The Car That Went Abroad: Motoring Through the Golden Age

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"And suppose I should send a million of my soldiers against you. What would you do then?"

"We should fire two shots apiece, Your Majesty."

In every Swiss town there are regular market days, important events where one may profitably observe the people. The sale of vegetables and flowers must support many families. In each town there is an open square, which twice a week is picturesquely crowded, and there one may buy everything to eat and many things to wear; also, the wherewith to improve the home, the garden, and even the mind; for besides the garden things there are stalls of second-hand books, hardware, furniture, and general knick-knacks. Flanking the streets are displays of ribbons, laces, hats, knitted things, and general dry-goods miscellany; also antiques, the scrapings of many a Swiss cupboard and corner.

But it is in the open square itself that the greater market blooms – really blooms, for, in season, the vegetables are truly floral in their rich vigor, and among them are pots and bouquets of the posies that the Swiss, like all Europeans, so dearly love. Most of the flower and vegetable displays are down on the ground, arranged in baskets or on bits of paper, and form a succession of gay little gardens, ranged in long narrow avenues of color and movement, a picture of which we do not grow weary. Nor of the setting – the quaint tile-roofed buildings; the blue lake, with its sails and swans and throng of wheeling gulls; the green hills; the lofty snow-capped mountains that look down from every side. How many sights those ancient peaks have seen on this same square! – markets and military, battles and buffoonery. There are no battles to-day, but the Swiss cadets use it for a drill ground, and every little while lightsome shows and merry-go-rounds establish themselves in one end of it, and the little people skip about, and go riding around and around to the latest ragtime, while the mountains look down with their large complaisance, just as they watched the capering ancestors of these small people, ages and ages ago; just as they will watch their light-footed descendants for a million years, maybe.

The market is not confined entirely to the square. On its greater days, when many loads of wood and hay crowd one side of it, it overflows into the streets. Around a floral fountain may be found butter, eggs, and cheese – oh, especially cheese, the cheese of Gruyère, with every size and pattern of holes, in any quantity, cut and weighed by a handsome apple-faced woman who seems the living embodiment of the cheese industry. I have heard it said – this was in America – that the one thing not to be obtained in Switzerland is Swiss cheese. The person who conceived that smartness belongs with the one who invented the "intelligence" epigram.

On the market days before Christmas our square had a different look. The little displays were full of greenery, and in the center of the market place there had sprung up a forest of Christmas trees. They were not in heaps, lying flat; but each, mounted on a neat tripod stand, stood upright, as if planted there. They made a veritable Santa Claus forest, and the gayly dressed young people walking among them, looking and selecting, added to this pretty sight.

The Swiss make much of Christmas. Their shop windows are overflowing with decorations and attractive things. Vevey is "Chocolate Town." Most of the great chocolate factories of Europe are there, and at all holiday seasons the grocery and confectionary windows bear special evidence of this industry. Chocolate Santa Clauses – very large – chickens, rabbits, and the like – life size; also trees, groups, set pieces, ornaments – the windows are wildernesses of the rich brown confection, all so skillfully modeled and arranged.

The toy windows, too, are fascinating. You would know at once that you were looking into a Swiss toy window, from the variety of carved bears; also, from the toy châteaux – very fine and large, with walled courts, portcullises, and battlements – with which the little Swiss lad plays war. The dolls are different, too, and the toy books – all in French. But none of these things were as interesting as the children standing outside, pointing at them and discussing them – so easily, so glibly – in French. How little they guessed my envy of them – how gladly I would buy out that toy window for, say, seven dollars, and trade it to them for their glib unconsciousness of gender and number and case.

On the afternoon before Christmas the bells began. From the high mountainsides, out of deep ravines that led back into the hinterland, came the ringing. The hills seemed full of bells – a sound that must go echoing from range to range, to the north and to the south, traveling across Europe with the afternoon. Then, on Christmas Day, the trees. In every home and school and hotel they sparkled. We attended four in the course of the day, one, a very gorgeous one in the lofty festooned hall of a truly grand hotel, with tea served and soft music stealing from some concealed place – a slow strain of the "Tannenbaum," which is like our "Maryland," only more beautiful – and seemed to come from a source celestial. And when one remembered that in every corner of Europe something of the kind was going on, and that it was all done in memory and in honor of One who, along dusty roadsides and in waste places, taught the doctrine of humility, one wondered if the world might not be worth saving, after all.

