the latter and banished Farel and Calvin two years later; but back they came and established the tyranny more solidly than ever. Calvin drove Castellio out of Geneva, caused Jacques Gruet to be tortured and put to death, mainly because he danced at a wedding and wore new-fangled breeches, and had Servetus burned at the stake. It was a cruel age.

A cloud evidently pa.s.sed over the face of the sun; the colours in the great rose window grew almost pallid. We left the church and again stood on the terrace.

"We are just about one hundred and fifty-two meters above the lake,"

said Will. "Do you know, in the harbour of Geneva there are two big rocks which the early inhabitants of this region used to wors.h.i.+p. They are granite, or protogen, and must have been brought down from some distant mountain, probably from the Saint-Bernard, by a glacier. In the old Roman days they were wors.h.i.+pped. On the top of one of them is a bronze plaque, put there in 1820 by General Dufour, and regarded as the standard, or rather the base, for all Swiss hypsometry. If you want to know how high above the level of the sea the Dent du Midi is, you will find it on the map 'R. P. N.' plus its height above the plaque. For instance the Cathedral here is R. P. N. plus a little more than one hundred and fifty-two meters. But the queer thing is that no two people who have tried to correct or verify General Dufour's reckoning of the height of the plaque have been able to agree. General Dufour made it a fraction over three hundred and seventy-six meters and a half, which would give the level of the lake as three hundred and seventy-five meters; but it has since been corrected to a bit less than three hundred and seventy-three meters--a loss of almost ten feet."

"What does that mean--that the scientists blundered?"

"It looks to me as if the whole level of the valley had perhaps settled. Every one knows that it is changing all the time--but come on, I want you to see the cathedral from the Place de Saint Laurent.

It isn't far from here."

When we got there Will stopped and said:

"There! Isn't that worth coming for? I wonder if there is any other cathedral in the world that has a more magnificent site."

We paused for some time, looking up at its solid bulk, which seemed to touch the gathering clouds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CATHEDRAL, LAUSANNE.]

"I brought you here especially," continued Will, "because one of Switzerland's few poets praises its aspect from this spot. He says something like this: 'It is a great crag fixt there. Contemplate it when heavy clouds are pa.s.sing over. Standing below it and letting your eye follow the radiant field which creeps up to its flanks, you imagine that it grows larger amid the wild clouds which it tears as they fly over, leaving it unshaken. You might believe yourself in some Alpine valley, over which towers a solitary peak while around it cl.u.s.ter the mists driven by the wind.' He grows still more enthusiastic at the beauty of it when the chestnut-trees are in bloom, contrasting with the violet roofs below and surrounded by the azure aureole of the lake and the mountains and he speaks of its 'graceful energy' against the golden background."

"Who is the poet?" I asked.

"Oh, Juste Olivier. I will introduce you to him some day--I mean to his works. He himself died in 1876, if I am not mistaken. I have the two volumes which his friends edited as a sort of memorial to him."

"I didn't suppose there were any Swiss poets--I mean great Swiss poets. Of course I know Hebel--"

"Yes, back in Gibbon's time, the society founded by his friend Deyverdun discussed the question, 'Why hasn't the Pays de Vaud produced any poets?' Juste Olivier deliberately set to work to fill the gap."

"Did he succeed? He is not much known outside of Switzerland, is he?"

"Probably not; you shall see for yourself. But I remember one stanza on Liberty which has a fine swing to it--

"'La Liberte depuis les anciens ages Jusqu'a ceux ou flottent nos destins Aime a poser ses pieds nus et sauvages Sur les gazons qu'ombragent nos sapins.

La, sa voix forte eclate et s'a.s.socie Avec la foudre et ses roulements sourds.

Nous qui t'aimons, Helvetie, Helvetie, Nous qui t'aimons, nous t'aimerons toujours.'

"That is a fine figure--Liberty loving to set her foot on the soil shaded by the Swiss pines,--and so is that of Helvetia mingling her voice with the rolling of the thunder. That stanza has been praised as one of the finest of the century."

As we leisurely strolled homeward my nephew called my attention to the northern slope of the Flon, just beyond the magnificent bridge, Chauderon-Montbenon. "That," he remarked, "is called Boston."

"Why is that?"

"I don't know, unless to commemorate the fact that Lausanne is built on three hills. The north part was called La Cite, that to the south was le Bourg--the Rue du Bourg was the court end of the town, and had especial privileges--and the western side was called Saint-Laurent. It was only a little town when Gibbon came here to live; but it had unusually good society and there was a great deal of wealth, as you can imagine from the fine old houses."

"Where did they get their money?"

"A good many of them through fortunate speculation. The men used to seek service in foreign countries. It is surprising how many of them became tutors to royal or princely families, or, if they were trained in the profession of arms, got commissions as officers in Russia, France, Spain and Holland. Some of them even went to India and America. A good many of them returned, if they returned at all, with handsome fortunes."

"Isn't it strange that a country which is always supposed to stand for liberty and patriotism should, next the Hessians, furnish the very best type of the mercenary! For a hundred years the French kings had to protect themselves with a Swiss guard, and the Pope's fence of six-footers have been recruited from Lucerne and the Inner Cantons during more than four centuries."

"Do you remember what Rousseau said about mercenary military service?

It runs something like this: 'I think every one owes his life to his country; but it is wrong to go over to princes who have no claim on you, and still worse to sell yourself and turn the n.o.blest profession in the world into that of a vile mercenary.' But Lausanne's best contribution to foreign countries was education. The Academy, or college as they used to call it, attracted many people from abroad.

