Shelley was gestating his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and this boy’s charm seems to have been one of the sparks. The poets spent the following night at Evian.
English poetry nearly lost two of its chief practitioners off the rocks between Meillerie and the village of St Gingoux, today called St Gingolph, on the border between Savoy and Switzerland at the eastern end of the lake. At Meillerie they dined on honey, in the manner of Rousseau’s Julie and her lover. A storm came up and Byron, an excellent swimmer (veteran of the Tagus and the Hellespont), proposed to rescue Shelley, who could not swim. Shelley huffed on a locker in the bows. ‘But I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘and I was overcome with humiliation when I thought that his life might have been risked to preserve mine.’15 Byron was more sanguine: ‘I ran no risk, being so nearby the rocks and a good swimmer,’ he wrote to his publisher. ‘The wind was strong enough to blow down some trees as we found at landing.’
Two soaked poets and their crew came ashore at the fishing village of St Gingolph. They must have caused a flurry of excitement. Shelley was sufficiently shaken by his near drowning to draft his will that night in the inn, naming Byron one of his executors. Had he gone further and asked Byron to teach him to swim, he might have avoided his fate off the coast at Positano ten years later.
Today St Gingolph sits half in Switzerland and half in France, separated by a mountain stream, the Morges, rushing through the tightly packed houses down to the lake. Official notices on the two footbridges warn about exporting currency, but you can happily cross from France into Switzerland and back again without being challenged. A tiny baroque chapel and a castle survive on the Swiss side, but much of the village on the Savoy side was destroyed by fire in the 1920s. The valley of the Morges was a crossing point for Jewish refugees attempting to flee Occupied France during the Second World War. Many were caught and sent back to their deaths. ‘The infamous Sergeant Arrettaz of Saint-Gingolph always handed over refugees with sadistic pleasure’, reported a local eyewitness. ‘His colleague the customs officer, on the other hand, always walked off and made himself scarce so as not to have to see the terrible expressions on the faces of the people who were handed straight over to the militiamen at the frontier.’16 At Evian, up the road on the French side of the lake, the World Refugee Conference in July 1938 tried to solve the crisis brought about by Nazi policy and Hitler’s annexation of Austria. The Swiss government of the day withstood American pressure to hold the conference in Geneva and imposed an entry ban on Austrian Jews in September, following the Anschluss earlier that year.
Down by the lake a small group of summer campers were learning life-saving. Their unwieldy rowboat held an inflated dummy on a stretcher. Once on shore, they took turns at artificial respiration. On the plump side, the boys had difficulty keeping their shorts up. Pinching the dummy’s nostrils, they counted breaths in French. I thought of Byron proposing to abandon ship and assist wan Shelley ashore. I thought of those fleeing Jews. Maybe Byron relished the prospect of rescuing white-knuckled Shelley. Any one of Europe’s women would have leapt at the prospect of being rescued by Byron. A touch of his nether lip and a spot of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would have set their fans aflutter.
Further along the promenade a picnicking Thai family had their trot-lines out, catching small grayling and grilling them on a charcoal burner. I remembered that King Bhumipol, the world’s longest-reigning monarch and the only king born on American soil (Elvis excepted), had been educated across the water at Lausanne University. This stretch of Lake Geneva is rich in associations and history.
1890 silver-gelatin print of the Château de Chillon
Byron and Shelley dried off at the inn and went on an evening ride to see the nearby mouth of the Rhône, flowing into the lake from the Valais. The next morning they visited Clarens, where Rousseau had set the trysts between his young lovers, and stopped at the eleventh-century Château de Chillon. Shelley was particularly affected by its gloom and monumental tyranny, but it was Byron who wrote the poem that forever links the castle to his name. It memorialises François Bonivard, imprisoned there in 1530 by the Duke of Savoy, and led to a nineteenth-century Byronic cult. The poet’s early death defending little Greece contributed to the myth of the swashbuckling hero. Shelley walked in Rousseau’s footsteps, but the tourists followed Byron around the lake.
