Chapter 38: Switzerland—james Fazy and the Refugees—monte Rosa (1)

The agitation in Europe was still so violent in 1849 that it was difficult, living in Geneva, to fix the attention on Switzerland alone. Moreover, political parties are rather like the Russian Government in the skill with which they divert the attention of the traveller. If he falls under their influence, he sees everything, but sees it all not simply but from a certain angle; he cannot get out of an enchanted circle. His first impression is prearranged, suborned, and does not belong to himself. The prejudiced view of the party catches him unawares, unprepared, indifferent, and, so to say, disarmed, and before he has taken his bearings it becomes his view. In 1849 I knew only Radical Switzerland, that Switzerland which brought about a democratic revolution, which in 1847 suppressed the _Sonderbund_.[56] Then more and more surrounded by the refugees, I shared their indignation with the cowardly Federal Government and the pitiful part it was playing in the face of its reactionary neighbours.

I learnt more about Switzerland and got to understand it better on later visits, and most of all in London. In the dreary leisure of the years 1853 and 1854 I learnt a great deal, and formed a different view of many things that I had experienced or seen in the past.

Switzerland was passing through a difficult ordeal. Among the ruins of the whole world of free institutions, among the fragments of foundering civilisations grinding each other into dust, amidst the destruction of all conditions of human life, of all political forms, for the benefit of a brutal despotism, two countries remained as they were—one behind its sea, the other behind its mountains, both mediæval republics, both firmly rooted in the soil by the traditions of ages.

But what a difference of power and position between England and Switzerland! If Switzerland, too, is like an island behind her mountains, her position, shut in by other countries, and her national spirit compel her to steer her course with care, and also make her politics far from simple. In England the common people do not stir, they are three centuries behindhand. Activity in England is confined to a certain class: the majority of the people are outside any movement; they are scarcely stirred by Chartism, and even that is confined exclusively to the town workmen. England stands aside, flings its inflammable material across the ocean as it accumulates, and there it grows triumphantly. Ideas do not crowd upon her from the Continent, but enter slowly, adapted to her manners and translated into her language.

It is utterly different in Switzerland: she has no ruling caste, nor even striking differences between the town and country. The patriarchal patricians of the cantons could not hold out against the first pressure of democratic ideas. Every doctrine, every idea passes backwards and forwards across Switzerland, and they all leave their traces on her: she speaks three languages. Calvin preached there; the tailor Weitling[57] preached there; there Voltaire laughed and Rousseau was born. That land in which every man from the ploughman and the workman upwards has a hand in the government, which is oppressed by powerful neighbours, has no standing army, no bureaucracy, and no dictatorship, remains after the storms of revolution and the saturnalia of reaction the same free republican federation as before.

I should very much like to know how conservatives explain the fact that the only countries in Europe that are tranquil are those in which personal freedom and freedom of speech are the least restricted. While the Austrian Empire, for instance, is kept up by a series of _coups d’état_ with the stimulant of galvanic shocks and administrative revolutions, and the French throne is only maintained by terrorism and the abolition of all legality, in Switzerland and England even the absurd and antiquated forms that have grown up with their freedom are preserved unshaken under its mighty canopy.

The behaviour of the Federal Council in regard to political refugees, whom they turned out at the first request from Austria and from France, was disgraceful. But the responsibility for it falls exclusively on the Government; questions of foreign policy are by no means so near the heart of the people as domestic problems. In reality all nations are only interested in their own affairs; everything outside is confined to a remote preference or simply a rhetorical exercise, sometimes sincere, but even then rarely affecting practice. The nation which has gained a reputation by its humane sympathy with all and everything knows less geography than any and is more than any tainted with insufferably susceptible patriotism. Moreover, the Swiss is by nature itself not drawn to distant horizons: he is confined to his native valley by his mountains, as the dweller by the sea to its shore, and as long as he is not interfered with in it he says nothing.

The right, assumed by the Federal Government, of dealing with the refugees did not really belong to the Swiss central government at all; according to its law, the question of the exiles was in the jurisdiction of each canton. The Swiss Radicals, carried away by French theories, tried to strengthen the central government in Berne, and made a great mistake. Fortunately, the attempts at centralisation, except in those instances in which its practical benefit is obvious, such as the organisation of the post and maintenance of roads and currency, were not at all popular in Switzerland. Centralisation may do a great deal for order and for various public undertakings, but it is incompatible with freedom. It easily brings a nation to the position of a well-tended flock, or a pack of hounds cleverly kept in order by a huntsman.

That is why the Americans and the English hate it as much as the Swiss.

Numerically weak, uncentralised Switzerland is a many-headed hydra, a Briareus; you cannot vanquish her at one blow. Where is her head? Where is her heart? Moreover, one cannot imagine a king without a capital city. A king is as great an absurdity in Switzerland as the grades of the Russian civil service in New York. The mountains, republicanism, and federalism have reared and preserved in Switzerland a mighty, vigorous breed of men, as sharply differentiated from each other as the soil is by the mountains, and as united by them as it is.

It is worth seeing the representatives of various cantons gathered together at some federal shooting competition, with their several standards, in their several costumes, with carbine on shoulder. Proud of their separate individuality and of their unity, coming down from their native mountains, they greet each other with brotherly shouts and salute the federal standard (which is kept in the town where the last competition was held), and yet remain distinct.

