The Gilded Chalet: Off-piste in Literary Switzerland
The Gilded Chalet: Off-piste in Literary Switzerland
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Overview
Part detective work, part treasure chest, full of history and scandal, The Gilded Chalet takes you on a grand tour of two centuries of great writing by both Swiss and foreign authors and shows how Switzerland has always been at the center of literary Europe. Two centuries after the Romantics went there to invent Gothic horror, the lure of Switzerland hasn't left us. Writers from the Fitzgeralds to Fleming, Highsmith to Hemingway, Conan Doyle to le Carré, came to escape world wars, political persecution, tuberculosis. They came for sanctuary (from oppression or the tax man), for fresh air and nude sunbathing, for scenery resembling, as Rooney puts it, 'Mother Nature on steroids.' Patricia Highsmith spent her last years in a granite home in Ticino with a fridge containing little but peanut butter and vodka. Hermann Hesse had himself buried to the neck as a cure for alcoholism. Nabokov chased butterflies and played tennis on the hotel courts. When it comes to literature, it seems all roads lead to Switzerland. Padraig Rooney peers through the chalet windows and discovers how Switzerland has influenced some of the greatest authors and characters of literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781473645028 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quercus |
| Publication date: | 09/27/2016 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
www.padraigrooney.com
Read an Excerpt
The Gilded Chalet
Off-Piste in Literary Switzerland
By Padraig Rooney
Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Copyright © 2015 Padraig RooneyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85788-636-8
CHAPTER 1
RUN OUT OF TOWN
Nineteenth-century illustration of the young Rousseau leaving Geneva in 1728
Gilt covers the whole surface. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The volume gets turned down on a winter Sunday in Switzerland. You'll find one shop open at the train station. In the small towns you might hear the slither of onionskin Bible pages and a clutch of dark teenagers around a kebab outlet. On the approach to Geneva, speed cameras are out to get you and the high rises suggest little room. On the lake, the fog, nature's very own anaesthetic, muffles the ducks. They know today is Sunday and are on their best behaviour. You could quietly top yourself and nobody would pay much attention.
Nature in Geneva seems to flow southwest into France: the Rhône, the Jura, the Savoy Alps, the long drooping crescent of the lake, all head in that direction. They tumble over themselves to escape, like weekenders at the border. The wind off the water – the Bise – blows them westward. Geneva's writers look to Paris. When Calvin's city got too much for them there was always the City of Light. The playgrounds there were in full swing.
It's a conference town chock-a-block with laptops and leadership. The august buildings flaunt their acronyms – UNHCR, UNBRO, UNESCO – a kind of concrete poetry, with an army of functionaries watching the clock. Now and then the bigwigs come to town, engaged in talks, ironing out the world's trouble spots, followed by heavies whispering into their wrists. Bono does Geneva. Geldof does Geneva. It has always been a town of worthies.
Rousseau is Geneva's very own bigwig. He was born here into a world of clocks and gets ticked off when you ask people to name a Swiss writer. More often than not they say Heidi or The Swiss Family Robinson and can't name the authors, but the well-read mention Rousseau. He was a polymath: when he turned his pen towards a subject – justice, romance, education, autobiography, nature – he changed it. His buzzing ideas got up Calvinist Geneva's nose and so he was often on the road, in a huff, mostly across the border in France. He handed down this role – the writer challenging orthodoxy – to his Swiss successors. Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains: that's Rousseau.
We all need to rattle our chains.
He had a bestseller: Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Tutor falls in love with student, daddy marries her to money, tutor wanders off, comes back and still they're in love. Social conventions get in the way of high-flown hanky-panky: a story that remains with us. All set against a backdrop of vineyards, lake, mountains. Julie did for Switzerland what the Waverley Novels did for Scotland and Huckleberry Finn for America: it put a landscape on the map. Half a century after publication the Romantics had it in their backpacks.
