Shelley did his best to fire Mary’s enthusiasm for the subject he had chosen with evening readings from Hume’s History of England; sitting under a starry sky on a summer night, with fireflies flickering across the grass and music floating up the hillside from the ballroom of one of the aristocratic visitors, she found it impossible to think about life in Stuart England. She made no secret of the fact that she was happier copying out the translation of Plato’s Symposium on which Shelley was working at Bagni di Lucca.
It was, Shelley told the Gisbornes on 10 July, just a diversion, an exercise, a way of giving Mary ‘some idea of the manners & feelings of the Athenians’. He was being prudently nonchalant; the Symposium’s subject, homosexual love, had put it out of bounds for English readers who knew no Greek. Shelley, as Richard Holmes has pointed out, was ‘the first major English writer to attempt an objective account of Platonic homosexuality’ and to show, through his translation and the essay it inspired him to write, ‘that Plato’s conception of love has a universal application’.12
The copying was done during the day; the essay, or Discourse, emerged from the discussions which took place in the cool of the evenings, out in the narrow garden of the Casa Bertini. Here, talking with Mary and Claire, Shelley shaped his argument. In Plato, he found a reflection of his own enduring belief in the power of love to uplift and purify, to annihilate evil. This was his creed. This unquenchable faith in love as a universal panacea was what Mary loved most in him. Reading the Discourse at the end of this tranquil summer, Mary seemed to be looking down through clear water at her own reflection, Shelley’s image of all she meant to him.
Degraded by an age which treated them as inferior beings, Shelley argued, women had been robbed of the power to inspire love.
They were certainly devoid of that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the lineaments and the gestures of every form which it inhabits. Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths.13
The act of love itself, Shelley wrote elsewhere in the Discourse, ‘is nothing’; love, in its highest state, was identifiable in the moment of meeting someone, some ‘frame, whose nerves like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own’.14 This state of intuitive empathy was what Shelley yearned for in all his relationships; in the summer of 1818, it still existed between himself and Mary. The deep and thoughtful eyes were hers; the ‘one delightful voice’ was, perhaps, a graceful allusion to Claire, their perpetual companion.
*
It was August and fiercely hot, even up here in the hills, when the spell broke. Mary was contentedly copying out the continuation of Rosalind and Helen, the poem about herself and Isabella Booth which Shelley had begun at Marlow, when two letters arrived from Elise in quick succession. The main news which they brought was that she and Allegra had been moved out of Byron’s home and put in the care of Richard Hoppner, the British consul in Venice. Thomas Moore, collecting biographical information some years later, heard from Byron’s mistress Teresa Guiccioli that Byron felt Elise was too young and inexperienced to have sole charge of Allegra, and thought it best to put her under Mrs Hoppner’s supervision.15 But Elise seems also to have hinted that Byron was preparing to debauch his daughter; the following year, Claire told him that she could foresee his becoming another Count Cenci: ‘Allegra shall never be a Beatrice.’16
The idea of Byron’s setting out to bring up a year-old child as his mistress was patently absurd, but Elise, no stickler for the truth, may have been ready to say anything which would bring her former employers to the rescue. ‘Elise was a pretty woman. Byron was thought to be intimate with her by some,’ Claire told E.A. Silsbee in the 1870s.17 If Elise had become pregnant by Byron and was now living with strangers, she had every cause to send alarming messages in the hope of restoring herself to the safe care of the Shelleys before her condition became apparent. Mrs Hoppner, a fiercely conventional Swiss woman, would have had little sympathy for a nursemaid’s predicament.
For whatever reason, and with whatever stories, Elise persuaded Claire that it was her duty to go instantly to Venice. It is not clear what Claire planned to do next; probably, she meant to make a direct appeal to Byron for the return of her daughter. Shelley, conscious that her sudden appearance in Venice was likely to enrage Byron and increase her own misery, decided to intercede on Claire’s behalf. Elise’s second letter arrived on 16 August. Shelley and Claire left Casa Bertini the following day. Mary, making brief mention of ‘important business’ which had taken them to Venice, wrote to invite the Gisbornes to come and lighten her solitude. She promised to read them Shelley’s translation of the Symposium, adding a cautious warning that ‘in many particulars it shocks our present manners, but no one can be a reader of the works of antiquity unless they can transport themselves from these to other times and judge not by our but by their morality.’18 Shelley would have been proud of her.
