CHAPTER XI

L’HOTEL DU MONT BLANC

203. THE little inn at Samoens, where I washed the stairs down for my mother,¹ was just behind the group of houses of which I gave a carefully coloured sketch to Mrs. John Simon, who, in my mother’s old age, was her most deeply trusted friend. She, with her husband, love Savoy even more than I; were kinder to Joseph Couttet to the last, and are so still to his daughter Judith.²

The Samoens inn was, however, a too unfavourable type of the things which-in my good old times-one had sometimes to put up with, and rather liked having to put up with, in Savoy. The central example of the sort of house one went there to live in, was the Hotel du Mont Blanc at St. Martin’s; to me, certainly, of all my inn homes, the most eventful, pathetic, and sacred.

204. How to begin speaking of it, I do not know; still less how to end; but here are three entries, consecutive, in my diary of 1849, which may lead me a little on my way:-

“ST. MARTIN’S, evening, July 11th.-What a strange contrast there is between these lower valleys, with their over-wrought richness mixed with signs of waste and disease, their wild noon-winds shaking their leaves into palsy, and the dark storms folding themselves about their steep mural precipices,-between these and the pastoral green, pure aiguilles, and fleecy rain-clouds of Chamouni; yet nothing could be more divine than (to-day) the great valley of level cornfield; half, smooth

¹ [See above, § 197 (p. 428), where Ruskin places the incident at Sixt.]

² [For Ruskin’s friendship with Sir John and Lady Simon, see the Introduction to the next volume.]

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