God rest her soul in keeping yet more wise and tender!
CHAPTER XXXI.
Chillon.
THE Castle of Chillon is a whitey-gray pile, with towers of varying heights and black, pointed roofs, like extinguishers, clustering about the central and tallest. The lake washes the base on all sides. A wooden bridge, once a “draw,” joins the fortress to the shore. This was the scene of the casualty to Julie’s child, and his rescue by the mother, resulting in the death of the latter, narrated by Rousseau in the concluding chapters of “La Nouvelle Héloïse.”
In spring and summer, the aspect of the storied prison is not forbidding. The walk from the steamboat is pleasantly shaded throughout much of its length. Trees grow down in the old moat; pretty creeping plants drop in festoons and knots from the top and face of the shore-wall; birds hop and sing in bending branches that dip in the water. The “thousand years of snow on high” are verdant slopes below. “The white-walled distant town,” “the channeled rock,” “the torrent’s leap and gush”—are as familiar to Byron’s reader as the fields and hills about his childhood’s home, distinct as a photograph painted by Swiss sunshine.
The scenery near Chillon is the grandest on Lake Leman, reminding one of the snow-capped ramparts of Lucerne. When, at eleven o’clock of the last day of October, we left the steamboat dock in front of the Hôtel Russie in Geneva, sky and wave were still and smiling. Mont Blanc drew a cowl over his face by the time we touched the Nyon pier. But the ugly old town had never been more nearly sightly. The five Roman towers of the ancient castle were softly outlined against the blue; the browns, grays and blacks of the houses, crowding into the lake, were foil and relief to the scarlet and gold of massy vines, the russet and purple and lemon-yellow of the trees on the esplanade and the steep, winding streets. The cowl unfolded into mantling mist upon “the left bank” (our right) as we sailed by Vevay, the “livest” town on the upper lake. A company of school-boys in uniform were drilling in the parade-ground close to the wharf, to the music of drum and fife, a herd of gamins peering enviously at them between the pales of the fence. Window-gardens were flush with petunias, salvias and pelargoniums. Woodbine streamed, as with living blood, from hotel-balconies and garden-walls. The “grape-cure” was over and the bulk of the vintage gathered, but purple bunches hung still among the dying leaves,—luscious gleanings for the peasant-children trampling the mellow soil with bare toes, and cheering shrilly as the boat glided by. Clarens—“Julie’s” home—a village of pink, buff and pea-green houses, more like painted sugar châteaux than human habitations, harmonized better with the autumnal tints of aspen and poplar than with their vernal green. The chestnut copse, known as the “Bosquet de Julie,”—where she gave the first kiss to her lover, was like fine gold for depth and brilliancy of hue. Montreux lies in the hollow of a crescent-shaped cove, sheltered from adverse winds from whatever quarter, a warm covert for invalids, where roses blossom eternally in sight of never-melted snows. The bristly spines of mountains are its rear-guard, and upon their lower terraces are hedges of evergreen laurels, orchards of figs and pomegranates.
Thus far, we had sunshine and color with us, while, upon the other shore, the stealing fogs kept pace with our progress,—a level line at the lower edge which rested mid-way up the sides of the nearer mountains, but gradually encroaching upon the blue above, until, when we stepped ashore at Chillon, the sun began to look wan. The days were shortening rapidly at this season. To save time, we took a carriage at the wharf and drove directly to the Château through the hamlet that has taken its name.
“God bless the ingoers and outcomers!” is the German legend above the entrance, put there by the pious Bernese in 1643.