Castles and Chateaux of Old Burgundy

Faverges, at the lower end of the Lac d’Annecy, backed up by the sombre Forêt de Doussard, and in plain view of the snowy top of Mont Blanc off to the eastward, is at once a ville industrielle and a reminiscent old feudal town. Its interest is the more entrancing because of the contrasting elements which go to make up its architectural aspect and the life of its present day inhabitants. A mediæval chateau elbows a modern silk factory, and the idle gossip of the workers as they take their little walks abroad on the little Place blends strangely enough with the amorous escapades of Henri IV which still live in local legend.

On the road from Faverges to Thone, by the switch-back mountain road, following the valley of the Fier, is the Manoir de la Tour, where on a fine mid-summer morning in 1730 Jean Jacques Rousseau climbed a cherry tree and bombarded the coquettish Mademoiselle Graffeny and Mademoiselle Galley with the rich, ripe – not overripe – fruit. We know this because Jean Jacques himself said so, and for that reason this little human note makes a pilgrimage hither the pleasurable occupation that it is. The fine old manor is still intact. But the cherry tree? No one knows. May be it was a mythical cherry tree like that of the George Washington legend. In spite of this the guardian will show visitors many cherry trees, and one may take his choice.

Lac Leman is commonly thought a Swiss lake, as is Mont Blanc usually referred to as a Swiss mountain – which it isn’t. A good third of the shore line of Lac Leman is French – “Leman Français,” it is called.

Practically the whole southern, or French, shore of the Lake of Geneva – or Lake Leman, as we had best think of it since it is thus known to European geographers – is replete with a fascinating appeal which the Swiss shore entirely lacks. It is difficult to explain this, but it is a fact.

The region literally bristles with old castle walls and donjons, though their histories have not in every instance been preserved, nor have they always been so momentous as to have impressed themselves vividly in the minds of the general reader or the conventional traveller. Perhaps they are all the more charming for that. The writer thinks they are.

Mont Blanc dominates the entire region on the east, and may be considered the good genius of Savoy and Upper Dauphiny, as it is of French-speaking Switzerland and the high Alpine valleys of Italy.

The French shore of Lac Leman, the Département of Haute-Savoie, is cut off from Geneva by the neutral Pays de Gex, and from Switzerland on the east by the torrent of the Morge, just beyond Saint Gingolph. For fifty-two kilometres stretches this French shore, or the “Côte de la Savoie” as the Swiss call it, and its whole extent is as romantic and fair a land as it is possible to conceive.

One may come from Geneva by boat; that indeed is the ideal way to make one’s entrance to Haute Savoie, unless one rolls in over the superb roads comfortably ensconced on the soft cushions of a luxurious automobile, a procedure which is commonly thought to be unromantic, but which, it is the belief of the writer, is the only way of knowing well the highways and byways of a beloved land, always excepting, of course, the ideal method of walking. Not many will undertake the latter, least of all the stranger tourist, who, perforce, is hurried on his way by insistent conditions over which he really has but little control. Walking tours have been made with pleasure and profit in Switzerland before now; the suggestion is made that the thing be attempted on the “Côte de la Savoie” sometime and see what happens.

One should leave the Geneva boat at Hermance, the last Swiss station on the west. After that, one is on French soil. Touges is a simple landing place, but rising high above the greenswarded banks are the donjon and imposing gables of the Chateau de Beauregard belonging to the Marquis Leon Costa. It is in a perfect state of conservation. It was here that was born, in 1752, Marquis Joseph Costa, a celebrated historian, whose fame rests principally on a work entitled “Comment l’Education des Femmes Peut-elle Rendre les Hommes Meilleurs?” This is considered an all-absorbing question even to-day.

At Nernier is a charming souvenir of Lamartine. It was here he lodged in 1815, in a humble thatched cottage – one of the few in France, one fancies, as they are seldom seen – at a franc a day, “la table et le couvert compris.” There are some artists and literary folk living cheaply in France to-day, but the pension is not nearly as bon marché as that.

A little farther on, beyond the green hillside of Boisy, is the tiny Savoyan city of Yvoire, with a great square mass of an old chateau, now moss-grown and more or less crumbled with age.

Near-by are Excevenex, Sciez and the magnificently environed Chateau de Coudrée, surrounded by a leafy park, a veritable royal domain in aspect.

Back a few kilometres from the shore of the lake is Douvaine, about midway between Geneva and Thonon. Here is the ancient Chateau de Troches, on the very limits of the Comté de Genevois, to the seigneurs of which house it formerly belonged. It served many times as the meeting place of the Princes of Savoy, and has been frequently cited in the historical chronicles.

