The Counts of Gruyère

Appendix 139

BIBLIOGRAPHY 141

ILLUSTRATIONS

LA PLACE DE GRUYERE Frontispiece From a watercolour by Colonel R. Goff

THE CHATEAU Facing p. 10

GATEWAY " 22

LACE-MAKERS " 38

FORTIFIED HOUSES--NORTH WALL " 56

THE CITY ON THE HILL " 72

TERRACE OF THE CHATEAU " 90

CHURCH OF ST. THEODATE " 112

JOUSTING COURT " 132

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THE COUNTS OF GRUYERE

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BIS SEPTEM SEACULA CURRENT MOENIA FUNDAVIT BELLO FORTISSIMUS HAEROS VANDALUS ATQUE SUO SIGNAVIT NOMINE MUROS GRUS VIXIT AGNOMEN COMITE DEDIT ADVENA PRIMO RUBEA GRUEM VEXILLA AC SCUTI PILOSI SUSTENTENT QUORUM EUTIS PARRIDA RUGIS AC ARMATA MANUS VULSIS RADICIBUS ARAE EST HUIC CELEBRIS SERVES ET LONGA PROPAGO NEPOTUM DIVES OPUM OLIVES PIETA VESTIS AURIS EXTITIT ET NOSTRIS PER PLURIMA SAECULA TERRAS PRAEFUIT GRUERIUS SEXTAE LEGIONIS VANDALORUM DUX

ANNO 436

Behold now twice seven centuries.--That a Vandal hero bravest among warriors.--Founded this fortress.--This fortified city has since preserved the name of the Grue.--The stranger became the first count.--His descendants carried the Grue on their scarlet banners.--And on their hairy shields.--To the Vandal hero succeeded a long line of illustrious descendants.--Rich in fortune, rich in their piety.--These Counts won the order of the golden vest.--And for many centuries the posterity of Gruerius.--Chief of the sixteenth Vandal legion who lived in the year 436 governed our country.

PROLOGUE

On the edge of a green plain around which rise the first steps of the immense amphitheatre of the Alps, a little castled city enthroned on a solitary hill watches since a thousand years the eternal and surpassing spectacle.

Around its feet a river runs, a silver girdle bending northward between pastures green, while eastward over the towering azure heights the sunrise waves its flags of rose and gold.

In the dim hours of twilight or by a cloudy moonlight, the city pitched amid the drifting aerial heights seems built itself of air and cloud, evanescent and unreal.

By the fair light of noonday, sharp and clear upon its eminence, it is like a Duerer drawing, massed lines of crenelated bastions, sharp-pointed belfreys, and towered gateways completing a mediaeval vignette ideal in composition. Strange as the distant vision seems to the traveler fresh from the rude and time-stained chalets of the mountains, still more surprising is the scene which greets his arrival by the precipitous road, past the double towered gateway, within the city walls. Expressly set it seems for a theatrical decor in its smiling gayety, its faultlessly pictorial effect. Every window in the blazoned houses is blossoming with brightest flowers, as for a perpetual fete. The voices of the people are soft with a strange Italianate patois, and the women at the fountain, the children at their play, the old men sunning themselves beside the deep carved doorways are seemingly living the happy holiday life which belongs to the picture. The one street in the city, opening widely in a long oval place, is bounded by stone houses fortified without and bearing suspended galleries for observation and defence, forming thus a continuous rampart along the whole extent of the hillside.

At the eastern extremity of this enclosure beyond the slender belfrey of the Hotel de Ville and the ancient shrine where a great crucifix looks down upon the scene, a flagged pathway rises sharply under a tall clock tower within the enceinte of the castle set at the steep extremity of the ridge. There behind strong walls a terrace looks from a crenelated parapet over the descending sunset plains, a prospect as fair as any in all Italy. Within a second rampart, semi-circular in form, the castle with its interior court looks eastward and southward over the encircling valley with its winding river, up to the surrounding nether heights of the Bernese Oberland. Walls twelve feet in thickness tell the history of its ancient construction, and chambers cut in the massive stone foundations recall the rude life of the early knights and vassals who defended this chateau-fort from the Saracen invasion. Noble halls, later superimposed upon the earlier foundations, with stone benches flanking the walls and recessed windows overlooking the jousting court, evoke the glittering days of chivalry and the vision of the sovereign race of counts who here held their court.

