While Saussure declined the Alps flourished, attracting more tourists than ever before. Nobility from all over Europe came to the mountains: Poles, Russians, Italians, French and Germans struggled to find hotel space amidst the hordes of British aristocrats who had made it their summer home from home. Letters and diaries of the period read like a marriage between Burke’s Peerage and the Almanack de Gotha. Dukes, earls, lords, counts and bishops of every description gathered with their wives and mistresses in popular spas such as Évian and Leukerbad. Each spa boasted its own curative speciality - some were good for scrofula, others for dyspepsia and liver complaints, while the one at Pfäffer, being excellent for sprains, was recommended to those who had recently undergone torture. But it was not a cure that visitors were after so much as an opportunity for socialising. The nobility were accompanied by equal numbers of rakes, swells and ne’er-do-goods. Charles James Fox, a British politician who had been known to gamble non-stop for twenty-four hours losing £10 a minute, was one. William Beckford, author and bon vivant, was another, arriving at Neuchâtel in 1792 with such éclat that it left the visiting Lord Cloncurry breathless: he ‘made his journey in a style that would astonish the princes of the present degenerate days. His travelling ménage consisted of about thirty horses, with four carriages, and a corresponding train of servants. Immediately upon his arrival, Mr. Beckford set up a fine yacht upon the lake.’1 Two years later Beckford bought Gibbon’s entire library ‘to have something to read when I passed through Lausanne’.2 Then there was Count Joseph Gorani, an adventurer who had been proscribed by every country in Europe and who swept through no less than thirty-one Swiss towns and cities in 1794 pursued by a team of assassins sent after him by the Queen of Naples.
To this glittering and occasionally fly-blown constellation the heights remained as repugnant as ever. Many marvelled at the views and stepped tentatively onto the lower glaciers. But generally they were more interested in the licentious delights of the spas, where it was not unknown for men and women to bathe in the same waters. Such expeditions as they made into the hills were often slightly ludicrous. Take this example, from the journal of one Friedrich Bouterweck, a German traveller who visited the Bernese valley of Lauterbrunnen in 1794:
An elegant English lady, whose name is not unknown, had come to Grindelwald to see the glaciers, and wanted to hire four men to carry her over the Scheidegg [the pass linking Grindelwald to Lauterbrunnen] for the normal fee of one new gold Louis. The four strongest men in the whole of Grindelwald were searched for. But however keen the Swiss is to earn an honest penny, no-one accepted the task of carrying so important a lady … But the lady wished to be carried. Four other men, the next strongest, were sent for and the hire money doubled. The eight stalwarts looked at one another and formed a plan. Divided into two shifts, relieving one another, they lifted the preposterous weight and strode towards the Scheidegg.
Bouterweck noted with awe that when the porters had completed the task they ‘slept all night and all next day, and were still exhausted when they woke’.3
It was not a new phenomenon. Back in 1786 Saussure, usually the most generous of men, had experienced a feeling of contempt as he climbed Mont Blanc and looked down to see ‘travellers struggling across the lower slopes of the Bossons glacier, leaning on their guides and probably composing for their return a pompous account of their courage and the dangers they had faced’.4 On and on they came, regardless. During the 1780s and 1790s, some 1,200 visitors per year stayed in Chamonix; the track to the Montenvers and the Mer de Glace became so crowded that more illustrious tourists were advised to avoid peak hours. Guides grew old before their time as they shuttled to and fro with their charges.
Other visitors were more discerning. William Wordsworth was deeply moved in 1790:
We are now … upon the point of quitting these most sublime and beautiful parts; and you cannot imagine the melancholy regret which I feel at the idea … I have looked upon, and as it were conversed with, the objects which this country has presented to my view so long, and with such increasing pleasure, that the idea of parting from them oppresses me with a similar sadness to what I have always felt in quitting a beloved friend … At this moment, when many of these landscapes are floating before my mind, I feel a high enjoyment in reflecting that perhaps scarcely a day of my life will pass in which I shall not derive some happiness from these images.5
Twelve years later Turner was also moved. He did not rhapsodise about the scenery but sketched away silently, producing 400 sketches from which, filling in the colours from memory, he produced a vibrant collection of paintings.
