If Saussure found his heir in Forbes, the mantle of Bourrit fell on the shoulders of Albert Smith. Like Bourrit, Smith was not a particularly successful climber, but he had an unquenchable urge to tell the world just how wonderful the Alps were. Whereas Bourrit, however, had only been able to express his enthusiasm through mediocre paintings and overblown prose, Smith had the whole arsenal of mid-nineteenth-century ingenuity at his disposal. It was largely thanks to him that, during the 1850s, word of the Alps spread beyond the small worlds of scientific travellers, gentlemen adventurers and vacationing tourists. Over the course of eight years he promoted them so successfully that hardly a soul in Britain remained unaware of their beauties and their hazards. For Smith was that most colourful, dubious, entertaining and ephemeral of characters: he was a Victorian showman.
Albert Smith was born on 24 May 1816, the son of a doctor in the Thameside town of Chertsey. It was a provincial place, where nothing of excitement happened and whose topographic high point was a small rise ‘from which it was fabled that the dome of St. Paul’s had once been seen with a telescope’.1 Smith loved it. In 1825, however, he was given a book called The Peasants of Chamouni, which contained a harrowing description of the Hamel disaster. This, and the discovery that he had a good voice - as a boy he got up at a dinner party and ‘sung two songs in the style of Matthews, with a genius and versatility that astonished everybody’2 - changed his life. It was understood by his father that he would become a doctor, but Smith’s inclinations lay elsewhere. He wanted to be an entertainer and, if possible, to become involved with the Alps. Aged 11, he frightened his younger sister with, ‘a small moving panorama of the horrors pertaining to Mont Blanc from Mr. Auldjo’s narrative’,3 and a few years later he learned French for the sole purpose of translating Saussure’s Voyages. He did eventually go to medical school in Paris, in 1838. But its only attraction was that it was nearer Mont Blanc than London was. In his first year he went to Chamonix on the cheap, carrying everything he owned in a second-hand French army rucksack and twelve pounds’ worth of French currency stored in five-franc pieces in a money belt.
To begin with he was amazed at Europe’s differing rates of exchange. On entering Savoy he tendered a French ten-sous piece to a fruit-seller and received six pears and twelve Savoyard sous in change. But the sense of wonder soon wore off and he trundled into Chamonix atop a pile of hay on a banquette, the cheapest mode of coach travel, congratulating himself on having reached his destination at a quarter of the cost to most other travellers. Like everybody else he went to the Montenvers and viewed its glacier. He was unimpressed. ‘The story that the Mer de Glace resembles the sea suddenly frozen in a storm is all nonsense,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘From Montenvers it looks rather like a magnified ploughed field.’4 He observed that others felt the same. Having walked on the glacier, he spent four hours in Bourrit’s Temple where he met ‘someone from almost every nation on earth, and with scarcely an exception, each one told the rest that they could see something in his country quite as good’.5 But he loved the climate, loved the atmosphere, was stupefied by his first view of Mont Blanc and, having been hauled off the streets to drink a glass of champagne in celebration of a fellow Englishman’s birthday, declared that ‘Chamouni is the nicest place in Europe’.6 He offered to act as porter to any party attempting Mont Blanc, but he had no takers and was very disappointed to learn that Henriette D’Angeville made her ascent the day after he left. His only regret on coming home was that he hadn’t done the trip even more cheaply. As one Parisian had told him, ‘With a knife, a bit of string and a walking stick I would go from here to the source of the Niger.’7
In 1841 Smith began a desultory career as a doctor in England. But his heart was not in it - he described his certificate as ‘a license to kill human game by powder and ball, in the shape of calomel and bolus’.8 Mont Blanc hung constantly in his imagination and so, in his free time, he dug out his childhood panorama, repainted the pictures on a larger scale and with the aid of a carpenter contrived a mechanism to make them roll smoothly. His first professional show was in the making. This was the age of the Literary and Philosophical Society, an age in which every British citizen with pretensions to knowledge could be found on Saturday afternoons, usually in the town hall, listening to lectures on the physiology of the eye or watching charcoal being burned in a bottle of oxygen. Into this stultifying world burst Albert Smith with ‘a grand lecture about the Alps’.9 His show comprised excerpts from Auldjo’s narrative, interspersed with his own observations on the movement of glaciers and the dangers of the Grand Plateau about which he knew nothing. Meanwhile, by the light of oil lamps, Smith’s brother Arthur wound the handle to provide an ever-changing backdrop of Alpine scenes. One of the best-loved moments came when Arthur ducked behind the pictures and held up a candle to illuminate the moon on the Grands Mulets. It was rickety in the extreme, and there were several near disasters with the oil lamps and candles, but it was very popular. For three years they toured Richmond, Brentford, Guildford, Staines, Hammersmith, Southwark and most of London’s outlying towns, with Mont Blanc packed on the back of a wagon. Smith said it was the finest time of his life.
