Francis Henry Gribble - Lake Geneva and Its Literary Landmarks

A. AND C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON

SUNSET ON MONT BLANC FROM ABOVE GENEVA

PAINTED BY
J. HARDWICKE LEWIS &
MAY HARDWICKE LEWIS
DESCRIBED BY
FRANCIS GRIBBLE

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1908

Towns which expand too fast and become too prosperous tend to lose their individuality. Geneva has enjoyed that fortune, and has paid that price for it.

Straddling the Rhone, where it issues from the bluest lake in the world, looking out upon green meadows and wooded hills, backed by the dark ridge of the Salve, with the great white mountain visible in the distance, it has the advantage of an incomparable site; and it is, from a town surveyors point of view, well built. It has wide thoroughfares, quays, and bridges; gorgeous public monuments and well-kept public gardens; handsome theatres and museums; long rows of palatial hotels; flourishing suburbs; two railway-stations, and a casino. But all this is merely the faadeall of it quite modern; hardly any of it more than half a century old. The real historical Genevathe little of it that remainsis hidden away in the background, where not every tourist troubles to look for it.

It is disappearing fast. Italian stonemasons are constantly engaged in driving lines through it. They have rebuilt, for instance, the old Corraterie, which is now the Regent Street of Geneva, famous for its confectioners and booksellers shops; they have destroyed, and are still destroying, other ancient slums, setting up white buildings of uniform ugliness in place of the picturesque but insanitary dwellings of the past. It is, no doubt, a very necessary reform, though one may think that it is being executed in too utilitarian a spirit. The old Geneva was malodorous, and its death-rate was high. They had more than one Great Plague there, and their Great Fires have always left some of the worst of their slums untouched. These could not be allowed to stand in an age which studies the science and practises the art of hygiene. Yet the traveller who wants to know what the old Geneva was really like must spend a morning or two rambling among them before they are pulled down.

The old Geneva, like Jerusalem, was set upon a hill, and it is towards the top of the hill that the few buildings of historical interest are to be found. There is the cathedrala striking object from a distance, though the interior is hideously bare. There is the Town Hall, in which, for the convenience of notables carried in litters, the upper stories were reached by an inclined plane instead of a staircase. There is Calvins old Academy, bearing more than a slight resemblance to certain of the smaller colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. There, too, are to be seen a few mural tablets, indicating the residences of past celebrities. In such a house Rousseau was born; in such another houseor in an older house, now demolished, on the same siteCalvin died. And towards these central points the steep and narrow, mean streetsin many cases streets of stairsconverge.

As one plunges into these streets one seems to pass back from the twentieth century to the fifteenth, and need not exercise ones imagination very severely in order to picture the town as it appeared in the old days before the Reformation. The present writer may claim permission to borrow his own description from the pages of Lake Geneva and its Literary Landmarks:

Narrow streets predominated, though there were also a certain number of open spacesnotably at the markets, and in front of the Cathedral, where there was a traffic in those relics and rosaries which Geneva was presently to repudiate with virtuous indignation. One can form an idea of the appearance of the narrow streets by imagining the oldest houses that one has seen in Switzerland all closely packed togetherhouses at the most three stories high, with gabled roofs, ground-floors a step or two below the level of the roadway, and huge arched doors studded with great iron nails, and looking strong enough to resist a battering-ram. Above the doors, in the case of the better houses, were the painted escutcheons of the residents, and crests were also often blazoned on the window-panes. The shops, too, and more especially the inns, flaunted gaudy sign-boards with ingenious devices. The Good Vinegar, the Hot Knife, the Crowned Ox, were the names of some of these; their tariff is said to have been fivepence a day for man and beast.