Leman’s Shrines
Beloved of Littérateurs—Gibbon—D’Aubigné—Rousseau—Byron—Shelley—Dickens, etc.—Scenes of Childe Harold—Nouvelle Heloïse—Prisoner of Chillon—Land of Byron.
Haunts of Littérateurs
A pilgrimage in the track of Childe Harold brings us from the shores of Albion, by Belgium’s capital and deadly Waterloo, along the castled Rhine and over mountain-pass to “Italia, home and grave of empires,” and to the sublimer scenery of “Manfred,” “Chillon,” and the third canto of the pilgrim-poet’s masterpiece; to his “silver-sheeted Staubbach” and “arrowy Rhone,” “soaring Jungfrau” and “bleak Mont Blanc.” We linger with especial pleasure on the shores of “placid Leman,” in an enchanting region which teems with literary shrines and is pervaded with memories and associations—often so thrilling and vivid that they seem like veritable and sensible presences—of the brilliant number who have here had their haunts. Here Calvin wrought his Commentaries; here Voltaire polished his darts; here Rousseau laid the scenes of his impassioned tale; here Dickens, Byron, and Shelley loitered and wrote; here Gibbon and de Staël, Schlegel and Constant, and many another scarcely less famous, lived and wrought the treasures of their knowledge and fancy into the literature of the world. A lingering voyage round the lake, like that of Byron and Shelley, is a delight to be remembered through a lifetime, and affords opportunity to visit the spots consecrated by genius upon these shores. At Geneva we find the inn where Byron lodged and first met the author of “Queen Mab,” the house in which Rousseau was born, the place where d’Aubigné wrote his history, the sometime home of John Calvin. Near by, in a house presented by the Genevese after his release from the long imprisonment suffered on their account, dwelt Bonnivard, Byron’s immortal “Prisoner of Chillon,” and here he suffered from his procession of wives and finally died. Just beyond the site of the fortifications, on the east side of the city, is an eminence whose slopes are tastefully laid out with walks that wind, amid sward and shrub, to the observatory which crowns the summit and marks the site of Bonnivard’s Priory of St. Victor, lost to him by his devotion to Genevan independence. Not far away is the public library, founded by his bequest of his modest collection of books and MSS. which we see here carefully preserved. Here also is an old portrait of the prisoner, which represents him as a reckless and jolly “good fellow” rather than a saintly hero, and accords better with his character as described by late writers than with the common conception of him.
Byron at Villa Diodati
Byron loved this Leman lake, and it is said his discontented sprite still walks its margins; certain it is he remains its poetic genius; his melody seems to wake in every breeze that stirs its surface. The Villa Diodati, a plain, quadrangular, three-storied mansion of moderate dimensions, standing on the shore a few miles from Geneva, was the handsome “Giaour’s” first home after his separation from Lady Byron and his exile from England. It had been the residence of the Genevan Professor Diodati and the sojourn of his friend the poet Milton. Pleasant vineyards surround the place and slope away to the water, but there is little in the spot or its near environment to commend it to the fancy of a poet. Byron’s study here was a sombre room at the back from which neither the lake nor the snowy peaks were visible, and here he wrote, besides many minor poems, “Manfred,” “Prometheus,” “Darkness,” “Dream,” and the third canto of “Childe Harold.” Here also he wrote “Marriage of Belphegor,” a tale setting forth his version of his own infelicitous marriage; but hearing that his wife was seriously ill, he burned it in his study fire. From here, by instigation of de Stael, he sent to Lady Byron ineffectual overtures for a reconciliation. His companion at the villa was an eccentric Italian physician, Polidori, who was uncle to the poet Rossetti, and who here quarrelled with Byron’s guests and wrote “The Vampire,” a weird production afterward attributed to Byron. Lovers of Byron owe much to his sojourn on Leman; he found in the inspiring landscapes here, especially in the environment of mountains, a power that profoundly stirred what his wife called “the angel in him.” His letters recognize an afflatus breathed upon him by the “majesty around and above,” and the quality of the poems here produced shows his yielding and response to that benign influence; many a gem of poetic thought was here begotten of lake and mount and cataract, which otherwise had never been. The insincere stanzas of some of his later poems would scarcely have been written on Leman. As we muse in the spots he frequented—wandering on the entrancing margins or floating on the crystal waters—and look thence upon the snow-crowned peaks, resplendent in the sunshine or roseate in the after-glow, we aspire to not only partake of his rapture in this sublime beauty, but to appreciate the deeper feelings to which it moved him.