When the tour was over Smith gave his spare hours to journalism. He started at the hard end, narrowly escaping death when a balloon flight from Vauxhall Gardens went horribly wrong. But he soon found an aptitude for the slight, less taxing subjects that absorbed early Victorian society. ‘Confession of Jasper Buddie, a Dissecting-room Porter’ did very well, as did ‘Physiology of the London Medical Student’ and a ‘History of Evening Parties’. These were followed by a series of sketches and pantomimes that made him, according to a friend, ‘one of the most popular and prolific writers of the day’.10 So he quit medicine and set himself up as a writer. He became the mainstay of Bentley’s Miscellany, was one of the earliest contributors to Punch and was dramatic critic for the Illustrated London News. He wrote in instalments a novel called Christopher Tadpole that might have earned him fame were it not a thinly disguised imitation of a more accomplished novel called Dombey and Son which Charles Dickens was publishing in instalments at the same time. He founded a paper for new writers called The Man in the Moon which he edited with energy if not finesse until 1849, when he suddenly dropped everything and went on a journey to Constantinople and Cairo. He wrote a good book about his exploits in the Levant and then, for no discernible reason, translated his travels into a show called ‘The Overland Trail’ describing a trip to India. Smith talked and sang, and the panorama was painted by a capable artist called William Beverley. Once again, audiences loved it. As Smith put it, ‘There is no nation of the world so great in distant enterprise and love of wandering as the English -none which ever turns with such deeply-rooted and constant affection, unchanged by any time or distance, to its HOME.’11 With shows such as ‘The Overland Trail,’ Smith hoped to tap both these loves at the same time. And, as his till receipts showed, he succeeded admirably.
An interesting picture of Smith in his Man in the Moon days was given by one of his contemporaries:
I can recall him as a sturdy-looking, broad-shouldered, short-necked man, with grey eyes and flowing locks of light brown, and large side-whiskers; later in life he wore a beard; and, on the whole, he bore a most striking resemblance to Mr. Comyns Carr. His voice was a high treble; his study was like a curiosity shop; although the ‘curios’ were not highly remarkable from the standpoint of high art, and were not very antique. Littered about the room, which was on the ground floor, were piles of French novels, in yellow paper covers, dolls, caricatures, toys of every conceivable kind, a debardeuse silk shirt, crimson sash, and velvet trousers, the white linen raiment of a Pierrot, cakes of soap from Vienna, made in the simulitude of fruit, iron jewellery from Berlin of the historic Ich gab Gold für Eisen pattern, miniature Swiss chalets, porcelain and meerschaum pipes - although Albert was no smoker - and the model of a French diligence.12
Another friend remembered him for his shabby clothes, his gaudy neckerchiefs, his watch chain festooned with charms and the skeleton that stood in his hallway and which sometimes sat at the dinner table when there were 13 guests.
