IV.

We come at length to that north shore of the lake which already we have noted with critical preference. We shall penetrate no longer amidst royally wooded hills, nor linger on mossy banks by the side of impetuous mountain streams. Our immediate natural environment, on the contrary, will now be comparatively dull; but by way of compensation we shall have always across the water, provided the day be clear, the massed and tumultuous grouping of those stern and shapely mountains of Savoy, which hitherto we have inspected, in the three secluded valleys of the Dranse, by sample and parcel only (as one cannot see the wood for the number of the trees). Moreover, instead of fashionable Thonon, and perhaps still more fashionable Evian, we have now in rapid succession a series of villages and small towns, along the actual margin of the lake, that are mostly of very old-world aspect, and often of some historical regard. We shall begin, however, by deserting the actual littoral for a short digression inland over the frontier into France, to visit one of those two or three great literary shrines that are connected with Lac Leman, and are not without interest to the student of the French Revolution and of modern thought.

EVIAN LES BAINS, HTE. SAVOIE.

From Geneva to Ferney Voltaire is a pleasant jaunt of about five miles. There is a steam-tramway along the road, but this hardly detracts from its agreeable rurality, which is remarkable, as we first quit Geneva, for its number of good and old-fashioned residences, and especially for the abundance and luxuriant growth of the timber along its borders, which is more English-like in character than one usually finds in France. Ferney consists of a single long street of white houses, backed, as we approach it, by the long blue wall of the Jura, towards whose foot we have been steadily advancing ever since Calvin's Geneva was left behind. From Calvin's Geneva to Voltaire's Ferney is a journey, long indeed in the history of human thought, but quickly enough effected on bicycle or foot. The château where Voltaire lived from 1759 to 1777 lies towards the head of the village, and was built, like most of the village, by the philosopher himself. Unhappily, it is shown only in summer, and then only on a single afternoon in the week; but as it is said to have been greatly altered since Voltaire's residence—though his bedroom still remains—little, perhaps, is missed, especially as the front of the house is well seen through the iron gates at the end of the public drive, as well as the little chapel to the left that he raised to the honour of God: "Deo Erexit Voltaire." Whatever view may be formed of Voltaire's religious and ethical opinions, undoubtedly there are aspects of his life to be praised. It was at Ferney that he caused to be educated, under his superintendence, the grandniece of the dramatist Corneille, whom he had "rescued from extreme want," and whom he endowed with the proceeds of an edition of her ancestor's works that he himself was at pains to edit. It was at Ferney, again, that he interested himself so passionately in denouncing the breaking on the wheel of poor Jean Calas by the Parliament and priests of Toulouse. English poets, no doubt, have conspired to present his character in a very unfavourable light. His contemporary, Cowper, writes of him:

"The Scripture was his jest book, whence he drew
Bon-mots to gall the Christian and the Jew;"

whilst Wordsworth styles his "Optimist," or makes his "Wanderer" style it:

"this dull product of a scoffer's pen,
Impure conceits discharging from a heart
Hardened by impious pride."

It is fair after this to recall what is said by Mr. Lecky: "The spirit of intolerance sank blasted beneath his genius. Wherever his influence passed, the arm of the Inquisitor was palsied, the chain of the captive riven, the prison door flung open. Beneath his withering irony persecution appeared not only criminal but loathsome, and since his time it has ever shrunk from observation, and masked its features under other names. He died leaving a reputation that is indeed far from spotless, but having done more to destroy the greatest of human curses than any other of the sons of men."

NYON CASTLE, LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO MONT BLANC.

From Ferney we return to Switzerland, and the shores of the lake, at Versoix, which impresses one disagreeably as dusty and untidy, though the Duc de Choiseul in the eighteenth century destined it as a rival to Geneva. "A pier was built," says Murray, "a Grand' Place laid down, streets running at right angles were marked out; but beyond this the plan was never carried into execution. Hence the verses of Voltaire:

"'A Versoix nous avons des rues,
Et nous n'avons point de maisons.'"

