Presently, owing to religious dissensions, Fribourg withdrew from the alliance.  Berne, however, adhered to it, and, in due course, responded to the appeal for help by setting an army of seven thousand men in motion.  The route of the seven thousand lay through the canton of Vaud, then a portion of the Duke’s dominions, governed from the Castle of Chillon.  Meeting with no resistance save at Yverdon, they annexed the territory, placing governors of their own in its various strongholds.  The Governor of Chillon fled, leaving his garrison to surrender; and in its deepest dungeon was found the famous prisoner of Chillon, Francois de Bonivard.  From that time forward Geneva was a free republic, owing allegiance to no higher power.

THE CASTLE OF CHILLON[42]

BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Here I am, sitting at my window, overlooking Lake Leman.  Castle Chillon, with its old conical towers, is silently pictured in the still waters.  It has been a day of a thousand.  We took a boat, with two oarsmen, and passed leisurely along the shores, under the cool, drooping branches of trees, to the castle, which is scarce a stone’s throw from the hotel.  We rowed along, close under the walls, to the ancient moat and drawbridge.  There I picked a bunch of blue bells, “les clochettes,” which were hanging their aerial pendants from every crevice—­some blue, some white....

We rowed along, almost touching the castle rock, where the wall ascends perpendicularly, and the water is said to be a thousand feet deep.  We passed the loopholes that illuminate the dungeon vaults, and an old arch, now walled up, where prisoners, after having been strangled, were thrown into the lake.

Last evening we walked through the castle.  An interesting Swiss woman, who has taught herself English for the benefit of her visitors, was our “cicerone.”  She seemed to have all the old Swiss vivacity of attachment for “liberte 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.  He could take only three steps, and the stone floor is deeply worn by the prints of those weary steps.  Six years is so easily said; but to live them, alone, helpless, a man burning with all the fires of manhood, chained to that pillar of stone, and those three unvarying steps!  Two thousand one hundred and ninety days rose and set the sun, while seed time and harvest, winter and summer, and the whole living world went on over his grave.  For him no sun, no moon, no stars, no business, no friendship, no plans—­nothing!  The great millstone of life emptily grinding itself away!

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,