Mignot now became communicative as to the amount of ice supplied by his glaciere, the lower of the two we had seen; and his statistics were so utterly confused, that I gave him ten centimes and an address, and charged him to write it all down from his account-book, and send it by post. The letter was accordingly written on July 24, and after trying many unsuccessful addresses in various parts of Switzerland, it finally reached England in the middle of September. It tells its own tale sufficiently well, and is therefore given here with all the mistakes of the original.

'Mon cher Monsieur Browne,—J'ai beaucoup tarde a vous ecrire les details promis, sans doute je ne voulait pas vous oublier; nous sommes affliges dans notre maison ma femme et gravement malade ce qui me donne beaucoup de tourment jour et nuit, enfin ce n'est pas ce qui doit faire notre entretient.

En 1863. Nous avons exploite comme suit. (Depenses.)

Aoust 27 10 journees pour confectionner les Echelles et les poser. " 29 3 journees pour couper la glasse. " 31 11 journees pour sortir la glasse avec les hotes. " 31 4 chars a deux chevaux pour ammener Menes la charge a deux: des St. Georges a Septembre 1 Gland plusieurs autres journees pour accompagner les chars. 70 pots de vin bu en faisant ces chargements, pour trois cordes pour se tenir. Septembre 2 Trois journees pour couper. le 3 12 journees pour sortir.

'Cher Monsieur.—Je ne vous ait pas mis le prix de chaque articles; ni tout-a fait tous les traveaux mais pour vous donner une idee, je veux vous donner connaissance du cout general des depences pour deux chargements s'eleve a 535 francs. Je vous donne aussi connaissance de la quantite de glasse rendue 235 quinteaux a 3 francs, qui produit 705 francs reste net sur ces deux chargements 175 francs: par consequent mon cher Monsieur je n'ai pas besoin de vous donner des details des chargements suivants c'est a peu pres les memes frais, et la quantite de glasse aussi.

'Nous en avons refait trois chargements:—

Un le 15 Septembre. 2 le 13 Octobre. 3 le 14 Novembre.

'Cela comprend toute l'exploitation de 1863.

'Vous m'excuserez beaucoup de mon retard.

'Je termine en vous presentant mes respectueuses salutations. Vous noublierez pas ce que vous mavez promis'[22]St. Georges, le 24 Juillet, 1864. Dimanche.

'JULES MIGNOT.'

Instead of three francs the quintal, Mignot had previously told me that he got four francs, delivered at Gland, and five at Geneva. His ordinary staff during the time of the exploitation was ten men to carry and load, and two to cut the ice in the cave.

It was a matter of considerable importance to catch the Poste at Gimel, and the two Swiss groaned loudly on the consequent pace, unnecessary, as far as they were concerned, for the Poste was nothing to them. As a general rule, the Swiss of this district cannot walk so fast as their Burgundian or French neighbours, unless it is very much to their interest to do so, and then they can go fast enough. A legend is still preserved in the valleys of Joux and Les Rousses, to the following effect. While the Franche Comte was still Spanish, in 1648, commissioners were appointed to fix the boundaries between Berne and Burgundy, on the other side of the range of hill we were now descending, and they decided that one of the boundary stones must be placed at the distance of a common league from the Lake of Les Rousses. Unfortunately, no one could say what a common league was, beyond the vague definition of 'an hour's walk;' so two men were started from the shore of the lake, the one a Burgundian and the other a Swiss, with directions to walk for an hour down the Orbe towards Chenit, the stone to be placed half-way between the points they should respectively reach at the end of the hour. It was for the interest of the Franche Comte that the stone should be as near the lake as possible, and accordingly the Swiss champion made such walking as had never been seen before, and gained for Berne a considerable amount of territory. There was no such tragic result in this case as that which induced the Carthaginians to pay divine honours to the brothers whose speed, on a like occasion, had added an appreciable amount to the possessions of the republic.

At length we reached the point where the roads for Gimel and S. Georges separate, and there, under a glorious sapin, we said our adieux, and wished our au revoirs, and settled those little matters which the best friends must settle, when one is of the nature of a monsieur, and the others are guides. They burdened their souls with many politenesses, and so we parted. The inclemency of the weather was such, that the people in the lower country asked, as they passed, whether snow had fallen in the mountains, and the cold rain continued unceasingly down to the large plain on which the Federal Camp of Biere[23] is placed. Here for a few moments the sun showed itself, lighting up the white tents, and displaying to great advantage the masses of scented orchises, and the feathery reine-des-pres, which hemmed the road in on either side. All through the earlier part of the day, flowers had forced themselves upon our notice as mere vehicles for collected rain, when we came in contact with them; but now, for a short time, they resumed their proper place,—only for a short time, for the rain soon returned, and did not cease till midnight. Not all the garden scenery about Aubonne and Allaman (ad Lemannum), nor all the vineyards which yield the choice white wine of the Cote, could counterbalance the united discomfort of the rain, and the cold which had got into the system in the two glacieres; and matters were not mended by the discovery that Bradshaw was treacherous, and that a junction with dry baggage at Neufchatel could not be effected before eleven at night.

There are some curious natural phenomena in this neighbourhood, due to the subterranean courses which the fissured limestone of the Jura affords to the meteoric waters. Not far from Biere, the river Aubonne springs out at the bottom of an amphitheatre of rock, receiving additions soon after from a group of twenty natural pits, which the peasants call unfathomable—an epithet freely applied to the strange holes found in the Jura. It is remarkable that the way seems to stand at different levels in the various pits.[24] The plain of Champagne, in which they occur, is unlike the surrounding soil in being formed of calcareous detritus, evidently brought down by some means or other from the Jura, and is dry and parched up to the very edges of the pits. The Toleure, a tributary of the Aubonne, frequently large enough to be called a confluent, flows out from the foot of a wall of rock composed of regular parallelopipeds, and in the spring, when the snows are melting freely, its sources burst out at various levels of the rock. Farther to the west, the Versoie, famous for its trout, pours forth a full-sized stream near the Chateau of Divonne, which is said to take its name (Divorum unda) from this phenomenon. Passing to the northern slope of this range of the Jura, the Orbe is a remarkable example of the same sort of thing, flowing out peacefully in very considerable bulk from an arch at the bottom of a perpendicular rock of great height. This river no doubt owes its origin to the superfluous waters of the Lake of Brenets, which have no visible outlet, and sink into fissures and entonnoirs in the rock at the edge of the lake. Notwithstanding that the lake is three-quarters of a league distant, horizontally, and nearly 700 feet higher, the belief had always been that it was the source of the stream, and in 1776 this was proved to be the fact. For some years before that date, the waters of the Lake of Joux had been inconveniently high, and the people determined to clean out the entonnoirs and fissures of the Lake of Brenets, which is only separated from the Lake of Joux by a narrow tongue of land, in the expectation that the water would then pass away more freely. In order to reach the fissures, they dammed up the outlet of the upper into the lower lake; but the pressure on the embankment became too great, and the waters burst through with much violence, creating an immense disturbance in the lake; and the Orbe, which had always been perfectly clear, was troubled and muddy for some little time. The source of the Loue, near Pontarlier, is more striking than even that of the Orbe.[25]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: A point common to the two sections, which are made by planes nearly at right angles to each other.]

[Footnote 22: The dimensions of the two caves, and of the various masses of ice.]

[Footnote 23: The Cartulary of Lausanne states that the wealthy village of Biere received its name from the following historical fact:—In 522, the Bishop of Lausanne, S. Prothais, was superintending the cutting of wood in the Jura for his cathedral, when he died suddenly, and was carried down on a litter to a place where a proper bier could he procured, whence the place was named Biere.]

[Footnote 24: The most curious pit of this kind is the frais-puits of Vesoul, in the Vosgian Jura, which pours forth immense quantities of water after rain has fallen in the neighbourhood. The water rushes out in the shape of a fountain, and on one occasion, in November 1557, saved the town of Vesoul from pillage by a passing army. This pit is carefully described by M. Hassenfratz, in the Journal de Physique, t. xx. p. 259 (an. 1782), where he says that Caesar was driven away from the town of Vesoul, which he had intended to besiege, by the floods of water poured forth from the frais-puits. I know of no such incident in Caesar's life, though M. Hassenfratz quotes Caesar's own words: the town of Vesoul, too, had no historical existence before the 9th or 10th century of our era. There is also a pit near Vesoul which contains icicles in summer, and may be the same as the frais-puits, for the old historian of Franche Comte, Gollut, in describing the latter, mentions that it is so cold that no one cares to explore it (pp. 91. 92).]