Many people disliked this strange, chirping man of eclectic tastes and curious costumes. His sense of self-importance was legendary and even his friends called him Albert the Great, or Lord Smith. He had the gift of the gab with a laugh like ‘the clatter of a steam shovel’,13 and ‘was hail-fellow-well-met, Christian-name calling, hand-shaking with hundreds’14 - qualities that did not go down well in middle-class Victorian Britain. According to the historian of Punch he ‘was usually the butt of jokers’.15 Thackeray detested him. Dickens sighed wearily that ‘we all have our Smiths’.16 On seeing Smith’s initials under a magazine article, the editor Douglas Jerrold said they represented only two-thirds of the truth.* A fellow member of the Garrick Club described him ‘in such offensive language that Smith’s friends were sorely perplexed as to the way it could best be resented’.17
Yet many people loved him, and reading his works on the Alps it is hard not to like him too - as, for instance, when describing Mont Blanc he told of a ‘traveller of rather full habit of body, who went up, and whose head flew off with a bang, by reason of the rarefied air’,18 or, confidentially, ‘I believe they show you, somewhere on the glacier, an entire boys’ school from Geneva, shut up in the ice like … strawberries in a mould of jelly.’19 He was so patently who he was, a man without airs, determined to get the best deal, the finest view, the biggest audience, a man who was prepared to live on nothing, but when he had something was equally prepared to spend it. He was a showman and made no claim to be anything else. Even Dickens realised this and, regretting his previous slight, later asked him for advice on public speaking. It was nice, therefore, that in 1851 Smith achieved his greatest ambition - to climb Mont Blanc.
Since his first visit in 1838 Smith had spent at least three weeks of every year in Chamonix. He had never had the money to climb Mont Blanc - guides’ charges went up and up - but in 1851, flush with the success of ‘The Overland Trail’, he thought it worth a try. His friends tried to dissuade him, pointing out that he was far from fit. ‘Pluck will serve me instead of training,’20 Smith replied grandly, climbing to the attic in search of his old French army backpack. He may now have become a wealthy man but he was going to do the trip on the cheap and carrying the minimum of equipment just as he had done in his youth. From the very outset it filled him with glee. ‘I found my old knapsack in a store-room,’ he wrote, ‘and I beat out the moths and spiders, and filled it as of old, and on the first of August, 1851, I left London Bridge in the mail-train of the South-Eastern Railway, with my Lord Mayor and other distinguished members of the corporation, who were going to the fêtes at Paris in honour of the Exhibition, and who, not having a knapsack under their seat, lost all their luggage, as is no doubt chronicled in the City archives.’21
At Chamonix, however, a disappointment awaited. On summoning the chief guide, Jean Tairraz, and informing him that he was now able to make the ascent, he was told that he couldn’t. He was too fat, his health was bad, and anyway the weather was turning. But Tairraz had a soft spot for Smith, and promised to call a meeting of the guides the following morning and see what they thought about it. As it happened, Smith was in luck; not because the guides thought he was capable but because he was able to tag along with a party of three Oxford undergraduates who had noticed Mont Banc while on a reading tour the month before and had set their caps at it. As one member said, ‘Richards of Trinity ascended last year, why should not we?’22 So, while Smith was sweating his way pluckily southwards, the three youths - whose names were Floyd, Philips and Sackville-West - went into thorough training in Chamonix. They arrived in the first week of August and booked their guides. While waiting for the weather to clear they received a note saying that ‘a Mr. Smith of London’ wished to accompany them. They ignored it at first, on the stout British principle that one should not speak to someone one does not know. But on learning that it was the Mr. Smith, the well-known comic author, they introduced themselves. Hands were shaken, Smith did his usual back-slapping routine, and it was agreed by all that he was ‘a tremendous brick’23 and would make an excellent climbing companion. Smith was so excited that for several nights he could not sleep.
Such was Smith’s personality that he leaped from being latecomer to leader. The expedition which departed on Tuesday, 12 August was the largest and most extravagant Chamonix had ever witnessed. According to regulations, each climber had to take four guides; on top of that Smith hired some twenty porters to carry the provisions he thought appropriate for the occasion. His inventory from the Hôtel de Londres, where he was staying, ran as follows:
60 bottles of Vin Ordinaire
6 bottles of Bordeaux
10 bottles of St. George
15 bottles of St. Jean
3 bottles of Cognac
1 bottle of syrup of raspberries
6 bottles of lemonade
2 bottles of champagne
20 loaves
10 small cheeses
6 packets of chocolate
6 packets of sugar
4 packets of prunes
4 packets of raisins
2 packets of salt
4 wax candles
6 lemons
4 legs of mutton
6 pieces of veal
1 piece of beef
11 large fowls
35 small fowls.
