After nearly capsizing in their efforts to enter the port of St Gingolph, it was a relief to Byron and Shelley to find that the weather was much calmer the next day and there were no difficulties about continuing their journey. They were heading for Villeneuve, at the head of the lake, and back into Swiss territory. As they passed beyond St Gingolph, and saw where the Rhone entered the lake, Shelley noticed that the powerful currents of the river caused the colour of the water to change in exactly the way St. Preux describes before the storm which forces him and Julie to land in Meillerie. Looking more or less directly down the lake towards Geneva at its far western end, Villeneuve was then, according to Shelley, ‘an old wretched town’ but very near is the château de Chillon with its splendid towers and imposing battlements. Built on a flat rock, and far more in the lake than out of it, Chillon had for several centuries belonged to the counts of Savoy but in 1536 had been captured by the Bernese Swiss. By the time Byron and Shelley visited the château, it had been transferred to the canton de Vaud (or Léman), which had long been under Bernese control but had been able to join the Swiss Federation as an independent unity in 1803 (the French invasion having had some positive democratic effects). The château de Chillon figures importantly in Julie in that it is after dining there that one of the heroine's children slips and falls into the lake. Plunging into the water to save him, Julie catches the chill from which she then dies.