A Little Swiss Sojourn | Page 8

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]
XI
Nothing could be more nobly picturesque than the outside of Chillon.
Its base is beaten by the waves of the lake, to which it presents wide
masses of irregularly curving wall, pierced by narrow windows, and
surmounted by Mansard-roofs. Wild growths of vines and shrubs break
the broad surfaces of the wall, and out of the shoulders of one of the
towers springs a tall young fir-tree. The water at its base is intensely
blue and unfathomably deep. This is what nature has done; as for men,
they have hugely painted the lakeward wall of the castle with the arms
of the Canton Vaud, which are nearly as ugly as the arms of Ohio; and
they have wrought into the roof of the tallest tower with tiles of a paler
tint the word "Chillon," so that you cannot possibly mistake it for any
other castle.
[Illustration: One of the Fountains]
XII
First and last, we hung about Chillon a good deal, both by land and by
water. For the latter purpose we had to hire a boat; and deceived by the
fact that the owner spoke a Latin dialect, I attempted to beat him down
from his demand of a franc an hour. "It's too much," I cried. "It's the
price," he answered, laconically. Clearly I was to take it or leave it, and
I took it. We did not find our fellow-republicans flatteringly polite, but

we found them firm, and, for all I know, honest. At least they seemed
as honest as we were, and that is saying a great deal. What struck us
from the beginning was the surliness of the men and the industry of the
women; and I am persuaded that the Swiss Government is really carried
on by the house-keeping sex. At any rate, the postmaster of Villeneuve
was a woman; her little girl brought the mail up from the railway
station in a hand-cart, and her old mother helped her to understand my
French. They were rather cross about it, and one day, with the
assistance of a child in arms, they defeated me in an attempt I made to
get a postal order. I dare say they thought it quite a triumph; but it was
not so very much to be proud of. At that period my French, always
spoken with the Venetian accent of the friend with whom I had studied
it many years before, was taking on strange and wilful characteristics,
which would have disabled me in the presence of a much less
formidable force. I think the only person really able to interpret me was
the amiable mistress of the Croix Blanche, to whose hostelry I went
every day for my after-dinner coffee. She knew what I wanted
whenever I asked for it, and I simplified my wants so as to meet her in
the same spirit. The inn stood midway of the village street that for
hundreds of yards followed the curve of the lake shore with its two
lines of high stone houses. At one end of it stood a tower springing out
of an almost fabulous past; then you came to the first of three plashing
fountains, where cattle were always drinking, and bareheaded girls
washing vegetables for the pot. Aloft swung the lamps that lighted the
village, on ropes stretching across the street. I believe some distinction
was ascribed to Villeneuve for the antiquity of this method of
street-lighting. There were numbers of useful shops along the