good-natured smile.




CHAPTER XIV

I Leave Zurich--Comic Adventure at Baden--Soleure--M. De Chavigni--M. and
Madame * * * I Act in a Play--I Counterfeit Sickness to Attain Happiness

M. Mote, my landlord, introduced his two sons to me. He had brought them
up like young princes. In Switzerland, an inn-keeper is not always a man
of no account. There are many who are as much respected as people of far
higher rank are in other countries. But each country has its own manners.
My landlord did the honours of the table, and thought it no degradation
to make his guests pay for the meal. He was right; the only really
degrading thing in the world is vice. A Swiss landlord only takes the
chief place at table to see that everyone is properly attended to. If he
have a son, he does not sit down with his father, but waits on the
guests, with napkin in hand. At Schaffhaus, my landlord's son, who was a
captain in the Imperial army, stood behind my chair and changed my plate,
while his father sat at the head of the table. Anywhere else the son
would have been waited on, but in his father's house he thought, and
rightly, that it was an honour to wait.

Such are Swiss customs, of which persons of superficial understanding
very foolishly make a jest. All the same, the vaunted honour and loyalty
of the Swiss do not prevent them from fleecing strangers, at least as
much as the Dutch, but the greenhorns who let themselves be cheated,
learn thereby that it is well to bargain before-hand, and then they treat