The Spell of Switzerland Part 5

He soon made the acquaintance of Georges Deyverdun, a young man a little older than himself, of high character and aristocratic connections. Deyverdun's early diaries are extant and often mention walking with M. de Guiben or de Guibon. They became life-long friends.

A book which had great influence on Gibbon was a "Logic" written by Professor Jean Pierre de Crousaz, who, after a life of great honours and wide experiences, had died three years before Gibbon's arrival at Lausanne.

Voltaire wrote him: "You have made Lausanne the temple of the Muses and you have more than once caused me to say that, if I had been able to leave France, I would have withdrawn to Lausanne."

De Crousaz's "Logic" fortified Gibbon to engage in a battle for his faith. He had lively discussions with Pavilliard, but gradually "the various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream;" and after a full conviction, on Christmas-day, 1754, he received the sacrament in the church of Lausanne.

Gibbon's "return to the light" caused a lively joy in the a.s.sembly which voted that the Dean should congratulate him on such a sensible act. He was examined and found "perfectly enlightened upon religion and remarkably well informed on all and each of the articles separating them from the Church of Rome."

Whether Gibbon may not have had a weather eye open to material benefits at home is a question which falls with several other of his expressions of opinion. He had a wealthy aunt who was much offended by his defection from her Church. Only a month later Pastor Pavilliard wrote this Mrs. Porten:--

"I hope, Madame, that you will acquaint Mr. Gibbon with your satisfaction and restore him to your affection, which, though his errors may have shaken, they have not, I am sure, destroyed. As his father has allowed him but the bare necessities, I dare beg of you to grant him some token of your satisfaction."

In the Autumn of 1755 Gibbon and his guardian made "a voyage" through Switzerland by way of Yverdun, Neuchatel, Bienne, Soleure, Bale, Baden, Zurich, Lucerne and Bern. He kept a journal of his experiences, written in not very accurate French. He was more interested in castles and history, in persons and customs than in scenery; indeed, he scarcely mentions the magnificence of the mountains, but he devotes considerable s.p.a.ce to the linen-market of Langental and the surprising wealth of the peasantry, some, he says, having as much as six hundred thousand francs. He explained it by the profits from their linen and their cattle and especially by their great thrift. Fathers brought up their children to work and to be contented with their state in life--simple peasants; they wore fine linen and fine cloth, but wore peasants' clothes; they had fine horses, but plowed with them; and they preferred that their daughters marry persons in their own condition rather than those who might bring them t.i.tles.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAUSANNE AND THE SAVOY MOUNTAINS.]

On reaching Bern he gives no description of the city but elaborately explains the curious system of government which obtained there. The inhabitants, he thought, were inclined to be proud, but he found a philosophical cause for it, and wondered that more of the natives were not guilty of that sin. He thought the environs of Bern had not a cheerful appearance, but were on the contrary rather wild.

Soon after his return began the one romantic episode in Gibbon's life--his love affair with Suzanne Curchod, daughter of the Protestant pastor at Cra.s.sy or Cra.s.sier, a village on the lower slopes of the Jura, between Lausanne and Geneva. Gibbon himself tells what she was: "The wit, the beauty, the erudition of Mlle. Curchod were the theme of universal applause. The report of such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in manners; and the first sudden emotion was fortified by the habits and knowledge of a more familiar acquaintance."

She had fair hair, and soft blue eyes which, when her pretty mouth smiled, lighted up with peculiar charm; she was rather tall and well proportioned; an extremely attractive girl.

The young men and women, particularly of La Cite, had formed a literary society, at first called l'Academie de la Poudriere but afterwards reorganized and renamed "from the age of its members" La Societe du Printemps.

Suzanne was the president of this society. They used to discuss such questions as these: "Does an element of mystery make love more agreeable?" "Can there be a friends.h.i.+p between a man and a woman in the same way as between two women or two men?" and the like.

Suzanne seems to have been inclined to treat young theological students in somewhat the same way as fishermen play salmon when they are "killing" them. Her friends expostulated with her on her cruelty.

Gibbon, who had the reputation of being the son of a wealthy Englishman, caused her to forget the sighing students. At that time he must have been an attractive youth--that is, if we can put any confidence in her own description of him. After praising his beautiful hair and aristocratic hand, his air of good-breeding, and his intellectual face and his vivacity of expression, she crowns her encomium by declaring that he understood the respect due to women, and that his courtesy was easy without verging on familiarity. She adds: "He dances moderately well."

They became affianced lovers. Years afterwards, Gibbon in his autobiography declared that he had no cause to blush at recollecting the object of his choice. "Though my love," he says, "was disappointed of success, I am rather proud that I was once capable of feeling such a pure and exalted sentiment. The personal attractions of Mademoiselle Susan Curchod were embellished by the virtues and talents of her mind.

Her fortune was humble, but her family was respectable."

He visited at her parents' home--"happy days," he called them--in the mountains of Burgundy, and the connection was honourably encouraged.

She seems to have made it a condition of her engagement that he should always live in Switzerland. When he returned to England in 1758 he found that his father opposed the match, and evidently his love speedily cooled. The absence of letters does not necessarily prove that none were written, but certainly there was no lively correspondence, and at length, after a lapse of four years, he calmly informs the young lady that he must renounce her for ever, and he lays the blame on his father, who, he says, considered it cruelty to desert him and send him prematurely to the grave, and cowardice to trample underfoot his duty to his country.

Considering the fact that Father Gibbon was busily engaged in dissipating his fortune, and had endured his son's absence for many years, this excuse strikes one as decidedly thin. At the end of his letter of renunciation he desires to be remembered to Suzanne's father and mother. Pastor Curchod had been dead two years, and Suzanne was then living in Geneva, where she was supporting herself and her mother by teaching.

Just ten years after his first arrival at Lausanne, Gibbon made a visit there on that memorable journey to Rome which resulted in the writing of his history. He made no attempt to see Suzanne, who seems to have deceived herself with the hope that his indifference was only imaginary. She wrote him that for five years she had sacrificed to this chimera by her "unique and inconceivable behavior." She begged him on her knees to convince her of her madness in loving him and to end her uncertainty.

She got a letter from him that brought her to her senses. She replied that she had sacrificed her happiness not to him but, rather, to an imaginary being which could have existed only in a silly, romantic brain like hers, and, having had her eyes opened, he resumed his place as a mere man with all other men; indeed, although she had so idealized him that he seemed to be the only man she could have ever loved, he was now least attractive to her because he bore the least possible resemblance to her chimerical ideal.

Gibbon chronicled in his diary in September, 1763, the receipt of one of Suzanne's letters, and in questionable French he called her "a dangerous and artificial girl" ("_une fille dangereux et artificielle_") and adds:--"This singular affair in all its details has been very useful to me; it has opened my eyes to the character of women and will long serve as a safeguard against the seductions of love."

Suzanne was no Ca.s.sandra, either; the very next year she married the young Genevan banker, Jacques Necker, then minister for the Republic of Geneva at Paris.

About two years later Gibbon wrote to his friend, J. B. Holroyd:--

"The Curchod (Madame Necker) I saw in Paris. She was very fond of me, and the husband particularly civil. Could they insult me more cruelly?

Ask me every evening to supper; go to bed and leave me alone with his wife. What an impertinent security! It is making an old lover of mighty little consequence. She is as handsome as ever; seems pleased with her fortune rather than proud of it."

The Platonic friends.h.i.+p was never again ruffled; if anything it grew more confidential and almost sentimental. The Neckers visited Gibbon in London more than once, and, when political and financial storms drove them from Paris, Gibbon found their Barony of Copet (as he spells it--he was not very strong in spelling!) a most delightful harbour, though he was too indolent to go there very often. This was in after years, when Lausanne again became his home.