The whole lot cost 456 francs, approximately £45, which to put it in perspective was more than seven times the amount Smith had allowed himself for his entire trip in 1838. Having travelled cheap, he clearly didn’t intend to climb cheap.
Smith, however, wanted to do more than climb Mont Blanc. He wanted to crush its myth. In all the years he had spent at Chamonix he had wondered not only at Mont Blanc’s beauty but at its apparent accessibility. From the valley, it didn’t look half the monolith it was made out to be. It still doesn’t, and modern visitors who scramble to the top of the Brévent must scratch their heads at the thought of Mont Blanc being considered a difficult climb, or even very high. With its smooth, dromedary humps of snow it looks absurdly easy. Smith was of the modern cast and he decided, therefore, that its difficulties and dangers had been exaggerated so that the guides could demand a higher fee - as was commonplace on the Mer de Glace -and it was down to him, straightforward people’s man that he was, to ‘expose the whole affair as an imposition’.24 And he wanted to expose it in as dramatic a fashion as possible, with every possible comfort to hand and champagne to crack at the summit. One can see why some people disliked him. In a very recognisable fashion he wanted to have his own dream and shatter those of others. Luckily, it didn’t work out that way.
Smith’s caravan set out at 7.30 a.m., its general leading the way on a mule, and a crowd of friends, family and sweethearts cavorting in its wake. At 4.00 p.m., Smith having dismounted and the camp followers having gone home, they reached the Grands Mulets. It was not cold; if anything it was rather sultry, and they draped their wet clothes to dry on the rock which was radiating heat like a natural storage heater. They then had a sumptuous banquet, which they concluded with a competition to see who could throw the empty bottles farthest downhill. The only discordant note came when they were joined by an Irishman who had followed their trail with his guide. They banished him indignantly to rocks farther uphill. When a second follower, a well-known American adventurer and balloonist called Vanstittart, also arrived with a guide, he too was invited to sleep elsewhere. Such annoyances aside, it was exactly the kind of climb Smith had anticipated and he was so happy with the way things were going that he did not bother with a tent that night. They slept under the sky, Smith resting his head on his old knapsack, spellbound by the scenery. As the sun went down, Smith thought the peaks ‘looked like islands rising from a filmy ocean - an archipelago of gold’. The sight was ‘more than the realisation of the most gorgeous visions that opium or hasheesh could evoke’.25 And to all of them it seemed as if Mont Blanc was an imposture. They had completed the first stage without the slightest mishap, wearing only cricket flannels in the case of the Oxford men, and the way ahead looked ‘as smooth as a racecourse’.26 Smith reckoned he could reach the top in two hours. They were so sanguine that they got up at midnight to continue the climb by lamplight. As they passed the Irishman’s camp they could hear him enjoying himself ‘in a most convivial fashion’ and teaching his guide to sing ‘God Save the Queen’.
