To include Geneva among the thrilling cities of Europe must seem to most people quixotic. What about Paris, Istanbul, Venice, for instance? Well, Paris is too big, Istanbul is too Asiatic, and Venice is a cliché. It had crossed my mind to write a joke essay on Venice and discuss the town without ever mentioning the canals, the gondolas, the churches or the piazzas. With a straight face, I would concentrate on the artistic purity of the railway station, the workings of the stock exchange, the intricacies of Venetian municipal finance, the history of the municipal waterworks and power station. I might even have found an erudite explanation in Venetian folk-lore for calling such a very small bridge the ‘Bridge of Size’. But apart from perpetrating what, at the best, would have been a pretty damp squib, there is absolutely nothing to say about Venice. It is there, and all that one can tell people is that they should go and see it for themselves. Instead I chose Geneva, clean, tidy and God-fearing, a model city devoted to good causes — the city of Calvin, of the Red Cross, and of the United Nations.
For to me Geneva, and indeed the whole of Switzerland, has a Georges Simenon quality — the quality that makes a thriller-writer want to take a tin-opener and find out what goes on behind the façade, behind the great families who keep the banner of Calvin flying behind the lace curtains in their fortresses in the rue des Granges, the secrets behind the bronze grilles of the great Swiss banking corporations, the hidden turmoil behind the beautiful, bland face of the country.
As soon as you get over the Arlberg Pass and down into the Vorarlberg (which, incidentally, voted to become a Swiss canton in 1919 but was snubbed by Switzerland), everything is changed. Even the yodelling is different. In Austria and Bavaria, yodelling is light and airy and gay and mixed up with romance. In Switzerland, the yodel has deep undertones of melancholy that sometimes descend into an almost primeval ululation akin to the braying moan of the Alpenhorn — an echoing plaint against the strait-jacket of Swiss morals, respectability and symmetry. For the solidity of Switzerland is based on a giant conspiracy to keep chaos at bay and, where it blows in from neighbouring countries, or pollinates within the frontiers, to sweep it tidily under the carpet.
Switzerland is one great ‘Mon Repos’ and, to keep this European pension spick and span so that, apart from other considerations, the rates at the lodging-house can remain high, the Swiss Government — which is more of a management than a government — and all the Swiss people labour constantly to keep up a front of cleanliness, order and impeccable financial standing.
This cultivated innocence seems, to the traveller arriving from happy-go-lucky Austria, to verge almost into infantilism in the Swiss-German cantons where the linguistic use of the diminutive rings almost like baby-talk. The diminutive suffix ‘li’ is everywhere, from the Bürli, Mädli and, of course, Kühli (boys, girls and cows) to the famous Müsli, the nature food with which Dr Bircher-Brenner endeavoured to save the life of Sir Stafford Cripps. My favourite is Kelloerettli, a derivation of quelle heure est-il? which is Berner-Swiss for a watch. With surroundings clean as the whistle of a Swiss train, soothed by the clonking of the cow-bells, besieged by advertisements for dairy products and chocolate, and with cuckoo clocks tick-tocking in every other shop window, the visitor to Switzerland feels almost as if he had arrived in some gigantic nursery.
