LONDON:

Printed by William Clowes and Sons,

Stamford Street.

A ride on horseback to Florence

CONTENTS

OF VOL. II.

Page 1

Ride to Chillon—Castle of La Tour du Peil—Chastellar—Chillon—Attentive gendarmes—Oubliettes—Destiny of their inhabitants—Salle de Justice—Torture room—Eating hall with its fleurs-de-lis—The dungeons—The beam—The interment in the lake—Bonnivard—His misfortunes—His prison—The first pillar having its own story—Sketches on the wall made by a captive—His escape—Drowned in the attempt two months before Bonnivard’s deliverance—Alexander Dumas’ name above that of Byron—The English amateur’s painting—The fat gendarme—A bad Bonnivard—Our determination to inhabit Chillon—Changed by thoughts of powder—Fanny our conductress—Ludlow’s house and tomb—Contrast between Protestant and Catholic cantons—Bulle—The bony hand holding a crucifix—The Counts of Gruyères—Fines paid for crimes perpetrated—The banner of Berne—Laws of the Simmenthal—The Bernese attacking Gruyères—Count Pierre’s danger—Plague described by Boccaccio—The Flagellans—The murdered Jews—Last of the Counts of Gruyères—Leaving Bulle—Fribourg—Battle of Morat—The lime tree—A monument of the young messenger—Berthhold, founder of Fribourg—Line drawn between plebeian and noble—Bridge—Organ

[CHAPTER II.]

Canton of Berne—Village where the Swiss troops obtained a victory over the French force in ’98—Berne—Bears in all forms—Their revenues diminished—Their new baptism—Foundation of Berne—Rodolph of Erlach—Laupen—Rodolph chosen guardian of orphans of the Count of Nidau—Murdered by his own son-in-law—Cathedral—Monument to Duke Berthhold—His wife’s execution—Charles Louis of Erlach massacred by his own soldiers during French invasion—Treatment of Berne by the French—Thun—Privileges—Castle of Thun—The brothers—The banquet—The murder—The “pension”—An acquaintance—The sketcher in haste—A Marseilles story—Spietz—The golden manor—Adrian of Bubenberg—His saving Morat—His embassy—His return as a minstrel—Unterseen—Unspunnen once the property of the Eschenbach family—Walter of Eschenbach—Confidant of the parricide Duke John—Murder of the Emperor Albert—Vengeance of Queen Agnes—Walter’s son spared—Walter a shepherd—Lauterbrunnen—The cascade—Grindelwald—A buried chapel in the glacier—The Harder—The grave of an only son—Return to Thun

[CHAPTER III.]

Leave Thun—Zweizemmen—The wrong road—Château d’Œx—Gruyères—The Préfet’s ball—Anniversary of the Virgin’s leaving school—Vevay—The patient Griselda’s obstinacy—The exploit—Villeneuve—The Valley of the Rhone—St. Maurice—The Theban legion—The Valais—The village buried—The Rhone overflowed—Former inundation—The old villager saved—St. Bernard—Story of its founder—Martigny—Riddes—Sion—The prelate’s murder—The family of the Rarons—The Mazza—Raron persecuted—Demands the aid of Duke Amedée—His castle burned—His wife driven forth—His revenge—The cretins of Sierre

[CHAPTER IV.]

106

Rhone overflowed—Baths of Louëche—Tourtemagne—Visp—Ravages of the Rhone—Madonnas placed to stop its further rise—Glys—Brieg—Ascent of Simplon—Ganther—Gallery of Schalbet—The toll-gate—Hospice—The Barons of Stockalper—Village of the Simplon—Broken road—Algaby—Gorge of Gondo—Fanny too near the edge—Gap in the road—Part of gallery carried away—Opportune aid—Arrival at Gondo—Broken road near Isella—Accident during the storm—Remnant of a carriage—The douanier’s aid—An auberge—The military post—My consolation—An amiable hostess—Good company in a quiet kitchen—A French gentleman expecting murder—An Italian vetturino—The Juge de paix and his interested verdict—Torrent or bedchamber—Our hostess’s supper—Departure—First difficulty—Road completely swept away—Impossibility of advancing—A lady and her guide killed—Way over the Trasquiera—Fanny aiding her conductor—A painful path—A draught of water—Top of the mountain—Inhabitants—Milk and apples—Fanny’s leap—Danger of Grizzle—Descent—Bridge gone—Torrent forded—Gallery of Crevola—The broken column—Arrival—Our friend’s welcome—Domo d’Ossola

[CHAPTER V.]

156

Vogogna—Country overflowed—The ferry—Isola Madre—Baveno—Innkeeper—Isola Bella—Ground made in 1670—Arona—Castle of St. Charles of Borromeo—Castle of Angera—Frescoes in its ruined halls—History of St. Charles of Borromeo—Early habits—Resides in his diocese at Milan—Strives to reform the church—Attempt to murder him—A miracle—His conduct during the plague—Life of St. Anthony—Who cured the young pig—St. Christopher, who was twelve feet high—The Ticino—Amusement on board the ferry—The commissary—Sesto Calende—A charge—Somma and Julius Cæsar’s cypress—Castle of the Visconti—Birthplace of Teobaldo—Elected Pope when in the Holy Land with Edward the First of England—Otho Visconti founder of his family’s grandeur—Gallerate—A threatened beating—The Lord’s Supper on the auberge wall—The robber’s seven towers—Battle between the Visconti—Unwarranted preference shown by a ghost—Murder in the castle at Milan—The murderer poisoned by his wife—Rhò—Milan

[CHAPTER VI.]

185

The Duomo—Our host’s advice—Joseph the Second—Tombs—That to the memory of Giovanni and Gabrielle de’ Medici, designed by Michael Angelo—Chapel of St. John—St. Bartholomew—Tomb of Otho, archbishop of Milan—Crucifix carried by St. Charles of Borromeo—Antique altar—Burial-place of St. Charles—La Scala—Opera ballet—The Brera, once monastery of the Umiliati—Paintings—The old castle—Arms of the Visconti—Prerogative preserved to himself by Giovanni—The parricide—Filippo Mario—His innocent wife executed—Carmagnuola Filippo’s general—Forced by his injustice to change of party—Suspicions of his new masters—His execution—Francis Sforza—His youth—His name’s origin—Jane of Naples—Imprisoned by her husband—Set free—King James a monk of St. Francis—Forte Braccio—Sforza’s death—Arena—Roman ruin

[CHAPTER VII.]

211

Leaving Milan—La Bicocca—Francis the First—Francis Sforza—Black Bands of Giovanni de’ Medici—Lautrec—An intrigue—Samblançay—The king prisoner—Samblançay falsely accused—Condemned to be hanged at Montfaucon—His death deferred till dark, in expectation of the king’s relenting—His last words resembling Wolsey’s—Lodi—The Austrians—Imprecations—The serenade—Doubts as to the road—Piacenza—A thirsty douanier—The cathedral—Alberoni—A bell-ringer—The Farnese—Pier Luigi’s murder—Statues on the piazza—Alessandro—His son Ranuccio—His danger in youth—His escape—His cruelty—His treatment of his son—Borgo St. Donnino—Maria Louisa—Castel Guelfo—Origin of names of Guelph and Gibelline—Parma—Madonna in the stable—A lamp serving two purposes—A procession seeking a criminal—Cambacérès—Ariosto—A robber’s love of poetry—Correggio—Modena—The countess Matilda—The Emperor Henry the Fourth—Canossa—Three days unsheltered in the court-yard—Rubiera—Modena

[CHAPTER VIII.]

243

Pic de la Mirandole—Castel Franco—Bologna—A bad inn left for La Pace—Its mistress—Statue of Pope Julius the Second—St. Petronio—Mistake of a learned man—Charles the Fifth—Here crowned King of Lombardy—King Enzio—His peasant-love—His twenty years’ captivity—The origin of a name—The towers—Accademmia—St. Cecilia—The cathedral—Temple dedicated to Isis—Papal troops—A capitulation—Cholera—An Italian hospital—French soldiers—The procession barefoot—The well-attested miracle—The Appennines—Lojano—The Pellegrino—Filigare—Pietra Mala—Strange properties of its fire and cold spring—Fruit—Montecarelli—St. Antonio’s grapes—Palazzo Borghese—Hôtel du Nord—Jerome Bonaparte’s cook—Piazza della Santa Trinità—Spot occupied by the Palazzo degl’ Uberti left vacant—Recording escutcheons—The Saviour, king of Florence—The Loggia—Galleria de’ Medici—Piazza del Duomo—The Baptistery—Work of Ghiberti at twenty years old—Chains of the gates of Pisa—A funeral

[CHAPTER IX.]

274

The Duomo—Its interior—Michael Angelo’s farewell—Vasari—Congress of artists convoked—A dome of pumice stone—Brunelleschi turned out as a madman—The egg—His colleague Ghiberti—His feigned illness—The difficulties divided—Height of the dome—Giotto—The Campanile—Pietro Farnese—His gilded mule—Dante—Condemned to be burned at the stake—Peter of Toledo-Conrad the traitor—The sacristy—The Pazzi—Julian murdered—Salviati hanged in his cardinal’s robes—Seventy executions—The artist nicknamed Andrea of the Hanged—The baptistery—The withered elm restored—The story of Joseph—John the Twenty-third from pirate become pope—Palazzo Riccardi—Gardens of Lorenzo—Michael Angelo—The Strada del Traditore—Lorenzino—The duke Alessandro—Made unpopular through his vices—The plot—Anecdote told by Benvenuto Cellini—The rendezvous—The murder—Lorenzino assassinated in turn—The Galleria—The Palazzo Pitti—Cosmo—His sons’ quarrel—The eldest killed by his brother—The father’s revenge—His wife poisoned—Duke Francesco and Bianca Capello—Her story and death

[CHAPTER X.]

311

Boboli Gardens—Buondelmonte—Ponte Vecchio—Santa Croce—Palazzo Borgo—Tombs—Michael Angelo’s monument—Died the year Galileo was born—Machiavelli—Alfieri—Galileo dying the year in which Newton was born—Chapel of the Pazzi—San Lorenzo—Monument of Cosmo, Pater Patriæ—Michael Angelo’s Day and Night—Contradictory employments—His reply to a verse addressed to his statue—Cappella dei Principi—Santa Maria Novella—Cimabue’s Virgin—Cappella de’ Spagnuoli—Portraits of Petrarch and Laura—Turned out by a friar—Pietre Dure—Our guide again—Sarcophagus of the Gran Duchessa—Shut up in a private oratory—Let out by a priest—Cascine—Palazzo Vecchio—Small tower-chamber prison of Cosmo—Savonarola—His prediction of Lorenzo’s death—The confession—The anathema—Trial by fire—The heavy rain—Savonarola executed—The Appennines—Birthplace of the Maréchale d’Ancre—Tre Maschere—Fog—Rain—Lojano—Crosses—Bologna—Grizzle’s attack on the kitchen—Miss Kemble—Modena—The ducal stable—The stuffed charger—Parma—The five saints canonized in May—Their claims to canonization

[CHAPTER XI.]

349

La Steccata—The Teatro Farnese—Its magnificence—Its ruins—Would contain 9000—St. Jeronimo—Sir Thomas Lawrence—Alti Relievi—The overflowed Po—The infant saved—Placentia again—Misery of Piedmontese—Voghera—Tortona—Plains of Marengo—The wrong road—The Tanaro overflowed—Asti—The Angelo and its reception—Moncaglieri—The vow, and the Virgin, who resembled a Duchess—The old Italian gentleman—Victor Amedée’s abdication—The old man’s arrest—His death at Moncaglieri—Susa—Its waterspouts—A chimney on fire—Mont Cenis—Fog and snow-storm—A postilion’s wonder—Danger of tourmente—Lanslebourg—A thick smoke and ill scent—Modane—Lesseillon—St. Michel

[CHAPTER XII.]

387

St. Jean de Maurienne—A tradition of two fingers—Story of a procession of bears at Henry the Second’s passage—Peculiar customs—Baptism—Funerals—Aiguebelle—La Carbonaria—Chambéry—Road by the Mont du Chat—A valley of the Rhone—Pierre Châtel once a monastery—Bellay—Murder committed by a notary—A peculiar race—Pont d’Ain—Cathedral of Brou—Its foundress and her motto—Bourg—Fair-time—An aubergiste—Montrevel—We are taken for part of Franconi’s troop—Tournus—Chalons—Arnay le Duc—Vermenton—Joigny—A poor traveller—The chapter of Sens—Montereau where Jean sans Peur was murdered—Melun—Paris—Fanny

CHAPTER I.

16th.

We dined at one, in company of some gentlemanly Swiss and French officers, and started at three for Chillon, passing on our way the hamlet La Tour du Peil, and catching a glimpse as we rode by of its ruined ancient castle, pillaged and burned by order of Berne, in punishment for having allowed the passage of foreign soldiers to Lausanne, where lay the camp of their foe, Charles, duke of Burgundy. Vevay suffered for the like fault, being plundered also, and of the two towns five hundred men were massacred.

There is nothing lovelier than this road, winding along the flank of the mountains, here rich with wood. We passed Clarens, beautiful as Byron’s description, hiding among its own trees, and straggling up the hill side from the shore. The noble old castle of Chastellar on its solitary mound, and the peaked stone spire of Montreux seeming to lean against the forest, above which the Dent de Jaman stands, cold and barren,—all the way the lake shining below, with the stern rocks of Meillerie opposite, and the Alps closing the valley. The heat was excessive; and the small vineyard flies so tormented our horses that D——’s taste for the picturesque had well nigh vanished, when a bend in the road brought us beneath a high bank, covered with old walnut-trees, and opposite the rock on which Chillon stands, with its towers and tall keep, the most picturesque of feudal castles. We crossed the covered wooden bridge, where the gendarmes stand, smiling welcome; and the horses consigned, each to the care of two, and left in a dark stable to be dusted with walnut branches, we were sufficiently tranquil as to their comfort to follow our guide, who was the wife of the concierge. She led across two courts, and opened a heavy prison door; it was “out of the sun and into a grave.” I obeyed her injunction to hold fast her hand, when, having scrambled over rubbish, and through partial darkness, she drew me to the brink of a square hole, and pointed down a depth of eighty-six feet. It was one of the fearful oubliettes, whose existence here was unknown till about fifteen months since. Grown accustomed to the dim light, we could distinguish a coarse woollen rug, now laid on the brink, but which was found below serving as shroud to a skeleton. The victim died from the fall, or was left to perish. In the same court-yard is the entrance to another, which was, at pleasure, dungeon or place of execution. Its depth is sixty and some feet; and from the top of the square opening descend three steps, the commencement of a stair which goes no farther. The condemned was lowered to the bottom, and his food administered in like manner. If death was decided on, he was forgotten, as there was no other communication with the living world.

A few steps lead to the salle de justice. The dryness of the air and thickness of the walls has so preserved all within, that the curious wooden ceiling, supported in the centre by pillars, which retain traces of paint, remains; and the planks of the floor were only exchanged for pavement, when, on the threats of France, the caissons of the Canton de Vaud were assembled here. At one end of this hall is a small room with a door, on a now closed staircase, near the wide chimney. At the other is the salle de question. A pillar of wood, to which the prisoner was bound, still stands,—as does a beam above it, pierced with holes for pulleys, and a portion of the old ropes hanging from them. A second beam, which supported a wheel on which the wretch was tortured, (tied by the arms with weights to the feet,) crumbled down a few months ago. The pillar is seared with the red-hot irons employed in the torture; that by burning being continued during three-quarters of an hour, with intervals of five minutes; if it induced confession, the private stair from the small chamber conducted the condemned to the potence in the dungeon below. The door has been walled up, on account of the vicinity of the powder magazine. Our guide led to the eating-hall, which was the kitchen also. The capitals of its pillars were ornamented with fleurs-de-lis, she said, when a count of Savoy conducted hither his bride, a daughter of France, perhaps Bonne de Bourbon, who married the green count Amedée the Sixth, about 1355. The two carved oaken chests with their curious locks, at the bottom of the room, are of the same date. The view from these windows is beautiful beyond praise, and there is “the little isle—the only one in view,” lying in the lake like a floating basket of flowers. Our last visit was to the dungeons: the first is the most modern, and least sad, as its loopholes are longer and less narrow. On one of the sills they form in the thick wall sat a Swiss girl, the light falling on her picturesque dress, touching her smiling face and bare arms,—she animated the dim prison house. Between this first dungeon and that of Bonnivard, there is one smaller and darker, though light enough for its destination: for a few moments’ stay allows the eye to distinguish, crossing a space between its pillars, a heavy beam, whose upper part is, in several places, deeply worn by the ropes which, upholding heavy weights, were bound round it; and a few paces behind, the steps of the narrow stair which conducts to the fatal door of the justice hall. The opposite wall, against which the lake ripples or foams in its various moods, has a square cavity, now closed with stones; the bodies of those who died unheard and unseen were cast forth there, and beneath the waves which told no tales. A narrow portal opens on the dungeon where Bonnivard lay. I think I reminded you before that he was prior of the abbey of St. Victor, a man of pure life as well as courage, who exhorted the Genevese to reform, and censuring the vices of the catholic clergy generally, as well as their bishops in particular, was betrayed by false friends to the duke of Savoy, whose anger he had above all excited, by urging an alliance between Fribourg and Geneva. One of these friends received for reward his rich priory. He was two years in prison, and set free and reinstated in his benefice by Pierre de la Baume, bishop of Geneva. He by force took possession of the property of which he had been deprived in Savoy, which, notwithstanding his affection for Geneva, was his country. The duke besieged him in his château of Cartigny, which, unable to defend long, he was forced to fly from, and saw himself almost wholly deprived of his revenues. The town of Geneva granted him a pension, and sustained him in his adversity; and the irritated duke, desirous only of obtaining possession of his person, granted him a safe-conduct with a view to lure him on his territory. Bonnivard, expecting no treachery, profited by the circumstance to visit his mother, sick and old, at Seyssel; and intending to go thence to Lausanne, he was seized on the Jura, and dragged to Chillon. The first two years of his detention he passed in comparative liberty; but Charles the Third visiting the castle, he was cast, by his order, into the vault below the level of the lake, where are

“The seven pillars of Gothic mould.”

