Rollo in Geneva

You would not suppose, when viewing these shores from a distance, that there was any place to land, so closely do the precipitous slopes of the mountains seem to shut the water in. But on drawing near the shore, you see that there is a pretty broad belt of land along the shore, which, though it ascends rapidly, is not too steep to be cultivated. This belt of land is covered with villages, hamlets, vineyards, orchards, and gardens, and it forms a most enchanting series of landscapes, from whatever point it is seen, while the more precipitous slopes of the mountains, towering above in grandeur and sublimity, complete the enchantment of the view.

The Castle of Chillon stands on the very margin of the lake, just in the edge of the water. Indeed, the foundations on which it stands form a little island, which is separated by a narrow channel from the shore. This channel is crossed by a drawbridge. It is possible, however, that it may be in some measure artificial. The island may have originally been a small rocky point, and it may have been made an island by the cutting of a ditch between it and the main land.

The steamer passed along the shore, very near to this castle, in going to the head of the lake, as you see represented in the engraving. There is no steamboat landing at the castle itself, but there is one at the village of Montreux, a little before you come to it, and another at Villeneuve, a little beyond. Numbers of tourists come in every steamer to visit the castle, and stop for this purpose at one of these landings or the other. The distance is only twenty minutes' brisk walking from either of them.

Villeneuve, the last landing mentioned above, is at the very extremity of the lake. We see it in the distance in the engraving. Here travellers who are going to continue their journey up the valley of the Rhone, either for the purpose of penetrating into the heart of Switzerland, or of going by the pass of the Simplon into Italy, leave the boat and take the diligence to continue their journey by land, or else engage a private carriage, and also a guide, if they wish for one. Mr. Holiday did not intend at this time to go on far up the valley, but he purposed to stop a day or two at Villeneuve, to visit Chillon, and perhaps make some other excursions, and also to enjoy the views presented there, on all sides, of the slopes and summits of the surrounding mountains.

Chapter XI.

Villeneuve

At Villeneuve, a pretty long, though small and very neatly made pier projects out from the shore, for the landing of passengers from the steamer.

Exactly opposite this pier, and facing the water, stands the inn. It is placed very nearly on a level with the water. This can always be the case with buildings standing on the margin of a lake, for a lake not being subject to tides or inundations, all buildings, whether houses, bridges, or piers, may be built very near the water, without any danger of being overflowed.

Before the inn is an open space, extending between it and the shore; so that from the front windows of the inn you can look down first upon this open space, and beyond, upon the margin of the lake and upon the pier, with the steamer lying at the landing-place at the head of it.

The sides of this square, Rollo observed, were formed of the ends of two buildings which stood on the shore, and along this space were wooden benches, which were filled, when the steamer arrived, with guides, postilions, voituriers, and other people of that class, waiting to be engaged by the travellers that should come in her.

There were also two or three omnibuses and diligences waiting to receive such persons as were intending to travel by the public conveyances. One of these omnibuses belonged to a large hotel and boarding house which stands on the shore of the lake, not far from Villeneuve, between it and the Castle of Chillon. You can see this hotel in the engraving. It is the large building in the middle distance, standing back a little from the lake, and to the left of the castle. This hotel is beautifully situated in a commanding position on the shores of the lake, and is a great place of resort for English families in the summer season.

The travellers that landed from the steamer at Villeneuve soon separated, after arriving at the open square before the inn. Some took their seats in the diligences that were standing there; some got into the omnibuses to go to the hotel; some engaged voituriers from among the number that were waiting there to be so employed, and, entering the carriages, they drove away; while a party of students, with knapsacks on their backs and pikestaves in their hands, set off on foot up the valley. Mr. Holiday and his party, not intending to proceed any farther that night, went directly to the inn.

They went first into the dining room. The dining room in the Swiss inns is usually the only public room, and travellers on entering the inn generally go directly there.

The dining room was very plain and simple in all its arrangements. There was no carpet on the floor, and the woodwork was unpainted. There were two windows in front, which looked out upon the lake. Directly beneath the windows was the road, and the open space, already described, between the hotel and the pier.

There was a boy with a knapsack on his back standing by the window, looking out. Rollo went to the window, and began to look out too.

"Do you speak English?" said Rollo to the boy.

"Nein," said the boy, shaking his head.

Nein is the German word for no. This Rollo knew very well, and so he inferred that the boy was a German. He, however, thought it possible that he might speak French, and so he asked again,—

"Do you speak French?"

"Very little," said the boy, answering now in the French language. "I am studying it at school. I am at school at Berne, and my class is making an excursion to Geneva."

"Do you travel on foot?" asked Rollo.

"Yes," said the boy; "unless there is a steamboat, and then we go in the steamboat."

