The Wine-press
In the cafés and other public places there were placards advertising American wine-presses, but I saw none of them in use. At a farm-house near us we looked on at the use of one of the old-fashioned Swiss presses. Under it lay a mighty cake of grapes, stems, and skins, crushed into a common mass, and bulging farther beyond the press with each turn of the screw, while the juice ran in a little rivulet into a tub below. When the press was lifted, the grapes were seen only half crushed. Two peasants then mounted the cake, and trimmed it into shape with long-handled spades, piling the trimmings on top, and then bringing the press down again. They invited us with charming politeness to taste the juice, but their heavy boots bore evidence of too recent a visit to the cherished manure heap, and we thanked them with equal courtesy.
This grape cake, when it had yielded up its last drop, would be broken to pieces and scattered over the fields as a fertilizer. The juice would meanwhile have been placed to ferment in the tuns, twelve and thirteen feet deep, which lay in the adjoining cellar.
For weeks after the vintage people were drinking the new wine, which looked thick and whitish in the glasses, at all the cafés. It seemed to be thought a dainty beverage, but our scruples against it remained, and I cannot say what its effect upon the drinkers might be. Perhaps it had properties as a “sweet, oblivious antidote” which rendered necessary the placard we saw in the café of the little Hôtel Chillon:
“Die Rose blüht, Der Dorn der sticht; Wer gleich bezahlt Vergisst es nicht.”
Or, in inadequate English:
The roses bloom, The thorns they stick; No one forgets Who settles quick.
The relation of the ideas is not very apparent, but the lyric cry is distinctly audible.
II
One morning, a week before the vintage began, we were wakened by the musical clash of cow-bells, and for days afterwards the herds came streaming from the chalets on all the mountains round to feed upon the lowland pastures for a brief season before the winter should house them. There was something charming to ear and eye in this autumnal descent of the kine, and we were sorry when it ended. They thronged the village in their passage to the levels beside the Rhone, where afterwards they lent their music and their picturesqueness to the meadows. With each herd there were two or three goats, and these goats thought they were cows; but, after all, the public interest of this descent of the cows was not really comparable to that of the fall elections, now coming on with handbills and newspaper appeals very like those of our own country at like times. In the cafés, the steamboats, the railway stations, the street corners, vivid posters warned the voters against the wiles of the enemy, and the journals urged the people of the Canton Vaud to be up and doing; they declared the issue before them a vital one, and the crisis a crisis of the greatest moment.
Castle of Aigle
In the mean time the people in our pension, who were so intelligent and well informed about other things, bore witness to the real security of the State, and the tranquillity of the Swiss mind generally concerning politics, by their ignorance of the name of their existing President. They believed he was a man of the name of Schultz; but it appeared that his name was not at all Schultz, when we referred the matter to our pasteur. It was from him, indeed, that I learned nearly all I knew of Swiss politics, and it was from his teaching that I became a conservative partisan in the question, then before the voters, of a national free-school law. The radicals, who, the pasteur said, wished Switzerland to attempt the role “grande nation,” had brought forward this measure in the Federal legislature, and it was now, according to the sensible Swiss custom, to be submitted to a popular vote. It provided for the establishment of a national bureau of education, and the conservatives protested against it as the entering wedge of centralization in government affairs. They contended that in a country shared by three races and two religions education should be left as much as possible to the several cantons, which in the Swiss constitution are equivalent to our States. I am happy to say that the proposed law was overwhelmingly defeated; I am happy because I liked the pasteur so much, though when I remember the sympathetic bric-à-brac dealer at Vevay, who was a radical, but who sold me some old pewters at a very low price, I can’t help feeling a little sorry too. However, the Swiss still keep their old school law, under which each canton taxes itself for education, as our States do, though all share in the advantages of the universities, which are part of the public-school system.
The parties in Switzerland are fortunately not divided by questions of race or religion, but the pasteur owned that the Catholics were a difficult element, and had to be carefully managed. They include the whole population of the Italian cantons, and part of the French and German. In Geneva and other large towns the labor question troublesomely enters, and the radicals, like our Democrats, are sometimes the retrograde party.
The pasteur spoke with smiling slight of the Père Hyacinthe and the Döllinger movements, and he confessed that the Protestants were cut up into too many sects to make progress among the Catholic populations. The Catholics often keep their children out of the public schools, as they do with us, but these have to undergo the State examinations, to which all the children, whether taught at home or in private schools, must submit. He deplored the want of moral instruction in the public schools, but he laughed at the attempts in France to instil non-religious moral principles: when I afterwards saw this done in the Florentine ragged schools I could not feel that he was altogether right. He was a member of the communal school committee, and he told me that this body was appointed by the syndic and council of each commune, who are elected by the people. To some degree religion influences local feeling, the Protestant Church being divided into orthodox and liberal factions; there is a large Unitarian party besides, and agnosticism is a qualifying element of religious thought.
