A Little Swiss Sojourn | Page 7

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