Gifted minds tried to wrest meaning from the disaster. In Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), a thirty-one-year-old doctoral student, Immanuel Kant, fascinated by newspaper accounts of the cataclysm, published what are commonly thought to be the founding documents of the science of seismology. From the shores of Lake Geneva, the habitually caustic Voltaire had the hero of his novella Candide visit Lisbon on the day of the quake, all in the service of shaking him out of his naïve belief in a benevolent God overseeing a benign world. The Lisbon catastrophe had laid bare a truth heretofore only suspected: Our world is a pitiless place, subject to sudden upheaval independent of any divine design.
The mountains began to make sense. Their awful asymmetry was not the devil’s—or God’s—handiwork. They stood as testament to cataclysms of an unthinkably distant past. They were violence frozen, made manifest, the only question being whether their irruption had been sudden, like the Lisbon earthquake, or a long process over time. The Enlightment, already a siren song of reason, would now produce another attraction, a pursuit so widespread and popular that it eventually came to be the nineteenth century’s obsession. Geology, deriving meaning from rock, became the occupation and avocation of thoughtful people throughout Europe. After Lisbon, there was no turning back the clock; rather, the geologists, scholarly and amateur, would from now on be the arbiters of time.
But to know the Alps was not necessarily to love them, as curiosity does not always spell affection.
Enter a new Heloise and Frankenstein’s monster.
WHEN I RETURN to my car, someone snaps a picture of me getting into the driver’s seat, making me feel like some D-list celebrity leaving an LA nightclub. Although the air-conditioning systems in Renault vehicles are not as cryogenic as the ones in American cars, relief eventually arrives by the time I leave town. Geneva gives way to the canton of Vaud, a French-speaking area to the east of the city with the infelicitous license-plate abbreviation of VD. And there is a lot of VD about: The shore road is one immense, linear parking lot, as what seems to be the entire populace of the canton heads down to the lake.
The village of Coppet flashes past, its hillside pink chateau famous for hosting salons thrown by the hyperliterate Mme. de Staël. In the opening decade of the nineteenth century, Coppet welcomed the most creative minds of the time. Not only was the hostess from an illustrious family (her Swiss banker father, Jacques Necker, enacted financial reforms in a vain effort to stave off the French Revolution), but Mme. de Staël was also a best-selling author. Her Corinne, the story of a poetess swanning scandalously about Italy, made bosoms heave all over the Continent.
Which is an appropriate image at the moment, given the bodies braving the traffic to bounce across the roadway to the water. The handful of kilometers east of Geneva continues in this fashion, as I dodge scores of people determined to beat the heat. When signs for Lausanne, the capital of Vaud, finally appear, all vehicular motion comes to a near-standstill. On the tree-lined Avenue de l’Elysée, we inch past the Olympic Museum. Lausanne is home to one of the world’s most succulent gravy trains, the International Olympic Committee, whose pashas travel the planet deciding which will be the next city to host the quadrennial extravaganza.
The sea of pedestrians eddying around my idling Mégane then flows into the lakeside Parc du Denantou, where a carnival midway is going strong, its wrenching rides eliciting shrieks of terror. From my near-stationary vantage point, I can see that the most popular nausea-inducing contraption is called the “Scary Mouse,” though it seems to me that the thrill-seekers need not spend their precious Swiss francs for a moment of fright. They need only turn their gaze southward, across the lake, where the vista is, if anything, more fearsome than Geneva’s. The lowering dark cliffs of France look taller and more threatening, the snow-capped heights beyond them seeming to stick an icy finger in the eye of God. They are enough to send a shudder down anyone’s spine.
Of course, beauty and terror lie in the eye of the beholder, landscapes being entirely blameless things, the pain or pleasure they inflict entirely the construct of the human mind. We nonscientists see in the natural world attributes that are not, objectively, there. Yet my problem now, as I am determined to sing the praises of those who freed the mountains from their age-old demons, resides in the suspicion that I am not fully convinced, on a visceral level, that these liberators were right. The mountains are scary, as scary as the Scary Mouse, and I’m not sure I can get beyond that.
But, as they say on the ski slopes, “go big or go home.” The literary pilgrims who flocked to these shores in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had no such qualms. Beautiful Lausanne was a magnet for such visitors, as Edward Gibbon had composed here the final two volumes of his wildly successful History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The street leading from his house (long since razed) became a warren of booksellers, stocked with the Swiss-published works deemed too seditious in the neighboring absolute monarchies. Yet middle-aged Gibbon may have had another reason to return to the Lausanne of his youth: He had had his heart broken here by the young woman who would later become the mother of Mme. de Staël.
The road eastward turns glorious in the afternoon sunshine. For once, the traveler’s gaze is not drawn to the Alps across the lake; rather, the terraced vineyards on this shore mesmerize. The slopes of the Lavaux chasselas and gamay grapevines are steep, their gray stone retaining walls, first erected by monks a thousand years ago, creating perilous spaces of the horizontal in a plane that is vertical. The colorful châteaux on the green countryside are similarly shored up. It’s not hard to see why UNESCO deemed this beauty spot a World Heritage Site.
