“He who ascends the mountain rises towards the light.” I’m reminded of this aphorism from a long-dead author as the trees start to thin out above Preda (1,789m), the highest rail station north of Switzerland’s Albula Pass.
What kind of trees? The slanting October sun backlights a particoloured forest of golden larches and gloomy Arolla pines. Yet I wouldn’t have noticed their cohabitation unless I’d just been reading a late work by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and his wife Athénaïs (1826–1899). There’s surely a wistful note in their write-up of these very woods:
The whole life of the country has centred in two trees: the heroic and vigorous arolla, which, if left to itself, would endure almost forever; and the smiling larch, incessantly renewed, and its yearly verdure simulating eternal youth.
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| Landscape in the Engadine. Illustration from Jules Michelet, La Montagne. |
The remark comes halfway through a chapter subtitled “Decay of the tree and of man”. Michelet and his younger wife are travelling in the Engadine valley, just south of my hike for the day. Yet, although they are taking a vacation, little in the way of holiday gaiety imbues his writing. In this chapter alone, the historian ruminates on winter’s approach, the destruction of the region’s forests, and the inevitable retreat of mountain plants in the face of interlopers from the plains:
To this wild ancient order, which was in all things distinguished by original characteristics, strongly marked, will succeed the new order, much richer but less varied, and with one object exactly like another.
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| Decay of the mountain forest. Illustration from Jules Michelet, La Montagne. |
I allow myself ten minutes for a second breakfast on a sunny boulder just above the treeline – no more, as there are a good thousand metres to gain between Preda and the Fuorcla da Tschitta (2,830 m), and the latter is only the first of two alpine passes in the day’s plan.
Minutes after setting out again, I start up a magnificent fox, who runs up and over an old moraine wall to escape. When Michelet published La Montagne, in 1868, an icecap would have surmounted the peak ahead, but its moraines now embrace nothing but boulders and rubble.
At least the glaciers have left some traces of their passing. It’s difficult to say the same of Michelet’s mountain book. An English translation, published by Thomas Nelson in 1886, seems to have done little to promote him abroad. Fortunately, Michelet had made his name decades before with his multivolume history of France. Even today, he is remembered as the first to use the term “Renaissance” in its modern sense of a cultural movement.
So what was Michelet doing, late in life, writing about mountains? The answer resides in the second Mme. Michelet. For theirs was a very literary marriage. The then Mlle. Athénaïs Mialaret started a correspondence with Michelet while she was tutoring the children of Princess Cantacuzène in Vienna, and married him in 1849, a decade after the death of his first wife.
Inspiring in her husband an interest in natural history, Athénaïs worked with him on a series of books: La Montagne (1868) was the fourth to appear, after L'Oiseau (1856), L'Insecte (1857) and La Mer (1861). La Montagne appeared under his name only, but Athénaïs contributed at least two chapters, focusing mainly on alpine flowers.
Their joint authorship may account for La Montagne’s uneven style. While Jules Michelet likes to sum matters up in a pithy maxim, as above, Athénaïs tends towards the effusive:
The peerless spring-anemone bent downwards, attired in a fairy garb of pale lilac. Her hour had already passed. She lay, as it were, asleep in the dream of a happy moment. Long, soft, airy, and electric silken folds falling over her head, enwrapped her maternal bosom. In this first apparition of the Alp I greeted a sweet and charming soul, which revealed to me the presence of God in a wilderness of desolation.
Pushing through a wilderness of desolation left behind by a vanished corrie glacier, I come up on the first pass, the Fuorcla da Tschitta (2,830m), well before noon.
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| Piz Ela from the Fuorcla da Tschitta. |
But any sense of self-congratulation crumbles when two women skim up from the opposite direction. Kitted out as trail runners, they have already despatched two thirds of this 26-kilometre circuit around the massive dolomitic bulwark of Piz Ela (3,339m). Since I am shod more traditionally in Vibram-soled boots and carry a pack with a heavy old-school DSLR, I need to get a move on. October days are short…
(To be continued)
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