The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(11)
At last we rejoin the Great Alpine Road down in the valley. The happy, verdant town of Cluses spreads before us, surrounded by towering peaks. There are several mega-chalet retirement residences under construction on the steep slopes outside the center of town, leaving one to speculate on the agility of the French elderly. As this is the spectacularly rugged region of Savoy, perhaps spryness has to last well into old age.
A sign flashes past: MUSéE DE L’HORLOGERIE ET DU DéCOLLETAGE. Once again I am flummoxed. The translation in my head—Museum of Watchmaking and Plunging Necklines—seems an unlikely pairing. I contemplate turning back to investigate, but the Dutch camper has decamped somewhere, so I can now barrel down the broad road running through the valley of the River Arve. On both sides are solid walls of green, punctuated by thin, linear cascades of water, unspooling downward like strands of white lace. The effect would be far lovelier were the floor of the valley not blanketed in furniture factories and workshops.
And a lot of signs use the word décolletage. I see EDELWEISS DéCOLLETAGE and ARVE DéCOLLETAGE competing for the eye in a grimy industrial district, not the type of neighborhood usually associated with a woman’s cleavage. Knowing French truck stops to be equipped with wi-fi, I pull into one to seek enlightenment.
Aha! My cell informs me that décolletage has a double meaning in French. One conforms to our English adoption of the French word, but the other means “machining,” as in the making of precision parts for clockwork mechanisms and the like. The Arve Valley, it turns out, is teeming with machining plants, hence the museum back in Cluses.
Finally, when I round the next bend, there it is, in all its blinding Cyclopean menace, blocking a good portion of the sky. There are eighty-two peaks in the Alps taller than four thousand meters, but this is the tallest of the lot, the monarch, standing at 4,808 meters.
Mont Blanc.
HORACE-BéNéDICT DE SAUSSURE was a man on a mission. A native of Geneva, he made pioneering studies in geology and dreamed of standing on the summit of Mont Blanc. As a Genevan, he would have been familiar with the view Sisi turns her back on: the green pre-Alps looming over the lake, and behind them, the ghostly goliath reaching for the sky. Saussure became obsessed with the mountain, sponsoring a reward for anyone with the temerity to make the ascent. In 1760 and the years that followed, flyers were regularly printed up and posted in the villages near the base of the monster, yet the locals did not take up Saussure on his offer. The great scientist from Geneva must be daft, went the reasoning, why in the world would anyone want to do such a thing?
Local interest in the reward perked up as the first trickle of tourists came to the valley in search of the sublime. Hostelries cropped up, businesses blossomed, and the Chamouniards finally took up the vocation that they perform to the present day: mountain guides. Repeated attempts to rise to Saussure’s challenge at last began to be made in the 1780s, but it was only on 8 August 1786 that the great white beast was summited. The climbers were Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard, both locals, who performed the feat with only one overnight bivouac. Balmat was an unlettered fellow, prowling the lower slopes to hunt chamois for their hides and horns and to dig up crystals for the collections of wealthy amateur geologists. Paccard was the town doctor—not a folksy quack but a learned man who published papers in the medical journals of Turin (the Savoy region was then part of an Italian kingdom). But, as the news of the achievement spread across Europe, a funny thing happened on the way to legend.
A writer of some talent from Geneva, Marc-Théodore Bourrit, had it in for Paccard. The animus may have been spurred when the two men unsuccessfully tried for the summit a few years earlier, the expedition having come undone thanks to Bourrit’s physical frailty. Whatever its cause, the dislike Bourrit felt for Paccard resulted in the popularization of a story, written by the polemical Genevan, that had the good doctor as a pitiful liability on the historic climb, an inept mountaineer who slowed the exploit and needed repeated rescue by the doughty Balmat. Bourrit may also have been jealous that a fellow bourgeois—Paccard—had made the climb, so he portrayed Balmat in the role of the man of the people, then the hero persona in vogue with the Romantics. The story stuck, and Balmat did little to dispel it. Whether or not the doctor ever spoke to the chamois hunter about this unfortunate fiction may have been complicated by the awkward fact that Paccard married Balmat’s sister.
A generation later, when a writer of genius arrived in Savoy, he met up with the then-seventy-year-old Balmat. This was in 1832, five years after Paccard’s death, so Balmat had the field to himself (his time would come two years later, when he fell off a cliff prospecting for gold). The writer, Alexandre Dumas père, lyrically amplified Balmat’s role in the historic climb, calling him “the god of the mountain” and cementing in the European imagination the story of a pathetic Paccard. The truth had to wait until the early twentieth century, after scholars unearthed diaries of eyewitnesses—a crowd had followed the pair’s ascent through their long-views—completely debunking the orthodox version of the ascent. Paccard and Balmat had spelled each other, each taking his turn leading the way upward, and the doctor had calmly conducted several scientific experiments on the summit itself. Thus was mountaineering born, in a stew of backbiting and second-guessing that flavors it still.
Saussure finally realized his dream of summiting Mont Blanc, the year following the ascent of Balmat and Paccard. Saussure’s huge expedition, laden with numerous scientific instruments and copious amounts of booze, was immortalized in his Voyages dans les Alpes. It became the first bible of the new pastime of mountaineering.