I reach the resort town of Vevey. A large central square down by the lake seems like the perfect place to stop. I take a quick look at the in-your-face panorama of the Alps across the water, then sit at a café terrace.
“Three francs ninety.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Three francs ninety.”
The young waitress, with a long braided ponytail, black against the spotless white of her blouse, looks at me. She has brought me a beer and now stares blankly at the expression of bewilderment on my face.
“Come again?”
“Three francs ninety.”
The penny finally drops. She is speaking to me in Swiss French. In the French here (and in that of the Walloons of Belgium), ninety is nonante. Similarly, eighty (huitante or octante) and seventy (septante) differ from standard French usage. For those unfamiliar with the distinction, it may come as a surprise to learn that the French language, as spoken in France, Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, and elsewhere, completely loses its mind once the number seventy is reached. Seventy is soixante-dix, that is, sixty-ten; seventy-five is sixty-fifteen. But the asylum doors are fully breached when the number eighty arrives. It is quatre-vingts, that is to say, four-twenties. Thus, eighty-five is four-twenty-five, and ninety—hewing to this logic—is four-twenty-ten. In 1999, if you wanted to say the year aloud in standard French, you needed most of the afternoon: mil neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, which gives us, literally, thousand nine hundred four-twenty-ten-nine.
“Nonante!” I exclaim as a way of apologizing for my French gaucheness. The waitress remains impassive. As I hand her the coins, I try another tack. I say, “So you’re a Suissesse,” using the term for a Swiss woman that almost all French-speakers view as one of the silliest words in the language.
She grins appreciatively and responds, “A Suissesse, yes. And proud of it.”
She lingers, as if expecting me to say something.
I take a sip of the beer and ask, “Do you like the view of the mountains over there?”
“I love it. Why?”
“I don’t know what to think about it,” I say hesitantly. I explain my mixed feelings and confess to being a bit frightened by the perspective.
“You are not Swiss, you don’t understand,” she says with conviction. “We Swiss cannot live without
our mountains.”
She smiles as she says this, as if to show compassion to an outsider.
We both look out at the view.
“Do all of the Swiss feel that way?”
“Of course! We were raised with the Alps.”
“You like them even when it snows?”
The smile becomes a laugh. “No, then they become a nuisance.”
THE GROUND WAS LAID for the Romantics, the Zeit had struck for the Geist. As the eighteenth century progressed, the heady brew of nascent nationalism, democratic dreams, and individual self-expression was matched by a bubbling respect for the natural world, quite apart from its new status as something worthy of scientific inquiry. From the growing cities, soon to be blighted by the “dark satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, the well-off took to going into the now-unfamiliar countryside in search of the “picturesque”—that is, a scene deemed suited to a painting. The English, in particular, took to their Lake District and the wild Scottish Highlands hunting the picturesque. Many held in their hands a Claude Glass, so named for landscape painter Claude Lorrain. This device was essentially a rearview mirror. When the intrepid traveler confronted a picturesque vista, he would turn his back to it, whip out his Claude Glass, then manipulate it so that its reflecting surface formed an ephemeral, well-composed painting, leaving out all the extraneous sights that might spoil the effect. While turning one’s back to the scenery that one is supposedly admiring might seem ridiculous—a series of satirical novels lampooned one Doctor Syntax, a retired vicar besotted with the picturesque—it may be no coincidence that the successor to the Claude Glass, the camera, obliged the photographer to look through a viewfinder.
The Claude Glass, the geologist’s hammer, the Grand Tour sketchbooks, the proliferating guidebooks to Switzerland—all conspired to prime the charge of Romanticism in the Alps. The detonation occurred in 1761, when Switzerland’s most famous son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise). Originally entitled Letters from Two Lovers Living in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, the novel streaked across the firmament of eighteenth-century thought like a blazing comet, running into seventy editions in many languages by the year 1800. The book, in short, was a sensation; its reception, ecstatic.
Julie is an epistolary novel, one whose story is told through an exchange of letters. The Héloïse of the subtitle refers to Héloïse d’Argenteuil, a brilliant and beautiful scholar of the twelfth century who exuberantly bedded her tutor, Pierre Abélard, then the most influential Scholastic of his day. Their exertions resulted in the birth of a son, whom they named Astrolabe; the castration of Abélard, performed by Héloïse’s outraged relatives; and a handful of profoundly passionate and learned letters the two exchanged later in life, after events had forcibly separated them. Fortunately for the fictional Saint-Preux, the tutor and lover of Julie, Rousseau’s novel does not stray into the surgical. Instead, Saint-Preux and Julie enthrall one another with declarations and descriptions of their forbidden love (he is a commoner; she, a noble), mixing philosophy, emotion, and the love of the authentic and of nature.
The trysting takes place on the waters and along the shores of Lake Geneva, most notably east of Vevey, in a hamlet called Clarens. The lovers find the mountainous setting purifying, worthy of their unsullied souls. When they get caught out in a storm on the lake, all of Europe swooned in empathetic fright. And when their love is consummated, many readers no doubt took to the privacy of their rooms. Julie became an emotional and intellectual landmark, situated in the hearts and minds of aspiring Romantics and, quite concretely, at the foot of the Alps.