In many other respects it is a great refreshment to arrive in Switzerland from any other country in Europe. Here at last you do not have to lock your car when you leave it on the street. There are no beggars, pimps or gangsters. Super petrol from the pump really is super. Privacy is respected and there are no gossip-writers. The lavatories are spotless and the waiters and shopkeepers have that desire to please that is only genuine in a really thrifty nation. In exchange for this cleanliness and orderliness, you yourself must, of course, conform by also being clean and orderly. Swiss management and officialdom are extremely managerial and officious, and to slip up chaotically by parking your car in the wrong place, leaving the smallest scrap of litter, or failing to have the right kind of ticket on a train may lead to positively magisterial retribution. For the thwarted or affronted Swiss readily goes, as the psychologists say, ‘into paroxysm’, as any member of the British Ski Club who has offended the guard on a Swiss train will agree. These states of paroxysm — the reaction of the symmetrist to chaos — are signs of the deep psychosis that results from restraint. They are the lid blowing off the pressure-cooker. Statistically, further symptoms show themselves in the suicide rate, where the Swiss stand fifth in the whole world, with nearly double the suicide rate of the United Kingdom; the divorce rate, which is the fourth highest in Europe; and alcoholism, which, thanks to a partiality for schnapps, is the prime cause of lunacy in the country. In the latter connection, a friend of mine who lives in the old town of Zürich tells me that, on Saturday nights, when the suburbanites and the neighbouring peasants forgather for the weekly lifting of the pressure-cooker lid, the night is made hideous by revellers who do not just fall down when they are drunk but stand outside in the streets and bay at the moon with terrible cries from deep down within their frustrated libidos.
But these tragic manifestations are hushed up (you may not mention suicide as a cause of death in a Swiss newspaper) for the sake of ‘Mon Repos’, and other human frailties are kept tidy. Extra-marital love, for instance, though it may end in the divorce court, is usually managed with great decorum. It is an understood thing that the Swiss businessman has a mistress, but it is also understood that the mistress shall not be kept in the home town but established in a neighbouring city which the businessman has reason to visit at frequent intervals. And it is typical of Swiss values that Lotte or Lisa shall not be some beautiful odalisque lounging all day on a satin chaise-longue while she dips into a chocolate box and reads the fashion magazines. The Zürich businessman expects his loved one in Berne to earn money in a respectable job, keep their love-nest spick and span, and prepare dainty meals for him when he comes over for the night. She must be a good Swiss citizen as well as a good Swiss mistress. Further, to tidy up the whole picture, abortion is legal in most cantons, though here again the process is respectably formalized. The girl, of whatever nationality, must first go to a G.P. who will certify that she is not fit to bear a child because her blood pressure is too high or too low, or because she is physically run down in one way or another. The G.P. will then recommend her to a gynaecologist who, in turn, will recommend her to a clinic, thus spreading the risk and the responsibility — and, incidentally, the financial reward which, through this triangular co-operative, mounts to between £80 and £100. Similarly with gambling. The Swiss are not great gamblers (though I believe it was a Swiss who invented the football pool system) except on the Stock and Bullion Exchanges, but casinos have recently been permitted to operate in most of the large cities on condition that boule only is played and the maximum stake shall be five Swiss francs — two conditions that effectively neutralize the vice.
Having thus fragrantized most of the common human weaknesses, there remain money crimes, and these the Swiss have not wished to push under the carpet. Instead they have elevated the crime against the holy franc to be the most heinous in their whole society. They have done this because they really mean it. The Swiss franc is the idol at which all Switzerland worships. A friend of mine who has to listen to the Swiss radio at frequent intervals tells me that there is no bulletin in which francs or Franken do not feature. Cantonal budgets are given down to the last centime, as is the cost of a local library, a football field, or a new apartment house (such local Swiss news is always given before the foreign news of the day). Since the greatest crime in Switzerland is to do something wrong with money, the smallest burglary is pursued relentlessly by the police, and the value of money is one of the prime pillars of a child’s education. If you see a small crowd in the street, it will not be in front of a shop window, but at the window of a bank, all of which give Wall Street prices half an hour after the opening and every hour thereafter.
This mania for money is not new. The Genevese, Henri Dunant, invented the Red Cross, but, in the process of promoting his humanitarian ideas, he let the family business — textile mills in Algeria — go to pot, with the result that he committed the gravest sin that Geneva can conceive of — he squandered capital. Years later, living a pauper’s life in the canton of Appenzell, he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize. Immediately, though his bankruptcy was thirty years old, his creditors attempted to have the prize seized in settlement of his debt. Dunant managed to stave them off, and when he died in 1910 he left the prize money to charities rather than let a penny go to his family.