Such was Byron’s fame that twenty-five years later, in 1839, the first of the grand hotels named after him, the Hotel Byron, opened its doors at Villeneuve, a mile up the hill from the lake. It was at the time the largest hotel on the Swiss Riviera. Listed in the first edition of Baedeker, the hotel commanded a stunning view west, the Jura lazily rising from one shore and the more dramatic Savoy Alps from the other. Before the advent of the railway, ‘Going over the Simplon’ often involved a pit stop at Le Byron. Its guest list was an artistic Who’s Who: Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Victor Hugo, Stefan Zweig and Rabindranath Tagore are among the scribbling luminaries who got a night’s kip in its rooms.
Henry James in his ‘Swiss Notes’ gives it five stars on his Trip Advisor scale:
There is a charming Hôtel Byron at Villeneuve, the eastern end of the lake, of which I have retained a kindlier memory than of any of my Swiss resting-places. It has about it a kind of mellow gentility which is equally rare and delightful … It has none of that look of heated prosperity which has come of late years to intermingle so sordid an element with the pure grandeur of Swiss scenery.17
In 1929, the Hotel Byron, always financially precarious, fell on hard times. The ambiguously named Chillon College, a private boarding school catering to the sons of British colonialism, precursor to the many international schools around the lake today, occupied the building. The Lausanne Gazette described the students as ‘a battalion of little Anglo-Saxons animating the corridors of the hotel’. The Straits Times went so far as to describe it as the ‘Eton of Switzerland’. On the night of 23 January 1933, at fifteen minutes past midnight, the Hotel Byron burned down, fortunately with no casualties among the boarders. Today there is an old people’s home on the site, still called Le Byron. Its chameleon career – from hotel to private school to retirement home – epitomises the Swiss ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Our two Romantics, filled with fervour after Chillon, paused in Lausanne to view the house and garden (now Lausanne Post Office) where Gibbon penned his Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Byron wrote his ‘best bad poem’ – The Prisoner of Chillon – in Room 18 of Auberge de l’Ancre in Ouchy, Lausanne’s port.
Now the Hotel d’Angleterre, it has a Byron Room in the pavilion and offers a Late Riser Package – his Lordship would have been in his element. The hotel wears its exclusivity lightly. I wander unchallenged up to the Salon Byron on the second floor, filled with large-format glossy magazines advertising the watch and fashion industries. Not a smell of literature about the place. Nothing even vaguely resembling a book, never mind a poem. It exudes that slick designer culture I was to encounter all through Switzerland. The hills are alive with the sound of business class. Bling with bells on. The Zen bling of mountain spas. Bling-aling. Down on the lakeshore, coveys of Chinese tourists, their spectacles catching the morning sun, follow guides to the nearby Olympic Museum. The Salon Byron is entirely empty in the middle of August, beautifully upholstered in the grand austere manner. I could have read the whole of The Prisoner of Chillon undisturbed.
Swiss painter Alexandre Calame’s view of the Villa Diodati where Byron stayed in 1816
My hair is grey, but not with years,
Nor grew it white
In a single night
In a letter to his publisher, Byron enclosed sprigs of acacia from Gibbon’s garden:
I have traversed all Rousseau’s ground – with the Heloise before me – and am struck to a degree with the force and accuracy of his descriptions – and the beauty of their reality: – Meillerie – Clarens – and Vevey – and the Chateau de Chi
llon – are places of which I had no, I shall say little, because all I could say must fall short of the impressions they stamp. … I have finished a third Canto of Childe Harold (consisting of one hundred and seventeen stanzas).18
On their return to the Villa Diodati, Byron was careful to absent himself from an excursion with the women to view the glaciers above Chamonix. He was no doubt aware of Claire’s pregnancy by this time and his response in a letter is seigniorial: ‘Is the brat mine?’ The relative lowliness of the cottage by the lake in contrast to the grand villa up the hill is emblematic of the relationship between the two households. Byron pacified the ladies by calling occasionally at Shelley’s cottage. Shelley had been brought up the eldest in a house of girls, and had a soft spot for a female entourage. Byron disliked bluestockings and preferred all-male company.
