A Little Swiss Sojourn | Page 6

you have no happiness but
in the pleasures the priests allow you. The ministers wish to abolish

vice, but there is where you will suffer most, and after having hated the
priests because they are so much like you, you will hate their
successors because they are so little like you. You will not have had
them two years before you will put them down. Meanwhile, if you trust
me, do one of two things: if you wish to remain deformed, as you are,
do not wonder that others are like you; or, if you wish to reform them,
begin by showing them how."
[Illustration: A Railroad Servant]
This was very odd language to use to a deputation of reformers, but I
confess that it endears the memory of Bonivard to me. He was a
thoroughly charming person, and not at all wise in his actions. Through
mere folly he fell twice into the hands of his enemies, suffered two
years' imprisonment, and lost his priory. To get it back he laid siege to
it with six men and a captain. The siege was a failure. He trusted his
enemy, the duke, and was thrown into Chillon, where he remained a
sort of guest of the governor for two years. The duke visited the castle
at the end of that time. "Then the captain threw me into a vault lower
than the lake, where I remained four years. I do not know whether it
was by order of the duke or from his own motion, but I do know that I
then had so much leisure for walking that I wore in the rock which
formed the floor of the dungeon a pathlet [vionnet], or little path, as if
one had beaten it out with a hammer." He was fastened by a chain four
feet in length to one of the beautiful Gothic pillars of the vault, and you
still see where this gentle scholar, this sweet humorist, this wise and
lenient philosopher, paced to and fro those weary years like a restless
beast--a captive wolf, or a bear in his pit. But his soul was never in
prison. As he trod that vionnet out of the stone he meditated upon his
reading, his travels, the state of the Church and its reform, politics, the
origin of evil. "His reflections often lifted him above men and their
imperfect works; often, too, they were marked by that scepticism which
knowledge of the human heart inspires. 'When one considers things
well,' he said, 'one finds that it is easier to destroy the evil than to
construct the good. This world being fashioned like an ass's back, the
fardel that you would balance in the middle will not stay there, but
hangs over on the other side.'"

Bonivard was set free by the united forces of Berne and Geneva,
preaching political and religious liberty by the cannon's mouth, as has
had so often to happen. That too must have seemed droll to Bonivard
when he came to think it over in his humorous way. "The epoch of the
Renaissance and the Reformation was that of strong individualities and
undaunted characters. But let no one imagine a resemblance between
the prior of St. Victor and the great rebels his contemporaries, Luther,
Zwinglius, and Calvin. Like them he was one of the learned men of his
time; like them he learned to read the Evangels, and saw their light
disengage itself from the trembling gleams of tradition; but beyond that
he has nothing in common with them. Bonivard is not a hero; he is not
made to obey or to command; he is an artist, a kind of poet, who treats
high matters of theology in a humorous spirit; prompt of repartee,
gifted with happy dash; his irony has lively point, and he likes to
season the counsels of wisdom with sauce piquante and rustic
bonhomie.... He prepares the way for Calvin, while having nothing of
the Calvinist; he is gay, he is jovial; he has, even when he censures, I
know not what air of gentleness that wins your heart."
[Illustration: A Bit of Villeneuve]
IX
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