Meeting Place of the World

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tary of State George Shultz stayed during his meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in January, is a regular setting for OPEC meetings. Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani maintains a pied-a-terre there. Manager Herbert Schotte, who transformed the 18th-floor restaurant into a four-room, $1,430-a- night royal suite, complete with Chinese dining room furniture, now describes it as "all ready to receive President Reagan if they ever decide on a summit here."

Geneva is a world diplomatic capital not only because of its beauty and its convenience but also because of its unique traditions and style. It is dedicated to neutrality, like the rest of Switzerland, and yet it is not at all like the rest of Switzerland. It was the last territory to become a canton of the Swiss Confederation, in 1815, after centuries of independence. Its patriotic holiday, known as the Escalade, commemorates the December night in 1602 when an old woman roused and saved the sleeping city by throwing a pot of soup at the invading troops of the Duke of Savoy. Geneva sheltered both the ascetic Calvin and the libertine Voltaire. Lenin conspired here, and so did the anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Geneva's international role derives from its location, in a gap between the Alps and the Jura Mountains. Here Lake Leman, Western Europe's largest, narrows into the foaming torrents of the Rhone River. Wandering tribesmen settled at the lake's edge as early as the Bronze Age. The Romans conquered the place in 120 B.C., and Julius Caesar came to fortify it for his Gallic Wars. In what is now the Place du Bourg-de-Four, where a stone fountain gently splashes through the seasons, the Roman road from Italy once crossed the road to southern France.

An autonomous city-state throughout the Middle Ages, Geneva welcomed the Reformation in the 16th century and welcomed as its priest the fierce young French theologian Calvin. He not only preached against sin but organized a * theocratic state that punished it. Wearing jewelry or playing cards was made illegal. A woman caught in adultery was drowned in the Rhone. A theologian who disputed Calvin was burned at the stake. Yet Calvin's teachings attracted followers from all over Europe, and his disciples spread his stern version of Protestantism to France, Scotland and New England.

When Louis XIV outlawed the Protestant Huguenots in France, thousands of them came to Geneva, bringing their skills as watchmakers, jewelers, merchants, bankers. Within a century they had helped make dour Geneva one of the richest cities in the world. It still forbade theatrical performances as sinful, so Voltaire acquired a new house just across the French border in order to stage his plays. Today Geneva boasts a refurbished Grand Theater (it had been gutted in 1951 when something went wrong during one of the more fiery scenes in Wagner's Die Walkure), but there is still very little night life. Since most forms of gambling are illegal, the casino across the frontier at Divonne is the busiest one in France.