The Discovery of France (42 page)

Until then, the only visitors to Chamonix had been intrepid tax collectors, touring bishops and the map-makers of the Dukes of Savoy. However, the villagers themselves were well travelled. They sold chamois hides, crystals and honey in Geneva; their shepherds were in demand all over the region as cheese-makers. As travelling salesmen, many of them had walked to Paris by way of Dijon and Langres, from where they claimed to be able to see their mountains
on the horizon. At any time, about a third of all Chamoniards lived in Paris.

The band of Englishmen refused the hospitality that was offered and set up camp outside the village. Guards were posted and fires burned all night long. Decades later, old people in Chamonix were still regaling visitors with tales of the English gentlemen who were prepared to defend themselves against stray sheep and inquisitive children. The Chamoniards were excellent impersonators and no doubt exaggerated the precautions of Windham’s party. But Windham himself exaggerated the ignorance of his hosts. ‘Primitive’ people were an essential part of the wildness he had come to see. In the morning, he asked the local people about the glaciers and was gratified but not surprised to hear ‘ridiculous’ tales of witches holding sabbaths on the ice.

After recruiting guides and porters, and noting what he assumed to be the villagers’ admiration of his fearless team, Windham and company scrambled over the ‘terrible havock’ wreaked by avalanches, teetered on the brink of precipices and followed the hunters’ well-trodden path to the summit of the Montenvers. (The same route was followed sixty years later by the ex-Empress Joséphine with sixty-eight guides and her ladies-in-waiting.) At the summit, they saw ‘an indescribable sight’: ‘You must imagine your Lake [Geneva] put in Agitation by a stormy Wind, and frozen all at once.’ This Greenland scene was later named – one might almost say captioned – the Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice).

William Windham’s great contribution to the development of tourism was not his discovery of the glaciers but his imported Romantic sensibility. His account of the expedition was passed around the salons of Geneva. When it was published in journals all over Europe in 1744, it caused a sensation. Mountains suddenly came into fashion. To most people, icy crags were about as attractive as a filthy village or a decaying Gothic church. ‘What did you think of the horrors?’ Jean Dusaulx was asked by a lady when he arrived in the Pyrenees in 1788. She was referring to what was later called the scenery. Mountains were wasteland that happened to be vertical. Until the late eighteenth century, few accounts of travelling through Provence even mention Mont Ventoux, which now seems to dominate
and coordinate the landscape. Few people knew what a mountain was. In 1792, a priest fleeing from the Terror was amazed to find enormous rocky masses that could scarcely be climbed in half a day: ‘I had imagined a mountain to be a huge but isolated prominence.’

To those who gave the matter any thought, mountains – and the people who lived there – were remnants of the primitive world. The Earth, like the human race, was creeping towards a state of perfection ‘when gradients shall be such that landslides are impossible and vegetation shall sit peacefully on the corpses of the mountains’ (Louis Ramond,
Observations faites dans les Pyrénées
, 1789). ‘Such uncouth rocks, and such uncomely inhabitants!’ wrote Horace Walpole after spending four days crossing the Alps and seeing his little pet spaniel abducted by a wolf in broad daylight. ‘I hope I shall never see them again.’

After the Windham expedition, the Alps of Savoy were invaded by tourists. The Scottish doctor John Moore complained in 1779 that ‘one could hardly mention any thing curious or singular, without being told . . . Dear Sir, – that is pretty well; but, take my word for it, it is nothing to the Glaciers of Savoy.’ By the end of the century, the Mer de Glace could be reached on horseback and tourists could sleep in a mountain refuge known as ‘The Temple of Nature’. There might even have been a proper road if Napoleon had not refused the Chamoniards’ request: ‘Those people don’t understand their own interests. What tales would ladies have to tell if one could reach the Mer de Glace in a carriage?’ When the poet Shelley visited that ‘desert peopled by the storms alone’ (‘Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni’, 1816), the ‘desert’ had enough hotels to house the local population several times over. An amazing mixture of tradesmen, teachers, painters, botanists, idle lords and interesting women known as ‘adventuresses’ sat in excruciating silence around the dining table. Since more than half the tourists were English, English manners prevailed. Some of them came to see the Mer de Glace, others to ascend the mountain that had recently been identified as the highest in Europe: Mont Blanc, which was first climbed in 1786 by a local shepherd and a doctor. A century later, almost every major peak in the Alps and the Pyrenees had been conquered several times. Thanks
to diplomatic guides, many people left with the happy impression that they were the first to scale their chosen peak.

