Notes
1. This verse was probably written in 1816 (draft in notebook, Bodleian, Ms Shelley adds. e. 16, p. 66), but was not published by Mary until 1839.
2. Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot was published by Viking in 1998, with an introduction by Claire Tomalin. Mary sent a fair copy (now lost) to her father, evidently hoping that it might bring revenue to the ailing Juvenile Library Godwin was dismissive. ‘If you were disposed to add more – enough to make up a volume – I should be very happy to publish it,’ he wrote, ‘but I would not have you give yourself trouble about it; such books do not make ready money.’ WG–MWS, 10.9.1822 (Abinger, Dep. c. 524). I have found no evidence that Mary tried to publish it elsewhere.
3. MWS, Note to The Witch of Atlas (PW).
4. It is worth noting that even in the laudatory prefaces written for the collected edition of 1839, Mary was prepared to say that Shelley’s talents remained underdeveloped in 1821, a year before his death.
5. PBS, Introductory verses, ‘To Mary’, The Witch of Atlas (1820; 1824), stanza 3.
6. MG, Journal, 28.8.1820 (Shelley’s Friends).
7. PBS–TLP, 8.11.1820.
8. Mary used the recently published second edition of J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (Paris, 1818). It had not yet been translated into English.
9. MWS–LH, 7.8.1823.
10. MWS, Valperga (1823), 3, xii.
11. MWSJ, 22.10.1820.
12. Valperga, 1, iii.
13. PBS–CC, 29.10.1820.
14. MWS–CC, 14–15.1.1821; Medwin himself gave a detailed account of the meaning and origin of the word ‘seccatura’ in his life of Shelley; the word evidently held no personal significance for him.
15. Lady Morgan, Italy, 2 (1821), p. 230.
16. Medwins Revised Life of Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (1913), p. 270.
17. MWS, Note to ‘Poems of 1820’ (PW).
18. PBS–CC, 29.10.1820.
* There is no known reason for Mary to have chosen to represent Claire by the sun, since sunshine was the very opposite of the emotional weather that prevailed when the two women shared a house. It may have been intended ironically, or to contrast with Shelley’s fondness in his poetry for representing Mary by the moon.
† It is possible that Mary had heard or read something about the twelfth-century counts of Valperga, whose castle was at Mazze on the Lago di Candia in Piedmont. From 1100 onwards, the families of Valperga and San Martino were engaged in bitter dispute over the strategically valuable town of Pont, on which they both had claims. Valperga, in Mary’s novel, is of strategic value to the tyrant lord of Lucca; when Euthanasia refuses to marry Castruccio, he becomes obsessed with gaining the fortress of Valperga from her.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LIFE ON THE LUNG’ARNO
1821
‘Mr Shelley is at present on a visit to Lord Byron at Ravenna and I received a letter from him today containing accounts that make my hand tremble so much that I can hardly hold the pen.’
Mary Shelley to Isabelle Hoppner, 10 August 1821
‘ARE WE NOT WANDERERS ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH – HAVE PITY on us,’ Mary entreated the Hunts on 3 December 1820. Her tone to the Hunts, her most regular correspondents, was often self-mocking; far from feeling like a wanderer, she was hard at work on her novel and, at the end of a month in Pisa, was beginning to feel that it was not, after all, such a disagreeable town in which to live.
Pisa, with the exception of a second summer break at Bagni di San Giuliano, became the Shelleys’ headquarters until they left to live on a windswept shore in the spring of 1822. It was, despite their initial reservations, a city in which they soon felt at home. Magnificent lodgings could be obtained for a modest rent; the weather, even in the depths of winter, was often almost springlike, with air scented by the pine woods of the Cascine, separating the town from the sea. Tuscany, under the rule of a benevolent grand-duke, was the most liberal state in Italy, and Pisa, neglected and underinhabited though it had become in the early nineteenth century, was full of charm. Lady Blessington, arriving in 1827 with a yawn of dismay at the prospect of spending six months in such a backwater, left her Lung’Arno home with real regret; the poet Giacomo Leopardi, describing Pisa to his sister a few years later, went into raptures over the cosmopolitan population, the ceaseless promenade of carriages and pedestrians along the riverside walks, the beauty of the architecture and of the language. In carnival season, which began a month after the Shelleys’ arrival, tapestries draped from palace windows turned the town into a medieval painting as ancient coaches gilded with family coats-of-arms rattled out of their dusty stables and over the cobbles of the grand Piazza dei Cavalieri, still shaped like the Roman theatre it had once been.1 Dowdy though Pisa could seem in the sleepy months of summer, this, in winter, was the place to be. The presence of the grand-duke and his court always produced a glow of happiness in Pisan bosoms; it might be only for their agreeable climate that he had come, but it guaranteed that Pisa, not Florence, was for a short space of each year the centre of fashion, interest and culture.
Here, after a month-long Christmas visit from Claire, Mary gradually established what was for her a perfect balance between study and sociability. In England, she remained an object of scandal; in Pisa, free at last of the awkwardness of living in a ménage à trois with her handsome stepsister, she could enter society.
There are few clues to Mary’s appearance at this time. Shelley’s poems often paid tribute to her serene expression and smile. Frequent requests to Peacock to send out combs suggest that she kept her waving red-gold hair pinned up, away from the high intellectual forehead she had inherited from Godwin. She prided herself on the small, white, unusually flexible hands which, to amuse a child, she could bend back like a contortionist; it startled and pleased her that people like Mrs Mason, who had not seen her since childhood, found her instantly recognizable. In the Marlow days, she had been a careless dresser; at twenty-three, she took more pride in her appearance. Medwin, who noticed his cousin’s scruffy daily attire – Shelley was especially fond of a long grey coat like a dressing-gown – was impressed by the fact that he invariably ‘made his toilette’ for dinner with his wife. The fashion of the day was still for high waists and puffed sleeves; when Mary chose materials, they were usually in a pink stripe or a light pretty colour. Over her shoulders, she draped a lilac or blue chiffon shawl from Hadbib’s famous store in Livorno. She may have grown a little plumper after bearing four children (increasing weight was a problem she combated with energetic walking and a light diet); grief had, she felt, robbed her face of its bloom.
Perhaps it was so, although she would be ready by the end of 1821 to tell Leigh Hunt that she felt physically and mentally rejuvenated. But the interest which Mary’s new friends took in her had more to do with her formidable erudition, her active interest in political events and her thirst for knowledge and experience.
Mrs Mason was in poor health in the winter of 1820–1; the couple who did most to introduce the Shelleys to a new circle in Pisa were the sociable, open-minded and cultivated Dr Vaccà and his wife. Sofia, ‘la bella Vaccà’, queen of the Pisan salons, knew everybody; their friends embraced members of the ducal court as easily as the teachers, writers and translators at the university where Vaccà’s brilliance and goodness – he set three hours a day aside for work among the poor of the town – had earned him the reputation of a modern Hippocrates.
The first to make an impression, so much so that he became a nightly guest, was Francesco Pacchiani. On 3 December, Mary sent Leigh Hunt a rapturous account of this cadaverous black-eyed man, this ‘profound genius’ with ‘an eloquence that transports’, who delivered his ideas in language so beautiful that she could imagine him conversing with Boccaccio, one of her favourite writers, or Machiavelli. Perhaps it was under Pacchiani’s spell that she decided for the first time to write Hunt a long letter entirely in Italian.
At fifty, the days
of Pacchiani’s high reputation as a brilliant logician and scientist – he held the Chair in Physics at Pisa in 1802 and impressed Volta by some of his experiments – were over; a good deal of his energy was spent in slandering the colleagues whose patience he had exhausted. By 1820, Pacchiani was shirking his university duties for the pleasures of literary society and womanizing. Known as ‘the devil of Pisa’, he revelled in his reputation, gleefully telling Thomas Medwin of the time when he had met questions about the kind of lady he was escorting by announcing that he was a republican, walking in a public street with a public woman.
Mary, like Shelley, loved and hated in fervent extremes. In December 1820, Pacchiani was wholly indispensable to them; by the end of January 1821, he stood revealed as a horror, foul-mouthed, obsessed with high society and wealth. His boasting was quite disgusting, Mary told Claire on 14–15 January. ‘And then his innumerable host of great acquaintances! – he would make one believe that he attracts the great as a milk pail does flies on a summer morning.’
Pacchiani’s disagreeable nature has caused him to be identified as a possible model for two of the unpleasantest characters in Valperga. The first, Benedetto Pepi, is the corrupt mentor of Castruccio in his early years. Pepi’s sympathies with the anti-republican Ghibellines mark him out as a villain from the start (Euthanasia, the blameless heroine, is a liberal-minded Guelph).* Pepi’s belief that the world should be governed by a few rich families certainly seems to echo Pacchiani’s obsessive interest in the social standing and finances of his friends, but his operations as a corrupt usurer who hounds debtors out of their estates also suggest that Mary was still haunted by her father’s troubled finances. Given that Mary had only just met Pacchiani when she introduced the character of Pepi into her first volume, it seems unlikely that she was drawing on him. More probably, Pepi was a mythical figure, inspired by the pack of wolves she imagined snapping at the Skinner Street doors.
Pacchiani has a more convincing role in Valperga’s second volume as Battista Tripalda, the evil canon of Perugia. Pacchiani had been made a canon shortly before he entered Pisa university; his eccentricity – Medwin remembered with horror how he used to pick the bones out of snipe with long skinny fingers – and his taste for obscene jokes are mentioned as characteristic of Tripalda. Mary’s own initial enthusiasm and swift disillusion with Pacchiani seem clearly recorded in the first account she gives of Tripalda. (He is, on this occasion, acting as Castruccio’s representative and trying to persuade Euthanasia to abandon the stronghold of Valperga.)
When he first appeared at Lucca, he was humble and mild, pretending to nothing but uncorrupted and uncorruptible virtue … [But] … when he became familiar with his new friends, he cast off his modest disguise, and appeared vain, presumptuous and insolent, delivering his opinions as oracles, violent when opposed in argument, contemptuous even when agreed with … stories had been whispered concerning him, but they were believed by few; it was said that the flagrant wickedness of his actions had caused him to be banished from Perugia …2
Perhaps Mary had believed the stories whispered in Pisa about Pacchiani; in the third volume, Tripalda is shown to have presided over every depravity his creator could imagine. ‘But I have said enough,’ his beautiful victim tells Euthanasia, ‘nor will I tell that which would chill your warm blood with horror.’ All we and Euthanasia are allowed to know is that he had been guilty of crimes ‘which it would seem that fiends alone could contrive … It was the carnival of devils, when we miserable victims were dragged out to –’ There, frustratingly, the account is terminated.3 Mary was no Marquis de Sade.
Pacchiani may have been an unpleasant man, but he was an invaluable source of introductions. One of the earliest was to Tommaso Sgricci, a thirty-three-year-old ex-law student who, by 1820, had made his name as a gifted improvisators His art, close to poetry, consisted of elaborating verse monologues on a given subject, often one picked by a member of the audience.†
Not everybody admired the elegant, slender little actor. Polidori, seeing him perform at Milan in 1816, thought him a bit of a charlatan; Sgricci’s unconcealed homosexuality and a weakness for noble families did not always find favour. Mary, who first met him on 1 December, was as pleased by his eloquence as by his warm espousing of the carbonarist cause in Naples, a subject which was dear to her heart. The actor was invited to dine with them twice that week. On 21 December, she and Shelley went to hear him perform. ‘Conceive of a poem as long as a Greek Tragedy, interspersed with choruses, the whole plan conceived in an instant,’ she wrote ecstatically to Hunt eight days later: ‘… it was one impulse that filled him; an unchanged deity who spoke within him, and his voice surpassed in its modulations the melody of music.’
Sgricci was to perform again at Lucca in January; nothing was going to prevent Mary from being in the audience. Shelley had boils; very well, she would go to Lucca with Pacchiani and take the baby with her. The performance was cancelled and Pacchiani was forced to go back to Pisa; Mary was prepared to accept a stranger’s invitation and stay on alone. Seated at last in the box of the imposing Marchesa Bernardini (Pacchiani had reverently hinted that she was ‘one of the first ladies of Lucca’), Mary settled down to enjoy herself. She had always loved the theatre; she had loved nothing more than these extraordinary outpourings of inspiration. It was, she thought, as if she were watching the very act of creation made manifest. One member of the audience declared that Sgricci had got the history of his subject, Inez de Castro, all wrong, and the Marchesa sniffed that it was ‘una cosa mediocra: to me it appeared a miracle,’ Mary confessed to Claire in a long excited account of the evening. The story had been obscure and complicated; what Claire must imagine was the genius of a single man who could fill the stage with characters: ‘when Pietro unveiled the dead Ignez, when Sancho died in despair on her body, it seemed to me as if it were all there; so truly and passionately did his words depict the scene he wished to represent.’4
Mary’s enthusiasm for Sgricci did not develop into a lasting friendship and the actor left Pisa to tour the country later in January; her feelings for another of Pacchiani’s introductions, John Taaffe, were never more than tepid. Taaffe, scathingly referred to by Mary as ‘the Poet Laureate of Pisa’, was a slightly pathetic character, disinherited and sent abroad by his Irish father after he unwittingly married a lady who already had a husband. He had been living at Pisa since 1816 and was the father of two children by a second marriage of somewhat insecure status. (His first ‘wife’ refused to divorce him.) Not even the fact that he was writing a commentary on Dante, one of her favourite authors, could induce Mary to produce more than a yawn of resignation at the prospect of an evening with Taaffe. She felt very differently about Alexander Mavrocordato, to whom the Vaccàs introduced her.
Shortage of money and the need of a warm climate had, by 1821, helped to make cheap and balmy Pisa home to a closely-knit colony of Greek exiles, all of whom were related to John Caradja, the former Hospodar, or Prince, of Wallachia. Mavrocordato had worked for a time as Caradja’s political secretary, but Caradja’s own position, as a Greek in the employment of the Turkish sultan, had led to threats on his life by extremists. In 1818, together with his daughter, her husband and the twenty-seven-year-old Alexander, Caradja had fled from Bucharest to the safety of Italy. Mavrocordato had, since then, become a leading figure among the Greek patriots, both abroad and in Pisa where he and his family shared the Vaccàs’ Lung’Arno home. The freedom of Greece from Turkish domination was his grand obsession.
‘Pacchiani and a Greek Prince calls,’ Mary noted on 2 December 1820. She had, it was true, met Sgricci the day before, but her journal in Pisa had until then been uncommonly glum. ‘The whole population are such that it wd. sound strange to an English person if I attempted to express what I feel concerning them,’ she had noted on Percy’s birthday, 12 November, before adding a misremembered quotation from Byron: ‘“Crawling & crablike thro their sapping streets.”’ But here was a prince, breathing fire on the
subject of liberty, and suddenly her mood had changed: ‘delightful weather,’ she added after Mavrocordato’s call, leaving us to suppose that he had helped to lift the clouds. Claire, a little later, heard that the prince was ‘much to my taste gentlemanly – gay learned and full of talent & enthusiasm for Greece – he gave me a greek lesson & staid until 8 o’clock …’5
Short and thickset with a mass of black hair, large glistening eyes and splendid moustaches, Mavrocordato struck most people who met him as admirable, ardent and intelligent. He did not normally strike them as a lively or cheerful man. Evidently, he liked Mary enough to lower his guard and relax and even, perhaps, to flirt a little. He must have noticed that Shelley led a somewhat separate life, closed up in his study at the top of the Casa Galletti; he must have wondered about a husband who seemed indifferent to the number of hours his wife spent studying Greek with a youngish and not unattractive bachelor.
Certainly, the prince found Mary a stimulating and intelligent companion, one who was ready to share his passion for the cause of Greek independence. Her hopes of a new republic in Naples were crushed by the ‘invited’ army of 11,000 Austrians who came to uphold King Ferdinand’s regime in March 1821. In the same month, the Greeks of the Morea rose up in rebellion against the Turkish oppressors; Greece, after this time, became the focus of Mary’s own political interest.
Shelley, as the author of Hellas, is usually perceived as a passionate espouser of the Greek fight for independence; Mary was far better informed and more closely involved with events there, through her close relationship with Mavrocordato, whom she saw almost every day during the first three months of 1821. It is tempting to wonder if the idea for Hellas was in fact hers, although the approach and execution were unquestionably not. ‘We are all Greeks,’ Shelley splendidly declared in his preface to the poem, written towards the end of 1821. But Greece, for him, was a symbol, representing all oppressed nations; his preface went on to allude to England, Russia, Italy and Germany. To Mary, fired by almost daily conversations with Mavrocordato, the Greek cause was no symbolic fight for freedom but a vivid reality.
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