Thy trees take root in love.”
Here is Chillon, with its great white wall sinking into the deep calm of the water, while its very stones echo memorable events, from the era of barbarism in 830, when Count Wala, who had held command of Charlemagne’s forces, was incarcerated within the tower of this desolate rock during the reign of Louis le Débonnaire, to the imprisonment of the Salvation Army captain.[97]
“Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls;
A thousand feet in depth below,
Its massy waters meet and flow;
Below the surface of the lake
The dark vault lies”
where Bonnivard, the prior of St. Victor and the great asserter of the independence of Geneva, was found when the castle was wrested from the Duke of Savoy by the Bernese.
Along the shores of Lake Geneva the Romans had many stations and posts, vestiges of which are still visible.[98] The confusion and the mixture of interests that succeeded the fall of the Empire gave rise in the Middle Ages to various baronial castles, ecclesiastical towns, and towers of defence, the ruins of which still stand on the margin of the lake or on the eminences a little inland,—
“Chiefless castles breathing stern farewells