He had published the first volume of his history of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and had immediately leaped into fame. The same year Necker was made Director of the Treasury of France, and began that remarkable career of success and disappointment. Perhaps his greatest glory was his daughter, afterwards so well known as Madame de Stael, whose loyalty to him in all the vicissitudes of his life was one of her loveliest characteristics.

Gibbon was back in Lausanne again in 1783; he seems to have reckoned time in l.u.s.trums, his dates there being 1753, 1763 and 1783, and he returned to London in 1793 where he died the following year, just a century after Voltaire was born. He certainly had pleasant memories of Lausanne and, after losing his one public office, and the salary which came in so handy, he formed what his friends called the mad project of taking up his permanent residence there. This came about through his old-time friend, Georges Deyverdun, who through the death of relatives and particularly of an aristocratic old aunt, had come into possession of the estate known as La Grotte, one of the most interesting historical buildings in the town, with memories covering centuries of ecclesiastical history. He and Deyverdun formed a project whereby the two should combine their housekeeping resources and live in a sort of mutually dependent independence.

Gibbon had a very pretty wit. A year or two after he had taken this decisive step, had bade a long farewell to the "_fumum et opes strepitumque Romae_," and had sold his property and moved with his books to Lausanne, the report reached London that the celebrated Mr.

Gibbon, who had retired to Switzerland to finish his valuable history, was dead. Gibbon wrote his best friend, Holroyd, who was now Lord Sheffield:--"There are several weighty reasons which would incline me to believe that the intelligence may be true. Primo, It must one day be true; and therefore may very probably be so at present. Secundo, We may always depend on the impartiality, accuracy and veracity of an English newspaper."--And so he goes on.

In another letter, after speaking of his old enemy, the gout, and a.s.suring Sheffield that he had never regretted his exile, he pays his respects to his fellow-countrymen: "The only disagreeable circ.u.mstance," he says, "is the increase of a race of animals with which this country has been long infested, and who are said to come from an island in the Northern Ocean. I am told, but it seems incredible, that upwards of forty thousand English, masters and servants, are now absent on the Continent."

Byron, a third of a century later, had the same ill opinion of his fellow-countrymen:--"Switzerland," he wrote Moore, "is a curst selfish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic regions of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants and still less their English visitors."

In a somewhat different spirit Lord Houghton pays his respects to the throng of foreigners who find pleasure and recreation and health in Switzerland. He says:--

"Within the Switzer's varied land When Summer chases high the snow, You'll meet with many a youthful band Of strangers wandering to and fro: Through hamlet, town and healing bath They haste and rest as chance may call; No day without its mountain-path, No path without its waterfall.

"They make the hours themselves repay However well or ill be shared, Content that they should wing their way, Unchecked, unreckoned, uncompared: For though the hills unshapely rise And lie the colours poorly bright,-- They mould them by their cheerful eyes And paint them with their spirits light.

"Strong in their youthfulness they use The energies their souls possess; And if some wayward scene refuse To pay its part of loveliness,-- Onward they pa.s.s nor less enjoy For what they leave;--and far from me Be every thought that would destroy A charm of that simplicity!"

Gibbon and Deyverdun were remarkably congenial; interested in the same studies and the same people. Which was the more indolent of the two it would be hard to say. But by this time Gibbon had grown into the comically grotesque figure which somehow adds to his fascination. He had become excessively stout; his little "potato-nose" was lost between his bulbous cheeks; his chin was bolstered up by the flying b.u.t.tress of much superfluous throat. He had red hair. A contemporary poem describes him:--

"His person looked as funnily obese As if a paG.o.d, growing large as man, Had rashly waddled off its chimney-piece, To visit a Chinese upon a fan.

Such his exterior; curious 'twas to scan!

And oft he rapped his snuff-box, c.o.c.ked his snout, And ere his polished periods he began Bent forward, stretching his forefinger out, And talked in phrases round as he was round about."