Ever since it was founded--and the Protestants deserve that credit--it provided remarkably good professors and lecturers. The old families that had country estates got into the habit of spending their winters in town. They were wonderfully interrelated and many of them, through marriage, had several baronies. They were enormously proud of their t.i.tles and position. I have recently been reading Rousseau--especially his 'Nouvelle Helose'--you know about a year ago they were celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of his birth,--and I was struck with what he makes My Lord Edward Bomston say about the petty aristocracy of this Pays de Vaud: 'Why does this n.o.blesse of which you are so proud claim such honors? What does it do for the glory of the country or for the happiness of the human race? Mortal enemy of laws and of liberty, what has it ever produced except tyrannical power and the oppression of the people? Do you dare in a republic boast of a condition destructive of the virtues and of humanity, a condition which produces slavery and makes one blush at being a man?'"

"It seems to have been a regular feudalism."

"It was. Gibbon was much struck by the unfairness of the regime which obtained in his day, and he speaks somewhere of three hundred families born to command and of a hundred thousand, of equally decent descent, doomed to subjection. They used to have a queer custom here, for a man, when he married, to add the wife's name to his own...."

"Just as in Spain," I interpolated.

"Yes, only hyphenated. They worked the particle _de_ to death. As almost every one of the great families was related more or less closely to every other, and the estates were constantly pa.s.sing from one branch to another, a man would at one time be Baron de Something-or-other, and the next year, perhaps, would appear with quite a different appellation. For instance, there was Madame Secretan, whose family name was taken from the Seigneurie d'Arnex-sur-Orbe. Antoine d'Arnay--he spelt his name phonetically--was Seigneur de Montagny-la-Corbe, co-seigneur de Luxurier, Seigneur de Saint-Martin-du-Chene and Seigneur de Mollondin. And the husband of the famous Madame de Warens appears under several aliases. It is very confusing.

"When the n.o.bles returned with hundreds of thousands of francs," he added, "they spent their money royally. Many of these houses are filled with splendid carved furniture and tapestries. As long as Bern was suzerain of Vaud, and governed it, there was small chance for Government service and this state of things led to a peculiar atmosphere--one of frivolity and pleasure-seeking. The men hadn't anything to do except to amuse themselves and few were the years when some foreign prince was not studying here and spending any amount of money in dinners and dances."

"Yes," said I, "considering that Lausanne was in the very centre of Calvinism, it must have been pretty gay. I suppose the influence of France was even stronger than that of Geneva or Bern."

By this time we had reached our own street and were climbing the flight of steps that led to the handsomely arched portal.

CHAPTER V

GIBBON AT LAUSANNE

The next day it rained. The whole valley was filled with mist. The _sudois_, as they call the southwest wind, moaned about the windows.

But I did not care; explorations or excursions were merely postponed.

There would be plenty of time, and it was a pleasure to spend a quiet day in the library. We devoted it mainly to Gibbon and old Lausanne--that is, the Lausanne of Gibbon's day, and, before we were tired of the subject, I think we had visualized the vain, witty, delightful, pompous, lazy, learned exile who so loved his "f.a.n.n.y Lausanne," as he liked to call the little town.

When he first arrived there from England, he was only sixteen--a nervous, impressionable, ill-educated youth. He had been converted to Roman Catholicism, and, glorying in it with all the ardour of an acolyte, he was taken seriously by the college authorities at Oxford and expelled. His father had to do something with him; he was just about to get married for the second time and, as the boy would be in his way, he decided to "rusticate" him in Lausanne.

It was arranged that young Gibbon should be put into the care of the worthy Pastor Daniel Pavilliard, a rather unusually broad-minded, sweet-tempered, and highly educated professor, the secretary and librarian of the Academy, afterwards its princ.i.p.al. He was then probably living in the parsonage of the First Deacon in the Rue de la Cite derriere, now a police-station, a picturesque house with high roof, with long vaulted corridors and wide galleries in the rear, from which could be seen the Alps beyond the Flon and the heights to the southeast of the city.

The plan of giving the boy a good cold bath of Presbyterianism worked better than would have been believed possible. Like a piece of hot iron dipped into ice-water he came out quite changed. He hissed and sizzled for a while, and then hardened into a free-thinker. It is odd how people can throw off a form of religion as if it were a cloak.

It was a trying experience for the lad. Madame Pavilliard, whose name was Carbonella, did not pattern after her husband. According to Gibbon she was narrow, mean and grasping, disagreeable and lacking in refinement. He could not speak French; they could not speak English.

He gives a pathetic account of his misery; telling how he was obliged to exchange an elegant apartment in Magdalen College "for a narrow, gloomy street, the most infrequented of an unhandsome town, for an old inconvenient house and for a small chamber, ill-contrived and ill-furnished, which at the approach of winter, instead of a companionable fire, must be warmed by the dull, invisible heat of a stove." His earliest entry in the diary which he kept said:--"First aspect horrid--house, slavery, ignorance, exile." He felt that his "condition seemed as dest.i.tute of hope as it was devoid of pleasure."

After a while, however, his natural good spirits rallied. He wrote his father: "The people here are extremely civil to strangers, and endeavor to make this town as agreeable as possible."

He began to join the young people in making excursions, and he wrote home asking permission to take riding lessons. Pastor Pavilliard encouraged him to join in the gayeties of the town. There were dances; there were concerts with violins, harpsichords, flutes and singing.