[Footnote 25: See p. 122.]

* * * * *



CHAPTER V.

THE GLACIERE OF THE GRACE-DIEU, OR LA BAUME, NEAR BESANCON.

The grand and lovely scenery of the Val de Travers has at length been opened up for the ordinary tourist world, by the railway which connects Pontarlier with Neufchatel. The beauties of the valley are an unfortunate preparation for the dull expanse of ugly France which greets the traveller passing north from the former town; but the country soon assumes a pleasanter aspect, and nothing can be more charming than the soft green slopes, dotted with the richest pines, which form the approach to the station of Boujeailles. It is impossible for the most careless traveller to avoid observing the ill effects produced upon the trees on the south side of the forest of Chaux, by the crowded and neglected state in which they have been left, and the wet state of the soil. The branches become covered with moss, which first kills them, and then breaks them off, so that many tall and tapering sapins point their heads to the sky with trunks wholly guiltless of branches; while in other cases, where decay has not yet gone so far, the branches wear the appearance of gigantic stags' horns, with the velvet; and when a number of these interlace, the mosses unite in large dark patches, giving a cedar-like air to the scene of ruin.

Up to this point, an elderly Frenchman in the carriage had been extremely offensive, from the evil odour of his Macintosh coat; but in answer to a remark upon the improvement which the railway would effect, by providing ventilation for the forest, he gave so much information on that subject, and gave it so pleasantly, and had evidently so good a knowledge of the topography of Franche Comte, that his coat speedily lost its smell, and we became excellent friends.

It is a tantalising thing to be whirled on a hot and dusty day through districts famous for their wines, the dust and heat standing out in more painful colours by contrast with the recollection of cooling draughts which other occasions have owed to such vineyards; though, after all, the true method of facing heat with success is to drink no wine. At any rate, the vineyards of Arbois must always be interesting, and if the stories of the Templars' orgies be true, we may be sure that the chapelry which they possessed in that town would be a favourable place of residence with the order; possibly Rule XVI. might there be somewhat relaxed. 'The good wine of Arbois,' la meilleure cave de Bourgougne, a judicious old writer says, had free entry into all the towns of the Comte; and when Burgundy was becoming imperial, Maximilian extended this privilege through all the towns of the empire. A hundred years later, it had so high a character, that the troops of Henri IV. turned away from the town, announcing that they did not wish to attack ceulx estoient du naturel de leur vin, qui frappe partout;[26] and the king was forced to come himself, with his constable and marshals, to beat down the walls, in the course of which undertaking his men felt the vigour of the inhabitants to a greater extent than he liked. It is said that when he had taken the town, the municipality received him in state, and supplied him with wine of the country. He praised the wine very highly, on which one of the body had the ill taste to assure him that they had a better wine than that. 'You keep it, perhaps,' was the royal rebuke, 'for a better occasion.' Henry had a great opinion of this wine; and the Duc de Sully states, in his Memoirs, that when the Duc de Mayenne retired from the league against the king, and came to Monceaux to tender his allegiance, Henry punished him for past offences by walking so fast about the grounds of the chateau, that the poor duke, what with his sciatica, and what with his fat, at last told him with an expressive gesture that a minute more of it would kill him. The king thereupon let him go, and promised him some vin d'Arbois to set him right again.[27]

The present appearance of the town, as seen from the high level followed by the railway, scarcely recalls the time when Arbois was known as le jardin de noblesse, and Barbarossa dated thence his charters, or Jean Sans-peur held there the States of Burgundy. Gollut[28] tells a story of a dowager of Arbois, mother-in-law to Philip V. and Charles IV. of France, which outdoes legend of Bishop Hatto. Mahaut d'Artois was an elderly lady remarkable for her charities, and was by consequence always surrounded by large crowds of poor folk during her residence at the Chatelaine, the ruins of which lie a mile or two from Arbois. On the occasion of a severe famine in Burgundy, she collected a band of her mendicant friends in a stable, and burned them all, saying that 'par pitie elle hauoit faict cela, considerant les peines que ces pauvres debuoient endurer en temps de si grande et tant estrange famine.'

There is a Val d'Amour near Arbois, but the more beautiful valley of that name lies between Dole and Besancon, and, as we passed its neighbourhood, my friend with the Macintosh informed me that as it was clear from my questions that I was drawing up a history of the Franche Comte, he must beg me to insert a legend respecting the origin of this name, Val d'Amour, which, he believed, had never appeared in print. I disclaimed the history, but accepted the legend, and here it is:—The Seigneur of Chissey was to marry the heiress of a neighbouring seigneurie, and, it is needless to add, she was very lovely, and he was handsome and brave. A lake separated the two chateaux, and the young man not unfrequently returned by water rather late in the evening; and so it fell out that one night he was drowned. The lady naturally grieved sorely for her loss, and put in train all possible means for recovering her lover's body. Time, however, passed on, and no success attended her efforts, till at length she caused the hills which dammed up the waters to be pierced, and then De Chissey was found. A village sprang up near the outlet thus made, and took thence its name Percee, or, as men now spell it, Parcey; and the rich vegetation which speedily covered the valley, where once the lake had been, gave it such an air of happiness and beauty, that the people remembered its origin, and called it the Valley of Love. It is a fact that Parcy was not always so spelled, for Noble Constantin Thiehault, Sieur de Perrecey, was a witness to the treaty for the transference of a miraculous host from Faverney to Dole in 1608, and old maps and books give it as Perrecey and Parrecey indifferently. The De Chisseys, whose names may be found among the female prebends of Chateau-Chalon, with its necessary sixteen quarters, filled a considerable place in the history of the Comte from the Crusades downwards, and known as les Fols de Chissey, the brave[29] and dashing, and witty De Chisseys—qualities which no doubt were possessed by the poor young man for whom the fair Chatelaine drained the Val d'Amour.

As we drew nearer to Besancon, each turn of the small streams, and each low rounded hill, might have served as an illustration to Caesar's 'Commentaries.' Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a battle, there was always a proximus collis for the conquered party to retire to; and it would have been easy to find many suitable scenes for the critical engagement, where the woods sloped down to a strip of grass-land between their foot and the stream.

The Frenchman knew his Caesar, but he put that general in the fourth century B.C. He made mistakes, too, in quoting him, which were easily detected by a memory bristling with the details of his phraseology, the indelible result of extracting the principal parts of his verbs, and the nominatives of his irregular nouns, from half a dozen generations of small boys. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besancon, and was greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him Caesar's description of his native town. He wholly denied the amphitheatre with which one of our handbooks has gifted it; and this denial was afterwards echoed by every one in Besancon, some even thinking it necessary to explain the difference between an amphitheatre and an arch of triumph, the latter still existing in the town. The Jesuit Dunod relates that the amphitheatre was to be seen at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the ruined state in which the Alans and Vandals had left it after their successful siege in 406. It seems to have stood near the present site of the Madeleine.

It was a great satisfaction to find that the Frenchman had himself visited the glaciere which was the object of my search, and was able to give some idea as to the manner of reaching it, for my information on the subject was confined to a vague notice that there was an ice-cave five leagues from Besancon. As so often happened in other cases, he advised me not to go to it, but rather, if I must see a cave, to go to the Grotto of Ocelles,[30] a collection of thirty or more caverns and galleries near the Doubs, below Besancon. Seeing, however, that I was bent on visiting the glaciere, he advised me not to go on Sunday, for the Cardinal Archbishop had ordered the Trappists at the Chartreuse near not to receive guests on that day; while Saturday, he thought, was almost as bad, for nothing better than an omelette could be obtained on days of abstinence. Saturday, then, was clearly the day to be chosen.

