much of a piece with other literary productions by the Geneva circle during the summer
of 1816, most particularly The Prisoner of Chillon, written by Lord Byron in the week
after he and Percy Bysshe Shelley visited the Castle of Chillon during their boat
trip around the lake in mid-July. Shelley included an account in the letters he appended
to A History of a Six Weeks' Tour. In Byron's poem, at the end of his long captivity,
François de Bonnivard, the prisoner, claims, "It was at length the same to me, / Fetter'd
or fetterless to be" (lines 372-73) and ruefully notes, in much the same language
as Victor employs here, that "iron is a cankering thing, / For in these limbs its
teeth remain, / With marks that will not wear away" (lines 38-40).