This and all the rest that I know of Bonivard I learn from a charming
historical and topographical study of Montreux and its neighborhood, by
MM. Rambert, Lebert, etc.; and I confess it at once, for fear some one
else shall find me out by simply buying the book there. It leaves you
little ground for classifying Bonivard with the great reformers, but it
leaves you still less for identifying him historically with Byron's
great melodramatic Prisoner of Chillon. If the Majority have somewhere
that personal consciousness without which they are the Nonentity, one
can fancy the liberal scholar, the humorous philosopher, meeting the
romantic poet, and protesting against the second earthly captivity that
he has delivered him over to. Nothing could be more alien to Bonivard
than the character of Byron's prisoner; and all that equipment of six
supposititious brothers, who perish one by one to intensify his
sufferings, is, it must be confessed, odious and ridiculous when you
think of the lonely yet cheerful sceptic pacing his _vionnet_, and
composing essays and verses as he walked. Prisoner for prisoner, even if
both were real, the un-Byronic Bonivard is much more to my mind. But the
poet had to make a Byronic Bonivard, being of the romantic time he was,
and we cannot blame him. The love of his sentimentality pervades the
region; they have named the nearest hotel after him, and there is a
_Sentier Byron_ leading up to it. But, on the other hand, they have
called one of the lake steamboats after Bonivard, which, upon the whole,
I should think would be more satisfactory to him than the poem. At any
rate, I should prefer it in his place.
X
The fine Gothic chapel where we heard our pasteur preach was whitewashed
out of all memory of any mural decoration that its earlier religion may
have given it; but the gloss of the whitewash was subdued by the dim
light that stole in through the long slits of windows. We sat upon
narrow wooden seats so very hard that I hope the old dukes and their
court were protected by good stout armor against their obduracy, and
that they had not to wait a quarter of an hour for the holy father to
come walking up the railroad track, as we had for our pasteur. There
were but three men in the congregation that day, and all the rest were
Suissesses, with the hard, pure, plain faces their sex wear mostly in
that country. The choir sat in two rows of quaintly carved seats on each
side of the pulpit, and the school-master of the village led the
singing, tapping his foot to keep time. The pastor, delicate and wan of
face, and now no longer living, I came afterwards to know better, and to
respect greatly for his goodness and good sense. His health had been
broken by the hard work of a mountain parish, and he had vainly spent
two winters in Nice. Now he was here as the assistant of the
superannuated pastor of Villeneuve, who had a salary of $600 a year from
the Government; but how little our preacher had I dare not imagine, or
what the pastor of the Free Church was paid by his parishioners. M.
P---- was a man of culture far above that of the average New England
country minister of this day; probably he was more like a New England
minister of the past, but with more of the air of the world. He wore the
Genevan bands and gown, and represented in that tabernacle of the
ancient faith the triumph of "the Religion" with an effectiveness that
was heightened by the hectic brightness of his gentle, spiritual eyes;
and he preached a beautiful sermon from the beautiful text, "Suffer
little children," teaching us that they were the types, not the models,
of Christian perfection. There was first a prayer, which he read; then a
hymn, and one of the Psalms; then the sermon, very simply and decorously
delivered; then another hymn, and prayer. Here, and often again in
Switzerland, the New England that is past or passing was recalled to me;
these Swiss are like the people of our hill country in their faith, as
well as their hard, laborious lives; only they sang with sweeter voices
than our women.
The wood-carving of the chapel, which must have been of the fourteenth
century or earlier, was delightfully grotesque, and all the queerer for
its contrast with the Protestant, the Calvinistic, whitewash which one
of our fellow-boarders found here in the chapel and elsewhere in the
castle _un peu vulgaire_--as if he were a Boston man. But the whole
place was very clean, and up the corner of one of the courts ran a strip
of Virginia-creeper, which the Swiss call the Canada vine, blood-red
with autumn. There was also a rose-tree sixty years old stretching its
arms abroad, over the ancient masonry, and feeling itself still young in
that sheltered place.
We saw it when we came later to do the whole castle, and to revere the
dungeon where Bonivard wore his _vionnet_ in the rock. I will not
trouble the reader with much about the Hall of Justice and the Chamber
of Tortures opening out of it, with the pulley for the rack formerly
used in cross-questioning prisoners. These places were very interesting,
and so were the bedchambers of the duke and duchess, and the great Hall
of the Knights. The wells or pits, armed round with knife points,
against which the prisoner struck when hurled down through them into the
lake, have long had their wicked throats choked with sand; and the bed
hewn out of the rock, where the condemned slept the night before
execution, is no longer used for that purpose--possibly because the only
prisoners now in Chillon are soldiers punished for such social offences
as tipsiness. But the place was all charmingly mediæval, and the more so
for a certain rudeness of decoration. The artistic merit was purely
architectural, and this made itself felt perhaps most distinctly in the
prison vaults, which Longfellow pronounced "the most delightful dungeon"
he had ever seen. A great rose-tree overhung the entrance, and within we
found them dry, wholesome, and picturesque. The beautiful Gothic pillars
rose like a living growth from the rock, out of which the vault was half
hewn; but the iron rings to which the prisoners were chained still hung
from them. The columns were scribbled full of names, and Byron's was
among the rest. The _vionnet_ of Bonivard was there, beside one of the
pillars, plain enough, worn two inches deep and three feet long in the
hard stone. Words cannot add to the pathos of it.
[Illustration: _The Prisoner of Chillon_]