I. THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE 495

floors and bad dinners at Bellinzona;-there was a quiet little opera-house, where it was always a kindness to the singers to attend to the stage business; finally, any quantity of marching and manœuvring by the best troops in Italy, with perfect military bands, beautifully tossing plumes, and pretty ladies looking on. So I settled at Turin for the autumn.

There, one Sunday morning, I made my way in the south suburb to a little chapel which, by a dusty roadside, gathered to its unobserved door the few sheep of the old Waldensian faith who had wandered from their own pastures under Monte Viso into the worldly capital of Piedmont.

The assembled congregation numbered in all some three or four and twenty, of whom fifteen or sixteen were grey-haired women. Their solitary and clerkless preacher, a somewhat stunted figure in a plain black coat, with a cracked voice, after leading them through the languid forms of prayer which are all that in truth are possible to people whose present life is dull and its terrestrial future unchangeable, put his utmost zeal into a consolatory discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more especially of the plain of Piedmont and city of Turin, and on the exclusive favour with God, enjoyed by the between nineteen and twenty-four elect members of his congregation, in the streets of Admah and Zeboim.¹

Myself neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this doctrine, I walked back into the condemned city, and up into the gallery where Paul Veronese’s Solomon and the Queen of Sheba glowed in full afternoon light. The gallery

¹ [Deuteronomy xxix. 23. There is an account of this service in a letter from Ruskin to his father (August 4, 1858), given in a later volume. It is interesting to note that at a somewhat earlier date (1832) Gladstone experienced a similar “disenchantment, when he made his way from Turin to Pinerol, and saw one of the Vaudois valleys. He had framed a lofty conception of the people as ideal Christians, and he underwent a chill of disappointment on finding them apparently much like other men. Even the pastor, though a quiet, inoffensive man, gave no sign of energy or of what would have been called in England vital religion.” Ruskin turned from the Waldensian chapel to Paolo Veronese; Gladstone, “with this chill at heart, came upon the atmosphere of gorgeous Rome” (Morley’s Life of Gladstone, vol. i. p. 87).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]