The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(4)

Yet the dam could not hold forever. One event, above all others, traumatized the eighteenth-century imagination and led many to distance the divine from nature. Shortly before ten in the morning on 1 November, All Saints’ Day, 1755, the great city of Lisbon was flattened by a tremendous earthquake and then swamped by a tsunami. Aftershocks were felt as far away as Britain and Ireland, and the coast of Brazil was buffeted by great waves. But the true tremors of the devastating quake affected a view of the world. Was the clockwork universe a time bomb? Or, if God took an interest in the doings of man, then He surely was possessed of a most ungodly temperament, devastating and destroying all of Catholic Lisbon’s churches, witnesses to the greatness of His glory. Worse yet, the Alfama, Lisbon’s prostitution district, emerged unscathed.

Gifted minds tried to wrest meaning from the disaster. In K?nigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), a thirty-one-year-old doctoral student, Immanuel Kant, fascinated by newspaper accounts of the cataclysm, published what are commonly thought to be the founding documents of the science of seismology. From the shores of Lake Geneva, the habitually caustic Voltaire had the hero of his novella Candide visit Lisbon on the day of the quake, all in the service of shaking him out of his na?ve belief in a benevolent God overseeing a benign world. The Lisbon catastrophe had laid bare a truth heretofore only suspected: Our world is a pitiless place, subject to sudden upheaval independent of any divine design.

The mountains began to make sense. Their awful asymmetry was not the devil’s—or God’s—handiwork. They stood as testament to cataclysms of an unthinkably distant past. They were violence frozen, made manifest, the only question being whether their irruption had been sudden, like the Lisbon earthquake, or a long process over time. The Enlightment, already a siren song of reason, would now produce another attraction, a pursuit so widespread and popular that it eventually came to be the nineteenth century’s obsession. Geology, deriving meaning from rock, became the occupation and avocation of thoughtful people throughout Europe. After Lisbon, there was no turning back the clock; rather, the geologists, scholarly and amateur, would from now on be the arbiters of time.

But to know the Alps was not necessarily to love them, as curiosity does not always spell affection.

Enter a new Heloise and Frankenstein’s monster.

WHEN I RETURN to my car, someone snaps a picture of me getting into the driver’s seat, making me feel like some D-list celebrity leaving an LA nightclub. Although the air-conditioning systems in Renault vehicles are not as cryogenic as the ones in American cars, relief eventually arrives by the time I leave town. Geneva gives way to the canton of Vaud, a French-speaking area to the east of the city with the infelicitous license-plate abbreviation of VD. And there is a lot of VD about: The shore road is one immense, linear parking lot, as what seems to be the entire populace of the canton heads down to the lake.

The village of Coppet flashes past, its hillside pink chateau famous for hosting salons thrown by the hyperliterate Mme. de Sta?l. In the opening decade of the nineteenth century, Coppet welcomed the most creative minds of the time. Not only was the hostess from an illustrious family (her Swiss banker father, Jacques Necker, enacted financial reforms in a vain effort to stave off the French Revolution), but Mme. de Sta?l was also a best-selling author. Her Corinne, the story of a poetess swanning scandalously about Italy, made bosoms heave all over the Continent.

Which is an appropriate image at the moment, given the bodies braving the traffic to bounce across the roadway to the water. The handful of kilometers east of Geneva continues in this fashion, as I dodge scores of people determined to beat the heat. When signs for Lausanne, the capital of Vaud, finally appear, all vehicular motion comes to a near-standstill. On the tree-lined Avenue de l’Elysée, we inch past the Olympic Museum. Lausanne is home to one of the world’s most succulent gravy trains, the International Olympic Committee, whose pashas travel the planet deciding which will be the next city to host the quadrennial extravaganza.

The sea of pedestrians eddying around my idling Mégane then flows into the lakeside Parc du Denantou, where a carnival midway is going strong, its wrenching rides eliciting shrieks of terror. From my near-stationary vantage point, I can see that the most popular nausea-inducing contraption is called the “Scary Mouse,” though it seems to me that the thrill-seekers need not spend their precious Swiss francs for a moment of fright. They need only turn their gaze southward, across the lake, where the vista is, if anything, more fearsome than Geneva’s. The lowering dark cliffs of France look taller and more threatening, the snow-capped heights beyond them seeming to stick an icy finger in the eye of God. They are enough to send a shudder down anyone’s spine.

Of course, beauty and terror lie in the eye of the beholder, landscapes being entirely blameless things, the pain or pleasure they inflict entirely the construct of the human mind. We nonscientists see in the natural world attributes that are not, objectively, there. Yet my problem now, as I am determined to sing the praises of those who freed the mountains from their age-old demons, resides in the suspicion that I am not fully convinced, on a visceral level, that these liberators were right. The mountains are scary, as scary as the Scary Mouse, and I’m not sure I can get beyond that.

But, as they say on the ski slopes, “go big or go home.” The literary pilgrims who flocked to these shores in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had no such qualms. Beautiful Lausanne was a magnet for such visitors, as Edward Gibbon had composed here the final two volumes of his wildly successful History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The street leading from his house (long since razed) became a warren of booksellers, stocked with the Swiss-published works deemed too seditious in the neighboring absolute monarchies. Yet middle-aged Gibbon may have had another reason to return to the Lausanne of his youth: He had had his heart broken here by the young woman who would later become the mother of Mme. de Sta?l.