The work appeared to be accomplished. The city of the Reformation thrilled with joy, and exulted in the air of liberty and of the Gospel. Here and there, however, sorrows and regrets remained. Many hearts were wrung, and many an eye was turned with mortification in the direction of Chillon, where Bonivard had been languishing for six years. He had done so much to give liberty to Geneva, and he alone was not free. He was pining away, imprisoned within those rocks, which, excavated below the level of the lake, form a gigantic sepulchre. A loophole permitted a feeble ray of light to enter the dungeon, and the prisoner, while walking slowly round the column to which he was chained, delighted to turn his eyes towards that side, and sometimes contemplated (according to tradition) a little bird, which used to perch on the iron bars of the narrow opening. At the slightest noise, the bird flew off to the wood behind the castle, or skimmed away over the surface of the lake. The bird was free; but Bonivard was in chains. 'I had such leisure for walking,' he said, 'that I wore away a path in the rock, as if it had been done with a hammer.'[733] When he was seized by the perfidious hands of his enemies he had said: 'I am going alone, with God, to suffer my passion!' And suffer it he did. But while his body and heart suffered, his mind was at work. Some of the thoughts which then occupied him have been recorded by his own hand: _Live in remembrance of death_,—_Courage increases by wounds_, and such like. For five or six months the Genevan envoys, so traitorously seized at Coppet, had also been imprisoned at Chillon, but not in the underground dungeons. [Sidenote: CHILLON ATTACKED.] Such iniquities could not be tolerated. Berne again took up her _fire-sticks_, and Geneva prepared her boats. On the 20th of March one hundred armed men were embarked on four war cutters and other vessels. The Genevese councils had given the command to Francis Favre and Francis Chamois. All the citizens would have liked to march in person to Chillon to set Bonivard and the plenipotentiaries at liberty. On the day of sailing, everybody left their houses, and from an agitated crowd assembled near the Rhone, there rose a universal cry, 'Rescue the captives!'