Shelley
A villa near Byron’s, and reached by a path through his grounds,—Maison Chapuis, of Mont Allegra,—was occupied that summer by the “impassioned Ariel of English verse,” with Mary Shelley and her brunette relative Jane Clermont (the Claire of Shelley’s journal), who after bore to Byron a daughter called Alba by the Shelleys, but later named by Byron Allegra, for the place where he had known the mother. At Mont Allegra “Bridge of Arve,” “Intellectual Beauty,” and Mrs. Shelley’s weird “Frankenstein” were penned. Here Byron was a daily visitant, and the Shelleys were the usual companions of his excursions upon the lake of beauty, in a picturesque lateen-rigged boat which was the property of the poets and the counterpart of which we see moored by the Diodati shore, looking like a bit of the Levant transported to this tramontane water. The “white phantom” observed by telescopists on the opposite shore to sometimes embark with Byron, and which he gravely told Madame de Staël was his dog, was doubtless the frail Claire. The admonitions of de Staël anent his mode of life provoked Byron to take sure revenge by being attentive to her husband, which the overshadowing wife always resented as an affront upon herself. It is said the poet’s observation of this pair prompted the couplet of “Don Juan:”
“But oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not henpecked you all?”
Voltaire
Gibbon
Dickens
Passing for the present the shrines of Ferney and Coppet, we find in picturesque Lausanne the quaint house in which Voltaire lived several winters, and not far away the place where Secretan died a few months ago. Gibbon’s dwelling has been demolished, but we find the place of his summer-house where the great history was completed, and of his famous rose-tree where Byron gathered roses long ago. Madame de Genlis narrates this incident of the great “Decliner and Faller” at Lausanne: he was enamoured of the comely Madame Crousaz, and, finding her alone, he knelt at her feet and besought her love. He received an unfavorable reply, but remained in his humble posture until the lady, after repeatedly requesting him to arise, discovered that his weight made it impossible, and summoned a servant to assist him to regain his feet. His obesity seems to have been a standing jest among his acquaintances: a sufferer from indigestion, due to lack of exercise, was advised by a witty friend to “walk twice around Gibbon before breakfast.” Several decades later another illustrious English man of letters sojourned in Lausanne. A pretty cottage-villa, with embowered walls and flower-shaded porticos which look from a mild eminence across the crescentic lake, was, in 1846, the dwelling of Dickens, who here wrote one of the matchless Christmas stories and a part of “Dombey and Son.” From the magnificent slope of Lausanne the whole lake region is visible, with the dark Juras rising to the western horizon, the Alps of Savoy, and “the monarch of mountains with a diadem of snow” upholding the sky away in the south. At the foot of this slope is the port-town of Ouchy, a resort of Byron’s in his sailing excursions; at the plain little Anchor inn near the quai (Byron called it a “wretched inn”) he lodged, and here, being detained two days (June 26 and 27, 1816) by a storm which overtook him on his return from Chillon and Clarens, he wrote the touching “Prisoner of Chillon.” In a parsonage not far from Lausanne was reared sweet Suzanne Curchod, erst fiancée of Gibbon, and later the mother of de Staël.
Rousseau
Eastward is “Clarens, birthplace of deep love,” whose “air is the breath of passionate thought, whose trees take root in love;” about it lies the charming region which Rousseau chose for his fiction and peopled with affections, and where Byron, Houghton, and Shelley loved to linger. Here the latter first read “Nouvelle Héloïse” amid the settings of its scenes; here Byron wrote many glowing lines, inspired by the beauty and romantic associations around him. From the vine-clad terraces which cling to the heights we behold the view which enraptured the poet,—a broad expanse of lacustrine beauty and Alpine sublimity, embracing the Leman shores from the Rhone to the Juras of Gex, the entire width of the “bleu impossible” lake and Alp piled on Alp beyond. Back of Clarens we find the spot of Rousseau’s “Bosquet de Julie,” and, at a little distance among embowering trees, the birthplace of a woman stranger than any fancied character of his fiction, the Madame de Warens of his “Confessions.”