I have read Julie and can quite sincerely state that it is unreadable. I am not an outlier in holding this opinion: Historian Simon Schama calls it “perhaps the most influential bad book ever written.” But it does not matter what gimlet-eyed critics of the twenty-first century think; for Rousseau’s contemporaries, his tale captured the aspirations of their time. The moment had come to break free, to realize one’s innate goodness, to look upon nature as a friend, to see it as a reflection far profounder than that produced by a Claude Glass.
One can certainly sympathize with the sentiment. Yet when I stand on the lakefront of Clarens, there is still that damned view across the water. The green cliffs form a dark fence protecting the great white monsters touching the sky. The setting is an open invitation to indulge in the pathetic fallacy—i.e., imbuing the natural world with human emotion. Not only did Rousseau find this setting amenable to a change of worldview, but so too did a much later artist, Igor Stravinsky, who composed his epochal Rite of Spring in Clarens. To my mind, the latter’s violent, discordant hymn to nature, culminating with a young woman dancing herself to death, seems a more apposite work for the site.
Nonetheless, it is Rousseau who clears up any lingering bewilderment about the attractions of inhospitable landscapes. Writing more than two decades after Julie, the philosopher explains what it is about mountain scenes that so fascinates him: “I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forest, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside me to frighten me, for the odd thing about my liking precipitous places is that they make me giddy, and I enjoy this giddiness, provided that I am safely placed.” He could, in fact, be describing the delights of roller coasters, which in many languages are called mountains, usually Russian or American. Rousseau is endorsing thrill-seeking, and where better to feel an enjoyable frisson than in the company of a death-inviting drop? As long as one is, in Rousseau’s formulation, “safely placed.”
Hence the Alps are a source of titillation, or, as Rousseau and his followers preferred to describe it, the Sublime. The Swiss did not popularize the notion; that distinction belongs to an Irishman, Edmund Burke. Although today the patron saint of reactionary scolds, Burke as a young man wrote an influential treatise on the subject of apprehending nature. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature … is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror,” Burke remarked, before going on to say, “Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect.”
Burke gave a philosophical stamp of approval to having the vapors; Rousseau pointed out the locale where they might be best experienced—and supplied a Romantic ideology advocating the search for such heightened emotion. As I pass the lakeside town of Montreux, like one of the countless literary pilgrims to have come this way two centuries ago, it occurs to me that my initial reaction on seeing Mont Blanc earlier in the day was useful. Had I not felt that way, I would have been unable to appreciate the next stage of the sublime process: the warm, snuggly embrace of terror.
THE CHILLON CASTLE stands just offshore, perched on a rocky island the same color as its tawny fortifications. It is a multiturreted jewel, a small masterpiece sited in a place of scenic perfection. The castle’s landward walls are almost windowless, with watchtowers, sentry walks, and slits for archers that show its role as a jealous guardian of the Via Italica, the age-old trade route linking Burgundy with Lombardy by way of the nearby Great St. Bernard Pass. Lakeward, the façade is punctuated by graceful Gothic windows to take in the view long enjoyed by the ruling family of the region, who regularly summered at Chillon and held feasts in the four great halls of the castle. That view from those halls contrasts the serenity of Lake Geneva and the violence of the Alps, which may account for its status as Switzerland’s most visited tourist shrine for generations. In the late nineteenth century, Henry James has the doomed heroine of his novella Daisy Miller explore the castle in the company of a confused suitor she has met at nearby Vevey.
As I drift through the halls and dungeons and courtyards, a weird zephyr of fairy voices wafts around the stone walls and staircases. I locate its source: a children’s troupe from Moscow is performing a play to celebrate the bicentenary of the establishment of diploma
tic ties between Russia and Switzerland. The effect is lovely, a spur to fantasy.
At about the same time those diplomatic ties were knotted, a trio of Rousseau-loving pilgrims toured the castle. Unlike so many others who mooned ineffectually on the shores of the lake, these three were artists of genius: Percy Bysshe Shelley, his future wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and the clubfooted copulator extraordinaire of his era, Lord Byron. Poems soon issued forth from them celebrating the beauty and melancholy of the area, Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, about a monk held captive in the castle, immortalizing the thousand-year-old structure as a redoubt of Romanticism.
In 1816, the weather turned very bad for the English visitors. Several months previously, on the other side of the world, the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history—that of Mount Tambora in Indonesia—had launched forty cubic kilometers of debris into the atmosphere. The resulting “Year Without a Summer” brought weeks of torrential rain and terrific electrical storms to the shores of Lake Geneva. Holed up in the villa they shared, the three friends amused themselves by telling each other ghost stories against the phantasmagoric backdrop of tempest, lake, and mountain. Doubtless Byron excelled at scaring the wits out of his friends—“mad, bad and dangerous to know,” a former mistress characterized him—and it was he who suggested that each should compose a lengthy tale of horror for their common edification. Of the three, only Mary held up her end of the bargain and the following year produced a manuscript entitled Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. No matter whether judged sublime or ridiculous, the novel made the mountains even more of a melodramatic dreamscape.
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