Part 24

The castle makes a far better appearance on a nearer view, and from the land, than when seen at a distance and from the water. It is built of stone, and seems to have been anciently covered with plaster, which imparts the whiteness to which Byron does much more than justice, when he speaks of “Chillon’s snow-white battlements.” There is a lofty eternal wall, with a cluster of round towers about it, each crowned with its pyramidal roof of tiles, and from the central portion of the castle rises a square tower, also crowned with its own pyramid to a considerably greater height than the circumjacent ones. The whole are in a close cluster, and make a fine picture of ancient strength when seen at a proper proximity; for I do not think that distance adds anything to the effect. There are hardly any windows, or few, and very small ones, except the loopholes for arrows and for the garrison of the castle to peep from on the sides towards the water; indeed, there are larger windows at least in the upper apartments; but in that direction, no doubt, the castle was considered impregnable. Trees here and there on the land side grow up against the castle wall, on one part of which, moreover, there was a green curtain of ivy spreading from base to battlement. The walls retain their machicolations, and I should judge that nothing had been altered, nor any more work been done upon the old fortress than to keep it in singularly good repair. It was formerly a castle of the Duke of Savoy, and since his sway over the country ceased (three hundred years at least), it has been in the hands of the Swiss government, who still keep some arms and ammunition there.

We passed on, and found the view of it better, as we thought, from a farther point along the road. The raindrops began to spatter down faster, and we took shelter under an impending precipice, where the ledge of rock had been blasted and hewn away to form the road. Our refuge was not a very convenient and comfortable one, so we took advantage of the partial cessation of the shower to turn homeward, but we had not gone far when we met mamma and all her train. As we were close by the castle entrance, we thought it advisable to seek admission, though rather doubtful whether the Swiss _gendarmes_ might not deem it a sin to let us into the castle on Sunday. But he very readily admitted us under his covered drawbridge, and called an old man from within the fortress to show us whatever was to be seen. This latter personage was a staid, rather grim, and Calvinistic-looking old worthy; but he received us without scruple, and forthwith proceeded to usher us into a range of the most dismal dungeons, extending along the basement of the castle, on a level with the surface of the lake. First, if I remember aright, we came to what he said had been a chapel, and which, at all events, looked like an aisle of one, or rather such a crypt as I have seen beneath a cathedral, being a succession of massive pillars supporting groined arches,--a very admirable piece of Gothic architecture. Next, we came to a very dark compartment of the same dungeon range, where he pointed to a sort of bed, or what might serve for a bed, hewn in the solid rock, and this, our guide said, had been the last sleeping-place of condemned prisoners on the night before their execution. The next compartment was still duskier and dismaller than the last, and he bade us cast our eyes up into the obscurity and see a beam, where the condemned ones used to be hanged. I looked and looked, and closed my eyes so as to see the clearer in this horrible duskiness on opening them again. Finally, I thought I discerned the accursed beam, and the rest of the party were certain that they saw it. Next, beyond this, I think, was a stone staircase, steep, rudely cut and narrow, down which the condemned were brought to death; and beyond this, still on the same basement range of the castle, a low and narrow [corridor] through which we passed, and saw a row of seven massive pillars, supporting two parallel series of groined arches, like those in the chapel which we first entered. This was Bonnivard’s prison, and the scene of Byron’s poem.

The arches are dimly lighted by narrow loopholes, pierced through the immensely thick wall, but at such a height above the floor that we could catch no glimpse of land or water, or scarcely of the sky. The prisoner of Chillon could not possibly have seen the island to which Byron alludes, and which is a little way from the shore, exactly opposite the town of Villeneuve. There was light enough in this long, grey, vaulted room, to show us that all the pillars were inscribed with the names of visitors, among which I saw no interesting one, except that of Byron himself, which is cut, in letters an inch long or more, into one of the pillars next to that to which Bonnivard was chained. The letters are deep enough to remain in the pillar as long as the castle stands. Byron seems to have had a fancy for recording his name in this and similar ways; as witness the record which I saw on a tree of Newstead Abbey. In Bonnivard’s pillar there still remains an iron ring, at the height of perhaps three feet from the ground. His chain was fastened to this ring, and his only freedom was to walk round this pillar, about which he is said to have worn a path in the stone pavement of the dungeon; but as the floor is now covered with earth of gravel, I could not satisfy myself whether this be true. Certainly six years with nothing else to do in them save to walk round the pillar, might well suffice to wear away the rock, even with naked feet. This column and all the columns, were cut and hewn in a good style of architecture, and the dungeon arches are not without a certain gloomy beauty. On Bonnivard’s pillar, as well as on all the rest, were many names inscribed; but I thought better of Byron’s delicacy and sensitiveness for not cutting his name into that very pillar. Perhaps, knowing nothing of Bonnivard’s story, he did not know to which column he was chained.

