The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond(5)
The road eastward turns glorious in the afternoon sunshine. For once, the traveler’s gaze is not drawn to the Alps across the lake; rather, the terraced vineyards on this shore mesmerize. The slopes of the Lavaux chasselas and gamay grapevines are steep, their gray stone retaining walls, first erected by monks a thousand years ago, creating perilous spaces of the horizontal in a plane that is vertical. The colorful chateaux on the green countryside are similarly shored up. It’s not hard to see why UNESCO deemed this beauty spot a World Heritage Site.
I reach the resort town of Vevey. A large central square down by the lake seems like the perfect place to stop. I take a quick look at the in-your-face panorama of the Alps across the water, then sit at a café terrace.
“Three francs ninety.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Three francs ninety.”
The young waitress, with a long braided ponytail, black against the spotless white of her blouse, looks at me. She has brought me a beer and now stares blankly at the expression of bewilderment on my face.
“Come again?”
“Three francs ninety.”
The penny finally drops. She is speaking to me in Swiss French. In the French here (and in that of the Walloons of Belgium), ninety is nonante. Similarly, eighty (huitante or octante) and seventy (septante) differ from standard French usage. For those unfamiliar with the distinction, it may come as a surprise to learn that the French language, as spoken in France, Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, and elsewhere, completely loses its mind once the number seventy is reached. Seventy is soixante-dix, that is, sixty-ten; seventy-five is sixty-fifteen. But the asylum doors are fully breached when the number eighty arrives. It is quatre-vingts, that is to say, four-twenties. Thus, eighty-five is four-twenty-five, and ninety—hewing to this logic—is four-twenty-ten. In 1999, if you wanted to say the year aloud in standard French, you needed most of the afternoon: mil neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, which gives us, literally, thousand nine hundred four-twenty-ten-nine.
“Nonante!” I exclaim as a way of apologizing for my French gaucheness. The waitress remains impassive. As I hand her the coins, I try another tack. I say, “So you’re a Suissesse,” using the term for a Swiss woman that almost all French-speakers view as one of the silliest words in the language.
She grins appreciatively and responds, “A Suissesse, yes. And proud of it.”
She lingers, as if expecting me to say something.
I take a sip of the beer and ask, “Do you like the view of the mountains over there?”
“I love it. Why?”
“I don’t know what to think about it,” I say hesitantly. I explain my mixed feelings and confess to being a bit frightened by the perspective.
“You are not Swiss, you don’t understand,” she says with conviction. “We Swiss cannot live without our mountains.”
She smiles as she says this, as if to show compassion to an outsider.
We both look out at the view.
“Do all of the Swiss feel that way?”
“Of course! We were raised with the Alps.”
“You like them even when it snows?”
The smile becomes a laugh. “No, then they become a nuisance.”
THE GROUND WAS LAID for the Romantics, the Zeit had struck for the Geist. As the eighteenth century progressed, the heady brew of nascent nationalism, democratic dreams, and individual self-expression was matched by a bubbling respect for the natural world, quite apart from its new status as something worthy of scientific inquiry. From the growing cities, soon to be blighted by the “dark satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, the well-off took to going into the now-unfamiliar countryside in search of the “picturesque”—that is, a scene deemed suited to a painting. The English, in particular, took to their Lake District and the wild Scottish Highlands hunting the picturesque. Many held in their hands a Claude Glass, so named for landscape painter Claude Lorrain. This device was essentially a rearview mirror. When the intrepid traveler confronted a picturesque vista, he would turn his back to it, whip out his Claude Glass, then manipulate it so that its reflecting surface formed an ephemeral, well-composed painting, leaving out all the extraneous sights that might spoil the effect. While turning one’s back to the scenery that one is supposedly admiring might seem ridiculous—a series of satirical novels lampooned one Doctor Syntax, a retired vicar besotted with the picturesque—it may be no coincidence that the successor to the Claude Glass, the camera, obliged the photographer to look through a viewfinder.
The Claude Glass, the geologist’s hammer, the Grand Tour sketchbooks, the proliferating guidebooks to Switzerland—all conspired to prime the charge of Romanticism in the Alps. The detonation occurred in 1761, when Switzerland’s most famous son, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published Julie, ou la nouvelle Hélo?se (Julie, or the New Heloise). Originally entitled Letters from Two Lovers Living in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, the novel streaked across the firmament of eighteenth-century thought like a blazing comet, running into seventy editions in many languages by the year 1800. The book, in short, was a sensation; its reception, ecstatic.
Julie is an epistolary novel, one whose story is told through an exchange of letters. The Hélo?se of the subtitle refers to Hélo?se d’Argenteuil, a brilliant and beautiful scholar of the twelfth century who exuberantly bedded her tutor, Pierre Abélard, then the most influential Scholastic of his day. Their exertions resulted in the birth of a son, whom they named Astrolabe; the castration of Abélard, performed by Hélo?se’s outraged relatives; and a handful of profoundly passionate and learned letters the two exchanged later in life, after events had forcibly separated them. Fortunately for the fictional Saint-Preux, the tutor and lover of Julie, Rousseau’s novel does not stray into the surgical. Instead, Saint-Preux and Julie enthrall one another with declarations and descriptions of their forbidden love (he is a commoner; she, a noble), mixing philosophy, emotion, and the love of the authentic and of nature.