The thirst for money is, of course, the chief economic strength of a country that is poor in natural resources and that has, broadly speaking, only services to sell. Originally the Swiss, who had as ferocious a record for fighting as the Scots, hired out their various cantonal armies as mercenaries (the Swiss Guards at the Vatican are the survivors), but in this century they have turned their attention to hotels and sanatoria (with the defeat of tuberculosis they are cannily switching to the modern managerial diseases resulting from stress and tension), and to the creation of the solidest banking system in the world.
The great virtue of Swiss banks is that they are not only solid but secret, and, in the vaults of Zürich, Basle and Geneva lie buried clandestine fortunes worth billions upon billions of pounds. The reason why fugitive money, in its search for safe repose, has poured into Switzerland in such a continuous torrent, particularly since the war, is due to the sympathy of the government for money which is more or less hot (if it was not, it would not be on the run). In a Swiss bank you may have an account or a safe deposit known only by a number, and this number will be known only by you and by one single director of the bank who may not disclose your identity even to his fellow directors. If, for instance, I. Fleming had such an account and a friend were to send £100,000 to my Swiss bank for the credit of I. Fleming, the bank would deny all knowledge of me and return the money. But if the money were sent to account No. 1234, the receipt of the money would be acknowledged in the normal way. Only if criminal proceedings are started against me in the Swiss courts by the Swiss authorities can the director concerned be subpoenaed and made to reveal the contents of my account or safe-deposit box.
To reinforce this device, heavy federal penalties were imposed by the law of November 8th, 1934 (just in time, be it noted, to welcome the flood of Jewish and German funds fleeing from Hitler), on any breach of banking security. I took the trouble to look up the relevant Article 47B, which lays down:
Whosoever intentionally as organ, official, employee of a bank, as accountant or accountant’s assistant, as member of the banking Commission, clerk or employee of its secretariat, violates the duty of absolute silence or the professional secret, whosoever seduces or attempts to seduce others to do so, will be punished with a fine of up to 20,000 Swiss francs or with imprisonment up to six months. Both penalties may be inflicted concurrently.
With these safeguards, and amid the silence of the fir trees that climb the innocent Alps and whisper no secrets to the wind, it is no wonder that Switzerland has been universally acclaimed the safe-deposit box for the world.
The hidden riches of Switzerland cannot be estimated in millions or billions, but Pick’s World Currency Report gave a clue in a recent examination of the average per capita gold holding in all countries. Switzerland easily leads the field with an average holding of 370 dollars of pure gold per head of the population — more than three times the figure for the American citizen, Fort Knox and all. (I do not wish to give the impression that the Swiss are miserly. Not only is the government most generous in charitable donations abroad, but the International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of the Red Cross Societies, as well as the Swiss Red Cross, are heavily subsidized by Switzerland. Moreover, a host of semi-official and private Swiss charitable organizations contribute vast sums annually towards foreign charitable causes.)
It is not surprising that the protection and further accumulation of this national fortune is an obsession with Switzerland, and the emphasis on privacy and security in the country is perhaps as much to attract money, for ever on the hunt for ‘Mon Repos’, as for the peace and protection of the citizens. The atmosphere of a well-guarded bank-vault is strengthened by the continued maintenance of war-time tank traps, camouflaged redoubts, and demolition chambers, not only all along the frontiers but on many bridges and other strategic points throughout the country. (At an intersection on the main road from Nyon to Geneva, for instance, there is a neat villa, window-boxes and, all that reveals itself on closer inspection to be a mighty stressed-concrete pillbox.) Military service is compulsory for all between the ages of twenty and sixty, and every soldier-citizen has to keep his rifle with forty rounds at home so as to be ready to go out and fight in the streets at a moment’s notice. Preparations for emergency go to the point where every housewife is required to keep in the larder iron rations, consisting basically of one litre of cooking oil, two kilos of rice and two kilos of sugar per head of the household, and to consume and replace these at regular intervals to keep them fresh. These measures, combined with a powerful, though not very bright, police force, create a glowing picture of law, order and security in a turbulent world. Combined with the honesty, industry and cleanliness of the Swiss, the impression on the foreigner and on foreign capital is little short of paradisal.