The first sight of Besancon explains at once why Caesar was so anxious to forestall Ariovistus by occupying Vesontio, although the hill on which the citadel stands is not so striking as the similar hill at Salins, and the engines of modern warfare would promptly print their telegrams on every stone and man in the place, from the neighbouring heights. The French Government has wisely taken warning from the bombardment by the Allies, and has covered the heights which command it on either side with friendly fortifications, in which lie the keys of the place. Historically, Besancon is a place of great interest. It witnessed the catastrophe of Julius Vindex, who had made terms with Rufus, the general sent against him by Nero, but was attacked by the troops of Rufus before they learned the alliance concluded between the two generals. Vindex was so much grieved by the slaughter of his troops, and the blow thus struck, by an unhappy accident, at his designs against the emperor, that he put himself to death at the gates of the town, while the fight was still going on.[31] The Bisuntians claim to themselves the glory acquired by the Sequani, whose chief city Vesontio was, by the overthrow of Julius Sabinus, who asserted that he was the grandson of a son of Julius Caesar, and proclaimed himself emperor in the time of Vespasian. The Sequani proceeded against him of their own accord, and conquered him in the interest of the reigning emperor; and he and his wife Peponilla lived hid in a tomb for nine years. Here two sons were born to them; and when they were all discovered and carried to Rome, Peponilla prettily told the emperor that she had brought up two sons in the tomb, in order that there might be other voices to intercede for her husband's life besides her own. They were, however, put to death.[32]

To judge from the style of the hotels, Besancon is not visited by many English travellers; and yet it well repays a visit, providing those who care for such things with a full average of vaulted passages, and feudal gateways, and arcaded court-yards, with much less than the average of evil smell. There are gates of all shapes and times—Louis-Quatorze towers, and fortifications specially constructed under Vauban's own eye; while the approach to the town, from the land side, is by a tunnel, cut through the live rock which forms a solid chord to the arc described by the course of the river Doubs. This excavation, called appropriately the Porte Taillee, is attributed by the various inhabitants to pretty nearly all the famous emperors and kings who have lived from Julius Caesar to Louis XIV.: it owes its origin, no doubt, to the construction of the aqueduct which formerly brought into the town the waters pouring out of the rock at Arcier, two leagues from Besancon, and was the work probably of M. Aurelius and L. Verus. Local antiquaries assign the aqueduct to Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, apparently for no better reason than because he built a similar work in Rome. The arch of triumph[33] at the entrance to the upper town has been an inexhaustible subject of controversy for many generations of antiquaries, and up to the time of Dunod was generally attributed to Aurelian: that historian, however, believed that its sculptures represented the education of Crispus, the son of Constantine, and that the name Chrysopolis, by which Besancon was very generally known in early times, was only a corruption of Crispopolis. Earlier writers are in favour of the natural derivation of Chrysopolis, and assert that when the Senones lost their famous chief, the Brennus of Roman history, before Delphos, they built a town where Byzantium afterwards stood, and called it Bisantium and Chrysopolis, in memory of their city of those names at home.

The Hotel du Nord is a rambling old house, comfortable after French ideas of comfort, and rejoicing in an excellent cuisine; though it is true that on one occasion, at least, haricots verts a l'Anglaise meant a mass of fibrous greens, swimming in a most un-English sea of artificial fat. It is a good place for studying the natural manners of the untravelled Frenchman, who there sits patiently at the table, for many minutes before dinner is served, with his napkin tucked in round his neck, and his countenance composed into a look of much resignation. The waiters are for the most part shock-headed boys, in angular-tail coats well up in the back of the neck, who frankly confess, when any order out of the common run of orders is given, that a German patois from the left bank of the Rhine is their only extensive language. One of these won my eternal gratitude by providing a clean fork at a crisis between the last savouries and the plat doux; for the usual practice with the waiters, when anyone neglected to secure his knife and fork for the next course, was to slip the plate from under the unwonted charge, and leave those instruments sprawling on the tablecloth in a vengeful mess of gravy. Chickens' bones were there dealt with on all sides as nature perhaps intended that they should be dealt with, namely, by taking them between finger and thumb, and removing superfluities with the teeth; and French officers with wasp-like waists, and red trousers gathered in plaits to match, boldly despised the sophistication of spoons, and ate their vanilla cream like men, by the help of bread and fingers. The manners and broken French of the stranger formed an open and agreeable subject of conversation, and the table was much quieter than a Frenchman's table d'hote is sometimes known to be: on one occasion, however, all decorum was scattered to the winds, and the guests rushed out into the court-yard with disordered bibs and tuckers, on the announcement by the head waiter of a 'chien a l'Anglaise, not so high as a mustard-pot,' which one of the company promptly bought for twenty-four francs, commencing its education on the spot by a lesson in cigar-smoking.

It frequently happens in France that cafe noir is a much more ready and abundant tap than water, and so it was here; notwithstanding which, the bedroom apparatus was most comfortable and complete. The chambermaid was a boy, and under his auspices a sheet of postage-stamps and a lead pencil vanished from the table. When it was suggested to him that possibly they had been blown into some corner, and so swept away, he brought a dustpan from a distant part of the house, and miraculously discovered the stamps perched upon a small handful of dust therein, deferring the discovery and his consequent surprise till he reached my room. It was curious that the stamps, which had before been in an open sheet, were now folded neatly together, and curled into the shape of a waistcoat-pocket. He was inexorable about the pencil.

No certain information could be obtained in the hotel respecting the glaciere; so an owner of carriages was summoned, and consulted as to the best means of getting there. He naturally recommended that one of his own carriages should be taken as far as the Abbey of Grace-Dieu, and that we should start at five o'clock the next morning, with a driver who knew the way to the glaciere from the point at which the carriage must be left.[34] Five o'clock seemed very early for a drive of fifteen miles; but the man asserted that instead of five leagues it was a good seven or eight, and so it turned out to be. This glaciere may be called a historical glaciere, being the only one which has attracted general attention; and the mistake about its distance from Besancon arose very many years ago, and has been perpetuated by a long series of copyists. The distance may not be more than five leagues when measured on the map with a ruler; but until the tunnels and via-ducts necessary for a crow line are constructed, the world must be content to call it seven and a half at least. The man bargained for two days' pay for the carriage, on the plea that the horse would be so tired the next day that he would not be able to do any work, and as that day was Sunday, the great day for excursions, it would be a dead loss. It so happened that the charge for two days, fifteen francs, was exactly what I paid elsewhere for one day, so there was no difficulty about the price.

We started, accordingly, at five o'clock. The day was delightfully fine, and in spite of the driver's peculiarity of speech, caused by a short tongue, and aggravated by a villanous little black pipe clutched between his remaining teeth, we got through a large amount of question and answer respecting the country through which we passed. Of course, the reins were carried through rings low down on the kicking-strap, ingeniously placed so that each whisk of the horse's tail caught one or other rein; and then the process of extraction was a somewhat dangerous one, for there was no splashboard, and the driver had to stow his legs away out of reach, before commencing operations. The landlord of the inn at Muehlinen, on the road from Kandersteg to Thun, has a worse arrangement than even this, both reins passing through one small leather loop at the top of the kicking-strap; so that when the horse on one occasion ran away down a steep hill in consequence of the break refusing to act, the man in his flurry could not tell which rein to pull, to steer clear of the wall of rock on one side, and the unfenced slope on the other, and finally flung himself out in despair, leaving his English cargo behind.

There has evidently been at some time a vast lake near Besancon, and the old bottom of the lake is now covered with heavy meadow-grass, while the corn-fields and villages creep down from the higher grounds, on the remains of promontories which stretch out into the plain. The people are in constant fear of inundation, and the driver informed me that in winter large parts of the plain are flooded, the superfluous waters vanishing after a time into a great hole, whose powers of digestion he could not explain. The villages which lie on the shores, as it were, of the lake, rejoice in church-towers with bulbous domes, rising out of rich clusters of trees, and the early bells rang out through the crisp air with something of a Belgian sweetness. Farther on, the road passed through glorious wheat, clean as on an English model farm, save where some picturesque farmer had devoted a corner to the growth of poppies. Here, as elsewhere, potatoes did not grow in ridges, but each root had a little hillock to itself; an unnatural early training which may account for the strange appearance of pommes de terre au naturel.

Anyone who has driven through the morning air for an hour or two before breakfast, will understand the satisfaction with which, about seven o'clock, we deciphered a complicated milestone into 14 kilometres from Besancon, which meant breakfast at the next village, Nancray. The breakfast was simple enough, owing to the absence of butter and other things, and consisted of coffee in its native pot, and dry bread: the milk was set on the table in the pan in which it had been boiled, and a soup-ladle and a French wash-hand basin took the place of cup and spoon. A cat kept the door against sundry large and tailless dogs, whose appetites had not gone with their tails; and an old woman kindly delivered a lecture on the most approved method of making a ptisan from the flowers of the lime-tree, and on the many medicinal properties of that decoction, to which she attributed her good health at so advanced an age. I silently supplemented her peroration by attributing her garrulity to a more stimulating source.