In these festivals of a free people, in the military games, free from the offensive _étalage_ of monarchy and the gorgeous setting of gold-embroidered aristocracy and dazzling guards, there is something impressive and powerful. On all sides speeches are delivered, home-made wine flows, there are sounds of shouting, singing, and bands; and all are conscious that there is no leaden weight, no oppressive burden of authority, on their shoulders....

In Geneva soon after my arrival a banquet was given at the end of the term to the pupils of all the schools. James Fazy, the president of the canton, invited me to this fête. A big pavilion had been put up in an open space in Carouge. The council and all the leading figures in the canton were present, and dined with the children. A number of citizens, those whose turn it was, in uniform and carrying guns, had been summoned for a guard of honour. Fazy delivered a speech of a thoroughly radical character, congratulated the prize-winners, and proposed the health of ‘The future citizens!’ to the strains of music and the firing of cannon. After this the children filed past him, two by two, to the field where various sports had been prepared, air-balloons, acrobatic performances, and so on. The armed citizens—that is, the fathers, uncles, and elder brothers of the school-children—formed an avenue, and as the head of the column passed they presented arms.... Yes! presented arms before their sons and the orphans brought up at the expense of the canton.... The children were the honoured guests of the town, its ‘future citizens.’ All this was strange to such of us as had been present at Russian school anniversaries and similar ceremonies.

It seems strange to us, too, that all the workmen, all the grown-up peasants, the waiters in restaurants as well as the restaurant-keepers, those who live in mountains and those who live in marshes, have a very good knowledge of the affairs of the canton, take an interest in them, and belong to one or other party. Their language, their degree of culture, is very different; and if a Geneva workman sometimes reminds one of a member of some Lyons club, while the simple mountaineer is to this day like the men who surrounded Schiller’s William Tell, that does not prevent their both taking the warmest interest in public affairs. In France there are offshoots and branches of political and social societies in the towns; their members are interested in the revolutionary question, and incidentally know something of the actual government. But, on the other hand, those who are outside these associations, and especially the peasants, know nothing and care nothing either for the affairs of France or for the affairs of the department.

Lastly, both we Russians and the French are struck by the absence of all sorts of trappings and vestments, all the operatic setting of a government. The president of a canton, the president of the Federal Assembly, the state secretaries (_i.e._ the ministers), and the federal colonels go to the café like simple mortals, dine at the common table, discuss public affairs, argue with workmen and argue before them among themselves, and they all drink the same wine and _kirsch_.

From the beginning of my acquaintance with James Fazy, I was impressed by this democratic simplicity, and it was only later on that I perceived that in all matters relating to the law the government of the canton was anything but weak, in spite of its lack of wardrobe grandeur, of stripes on trousers, of plumage, of beadles with staves, of sergeants with moustaches, and all the other gewgaws and superfluities of the royal _mise en scène_.

In the autumn of 1849 the persecution of refugees who had sought shelter in Switzerland began; the government was in the weak hands of doctrinaires, the federal ministers lost their heads. The intimidated Confederation, which had once refused Louis-Philippe’s request for the deportation of Louis-Napoleon, now at the command of the latter turned out those who sought a refuge, and performed the same gracious act for Austria and Prussia. Of course, the Federal Government had on this occasion to deal not with a fat old king who disliked extreme measures, but with men whose hands were wet with blood and who were in the fury of savage reprisals. But what was the Federal Assembly afraid of? If it had been capable of looking beyond its mountains, it would have perceived how much secret alarm lay hidden under the insolence and menaces of the neighbouring governments. Not one of them had in 1849 a sufficiently stable position and sense of its own power to begin a war. The Confederation need only have shown its teeth and they would have desisted; the doctrinaires preferred timid submission, and began a petty, unworthy persecution of men who had nowhere to go to.

For a long time some of the cantons, and among them that of Geneva, maintained their opposition to the Federal Assembly, but at last even Fazy was drawn, _nolens volens_, into persecuting the refugees.

His position was very unpleasant. The transition from being a conspirator into being a member of the government, however natural it may be, has its comic and vexatious sides. In reality, it must be said that it was not Fazy who went over to the government, but the government who went over to Fazy; nevertheless, the former conspirator was not always at one with the president of the canton. He had to strike at his own people, or at times openly to disregard the Federal decrees, or to take measures against which he had been declaiming for the last ten years. He followed the one or the other course as the caprice took him, and so excited the hostility of both sides.

Fazy was a man of great energy and of great administrative abilities, but too much of a Frenchman not to like hard-and-fast measures, centralisation, authority. He had spent his whole life in the political struggle. As a young man we meet him on the Paris barricades of 1830, and then in the Hôtel de Ville among the young people who, in opposition to Lafayette and the bankers, demanded the proclamation of a republic. Périer[58] and Laffitte[59] considered that the ‘best republic’ was the Duc d’Orléans; he was made king, while Fazy threw himself into the extreme republican opposition. Then he was associated with Godefroy Cavaignac[60] and Marrast,[61] with the Société des Droits de l’Homme and with the Carbonari, was mixed up with Mazzini’s Savoy expedition, and published a journal which after the French fashion was suppressed by successive fines....

