436 PRÆTERITA-II

206. So earnestly was my heart set on discovering and contending with the neglect and error which were the causes of so great evil to so noble a people, that-I must here anticipate the progress of many years-I was in treaty again and again for pieces of land near the chain of Mont Blanc on which I thought to establish my life, and round which to direct its best energies. I first actually bought the piece of meadow in Chamouni above the chalets of Blaitière; but sold it on perceiving what ruin was inevitable in the valley after it became a tourist rendezvous.¹ Next, I entered into treaty with the Commune of Bonneville for the purchase of the whole top of the Brezon; but this negotiation came to nothing, because the Commune, unable to see why anybody should want to buy a waste of barren rock, with pasturage only for a few goats in the summer, concluded that I had found a gold mine or a coal-bed in it, and raised their price on me till I left the Brezon on their hands: (Osborne Gordon having also walked up with me to my proposed hermitage, and, with his usual sagacity, calculated the daily expense of getting anything to eat, up those 4000 feet from the plain).

207. Next, I was tempted by a grand, fourteenth-century, square-set castle, with walls six feet thick, and four round towers, cone-roofed, at the angles, on the west bank of the Arve, below La Roche:² but this baronial residence having been for many years used by the farmer to whom it belonged for his fruit store, and the three floors of it only accessible by ladders through trap doors in them, and soaked through with the juice of rotten apples and plums;-so that the most feasible way of making the place habitable would have been to set fire to the whole, and refit the old masonry with an inner lodging of new wood,-(which might as well have been built inside a mountain cave

¹ [The land at Chamouni was bought in 1863. For the proposed purchase of the Brezon, see Vol. XVII. pp. lxxii.-lxxvi.]

² [See Ruskin’s letter to his mother from Mornex (August 31, 1862): Vol. XVII. p. lv. The château is seen in Plate IV. in that volume (p. lx.).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]