When we started again, it was time to learn something about the scene of our further proceedings, and the driver enunciated his views on monks in general, a propos to the Convent of Grace-Dieu, the Chartreuse at which we were to leave our carriage, and obtain food for man and horse. The Brothers, he said, were possessed of many mills, and were in consequence enormously rich. Among the products of their industry, a liqueur known as Chartreuse seemed to fill a high place in his esteem, for he considered it to be better—and he said it as if that comparative led into an eighth heaven—better even than absinthe. I had an opportunity of tasting this liqueur some weeks after, a few minutes below the summit of Mont Blanc, and certainly no one would suspect its great strength, which is entirely disguised by an innocent and insidious sweetness, as unlike absinthe as anything can possibly be: impressions, however, respecting meat and drink, and all other matters, are not very trustworthy when received near the top of the Calotte. It has lately been found that the worthy Brothers of the Grande Chartreuse have been systematically defrauding the revenue, by returning their profits on the manufacture of this liqueur at something merely nominal as compared with the real gains. I could not learn whether the ceremony of blessing each batch of the liqueur, before sending it out to intoxicate the world, is performed with so much solemnity at Grace-Dieu as at Grenoble; and, indeed, it rests only on the assertion of the short-tongued Bisuntian that the manufacture is carried on at all at the former place.[35]

Having communicated such information as he possessed, the man seemed to think he had a right to learn something in return, and administered various questions respecting customs which he believed to prevail in England. He evidently did not credit the denial of the truth of what he had heard, nor yet the assertion, in answer to another question, that English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English are a sad and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made of this parasite by young people in the country at Christmas-time. Instead, however, of being thereby impressed with our national liveliness, he looked with a sort of supercilious contempt upon a people who could require the intervention or sanction of anything external in such a matter, and turned the conversation to some more worthy subject.

At length we passed into a pleasant valley, with thrushes singing, and much chirping of those smaller birds, in the murder of which, sitting, consists le sport in the eyes of many gentlemen of France. Up to this point, nothing could have been more unlike the scenery which I had so far found to be associated with glacieres; but now the country became slightly more Jurane, and limestone precipices on a small scale rose up on either hand, decked with the corbel towers which result from the weathering of the rock. It was the Jura in softer as well as smaller type, for all the desolate wildness which characterises the more rocky part of that range was gone, and there were no signs of the grand pine-scenery, or needle-foliage, as the Germans call it; the trees were all oak and ash and beech, and the rocks were much more neat and orderly, and of course less grand, than their contorted kindred farther south. The valley speedily became very narrow, and a final bend brought us face-to-face with the buildings of the Abbaye de Grace-Dieu, striking from their position—filling, as they do, the breadth of the valley,—but in no way remarkable architecturally. The journey had been so long that it was now ten o'clock; and as we were due in Besancon at five in the evening, we put the horse up as quickly as possible, in a shed provided by the Brothers, and set off on foot for the glaciere, half an hour distant. About a mile and a half from the convent, the valley comes to an end, the rocks on the opposite sides approaching so close to each other as only to leave room for a large flour-mill, belonging to the Brothers, and for the escape-channel of the stream which works the mill. This building is quite new, and might almost be taken for a fortification against inroads by the head of the valley, especially as the words Posuerunt me custodem appear on the face, applying, however, to an image of the Virgin, which presides over the establishment. The monks have expended their superfluous time and energies upon the erection of crosses of all sizes on every projecting peak and point of rock, one cross more sombre than the rest marking the scene of a recent death. As I had no means of determining the elevation of this district above the sea,[36] I made enquiries as to the climate in winter; and one of the Brothers told me, that it was an unusual thing with them to have a fall of snow amounting to two joints of a remarkably dirty finger.

At the mill, the path turns up the steep wooded hill on the right, and leads through young plantations to a small cottage near the glaciere, where the plantations give place to a well-grown beech wood. Here my conductor startled me by announcing that there was 20 centimes to pay to the farmer of the cave for entrance; an announcement which seemed to take all the pleasure out of the expedition, and invested it with the disagreeable character of sightseeing. The poor driver thought, no doubt, with some trepidation upon the small amount of pour-boire he could expect from a monsieur on whom a demand for two pence produced so serious an effect, and it was difficult to make him understand that the fact and not the amount of payment was the trouble. When I illustrated this by saying that I would gladly give a franc to be allowed to enter the glaciere free, he seemed to think that if I would entrust him with the franc, he might possibly arrange that little matter for me.

The immediate approach to the glaciere is very impressive. The surface of the ground slopes slightly upwards, and the entrance, from north to south, is by a broad inclined plane, of gentle fall at first, which rapidly becomes steep enough to require zigzags. The walls of rock on either side are very sheer, and increase of course in height as the plane of entrance falls. The whole length of the slope is about 420 feet, and down a considerable part of this some grasses and flowers are to be found: the last 208 feet are covered more or less with ice; though, at the time of my visit, the furious rains of the end of June, 1864, had washed down a considerable amount of mud, and so covered some of the ice. There were no ready means of determining the thickness of this layer of ice, for the descent of which ten or eleven zigzags had been made by the farmer. In one place, within 24 feet of its upper commencement, it was from 2-1/2 to 3 feet thick; but the prominence of that part seemed to mark it out as of more than the average thickness. Even where to all appearance there was nothing but mud and earth, an unexpected fall or two showed that all was ice below. Whether the driver had previously experienced the treacherousness of this slope of ice, or whatever his motive might be, he left me to enter and explore alone.

The roof of the entrance is at first a mere shell, formed by the thin crust of rock on which the surface-earth and trees rest high overhead; but this rapidly becomes thicker, as shown in the section of the cave, and thus a sort of outer cave is formed, the real portal of the glaciere being reached about 60 feet above the bottom of the slope. This outer cave presents a curious appearance, from the distinctness with which the several strata of the limestone are marked, the lower strata weathered and rounded off like the seats of an amphitheatre of the giants, and all, up to the shell-like roof, arranged in horizontal semicircles of various graduated sizes, showing their concavity; while at the bottom of the whole is seen a patch of darkness, with two masses of ice in its centre, looming out like grey ghosts at midnight. This darkness is of course the inner cave, the entrance to which, though it seems so small from above, is 78 feet broad.

The glaciere itself may be said to commence as soon as this entrance, or perpendicular portal, is passed, and thus includes 60 feet of the long slope of ice, from the foot of which to the farther end of the cave is 145 feet, the greatest breadth of the cave being 148 feet. Immediately below the portal I found a piece of the trunk of a large column of ice, 7 feet long and 12 feet in girth, its fractured ends giving the idea of the interior of a quickly-grown tree, in consequence of the concentric arrangement of convergent prisms described in the account of the Glaciere of S. Georges. The wife of the farmer told me afterwards that there had been two glorious columns at this portal, which the recent rains had swept away. Excepting a short space at the foot of the slope, and another towards the farther end of the cave, the floor was covered with ice, in some parts from 3 to 4 feet thick: of this a considerable area had been removed to a depth of 2 1/2 or 3 feet, leaving a pond of water a foot deep, with bottom and banks of ice. The rock which composes the true floor rises at the farthest end of the cave, and the roof is so arranged that a sort of private chapel is there formed; and from a fissure in the dome a monster column of ice had been constructed on the floor, which, at the time of my visit, had lost its upper parts, and stood as a hollow truncated cone with sides a foot thick, and with seas of ice streaming from it, and covering the rising pavement of the chapel. Without an axe, and without help, I was unable to measure the girth of this column, which had not been without companions on a smaller scale in the immediate neighbourhood. At the west end of the cave, the wall was thickly covered for a large space with small limestone stalactites, producing the effect of many tiers of fringe on a shawl; while from a dark fissure in the roof a large piece of fluted drapery of the same material hung, calling to mind some of the vastly grander details of the grottoes of Hans-sur-Lesse in Belgium: down this wall there was also a long row of icicles, on the edges of a narrow fissure. The north-west corner was very dark, and an opening in the wall of rock high above the ground suggested a tantalising cave up there: the ground in this corner was occupied by the shattered remains of numerous columns of ice, which had originally covered a circular area between 60 and 70 feet in circumference.



