Geneva (Illustrated)

Towns which expand too fast and become too prosperous tend to lose their individuality. Geneva has enjoyed that fortune, and has paid that price for it.

Straddling the Rhone, where it issues from the bluest lake in the world, looking out upon green meadows and wooded hills, backed by the dark ridge of the Salève, with the 'great white mountain' visible in the distance, it has the advantage of an incomparable site; and it is, from a town surveyor's point of view, well built. It has wide thoroughfares, quays, and bridges; gorgeous public monuments and well-kept public gardens; handsome theatres and museums; long rows of palatial hotels; flourishing suburbs; two railway-stations, and a casino. But all this is merely the façade--all of it quite modern; hardly any of it more than half a century old. The real historical Geneva--2the little of it that remains--is hidden away in the background, where not every tourist troubles to look for it.

It is disappearing fast. Italian stonemasons are constantly engaged in driving lines through it. They have rebuilt, for instance, the old Corraterie, which is now the Regent Street of Geneva, famous for its confectioners' and booksellers' shops; they have destroyed, and are still destroying, other ancient slums, setting up white buildings of uniform ugliness in place of the picturesque but insanitary dwellings of the past. It is, no doubt, a very necessary reform, though one may think that it is being executed in too utilitarian a spirit. The old Geneva was malodorous, and its death-rate was high. They had more than one Great Plague there, and their Great Fires have always left some of the worst of their slums untouched. These could not be allowed to stand in an age which studies the science and practises the art of hygiene. Yet the traveller who wants to know what the old Geneva was really like must spend a morning or two rambling among them before they are pulled down.

The old Geneva, like Jerusalem, was set upon a hill, and it is towards the top of the hill that the3 few buildings of historical interest are to be found. There is the cathedral--a striking object from a distance, though the interior is hideously bare. There is the Town Hall, in which, for the convenience of notables carried in litters, the upper stories were reached by an inclined plane instead of a staircase. There is Calvin's old Academy, bearing more than a slight resemblance to certain of the smaller colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. There, too, are to be seen a few mural tablets, indicating the residences of past celebrities. In such a house Rousseau was born; in such another house--or in an older house, now demolished, on the same site--Calvin died. And towards these central points the steep and narrow, mean streets--in many cases streets of stairs--converge.

Contents
CHAPTER I
PAGE
Old Geneva 1
CHAPTER II
The War of Independence 9
CHAPTER III
The Reformation 13
CHAPTER IV
The Expulsion of the Nuns 17
CHAPTER V
The Rule of Calvin 23
CHAPTER VI
The Triumph of the Theocracy 29
CHAPTER VII
The University 33
CHAPTER VIII
viProfessor Andrew Melvill 39
CHAPTER IX
Théodore de Bèze 43
CHAPTER X
War with Savoy 51
CHAPTER XI
The Escalade 53
CHAPTER XII
An Interval of Quiet 61
CHAPTER XIII
Revolutions 65
CHAPTER XIV
Literature and Science 71
CHAPTER XV
Saussure 77
CHAPTER XVI
Men of Letters 89
CHAPTER XVII
Songs and Squibs 93
CHAPTER XVIII
Religious Revival 95
CHAPTER XIX
viiRomanticism 99
CHAPTER XX
Later Men of Letters 105
CHAPTER XXI
Voltaire 107
CHAPTER XXII
Voltaire and the Theatre 111
CHAPTER XXIII
Visitors to Ferney 119
CHAPTER XXIV
Coppet 123

Geneva (Illustrated)