The Car That Went Abroad: Motoring Through the Golden Age

by Albert Bigelow Paine

There are villas enough about the lake to-day, and châteaux by the dozen, most of the latter begun in the truculent Middle Ages and continued through the centuries down to within a hundred years or so ago. You cannot walk or drive in any direction without coming to them, some in ruins, but most of them well preserved or carefully restored, and habitable; some, like beautiful Blonay, holding descendants of their ancient owners. From the top of our hotel, with a glass, one could pick out as many as half a dozen, possibly twice that number. They were just towers of defense originally, the wings and other architectural excursions being added as peace and prosperity and family life increased. One very old and handsome one, la Tour de Peilz, now gives its name to a part of Vevey, though in the old days it is said that venomous little wars used to rage between Vevey proper and the village which clustered about the château de Peilz. Readers of Little Women will remember la Tour de Peilz, for it was along its lake wall that Laurie proposed to Amy.

But a little way down the lake there is a more celebrated château than la Tour de Peilz; the château of Chillon, which Byron's poem of the prisoner Bonivard has made familiar for a hundred years.[12] Chillon, which stands not exactly on the lake, but on a rock in the lake, has not preserved the beginning of its history. Those men of the bronze age camped there, and, if the evidences shown are genuine, the Romans built a part of the foundation. Also, in one of its lower recesses there are the remains of a rude altar of sacrifice.

It is a fascinating place. You cross a little drawbridge, and through a heavy gateway enter a guardroom and pass to a pretty open court, where to-day there are vines and blooming flowers. Then you descend to the big barrack room, a hall of ponderous masonry, pass through a small room, with its perfectly black cell below for the condemned, through another, where a high gibbet-beam still remains, and into a spacious corridor of pillars called now the "Prison of Bonivard."

There are seven pillars of gothic mold
In Chillon's dungeons deep and old;...
Dim with a dull imprisoned ray,
A sunbeam which has lost its way ...
And in each pillar there is a ring
And in each ring there is a chain.
That iron is a cankering thing,
For in these limbs its teeth remain....

Bonivard's ring is still there, and the rings of his two brothers who were chained, one on each side of him; chained, as he tells us, so rigidly that

We could not move a single pace;
We could not see each other's face.

We happened to be there, once, when a sunbeam that "had lost its way" came straying in, a larger sunbeam now, for the narrow slits that serve for windows were even narrower in Bonivard's time, and the place, light enough to-day in pleasant weather, was then somber, damp, and probably unclean.

Bonivard was a Geneva patriot, a political prisoner of the Duke of Savoy, who used Chillon as his château. Bonivard lived six years in Chillon, most of the time chained to a column, barely able to move, having for recreation shrieks from the torture chamber above, or the bustle of execution from the small adjoining cell. How he lived, how his reason survived, are things not to be understood. Both his brothers died, and at last Bonivard was allowed more liberty. The poem tells us that he made a footing in the wall, and climbed up to look out on the mountains and blue water, and a little island of three trees, and the "white-walled distant town"—Bouveret, across the lake. He was delivered by the Bernese in 1536, regaining his freedom with a sigh, according to the poem. Yet he survived many years, dying in 1570, at the age of seventy-four.

On the columns in Bonivard's dungeon many names are carved, some of them the greatest in modern literary history. Byron's is there, Victor Hugo's, Shelley's, and others of the sort. They are a tribute to the place and its history, of course, but even more to Bonivard—the Bonivard of Byron.

Prisoners of many kinds have lived and died in the dungeons of Chillon—heretics, witches, traitors, poor relations—persons inconvenient for one reason or another—it was a vanishing point for the duke's undesirables, who, after the execution, were weighted and dropped out a little door that opens directly to an almost measureless depth of blue uncomplaining water. Right overhead is the torture chamber, with something ghastly in its very shape and color, the central post still bearing marks of burning-irons and clawing steel. Next to this chamber is the hall of justice, and then the splendid banquet hall; everything handy, you see, so that when the duke had friends, and the wine had been good, and he was feeling particularly well, he could say, "Let's go in and torture a witch"; or, if the hour was late and time limited, "Now we'll just step down and hang a heretic to go to bed on." The duke's bedroom, by the way, was right over the torture chamber. I would give something for that man's conscience.