Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland

beauties of the valley are an unfortunate preparation for the dull expanse of ugly France which greets the traveller passing north from the former town; but the country soon

f the soil. The branches become covered with moss, which first kills them, and then breaks them off, so that many tall and tapering sapins point their heads to the sky with trunks wholly guiltless of branches; while in other cases, wh

pon the improvement which the railway would effect, by providing ventilation for the forest, he gave so much information on that subject, and gave it so pl

ys, had free entry into all the towns of the Comté; and when Burgundy was becoming imperial, Maximilian extended this privilege through all the towns of the empire. A hundred years later, it had so high a character, that the troops of Henri IV. turned away from the town, announcing that they did not wish to attack ceulx estoient du naturel de leur vin, qui frappe partout;[26] and the king was forced to come himself, with his constable and marshals, to beat down the walls, in the course of which undertaking his men felt the vigour of the inhabitants to a greater extent than he liked. It is said that when he had taken the town, the municipality received him in state, and supplied him with wine of the country. He praised

bois, mother-in-law to Philip V. and Charles IV. of France, which outdoes legend of Bishop Hatto. Mahaut d'Artois was an elderly lady remarkable for her charities, and was by consequence always surrounded by large crowds of poor folk during her residence at the Chatelaine, the ruins of which lie a mi

nfrequently returned by water rather late in the evening; and so it fell out that one night he was drowned. The lady naturally grieved sorely for her loss, and put in train all possible means for recovering her lover's body. Time, however, passed on, and no success attended her efforts, till at length she caused the hills which dammed up the waters to be pierced, and then De Chissey was found. A village sprang up near the outlet thus made, and took thence its name Percée, or, as men now spell it, Parcey; and the rich vegetation which speedily covered the valley, where once the lake had been, gave it such an air of happiness and beauty, that the people remembered its origin, and called it th

Now at length it was seen how, whatever the result of a battle, there was always a proximus collis for the conquered party to retire to; and it would have

s. He promised me a rich Julian feast in Besan?on, and was greatly affected when he found that the Englishman could give him C?sar's description of his native town. He wholly denied the amphitheatre with which one of our handbooks has gifted it; and this denial was afterwards echoed by every one in Besan?on, some even thinking it necessary to explain the diff

on. As so often happened in other cases, he advised me not to go to it, but rather, if I must see a cave, to go to the Grotto of Ocelles,[30] a collection of thirty or more caverns and galleries near the Doubs, below Besan?on. Seeing, however, that I was bent on visiting the glacière, he advised me not

terest. It witnessed the catastrophe of Julius Vindex, who had made terms with Rufus, the general sent against him by Nero, but was attacked by the troops of Rufus before they learned the alliance concluded between the two generals. Vindex was so much grieved by the slaughter of his troops, and the blow thus struck, by an unhappy accident, at his designs against the emperor, that he put himself to death at the gates of the town, while the fight was still going on.[31] The Bisuntians claim to themselves the glory acquired by the Sequani, whose chief city Vesontio was, by the overthrow of Julius Sabin

illée, is attributed by the various inhabitants to pretty nearly all the famous emperors and kings who have lived from Julius C?sar to Louis XIV.: it owes its origin, no doubt, to the construction of the aqueduct which formerly brought into the town the waters pouring out of the rock at Arcier, two leagues from Besan?on, and was the work probably of M. Aurelius and L. Verus. Local antiquaries assign the aqueduct to Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, apparently for no better reason than because he built a similar work in Rome. The arch of triumph[33] at the entrance to the upper town has been an inexhaustible subject of controversy for many ge

orders is given, that a German patois from the left bank of the Rhine is their only extensive language. One of these won my eternal gratitude by providing a clean fork at a crisis between the last savouries and the plat doux; for the usual practice with the waiters, when anyone neglected to secure his knife and fork for the next course, was to slip the plate from under the unwonted charge, and leave those instruments sprawling on the tablecloth in a vengeful mess of gravy. Chickens' bones were there dealt with on all sides as nature perhaps intended that they should be dealt with, namely, by taking them between finger and thumb, and removing superfluities with the teeth; and French officers with wasp-like waists, a

nd a lead pencil vanished from the table. When it was suggested to him that possibly they had been blown into some corner, and so swept away, he brought a dustpan from a distant part of the house, and miraculously discovered the stamps perched upon a small handful of dust t

een miles; but the man asserted that instead of five leagues it was a good seven or eight, and so it turned out to be. This glacière may be called a historical glacière, being the only one which has attracted general attention; and the mistake about its distance from Besan?on arose very many years ago, and has been perpetuated by a long series of copyists. The distance may not be more than five leagues when measured on the map with a ruler; but until the tunnels and via-ducts necessa

kicking-strap, ingeniously placed so that each whisk of the horse's tail caught one or other rein; and then the process of extraction was a somewhat dangerous one, for there was no splashboard, and the driver had to stow his legs away out of reach, before commencing operations. The landlord of the inn at Mühlinen, on the road from Kandersteg to Thun, has a worse arrangement than even this, both rein

of the plain are flooded, the superfluous waters vanishing after a time into a great hole, whose powers of digestion he could not explain. The villages which lie on the shores, as it were, of the lake, rejoice in church-towers with bulbous domes, rising out of rich clusters of trees, and the early bells rang out through the crisp air with something of a Belgian sweetness

and other things, and consisted of coffee in its native pot, and dry bread: the milk was set on the table in the pan in which it had been boiled, and a soup-ladle and a French wash-hand basin took the place of cup and spoon. A cat kept the door against sundry large and tailless dogs, whose appetites had not gone with their tails; and a

as if that comparative led into an eighth heaven--better even than absinthe. I had an opportunity of tasting this liqueur some weeks after, a few minutes below the summit of Mont Blanc, and certainly no one would suspect its great strength, which is entirely disguised by an innocent and insidious sweetness, as unlike absinthe as anything can possibly be: impressions, however, respecting meat and drink, and all other matters, are not very trustworthy when received near the top of the Calotte. It has lately been found that the worthy

