Kate Putnam Osgood.
THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON: A GENTLEMAN GROSSLY MISREPRESENTED.
"A character more celebrated than known" is Francis Bonivard, prior of St. Victor and Prisoner of Chillon. It is not by any intentional imposture on his part that he goes stalking through modern literature disguised in the character of hero, saint and martyr, and shouting in a hoarse chest-voice his "appeal from tyranny to God." In fact, if he could be permitted to revisit his cherished little shelf of books about which has grown the ample library of the University of Geneva, and view the various delineations of himself by artist, poet, and even serious historian, it would be delightful to witness his comical astonishment. Perhaps it is not to be laid to the fault of Lord Byron, who after visiting the old castle and its dungeon beguiled the hours of a rainy day at the inn at Ouchy with writing a poem concerning which he frankly confesses that he had not the slightest knowledge of its hero. Hobhouse, his companion, ought to have been better informed, but was not. If anybody is to blame, it is the recent writers, who do know the facts, but are unwilling to hurt so fine an heroic figure or to dethrone "one of the demigods of the liberal mythology." Enough to say that the Muse of History has been guilty of one of those practical jokes to which she is too much addicted, in dressing with tragic buskins and muffling in the cloak of a hero of melodrama, and so palming off for earnest on two generations of mankind, the drollest wag of the sixteenth century.
A wild young fellow like Bonivard, with a lively appreciation of the ridiculous, could not fail to see the comic aspect of the fate which invested him with the spiritual and temporal authority and emoluments of the priory of St. Victor. This was a rich little Benedictine monastery just outside the eastern gate of Geneva, on the little knoll now crowned by the observatory, surrounded with walls and moat of its own, independent of the bishop of Geneva in spiritual matters, and in temporal affairs equally independent of the city: in fact, it was a petty sovereignty by itself, and its dozen of hearty, well-provided monks, though nominally under the rule of Cluny, were a law to themselves, and not a very rigid one either. The office of prior, by virtue of a little arrangement at Rome, descended to Bonivard from his uncle, immediately upon whose demise the young potentate of twenty-one took upon him the state and functions of his office in a way to show the monks of St. Victor that they had no King Log to deal with. The document is still extant, in the Latin of the period, in which Prior Bonivard ordains that every new brother at his initiation shall not only stand treat all round, but shall, at his own cost and charges, furnish every one of his brethren with a new cap. Another document of equal gravity makes new ordinances concerning the convent-kitchen, which seems to have been one of the good prior's most religious cares.[6] Not only his own subjects, but those of other jurisdictions, were made to feel the majesty of his sovereign authority. He would let them know that he had "just as much jurisdiction at St. Victor as the duke of Savoy had at Chambéry." He heard causes, sentenced to prison, even received ambassadors from his brother the duke, but not without looking sharply at their credentials. If these were wanting, the unfortunate wretches were threatened with the gallows as spies, and when they had been thoroughly frightened the monarch would indulge himself in the exercise of the sweetest prerogative of royalty, the pardoning power, and, when it was considered that the majesty of the state had been sufficiently asserted, would wind up with asking the whole company to dinner.
It had been considered a clever stroke of policy, at a time when the dukes of Savoy and the bishops of Geneva, who agreed in nothing else, were plotting, together or separately, to capture and extinguish the immemorial liberties of the brave little free city, to get this fortified outpost before its very gate officered by a brilliant and daring young Savoyard gentleman, who would be bound to the duke by his nativity and to the Church by his office, and to both by his interests. To the dismay of bishop and duke, it appeared that the young prior, who had led a gay life of it at the University of Turin, had nevertheless read his classics to some purpose, and had come back with his head full of Plato and Plutarch and Livy and of theories of republican liberty. So that by putting him into St. Victor they had turned that little stronghold from an outpost of attack upon Geneva liberties into the favorite resort and rendezvous of all the young liberal leaders of that gay but gallant little republic, who found themselves irresistibly drawn to young Bonivard, partly as a republican and still more as a jolly good fellow.