Villa Le Lac/Corbusier
I had snoozed the deepest sleep of the jet-lagged all the way through Belgium and France on the boat train from Ostende. So when I changed trains in Basel for Lausanne, I was preternaturally alert. I just had to schmooze with the distinguished looking gent sitting across form me in the first-class coach (Eurailers, however declasse at home, ride first class in Europe, if they're over 26 and thus ineligible for the Youth Pass).
What a boon that I overcame my natural reticence. My informant was the retired editor of Vevey's newspaper for the past 50 years. When I told him I was in Europe to check out the Corbusier centennial, he insisted that I see the "petite maison" that Corbu built for his parents' retirement in Courseaux, a suburb of Vevey. "Call me back tomorrow morning," he advised me. Zounds, then I found we were to have a private tour of the house overlooking Lac Leman.
It was a great privilege to be able to check out my skepticism under such official auspices. Corbu had drawn his Procrustean plans long before he had found a site (16 metres long, 4 metres deep, 11 metres of unbroken fenestration facing the lake.) The site is still luminous, even though a railway and a through highway have diminished its bucolic setting. And its beton structure couldn't take the climate, so it's now sheathed in aluminum.
The interior was full of semi-religious mementos. His music-teacher mother lived to over a hundred years, so it was never abandoned like the Villa Savoye in Poissy. To express my gratitude at this favor (and to indulge my love for fresh fish), I asked my Vevey vieux to take me "to the best fish restaurant with the best view." And not to worry about price. This would be a libation to the great god Visa.
After a sweet diversion to our hostess's house high in the hills over Vevey (with a short stop at the civic park dedicated to Charles Chaplin, who had the wit to live in this lovely town), I found myself seated on the terrace of the Hotel du Lac, pretending that I belonged between conspicuously consuming jet setters on my left and the two generation Japanese industrialist family on my right.
For as long as it took to consume a perch from the Lac and test the high school aphorism ("poisson sans boisson est poison") with a local white, I wished that I had been born rich and well-mannered.
I left my new friends in a high state of euphoria to sample the museums of Vevey. First was the Alimentarium, a stylishly recycled stately home on the lakefront that Nestle (it's headquartered in the city) has turned into an engrossing museum about food and the human condition. Lucky my French was too marginal to lecture them on flogging baby formula in the Third World. My illiteracy freed me to enjoy a temporary exhibition on chocolate and another on ritual breads. It's a must see.
So is the brand new Museum of Games, set beguilingly in a recycled Chateau, also along the lake. It's ingeniously anthropological in the way it analyzes the human hunger to play games.
On a musicological high, I sought out the city museum, shamefully under-attended, so much so that the curator just started taking me on a hand-tooled tour of the place, ending in the impressive room where the local winemakers keep their vines in unison. A splendid byway, Vevey.
from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, August 19, 1987
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