Tissot Victor – In the Land of Glaciers (Holidays in Switzerland): “Oh! the pleasure of traveling on foot, going backpacking, alpenstock in hand, by the shortest path which opens before you and which seems, expressly for your passage, to be adorned with new flowers! To go on foot is to go at the whim of his whim, his fantasy, to depend on no one, to be his only and sole master, to be at one and the same time his horse, his postilion and his carriage, to run as freely as he can. air and wind. It is a delightful vagrancy and fills your head with ideas, when the country is pretty, when the stones are not too hard, and when the streams joust beside you as if to keep you company. If you knew what there are charming stories in the babbling confidences of the little brooks that pass through the villages! ”

A great traveler who takes his time and knows how to appreciate the peace and the nature, Victor Tissot travels with his family, his wife and his 14 year old son. He climbs the summits, admires the landscapes of Lucerne, Engadine, Ticino, Valais, Gruyère and takes advantage of delivering some tasty anecdotes that were told him during his journey. Without ever being pedantic, he gives all kinds of information about mountain animals, glaciers, different Swiss dialects, the origin and customs of the inhabitants he meets and with whom he easily weaves links.

With a certain lyricism, he describes the landscapes and the “intimate relations between man and the soil he inhabits”

Victor Tissot, born August 14, 1844 in Friborg, will lead a career as a writer and journalist in Paris but also in Lausanne (where he will be editor in chief of the Gazette de Lausanne before being the one of Le Figaro in Paris). Then he returns to settle in Switzerland, in Gruyère. He died in Paris, July 6, 1917, and bequeathed his fortune and collections to the City of Bulle, for the creation of a museum (it will be the Gruyerian Museum).