The Gisbornes arrived eight days later. They found Mary pale and nervous. Little Clara was ill and she herself had been sick for two days. ‘Well my dearest Mary are you very lonely? Tell me truth my sweetest do you ever cry?’ Shelley had tactlessly written during a day’s halt at Florence; he urged her to be cheerful and to please him by working on her play.19 But Mary was too sad for work; even Mrs Gisborne could not drive away the terror she always felt when Shelley left. The memory of how easily he had abandoned Harriet was never far away.
Clara was still ill when Shelley’s second letter reached Mary. It had taken five days to arrive and the contents required immediate action. Claire and he had met and liked the Hoppners. Acting on their advice, Shelley had pretended to Byron that Mary and the children had come with them and were now staying with Claire at Padua. Byron, full of friendship towards Shelley, had said, first, that Claire should have Allegra back for good, and then, that she should have her for a week. He had offered to lend them all his own summer home at Este, which was not far from Padua.
So far, so good; the offer had been accepted and acted on. But it would not do for Byron to discover that Claire and Shelley were living alone at his villa; the only solution Shelley could find was for Mary and the children to come immediately to Este. The rest of his letter was taken up with details about the quickest route. An order for £50 was enclosed to cover her costs. ‘If you knew all that I had to do!’ he exclaimed, before asking her to ‘be well be happy come to me & confide in your own constant & affectionate PBS’.20
Shelley did not know how ill his baby daughter was; he would probably still have insisted on the journey. It was painful for Mary to compare the tender chivalry with which he had insisted on chaperoning Claire with his easy supposition that she, acting alone, could pack up the house at Bagni di Lucca and set off on a hot, arduous journey across Italy with a nine-month-old baby. Mrs Gisborne, whom she consulted, could see no alternative. Paolo Foggi, the invaluable factotum, was dispatched to make the necessary travelling arrangements at the nearby town of Lucca. On the next day, 30 August, Mary sadly noted: ‘My birthday – 21 – packing.’ This was not how she had planned to spend it; had all gone as intended, they would have been readying themselves for a sea voyage down to Naples for the winter months. ‘O Mary dear, that you were here; / The Castle echo whispers “Here!”’ Shelley charmingly entreated her from Este in his poem ‘To Mary’: it was easier for him to imagine than for her to achieve.
Travelling towards Este over the next four days in the company of Paolo, an inexperienced young English nursemaid and her own feverish child, now suffering acutely from dysentery, Mary must have been rigid with resentment of Claire. If she had not been so determined to have Byron’s child; if she could only have consented to leave Allegra in the Hoppners’ care: it did not bear thinking about.
*
&
nbsp; Clara was still dangerously ill when they reached Este; Shelley and Claire might have been more concerned if they had not both been struck down themselves, Claire with a mysterious ailment which had been troubling her for most of the summer, Shelley from food-poisoning. Neither of them took their illnesses lightly; occupied with their own ailments, they were eager to reassure the anxious mother that her child was only suffering from teething problems.
Mary, while resolutely refusing to leave Clara for a visit to Venice, did her best to distract herself. She read Italian poetry and plays; with her thoughts still on the strange incestuous history of Beatrice Cenci, she started a translation of Mirra, a treatment of the forbidden love of a father for his daughter by one of Italy’s greatest modern playwrights, Vittorio Alfieri. The frequency with which Mary herself made literary use of a relationship between father and daughter might cause a modern reader to wonder if some hidden experience between Godwin and his daughter was being exorcized on paper. This notion should be dismissed. There are, undoubtedly, elements of autobiography in Mary’s fictional works, but the theme of love between relatives was not uncommon at that time. British publishers were often discomforted by it and this was the probable reason why one of Alfieri’s finest works remained without a translator. It is, however, true that Mary’s own powerful attachment to Godwin gave her a reason for being drawn to explorations of father—daughter relationships in her work and in that of other writers.