, that English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English are a sad and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made o

ch more neat and orderly, and of course less grand, than their contorted kindred farther south. The valley speedily became very narrow, and a final bend brought us face-to-face with the buildings of the Abbaye de Grace-Dieu, striking from their position--filling, as they do, the breadth of the valley,--but in no way remarkable architecturally. The journey had been so long that it was now ten o'clock; and as we were due in Besan?on at five in the evening, we put the horse up as quickly as possible, in a shed provided by the Brothers, and set off on foot for the glacière, half an hour distant. About a mile and a half from the convent, the valley comes to an end, the rocks on the opposite sides approaching so close to each other as only to leave room for a large flour-mill, belonging to the Brothers, and for t

nouncement which seemed to take all the pleasure out of the expedition, and invested it with the disagreeable character of sightseeing. The poor driver thought, no doubt, with some trepidation upon the small amount of pour-boire he could expect from a monsieur on whom a demand for two pence produced so serious an effect, an

ble part of this some grasses and flowers are to be found: the last 208 feet are covered more or less with ice; though, at the time of my visit, the furious rains of the end of June, 1864, had washed down a considerable amount of mud, and so covered some of the ice. There were no ready means of determining the thickness of this layer of ice, for the descent of which ten or eleven zigzags had been made by the farmer. In one place, within 2

ve the bottom of the slope. This outer cave presents a curious appearance, from the distinctness with which the several strata of the limestone are marked, the lower strata weathered and rounded off like the seats of an amphitheatre of the giants, and all, up to the shell-like roof, arranged in horizontal semicircl

al, is passed, and thus includes 60 feet of the long slope of ice, from the foot of which t

THE GLACIèRE OF GRCE

water a foot deep, with bottom and banks of ice. The rock which composes the true floor rises at the farthest end of the cave, and the roof is so arranged that a sort of private chapel is there formed; and from a fissure in the dome a monster column of ice had been constructed on the floor, which, at the time of my visit, had lost its upper parts, and stood as a hollow truncated cone with sides a foot thick, and with seas of ice streaming from it, and covering the rising pavement of the chapel. Without an axe, and without help, I was unable to measure the girth of this column, which had not been without companions on a smaller scale in the immediate neighbourhood. At the west end of the cave, the wall was

had collected round the trunk of the fir-tree, branched out at the top into all varieties of eccentricity and beauty, each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid bar of frosted ice, with graceful curve, affording a point of suspension for complicated groups of icicles, which streamed down side by side with emulous loveliness. In some of the recesses of the column, the ice assumed a pale blue colour; but as a rule it was white and very hard, not so regularly prismatic as the ice described in former glacières, but palpably crystalline, showing a structure not unlike granite, with a bold grain, and with a large predominance of the glittering element. But the westernmost mass was the grandest and most beautiful of all. It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty, resembling a family group of lions' heads in a subdued attitude of grief, richly decked with icy manes. Similar heads seemed to grow out here and there from the solid sides of the huge mass. The girth was 76 1/2 feet, measured about 2 feet from the floor. When this column was looked at from the

probably will be held to explain, the present excess of height above that of earlier times.[37] The citizen Girod-Chantrans, who wrote this description, had procured the notes of a medical man living in the neighbourhood, from which it seemed that Dr. Oudot made the experiment, in 1779, of fixing stakes of wood in the heads of the columns, then from 4 to 5 feet high, and found that these stakes were the cause of a very large increase in the height of the columns, ice gathering round them in pillars a foot thick. So that it is not improbable th

a drawing-board on a large stone in the middle of the pond of water which has been mentioned, and the other on a bundle of pencils at the entrance of the end chapel, in a part of the cave where the ice-floor ceased for a while, and left the stones and rock bare. The former gave 33°, the latter, till I was on the point of leaving, 31 1/2°, when it fell suddenly to 31°. It was impossible, however, to stay any longer for the sake of watching the thermometer fall lower and lower below the freezing point; indeed, the results of sundry incautious fathomings of the

the cave. After a time, however, it came to a corner which it seemed an unnecessary risk to attempt to pass alone; and my prudence was rewarded by the discovery that, after all, the supposed cave could not be thus reached. It is sai

an one thing, and a char in the village of Chaux another; but the difference between 12 quintaux and 50 or 60 is too great to be thus explained, and probably Madame Briot made some mistake. Her husband, Louis Briot, works alone in the cave, and has twelve men and a donkey to carry the ice he quarries to the village of Chaux, a mile from the glacière, where it is loaded for conveyance to Besan?on. He uses gunpowder for the flooring of ice, and expects the eighth part of a pound to blow out a cubic metre; and if, by ill luck, the ice thus procured has stones on the lowe