This student roused me into thinking about Bismarck for
myself.
Having lain down, all bathed in perspiration, during the ascent without
a guide of a mountain in Switzerland, I was accosted by a woman, who
feared I had come to some harm. I walked on up with her. She turned out
to be a young peasant woman from Normandy, who lived half-way up the
mountain. She had accompanied her husband to Switzerland, but cursed her
lot, and was always longing to be back in France. When I remarked that
it must be some consolation to live in so lovely a place, she
interrupted me with the most violent protests. A beautiful place! This!
The steep mountain, the bristly fir-trees and pine-trees, the snow on
the top and the lake deep down below--anything uglier it would be hard
to conceive. No fields, no pasture-land, no apple-trees! No indeed! If
she had to mention a country that really was beautiful, it was Normandy.
There was plenty of food for all there, you did not need to go either up
or down hill; there, thank God, it was flat. Did I think stones
beautiful, perhaps? She had not been down in the valley for five months,
and higher than her house she had never been and would never go; no,
thank you, not she! She let her husband fetch what they required for the
house; she herself sat and fretted all through the Winter; life then was
almost more than she could bear.
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