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A
T THE TIME OF
Windham’s expedition, in the flatter parts of France tourism was practically non-existent. There was little to enable a traveller to plan a tour of the country and plenty to encourage him to stay at home. Guidebooks had barely changed since the twelfth-century pilgrim’s guide to Santiago de Compostela. Written by a monk at Cluny, it described the main routes and holy sites, the food and accommodation, the time each stage might take and the sort of reception that a pilgrim might expect. The general message was that the further one travelled from the civilized north, the worse things became. Beyond the river Garonne, the language was incomprehensibly ‘rustic’; the Landes (‘three days on foot’) was a region of gigantic flies and sinking sand, where meat, fish, bread, wine and water were unobtainable; the people of Gascony were drunken, lustful, loquacious, sarcastic, badly dressed and – surely a mixed blessing – hospitable.

Seven centuries later, guidebooks were still being written along similar lines. The reader was assumed to be Parisian or at least to have begun the journey in Paris, because, according to
Le Nouveau voyage de France
(1740), ‘in order to form one’s taste and to gain a sound knowledge of the customs and government of a Province, one should first of all study the Capital and the Court’. For obvious reasons, most books confined themselves to whatever could be seen along the post roads. Jean Ogée’s 1769 guide to Brittany was subtitled, typically: ‘including all the remarkable Objects that occur Half a League [just over a mile] to the Right and Left of the Road’. The sights themselves were not expected to be the aim of the trip. To make a long journey less boring, the guide would supply the historical details that a traveller might need to lighten the tedium and bore his fellow passengers. John Breval’s guide to ‘several parts of Europe’ (1738) was addressed to that ‘set of Readers’ who can derive pleasure from ‘the barrenest Plain or most uninhabited Village’ if they only have a date and a name.

Since geographical information was scarce, most writers took their facts from earlier books, which had been plagiarized from even earlier works. In this way, monuments that had long since ceased to exist were described as though the writer had actually seen them. Many writers clearly never expected anyone to follow their directions and painted detailed pictures of imaginary provincial towns. Franc¸ois Marlin travelled with Robert de Hesseln’s compact
Dictionnaire universel de la France
(1771) because it was ‘useful to have the whole country in six volumes in the pockets of one’s carriage’. Unfortunately, Hesseln’s local informers sometimes let him down, as Marlin discovered when he reached the capital of the Lozère
département
in 1790. ‘M. Robert went to the trouble of placing Mende on a mountain, giving it a triangular shape and a large population. There are only three errors in this statement.’

Even at the end of the nineteenth century, there were many guidebooks that described the ‘eternal snow’ on the summit of Mont Ventoux (the ‘snow’ is white stones). One of those books, published in 1888, also mentioned ‘thick clumps of bulrushes growing in a desolate marsh’ on the summit of the Gerbier de Jonc, which is completely arid. (Its name comes from two words meaning ‘rock’ and ‘mountain’ but, in modern French, suggests a sheaf of rushes.) Most of those authors had never strayed beyond the outer boulevards of Paris, except on a train.

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B
EFORE THE
R
EVOLUTION
, the sights of France and neighbouring regions that most people came to see could be summarized in a short list: the squares and monuments of Paris and the nearby chaˆteaux of Fontainebleau, Versailles and Chantilly; a few other cities that were handsome, at least at a distance – Bordeaux and its quays, Lyon and its riverside conurbation, Marseille and its suburbs; and the shipyards of Toulon and Rochefort. Mont-Saint-Michel was already crammed with bars and souvenir shops in the eighteenth century. The main natural attractions were the glaciers of Savoy; the natural amphitheatre of the Cirque de Gavarnie in the Pyrenees; the Perte du Rhoˆ ne, where the river disappeared underground; the resurgent spring called the Fontaine de Vaucluse; and the source

of the Seine, which was unremarkable but conveniently close to a major post road. Modern marvels such as the Canal du Midi, the gardens and pagoda of Chanteloup, near Amboise on the Loire, and the bridge at Tours were tourist attractions in their own right. Cathedrals were remarked on much less than Roman ruins, especially the arches, amphitheatres and temples of Autun, Saintes, Nýˆmes, Orange and Arles, and the Pont du Gard aqueduct, though one could expect to find the Pont du Gard deserted, even in summer. Little else detained a traveller bound for the wonders of Italy. The
Itinéraire des routes les plus fréquentées
(1783) recommended a year’s stay in Paris followed by ‘two or three weeks in some of the principal towns, and with a little discernment, you may flatter yourself on knowing France and the French’.