The first column has a story of its own, for a wall of separation, now thrown down, divided it and a space of twelve feet square from the prior’s prison, forming one which enclosed a young man, his companion. On the walls are a few figures, in the costume of the time, rude but spirited sketches, the work of his long leisure; they are fresh still. Attached to the pillar is the portion of the broken ring which held his chain, and an iron bar of his loophole was sawed through, to allow room for the passage of a human body. Long toil, and the use of some instrument left him inadvertently, severed the fetters and opened the path; but he reckoned on his powers of swimming, forgetting they were paralyzed by the space and air of a dungeon—he plunged into the lake, and rose no more alive. Bonnivard was delivered two months later; it was in March, 1536. Chillon remained the last possession of Savoy in the Pays de Vaud. Confiding in its strength, her garrison’s boats insulted all who were not subjects of Duke Charles, and haughtily rejected the truce proposed to the Bernese by the emperor’s ambassador. The Bernese army besieged it on the land side; the troops and artillery of Geneva armed barks on the lake; the garrison was forced to surrender, and Bonnivard set free. His pillar, retaining its iron ring, is the second in order; the floor of rock round, worn by the uneasy pacing of four years: on the column, among more perishing names, is that of Byron. I noticed that of Alexander Dumas, so high above, that to engrave its enormous letters he must have mounted a ladder. The space on either side the range of columns which support the roof’s groined arches, forms a sombre aisle, the inner wall left as nature made it, irregular masses of living rock; that towards the lake intersected with a few narrow loopholes high from the ground, which are rather slits in the stone, so small that in the morning it is a dark vault, and only when the beams shine low they come “creeping over the floor.” At sunset, however, “the imprisoned ray” is not “dull:” for, as if it acquired force from its concentration, it falls like a streak of fire on the pillars and blocks of stone. As we saw it, the effect was splendid, but partial, as at the extreme end an artist was sketching by the light of candles, being otherwise in perfect obscurity. It is to carry his materials that the young Swiss, whom we saw as we passed again, comes daily. Last summer, an amateur, an English gentleman, visited Chillon with the intention of painting not only the dungeon, but Bonnivard! for this purpose he chose a gendarme of spare habit, having a long beard and sallow face, chained him to the pillar, and commenced his work, saying, “vous bon Bonnivard.” He could not, as you may suppose from the specimen, explain himself in French; but Monsieur Chéri (a strange name for a captive prior) understood his signs made with money, and submitted with fortitude to lie robed and fettered on the rocky floor. One day, unfortunately, a feeling of pity came over his comrade in the court-yard above, and he descended to relieve him, thinking to divide the duty, and that one might do as well as the other, seeing both were gendarmes. The new comer was a healthy, very young man, stout and beardless, unlike the studious prior, who had eaten black bread in small quantities, and probably abstained from shaving six years. The pallid gendarme feeling, like him he represented, the blessing of freedom, sprang up in delight; and the amateur, in despair, when the fat man assumed the chain, could only hold his first prisoner fast, stamp his foot and shake his head at the other, and repeat all the French he knew, “Lui, bon Bonnivard, rester; vous aller, pas bon Bonnivard!” He grew at last so angry that my conductress, who had, she said, almost expired with laughter, interfered, and Chéri once more cast himself at the foot of his pillar. As we went out, she mentioned the circumstance of having two English ladies “en pension.”

D—— looked up in intense delight, the horses were in a good stable, the gendarmes would make admirable grooms. Our best fare might be fresh eggs, it was true, but what signified our dinner compared with the advantages of a view of the lake, with the “Isle’s tall trees;” of walking from the oubliettes to the torture chamber, and resting under the potence, and in Bonnivard’s dungeon, a lodging of three chambers, looking on the lake, which we should hear “ripple night and day.” We told her we would come in the spring, when we should have repassed the mountains, and she looked rather surprised and very much pleased at the sudden wandering of our senses.

Arrived at the stable, we were confirmed in our resolve, by seeing the gendarmes obeying orders; one holding a horse’s head, another shaking a bough, in the places where we had left them, like the warriors in the Belle au Bois dormant. As I mounted Fanny, the châtelaine asked permission to touch my hand, and unaccustomed, I suppose, to see ladies on horseback, said it would be “amusant” to have us there; so we rode away.

Arrived on the brow of the hill, we looked down on the romantic castle, and my eye lighted on the chapel roof. “Dear me,” said I, looking at D——, “the powder magazine!”

“Humph,” said D——, looking down in turn.

“Is there any danger?”

“There might be;” and thereupon we both commenced enumerating all our memories held of powder mishaps; till at last I began to think I might fear to order dinner, from dread of some mischance in the chimney, and to ride Fanny, lest her shoes should strike fire against the stones of the court-yard. We talked the pour and the contre the whole way, and arrived at the most perfect indecision.

We had a splendid view of a stormy sunset, of golden lake and blackening mountains, and when we reached Vevay, night had completely closed, and we, who had never seen the road till that afternoon, were puzzled. Fanny was not so; she assumed her wisest manner, wound through the crooked streets, and stopped at the stable of the Trois Couronnes.

17th.

Rain all day, detaining us within doors; we hope to leave the 20th for Berne and Fribourg.

We walked this evening up the steep road which leads to the church of St. Martin, as its terrace has a view no one should fail to see before quitting Vevay. The church is simple and pretty, of the thirteenth century. Ludlow’s monument, raised by his widow, is within it, built against the wall; Broughton’s tombstone forms part of the pavement near. The former’s memoirs, in which he so prides himself on his crime as regicide, were first published at Vevay, where he lived under the protection of the magistrates of Berne.

When William the Third ascended the throne, he returned to England, and to London, but finding it possible that he might still be held there in the light of an assassin, he thought it more prudent to return to Vevay. He was seventy-three when he died; his house is still shown, and the inscription he engraved above its doorway,

“Omne solum forti patria,”

was effaced but a short time since.

18th August.

We left Vevay late, taking the road which passes through Bulle to Fribourg, being counselled against that by Romont. Even this is far from a good one for horses, being for a considerable distance a painful succession of hills, paved and steep, but from which the views are beautiful, back to Vevay and the lake, and down the precipices to the valley, where the Vevayse flows between deep and wild banks.

Arrived at the Châtel St. Denis, with its old castle on the mound, we could observe the contrast between the Protestant and Catholic cantons, even between the habitations which lie on either side the frontier, scarce a stone’s throw apart. This is the first village of the canton Fribourg, and for the first time we saw heaps of manure piled before the cottage doors, with the tame pig rooting in them. As it was a holiday, the peasants who passed us were in their gayest costume, the men with their full coloured waistcoat sleeves, the young girls with their hair braided across their brows, and the black riband dividing it from the enormous mass behind, for they wear their own tresses plaited over a foundation of wool, which gives them an unnatural bulk; but as they are commonly fresh and good-looking, not absolutely unbecoming. A few ancient ladies, dressed after this fashion, looked far less well. With all this attention to toilette, the poverty and dirt of the dwellings whence they issued was melancholy. They have here a character more entirely Swiss, as the lodging of the family and the cow stable are under the same roof, and the warmth of the cattle being necessary to the poor, to whom it often supplies the place of fuel, only the richer proprietors run a partition between. It is seldom that even the first few feet from the ground are built in stone. Fire, when it occurs, is awfully destructive, their roofs, chimneys, and walls all wood, and that intended for fuel piled against the planks outside, probably for the sake of warmth, as the wind whistles through every cranny.

The plain which extends from the top of the long hill to Bulle is covered with rich pasture, stretching thence up the mountains, and dotted with chalets.

It is a most picturesque town; the old brick building, with its high tower, and small turrets with pointed roofs, is the castle of Bulle, now the prefet’s residence. The Cheval Blanc, where we stopped, is a good inn, and the view from the windows lovely, even in Switzerland. There was nearly opposite, a little to the left, the castle tower and its heavy walls, gilded by the sunset,—the road below, which wound on towards Gruyères; its cottages with their galleries and jutting roofs, and outside stair, advancing or retreating on either side, and between green trees, their background a mountain range, whose pine forests were blue in the distance; beyond a copse in the plain, (shining in the sun also,) the town and ancient castle of Gruyères crowned one hill to the right; a second rose abruptly behind it, wooded and in shadow; and stretching darkly and far away behind and beyond them, the mountains, which peak above peak shut in the valley of the Simmenthal.

While D—— was employed in superintending the evening comforts of Grizzle and Fanny, the good-natured fille d’auberge was my guide through the streets to the chapel of the Capucin convent, which has a strange altar, I think of gilt crockery, and a pulpit whose effect is peculiarly horrid, as out from it projects a solitary arm, in a Capucin sleeve, whose bony fingers hold a crucifix.

While our dinner was preparing, for nine o’clock to-night, (those who ride a journey keeping irregular hours,) D—— and myself strolled towards Gruyères, along the winding road as far as the wooden bridge which crosses the torrent of Trême, near the tower which bears the same name, and was an outpost of the lords of Gruyères. The castle is interesting from its age and extraordinary preservation.

The precise origin of the Comtes de Gruyères is unknown; but Müller says they were rich and powerful even in the eleventh century. The mountain which rises behind the castle is called La Tine, and the Saarine foams and roars among the dark pines of its defiles. Its early possessors depended for their revenues on agriculture only; their wars were with the wolves, and their proudest conquests the cultivation of a desert. The younger branches of their house owned as their inheritance the forest-castle of Mont Salvans, and a few mountain pastures: they lived in company of their knights among their herdsmen, and with a simplicity resembling theirs; and from the height on which their château of Œx still stands watched over and protected their vassals.

After the battle of Laupen, and when peace had ensued, the counts, impoverished by the wars, were constrained by their need to part with various rights and privileges. In 1341 Count Pierre mortgaged for ten years to the inhabitants of Gruyères the duties they were wont to pay on each head of cattle, those on forage, cheese, and butter, and also the receipt of the fines paid for crimes perpetrated in the forest. Three times at this period did Berne revive the feud with Gruyères.

The Count Pierre above-mentioned, deceased, left the administration in the hands of a namesake, whose connexions in the Simmenthal rendered him sufficiently powerful there to manifest the old hatred of his house to the seigneur of Weissenburg, citizen of Berne. The greater part of the Simmenthal was under the count’s protection; but many of its farms and châteaux belonged to the lords of Weissenburg and others, having been built by their ancestry. Count Pierre of Gruyères marched against Weissenburg; Banneret Peter Wendschaz commanded the Bernese against him. At that spot of the Simmenthal there are heights which narrow the passage, and the Bernese, who had strayed to plunder cattle, received a sore punishment for their lack of foresight. The banneret himself, fighting with the courage of despair, surrounded and overpowered, collected his failing strength for a last effort, hurled the banner of the republic above the heads of his assailants, and died consoled, because it was unprofaned by the touch of a conqueror: the Bernese mournfully bore it within their walls.

The peasants of the Simmenthal enacted laws for their own territory; that on fines showing a chivalrous spirit which did them honour. As it was presumed that the offended might defend himself against a blow, the offender was fined one livre only; the man who uttered abuse was fined four, and he who falsely gave the lie in a judge’s presence, ten livres, since it was considered most difficult to guard against slander and calumny.

Required by their allies of Fribourg to march with them against the sire of Grumingen, vassal of Gruyères, the Bernese gladly answered to the call, and seized on his castle, though he sued for peace. The count and his knightly companions were wont to pursue their chivalrous sports on the green meadows which stretch beneath the castle. The count’s attendants had dispersed themselves in a wood not far distant, and in the copses which surround the Tour de Trême, when the men of Berne and Fribourg, with a force superior to his own, surprised the count himself in the oak-tree meadow. Pierre fought with the heroism of his antique race, but the numbers had well nigh overpowered him, when two of his vassals, Clarembold and Ulric Bras de fer, resolved to save him at all hazards, flung themselves before his person, favoured his retreat, and guarding the narrow defile through which he had passed, kept his enemies at bay, till the count, who had hastily sounded his war-note and gathered his scattered troop, spurred back to the charge, put the assailants to the rout, and many of them to the sword. To Clarembold and Bras de fer, who covered with blood hailed his reappearance and joined in his attack, he accorded privileges and franchises, which he extended to their posterity. Their memories are still honoured in their village of Villars sous Monts.

Soon after this, in 1349, ushered in by fearful earthquakes, broke out the plague described by Boccaccio, which desolated Europe and Asia. According to the general belief, a third of the population of Switzerland died; the churchyards were filled to overflowing, and the victims buried in unconsecrated ground, and without religious rites, which priests were wanting to perform; whole regions were left desert, and lordships abandoned and unclaimed by friend or foe. Struck with terror, men strove to avert the scourge by the various and horrid means prompted by fear and fanaticism. It was then that numerous travelling societies, the Flagellans, wandered from canton to canton, inflicting blows and torment on themselves, for the sins of the world. Where they passed, the excited people devoted to death a number of Jews, innocent of all crime; it is well known that at Kybourg, the more enlightened Duke Albert was forced against his will to deliver three hundred to the flames; that at Bâle they were all driven into a wooden house, and burned with it; while at Constance and at Eslingen, in the synagogue, the despairing people inflicted death on themselves.

The vassals of Gruyères, unflinching in battle, attached and faithful to their lords, had obtained from them so many and important privileges, either as reward for their services, or in barter for the sums of money their necessities demanded, as to become almost as free as the most democratic states of Switzerland. But for their insatiable ambition, the counts of Gruyères might have been the happiest of mortals; but they looked from their tall towers on the height, less to rejoice in their possessions than to mourn that they saw their boundary. Not being kings themselves, they strove to find consolation in rendering themselves necessary to royalty; and they led their vassals from their flocks, and mountain pastures, and calm homes, to fight in foreign quarrels, and in climates so different from their own, that those sunk victims to the change who had been spared by the sword.

Count Michel of Gruyères, who died in 1570, was the last of his line. He was one of that brotherhood of La Cuiller, who quitted their own lands to ravage those of Geneva. He had commanded their army, forced many of his vassals to serve under their banner; and also sold yearly, and for several years, five hundred men to the French armies in Italy. They had rendered good service to the king of France, but Henry the Second, under various pretences, refused to pay the immense sums he owed to Gruyères; and Michel saw his country depopulated in vain, his debts accumulating, though he had received a large loan from his neighbours and sold his subjects a portion of his lordly privilege, till at last, persecuted by his creditors, and notwithstanding his carelessness of their welfare, mourned by his devoted vassals, he abandoned the inheritance of his fathers, which he saw before his eyes divided between the two cantons, and concealed his shame and sorrow in the castle of a relative in Burgundy, where he died poor and without an heir.

19th August.

So unwell this morning as to fear durance vile at the Cheval Blanc, but, being determined to go if possible, set off at three. I had hoped our road lay beneath Gruyères, but it led through the streets of the town, and thence for a considerable distance across rich meadows, their green pastures spotted with chalets; farther on they are divided by pine forests, the road skirting or passing through them, the sunshine reposing on their verdant glades, or playing among their old trunks, or excluded where these have been felled and supplied by multitudes of young stems crowded in nature’s extravagance. The hedges were gay with wild pinks and woodbine, and on the sides of the road were strips of green and rivulets for Fanny’s feet. We left on the right a gorge, through which the Saarine flows, commanded by a noble looking ruin. The peasantry here are almost German, and therefore perhaps a milder and more amiable race than the French or Genevese. They issued from their cottages and ran from their work in the fields to see us pass by, but always took off their hats and wished good evening. The clouds had threatened rain, but the wind, which whistled in the firs, blew it over us and left only a fine stormy sky above the mountains, partly hiding their white heads, while the sun was brilliant in the valley. As we passed the meadows where the cows were grazing, and the little cowherd lay almost hid in the clover, we thought of Lord Byron’s praise of the bells; their tones, differing and harmonizing, tinkled sweet music. Nearer Fribourg is a fair view into the gorge from the road, which hangs over it where a sweep of the Saarine makes almost an island of a tract of pine grove, and a suspension bridge has been flung from the peninsula to the shore. An avenue of fine trees leads into Fribourg, of which the first view with its dim mountains and most golden valley, is more striking than that of any town I have seen as yet, from the magnitude of the mighty chasm, over whose very edge the houses seem to hang giddily high above the torrent, and the feudal watch-towers, which guarded once, and are still ranged along the winding of its opposite shore. The far famed bridge was not visible, but we could see that now in progress, crossing the gorge of the Gotteron, which issues from the Saarine. In its present and unfinished state it hangs in an awful curve over the abyss, like a thread for a fairy rope-dancer.

The avenue passed, the road becomes precipitous, and scarcely, on a dark night, safe we crossed a bridge, and rode beneath an ancient gate to enter the old town. The houses which line the streets, narrow and ill-paved, are curious and of great age, as are the quaint fountains; at the summit of whose gilt and painted columns figure grotesque saints and Virgins. After various windings we reached this hotel, the Zahringerhof, which should be chosen for its situation and view, as it is close to the bridge and built on the very edge of the chasm.

20th August.

Stayed at Fribourg, a cold day broken by hail-storms, and passed it in walking over the town and along the narrow valley of the Gotteron. Not far from the hôtel on the Place, and opposite the town hall, which is built on the site of the palace of Duke Berthhold, is the venerable lime-tree, planted, according to tradition, the 22nd June, 1476, the day of the battle of Morat.

