“Coppet is Hell in motion,” said Napoleon.  “The woman who lives there has a petticoat full of arrows that could hit a man were he seated on a rainbow.  She combines in her active head and strong heart Rousseau and Mirabeau; and then shields herself behind a shift and screams if you approach.  To attract attention to herself she calls, ‘Help, help!’”

The man who voiced these words was surely fit rival to the chatelaine of this vine-covered place of peace that lies smiling an ironical smile in the sunshine on yonder hillside.

Coppet bristles with history.

Could Coppet speak it must tell of Voltaire and Rousseau, who had knocked at its gates; of John Calvin; of Montmorency; of Hautville (for whom Victor Hugo named a chateau); of Fanny Burney and Madame Recamier and Girardin (pupil of Rousseau); and Lafayette and hosts of others who are to us but names, but who in their day were greatest among all the sons of men.

Chief of all was the great Necker, who himself planned and built the main edifice that his daughter “might ever call it home.”  Little did he know that it would serve as her prison, and that from here she would have to steal away in disguise.  But yet it was the place she called home for full two decades.  Here she wrote and wept and laughed and sang:  hating the place when here, loving it when away.  Here she came when De Stael had died, and here she brought her children.  Here she received the caresses of Benjamin Constant, and here she won the love of pale, handsome Rocco, and here, “when past age,” gave birth to his child.  Here and in Paris, in quick turn, the tragedy and comedy of her life were played; and here she sleeps.

In the tourist season there are many visitors at the chateau.  A grave old soldier, wearing on his breast the Cross of the Legion of Honor, meets you at the lodge and conducts you through the halls, the salon and the library.  There are many family portraits, and mementos without number, to bring back the past that is gone forever.  Inscribed copies of books from Goethe and Schiller and Schlegel and Byron are in the cases, and on the walls are to be seen pictures of Necker, Rocco, De Stael and Albert, the firstborn son, decapitated in a duel by a swinging stroke from a German saber, on account of a king and two aces held in his sleeve.

Beneath the old chateau dances a mountain brook, cold from the Jura; in the great courtway is a fountain and fish-pond, and all around are flowering plants and stately palms.  All is quiet and orderly.  No children play, no merry voices call, no glad laughter echoes through these courts.  Even the birds have ceased to sing.

The quaint chairs in the parlors are pushed back with precision against the wall, and the funereal silence that reigns supreme seems to say that death yesterday came, and an hour ago all the inmates of the gloomy mansion, save the old soldier, followed the hearse afar and have not yet returned.