Rebel without a cause: The teenage Rousseau
Rousseau's father, Isaac, had been clockmaker in the seraglio of Constantinople in the first decade of the eighteenth century. A seraglio is where the Ottoman big turbans kept their women. I can see why they might want the clocks on time. Newly married Isaac was busy, winding and tightening the springs, polishing the works, assembling ever more ornate timepieces for his new masters in the east. Geneva's population of 17,000 was tiny compared to Istanbul's 700,000. The Ottomans were the command economy of the day and the Swiss were the immigrant labour. Swiss artisans, clockmakers and pedagogues were in demand. Ticino architects laid out swathes of St Petersburg. The tutor to the future Tsar Alexander I of Russia was Swiss. Geneva's craftsmen, its jobbing teachers and writers tended to follow the river and achieve fame elsewhere.
There was nothing unusual in this. In his autobiographical Confessions (1782), Rousseau acknowledges 'a charm in seeing different countries which a Genevese can scarcely ever resist'. Many of his relatives in the clock business were on the road. A brother of Isaac's went to Amsterdam; another to London; and a brother-in-law went to Charlestown in the new colony of Carolina. A cousin travelled with Louis XIV to Persia, settled in Isfahan and brought up a Farsi-speaking family. His son, Jean François, speaking Farsi, Turkish, Arabic and Armenian, became the French consul at Basra. Geneva may have been small but its emigrants saw the world.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born into this artisan milieu, was set ticking like a fat gold watch in 1712. His mother died ten days later. Motherless children have a hard time. Jean-Jacques spent his first six years right in the heart of the old town, in hearing of the bells and in sight of the town hall. Hours reading in his father's workshop in St-Gervais, in the poorer area across the Rhône, gave him a restless mind:
Good or bad, all were alike to me; I had no choice, and read everything with equal avidity. I read at the work table, I read on my errands, I read in the wardrobe, and forgot myself for hours together; my head became giddy with reading; I could do nothing else.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Geneva was a university and clockmaking town in the Calvinist tradition. The tectonic plates of Enlightenment France and a deep-seated Puritanism rubbed against each other, just as, millennia before, the Alps had reared up against the Jura. On the doors of the town hall a Latin inscription called the Pope 'the Antichrist'. An influx of French Huguenot refugees had only emboldened the reformist character of the town. Stoutly walled, independent, Geneva was wary of the Dukes of Savoy on its doorstep and the king of Sardinia to the south. Its characteristic openness to refugees and prickliness with strangers were established early.
Solidly Protestant, not too much garlic. I've never heard of Jean Calvin having a sense of humour. Picardy French, he initially fled to Basel in 1536 from oppression across the border and then found a foothold in Geneva, gradually hijacking the town as his own fiefdom against local opposition. Calvinism preached an individualised and egalitarian reading of the Bible and Geneva became its spiritual home. Following the St Bartholomew's Day massacre, when a French mob turned on and slaughtered thousands of Huguenots, those who could escape across the border to the safety of Geneva were the human rights refugees of the day. The English poet John Milton commemorated an earlier slaughter bordering Switzerland in his sonnet 'On the Late Massacre in Piedmont':
Geneva's reformer: Jean Calvin (1509–64)
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold
Geneva thereby gained a reputation as a refuge from religious persecution. Initially they were Reformers fleeing Catholic orthodoxy, but later refugees fled Russian serfdom and the Tsar's police, conflicts and persecution of all stripes. The UN High Commission for Refugees based in Geneva has been long in the making.
Rousseau was brought up with a firm view of Catholics as the dreaded other:
I had an aversion to Catholicism peculiar to our village, which represented it as a frightful idolatry, and painted its priests in the blackest colours. This feeling was so strong in me, that at first I never looked into the inside of a church, never met a priest in a surplice, never heard the processional bell, without a shudder of terror and alarm, which soon left me in the towns, but has often come upon me again in country parishes.
