The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  The most scandalous group descended from England in the summer of 1816, in the disreputable wake of Lord George Gordon Byron. Like some deviant Adonis, the twenty-eight-year-old Romantic poet had already rampaged through London’s high society, where he was dubbed “mad, bad and dangerous to know” by one former lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, for his self-destructive excesses and shocking liaisons with men and women, including his half sister Augusta. Earlier in 1816, he had been forced to abandon England in the face of an ignominious divorce—it was rumored that his wife would expose his penchant for sodomy, which was illegal at the time and too shocking to even be mentioned in decent society—and so he traveled south along the Rhine in a reproduction of Napoléon’s coach with a squadron of servants, his private doctor, a peacock, a monkey, and a dog. Byron had set the tone for his European jaunt at his very first hotel in Calais, when, according to his medical companion, “he fell upon the chambermaid like a thunderbolt.” Switzerland was the obvious choice for a dashing young sybarite to enjoy the summer. For four months, Byron rented a villa by the electric blue waters, where he hosted riotously animated literary soirées while love-struck admirers spied on him with telescopes from the opposite shore.

  Rumors of depravity at Byron’s villa were fueled when the new neighbors arrived: the intense twenty-three-year-old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had become notorious in London as an advocate of atheism and free love; his soulful, auburn-haired, eighteen-year-old mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, for whom he had abandoned his wife and son; and Mary’s adventurous stepsister, Claire Clairmont. (Also eighteen, she had been Byron’s lover back in England, and almost certainly Shelley’s, too. Spirited and self-dramatizing, she had changed her name from Jane to make it sound more like a heroine’s from fiction.) The result was doubtless the most artistically productive vacation of the century.

  The summer of 1816 was also noteworthy for a startling event in meteorological lore. The eruption of Mount Tambora in faraway Indonesia sent a cloud of volcanic ash across the northern hemisphere; it became “the year without a summer.” Trapped indoors by wild lightning storms, Byron proposed that each member of the group compose a horror story, with their imaginations fueled by wine and opiates. The teenage Mary came up with Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, now a Gothic classic, while a nightmarish short story called The Vampyre was written by Byron’s mentally disturbed physician, John Polidori. (Developed from an idea of Byron’s, it was the first vampire tale in English, predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by more than eighty years.) The volatile combination of sex, drugs, and horror has been mythologized ever since, evoked in films like Haunted Summer and Ken Russell’s Gothic, which envisions the Byron ménage as a hallucinogenic orgy breaking down the barriers of the psyche. Today, the creative audacity of the Romantic coterie seems like a precursor to all the youth culture outbursts since, from the Beats to punk.

  Once the storms broke, the Diodati group also enjoyed Switzerland’s more civilized pursuits, such as sailing on the lake, swimming off smooth-pebble beaches, and hiking in the Alps. Lake Geneva has its own warm microclimate, making summers (usually) almost tropical. Today, the shores are even bristling with palm trees, earning it the PR-friendly moniker the Swiss Riviera. It all sounded marvelously picturesque, and, frankly, a little dull. But I was delighted to find that our own visit would coincide with the Montreux Jazz Festival—just the thing, I hoped, to awaken the bohemian spirit of fat-cat Swiss bankers and bureaucrats.

  SECOND-CLASS SWISS

  On their arrival in 1816, the Shelleys were pleasantly surprised by Switzerland’s democratic spirit, which lent the peasantry “a freedom and refinement of manners” and indifference to class barriers. Most British travelers, on the other hand, were in the habit of abusing their servants at whim, and they were exasperated by the Swiss commoners, who seemed to regard themselves as equals, refusing to cower, cap in hand.

  These days, we discovered, the roles are neatly reversed. The Swiss are now the Brahmin caste of Europe, while visiting foreigners are scrambling for scraps at the table.

  From our mint-condition train carriage, we peered out at the pristine Lego-built houses trimmed with their identical rows of red geraniums, not a whiff of disorder in sight. Every inch of spare land in Switzerland has been tidied up and accounted for. The streets have no potholes. Tidy vineyards braid the surrounding hills. Lining the shore in Montreux were five-star hotels and designer stores, housed in art nouveau palaces where the likes of Noel Coward and Audrey Hepburn came to take the mountain air. It was as if the Swiss didn’t know how to spend all their money. What should we do today, you could hear them thinking, buy another Rolex?

