a great throng of people from all parts of the country, a
memorial service was held in the church at Gruyere. "_Desolatione magna
desolata est Grueria, ploratus et ulleratus auditi sunt in Grueria, et
in omnibus finibus eius._" With such a text the last Gruyere prelate
celebrated the honors due to the last count of his line. "Desolate with
a great desolation," in truth were the people who, bitterly weeping,
lamented the loss of their happy independence, preserved through so many
long centuries under the kindly rule of their beloved counts. A halo of
melancholy romance had gathered through the popular traditions about the
figure of Count Michel, so that he has strangely become the typical
representative of the beauty, strength and valor of his far worthier
predecessors. Conflicting reports about the place of his death and
entombment, strange tales of his reappearance, have made him a second
Boabdil, unburied, always returning to the beloved home of his youth. An
hallucinated exile in life, his ghost, hallucinated, ever returning,
haunts his lost and lovely Gruyere.

CHAPTER X

GRUYERE WITHOUT ITS COUNTS

Nearly four hundred years have passed since the fall of its counts, but
the merciless march of democracy, although changing the government of
Gruyere has left the people strangely unaltered. In spite of the
injunctions of the Lutheran Bernois, they still danced and sang, and
until the dawn of the present century still spoke their musical patois.
The chateau, long used as the residence of a prefet of Fribourg, was
offered for sale when in the middle of the 19th century the prefecture
was transferred to Bulle. For a long time left to decay, it was finally
doomed to demolition, when for the same sum offered by a housebreaker of
Vevey, it was happily purchased by M. Bovy of Geneva. His brother, a
painter and pupil of Ingres, devoted the remaining strength left to him
after a disabling paralysis, to the restoration of the chateau, and in
this enthusiastic service exhausted the family fortune. His friends and
companions in Paris gathered about him, and to the beautiful frescoes
with which he adorned the walls of the Hall of the Chevaliers were added
the landscape vignettes of the salon. Thus several Corot canvases are
strangely found in this out of the way corner in the Swiss mountains, a
lovely tribute of the great modern master to the long past glories of
Gruyere. In the jousting court flowers bloom bravely throug