Among other things that self-respecting pilgrims cannot do, is to ascend a mountain by means of a funicular railway; better stay at the bottom, and look up with reverence.  Therefore, instead of strolling out to the little station about twelve o’clock, with the view of reaching the restaurant on the plateau in time for dejeuner, we met on the balcony of the Bristol at seven in the morning.  There we fortified ourselves for a long walk, with eggs and cafe au lait, while Innocentina and Joseph grouped the animals at the foot of the steps.

The day was divinely young, and most divinely fair, when we set forth.  Only the soft fall of an occasional leaf, weary of keeping up appearances on no visible means of support, told that autumn had come.  The weather put me in mind of a beautiful woman of forty, who can still cheat the world into believing that she is in the full summer of her prime, and is making the most of the few good years left before the crash.

As we struck up the steep hill that leads out of Aix-les-Bains and civilisation, passing with all our little procession into the oak copses which fringe the lower slopes of Mont Revard, the Boy and I agreed that nothing became the town so well as the leaving it behind.  At last little Aix unveiled her face to us, as we looked down upon it from airy altitudes.  We had space to see how pretty she was, how charmingly she was dressed, and how gracefully she sat in her mountain-backed chair, with her dainty white feet in the lake, which, as Joseph said, we could now follow with our eyes dans toute son etendue.  A beautiful etendue it was, the water keeping its extraordinary brilliance of colour, even in the far distance; vivid in changing blue-greens, flecked with gold, like the spread tail of a peacock burnished by the sun.

Mont Revard is chiselled on the same pattern as all the other mountains, big and little, of this part of Savoie; first, the long, steep slope decently covered with a belt of wood, oak below, and pine above; then a grey, precipitous wall, scarred and furrowed by the frost and storm of a million years or more.  This block-and-socket arrangement of Nature is, generally speaking, one of the least interesting of mountain forms, and its crudity was the more noticeable as we were fresh from the soaring pinnacles and stupendous pyramids of Switzerland.  But Mont Revard is the perfection of its type; and as we plodded in single file up the threadlike path wound round the mountain (Joseph and Innocentina in front, driving the animals), my respect for Revard increased with each steeply ascending step.