The three large masses of ice which rendered this glaciere in some respects more remarkable than any of those I have seen, lay in a line from east to west, across the middle of the cave, on that part of the floor where the ice was thickest. The central mass was extremely solid, but somewhat unmeaning in shape, being a rough irregular pyramid; its size alone, however, was sufficient to make it very striking, the girth being 66-1/2 feet at some distance from the ice-floor with which it blended. The mass which lay to the east of this was very lovely, owing to the good taste of some one who had found that much ice was wont to accumulate on that spot, and had accordingly fixed the trunk of a small fir-tree, with the upper branches complete, to receive the water from the corresponding fissure in the roof. The consequence was, that, while the actual tree had vanished from sight under its icy covering, excepting on one side where a slight investigation betrayed its presence, the mass of ice showed every possible fantasy of form which a mould so graceful could suggest. At the base, it was solid, with a circumference of 37 feet. The huge column, which had collected round the trunk of the fir-tree, branched out at the top into all varieties of eccentricity and beauty, each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid bar of frosted ice, with graceful curve, affording a point of suspension for complicated groups of icicles, which streamed down side by side with emulous loveliness. In some of the recesses of the column, the ice assumed a pale blue colour; but as a rule it was white and very hard, not so regularly prismatic as the ice described in former glacieres, but palpably crystalline, showing a structure not unlike granite, with a bold grain, and with a large predominance of the glittering element. But the westernmost mass was the grandest and most beautiful of all. It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty, resembling a family group of lions' heads in a subdued attitude of grief, richly decked with icy manes. Similar heads seemed to grow out here and there from the solid sides of the huge mass. The girth was 76-1/2 feet, measured about 2 feet from the floor. When this column was looked at from the side removed from the entrance to the cave, so that it stood in the centre of the light which poured down the long slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice brought it to pass that the whole seemed set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid blue, the effect of light penetrating through the mass at its extreme edges. The only means of determining the height of this column was by tying a stone to the end of a string, and lodging it on the highest head; but this was not an easy process, as I was naturally anxious not to injure the delicate beauty which made that head one of the loveliest things conceivable; and each careful essay with the stone seemed to involve as much responsibility as taking a shot at a hostile wicket, in a crisis of the game, instead of returning the ball in the conventional manner. When at last it was safely lodged, the height proved to be 27 feet. I had hoped to find it much more than this, from the grandeur of the effect of the whole mass, and I took the trouble to measure the knotted string again with a tape, to make sure that there was no mistake. The column formed upon the fir-tree was 3 or 4 feet lower.

I have since found many notices of this glaciere in the Memoirs of the French Academy and elsewhere, extracts from which will be found in a later chapter. These accounts are spread over a period of 200 years, extending from 1590 to 1790, and almost all make mention of the columns or groups of columns I have described; but, without exception, the heights given or suggested in the various accounts are much less than those which I obtained as the result of careful measurement. The latest description of a visit to the glaciere states a fact which probably will be held to explain, the present excess of height above that of earlier times.[37] The citizen Girod-Chantrans, who wrote this description, had procured the notes of a medical man living in the neighbourhood, from which it seemed that Dr. Oudot made the experiment, in 1779, of fixing stakes of wood in the heads of the columns, then from 4 to 5 feet high, and found that these stakes were the cause of a very large increase in the height of the columns, ice gathering round them in pillars a foot thick. So that it is not improbable that the largest of the three masses of the present day owes its height, and its peculiar form, to a series of stakes fixed from time to time in the various heads formed under the fissures in the roof, though nothing but the most solid ice can now be seen. It would be very interesting to try this experiment in one of the caves where, without any artificial help, such immense masses of ice are formed; and by this means columns might, in the course of a year or two, be raised to the very roof. Further details on this subject will be given hereafter.

There was no perceptible draught of air in any part of the cave, and the candles burned steadily through the whole time of my visit, which occupied more than two hours. The centre was sufficiently lighted by the day; but in the western corner, and behind the largest column, artificial light was necessary. The ice itself did not generally show signs of thawing, but the whole cave was in a state of wetness, which made the process of measuring and investigating anything but pleasant. I had placed two thermometers at different points on my first entrance—one on a drawing-board on a large stone in the middle of the pond of water which has been mentioned, and the other on a bundle of pencils at the entrance of the end chapel, in a part of the cave where the ice-floor ceased for a while, and left the stones and rock bare. The former gave 33 deg., the latter, till I was on the point of leaving, 31 1/2 deg., when it fell suddenly to 31 deg.. It was impossible, however, to stay any longer for the sake of watching the thermometer fall lower and lower below the freezing point; indeed, the results of sundry incautious fathomings of the various pools of water, and incessant contact of hands and feet with the ice, had already become so unpleasant, that I was obliged to desert my trusty hundred feet of string, and leave it lying on the ice, from want of finger-power to roll it up. The thermometers were both Casella's, but that which registered 31 deg. was the more lively of the two, the other being mercurial, with a much thicker stem: the difference in sensitiveness was so great, that when they were equally exposed to the sun in driving home, the one ran up to 93 deg. before the other had reached 85 deg..

In leaving the glaciere, I found a little pathway turning off along the face of the rock on the left hand, a short way up the slope of entrance, and looking as if it might lead to the opening in the dark wall on the western side of the cave. After a time, however, it came to a corner which it seemed an unnecessary risk to attempt to pass alone; and my prudence was rewarded by the discovery that, after all, the supposed cave could not be thus reached. It is said that this other cave was the place to which the inhabitants fled for refuge when their district was invaded, probably by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar with his 10,000 Swedes, and that a ladder 40 feet long is necessary for getting at it.

The driver had long ago absconded when I returned to the upper regions; but the wife of the farmer of the grotto was there, and communicated all that she knew of the statistics of the ice annually removed. She said that in 1863 two chars were loaded every day for two months, each char taking about 600 kilos, the wholesale price in Besancon being 5 francs the hundred kilos. Since the quintal contains 50 kilos, it will be seen that this account does not agree with the statement of Renaud as to the amount of ice each char could take. No doubt, a char at S. Georges may mean one thing, and a char in the village of Chaux another; but the difference between 12 quintaux and 50 or 60 is too great to be thus explained, and probably Madame Briot made some mistake. Her husband, Louis Briot, works alone in the cave, and has twelve men and a donkey to carry the ice he quarries to the village of Chaux, a mile from the glaciere, where it is loaded for conveyance to Besancon. He uses gunpowder for the flooring of ice, and expects the eighth part of a pound to blow out a cubic metre; and if, by ill luck, the ice thus procured has stones on the lower side, he has to saw off the bottom layer. Madame Briot said I was right in supposing March to be the great time for the formation of ice, as she had heard her husband say that the columns were higher then than at any other time of the year: she also confirmed my views as to the disastrous effects of heavy rain. As with every other glaciere of which I could obtain any account, excepting the Lower Glaciere of the Pre de S. Livres, she complained that the ice had not been so beautiful and so abundant this year as last, although the winter had been exceptionally severe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 26: Jean Bontemps, Conseiller au bailliage d'Arbois.]

[Footnote 27: 'Allez vous en reposer, rafraischir et boire un coup au chasteau, car vous en avez bon besoin; j'ay du vin d'Arbois en mes offices, dont je vous envoyeray deux bouteilles, car je scay bien que vous ne le hayes pas.'—Petitot. iii. 9.]

[Footnote 28: Mem. de la Comte de Bourgougne, Dole, 1592, p. 486.]

[Footnote 29: One of the Seigneurs de Chissey, Michaud de Changey, who died in high office in 1480, was known by preeminence as le Brave.]

[Footnote 30: Dr. Buckland visited these caves in 1826, to look for bones, of which he found a great number. Gollut (in 1592) spelled the name Aucelle, and derived it from Auricella, believing that the Romans worked a gold mine there. It is certain that both the Doubs and the Loue supplied very fine gold, and the Seigneurs of Longwy had a chain made of the gold of those rivers, which weighed 160 crowns.]

[Footnote 31: Dion Cass. lib. lxiii.]

[Footnote 32: Ib. lib. lxvi.]

[Footnote 33: Known locally as the Porte Noire, like the great Porta Nigra at Treves, and other Roman gates in Gaul.]

[Footnote 34: I should be inclined, from what I saw of the country, to go to the station of Baume-les-Dames on any future visit, and walk thence to the glaciere, perhaps three leagues from the station.]

[Footnote 35: He was in error. The Paris correspondent of the 'Times' gave, some months since (see the impression of Jan. 20, 1865), an account of an interesting trial respecting the manufacture of the liqueur peculiar to the Abbey of Grace-Dieu. From this account it appears that the liqueur was formerly called the Liqueur of the Grace-Dieu, but is now known as Trappistine. It is limpid and oily; possesses a fine aroma, a peculiar softness, a mild but brisk flavour, and so on. It was invented by an ecclesiastic who was once the Brother Marie-Joseph, and prior of the convent, but is now M. Stremler, having been released by the Pope from his vows of obedience and poverty, in order that he might teach Christianity to the infidels of the New World. The Brothers took the question of the renunciation of poverty into their own hands, by declining to give up the money which Brother Marie-Joseph had originally brought into the society; so M. Stremler, being now moneyless, commenced the secular manufacture of the seductive Trappistine, in opposition to the regular manufacture within the walls of the Abbey, abstaining, however, from the use of the religious label which is the Brothers' trade-mark. The unfortunate inventor was fined and condemned in costs for his piracy.]

