Molly said that the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse was like a body without a soul; and in another breath she was asking Jack, quite seriously, whether she could buy one of the cells from the French Government, all complete, to “express” as a present to her father in New York.

We flew, our motor humming like a bee, through exquisite forests clothing the sides of a narrow ravine, where hidden streams made music.  Then in a twinkling we slipped out from the secret recesses of scented woods, into a village almost too beautiful to accept as reality, in a practical mood.  There it lay, like a little heap of pearls tossed down from the lap of one mountain at the feet of another—­and we were at St. Pierre de Chartreuse.

The tiny gem of beauty had caught the glory of Switzerland, and the soft, fairy charm of Dauphine.  Its guardian mountain was a miniature Matterhorn of indescribable grace and airy stateliness; its lesser attendants formed a group of peaks, grey and green and rose.  As if enough gifts had not yet been bestowed upon the little place at its christening, a playground of forest land, rolling up over grassy slopes, had been given, with a neighbouring river, swift and clear, to sing it a lullaby.

I had the impulse to clap my hands at St. Pierre de Chartreuse, as at some “setting” excellently designed and carried out by the most celebrated of scene painters.  It was a place in which to stop a month, finding a new walk for each new day; but one does not discover walks in a motor car.  One sweeps over the country, sounding notes of triumph.  We glanced at St. Pierre de Chartreuse and sped on towards Grenoble, through a landscape markedly different from that of Savoie.

In Savoie everything is done lavishly, on a large scale.  The eye roams over spaces of noble amplitude, expressing strength in repose.

Dauphine is livelier and daintier; more lovable, too.  Fairies or brownies (since no mortals do it) keep the whole country like a vast private park.  In crossing from Savoie into Dauphine one seemed to hear the allegro movement after listening to the andante.

With each twist of our road the prospect changed.  The mountains grew, soared more abruptly, and the youthful-looking landscape smiled at their strange shapes.  As for the Cham Chaude, which had been the Matterhorn at St. Pierre de Chartreuse, it now disguised itself for some new part at every turn.  Such lightning changes must have been fatiguing, even for so extraordinarily versatile and clever a mountain, for within fifteen minutes after playing it was the Matterhorn, it was a giant, tonsured monk; a Greek soldier in a helmet; a Dutch cheese; a hen, and a camel.