AMBITION FOR LOVE’S SAKE

In 1823 two young men, having agreed as a plan for a holiday to make a tour through Switzerland, set out from Lucerne one fine morning in the month of July in a boat pulled by three oarsmen.  They started for Fluelen, intending to stop at every notable spot on the lake of the Four Cantons.  The views which shut in the waters on the way from Lucerne to Fluelen offer every combination that the most exacting fancy can demand of mountains and rivers, lakes and rocks, brooks and pastures, trees and torrents.  Here are austere solitudes and charming headlands, smiling and trimly kept meadows, forests crowning perpendicular granite cliffs, like plumes, deserted but verdant reaches opening out, and valleys whose beauty seems the lovelier in the dreamy distance.

As they passed the pretty hamlet of Gersau, one of the friends looked for a long time at a wooden house which seemed to have been recently built, enclosed by a paling, and standing on a promontory, almost bathed by the waters.  As the boat rowed past, a woman’s head was raised against the background of the room on the upper story of this house, to admire the effect of the boat on the lake.  One of the young men met the glance thus indifferently given by the unknown fair.

“Let us stop here,” said he to his friend.  “We meant to make Lucerne our headquarters for seeing Switzerland; you will not take it amiss, Leopold, if I change my mind and stay here to take charge of our possessions.  Then you can go where you please; my journey is ended.  Pull to land, men, and put us out at this village; we will breakfast here.  I will go back to Lucerne to fetch all our luggage, and before you leave you will know in which house I take a lodging, where you will find me on your return.”

“Here or at Lucerne,” replied Leopold, “the difference is not so great that I need hinder you from following your whim.”

These two youths were friends in the truest sense of the word.  They were of the same age; they had learned at the same school; and after studying the law, they were spending their holiday in the classical tour in Switzerland.  Leopold, by his father’s determination, was already pledged to a place in a notary’s office in Paris.  His spirit of rectitude, his gentleness, and the coolness of his senses and his brain, guaranteed him to be a docile pupil.  Leopold could see himself a notary in Paris; his life lay before him like one of the highroads that cross the plains of France, and he looked along its whole length with philosophical resignation.