the Helvetic capital is a highly artificial compound. … the want of humour in the local atmosphere, and the absence, as well, of that aesthetic character which is begotten of a generous view of life. There is no Genevese architecture, nor museum, nor theatre, nor music, not even a worthy promenade – all prime requisites of a well-appointed foreign capital; and yet somehow Geneva manages to assert herself powerfully without them.19
Rousseau pointed out the truism that the wellbeing of the rich is rooted in the exploitation of the poor – ‘Thus it is that the substance of the poor always goes to enrich the wealthy’20 – an observation that gave grist to nineteenth-century socialism and twentieth-century Communism. You could make a good case for it being true also of the twenty-first-century banking crisis and the 99% in our own day. At the end of Joseph Conrad’s spy novel Under Western Eyes, about Russian revolutionaries in Geneva, Razumov the double agent pointedly visits Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s island in the Rhône, the city’s homage to its wayward son:
a hexagonal islet with a soil of gravel and its shores faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile neatness. A couple of tall poplars and a few other trees stood grouped on the clean, dark gravel, and under them a few garden benches and a bronze effigy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau seated on its pedestal. … This was the place for the beginning of that writing which had to be done.21
A century after Rousseau’s birth in Geneva, a group of free-love practitioners descended on the town and met up with lead guitarist Lord Byron. He was trying to shed a few pounds, finish his triple concept album and keep out of the way of the groupies. The summer of rain and love had begun.
2
HERE COME THE MONSTERS
Boating with Byron and frolicking with Frankenstein on Lac Léman
1820 print of Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, 1816
I saw their thousand years of snow
On high – their wide long lake below,
And the blue Rhone in fullest flow
Lord Byron
It begins with a volcano. In April 1815 Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Ash rained across the northern hemisphere and brought cold weather and torrential downpours to Europe the following summer. In June 1816 snow fell in Albany, New York. Volcanic winter caused freaky summer weather in Switzerland, where a group of English free-love advocates were in and out of each other’s beds on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. They passed the inclement evenings inventing tales of vampires and monsters. Mary Shelley took up her pen and began Frankenstein, looking out at the downpour on the lake. It was good writing weather.
‘I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva’, she wrote in the introduction to her gothic horror story:
The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited us in a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than anything I can hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story founded on some supernatural occurrence.1
The two friends were Lord Byron and Mary’s lover Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Mary Godwin and Shelley had eloped from England two years earlier, in the summer of 1814, when she was not yet seventeen. Shelley was already married and turning twenty-two, the father of a child, with a second on the way. Here he is in June 1814, waxing lyrical to his old university friend Hogg:
The originality and loveliness of Mary’s character was apparent to me from her very motions and tones of voice. The irresistible wildness and sublimity of her feelings showed itself in her gestures and her looks – Her smile, how persuasive it was, and how pathetic! She is gentle, to be convinced and tender.2
They were soon meeting at her mother’s grave in St Pancras Churchyard. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), studied and translated French and German and had read Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. The French Revolution cast its light and shadow over the late eighteenth century the way the fall of Communism – or perhaps the Twin Towers – does over ours. Nonconformist William Godwin took up with Wollstonecraft when he was forty and she the unmarried mother of Fanny, born of a stormy affair with a young American in Paris. When Wollstonecraft became pregnant with Mary, Godwin made an honest woman of her. She died in childbirth. Her daughter, canoodling at her grave with the young poet, seems to have inherited the tangled apron strings of feminist revolt and its consequences.
Muriel Spark makes no bones about what attracted Shelley:
Mary offered fresh, 16-year-old sexuality combined in the most extraordinary way with the precocious intellectual flair of her Godwinian upbringing. She was both naïve and knowing, both flesh and spirit, burning with a youth and intelligence which blazed out all the more hypnotically against the gloomy, hopeless, complicated collapse of Shelley’s married relationship with Harriet.3
Shelley was a bit of a dish, but you mightn’t want your daughter meeting him on the sly among the tombstones. His family were squires of Horsham in Sussex. He had been expelled from Oxford for distributing an atheistic pamphlet and was wrangling with his father about inheritance and money. A pretty boy, pugnacious, he had behind him three years of utopianism, communal living and a spell of revolutionary rabble-rousing in Ireland. Mary was sixteen and impressionable.