[Footnote 36: See p. 310.]

[Footnote 37: Journal des Mines, Prairial, an iv., pp. 65, &c.]

* * * * *



CHAPTER VI.

BESANCON AND DOLE.

The afternoon was so far advanced when I returned to the convent, that it was clearly impossible to reach Besancon at five o'clock, and consequently there was time to inspect the Brothers and their buildings. The field near the convent was gay with haymakers; and the brown monks, with here and there a priest in ci-devant white, moved among the hired labourers, and stirred them up by exhortation and example,—with this difference, that while it was evidently the business of the monks so to do, the priests, on the other hand, had only taken fork in hand for the sake of a little gentle exercise. One unhappy Jacques Bonhomme made hot and toilsome hay in thick brown clothes, plainly manufactured from a defunct Brother's gown; for, to judge from appearances, a cast-off gown is a thing unknown. It was good to see a Brother, in horn spectacles of mediaeval cut, tenderly chopping a log for firewood, and peering at it through his spectacles after each stroke, as a man examines some delicate piece of natural machinery with a microscope; to see another Brother, the sphere of whose duties lay in the flour-mill, standing in the doorway with brown robe and shaven crown all powdered alike with white, and a third covered from head to foot with sawdust; or, best of all, to see an antique Brother, with scarecrow legs, and low shoes which had presumably been in his possession or that of his predecessors for a long series of years, wheeling a barrow of liquid manure, with his gown looped up high by means of stout whipcord and an arrangement of large brass rings. The Brother whose business it was to do such cooking as might be required by visitors, grinned in the most friendly and engaging manner from ear to ear when he was looked at; and, by fixing him steadily with the eye, he could be kept for considerable spaces of time standing in the middle of the kitchen, knife in hand, with the corners of his mouth out of sight round his broad cheeks. His ample front was decked with a blue apron, suspended from his shoulders, and confined round the convexity of his waist by an old strap which no respectable costermonger would have used as harness. The soup served was by courtesy called soupe maigre, but it was in fact soupe maigre diluted by many homoeopathic myriads, and the Brother showed much curiosity as to my opinion of its taste—a curiosity which I could not satisfy without hurting his professional pride. When that course was finished, the large-faced cook suggested an omelette, as the most substantial thing allowed on eves, proceeding to draw the materials from a closet which so fully shared in the general abstinence from water as a means of cleansing, that I shut my eyes upon all further operations, and ate the eventual omelette in faith. Its excellence called forth such hearty commendations, that there seemed to be some danger of the mouth not coming right again. Then salads, and bread and butter, and wine, and various kinds of cheese were brought, which made in all a very fair dinner for a fast-day.

The culinary monk knew nothing of the history of his convent, beyond the bare year of its foundation, and displayed a monotonous dead level of ignorance on all topographical and historical questions: to him the Pain d'Abbaye[38] meant nothing further than the staff of life there provided, and he neither knew himself nor could recommend any Brother who knew anything about the glaciere. He was a German, and we talked of his native Baiern and the modern glories of his capital; and when his questions elicited a declaration of my profession, he passed up to Saxony, and pinned me with Luther. Finding that I objected to being so pinned, and repudiated something of that which his charge involved, he waived Luther, of whom he knew nothing beyond his name, and came down upon me triumphantly with the word Protestant. I explained to him, of course, that the worthy Elector, and his friends who protested, had not much to do with the Anglican branch of the Church Catholic; and then the old task had to be gone through of assuring the assembled Brothers that we in England have Sacraments, have Orders, have a Trinitarian Creed.

At length, about half-past three, we started for Besancon, paying of course a volonte for food and entertainment, as we did not choose to qualify as paupers. The driver told me on the way that there was another glaciere at Vaise, a village three or four kilometres from Besancon, and at no great distance from the road by which we should approach the town; so, when we reached the crest above Morre, where the road passes the final ridge by means of a tunnel, I paid the carriage off, and walked to the village of Vaise. The public-house knew of the glaciere—knew indeed of two,—further still, kept the keys of both. This was good news, though the idea of keys in connection with an ice-cave was rather strange; and I proposed to organise an expedition at once to the glacieres. The male half of the auberge declared that he was forbidden to open them to strangers, except by special order from a certain monsieur in Besancon; but the female half, scenting centimes, stated her belief that the monsieur in Besancon could never wish them to turn away a stranger who had come so many kilometres through the dust to see the ice. She put the proposed disobedience in so persuasive and Christian a form, that I was obliged to take the husband's side,—not that he was in any need of support, for he had been longer married than Adam was, and showed no signs of giving way. It turned out, after all, that though there was no doubt about the existence of the glacieres, there was equally no doubt that they were glacieres artificielles, being simply ice-houses dug in the side of a hill, and the property of a glacier in Besancon; so that my friend the driver had sent me to a mare's-nest.

The pathway across the hills to Besancon was rather intricate, and by good fortune an old Frenchman appeared, who was returning from his work at a neighbouring church, and served as companion and guide. He had bid farewell to sixty some years before, and, being a builder, had been going up and down a ladder all day, with full and empty hottes, to an extent which outdid the Shanars of missionary meetings; and yet he walked faster than any foreigner of my experience. He talked in due proportion, and told some interesting details of the bombardment of Besancon, which he remembered well. When he learned that I was not German, but English, he told me they did not say Anglais there, but Gaudin,—I was a Gaudin. This he repeated persistently many times, with an air worthy of General Cyrus Choke, and half convinced me that there was something in it, and that I might after all be a Gaudin. It was not till some hours after, that I remembered the indelible impression made by the piety of speech of recent generations of Englishmen upon the French nation at large, and thus was enabled to trace the origin of the name Gaudin. The old man evidently believed that it was the proper thing to call an Englishman by that name; thus reminding me of a story told of a French soldier in the Austrian service during the long early wars with Switzerland. The Austrians called the Swiss, in derision, Kuehmelkers—a term more opprobrious than bouviers; and it is said that, after the battle of Frastens—one of the battles of the Suabian war,—a Frenchman threw himself at the feet of some Grisons soldiers, and innocently prayed thus for quarter; 'Tres-chers, tres-honorables, et tres-dignes Kuehmelkers! au nom de Dieu, ne me tuez pas!'

The town of Besancon seems to spend its Sunday in fishing, and is apparently well contented with that very limited success which is wont to attend a Frenchman's efforts in this branch of le sport. There is a proverb in the patois of Vaud which says 'Kan on vau dau pesson, se fo molli;'[39] and on this the Bisuntians act, standing patiently half-way up the thigh in the river, as the Swiss on the Lake of Geneva and other lakes may be seen to do. It is all very well to wade for a good salmon cast, or to spend some hours in a swift-foot[40] Scotch stream for the sake of a lively basket of trout; but to stand in a Sunday coat and hat, and 2-1/2 feet of water, watching a large bung hopelessly unmoved on the surface, is a thing reserved for a Frenchman indulging in a weekly intoxication of Sabbatical sport, under the delirious form of the chasse aux goujons.

Clean as the town within the circuit of the river is, the houses which overhang the water on the other side are picturesque and dirty in the extreme, story rising above story, and balcony above balcony. It does not increase their beauty, and to a fastidious nose it must militate against their eligibility as places of residence, that there is apparently but one drain, an external one, which follows the course of the pillars supporting the various balconies: nevertheless, from the opposite side of the river, and when the wind sets the other way, they are sufficiently attractive. In this quarter is found the finest church, the Madeleine, with a very effective piece of sculpture at the east end. The sculpture is arranged on the bottom and farther side of a sort of cage, which is hung outside the church, but is visible from the inside through a corresponding opening in the east wall. The subject of the sculpture is 'The Sepulchre,' and the ends of the cage or box are composed of rich yellow glass, through which the external light streams into the cave of the Sepulchre; and when the church itself is becoming dark, the effect produced by the light from the evening sky, passing through the deep-toned glass, and softly illuminating the Sepulchre, is indescribably solemn.