The young soldier who brought the tidings was a native of Fribourg; he had been wounded in the conflict, and feeling he grew weaker as he approached the town from fatigue and loss of blood, and that his shout of victory waxed too feeble to be heard, he gathered a bough as he passed, and waved it over his head in token of rejoicing. Arrived at this place, where the townsmen were assembled, he faltered forth his news and sunk down to die. They planted on the very spot his lime-tree branch, and it lived and grew his monument, and is now so old, that the decaying branches are rested on the four stone pillars and wooden trellis-work which surround it; there is an express order to tie no animal near, but it is dying of extreme age, and will hardly outlive another winter.

Berthhold, duke of Zahringen, was imperial governor of Zurich, landgrave of Burgundy, and lieutentant of Œchtland and Lausanne. By his command ancient villages were surrounded by walls and free towns built, behind whose fortifications the peasants of the empire, who united themselves to the inhabitants, might rest in peace and security. The love of change, the hope of gain, but above all of liberty, quiet, and order, aided in peopling these towns. The duke, as hereditary governor, and because the high roads and bridges were everywhere property of the feudal lord, taxed each house, and levied a duty on all merchandise; and also, when a subject died without heirs, inherited a third of his possessions. The citizens were tried by twelve or twenty-four of their own body, presided, over by an “avoyer” elected yearly, and sentence pronounced in accordance with the facts proved by a sufficient number of witnesses. Each townsman was, during his life, master of his own property, and it fell to his widow in case of his demise. The whole town took care of the orphans. The feudal lord could neither force a man to become a citizen, nor prevent an inhabitant of his town from departing if so pleased him; but freemen and serfs sought therefore the more willingly within it a safeguard from the dangers consequent on dispersion; and the serfs were considered free if during the first year their master failed to claim them and prove their servitude by the affirmation of seven relatives. When the lord of the city required their presence, they were bound only to journey to a distance whence they might return to sleep in their own homes.

In the year 1178, Berthhold the Fourth, whose father and uncle had set the example of encouraging these establishments, chose the village built along the precipices of the Saarine, and founded his town of Fribourg partly on a territory belonging to the abbey of Payerne, but mostly on his own land, and with the aid and counsel of various barons. It became inhabited; boasting freedom, but certainly not equality, for the nobles, as yet unused to citizenship, kept the line of demarcation so strongly marked as even to fix on a separate place of burial, and, in consequence of this, six hundred years passed without so confounding distinctions, as to give one language to the town on the shore, and that on the crags above it—German being the dialect most in use among the inhabitants of the former, while their fellow-citizens spoke French only. This is no longer the case, but in 1794, when Müller wrote, many who lived in the one spot were unintelligible to the other.

Taking one of the steep streets, which is paved in steps as a stair, we walked to the massy roofed wooden bridge, across which the diligence to Berne travelled before the new one was built, the descent and ascent occupying about an hour. From between its heavy wooden work you have a good view of the suspension bridge, 174 feet above the bed of the torrent, and which, though so much longer than the Menai, for its length is 905 feet, appears of so much lighter construction; from this spot the Zahringen hôtel seems a real castle in the air. We crossed the Saarine, and turned to the left, and under an old archway of Duke Berthhold’s time, which forms the entrance to the gorge of the Gotteron. It is a lonely and beautiful glen, sunk deep between wooded crags which barely allow room for a path way beside the stream, which bounds brightly on, flashing in the sun, while it turns the heavy wheels of rustic mills, as if glad of its own usefulness; and farther, where the valley is less narrow, winding through the small green meadow, and among the picturesque wooden cottages, as if seeking repose near those it has toiled for. In the spring, the quiet river becomes at times a destructive torrent, uprooting tree and dwelling. About Fribourg cretinism exists, and among the elder peasantry the goitre is common—we saw in the glen one poor idiot, who howled and gibbered as we went by.

Dined in company of a French family—the elder hope just issued from the Jesuits’ college, a disagreeable specimen of their training, with large black hands and unpleasant habits. In the evening went to the cathedral, which in itself is only gaudy, but whose organ and organ player are most wonderful. Listening to the higher tones, it was difficult to persuade myself that I did not hear a chorus of sweet voices, and its “storm” did not resemble an earthly instrument touched by a mortal hand; it was like “nothing but thunder,” and solemn and awful, as it rolled along the aisle’s dusk in the evening.

CHAPTER II.

21st August.

Left Fribourg for Berne, and was disappointed in the road, which presents a long series of endless hills, and (as heavy clouds, which brought us several hail-storms, hid the white mountains) less interesting than those hitherto travelled.

At the limit of the cantons of Berne and Fribourg, where the river Sense separates them, the country is wooded and beautiful, but of a mild character and resembling England. The name of the village is Neunneck; and here, on the 5th of March, 1798, the same day on which Berne surrendered to another column of the French army, two thousand Swiss, commanded by Colonel de Grafenried, defeated the French, drove them across the Sense, killed or wounded fifteen hundred of their men, and took eighteen pieces of cannon. They made no prisoners, but marched up the mountain with fixed bayonets, and forced the enemy from all his positions. They lost themselves 173 soldiers, and great numbers were wounded.

We exchanged here the seeming poverty of the canton Fribourg for the air of happiness and riches peculiar to this. The peasantry appear a civil and kindly race. The females wear dark dresses and black velvet caps, whose broad wired lace worn far back from their sunburnt faces looks like the outspread wings of a hornet. The entrance to Berne is not on this side (that of the plain) striking. A long avenue leads to a handsome gate flanked by two modern bears; for the bear is omnipresent. Armed cap-a-pie on the column of one fountain, on another standing as esquire beside the figure of Duke Berthhold, forming a procession on the clock-tower, which in his time guarded the outer wall, marking in effigy the butler at the inn, and in propria persona inhabiting the town ditch outside the Aarberg gate, where four of the fraternity live on (alas!) diminished revenues, for the property bequeathed them towards the close of the last century by a bear-loving old lady, and which, it is said, had accumulated to 70 millions of francs, was seized by the French in ’98, and with the remainder of the town-treasure, and the bears themselves led away captives, were transported to Paris. In insult to the conquered, the animals received fresh names, and the new one of each was inscribed on his travelling caravan, being that of a magistrate of Berne!

It was in 1191, when the great barons of the Alps and the most powerful lords of Burgundy leagued their forces against Berthhold the Fifth, lieutenant of the empire, either, historians say, in hatred of his equitable administration, or in jealousy of his still increasing sway, that he inclosed as small towns various villages for his own and his vassals’ security; and seeking out another spot under the protection of the imperial franchise, equally distant from all his enemies, and unsuspected by his partizans, he chose a hamlet called Berne, built on a peninsula formed by the rapid Aar, when it rushes from the lake of Thun; and, about a month after he had defeated the leagued lords in one of the high valleys, surrounded it with a ditch and walls. Many knights and nobles took up their residence there; among the rest, Rodolph of Erlach, of an ancient Burgundian house, and whose descendants have seven times given chiefs to the republic, and twice saved Berne from ruin. The laws were similar to those of Fribourg.

In 1338, the year in which the emperor Louis of Bavaria convoked the diet of Frankfort to discuss the affair of his excommunication, 147 years after the foundation of Berne, when she had no protector and few allies, the counts and barons of Œchtland, Aargau, and Burgundy, urged on by the emperor, projected her destruction. The lords of the house of Neuchâtel, the counts of Kibourg, and Pierre of Gruyères and others, assembled in the castle of Nidau, whither, notwithstanding her alliance with Berne, came ambassadors from Fribourg, to say that the injuries they all suffered had a common origin, that Berne strove to level the nobles to the condition of the populace, and it being vain to essay by partial attacks to set bounds to her audacity, it would be well that united forces should raze her city to the ground.

Berne acted nobly and calmly—she besought no foreign protection, but said, in a conference which took place between her delegates and the feudal lords, that “to peace she would sacrifice all save justice.” She summoned Fribourg to a diet held at Blamatt, reckoning on the memory of their common founder and long friendship; but her deputies received no token of peace or amity, and Berne felt she was abandoned. During this time, 700 lords with the coronet on their casques, 1200 armed knights, 3000 horsemen, and more than 15,000 foot, were gathering against Berne.

Laupen, which is also on the Sense, four miles lower down than Neunneck, besieged by the allies, had demanded and obtained succour from Berne. The Bernese were themselves embarrassed in the choice of a general; of the brave knights and citizens who surrounded the avoyer of Bubenberg, none esteeming himself capable of a command on which depended the fate and liberty of their descendants; and while they still sate irresolute in council, Rodolph, knight and castellan of Erlach, son of Ulrich, under whose command many still living had conquered the leagued nobles at Donnerbuhel forty years before, rode armed into Berne.

He was at the same time guardian of the young count of Nidau and citizen of Berne. To conciliate his will with the fidelity he owed his suzerain, he represented to his ward, that to serve the cause of the nobles against his fellow-citizens would injure his interests beyond reparation; and the young count, as in reply he scornfully bade him join the ranks of his peers, said, “With two hundred coroneted casques, and a hundred and forty knights devoted to my banner, it is indifferent to me to lose a man.”

Erlach replied coldly, “You have called me a man, Sir Count; I will prove to you that I am one.”

When he had dismounted and appeared before the senate, the sight of him reviving the memory of Donnerbuhel and his father, he was named general by acclamation, and the avoyer placed the banner of the republic in his hand.

As he stood holding it, he addressed the citizens:

“I have fought with you,” he said, “in six battles, where our numbers were always inferior, and always victorious. Discipline is a sure means of conquest, and without it courage is of no avail. You, artisans, who are freemen, and obey unwillingly, you can remain free only by learning obedience to those to whom it is due; without absolute authority I will not be your general. I do not fear the foe; with God’s aid and yours we will drive him back, as when you were led by my father.”

The people of Underwald and of Soleure were the sole allies of Berne. Alms were distributed, solemn vows and processions made, during the brief time which intervened. One night, by the light of the moon, the general gave the troops the signal to depart. They were in all about six thousand. The women and children, who remained on the summit of the walls to watch and to pray, followed them with their eyes till they could distinguish them no longer, over the unequal ground and in the doubtful light. Descending thence they sought, the poor the churches, their superiors the private oratories of their mansions, and remained the livelong day in prayer; while the avoyer of Bubenberg, and others of the senate’s oldest members, remained sitting in council, to provide at all events for the city’s safety.

Rodolph of Erlach led on his troops in the most perfect order, taking up his position, about mid-day, at a short distance from Laupen on a height, and flanked by a forest. Several of the knights of the opposing army, which was encamped in sight, rode forth from the ranks to survey the Bernese, and kept up a conversation of mingled raillery and bravado.

The young count of Nidau augured differently of the result: “I shall lose land and life to-day,” he said, “but I will sell them dearly.” In the attack, the rear guard of the Bernese, composed of inexperienced troops, was seized with panic, and fled. Erlach, to whom the news came, said gaily, “Victory is ours, friends; we have lost the clog of cowards!” and dashing forward, heading the young men he had assembled round his own person, the flower of Berne, he broke through the masses of the enemy’s infantry. Thenceforth the fortune of the day was no longer doubtful. The young count of Nidau fell one of the first, and the Bernese army, returned from the pursuit, kneeled down to offer up thanksgiving on the field where it had conquered, and according to custom passed the night there; the following morning saw its triumphal return to Berne.

Diebold Baselwind, the priest who had harangued them before the battle, marched first; behind them were borne the banners and arms of the fallen, and Rodolph of Erlach, contented with reviving his father’s fame in his own, deposed his sovereign authority.

The count of Nidau had left two young children; and their relatives of the house of Neuchâtel, too feeble themselves to defend the lordship, feared with reason to confide it to a foreign prince. Their conduct speaks the highest praise of the knight of Erlach. They employed the mediation of the bishop of Basle to pray that he, “whose integrity was as well known as his valour, would receive as his charge the orphan boys and the lordship of Nidau.” He accepted the trust; a peace was concluded between Nidau and Berne, and the dead count’s sons, Rodolph and Jacques, enjoyed undisturbed the inheritance of their brave father.

Time had gone on, and the castellan of Erlach, grown an aged man, lived at Reichenbach, a solitary spot on the shores of the Aar, which had also been his father’s residence. He had two sons, and a daughter married to the esquire of Rudenz.

One day of the year 1360, when he had employed, as was his wont, his domestics in his fields and gardens, and sate in his halls with no company save his dogs couched on the floor, and his sword of the battle of Laupen suspended from the wall, his son-in-law came to seek him. He was a dissipated and reckless man, and as they conversed together, high words ensued on the subject of Margaret’s marriage portion. The knight was white-headed and feeble; and as he reprimanded Rudenz with dignity and gravity, his son-in-law started from his seat, seized the sword which hung near him, and plunged it into the old man’s heart.

The howling dogs pursued him to the forest, whither he fled, and when the news got wind, there was neither noble nor citizen who did not rise in arms to pursue the parricide. He died shortly, but in what manner is not known.

This is a long digression, but the ride through the sombre streets of the old town calls to mind the man who was named its irreproachable hero. The date of the most ancient mansions now standing is of 1405, as in that year the entire city then existing was destroyed by fire, saving, however, the three massive towers, that of Duke Berthhold, the prison, and Christopher’s tower, in the principal street of Berne.

The town has a gloomy aspect, with its low arcades resting on heavy masonry. The streets have a deep dangerous ruisseau flowing down their centre, bound by stone. I feared that my starting Fanny might break a leg, by slipping down. We rode to the Faucon, which has, I believe deservedly, the reputation of being one of the best inns in Switzerland; but we had left Fribourg late, and lingered on the way, and consequently found it full. The Couronne was a bad substitute; the house is three hundred years old, and has objections attendant on its worm-eaten wood and dirty old age, which I advise you to avoid; the more so as its master is the first Swiss I have seen who unites incivility with high charges. We paid the strangers’ homage to the citizen bears, who are comfortably lodged without the Aarberg gate. The largest received our visit in his bath, a stone bason, into which he waddled on our approach, and remained while we stayed, staring hungrily at us, up to his neck in water.

From the bears we walked to the cathedral, which stands on the terrace above the Aar, looking down on the range of aristocratic buildings which skirt it, their possessors’ coats of arms sculptured over their portals, and their gardens sloping to the water, and on the range of Bernese Alps, rising grandly in the distance, but half hidden to-day by the heavy clouds.

This shady platform is raised one hundred and eight feet above the Aar, yet into its wall was inserted a marble slab, recalling a singular accident on the 25th of July, 1654. A young student, amusing himself with his companions, vaulted on a horse which was quietly feeding under the trees, and being a spirited animal, started violently away, and, terrified by the shouts of Weinzapfli’s comrades, sprang with him over the low parapet. The horse was killed on the spot, but the student, who fell in soft garden ground, and only broke his arms and legs, recovered, and became a pastor.

The minster is a fine Gothic building, and was commenced, in 1420, by the son of the architect who built the famous tower of Strasburg.

The monument, surrounded by gaudy armorial bearings, was raised by the town to Duke Berthhold the Fifth, in 1600. He was the last of the line of Zæringen, for he had been left a widower early, with two young sons, and contracted a second marriage with a countess of Kibourg. Either to ensure the inheritance to her own future offspring, or won by the jealous nobles to be their accomplice, this fury in human shape poisoned the two children of her husband. Her guilt once proved to him, neither the tenderness he had once felt for her, nor the thought that by accusing one so nearly allied he tarnished the glory of his house, could arrest the outburst of his paternal agony. In the year 1217 she perished by the hands of the executioner; and Duke Berthhold, unwilling to form another alliance after one so fatal, felt it a consolation that in his person would close the misfortunes of his house.

Occupying a place in the aisle opposite that which contains Duke Berthhold’s monument, is a long catalogue of names inscribed on marble tablets; those of the brave men who fell in 1798, vainly resisting foreign invasion.

The saddest fate was that of Charles Louis of Erlach, a man who, like his ancestors, had deserved the esteem and love of his fellow-citizens. Before the revolution he had served France, and was named field-marshal at the moment of the French invasion in 1798. He had hurried to his native town, and, like his great predecessor, been named by acclamation general of the forces; but the then existing government was timid and irresolute. Accompanied by eighty of his officers, like himself members of the council, he presented himself before it the 24th of February, and, by his energy and arguments, revived its hopes and raised its courage. He was endowed with full powers to act as he should see fit as soon as the yet unconcluded truce should expire. He left the city to decide on the measures to be taken, but, even as the moment for their execution arrived, received the order to suspend hostilities. The government had abdicated its powers. Marshal Brune’s policy had sown division in the senate as well as among the troops. Berne yielded almost without resistance; and Erlach’s soldiers, blinded by suspicions artfully instilled, and maddened by despair, massacred him in the village of Wichdorff.

The treasure of the republic, accumulated through so many generations, was seized on by Marshal Brune without even the formality of an inventory taken. The Directory, informed of the omission, and in a case of this sort placing little confidence in its general, despatched a courier extraordinary with positive orders that it should be repaired.

A kind of list was in consequence hastily made by the marshal s command, and himself wrote to the Directory—

“Vous verrez par l’état, dont je vous envoie copie, que les sommes trouvées dans le trésor cadrent à peu près avec les régistres.”

The most moderate calculation, for into it private losses and depredations cannot enter, computes the losses of Berne (city and canton) at forty-two millions of francs. It was asserted that of this Brune had appropriated to himself the golden medals of the Hôtel de Ville, twenty-two carriages, and above three hundred thousand francs in specie!! This treatment of Berne followed close on assurances of support and amity, for while the marshal’s forces were yet unassembled, and before Schaumbourg’s reinforcement had arrived, France, through her commissary, declared that she desired her neighbour’s freedom and happiness only, and that, as soon as a government sufficiently democratic should be established, the independence of Berne would be respected, and the French army withdrawn.

23rd August, Thun.

Left the Couronne with its discomfort and dirty stables. A steep descent leads to the bridge, beyond which run at right angles the two roads, one leading hither, the other to Zurich, beneath noble avenues. We had a lovely day and ride through a happy looking country, wood, pasture and mountain, and passed through a village, where the laugh of all the lookers-on from the windows saluted me as I rode Fanny in and through a clear pond, far deeper than I thought, but out of which we got to our honour.

Approaching Thun, the country is romantic and most beautiful. It was a warm fine evening, and the old dark castle, now a prison, on the height, with its peaked roof and four towers flanking it, and the church by its side, stood out from a bright sky.

The Aar, which issues from the lake about a mile further, winds below, rapid and blue as the Rhone. We crossed it on a covered wooden bridge, and skirted the town, passing ancient gates and massive towers, and the once fortified wall, to arrive hither.

The Pension Baumgarten stands on higher ground than the Hôtel Bellevue, backed by wooded heights, to the foot of which its park extends; and the rooms opening on flower-gardens look on the Aar, winding through rich meadows, with scattered houses, and a grey feudal tower on the near shore; and the Stockhorn, with its strange sharp peak projecting above; and the massive pyramid of the Neisen beyond; the wreaths of vapour floating along the side of the first serving its forests for pedestal or canopy. On the right rose the castle; and to the left, far away in the opening, the Jungfrau and her attendants, looking with the blush of that sweet evening on them, I thought even lovelier than Mont Blanc.

The rights of “bourgeoisie” attached to Thun make poverty almost impossible, and its inhabitants are therefore less laborious than in other parts of Switzerland; each citizen possessing a right of pasture, building timber, and firewood, besides a yearly sum of money drawn from the surplus revenues of their flourishing and unexpensive country. By a strangely egotistical rule of the law-makers, these advantages attach exclusively to the males, so that a female orphan left unmarried, or a widow without a son, might find herself suddenly destitute, and dependent on strangers’ charity.

The service of the English church is performed every Sunday by an English clergyman in the Swiss church. No prospect can be more beautiful than that from the churchyard of Thun. The wall is built on the very edge of the precipitous hill it half circles; round and along it, from distance to distance, are what elsewhere I should call summer-houses, open stone edifices, on whose benches the inhabitants of Thun sit in the shade, enjoying the glorious and varied views over each side of the valley. A winding road, passing beneath an ancient gateway and a stair of irregular steps, leads up the height on which the church stands. The castle is but a few paces from it, on the platform of the same hill: among its annals is written a bloody tale of family feud.

When the last duke of Zæringen, who had refused to become an emperor, was interred in 1218 at St. Pierre in the Black Forest, his large possessions were divided. Ulric of Kibourg, his brother-in-law, inherited those situated in Burgundy; Berne and Zurich solicited and obtained from the Emperor Frederic the Second the title of free towns; and when the news, so long desired, reached Lausanne of the failing of the line of Zæringen, (the fall of the founder of Berne twenty-five years after its foundation,) the Bishop Berthhold of Neuchâtel convoked together the chapter, knights, and citizens in the court of the church of Notre Dame, and, solemnly cursing the memory of the deceased duke, who had once made war against him, he gave (solemnly also) the advowson of the bishopric into the hands of the Mother of God for ever!!

In the year 1332, Hartmann, count of Kibourg, possessed, with the lordship of Thun itself, that of various villages surrounding it, as well on the mountains as on the green plains through which flows the Aar. Among these were Berthoud, Landshut, and other property of allodial tenure. Thun and Berthoud, governed according to the sage customs of their territory, had extended their limits by reason of their increasing population. The avoyers of the count pronounced judgment in accordance with a municipal code which even himself respected. The richest and most ancient of the nobility thronged his court and were his brothers in arms. When Hartmann of Kibourg died, his widow, the countess Elizabeth, allowed an overweening influence to Senn of Münsigen, a nobleman whose domains lay in the neighbourhood, and who through her favour had become director of her councils. Her sons, Hartmann, heir of Kibourg, and Eberard, were youths, and the eldest, who hated his brother, used every means to conciliate Münsigen’s favour to himself, and to prejudice him against Eberard, at that period studying at Bologna, the cradle of all science then existing, at an expense of sixteen marks yearly. Owing to his brother’s influence, this remained undefrayed; and, having vainly besought its payment, Eberard returned to his paternal castle to claim the portion left him by his father.

His relatives treated his demands with derision, and himself as a young man who might indeed possess rights but who knew not how to uphold them. One night, after a hunting or hawking party, the brothers had arrived at the castle of Landshut, which is some leagues from Berthoud, and Eberard, fatigued with exertion, slept by Hartmann’s side too soundly to be at first aware of his treason. Hartmann bound him as he lay, and sent him, thus secured and half naked, under a strong guard, to Rochefort in Neuchâtel, Comte Rodolph of Neuchâtel being his wife’s father. Arrived at his destination, Eberard accepted, perforce, for arbitrator between their differences Duke Leopold of Austria. Leopold pronounced that Hartmann should remain sole lord of the entire patrimony; that Eberard should inhabit the castle of Thun, and of the two hundred marks he received from his benefices as canon of Strasburg and Cologne yield three parts to his brother to defray the debts of their house. To this sentence the prisoner was obliged to subscribe, and all the nobility of the lordship of Kibourg assembled by invitation in the castle of Thun to celebrate the reconciliation of the brothers. As the defrauded young man sate with them at the banquet, Count Hartmann and the favourite, Senn of Münsigen, applauded each other unconstrainedly on the success of their schemes: “Belike,” said the former, alluding to Eberard’s inexperience and easiness of belief, “my brother may need a tutor to teach him to sign our peace.”

Eberard had many friends among the guests, and this and other sarcasms, which reached their ears, raised their choler, long restrained,—and some started from the banquet and drew their swords. A fearful tumult arose instantly. The furious guests, dividing themselves into two parties, rushed madly at each other, and Hartmann was killed by chance and in the obscurity on the steps of the tower stair. It was unknown whether the instrument of this involuntary murder was Eberard in person; but at the moment when the citizens of Thun, who, attracted by the extraordinary noise, had armed in haste, rushed up the hill to the castle to know its cause, the body of Count Hartmann, flung by some violent hand from a window of the castle, made them an awful reply. The greater number at once turned and fled; the few who lingered were taken prisoners as a measure of precaution; and Eberard, giving orders to close the gates, sent ambassadors to Berne, offering to become, himself and those of his house, citizens of her city for ever, and to cede to her, with a portion of his remaining possessions, the fief of Thun. The Bernese marched thither without loss of time, took possession with little difficulty, and confirmed the count in the place of power occupied by his ancestors, on condition of his paying them a contribution of one mark yearly.

August.

We have of late borne with some days of Swiss rain, unintermitting from morning to night. A pension has one disadvantage: for its inmates depend not on their own resources, but on the forced companions of its breakfast, early dinner, and long evening. We are fortunate in an agreeable party, particularly so in the acquaintance of an English clergyman and his charming young wife, who, with her rosy children round her, forms the prettiest picture imaginable. The vie de pension consists in breakfasting, in irregular order, between eight and twelve; dining at three, which interferes sadly with excursions or occupations; drinking tea at eight; talking till ten; and going to bed to re-commence on the morrow. This is bearable during sunshine; but when we are shut up in bad weather, and deprived of our home occupations, with torrents falling all day, and the moon shining at night in the valley on so dense and white a fog that I at first took it for the lake, which is a mile off, as has been the case the last few days, we form in groups, and have recourse to a leetle scandal (as I once saw it written), which commences in the kitchen among the scourges thither imported by the victims, their masters, and steals by degrees among ourselves, where it sometimes finds somebody

“To point a moral or adorn a tale.”

And should we all be good naturedly-minded and charitable to our neighbours, we pounce upon the cookery, and wonder that Madame Rufenacht should be so niggardly an old personage, and how long will last her dynasties of hard ducks and bony pigeons. An addition to our circle, and an improving one, arrived to-day, in the persons of a gentleman and lady from Marseilles, and whose conversation induced us to let the poultry die and be served up in peace. I was amused by his account of their passage on board the steamer, from Geneva to Lausanne. Of the party was a lady speaking French imperfectly, and sketching with remarkable assiduity, as she went along, notwithstanding the velocity of the boat’s motion. Monsieur R——, though not professionally so, is really an artist; the lady was a sketcher,—like one who described to me that he never made more than two perpendicular and three horizontal lines for any view, filling up the vacuum after; or like another who, having sketched the falls of the Rhine, showed them to a lady, who exclaimed—“Oh! that is the beautiful field we just now walked through, and the stile we jumped over.”

This lady had united to a very faint idea of their geographical position a strong desire of bearing away in her album drawings of all the mountains in Switzerland; and the young French gentleman could not resist the opportunity for amusement: he had been her interpreter already. Mont Blanc, she heard all voices echo, and used her pencil in haste. The Buet, with its white round head, was in sight also, and the lady said in an interrogatory tone, “Mont Cenis, Monsieur?”

“Oui, Madame,” said her deceiver gravely, and she hurried to mark down the shape of the mountain, and write under it “Mont Cenis,”—extract the leaf from her book, and with due care lay it in her portfolio. She looked about again.

“Mont Pilatre, Monsieur?” said she, forgetting that Lucerne was not there; and pointing to the Voiron,—

“Bien loin, Madame; bien haut,” said the artist, and a cloud above the Voiron was again marked down, and inscribed Mont Pilatre. The steamer was passing Coppet, and Monsieur R—— pointed out the château, giving it its proper name.

“Ha!” said the lady, cutting her pencil, “Coppet château, Madame Staël.”

“Oui, Madame, voilà;” but alas! for the sketcher; below the château on the lake shore is a square house, with a chimney at each end of its ignoble roof, and three prosaic-looking windows. It was this she believed to be Corinne’s cradle. The drawing was completed in a minute: two upright lines for walls; two ears for chimneys; three blacker strokes for windows; and under all, Château Coppet. You should have heard him describe the complacency with which she drew a bit of the Salève for Monterosa, and the gratitude with which she parted from him who had shown her

“More things in heaven and earth,

Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

An anecdote Monsieur R—— repeated last evening, of a member of the national guard of Marseilles, was too amusing to avoid telling you in my turn:—

Just after the revolution of 1830, troops disembarked from Algiers, bringing with them a large treasure, destined for Paris; it was to leave Marseilles under an escort of the national guard, as the lower orders were still in a state of excitement, which might render its passage hazardous.

The person who commanded the escort had our acquaintance under his orders, and Monsieur R—— was rather surprised, on entering the suburbs, to hear himself and his comrades ordered to the rear, while the waggon with its load of specie went, pioneer fashion, first. He asked the reason:—

“You see,” said the commandant, (a stout peaceable man,) “that our charge being at some distance from us, in case of its being attacked we shall have notice of it before the offenders reach ourselves.”

“Therefore we had better ride to the front, and be ready to meet them.”

“Not at all; we should be deprived of discretionary power, being only six; by remaining behind, we can best judge whether the attacking force matches our own, or is too strong; and may, at our choice, advance or retreat for reinforcement.”

The escort staid in the rear and the convoy travelled in safety.

Monday.

Notwithstanding the assurances of the whole pension, that all cascades are alike,—that wood, water, and mountain may grow familiar to weariness; notwithstanding melancholy prognostics of misfortunes, which may happen to the horses,—and fine weather, which may not last for our journey to Italy, I have insisted on seeing the Staubbach; and to Interlaken, or rather towards Interlaken, we rode last Wednesday, for we were hardly a mile away when the mist closed around us, obscuring the view from the higher ground over the lake and towards Thun, which is so lovely in sunshine. D—— proposed turning back, but we were averse to seeing the whole contents of Baumgarten shake their heads at our discomfiture, as they had done when foretelling it ere we started. We took refuge instead under a pear tree in an old woman’s garden, an agreeable situation, in which we remained an hour, watching the torrents which concealed everything else a dozen paces from us: and as the bad weather did not set in as violently as it sometimes does in the mountains, took advantage of each clearer half hour to proceed, and of the shelter the road afforded when the rain returned.

In this manner we arrived, not very promptly, opposite Spietz, whose old castle is romantically placed on a promontory, near the road and on the lake shore. It belonged to the lords of Bubenberg, and went by the name of the Golden Manor. One of its most noted possessors was Adrian of Bubenberg. In the year 1470 he had been deputed to the court of Duke Charles of Burgundy, and received by him with esteem and affection. On his return he remained attached to the Burgundian party, inasmuch as he believed a continued peace with Burgundy beneficial to Berne. Hagenbach, however, had been seized and executed; and Charles’s fury venting itself not merely in menaces against Switzerland, he named his officer’s brother to fill his vacant place, with orders to cover the county of Ferrette (the part of Alsace which joins Switzerland) with flames and blood. This fresh violence restored to Nicholas Diesbach, the zealous partizan of France, the credit he had lost with his countrymen. He sought to renew the treaty of alliance with Louis the Eleventh; but aware that Adrian of Bubenberg’s influence would be exercised on the opposing side, found means to exclude him from the council, and taught the people rather to take umbrage at his pride of birth and dignity of bearing, than to remember the part he had acted.

Under various pretexts he was exiled to his Golden Manor of Spietz; but when, in 1476, Charles of Burgundy advanced, determined to commence the campaign by the conquest of Morat, at the head of sixty thousand men, the Bernese recollected their banished avoyer, and, recalling him to their councils, implored that he would take the command of the force destined to garrison Morat. The senator, who had ever sought to avoid a perilous war, did not hesitate to draw his sword in one become inevitable. He demanded only implicit obedience, and seeing that the greater portion of the inhabitants were ill disposed, he proclaimed that the first who showed fear or irresolution would be punished with death! He also adopted measures which had been already, on other occasions, successful, separating friends and relations; placing some within the town, and of others forming part of the force destined to repulse the besiegers. Wise, active, and courageous, calm amidst danger, Bubenberg’s conduct and skill saved Morat, to whose fate seemed bound that of all Switzerland, and to him chiefly did Louis the Eleventh of France attribute the victory. Twelve Swiss deputies, Adrian of Bubenberg at their head, were despatched to the French court, and received with royal magnificence. The following year the conqueror of Morat returned on a mission connected with the succession to the throne of Burgundy. The object of his embassy had altered gratitude to coldness—esteem to hatred; faithful to his own high character, firm and incorruptible, when Adrian of Bubenberg saw his colleagues won and wavering, he disguised himself as a minstrel, and returned alone to Berne; this was in 1478. He died there the following year.

The barony of Spietz afterwards belonged to the family of Erlach, which counts among its members Rodolph, conqueror of Laupen, murdered by his son-in-law, and Charles Louis, massacred by his misled soldiers when he came to defend Berne.

From Spietz the road lately made skirts the lake almost the whole way, and rather nervously, as there are neither barriers towards the water nor retreat towards the rock, which has been blasted to leave a passage, and round whose base it winds. As Fanny’s habit of starting rendered the meeting of cart or carriage perilous, we cantered along while the way was free, and to distract her attention from the rivulets and small cascades dashing down to her feet. Arrived at the extremity of the lake, the rain fell in earnest; despite our cloaks it threatened drowning: the mists were sufficiently opaque for Ossian to rest his heroes on; and the dim grey water which stretched below, melting into and confounded with them, looked mysterious and beautiful, as a single gleam of pale sunshine struggling through the vapour just touched the Neisen and descended to rest on the surface. Unterseen was ten minutes nearer than Interlaken, and, though we had heard the hôtel called a bad one, the dripping manes and drooping tails of our horses prayed movingly for the nearest shelter. We took the road along the bottom of the lake, and arrived among the dark wooden houses, some of which bear date of two hundred years ago. The accommodation at the inn was better than I had expected; but, considering we had come thither for pleasure, our object was not altogether accomplished, as we sat alone at supper, faintly lighted by two candles at the end of the large gloomy room, the storm beating against the windows and the wind whistling under the doors. Our bed-room looked on the church, backed as it is by the steep sides of the Harder, to which the clouds clung,—threatening an inauspicious close to our explorings; and the most musical of German watchmen woke us every hour during the night chanting them and an appropriate rhyme in his fine deep voice. Called as we desired, and the car ready, the state of the weather, as we breakfasted shivering in the same large room, looked by no means promising, and the barometer had continued sinking pertinaciously. Not choosing, however, to ride back to Thun, as we had ridden from it, in rain and fog, and our object unaccomplished, we preferred driving in their company to Lauterbrunnen; and leaving our horses with strict charges to the stable servants, we started rather silent and rather sad in that chill morning at seven, over the four picturesque bridges, which, crossing the Aar, divide Unterseen from Interlaken. From one of these there is visible between the nearer mountains a view of the Jungfrau, splendid in fine weather. She looked mournfully through the wreaths of heavy vapour like a captive through her prison bars: by degrees the mist rolled away, and we could admire Interlaken, where you know D—— was prevented passing part of his summer by the unfavourable description given by ——. I should prefer it even to Thun, for its green plain nestles more closely under the hills. The pensions are built on the same line, but apart; with a mountain back and mountain view, their gardens surrounding them, and a noble avenue of old walnut-trees extending the whole length they occupy. The road to Lauterbrunnen winds through shady lanes and crosses meadows of Swiss verdure, and then lies beneath wooded hills, on the summit of one of which rises Unspunnen, the castle of Byron’s Manfred; a square and a round tower, from the top of one of which spring two slight trees, being all remaining. The marriage of the baroness Ida of Unspunnen with Eschenbach of Wadischwyl bare to the latter’s house her father’s lands of Unspunnen, she being his only child, and Oberhofen her maternal inheritance.

