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CHAPTER II
MONT VELAN
24. I WAS crowded for room at the end of last chapter, and could not give account of one or two bits of investigation of the Vaudois character, which preceded the Queen of Sheba crash. It wasn’t the Queen herself,-by the way,-but only one of her maids of honour, on whose gold brocaded dress, (relieved by a black’s head, who carried two red and green parrots on a salver,) I worked till I could do no more;1-to my father’s extreme amazement and disgust, when I brought the petticoat, parrots, and blackamoor, home, as the best fruit of my summer at the Court of Sardinia; together with one lurid thunderstorm on the Rosa Alps, another on the Cenis, and a dream or two of mist on the Viso.2 But I never could make out the set of the rocks on the peak of Viso; and after I had spent about a hundred pounds at Turin in grapes, partridges, and the opera, my mother sent me five, to make my peace with Heaven in a gift to the Vaudois churches. So I went and passed a Sunday beneath Viso; found he had neither rocks nor glaciers worth mentioning, and that I couldn’t get into any pleasant confidences with the shepherds, because their dogs barked and snarled irreconcileably, and seemed to have nothing taught them by their masters but to regard all the rest of mankind as thieves.
I had some pious talk of mild kind with the person I
1 [For Ruskin’s letters to his father giving account of the progress of this study, see Vol. XVI. pp. xxxvii.-xl. For a reproduction of a photograph of the picture, see ibid., p. 186.]
2 [“Storm-Clouds on Mont Cenis, opposite the Monastery of St. Michael, from Rivoli; August 13, 1858,” No. 177 in the Ruskin Exhibition at the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1901; “Thunder Clouds, Turin,” No. 63 in the Ruskin Exhibition at the Fine Art Society, 1907. See also the engraved subjects in Vol. VII., Plates 70, 71, and p. 168.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