Convinced at last that there was no doing anything in France, he bethought himself of his native land, and transferred all his energy and all the experience he had gained as a politician, a journalist, and a conspirator to the advancement of his ideas in the canton of Geneva. He thought out a radical revolution in it, and carried it through. Geneva rose up against its old government. Debates, attack and counter-attack, passed from private rooms and newspapers into the market-place, and Fazy appeared at the head of the rebellious part of the town. While he was organising and stationing his armed friends, a grey-headed old man looked out of a window and, having been an officer by profession, could not resist giving advice where to station a cannon or a company. Fazy obeyed him. The advice was excellent—but who was this officer? Count Osterman-Tolstoy, commander-in-chief of the allied armies at Kulm, who had left Russia on the accession of Nicholas and had lived afterwards almost permanently at Geneva.

During this revolution Fazy showed that he possessed to the full not merely tact and judgment, but also the audacity which Saint-Just considered necessary in a revolutionary. Having vanquished the Conservatives almost without bloodshed, he appeared before the Grand Council and informed it that it was dissolved. The members wanted to arrest him, and asked with indignation: ‘In whose name dare he speak like that?’

‘In the name of the people of Geneva, who are sick of your bad government and are with me,’ and thereupon Fazy pulled back the curtain on the council-room door. A crowd of armed men filled the hall, ready at Fazy’s first word to lower their guns and fire. The old ‘patricians’ and peaceful Calvinists were disconcerted. ‘Go, while there is yet time!’ observed Fazy, and they meekly trudged home, while Fazy sat down at the table and wrote a decree or _plébiscite_ announcing that the people of Geneva, having dissolved the old government, were assembling to elect a new one and to frame a new democratic code, and in the meantime were entrusting the executive power to James Fazy. This was his eighteenth of Brumaire for the benefit of democracy and the people. Though he did elect himself dictator, the choice was undoubtedly a very good one.

From that time—that is, from the year 1846—he had been governing Geneva. Since, in accordance with the constitution, the president is elected for a period of two years and cannot be elected twice in succession, the people of Geneva appointed every two years some inconspicuous adherent of Fazy’s, and in this way he remained _de facto_ president, to the great distress of the Conservatives and Pietists, who always remained in the minority.

Fazy displayed new abilities during the period of his dictatorship. Administration, finance, everything made rapid progress; the resolute way in which radical principles were put into practice won the attachment of the people: Fazy showed himself as vigorous in organisation as he had been in destruction. Geneva flourished under his rule. This I was told not only by his friends but by people completely disinterested, among others by the celebrated victor of Kulm, Osterman-Tolstoy.

Abrupt and irritable, hasty and intolerant by disposition, Fazy always had despotically republican leanings; as he grew used to authority, the despotic _pli_ sometimes got the upper hand. Moreover, events and ideas after 1848 caught Fazy unawares; he was perplexed on the one hand and circumvented on the other. Here it was the republic of which he had dreamed with Godefroy Cavaignac and Armand Carrel ... and yet there was something wrong about it. His old comrade Marrast, as president of the National Assembly, observed to him that he had made an incautious reference to Catholicism ‘at lunch in the presence of the secretary,’ and told him that religion must be respected in order that the priests might not be incensed; when the ex-editor of the _Nationale_ passed from room to room in the president’s house, two sentries saluted him. Another friend and _protégé_ of Fazy’s went further still: he became himself president of the republic, but would not recognise his old comrade, and aimed at being a Napoleon.

‘Was the republic in danger?’ And meanwhile the workers and the leading men were not interested in it; they were all talking of socialism. So that was what was to blame—and with obstinacy and exasperation Fazy fell upon socialism. That meant that he had reached his limit, his _Kulminationspunkt_, as the Germans say, and was going downhill.

Mazzini and Fazy, who had been socialists in the days before socialism, became its enemies when it began to pass from general tendencies into a new revolutionary force. Many a lance I have broken with both of them, and I have seen with surprise how little can be done by logic when a man does _not want_ to be convinced. If in both these men it was policy, a concession to the necessity of the times, what need had they to get so hot about it? What need had they to play their parts so well even in private conversation? No, there was something else in it, a sort of grudge against a doctrine formulated _outside_ their own circle: there was a spite against the very name. I once suggested to Fazy that in our conversations I should call socialism Cleopatra, that he might not be angered by the word and prevented from understanding by the sound of it. Mazzini’s _brochures_ against socialism later on did the famous agitator far more harm than did Radetsky,—but that is not the point under discussion here.

One day on reaching home I found a note from Struve—he informed me that Fazy was turning him out, and very abruptly. The Federal Government had long before decreed the deportation of Struve and Heinzen; Fazy had confined himself to communicating the fact to them. What new incident had occurred?

Fazy did not want Struve to publish his ‘international’ journal in Geneva; he was afraid—and perhaps he was right—that Heinzen and Struve would publish such dangerous nonsense as to provoke again threats from France, to raise a howl from Prussia, and set Austria gnashing its teeth. How a practical man could imagine that the journal would come into existence I do not know; anyway, he offered Struve the choice of giving up the journal or of leaving Geneva. To give it up when Struve was fanatically dreaming that by means of his journal he would finally vanquish ‘the seven scourges of mankind’ was too much for the Baden revolutionary. Then Fazy sent a policeman to him with the order to leave the canton at once. Struve received the policeman frigidly, and announced that he was not yet ready for departure. Fazy resented the treatment of the policeman, and ordered the police to turn Struve out. To enter a house without a legal warrant was impossible; the measures taken in Berne had been by the police and not by a legal tribunal (what the French call _mesures de salut publique_). The policeman knew that, but, wishing to oblige Fazy, and probably to pay Struve back for his rude reception, got a carriage ready and sat down with a comrade under a lime-tree not far from Struve’s house.

