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Updated: May 20, 2025
"First you will go round the lake," said Madame Wolsky to the driver, "and then you will take us to the Pension Malfait, in l'Avenue des Acacias." Under shady trees, bowling along sanded roads lined with pretty villas and châlets, they drove all round the lake, and more and more the place impressed Sylvia as might have done a charming piece of scene-painting.
We trust ourselves to the care of an experienced boatwoman, and are soon in a fairy-like scene, a long sheet of limpid water surrounded by verdant ridges, amid which peep chalets here and there, and velvety pastures slope down to the water's edge; all is here tenderness, loveliness, and peace.
There is nothing prettier in a quiet way than this Swiss borderland, reached after a long stretch of dreary country; here we have grace without severity, beauty without gloom, pastoral hills and dales alive with the tinkling of cattle-bells, and pleasingly diversified with villages scattered here and there; a church spire rising above the broad-roofed, white-washed chalets on every side, undulating green pastures, in some places shut in by pine-clad ridges, in others by smiling green hills.
Sometimes we stood contemplating the cheerful valley of Chambery which appeared to widen as we mounted higher; or we loitered on the edge of cascades, whose sun-tinted vapors enveloped us in watery rainbows that seemed to be the mysterious halo of our love; or we would gather the latest flowers of earth on the sloping meadows before the chalets, and exchange them between us, as the letters of the fragrant alphabet of Nature, intelligible to us alone; or we gathered chestnuts which we brought home to roast at night by her fire; or we sat under shelter of the highest chalets which were already abandoned by their owners, and thought how happy two beings like ourselves might be, confined by fate to one of these deserted huts, made from rough boards and trunks of trees, so near the stars, so near the murmuring winds, the snows and glaciers, but divided from man by solitude, and sufficing to each other during a life filled with one thought and but one feeling!
"About seven we supped on milk and cheese, and when it was time to retire Young led me into a goodsized room on the first floor, with a bed and a few chairs in it, panelled in fir, as is generally the case in the greater number of Swiss châlets. You are only separated from your neighbours by a deal partition, and you can hear every footstep and nearly every word.
Early next morning we went by steamer over the Lake of Flüelen, and were much struck with the view of this place from the distance the quaint red steeple, and the little Swiss châlets looking so pretty against the huge mountains, which are here more striking than anywhere on the banks of the lake. At Flüelen we continued our journey by the St.
Mountains piled on mountains, avalanches stemmed by pine forests; waterfalls, chalets, mountain-torrents, wooden bridges, every conceivable picture of Swiss scenery! The whole village turned out to receive our bore. The peasant girls kissed him, the men shook hands with him, one old lady of benevolent appearance wept upon his breast.
«Vers la bas de la descente, on trouve des chalets que je m'étonnai de voir construits en pierres de taille, d'une forme très régulière; je demandai la raison de cette recherche, peu commune dans les montagnes, et j'appris que c'étoit la nature qui avoit fait tous les frais de cette taille.
I even met her sometimes near the châlets, with the little girls who drove her donkey or picked strawberries for her, at other times, in her boat on the lake; but I never showed any sign of recognition or interest, beyond a grave and respectful bow; she would return it with an air of melancholy abstraction, and we each went our separate ways, on the hills or on the waters.
The sun now broke through the haze; and his rays, falling on the luxuriant beauty of the valley, and on the more varied but not less rich covering of the hill-side, the pasturages, the winding belts of planting, the white chalets, lighted up a picture which a painter might have exhibited as a relic of an unfallen world, or a reminiscence of that garden from which transgression drove man forth.
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