Traditionally a haven for refugees from turmoil and persecution, modern Switzerland has gathered to its bosom a new kind of refugee — the fugitive from punitive taxation. The political refugee still exists in the form of fugitive royal families, Italian, Rumanian, Spanish and Egyptian, together with a handful of sheikhs. These sad orphans of the world’s storm, evicted from their palaces, have found shelter in the Palace Hotels along the shores of Lac Leman, and there hold strictly mediatized tea and bridge parties and are courted by the local snobs.
There are many cranks attached to this fusty world of ex-kings and queens, including, in Lausanne, one bizarre sect, about thirty strong, that worships our queen. The members believe that Queen Elizabeth is a descendant of the biblical King David, and that she will reign over the world and bring about the millennium. This world rule will have its headquarters in Lausanne where the sect has set up a ‘temple’ over a garage and decorated it with bright rainbow-coloured draperies and a large red-leather armchair which is to be her throne. A similar but smaller chair awaits Prince Charles. Members of the sect take it in turns to fast for twenty-four hours at a time while awaiting Her Majesty’s arrival. The leader, a certain Frederick Bussy, is a bearded gentleman in his late forties who wears white robes embroidered with the British royal coat of arms, and records the prophecies of the sect on a dictaphone for typing and posting to world leaders. Monsieur Bussy is particularly proud that Her Majesty appears to take note of his requests. He told a reporter, ‘We suggested Her Majesty should choose King Edward’s throne for her coronation and she did so.’
A host of British and American actors and writers are the Voltaires, Rousseaus and Mesdames de Staël of today — Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, Ingrid Bergman, Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov, Yul Brynner, William Holden, Georges Simenon, Mel Ferrer and Audrey Hepburn among them. I stayed with Noël Coward near Montreux, and there my wife joined me. Noël Coward is, besides being a friend, one of my heroes, and I was disgusted by the hullabaloo in the press — but not, I think, among his public — when some years ago, instead of allowing him to go slowly bankrupt, his lawyer persuaded him to reside outside England and stay alive. I will not weary my readers with the details of his case, but I have a basic alteration to propose in our tax laws which I will call, so that it looks properly portentous on the statute books, the Quantum of Solace Clause. Briefly, this will allow tax relief to those who, as judged by an independent tribunal, have given the maximum amount of pleasure to their fellow citizens. Most beneficiaries will, of course, come from the creative arts — acting, writing, painting, music, etc — but they will also come from sport, politics and medicine. Such a clause would, I believe, have the blessing of the general public, it would greatly encourage the arts, and it would serve to keep creative ability within our shores (copy to the Inland Revenue for action!).
Noël Coward arranged a dinner party for us with his neighbour, Charlie Chaplin, and it was a dazzling experience to spend a whole evening with the two people who have made me laugh most of all in my life. Charlie Chaplin lives in a handsome eighteenth-century house in a large, well-treed park above Vevey, with furniture unremarkable but appropriate, both comfortable and ‘lived with’. There is no pretension anywhere except perhaps in the glasses at dinner. Charlie Chaplin hates them. They are Venetian and spidery, with gold rims, and Charlie Chaplin described how, on a visit to Venice, for all his efforts to avoid the experience, he and his wife were gondolaed off ‘to that damned island where they blow glass’. He blew realistically until he was red in the face. ‘And they made me, absolutely made me, spend about a thousand dollars on this junk.’ He waved a hand. I was absolutely furious at falling into the trap.’ Much of the success of the evening was due to Oona, his beautiful young wife, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill. She has borne him seven children in the seventeen years of their marriage. It is wonderful to see two people bask unaffectedly in each other’s love, and the relationship lit up the evening.