Struve, secretly delighted that the era of persecution and martyrdom was beginning again, and convinced beforehand that nothing of importance would be done to him, sent notes concerning the proceedings to all his acquaintances. While awaiting their fervent sympathy and ardent indignation he could not resist going out to visit his friend Heinzen, who had received a similar polite _billet-doux_ from Fazy. As Heinzen lived close by, Struve, _ganz gemüthlich_, went off to him wearing his indoor clothes and slippers. He had scarcely reached the lime-tree behind which the crafty son of Calvin was concealed, when the latter barred his way and, showing the order of the Federal Council, asked Struve to follow him. Two policemen reinforced the urgency of his invitation. The astonished Struve, cursing Fazy and putting him on the list of the ‘seven scourges,’ got into the carriage and was driven off with the policeman to the canton of Vaud.

Since Fazy had been dictator, nothing of the sort had happened in Geneva. There was something coarse, unnecessary, and even clownish about it. I was returning home between eleven and twelve that evening, boiling with indignation: at the Pont des Bergues I met Fazy; he was walking along in excellent spirits, accompanied by a few Italian refugees.

‘Ah, good evening; any news?’ he said, seeing me.

‘A great deal,’ I answered with elaborate frigidity.

‘Why, what?’

‘Why, here for instance in Geneva, just as in Paris, men are seized in the street, carried off by force; _il n’y a plus de sécurité dans les rues_—I am afraid to walk about....’

‘Oh, you are referring to Struve ...’ answered Fazy, already so angry that his voice began to break. ‘What is one to do with these nonsensical people? I am tired of them: I’ll show these gentry what it means to treat the law with contempt, to be openly disobedient to the orders of the Federal Council....’

‘A right,’ I observed, smiling, ‘which you reserve for yourself alone.’

‘Am I to expose the canton and myself to danger for the sake of every lunatic broken out of Bedlam, and to do it under present circumstances too? And, what’s more, one gets no thanks but only rudeness from them. Only fancy, gentlemen: I sent a _commissaire_ of the police to him, and he all but kicked him out—it’s beyond anything! They don’t understand that an official (_magistrat_) coming in the name of the law must be treated with respect, mustn’t he?’

Fazy’s companions nodded their heads affirmatively.

‘I don’t agree,’ I said, ‘and see no reason at all to respect a man for being a policeman and for coming to announce some nonsense written by Fourrère or Drouey[62] in Berne. There is no need to be rude, but why should one lavish civilities on a man who comes to one as an enemy, and, what’s more, an enemy supported by force?’

‘I never heard such things in my life,’ remarked Fazy, shrugging his shoulders and flashing a withering glance at me.

‘It’s new to you because you have never thought about it. To imagine that officials are sacred personages is something thoroughly monarchical.’

‘You refuse to see the difference between respect for the law and slavish servility, because with you the Tsar and the law are the same thing—_c’est parfaitement russe_!’

‘But how is one to see it when your respect for the law means respect for a constable or a police-sergeant?’

‘Are you aware, sir, that the _commissaire_ of police whom I sent is not merely a very honest man, but one of the most devoted patriots? I have seen him in action....’

‘And an exemplary father of a family,’ I went on; ‘only, that has nothing to do with either me or Struve; we are not acquainted with him, and he came to Struve not as a model citizen but as the instrument of an oppressive power....’

‘Why, upon my soul,’ observed Fazy, growing more and more irate, ‘what do you care for that Struve? Only yesterday you were laughing at him yourself....’

‘I should not laugh to-day if you were to hang him.’

‘Do you know what I think——?’ He paused. ‘It’s my opinion that he is simply a Russian spy.’

‘Oh, Lord, what nonsense!’ I said, bursting into laughter.

‘Nonsense, indeed!’ shouted Fazy still more loudly; ‘I tell you that in earnest!’

Knowing the unbridled hastiness of my Geneva tyrant, and knowing that with all his irritability he was in reality a hundred times better than his words and not an ill-natured man, I might perhaps have let his shouting pass; but there were other people listening. Besides, he was president of the canton, and I was just such another vagrant without a passport as Struve himself, and therefore I responded in a stentorian voice:

‘Do you imagine because you are president that, if you say a thing, that’s enough for every one to believe it?’

My shouting produced its effect: Fazy lowered his voice, but, mercilessly beating his fist against the parapet of the bridge, he observed: ‘Why, there was his uncle too, Gustav Struve, a Russian attorney in Hamburg.’

‘That’s as good as “The Wolf and the Lamb.” I had better be going home. Good-bye!’

‘Yes, indeed, we had better go to bed instead of arguing, or we shall end by quarrelling,’ observed Fazy with a forced smile.

I went to the Hôtel des Bergues; Fazy and the Italians crossed the bridge. We had been shouting so excitedly that several of the windows of the hotel had been opened, and an audience consisting of waiters and tourists had been listening to our discussion.

