In the morning, the sky cleared and a strong wind blew them straight into the harbor at Calais. The day was bright and fresh as though there had been no storm just a few hours earlier. “Mary, look; the sun rises over France,” Shelley exclaimed. Mary was delighted. The beautiful day was a glorious omen, she believed, just like the comet that had marked her birth.
In Calais, Shelley checked them into the most expensive rooms at Dessin’s, the hotel of choice for wealthy English tourists, where they napped, exhausted from their adventure. That evening, a servant knocked on the door and told them “a fat lady” was there, demanding her daughter. Somehow, Mary-Jane had found them. She seized Jane, carried her off to her own room, and tried to persuade her daughter to come home. Having suffered from her own youthful indiscretions, Mary-Jane knew only too well the difficulties Jane would face as an unmarried woman with a dubious reputation. Jane wavered, but Shelley took her for a walk and talked her into staying, reminding her of their ideals: freedom from slavery; the rejection of bourgeois values; a life of passion. If she wanted to be a true radical, then she must follow in Wollstonecraft’s footsteps and persevere against Mary-Jane and the conventional forces of society. The starstruck Jane fended off her mother’s entreaties until Mary-Jane conceded defeat. She blamed Shelley, but she reserved most of her anger for her implacable opponent of the last twelve years, her stepdaughter. Mary had triumphed at last. There was no better way to hurt a mother than to harm her daughter.
But Mary-Jane was a dangerous enemy. An effective writer in her own right, she knew how to exact revenge with a pen. In long letters to her friends, Mary-Jane raged against Mary Godwin, maintaining that the girl had corrupted Jane. Shelley’s abandoned wife, Harriet, also launched a letter-writing campaign, against not just Mary but the whole Godwin family. Shelley had already told her that he had fallen in love with Mary Godwin, but she had hoped his infatuation would pass and that he would return to her before the birth of their new baby. Now that the situation seemed hopeless, she told her friends that Godwin had sold his two daughters to Shelley for £1,500. There was a grain of truth in the accusation, as right before he fled Shelley had at last lent Godwin the money he had promised, saving the philosopher from financial ruin.
Without any defenders, the trio were berated by London society. The scandal would burn for years. Shelley, the heir to a distinguished title, had run away with two teenage girls, one of them the daughter of the scandalous Mary Wollstonecraft. Wasn’t one girl enough? Did he plan to sleep with them both? Had Godwin really auctioned off his daughters into sexual slavery? Sir Timothy, Shelley’s father, was profoundly humiliated and never forgave his son for this second elopement, writing off the Godwin/Wollstonecraft girl as a whore.
Still, as Shelley watched Mary-Jane’s ship disappear against the horizon, he was elated. He had won. The parents had been defeated; the children were in charge. This was a triumph for the oppressed everywhere. The Irish. The peasant. The slave. Mary, too, was thrilled to see Mary-Jane retreat, but her feelings were more complicated than her lover’s. She hated her stepmother, but she had never wanted to be free of her father. Ever since she could remember, she had wanted him to love her more than Mary-Jane. She would even write a novel a few years later in which a father would confess his incestuous love for his daughter. Unlike her lover, she had never regarded Godwin as a tyrant and had not wanted to hurt him. She yearned for his praise and worried that she had lost him forever. But it was impossible to be too downcast when she was with Shelley, and the three young people left for Paris full of anticipation, despite the fact that the weather was hot, the horses glistened with sweat, and the girls suffered in their black high-necked traveling dresses.
But when they arrived in the capital on August 2, 1814, dusty and tired, fraternité and liberté were nowhere to be found. They checked into the unprepossessing Hôtel de Vienne on the edge of the Marais and roamed through the city streets, disappointed to find most Parisians war-weary and cynical. Napoleon’s defeat earlier that year, a relief to many as it meant the end of the war, was also a blow to French honor. No one was preaching revolution anymore. Many of the people they met were royalists, eager to restore French gloire. Justice and freedom were passé. The martyred revolutionaries Madame Roland and Charlotte Corday, so inspirational to Mary when her friend Isabella had talked about them in Scotland, were long dead. And so, for that matter, was Mary Wollstonecraft.
