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Updated: May 24, 2025
Everybody who is patient and waits in the cold and inhospitable-looking valley of the Chamouny long enough, sees Mont Blanc; but every one does not see a sunset of the royal order.
Yes! it was a peculiar beauty of those sunsets and moonlights on the levels of Chicago which Chamouny or the Trosachs could not make me forget. Notwithstanding all the attractions I thus found out by degrees on the flat shores of the lake, I was delighted when I found myself really on my way into the country for an excursion of two or three weeks.
The village of Chamouny is not large, but contains several extremely good inns, which, since the opening of the Continent, have had their full share of English travellers, whose names, in the books of the hotel where we lodged, more than doubled those of all other nations who had visited the various grand scenes with which this country abounds; and the most lucrative employment here is that of a guide.
As soon as the guides informed us that they were ready to attend us, we continued our journey to Chamouny, making another little detour to visit the glacier des Bossons.
Thence we go on in small carriages, over a still excellent but more hilly road, and begin to enter the real mountain wonders; until, at length, real glaciers pouring down out of the clouds nearly to the road meet us, and we enter the narrow Valley of Chamouny, through which we drive to the village in a rain.
This glacier is only three quarters of a league from Chamouny, or the priory, where we soon arrived. The valley of Chamouny is about eighteen English miles long, and hardly one in breadth. It is as varied a scene as can possibly be imagined; and no where can the contrast between nature in its wild and in its cultivated state, make a more forcible impression on the mind.
There was also there another of the same country, got up for the most dangerous Alpine climbing, conspicuous in red woolen stockings that came above his knees. I could not learn that he ever went up anything higher than the top of a diligence. The greatest diligence we have seen, one of the few of the old-fashioned sort, is the one from Geneva to Chamouny.
We were after the first league frequently obliged to dismount, having in some places literally to ascend steps cut in the rock, which I think must have not a little puzzled two gentlemen, who set out on horseback about the same time we did from Chamouny, but who did not reach Martigny for a long time after us, and were greatly tired with the difficulties they had to encounter.
Everybody who is patient and waits in the cold and inhospitable-looking valley of the Chamouny long enough, sees Mont Blanc; but every one does not see a sunset of the royal order.
But more of Geneva hereafter, as although I had so recently arrived there, I was soon to quit it for a short time. I found at my hotel a party, consisting of two of my countrymen and a French gentleman, who were waiting for a fourth person to join them, in making an excursion to the celebrated scenes of Chamouny and Moutanvert.
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