Meanwhile the policeman and very honest citizen who had carried Struve off returned, not alone but still accompanied by Struve. A very amusing incident had occurred in the first little town in the canton of Vaud, near Coppet, where Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier once lived. The prefect of the police, an ardent republican, hearing how Struve had been seized, declared that the Geneva police had acted illegally, and not only refused to send him on further, but turned him back.

The fury of Fazy may be imagined when, to put the finishing touch to our conversation, he heard of Struve’s safe return. After exchanging abuse with the ‘tyrant’ by letter and by word of mouth, Struve departed to England with Heinzen; there the latter formulated his demand for two million heads, and then peacefully sailed off with his Pylades to America, at first with the object of founding a _school for young girls_, afterwards to edit in St. Louis _The Pioneer_, which is sometimes too strong for elderly men to stomach.

Five days after our conversation on the bridge I met Fazy in the Café de la Poste.

‘Why is it I have not seen you for so long?’ he asked; ‘surely you are not still angry? Well, I must own all this business with the refugees is enough to drive one out of one’s mind! The Federal Council keeps bombarding me with one note after another, and here the accursed _sous-préfet_ of Gex is simply staying here on purpose to see whether the French are interned. I try to satisfy every one, and for that my own people are angry with me. Here’s a new trouble now, and a very nasty one; I am sure they’ll abuse me, and what am I to do?’ He sat down at my little table and, dropping his voice, went on: ‘This is not a question of talk: it’s not socialism, it’s simply robbery!’

He handed me a letter. Some German feudal prince complained that when his little town had been taken by the students various objects of value had been seized by them, and among other things some ancient vessel of rare workmanship; that it was in the possession of the late commander of the legion, Blenker;[63] and as it had come to the knowledge of his highness that Blenker was living in Geneva, he asked for the co-operation of Fazy in recovering the stolen articles.

‘What do you say?’ asked Fazy in a solemn voice.

‘Nothing. Lots of things happen in war-time.’

‘What ought I to do, do you think?’

‘Take no notice of the letter, or write to the fool that you are not his detective in Geneva. What have you to do with his crockery? He ought to be glad Blenker did not hang him, and here he is worrying about his goods.’

‘You are a very dangerous sophist,’ said Fazy, ‘and you don’t think what discredit such things cast on our party.... We can’t leave it like that.’

‘I don’t know why you take it to heart so much. Far worse things are done in the world. As for the party and its honour, I dare say you will say again that I am a sophist—but think for yourself, will you do any good by giving publicity to the matter? Don’t take any notice of the German prince’s accusation and it will be taken as a calumny; but if people add to the rumour about it that you sent to make a police search—what is more, if by ill-luck anything is found—then it will be difficult to exonerate Blenker and the whole party.’

Fazy was genuinely amazed at the Russian irregularity of my views. The Blenker affair ended most fortunately. He was not in Geneva: on the arrival of the police and investigating magistrates, his wife calmly showed all their possessions and their money, described where they had got them from, and, hearing about the vessel, found it herself—it was a very ordinary silver vessel. It had been taken by some young men in the legion and brought to their colonel as a souvenir of the victory.

Later on, Fazy apologised to Blenker, admitting that he had been over hasty in the matter. The immoderate passion for discovering the truth, for going into every detail in criminal cases, for pursuing the guilty with fury and crushing them, is a purely French failing. The judicial process is for them a bloodthirsty sport like bull-baiting for the Spaniards; the prosecutor, like a skilful toreador, is humiliated and mortified if the baited beast escapes unharmed. In England there is nothing of the kind: the judge looks with cool unconcern at the prisoner in the dock, shows no zeal, and is almost pleased when the jury acquit him.

The refugees, on their side, tormented Fazy and poisoned his existence. That was all very natural, and one must not be too severe upon it. The passions unloosed during revolutionary movements are not appeased by failure, and, having no other outlet, find a vent in peevish restlessness of spirit. These men had a mortal longing to speak just when they had to hold their tongues, to keep in the background, to efface and concentrate themselves; they, on the contrary, were trying not to disappear from the footlights, but to advertise their existence by every means in their power. They wrote pamphlets, wrote to the newspapers, talked at meetings, talked in cafés, spread false news, and frightened the foolish governments by expectations of an immediate insurrection. The majority of them belonged to the class of very harmless persons who make up the chorus of revolution; but the terrified governments with equal senselessness believed in their power, and, unaccustomed to free, bold speech, made an outcry about the inevitable danger, the menace to religion, the throne, and the family, and insisted that the Federal Council should expel these terrible advocates of disorder and destruction.

One of the first measures taken by the Swiss Government was the removal from the French frontier of those of the refugees who were specially disliked by Napoleon. It was particularly disagreeable to Fazy to carry out this measure; he was personally acquainted with almost all of them. After informing them of the order to leave Geneva, he did his best not to know who had gone and who had not. Those who remained had to keep away from the principal cafés, from the Pont des Bergues, and that was the very concession they would not make. This led to ludicrous scenes, suggestive of a boarding-school, scenes in which the performers on the one side were the representatives of the people, grey-headed men, well-known literary men over forty, and on the other, the president of a free canton and the police agents of the servile neighbours of Switzerland.