Charlie Chaplin, in a plum-coloured smoking-jacket which, he said, he wore because it made him feel like a millionaire, exuded vitality tempered with the deprecation and self-mockery one expects from him. After dangerously skirting politics over the matter of Caryl Chessman’s execution (though he was disgusted with it, Chaplin said that, by his death, Chessman had achieved more for mankind than any other man since the war), we got on to Ben Hur, which Chaplin, who practically never goes to films or theatres and does not own a television set, had not seen. Chaplin immediately became airborne. He was going to make a really great film, it would be a mixture of half a dozen spectaculars — Ben Hur, Anna Karenina, South Pacific and others. It would be Around Romance in 80 Days. Certainly he would put in the chariot race. The villain with the big knives on his chariot wheels would overhaul the hero, ‘a chap called Gulliver or Don Quixote or one of those’. As the villain came alongside, the hero would nonchalantly hold out a side of ham which the knives on the chariot wheels would cut into thin slices which the hero would eat and gain strength so that he would win the race. All this splendid mirage was illustrated with unceasing dumb crambo.
More seriously, he said that he would make one more ‘Little Man’ film. My wife suggested that the theme should be ‘the little man who had never had it so good’, and Chaplin seized the idea and tucked it away. He next enlivened us with a graphic account of being invited by the Duke of Westminster to a boar hunt in France, of the clothes he had had to borrow and how his horse had run away with him. And then he was off again, brilliantly ‘fed’ by Noël Coward, into memories of his early days on the boards in England, of the great actors and actresses he had worshipped, and of his own struggles and first notices.
He is now writing his memoirs. He works every day from eleven to five and has finished nine hundred pages. On that day, there remained only twenty pages to go. He complained of being bedevilled by his Swiss secretary who constantly tried to improve his English. He said he was not surprised, as he had taught himself the language and suspected that his secretary knew it far better than he did, but, even so, he liked his own version and hoped that some of what he had actually written would survive the process of editing by his publishers. We all, of course urged him to reject any kind of editorial censorship or correction, but his modesty will, one fears, allow Big Brother’s blue pencil to wreak its havoc. (How much better those who ‘don’t write’ write than those who do — Lord Attlee, Lord Moran, Viscount Montgomery and, latterly, Ralph Richardson!) The evening had to end. It is wonderful when one’s heroes in the flesh are even better than in the imagination.
It was the time of the Narcissus Festival, and the fields around Noël Coward’s house (which he has not, after all, called ‘Shilly Chalet’) were thick with the flowers that were to line my route round Europe — tulips in Holland, lilac in Vienna, narcissi in Switzerland and, later, bougainvillaea and hibiscus in Naples. Alas, I had to forsake these innocent Alps (what is the definition of an Alp, by the way, and when does an Alp become a Berg?) and spend my days in Geneva — Voltaire’s ‘shining city that greets the eye, proud, noble, wealthy, deep and sly’.
Geneva is far, far wealthier than it was in Voltaire’s day when, as the Duc de Choiseul, Madame de Pompadour’s foreign minister, advised, ‘If you see a Genevese jump out of the window, jump right after him. There is fifteen per cent to be gained.’ Today, its economy bulging with the wealth of countless international organizations and of big foreign businesses attracted by tax advantages, such as Chrysler and Dupont, with a quarter of its residents foreigners and well over a million tourists every year, the town is bursting at the seams, and the small population of true Genevese — about fifty thousand — have a hard time trying to avoid being overlaid by the giant golden calf for whom, originally with enthusiasm but now with very mixed feelings, they provide pasture.
Parking a car in any city these days is almost impossible. In the centre of Geneva it is totally so. Hunting round and round like a mouse in a trap, it crossed my mind that, for the motorist, ‘P’ has become the most desirable letter of the alphabet. How blessed it is to be able actually to stop and get out of the car and leave it without the fear of a torrent of abuse when you return to it! So far as Geneva is concerned, the only hope is for them to build vast parking places out over the famous lake.