Their euphoria did not last. Smith began to feel cold shortly after leaving the Grands Mulets. He also began to feel a bit sick. When they reached the Grand Plateau and his guides pointed out the Hamel crevasse he noted it half-heartedly. The Irishman, who had overtaken them, was shortly discovered on his face, vomiting into the snow while simultaneously bleeding from his nose. He was sent back to the Grands Mulets. Floyd was disturbed. ‘It gave us some idea of the horrors of a forced march and the pluck needed to endure it,’27 he wrote. Meanwhile, Smith’s mind took on a life of its own. ‘Every step we took was gained from the chance of a horrible death,’28 he wrote, exaggeratedly. It got colder. He sat down and refused to continue. The guides dragged him on. An hour later, on the steep but relatively untaxing Mur de la Côte, he was reeling like a drunkard and said he just wanted to be left alone to sleep. Again, they hauled him on. ‘It is an all but perpendicular iceberg,’ Smith lied in his journal. ‘You begin to ascend it obliquely; there is nothing below but a chasm in the ice, more frightful than anything yet passed. Should the foot slip or the baton give way there is no chance for life. You would glide like lightning from one frozen crag to another, and finally be dashed to pieces hundreds and hundreds of feet below, in the horrible depths of the glacier.’29 For a while the horrors overcame him. ‘He looked very ill indeed,’ said Floyd, ‘and was quite insensible when I poured a glass of champagne down his throat.’30 Thus restored, Smith continued his ever more lurid litany. ‘Placed fourteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, terminating in an icy abyss so deep that the bottom is lost in obscurity; exposed, in a highly rarefied atmosphere, to a wind cold and violent beyond all conception; assailed, with muscular powers already taxed far beyond their strength, and nerves shaken by constantly increasing excitement and want of rest - with bloodshot eyes and a raging thirst, and a pulse leaping rather than beating - with all this, it may be imagined that the frightful Mur de la Côte calls for more than ordinary determination to mount it.’31 He was hauled up by rope, a couple of guides hacking steps in the ice, and at 9.00 a.m. on 13 August, crawling on his hands and knees, he finally reached the summit. It had happened at last: Albert Smith had climbed Mont Blanc. He immediately fell asleep.
They stayed there for only half an hour, during which time Smith recovered sufficiently to enjoy the view and drink several glasses of champagne, then they hurried back to the Grands Mulets where they finished off the last of their provisions, collected the Irishman and marched down to Chamonix. The manner of their arrival more than compensated Smith for any discomfiture he had experienced on the ascent. Forming themselves into a line, they walked through the fields, attracting as they went the same camp followers who had started out with them. Tourists and locals alike crowded the streets of Chamonix, waving handkerchiefs and cheering the procession as if it had returned from a military campaign. Bands played and, to complete the picture, volleys of artillery fire rumbled through the valley in what had become the traditional salute of a successful assault. (A small cannon was by now de rigueur for any self-respecting Chamonix hotelier.) In the courtyard of the Hôtel de Londres a table strewn with flowers and champagne bottles awaited the conquerors. And that evening Floyd’s cousin Sir Robert Peel invited the entire Company of Guides to a boisterous celebration.
If Smith had not destroyed Mont Blanc’s reputation he had done the next best thing: he had reinforced it. When he left for London he carried in his head a piece of copy that had money written all over it. The public’s first inkling of what was to come appeared in The Times on 20 August 1851, when Smith wrote a short letter alerting Britain to his achievement. Then came the full journal. He told the tale in dramatic fashion, exaggerating the dangers and omitting the names of the Irishman or the American, whom he described as mere ‘followers’. He also omitted the fact that he had been last to the summit and made great play of the frostbite he claimed to have suffered in one hand: ‘even as I now write, my little finger is without sensation, and on the approach of cold, it becomes very painful’.32
People wrote in to complain. They complained firstly about the value of such risky expeditions. This was, after all, the year in which Britain was at last becoming aware that its explorer hero Sir John Franklin, who had departed in search of the North-West Passage in 1845, was never going to return, nor were the two ships and 135 men he had taken with him. In the ensuing backlash, snow, ice and death became indivisible. Futility was the word that cropped up whenever anyone mentioned risk, and Smith had most definitely mentioned risk. Secondly, they complained about Smith himself. ‘Saussure’s observations and his reflections on Mont Blanc live in his poetical philosophy,’ said a writer in the Daily News. ‘Those of Mr. Albert Smith will be appropriately recorded in a tissue of indifferent puns and stale, fast witticisms with an incessant straining after smartness. The aimless scramble of four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc, with the accompaniment of Sir Robert Peel’s orgies at the bottom, will not go far to redeem the somewhat equivocal reputation of the herd of English tourists in Switzerland, for a mindless and rather vulgar redundance of mere animal spirits.’33
