16th.
We dined at one, in company of some gentlemanly Swiss and French officers, and started at three for Chillon, passing on our way the hamlet La Tour du Peil, and catching a glimpse as we rode by of its ruined ancient castle, pillaged and burned by order of Berne, in punishment for having allowed the passage of foreign soldiers to Lausanne, where lay the camp of their foe, Charles, duke of Burgundy. Vevay suffered for the like fault, being plundered also, and of the two towns five hundred men were massacred.
There is nothing lovelier than this road, winding along the flank of the mountains, here rich with wood. We passed Clarens, beautiful as Byron’s description, hiding among its own trees, and straggling up the hill side from the shore. The noble old castle of Chastellar on its solitary mound, and the peaked stone spire of Montreux seeming to lean against the forest, above which the Dent de Jaman stands, cold and barren,—all the way the lake shining below, with the stern rocks of Meillerie opposite, and the Alps closing the valley. The heat was excessive; and the small vineyard flies so tormented our horses that D——’s taste for the picturesque had well nigh vanished, when a bend in the road brought us beneath a high bank, covered with old walnut-trees, and opposite the rock on which Chillon stands, with its towers and tall keep, the most picturesque of feudal castles. We crossed the covered wooden bridge, where the gendarmes stand, smiling welcome; and the horses consigned, each to the care of two, and left in a dark stable to be dusted with walnut branches, we were sufficiently tranquil as to their comfort to follow our guide, who was the wife of the concierge. She led across two courts, and opened a heavy prison door; it was “out of the sun and into a grave.” I obeyed her injunction to hold fast her hand, when, having scrambled over rubbish, and through partial darkness, she drew me to the brink of a square hole, and pointed down a depth of eighty-six feet. It was one of the fearful oubliettes, whose existence here was unknown till about fifteen months since. Grown accustomed to the dim light, we could distinguish a coarse woollen rug, now laid on the brink, but which was found below serving as shroud to a skeleton. The victim died from the fall, or was left to perish. In the same court-yard is the entrance to another, which was, at pleasure, dungeon or place of execution. Its depth is sixty and some feet; and from the top of the square opening descend three steps, the commencement of a stair which goes no farther. The condemned was lowered to the bottom, and his food administered in like manner. If death was decided on, he was forgotten, as there was no other communication with the living world.
A few steps lead to the salle de justice. The dryness of the air and thickness of the walls has so preserved all within, that the curious wooden ceiling, supported in the centre by pillars, which retain traces of paint, remains; and the planks of the floor were only exchanged for pavement, when, on the threats of France, the caissons of the Canton de Vaud were assembled here. At one end of this hall is a small room with a door, on a now closed staircase, near the wide chimney. At the other is the salle de question. A pillar of wood, to which the prisoner was bound, still stands,—as does a beam above it, pierced with holes for pulleys, and a portion of the old ropes hanging from them. A second beam, which supported a wheel on which the wretch was tortured, (tied by the arms with weights to the feet,) crumbled down a few months ago. The pillar is seared with the red-hot irons employed in the torture; that by burning being continued during three-quarters of an hour, with intervals of five minutes; if it induced confession, the private stair from the small chamber conducted the condemned to the potence in the dungeon below. The door has been walled up, on account of the vicinity of the powder magazine. Our guide led to the eating-hall, which was the kitchen also. The capitals of its pillars were ornamented with fleurs-de-lis, she said, when a count of Savoy conducted hither his bride, a daughter of France, perhaps Bonne de Bourbon, who married the green count Amedée the Sixth, about 1355. The two carved oaken chests with their curious locks, at the bottom of the room, are of the same date. The view from these windows is beautiful beyond praise, and there is “the little isle—the only one in view,” lying in the lake like a floating basket of flowers. Our last visit was to the dungeons: the first is the most modern, and least sad, as its loopholes are longer and less narrow. On one of the sills they form in the thick wall sat a Swiss girl, the light falling on her picturesque dress, touching her smiling face and bare arms,—she animated the dim prison house. Between this first dungeon and that of Bonnivard, there is one smaller and darker, though light enough for its destination: for a few moments’ stay allows the eye to distinguish, crossing a space between its pillars, a heavy beam, whose upper part is, in several places, deeply worn by the ropes which, upholding heavy weights, were bound round it; and a few paces behind, the steps of the narrow stair which conducts to the fatal door of the justice hall. The opposite wall, against which the lake ripples or foams in its various moods, has a square cavity, now closed with stones; the bodies of those who died unheard and unseen were cast forth there, and beneath the waves which told no tales. A narrow portal opens on the dungeon where Bonnivard lay. I think I reminded you before that he was prior of the abbey of St. Victor, a man of pure life as well as courage, who exhorted the Genevese to reform, and censuring the vices of the catholic clergy generally, as well as their bishops in particular, was betrayed by false friends to the duke of Savoy, whose anger he had above all excited, by urging an alliance between Fribourg and Geneva. One of these friends received for reward his rich priory. He was two years in prison, and set free and reinstated in his benefice by Pierre de la Baume, bishop of Geneva. He by force took possession of the property of which he had been deprived in Savoy, which, notwithstanding his affection for Geneva, was his country. The duke besieged him in his château of Cartigny, which, unable to defend long, he was forced to fly from, and saw himself almost wholly deprived of his revenues. The town of Geneva granted him a pension, and sustained him in his adversity; and the irritated duke, desirous only of obtaining possession of his person, granted him a safe-conduct with a view to lure him on his territory. Bonnivard, expecting no treachery, profited by the circumstance to visit his mother, sick and old, at Seyssel; and intending to go thence to Lausanne, he was seized on the Jura, and dragged to Chillon. The first two years of his detention he passed in comparative liberty; but Charles the Third visiting the castle, he was cast, by his order, into the vault below the level of the lake, where are
“The seven pillars of Gothic mould.”
