The Matterhorn, that monolithic pyramid which for so long had been the grail of Alpine exploration and whose conquest had caused such heartache, was, ironically, the agent of the Meije’s downfall. Among the scores of tourists who came to Zermatt in the wake of the 1865 disaster were two Americans: Meta Brevoort and William Coolidge. The former was a spinster in her late thirties, conservative and rather stern-looking but determined and adventurous. The latter was her nephew, a podgy, short-sighted, intelligent teenager whose head bulged peculiarly above his collar and who was interested in history. They had no intrinsic yearning for the Alps and had only come to Europe the previous year because Coolidge suffered from typhoid fever: his doctor had ordered him abroad and his aunt had been sent to look after him. With them came Mrs Coolidge, William’s mother, and her daughter Lil, both of whom were also unwell. What started as a simple change of air developed into lifelong European residence. All thanks to the Matterhorn.
On arrival the Coolidges drifted across Europe, staring at the usual sights, admiring the usual museums and doing what sightseers usually did. When news came in of the Matterhorn disaster, Coolidge and his aunt followed the herd to Zermatt. Meta Brevoort was immediately hooked by the tragedy. She interviewed Whymper’s chambermaid and added a few more details to the story:
Said it was dreadful to have to go into the dead men’s rooms full of their scattered clothes etc. Described the excitement in Zermatt the day they reached the top … Then the horror the next day when they went to seek for the bodies & then the arrival of the relatives & especially of poor Douglas’ brother. She says he would stay in the same room & bed his brother had occupied & that one morg. he started off leaving a letter on the table saying he was going to look for his brother. He was alone & without any provisions. They followed & found him near the foot of the mtn. half crazy. As to Whymper she says he neither eat nor slept but went abt. crying all the time afterwards whilst he was here.1
Young Coolidge was overwhelmed by proximity to fame. He wrote to his mother on a sheet of notepaper headed by a view of Zermatt and the Matterhorn. His letter contained details of everything he and ‘aunty’ had been doing and could have been sent from the seaside were it not for a few schoolboyish sentences: ‘The two dots you see on the picture represent where they fell from, and where they fell. A horrible distance. The house with the dot is our hotel, du Mont Rosa.’2 Just as Whymper, when young, had been awed by the Franklin disaster, so were the Coolidges, in turn, awed by Whymper’s own tragedy. Franklin’s had been a distant, untouchable, romantic doom. The deaths of Croz, Douglas, Hadow and Hudson, on the other hand, while equally romantic - or perceived as such - were present and all too tangible. ‘I can say for certain,’ Coolidge later wrote, ‘that it was this accident which drew me first to Zermatt.’3
The Matterhorn led Meta Brevoort and her nephew to other parts of the Alps. Later that year she climbed Mont Blanc, danced on the top and sang the Marseillaise, while Coolidge went up La Flégère opposite and watched her progress. Meta Brevoort climbed several more mountains and acquired a taste for it. Coolidge, though too young to go up anything serious, became fascinated by Alpine history. Like so many ètrangers before them, they became entranced. The Alps offered Meta Brevoort all the climbing she wanted and William Coolidge was very content to record first her ascents, then, as he grew older, their joint ascents and finally the ascents of anybody who had set foot in the region in the last four hundred years. The Rockies, the Andes, the White Mountains and other New World ranges seemed crude in comparison. That Christmas, Meta Brevoort gave Coolidge the complete set of the Alpine Club’s Peaks, Passes and Glaciers. It was as much a gift to herself. ‘We pored over those volumes with an almost unbelievable intensity,’ Coolidge recorded. ‘We wished to become complete mountaineers.’4 He was then 15 years old.
Newcomers to the Alpine scene, they found nothing boring in the chromolithographs of yore, nor were they put off by the fact that everything seemed to have been climbed already. For the next five years Coolidge and his aunt stomped across the Alps, following the routes described by members of the Alpine Club. Basing themselves in Grindelwald, they adopted Christian Aimer as their personal guide, and while climbing few new peaks made numerous second ascents. With Aimer’s assistance they started the (never very popular) trend for winter mountaineering, becoming the first people to make winter ascents of the Wetterhorn, the Jungfrau and other Oberland peaks. They also instigated the concept of the high bivouac, in which a single tent pitched at a high level enabled them to climb peak after peak in succession, thereby cutting out the tiresome and time-consuming slog from the valley. Meta Brevoort was the more adventurous of the two; Coolidge was tough but technically insecure. He was insecure in other ways too: lacking a mother he clung to his aunt; and when, after a retreat from the Eiger in 1868, Christian Aimer gave him a consolation gift of a tan mongrel named Tschingel, he clung to the dog too. Tschingel became famous as the dog that climbed Alps, following his master up peak after peak. During his lifetime Tschingel made eleven first ascents, and accompanied Coolidge up more than 150 other mountains. After several litters of puppies Coolidge began to refer to him as ‘her’, but Meta Brevoort was made of sterner stuff: for her, Tschingel was always a ‘him’.
