the hut upon the mountain

Mary Shelley knows from experience of what she writes. There were actually two such huts on Montanvert above the Sea of Ice, one made of wood and erected by an Englishman named Blair in 1779, and the other of stone constructed by a Frenchmen, Desportes, in the year 1795.

The Desportes refuge of hewn stone in a nineteenth-century photograph -- from Charles Edward Mathews, The Annals of Mont Blanc (Boston: L.C. Page, 1900), facing p. 16. This drawing -- from Charles Edward Mathews, The Annals of Mont Blanc (Boston: L.C. Page, 1900), titlepage vignette -- shows the two huts together.

In this early ninteenth-century romantic vista of the Mer de Glace only the Desportes hut is visible, but the illustration shows how prominent an intrusion this human imposition made upon an otherwise sublime landscape.

["Illustration"]

from William Beattie, Switzerland, illustrated in a series of views taken expressly for this work by W. H. Bartlett, Esq., Volume 1 (London: G. Virtue, 1836).