From Chambery to Milan - Page 2

walls and
to lodge in the crevices of the brown wooden ceilings. Madame de
Warens's bed remains, with the narrow couch of Jean-Jacques as
well, his little warped and cracked yellow spinet, and a
battered, turnip-shaped silver timepiece, engraved with its
master's name--its primitive tick as extinct as his passionate
heart-beats. It cost me, I confess, a somewhat pitying
acceleration of my own to see this intimately personal relic of
the genius loci--for it had dwelt; in his waistcoat-
pocket, than which there is hardly a material point in space
nearer to a man's consciousness--tossed so the dog's-eared
visitors' record or livre de cuisine recently denounced by
Madame George Sand. In fact the place generally, in so far as
some faint ghostly presence of its famous inmates seems to linger
there, is by no means exhilarating. Coppet and Ferney tell, if
not of pure happiness, at least of prosperity and, honour, wealth
and success. But Les Charmettes is haunted by ghosts unclean and
forlorn. The place tells of poverty, perversity, distress. A
good deal of clever modern talent in France has been employed in
touching up the episode of which it was the scene and tricking
it out in idyllic love-knots. But as I stood on the charming
terrace I have mentioned--a little jewel of a terrace, with
grassy flags and a mossy parapet, and an admirable view of great
swelling violet hills--stood there reminded how much sweeter
Nature is than man, the story looked rather wan and unlovely
beneath these literary decorations, and I could pay it no
livelier homage than is implied in perfect pity. Hero and heroine
have become too much creatures of history to take up attitudes as
part of any poetry. But, not to moralise too sternly for a
tourist between trains, I should add that, as an illustration,
to be inserted mentally in the text of the "Confessions," a
glimpse of Les Charmettes is pleasant enough. It completes the
rare charm of good autobiography to behold with one's eyes the
faded and battered background of the story; and Rousseau's
narrative is so incomparably vivid and forcible that the sordid
little house at Chambéry seems of a hardly deeper shade of
reality than so many other passages of his projected truth.

If I spent an hour at Les Charmettes, fumbling thus helplessly
with the past, I recognised on the morrow how strongly the Mont
Cenis Tunnel smells of the time to come. As I passed along the
Saint-Gothard highway a couple of months since, I perceived, half
up the Swiss ascent, a group of navvies at work in a gorge
beneath the road. They had laid bare a broad surface of granite
and had punched in the centre of it a round black cavity, of
about the dimensions, as it seemed to me, of a