Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878.

by Various

The first manifestation of his sympathies in that direction occurred soon after his installation as prior. His uncle on his deathbed had confessed to young Francis the burden on his conscience in that he had taken Church money and applied it to the making of a battery of culverins wherewith to levy war against one of his neighbors in the country; and bequeathed to his nephew the convent and the culverins, with the charge to melt down the latter into a chime of church-bells which should atone for his evil deeds. Not long after, Bonivard was telling the story to his friend Berthelier, the daring and heroic leader of the "Sons of Geneva" in their perilous struggle against tyranny, when the latter exclaimed, "What! spoil good cannon to make bells? Never! Give us the guns, and you shall have old metal to make bells enough to split your ears. But let guns be guns. So the Church will be doubly served. There will be chimes at St. Victor and guns in Geneva, which is a Church city." The bargain was struck, as a vote in the records of the city council shows to this day. But it was the beginning of a quarrel with the duke of Savoy which was to cost Bonivard more than he had counted on. There was reckless deviltry enough among all these young liberals, but some of them—not Bonivard—were capable of seriously counting the cost of their game. On one occasion—it was at the christening of Berthelier's child, and Bonivard was godfather—Berthelier took his friend aside from the guests and said, "It is time we had done with dancing and junketing and organized for the defence of liberty."—"All right!" said the prior. "Come on, and may the Lord prosper our crazy schemes!" Berthelier took his hand, and with a serious look that sobered the rattle-headed ecclesiastic for a moment, replied, "But let me warn you that this is going to cost you your living and me my head."—"I have heard him say this a hundred times," says Bonivard in his Chronicles. The dungeon at Chillon and the mural tablet in the Tour de l'Isle at Geneva tell how truly the prophecy was fulfilled.

There was so little of the strut of the stage-hero about Bonivard that he could not be comfortable in doing a chivalrous thing without a joke to take off the gloss of it. Before the ducal party had quite given up hopes of him there was a serious affair on their hands—the need of putting out of the way by such means, treacherous and atrocious, as the Savoyards of that day loved to use, one of the noblest of the Geneva magistrates, Aimé Lévrier. An emissary of the duke, of high rank, kinsman to Bonivard, came to St. Victor and offered the prior magnificent inducements to aid in the plot. With a gravity that must have convulsed the spectators if there had been any, Bonivard pointed to his monastic gown, his prayer-book and his crucifix, and pleaded his deep sense of the sacredness of his office as a reason for having nothing to do with the affair. "Then," says his kinsman, rising in wrath, "I will do the business myself. I'll have Lévrier out of his bed and over in Savoy this very night."—"Do you really mean it, uncle? Give me your hand!"—"Then you consent, after all, to help me in the matter?"—"Oh no, uncle: that isn't it. But I know these Genevese are a hasty sort of folk, and I am just going to raise thirty florins to be spent in saying masses to-morrow for the repose of your soul." Before the evening was over, Bonivard found an opportunity of slipping in disguise over to the house of Lévrier and giving a hint of what was intended: the notes of preparation for resistance that Berthelier and his friends began at once to make wrought upon the excited nerves of the ambassador and his armed retinue to such a point that they were fain to escape from the town by a secret gate before daylight.

The affair of his rescue of Pecolat is another illustration of his character and of the strange, turbulent age in which he lived; and it went far to embitter the hatred of the duke and the bishop against him. This poor fellow was the jester, song-singer and epigrammatist of the madcap patriots who were associated under the title of "Sons of Geneva." Under a trumped-up charge of plotting the death of the bishop he was kidnapped and carried away to one of the castles in the neighborhood, and there tortured until a false confession was wrung from him implicating Berthelier and others. To secure his condemnation to death he was brought back into the city and presented before the court; but the sight of the poor cripple, racked and bruised with recent tortures, and his steadfastness in recanting his late confession, wrought more with the judges than the fear of the duke, and he was acquitted. But the feeble and ferocious bishop, moved partly by malignity and partly, no doubt, by sincere and cowardly terror, was resolved to kill him; and by some fiction declaring him to have been in the minor orders, he clapped him into the bishop's prison, claiming to try him by ecclesiastical law. The story of renewed tortures inflicted on their helpless comrade, and their knowledge of the certain death that awaited him, stirred the blood of the patriots of Geneva. It was just the moment for the prior of St. Victor to show that the studies at Freiburg and Turin that had made him doctor utriusque juris had not been in vain. He would fight the bishop with his own weapon of Church law. He despatched Pecolat's own brother with letters to the archbishop of Vienne, metropolitan to the bishop of Geneva, and, using his family influence, which was not small, he secured a summons to the bishop and chapter of Geneva to appear before the archiepiscopal court and give account of the affair, and meanwhile to cease all proceedings against the prisoner.

It was comparatively easy to procure the summons. The difficulty was to find some one competent to the functions of episcopal usher and bold enough to serve it. Bonivard bethought him of a "caitiff wretch"—an obscure priest—to whom he handed the document with two round dollars lying on it, and bade him hand the paper to the bishop at mass the next day in the cathedral. The starving clergyman hesitated long between his fears and his necessities, but finally promised to do the work on condition that the prior should stand by him in person and see him through. The hour approached, and the commissioner's courage was oozing rapidly away. His knees knocked together, and he slipped back in the crowd, hoping to escape. The vigilant prior darted after him, seized him, and laying his hand on the dagger that he wore under his robe whispered in his ear, "Do it or I'll stab you!" He adds, in his Chronicles, "I should have been as good as my word: I do not say it by way of boasting. I know I was acting like a fool, but I was quite beside myself with anxiety for my friend." Happily, there was no need of extreme measures. He gripped his terrified victim by the thumb, and as the procession moved toward the church-door he thrust the paper into his hand, saying, "Now's the time! You've got to do it." And all the time he held him fast by the thumb. The bishop came near, and Bonivard let go the wretch's thumb and pushed him to the front, pointing to the prelate and saying, "Do your work!" The bishop turned pale with terror of assassination as he heard the words. But the trembling clerk, not less terrified than the bishop, dropped on his knees and presented the archiepiscopal mandate, gasping out, "My lord, inhibitur vobis, prout in copia." Bonivard retreated into his inviolable sanctuary of St. Victor. "I was young enough and crazy enough," he says, "to fear neither bishop nor duke." He had saved poor Pecolat's life, although the work was not finished until the publication of an interdict from the metropolitan silencing every church-bell and extinguishing every altar-candle in the city had brought the bishop to terms.[7]

