The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(2)
But I will not abandon our irrational system entirely. Snarled traffic will still inch along, a nearby object will still be a few feet away. A six-foot-tall man will remain six feet. Consistency is vastly overrated, so in the particulars of daily life I shall revert to the familiar. In this I take my cue from a former leader of the French Communists who, when called out on an inconsistency, used to say, “Such are my contradictions!”
PART ONE
LAKE GENEVA TO THE GOTTHARD PASS
1. LAKE GENEVA
THE ROAD SOUTH lies before me, the air above it shimmering in the heat. Once past the outskirts of Paris, the woodlands of the Ile-de-France close in, only to be relieved an hour or so later by the vines of Chablis. Farther into Burgundy, fortified farmhouses stand atop the gentle folding of the landscape, sentinels of pastoral plenty since the Middle Ages. The hot day wears on. The vineyards of Beaujolais appear now to my right, whereas beyond the River Sa?ne to my left rise the first foothills of the Jura Mountains. The green hills are harbingers of where I will spend the summer, in a geological bedlam.
The kilometers click past until I’m about an hour north of Lyon. After a quick overnight in a sleepy wine-making town, I leave the north–south expressway for another heading eastward, straight to Switzerland. As the heat of the day has yet to build, I slide the windows down and let the cool morning air flow through the car. The rolling hills and red-roofed houses of the Franche-Comté file past, every public building glimpsed seemingly required to have a huge clock, as if no one here wants to lose track of the time. This strikes me as odd, for the beautiful region seems entirely stuck out of time. Bucolic and peaceful, the Franche-Comté is the kind of France that starry-eyed France-lovers imagine after their second glass of wine.
At last the border arrives. A woman with some sort of Swiss uniform tells me that I have to fork over the equivalent of twenty euros. I comply, and she slaps a sticker on my windshield, allowing me to use Switzerland’s expressways for the next twelve calendar months. As my car purrs through the quiet streets of Geneva, heads turn in my direction, almost all of them male, leading me to wonder if I’m in denial about some aspect of my personality. Then I remember that I am at the wheel of a limited-edition, souped-up Renault Mégane Sport, gray with red trim, a muscle car rented for the mountain driving ahead. No one has seen this thing before. When I park by the lakeside, three car-lovers approach, seemingly rising out of the sidewalk, eager to inspect the vehicle.
Geneva is limping through a broiling weekend of late spring. Out in the harbor, the city’s famed fountain shoots a stupendous volume of white water more than a hundred meters into the air. Defeated by gravity, the spray falls through the haze of the day into the milky waters below. Those waters, at the western end of the great banana-shaped Lake Geneva (or Lac Léman, as it is called here), then continue on as the Rh?ne to resume a long journey to the Mediterranean.
Geneva is not a postcard-perfect city. Grand nineteenth-century buildings crowd the shores of its lake, of different shades and hues, like a Paris organized by the color-blind. There is no unity, no coherent civic vista to relieve the eye, just intermittent stretches of architectural beauty. Yet Geneva, the most boring interesting city on the Continent, the spot Fyodor Dostoyevsky dismissed as a “dull, gloomy, Protestant, stupid town,” midwife to the Calvinist Reformation, home to do-gooderism past and present—the League of Nations, the Red Cross, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—Geneva must be where my journey begins. For it was along the shores of Lake Geneva that an aesthetic revolution occurred more than two centuries ago, a revolution in thought that altered how humanity viewed nature. And, more to our purpose, the mountains. What Geneva’s worldwide web and its Large Hadron Collider have done to reality, the bygone artists and thinkers and scientists of Lake Geneva did to taste, which is, arguably, reality’s stepsister.
On the waterfront, a statue of a woman commands attention through the kinks of scorching air rising from the surrounding cobbles. The regal figure portrayed in bronze is angular, and pretty, although her Scottish creator, sculptor Philip Jackson, has her trying to hide her beauty behind a fan. The monument honors Empress Elisabeth of Austria, murdered near this spot on 10 September 1898, another furnace of a day in Geneva. The sixty-year-old empress was on her way to take a ferry out onto the lake, to escape the torpor. Her Italian anarchist assassin, armed with a sharpened file, had come to Geneva to kill another royal—the Duc d’Orléans—but, upon realizing his intended victim was out of town, settled instead on driving his needle into the heart of Elisabeth—or, as she was universally known, Sisi. To a fawning central Europe, Sisi was a combination of Princess Di and Jackie O, her beauty and many travels cataloged and wondered at. Sisi smoked cigarettes (transgressive, for a woman), wrote poetry (suspect, at court), learned Hungarian (subversive, at best), took lovers (discouraged, unless discreet), and journeyed incognito (scandalous, for a royal).
Her statue stands in the lakeside Rotonde du Mont Blanc, along the Quai du Mont Blanc, near where the Rue du Mont Blanc meets the Pont du Mont Blanc. Yet the sculpture faces northward, inland, staring at the grand old H?tel Beau-Rivage, where Sisi spent her last night and ate her last meal. The placement of the artwork, erected on the centenary of her demise, is clever: The vain empress turns her back on the famous view out over the lake, as though not wanting to share the spotlight, as though rebelling one last time. And by now it should be clear what that view takes in.