"And I suppose you are going to take the steamboat here to-morrow morning to go to Geneva."

"No," said the boy; "we are going to see Chillon to-night, and then we are going along the shore of the lake beyond, to Montreux, and take the boat there to-morrow morning."

It was quite amusing to Rollo to talk thus with a strange boy in a language which both had learned at school, and which neither of them could speak well, but which was, nevertheless, the only language they had in common.

"How many boys are there in your class?" asked Rollo.

"Sixteen," said the boy; "sixteen—six." The boy then held up the five fingers of one hand, and one of the other, to show to Rollo that six was the number he meant. The words six and sixteen are very similar in the French language, and for a moment the boy confounded them.

"And the teacher too, I suppose," said Rollo.

"Yes," said the boy, "and the teacher."

Here there was a short pause.

"Are you going to Chillon?" said the boy to Rollo.

"Yes," said Rollo. "I am going with my father and mother."

"I wish you were going with us," said the boy.

"I wish so too," said Rollo; "I mean to ask my father to let me."

During this time Mr. Holiday had been making an arrangement with the maid of the inn for two bedrooms, one for himself and his wife, and the other for Rollo; and the maid was now just going to show the party the way to their rooms. So Rollo went with his father, and after seeing that all their effects were put in the rooms, he informed his father that he had made acquaintance with a young German schoolboy who was going with his class and the teacher to visit Chillon; and he asked his father's consent that he might go with them.

"I can walk there with them," said Rollo, "and wait there till you and mother come."

"Does the boy speak English?" asked Mr. Holiday.

"No, sir," said Rollo; "but he can speak French a little. He speaks it just about as well as I can, and we can get along together very well."

"Is the teacher willing that you should go?" asked Mr. Holiday.

"I don't know," said Rollo; "we have not asked him yet."

"Then the first thing is to ask him," said Mr. Holiday. "Let your friend ask the teacher if he is willing to have another boy invited to go with his party; and if he is willing, you may go. If you get to Chillon first, you may go about the castle with the boys, and then wait at the castle gates till we come."

"How soon shall you come?" asked Rollo.

"Very soon," said Mr. Holiday. "I have ordered the carriage already, and we shall perhaps get there as soon as you do."

So Rollo went down stairs again to his friend, the German boy.

"Do you think," said Rollo, "that the teacher would be willing to have me go with you?"

"Yes," said the boy, "I am sure he will. He is always very glad to have us meet with an opportunity to speak French. Besides, there are some boys in the school who are learning English, and he would like to have you talk a little with them."

"Go and ask him," said Rollo.

So the boy went off to ask the teacher. He met him on the stairs, coming down with the rest of the boys. The teacher was very much pleased with the plan of having an American boy invited to join the party, and so it was settled that Rollo was to go.

The boys all went down stairs, and rendezvoused at the door of the inn. Most of the omnibuses and diligences had gone. The boys of the school all accosted Rollo in a very cordial manner; and the teacher shook hands with him, and said that he was very glad to have him join their party. The teacher spoke to him in French. There were two other boys who tried to speak to him in English. They succeeded pretty well, but they could not speak very fluently, and they made several mistakes. But Rollo was very careful not to laugh at their mistakes, and they did not laugh at those which he made in talking French; and so they all got along very well together.

Thus they set out on the road which led along the shore of the lake towards the Castle of Chillon.

Chapter XII.

The Castle of Chillon

The party of boys walked along the road very pleasantly together, each one with his knapsack on his back and his pikestaff in his hand. Rollo talked with them by the way—with some in English, and with others in French; but inasmuch as it happened that whichever language was used, one or the other of the parties to the conversation was very imperfectly acquainted with it, the conversation was necessarily carried on by means of very short and simple sentences, and the meaning was often helped out by signs, and gestures, and curious pantomime of all sorts, with an accompaniment, of course, of continual peals of laughter.

Rollo, however, learned a good deal about the boys, and about the arrangements they made for travelling, and also learned a great many particulars in respect to the adventures they had met with in coming over the mountains.

Rollo learned, for example, that every boy had a fishing line in his knapsack, and that when they got tired of walking, and wished to stop to rest, if there was a good place, they stopped and fished a little while in a mountain stream or a lake.

Another thing they did was to watch for butterflies, in order to catch any new species that they might find, to add to the teacher's cabinet of natural history. For this purpose one of the boys had a gauze net on the end of a long but light handle; and when a butterfly came in sight that seemed at all curious or new, one of the boys set off with the rest to catch him. If the specimen was found valuable, it was preserved. The specimens thus kept were secured with a pin in the bottom of a broad, but flat and very light box, which one of the older boys carried with his knapsack. The boy opened this box, and showed Rollo the butterflies which they had taken. They had quite a pretty collection. There were several that Rollo did not recollect ever to have seen before.