Emerging from the dungeon-vaults, our guide led us through other parts of the castle, showing us the Duke of Savoy’s kitchen, with a fireplace at least twelve feet long; also the judgment-hall, or some such place, hung round with the coats-of-arms of some officers or other, and having at one end a wooden post, reaching from floor to ceiling, and having upon it the marks of fire. By means of this post contumacious prisoners were put to a dreadful torture, being drawn up by cords and pulleys, while their limbs were scorched by a fire underneath. We also saw a chapel or two, one of which is still in good and sanctified condition, and was to be used this very day, our guide told us, for religious purposes. We saw, moreover, the Duke’s private chamber, with a part of the bedstead on which he used to sleep, and be haunted with horrible dreams, no doubt, and the ghosts of wretches whom he had tortured and hanged; likewise the bedchamber of his duchess, that had in its window two stone seats, where, directly over the head of Bonnivard, the ducal pair might look out on the beautiful scene of lake and mountains, and feel the warmth of the blessed sun. Under this window, the guide said, the water of the lake is eight hundred feet in depth; an immense profundity, indeed, for an inland lake, but it is not very difficult to believe that the mountain at the foot of which Chillon stands may descend so far beneath the water. In other parts of the lake and not distant, more than nine hundred feet have been sounded. I looked out of the duchess’s window, and could certainly see no appearance of a bottom in the light blue water.

The last thing that the guide showed us was a trap-door, or opening, beneath a crazy old floor. Looking down into this aperture we saw three stone steps, which we should have taken to be the beginning of a flight of stairs that descended into a dungeon, or series of dungeons, such as we had already seen. But inspecting them more closely, we saw that the third step terminated the flight, and beyond was a dark vacancy. Three steps a person would grope down, planting his uncertain foot on a dimly seen stone; the fourth step would be in the empty air.

ROCCA MALATESTIANA

CHARLES YRIARTE

The name of Malatesta illuminates every step in Rimini. The fortification that serves to enclose the town, strengthened by towers of defence and by windows that resemble our modern casements, is certainly due to them. The celebrated fortress known under the name of Rocca Malatestiana still commands the city, although it is now dismantled and converted into a prison, and upon the square, San Francesco, there rises the Temple of the Malatestas (Tempio Malatestiano), the purest building, perhaps, of the most beautiful period of Italian art, upon the pediment of which you read the pompous inscription: “To Immortal God Sigismond Malatesta, son of Pandolphe.”

[Illustration: ROCCA MALATESTIANA, ITALY.]

In 1294, Malatesta da Verucchio built the castle upon the same site, and he made of it at once a sumptuous residence and a solid fortress to which was given the name of Gattolo dei Malatesta. It is from there that Verucchio dates his will. The great Ghiberti, the sculptor of the “Gates of Paradise,” tells us, in his _Commentaries_ that in 1400 he made some enamels for the apartments and that he painted some frescoes. Alas! nothing of these remains for us. In 1446, comes Sigismond, son of Pandolphe, the great warrior and conqueror, he who has been nicknamed Poliorcète, skilful in making fortifications, pupil and soon the rival of Roberto Valturco, the celebrated author of the volume of _Re Militari_; he battered down the Gattolo, or, at least, he changed it from roof to basement at the moment when the discovery of artillery had changed all the conditions of the attack and defence of old castles. It was during this transformation that the frescoes and all the ornamentation, of which Ghiberti speaks, disappeared. Two superb inscriptions, one Gothic, the other of the first half of the Fifteenth Century, surmounted by the escutcheon of the Malatestas with the helmet crowned by elephants’ heads and the chess-board, are sure guarantees of these serious modifications. In order that they should be proved with more certainty, Matteo de’ Pasti, a pensioner of the lord of Rimini, struck, by order of his master, the superb commemorative medal representing the Rocca Malatestiana. Piero della Francesca, the great artist to whom we owe the greater number of the beautiful portraits of the Bentivoglios, the Montefeltros, and the Malatestas, brings us, in his turn, an unexceptionable proof,--the day when, in the temple of San Francesco of Rimini, the pantheon of the Malatesta family, he represents the lord of Rimini kneeling before Saint Sigismond, and gives the view of the Rocca as a background for his precious fresco.