This beautiful lake, plus the highest fountain in the world and the Rhône that thunders so majestically through the town — all this and Mont Blanc too, do not make Geneva a happy town. The spirit of Calvin, expressed in the ugly and uncompromising cathedral that dominates the city, seems to brood like a thunderous conscience over the inhabitants. In the rue des Granges adjoining the cathedral, the great patrician families, the de Candoles, de Saussures, Pictets, set a frightening tone of respectability and strait-laced behaviour from which the lesser Genevese take their example. The international set — the delegates, staffs of the various organizations and staffs of foreign businesses — do not penetrate even the fringes of Genevese society. They even mix poorly among themselves. The lack of adjustment between the resident Americans, for instance, and Geneva life is such that a booklet — an excellent common-sense one, by the way — has been prepared at the behest of the President of the American Women’s Club of Geneva and the Chief of the Mental Health Section of the World Health Organization, to prepare Americans coming to work in Geneva for what is described as ‘Culture Shock’ — the impact of the European way of life on an American.
The chief trouble is the language problem, closely followed by the business of bringing up children. In Geneva, as in the rest of Switzerland, Swiss children have butter or jam for tea. Swiss children are not allowed to go to most films until they are eighteen, and even the harmless Danny Kaye is forbidden to children until they are sixteen, to be proved by the presentation of identity cards. When a Swiss child comes back from a party, he or she is asked, ‘Were you good?’ whereas the American parent will ask, ‘Did you have a good time?’ The Swiss mother finds it difficult to make adult conversation to a foreign mother because only in 1960, and by a very narrow majority, did Swiss women obtain the vote, and then only in a minority of the cantons. Finally, the general values and moral judgments of the Swiss have hardly developed since 1914, whereas the foreigners’ have been turned inside out by two world wars.
But, above all, it is the reserve of the Genevese that chills those many Americans who so much want to be loved (the British don’t particularly expect to be liked, or are too obtuse to notice if they aren’t). It was this reserve, this holier-than-thou attitude, that Voltaire endeavoured to dynamite in his constant forays against Calvinism. Today it is only the giant scandal that can fracture the smugness. Fortunately, from time to time, the Lord who, I have always believed, has little sympathy for Calvinism, visits just such a scandal upon Calvin’s present-day disciples. The echoes of such a visitation were still rumbling when I was in Geneva in May 1960 — the case of Pierre Jaccoud, Geneva’s senior lawyer, head of the Bar Association and chief of the all-powerful Radical Party in the town, and it was a real grand slam in scandals.
The story is this: on May 1st, 1958, an elderly man, Charles Zumbach, was found shot and stabbed in his house on the outskirts of Geneva. His wife, on returning from a church meeting that night, was shot at and wounded by the murderer whom she described as a tall, dark man wearing a dark suit who had dashed out of the house and made his escape on a black bicycle. It was a headline story, but no headlines were black enough for the sensational arrest of Maître Pierre Jaccoud a month later on the charge of murder.
The scandal developed swiftly. It was revealed that, shortly after the murder, Jaccoud had gone to Stockholm and had his hair bleached, that he had tried to take poison during the police investigation, and that he had had a mistress, Linda Baud, a secretary at Radio Geneva. All this of one of Geneva’s sons who had been nicknamed ‘Calvin’ at school because of his puritanical nature; of a lawyer who had counted Aly Khan, Sacha Guitry and I.G. Farben among his clients, of a Director of the Conservatoire de Musique and of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, of a Municipal Councillor and Deputy of the Grand Conseil of Geneva — worse, of a man who lived in a street that abutted on the rue des Granges!
It turned out that Jaccoud had met Linda Baud, then in her twenties, at an official dinner when, as his lawyer claimed, ‘he was ready to love like a schoolboy, never having loved as a schoolboy’. The affair lasted ten years, with passionate ups and downs. His wife knew all about it but did nothing for fear of offending the conventions, and, when it ended, Madame Jaccoud, worn down by those ‘meals heavy with silence’, took him back and the marriage was mended.