It was a hot day in London and they had a stormy crossing from Dover on the night of 28 July 1814. Sheet lightning lit the channel. They stayed at an inn in Calais and three days later in Paris Shelley bought a notebook, now at the Bodleian, in which both of them recorded their travels. Shelley wrote a letter at Troyes to his pregnant wife with a curious proposal for a threesome about which biographers can only speculate:
I write to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least find one firm & constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear, by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured … you shall know our adventures more detailed, if I do not hear at Neuchâtel, that I am soon to have the pleasure of communicating to you in person, & of welcoming you to some sweet retreat I will procure for you among the mountains.4
Harriet – the spurned wife left holding the baby – did not rise to the bait: ‘Every age has its cares. God knows, I have mine. Dear Ianthe is quite well. She is fourteen months old, and has six teeth.’
Why Switzerland? Napoleon’s war had despoiled France and Shelley had read his Rousseau. Switzerland was safe, romantic. The elopement of these young lovers was harum-scarum. The presence of Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, underlines the devil-may-care recklessness. She thought she was half-Swiss, although later evidence would prove this unfounded. Shelley and Mary’s co-authored journal, published in 1817 as History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, has a backpacker quality. This early Lonely Planet Guide describes their first view of Switzerland:
On passing the French barrier, a surprising difference may be observed between the opposite nations that inhabit either side. The Swiss cottages are much cleaner and neater, and the inhabitants exhibit the same contrast.5
Eastern France ‘had been entirely desolated by the Cossacks’ in the Napoleonic wars. Flush with some money Shelley managed to procure from the bank, they arrived at Lucerne, and from there boarded the boat down the lake to Brunnen. Always interested in revolutionaries, Shelley focused on William Tell:
The high mountains encompassed us, darkening the waters; at a distance on the shores of Uri we could perceive the chapel of Tell, and this was the village where he matured the conspiracy which was to overthrow the tyrant of his country; and indeed this lovely lake, these sublime mountains, and wild forests, seemed a fit cradle for a mind aspiring to high adventure and heroic deeds. Yet we saw no glimpse of his spirit in his present countrymen. The Swiss appeared to us then, and experience has confirmed our opinio
n, a people slow of comprehension and of action; but habit has made them unfit for slavery, and they would, I have little doubt, make a brave defence against any invader of their freedom.6
The lovers spent three weeks on the run, with the vague intention of founding a commune. Renting a house for six months, they moved in full of excitement, but the next day did a flit. There were bedbugs and they had £28 in the kitty. With the lack of foresight that characterised all their movements, they left Lucerne on 28 August, taking the boat-diligence to Laufenberg on the Rhine. River travel was the cheapest way to get around Switzerland at the time. From Laufenberg they hitched a flat boat to Mumph, where they managed to board a cabriolet to Rheinfelden. The cab broke down and some Swiss soldiers gave them a lift:
we were directed to proceed a league further to a village, where boats were commonly hired. Here, although not without some difficulty, we procured a boat for Basle, and proceeded down a swift river, while evening came on, and the air was bleak and comfortless. Our voyage was, however, short, and we arrived at the place of our destination by six in the evening.7
Shelley’s biographer Richard Holmes remarks on the young people’s whingeing about other passengers: ‘their democratic spirit was often strained by the coarseness and proximity of their fellow-travellers, and a peculiarly English kind of fastidiousness emerged’.8 Like schoolkids on an excursion, plugged into their Tacitus, they looked down their noses at the local oiks: ‘Our companions in this voyage were of the meanest class, smoked prodigiously, and were exceedingly disgusting.’ After punching one of the boat passengers, ‘Mad Shelley’, who had been bullied at Eton, managed to procure the seats he wanted.
Mary was soon pregnant. The child, born prematurely in February 1815, died in March. A second child, William Shelley, was five months old when the two teenagers and the married man attempted continental escape again in May 1816. Stepsister Claire had already slept with Lord Byron in April and was out to snag him in Geneva. Both poets that spring were waiting on financial and marital settlements: Byron, like Shelley, was shaking off the dust of a bad marriage and the bailiffs.
This time they entered Switzerland in blizzard conditions (that volcano) across the snow-covered Jura, travelling in a large carriage Shelley had ordered constructed in London three years previously. The cash flow for our young free-lovers had improved somewhat. They booked into Monsieur Dejean’s Hotel d’Angleterre in Sécheron, at the time outside Geneva’s city walls. Today the original building and its stables still face a park and the lake – it was a well-appointed hotel with all the amenities for English expats on the Grand Tour. Mary describes their first glimpse of Lake Geneva:
Hotel d’Angleterre at Sécheron, where Byron and the Shelleys stayed in 1816
blue as the heavens which it reflects, and sparkling with golden beams. The opposite shore is sloping, and covered with vines, which however do now so early in the season add to the beauty of the prospect. Gentlemen’s seats are scattered over these banks, behind which rise the various ridges of black mountains, and towering far above, in the midst of its snowy Alps, the majestic Mont Blanc, highest and queen of all. Such is the view reflected by the lake; it is a bright summer scene without any of that sacred solitude and deep seclusion that delighted us at Lucerne.9
Claire Clairmont shared the first six years of the Shelley couple’s life together. Richard Holmes describes her: ‘With thick, black unruly ringlets of hair parted round an oval face, a compact and generously moulded figure verging on chubbiness, and large dark bright eyes, she was volatile, childish and outgoing.’10 Claire spoke the best French of the three of them. That spring Byron had got her pregnant and was trying to shake her off. There was a touch of the groupie about her. Byron described her in a letter as ‘the 18 year-old plump girl … who had scrambled 800 miles to unphilosophise me’. In 1820, with the benefit of hindsight, he said: ‘I think Madame Claire is a damned bitch’.
His Lordship was a bit on the plump side himself. He spent the summer of 1816 trying to lose weight on a diet of spritzers, toast, tea and vegetables, with the help of his live-in doctor, Polidori. At twenty-eight, the oldest of the group, Byron was beginning to feel his age.
Polidori – Byron called him ‘Dr. Pollydolly’ – had travelled in the poet’s coach from London. Young, good-looking and voluble, he was Edinburgh trained. Like his employer, he had a decade of exposure to Aberdeen Calvinism behind him. In Geneva, Polidori’s street fights drew the attention of the local gendarmes. Byron’s drug of choice was magnesia, a purgative administered as part of his diet. Polidori’s job was to procure it – personal trainer and dealer rolled into one. This led him to a scrape with a Geneva apothecary over quality. The brawl went before the magistrates. There was also laudanum going around. Byron cashiered Polidori at the end of the summer after one fight too many and the doctor returned to London, where he wrote and published under Byron’s name The Vampyre, a story of blood-sucking and depravity that the poet disowned. That rainy summer in Geneva is responsible for the creation of not one but two monsters in the shock-horror tradition.
Polidori records for posterity the first meeting between Byron and Shelley on the shore of the lake that would forever be associated with their names. The hotel buzzed with English tourists of the better sort and the presence of Lord Byron only led to more gossip. He had made his ostentatious way down the Rhine valley in a grandiose copy of Napoleon’s travelling coach.
Dined. P[ercy] S[helley], the author of Queen Mab, came; bashful, shy, consumptive; twenty-six; separated from his wife; keeps the two daughters of Godwin, who practise his theories; one L[ord] B[yron]’s.11
‘Consumptive’ refers to Shelley’s slight, pale appearance, while ‘practise his theories’ suggests he might be sleeping with both women. The last phrase refers to the hanky-panky between Byron and Claire and tells us that Polidori was observant. Byron’s publisher, John Murray, was paying Pollydolly to keep a kiss-and-tell journal.
The Shelley party moved into Maison Chapuis on the lakeshore opposite the hotel. It was a smallish two-storey house uphill from the stormy water. A surviving nineteenth-century photo shows a foursquare structure that would easily fetch a couple of million Swiss francs today on location alone. From the upper windows there was a perfect view of the lake and the Jura mountains. Rising behind the house were the vineyards; across the slippery slope there was a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing that downpouring summer. The Villa Diodati commanded the rise, as befitted the lordly Byron. He ensconced himself there with Pollydolly, Byron’s faithful valet William Fletcher and a young footman, Robert Rushton. The two servants had been in Byron’s entourage since their teens and knew what was what and on which side their bread was buttered.
Nineteenth-century photograph of the Maison Chapuis (above right) where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein
Byron was the literary lion of the age. Infamous for his entanglements with high-society women and chambermaids alike, he was happy to have them cloak an underlying interest in adolescent boys. Indulging this predilection at Harrow and Cambridge, he fully explored it during his year in Greece. An early poem puts his closeted dilemma succinctly:
To one, who thus for kindred hearts must roam,
And seek abroad the love denied at home.12
He was an early sex tourist. Writing to his Cambridge friend Hobhouse about his Athenian year of living dangerously, Byron was graphic: ‘none female nor under ten nor Turk’.13 For Byron they were willing to drop their drawers for a drachma. Middle-aged women, dumpy women, temple boys, pageboys, a boy on the beach at Brighton, his half-sister – all were grist to his philandering mill.
Chalk drawing of Lord Byron by George Henry Harlow, 1815
Shelley, on the other hand, was unknown as a poet outside a small circle. Like Byron, he had a reputation as a skirt-chaser and a squire who didn’t pay his bills. Byron admired the younger poet’s work, although he found Shelley himself a bit too ethereal. Shelley was a couple of rungs down the social ladder from
Lord Byron, and occasionally got tired looking up. They shared an interest in sailing.
For the men it was one of the most productive periods in poetry the world has known. For the women there was a good deal of running across the vineyards. At one point, Byron’s servants found a slipper on the path below the house. Baby William was in nappies. It’s a wonder Frankenstein came to light at all. From the hotel opposite, English guests trained lorgnettes and telescopes on the goings-on of the two poets and their women.
On 23 June the weather cleared and Byron and Shelley set off with Maurice, their Swiss boatman, to circumnavigate the lake. Shelley was an early riser while Byron, with aristocratic indolence, was a lie-abed. The younger poet was heading on a literary pilgrimage to the places mentioned in Rousseau’s Julie, a bestseller subtitled Letters between two lovers living in a small town at the foot of the Alps. It was on the Catholic index of banned books. For Shelley it was a Romantic bible and he was so much a fan that he read passages to Byron on the boat.
On that first afternoon they rowed and sailed to Hermance and spent the night at Nernier on the Savoy coast. Shelley noted the thyroid deficiencies of the children playing ninepins on the shore. Due to an iodine deficiency in drinking water, these goitres were prevalent at the time in Alpine regions. Shelley remarked on the contrasting beauty of one boy in particular:
Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged throats; but one little boy had such exquisite grace in his mien and motions, as I never before saw equalled in a child. His countenance was beautiful for the expression with which it overflowed. There was a mixture of pride and gentleness in his eyes and lips, the indications of sensibility, which his education will probably subvert to misery or seduce to crime; but there was more of gentleness than of pride, and it seemed that the pride was tamed from its original wildness by the habitual exercise of milder feelings. My companion gave him a piece of money, which he took without speaking, with a sweet smile of easy thankfulness, and then with an unembarrassed air turned to his play.14
The Gilded Chalet Page 4