In 1682 Victor Amadée II made Troches and Douvaine a barony in favour of François Marie Antoine Passerat, whose family were originally of Lucca in Italy. The descendants of the same family have held the property until very recent times, perhaps hold it to-day.

Throughout this region of the Chablais, as it is known, on towards Thonon, and beyond, are numerous well preserved chateaux (chateaux debout the French appropriately call them in distinction to the ruined chateaux which abound in even greater numbers), and others, here and there arising a crumbled wall or tower above the dense foliage of the hillsides round about. Certain of these old manors and chateaux of the Genevois, the Chablais and Faucigny have, in recent years, after centuries of comparative ruin, taken on new life as country houses and “villas” of commoners – as sad a fall for a proud chateau as to become a barracks or a poorhouse if the transformations have not been undertaken in good taste. Still others remain at least as undefiled memories of the chateaux orgueilleux of other days. A remodelled, restored chateau of the middle ages may be sympathetic and appealing, but the work must be well done and all art nouveau instincts suppressed.

There are other examples which have been allowed to tumble to actual ruin, mere heaps of stones without form or outline, and others, like Allinges, La Rochette, De la Roche and Faucigny, possessing only a crumbling tower perched upon a height which dominates the valley and the plain below and tell only the story of their former greatness by suggestion. Chiefly however these can be classed as nothing more pretentious than ruins.

Thonon-les-Bains, midway along the extent of the French shore, is renowned as a “ville d’eau.” In all ways it quite rivals many of the Swiss stations on the opposite shore. It sits high on a sheaf of rock, the first buttresses of the Alps, and enjoys a wide-spread view extending to the other shore, and beyond to the Swiss Jura and the Bernese Oberland.

A dainty esplanade shaded with lindens is the chief thoroughfare and centre of life of this attractive little lakeside resort. Here once stood an old chateau of the Ducs de Savoie. The court frequently repaired thither because of the purity of the air and the altogether delightful surroundings. It was one of the later line of dukes who exploited the mineral springs which have given Thonon its latter-day renown.

Back of Thonon rises a curiously disposed table-land known as the Colline des Allinges. It alternates bare rock with a heather-like vegetation in a colouring as wonderful as any artist’s palette could conceive. The ruins of two fortress-chateaux crown the height of the plateau, one coming down from a period of great antiquity, whilst the other is of more recent date, with a well preserved portal and a drawbridge. Within the precincts of this latter are still to be seen the ruins of a chapel rich in memories of Saint François-de-Sales, who spent a considerable part of his apostleship here in the Chablais. To-day, the old chateau and its chapel are a place of pious pilgrimage, but with the piety left out it is the chief and most popular excursion for mere sight-seers coming out from Thonon. This mere fact does not, however, detract from its historic, religious and romantic significance, so let no one omit it for that reason.

The Chateau de Ripaille, beyond Thonon towards Évian, is a grander shrine by far. It was the retreat of a Duc de Savoie who was finally withdrawn from his hiding place that he might be crowned with the papal tiara. The incident is historically authenticated, and the very substantial remains of the old chateau to-day – monumental even – make it one of the most interesting shrines of its class in all France.

The Chateau de Ripaille was originally built by Amadée VIII as a rendez-vous de chasse. “Near the Couvent des Augustins he built himself a chateau of seven rooms and seven towers, after the death of his wife, Marie de Bourgogne, in 1434,” say the chronicles.

Here Amadée shut himself up with six fellowmen, either widowers or celibates, who formed his sole counsellors and society. The Council of Bale of 1439 sent the Cardinal d’Arles and twenty-five prelates to offer the self-deposed monarch the papal crown. The attractions of the position, or the inducements offered, were seemingly too great to be resisted, and, as Felix V, he was made Pontiff in the Église de Ripaille in the same year.

Soon the cramped quarters of the chateau and all the town were filled with a splendid pageant of ambassadors, prelates and dignitaries. All were anxious to salute in person the new head of the Church. France, England, Castile, the Swiss Cantons, Austria, Bohemia, Savoy and Piedmont recognized the new Pope, but the rest of Christendom remained faithful to Eugene IV. Ripaille and Thonon received such an influx of celebrities as it had never known before, nor since.

The towered and buttressed walls remain in evidence to-day, but within all is hollow as a sepulchre. The great portal by which one passed from the chapel to the dwelling is monumental from every point of view. What it lacks in architectural excellence it makes up in its imposing proportions, and moreover possesses an individual note which is rare in modern works of a similar nature.

The chief centre after Thonon, going east, is Évian, with which most travellers in France are familiar only as a name on the label on the bottle of the most excellent mineral water on sale in the hotels and restaurants. The “Eau d’Évian” is about the only table water universally sold in Europe that isn’t “fizzy,” and is accordingly popular – and expensive.