  As for us, we hiked up 343 neat stone steps to reach our rented cottage. Here we discovered that not all Swiss homes look like IKEA catalogs. Somehow I’d managed to find us the last slice of Swiss grunge, an old worker’s croft in gray concrete with a bathroom tiled in seventies olive green. Henry took one look at the rusted shower and declared it “unsanitary.” He and Sam then took to chanting “Unsanitary Swiss people!” for some reason, laughing dementedly as they danced in a circle. The balcony, built for two with knees touching, afforded “partial lake views”—that is, a sliver of sparkling blue water between two luxury apartment buildings, each with panoramic terraces.

  But the jazz festival would soon be in full swing, I declared, so to cheer ourselves, we dressed up and plodded back down the 343 steps to mingle with the mad, mad Swiss. The waterfront promenade was now blazing with lights, its perimeter entirely lined with vendors. In fact, anywhere else in the world, it would probably just be called a Shopping Festival. There was plenty of piped music—very little of it jazz, thankfully—but live concerts were thin on the ground. Apparently, the headliners all played to seated audiences inside concert halls. Instead, we joined Lake Geneva’s current youth culture—hordes of well-shod teenagers celebrating the fact that the legal drinking age in Switzerland is sixteen. Well, they were closer to Mary Shelley’s age anyway. Admittedly, for the average nineteenth-century tourist, excitement could also be difficult to find around these shores. One English visitor, Lord Henry Brougham, described Switzerland as “a country to be in for two hours, or two and a half, if the weather is fine, and no longer. Ennui comes on the third, and suicide attacks you before the night.”

  We retreated to a bar hanging over the water and ordered a couple of glasses of wine. They arrived in what appeared to be plastic medicine cups.

  I held up one of the tiny tubs in confusion. They had cost the equivalent of $12 each. The waitress impatiently explained that here in the Canton of Vaud, the standard pour was carefully measured out to one deciliter. You could buy two deciliters for $24, three for $36. And that was the vin ordinaire. It seemed downright un-European. Back in France, wine was cheaper than Coca-Cola and was often siphoned on tap at bars. For the rest of the night, we staggered around in shock, calculating the exchange rate from Swiss francs. Each time the boys began to ask for soda, we chanted, “No Coke for you!” It didn’t take long to realize that the restaurants were also run like banks; dining out is treated like a gold bullion transaction. Every dish on the menu is calibrated by weight—200 grams of cheese fondue, 125 grams of salmon—all of exquisite quality, but all rapaciously expensive. You could imagine the chefs measuring each ingredient with calipers. Les was mortified. “There’s no love of cooking here!”

  We watched other travelers press their noses up against restaurant windows with forlorn expressions. Even in the supermarkets, where everyone ended up, people stared bewildered at the prices.

  “We’re like bums!” Les railed, as we huddled in bush shelter gnawing salami. “We’re the bums of Montreux!”

  The young romantics of 1816, I reminded everyone, also had to make their own fun in Switzerland. When Byron’s and Shelley’s parties first rendezvoused in a Geneva hotel, they were immediately entranced by the natural setting. Mary waxed lyrical in letters about the brilliance of the lake, “blue as the heav
ens which it reflects,” and the unearthly clarity of its waters, which on dusk boating excursions revealed trout and perch zigzagging over the stones far below—an image she would work into Frankenstein. She spent hours in the hotel’s exuberant gardens, watching lizards and listening to the female vineyard workers singing. But their idyll wasn’t perfect. Byron found himself being followed about by “staring Boobies,” disapproving English tourists, and the odor of opprobrium also clung to Shelley and Mary, who were living in sin while traveling with the scandalously unchaperoned Claire. So they all rented private lodgings in the isolated rural hamlet of Cologny, on the northwestern shore. Byron settled into the sumptuous Villa Diodati, with sweeping mountain views, and the Shelleys and Claire into the more humble Maison Chapuis nestled by the leafy waterfront below.

