The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-04 00:00:00

Al pine Tourists.

(Prom, a Correspondent of the Times.)

BEAU RIII.A.GE, LAKE LEMAN, Sept. 29.

We have achieved the last of our Alpine feats.
We walked, yesterday, from Chamounix up to the
Col. de Tete Noire, and, like the old King of France,
came down again on Martigny. From the latter place
we took the afternoon train to Villeneuve, and there,
as the Swiss do not allow of a coincidence between
railway and steamer, which might be a convenience
to the traveller, but would, as they foolishly con-
ceive, interfere with their profits, we had to come
on by rail to the Lausanna Station, whence the lum-
bering omnibus brought us to this fairy place, the
Hotel du Beau Rivage, on the Lake shore of Ouchy.
At Ouchy this morning, on board the steamer
bound to Geneva, I shook hands with my English
companion, with whom I cast in my lotnine days ago
at Interlaken, without even a nod of previous ac-
quaintance, after the confiding fashion of ancient
knights-errant, and who has proved to me an in-
valuable friend, both sharing toil and expense, and
enabling me to drop for a time the obnoxious ego.
and to allude to my movements in the plural number.
The Tete Noire is a lady's own mountoin pass—
with a carriage road up to Argentiere, and a smooth
bridle pass to the end of the route, as easy and com-
fortable as any in our own region of the Cumber-
land Lakes, or our sweet tiny valley of the Wye.
That path leads up and down a succession of deep
glens, across dark woods, along babbling streams,
till you come to the Col, from the summit of which
you have Martigny at your feet, with all the broad
Valais, the perfectly straight, high, and rail road
running up to Sion, and the rugged mountain wall
of the Bernese Oberland, tipped with snow and ice
here and there, closing the vast but not unlimited
horison. _ _ _