In 1870 the unique combination of aunt, dog and nephew - who was by now a bulbous-headed 20-year-old - reached the Dauphiné. ‘I am not quite sure what it was that made us choose Dauphiné as our battleground,’ Coolidge later wrote, ‘but I believe it was ambition. There was a whole world out there and that was enough for us.’5 It was an unsavoury world but it was one that contained the highest unclimbed mountain in the Alps and so, that June, he, his aunt and their dog, escorted by Christian Aimer and his son, Ulrich, set out to conquer the Meije.
Coolidge and his aunt had studied the available literature and in doing so must have come across A. W. Moore’s report to the Alpine Club on the Meije’s accessibility. Peering at it in the winter of 1869 Moore wrote that ‘the more I looked at the mountain, the less hopeful did I become; and in the end I signally failed to discover any line of approach at all promising. The final peak resembles the Aiguille du Dru, and even to reach its base would be no easy task.’6 He hoped, however, ‘that some enterprising person will, at any rate, go and give the mountain a fair trial; if successful, he will have the satisfaction of vanquishing one of the noblest and most formidable of Alpine peaks’.7
Coolidge wanted to be that enterprising person. He and his aunt walked over the passes to La Grave where Meta Brevoort found everything that had been said about the Dauphiné to be true. ‘Such an inn!’ she wrote to Coolidge’s mother. ‘The floor of our room black as the ace of spades, a bag of flour and a sieve in one corner. No means of washing apparent, flowers spread out to dry on the floor, no pillows, sheets like dishcloths! Will went to bed while his clothes were drying and, concluding it was the best place for him, stayed there.’8 Outside the Meije looked ‘so unpromising that we entertained but slight hope of succeeding in attaining its summit’.9
The Meije - whose name they discovered was patois for femme - comprised three peaks skirted by glaciers. One peak, the easternmost, was lower than the other two and linked to them so casually that it might almost have been a separate entity. It was to the central and western peaks, therefore, that they turned their attention. From where they stood the central peak looked the highest. It also looked the most difficult, a triangle of sheer rock that leaned outward towards La Grave. On 25 June they sent the Aimers to reconnoitre while they dawdled away an afternoon in the woods, Meta Brevoort knitting while Coolidge recited Macaulay on the banks of a stream. The Aimers returned with the information that the central peak looked difficult but not impossible; the overhang could be circumvented and they had found a place where they could bivouac on the first night.
The party left at 11.00 a.m. on 27 June 1870, and crossed the glacier to the Aimers’ chosen campsite. The wind blew and none of them slept very well. At 4.20 a.m. on Tuesday, 28 June, they left Tschingel in the tent and moved on. They had a nasty moment when they climbed a set of rocks so steep and smooth that, in Christian Aimer’s view they were as bad as ‘the rocks on the Italian side of the Matterhorn without the ropes’.10 But they managed to wriggle over them - Meta Brevoort having discarded her dress in favour of trousers - and at 12.10 p.m. they reached the top where, to Coolidge’s dismay, they saw that they had climbed the wrong peak: ‘what was our horror to find that the west peak overtopped us’.11 The difference in height was minimal - some 40 feet, by Coolidge’s estimate - and he had wild hopes of crossing the ridge that linked them but was stopped by Aimer, who ‘pronounced it utterly impossible for any human being to reach the summit as it was sheer on all sides’.12 With that admonition they retreated to their tent, where Tschingel greeted them delightedly. They spent the night there and reached La Grave at 10.45 the next morning.