Probably the streets have been long since grassed up; certainly one does not note them in merely passing through as one notes the streets of Winchelsea (where the town, however, was built, though it since has largely perished). At Coppet, which comes next in succession, but before reaching which the Canton of Geneva is exchanged for Canton Vaud, the village, in pleasant contrast, is entirely delightful, with a little church that faces directly on the street, and that has a picturesque flamboyant west front and a delightful little bell-turret. This sleepy little village is the second literary shrine that we encounter on our pilgrimage along the northern shore of Lac Leman; for here, in the ancient château on the slope above the lake, was the home for many years (between 1790 and 1804) of the famous Monsieur Necker, Minister of Finance to Louis XVI., and the occasional home, both then and later, of his still more famous daughter, the Baroness de Staël. Necker, of course, was Genevois by birth, though German by descent, and even Anglo-Irish. According to Carlyle, he was a man of boundless vanity: "Her father is Minister, and one of the gala personages; to his own eyes the chief one ... 'as Malebranche saw all things in God, so M. Necker sees all things in Necker'—a theorem that will not hold." Madame de Staël is perhaps now best remembered for her letters; but it is worth recalling at this moment, when the German genius has again been weighed in the balance and found wanting, that it was her book of German eulogy ("De l'Allemagne," published in London in 1813) that did for the German genius in France something of the same sort of friendly office that Carlyle himself performed for it in England. She is remarkable, too, indirectly, as the subject of an epigram, as neat in its way, and as cutting, as that which we have cited of her father. Napoleon, when he banished her, summed up her talents in a line (it may well have been unjust): "la manie qu'elle a d'écrire sur tout et à propos de rien." She died at Paris in 1817, and is buried here at Coppet; but I have not sought her grave. The château, at any rate, may be easily found, for it stands high above the town, a picturesque old pile, with the delightful mellow colouring—white walls, with gay green blinds, and vast slopes of soft brown roof—that for some odd reason unexplored is never found in England, but obtrudes itself at every turn in Switzerland, or Italy, or France. It is built round a courtyard, the entrance to which is framed outside with masses of wistaria.

From Coppet on to Nyon the way is well enough, with the azure levels of the lake for companion on the right, and with Jura, of a darker blue, like a rampart on the left. Nyon, placed pleasantly just short of the point where the lake broadens suddenly from about three to about seven miles by a huge expansion to the south, and thus at the termination of the so-called Petit Lac, whose littoral we have hitherto followed from Versoix, and less closely from Geneva, is one of those delightful old towns—Rolle and Morges belong to the same category—that lend such grace and character to the Swiss shore of the lake, and have such delightful inland parallels at Aubonne, Morat, and Moudon. Morat, I suppose, though it lacks the glorious lake, and the majestic distant snows, here still visible, of Mont Blanc, must carry away the palm as a triumph of pure mediævalism; but, Morat put aside, there is hardly another small town in Switzerland so wholly delightful as this (the Roman Noviodunum) in its charm of situation, or so rich in varied combination of artificial and natural grace. High above the quays rises the old sixteenth-century castle, the residence of the Bernese bailiffs at a time when Canton Vaud was a mere appanage of Berne, though Geneva still succeeded in maintaining her independence. You may reach it from the shore by a multiplicity of ways—directly, by one of the narrow lanes that climb steeply from the lake; or, less painfully, by the broad terrace walk that rises gradually westward below the old town wall, through avenues of tortured plane-trees of the familiar foreign type, to the pleasant Promenade des Maronniers, with its growth of vigorous chestnuts, and its splendid prospect of lake and mountain. From here, or from the sister terrace that lies to the south of the château, the opposite hills of Chablais are now become noble objects: not merely Mont Blanc himself, always and insistently a king, but lesser rocky heights that lack only summer snow—the Dent d'Oche beyond Evian, the Pointe de Grange and the Cornette de Bise (curiously enough, according to some maps—and anyhow there is only a difference of a mètre—both exactly of the same height, and each of them, still more curiously, just exactly 8,000 feet high) on either side of Abondance, and the pinnacled Roc d'Enfer—to justify as attendant squires to their great and peerless king. On the way between the two terraces is passed the parish church, in part, I think, of the fifteenth century, but with traces of Romanesque. The castle itself, on its sovereign brow, is picturesque enough, with its round towers at the corners (but one is octagonal), and its extinguisher, or pepper-pot, turrets—which are found again in Scotland, who borrowed so industriously from France, but never, I think, in England—and with its curious wooden galleries in an additional courtyard to the east. Inside is the town museum, with some lake village antiquities of the Bronze Age, in addition to the usual banalities of stuffed animals and birds: it is perhaps just worth visiting when the door is open, but hardly when you have to get the key.