Prison of Chillon
Between Clarens and Villeneuve, on an isolated rock whose base is laved by Leman’s waters, which “meet and flow a thousand feet in depth below,” stands the grim prison of Chillon, the scene of Byron’s poem. The fortress is an irregular pile of masonry, and, with its massive walls, loop-holed towers, and white battlements, is a picturesque object seen across wide reaches of the lake. The present structure is a hoary successor to a stronghold still more ancient: the prehistoric lake-dwellers here had a fortress and were succeeded by the Franks and Romans. Of the present structure, the Romanesque columns and the range of dungeons are known to have been in existence in 830, when Count Wala, a cousin of Charlemagne, for alluding to the wife of Louis the Debonair as “that adulterous woman,” was incarcerated here. Thus Judith’s reputation was vindicated and the earliest certain date of this fortress fixed. The present superstructure remains unchanged since the thirteenth century. It is now connected with the shore by a wooden structure which spans the moat and replaces the ancient drawbridge. Through a massive gate-way we enter a roughly-paved court, whence a bluff Savoyard conducts us through the romantic pile. Among the apartments of the ducal family we see the banqueting-hall where the dukes held roistering wassail; the kitchen on whose great hearth oxen were roasted whole; the Chamber of Inquisition where hapless prisoners were tortured to extort confession, this room being near the chamber of the duchess, into which—despite its thick wall—the shrieks of the tortured must have sometimes penetrated and disturbed Her Serene Highness. Outside her door is a post to which the wretches were bound, and it is scored by marks of the irons which cauterized their flesh; in a near corner stood a rack which rent them limb from limb. The crypt beneath, with its low arched vaults and its graceful pillars rising out of the rock, is the most interesting portion of the fortress. Referring to their architectural perfection, Longfellow once said these were the “most delightful dungeons he ever saw,” but as we stand in their twilight gloom the horrors of their history weigh heavily on the heart. During this century the castle has been used as an arsenal, but occasionally also as a prison, and Byron found some of these “chambers of sorrow” tenanted at the time of his visits. One contracted cell is that in which the condemned passed their last night of life chained upon a rock, near the beam upon which they were strangled and the opening through which their bodies were thrust into the lake. Another vault contains a pit or well, with a spiral stair down which poor dupes stepped into a yawning depth and—eternity. A third chamber, so dark that its grotesque carvings are scarcely discernible and no missal could be read by daylight, was the chapel of the fortress. Traversing the succession of dungeons, we come to the last and largest, and reverently stand beside the column where Byron’s prisoner was chained. This “dungeon deep and old” lies not beneath the level of the lake, as Byron believed, yet it is sufficiently dank and dismal to be the appropriate scene of the touching and tragic story which he located here. It is a long, crypt-like apartment, whose vaulted roof of rock is upheld by the “seven pillars of Gothic mould” aligned along the middle. It is dimly lighted by loop-holes pierced in the ponderous walls for the feudal bowmen; through these narrow apertures, where the prisoner “felt the winter’s spray wash through the bars when winds were high,” we look out, as did he, upon the distant town, “the lake with its white sails,” the “mountains high,” and the little Isle de Paix—“scarce broader than the dungeon floor”—gleaming like an emerald from a setting of amethyst. Here is Bonnivard’s chain, scarce four feet long, and in the central pillar the ring which held it. The light, falling aslant “through the cleft of the thick wall” upon the floor, shows us the pathway worn in the rock by the pacing of the prisoner during the weary years, and reveals—graven on the column-stone by the poet’s hand—the name Byron.
At Chillon we are in the midst of a region pervaded by the sentiment of the pilgrim-poet. The Byron path leads from the shore to the broad terraces of the Hôtel Byron, whence we behold as in a picture the romantic scene his poetry portrays,—the “mountains with their thousand years of snow,” the shimmering water of “the wide long lake,” the dark slopes of the Juras terraced to their summits, the “white-walled towns” upon the nearer hill-sides. Directly before us—bearing its three tall trees—“the little isle, the only one in view,” smiles in our faces from the bosom of the water; on the right we see sweet Clarens and the picturesque battlements of Chillon; on the left, the glittering peaks of Dent du Midi and the Alps of Savoy, with the “Rhone in fullest flow” between the rocky heights; while from the farther shore rise the cliffs of Meillerie, at whose base Byron and Shelley, clinging to their frail boat, narrowly escaped a watery grave on the very spot where St. Preux and Julia of “Nouvelle Héloïse” were rescued from the same fate.
Rousseau and Byron scenes
Our farewell view of this Land of Byron is taken on a cloudless summer night, when the radiance of the harvest moon exalts and glorifies all the scene; the grim prison of Bonnivard is transformed into a snowy palace of peaceful delights, the white mountain-peaks gleam with the chaste lustre of pearls, the vine-embowered village on the shore seems an Aidenn of purity and light, and the sheen of the tremulous water is that of a sea of molten silver. Surely, on all her round, “Luna lights no spot more fair.”