Calvin left his stamp on the city-state. Sumptuary laws forbade goldsmiths from making jewellery and so stimulated watchmaking, a neat motif for the plain, utilitarian, industrious virtues that he espoused. A history of timepieces is a history of enslavement to the nine to five, to twenty-four–seven, to clocking in and signing out. Taskmasters like their clocks: they are a measure of control. Geneva's early watchmakers were of French origin and their skills spread to the Jura towns of Vallée de Joux and La Chaux-de-Fonds, where there was a ready supply of labour.
The Grand Council – the leadership team of the day – kept the populace in check with the help of Calvinist pastors. They had their PowerPoints, their bullet points, their protocols and their hymn sheets, from which everybody was singing in unison. A strategic plan was in place. All knew the staff handbook by heart, policies and procedures for everything. They were moving forward, striving for excellence, researching and developing their souls, busting a gut for heaven, reflecting on that mansion on the hill – and gaining on the competition: the papists, who clearly were not with the programme. The aristocratic families in Geneva's Old Town and the more radical forces across the Rhône in St-Gervais were often in dispute. Rousseau was never one to side with management and was clearly thinking outside the box. His writings fell foul of the quasi-theocratic power of the Grand Council. For all the talk of predestination, what was wanted was obedience.
Apprenticed to an engraver, carousing with his mates outside the city one Sunday in 1728, the teenage Rousseau got locked out. It was the third time. Curfew was at dusk and he was tardy. The Porte de Rive banged shut. Geneva had a lockdown procedure in place that would be the envy of any high school. The sixteen-year-old Rousseau had had enough. In his Confessions he makes much of this call to freedom:
During our walks outside the city I always went further than any of them without thinking of my return, unless others thought of it for me. Twice I was caught: the gates were shut before I was back. ... I was returning with two companions. About half a league from the city I heard the retreat sounded: I doubled my pace; I heard the tattoo beat, and ran with all my might. I arrived out of breath and bathed in perspiration; my heart beat; from a distance I saw the soldiers at their posts; I rushed up and cried out with a voice halfchoked. It was too late!
Rousseau's brush with authority set the template for the later rebellion of the Romantics. Percy Shelley read Rousseau's novel Julie to Byron, neither philandering poet averse to a tumble in the hay should the occasion arise. Mary Shelley locks her Victor Frankenstein – 'by birth a Genevese' – out of his hometown in the manner of the teenage Rousseau:
It was completely dark when I arrived in the environs of Geneva; the gates of the town were already shut, and I was obliged to pass the night at Sécheron, a village at the distance of half a league from the city.
For Rousseau, freedom meant Savoy, the Piedmont, women in furbelows and Mother Church. Having run away from home and the hated apprenticeship, he converted to Catholicism at sixteen and put himself beyond the pale of Geneva citizenship. The catalyst that sent him over to 'the scarlet woman of Rome', as Ian Paisley used to put it, was called Madame Françoise-Louise de Warens.
She was twenty-nine when the sixteen-year-old Rousseau clapped eyes on her in 1728. 'I was approaching an age when a woman of her own years could not with propriety express a desire to keep a young man with her.' Originally from Vevey, she had been married at fourteen to de Warens, a marriage she annulled. Rousseau was smitten. She welcomed him as a pensionnaire into her home in Annecy, seat of the Catholic bishop of Geneva. Her specialty was conversions to the Catholic faith, for which she received a Church stipend. She was a covert recruitment agency in frocks, to counteract the bastion of reformism that was Geneva. Rousseau quickly got himself baptised into the Catholic Church in Turin. The motherless boy had met the woman of his life:
From the first day, the most complete intimacy was established between us, which has continued during the rest of her life. 'Little one' was my name; 'Mamma' was hers; and we always remained 'Little one' and 'Mamma', even when advancing years had obliterated the difference between us.