Shelley, beginning on the most technically dazzling and ambitious of his works, Prometheus Unbound, was all encouragement. He liked to feel that they were working in harmony; generously, he longed for Mary’s success as much as for the acknowledgment which continued to elude him. Mary continued to regard Mirra as the noblest of Alfieri’s dramas, but she did not complete the translation.
Health apart, they felt they had landed in paradise. The house, I Cappuccini (now the Villa de Künkler), was airy and light. Its windows faced away from the plump wooded cones of the Euganean hills, looking across a fruit-laden garden with a vine-trellised path leading to the summerhouse which Shelley promptly converted into a study, and out to the wide green plain of Lombardy. In the foreground, separated from the garden by a deep ravine, stood a gloomy fortress once owned by the Medici family, ‘whose dark massive wall gave forth an echo’, Mary wrote with evident relish for its gothic charm, ‘and from whose ruined crevices, owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and heavy battlements’.21 Her affection for the place remained strong; writing in 1833 on Petrarch, whose last home had been nearby at Arqua, she found an excuse to praise ‘the ancient and picturesque town of Este’.22
Little Clara’s health did not improve. The doctor at Este was hopelessly inadequate. Shelley, visiting Venice to request an extension of Allegra’s visit, was told by Byron that his own doctor, Aglietti, was by far the best man to consult. Mary was instructed by her husband to chaperone Claire to a doctor’s appointment at Padua, bringing the baby with her. Claire would then return to Este, while Shelley conducted his wife and Clara to Venice – and Aglietti.
They left Este well before dawn on 24 September, hoping to avoid the heat of the day. By the time they reached Padua, Clara’s condition had deteriorated. Ahead of them lay the slow journey along the Brenta canal to Fusina where, to their dismay, it transpired that their passports had been left behind. Either the baby’s convulsions or Shelley’s fury persuaded the Austrian guards to break the rules.
‘It is strange, but to any person who has suffered, a familiar circumstance,’ Mary wrote in Venice twenty-two years later, ‘that those who are enduring mental or corporeal agony are strangely alive to immediate external objects … a relief afforded by nature to permit the nerves to endure pain … Thus the banks of the Brenta presented to me a moving scene; not a palace, not a tree of which I did not recognise, as marked and recorded, at a moment when life and death hung upon our speedy arrival at Venice.’23 She waited, holding Clara in her arms, in the hallway of an inn while Shelley rushed in search of Dr Aglietti. When he returned, Mary, white-faced and mute, was standing where he had left her, still holding the baby. Clara was dead.
‘This is the Journal book of misfortunes,’ Mary wrote bitterly in her diary that evening, seated at a desk in the Hoppners’ house. Two days later, Clara’s small body was buried on the lonely beach of the Lido, as desolate as the sea which stretched beyond it. No tablet marked her grave.
They returned to Este a few days later, taking with them Byron’s Ode to Venice and Mazeppa which he had asked Mary to transcribe, probably with the kind intention of giving her an occupation. Frightening symptoms of ill health in little ‘Willmouse’ brought them hurrying back to Venice in search of better doctors on 11 October. Mary remained there until the end of the month, dining daily with the Hoppners and, since he seemed to wish it, offering Byron her view of his unpublished memoirs. On 24 October Shelley left her to collect Allegra from Claire at Este. Perhaps, despite the relief of almost daily rides with Byron and the long, enthralling conversations on which he based the poem Julian and Maddalo which was completed the following year, Shelley was anxious to distance himself from the reproach of Mary’s sad face. He was certainly in no hurry to return; he remained at Este, alone with Claire and Allegra, for four full days.
Godwin’s well-intended letter of consolation did not reach Mary until long after Clara’s death. In it, he invited his daughter to consider this as the first hardship she had been asked to bear and to recollect that ‘it is only persons of a very ordinary sort, and of a pusillanimous disposition, [that] sink long under a calamity of this nature. I assure you,’ Godwin continued confidently, ‘that such a recollection will be of great use to you. We seldom indulge long in depression and mourning, except when we think secretly that there is something very refined in it, and that it does us honour.’24
Harsh though Godwin’s prescription sounds, it was given for reasons of affection and concern. Godwin had lived with Mary Wollstonecraft long enough to be aware of the strong streak of melancholy in her character. He knew of her attempts to kill herself; he recognized that his daughter had inherited her mother’s nature. When he urged her to be cheerful and resolute, he was writing in fear that Mary’s despair might become self-destructive.