Meta Brevoort’s heel was hurting from a pair of boots that had not been worn in, Christian Aimer was snow-blind, they were all ‘in a very much burnt condition’,13 and they had not reached the summit. They had, however, done what none of the best mountaineers dared do. The central peak - any peak - of the Meije had escaped Whymper, Moore, Walker and other big names from the Golden Age. The American parvenus had climbed it at first go, so they had cause for congratulation. They clambered into a carriage with the Aimers and rode exultantly through the mountains to Monastier, a village that was a good base for future conquests and in which they were mistaken for wizards accompanied by a witch. Here they settled into another Dauphiné hotel. ‘We are lodged in a most peculiar room with a vaulted roof,’ wrote Meta Brevoort. ‘Almost everything is kept in it. Flour, bed clothes, saws, shovels, bird cages, wine skins, hub, clothes, sieves, an old clock, water pipes, brooms, old chest of trunks; and Will’s bed is made of a table which is also a large chest with a sliding top to it.’14
Meta Brevoort was crippled by her boots and remained at Monastier while Coolidge and the Aimers rushed over the Écrins, Mont Pelvoux and - a first - the 12,874-foot Ailéfroide. As she waited she barricaded her room against a drunken debauch that lasted until 2.00 in the morning and thereafter came out only to collect her meals. ‘The eggs became exhausted, which were my principal food,’ she told her sister, ‘so I have lived on nuts and bread and honey and a small allowance of water. Soup (which is water, butter, salt, potatoes and herbs) I have eaten on days I did not happen to see it made.’15 They walked back to civilisation having spent a fortnight in the Dauphiné and caught carriages and coaches back to Britain. The Meije was unbroken but, as Coolidge said, ‘for me it will ever be surrounded by a halo of romance’.16 Others thought so too.
In 1873 a team of six Britons surveyed the western peak from La Grave and were disheartened. Their two guides, both named Baumann, thought the task impossible. ‘When Hans Baumann was questioned about it he gave it as his opinion that one Herr and two guides might get up, if they never wished to come down again,’ wrote their leader. ‘Peter Baumann, doubling the amount at which he usually declined anything, declared two thousand francs an insufficient sum to induce him to make the attempt.’17 Nevertheless, they went up the central peak, following in Coolidge’s steps, and tried the arête to the western peak only to find it ‘unspeakably formidable’.18 They returned to London with the news that the Dauphiné was as squalid as ever, that their landlord had added the day of the month to their bill and that ‘the maps of the neighbourhood of the Meije are … without a single exception … grossly and grotesquely inaccurate’.19
Clouds of mountaineers swirled round the Meije over the next four years. French, Swiss, British and Italian, they came, failed and went home again. They tried to climb the western peak from all points of the compass; they went singly, in large groups and in small; they attacked it year after year and day after day. In 1875 ten parties -two of which were composed of guides alone - poked and prodded at the Meije. That August one group climbed the central peak twice and made a determined assault from a different direction within the space of three days. The mountain was only slightly less busy in 1876. A Frenchman named Cordier claimed to have conquered the western peak but was forced to retract when it became obvious that he had not. Another Frenchman, Henri Duhamel, wrestled with the southern face for three successive days, trying three new and fruitless routes before departing in search of easier prey - and at the end of his journey reporting that, whatever the English might think, French surveyors had triangulated the Meije impeccably.
‘I have no hesitation in saying that every one of these [routes] ought to be tried again,’ wrote a British climber, Henry Gotch, who in June 1876 had joined the list of failures. ‘A little more or less snow might make all the difference wanted. But the assailant of the Meije should be no ordinary man; he should be able to subsist on anything or nothing, he should be flea-proof and fly-proof, he should be able to sleep in any posture or go without sleep altogether, his senses of smell and hearing should be removable at will, he should have no prejudices as to his personal cleanliness or health, and above all he should have the power of waiting.’20
Coolidge also returned for a second attempt in that year but decided the weather was too bad. Meta Brevoort, who was unable to accompany him, was despondent when Coolidge sent a letter detailing the depth of competition. ‘Alas! Alas!’ she replied, ‘And to think of all the others who will be coming and of the one who may succeed. Dear Will, give my love … to that glorious Meije and ask her to keep herself for me.’21 In a burst of adopted patriotism she feared not only that someone other than herself might climb the Meije but that that someone might be a foreigner. ‘Have you found out whether, as we thought there must be, there is any English blood in Cordier?’22 she enquired.
