That Nicolas Bouvier lived in movement does not mean that he did not enjoy himself in Switzerland. Quite the contrary: he was involved in various activities, creating the progressive Gruppe Olten with Frisch and Dürrenmatt, after having left the Swiss Writers Society, which he found too conservative. In "L'Echappée Belle, éloge de quelques pérégrins" he celebrates a Switzerland "rarely spoken of: a Switzerland in movement, a nomadic Switzerland." The Swiss, sedentary? "You must be joking! In fact, the Swiss are the most nomadic people in Europe. Every sixth Swiss has chosen to live his life abroad." Reasonable? "It remains to be seen! Under the ordered surface, the varnish of the Helvetic 'as it should be,' I sense the passage of great strata of the irrational, a deaf fermentation, so present in the first thrillers of Dürrenmatt, in Fritz Zorn's "Mars", a latent violence that, to me, renders this country bizarre and engaging." The traveller-writer, a close friend of Ella Maillart, thus sees in the history of his country "a constant of nomadism, of exile, of quest, of anxiety, a manner of not staying in place that have profoundly marked our mentality and, therefore, our literature. There has been, for two thousand years, a Switzerland, vagabond, pilgrim, often forced on to the road by poverty, and of which we speak all too rarely."