An illustrious ancestor of this Eschenbach, but more as poet than warrior, though for his military exploits he was armed knight by Count Poppo of Henneberg, was Wolfram; the year of whose birth is not known with certainty, but who lived when the emperors of the house of Swabia had roused in Germany a love for poetry, which had grown to passion: and the verse of its votaries had a depth and brilliancy which in no way foretold the coming barbarism of the fourteenth century. His life passed in the wanderings of a troubadour from court to court, admired and honoured, as he retired to the home of his forefathers but a brief time ere he died. A zealous patron of letters and his friend was the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringe, at whose court of Wartbourg (the most romantic of mountain castles) congregated the wisest and wittiest of their time. In the year 1207 six noble minnesingers entered the poetical lists there; Hermann and his fair wife distributing the prizes, while Nicholas Klingsor, famed for his love ditties, as well as his knowledge of necromancy and astrology, presided as judge, summoned for that purpose from Hungary. The general voice hailed Wolfram conqueror; but Klingsor, whom he had unwittingly offended, in vengeance adjudged the palm to his friend Henry of Ofterdingen. His superiority was, however, fully acknowledged by the poets of Swabia, with all of whom he was on terms of intimacy, and who styled him sage and master. His genius was varied,—for he was called the Homer and the Ariosto of his day. Among the works his astonishing fertility left to found his fame on, is a species of drama, entitled the Combat of Wartbourg, containing the six pieces recited by himself and his five troubadour companions in 1207 at the court of Thuringe.

A hundred years later lived Walter of Eschenbach, comrade and confidant of the parricide Duke John of Swabia.

When the latter’s father, Duke Rodolph, died, leaving him a boy, the Emperor Albert sent for him to court, and held his patrimony in his own hands as the orphan’s guardian. The minor, become of age, demanded his birthright, which Albert, under various pretexts, refused; and the young man, exasperated by each succeeding subterfuge, urged on by the mockery of his partisans, who nicknamed him Duke sans duchy, and the fear that his uncle might intend his utter spoliation, employed as mediator the bishop of Strasburg.

He begged that the emperor would at least yield to his nephew some castles with their domains, belonging to his paternal inheritance; but Albert once more evaded a direct reply, speaking of giving Duke John a command in his meditated expedition against Bohemia, and of satisfaction when the wars were done.

The bishop returned from his embassy, the young man heard its issue in silence, breaking it only to observe, “the hand which grasps my birthright menaces my life.” Quitting his reverend adviser, he sought without further delay the companions of his pleasures, who in more serious moments were his counsellors also: these were Ulric of Palm, Rodolph of Wart, and Walter of Eschenbach.

The 1st of May, 1308, there was held an imperial banquet at Stein, at which Albert’s sons and Duke John sate. By the emperor’s command wreaths of flowers were brought, with which the children and disinherited prince were alike crowned. There was some allusion, some remark made, as to these diadems being sufficiently weighty for the brows which sustained them, to which John listened gloomily. The banquet concluded, the emperor mounted on horseback to proceed to Rhinsfeld, whither the empress had gone some days before. His suite was composed of the unpopular favourites, Landenberg and Waldsee, his cousin the count of Hohenberg, and others of his nobles and vassals. Pretexting a fear of overloading the boat, arrived at the river Reuss, John and his party found means to separate Albert from his followers.

He rode slowly and a little in advance across the broad ploughed lands which stretch beneath the hill and castle of Habsburg, the territory of his ancestors, conversing with the knight of Castelen.

Suddenly riding up to his side, Duke John exclaimed, “Receive the wages of fraud,” and plunged his lance into his throat; at the same moment Balm ran him through the body, and Walter of Eschenbach clove his skull in twain with a back stroke of his sword.

Rodolph of Wart stood motionless, and Castelen fled. Duke John and his friends, terrified as by some unexpected crime, gazed at each other for the last time, and rushed in various directions from the scene of their murder; Albert had fallen bathed in his blood, and insensible. His suite, congregated on the opposite shore of the river, witnessed the assassination, and fled in fear from their dying master. A poor young woman passing by saw and ran to raise him from the ground; he breathed the last sigh in her arms: twice he essayed to open his eyes, and at the third effort to do so, died.

Duke John took refuge in the solitudes of the Alps, and wandered some days in the forests which surround the abbey of Einsilden. Disguised as a monk, he travelled thence to Italy, where he threw himself at the pope’s feet, and as a favour obtained from him permission to hide beneath the cowl his remorse and friendlessness. The remainder of his days passed in obscurity as an unknown monk, it was believed in the convent of the Augustines at Pisa; and the blind man who sat begging in the market-place of Vienna, was, it is thought, as he asserted himself to be, son of John the parricide.

Rodolph of Wart, accomplice but not actor in this tragedy, had sought protection with a relative, the Comte de Blamont, who, for a sum of money, betrayed him to Albert’s survivors. He was married to a noble lady of the house of Balm, who was fondly attached to him. Having implored his pardon vainly on her knees, before the Empress Elizabeth and her daughter Queen Agnes, she determined on affording him the consolation of her presence when condemned to be broken on the wheel: his sentence was executed. His torments, ere they ended his existence, lasted three days and three nights, during which his unhappy wife remained kneeling near him in tears and prayer, taking neither food nor drink.

It was said by some that he had been wholly innocent, and even unaware of the meditated murder; he solemnly asserted it while his broken limbs were stretched on the wheel. When he had expired, his widow rose, travelled on foot to Bale, and died. Ere yet Rodolph was taken, Duke Leopold had entered his domains in arms, put all his domestics to the sword, and razed the castle of Wart to the level of the ground. Jaques of Wart, his innocent brother, reduced to beggary, lived the remainder of his days in a poor cabin of Neflenbach, a village founded by his ancestors.

Farwangen, the chief among the castles of the lords of Balm, capitulated; but Duke Leopold and his sister Agnes, queen of Hungary, widow of King Andrew, caused sixty-three nobles and many other warriors to be conducted to the forest, and beheaded there in her presence. It was then that Agnes, as their blood streamed round her, said, “I am bathing in the dews of a May morning.”

When the castle of the house of Eschenbach (whose name has induced me to linger so long on this story) was taken, and all the vassals of Walter had been massacred, the soldiers of Agnes, and herself also, were attracted by the faint cries of an infant in its cradle, whom the shouts and shrieks of the assailants and their victims had fearfully roused. The boy was so beautiful as to interest even Agnes, hard and cruel as she was, till she discovered he was Walter’s son, when she commanded that he should be put to death also; and her officers had much ado to shield this one life from the fury which had exterminated before all those who protected it. Yielding at last, she commanded that he should renounce the name of Eschenbach, and be called Schwartzenberg. It is probable that the child did not grow to manhood, for his father was last of his line.

Walter of Eschenbach sent to his wife the deeds of the property she had brought him as her marriage portion, became a shepherd, and lived as one, in the county of Würtemberg, thirty-five years. He made himself known only when at the point of death, and was interred with the pomp due to the dignity of the ancient family which in his person closed. On the spot where the emperor was murdered, the Empress Elizabeth and Queen Agnes founded the monastery of Kœnigsfelden the high altar being built on the very place where he expired.

No one crime was ever succeeded by so many in pretended expiation. All who bore the same name with any of the guilty; all who had ever had connexion with them; all found within the prescribed domains, were sacrificed without pity. The accomplices not taken were put to the ban of the empire, their marriage vows dissolved, their friends commanded to avoid their presence, their enemies permitted to free themselves of their lives, their lands adjudged to the empire.

Agnes having founded the convent, ever averse to communion with the world, hard, cold, and cruel, though only six-and-twenty, enclosed herself within its walls, distributing alms, practising fast and penance, and performing the most humble offices. It was in vain however that she strove to attract to Kœnigsfelden the old brother Berthold of Offtringen, who had been a knight and warrior, and lived as a hermit on the mountain: “Woman,” he said, “you serve God ill while shedding innocent blood, and founding monasteries with the fruit of your rapine; only on goodness and mercy doth he look with favouring eye.”

The road having passed Unspunnen, skirts a wild stream in an enchanting glen, the White Lutschine, which waters the valley of Lauterbrunnen. On entering the village of Zweylustchinenr the mountains open to leave a way to Grindelwald, and through the chasm rushes the sister torrent, the Black Lutschine, a picturesque bridge crossing the place where meet these troubled waters.

Our road lay straight before, made beautiful by the varied forms and tints of the bold rocks which are the belt of the White Lutschine, and the dark and vivid green of pines and beech, which rise among the crevices, or from the strangely shattered summits of these crags, stained brown and grey, like genius springing from and brightening poverty.

Somewhere hereabouts, where there is barely room left for the car between rock and river, one of the former, projecting over the path sombre and sternly, once shadowed a fratricide. Of the tradition I heard only that the murderer was a powerful noble, who after his crime left in remorse his castle to ruin, and his lands to the first invader, and died in his wanderings.

The valley continued to narrow till we had surmounted the ascent to the first houses of Lauterbrunnen. On the left was the rock of Hunenflue, having the form and regularity of a bastion. Before us we saw the Jungfrau, who had dropped her veil, demanding I suppose the sun’s homage on her maiden brow, which he yielded soon after, but not until we had seen the Staubbach,—alas! without its iris.

The fall is on the right hand, about a quarter of a mile from the Capricorn, where we left our conveyance. The new hotel, which bears its name, and is built closer to it, commands the best view, saving that from the mound beneath it, which, in its deceitful neighbourhood, appears a hillock, but whose steep side I climbed with difficulty, and was puzzled to descend with sober step. We offered due reverence to the cascade, arriving ancle deep in the rivulet, from the plank made slippery by its spray; receiving a bath on the before-named mound, where the voice of the water was so loud we could not hear our own; but certainly not aware that in its spring of eight hundred feet it sometimes brings down stones to break its admirers’ reveries. The late rains had increased its volume and grandeur, and therefore perhaps lessened its resemblance to the tail of a white horse in the wind. In the winter it forms a colonnade of ice.

Along the wall of cliff which bounds this side of the valley, are other falls of equal beauty, though less fame. The Jungfrau and Wetterhorn close its extremity, and up the mountains, on the stream’s opposite shore, the green pastures stretch nearly to the summit, dotted with chalets to receive cattle and herdsmen, some seeming too high for human foot to rest on. These and the poorer houses of the village, which is scattered over the valley, are built of whole pine trunks, rudely mortised at the corners, a hole left for door and window, and the heavy stones laid on their roofs of bark, that the wind may not whirl them away.

The more aristocratic dwellings have the sawn planks which form their walls carved and ornamented, the open balconies of elaborate workmanship, and below the jutting roof inscriptions graven to recall the name of the owner, and the year and day in which the work was done, and generally some blessing, in quaint rhyme, on building and builder.

We had not intended a visit to the glaciers of Grindelwald, but the day growing fine and the road thither tempting us as we approached the bridge, our resolution altered. The narrow road winds along precipices, high above the Black Lutschine, and till it brought us within sight of the glaciers, with the domes and spires of snow which shoot up above them, I thought less interesting than the way to Lauterbrunnen. The two glaciers are well seen from the inn windows and its garden. The Mettenberg separates them, the Wetterhorn forming the boundary of that nearest Lauterbrunnen.

The places occupied by these seas of ice were once, according to tradition, fertile valleys, for in one of them was discovered a buried chapel and a bell, bearing the date 1044. From the arch of an ice cavern in this upper glacier issues the Black Lutschine; green pastures, with wild flowers and strawberries growing at their edge, are here on a level with the masses of ice ever encroaching, like death advancing to grasp childhood.

In 1790, the innkeeper of Grindelwald, crossing the glacier while driving a few sheep home from the mountains, slipped down a crevice, and found himself laid, with a broken arm only, beneath a vault of ice, and beside the torrent. Guided by the dim light which crept through the fissures, he followed along its edge, and issued through the arch into the world; he was still living when Ebel wrote.

The clergyman who in 1821 explored the glacier between the Mettenberg and Eigher, met with a similar accident, but which ended fatally. He fell to a depth of seven hundred feet, and his body, recovered after twelve days of vain attempts, lies buried in the cemetery of Grindelwald.

We dined in company of a most hungry and silent young German, and returned to Unterseen; the drive back lovelier than you can conceive, for in the place of mist we had sun and shadow; the torrent sparkling, and the distant snow blending gold with rose colour.

The horses were found in safety, Grizzle demanding oats with the impatience and attitudes of a wild beast. It is mournful to shut oneself within a lonely room in a strange inn. I walked, while the light remained, up the flight of steps which, just opposite our hotel, lead to the church, whose grey tower has the Harder for background. In the churchyard was something sadder than solitude,—the tomb of an only son, who perished, aged twenty-two, in the precipices of the Harder; rose trees were cultivated on the turf, and a bench placed opposite, where sits his mother, who, for the last ten years, has every summer made a six weeks’ pilgrimage from her far home to his grave.

We drank tea at one table of the enormous room, while a noisy Parisian party from the Rue St. Martin, or thereabouts, supped at the other, a young man of the family throwing cakes in the air and catching them in his mouth after the manner, he said himself, of the bears of Berne; there are various modes of seeking instruction when travelling: and a lady, large and red-faced, informed her companions, for our benefit, “how the douaniers had complimented her on her black eyes, and how they said they were a rarity in Switzerland!”

Rising early, we left Unterseen by the old road, which passes through Interlaken and along the rocky bank of the river. In admiration of the lake all the way, and having enjoyed a lovely ride, and seen, without a cloud to shroud them, the whole range of snow peaks with romantic names which surround the Blummis Alp and Jungfrau, we reached Baumgarten early, and rejoiced in exchanging the solitude of the dark old inn for the society of Mr. ——, his pretty wife, and her gay children.

CHAPTER III.

Left Thun the 9th, at eleven, as we waited till the morning fogs, which have now grown dense and cold, rolled up from the valley. The last bad weather, which to us brought rain, laid a light covering of snow on the mountain summits, which the natives say is a favourable sign. Madame Rufenacht remains a desolate widow. Madame R. and Mrs. H—— left (wisely) some hours before us, as the mist no sooner rises than the heat becomes intense. The road was for some distance that we had ridden towards Interlaken; it turns off where the river Kander comes dashing along its stony defile, and beneath its covered wooden bridge, to the lake. Our route skirted its precipices, and is very lovely where, at the entrance of the valley of the Simmenthal, the wooded base of the Niesen and the Stockhorn’sr crags leave barely space for the road and the torrent, which a one arched bridge spans. We found at Erlenbachr Mr. ——, who was to be our companion on this day’s journey, and, to our regret, this day’s only; as he is light-hearted and light-footed, all annoyance, and most fatigue, finding him invulnerable. Near the village was an extensive horse and cattle fair, through which, without the assistance of his mountain pole and his hand on her rein, it would have been difficult to guide Fanny unharmed, particularly as, when they stood “betwixt the wind and her nobility,” she took a sly opportunity of biting two four-footed plebeians. Weissenburg is picturesquely situated beside the torrent. We crossed it a few steps further on a wooden bridge, where horses pay a toll of a batz each, which the receiver, in her fly cap, ran after us to levy. The path to the baths winds up the hill on the right hand.

Further on, the river forms a pretty cascade, boiling and bounding over its stones below the precipitous road. Stopped at Zweizemmen, twenty-seven miles from Thun, a village of wooden houses with a wooden inn, and nothing to eat. It was unfortunately too late to go further, as the horses were the only individuals passably lodged and in any degree fed. With the exception of a damp, limp loaf and a plate of nuts, our supper presented an uneatable variety, and I was obliged to confess that I had left comfort behind when I preferred the romantic route of the Simmenthal to that by Berne and Fribourg. A quantity of wearing apparel, very far from new, hung round my bed-room, which the servant, with German phlegm, said “could not derange me as I lay in bed,” and I had some trouble to get removed in consequence. These wooden mansions are like a sounding board, for, while I was dressing this morning, I heard distinctly, as if she had been in the room, a lady in the next admonishing her daughter, and D—— and Mr. —— conversing at breakfast below; forming a tower of Babel colloquy. We had such coffee as the French call eau trouble, its few grounds floating to the top; and dismissed the unborn chickens presented for eggs. Our acquaintance parted from us here, hiring a car as far as Château d’Œx, whence he was to take the footpath to Vevay across the Dent de Jaman. We started after him, and on the wrong road, no one belonging to the Wooden Crown attempting to set us right. Over blocks of stone, and by a way which grew steep and narrow as a mule-path, we toiled debating whether we had mistaken, or this was indeed what the natives called a passable bridle-road. I asked a peasant at a cottage window, “Is this the road to Saanen?” “Ya,” said the dame composedly, pointing her hand with the stocking dangling from it to the sharp ascent scattered over with lumps of crag large enough to break a horse’s leg.

Looking down in despair, we could distinguish another road far away on the other side of the torrent and the valley. “Is that the road to Saanen?” I shrieked to a man who was driving a goat.

“Ya, ya.”

“And this we are going?”

“Ya.” So seeing no further information likely, we led the horses down this stone ladder in search of the new road, returning to the village which it skirts without entering; leaving me a hope that its completion will in no way serve the abominable Wooden Crown of Zweizemmen. It is a grand work, a broad splendid causeway for a long distance cut along the face of the rock several hundred yards above the torrent, but without the semblance of a parapet, a circumstance of which Fanny’s starts often reminded me. It crosses the stream a dozen times over handsome bridges built of stone. One of the principal of these is yet in progress, and a young German at work on the road pointed to the steep sheep-track which dips suddenly down to the torrent’s edge, and a narrow path which followed its windings. Not much liking the itinerary, we asked whether horses might not pass over, but the German, who spoke a little English, saying, “Peoples, only peoples,” down obediently we went, passing under the bridge, and pausing in the loveliest ravine in the world, with its clear rushing water and mountain sides covered with pines, those near us brilliant in light and black in shadow; and the faint mist shedding a blue tinge over the further and higher forests; the bold arch flung over at a considerable elevation, still surrounded by its wooden framework, and all the workmen, variously and picturesquely attired, crowding to the edge to look down on the apparition of Fanny pawing in the water. Continuing to follow its banks, there being neither guide nor finger-post, we crossed a wooden bridge, without rails, broad enough for one horse at a time, and high enough to break our necks perfectly. The glen and the path grew narrower, till at last we came on a party of workmen, whose cart, laden with stones, completely blocked our passage, and the horses, which we tried to force into the water, refused to stir, inasmuch as they did not know its depth, and the crags it foamed over were visible.