On pilgrimages of this sort it was tempting to think the dead might materialize, that a visit to an old home or a walk through old haunts might bring them back. When the trio read Wollstonecraft’s work out loud, which they did frequently, she felt close by. Perhaps if they looked hard enough they might catch a glimpse of her striding down one of the narrow streets, the long skirts of her muslin dress trailing behind her. Instead they saw nattily dressed men sipping coffee, young men and women flirting and gossiping as though no revolution had ever taken place. Fashionable ladies minced by in high-heeled, sharp-toed slippers, holding up the skirts of their light clingy gowns. Buttoned up to the chin in their conservative dresses, Mary and Jane knew they looked irrevocably English. They wore black bonnets and brushed their hair behind their ears like schoolgirls, while the French women lacquered their hair into elaborately sculptured masterpieces.
And yet, despite these disappointments, on the first night in Paris, when they closed their door on the city, Mary and Shelley were “too happy to sleep.” It was what Shelley would later call their “bridal night.” For the first time, they were alone, free from their pursuers and free from Jane, who was safely installed in her own room. Mary had been yearning for this moment ever since she declared her love for Shelley on her mother’s grave. Shelley, too, had been dreaming of the time that he and Mary could be together without worry or guilt. For him, sex was an almost mystical experience, a passage into spiritual “ecstasies.” But although he desperately desired her—commemorated in a poem in which he celebrated “her eager lips, like roses,” “her white arms lifted through the shadowy stream / Of her loose hair”—he did not rush them to bed.
First they talked, sharing their dreams about writing and their literary future. Mary told Shelley about her years in Scotland and showed him some of the letters Isabella had written her. They read Byron’s poetry aloud, and only then did they make love. Shelley later wrote:
I felt the blood that burn’d
Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
Around my heart like fire.
Afterward, they fell into what Shelley called a “speechless swoon of joy.” He was calm, finally at peace after the frantic anxiety of the last few months. Mary told Shelley that she never wanted to leave the circle of his arms.
The next morning, however, they had to face their responsibilities. There was Jane to worry about, as well as the need to eat—though Mary said she could do without eating, she was so happy. Most worrisome of all, they were almost penniless. Having left England in such a rush, Shelley had not thought to bring along spare funds, and they were out of cash. After a long search, they found one brave banker willing to advance them sixty pounds on the strength of Shelley’s noble name. This seemed a large sum to Mary and Jane, but it would not last long, given the extended pilgrimage they had planned. Shelley was aware of this but waved all concerns aside. He was sure they would find funds and make do somehow.
With each passing day, Paris grew less glamorous. Notre Dame was not as splendid as they had hoped. The Tuileries gardens were ugly. The hotel was dark, cramped, and unbearably hot. On August 8, after almost a week there, they gave up on finding the Revolution in the city and headed into the countryside. In an effort to economize, Shelley, ignoring the warnings of their hotelier, decided it would be more “delightful” to walk than to hire a carriage. He and Jane went to buy a donkey to carry their possessions while Mary rested at the hotel, feeling weak and anxious. But neither Shelley nor Jane knew much about choosing donkeys. Although the poor creature was friendly and willing en
ough, it collapsed in the heat not long after they began their journey, leaving them stranded with their books, clothing, and boxes. At the next town, they traded the donkey for a mule, but after four days of this new arrangement, Shelley, displaying a distressing propensity for accidents, twisted his ankle and could not walk. They had to unpack the mule and let Shelley climb aboard while Jane and Mary trudged along behind, laden with their belongings and hoping for a refreshing stop at a country inn or a friendly peasant’s thatched cottage.