Outside of our pension I had not many sources of information concerning the political or social life at Villeneuve. I knew the village shoemaker, a German, who had fixed his dwelling there because it was so bequem, and who had some vague aspirations towards Chicago, whither a citizen of Villeneuve had lately gone. But he was discouraged by my representation, with his wax, his awl, and his hammer, successively arranged as New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, on his shoe-bench, of the extreme distance of the last from the seaboard. He liked his neighbors and their political system; and so did the portier at the Hôtel Byron, another German, with whom I sometimes talked of general topics in transacting small affairs of carriage hire and the like, and who invited me to notice how perfectly well these singular Swiss, in the midst of a Europe elsewhere overrun with royalties, got on without a king, queen, or anything of the kind. In his country, he said, those hills would be covered with fortifications, but here they seemed not to be thought necessary.
The Market at Vevey
I made friends with the instituteur of the Villeneuve public school, who led the singing at church, and kept the village book-store; and he too talked politics with me, and told me that all elections were held on Sunday, when the people were at leisure, for otherwise they would not take the time to vote. He was not so clear as to why they were always held in church, but that is the fact; and sometimes the sacred character of the place is not enough to suppress boisterous party feeling, though it certainly helps to control it.
After divine service on election Sunday I went to the Croix Blanche for my coffee, to pass the time till the voting should begin. On the church door was posted a printed summons to the electors, and on the café billiard tables I found ballots of the different parties scattered. Gendarmes had also distributed them about in the church pews; they were enclosed in envelops, which were voted sealed. On a table before the pulpit the ballot-box — a glass urn — was placed; and beside it sat the judges of election, with lists of the registered voters. But in any precinct of the canton an elector who could prove that he had not voted at home might deposit his ballot in any other. The church bell rang for the people to assemble, and
the voting began and ended in perfect quiet. But I could not witness an election of this ancient republic, where Freedom was so many centuries old, without strong emotion; it had from its nature and the place the consecration of a religious rite.
III
The church itself was old — almost as old as Swiss freedom, and older than the freedom of the Vaud. The Gothic interior, which had once, no doubt, been idolatrously frescoed and furnished with statues, was now naked and coldly Protestant; one window, partly stained, let in a little colored light to mix with the wintry day that struck through the others. The pulpit was in the centre of the church, and the clerk’s desk diagonally across from it. The floor was boarded over, but a chill struck through from the stones below, and the people seemed to shiver through the service that preceded the election. When the pasteur mounted the pulpit they listened faithfully, but when the clerk led the psalm they vented their suffering in the most dreadful groaning that ever passed for singing outside of one of our country churches.
It was all very like home, and yet unlike it, for there is much more government in Switzerland than with us, and much less play of individuality. In small communes, for example, like Villeneuve, there are features of practical socialism, which have existed apparently from the earliest times. Certain things are held in common, as mountain pasturage and the forests, from which each family has a provision of fuel. These and other possessions of the commune are “confided to the public faith,” and trespass is punished with signal severity. The trees are felled under government inspection, and the woods are never cut off wholesale. When a tree is chopped down a tree is planted, and the floods that ravage Italy from the mountains denuded of their forests are unknown to the wiser Swiss. Throughout Switzerland the State insures against fire, and inflicts penalties for neglect and carelessness from which fires may result. Education is compulsory, and there is a rigid military service, and a show of public force everywhere which is quite unknown to our unneighbored, easy-going republic. I should say, upon the whole, that the likeness was more in social than in political things, strange as that may appear. There seemed to be much the same freedom among young people, and democratic institutions had produced a kindred type of manners in both countries. But I will not be very confident about all this, for I might easily be mistaken. The Swiss make their social distinctions as we do; and in Geneva and Lausanne I understood that a more than American exclusivism prevailed in families that held themselves to be peculiarly good, and believed themselves very old.
Our excursions into society at Villeneuve were confined to a single tea at the pasteur’s, where we went with mademoiselle one evening. He lived in a certain Villa Garibaldi, which had belonged to an Italian refugee, now long repatriated, and which stood at the foot of the nearest mountain. To reach the front door we passed through the vineyard to the back of the house, where a huge dog leaped the length of his chain at us, and a maid let us in. The pasteur, in a coat of unclerical cut, and his wife, in black silk, received us in the parlor, which was heated by a handsome porcelain stove, and simply furnished, much like such a room at home. Madame P —— , who was musical, played a tempestuously representative composition called “L’Orage” on the upright piano, and joined from time to time in her husband’s talk about Swiss affairs, which I have already allowed the reader to profit by. They offered us tea, wine, grapes, and cake, and we came away at eleven, lighted home through the vineyards by Louis, the farm boy, with his lantern.