For some people, however, the Alps were dreary, dreadful and dangerous. In 1805, Chateaubriand wrote:
The grandeur of mountains about which so much fuss is made is based only on the fatigue which they occasion … I was delighted with the shores of the lake [of Geneva], but not at all with Chamonix. High mountains suffocate me. I did not like to feel my puny existence shut in so tightly between those heavy masses … Finally, I may have been very unlucky, but I never discovered among those celebrated chalets, made illustrious thanks to J. J. Rousseau’s imagination, anything but dirty hovels full of cattle dung or the stink of cheese and fermented milk; they are inhabited only by wretched mountaineers who feel themselves exiled and long for the time when they can go down to the valley.6
The mountaineers of whom Chateaubriand spoke were not mountaineers in the modern sense, merely people who lived in the mountains. Those who came to the Alps were known as travellers or Strangers. In fact there was no word for mountaineers, and those few who did climb to any height were considered to fall within an unclassified species of idiot. In 1792, a party of four Englishmen decided to climb Mont Blanc just for the fun of it. They went up, according to Bourrit, ‘as if on a pleasure excursion … Their irresponsibility and carelessness had consequences that were very nearly deplorable.’7 They set off a rockfall that broke one guide’s leg and cracked the skull of another. They returned in disarray, all having suffered injuries of one sort or another. ‘Reason and humanity appear to discountenance, except for some definite pupose of utility, expeditions upon this hazardous mountain,’ wrote one John Owen the same year. ‘Saussure was a philosopher, and his ascension of the Mont Blanc tended to ascertain some points of the moment, respecting the altitudes of the mountains, the rarity of the air, and other physical phenomena. A recent attempt was made, by four English gentlemen, to climb this mountain; and the issue of their expedition ought to render this the last example of similar curiosity.’8 Bourrit agreed: ‘Without some great goal… it is pointless to consider such a thing.’9 These opinions were shared by many. The Alps were there to be marvelled at or swanned around, not trampled underfoot. Climbing was seen as a dangerous, foolhardy, irresponsible and, in some vague way, wicked pastime.
During the Napoleonic Wars of 1799-1815 opportunities for people to visit the Alps, let alone climb them, were drastically reduced. In the first few years they became virtually a no-go zone as French troops marched to and fro across Switzerland, Italy and Austria. British tourists, who had been such a prominent feature of the Alpine scenery, vanished almost completely. Some continued to go there, such as the party who escaped imprisonment by the simple expedient of wearing tricoloured cockades and who crossed the Great St Bernard Pass a few days after Napoleon and his army, noting with interest the number of corpses that scattered the road. For most Britons, however, a trip to the Alps was replaced by a stay at Matlock Bath in the Derbyshire dales, where they could imbibe healthy waters and admire craggy scenery. The crags existed only because Matlock was situated at the bottom of a gorge, and were therefore a slight fraud in terms of altitude. But they looked the part and were easy to get to so nobody minded too much. (Britain’s true mountains were eschewed because they were too high and barbarous.) The Peace of Amiens gave the British an opportunity to return to the Alps between 1802 and 1803. During this period Coleridge wrote his ‘Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni’, which was published on 11 September 1802 in the Morning Post. But thereafter it was back to Matlock.
On the continent, where Savoy, Piedmont and the Swiss Confederation all became part of Napoleon’s empire, Alpine tourism recovered smoothly after the initial upset. By 1801 everything was more or less back to normal with travellers once more making their way to Chamonix. Bourrit held his habitual court, entertaining audiences with his oratory and leading famous personages on tours of the Mer de Glace. Having climbed the Col du Géant and (almost) Mont Blanc, he had become splendidly authoritative. One devotee whispered to another that ‘[t]he man must have inherited Rousseau’s eyes, for I have never seen such a striking similarity’.10 Paccard, by now the Mayor of Chamonix, displayed a graver authority, pointing out to visitors on a clear day the route he had taken to the summit. ‘Paccard’s appearance is one of the most imposing and impressive that I have ever seen,’11 said a visiting German.
In the meantime, children roamed the streets displaying live marmots, and Saussure’s old acquaintance Exchaquet did a busy trade in wooden models of Mont Blanc. Exchaquet’s models were about three and a half feet long and were painted to resemble nature, the glaciers being represented by chips of crystal. One such work, measuring twelve feet long, was presented as a gift to Napoleon. (Not to be outdone, the Mayor of Geneva sent a very large trout.) Napoleon, as a military man, did not himself rate the Alps very highly. He crossed the Great St Bernard Pass slightly unsteadily on a mule in 1800 and remained tight-lipped about its beauties. His wife Josephine, however, had a better sense of an occupying power’s obligations, importing a Swiss farmer and his wife, plus seven cows and a bull, to live in a mock-Alpine chalet on the outskirts of Paris.
