Note 12 — THE REAL PRISONER OF CHILLON: A GENTLEMAN GROSSLY MISREPRESENTED.

It is needful to caution enthusiastic tourists that nearly all the details of Byron's poem are fabulous. The two brothers, the martyred father, the anguish of the prisoner, were all invented by the poet on that rainy day in the tavern at Ouchy. Even the level of the dungeon, below the water of the lake, turns out to be a mistake, although Bonivard believed it: the floor of the crypt is eight feet above high-water mark. As for the thoughts of the prisoner, they seem to have been mainly occupied with making Latin and French verses of an objectionable sort not adapted for general publication. (See Ls. Vulliemin: Chillon, Étude historique, Lausanne, 1851.)