When Besancon was supplied by the aqueduct with the waters of Arcier, there was a great abundance of baths, as the remains discovered in digging new foundations show; but in the present state of the town such things are not easily met with. The floating baths on the river are appropriated to the other sex, and the only thing approaching to a male bath was of a nature entirely new to me, being constructed as follows:—There is a water-mill in the town, with a low weir stretching across the river, down which the water rushes with no very great violence. At the foot of this weir a row of sentry-boxes is placed, approached by planks, and in these boxes the adventurer finds his bath.[41] A stout piece of wood-work is fixed horizontally along the face of the weir, and has the effect of throwing the downward water out of its natural direction, and causing it to describe an arch, so that it descends with much force on to the weir at a point below the wood-work. Here two planks are placed, forming a seat and a support for the back, and a little lower still another plank for the feet to rest upon, without which the bather would have a good chance of being washed away. The water boils noisily and violently on all sides and in all directions, coming down upon the subject's shoulders with a heavy thud, which calls to mind the tender years when something softer than a cane was used, and sends him forth like a fresh-boiled lobster. All this, with towels, is not dear at fourpence.

The citadel is the great sight of Besancon, and the polite Colonel-commandant attends at his office at convenient hours to give passes. What it might be to storm the position under the excitement of the sport of war, I cannot say; but certainly it is a most trying affair on a hot Sunday's afternoon, even when all is made smooth, and the gates are opened, by a comprehensive pass. The wall mentioned by Caesar as a great feature of the place cut the site of the citadel off from the town, and many signs of it were found when the cathedral of S. Stephen was built, the unfortunate church which went down before the exigencies of a siege under Louis XIV. The barrack-master proved to be a most interesting man, knowing many details of Caesar's life and campaigns which I suspect were not known to that captain himself. He had served in Algeria, and assented to the proposition that more soldiers died there of absinthe than of Arabs, stating his conviction that three-fourths of the whole deaths are caused by that pernicious extract of wormwood, and that he ought himself to have died of it long ago. He pointed out the difference between the massive masonry of the period of the Spanish occupation and the less impressive work of more recent times, and showed the dungeon from which Marshal Bourmont bought his escape, in the time of the first Napoleon.

The floor of one of the little look-out towers is composed of a tombstone, representing a priest in full ecclesiastical dress, and my question as to how it came there elicited the following story:—When Louis XIV. was besieging the citadel, he placed his head-quarters, and a strong battery, on the summit of the Mont Chaudane,[42] which commands the citadel on one side as the Bregille does on the other. Among the besieged was a monk named Schmidt, probably one of the Low-country men to whom the Franche Comte was then a sort of home, as forming part of the dominions of Spain; and this monk was the most active supporter of the defence, against the large party within the walls which was anxious to render the town. He was also an admirable shot; and on one of the last days of the siege, as he stood in the little tower where the tombstone now lies, the King and his staff rode to the front of the plateau on the Mont Chaudane to survey the citadel; whereupon some one pointed out to Schmidt that now he had a fair chance of putting an end at once to the siege and the invasion. Accordingly, he took a musket from a soldier and aimed at the King; but before firing he changed his aim, remarking, that he, a priest, ought not to destroy the life of a man, and so he only killed the horse, giving the Majesty of France a roll in the mud. When the town was taken, the King enquired for the man who killed his horse, and asked the priest whether he could have killed the rider instead, had he wished to do so. 'Certainly,' Schmidt replied, and related the facts of the case. Louis informed him, that had he been a soldier, he should have been decorated for his skill and his impulse of mercy; but, being a priest, he should be hung. The sentence was carried out, and the priest's body was buried in the floor of the tower from which he had spared the King's life. If this be true, it was one of the most unkingly deeds ever done.[43]

This siege took place in the second invasion or conquest of the Franche Comte by Louis XIV., when Besancon held out for nine days against Vauban and the King: on the first occasion it had surrendered to Conde after one day's siege, making the single stipulation that the Holy Shroud should not be removed from the town.[44] The Saincte Suaire was the richest ecclesiastical treasure of the Bisuntians, being one of the two most genuine of the many Suaires, the other being that of Turin, which was supported by Papal Infallibility. Both were brought from the Crusades; and the one was presented to Besancon in 1206, the other to Turin in 1353. Bede tells a story of the proving of a Shroud by fire in the eighth century, by one of the caliphs; and as its dimensions were 8 feet by 4, like that of Besancon, while the Shroud of Turin measured 12 feet by 3, the people of Besancon claimed that theirs was the one spoken of by Bede.

The Cathedral of Besancon is no longer S. Stephen, since the destruction of that church by Louis XIV. The small Church of the Citadel is now dedicated to that saint, an inscription on the wall stating that it takes the place of the larger church, ex urbis obsidio anno 1674 lapsae, and offering an indulgence of 100 days for every visit paid to it, with the sensible proviso una duntaxat vice per diem. Soldiers not being generally made of the confessing sex, or of confessing material, there is only one confessional provided for the 6,000 souls which the citadel can accommodate.

The Cavalry Barracks are in the lower part of the town, and near them is a large building with evident traces of ecclesiastical architecture on the outside. It is, in fact, a very fine church converted into stables, retaining its interior features in excellent preservation. Under the corn-bin lies a lady who had two husbands and fifteen children, Antigone in parentes, Porcia in conjuges, Sempronia in liberos; while a few yards further east, less agreeably placed, is an ecclesiastic of the Gorrevod family, who reckoned Prince and Bishop and Baron among his titles. The nave of this Church of S. Michael accommodates thirty horses, and the north aisle thirteen; the south is considered more select, and is boarded off for the decani, in the shape of officers' chargers. The north side of the chancel gives room for six horses, and the south side for a row of saddle-blocks. It had been an oversight on the part of the original architect of the church that no place was prepared for the daily hay; a fault which the military restorers have remedied by improvising a lady-chapel, where the hay for the day is placed in the morning. With Spelman in my mind, I asked if the stables were not unhealthy; but the soldiers said they were the healthiest in the town.[45]

The Glaciere of Vaise had proved, as has been seen, to be a mare's-nest; and yet, after all, it produced a foal; for while I was endeavouring to overcome the evening heat of Besancon in a specialite for ice, I found that the owner of the establishment was also the owner of the two glacieres of Vaise; and in the course of the conversation which followed, he told me of the existence of a natural glaciere near the village of Arc-sous-Cicon, twenty kilometres from Pontarlier, which he had himself seen. As I had arranged to meet my sisters at Neufchatel, in two days' time, for the purpose of visiting a glaciere in the Val de Travers, this piece of information came very opportunely, and I determined to attempt both glacieres with them.

Some of the trains from Besancon stop for an hour at Dole in passing towards Switzerland by way of Pontarlier, and anyone who is interested in the Burgundian and Spanish wars of France should take this opportunity of seeing what may be seen of the town of Dole and its massive church-tower. The sieges of Dole made it very famous in the later middle ages, more especially the long siege under Charles d'Amboise, at the crisis of which that general recommended his soldiers to leave a few of the people for seed,[46] and the old sobriquet la Joyeuse was punningly changed to la Dolente. It has had other claims upon fame; for if Besancon possessed one of the two most authentic Holy Shrouds, Dole was the resting-place of one of the undoubted miraculous Hosts, which had withstood the flames in the Abbey of Faverney. It was for the reception of this Host that the advocates of the Brotherhood of Monseigneur Saint Yves built the Sainte Chapelle at Dole.[47]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 38: One of the rights of the sovereigns of Burgundy was known by this name. The sovereign had the power of sending one soldier incapacitated by war to each abbey in the County, and the authorities of the abbey were bound to make him a prebendary for life. In 1602, after the siege of Ostend, the Archduke Albert exercised this right in favour of his wounded soldiers, forcing lay-prebendaries upon almost all the abbeys of the County of Burgundy. The Archduchess Isabella attempted to quarter such a prebendary upon the Abbey of Migette, a house of nuns, but the inmates successfully refused to receive the warrior among them (Dunod, Hist. de l'Eglise de Besancon, i. 367). For the similar right in the kingdom of France, see Pasquier, Recherches de la France, l. xii. p. 37. Louis XIV. did not exercise this right after his conquest of the Franche Comte, perhaps because the Hotel des Invalides, to which the Church was so large a contributor, met all his wants.]

[Footnote 39: 'Quand on veut du poisson, il se faut mouiller;' referring probably to the method of taking trout practised in the Ormont valley, the habitat of the purest form of the patois. A man wades in the Grand' Eau, with a torch in one hand to draw the fish to the top, and a sword in the other to kill them when they arrive there; a second man wading behind with a bag, to pick up the pieces.]