The cart, from which the horses had been taken, was immoveable, despite the united efforts of the civil Germans—rather a fortunate circumstance, as, on asking the question, we found we were not likely to arrive that way at Saanen. One of the men left his work to conduct us back to the bridge without parapets, and up a narrow, slippery, and perpendicular road, ranging over the admired ravine, which happily brought us to a level with the new bridge, and beyond it on the way to Saanen, to which unpicturesque place we arrived by a short cut, for once successful.

At the next village, we left the Canton Berne for the Canton Vaud. Before entering the latter at Rougemont, from another stone bridge, we saw a lovely assemblage of torrent and mountain—one range all snow, the rest with a robe of green pastures and a crown of pine forests. Fed the horses at Château d’Œx, a commanding feudal situation when it belonged to the lords of Gruyères, perched on an eminence in the plain, backed by wild crag and mountain.

The road crosses the Saane and enters a narrow pass called Latine. Montbovon, the village which Lord Byron mentions, is here in the Canton Fribourg, and from it ascends the mule-path to the Dent de Jaman. Our own road was far from safe, and at present almost impassable for post-carriages, as for a considerable distance between the rock and precipice there would be no room to pass. We fortunately met only two carts, and had some trouble in leading our horses by, as there is no protection on the side of the precipice; the road rises and falls continually, cut through the rock and the pines, and high over the torrent. It continues thus for some miles, the stream and valley then widen, and grow calmer in their beauty. No one along these new roads, undivided by league-stones, has an idea of distance. We were told two leagues for the last fifteen miles, and we were weary and the sun low when we came in sight of Gruyères, and admired its old castle and town high on the hill, below which we wound. On the authority of the Baumgarten, having reckoned on twenty-five miles, we found we had ridden forty-two. As the last faint light was disappearing, we crossed the last stream with its border of pines, and near the watch-tower of Trême, built on a rock, with an arch by its side and dirty habitations round, and, to my extreme satisfaction, arrived at the Cheval Blanc; and little Fanny, recollecting her bed of a month ago, walked straight to the stable-door.

We had our old room opposite the castle, and the inn yclept hôtel de la Mort, a most ill-omened name.

Three of the castle windows were feebly lighted, and I heard, on inquiry, that the préfet gave a ball; but not choosing to pay the fine levied here, as well as at Geneva, on entertainments during undue hours, the six young ladies and fifteen gentlemen who formed the company were invited to dance from five to ten!

It was fête at Bulle, and everybody tipsy in honour of it. I heard it was the anniversary of the Virgin Mary’s quitting the convent in which she had been educated, to marry St. Joseph.

Wednesday, September 11.

Arrived at Vevay, the day having been as burning as that on which we left it a month ago. The horses gave a strange proof of memory, insisting on stopping at a fir wood, where we then rested them in the shade. Persecuted by the small vineyard flies and musquitoes, of which we were free in the mountains, wearied by the horses kicking the whole length of the steep paved hills, we were glad to reach the Trois Couronnes, where we found our Thun acquaintances and the letters we expected, but must wait for the baggage.

16th September.

We intended leaving Vevay last Friday in company with Mr. and Mrs. H——, but Griselda the patient having with great reluctance allowed the putting on of three shoes, so positively insisted on kicking the farrier and his assistant from the off hind leg, that having called her rosse and démon, and sworn considerably, they gave up the idea, leaving her with three new shoes and a hoof with none. This was an impediment to the journey quite unlooked for, and rather disturbed our equanimity. Saturday, D—— bribed the farriers back, and after breakfast and goûter they returned to look at her and to talk, and at four o’clock the business seemed still far from completion, when one bethought him of tweaking her nose. This operation, with the aid of two pushing her side, one holding her leg, and the fifth shoeing, proved successful. Little Fanny, seeing her comrade surrounded to be sacrificed, shrieked a melancholy neigh, as she was tied in the corner.

The gold was drunk merrily, and the exploit of the five has been so exaggerated by dint of telling it, that I should think the conquest of the grey horse would remain, for all future travellers’ advantage, inscribed among the “fastes” of Vevay.

The rain has fallen in torrents during three days; this morning was fine, and the road enchanting; we passed again old Blonay, and Chastellar on his hill, and Clarens with her foot in the water, and the peak of Jaman above the spire of Montreux, the mountains not like those of the Simmenthal, everywhere dark with evergreen pine, but their sides feathered with summer leaves, and the spiral fir-forests, only far above, pointing against the blue sky.

Arrived at the narrowed road, and the high grey crag opposite Chillon, Fanny walked to the drawbridge, and but for the mist in the valley of the Rhone rising gradually and threatening, we should have paid it one visit more. The view of the castle is far grander from the shore than lake, as its uniformity is broken by the three massive towers and the keep which surmounts them, and it wears the sober grey which should be the livery of a feudal castle. We suspect the wall towards the lake of having been lately whitewashed, and the republicans have daubed thereon an enormous device, inscribed Liberté and Patrie.

As we wound along the road towards Villeneuve, beneath the old walnut trees, we turned to see it and the prisoners’ isle, till D——, who accuses me of always admiring scenery backwards, cricked his neck. The tiny habitation has no business on the island; the mountain breeze should only blow over the three tall trees and the flowers of gentle hue.

Villeneuve is an abominable hole: its inns of the Croix Blanche and Lion d’Or looking equally uninviting. Bidding here good-bye to the lake, we enter the valley of the Rhone, wild and muddy, with his eighty-four tributary streams, already received in his passage through the mountains. L’Aigle is a charming village, hid in the hills. Bex is not, in my opinion, situated quite so prettily, but the inn has a prepossessing appearance.

A peasant pointed out the way to the Salines, which lie in the mountain behind, but of them you must ask descriptions elsewhere, for it just then began to rain heavily, and we put on our cloaks, bound for Martigny. St. Maurice stands, its castle on the crag, above the road from Geneva, where a fine bridge crosses the wild Rhone, its one arch flung from the Dent de Morcles on the further side, to the Dent du Midi on ours. Before us was a little fort, thrown up by the Swiss in 1832, to defend this already well closed pass. I thought it one of the most striking spots I had seen in Switzerland. You know the legend, that here in the year 302, the Theban legion was massacred by command of the Emperor Maximilian, and the place called St. Maurice, from the name of the chief of these martyrs, who refused to abjure Christianity. When we had crossed the bridge, the grandeur and the beauty merged in the muddy street of this most filthy town; the contrast between the Vaud we had left and the Valais we had just entered, marvellous, considering that the separation is a bridge seventy feet long. Manure heaps before the doors, and pigs revelling in them once more; and the hideous goitre, and more hideous cretin, telling at every step their tale of unwholesome filth and misery. One passed us with the usual vacant grin and dead eye, and uttered a yell which startled the horses; the wretched object wore a petticoat, and we could not tell whether it were male or female.

Leaving the Rhone to our right, and now again passing numerous crosses and chapels, and votive offerings, which deprecate its fury, we came at no great distance to a most desolate spot, where the road for a considerable way crosses a tract covered only with gravel and crags, in melancholy disorder. Among the rubbish is a roofless cottage, almost buried. We were told that the bursting of a glacier in 1835 caused this desolation; a torrent of mud descended from the Dent du Midi, floating on its surface the blocks of stone which ruined the valley, sacrificing no lives, as its progress was slow, but overwhelming fields, orchards, and houses. It skirts the road for the length of nine hundred feet, and is the saddest sight imaginable; we were glad to exchange it even for the low barberry bushes which, with their pendent fruit, like coral branches, cover a soil which seems to produce little beside.

Shortly before reaching the waterfall of the Sallenche, we found that the Rhone had broken his usual bounds, and overflowed the narrow valley, more muddy in his rapid course than ever. The rain had ceased falling, but the mists lingered and deepened, and the clouds lay ominously low on the dark bare mountains. The fall is the finest I have seen, from the volume of its foaming water, and the violence with which it leaps from crag to crag through the ravine it has hollowed till it makes its last bound of one hundred and twenty feet, and from the basin which receives it, the spray mounts like steam. As, excepting the elevated causeway on which we stood, the whole expanse was here inundated, the broad sheet of water under it, and blackness of the crags surrounding, with a rare tuft of green here and there, but mostly naked and shattered, added to the grand melancholy of the scene, the vale of the Rhone might form a fit picture of the valley of the shadow of death.

Farther on a covered bridge, we crossed the Trient, a narrow but wild torrent, descending from the Tête Noire, and issuing from the black mouth of the stony gorge which opens barely enough to vomit it forth.

The rain recommenced, and we saw through the mist the round tower of the castle of La Batie, once a stronghold of the bishops of Sion, built on the summit of a solitary rock, not far from Martigny; between it and the town we crossed the Dranse, where it flows to swell the Rhone.

Arrived at the hotel de la Poste we were kept waiting a long time for the worst of all meals, served up in a picturesque vaulted hall, where fire and candles only made darkness visible. We cut up the doubtful meat only in mercy to the next comers. I imagine this has been a convent, from the open pillared galleries which run round the old house, and the corridors and private stairs, and rooms like cells.

A black line drawn along the outer wall of several houses in Martigny recalls the height to which the waters rose in the inundation of 1818, when the masses fallen from the glaciers of Getroz into the valley first formed an obstacle, behind which the waters of the Dranse, stopped in their flow, accumulated to a lake, and at last yielding to the mighty pressure, gave passage to the scourge, which in an hour and a half had swept over the eight leagues which divided it from Martigny, having borne away all that stood in its path; the bridge of Mauvoisin, ninety feet above its ordinary course, three hundred habitations, and a forest.

It is wonderful that its column rushed, without touching, past the village of Bauvernier, emitting a vapour like the smoke of a conflagration. It went on to tear from their foundations eighty houses at Martigny; its surface covered with the bodies of drowned cattle, and human beings, despite their warning, taken unawares.

One wondrous instance of preservation occurred in the person of an old man, aged a hundred years: there was a high mound, formed of the wrecks cast there by the former inundation of 1595. He would have been too feeble to climb it for safety; he stood there by chance when the roaring destroyer rushed by, circling round, without wetting the sole of his foot, as if it respected the monument of its former power.

This morning, 17th of September, started early as we conveniently could, the innkeeper having told us, for our comfort, that the overflow of the Rhone has cut the road between Sion and Sierre, and stopped the diligence. The monks of St. Bernard have a convent here, and when the climate has undermined the health of their brothers on the mountain, they are relieved from hence.

The monastery of the Great St. Bernard is distant but a ten hours’ journey; we intended going thither, but feared to over-fatigue our horses, yet I wished it much, from admiration of these self-made martyrs, and also from the romantic story of the founder. The castle of Menthon, for I must tell you this story, is built on the height which overlooks the lake of Annecy, in Savoy. An heir was born to its noble possessors on the 15th of June, 923. From early boyhood his taste and studies were unsuited to close intercourse with the world; and grown to a man, he resisted gently but firmly, the will of his family, who had chosen for his wife the heiress of the house of Dwingt.

As he was the only hope of their line, the sole seedling of their falling tree, his parents entreated and pressed him earnestly, and the youth consented at last, unable to deny them longer. The marriage morning came, the fair young bride was adorned, and the guests assembled, for there was to be feasting at the castle of Menthon. As the hour for the ceremony drew nigh, it became matter of marvel that the bridegroom should so long remain absent. His chamber, where he had not slept, and the domains of Menthon, were searched vainly; Bernard had fled. The wedding guests, one by one and whispering, departed, and the maiden, ere yet she was a wife, was left a widow.

Years went by; the heiress was no longer at Menthon, she had probably formed a more auspicious alliance, and the desolate father and mother had no son seated beside them near the hearth of their hall. They had called up hope till despair came in its place, and believing him dead at last, they set forth on a pilgrimage, not to the shrine of a saint, but the feet of a living man, whose self abnegation and holy life had become the discourse of Christendom.

Travelling by slow journeys, they arrived through the snows at the summit of the mountain, where the solitary lived in the hospital he had founded, compassionating the dangers which awaited travellers from France and Germany to Italy. They found a man old before age, worn with fatigues and hardships, and knelt before him to ask his blessing, and to beg he would say masses for the peace of their son’s soul. The monk knew them, for their old age had altered less than his youth: and while he blessed them tremulously, they knew his voice, and started from his feet to fall on his neck and bless him also.

He had fled from the wedding feast to the city of Aosta, where he received holy orders and became archdeacon of the cathedral. He had preached at the peril of his life, in the heathen Alpine valleys, and rooted out idolatry; thrown down the statue of Jupiter still worshipped on the mount Jou, the little St. Bernard, and founded hospitals on each of the mountains which now bear his name, instituting for each one a congregation of monks. He told his past life and his vocation to the parents who had found him; they wept together, and then they parted, as was his will, they to return to their lone castle of Menthon, to pray for its exiled heir; he to bury himself once more in the tomb he had selected, and forget if he could that he had seen forms and re-awakened affections which drew him back to the world.

St. Bernard preached in the Alpine valleys forty-two years, and afterwards in Lombardy, whence he travelled to Rome; he died at Novara and was canonized.

It is not surprising that the country about Martigny should be unhealthy; the road from this to Riddes, two posts and a half, is raised along the centre of a marsh, now overflowed by the Rhone; the valley produces here only rushes and rank-grass, which feed the thin cattle scantily, and stunted birch trees, and unprofitable barberry bushes, and a kind of furze with a red berry. It seems a fitting habitation only for the frogs, which croaked and jumped by myriads from the wet bank to the muddy stream as we rode along. The unfortunate peasants scarce look like human beings. I did not see two with throats undeformed by enormous goitres. Cretins abound in the valley, and those not belonging to the idiot tribe have an expression of abjectness and misery not much higher in the scale. They are mostly of dwarfish stature, and the women wear the small straw hat with turned-up brim, ornamented with brilliant ribands of gold and silver tissue, which show off in all their ugliness their unwholesome complexions and ill-formed features. At Riddes the Indian corn is cultivated again, and near Riddes to the right is a fine view of chasm and torrent, a castle above and hamlet beside, breaking the sadness of the drear valley and barren mountains. Farther on are pretty villages, surrounded by fine old walnut-trees and pastures, green as those of the Simmenthal. In a field we rode by were hay-makers busy; a woman called to desire I would approach and show my strange figure. I answered, at a like pitch of voice, that I had not time, and we left merriment behind us.

It would be difficult to fancy a finer grouping of crag, river, and valley than approaching Sion. The Rhone to the right; the peaked mountains rising before two crowned with castles; to the left, highest and grandest, Tourbillon; on the right, Valerie. The first ruined, but nobly; turret and tower and battlement standing as in the fine old age which succeeds a strong manhood. Below, as we approached the fortified wall, which, flanked by its look-out towers, surrounds the city, we saw the third castle of Majorie, once the residence of the governors of the Valais. Behind the town, on another and almost inaccessible crag, is the ruin of the castle of Seyon, of which time, and siege, and fire have left small remains.

In the year 1375, Wischard of Tawell was bishop of Sion, and had governed the republic of the Upper Valais, under circumstances of difficulty, during thirty-three years. This prelate had so well merited the affection of the people, and the confidence of the neighbouring districts, that he was named the Count of Savoy’s lieutenant-general in the Lower Valais. He had attained extreme old age, when one day while celebrating mass in his castle of Seyon, arrived with his suite his nephew Baron Anthony of Thurn Gestelenbourg,—whom his high alliance and extensive domains rendered one of the most important of the nobles. He had some difference with his uncle respecting the hereditary fief of the mayoralty of Sion, purchased by the bishop, and to whose rights and revenues he put forth claims which the old man would not acknowledge. The dispute grew warm and loud: whether the baron of Thurn was, in his own person, guilty of what followed, is a fact disputed. Those who excuse him assert that his furious vassals, uninstigated by his example, laid violent hands upon the bishop: even while he held his breviary, despite his feeble resistance and prayers for mercy, he was thrust forth to the abyss from a window of his rock-founded castle. His subjects, who loved, rose to avenge him at the news of his murder.

Peter, baron of Raron, his brother and other nobles, either did not partake in the general opinion of Anthony’s guilt, or allowed party spirit to deafen them to the claims of country and the cry of nature. Brieg, Leuk, Sierre and Sion vowed to avenge their lost lord; and, first taking several castles, met the assembled nobles near the bridge of St. Leonard, and gained a signal victory. The baron of Thurn vainly sold to Savoy his domain of Gestelenbourg. The Valaisans became its masters. The baron of Brandis, a powerful noble of the Simmenthal, through his mother, who was a Weissembourg, marched his vassals to aid Anthony. His ill-placed friendship cost him his life, and his dispersed troops sped homeward by the mountain passes. It was then that the village of An der Leuk, in the upper Simmenthal, left without defence, as its men had marched to battle, was entered by a detachment of the Valaisans, who threatened pillage. The mountain women, bred to hardships and danger, having their children and their children’s property to guard, seized on what arms had been left behind, and with the energy of roused lionesses rushed forth and drove back the enemy.

Anthony of Thurn, forced to quit the country, lived the remainder of his days at the court of Savoy. About the year 1416, the Valaisans complained that no account had been rendered of his male fiefs, (he died without heirs in 1404), and expressed fears that these also would fall into the hands of the all-grasping Rarons. These barons of Raron, as the nobles of most ancient date and largest possessions, were the sole persons whose power counterbalanced that of the bishops of Sion, till the heir of the house was named to the bishopric at the time his father held a post of importance, and the opposition ceased to exist as soon as its cessation placed the whole authority in the hands of son and father.