Talking in this way, they went on till they came to the part of the road which was opposite to the Hotel Byron. The hotel was on an eminence above the road, and back from the lake. Broad gravelled avenues led up to it. There were also winding walks, and seats under the trees, and terraces, and gardens, and parties of ladies and gentlemen walking about, and children playing here and there, under the charge of their nurses.

The boys gave only a passing glance at these things as they went by. They were much more interested in gazing up from time to time at the stupendous cliffs and precipices which they saw crowning the mountain ranges which seemed to border the road; and on the other side, in looking out far over the water of the lake at the sail boats, or the steamer, or the little row boats which they beheld in the offing.

The road went winding on, following the little indentations of the shore, till at length it reached the castle. It passed close under the castle walls, or, rather, close along the margin of the ditch which separated the foundations of the castle from the main land. There was a bridge across this ditch. This bridge was enclosed, and a little room was built upon it, with windows and a door. The outer door was, of course, towards the road, and it was open when the boys arrived at the place.

The teacher led the way in by this door, and the boys followed him. There was a man there, dressed in the uniform of a soldier. He was a sort of sentinel, to keep the door of the castle. He had a table on one side, with various engravings spread out upon it, representing different views of the castle, both of the interior and of the exterior. There were also little books of description, giving an account of the castle and of its history, and copies of Byron's poem, the Prisoner of Chillon. All these things were for sale to the visitors who should come to see the castle.

The engravings were kept from being blown away by the wind by means of little stone paper weights made of rounded pebble stones, about as large as the palm of the hand, with views of the castle and of the surrounding scenery painted on them. The paper weights were for sale too.

The boys looked at these things a moment, but did not seem to pay much attention to them. They walked on, following their teacher, to the end of the bridge room, where they came to the great castle gates. These were open, too, and they went in. They found themselves in a paved courtyard, with towers, and battlements, and lofty walls all around them. There was a man there, waiting to receive them in charge, and show them into the dungeons.

He led the way through a door, and thence down a flight of stone steps to a series of subterranean chambers, which were very dimly lighted by little windows opening towards the lake. The back sides of the rooms consisted of the living rock; the front sides were formed of the castle wall that bordered the lake.

"Here is the room," said the guide, "where the prisoners who were condemned to death in the castle in former times spent the last night before their execution. That stone was the bed where they had to lie."

So saying, the guide pointed to a broad, smooth, and sloping surface of rock, which was formed by the ledge on the back side of the dungeon. The stone was part of the solid ledge, and was surrounded with ragged crags, just as they had been left by the excavators in making the dungeon; but whether the smooth and sloping surface of this particular portion of the rock was natural or artificial, that is, whether it had been expressly made so to form a bed for the poor condemned criminal, or whether the rock had accidentally broken into that form by means of some natural fissure, and so had been appropriated by the governor of the castle to that use, the boys could not determine.

The guide led the boys a little farther on, to a place where there was a dark recess, and pointing up towards the ceiling, he said,—

"There is where the criminals were hung. Up where I point there is a beam built into the rock; and from that the rope was suspended."

The boys all crowded round the spot, and looked eagerly up, but they could not see any beam.

"You cannot see it," said the guide, "now, because you have just come out from the light of day. We shall come back this way pretty soon, and then you will be able to see it; for your eyes will then get accustomed a little to the darkness of the dungeon."

So the guide went on, and the boys followed him.

They next came into a very large apartment. The front side and the back side of it were both curved. The back side consisted of the living rock. The front side was formed of the outer castle wall, which was built on the rock at the very margin of the water. In the centre was a range of seven massive stone columns, placed there to support the arches on which rested the floor of the principal story of the castle above. The roof of this dungeon of course was vaulted, the arches and groins being carried over from this range of central pillars towards the wall in front, and towards the solid rock behind. All this you will plainly see represented in the engraving.

THE DUNGEON IN THE CASTLE OF CHILLON.

This great dungeon was lighted by means of very small loopholes cut in the wall, high up from the floor. The light from these windows, instead of coming down, and shining upon the floor, seemed to go up, and to lose itself in a faint attempt to illuminate the vaulted roof above. The reason was, that at the particular hour when the boys made their visit, the beams of the sun which shone directly from it in the sky were excluded, and only those that were reflected upward from the waters of the lake could come in.

The guide led the boys to one of the central pillars, and pointed to an iron ring which was built into the stone. He told them that there was the place where one prisoner was confined in the dungeon for six years. He was chained to that ring by a short chain, which enabled him only to walk to and fro a few steps each way about the pillar. These steps had worn a place in the rock.