THE SAVOY ALPS IN SUMMER. FROM VILLENEUVE.

From Nyon on to Rolle we still keep closely to the lake, though never on its margin, past unfenced woods at intervals that invite us to step aside to hunt for lily-of-the-valley and Solomon's seal in their "green of the forests' night." Always across the water are the solemn, splendid summits of Savoy: always on our left the level line of Jura, which after Rolle, however, retires from the lake to give place to the central plain of Switzerland, which here debouches on the waters till we meet the Alps beyond Lausanne. Rolle is another quaint old town, consisting chiefly of one long, old-fashioned street, with another typical castle placed at its farther end; but in this case both town and castle are built wholly on the level, on the margin of the lake. The Dent-du-Midi is now visible to the right of the Pointe de Grange, but has not yet assumed the isolated supremacy that it wears presently in the landscape, being partly merged for the moment in the company of hills. A little beyond Rolle a turning to the left mounts slowly up the hill past a lonely little burial-ground, and through the rich vineyards of La Côte, to the upland town of Aubonne. I took this road myself on a mild evening towards the close of April, chiefly because I was drawn to Aubonne by what Byron wrote of it in his Journal under date September 29, 1816. "In the evening reached Aubonne (the entrance and bridge something like that of Durham), which commands by far the finest view of the Lake of Geneva; twilight; the moon on the lake; a grove on the height, and of very noble trees. Here Tavernier (the Eastern traveller) bought (or built) the château, because the site resembled and equalled that of Erivan, a frontier city of Persia; here he finished his voyages, and I this little excursion,—for I am within a few hours of Diodati, and have little more to see, and no more to say." I am not sorry that I took this road, for, ever mounting higher, it commands ever wider and wider views of the crescent lake, whose centre we now approach, in both directions, with the glorious Chablais mountains embraced in its noble curve. Aubonne, however, is no more like Durham—I speak, of course, of my own impressions: Byron saw it with different eyes—than any other old town that is perched on the edge of a winding ravine, with a river and bridge at the bottom. Certainly any resemblance it has—I do not admit any—is due to natural situation, and not at all to artificial charm. The parish church, which contains, however, the grave of the great Admiral Duquesne, who is commemorated by a statue in the market square of his native town of Dieppe, is apparently of little architectural interest (I did not get inside), and the castle is of no account at all. Durham to my ignorance has only one real rival, where the great red-brick cathedral and castle of Albi are piled above the Tarn like Durham above the Wear. It is worth your while, however, to make this digression to Aubonne (quite a pretty little town) for the sake of the long ascent from Rolle, through miles of purple vineyard, and for the sake of the journey back to Morges, where we regain the margin of the lake and the main highroad from Geneva to Lausanne. The descent, by way of contrast, is through continuous apple-orchard and meadow, the pink and white blossom floating freely round your shoulders as you pursue the unfenced road in middle spring.

LAUSANNE CATHEDRAL FROM MONTBENON.

Morges is another quaint old town, with yet another quaint old castle, and with a glorious view of Mont Blanc, seen in this case in long perspective up the valley of the Dranse, which opens deeply through the heart of the Savoyard mountains on the opposite shore of the lake. It is worth while landing here for a few hours, if only to mount the slopes behind the town, deep with wood and orchard, to the noble old castle of Vufflens, which is perhaps the best of its class in Switzerland. Seen from the surface of the lake—and it is seen thence conspicuously—this has a very modern look, and suggests that the whole building has been grossly over-restored. You never doubt, in fact, that the place is still inhabited, and most likely furbished up to the point of loss of interest. You approach with heavy heart, but are pleasantly surprised to find only part of the pile still occupied, apparently as a farm, whilst the whole is quite unspoilt. The plan is widely different from that of Nyon or Chillon (themselves not really similar), and absolutely unparalleled by anything in Britain. Tower-houses were still built in England as late as the fifteenth century—Tattershall in Lincolnshire is a prominent example—but these were not really keeps; and they were primarily meant, not for places of refuge in the last resort, but principally for residence and comfort. The great fourteenth-century donjon at Vufflens, on the contrary, is plainly intended for defence not less than the Tower of London in the eleventh century, or than Rochester keep in the twelfth. Moreover, this enormous tower—it is one hundred and sixty feet high, and thus again without equal or rival in England, though formerly surpassed by the great cylinder at Coucy-le-Château in France, which was actually about two hundred feet—is girt about its base with four lower towers, or satellites, as though for extra strength: the whole is very grim and menacing. It is built of yellow brick, and everywhere heavily machicolated. The vaulted kitchen, towards the basement, has a very striking fireplace, with a vine pattern running round in a deeply hollowed moulding. A vice, or spiral stair, ascends in the thickness of the south wall, which is thickened out to hold it in the form of a circular turret. Most of the roof is modern; but the visitor should notice the heavy wooden shutters that close the big, segmental-headed openings for hurling stones or shooting arrows, and that run on wheels in wooden troughs, so that a man might discharge his missile and immediately close the aperture ere the enemy could reply. The view, of course, is magnificent, and would alone repay the climb, unless the visitor happens to be giddy-headed. To the south of this great tower lies an open courtyard, and to the south of this, again, is the dwelling-house, or palace. This planning, in my experience, is unique; but there seems to be something like it (I speak only from distant view) at the great country castle of the Bishops of Lausanne at Lucens, which forms so conspicuous and delightful a feature on the hill on the west side of the valley of the Broye between Moudon and Payerne, in that delightful central vale of Switzerland that is perhaps so seldom visited, yet combines such unexpected charm of pleasantly pastoral landscape with such wealth of old-world interest as we find at Avenches (the Roman Aventicum), Morat, and Estavayer.

