Ladies’ Edinburgh Magazine > Volume 5

A t Home and A broad. 5 ^
factories on Prince B. D.'s estates demand his attendance.
But these leave-takings are all over, the doors are shut, and
the three trains are started in their different directions.
Ours is soon running southwards along the edge of the Lac
du Bourget. This is the ' Lwc' of Lamartine's elegiac muse,
and of Medermeyer's music—the lake which we shall know
for so many weeks, since our headquarters are to be fixed
at Aix-les-Bains for the summer.
You come to Aix an invalid and a cripple, and its waters
soon reduce you to a state of still greater suffering. The
doctor smiles blandly, and assures you that this is all right,
since these waters ' viennent frapper a toutes les portes.' It
may be so, but in the meantime, through the long, hot days
and the hot nights, you must have something to distract
your attention from all these pains.
So you send for some books, and you hope for great things
from them.
What have they sent us from Bolliet's Library ? First,
a guide to the Grande Chartreuse. Ah ! that will never do.
Getting up at six the one day, to return after dark the next,
after having seen the desert and the cascade, and the terrible
mountain wildernesses that lie between Chambery and Gre¬
noble, is not to be thought of It makes one tired even to
hear of it, or of excursions to the Semnoz-Alpe, or to the top
of the Dent du Chat either. So that book may be sent back.
Then try Lamartine's Raphael, which is a very sentimental
description of Aix and its environs. Yes ; and take also
the volume of his poems; we can read them on the brows
of the Tresserve under the big chestnuts, or of an evening
on the jetty in the lake, when the little cue-owls hoot, and
the evening star hurries down behind the black rampart of
mountains that shuts in Savoy on the side of the district of
Belley. Lamartine being accepted, we turn next to the
works of Ducis the academician, whom Napoleon used to
call the plre Ducis, and whose family still inhabit Chambery.
Then we had better secure that volume of Noel's, in Bressan
dialect, for these carols are authentic as well as curious.
And we cannot go wrong in keeping the last number of the
Revue des deux Mondes, whose editor, Buloz, had a country-
house down below Le Bourget, not far from La Serraz, or
from that little white house at Bissy, which still belongs to
the family of De Maistre.
And what is there to be had besides all this, and the
works of the two De Maistres ? Ah ! a volume of the letters
of St. Francis de Sales. Certainly, let us keep that also: only
I shall not read it till I have seen the castle near Annecy,