It is a hardship to the writer to be compelled to retrench the story of the early deeds for liberty of Bonivard and his boon companions. There is a rollicking swagger about them all, which by and by begins to be sobered when it is seen that on the side of the oppressor there is power. By violence, by fraudulent promises, by foul treachery on the part of cowardly citizens, the duke of Savoy gains admittance with his army within the walls of Geneva, and begins his delicious and bloody revenge for the indignities that have been put upon his pretensions and usurpations. Berthelier, a very copy from the antique—a hero that might have stepped forth into the sixteenth century from the page of Plutarch[8]—remained in the town serenely to await the death which he foreknew. On the day of the duke's entrance Bonivard, who had no such relish for martyrdom for its own sake, put himself between two of his most trusted friends, the lord of Voruz and the abbot of Montheron of the Pays de Vaud, and galloped away disguised as a monk. "Come first to my convent," said the abbot, "and thence we will take you to a place of safety." The convent was reached, and in the morning Bonivard was greeted by his comrade Voruz, who came into his room, and, laying paper and pen before him, required him to write a renunciation of his priory in favor of the abbot of Montheron. Resistance was vain. He was a prisoner in the hands of traitors. The alternative being "Your priory or your life!" he frankly owns that he required no time at all to make up his choice. Voruz took the precious document, with the signature still wet, and went out, double locking the door behind him. His two friends turned him over to the custody of the duke, who locked him up for two years at Grolée, one of his castles down the Rhone, and put the honest abbot of Montheron in possession of the rich living of St. Victor.

But Bonivard in his prison was less to be pitied than the citizens of Geneva who remained in their subjugated city. The two despots, the bishop and the duke, who had seized the unhappy town, combined to crush the gay and insubordinate spirit out of it. All this time, says Bonivard, "they imprisoned, they scourged, they tortured, they beheaded, they hung, so as it is pitiful to tell."

Meanwhile, the influential family friends of Bonivard, some of them high in court favor, discovering that he was yet alive and in prison, bestirred themselves to procure his liberation; and not in vain, for the possession that had made him dangerous, the priory of St. Victor, having been wrested from him, there was little harm that he could do. His immediate successor in the priory, good Abbot de Montheron, had not indeed long enjoyed the benefice. He had gone on business to Rome, where certain Churchmen who admired his new benefice invited him (so Bonivard tells the story) to a banquet more Romano, and gave him a dose of the "cardinal powder," which operated so powerfully that it purged the soul right out of the body. He left a paper behind him in which, as a sign of remorse for his crime, he resigned all his rights in the priory back to Bonivard.[9] But the pope, whose natural affection toward his cousins and nephews overflowed freely in the form of gifts of what did not belong to him, bestowed the living on a cousin, who commuted it for an annual revenue of six hundred and forty gold crowns—a splendid revenue for those days—and poor Bonivard, whose sole avocation was that of gentleman, found it difficult to carry on that line of business with neither capital nor income. He came back, some five years later, into possession of the priory. They were five years of exciting changes, of fierce terrorism and oppression at Geneva, followed by a respite, a rallying of the spirit of the people, an actual recovery of some of the old rights of the city, and, presently, by the beginning of some signs of religious light coming from the direction of Germany. And the way in which Bonivard at last got reinstalled into his convent is curiously illustrative of the strange condition of society in those times. One May morning in 1527 the little town was all agog with strange news from Rome. The Eternal City had been taken by storm, sacked, pillaged, burned! The Roman bishop was prisoner to the Roman emperor, if indeed he was alive at all. In fact, there was a rumor—dreadful, no doubt, but attended by vast consolations—that the whole court of Rome had perished. Immediately there was a rush to the bishop's palace, and a scramble for the vacant livings in the diocese that had been held by absentees at Rome. The bishop, delighted at such a windfall of patronage, dispensed his favors right and left, not forgetting, says Bonivard, to reserve something comfortable for himself in the shape of a fat convent that had been held by a cardinal. This was Bonivard's opportunity, and, times and the bishop having changed, he got back once more into his cherished quarters as prior of St. Victor. The convent was there, and the friars, but the estates that had been wont to keep them all right royally were mostly in the hands of the duke and his minions. It is in the effort to recover these that Bonivard shines out in his most magnificent character, that of military hero. The campaign of Cartigny includes the most memorable of his feats of arms.

Cartigny was an estate about six miles down the left bank of the Rhone from Geneva, appertaining to St. Victor. "It was a chastel of pleasaunce, not a forteresse," says our hero, who is the Homer of his own brave deeds. But the duke kept a garrison there, and to every demand the prior made for his place he replied that he did not dare give it up for fear of being excommunicated by the pope. Rent-time came, and the Savoyard government enjoined the tenants not to pay to the prior. Whereupon that potentate declared that, being refused civil justice, he "fell back on the law of nations."