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At Ivrea, I entered the interesting valley of Aosta. The whole valley, fifty miles in length, is inhabited by miserable looking people, nearly one half of them being afflicted with goitre and cretinism. They looked more idiotic and disgusting than any I have ever seen, and it was really painful to behold such miserable specimens of humanity dwelling amid the grandest scenes of nature.
Crowder replied; "and as I did not care to accompany the emperor into Italy, for probably I would be recognized as the man who had assisted Adelheid to escape from the prison at Ivrea, and as I was not at all sure that the emperor would remember that I needed protection, I thought it well to protect myself, and so I journeyed back into France as well as I could.
To return to the marks of glaciation: in the moraine at Mazze there are many large blocks of protogine and large and small ones of limestone and serpentine which have been brought down from Monte Rosa, through the gorge of Ivrea, after having travelled for a distance of 50 miles.
The next Italian king, Berengar II. of Ivrea , who, like his two predecessors, was an offshoot of the Carlovingian house, tried to force Adelheid, the beautiful young widow of Lothar, into a marriage with his son Adalbert. He descended into Italy, married the injured queen, and obliged Berengar to own him as suzerain . Berengar proved faithless and rebellious.
"About fifty years after this she was queen regent in Italy, during the infancy of her grandchild Otto III. Being in Rome, and very poor, I determined to go to her, not to seek for charity, but to recall myself to her notice, and to boldly ask to be reimbursed for my expenses when assisting her to escape from Ivrea, and in afterward going as her ambassador to Otto I. In other words, I wanted to present my bill for enabling her to take her seat upon the throne of the 'Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
In the same campaign the first objective point of Napoleon was to fall upon the right of Mélas by the Saint-Bernard, and to seize his line of communications: hence Saint-Bernard, Ivrea, and Piacenza were decisive points only by reason of the march of Mélas upon Nice.
Had they speedily reinforced their detachment at Bard, there can be little doubt that Bonaparte's movements could have been seriously hampered. But, up to May 21st, Melas was ignorant that his distant rear was being assailed, and the 3,000 Austrians who guarded the vale of the Dora Baltea were divided, part being at Bard and others at Ivrea.
"The great peaks rose several thousand feet above the glaciers, and then, as now, shattered by sun and frost, poured down their showers of rocks and stones, in witness of which there are the immense piles of angular fragments that constitute the moraines of Ivrea. "The moraines around Ivrea are of extraordinary dimensions.
The descent, though free from enemies, was still more dangerous, and it required, at one place, three days’ labor to make the road practicable for the elephants. The army arrived, the middle of September, in the plain of Ivrea, where his exhausted troops were quartered in friendly villages.
"The boulders from Mont Blanc, upon the plain below Ivrea, assure us that the glacier which transported them existed for a prodigious length of time. Their present distance from the cliffs from which they were derived is about 420,000 feet, and if we assume that they traveled at the rate of 400 feet per annum, their journey must have occupied them no less than 1,055 years!
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