ver negotiations were opened between
them and the duke of Savoy, the liberation of Bonivard was always
insisted on as one of the conditions.

The story of the imprisonment is soon told; for, strangely enough, this
most garrulously egotistical of writers never alludes to it but twice,
and then briefly. The first two years he was kept in the upper chambers
of the castle and treated kindly, but at the end of this time the castle
received a visit from the duke, and from that time forth the Prisoner of
Chillon was remanded to the awful and sombre crypt. A single sentence in
his handwriting is all that he tells us of this period, of which he
might have told so much, and in this he shows a disposition to look at
the affair rather in its humorous than in its Byronesque aspect. For his
one recorded reminiscence of his four years of dungeon-life is, that "he
had such abundant leisure for promenading that he wore in the rock
pavement a little path as neatly as if it had been done with a
stone-hammer."[12]

One March morning in 1536 the Prisoner of Chillon heard through the
windows of his dungeon the sound of a cannonade by land and lake. It was
the army of Berne, which was finishing its victorious campaign through
the Pays de Vaud by the siege of the duke's last remaining stronghold,
the castle of Chillon. They were joyfully aided by a flotilla fitted out
by Geneva, which had never forgotten its old friend. That night the
dungeon-door was burst open, and Bonivard and three fellow-prisoners
were carried off in triumph to Geneva.

Not Rip Van Winkle when he awoke from his long slumber in the Catskills,
not the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus when they came back from their
sepulchre and found their city Christian, had a better right to be
surprised than the prior of St. Victor when he got back to Geneva. Duke
and bishop and all their functionaries were expelled; priests and
preaching-friars were gone; the mass was abolished; in the cathedral of
St. Peter's and all the lesser churches, which had been cleared of
their images, there were singing of psalms and preaching of fiery
sermons by Reformers from France; and the streets through which he had
sometimes had to move by stealth were filled with joyous crowds to hail
him as a martyr. St. Victor was no more. If he went to look for his old
home, he found a heap of rubbish, for all the suburbs of the city that
might give shelter to an enemy had been torn down by the unsparing
patriots of Gen