[Illustration: NYON CASTLE, LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO MONT BLANC.] From Ferney we return to Switzerland, and the shores of the lake, at Versoix, which impresses one disagreeably as dusty and untidy, though the Duc de Choiseul in the eighteenth century destined it as a rival to Geneva. "A pier was built," says Murray, "a Grand' Place laid down, streets running at right angles were marked out; but beyond this the plan was never carried into execution. Hence the verses of Voltaire: "'A Versoix nous avons des rues, Et nous n'avons point de maisons.'" Probably the streets have been long since grassed up; certainly one does not note them in merely passing through as one notes the streets of Winchelsea (where the town, however, was built, though it since has largely perished). At Coppet, which comes next in succession, but before reaching which the Canton of Geneva is exchanged for Canton Vaud, the village, in pleasant contrast, is entirely delightful, with a little church that faces directly on the street, and that has a picturesque flamboyant west front and a delightful little bell-turret. This sleepy little village is the second literary shrine that we encounter on our pilgrimage along the northern shore of Lac Leman; for here, in the ancient château on the slope above the lake, was the home for many years (between 1790 and 1804) of the famous Monsieur Necker, Minister of Finance to Louis XVI., and the occasional home, both then and later, of his still more famous daughter, the Baroness de Staël. Necker, of course, was Genevois by birth, though German by descent, and even Anglo-Irish. According to Carlyle, he was a man of boundless vanity: "Her father is Minister, and one of the gala personages; to his own eyes the chief one ... 'as Malebranche saw all things in God, so M. Necker sees all things in Necker'--a theorem that will not hold." Madame de Staël is perhaps now best remembered for her letters; but it is worth recalling at this moment, when the German genius has again been weighed in the balance and found wanting, that it was her book of German eulogy ("De l'Allemagne," published in London in 1813) that did for the German genius in France something of the same sort of friendly office that Carlyle himself performed for it in England. She is remarkable, too, indirectly, as the subject of an epigram, as neat in its way, and as cutting, as that which we have cited of her father. Napoleon, when he banished her, summed up her talents in a line (it may well have been unjust): "la manie qu'elle a d'écrire sur tout et à propos de rien." She died at Paris in 1817, and is buried here at Coppet; but I have not sought her grave. The château, at any rate, may be easily found, for it stands high above the town, a picturesque old pile, with the delightful mellow colouring--white walls, with gay green blinds, and vast slopes of soft brown roof--that for some odd reason unexplored is never found in England, but obtrudes itself at every turn