I pulled out my photos from a 2011 day trip to Chamonix that Y and I made. When we visited Switzerland that year–our last real vacation–I really wanted to see Mont Blanc, because of its importance in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). It’s where Victor encounters his creation, learns his creation’s story, and agrees to create a mate for his creation. Also, it figuratively looms large in Romanticism and works of that era. Here is one of my favorite photos–the mountaineer Jacques Balmat, who with Michel-Gabriel Paccard first summited Mont Blanc on 8 August 1786, points the way to the highest peak in Western Europe to Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who had offered a reward for the first to the summit and climbed it himself with Balmat and 15 others on 3 August 1787.