The jealousy thus excited was increased by Raron’s character and the personal dislike it roused. By no means a hard or bad man, his chief offence towards his country seems to have been his contempt for their coarse habits and lack of culture, and a predilection for the house of Savoy. What these habits were may be inferred from a list of laws passed by the nobles, magistrates, and citizens in council, when his power was at its zenith. They commanded “that men should be stationed to enforce the cleansing of the sewers, to prevent their overflow; that no foul linen should thenceforth be washed in water destined for the town’s consumption, nor manure allowed to accumulate before the habitations, and that the high street should be swept at least once a week.”

The dislike to Raron increased from a report which spread, that, after the invasion and conquest of the valley of Ossola by the Swiss troops, the baron had been heard to say, that “had he been opposed to them there, not one would have returned.”

Offended by this speech, they dispatched to Berne, of which city he was burgess, the landamman of Unterwald, to demand full satisfaction for words which, as they affected their honour, could not be passed by unnoticed. Berne replied, that since she had vainly demanded the baron of Baron’s aid in an expedition to Oltingen, she had abandoned him to his own guidance.

The resentment of the Valais gave henceforth its own colouring to every action of the Raron family, and in particular to its alliance with Savoy. On a day when the inhabitants of Brieg had assembled, to give loose to their ever-increasing discontent, a few Savoyard soldiers arrived in the village from the Simplon pass. They seized their arms, maltreated and drove them forth, exclaiming that their presence would be no longer borne with in the Valais.

The authors of this outrage, for their own protection, raised the country by means of an expedient derived perhaps from some gone-by custom. Assembling friends and comrades, they bare at evening a large log to a place where grew a young birch tree which they rooted up. They carved the stump into the rude semblance of a human figure, and placed it in the centre of the branches, entangling them with thorns and brambles, to represent suffering justice encompassed by the trammels of tyranny; and in proof of their determination to free her, each drove a nail deep into the stem of the birch tree. They bound the figure, thus encircled, to a tree on the high road (it was called La Mazza), and lingered near the spot to mark what might follow. Those who came that way at dawn stopped also, and there soon gathered a multitude, as yet in expectant silence and passive. At last one advanced and unbound the “Mazza,” and placed himself at its side in the centre of the crowd. Several voices next apostrophized her, demanding what injuries brought her thither, and treating her silence as the effect of fear caused by an unjust power.

“If,” they said, “there be in this assembly one man who loves his country sufficiently to be the Mazza’s questioner, let him advance!”

An instigator of the scene stepped forth:—

“Mazza,” he said, “they are sworn to aid thee: whom dost thou dread? Is he of the race of Silinen; of the houses of Henn or Asperling?”

The figure, and the man who had stood beside her from the first, remained motionless; and the speaker continued to enumerate the noble names of the Valais with as little success as before.

“Is it,” he said at last, “the baron of Raron?”

The wooden figure was bent low to the ground in signal of assent.

“You mark her complaint,” rejoined the orator; “you who will succour her raise the right hand.”

A large majority obeyed; a near day was appointed; and the news was sent from village to village, “that the Mazza was about to visit the captain-general, the bishop, and all the partizans of the Raron.”

The plot succeeded throughout; neither the lustre of their ancient name, nor the favour of a foreign prince, nor the first dignities of the land united on their heads, prevented the various districts of the Valais from planting on the appointed day, and by unanimous consent, the ill-omened Mazza before all the unfortified castles of Raron and his partizans. The multitude forced a way, and pillaged from vault to battlement. Had Raron remained in the country, he too, doubtless, would have fallen sacrifice to the Mazza. He had gone to Berne, there to renew his treaty of co-citizenship, and obtained, on the conditions of resigning his place of captain-general, and leaving Bishop William to his own resources, a promise from the Valaisans to persecute him no farther.

He believed that (his foes appeased) time might restore to him the power he had exercised in days past; but there was nothing which those enemies so dreaded, and they worked on the passions of the already-excited people, till rising again they marched on and destroyed his castle at Sierre,—took a fortress, held by the bishop, at Leuk,—and besieged Beauregard, which, built on a rock, had long seen beneath its sway and protection the valley of Ennfisch, whose fertile meadows stretch to the very foot of the Alps of Aosta.

Raron returned to Berne; but Berne was occupied wholly with the affairs of Frederic of Austria, and feeling that to the bishop and himself hesitation might be fatal, he demanded for both the aid of Savoy. Amedée the Eighth, created duke by Sigismund, charmed to find a pretext for interference, commanded Amedée of Challant, then in Chablais, to leave it with sufficient force, and take under his own protection and out of the bishop’s hands, the castles of Majorie and Tourbillon. On his side the baron of Raron victualled his strong hold of Seyon, conducted within its walls his wife and children, the Bishop William, and all the aged and infant members of his house, charging with its defence his most tried and brave vassals. A numerous and staunch garrison held Beauregard, and the heat of that burning summer aided its efforts by paralyzing those of the besiegers, till at last conquered by famine and forced to open their gates, the soldiers as they marched forth saw lighted behind them the flames, which, consuming the castle, illuminated the entire valley. The insurrection became so serious, that Amedée of Challant, fearing for Chablais, concluded a truce, which peace soon followed; but although the baron of Raron had placed sole confidence in the duke of Savoy, the latter, when renewing his ancient treaties, made no stipulations in his favour, delivered to the bishop neither Tourbillon nor Majorie, ceding both for a sum of money to the chapter. The Valaisans pillaged and destroyed them: Seyon remained alone; the riches of the Rarons were plundered; their power had departed. His courage only remaining to support him, the baron again entered Berne, and appeared in its assembly with none of the splendour, but more than the dignity of past years: he was received as its citizen once more. Meanwhile the forces of the Valais besieged Sion, determined on the total ruin of Wischard of Raron. The negociations between Berne and the Valais grew stormy: the latter insisting on the surrender of the castle, but consenting to let all within it go free. The lady of Raron, profiting by the permission, came trembling forth,—slowly treading the steep way, followed by the Bishop William, her younger children, and a long train of menials. It was then that Seyon fell. The multitude thronged thither, bearing torches, and its noble halls were sacked and fired.

Sion had abjured all respect towards this illustrious family, and the unhappy lady, who, born in luxury, had long been the spouse of these countries’ most powerful lord, descending the heights of the Valais, and traversing the Pays de Vaud in the haste of fear with her melancholy train, repaired to Berne. Her husband, listening to his angry passions only, while the debate concerning his cause was still pending, sought the Oberland, and gathering round his banner all the brave youth of Frutigen, the Simmenthal, and Saanen, marched at nightfall from the latter village, and along a narrow valley, which bears the name of Gsteig. The dawn was hardly red on the mountains when they climbed the steep paths of the Sanetsch, near the great cataracts; and appearing before Sion at the dinner hour of its inhabitants, mastered their resistance easily. In the course of some hours Sion was reduced to a few streets, the remaining space it had occupied a mass of smoke and flame, and the troop, when it had ravaged the surrounding lands three days, returned by the way it came, having hardly lost a man.

The negociations between Berne and the Valais were succeeded by war; to put a stop to which, the neutral cantons interfered, and at last, through the mediation of the duke of Savoy, it was decided that Wischard of Raron should be reinstated in his lordships, and receive as indemnity for his losses the sum of 10,000 florins. Yet, notwithstanding this, Wischard of Raron died far from his own land; his opulence, his noble name, his chivalrous virtues availed nothing to one who had neglected to conciliate the affection of his countrymen, and their caprice cast down an authority which rose no more.

Entering the town, a dirty street leads to an inn of unprepossessing appearance. We passed on to the left, winding half round the base of the crag on which stands Tourbillon. We passed a picturesque monk in his robe of brown serge, with a fine face and shaven crown; and a squinting specimen of the same species, who, I think, chose the cowl that it might serve for veil at need, he drew it so closely over his face when I asked him a question.

As we slowly descended the road which skirts the Rhone, we could long look back on this romantic castle, dark on its shadowed crag, while the sun made a sheet of silver of the swollen river, which spread beyond its natural shores, forming islets and peninsulas innumerable, circling round the peaked mounds, which, varying in height from fifty to two hundred feet, their crags gay with vegetation, crowd the valley,—first created, Ebel says, by the violent Rhone cutting a deep passage among the rubbish and ruins cast in his bed by the earth—avalanches of the mountains; and increased by that driven along at each succeeding flood. They look as if a portion of chaos had been left when the rest was softened into a world.

Riding without shade under the craggy hill and over the river, we followed vineyards for some distance, and as the branches hang within reach, and we were hot and thirsty, I did not keep my hands from picking and stealing, and we went on, refreshed by roguery, till we had nearly met with merited retribution: for at a place whence the Rhone had just retired, his slime left on the road made such perilous footing for some hundred yards, that our horses had several times almost brought us down with themselves, which there would have been unpleasant, as we should infallibly have rolled into the river. At the entrance of Sierre we passed the ruin of its demolished castle, one of those belonging to the ill-fated Raron. Found the Soleil infinitely better than the Poste at Martigny, and cleaner than report describes the inn at Sion. The number of cretins at this place is fearful, and you must see them to feel their degradation, and ours, that beings, so below brutes, should indeed belong to our species—large heads and old faces on the frail bodies of children, and with the weak limbs of a cripple,—goitres, of an enormous size, swelling the throat and hanging over the strangely-formed chests, and sometimes all the faculties wanting—the ear deaf; the tongue dumb; the eye having no “speculation” in its glare; and the enjoyment to lie rolling in filth, or basking in the sun, like some unclean animal. As I stood at the inn window, three of these wretched creatures appeared in the place below; they were attracted by a part of my dress, and staid grinning at me, demanding it, after their manner, with signs and inarticulate sounds. I could have ascribed to their colourless and withered countenances neither sex nor age. The peasants treat and speak to them kindly; but I doubt their considering now, as in darker times, the presence of one of them in their families a blessing; and such as are free from the curse ascribe it to the extreme dirt, if not of the present, of past generations. The water of Sierre is unwholesome, and drunk cold produces instant hoarseness.

The diet of the Upper Valais is sitting here; the diet of the Lower Valais at Sion: it is curious that the two districts divide the possession of the latter town.

CHAPTER IV.

Rhone overflowed—Baths of Louëche—Tourtemagne—Visp—Ravages of the Rhone—Madonnas placed to stop its further rise—Glys—Brieg—Ascent of Simplon—Ganther—Gallery of Schalbet—The toll-gate—Hospice—The Barons of Stockalper—Village of the Simplon-Broken road—Algaby—Gorge of Gondo—Fanny too near the edge—Gap in the road—Part of gallery carried away—Opportune aid—Arrival at Gondo—Broken road near Isella—Accident during the storm—Remnant of a carriage—The douanier’s aid—An auberge—The military post—My consolation—An amiable hostess—Good company in a quiet kitchen—A French gentleman expecting murder—An Italian vetturino—The Juge de paix and his interested verdict—Torrent or bedchamber—Our hostess’s supper—Departure—First difficulty—Road completely swept away—Impossibility of advancing—A lady and her guide killed—Way over the Trasquiera—Fanny aiding her conductor—A painful path—A draught of water—Top of the mountain—Inhabitants—Milk and apples—Fanny’s leap—Danger of Grizzle—Descent—Bridge gone—Torrent forded—Gallery of Crevola—The broken column—Arrival—Our friend’s welcome—Domo d’Ossola.

18th September.

Left Sierre early, and found, when but a short distance on our way, that the damage done by the Rhone had not been exaggerated. We crossed it on a bridge, and beyond, in lieu of the road which had been there, found a broad and deep deposit of the river, which had broken and swept it away. Three hundred workmen are employed since the overflow, and, as none of our party could swim, we stopped to inquire at which part it might be fordable. One of the men came good-naturedly forward to lead Fanny, and in and to her shoulder in water we went, Grizzle following, and arrived safe at the opposite shore. Rode fast up the hill to dry ourselves, leaving our friend grinning at his fee, and shaking himself like a gay poodle. The route here turns through a pine forest, a wild and beautiful way, St. Bernard and the range of brother Alps behind. The Gemmi, to the left, topped with snow, and the Rhone at its foot, and, on our right, cliff above cliff,—not cold, white, or grey, but rich with tints warm and beautiful; and fir woods below them and around us, covering the peculiar and conical mounds. A tract of forest on one of these had been burned, probably by lightning or inadvertence, and the scathed and blackened trunks stood like the plague-stricken among their green fellows. The road skirted the river, still on our left, and we saw opposite, on the mountain, a romantic village with an old turreted castle, to which conduct a wooden bridge, sinking ominously in its centre, and a steep winding road. It commands the noble gorge in the grey rock, through which rushes the Dala river, and the Gemmi surmounts it in turn. This is the village of Louëche, and its famous baths are about nine miles higher in the mountain. I might give you an account of these hot springs, which flow at five thousand feet above the level of the sea, but that I think I might weary you. They must be of extraordinary efficacy, as the cold of morning and evening at Louëche does not impede the cure, though snow sometimes falls there in July; and crowds frequent them notwithstanding their inconvenient position and the total want of comfort, often of necessaries, in the dilapidated wooden dwellings which receive the sick. It is strange that the water which at its source will harden an egg and scald a fowl, and in which one cannot, from its extreme heat, plunge the hand, so soon loses this quality, that it may be received in a glass and immediately swallowed without annoyance.

Near Tourtemagnen, where there is a strange looking inn, but I hear comfortable notwithstanding, the beauty of the country wholly disappeared, for the road ran among pools and marshes—the melancholy cows standing to their knees in water to eat the high coarse grass which half grows, half floats, around—the few trees which have attained any size bent and blasted by the searching wind; the wretched stunted women, who would be prodigies of ugliness even without the goitre, were digging in the mud for the unwholesome potatoes which grew there.

The day had grown cold and foggy, and lighted sadly the late ravages of the Rhone—painfully visible; as its widened bed now dry once more swept over meadows and fields of Indian corn, and left, on its retreat, desolating heaps of stones and sand. We passed here and there a shattered mill and a ruined habitation—the owners mostly standing idly and hopelessly on the bank—a few striving to combat with misfortune, and reap the rotting harvest; or at least collect the logs flung to their feet on the shore—relics of bridges broken and scattered in the contempt of the waters they had spanned for a time. We compared it to a land visited by a curse;—the struggle seemed so unequal between earth’s frailest race and her heaviest disasters.

I think it is after passing a village of some miserable huts called St. Pierre, that it improves for a space—green pastures once more ascending to the pine forests, and neater wooden houses covered, for the first time, with trained vines. The peasants seemed miserable as ever, ragged, and famished, but a spice of coquetry remaining through it all, for the outwork of broad riband with a tinsel border eternally trimmed the low crown of the felt hat.

With the exception of this and one other portion of better land, the marshes stretch to Visp, and the thick air is impregnated with miasmas. Visp is built where the valley parts itself in two distinct branches. The one, down which rushes the torrent which gives its name to the village, leading to Monterosa; but it is the Haneck and not Monterosa whose white mass, seen from this spot, terminates the defile of the Moro. The Visp is here broad and rapid as the Rhone, yet this place, situated near their junction, is filthy as all villages in the catholic cantons,—their united streams cannot wash the blackamoor white.

After traversing the streets, our road wound grandly and perilously round the base of rocks blasted for its formation; but this portion passed, we were again amidst the marshes, and between Visp and Glys the overflow of the Rhone has done most damage, as it is hereabouts swollen by numberless tributary streams—most turbulent vassals. Our horses sank above the fetlock in soft mud, which covered the whole face of the valley: Indian corn and pumpkins floating on its surface. The ground floors of the deserted cabins were flooded, for through this desolate tract wound a stream whose deposits made pools deep and broad; and planted in the mud, or half drowned in the water, were several small wooden crucifixes and Madonnas, placed there to deprecate its further rise.

We passed through Glys, in whose church lie buried Georges of Flue and his twenty-three children. At the entrance-gate stands the Virgin Mary, the iron glory round her head resembling the snakes of Medusa; and over the portico is a painting of the heavenly Father, extending his mantle over multitudes of the faithful, who look like deformed children,—the native artist drew, alas! his inspiration from the goitre-afflicted and the cretin. The last bridge which we crossed over the Saltine leads directly to Brieg, and at the window of the hôtel de la Poste we saw the pretty face of Mrs. —— looking out to greet our coming. The pine log fire blazing in the wide hearth was agreeable this chill evening, and her voice and laugh aided to dispel the impressions left by the dull air of that desolate valley. There are rumours of the impossibility of crossing the Simplon, of roads injured and bridges broken by some recent storm—the postmaster’s son has been sent hence to verify their truth, and we wait his fiat.

September 19th.

It is decided that we are to go, the courier from Sierre having passed through Brieg at daybreak with news that the road is open.

September 21st., Domo d’Ossola.

After two days’ silence, I write again to give you a recital of adventures which have befallen us wayfarers. Our friends and ourselves, with the rest of the party assembled at Brieg, left after breakfast, and we hardly said good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. H——, in whose company we were to dine at Domo d’Ossola. The morning was cloudy and cool, changing to the loveliest of days. Half a mile above Brieg we passed the covered bridge which crosses the Saltine, and is the first of the works of the mountain, for it is on the direct road, which begins from Glys, but is seldom taken, as there is no inn there. At this spot they join, and the ascent grows steeper, turning away from the Glytzhorn, which bounds the valley on the right, towards its comrade the Breithorn. Our horses, at a walk, soon left behind the posters and heavy carriages, and we passed beneath a hill, at whose summit is a Calvary, the stations conducting thither peeping whitely out among the thick dark firs. The valley of the Rhone looked beautiful below, Brieg in the plain, the tin globes which surmount her minaret-like steeples shining in the sun as if his rays had kindled so many stars; behind the town and the high bridge which spans the Saltine, dashing towards the Rhone, arose the mountains—parted by the deep and narrow cleft whence the river issues; and again above these were the glaciers, their forms half concealed by the vapours which, as we ascended, partially veiled the range of Bernese Alps also, but made our road the lovelier;—where, skirting the precipice from the depths of the gorge through which the Saltine foams, they rose curling thin and delicate as the smoke from a cottage chimney, or, lying at our feet for a few moments, impenetrable as a floor, slowly opened to show the torrent, glittering among its black crags, and the green forests, all dew and sunshine. At several of the windings of the road, now steep but always smooth and broad, and almost always protected, we again hung over what seemed a miniature of Brieg and the valley as far as Tourtemagnen, till arrived at a certain height, it runs nearly on a level along the edge of the ravine of the Ganther to the bold bridge at its extremity. Beneath its arch, from the rocks which back it, rushes the torrent, forming a cascade in its leap, where in winter roll the avalanches. Crossing this bridge, we returned on a parallel line with that we had already gone on the opposite side of the valley: we could distinguish the carriages some miles behind. The route ascends thence in steep zigzags to Berisol, a post-house and poor inn.