We sat down more than 50 or 60 at the table
(note of the Hotel de Londres at Chamounix.
Along the Tete Noire we met scores of parties on
foot and mounted. The Hotel de la Poste at
Martigny was crowded with groups of travellers
making ready to tread in the afternoon the footsteps
we had traced on the dusty road in the morning.
These Alpine solitudes are this year busy thorough-
fares. But all the crowds I have met everywhere
since I left home are nothing to the multitude which
was swarming yesterday in the afternoon all along
the line from Martigny to Lausanne. I have not
been, or at least not tarried here, for half a score of
years, and I must confess that the whole aspect of
this Leman region seems to me totally changed.
From St. Maurice downwards, at Bex, Aigle, Roche,
Montrex, Clarens, Vevey, &c., it is now only one
great watering place. For one Hotel Byron, or Pen-
sion Heloise, that was in existence ten years ago,
you may reckon scores, and I almost said hundreds,
of such establishments at the present time. How
different everything must look from the time when
brain-sick Byron plied his solitary oar along the
" birthplace of sweet love." Things are not altered
for the better, I must say. The industrie vinicole of
these Vaudois has thinned the shades which tem-
pered the glare of this sun-wooed shore. All is wall
and low wine plantation, stony lane, dusty road,
bare hill, gravelly shore ; villas, boarding-houses,
big hotels, flaunting chateaux in the " folly" style,
line every hill, choke up every dell, too many of
them staring and glaring dazzling white, withoutthe
relief of an inch of foreground, without a patch of
verdure for:the aching eye to rest upon. Through
the midst of it all the noise and bustle of the new
railway. The Swiss have as much right to that means
of locomotion as other people, I presume, but cer-
tainly their Leman line is as much out of place as
any work of man can well be among the spots most
tenderly cherished by nature. The train necessarily
stops every five minutes at stations which are neither
down in the map nor on the way-bill ; stops at the
beck of every landlord or maitre de pension ; the
very beau ideal of a Paddington omnibus. What a
tide of human beings, ebbing in and flowing out, and
what a variety of "garb, feature, and limb !" There
is a population on the north-eastern slope of the
Leman that is hardly to be met with anywhere else
in the world; some scores of thousands of those Eng-
lish people who are "doing it cheap" on the Continent.
There are pensions here without number where people
board at Gf. in the summer, at 4f. in the dead winter
season, a very infirmary for broken-down constitu-
tions, for consumptive chests, for extenuated stamina,
a paradise for half-pay old officers, hopeless widows,
determined spinsters, a nursery for the bringing up
of numerous families. I was staying at a small inn
on the very spot on which this gorgeous Beau Rivage
has now grown up, at a small inn here, 11 years ago.
I made the acquaintance of an aged Chef de Batail-
lon, a French hero of the Ancienne Garde, all beri-
banded, and complimented him on his good taste for
preferring his quiet hostelry here on the Lake-shore
to all the fuss and noise of the Hotel Gibbon up at
Lausanne. " Oui, Monsieur,"—he replied, cutting,
short my rhapsodies about the fresh open air, rip-
pling lake, &c.,—" oui, je viens ici tousles ans, et
j'y reste. Que voulez-vous ? La nourriture est
bonne." " The fare is good and cheap," that is the
unanswerable argument of 99 out of 100 dwellers on
the lake, added to the unquestionable salubrity of
the air and mildness of climate. Now, the whole of
this population vegetating here in cheap clover was
on the road yesterday, mixed up with that floating
multitude of tourists who at this period throng every
Alpine highway. This is the heyday of their existence,
pleasingly contrasting with their remaining nine
months of dull and dreary hybernation. The railway
cars and the stations were crammed with them. They
were all out, one pension pouring out its inmates on
a visit to the next ; one village going forth to greet
the other village. Here was Mrs. Gamp stepping
down for her dish of tea with Mrs. Harris. There
Major Blunderbore hailing from the window old
Captain Fogey on the platform. Withal, what lots
of children, what exhibition of babies in arms, what
variety of antediluvian costumes ! The buttoned-
up coats, the scanty skirts, the pinched-up bonnets,
the malacca canes, the cotton umbrellas ! Contrast
this, which is the finery of these poor permanent
residents, with the dainty tunics, the knowing hats,
the well-cut jackets, the elegant plumage which is
only the neglige of the birds of passage ; with the
thin arms and sour visage of the crabbed pension-
naire compare the blooming cheeks and rounded
form of the jolly touriste ; with the bent frame and
tottering crutch of the wheezy veteran, the wide
chest, the sturdy limbs, the bushy beard, the Alpine
stock of the Alpine Club-man. All this old-world
life and this latter-day stir mingling in one stream,
and going down the road side by side—an odd
world, ill-suited, heterogeneous ; English in the
main, yet with a sufficient dash of French, German,
and native Vaudois elements to make up a Jehosha-
phat of sights, a Babel of sounds.

The Hotel Beau Rivage at Ouchy has been opened
five years ; yet I had not even heard its name before
coming to Switzerland. We arrived here a little
later than six o'clock, the dinner hour. We went
down to the great see a manger, where more than
a hundred persons were seated at the table d'hôte,
nine out of ten English. The numbers which force
their way into this new Pet place by no means dimi-
nish—nay, pet
greatly increase the custom of the Trois
Couronnes at Vevey, of the Gibbon at Lausanne, of
the hundred large houses accommodation scat-
tered all along the of
in shoresthat
tt of the Lake of Geneva,
and clustering
Hardly any amount of
accommodation can keep
aPhellee with the overwhelm-
ing influx of strangers.
ray
English
urnivage is an English
house, cela va sans dire ; fellow traveller,
on merely approaching it, calledisillt a " place."
On a nearer acquaintance he pronounceditell a
e mixed,
"snob-
bish place" as well. The company
is greatly
no doubt, for at the present day how can
exclusive-
ness screen itself behind the charge of three francs
for a bed and four francs for a dinner 9 You have
Duchesses here cheap as cookmaids, M.P.'s, mu_
lionnaire bankers, rev. and right rev. divines ; but
you meet your tailor, your wine merchant, your
haberdasher also. Why not, when the honest trades-
man pays his way like a lord and behaves, on the
whole, as the best of gentlemen ? In outward show
you cannot tell high from low ; certainly not the
icande dame from the equally stylish "gentlewoman."
de ed, as to apparel, rank willingly yields the palm.
n point of lace and flounces and holding up her
thereh is no straighte
head the shopkeeper's wife beats the world ; and
r, stiffer back than that of the
nouveau riche. But, whatever may be the station in