GENEVA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 33 



pierced by only three land gates, the Porte Neuve and the Port de 

 Rive south of the Rhone, leading into Savoy, and the Porte de 

 Cornavin in St. Gervais, leading to France and Switzerland. 

 The business quarter lay on the lake or river -bank. If Geneva 

 lacked the picturesque features of the old towns of the Swiss 

 lowlands, its architecture had one characteristic of its own. 

 In many of the streets of the lower town and round the 

 market, the Place du Molard, broad overhanging penthouses, 

 known as domes, supported from the ground on huge wooden 

 pillars, sheltered the walls and windows and gave a cover from 

 rough weather to pedestrians similar to that afforded elsewhere 

 by arcades. Many of these structures remained till the middle 

 of the nineteenth century. At their base between the footway 

 and the road nestled rows of tiny wooden stalls or booths. One 

 main street, the Rue de la Cite, or Grand' Rue, and many narrow 

 lanes, almost staircases, like those of Edinburgh, led up from the 

 river-bank, the centre of the commercial quarter, to the upper 

 town, the aristocratic quarter. Here were clustered the Town 

 Hall with its inclined passage up which the bewigged councillors 

 could be carried in their sedan chairs, the Arsenal, the Hospital, 

 the Cathedral, and the ' College,' a public school, the buildings 

 of which have been little altered. The external aspect of the 

 public edifices was solid but plain ; they reflected the austerity 

 of the religion and life of their inhabitants. No gracious 

 saints, no dancing figures, or grotesque troops of bears, presided 

 over their fountains and their doorways. Eighteenth-century 

 Geneva showed little sign of the joie de vivre of the Renaissance ; 

 it lacked both the homely humour of the Teutonic mind and the 

 poetical imagination of Catholic legend. 



Unlike the modern city, with its pretentious rows of open and 

 wind-swept quays, old Geneva turned its back on its little port and 

 the lake and the bleak north-easterly blasts which in winter blow 

 over it. Its outlook lay towards the south-west and the sunshine. 

 Early in the eighteenth century, as commercial and financial pros- 

 perity increased, the more wealthy citizens bankers and mer- 

 chants began to erect fine houses. These were mostly in the 

 classical style of architecture then in vogue in France with some 

 admixture of Italian features, such as internal courts and arcades, 

 which might recall their old homes to refugees from Lucca or 



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