Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/338

354 of which, I was present, but not much edified, owing to the incongruous mixture of spiritual and worldly music.

You are shown, in the little church, the grave of General Dessaix.

“I will give you the Alps for your monument!” said Napoleon to his dying general, after the battle of Marengo; “you shall rest on their loftiest inhabited point,—in the church of St. Bernard!”

I had some conversation on the life in the convent, with Père Clavendier, a very kind and well-informed man, who appears to have the especial charge of travelers of the more cultivated class.

“I should not remain here long by myself,” said he, “but we are many, and so I stay. We often witness sorrowful occurrences. Two years ago, two of our brethren went out, with a couple of servants, to seek for a man who was supposed to have lost himself in the mountains; they were scarcely fifty paces from the house, when we saw an immense avalanche fall and bury our poor friends under eighteen feet of snow. When we recovered them, they were dead! We often find poor travelers, whose feet are frozen, and here we nurse them till they are sufficiently recovered to continue their journey.”

It is now an unfrequent occurrence for travelers to perish in this region; the cases of being frozen to death usually do not exceed two in the course of the year.

“We ourselves,” said Père Clavendier, “may hold out twelve or fifteen years, but our dogs not above seven or eight years; they then become rheumatic and