It was all perfectly true in Smith’s case, and he retorted mildly that ‘those who chose to attack me, in print, on my return from [this] achievement, in such a wanton and perfectly uncalled-for manner, knew nothing at all about the matter’.34 But the same writer made the mistake of slighting Smith’s second ‘follower’, Vanstittart, who unlike the Irishman, had made it to the summit. In a diatribe on pointless exploits, he jeered at ‘aeronauts who peril their lives for the purpose of earning a few shillings as showmen, or to gratify an idle vanity’.35 Balloonists were stupid enough he said, but at least they risked only their own worthless necks; climbers, however, were grossly idiotic because they also risked the lives of their guides. Vanstittart was the wrong man to pick on. He was widely travelled, very intelligent and had a good idea of the risks - if any - that he undertook. He crushed his antagonist in a frosty reply: ‘Having walked under the sea in a diving apparatus at a depth of more than a hundred feet, having descended into the bowels of the earth both in the iron mines of Dannemora in Sweden and the salt mines in Poland, having made balloon ascents and climbed many high mountains, I can safely assert that there is a pleasure in such enterprises altogether unknown to those who have not experienced them.’36 Floyd also wrote to the Daily News in defence of the climb, and the man soon shrank into his slippers.
The controversy was delightful as far as Smith was concerned because it drew his climb to the attention of armchair travellers, the very people he had targeted as a potential audience. And he had a show in the pipeline that he thought such people would like very much. ‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc’ opened on 15 March 1852 at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. It comprised two parts: the first was a description of the journey from London to Chamonix, taking in anything else that was not exactly en route but which was in the slightest sensational, such as the charnel house on the Great St Bernard Pass; the second was a portrayal of Chamonix and Mont Blanc. It followed Smith’s usual routine, in which he stood on stage and sang and talked his way through a series of illustrations drawn by William Beverley. He exaggerated unashamedly: every slope was a precipice, every snowball an avalanche, every rock a cliff, every crevasse an abyss. He feared on the first night that Mont Blanc might not be sufficiently attractive to Londoners. But as he wrote delightedly, ‘I have found, to my infinite delight, that a large proportion of the public have appeared to be, with me, interested in the subject.’37 Audiences were spellbound, and for a run of six years Smith’s ‘Ascent’ was the most popular show in town. He milked it with consummate professionalism. Every year the route to Chamonix would be changed - he researched it himself, taking an annual six weeks’ holiday to do so -and whenever possible a novelty was introduced. One year St Bernard dogs panted through the stalls, little boxes of chocolate slung around their necks for children to pick at.* Another year, two Alpine milkmaids paraded on stage in traditional costume. (Actually, they were a pair of Chamonix barmaids who had been persuaded to play the part.) And on one occasion four chamois made a nervous appearance. He fiddled with the pictures to make them look like photographs. At the close of each season he personally presented a bouquet of flowers to every woman in the audience.
People still laughed at Smith - he was was forever flourishing his Mont Blanc certificate at them - and the press poured scorn on him and his mountain. ‘Mont Blanc has become a positive nuisance,’38 said The Times, describing it as ‘a mere theatrical gimcrack … about as tremendous as the mysteries of the Thames Tunnel … really, the world in general cares very little about the matter’.39 Ruskin, who had been present at Smith’s champagne-popping descent from Mont Blanc and had been disgusted by its showiness, pointed out that the money Smith earned from his ‘Ascent’ could have set up the Alpine economy forever - forgetting that by his reasoning geographical beauty, rather than cash, was the most powerful stimulus to material success. But Smith laughed back at them. After only three months he gave a private morning performance for Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and their two sons Prince Edward and Prince Alfred. He gave another, two years later, at Osborne, after which Queen Victoria presented him with a diamond scarf pin. (He gave her two St Bernards in return.) And two years after that he was once again entertaining the royal family, this time at Windsor and in the presence of the whole court plus King Leopold I of Belgium. In 1857 he escorted the Prince of Wales to Chamonix. He was known to thousands as ‘the man of Mont Blanc’. A board game was issued called ‘The New Game of Mont Blanc’, and thousands of children across the realm prayed with each throw of the dice that they would land on the Mur de la Côte - to receive two counters from each player for their extraordinary bravery in climbing it. In London, their parents danced to the ‘Mont Blanc Quadrille’ and the ‘Chamonix Polka’, or, at the Baker Street Glaciarium, skated year-round on 3,000 square feet of ice amidst Alpine scenery, covered with snow and hoar frost. The country was gripped by what The Times described as ‘a perfect Mont Blanc mania’.40 Smith let his beard grow and posed ruggedly for photographs. When the ‘Ascent’ closed in 1858 it, had earned him an estimated £30,000.
