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Updated: June 26, 2025
With his eyes glued to the criticism of a sharpened writer on the last measure before Parliament, he read on, all oblivious to his surroundings. Even here, at his beloved Lucerne, the man of affairs could not escape the thrall of the life into which he had thrown the whole effort of his fine mind.
The summer was spent on the Lake of Lucerne, where the old-world couple came across that modern of the moderns, Richard Wagner, and his family. By way of the Italian Lakes and Venice they travelled, in leisurely fashion, to Rome, where they celebrated their golden wedding in April, 1871.
Suddenly she sprang up, one of those fine movements of hers full of cat-like grace. "Paul," she said, "listen," and she spoke rather fast. "You are so young, so young and I shall hurt you probably. Won't you go now while there is yet time? Away from Lucerne, back to Paris even back to England. Anywhere away from me." She put her hand on his arm, and looked up into his eyes.
Downstairs he glanced for the last time into the empty garden. He crept away like a thief in the night. An icy mist pricked his face and hands. Christophe skirted the walls of the houses, dreading a meeting with any one he knew. He went to the station, and got into a train which was just starting for Lucerne. At the first stopping-place he wrote to Braun.
We were no more than well clear of that immobile host when it all surged forward, headed by massed bands playing a tune that sounded like the very pulse of France. The two Generals, with their Staff, and the French Minister for War, were on foot near a patch of very green lucerne. They made about twenty figures in all. The cars were little grey blocks against the grey skyline.
You figure us returning after a day or so of such Utopian experiences as I must presently describe, to the central office in Lucerne, even as we have been told to do. I make my way to the desk of the man who has dealt with us before. "Well?" I say, cheerfully, "have you heard?" His expression dashes me a little. "We've heard," he says, and adds, "it's very peculiar."
Oh, I've been dissecting myself! Should I really have cared so much for Lucerne and Nuremberg if you hadn't been with me? I concluded that I should not. Well, said I to myself, if he can make the Old World so fascinating, can he not do something for the New World, too?" An alarmist rushed by. "They are going to lower the boats!" he cried. "Better get your valuables together."
Until this moment it had seemed absolutely incredible that his mother could be dead, though the telegram to Canon Pascal had said so distinctly. There must be some mistake, he had constantly reiterated as they hurried through France to Lucerne; Phebe had been frightened, and in her terror had misled herself and them.
It amazed one to see in this good lady's house that Etruscan warrior wearing a green bronze helmet and a cuirass. He slept among boxes of bonbons, vases of gilded porcelain, and carved images of the Virgin, picked up at Lucerne and on the Righi. Madame Marmet, in her widowhood, had sold the books which her husband had left.
"On this spot," said the Indian, bending reverentially towards the sun, just then rising over the walls of the city, "stood the great temple where our fathers worshipped the God in whom they trusted; away to the right, where now those convent walls appear, were the residences of the beautiful virgins of the sun; and in these fields of corn and lucerne which surround us were once laid out the magnificent gardens of the temple, filled with menageries of all the animals of our country, with aviaries of birds of many-coloured plumage, with fountains, and trees, and flowers, and ornaments of vast size, of gold and silver and precious stones, many in the form of the shrubs and plants among which they stood, and of workmanship so admirable that they seemed to vie with them in elegance and beauty.
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