Once, in my presence, the _sous-préfet_ of Gex asked Fazy in an ironical tone: ‘Tell me, M. le président, is So-and-so in Geneva?’ ‘He has been gone a long time,’ Fazy answered abruptly. ‘I am very glad to hear it,’ said the _sous-préfet_, and went on his way. And Fazy, clutching my arm convulsively and pointing furiously at a man who was calmly smoking a cigar: ‘There he is! there he is! Let us move to the other side, so as not to meet the villain. This is hell—there is no other word for it!’

I could not help laughing. Of course, it was a refugee who had been expelled, and he was promenading up and down the Pont des Bergues, which is for Geneva what the Tverskoy Boulevard is for Moscow.

I stayed in Geneva till the middle of December. The measures which the Russian Government was stealthily beginning to take against me compelled me to go to Zurich to try to save my mother’s property, upon which the Tsar ‘of eternal memory’ was beginning to lay his Imperial claws.

This was a terrible period of my life. A lull between two thunderclaps, an oppressive, painful, but not eventful calm ... there were menacing omens, but I still, even then, turned away from them. Life was troubled, inharmonious, but there were bright days in it; for those I was indebted to the grand natural scenery of Switzerland.

Remoteness from men, and beautiful natural surroundings have a wonderfully healing effect. From experience I wrote in _A Wreck_:—

‘When the soul bears within it a great grief, when a man has not mastered himself sufficiently to grow reconciled with the past, to grow calm enough for understanding, he needs distance and mountains, the sea and warm mild air. He needs them that sadness may not pass into bitterness and despair, that he may not grow hard....’

I was longing for a rest from many things even then. A year and a half spent in the centre of political upheavals and dissensions, in continual irritation, in the midst of bloody sights, terrible downfalls, and petty treacheries, had left much bitterness, misery, and weariness at the bottom of my soul. Irony began to take a different character. Granovsky wrote to me after reading _From the Other Shore_, which I wrote just at that time: ‘Your book has reached us. I read it with joy and a feeling of pride ... but, for all that, there is something of fatigue about it; you stand too much alone, and perhaps you will become a great writer, but what was in Russia living and attractive to all in your talent seems to have disappeared on foreign soil....’ Then Sazonov, who, just before I left Paris in 1849, read the beginning of my story, _Duty before Everything_, written two years previously, said to me: ‘You won’t finish that story, and you will never write anything more like it. Your bright laughter and good-natured jesting are gone for ever.’

But could a man pass through the ordeal of 1848 and 1849 and remain the same? I was myself conscious of the change. Only at home, when no outsiders were present, there were sometimes moments as of old, not of ‘bright laughter’ but of bright sadness; recalling the past and our friends, recalling recent scenes of our life in Rome, beside the cots of our sleeping children or watching their play, the soul was attuned to the mood of old days—there came a breath of freshness, of youthful poetry, of gentle harmony, there was peace and content in the heart, and under the influence of such an evening life was easier for a day or two.

These minutes were not frequent; a wretched, depressing distraction prevented them. The number of visitors kept increasing about us, and towards evening our little drawing-room in the Champs-Élysées was full of strangers. For the most part, these were newly arrived refugees, good and unfortunate people, but I was intimate with only one man.... And why was I intimate with him!...

I was delighted to leave Paris, but in Geneva we found ourselves in the same society, though the persons in it were different and it was on a narrower scale. In Switzerland everything at that time had rushed into politics; everything—_tables d’hôte_ and coffee-houses, watchmakers and women—all were divided into parties. An exclusive preoccupation with politics, particularly in the painful stagnation which always follows unsuccessful revolutions, is extremely wearisome with its arid barrenness and monotonous censure of the past. It is like summer-time in big cities where everything is hot, dusty, airless, where through pale trees the walls and the hot paving-stones reflect the glaring sun. A living man craves for air which has not been breathed over a thousand times, free from the smell of the refuse of life, from the sound of discordant jangling, from the dirty, putrid stench and everlasting noise.

Sometimes we did in fact tear ourselves away from Geneva, visit the shores of Lake Léman and the foot of Mont Blanc; and the frowning, gloomy beauty of mountain scenery with its intense shadows screened all the vanity of vanities from one’s eyes, refreshing soul and body with the cold breath of its everlasting glaciers.

I do not know whether I should like to stay for ever in Switzerland. We dwellers in the plains and prairies after a time feel the mountains a restriction; they are too immense and too close, they hem us in, limit us; but sometimes it is good to stay a while in their shadow. Moreover, a pure and good-hearted race live in the mountains, a race of people poor but not unfortunate, with few wants, accustomed to a life of sturdy independence. The froth of civilisation, its verdigris, has not settled on these people; historical changes have passed like clouds beneath their feet, scarcely touching them. The Roman world still persists in Graubünden, the times of the peasant wars have scarcely passed in Appenzell. Perhaps in the Pyrenees, in the Tyrol, or other mountains, the same sturdy type of population may be found, but it no longer exists in Europe as a whole.

In the north-east of Russia, however, I have seen something like it. In Perm and Vyatka I have come upon people of the same stamp as in the Alps.