[Footnote 40: 'Swift-foot Almond, and land-louping Braan.']

[Footnote 41: The sentry-box is omitted in the accompanying illustration.]

[Footnote 42: Believed to be derived from Collis Dianae. Dunod found that Chaudonne was an early form of the name, and so preferred Collis Dominarum, with reference to the house of nuns placed there.]

[Footnote 43: Schmidt was not without the support of example in the indulgence of his warlike tastes. Thirty-eight years before, the religious took so active a part in the defence of Dole against Louis XIII., that the Capuchin Father d'Iche had the direction of the artillery; and when an officer of the enemy had seized the Brother Claude by the cowl, the Father Barnabas made the officer loose his hold by slaying him with a demi-pique. When Arbois was besieged by Henry IV., the Sieur Chanoine Pecauld is specially mentioned as proving himself a bon harquebouzier.]

[Footnote 44: There is a painting by Vander Meulen, representing this siege, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.]

[Footnote 45: The Church of S. Philibert, in Dijon, now a forage magazine, has an inscription let into the wall almost ludicrously out of keeping with the present desecrated state of the building,—Dilexi Domine Decorem Domus tuae, 1648.]

[Footnote 46: 'Qu'on les laisse pour grain!']

[Footnote 47: In the year 1648, it was suspected that some decay was going on in the material of this Host, and the following translation from the Latin describes the investigation entered into by the Dean and a large body of clergy and laity, in order to quiet the public mind:—'Apres que tous les susnommes (viz. the Dean, Canons, President of the Parliament, &c.) etant presents eurent adores le S. Sacrement, la custode fut ouverte avec tout le respect possible; et alors le dit Doyen apercut un vermisseau roule en spirale, qu'il saisit avec la pointe d'une epingle et placa sur un corporal ou chacun l'examina; puis on le brula avec un charbon pris dans l'encensoir, et ses cendres furent jetees dans la piscine. On put alors constater tout le dommage que ce miserable petit animal avait cause aux especes sacrees dont les debris ici tombaient en poussiere, la se trouvaient ronges et laceres, de telle sorte que l'Hostie n'avait presque plus rien de sa forme circulaire, et presentait de profondes decoupures partout ou le vermisseau s'etait livre a ses sinueus es evolutions.']

* * * * *



CHAPTER VII.

THE GLACIERE OF MONTHEZY, IN THE VAL DE TRAVERS.

I rejoined my sisters at Neufchatel on the 5th of July, and proceeded thence with them by the line which passes through the Val de Travers. One of them had been at Fleurier, in 1860, on the day of the opening of this line, and she added an interest to the various tunnels, by telling us that a Swiss gentleman of her acquaintance, who had taken a place in one of the open carriages of the first train, found, on reaching the daylight after one of the tunnels, that his neighbour had been killed by a small stone which had fallen on to his head. Where the stone came from, no one could say, nor yet when it fell, for the unfortunate man had made no sign or movement of any kind.

Every one must be delighted with the wonders of the line of rail, and the beauties through which the engineer has cut his way. In valleys on a less magnificent scale, cuttings and embankments on the face of the hill are sad eyesores, as in railway-ruined Killiecrankie; but here Nature's works are so very grand, that the works of man are not offensively prominent, being overawed by the very facts over which they have triumphed. When we reached the more even part of the valley, where the Reuse no longer roars and rushes far below, but winds quietly through the soft grass on a level with the rail, the whole grouping was so exceedingly charming, and the river itself so suggestive of lusty trout, and the village of Noiraigue[48] looked so tempting as it nestled in a sheltered nook among the headlong precipices, that I registered in a safe mental pigeon-hole a week at the auberge there with a fishing-rod, and excursions to the commanding summit in which the Creux de Vent is found. The engine-driver knew that he was in a region of beauties, and, when he whistled to warn his passengers that the train was about to move on, he remained stationary until the long-resounding echoes died out, floating lingeringly up the valley to neighbouring France.

We had no definite idea as to the locale of the glaciere we were now bent upon attacking. M. Thury's list gave the following information:—'Glaciere de Motiers, Canton de Neufchatel, entre les vallees de Travers et de la Brevine, pres du sentier de la Brevine;' and this I had rendered somewhat more precise by a cross-examination of the guard of the train on my way to Besancon. He had not heard of the glaciere, but from what I told him he was inclined to think that Couvet would be the best station for our purpose, especially as the 'Ecu' at that place was, in his eyes, a commendable hostelry. Some one in Geneva, also, had believed that Couvet was as likely as anything else in the valley; so at Couvet we descended.[49]

This is a very clean and cheerful village, devoted to the lucrative manufacture of absinthe, and producing inhabitants who look like gentlemen and ladies, and promenade the ways in bonnets and hats, after a most un-Swiss-like fashion. They carefully restrict themselves to the making of the poisonous product of their village, and have nothing to do with the consumption thereof:[50] hence nature has a fair chance with them, and they are a healthy and energetic race. The beauties of the surrounding mountains, with their fitful alternations of pasture and wood, and grey face of rock, are not marred by the outward appearance, at least, of that which Bishop Heber lamented in a country where 'every prospect pleases.' An old lady is commemorated in the annals of Couvet as an example of the healthiness of the situation, who saw seven generations of her family, having known her great-grandfather in her early years, and living to nurse great-grandchildren in her old age. The landlord of the inn informed us, with much pride, that Couvet was the birthplace of the man who invented a clock for telling the time at sea; by which, no doubt, he meant the chronometer, invented by M. Berthoud. At Motiers, the next village, Rousseau wrote his Lettres de la Montagne, and thence it was that he fled from popular violence to the island on the Lake of Bienne.

The 'Ecu' promised us dinner in half an hour, and we strolled about in the garden of that unsophisticated hotel for an hour and a half, reconciled to the delay by the beauty of the neighbouring hills, the winding of the valley giving all the effect of a mountain-locked plain, with barriers decked with firs. It will readily be conceived, however, that three practical English people could not be satisfied to feed on beauty alone for any very great length of time, and we caught the landlady and became peremptory. She explained that dinner was quite ready, but she had intended to give us the pleasure of an agreeable society, consisting of sundry Swiss who were due in another half-hour or so: she yielded, nevertheless, to our representations, and promised to serve the meal at once. We were speedily summoned to the salle-a-manger, and entered a low smoke-stained wooden chamber, with no floor to speak of, and with huge beams supporting the roof, dangerous for tall heads. The date on the door was 1690, and the chamber fully looked its age. There was a long table of the prevailing hue, with a similar bench; and on the table three large basins, presumably containing soup, were ranged, each covered with its plate, and accompanied by a ricketty spoon of yellow metal and a hunch of black bread. A., who was hungry enough and experienced enough to have known better, began promptly a most pathetic 'Why surely!' but the landlady stopped her by opening a side door, and displaying a comfortable room in which a well-appointed table awaited us:—she had taken us through the kitchen rather than through the salon, in which were peasants smoking. We were somewhat disconcerted when we heard that the unwashed-looking place was the kitchen; but the landlady had made up for it by scrubbing her husband, who waited upon us, to a high pitch of presentability, and further experience showed that the 'Ecu' is to be highly commended for the excellence and abundance and cheapness of its foods.

There are many natural curiosities in and near the Val de Travers, which well repay the labour that must be expended upon them. The Temple des Fees, on the western side of the Valley of Verrieres, used to be called the most beautiful grotto in Switzerland; and the great Cavern of La Baume, near Motiers, is said to be exceedingly wonderful. We were shown the entrance to a line of caverns in the hills above Couvet, and were informed that it was possible to pierce completely through the range, and pass out at the other side within sight of Yverdun. One of the caverns in this valley had been explored by some of A. and M.'s Swiss friends, and the account of what they had gone through was by no means inviting, seeing that the prevailing material was damp clay of a solid character, arranged in steep slopes, up which progression must be made by inserting the fingers and toes as far as might be into the clay; and, of course, when the handful of unpleasant mud came away, the result was the reverse of progression. To anyone who has only known the rope up the pure white side of some snow mountain, the idea of being roped for the purpose of grappling with underground banks of adhesive mud and clay must be horrible in the extreme. Another interesting natural phenomenon is presented by the source of the Reuse, that river gushing out from the rock in considerable volume, probably formed by the drainage of the Lake of Etallieres, in the distant valley of La Brevine; while the Longe-aigue, on the contrary, is lost in a gulf of such horror that the people call the mill which stands on its edge the Moulin d'enfer.