But there were neither friendly peasants nor refreshing country inns—a rude shock for three young people who had prepared themselves for their journey by gazing at eighteenth-century prints of the bucolic French countryside, complete with pink-cheeked milkmaids, handsome shepherds, and dutiful farmers tilling the dark earth. The land they found had barely survived the final years of the Napoleonic wars. Just a few months earlier, in retaliation for Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Cossacks, along with the Austrian and Prussian armies, had galloped into France. They stole livestock and trampled fields, burned villages, killed children, and raped women. Napoleon’s troops were little better, pillaging the countryside for food and treasure. Finally, on April 11, Napoleon had surrendered, but the country remained in crisis. Dusty dirt tracks, ruined crops, and barren hillsides had replaced prosperous farms and pastures dotted with fat cows. The people were starving. “Filth, misery, and famine [are] everywhere,” Shelley declared. The French themselves were, according to Shelley, “the most unamiable, inhospitable, and unaccommodating of the human race.” Stray English visitors like the bedraggled trio were easy prey for famished peasants who charged exorbitant rates for everything, even a glass of sour milk. Sometimes all they could find to eat was dry bread that had to be soaked in water to make it palatable. At night, they slept in haylofts and cots in farmhouses. In Troyes, about a hundred miles east of Paris, they did find an inn, but rats ran across Jane’s face in the middle of the night and she fled into Mary and Shelley’s room, screaming so loudly they had to take her into their bed.
Disheartened, Shelley suggested they change course and head for Switzerland. This was the true land of freedom and joy, he declared, basing this claim on Godwin’s novel Fleetwood, a celebration of William Tell and “the glorious founders” of Swiss liberty. According to Godwin, the Swiss were a noble people, above the petty restrictions of bourgeois life.
But they should have known better. Godwin had never been to Switzerland, and although he was a careful researcher, his goal had been to write a good novel, not provide an accurate travelogue. Mary understood this, but missing her father as she did, she hoped that if they retraced his novelistic journey, he might come to approve of her actions, or at least see how much she admired and loved him. The August heat made the journey miserable, and their pace slowed, especially since Shelley was still limping. Finally, despite their rapidly dwindling funds, they hired a coach and driver to take them to Neuchâtel.
Mary and Shelley had been keeping a joint journal since the beginning of their adventure in which Shelley raved about Mary’s brilliance, the nature of true love, and the novel he wanted to write, while Mary composed passages about the view and their travails. Both had grown impatient with Jane, who recorded her squabbles with both Shelley and Mary in her own diary. Secretly, Jane considered herself in love with Shelley, but Shelley was too smitten with Mary to pay her much attention, although he did remember Harriet with affection, even writing her a letter declaring himself a “firm and constant friend” and inviting her to join them as a comrade in the utopian society he wanted to create. Harriet, quite understandably, did not reply.
“Their immensity staggers the imagination,” Shelley remarked in their journal when they finally saw the snow-capped peaks of the Alps. But the journey had taken its toll, as had the frantic search for money. Mary missed her father and was finding Shelley not quite the romantic hero she had imagined him to be. In Paris, sharing a bed with her new lover had more than made up for her disappointment in the city. But after enduring ten hot days of walking in the bleak French countryside, it was difficult to feel those same stirrings of passion. They were hungry, sweaty, and exhausted. Besides, it was nearly impossible to find privacy in a hayloft or a peasant’s kitchen. Even the magnificent peaks did little to cheer her up; she grew silent and withdrawn, and one afternoon she reflected gloomily that nothing ever turned out the way people thought it would. A person might act with good intentions, but there could still be painful results. Although she spoke in broad philosophical terms, Shelley understood her meaning and accused her of regretting her decision to run away with him. Mary quickly retrenched, but Jane noted in her journal that Mary had lied. Shelley was right. Mary was unhappy with her lover and the whole escapade. They were not living in the free Eden he had promised, but had been on the brink of disaster ever since they left London.