Chapter XVIII

THE LITTLE TOWN OF VEVEY

It would seem to be the French cantons along the Lake of Geneva (or Léman) that most attract the deliberate traveler. The north shore of this lake is called the Swiss Riviera, for it has a short, mild winter, with quick access to the mountaintops. But perhaps it is the schools, the pensionnats, that hold the greater number. The whole shore of the Lake of Geneva is lined with them, and they are filled with young persons of all ages and nations, who are there mainly to learn French, though incidentally, through that lingual medium, other knowledge is acquired. Some, indeed, attend the fine public schools, where the drill is very thorough, even severe. Parents, as well as children, generally attend school in Switzerland – visiting parents, I mean. They undertake French, which is the thing to do, like mountain climbing and winter sports. Some buy books and seclude their struggles; others have private lessons; still others openly attend one of the grown-up language schools, or try to find board at French-speaking pensions. Their progress and efforts form the main topic of conversation. In a way it makes for a renewal of youth.

We had rested at Vevey, that quiet, clean little picture-city, not so busy and big as Lausanne, or so grand and stylish as Montreux, but more peaceful than either, and, being more level, better adapted for motor headquarters. Off the main street at Montreux, the back or the front part of a car is always up in the air, and it has to be chained to the garage. We found a level garage in Vevey, and picked out pensionnats for Narcissa and the Joy, and satisfactory quarters for ourselves. Though still warm and summer-like, it was already late autumn by the calendar, and not a time for long motor adventures. We would see what a Swiss winter was like. We would wrestle with the French idiom. We would spend the months face to face with the lake, the high-perched hotels and villages, the snow-capped, cloud-capped hills.

Probably everybody has heard of Vevey, but perhaps there are still some who do not know it by heart, and will be glad of a word or two of details. Vevey has been a place of habitation for a long time. A wandering Asian tribe once came down that way, rested a hundred years or so along the Léman shore, then went drifting up the Rhone and across the Simplon to make trouble for Rome. But perhaps there was no Rome then; it was a long time ago, and it did not leave any dates, only a few bronze implements and trifles to show the track of the storm. The Helvetians came then, sturdy and warlike, and then the Romans, who may have preserved traditions of the pleasant land from that first wandering tribe.

Cæsar came marching down the Rhone and along this waterside, and his followers camped in the Vevey neighborhood a good while – about four centuries, some say. Certain rich Romans built their summer villas in Switzerland, and the lake shore must have had its share. But if there were any at Vevey, there is no very positive trace of them now. In the depths of the Castle of Chillon, they show you Roman construction in the foundations, but that may have been a fortress.

I am forgetting, however. One day, when we had been there a month or two, and were clawing up the steep hill – Mount Pelerin – that rises back of the hotel to yet other hotels, and to compact little villages, we strayed into a tiny lane just below Chardonne, and came to a stone watering trough, or fountain, under an enormous tree. Such troughs, with their clear, flowing water, are plentiful enough, but this one had a feature all its own. The stone upright which held the flowing spout had not been designed for that special purpose. It was, in fact, the upper part of a small column, capital and all, very old and mended, and distinctly of Roman design. I do not know where it came from, and I do not care to inquire too deeply, for I like to think it is a fragment of one of those villas that overlooked the Lake of Geneva long ago.

There are villas enough about the lake to-day, and châteaux by the dozen, most of the latter begun in the truculent Middle Ages and continued through the centuries down to within a hundred years or so ago. You cannot walk or drive in any direction without coming to them, some in ruins, but most of them well preserved or carefully restored, and habitable; some, like beautiful Blonay, holding descendants of their ancient owners. From the top of our hotel, with a glass, one could pick out as many as half a dozen, possibly twice that number. They were just towers of defense originally, the wings and other architectural excursions being added as peace and prosperity and family life increased. One very old and handsome one, la Tour de Peilz, now gives its name to a part of Vevey, though in the old days it is said that venomous little wars used to rage between Vevey proper and the village which clustered about the château de Peilz. Readers of Little Women will remember la Tour de Peilz, for it was along its lake wall that Laurie proposed to Amy.