Évian, sitting snug under the flank of Mont Bénant, a four thousand foot peak, its shore front dotted with little latteen-rigged, swallow-sailed boats is the “Biarritz de Lac Leman,” but a Biarritz framed with a luxuriant vegetation, whereas its Basque prototype is, in this respect, its antithesis.

Twenty thousand visitors come to Évian “for the waters” each year now, but in 1840, when the delightful Tapffer wrote his “Voyages en Zig Zag,” it was difficult for his joyous band of students to find the change for a hundred franc note. Aside from its fame as a watering-place Évian has no little architectural charm.

The waters of Évian and their medicinal properties were discovered by a local hermit of the fifteenth century who loved the daughter of the neighbouring Baron de la Rochette. This daughter, Beatrix, also loved the hermit, all in quite conventional fashion, as real love affairs go, but the obscure origin of the young man was no passport to the good graces of the young lady’s noble father, who had fallen ill with the gout or some other malady of high living and was more irascible than stern parents usually are.

So acute was the old man’s malady that he caused it to be heralded afar that he would give his daughter in marriage to him who would effect a cure. This was a new phase of the marriage market up to that time, but the hermit, Arnold, at a venture, suggested to the baron that he had but to bathe in the alkaline waters of Évian to be cured of all his real or imaginary ills. The miraculous, or curative, properties of the waters, or whatever it was, did their work, and the lovers were united, and the smiling little city of Évian on the shores of Lac Leman has progressed and prospered ever since.

The origin of Évian is lost in the darkness of time, though its nomenclature is supposed to have descended from the ancient patois Evoua (water), which the Romans, who came long before the present crop of flighty tourists, translated as Aquianum. From this one gathers that Évian is historic. And it is, as much so as most cities who claim, an antique ancestry. From the thirteenth century Évian possessed its chateau-fort, surrounded by its sturdy bulwarks and a moat. Some vestiges still remain of this first fortification, but the wars between the Dauphin of the Viennois and the Comtes de Genevois necessitated still stronger ones, which were built under Amadée V and Amadée VI.

Within the confines of the town are three distinctly defined structures which may be classed as mediæval chateaux: the Chateau de Blonay, the Tour de Fonbonne, and the Manoir Gribaldi, belonging to the Archbishops of Vienne. This last has been stuccoed and whitewashed in outrageous fashion, so that unless the rigours of a hard winter have softened its violent colouring, it is to-day as crude and unlovely as a stage setting seen in broad daylight. It has moreover been incorporated into the great palatial hotel which, next to the more splendid Hotel Splendid on the height, is the chief land-mark seen from afar. Sic transit!

Évian’s parish church, capped with an enormous tower, is most curious. A great Place, or Square, has been formed out of the ancient lands of the Seigneurie of Blonay, which belonged to Baron Louis de Blonay, Vice-Roi de Sardaigne. The seigneurial residence itself has been transformed, basely enough, one thinks, into a casino and theatre, with an art nouveau façade. Not often does such a debasement of a historic shrine take place in France to-day. Sometimes a fine old Gothic or Renaissance house will disappear altogether, and sometimes a chateau, a donjon or even a church may be turned to unlikely public uses, such as a hospital, a prison or a barracks. This is bad enough, but for an historic monument to be turned into a music hall and a gambling room seems the basest of desecration. That’s a great deal against Évian, but it must stand.

Another property once belonging to the same proprietor, and known as the Manoir de Blonay, a name continually recurring in the annals of the Chablais, is to be noted beyond the town, near the little village of Maxilly.

Beyond Évian is “La Tour Ronde,” a name given to a structure on the edge of the lake. The nomenclature explains itself. A dismantled donjon of the conventional build rises grim and militant among a serried row of coquettish villas, chalets and hotels, but uncouth as it is, using the word in a liberal sense, it forms a contrasting note which redounds to its benefit as compared with the latest craze for fantastic building which has been incorporated into many of the houses which line the shores of the lake. Your modern tourist often cares as much for an armoured cement, green tiled villa with a plaster cat on its ridge pole as he does for a great square manoir of classic outline, or a donjon with a chemin de rond at its sky line and a half-lowered portcullis at its entrance.

Meillerie, just beyond the Tour Ronde, is ever under the glamour cast over it by Jean Jacques Rousseau. A souvenir of the hero of “La Nouvelle Heloise” is here, the vestiges of the grotto where Saint Preux sought a refuge. As a sight it may compare favourably with other grottos of its class, but that is not saying that it is anything remarkable.