Fanny sometimes started at a pine trunk fallen on her path, or a cow feeding above us with its tinkling bell, or obstinately refused to pass some unfamiliar object, such as the poor priest who, book in hand, was summoning a dozen white goats from the pinnacles on which they were perched feeding, and who came bounding from crag to crag at his call. At such times, to distract her attention, we cantered along through the sunshine and sweet air, acknowledging its influence, for on the broad road there was little danger; it is certain the mind has less energy, and the body feels more fatigue, on the plain. Somewhere hereabouts we crossed a bridge of planks without parapets, not dangerous however. Here also a stream gushes from the rock, and passes under to foam and lose itself among the pine trees,—some standing to fringe its shores, others, broken by its force, lying at its feet to do it homage. It is one of the sweetest glimpses on the Valais side of Berisol. The last named place consists of two houses, connected by a roof which crosses the road; and here we passed more carriages, ourselves proud and rejoicing in the lesser weight which enabled us to desert them all. Continuing to mount higher, our way became more wild till we had passed the pine region, and the crags were clothed with rhododendron only, whose blossoms lent beautiful tints to the far mountain side. Here and there we saw a solitary tree broken by some avalanche, or raising boughs withered and whitened by the ungenial climate. But the sterility is almost total near the Gallery of Schalbet, the first which we traversed: it is hollowed through a rock which obstructed the passage of the road, here cut along the verge of the precipice and edge of the bare mountain, narrower and without barriers.

From the fifth refuge, which immediately follows this cavern of ninety-five feet long, to the summit, is the place of peril in the time of tourmentes and avalanches. I looked with some attention to the snow, which, lately fallen, had accumulated thick and far above our heads, and to the track of the avalanches, now marked by stream and torrent, which rush down the chasms uttering their ominous roar, repeated and prolonged by all the mocking echoes of the mountain. We were beneath the glaciers of the Kalt Wasser, and, to afford adequate protection to the road they threaten, two houses of refuge, three galleries, and an hospital, have been erected within a brief distance. The second of these galleries passes beneath one of the mighty falls, and our horses started to find themselves wet with its spray, as, carried over the roof, it dashes down before one of the apertures which light it.

The longest of these glacier galleries has been blasted through the living rock, within which it turns, and damp and cold it is as a dungeon—the water distilling through the fissures in its roof, forming in winter long needles of crystal, but now dropping mercilessly on our heads, changing the soil to a sea of mud; and the draught of air striking a chill so penetrating, that to save the horses from harm, we trotted them the one hundred and thirty feet which form the length of this gloomy cavern.

A little further, we passed the sixth refuge, which is the toll-gate also. The receiver, who came running out, found time to tell that he had served in the Hanoverian guard, and fought at Waterloo, and also to cheat us of two francs per horse, the toll amounting to four for the two. It was twelve o’clock, he said, so that we had ascended in three hours, for here is the cross which marks the highest point of the road. It continues bare and wild; but down in the meadow, which seems rather to produce a kind of moss than grass, there are scattered a few wretched cottages; heaven knows what the inhabitants exist on. The hospice founded by Napoleon, and at present occupied by a few Augustine monks, is a fine-looking building without, but desolate and unfinished within. We were saluted as we rode by two of the lonely brothers, who were wandering on the irregular hillocks which surround it, bare of bush or verdure, surmounted by the unchanging snows. In the broad valley below our road, shut in by rocks naked as itself, rises on a mound the square six-storied building, or rather tower, which served for hospice ere this was instituted. A few cows were standing before it, chewing the cud—“of sweet and bitter fancies” it must have been,—for there appeared nothing to swallow bodily. It is said that the old barons of Stockalper were in the habit of sending hither their children to preserve them from the baleful influence of the air of the plain: it still belongs to a proprietor of the same name.

From this place the road commences and continues to descend. We were among green and living things once more, and the milder temperature restored to activity that worst of all species of crawling fly which had already so persecuted our horses in the ascent, and, notwithstanding my long apprenticeship in fly murder, consequent on our ride, resisted all efforts to kill, being cased in armour, till I adopted suffocation, and therefore, for the benefit of future horse travellers, recommend that they be pressed between finger and thumb until death shall ensue.

Crossing a torrent on a bridge, at last, about two leagues from the summit, we entered the most dirty village of the Simplon, where we had decided to stop only to feed the horses, who were well able to end their day’s journey at Domo d’Ossola: it is built on a knoll above the rapid stream, commanding an unproductive valley. The houses, built in stone, take mellow and picturesque tints from the moss and lichens which clothe them, and winter lasting here during two-thirds of the year, the small garden, which each possesses, is cultivated almost in vain. The clearing of the snows and the transport of merchandise (for it has been calculated that at least two hundred horses pass weekly in the severe season) supply to its hardy inhabitants, the profit more easily won in other regions, preserving from the misery which would seem their doom. Traversing courageously heaps of manure and pools of abomination, D—— accompanied the horses to the stables, while I walked into the inn opposite, before which stood a collection of English and other carriages, and on the steps, in discussion or dispute, discomfited gentlemen and villanous-looking Italians. The house was crowded to overflow, a circumstance which appeared to improve neither its attendance nor the politeness of its landlady: for when I asked the last-mentioned fat personage for some refreshment, she handed me to her sharp-faced, thin daughter, who left me on the stairs, saying the salle was at the top, and disappeared, promising to ask the cook if he had anything to eat, which she said she believed he had not, owing to the immense influx of guests who had come thus far, unapprized of the road’s real state, and stayed from the impossibility of proceeding. As she did not come back, I found my way through corridors innumerable to the kitchen, and stood opposite the cook and his company of marmitons. Perhaps he felt mortified that the uninitiated should perceive the nakedness of the land, devoid of both food and fire; certainly he received me unamiably, proffering only a foot of raw beef sausage, and being sulky when I declined it; informing me that it had been five times the length, and all the remainder of the guests had been very glad to eat it raw. When I assured him, that although it might serve his house to spare fuel, it by no means suited me, he produced two shining slices of ham and a piece of bread, the last in the house; he said he had sent to Domo d’Ossola for more, and I returned in triumph to the eating-room, a little marmiton carrying the hot ham and dry crust behind me. I found there several disconsolate groups, and as companions in misfortune we were in five minutes acquainted: there were two American gentlemen, who from their accent I thought Irish, and from their kind politeness afterwards made me feel that Mrs. Trollope’s recital was not always fair; and an amiable English family, about to turn back, the extortion of the Italians who in the morning had asked 500f. for transporting their carriage, now raising it to 1000. The Americans had determined on going on, though every one assured them it was wholly impossible, and D—— said we might follow where they went: so, having given our horses proper repose, we mounted them again,—our new acquaintances having the start of us by about half an hour. For some distance the road was good and smooth, the first awkward-looking portion we approached being where it bends backward like the coil of a snake, beyond the village. The light carriage had passed; for close to the edge of the precipice were the marks left by its wheels, and as we led our horses over we agreed that the damage had been probably exaggerated, and we should want no guide. The gallery of Algaby, 115 feet long, conducted us from the more open space to the gorge of Gondo. In 1814 it was converted to a military post, and its entrance is half closed by a wall, pierced with loopholes to defend the pass. It is the most savage of stony glens: no sunshine in its recesses, for the cliffs rise to a height of more than 2200 feet; no vegetation, except you can call such the broken line of firs here and there seen on the tops of the bare black crags, so nearly met overhead, that

“The wanderer’s eye may barely view

The summer heaven’s delicious blue”—

their fragments lying in the stream, which frets against and over them with a roar so deafening, that we could not hear each other’s voices; as sometimes (I speak for myself), awed by the silence of all saving nature, we rode along a narrower road, guarded only by far severed granite posts, unconnected by pine trunks, advancing like a cornice on the edge of the rock and over the abyss,—proving, it is true, that the work of man has been mighty; but also showing, by the masses of crags scattered like chaff, and the rush of unnumbered waterfalls, which might bring destruction with them from the mountain top, how easily his skill may be baffled. Fanny’s sudden fright at one of these had very nearly closed my journal: while, in consequence of her starts, Grizzle placed outside as a bulwark, we were walking our horses, a sharp turn brought us suddenly on one of these cascades, bounding down a cleft in the rock and crossing the road, she swerved violently behind Grizzle and towards the edge, which of course she did not see, as her bright eye was fixed on the waterfall. The curb-stone was slippery with the spray, and we were within a foot of it; so close that I said, “We are going over;” but at the same time, from instinct, struck poor Fanny with all my force, and the pain made her bound forward, and pass the peril. D—— looked pale and frightened, it being one of the cases in which aid was impossible: I had not time to be afraid. The Ponte Alto, a superb bridge, which, with two enormous crags for support, spans the Doveria, conducts the road to its opposite shore. The still narrowing gorge is at every step more deep sunken and wild, almost resembling a cavern. We had passed a break on the road of small consequence, and had again commenced remarking on Italian exaggeration, when we arrived at a gap, some forty feet wide, cut by the rise of the Doveria. Hid in it were a few men, rather examining than repairing what would have required fifty. To our surprise we saw the marks of the carriage-wheels on the soft earth,—it had been dragged in and out again. We led our horses down the steep, the men significantly pointing to some holes through which we might have sunk too far,—and Fanny, whose rein I held, pulled me gallantly up on the other side. At the wooden bridge which, some steps farther, again traversed the torrent, we found our American acquaintances, tying up their pole which had broken there. We exchanged a few words: on their side promises of help, if help were needed, and thanks on ours, and a portion of undamaged road led us to the gallery of Gondo, 683 feet long, (according to guide-books), blasted through the rock, whose mass stood forth to bar the way: the two vast apertures, made towards the torrent, formerly lighted it but feebly, but this was not the case to-day,—for a part of its rocky roof and wall had been carried away also. Issuing at its mouth, we came, to my surprise, and not, considering my late adventure, to my pleasure, on the bridge, which immediately after crosses the superb waterfall of Frascinodi thundering down its immense volume from the high glacier, and along the hollow of the cliff below the arch with a spray which blinds and a roar which deafens, falling into the deep gulf, where, struggling among the crags, groans, as if in pain, the Doveria.

Having ridden down the abrupt descent which immediately follows, ere the bending of the road concealed this view, we turned to look at it once more. It is that of which we have so often seen drawings, the noblest in the Simplon: the graceful stone arch—the tall rocks and the chasm—the fall and the torrent,—and where the foam was not, the water in the basin it has hollowed in the crag, of that pale clear green seen in the crevices of a glacier.

Before reaching the village of Gondo we again passed the carriage, but were soon stopped ourselves by a ruined piece of road which, though dangerous to horses’ knees only, was exceedingly embarrassing, as D—— could not lead two; and I found that, even without the care of Fanny, I was fully employed in keeping my footing while scrambling up and down the mounds of crag and loose stones, and through the stream which, shrunk and quiet now, had done this damage. I tried my skill notwithstanding, and arrived at the top of the first heap, whence Fanny refused either to slide or jump into the water; and we were very much in the situation of statues on a pedestal, when our kind fellow-travellers arrived to my aid, altering Fanny’s determination, and in consequence Grizzle’s, who will not stir a step unless she leads the way.

The carriage was dragged over with a difficulty which several times made me fear that our acquaintances and those with them would have been forced along with it into the Doveria: for it required the united strength of all to preserve its equilibrium along the narrowed way, now barely the width of its wheels. It tottered several times on the slopes, and it made me dizzy to see the men on the verge opposing to its weight their own, where a false step would have cast them below to be mangled among the stones of the rapid torrent. Another and worse obstacle waited us at the entrance of Gondo: for here the stream, which descended from the mountains, was still three feet deep, and its violence made the crossing it a work of danger; though with the aid of our friends we accomplished it, scrambling over piles of smooth rock and rolling stones, and through the water. The carriage was taken off its wheels, as no vehicle made with human fingers could have passed here; and the poor post-horses, who, no care bestowed on them, had hitherto picked their own way, could go no farther. We therefore proceeded alone to Gondo, a melancholy village of a few cabins and a chapel, and a strange building of eight stories, with barred windows, which I certainly should rather have supposed a prison than an inn belonging to the family of Stockalper. Could we have imagined that it boasted common accommodation, as Artaria assures it does, we should have remained there to pass the night, being wet and weary; but deceived as to its destination, we applied at an inn some steps farther, and after screaming at the entrance of the dark corridor till we had roused every cur in the neighbourhood, a solitary woman appeared, to say that this was not, as we had fancied, Isella; that she had neither bed for ourselves, nor food for our horses, and we must go on, and should do well to make haste as the evening was closing and there was a “cattivo passo.” Fortunately for us (our friends being no longer within call) at the frontier of the Valais and Italy, where on the left to mark it there is a humble chapel on the crag, and on the right poised above the torrent a colossal fragment of fallen rock, we found some good-natured douaniers, who assured us of the impossibility of passing Isella, and the difficulty of even arriving there, and offered to accompany us, a proposal we gladly accepted as the evening was growing dusk, and my hand was almost useless in leading Fanny over such ground as we had been treading.

At this place, between the frontier and Isella, on the 15th, the day of the storm, a carriage was passing under the torrents of rain, and the postilion, who, fortunately, was of the mountains and on his guard, walking at the heads of his horses, saw above, symptoms of the coming earth avalanche. He had time to shout to the travellers to descend and to cut the traces, when it came rushing down, the carriage was swept into the Doveria with its luggage, and instantly shattered to atoms: for the largest remnant rescued, a portion of the coach-box, was placed as a memento on a rock by the road-side, and is hardly longer or broader than a man’s hand.

Our difficulties had now seriously begun. Isella was in sight, but between it and us a space of the road for about two hundred yards had been swept away, leaving in its room piled rocks and masses of stone, which had been its foundation; a torrent, not very deep but furious in its rapidity, was boiling down, crossing these, and had already hollowed a bed athwart the ruin. The douaniers came up to assist as we stopped in dismay and discouragement. How the horses got over, and without fall or stumble, is to me a matter of wonder; they scrambled over the rocks and jumped down descents, and struggled through the water, and up the high mound of loose stones, which yielded beneath their hoofs, doing honour to their blood and race.

I had been so completely wet before that, but that the force of the stream was well nigh enough to lift me off my feet, I should have preferred it to the plank thrown over by some Samaritan.

At Isella, however, we were, passing the custom-house, which I had hoped might be the inn, being a building of decent exterior, to arrive at the most miserable auberge ever owned by even Italian masters: a wretched shed on one side for stable, the sharp air blowing in on our wet horses, no groom to dry them, and filth for a bed; straw so rare, that it was sold by the pound, at an inconceivable price. A poste of “carabinieri reali” joined the inn on the other side, and this was my consolation, for while D—— was watching our poor four-footed companions eat such hay and oats as this place afforded, with apparent satisfaction, I made my entry, mounting a ladder-like stair which several Italians were descending, one of whom held his candle in my face, as I passed him on my way to the kitchen, where I found (a red handkerchief tied above an assassination-looking face) a most furious Italian woman, distributing spirits, by the light of one tallow candle, to a band of lawless looking personages, who were shouting and swearing.

As nobody made way for me, I asked mine hostess for a room, to which she said, “Patienza;” and having assuaged the thirst of all her dark-faced customers, she set herself to stirring a caldron full of some ill-scented mixture on her hearth.

On my applying for attention once more, she said, with a toss of her head and spoon, that I must wait, as she had not time to mind me; and as I was really afraid of offending her, I took a seat, which a douanier who was smoking by the fire offered me by his side, and sate close to him, placing my confidence in his presence, and the vicinity of the carabinieri.

The turbulent party round my landlady continued to drink and to smoke till I could hardly see them through the cloud. As my courage rose and the atmosphere grew stifling, besides that I was weary of the Swiss Italian of my companion, I got up to see if, till D—— should have left his horses, I had, by passing through the open door, a chance of more humanized society, or at least of none. To my extreme pleasure, on the balcony I found an old French gentleman, with his son and grandson, who had arrived some hours before ourselves. They hailed the addition which we and the Americans, who were on their way, would make to their party, for the old man said they had stopped only because they could get no further, as he in his own person had doubts of his hostess, and thought it would be as well that we each should know the other’s sleeping apartment, to afford help reciprocally, “dans le cas,” he added, “que nous soyons assassinés!”

His son was complaining bitterly of an Italian vetturino, who, when on starting he agreed for a certain sum to conduct his passengers to Milan, already knew the state of the road, as the 13th and 14th the storm had been raging on the Italian side, though its greatest fury was on the 15th. Under the Kaltwasser glaciers a sudden gust of wind had overturned his carriage, absolutely on the verge of the tremendous precipice. The poor pale boy had shown great courage, and even the horses and carriage received no injury.

A Ride on Horseback to Florence Through France and Switzerland. Vol. 2 of 2 / Described in a Series of Letters by a Lady

A ride on horseback to Florence

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.