Unfortunately, in the summer of 1957, Linda Baud took another lover, a young technician from Radio Geneva called André Zumbach, to whom, out of jealousy, Jaccoud wrote anonymous letters. They were sordid ones:
I have heard that you are a friend of Linda Baud and feel you should be informed of what is going on. After having been the mistress of a barkeeper, then of one of the employees of your organization, not to mention a number of other adventures, she has been the mistress of a married man for several years. I have just heard that she has relations with someone very dear to me. I saw them together on the 17th August and found by chance a most edifying photograph of the way they spend their time. I am enclosing this photo.
[Signed] ‘SIMONE B.’
The photograph was one of Linda Baud naked which, she claimed, Jaccoud had taken of her at pistol point one evening in the grimy little room they had used for their affair. André Zumbach accused Jaccoud of sending these letters and the prosecution maintained that Jaccoud, frightened by the accusation, had gone to Zumbach’s home to kill André Zumbach and get the letters back. Surprised by the father, Jaccoud had shot him and, panicking, had also shot the mother.
The trial, in March 1960, lasted three weeks and was enlivened by the production of five hundred love-letters from Jaccoud to Linda Baud, the discovery of a Moroccan dagger, showing traces of blood and liver cells, at Jaccoud’s home, and of a button, found on the scene of the crime, of an English raincoat parcelled up in Jaccoud’s apartment to be sent to the Red Cross. To heighten the drama, the Public Prosecutor was a great friend of Jaccoud and they broke out into ‘tu’ in the court — the court where Jaccoud himself had so often pleaded. The judge also knew the accused, and the defence lawyers were old friends. The Public Prosecutor himself admitted acquaintance with Linda Baud, and the drama was intensified by the appearance of a famous Paris lawyer, René Floriot, for the defence, who spread mud still more widely over Geneva, to the fury of the inhabitants.
Finally, with the natural respect of the Genevese for authority, titles and high society torn to shreds, Jaccoud was convicted and sentenced to seven years, subsequently reduced to three.
Such cases — the Dubois espionage affair of 1957 was another one — burst upon the Swiss scene with all the greater impact because, though sordid crimes occur in every other country of the world, they really should not disturb a society that has ‘Mon Repos’ as its motto. These scandals have no more impact abroad than any other headline murder story, but, among the Swiss, it is as if a corner of the lid of the great pressure-cooker had lifted to emit a poisonous jet of steam — a whiff from the great cauldron of human chaos that is the supreme enemy of the symmetry that is Switzerland.
Much, far too much, I fear, of what I have written will seem critical of the Swiss and of their surpassingly beautiful country. Yet it is not my wish to be critical, but merely to examine, to look beneath the surface of a country that holds so much more mystery than those that wear their hearts and psychoses on their sleeve. I was partly educated in Switzerland — at the University of Geneva where I studied Social Anthropology, of all subjects, under the famous Professor Pittard. I was once engaged to a Swiss girl. I am devoted to the country and to its people and I would not have them different in any detail. But, as I said at the beginning, Switzerland has a Simenon quality, an atmosphere of still-water-running-deep, which is a great temptation to the writer of thrillers. If I have revealed a wart here and a wen there and poked mild fun at the reserved, rather prim face Switzerland presents to the world, this is because the mystery writer enjoys seeing the play from back-stage rather than from out front, in the stalls.
To conclude, I will draw the veil aside from one last Swiss secret that, amongst all, the world has perhaps found the most baffling: Swiss cheese has holes in it because, in the process of making Gruyère and Emmental, carbon dioxide is formed and, as the cheese solidifies, the bubbles remain.
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INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE
Hotels
Hotels in Geneva are usually top-heavy with conference delegates. This applies even to winter-time and even to conferences no one has ever heard of.