Sweet, we might think, but Mamma was no nun and had several lovers. Le petit wanted to keep her on a pedestal as a surrogate mother. They had the decency to wait until the autumn of 1733 before bedding down and establishing 'relations of a different character'. They performed the deed in a guinguette – a sort of suburban dancing garden – in Chambéry. Maman became Madame. She was already the mistress of her manservant, Claude Anet. The three conducted a ménage à trois for a year in Chambéry, until Anet's death. Rousseau loved her, but like all his loves, there was a certain amount of sex in the head to contend with:
Rousseau's 'Mamma', Mme de Warens, and her welcoming bedroom in Les Charmettes, Chambéry
Her image, ever present to my heart, left room for no other; she was for me the only woman in the world; and the extreme sweetness of the feelings with which she inspired me did not allow my senses time to awake for others, and protected me against her and all her sex. In a word, I was chaste, because I loved her.
Rousseau then began a long wandering apprenticeship as a teacher, dancing master, fiddler and valet de chambre, but always coming back to Mamma's apron strings. He did a bit of tutoring here, hung around the great houses there, tried his hand at music, lusted after young women and a few older ones, and sang for his supper. The philosopher Edmund Burke, taking issue during the French Revolution with what he saw as Rousseau's bad moral example, lamented his 'men of wit and pleasure, of gay, young, military sparks, and danglers at toilets'. Burke lays the moral degeneracy of the French Revolution firmly at the feet of poor old long-dead Rousseau. These new tutors 'infuse into their youth an unfashioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and lewdness'. Burke seems to be losing the plot here, although 'danglers at toilets' is worth it. But certainly the unschooled Rousseau had a jumped-up quality – and from Burke's point of view he was continental to boot. Lackey to the rich and titled in Piedmont and Savoy, Rousseau seems to me like an early international schoolteacher, eavesdropping at the coffee klatches of the mothers, at times bored by their pushy wittering, at times amused by their advances.
Obliged to give Geneva a wide berth by virtue of his conversion, Rousseau settled along the lakeshore in Vevey, the 'small town at the foot of the Alps' where the youthful scenes of his bestseller Julie take place. Madame de Warens infamously hailed from those parts, so he had to be circumspect:
her birthplace was only twelve miles from Lausanne, I spent three or four days in walking there, during which a feeling of most tender emotion never left me. The view of the Lake of Geneva and its delightful shores always possessed a special charm in my eyes which I cannot explain, and which consists not only in the beauty of the view, but in something still more attractive, which moves and touches me ... it is always the Canton of Vaud, near the lake, in the midst of enchanting scenery, to which it draws me. I feel that I must have an orchard on the shore of this lake and no other, that I must have a loyal friend, a loving wife, a cow, and a little boat.
Rousseau had more than forty different addresses in his life and the wife, cow and boat never materialised for long. They were his equivalent of a little cabin in the woods. In Vevey he lodged at La Clef just behind the market hall, where a plaque commemorates his stay. The old rooming house is now a restaurant serving fillets of perch from the lake, just as le petit liked them, done in butter.
This is the landscape that Rousseau made synonymous with romance, Switzerland's equivalent to the Lake District or Brontë Country. He invented the idea of a natural landscape as possessing beauty (and the idea of the 'noble savage'), even though the shoreline here has been cultivated for over two thousand years, its vineyards stretching back to Roman times. The Savoy Alps rear across the lake, vines come down to the water's edge, the lacustrine villages are crowned with pretty castles and a tradition of peace.
Sometimes you just have to rattle the chains.
Throughout the nineteenth century, writers and travellers came in pilgrimage to Rousseau's fictional places. The Romantics only added to the way stations with an admixture of sulfurous sex and poetry. They were like rock stars who die young – members of the twenty-seven club – quickly canonised and thought of as bad boys in heaven, strumming their air guitars: Shelley on vocals, Byron playing lead guitar, Coleridge overdosing in the dressing room and refusing to come out. I think I'd put Wordsworth on a Moog synthesiser. Hazlitt, Dickens, Dean Howells, Twain and Henry James were the groupies. These writers of the nineteenth century broadened the audience to include a transatlantic readership and contributed to the development of Switzerland as a mass tourism destination.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Gilded Chalet by Padraig Rooney. Copyright © 2015 Padraig Rooney. Excerpted by permission of Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
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