Exhausted by the long, unbroken climb step by step up the mountain, my companion and I, travelling to Zermatt, stopped to give our horses a rest, and went into a small inn a little above St. Niklaus, if I remember right. The hostess, a tall, thin, but muscular old woman, was all alone in the house. Seeing guests, she bustled about, complaining of the scantiness of her stores, and, after rummaging here and there, brought out a bottle of _kirsch_, some bread hard as a stone (bread is not a simple matter in the mountains; it is brought up from the villages on asses), some smoked mutton (also very dry), some cheese and goat’s milk, and then proceeded to make us a sort of sweet omelette which I could not eat; but the mutton, the cheese, and the _kirsch_ were very good. The woman regaled us as though we were invited guests, put choice morsels before us with a good-natured air, and kept apologising. Our guides, too, ate and drank _kirsch_. As I was going away I asked her what we owed her. The woman pondered for a long time, even went into the other room to collect her thoughts, and then, after some preliminary remarks about the dearness of provisions and the difficulty of transport, ventured to say _five francs_. ‘What!’ I commented, ‘with the horses’ food, too?’ She did not understand what I meant, and made haste to add: ‘Well, four will be enough.’

When I was being taken from Perm to Vyatka, in a village where we changed horses I asked a woman who was sitting on a log beside her hut for some _kvass_. ‘It’s dreadfully sour,’ she answered; ‘but here, I’ll bring you some home-made beer; it’s left from the holiday, you see.’ A minute later she brought me an earthenware jug wrapped in a rag, and a dipper. The gendarme and I drank to our hearts’ content. As I handed the dipper back to the old woman I gave her ten or fifteen kopecks, but she would not take the coin, saying: ‘God bless you! to think of taking from a travelling man, and you going as you are,’ glancing at the gendarme. ‘But why should we drink your good beer for nothing, auntie? Take it for cakes for the children.’ ‘No, kind sir, don’t you think it; but if you’ve money to spare, give it to the poor or put up a candle to God.’

Another similar incident happened to me on the Great River near Vyatka. I had gone to look at the curious procession in which the _ikon_ of St. Nicholas of Hlynov is taken down the river to pay a visit. On the way back, I went with my driver into a hut where he got some oats. The people of the house and three pilgrims were sitting down to dinner; there was a strong smell of cabbage soup, and I asked for some for myself. A young woman brought me a wooden bowl of soup, a hunk of bread, and a huge salt-cellar. When I had eaten I gave the master of the house a quarter-rouble. He looked at me and scratched the back of his head, saying: ‘That won’t do, you know; here you’ve eaten two-ha’porth and given me a quarter-rouble; it’s not right for me to take it—it’s a sin before God and a shame before men.’

I remember I have somewhere mentioned the Perm peasant habit of putting a piece of bread with _kvass_ or milk outside the window at night, in case an _unfortunate_—that is, an exile—should be making his way back from Siberia and be afraid to knock, so that he might find nourishment without making a noise. I have found a like custom on the Swiss mountains; only, not being near Siberia, there it is done simply for the benefit of travellers. On the rather high peaks, where life is scanty, where the rock stands out like the skull of a man beginning to grow bald, and an icy-cold wind blows on the vegetation, as dried and withered as the herbs in a chemist’s shop—there I came upon huts, empty, but with unlocked doors, that a traveller who had lost his way or had been overtaken by bad weather might find hospitality even without a host. All sorts of peasant wares were there, and, on the table, cheese, bread, and goat’s milk. Some after eating leave a coin on the table, others leave nothing, but evidently nobody steals. Of course, very few strangers reach them, but nevertheless these unlocked doors amaze a townsman.

Since I am talking of mountains and heights, I will describe my visit to Monte Rosa. How can I better finish my chapter on Switzerland than on a height of seven thousand feet?

From the hut of the old woman who was ashamed to take five francs for feeding four men and two horses, including a whole bottle of _kirsch_, we were climbing till late evening up a narrow pass, in places hardly more than a yard wide, to Zermatt; on the rocky and uneven little path the accustomed horses moved carefully at a walking pace, picking out the spot to put their hoof on. The guides were continually reminding us not to touch the reins, but to let the horse go as it would. On one side was a steep precipice, some three thousand feet or more. At the bottom below, the Visp roared and raced along with a sort of senseless haste, as though trying to find a more open channel to break away from its narrow, stony bed. Its foaming and whirling surface could be seen here and there; on its mountainous banks there were regular pinewoods which looked like moss from the height on which we were moving. On our other side there was a bare, stony height here and there hanging over our heads. For whole hours one goes on and on ... the hoofs ring on the stone, the horse slips, the Visp roars, and still there are the same rocks on one side, beyond which nothing can be seen, and on the other the abyss below already growing dim with the twilight—it produces a feeling of dreariness, of nervous fatigue. I should not care to repeat that journey often.

Zermatt is the highest spot on which several families are living: it stands as though in a cauldron; huge masses of mountains surround it. One of the people there takes in the few travellers; we found in his house a Scotsman, a geologist. It got quite dark while they were setting our supper; the nearness of the mountains made the evening twice as dark. Between ten and eleven our hostess, listening at the window, said: ‘Why, there’s the sound of hoofs, and I can hear the shout of the guides ... who would care to travel at night-time on such a path?’ The tramp of hoofs came slowly nearer; the hostess took a lantern and went out with it to the entrance. I followed her; something began to stand out against the black darkness, figures appeared in the streak of light from the lantern, and at last two horses came up to the entrance. On one horse sat a tall, middle-aged woman, on the other a boy of fourteen. The lady alighted from the horse as calmly as though she had returned from a ride in Hyde Park, and went into the common room. She had met the Scotsman before, and so began talking to him at once. After asking for something to eat, she sent her son to find out from the guides how long the horses must rest. They said that two hours would be enough. ‘Surely you are not going on without waiting for daylight?’ asked the Scotsman. ‘One can’t see an inch before one’s face, and you’ll be going down by a new road.’

