five “author’s lakes” to recharge your batteries

THE MORNING LIST

Sunny days are an invitation to get some fresh air on the shores of lakes celebrated by poets and writers. Mountain settings that promise dreamy or cultural strolls in a grandiose natural setting.

Le Bourget and Lamartine, time suspended

“One evening, do you remember?” We sailed in silence (…)/ Beautiful lake, and in the appearance of your laughing hillsides/And in these black fir trees, and in these wild rocks (…). » Despairing at having lost Julie Charles, whom he met in Aix-les-Bains (Savoie) in 1816 where he saved her from drowning in the lake, Lamartine composed Lake a year later, an ode from a man in love to an absent woman. Suffering, she will no longer come to take the waters…

The spa town has retained its 19th century bourgeois charm.^e century, a legacy of the time when cures attracted the European elite. Queen Victoria of England, King George I^er of Greece or “Sissi”, the Empress of Austria, had its heyday, of which the casino (1849) and the former Grand Hôtel (1853) retain their splendor.

If care and health tourism remains vibrant, leisure tourism has caught up. From the Esplanade, a long pedestrian promenade along the water’s edge, you can watch sailboats and pleasure boats sail past. You can also try a road trip from Brison-Saint-Innocent, which looks like a southern village, to Chindrieux, where the statue of Lamartine sits on the water’s edge, under the Château de Châtillon. Landscapes to also contemplate during a cruise to Hautecombe Abbey, on the largest natural lake in France. Austere and solitary, the site, the final resting place of the sovereigns of Piedmont-Sardinia, echoes the frozen melancholy of Lamartine, for whom, definitively, ” the weather [s]‘escape and flee’.

Lake Geneva and Rousseau, Franco-Swiss faiths

The Vaudois writer Jacques Chessex wrote: “This lake? An inkwell where everyone has dipped their pen. » Besides Voltaire, Flaubert, Dumas, Hugo, there is Rousseau, the local child. The museum dedicated to him in his birthplace recalls the troubled relations that Geneva had with the writer. At the time, the Geneva bourgeoisie wanted to protect its privileges. The Enlightenment philosopher wants the people to emancipate themselves.

While strolling through a wealthy town where the immense Lake Geneva, bordering France, flows into the Rhône, we will take the Pont des Bergues to reach the island… Rousseau. At the entrance to the river, it was renamed in 1835 when Geneva, repentant, erected a statue of the writer, seated, pen in hand, book open on his knee.

Following in Rousseau’s footsteps, we will pass through Bossey, at the foot of Mont Salève, where he was a boarder (statue, Place de l’Eglise). Before heading to Meillerie, after Thonon and Evian, under the Chablais mountains. It is in this village facing the Swiss shore that Rousseau places the setting of Julie or the New Héloïse (1761).

At Lake Maggiore, Hemingway’s “Farewell”

Long (66 kilometers) and undulating ribbon stretched between Italy and Switzerland, Lake Maggiore, like that of Como, is embedded in a corridor of mountains. A romantic Alpine setting directed by Ernest Hemingway. Wounded on the Italian front in 1918, the American writer came to convalesce in Stresa, at the Grand Hotel of the Borromean Islands. Jewel of the lake with its 17th century palace^e century and its botanical garden, the palace maintains the memory of the novelist: the bar bears his name as does the room he occupied.

“The Grand Hôtel des Iles Borromées was open. I got a good room. It was very large and bright and overlooked the lake. » This is how Frédéric expresses himself in Farewell to Arms (1929), a novel in which Hemingway mixes his own story with that of his hero, a deserting soldier. Part of the story is set in Maggiore which, north of Stresa, on the charming west bank, reveals luxury resorts and gardens, palace and medieval villages.

We will climb by cable car to Mottarone (1,491 meters), to take in the lake in a single view. We will stop in Verbania to visit the splendid garden of Villa Taranto and its 20,000 species of plants. We will pass the medieval village of Carmine Superiore then that of Cannobio and its beautiful Renaissance sanctuary to arrive in Switzerland and reach Ascona, a former fishing village that has become a charming resort. With a thought for Frédéric, Hemingway’s hero, fleeing Italy in a boat with Catherine, his beloved nurse, and stranded after the border, in Brissago, “a small town with a very pretty appearance [où] despite the rain, everything seemed clean and cheerful”…

The Lady of Loch Katrine, by Walter Scott

If Loch Ness maintains the legend of its monster, another, smaller Scottish lake is surrounded by a popular and literary halo: Katrine. Planted in the level and often cloudy mountains of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park (the largest in Scotland, land of hiking and gastronomy), this lake, an hour and a half drive north of Glasgow, has been celebrated by several authors. Among them, Sir Walter Scott, Scottish poet and writer, author ofIvanhoe (1819). In The Lady of the Lakeromantic poem from 1810, Katrine “unfolds like a vast sheet of gold in the rays of the setting sun” while “its mountains (…) appear as giants guardians of an enchanted land”.

To discover this wild setting, all you have to do is board the Sir Walter Scott, steamboat which for more than a hundred years has been sailing on this freshwater serpent, 13 kilometers long and barely 1 kilometer wide. Queen Victoria herself reassembled it in 1869 to go to one of her second homes. We can also judge whether ” these places (…) would be worthy of the magnificence of a prince” by cycling along the paths that run along the shore, from the small tourist port of Trossachs.

Lake Kleifarvatn, the Icelandic enigma of Arnaldur Indridason

Set in a setting of low, lunar-looking peaks, less than three-quarters of an hour’s drive from Reykjavik – an easy excursion by car from the capital – this lake experienced a rare geological accident which titillated the imagination of Arnaldur Indridason, famous Icelandic crime writer. After an earthquake in 2000, it lost 20% of its surface area, its water escaping through new underground faults.

If Indridason reveals a skeleton revealed by the lowering of the water level, the plot of The Man from the Lake (2008), it also reveals the atmosphere of the Reykjanes peninsula where Kleifarvatn is located, “ a popular and grandiose route which crossed lava fields, hills (…)before going down to the sea ». Summer and winter alike, the lake recalls the power and evocative force of Icelandic nature. This lens of water located in the heart of a volcanic region where eruptive activity has been permanent since 2021 is said to be home to a monster, a snake the size of a whale.

If you can’t see it, you can follow its west bank along a track and enjoy the striking contrast between the ocher mineral landscape and the intense blue of the lake. An environment with a strange and mystical atmosphere which pushes Indridason to imagine that, sometimes, a criminal case does not give rise to investigation: “We don’t generally investigate disappearances because, in Iceland, we don’t see no wonder people disappear. »