I mention these places with less reluctance, though certainly not on the shores of Lac Leman, because they may all be easily visited from Lausanne, and to some degree may even be thought connected with it—Lucens, because the Bishop-Princes of Lausanne (who, like the Bishop-Princes of Coire, were also Electors of the Holy Roman Empire) had here a noble hunting-seat; Moudon, because its lovely thirteenth-century church is supposed to exhibit close analogies to Lausanne Cathedral; and Avenches, because this was actually the seat of the Bishop's stool before this was translated to Lausanne by Bishop Marius in 590. Lausanne itself is now a city of very modern aspect, stretching with its villas in the usual straggling Helvetic fashion—in contrast with the neat compactness of France: Neuchâtel and Bienne are other bad examples—for a distance of nearly eight miles along the gentle slopes of Mont Jorat that impend above the lake, and presenting, as seen from the water, a long line of clustered white houses (not unpicturesque in distant view), crowned by the lofty tower of its beautiful cathedral of Notre Dame. This is a purely residential city, and gives one the same impression as Milan of superabundant prosperity and wealth. These factors, indeed, have proved its ruin—I mean, of course, æsthetically—for the Swiss (they are great iconoclasts) have of recent years remodelled it so drastically that soon, one is afraid, there will be nothing ancient left save here and there a church, preserved like flies in amber. In every direction are fine new streets, with splendid new houses and blocks of tenements. The result, no doubt, will be very magnificent; but Morat is more to my taste, or Payerne. Certain old quarters of Bâle have thus recently been levelled, and Neuchâtel is now almost wholly of modern aspect. A city, no doubt, belongs primarily to the people who inhabit it; they have to live their lives in it, and consult their own convenience; but at least one may be permitted to hope that this sort of civic madness will not hastily lay criminal hands on Geneva, or Berne, or Fribourg.