Amidst all the touristic fuss, climbing lingered on as a passion that dared not yet say its name. In 1802 a German named Doorthesen and a M. Forneret from Lausanne made an abortive attempt on Mont Blanc. Taking only seven guides, they set out on 10 August and returned defeated two days later. They described their sufferings at high altitude to Bourrit, who told the world how the low pressure had almost torn their lungs from their bodies. Around the same time a member of the Montgolfier ballooning family tried to go up the mountain without guides - and failed. Then, in 1809 a young girl named Marie Paradis became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc. The story, as related by Jacques Balmat, was that he and two other guides had decided to make an ascent for their own amusement. At the start of the expedition they encountered Marie Paradis, and Balmat persuaded her to accompany them by force of charm, declaring: ‘I am an old wolf of the mountains, and even I will not promise to succeed. All I ask of you is to be courageous.’12 They had then climbed to the Grands Mulets, where they spent the night, and the following day, 14 July 1809, they reached the summit. Balmat proudly, if ungallantly, related that Marie had been unable to keep up with him on the Grand Plateau. ‘Go more slowly, Jacques, my heart fails me,’ she had begged. ‘Go as if you were tired yourself.’13 But Balmat did not relent. The other two guides took her by the arms and hauled her to the top. On returning to Chamonix on 15 July she was quizzed by * other women about her experience. Her only answer was that the marvels she had seen would take too long in the telling and if anyone wanted to know what she had been through, the mountain was there and waiting.
The account of Marie Paradis herself was far less romantic. ‘“You are a pretty girl and you need to earn money,” the guides said. “Come with us. Travellers will ask to see you, and they will tip you well.” That decided me, and I went off with them.’14 On the Grand Plateau, she suffered terribly and, far from asking Balmat to go slower, told him, ‘Ficha mé din una cravasse et alla o vo vodra’ - ‘Throw me in a crevasse and go where you want.’15 On her return, there was no grandiose invitation to others to experience for themselves what she had been through. There was simply the stunned recollection: ‘I climbed, I could not breathe, I nearly died, they dragged me, carried me, I saw black and white, and then I came down again.’16
Taken together the two tales told the same story - that Mont Blanc was a good money-spinner. The climb boosted Balmat’s reputation and made Marie Paradis one of the valley’s most famous characters. She became known as ‘Marie Mont-Blanc’, a sort of wife to ‘Balmat dit Mont-Blanc’, and she set up a small tea shop at Les Pèlerins whose remarkable bouncing cascade - long since vanished - was one of Chamonix’s tourist attractions. She would spread a cloth beneath a tree and offer visitors a snack of milk, cream and biscuits. As the guides had promised, she was very well tipped.
Bourrit did not especially enjoy being a citizen of the French empire. He took a conservative view of the Revolution and wrote damningly of its adherents. Nevertheless, he was always willing to facilitate peoples’ appreciation of the Alps whatever their political hue. His greatest achievement to this end was to create a permanent shelter on the Montenvers from which the Mer de Glace could be explored. There was already a structure in place, a stone shack that had been built in 1779 by an Englishman named Blair, ‘whose claret, hounds and fortune had run so fast in Dorsetshire that he himself was obliged to quit England’.17 It was a rough thing, known locally as ‘Blair’s Cabin’ or the ‘Château de Folie’, and it was commonly believed that it had been erected as a wine cellar for Blair’s trips to the glacier. Whatever its original purpose, it had now become a shelter for tourists and was patently too small to cope with the numbers. In 1792 Bourrit escorted a French diplomat named Sémonville to the glacier and was so expressive about its beauties that the man offered to pay for a new building. Unfortunately, Sémonville was captured by Austrian troops shortly afterwards and Bourrit was forced to find a new benefactor. Help came in the shape of M. Desportes, a friend of Saussure who had been appointed French resident at Geneva and who donated 200 francs for the construction of a ‘Temple dedicated to Nature’. Not so much a temple as a slightly larger hut than Blair’s, it was nevertheless designed in a grand manner, with a classical pediment and interior arrangements that included hammocks, a fireplace, cooking equipment, medical supplies, a hatchet, alpenstocks, a thermometer and a barometer. There was to be a glazed window and even a mirror fixed to the wall. A padlock was to be fitted to keep undesirables at bay. The site was granted by the Chamonix town council - whose mayor was none other than Bourrit’s old foe, Dr Paccard - and throughout the summer of 1795 workmen toiled up the Montenvers on a newly built mule track. Bourrit was delighted with the result - he had even persuaded his daughter to lend a hand - and was so grateful to Paccard that he went to the astonishing length of retracting his statements about the conquest of Mont Blanc. Paccard should share the glory with Balmat, he declared, ‘if indeed, as we have reason to believe, he has not the prior claim’.18 Admittedly, when this was written in 1803, Bourrit seemed to have fallen out with Balmat - whom he now called ‘this Chamoniard’ - but it was a climb-down all the same.