After the boys had looked at this pillar, and at the iron ring, and at the place worn in the floor by the footsteps of the prisoner, as long as they wished, they followed the guide on to the end of the dungeon, where they were stopped by the solid rock. Here the guide brought them to a dark and gloomy place in a corner, where, by standing a little back, they could see all the pillars in a row; and he said that if they would count them they would find that there were exactly seven. The boys did so, and they found that there were seven; but they did not understand why the number was of any importance. But the teacher explained it to them. He said that Byron had mentioned seven as the number of the pillars in his poem, and that most people who had read the poem were pleased to observe the correspondence between his description and the reality.

The teacher quoted the lines. They were these:—

"In Chillon's dungeons, deep and old,There are seven columns, massy and gray,Dim with a dull, imprisoned ray—A sunbeam that hath lost its way,And through the crevice and the cleftOf the thick wall is fallen and leftCreeping o'er the floor so damp,Like a marsh's meteor lamp."

In repeating these lines, the teacher spoke in a strong foreign accent. All the boys listened attentively while he spoke, though of course only Rollo and those of the boys who had studied English could understand him.

After this the boys came back through the whole range of dungeons, by the same way that they had come in. They could now see the beam from which the condemned criminals were hung. It passed across from rock to rock, high above their heads, in a dark and gloomy place, and seemed perfectly black with age.

When the party came out of the dungeons, a young woman took them in charge, to show them the apartments above. She conducted them up a broad flight of stone stairs to a massive doorway, which led to the principal story of the castle. Here the boys passed through one after another of several large halls, which were formerly used for various purposes when the castle was inhabited, but are employed now for the storage of brass cannons, and of ammunition belonging to the Swiss government. When the castle was built, the country in which it stands belonged to a neighboring state, called Savoy; and it was the Duke of Savoy, who was a sort of king, that built it, and it was he that confined the prisoners in it so cruelly. Many of them were confined there on account of being accused of conspiring against his government. At length, however, the war broke out between Switzerland and Savoy, and the Swiss were victorious. They besieged this castle by an army on the land and by a fleet of galleys on the lake, and in due time they took it. They let all the prisoners which they found confined there go free, and since then they have used the castle as a place of storage for arms and ammunition.

One of the halls which the boys went into, the guide said, used to be a senate house, and another was the court room where the prisoners were tried. There was a staircase which led from the court room down to the dungeon below, where the great black beam was, from which they were to be hung.

The boys, however, did not pay a great deal of attention to what the guide said about the former uses of these rooms. They seemed to be much more interested in the purposes that they were now serving, and so went about examining very eagerly the great brass cannons and the ammunition wagons that stood in them.

At length, however, they came to something which specially attracted their attention. It was a small room, which the guide said was an ancient torturing room. There was a large wooden post in the centre of the room, extending from the floor to the vault above. The post was worn and blackened by time and decay, and there were various hooks, and staples, and pulleys attached to it at different heights, which the guide said were used for securing the prisoners to the post, when they were to be tortured. The post itself was burned in many places, as if by hot irons.

The boys saw another place in a room beyond, which was in some respects still more dreadful than this. It was a place where there was an opening in the floor, near the wall of the room, that looked like a trap door. There was the beginning of a stone stair leading down. A small railing was built round the opening, as if to keep people from falling in. The boys all crowded round the railing, and looked down.

They saw that the stair only went down three steps, and then it came to a sudden end, and all below was a dark and dismal pit, which seemed bottomless. On looking more intently, however, they could at length see a glimmer of light, and hear the rippling of the waves of the lake, at a great depth below. The guide said that this was one of the oubliettes, that is, a place where men could be destroyed secretly, and in such a manner that no one should ever know what became of them. They were conducted to this door, and directed to go down. It was dark, so that they could only see the first steps of the stair. They would suppose, however, that the stair was continued, and that it would lead them down to some room, where they were to go. So they would walk on carefully, feeling for the steps of the stair; but after the third there would be no more, and they would fall down to a great depth on ragged rocks, and be killed. To make it certain that they would be killed by the fall, there were sharp blades, like the ends of scythes, fixed in the rock, far below, to cut them in pieces as they fell.

It seems these tyrants, hateful and merciless as they were, did not wish, or perhaps did not dare, to destroy the souls as well as the bodies of their victims, and so they contrived it that the last act which the poor wretch should perform before going down into this dreadful pit should be an act of devotion. To this end there was made a little niche in the wall, just over the trap door, and there was placed there an image of the Virgin Mary, who is worshipped in Catholic countries as divine. The prisoner was invited to kiss this image as he passed by, just as he began to descend the stair. Thus the very last moment of his life would be spent in performing an act of devotion, and thus, as they supposed, his soul would be saved. What a strange combination is this of superstition and tyranny!