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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.
She seemed to have all the old Swiss vivacity of attachment for "liberté et patrie." She took us first into the dungeon, with the seven pillars, described by Byron. There was the pillar to which, for protecting the liberty of Geneva, Bonivard was chained. There the Duke of Savoy kept him for six years, confined by a chain four feet long.
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.
What a power of vitality was there in Bonivard, that he did not sink in lethargy, and forget himself to stone! But he did not; it is said that when the victorious Swiss army broke in to liberate him, they cried, "Bonivard, you are free!" "And Geneva?" "Geneva is free also!" You ought to have heard the enthusiasm with which our guide told this story!
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.
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.
"I never saw a man that knew so much!" The history of Bonivard had evidently, as they say, gone into one ear and out of the other. But Daisy went on to say that she wished Winterbourne would travel with them and "go round" with them; they might know something, in that case. "Don't you want to come and teach Randolph?" she asked.
Two or three centuries later how quickly all those stupid, cruel, weary years pass under the pen! the spirit of liberty and protestantism began to stir in the heads and hearts of the burghers of Berne and of Geneva. A Savoyard, Francis de Bonivard, prior of St. Victor, sympathized with them. He was noble, accomplished, high-placed, but he loved freedom of thought and act.
Near by are the relics of the cell of a companion of Bonivard, who made an ineffectual attempt to liberate him. On the wall are still seen sketches of saints and inscriptions by his hand. This man one day overcame his jailer, locked him in his cell, ran into the hall above, and threw himself from a window into the lake, struck a rock, and was killed instantly.
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.
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