The Princess PassesWilliamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
General
The Princess Passes
Williamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
Automobiles -- Fiction
The tiny gem of beauty had caught the glory of Switzerland, and the
soft, fairy charm of Dauphiné. Its guardian mountain was a miniature
Matterhorn of indescribable grace and airy stateliness; its lesser
attendants formed a group of peaks, grey and green and rose. As if
enough gifts had not yet been bestowed upon the little place at its
christening, a playground of forest land, rolling up over grassy
slopes, had been given, with a neighbouring river, swift and clear, to
sing it a lullaby.
I had the impulse to clap my hands at St. Pierre de Chartreuse, as at
some "setting" excellently designed and carried out by the most
celebrated of scene painters. It was a place in which to stop a month,
finding a new walk for each new day; but one does not discover walks
in a motor car. One sweeps over the country, sounding notes of
triumph. We glanced at St. Pierre de Chartreuse and sped on towards
Grenoble, through a landscape markedly different from that of Savoie.
In Savoie everything is done lavishly, on a large scale. The eye roams
over spaces of noble amplitude, expressing strength in repose.
Dauphiné is livelier and daintier; more lovable, too. Fairies or
brownies (since no mortals do it) keep the whole country like a vast
private park. In crossing from Savoie into Dauphiné one seemed to hear
the allegro movement after listening to the andante.
With each twist of our road the prospect changed. The mountains grew,
soared more abruptly, and the youthful-looking landscape smiled at
their strange shapes. As for the Cham Chaude, which had been the
Matterhorn at St. Pierre de Chartreuse, it now disguised itself for
some new part at every turn. Such lightning changes must have been
fatiguing, even for so extraordinarily versatile and clever a
mountain, for within fifteen minutes after playing it was the
Matterhorn, it was a giant, tonsured monk; a Greek soldier in a
helmet; a Dutch cheese; a hen, and a camel.
When Dragon Mercédès had rushed us up the great Col, and whirled round
a corner, suddenly a battalion of magnificent white warrior-mountains
sprang at us from an ambush of invisibility. Then, no sooner had they
struck awe to our hearts with their warlike majesty, than, repentant,
they turned into lovely white ladies, bidding us welcome to the rich,
ripe figs and purple grapes which they held in their generous laps. I
thought of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary with her fair face, her candid
sky-blue eyes, her high, noble bearing, and her white dress caught up,
heaped with the roses into which her loaves had been transformed. The
tallest, purest white mountain of all I chose for sweet Elizabeth, and
that was none other than far Mont Blanc, floating magically in pure
blue ether, like a gleaming pearl.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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