Early in his career Gibbon was rather careless in his dress, but he could not afford not to be in style as the lion of Lausanne, and he had any number of changes of apparel. He had a _valet de chambre_, a cook who was not put out if he had forty, or even fifty, guests at a dinner, and who received wages of twelve or fifteen livres a month--a little more than a dollar a week, but money went farther in those primitive days--he had a gardener, a coachman and two other men.

Altogether he paid out for service a little more than eleven hundred livres a year. He spent generously, also, for various magazines and other periodicals, French and English, and he was constantly adding to his library. After the French Revolution, when many French emigres came to Lausanne, there were loud complaints at the increased cost of living.

In 1788 Gibbon required a new maid-servant and his faithful friend, Madame de Severin, recommended one to him in these terms:--

"She will make confitures, compotes, winter-salads, dried preserves in summer; she will take charge of the fine linen and will herself look after the kitchen service. She will keep everything neat and orderly in the minutest details. She will take care of the silver in the English fas.h.i.+on; she can do the ironing; she can set the table in ornamental style. You must entrust everything to her (except the wine) by count; so many candles, so many wax-tapers in fifty-pound boxes; so much tea, coffee and sugar. The oftener the counting is made, the more careful they are; three minutes every Sunday will suffice. I have excepted nothing of what can be expected of a housekeeper. She will look after the poultry-yard. She will make the ices and all the pastry and all the bonbons, if desired, but it is more economical to buy the latter."

Gibbon was generous to others; he subscribed to various charities and he paid all the expenses of an orphan boy, Samuel Pache.

Lord Sheffield's daughter, Maria Holroyd, could not understand why he should prefer Lausanne to London. She declared that there was not a single person there whom he could meet on a footing of equality or on his height; she thought it was a proof of the power of flattery. But there were always distinguished visitors at Lausanne, and Gibbon knew them all. His letters are full of references to the celebrities whom he is cultivating.

He writes to Lady Sheffield to tell her how he "walked on our terrace"

with Mr. Tissot, the celebrated physician; Mr. Mercier, the author of the "Tableau de Paris;" the Abbe Raynal, author of "L'Histoire Philosophique des Etabliss.e.m.e.nts et du Commerce des Europeens dans les deux Indes," the clever free-thinker with whom Dr. Johnson refused to shake hands because he was an infidel; M. and Mme. Necker; the Abbe de Bourbon, a natural son of Louis XV; the hereditary Prince of Brunswick; Prince Henry of Prussia; "and a dozen counts, barons and extraordinary persons, among whom was a natural son of the Empress of Russia."

In London, great as he was (even though he was a Lieutenant Colonel Commandant and Member of Parliament), he had found himself eclipsed by larger and brighter planets; in Lausanne he was the bright particular star. "I expected," he says, "to have enjoyed, with more freedom and solitude, myself, my friend, my books and this delicious paradise; but my position and character make me here a sort of public character and oblige me to see and be seen."

He used to give great dinners. Thus, in 1792, the beautiful and witty d.u.c.h.ess of Devons.h.i.+re made a visit to Lausanne and Gibbon gave her a dinner with fourteen covers. The year before he gave a ball at which at midnight one hundred and fifty guests sat down to supper. He was well pleased with it and boasted that "the music was good, the lights splendid, the refreshments abundant." He himself went to bed at two o'clock in the morning and left the others to dance till seven. It was as common in those days, even in Calvinistic Lausanne, to dance all night as it is now in stylish society. He had a.s.semblies every Sunday evening, and rarely did a day pa.s.s without his either dining out or entertaining guests at his own hospitable board.

In a pleasure-loving community like that of Lausanne eating was one of the chief employments of life. On their menus they had all kinds of game, for hunting was one of the recreations of the gentry of the lake sh.o.r.e, and they brought home hares, partridges, quails, wood-c.o.c.k from the Jura, heath-hens, roe-bucks and that royal game, the wild-boar, not to speak of the red foxes and an occasional wolf or bear.