The Montenvers Temple was picturesquely, if unintentionally, decrepit in the best Romantic tradition. By 1803, however, it had become more ruinous still. The window and mirror had been broken and everything portable had been stolen, including the padlock. Bourrit applied himself to its reconstruction and with the aid of a new patron, a prefect of Brussels called Doulcet de Pontécoulant, had the whole place refurbished in 1806. As well as a new coat of paint it was given two beds, chairs and the homely touch of tongs and bellows. Visitors were invited to carve their names on the walls, which Bourrit did with vigour, and later a guest book was supplied. Empress Josephine visited the Temple - the page with her comments was stolen three days afterwards - and so, too, did Napoleon’s second wife, Marie-Louise of Austria.
As Bourrit grew older he abandoned his unsuccessful climbing career. He still painted, still stayed in Chamonix during the tourist season and still waxed fulsome on the subject of Alpine splendour, but the Temple was now his greatest concern. By 1816 it had begun to crumble and Bourrit once again looked for benefactors. Desportes came to the rescue. By now exiled to Germany, he instigated an overhaul that included a cornice on which were to be carved the names of famous naturalists. The whole thing cost 300 francs, and when it was finished in 1819 so too was Bourrit. He died that year, leaving the Temple as a memorial to his life’s passion.
Bourrit’s death marked the end of an era. After Saussure he had been the man most linked with Alpine discovery. From those early days of travail there remained only Paccard and Balmat. Paccard died in 1827 leaving Balmat as the last participant in the Mont Blanc saga. For more than fifty years visitors had marvelled at Balmat’s vigour and the genius of his ice craft. ‘Balmat is necessary, one could almost say indispensable, for any journey of discovery,’ wrote an impressed climber in 1813. ‘I do not exaggerate when I say we could have done nothing without him. He has an instinct for glaciers that lets him choose the right path at a glance … The other guides recognise his superiority and are not jealous.’19 Unfortunately, Balmat also possessed an instinct for money. It had first manifested itself in his dash to claim Saussure’s prize and as the years went by it became increasingly dominant. He refused, for example, to be accompanied by other guides lest he have to share his employers’ money. ‘He does not like to go with other guides across these deserts of ice,’ the same climber remarked innocently. ‘He says that he is never happier and more certain of his step than when surrounded by precipices, but that the presence of his fellows makes him nervous and insecure.’20 Saussure’s great-grandson explained his character more precisely: ‘It was only the prospect of the large reward offered by [Saussure] which ended in drawing Balmat to the top of Mont Blanc. He several times abandoned his attempt on finding himself followed by other guides. Always greedy of gain, his greatest fear was that of having to share with others, not the glory, but the money.’21
Balmat drank heavily and invested unwisely. When his funds ran out, as they often did, he would take off on wild prospecting missions. In 1814, a climber who had looked forward to employing the illustrious Balmat dit Mont-Blanc was disappointed. ‘We had little hope of meeting him. This extraordinary man darts across the mountains, never following the trodden path but flying like a bird from rock to rock, according to his caprice, in search of precious stones and minerals … He has an iron constitution; but although he has abused it heavily he has not yet destroyed it.’22
Avarice, rather than alcohol, was Balmat’s undoing. In 1834, his fortunes having taken a turn for the worse, he departed for nearby Sixt in search of gold. He fell down a precipice and was never seen again. His death was witnessed by a young boy but was not reported until many years later lest others come in search of the same gold which, ironically, did not exist anyway. Back in Chamonix, amidst rumours that he had been murdered, they slapped yet another commemorative plaque on his house.