Byron was lionised by Geneva’s bon ton and at the literary salon of Madame de Stäel at Coppet. He warned opinionated Pollydolly to be on his best behaviour: ‘Above all, speak as little as possible, and only when she addresses you. She has met everybody, and after Goethe, Schiller and Napoleon we are all inferior.’ On 30 July, he attended a gala gathering of English at the villa of Charles Hentsch, his financial adviser in Switzerland, where historian Jacques Augustin Galiffe described him: ‘His features are handsome, but his eyes now and then horrid. He has composed a poem of Chillon on our lake, the heroes of which are two brothers who suffer death for the faith of their fathers.’19
An excursion along the banks of the river Arve and up to the Montenvers glacier was a standard piece of sightseeing for the well-to-do English tourist, growing in popularity as the nineteenth century advanced. Robert Macfarlane, in his hymn to elevation, Mountains of the Mind, describes Victorian ladies edging towards crevasses in the ice, in the arms of their local guides. They were thrill-seekers. Even in the earliest illustrations of glaciers, dating from the mid-1700s, tiny sightseers in the foreground give a sense of the awe-inspiring Alps. Part of the attraction of glacier watching was a growing awareness that nature at home in Britain had been spoiled by the industrial revolution. The word glacier itself only entered the English language towards the end of the eighteenth century, from the French for ice.
But then [1863] the glaciers were superb enigmas in an age which, beset by mechanization and materialism, was hungry for mysteries. Their history and their motion were imperfectly understood. No one really knew how they moved their bulks over the land, or even whether glacial ice was a liquid, a solid or some category-defying hybrid substance which both flowed (like a liquid) and fissured (like a solid). It had also since the 1840s become apparent that at some point in the spans of geological time glaciers had been far more extensive than they presently were.20
Nineteenth-century Bible readers were familiar with the verses in the Apocrypha, portending the ice next time: ‘He poureth the hoar-frost upon the earth. It abideth upon every gathering together of water with a breastplate. It devoureth the mountain, and burneth the wilderness, and consumeth the grass as fire.’ Such dire prognostications put ice in the soul.
Mary Shelley’s excursion into the mountains forms the template for the encounter between creator and monster in Frankenstein. It inspired Percy Shelley to write his poem ‘Mont Blanc’ at the Hotel de Londres in Chamonix.
They climbed to see the so-called Sea of Ice. Mary describes the climb in Frankenstein:
In a thousand spots the traces of the winter avalanche may be perceived, where trees lie broken and strewed on the ground, some entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning upon the jutting rocks of the mountain or transversely upon other trees … I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of a man.21
That summer of 1816 the rivers were in full spate with volcano-induced rains. As they abated, eighteen-year-old Mary advanced her first draft. Dr Victor Frankenstein echoes Rousseau’s Confessions: ‘I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic’. Mary gives him Percy Shelley’s interest in galvanism, a theory that the dead could be reanimated – galvanised – by electricity:
When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house.22
The Plainpalais behind the old town of Geneva is the setting for the child murder of Victor Frankenstein’s brother. Today the Plainpalais hosts a skate park and a weekend antiques market. Returning from Ingolstadt, where he has been studying, Dr Frankenstein follows Mary Shelley’s footsteps, but also Rousseau’s – who as a youth had missed the last bus and been locked out of town:
the gates of the town were already shut, and I was obliged to pass the night at Sécheron, a village at the distance of half a league from the city. The sky was serene, and I was unable to rest, I resolved to visit the spot where my poor William had been murdered. As I could not pass through the town, I was obliged to cross the lake in a boat to arrive at Plainpalais. During this short voyage I saw lightnings playing on the summit of Mont Blanc in the most beautiful figures.23
The Maison Chapuis where Mary wrote was separated from the water by an overgrown garden of trees. Visiting two years later in 1818, Thomas Medwin, Percy Shelley’s cousin and old prep school chum, described the spot as ‘one of the most sequestered on the lake, and almost hidden by a grove of umbrageous forest trees, as is a bird’s nest by leaves’. A photograph of the house where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein shows the trees still there, the lakeshore embanked and the house oddly suburban and tamed.