  Today, traveling by water is still the most charming way to explore Lake Geneva, with a fleet of restored fin de siècle paddle steamers drifting from one trim little village to the next. Feeling defiant, we hopped on one vessel and went straight downstairs to the walnut-paneled first-class restaurant. A maître d’ escorted us with the highest aplomb to a white linen-covered table, until we ordered four bowls of soup and nothing more. After our initial financial humiliation in Montreux, a new tactic was needed. Like the feisty peasants of yore, we refused to be cowed by the aristocratic opulence but took on the challenge of enjoying the luxuries of Switzerland while squandering the barest minimum of funds. It drove the Swiss nuts. The staff first tried being snooty, then cajoling, then imploring. We were unmoved. There were no regulations saying we had to order the $120 set menu or an $80 bottle of wine. Instead, we leaned back by the splendid open window and watched the majestic scenery drift by.

  The Château de Chillon on Lake Geneva, which inspired one of Byron’s most popular poems.

  Back in 1816, during a break in the rain, Shelley and Byron had set off on a weeklong sailing excursion together, accompanied only by their Swiss boatman, Maurice. (Although Byron had innumerable encounters with men over his lifetime, there is no evidence that he and Shelley were ever physically intimate.) The poets were literary tourists themselves, seeking out the homes of earlier residents Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had set his 1761 romantic novel, Julie, or the New Heloïse, in these hills. This heartrending saga of two star-crossed lovers was the great bestseller of the eighteenth century, going through seventy-two editions before 1800 and making Rousseau Europe’s first celebrity author—a role that Byron was already taking to new and sensational heights. The climax of their trip was the Château de Chillon, a fortress whose spires jut like some Arthurian fantasy from the lake, framed by icy peaks.

  With his wicked reputation and saturnine good looks, Byron made quite a stir in the small lakefront villages, and today almost everywhere he visited has some sort of memorial, if only a Rue Byron, while the pale, intellectual Shelley is largely ignored. The undistinguished house in Clarens, for example, where they stayed with the mayor has a plaque, as does the Hotel d’Angleterre in Ouchy, where Byron wrote his popular poem The Prisoner of Chillon. The most authentic survival is the mansion of Madame de Staël, whose star-studded literary salon in Coppet was the only one Byron would deign to attend. The writer and socialite Staël, scintillating and vivacious for her fifty years, was as famous for illustrious lovers, who included the French foreign minister Talleyrand and politician Benjamin Constant, as she was for her steamy novels. Today, the Madame’s tenth-generation descendent, Count Othenin d’Haussonville, opens to the public many of the rooms, which still have the original furnishings, including her elegant bathtub. Also intact is the first-floor library, which became so crowded during theatrical events that servants would pass drinks in through the windows using fishing poles. And the upstairs salon remains as lavishly furnished as it was when the infernally handsome Byron made his first appearance dressed head to toe in black, his chestnut curls flowing, dark eyes burning, and cleft chin jutting. Upon his entry, one Englishwoman apparently fell into a dead faint. Madame de Staël’s daughter was appalled, muttering, “This is too much—at sixty-five years of age!”

  Byron carved his name in the dungeon of the Château de Chíllon (although his friend Hobhouse thought it was done by a PR-savvy guard).

  I dragged Les and the boys to see them all, with varying degrees of success. The dungeon of the Château de Chillon, on the one hand, was quite a hit: Water lapped at the iron bars next to the pillar where Byron had carved his name, now under glass and marked by a plaque. (Byron’s friend John Hobhouse insisted that this famous graffito had actually been carved by an enterprising prison guard to lure Romantic poetry groupies.)

  But Sam and Henry began to resist the idea of trudging for hours in the heat to behold, say, a featureless building with a dead poet’s name on it. Les was also starting to roll her eyes. So I took to the only logical recourse: bribery.

  I hammered out with Henry what came to be known as “the candy contract.” Lindt chocolate could be had for ready francs on any street corner. What if he and Sam were allowed a piece for every stint of solid walking? Say, one square every fifteen minutes. It would be like some Brothers Grimm story, only with a happy ending.

  Henry weighed the offer. “Every five minutes.”

  “Twelve?”

  “Ten!”

  “Done.”

