Chillon, the Prisoner, the Poet, and the Graffiti

On the water’s edge of Lake Geneva in western Switzerland, in the town of Montreux in the canton, or state, of Vaud, is the medieval castle of Chillon (pronounced she-yo), or the Chateau de Chillon, about an hour’s drive from the city of Geneva.  One side of the lordly castle facing the ancient road to Italy looks like a fortress, as it may have been built as such as protection against encroachments.  Its other side facing the lake is a royal residence, as it was built and meant to be by the Savoys.

Perhaps next to the Swiss Alps, or even Swiss knives, and the fact that Geneva is home to many international organizations and the site of many international treaties debated and agreed on, Chillon and Switzerland are as synonymous as holes and Swiss cheese.  It is the most known historic piece of architecture in Switzerland, a historical spot situated in a beauty spot with the tranquil lake on one side and the high mountains of Jura on its other side.

On our way when we had the chance to visit the castle a few years back, I secretly held on to the thrill of seeing the exact dungeon where the English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was imprisoned.  I was wrong, of course, because I learned later that Byron was not a prisoner but a visitor.  The famous political prisoner of the Savoys whom they kept in the castle was Francois Bonivard, the Genevan patriot.

This inspired Byron to write the poem “The Prisoner of Chillon,” largely credited for making the castle very popular and a tourist spot that it has come to be.

The prisoner Bonivard was kept underground in the castle from 1532 until his release in 1536.  He was the head of the Cluniac Priory of St. Victor until the duke of Savoy, Charles III, and the bishop of Geneva made inroads into his territory and divested him of his ecclesiastical income.  It was after his armed rebellion against these aggressors that he was imprisoned in the castle of Chillon.

When he was released four years after, he became a Protestant, married four times, and went on to write a history of Geneva from the earliest times and the book “The Old and New Government of Geneva” in 1555. Some accounts credit him as the father of the modern government of Geneva.

Meanwhile, the Savoys, or the House of Savoy to use history’s term for ruling families, were a European dynasty whose beginnings can be traced all the way to the Middle Ages, sometime in the 11th century. The Savoys as a ruling dynasty began with Humbert I the Whitehanded and ended some eight centuries later when Umberto II as an Italian monarch was overthrown when the Italians voted for a republic on 02 June 1946.

Those early centuries of the Savoys’ rule were times when the boundaries of continental European countries were still not as drawn as they are now, with national territories whose current boundaries were actually results of World War II.  Thus, while the Savoys ruled Italy from 1861 to 1946 largely because of its contribution to Italy’s unification, the family started with land acquisitions in the Middle Ages in the western Alps where the countries of France, Italy and Switzerland now have clear-cut borders.

The House was raised to a ducal status in the 15th century within the Holy Roman Empire and attained a royal title by the 18th century.  This explains why the Savoys once owned the feudal Chillon castle found in Switzerland and eventually became the royal family of Italy while their origin was said to be Burgundian, which is French.

Byron, the English poet and witty satirist of the Romantic Era spent some time vacationing around Lake Geneva as a man in his 20s in 1816. Although the poet was clubfooted and walked with a limp, he was noted as handsome as he was wild and rootless.  He dabbled for awhile in politics as a gadfly and rebel, most especially when he took his seat in England’s House of Lords.  Yet he was respected by the Greeks as a disinterested patriot when he fought with them against the Turks and helped in Italy’s revolution.  He also entered into a series of scandalous and dangerous liaisons with women.

Most of Byron’s works stir up his impressions on places and their history in his travels.  And he traveled extensively in Europe and stayed for long periods of time in some places, one of which was Switzerland where he joined his friend Scottish poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Byron’s sensitivity to the places he traveled to and their history was once again given form when he was inspired by Chillon’s prisoner of centuries back, compelling him to write the now famous “The Prisoner of Chillon,” published in the volume The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems in 1816.

The poem is a historical narrative in 14 stanzas written as a dramatic monologue.  Dramatic monologue in literature is a poetical form written as a speech by an individual character to an imaginary listener or audience.  Its power lies in how it is used to “compress vividly and convey the speaker’s history and insight into his character.”  (Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1995)

In Byron’s poem, the speaker is the prisoner Bonivard, who is chained to a pillar next to his brothers who die one by one while he watched helplessly.

While the historical Bonivard was not as laudable nor gallant as Byron made him out to be, the poem still became very popular because of its simplicity and directness.  With it, so did the prisoner Bonivard become known outside Switzerland centuries after he lived.  And so did the castle where he was imprisoned.  “The Prisoner of Chillon” as a poem has become a stirring denunciation on tyranny and a hymn to freedom.

Other writers and poets of the Romantic era, like Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas wrote narratives about Chillon but Byron’s poem is the most popular written form about the medieval castle.

It was thus with a sense of awe and history that we entered the castle that early spring in 1998.  The castle was cold within as without, as well it should be in that time of year in a temperate, landlocked, and highland country whose terrain runs from almost eight hundred to over four thousand meters at its highest peak above sea level.

The castle has 25 units of buildings, with great halls, inner courtyards, storage rooms, the Camera Domini, St. George’s Chapel, military structures, towers, dungeons, and, curious that I was and not wanting to miss them, rest rooms which were preserved and restored as they were built from the Middle Ages.  These were small rooms with holes in the floor through which one can see the inviting clean waters of Lake Geneva’s edge.  Needless to say, these rest rooms are no longer used for the purpose of which they were built.  These are now well-preserved and polished to perfection.

The halls and rooms had spare furniture and a smattering of antiques like Roman coins, pewters, weapons and other items excavated from the area all these centuries.

We had to go the dungeon or our visit would be for naught.  The pillar where Bonivard was chained was there, and so were the chains which bound him and his brothers.  It was easy to see where Bonivard was, which was apart from his brothers in the same dungeon.  At the stone wall near the pillar was an interesting piece of history.  Etched on it in a very readable size of about four centimeters was the name “George Byron.”

The poet had evidently used a knife when he vandalized the wall as a visitor.  But obviously because he is Byron a great poet long dead who also contributed to the castle’s fame, its management took to framing his graffiti in glass for posterity.  We cannot help but smile at the memory of a footloose genius etching his name, an act which today is called by no other name but vandalism and could merit unmerciful caning in Singapore.

But the castle, a property of the Vaud canton since 1798, and its current management, the “Association du Chateau de Chillon,” must have thought better by providing lesser mortals with a similar tendency.  One door leading to one of the courtyards was painted white, and as far as I can remember it was the only painted part of the castle.  But the white paint only served as a background.  Hundreds, or even thousands, of names have been written on the door it now looked like an unforgiving tattoo on a flat body.  It seemed

like a mute invitation to all comers, though there was not a sign or notice encouraging such.

Luckily, I had a felt pen in my bag.  I hurriedly wrote my name on the door in bold letters, on top of other names no doubt, with an unreadable result, some considerable meters and a good number of doors away from where Byron etched his name.  More than a hundred years removed from Byron’s last visit there, I felt some kinship with him, not as a great poet but as a vandal, but kinship nevertheless.

(Oct 2004)