Among those who saw Smith’s show was a nine-year-old boy called Douglas Freshfield. In later years Freshfield would become Saussure’s biographer and one of Britain’s foremost Alpine climbers. He was a ‘grim, behind-the-stockades figure’,41 according to one historian, and Smith’s vulgarities were the last thing he wanted to be associated with. But, as Freshfield admitted, ‘[Smith] came forward just at the psychical moment when railways across France had brought the Alps within the Englishman’s long vacation. And, strange to say, he had a genuine passion for Mont Blanc, which fortune or rather his own enthusiasm enabled him to put to profit.’42
Enthusiasm and profit were just fine as far as Chamonix’s hoteliers were concerned. In 1848 the continent had been convulsed by a series of revolutions that affected it almost as profoundly as the Napoleonic Wars. For a few months every European state was in flux and the Alpine duchies, kingdoms and confederacies were no exception. The ensuing autocratic backlash had only put a lid on a pot that was still boiling. Normality was needed and Smith helped provide it. He became a local hero, not only for the crowds he drew to Chamonix but for the time and money he spent on the place. He contributed to several public projects and organised relief funds when the village was hit by fire and floods in the 1850s. His annual return was greeted with cannonades; he was given his own suite in the Hôtel de Londres, complete with brass nameplate; fetes and holidays were proclaimed in his honour; and during his stay he was treated as the lion of Alpine society.
Thanks to Smith, so many people wanted to climb Mont Blanc that in the winter of 1853-4 the guides built a hut on the Grands Mulets. It measured fourteen feet by seven, had two glazed windows, a door ‘that fitted tolerably well’, and was equipped with benches, tables, shelves and an iron stove. Naturally, Albert Smith was among the fifty-strong group of swells and guides who attended its opening. He was delighted to note that it was the biggest party ever to have climbed to the Grands Mulets. He was even happier when they arrived too late and had to spend the night in the hut - the distress of grand people always amused him. One by one the notables sat down against the wall, their knees drawn up, then another line of people sat in front of them, and so on until all fifty people had somehow crammed themselves inside. The guides shut the windows, fired up the stove and lit their pipes. It reeked and stank and reminded Smith nostalgically of the diligences he had travelled in when he was younger. A fellow inmate took it less well: ‘The spasmodic and quick repeated sound “ppahh,” “ppahh,” of fifty smokers on Mont Blanc -could anybody sleep under it?’43 Then there was what he called ‘the malicious revelry’ of Albert Smith, who started a round of joke-telling, each person raising his hand for attention when he remembered something good. So it continued through the night, Smith darting out for the occasional breath of fresh air, until dawn arrived and they all went home.
A later Alpinist, Edward Whymper, said that the ‘Ascent’ could have played forever. But fickle Smith deserted Chamonix in 1859 and went to China, returning from there with yet another profitable show. It ran for only a year before he had a stroke. In the spring of 1860 he contracted bronchitis and on 23 May he died. The funeral was held five days later in Brompton Cemetery, and on Smith’s instruction that it cost no more than £20 was attended only by a few relatives. ‘Poor, dear Albert is gone!’ wept a friend. ‘The joyous voice, the merry laugh, the droll remark, the quaint anecdote, will be heard no more.’44 Or, as another friend put it, they would never again see his big, red face grinning out of the cab window as he went home with the takings.