squadron of guides and porters for the ascent of the Montanvert. This idiot glared at us, and said,—
"You don't need guides and porters to go to the Montanvert."
"What do we need, then?"
"Such as you?—an ambulance!"
I was so stung by this brutal remark that I took my custom elsewhere.
Betimes, next morning, we had reached an altitude of 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. Here we camped and breakfasted. There was a cabin there—the spot is called the Caillet—and a spring of ice-cold water. On the door of the cabin was a sign, in French, to the effect that "One may here see a living chamois for 50 centimes." We did not invest; what we wanted was to see a dead one.
A little after noon we ended the ascent and arrived at the new hotel on the Montanvert, and had a view of six miles, right up the great glacier, the famous Mer de Glace. At this point it is like a sea whose deep swales and long, rolling swells have been caught in mid-movement and frozen solid; but further up it is broken up into wildly-tossing billows of ice.
We descended a ticklish path in the steep side of the moraine, and invaded the glacier. There were tourists of both sexes scattered far and wide over it, everywhere, and it had the festive look of a skating rink.
The Empress Josephine came this far, once. She ascended the Montanvert in 1810—but not alone; a small army of men preceded her to clear the path—and carpet it, perhaps,—and she followed, under the protection of sixty-eight guides.
Her successor visited Chamonix later, but in far different style. It was seven weeks after the first fall of the Empire, and poor Marie Louise, ex-Empress, was a fugitive. She came at night, and in a storm, with only two attendants, and stood before a peasant's hut, tired, bedraggled, soaked with rain, "the red print of her lost crown still girdling her brow,"