Some of the tourist sights of France had been famous since the Middle Ages and were beginning to show their age. The province of Dauphiné even had an early form of tourist trail called ‘The Seven Wonders of the Dauphiné’, of which there were fifteen. The Wonders were an assortment of structures and natural phenomena that local legend had identified as miraculous. They included the Winy Fountain, which later made a fortune for a mineral-water bottling company; the Trembling Meadow (a clump of boggy earth in the middle of a swamp); the Inaccessible Mountain (Mont Aiguille), which was known to have been climbed in 1492 on the orders of Charles VII I but was still being depicted in the mid-nineteenth century as an upside-down pyramid; the Manna of Brianc¸on (larch resin); and the Tower Without Venom, on a chilly mountain above Grenoble, where no snake was ever seen.

The ‘Tour sans venin’, which probably owed its name to Saint Vérin,is now sadly abandoned, not only by snakes. A tour of the sites that were said to be marvellous two hundred years ago makes for a quiet and interestingly disappointing trip. Few people now visit the caves of Bétharram, the slate mines of Angers or the bottomless lake of Signy in the Ardennes. The only miraculous site in the list of the top twenty-five attractions in France in 1996 (excluding ski resorts and casinos) was the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal in the Rue du Bac in Paris, where the Virgin Mary ordered a medallion to be struck in 1830. Early tourists would be amazed at the size of modern,
multi-volume guides to France and at the absence of some once-famous waterfalls, wells and grottos. For similar reasons, future generations might wonder why early twenty-first-century tourists spent their holidays in the desolate Camargue, on the fly-infested Poitevin marsh or on the sun-scorched beaches of the Côte d’Azur.

The discovery of France was partly the process of determining what was worth discovering and how exactly to appreciate it. The tourists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries lived between the age of pilgrimage and the age of mass tourism. Apart from a few local attractions like the bogus ‘House of Petrarch and Laura’ at the Fontaine de Vaucluse, the sights they saw had not been marketed, packaged and explained with brochures and information panels. Readers of the twelfth-century Compostela guide had known exactly what to do when they visited the Roman necropolis near Arles called the Alyscamps or ‘Champs-Élysées’. They were to ‘intercede there, as is customary, for the deceased with prayers, psalms and alms’. Modern guides had no practical aims such as saving ancient souls. The
Guide pittoresque, portatif et complet du voyageur en France
(1842) simply recommended the Alyscamps as part of ‘a walk that is pleasing for the variety of the sites and landscapes’. Another guide saw it as an opportunity to ‘use your drawing pencils’. But most Frenchmen who visited Arles were far more zealous in seeking out signs of past glories in the famously beautiful Arlésiennes, who were thought to be descended from the Greeks.

The new generation of travellers was unimpressed by marvels such as magic wells and sacred trees. In 1811, an Alsatian historian, George Depping, published the first comprehensive guide to the ‘natural curiosities’ of France. He devoted a special section to the Seven Wonders of the Dauphiné. He analysed them ‘so as to leave no doubt as to their inanity’. However, he also showed that weird rock formations and volcanic springs were objects of aesthetic and scientific interest. Tourists should admire their beauty, observe the processes of Nature and marvel at the credulity of their ancestors.

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T
HE FIRST GUIDEBOOK
published in France for the new, enlightened breed of tourist was one of the most passionate, conscientious
and useless ever written. Joseph Lavallée’s
Voyages dans les départements de la France
began to appear in instalments in 1792. Lavallée was a born-again revolutionary who wanted to show those snooty Parisians that the provinces were just as interesting as their bloated capital. He and his collaborators set out to cover the entire country by tracing an unbroken line through all the
départements
without passing through the same
département
twice.