From the Beau Rivage Hotel we took steamer, and sailed along the shore, passing Vevay, with its handsome hotels, the romantic village of Clarens, and finally landing at Villeneuve, rode up to the beautifully situated Hotel Byron. This hotel, although small compared with the others, was admirably kept, and is in one of the most romantic and lovely positions that can be imagined. It is placed upon a broad terrace, a little above the shore, and, being at the very end of the lake, commands an extensive view of both sides, with all lovely and romantic scenery.
There, as we sat beneath the trees, we looked upon the scene, which is just as Byron wrote about it, and as true to the description as if written yesterday. The "clear placid Leman" is as blue as if colored with indigo. There was Jura; there were "the mountains, with their thousand years of snow;" the wide, long lake below; there, at our left, went the swift Rhone, who
"cleaves his way between
Heights which appear as lovers who have parted in hate."
At a little distance we could see
"Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep love;"
and there, directly before us, was the "small green isle" that the prisoner of Chillon saw from his dungeon window; and only a quarter of a mile away is the Castle of Chillon itself. Down the dusty road we started to visit this celebrated place, which almost every visitor who has read the poem feels that he is acquainted with.
The castle, which is small, is on a point of land that juts out into the lake, and its whole appearance realizes an imagination of a gloomy old feudal castle, or prison. It was formerly surrounded by the waters of the lake, and is still connected on one side with the land by a drawbridge, and the lake washes up to its very base, seven hundred feet deep, on the other. Something of the romance of the place is taken away by the railway track, within a few rods of the drawbridge, and the shrieking locomotive rushes past the very point where once stood the castle outworks.
The massive, irregular walls of this old castle have five or six towers, with the loopholes and battlements of old times. We crossed the bridge, passed into the old rooms—the Hall of Knights, and the Chamber of Question, where the rack and other instruments of torture were used upon the victims of jealous tyrants. Here we grasped a now useless fragment of old shattered machinery, which had once been bathed with the sweat of agony, as the victim's limbs stretched and cracked beneath the terrible force of the executioner. Here was the huge stone that was fastened to the sufferer's feet when he was hoisted by the wrists to the iron staple above. This was the square chamber in the solid masonry, where the victim's groans were unheard by those without, now transformed into a peaceful storehouse for an old wagon or two, with the sun streaming in at a square opening in the thick wall. But a few steps from here, and we come to the oubliette, the staircase down which the victim made three or four steps, and then went plunging a hundred feet or more into the yawning chasm of blackness upon the jagged rocks, or into the deep waters of the lake below.
But what we all came to see were the dungeons beneath the castle, the scene of Byron's story. These dungeons are several cells, of different sizes, dug out of the rock upon which the massive arches of the castle seem to rest. The two largest of them are beneath the dining and justice halls. From the latter we were shown a narrow staircase, descending into a little narrow recess, where victims were brought down, and strangled with a rope thrown across an oak beam, which still remains, blackened with age. Near it was another narrow, gloomy cell, said to be that in which the prisoner passed the night previous to execution, and near by the place where thousands of Jews were beheaded in the thirteenth century, on accusation of poisoning the wells, and causing the plague. The gloomy place fairly reeked with horror; its stones seemed cemented with blood, and the very sighing of the summer breeze without was suggestive of the groans of the sufferers who had been tortured and murdered within this terrible prison.