Brevoort was then staying at the Hôtel Bel Alp above the Aletsch glacier, looking after Coolidge’s sick sister Lil. While she was there she had the opportunity of meeting one of the giants of the Matterhorn, John Tyndall, who had come to Bel Alp for his honeymoon. The struggle which had first inspired Meta now seemed a distant and uninteresting thing compared to her own. She did not engage with the Tyndalls, but sneered at them from a distance. ‘She is very plain and thirty if a day old. He looks old and ghastly,’ she wrote, disapprovingly. ‘Professor ‘I and his wife are very tender in their behaviour to one another, even in public. They walk off with their arms around one another and were seen kissing on one of the spurs of the Sparrenhorn the other day. They only join the vulgar herd at dinners, when he lectures away as usual.’23 It was a strange judgement for, by all accounts, the Tyndalls were a charming couple and the combative scientist had been mellowed by age and ill health. But Tyndall had lost the battle for the Matterhorn and it was perhaps this that soured Meta Brevoort against him; at such a crucial juncture she did not want to be associated with failure, particularly when it seemed so likely that she would, indeed, be beaten to the top of the Meije. Neither, perhaps, did she want to be reminded that Tyndall was a defeated man of 56 years and looked it; she herself was pushing 50 and might soon look similarly time-worn. Distraction came with the prospect of climbing Mount Everest. Among her fellow guests were a British couple named Walker from India. ‘He has told me lots about Mt. Everest,’ she wrote to Coolidge. ‘No fear of wild beasts, nor rains at the proper season, nor hostile natives if one could get properly accredited, but the height he thinks would be an insuperable objection.’24 She and the Walkers went outside where, by pointing at a cloud, Mrs Walker tried to explain how high Everest appeared on the horizon. Height was a mere technicality, Meta Brevoort decided. Within days she was firing off letters to friends enquiring about the practicalities of such an expedition. The power of waiting, which Gotsch had recommended, was not one of her fortes.
That August, while Brevoort fretted in Bel Alp, Coolidge went with Christian Aimer on a tour of the Dolomites, the precipitous towers of orange rock that lay to the east of Switzerland. ‘A veil of mystery still shrouded the Dolomites,’ he wrote, ‘even in the case of those who do not count themselves to belong to the vulgar crowd.’25* He had ‘some vague idea of undertaking their minute exploration, if they and I happened to agree’.26 They did not agree: they lacked snow; the sight of so many vertical pinnacles made him uneasy; to climb them required mountaineering methods that had yet to be introduced; and the Meije still waited. ‘I still have longings after this marvellous region,’ he later wrote. ‘But my attention became gradually fixed on the more westerly portion of the Alps. Yet in the Autumn of 1876 it for a while hung in the balance … The South Western Alps won the day.’27
Christmas approached. Coolidge and his aunt were by this time living in Oxford, where his intellectual precocity had gained him a Fellowship at Magdalen College - of which, as a displaced foreigner, he was rightly proud. He was planning their campaigns for 1877 and she was compiling material for a sensational book to be called ‘Perils of the Alps’. Everything seemed hopeful and positive. Then Meta caught rheumatic fever. It was bad but not that bad, and recovery seemed certain. She was in good health on the morning of 19 December when she received a request for her signed photograph from one of her Meije rivals, Duhamel. Quite suddenly, that afternoon, she died.
Coolidge was bereft. He had been exceptionally close to his aunt -so much so that some thought he was her son. He had spent a formative part of his life with her. She had been his closest companion during the unsettling process of moving from one continent to another. She had been his ‘dear Ducky’ and he her ‘darling Will’. When she died, his life changed irrevocably - or, more exactly, it ceased to change. After 19 December 1876, he sought nothing new, made no close relationships, looked only to the past and travelled only to places with which he was acquainted. From the safety of his cloisters (where he taught history) he now peered at the world, suspiciously and antagonistically, through the shade of Meta Brevoort.
His aunt’s memorial was to be the conquest of the Meije. In 1877 Coolidge went back to the Dauphiné to complete the task on her behalf. The Meije was as frantic as ever. Duhamel was there, so was Cordier and their compatriot Paul Guillemin. A fourth Frenchman was also in evidence, a pop-eyed youngster named Emmanuel Boileau de Castelnau. Britain’s Lord Wentworth sprang fruitlessly at the mountain twice in two late June days. Meanwhile, hovering fitfully in the background was a Briton called Maund, ‘whose fitness is a chronic marvel’.28 By now they were hammering at the mountain from all directions. La Bérarde, a village which lay to the south of the Meije, was almost as thronged as La Grave to the north. Coolidge eschewed both north and south faces, choosing instead an approach via the Breche on 22 July. He failed, like everybody else. Guillemin attacked it from two different angles on 30 July; Boileau de Castelnau also returned disappointed on 30 July, despite having the assistance of the Dauphiné’s best guides, Pierre Gaspard and his son. Cordier did not even bother to try, but went up a nearby peak and was killed when, short-sightedly, he glissaded into a glacial stream - tragically, the drop was only twelve feet. Coolidge decided there was nothing more to be done that season and went back to Oxford. He was slightly disturbed by Boileau de Castelnau, who was plotting a fresh attempt even as he left. But he was sure that the Frenchman would never make it.