Doctor and monster criss-cross the lake in a game of hunter and hunted, under the electrically charged weather of that summer. The Jura range on the northern bank is pitted against Mont Blanc on the southern. At one point Mary Shelley’s scientist quits Ireland, hailing ‘the darkness that shut Ireland from my sight, and my pulse beat with a feverish joy when I reflected that I should soon see Geneva’. She knew that Percy had undertaken a scamper to Ireland with his estranged wife some years earlier. It is entirely possible that Mary Shelley, a communard herself, knew of the failed settlement of New Geneva in County Waterford in 1782. This early utopian project envisioned a thousand Genevois watchmakers relocating to Ireland, escaping the heavy-handed repression of Geneva’s city fathers.
Lake Geneva forms a backdrop to the vengeful murder of Dr Frankenstein’s bride on their wedding night. Bride and groom depart from Belrive. The imagery of opposing tectonic plates feminises Mont Blanc and sees the older Jura as a champion of freedom.
it was agreed that Elizabeth and I should commence our journey by water, sleeping that night at Evian, and continuing our voyage on the following day. The day was fair, the wind favourable … where we saw Mont Salêve, the pleasant banks of Montalègre, and at a distance, surmounting all, the beautiful Mont Blanc and the assembly of snowy mountains that in vain endeavour to emulate her; sometimes coasting the opposite banks, we saw the mighty Jura opposing its dark side to the ambition that would quit its native country, and an almost insurmountable barrier to the invader who should wish to enslave it.24
Mary Shelley knew her readers were armchair travellers and she accordingly makes her landscape both sublime and threatening. Perhaps she was thinking of her own return to the weather and petty scandals of England:
The sun sank lower in the heavens; we passed the river Drance, and observed its path through the chasms of the higher and the glens of the lower hills. The Alps here came closer to the lake, and we approached the amphitheatre of mountains which forms its eastern boundary. The
spire of Evian shone under the woods that surround it and the range of mountain above mountain by which it was overhung.
…as I touched the shore I felt those cares and fears revive which soon were to clasp me and cling to me forever.25
The strangling of Victor Frankenstein’s bride takes place on a stormy night at Evian. The author borrows gothic trappings from Monk Gibbon. Frankenstein expects the monster, and the denouement is swift: ‘The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips.’ The monster disappears into the lake, pursued by Dr Frankenstein across the Black Sea, ‘the wilds of Tartary and Russia’ and the polar ice.
Mary Shelley’s masterpiece is a product of that stormy summer of love and forked lightning. The inhospitable town, the glaciers, the sea of ice are properties of a Hammer movie set that she observed all around her. Who would have thought that Geneva, righteous and dull, could give birth to such a monster?
A second monster creation of that summer was John Polidori’s Vampyre, a tale of blood sucking and the living dead that the doctor passed off as the work of Byron. Polidori had seen a fragment of a novel that Byron was writing on 17 June 1816. It concerns the narrator and a dying nobleman called Darvell:
I was yet young in life, which I had begun early; but my intimacy with him was of a recent date: we had been educated at the same schools and university; but his progress through these had preceded mine, and he had been deeply initiated into what is called the world, while I was yet in my novitiate.26
1884 penny dreadful edition of Polidori’s The Vampyre, misattributed to Byron, first published in 1819
Polidori expanded the situation and had The Vampyre published under Byron’s name in 1819, in New Monthly Magazine. He named his vampire Lord Rutheven and attributed to him his former master’s lordly hauteur and scandalous behaviour. Polidori’s tale was successful and much copied. When it was adapted for the stage, Paris theatres picked it up and made it a hit. Nikolai Gogol and Alexandre Dumas wrote their own vampire tales. The pulp fiction aspect was there from the start. By the time the Irish manager Bram Stoker pitched up at London’s Lyceum Theatre, Polidori’s vampire had recrossed the channel. Stoker tried out such names as Wampyr, Ordog and Pokol for his nobleman protagonist, none of them fetching. Finally he hit on Vlad ‘the Impaler’ Dracula. Dracula (1887) had risen from the dead.
The Gilded Chalet Page 5