Lausanne itself is built at some little height above the lake, and visitors land from the steamer at Ouchy, which at once is port and suburb. Here, "at a small inn" (then the Ancre, but now the Hôtel d'Angleterre: everything at Lausanne expands to over-maturity), Byron wrote his "Prisoner of Chillon," perhaps the best of his poems in irregular metre, in the short space of two days, whilst detained "by stress of weather," "thereby adding one more deathless association to the already immortalized localities of the Lake." From Ouchy ascend at once by cable tramway, unless you have a particular fancy for perambulating miles of new streets, to the old "cité" on the height; and climb at once to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Here, standing at the entrance to the great south porch, with its noble Romanesque statuary, and with its glorious views across the water to the splendidly rocky summits of Savoy, you can easily forget the gay swarms of pacing idlers, and even a great bun-shop that for vastness and magnificence (and Lausanne has less than fifty thousand souls!) would strike you with astonishment in Piccadilly or Regent Street. This Cathedral of Notre Dame is of about the same length as Beverley Minster, or King's College Chapel at Cambridge; and is not only a splendid example of thirteenth-century architecture (the classic moment of Gothic), but far and away the finest monument of ecclesiastical art in Switzerland. Protestant since 1536, when its Bishop was deposed—he has now his throne at Fribourg—the interior suffers, of course, from the usual cold and bare austerity that characterizes a Calvinistic place of worship hardly less in Switzerland than Holland. Of recent years, however, it has been lovingly restored, and the lack of Catholic furniture and ritual—I write always from the æsthetic point of view, and never from that of divinity—is perhaps felt no worse at Lausanne, or, for the matter of that, at Geneva, than it is felt in Dunblane or Glasgow Cathedral. Remarkable externally is the north-west tower, with its curious open-work buttresses like those at Bamberg and Laon: remarkable inside are the early sixteenth-century stalls, now misplaced in the south nave aisle; the extravagant complication of the vaulting system in the nave (it is different in almost every bay); the exquisite beauty of the south end of the south transept; and the four or five recumbent effigies, or monuments, of mediæval Bishops that are still allowed on sufferance in this abode of rigid presbyterianism. One of these is said in Murray (but Baedeker ignores it) to be that of Pope Felix V., previously Duke of Savoy and Bishop of Geneva, who retired from the Papal throne to end his days as a mere monk at Ripaille, near Thonon, and died there in the monastery in 1451.

MONTREUX FROM THE LAKE—AUTUMN.

Eastward from Lausanne, the hills, now foot-stools of the Alps, drop more immediately to the actual margin of the lake than any yet encountered from Geneva to Lausanne. From top to bottom they are richly dotted with vineyards, with hardly a green field in between; and everywhere among these vineyards, on the slope of the hillside, are innumerable little white villages, with their mellow red-brown roofs, clustered at frequent intervals round a central parish church. Opposite, as we advance, the prospect of distant Alps grows more and more magnificent, as the view opens deeper and deeper, beyond the head of the lake, into the great valley of the Rhone. So we come at last to Vevey, the second town of Vaud, from whose pleasant quay, with its lines of young chestnuts and planes, in the neighbourhood of the Marché pier, is got what is perhaps the last good littoral view, as we journey in this direction, of the glorious head of the lake, without base suburban admixture to disguise and disfigure the foreground. The Marché itself is open to the lake, but enclosed on its other three sides by old-fashioned brown-roofed houses, among which stand out prominent the picturesque open arcades of the Market House, and above which, on the hill, though backed itself by charmingly wooded lines of higher hill, rises the tower of the old town church. To the left, as we look eastward, is the prettily timbered promontory of the Tour de Peilz (the tower itself is visible), which luckily shuts out the long line of villas past Clarens and Montreux; and beyond this, again, the gaping valley of the Rhone opens in unrivalled magnificence deep into the bosom of now considerable Alps, guarded on the left by the sharp, horn-like precipices of the noble Dent-de-Morcles (9,775 feet), and on the right by the still nobler, boldly cut, square summit of the Dent-du-Midi (10,695 feet). The view is one of simple magnificence, not of such involved and complicated hill forms as we contemplate with a different kind of pleasure from the quays at Lucerne, but compounded only of a few grand elements. The lights are always changing on this stupendous mountain range; now the distant hills are intensely blue, now purple, or red, in the sunset; now their summits stand up sharply in an unbroken summer sky, now their edges are blurred by fleecy white clouds, or obscured by golden mists,

"curling with unconfirm'd intent,"

but never static for a moment, or less than unearthly and beautiful.