But a little way down the lake there is a more celebrated château than la Tour de Peilz; the château of Chillon, which Byron's poem of the prisoner Bonivard has made familiar for a hundred years.12 Chillon, which stands not exactly on the lake, but on a rock in the lake, has not preserved the beginning of its history. Those men of the bronze age camped there, and, if the evidences shown are genuine, the Romans built a part of the foundation. Also, in one of its lower recesses there are the remains of a rude altar of sacrifice.

It is a fascinating place. You cross a little drawbridge, and through a heavy gateway enter a guardroom and pass to a pretty open court, where to-day there are vines and blooming flowers. Then you descend to the big barrack room, a hall of ponderous masonry, pass through a small room, with its perfectly black cell below for the condemned, through another, where a high gibbet-beam still remains, and into a spacious corridor of pillars called now the "Prison of Bonivard."

There are seven pillars of gothic mold

In Chillon's dungeons deep and old;…Dim with a dull imprisoned ray,A sunbeam which has lost its way …And in each pillar there is a ringAnd in each ring there is a chain.That iron is a cankering thing,For in these limbs its teeth remain…

Bonivard's ring is still there, and the rings of his two brothers who were chained, one on each side of him; chained, as he tells us, so rigidly that

We could not move a single pace;We could not see each other's face.

We happened to be there, once, when a sunbeam that "had lost its way" came straying in, a larger sunbeam now, for the narrow slits that serve for windows were even narrower in Bonivard's time, and the place, light enough to-day in pleasant weather, was then somber, damp, and probably unclean.

Bonivard was a Geneva patriot, a political prisoner of the Duke of Savoy, who used Chillon as his château. Bonivard lived six years in Chillon, most of the time chained to a column, barely able to move, having for recreation shrieks from the torture chamber above, or the bustle of execution from the small adjoining cell. How he lived, how his reason survived, are things not to be understood. Both his brothers died, and at last Bonivard was allowed more liberty. The poem tells us that he made a footing in the wall, and climbed up to look out on the mountains and blue water, and a little island of three trees, and the "white-walled distant town" – Bouveret, across the lake. He was delivered by the Bernese in 1536, regaining his freedom with a sigh, according to the poem. Yet he survived many years, dying in 1570, at the age of seventy-four.

On the columns in Bonivard's dungeon many names are carved, some of them the greatest in modern literary history. Byron's is there, Victor Hugo's, Shelley's, and others of the sort. They are a tribute to the place and its history, of course, but even more to Bonivard – the Bonivard of Byron.

Prisoners of many kinds have lived and died in the dungeons of Chillon – heretics, witches, traitors, poor relations – persons inconvenient for one reason or another – it was a vanishing point for the duke's undesirables, who, after the execution, were weighted and dropped out a little door that opens directly to an almost measureless depth of blue uncomplaining water. Right overhead is the torture chamber, with something ghastly in its very shape and color, the central post still bearing marks of burning-irons and clawing steel. Next to this chamber is the hall of justice, and then the splendid banquet hall; everything handy, you see, so that when the duke had friends, and the wine had been good, and he was feeling particularly well, he could say, "Let's go in and torture a witch"; or, if the hour was late and time limited, "Now we'll just step down and hang a heretic to go to bed on." The duke's bedroom, by the way, was right over the torture chamber. I would give something for that man's conscience.

One might go on for pages about Chillon, but it has been told in detail so many times. It is the pride to-day of this shore – pictures of it are in every window – postal cards of it abound. Yet, somehow one never grows tired of it, and stops to look at every new one.

