The Gilded Chalet Read online

  The Paper Museum houses the oldest printing works in Switzerland. Putting words on paper with moveable type – the right words in the right order – has been going on here since Gutenberg set up his bible. Paper has been made in the St Alban valley since the late Middle Ages. It requires a special sort of chutzpah to take time out here to write. What else is there to say? Who needs more words?

  But the Paper Museum is where I got the idea for this book: a book about books, about writers and travellers.

  Basel has always been Switzerland’s point of entry from the north. You follow the river and water your horses before the assault of the mountains. It’s where French and German trains stop. Travellers with a few shillings stayed at the Hotel des Trois Rois, overlooking the Rhine – writers as diverse as Thomas Mann, Patricia Highsmith and Lord Byron. Mann was in retreat from the Nazis in 1933 when he heard marching music and singing from his hotel window.7 Hitchcock had just filmed Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950). We have no record of Byron’s stay, but he might have bedded one of the room maids or a willing stable boy.

  There wasn’t just Byron frightening the horses. Many of the writers in this book came to Switzerland with romantic ideas. However, the writer on my mind that March evening in the Paper Museum was a scribe like myself: Irish, an Ulsterman, a bit of a travel writer.

  He passed through Basel en route to Rome 400 years before, in March 1608. His name was Tadhg Ó Cianáin, scribe in the party of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Tadhg means ‘poet’ or ‘storyteller’ in Irish. He was one of a hundred-strong band accompanying the Earls of Ulster from Ireland, following the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603). This is known as the Flight of the Earls – but, as is the way in Ulster, it depends whose side you’re on. It depends on the way you tell it. Were they fleeing or leaving? Was it a ‘tactical retreat’, as Irish historians tend to see it, or were they traversing Switzerland with their tails between their legs?

  It was with some trepidation that these Irish chieftains crossed the border into Protestant Reformed Basel. Tadhg’s is the earliest account of Switzerland we have in Irish. A thousand years before, Irish monks founding monasteries in Helvetia – St Columbanus, St Gallen – must have scratched their thoughts in an idle moment, but such marginalia are now lost to us.

  Tadhg’s is also the first travel diary in Irish. As an old travel journalist myself, I want to salute him across the centuries in Gaelige, with the somewhat clichéd greeting we both learned in school: Go n-éirí an bóthar leat, may the road rise with you, may you succeed.

  The road does rise steeply from Basel, across the Jura and into the Alps, but our Earls did not succeed:

  They moved on to Basel, a fine, strong, ancient, remarkable city which is built on that river [the Rhine]. There is a very good bridge in the very centre of the city over the river, and numerous boats afford a means of leaving it and getting to it from Flanders and the country around the river. Those who occupy and inhabit it are heretics. There is a very large church in the very centre of the city in which there are statues and pictures of Luther and Calvin and many other bad, devilish authors.8

  Tadhg is an observant scribe. Holbein’s portrait of Luther the heretic now hangs in Basel Kunstmuseum. At the city gates a toll had been exacted for the number of horses. Drivers entering Switzerland still fork out forty francs at the toll bridge for the privilege of using the country’s excellent motorways, tunnels and mountain passes.

  As Tadhg was leaving Switzerland he summarised its politics:

  In themselves they are a distinct, remarkable, peculiar state. They make their selection of a system for the government of the country each year. They have fourteen famous great cities. Half of them are Catholics and the other half are heretics, and by agreements and great oaths they are bound to one another for their own defence and protection against any neighbour in the world who should endeavour to injure them or oppose them in upholding the public good with moderation and appropriateness.9

  Switzerland provided the Earls safe passage. At Hospental – known to the Romans as Hospitaculum – near the Gotthard Pass an inscription in the church makes no bones about where we are. ‘The ways part here, my friend, so where do you want to go? Down to eternal Rome? Down to holy Cologne, the German Rhine or westward and way into Franconia?’ Many of the writers in our story paused here to get their bearings. Tadhg took stock of the Swiss character:

  It is said of the people of this country that they are the truest, most honest and untreacherous in the world, and the least given to breaking their word. They allow no robbery or homicide to be done in their country without punishing it at once. Because of the perfection of their truth they alone are guards to the Catholic kings and princes of Christendom.10

  This seems to me a just measure. Writers since Tadhg have commented on Swiss probity. At times it is the epitome of dullness, smug righteousness; at other times highly prized. I once left my bag at the motorway stop south of the Gotthard tunnel. Phone, credit cards, cash, camera, passport, residence permit and notebook – all gone in a moment. Back in Basel I opened up Find My iPhone, saw its GPS blinking south of the mountains, and contacted the service station. We have your bag, the attendant said, we’ll post it in the morning. And so she did. And refused any reward.

  The late, lamented historian Tony Judt tackles the gilded ambiguities of Switzerland head on:

  Switzerland did remarkably well out of World War II – trading with Berlin and laundering looted assets. It was the Swiss who urged Hitler to mark Jewish passports with a ‘J’ … Then there are the tax evaders, although it has never been clear to me why what Swiss banks do in servicing a handful of wealthy foreign criminals is significantly worse than what Goldman Sachs has done with the proceeds of millions of honest US tax dollars.11

  He ends by giving the country a thumbs up, and so do I. There is gold surely in these mountains, and there is gilt – and there is guilt. When the sun strikes the roof of the chalet it glitters with borrowed or stolen light. The tracks in the snow criss-cross off-piste, by curious paths and old logging trails, and you add to them. Inside, the heating is on, and gives a piny, medicinal fragrance to the communal area, its carved woodwork, its tatty boxes of games, a shelf of well-thumbed books in many languages.

  Upstairs, the room is spotless and faces a picture window. A chair. A desk. That incomparable view.

  1

  RUN OUT OF TOWN

  Rousseau’s walk on the wild side

  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.1

  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.2

  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 half-choked. It was too late!3

  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 t
he 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.4

  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.’5 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.6

  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: