Then, when the evening comes, and you have dined as well as you have lunched, there will be a performance in the little theatre, given by artistes from Paris, who come on to Evian from Aix-les-Bains: Réjane, Jeanne Granier, Charlotte Wiehe, or others. Or there will be a ball in the grand style--not in the least like the balls in the Hall-by-the-Sea at Margate--given in as good a ballroom as the heart of a dancer could wish for. But no hurrying, or hustling, or excitement. At Evian, if nowhere else on Lake Leman, life is a leisurely pageant. [Illustration: GRANDVAUX FROM CULLY] For the rest, there is little enough for you to do--nothing, in fact, except to stroll up and down the long avenue of linked plane-trees by the lake-side, observe how clean they keep the water, and gaze across its calm surface to the Swiss shore where the trippers make a noise. But this has always been a favourite occupation of the dwellers on the French shore, whether in fact or works of fiction. From Meillerie St. Preux gazed across at the _bosquet_ of Clarens. From Thonon St. Francis de Sales gazed across, pondering plans for working the Counter-Reformation in the Canton de Vaud. From Evian itself, Madame de Warens gazed across, regretting the home of her youth to which she could never return, because, when she left it, she had abandoned her religion, and taken with her certain goods and chattels which her creditors were about to seize. CHAPTER XI HISTORY OF THE FRENCH SHORE--FELIX V The history of the French shore, which has only recently belonged to France, may be told in briefest outline. In the earliest times of which we need take cognizance it belonged to the Dukes of Savoy, whose domains continued for a considerable distance up the valley of the Rhone. Then came the war of 1536, of which we have spoken more than once, in which the Bernese took the territory away from them. Part of it was recovered by Duke Emanuel Philibert in 1564, and the whole was reassigned by treaty in 1593. The inhabitants had, in the meantime, been converted to Protestantism, and the first task of Savoy was to reconvert them. A mission for that purpose was led by St. Francis de Sales, and the principles of the Counter-Reformation quickly triumphed. The French Revolution brought a French army to Savoy, but the expelled rulers came to their own again when the Holy Alliance resettled the map of Europe. Nothing further happened until the war which resulted in the consolidation of a United Italy. Savoy (together with Nice) was then Napoleon III.'s reward for ejecting the Austrian garrison from Italian territory. The country had long been French in its language and its sympathies, and the people were quite willing, if not actively anxious, to change their allegiance; and the history of Savoy has, since that date, belonged to the history of France. Its extreme Catholicism, like that of Brittany, gave trouble at the time of the expulsion of the Religious Orders, but