So imposing a mass should certainly have triumphed over time, but it has been disfigured at the pleasure of succeeding generations. Upon the ground where we walk while regarding the present façade, is dug the first enclosure, a large moat a hundred feet wide and thirty-five feet deep, to-day filled up and forming a platform. We find no longer the six towers, eighty feet high, destroyed by Urbain VIII. (1625), who has also given his name to the building for more than a century,--Castello Urbano. Finally, in 1826, the first circuit was razed, and, the moat having already disappeared, they did away with the drawbridge. It is nothing more than a prison, through the gratings of which we see the red caps of the prisoners who come to gaze upon a bit of blue sky.

Another tradition insists that the Malatestas, sons of Verucchio, lived, during the lifetime of their father, in a dwelling near the old gate of San Andrea; but the house designated, dating at most from the last centuries, belonged to the Graziani, and to-day it serves as the residence for the family of the Ugolini Micheli. One sees how difficult it is to establish anything even after long inquiry; however, the conclusion of the historian, Tonini, must also be our own: the cruel scene must have taken place in Rimini, and probably in the Gattolo de Santa Colomba, that is to say in the fortress known to-day under the name of Rocca Malatestiana, a residence greatly disfigured and modified, where it would be impossible to identify the exact spot of the murder, but which, according to a number of chronicles, was at the moment this murder was accomplished, a princely residence, “containing noble apartments,” with the exterior appearance of a castle.

Since Francesca was born in Ravenna, why has posterity unanimously designated her under the name of Francesca da Rimini? Logically she should be Francesca da Ravenna; but she lived in Rimini as the wife of Giovanni Malatesta, and it was there that she expiated her crime, or her weakness, by death; it was there that her tomb was made, and posterity will therefore forever call her by the name of Francesca da Rimini. Moreover, if we sum up the opinions of the chroniclers and historians, it is understood by the most of them that the deed was accomplished in this town, and they doubt it so little that the idea never occurs to them to support a contrary opinion. Marco Battaglia, Benvenuto da Imola, Fra Giovanni da Serravalle, and Baldo di Branchi furnish proofs that might be considered as negative; but if they do not cite the name of Rimini, it never occurs to them to mention any other town. As for Jacopo Della Lana, Gradinego and Boccaccio, all three name the city of the Malatestas, and later, when Silvio Pellico and many other dramatic poets of other nations will write their dramas, their poems, or their stories, they will not hesitate to place the scene in the same city. Count Odoardo Fabri will not do otherwise, and if Lord Byron had realized the plan he conceived and which he made known to Murray, his publisher, in the letters which are now in everybody’s hands, Rimini would still be the scene. Is it necessary to speak of our compatriot, M. Auguste Thomas, the composer of _Mignon_, who having written the score of _Francesca da Rimini_, dedicated it to M. Tonini, the librarian of the Gambalunghiana.

Francesca then is not Francesca da Ravenna, she is and she will ever remain “Francesca da Rimini.”

She belongs to the history of this town, or if you prefer, to its legend. It is in vain to turn over the leaves of the archives, you cannot deprive the city of the Malatestas of its touching picture.

Before formulating our conclusions we will note, merely for the curiosity of the fact, a singular document taken from a volume printed in Rimini in 1581, by Simbeni, entitled _Il Vermicello della seta_, signed under the name Giovanni Andrea Corsucci da Sascorbaro, and cited by Luigi Tonini:

“A few days ago in the church of Saint Augustin, in Rimini, they found in a marble sepulchre Paolo Malatesta and Francesca, daughter of Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, who were put to death by Lancilotto, son of Malatesta, lord of Rimini, brother of the said Paolo found under the accomplishment of a dishonest deed, and both miserably killed with the blows of a poignard, as Petrarch describes in his _Triumph of Love_. Their clothes were of silk, and, although they had been shut up in this sepulchre for so many years, they were found in a perfect state of preservation.”

Upon what document Sascorbaro relies for this statement no one can say; there was no inscription, no medal and no sign whatever that could certify to the identity of the skeletons; but the legend was evidently established, since Boccaccio and the greater number of chroniclers had said that the two bodies were united in the same tomb. The assertion of Sascorbaro, deprived of all proofs as it is, has come to confirm the opinion of the Florentine story-teller. Rimini persists in its legend, if legend it is; and I also discovered a few days ago, at Gambalunghiana, the bit of silk tissued with gold, and placed in a frame upon which the erudite son of Tonini, successor to the historian of Rimini, does not willingly call to the attention of learned historians, because history desires authentic proofs; but the common people view with great pleasure a contemporary relic of Francesca and Paolo.