Ten centuries have passed over this castle on the hill; six told the story of its sovereignty over the surrounding country, but unlike most of the chateaux of Switzerland it has been carefully restored and maintains its feudal character. The caparisoned steeds no longer gallop along the ancient road, the crested knights no longer break their lances in the jousting court; but in the wide street of the little city is heard a speech, and in the valleys and from the hillsides echo herdsmen's songs, which contain Latin and French words, Greek, Saracen and German, a patois holding in solution the long story of the past.

GRUYERE

CHAPTER I. Origin of the People

ORIGIN OF THE PEOPLE

Triply woven of the French, German and Italian races, the Swiss nation discovers in its Romand or French strain another triple weave of Celtic-Romand-Burgundian descent.

While the high mountainous regions of eastern Switzerland were early scaled and settled by the Germanic tribes, the western were still earlier inhabited by the ancient Celtic-Helvetians and then civilized and cultivated by the most luxurious of Roman colonies. Resisting first and then happily mingling with their Roman conquerors, the Celtic people were transformed into a Romand race, similar in speech and origin to the French. In the heart of this Romand country was an ancient principality where the essential qualities of the beauty loving and imaginative races, Roman and Celtic, expressed themselves uniquely. A fountain of Celtic song and legend, a centre of chivalry and warlike power, this principality is known only to the outer world by the pastoral product which bears its name "Gruyere."

Remarkable in the interest of the unbroken line of its valorous and lovable princes, and in the precious and enchanting race mixture of its brave, laughter-loving people, its supreme historical interest lies in its little recorded and astonishing political significance among the independent feudal principalities of Europe.

When the Teuton barbarians came to devastate the enchanting loveliness of the templed Roman garden which was Switzerland for three idyllic centuries, they stopped at last at the penultimate peaks of the Occidental Alps, at a certain region called aux fenils (ad fines), where a glacial stream rushes across the narrow valley of the Griesbach, among the southern mountains of the Bernese Oberland. Thus western or Romand Switzerland preserves a character definitely apart from the eastern, and this barrier across the Bernese valley, unpassed for a thousand years, still divides the German from the Romand speaking peasantry. To the north and west lies Gruyere, greenest of pastoral countries, uniquely set in a ring of azure heights, where like a lost Provence, the Romand spirit has preserved its eternal youthfulness and charm. Greatly loved by all the Swiss, its annals piously preserved by ancient chroniclers, this country is German only in its eastern rocky portion; but where the castle stands and in all the wide valleys which open towards the setting sun, it is of purest Romand speech and character. Here ruled for six hundred years a sovereign line of counts whose history, a pastoral epic, is melodious with song and legend, and glowing with all the pageantry and chivalry of the middle ages. Although skirted by the great Roman roads, and flanked by outpost towers, Gruyere was never romanized, being settled only in its outlying plains by occasional Gallo-Roman villas, while the interior country, ringed by a barrier of almost inaccessible mountains, was left to the early Helvetian adventurers who had first penetrated its wild forests and its mountain fastnesses. Here, unaffected alike by Roman domination or Teuton destruction, they had set up the altars of their Druid faith and here preserved their ancient customs and their speech.

Here also traveled the adventurous Greek merchants from old Massilia (Marseilles), leaving in their buried coins and in the Greek words of the Gruyere dialect the impress of their ancient visitation.

A country fit for mysterious rites, for the habitation of the nature deities of the Druid mythology, was Gruyere in those early days. The deep caverns, the "black" lakes, and the terrifying depths of the precipitous defiles through which the mountain streams rushed into marshy valleys, were frequented by wild beasts and birds, and haunted in the imagination of the people by fairies and evil spirits holding unholy commerce for the souls of men. Here until the Teuton invasion the early Celts lived unmolested, when some fugitives from the once smiling cities and the cultivated plains came to join them in the refuge of their mountain homes. Strange to their half-savage brothers were these softened and romanized Celts who had tended the olives and the vines on sunny lake sides, and who in earlier days had mingled in Dionysian revels with Roman maidens with curled locks and painted cheeks. Strange their tales of the white pagan temples, and all the glories of the imperial cities left smouldering in ashes after the Teuton hordes had worked their will. The arduous pioneer life of their predecessors and the task of clearing and cultivating their wild asylum among the mountains and the marshes was now their lot. Adopting slowly the altered speech of these later romanized inhabitants and converted to the Christian faith by Gallo-Roman priests, the indigenous inhabitants finally lost all memory of the teachings of their Druid bards and the firm belief in reincarnation which sent the Celtic warrior laughing to his death; but in the traditions of the peasantry, abounding with nature myths, sorcerers still haunt their mountain caves, fairies and May maidens still flutter about their crystal streams.

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