‘This is the time I’ve allowed for it.’

Two hours later the Englishwoman and her son began the descent on the Italian side, and we went to bed for two or three hours. At dawn we took as a third guide a botanist who knew all the paths and whistled the Alpine airs in a wonderful way, and began our ascent of one of the nearer peaks, climbing towards a sea of ice and the Matterhorn.

At first a greyish mist hid everything and wetted us with a fine rain; we went up and up and it sank lower; soon it became glaringly bright and the air became extraordinarily pure and clear.

Hugo describes somewhere ‘what can be heard on the mountains’; his mountain could not have been a high one. I was struck, on the contrary, by the complete absence of sound; there was absolutely nothing to be heard except the light, intermittent grinding from the slipping avalanches, and that only at rare intervals ... as a matter of fact, the stillness is deathly, _transparent_—I use the word intentionally,—an extraordinary rarefaction of the air seems to make _visible_, audible, this absolute dumbness, this eternal, inanimate, elemental sleep[64] of primeval ages.

Life is noisy—but everything living is below and hidden in the clouds. Here are no plants, only grey rough lichen is found here and there upon the stones. Higher still it is even fresher, and the region of never-melting frost begins: here there is the dividing line, here is nothing; only the most inquisitive of all animals crosses it to peep for a minute at that desert of emptiness, to look at the highest outposts of the planet, and hastens to descend to his own domain, full of vanities, of trivial bustle—where he is at home.

We halted before that sea of snow and ice which lay stretched between us and the Matterhorn; ringed round by mountains that were bathed in sunshine, dazzlingly white, it looked like the frozen arena of some titanic coliseum. Hollowed out in places by the winds into the form of waves, it seems to have grown stiff at the very moment of movement; the curves of the billows are frozen before they have had time to sink.

I got off my horse and lay down on a granite boulder moored to the shore by the snowy billows ... mute, motionless whiteness, boundless on all sides ... a light wind lifted a fine white powder, wafted it away, set it whirling ... it fell, and all again passed into stillness; but twice the avalanches breaking away with a hollow reverberation rolled down in the distance, clinging to the rocks, clashing against them and leaving a cloud of snow behind them....

A man feels strange in this setting—a visitor, superfluous, an outsider; and on the other hand he breathes more freely, and as though from the colour surrounding him grows whiter and purer within ... earnest and full of a sort of devout gravity!...

What melodramatic rhetoric I should be charged with if I concluded this picture of Monte Rosa by saying that in that world of whiteness, freshness, and silence, of the two travellers stranded on that height, reckoning each other dear friends, one was plotting black treachery against the other!

Yes, life sometimes plays us melodramatic tricks—it has its _coups de théâtre_ which are very artificial.

Appendix II

(_From ‘West European Sketches—Notebook II.’_)

I

IL PIANTO

After the days of June, I saw that the revolution was vanquished, but I still believed in the vanquished, in the fallen, I believed in the wonder-working powers of the relics, in their moral strength. In Geneva I began to understand more and more clearly not only that the revolution was vanquished, but that it was bound to be vanquished.

My head was dizzy with my discoveries, an abyss was opening before my eyes, and I felt that the ground was giving way under my feet.

It was not the reaction that vanquished the revolution. The reaction showed itself everywhere densely stupid, cowardly, in its dotage; everywhere it shamefully retreated into safety before the onrush of the popular tide, furtively biding its time in Paris, in Naples, in Vienna, and in Berlin. The revolution fell, like Agrippina, under the blows of her own children, and, what was worst of all, without their being conscious of it; there was more heroism, more youthful self-sacrifice, than good judgment; and the pure, noble victims fell, not knowing why. The fate of the survivors was almost more grievous. While absorbed in dissensions among themselves, in personal disputes, in melancholy self-delusion, and consumed by unbridled vanity, they kept dwelling on their unexpected days of triumph, and were unwilling to take off their faded laurels or wedding garments, though it was not the bride who had deceived them.

Misfortunes, idleness, and poverty induced intolerance, obstinacy, nervous irritability.... The exiles broke up into little groups, rallying not round principles but round names and hatreds. The fact that their thoughts continually turned to the past, and that they lived in an exclusive, narrow circle, began to find expression in speech and thought, in manners and in dress; a new class—the class of refugees—was formed, and grew as stiff and rigid as the rest. And just as once St. Basil the Great wrote to St. Gregory Nazianzen that he ‘gloated over fasting and revelled in privations,’ so now there were voluntary martyrs, victims by vocation, unhappy as a profession, and among them were very conscientious people; and indeed St. Basil was quite sincere when he wrote to his friend of his orgies of mortifying the flesh and of the voluptuous ecstasy of persecution. With all that, ideas did not move a step forward, thought slumbered.... If these people had been awakened by the blast of a new trumpet and a new call to battle, they would, like the nine sleeping maidens, have been the same as on the day on which they fell asleep.

These bitter truths made my heart sink with despondency; I had to live through a hard stage of my education.