To their pleasure, the service was well-conducted, and the singing very good. In the afternoon, the family and some of the senior servants went to the Oratory. Elizabeth noticed Mr. Darcy and Mr. Harmon fast asleep, likely due to their having walked about the town since service; she saw also—with disgust—that it was the custom of the French and Swiss men to expectorate everywhere and frequently, an habit she could not wish to be more generally prevalent.

There was a cold collation for dinner, and, following tea, the evening was spent chiefly in correspondence. Elizabeth Darcy wrote her father a long letter on her impressions of the peoples and places they had seen:

Sunday
Hôtel Les Balances, Geneva

DEAR FATHER,

It is the Sabbath-day and so our self-permitted intrusion into the privacy of our neighbours is temporarily suspended. We have, as you see above, reached Geneva. It is a relief to come into Switzerland where the inns are clean and the habits more akin to ours: general industry and tranquility, after the noise and inattention to house-keeping of the French. The hôtel here is well-appointed, not in the sumptuous stile of the Parisian hôtels, but, happily, much cleaner and quieter. The food here is plentiful and wholesome—not up to the justly acclaimed standards of the French, much to my own relief, as were it in the French stile, I would have had to order all new cloathes, being no longer able to cover myself decently with those I now have. Mr. Darcy is also enjoying the relief from the dinners of seven or more courses, each comprised of more than a dozen different dishes, from which one is obliged out of courtesy to take something. The French seem to stand in greater fear of their cooks than even the English, and to slight even the plainest ragoût, is an offence of the gravest iniquity.

In contrast, the Swiss are not only uniformly industrious, but seem cheerful, religious, and respectable. The appearance of the wealthy is not so distinguished from even the labouring class, the former having no very great taste for luxury and finery, and the latter so well-employed as to be above want. This blessing of universal prosperity is, I believe, the result of education being widely available here—to both sexes—being the burthen of the state (which our own England would do well to emulate); and, wealth is also not restricted to the male line, an antiquated practise from which our own family has suffered. The Swiss shew an elegance and simplicity of taste which contrasts very favourably with that of other nations where opulence is only surmounted by an even greater excess of the same, but I suppose that if the latter were less objectionable, it would be, in consequence, less desireable.