For a thousand years, at least, Chillon was the scene of all the phases of feudalism and chivalry; its history is that of the typical castle; architecturally it is probably as good an example as there is in Switzerland. It has been celebrated by other authors besides Byron. Jean Jacques Rousseau has it in his Nouvelle Héloïse, Hugo in Le Rhin, and it has been pictured more or less by most of the writing people who have found their way to Léman's pleasant shore. These have been legion. The Vevey and Montreux neighborhood has been always a place for poor but honest authors. Rousseau was at Vevey in 1732, and lodged at the Hotel of the Key, and wrote of it in his Confessions, though he would seem to have behaved very well there. The building still stands, and bears a tablet with a medallion portrait of Rousseau and an extract in which he says that Vevey has won his heart. In his Confessions he advises all persons of taste to go to Vevey, and speaks of the beauty and majesty of the spectacle from its shore.

When Lord Byron visited Lake Léman he lodged in Clarens, between Vevey and Montreux, and a tablet now identifies the house. Voltaire also visited here, lodging unknown. Dumas the elder was in Vevey in the thirties of the last century, and wrote a book about Switzerland – a book of extraordinary interest, full of duels, earthquakes, and other startling things, worthy of the author of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Switzerland was not so closely reported in those days; an imagination like Dumas' had more range. Thackeray wrote a portion of the Newcomes at the hotel Trois Couronnes in Vevey, and it was on the wide terrace of the same gay hostelry that Henry James's Daisy Miller had her parasol scene. We have already mentioned Laurie and Amy on the wall of Tour de Peilz, and one might go on citing literary associations of this neighborhood. Perhaps it would be easier to say that about every author who has visited the continent has paused for a little time at Vevey, a statement which would apply to travelers in general.

Vevey is not a great city; it is only a picturesque city, with curious, winding streets of constantly varying widths, and irregular little open spaces, all very clean, also very misleading when one wishes to go anywhere with direction and dispatch. You give that up, presently. You do not try to save time by cutting through. When you do, you arrive in some new little rectangle or confluence, with a floral fountain in the middle, and neat little streets winding away to nowhere in particular; then all at once you are back where you started. In this, as in some other points of resemblance, Vevey might be called the Boston of Switzerland. Not that I pretend to a familiarity with Boston – nobody has that – but I have an aunt who lives there, and every time I go to see her I am obliged to start in a different direction for her house, though she claims to have been living in the same place for thirty years. Some people think Boston is built on a turn-table. I don't know; it sounds reasonable.

To come back to Vevey – it is growing – not in the wild, woolly, New York, Chicago, and Western way, but in a very definite and substantial way. They are building new houses for business and residence, solid structures of stone and cement, built, like the old ones, to withstand time. They do not build flimsy fire-traps in Switzerland. Whatever the class of the building, the roofs are tile, the staircases are stone. We always seem to court destruction in our American residential architecture. We cover our roofs with inflammable shingles to invite every spark, and build our stairways of nice dry pine, so that in the event of fire they will be the first thing to go. This encourages practice in jumping out of top-story windows.

By day Vevey is a busy, prosperous-looking, though unhurried, place, its water-front gay with visitors; evening comes and glorifies the lake into wine, turns to rose the snow on Grammont, the Dents de Midi, and the Dents de Morcles. As to the sunset itself, not many try to paint it any more. Once, from our little balcony we saw a monoplane pass up the lake and float into the crimson west, like a great moth or bird. Night in Vevey is full of light and movement, but not of noise. There is no wild clatter of voices and outbursts of nothing in particular, such as characterize the towns of Italy and southern France. On the hilltops back of Vevey the big hotels are lighted, and sometimes, following the dimmer streets, we looked up to what is apparently a city in the sky, suggesting one's old idea of the New Jerusalem, a kind of vision of heaven, as it were – heaven at night, I mean.

Chapter XIX

MASHING A MUD GUARD

One does not motor a great deal in the immediate vicinity of Vevey; the hills are not far enough away for that. One may make short trips to Blonay, and even up Pelerin, if he is fond of stiff climbing, and there are wandering little roads that thread cozy orchard lands and lead to secluded villages tucked away in what seem forgotten corners of a bygone time. But the highway skirts the lake-front and leads straight away toward Geneva, or up the Rhone Valley past Martigny toward the Simplon Pass. It has always been a road, and in its time has been followed by some of the greatest armies the world has ever seen – the troops of Cæsar, of Charlemagne, of Napoleon.