Godwin’s letter did not arrive until the winter. Mary had already done her best to keep her unhappiness to herself, but it was hard. Clara had deliberately been given the name of their first dead baby, as if to preserve and encompass her. Now, both were gone and, try as she would, Mary could not rid herself of the thought that it was the journey Shelley had forced her to make across Italy in the height of summer which had helped to cause their second child’s death. Even if she never voiced the accusing thought, her feelings were apparent. ‘One looks back with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such periods,’ she wrote in 1839 in her note to Shelley’s poems of 1818. They included sections of Julian and Maddalo, ‘Invocation to Misery’ and ‘Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples’. Kept from her sight at the time, these were the poems in which Shelley expressed his own sense of loss and estrangement. ‘O Thou, my spirit’s mate,’ he wrote in Julian and Maddalo, in lines which seem to represent a personal situation:
Who, for thou art compassionate and wise,
Wouldst pity me from thy most gentle eyes
If this sad writing thou shouldst ever see –
My secret groans must be unheard by thee,
Thou wouldst weep tears bitter as blood to know
Thy lost friend’s incommunicable woe.
It is possible that there were other factors at work which contributed to Shelley’s own misery. His health was always a concern and it is even possible, as one critic has cogently argued, that his unhappiness stemmed from the knowledge that he was suffering from syphilis contracted during his brief period as an Oxford undergraduate – knowledge which he may not have shared with his wife.25 This remains a matter of speculation; what is certain is that Mary
was much affected by the loss of her second daughter and that she was not a woman who shared her deepest feelings with others when she was unhappy. She would not even allow herself the luxury of writing her thoughts in her journal, although this would be a solace in later years; the record of the period immediately after Clara’s death is unusually terse. One day, she passed the time by writing the details of some ghost stories told by the Chevalier Angelo Mengaldo when he dined with the Hoppners. ‘Thursday, 8th October: Read Vita di Alfieri & Livy – S[helley] reads Winter’s Tale aloud to me’, is a more typical entry.
A rare hint of what Mary was enduring is visible in an oblique description written more than twenty years later, when she was staying in Venice again.
Evening has come, and the moon, so often friendly to me, now at its full, rises over the city. Often, when here before, I looked on this scene, at this hour, or later, for often I expected S’s return from Palazzo Mocenigo, till two or three in the morning. I watched the glancing of the oars of the gondolas, and heard the far song, and saw the palaces sleeping in the light of the moon, which veils by its deep shadows all that grieved the eye and heart in the decaying palaces of Venice.26
On 5 November, after returning Allegra to the care of the Hoppners, the depleted party set out on the road again.
Notes
1. Since the records of Elise’s family, first identified by Emily Sunstein in ‘Louise Duvillard of Geneva, the Shelleys’ Nursemaid’ (Keats-Shelley Journal, XXIX, 1980, pp. 27–31), show no record of her having had a daughter, it is usually assumed that Aimée Romieux, born on 20 January 1816, is the child of Elise’s mother’s second marriage. Mary and Claire’s letters provide convincing evidence that Aimée was, in fact, Elise’s child. Writing to the Hunts on 6 April 1818 just after meeting Elise’s family, Mary gave them a lengthy description of Aimée. She is said to be ‘very beautiful with eyes something like but sweeter than William’s – a perfect shaped nose and a more beautiful mouth than her Mothers expressive of the greatest sensibility’. No description is given of any other member of the nursemaid’s family, but the Hunts would naturally have been interested to hear about a child of Elise’s after spending several weeks in her company at Marlow. Mary’s description of Aimée as having a mouth more beautiful than her mother’s would make sense to the Hunts only if she was talking of Elise; they had never met Madame Romieux, who lived in Switzerland. Three weeks later, on 26 April 1818, Claire told Byron that Elise was ‘a mother herself’. We can conclude that Elise, when the Shelleys decided to employ her at Geneva in 1816, probably had an illegitimate baby which was given the name of her stepfather and brought up as a member of his family while she returned to England with the Shelleys.
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