The Market, Vevay — A Bargain before the Notary
Another day mademoiselle did us the pleasure to take us to her sister, married, and living at Aigle — a clean, many-hotelled, prosperous town, a few miles off, which had also the merit of a very fine old castle. We found our friends in an apartment of a former convent, behind which stretched a pretty lawn, with flowers and a fountain, and then vineyards to the foot of the mountains and far up their sides. We entered the court by a great stone-paved carriage-way, as in Italy, and we found the drawing-room furnished with Italian simplicity, and abounding in souvenirs of the hostess’s long Florentine sojourn; but it was fortified against the Swiss winter by the tall Swiss stove. The whole family received us, including the young lady daughter, the niece, the well-mannered boys and their father openly proud of them, and the pleasant young English girl who was living in the family, according to a common custom, to perfect her French. This part of Switzerland is full of English people, who come not always for the French, but often for the cheapness which they find equally there.
Mr. K —— was a business man, well-to-do, well educated, agreeable, and interesting; his house and his table, where we sat down to the mid-day dinner of the country, were witness to his prosperity. I hope it is no harm, in the interest of statistics, to say that this good Swiss dinner consisted of soup, cold ham put up like sausage, stuffed roast beef which had first been boiled, cauliflower, salad, corn-starch pudding, and apples stewed whole and stuck full of pine pips. There was abundance of the several kinds of excellent wine made upon the estate, both white and red, and it was freely given to the children. Mr. K —— seemed surprised when we refused it for ours; and probably he could have given us good reason for his custom. His boys were strong, robust, handsome fellows; he had a charming pride in showing us the prizes they had taken at school; and on the lawn they were equally proud to show the gymnastic feats they had learned there. I believe we are coming to think now that the American schools are better than the Swiss; but till we have organized something like the Swiss school excursions, and have learned to mix more open air with our instruction, I doubt if the Swiss would agree with us.
After dinner we went to the vente, or charitable fair, which the young ladies of the town were holding in one of the public buildings. It was bewilderingly like the church fair of an American country town, socially and materially. The young ladies had made all sorts of pretty knick-knacks, and were selling them at the little tables set about the room; they also presided, more or less alluringly, at fruit, coffee, and ice-cream stands; and — I will not be sure, but I think — some of them seemed to be flirting with the youth of the other sex. There was an auction going on, and the place was full of tobacco smoke, which the women appeared not to mind. A booth for the sale of wine and beer was set off, and there was a good deal of amiable drinking. This was not like our fairs quite; and I am bound to say that the people of Aigle had more polished manners, if not better, than our country-town average.
To quit this scene for the castle of Aigle was to plunge from the present into my favorite Middle Ages. We were directly in the times when the Lords of Berne held the Vaud by the strong hand, and forced Protestant convictions upon its people by the same vigorous methods. The castle was far older than their occupation, but it is chiefly memorable as the residence of their bailiffs before the independence of the Vaud was established after the French Revolution. They were hard masters, but they left political and religious freedom behind them, where perhaps neither would have existed without them. The castle, though eminently picturesque and delightfully Gothic, is very rudely finished and decorated, and could never have been a luxurious seat for the bailiffs. It is now used by the local courts of law; a solitary, pale, unshaven old prisoner, who seemed very glad of our tribute-money, inhabited its tower, and there was an old woman carding wool in the baronial kitchen. Her little grandson lighted a candle and showed us the oubliettes, which are subterranean dungeons, one above the other, and barred by mighty doors of wood and iron. The outer one bore an inscription, which I copied:
“Doubles grilles a gros cloux, Triples portes, fortes Verroux, Aux âmes vraiment méchantes Vous représentez l’Enfer; Mais aux âmes innocentes Vous n’êtes que du bois, de la pierre, & du fer!”
Germans at Montreux
But these doors, thus branded as representing the gates of hell to guilty souls, and to the innocent being merely wood, stone, and iron, sufficed equally to shut the blameless in, and I doubt if the reflection suggested was ever of any real comfort to t
hem. For one thing, the captives could not read the inscription; it seems to have been intended rather for the edification of the public.
We visited the castle a second time, to let the children sketch it; and even I, who could not draw a line, became with them the centre of popular interest. Half a dozen little people who had been playing “snap-the-whip” left off and crowded round, and one of the boys profited by the occasion to lock into the barn, near which we sat, a peasant who had gone in to fodder his cattle. When he got out he criticised the pictures, and insisted that one of the artists should put in a certain window which he had left out of the tower. Upon the whole, we liked him better as a prisoner.
“What would you do,” I asked the children, “if I gave you a piece of twenty-five centimes?”
They reflected, and then evidently determined to pose as good children. “We would give it to our mamma.”
“Now don’t you think,” I pursued, “that it would be better to spend it for little cakes?”
This instantly corrupted them, and they cried with one voice, “Oh yes!”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1251