We were not to be without our own experience in motor mountain climbing. We did not want it or invite it; it was thrust upon us. We were returning from Martigny late one Sunday afternoon, expecting to reach Vevey for dinner. It was pleasant and we did not hurry. We could not, in fact, for below Villeneuve we fell in with the homing cows, and traveled with attending herds – beside us, before us, behind us – fat, sleek, handsome animals, an escort which did not permit of haste. Perhaps it was avoiding them that caused our mistake; at any rate, we began to realize presently that we were not on our old road. Still, we seemed headed in the right direction and we kept on. Then presently we were climbing a hill – climbing by a narrow road, one that did not permit of turning around.

Very well, we said, it could not be very high or steep; we would go over the hill. But that was a wrong estimate. The hill was high and it was steep. Up and up and up on second speed, then back to first, until we were getting on a level with the clouds themselves. It was a good road of its kind, but it had no end. The water was boiling in the radiator – boiling over. We must stop to reduce temperature a little and to make inquiries. It was getting late – far too late to attempt an ascension of the Alps.

We were on a sort of bend, and there was a peasant chalet a few rods ahead. I went up there, and from a little old woman in short skirts got a tub of cool water, also some information. The water cooled off our engine, and the information our enthusiasm for further travel in that direction. We were on the road to Château d'Oex, a hilltop resort for winter sports.

We were not in a good place to turn around, there on the edge of a semi-precipice, but we managed to do it, and started back. It was a steep descent. I cut off the spark and put the engine on low speed, which made it serve as a brake, but it required the foot and emergency brake besides. It would have been a poor place to let the car get away. Then I began to worry for fear the hind wheels were sliding, which would quickly cut through the tires. I don't know why I thought I could see them, for mud guards make that quite impossible. Nevertheless I leaned out and looked back. It was a poor place to do that, too. We were hugging a wall as it was, and one does not steer well looking backward. In five seconds we gouged into the wall, and the front guard on that side crumpled up like a piece of tinfoil. I had to get out and pull and haul it before there was room for the wheel to turn.

I never felt so in disgrace in my life. I couldn't look at anything but the disfigured guard all the way down the mountain. The passengers were sorry and tried to say comforting things, but that guard was fairly shrieking its reproach. What a thing to go home with! I felt that I could never live it down.

Happily it was dark by the time we found the right road and were drawing into Montreux – dark and raining. I was glad it was dark, but the rain did not help, and I should have been happier if the streets had not been full of dodging pedestrians and vehicles and blinding lights. The streets of Montreux are narrow enough at best, and what with a busy tram and all the rest of the medley, driving, for a man already in disgrace, was not real recreation. A railway train passed us just below, and I envied the engineer his clear right of way and fenced track, and decided that his job was an easy one by comparison. One used to hear a good deal about the dangers of engine driving, and no doubt an engineer would be glad to turn to the right or left now and then when meeting a train head on – a thing, however, not likely to happen often, though I suppose once is about enough. All the same, a straight, fenced and more or less exclusive track has advantages, and I wished I had one, plunging, weaving, diving through the rain as we were, among pedestrians, cyclists, trams, carriages, other motors, and the like; misled by the cross lights from the shops, dazzled by oncoming headlights, blinded by rain splashing in one's face.

It is no great distance from Montreux to Vevey, but in that night it seemed interminable. And what a relief at last were Vevey's quiet streets, what a path of peace the semi-private road to the hotel, what a haven of bliss the seclusion of the solid little garage! Next morning before anybody was astir I got the car with that maltreated mud guard to the shop. It was an awful-looking thing. It had a real expression. It looked as if it were going to cry. I told the repair man that the roads had been wet and the car had skidded into a wall. He did not care how it happened, of course, but I did; besides, it was easier to explain it that way in French.