Luxury hotels are growing like mushrooms, but the Richmond and the Hôtel des Bergues are particularly favoured by visiting high society and statesmen, while the newer Hôtel du Rhône is more frequently chosen by business magnates and sheikhs.
For another type of luxury: quiet, remote lakeside setting and the atmosphere of a country manor, there is the less-known Clos de Sadex, near Nyon, twenty-five kilometres outside the town on the Route Suisse leading to Lausanne, and therefore only recommended to the motorised. The Clos de Sadex is run by English-speaking Mr and Mrs L. de Tscherner who have transformed their own home into a first-class residential hotel and who loan their own motor boat for lake excursions.
A picturesque but not inexpensive retreat in Geneva itself is the Hôtel Lamartine. This is an ‘authentic’ chalet in its own garden at Champel, chemin des Clochettes; it is mentioned in the Guide Michelin and caters mainly for bed-and-breakfast customers.
Less money to spend? There is a pleasant pub-style pension on the lakeside a kilometre or so outside Geneva at la Belotte, chemin des Pêcheurs, the Hôtel de la Belotte. A limited number of rooms and the inconvenience of Sunday invasions of lunchers who come inter alia for perches du lac, a fresh-water fish speciality.
Restaurants
The gastronomic delights of Geneva are slightly overshadowed by the vicinity — within fifty kilometres — of Le Père Bise, one of France’s three best restaurants, at Talloires, just after Annecy.
Inside Geneva the Béarn, quai de la Poste, is the uncrowned king of local restaurants. After that the choice is vast and interesting, and advice will be tendered from every side.
For fondue bourguignonne, a local speciality, Le Chandelier, 23 Grande Rue, in the old city, ranks high. This fondue consists of portions of cut-up raw steak which you impale on a stick and cook yourself in boiling oil and butter at the table. It is served with a variety of sharp sauces.
Cheese fondue is rarely served in summer and it tastes better in any brasserie than in a restaurant. I always feel that this cheese-and-white-wine speciality takes the limelight from an even tastier speciality: raclette. Raclette is merely toasted cheese. But what toasted cheese! The performance takes place at an open fire and the chef scrapes the melted cheese straight from the fire on to a numbered plate: yours. You are automatically served with a fresh portion on the same easily identified plate until you beg for mercy. Raclette should be eaten in the mountains before the fresh cheeses and the cows come down to the valley. In Geneva the Café du Midi, round the corner from the Hôtel des Bergues, has a cellar, or carnotzet, which specializes in raclette — if you can stand the heat.
It is cooler, less picturesque, and the raclette or fondue is just as good when served in a café called Le Bagnard, place du Marché, Carouge. The word Bagnard comes from Bagne cheese and not from a convict past in the café ownership.
I hope habitués will forgive me for giving away the name of a bistro which serves excellent meals and charges according to the size of the portion asked for: Chez Bouby, rue Grenus 1.
At the other extreme, as a preliminary to night-clubbing, the only place where it is possible to dine to music and dance is the Gentilhomme, which belongs to the Richmond. (Incidentally all restaurants, including the Béarn, must be looked up in the telephone directory for booking purposes under the word ‘café’, for reasons unknown.)
Night-clubs are numerous, cheaper than in England and as naughty as those in Paris, hope the Genevese.
The Bataclan, run by Madame Irène, is famous for its strip-teasers. The floor show here is one reason why German Swiss, less privileged at home, find business visits to Geneva quite essential.
La Cave à Bob, in an old town cellar, also has strip-teasers, chansonniers, and tries to be reminiscent of St-Germain-des-Prés. The Moulin Rouge usually has extremely good attractions from Paris and even New York.
With a star show, night-clubs charge an entry fee of up to ten francs. Otherwise a whisky or a shared bottle of vin blanc can last you till 2 a.m. at a cost of about 10s. per person. It is of course possible and easy to spend more.