The first column has a story of its own, for a wall of separation, now thrown down, divided it and a space of twelve feet square from the prior’s prison, forming one which enclosed a young man, his companion. On the walls are a few figures, in the costume of the time, rude but spirited sketches, the work of his long leisure; they are fresh still. Attached to the pillar is the portion of the broken ring which held his chain, and an iron bar of his loophole was sawed through, to allow room for the passage of a human body. Long toil, and the use of some instrument left him inadvertently, severed the fetters and opened the path; but he reckoned on his powers of swimming, forgetting they were paralyzed by the space and air of a dungeon—he plunged into the lake, and rose no more alive. Bonnivard was delivered two months later; it was in March, 1536. Chillon remained the last possession of Savoy in the Pays de Vaud. Confiding in its strength, her garrison’s boats insulted all who were not subjects of Duke Charles, and haughtily rejected the truce proposed to the Bernese by the emperor’s ambassador. The Bernese army besieged it on the land side; the troops and artillery of Geneva armed barks on the lake; the garrison was forced to surrender, and Bonnivard set free. His pillar, retaining its iron ring, is the second in order; the floor of rock round, worn by the uneasy pacing of four years: on the column, among more perishing names, is that of Byron. I noticed that of Alexander Dumas, so high above, that to engrave its enormous letters he must have mounted a ladder. The space on either side the range of columns which support the roof’s groined arches, forms a sombre aisle, the inner wall left as nature made it, irregular masses of living rock; that towards the lake intersected with a few narrow loopholes high from the ground, which are rather slits in the stone, so small that in the morning it is a dark vault, and only when the beams shine low they come “creeping over the floor.” At sunset, however, “the imprisoned ray” is not “dull:” for, as if it acquired force from its concentration, it falls like a streak of fire on the pillars and blocks of stone. As we saw it, the effect was splendid, but partial, as at the extreme end an artist was sketching by the light of candles, being otherwise in perfect obscurity. It is to carry his materials that the young Swiss, whom we saw as we passed again, comes daily. Last summer, an amateur, an English gentleman, visited Chillon with the intention of painting not only the dungeon, but Bonnivard! for this purpose he chose a gendarme of spare habit, having a long beard and sallow face, chained him to the pillar, and commenced his work, saying, “vous bon Bonnivard.” He could not, as you may suppose from the specimen, explain himself in French; but Monsieur Chéri (a strange name for a captive prior) understood his signs made with money, and submitted with fortitude to lie robed and fettered on the rocky floor. One day, unfortunately, a feeling of pity came over his comrade in the court-yard above, and he descended to relieve him, thinking to divide the duty, and that one might do as well as the other, seeing both were gendarmes. The new comer was a healthy, very young man, stout and beardless, unlike the studious prior, who had eaten black bread in small quantities, and probably abstained from shaving six years. The pallid gendarme feeling, like him he represented, the blessing of freedom, sprang up in delight; and the amateur, in despair, when the fat man assumed the chain, could only hold his first prisoner fast, stamp his foot and shake his head at the other, and repeat all the French he knew, “Lui, bon Bonnivard, rester; vous aller, pas bon Bonnivard!” He grew at last so angry that my conductress, who had, she said, almost expired with laughter, interfered, and Chéri once more cast himself at the foot of his pillar. As we went out, she mentioned the circumstance of having two English ladies “en pension.”
D—— looked up in intense delight, the horses were in a good stable, the gendarmes would make admirable grooms. Our best fare might be fresh eggs, it was true, but what signified our dinner compared with the advantages of a view of the lake, with the “Isle’s tall trees;” of walking from the oubliettes to the torture chamber, and resting under the potence, and in Bonnivard’s dungeon, a lodging of three chambers, looking on the lake, which we should hear “ripple night and day.” We told her we would come in the spring, when we should have repassed the mountains, and she looked rather surprised and very much pleased at the sudden wandering of our senses.
Arrived at the stable, we were confirmed in our resolve, by seeing the gendarmes obeying orders; one holding a horse’s head, another shaking a bough, in the places where we had left them, like the warriors in the Belle au Bois dormant. As I mounted Fanny, the châtelaine asked permission to touch my hand, and unaccustomed, I suppose, to see ladies on horseback, said it would be “amusant” to have us there; so we rode away.
Arrived on the brow of the hill, we looked down on the romantic castle, and my eye lighted on the chapel roof. “Dear me,” said I, looking at D——, “the powder magazine!”
“Humph,” said D——, looking down in turn.