I have spoken deliberately of this grand view from the quays at Vevey as the last good littoral view (and I put the stress on "littoral") that one gets of the lake as one continues on one's journey eastward from Lausanne, or Ouchy, to Chillon. The littoral, in fact, from Vevey as far as Chillon is now virtually a continuous line of huge, flaunting hotels, restaurants, villas, and tea-rooms: not even the French Riviera between Cannes and Mentone, which I take to be the second vulgarest spot in Europe, has forfeited so entirely its original character, or, from the scenic point of view, been so utterly ruined. The line of devastation, it is true, is luckily very thin; and though the hills above Montreux and Territet are themselves loaded at frequent intervals with monster hotels, and laced in every direction with a perplexing network of lifts and mountain railways, it must frankly be confessed that to look at this five-mile-long string of pleasure towns from a distance—as, for instance, from those windows of Chillon Castle that project farthest into the lake—is a much less trying test of temper than to contemplate the glories of the head of the lake with Territet or Montreux for foreground. The destruction of these odd five miles of natural loveliness—and such natural loveliness—forms part of a fierce denunciation by the late Mr. Ruskin, which those who hardly think at all will probably think extravagant, but which seems to others entirely just: "You have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva." Clarens, indeed, was formerly a place of such exquisite loveliness that Rousseau chose it as the ideal dwelling-place for the heroine of his "Nouvelle Héloïse." "Allez à Vevey," he says in the fourth book of his "Confessions," "visitez le pays, examinez les sites, promenez-vous sur le lac, et dites si la Nature n'a pas fait ce beau pays pour une Julie, pour une Claire, et pour un St. Preux; mais ne les y cherchez pas." Nor was Byron, coming here in 1816, any less enthusiastic. "I have traversed," he writes in a letter of June 27 of that year to Mr. Murray—"I have traversed all Rousseau's ground with the 'Héloïse' before me, and am struck to a degree that I cannot express with the force and accuracy of his descriptions and the beauty of their reality. Meillerie, Clarens, and Vevey, and the Château de Chillon, are places of which I shall say little, because all I could say must fall short of the impressions they stamp." And Byron himself, with the "Héloïse" in recollection, addresses Clarens in the third canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," in the stanzas beginning—

"Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love!"

which Sir Edward Bridges pronounces "exquisite." Yet not the natural beauty of Clarens itself—

"'tis lone,
And wonderful, and deep, and hath a sound,
And sense, and sight of sweetness; here the Rhone
Hath spread himself a couch, the Alps have reared a throne"

—nor the associations with Rousseau and Byron, could save this "little nook of mountain ground" from being sacrificed to the dictates of a thoughtless and idle fashion. "You have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva."

One is glad indeed that the famous Castle of Chillon, with which we must now conclude our perambulation of the north shore of the lake, and the little walled town of Villeneuve, which now, however, notwithstanding its name, seems ancient and venerable indeed in comparison with this gay modernity that pulsates at its doors, should lie just beyond the limit of this land of ruined Edens, and should thus restore us to the right mood in which to take farewell of the Lake of Geneva. Chillon is far from the finest castle, considered merely as a building, in Switzerland (an honour due to Vufflens), nor, in fact, is it even the most beautifully situated (an honour surely due to the crag-perched residence of the old Bishop-Princes of the Valais on the towering rock of Sion). Its chief curiosity of site is the immense depth of water that lies immediately below its walls, which is sometimes said (I cannot vouch for so astonishing a statement) to have been "fathomed to the depth of 800 feet, French measure"—

"Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls:
A thousand feet in depth below
Its massy waters meet and flow;
Thus much the fathom-line was sent
From Chillon's snow-white battlement;"

but it is due neither to its value as a specimen of military architecture, nor to its charm of situation, nor to this marvel of subterraneous precipice, that Chillon maintains the extended reputation that renders it perhaps the most visited and best known of all the many famous castles of the world. Its cult is rather due to its association with Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon," which was written, as we have seen, in the old Ancre Inn at Ouchy in the short course of a couple of days in 1816. Byron himself has entitled this a "fable," and it has certainly little or nothing to do with the historical Bonnivard, who was certainly imprisoned here for six years, between 1530 and 1536, but was released in the latter year, and subsequently became a Protestant, and married four wives in succession! Byron, however, in the last six lines of another poem—the "Sonnet on Chillon"—has paid a stately tribute to the actual Bonnivard, which will be recalled with interest in the striking, half-subterranean dungeon in which he was confined for more than four years of his captivity:

"Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
And thy sad floor an altar—for 'twas trod,
Until his very steps have left a trace
Worn, as if the cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God."

I do not know whether these footmarks are still visible, or, indeed, were ever visible; but if we choose to imagine them—Bonnivard was chained to the fifth pillar from the entrance—we shall not do much amiss. At least it would be better thus to err on the side of imagination than to imitate the English lady of whom Byron complained when he visited Chillon, not for the first time, on September 18, 1816, that he met her on his return fast asleep in her carriage—"fast asleep in the most anti-narcotic spot in the world."

[INDEX]

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND

[Transcribers' Notes]

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

This book does not have a Table of Contents.

Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

Text uses both "Genevese" and "Genevois".

Page [28]: "Ano" and "Dni" originally were printed with overscores above the lower-case letters.

Page [42]: "a Grand' Place" was printed with the apostrophe.