THE WARTBURG

L. PUTTICH

The Wartburg lies on the north-western slope of the Thuringer Forest at the top of a spur that commands an extensive view over the fruitful fields and woody Thuringian ridges. If the traveller has enjoyed the prospect during the ascent, he is engrossed by other feelings as soon as he has passed through the gateway into the old stronghold and mentally rehabilitates the entire castle as it was in days of yore. For the Wartburg is not only memorable as having been the abode for a century of the powerful landgraves of Thuringia who had their court here from the time this hold was built by Ludwig II. at the end of the Eleventh Century (1080 A. D. is usually considered the year of its completion) to the extinction of his line with Heinrich Raspe in the middle of the Thirteenth Century, but it has also acquired a classic repute in German history by three important occurrences: the famous Singer-war, the life of Saint Elizabeth, and Luther’s sojourn here.

[Illustration: THE WARTBURG, GERMANY.]

The Singer-war, also called the war of the Wartburg, was brought about, as is well known, by the Minnesong-enthusiast landgrave, Hermann I. and his art-loving wife, Sophia. In 1206, they assembled six of the most celebrated Minnesingers,--Walter von der Vogelweide, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Heinrich (the virtuous writer), Johann Bitterolff, and Reimer von Zwethin, partly native and partly foreign,--and arranged a singing-contest among them. Heinrich von Ofterdingen sang of the knightly qualities of the Archduke Leopold II. of Austria; Eschenbach celebrated the fame of the King of France; and Walter von der Vogelweide, the preëminence of the landgrave Hermann; whilst the other singers extolled other princes. But this gave rise to a serious strife, and the irritated contestants agreed (so it is said) that the defeated singer should die by the executioner’s hand. The landgrave strongly forbade such a bargain over his undertaking, but nevertheless when Ofterdingen was declared the loser, the protection of the landgravine, to whom he fled, was necessary to save him from his adversaries. The landgrave adjusted the quarrel by arranging a new contest, to which Ofterdingen had to fetch from Hungary the world-famous meistersinger, Klingsor, to act as umpire. About a year afterwards, therefore, the latter appeared with Ofterdingen and the contest began again. Klingsor, however, would not decide in favour of any one singer, but rather sought to reconcile the parties. In this he was successful, and so the “War of the Wartburg” ended in feasting and revels which the landgrave provided.

Although its original features have been destroyed, the Minnesinger Hall in which the contest took place still stands, and might easily be restored; but fragments of the poems of the Wartburg war are preserved in the _Maneseichen_, _Docenschen_, and other collections. It has been held, however, and not without good grounds, that the poems still extant of that contest were first collected a century after it was held. It seems certain, nevertheless, that the kernel of the matter is largely contained in these collections.

Saint Elizabeth, the daughter of King Andrew II. of Hungary, became the wife of the landgrave Ludwig VI., the Pious, in 1221; and resided at the Wartburg with him. She was a model of simplicity, piety and gentleness; and during a famine and accompanying pestilence that ravaged Thuringia, she displayed these great virtues to the highest degree, proving herself a true mother of her country by her self-sacrifice in nursing the sick and dying.

Luther had left the Diet at Worms; he had been outlawed, and the safe-conduct granted to him by the Emperor Charles V. was soon about to lapse, for it was limited to twenty-one days. His friends and protectors therefore feared for his life, and, in order to hide him, Luther was snatched up by masked servants while passing through the Thuringer Forest, and brought to the Wartburg. It is scarcely to be doubted that this happened by the contrivance of the Kurfurst Friedrich, although at first he may have avoided all knowledge of Luther’s retreat, in order to be able to meet all official inquiries. Luther arrived at the Wartburg in May, 1521, under the name of a knight Görg. Here, for nearly a year, he lived in a little chamber, in a wing to the right of the chief tower, very simply adorned and furnished only with the barest necessaries. It still exists in its original condition, and it is with awe that the visitor enters the little abode wherein the great man partly accomplished his undying work,--the translation of the Bible. The castle chapel in the landgrave’s quarters still contains the pulpit from which Luther often preached to the inmates.

When we approach the castle from the east, where the carriage road leading from the town of Eisenach first winds through a wooded valley up to the tree-clad ridge, the Wartburg sits enthroned high above on the top of the mountain. From this point we see the landgrave-abode, and to its immediate right the residence built in 1791, and fortified walls stretching to the gate-house, or knight-house (_Ritterhaus_).