  This worked for a few days. But I had left the biggest challenge until last: the actual mansion where Frankenstein was conceived, the Villa Diodati. For this mission, I suspected that some serious traipsing would be involved. Directions to the villa were suspiciously vague, and there was a good chance we would get lost.

  I noticed Les frantically researching the luxury spa pool complexes Switzerland was famous for, planning to abscond with the boys. But these would literally cost an arm and a leg, I told her. No, this was a sacrifice we would all have to make.

  THE LABORATORY OF LOVE

  The village of Cologny, where all the excitement occurred over the summer of 1816 in Byron’s Villa Diodati, is today one of the most prestigious suburbs of Geneva, home to the trophy mansions of assorted sheikhs, CEOs, and Europop stars.

  “The tourist office calls Cologny the Beverly Hills of Switzerland,” I read from a brochure, as we skimmed over the lake, past the famous Jet d’Eau fountain.

  “Oh great,” Les muttered. “I thought Switzerland was all Beverly Hills! You mean they get even richer?”

  Unfortunately, I managed to get the ferry schedules confused, and we found ourselves traipsing in the blistering heat along a busy six-lane highway, miles from our destination. If Cologny was “the Beverly Hills of Switzerland,” we were lost on the Santa Monica freeway. Our water ran out. Not even the candy contract could help.

  I peered at my map. Something up ahead was labeled Geneva Plage, Geneva Beach. At least we could get drinking water there, I reasoned, if only for $10 a bottle.

  “Oh man!” Henry screeched, when we saw the Plage. “It’s a water park!”

  The Swiss version was a little more upmarket than the average Splish Splash in New Jersey. Apart from the immaculate new slides, there was a lakeside beach with canoes and diving towers, a vast plush lawn where smokers planted their individual spiked ashtrays, self-service cafés, and an elegant bar for the adults. As if to remind us that we were light years from Wildwood, Les found a Bulgari-leather-clad iPhone dropped casually on the lawn. She returned it despondently to the front desk.

  By midafternoon, the mercury had climbed to 98 degrees, but I was getting restless. The Villa Diodati was up in the hills somewhere, waiting for me to visit. When I broached the subject of continuing the hike, the boys ran off shrieking in rebellion. Les closed her eyes and lay back on her towel, contemplating a siesta.

  “Why don’t you take this one, hon?” she murmured. “You can tell us all about it.”

  Half an hour later, I was sweating up a near-vertical pedestrian lane that (I prayed) led to the billionaire estates of Cologny. Every few yards, security guar
ds in air-conditioned glass booths eyed me as if I were a terrorist. My printout from Google Maps was not proving entirely accurate, leading me into cul-de-sacs of tall hedges and luxury McPalaces, all of which seemed to be empty. I eventually stumbled into Cologny’s old village center, where the few historical buildings had been turned into real estate offices. Along with the new wealth, modern art was clearly thriving in Switzerland. The lawns were graced with avant-garde sculptures that resembled giant spanners and screwdrivers, while the town centerpiece, by a celebrated Swiss artist, was a totem pole of teddy bears. By now I was feeling sunstruck. When I lurched into the only store to buy a bottle of water, the shopkeeper recoiled as if I were the creature from the black lagoon.

  Finally I found the discreet stone gatepost engraved with the number 9 and a single word, DIODATI—placed next to a very sleek and very tall security gate.

  The Villa Diodati, scene of Byronic excesses, in Cologny today.

  Peering through the grille, I could see the legendary dwelling, its coral-pink exterior hardly changed from nineteenth-century engravings, complete with the wraparound balcony where Byron finished the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The vineyards that once covered the grounds have been landscaped into orderly gardens, and the Shelleys’ more rustic cottage, the Maison Chapuis, has vanished, but Diodati has been preserved in aspic—although still in private hands, and divided into glamorous apartments.

  I pressed the buzzer and smiled into the unblinking eye of a surveillance camera, but it remained dead. Nobody was home. A meadow next door, called Byron Field, offered another partial glimpse of the villa, although the owners had planted trees to limit the public view. A sign asked visitors to respect the Swiss code of conduct: PEACEFULNESS—TIDINESS—FRIENDLINESS—SECURITY. It added that the police and “a private security agency” were supervising behavior at the site. Presumably some visiting poetry buffs get a little rabid.