One afternoon, the heat was so smothering Shelley suggested that Mary take a dip in one of the woodland pools they saw from the road. He would screen her from any passersby and dry her off with grass and leaves. Instead of being enchanted by this idea, as Shelley thought she should have been, Mary was annoyed. What an indelicate proposition! There was the driver to consider, not to mention any strangers who might happen by. She did not want to strip in the middle of the woods for Shelley’s viewing pleasure or, for that matter, anyone else’s. Jane thought Mary was being ridiculously puritanical. If Shelley had invited her to bathe naked, she would have jumped at the offer, she noted grumpily.
When at last they crossed the border, it was raining. They had been on the road for almost three weeks and were prepared to be delighted with the Swiss. But the hardworking businessmen, clean streets, tidy front steps, well-fed children, and cheerful wives that usually delighted English tourists were deeply disappointing to this trio. Jane spoke for all of them when she wrote that the Swiss “are rich, contented & happy and uninteresting for they are most immoderately stupid & ugly almost to deformity.” The respectable townspeople must have wondered about this odd travel-stained threesome—or at least the three young renegades hoped so, as they liked the idea of appearing different, “conjectur[ing] the astonishment” of those they met, as Mary said.
The rain had broken the August heat, and although that was a welcome change, they could hardly glimpse Lake Lucerne through the fog. Nor could they find Godwin’s forests of beech and pine or the wild and romantic countryside of Fleetwood’s adventures. In Brunnen, nearly halfway through the sixty pounds Shelley had borrowed in Paris, they rented a house on the lake for six months. But after the first day they were bored. Switzerland was not for them after all. Returning to France was out of the question. After discussing the matter, it turned out that all three were ready to head home. In fact, they wanted to leave right away. However, they had to wait for the laundress to return their clothing, and when she did, their clothes were still wet, which meant their departure was delayed to the next day—an annoyance that Shelley noted in their journal. Mary and Shelley tried to console themselves by reading Tacitus to each other, but Jane sulked. She did not like it when they ignored her.
To avoid any further encounters with French peasants, they decided to book passage on a barge up the Rhine and cross the Channel from Holland. This route had the added advantage of being cheaper than the overland journey back through France. As it was, they would have to be very careful in order to have enough money to make it home.
Floating downriver was certainly more pleasant than hiking through the devastated French countryside, but although Mary was inspired by the dramatic sweep of the Rhine Valley, she was appalled at the vulgarity of their fellow travelers, who drank all day long, getting louder and more crude as the hours passed. She and Jane tried to avoid them, but on such a small craft, it was impossible. After the first day, Mary snapped in her diary, “Our only wish was to annihilate such uncleansable animals. Twere easier for god to make entirely new men than attempt to purify such monsters as these…loathsome creepers.”
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One day, early in September, when the barge had paused at Gernsheim, a few miles north of Mannheim, she and Shelley stole away from Jane and strolled past the gabled cottages, along the cobbled streets, and out into the surrounding countryside. In the distance against the sky, they could make out the towers of a picturesque castle named Frankenstein.
There was a disturbing legend associated with this castle, and in exchange for a few coins, a villager told them the story. A notorious alchemist named Konrad Dippel had been born there in 1673. Dippel was obsessed with finding a “cure” for death and conducted macabre experiments, digging up graves to steal body parts and grinding the bones into dust that he mixed with blood and administered to corpses in an attempt to bring them back to life. He died a failure, leaving the question unresolved: Is it possible to bring the dead back to life?
Afterward, Mary and Shelley spent their time on the barge talking about this story and the books they had read and the books they wanted to write. Jane immersed herself in one of Wollstonecraft’s favorite books, Rousseau’s Émile. Like Wollstonecraft, Jane found that she admired the French philosopher’s ideas but loathed his portrayal of women, which was not surprising, since she tended to agree with most of Wollstonecraft’s views.
In the last few days of their journey, they took turns reading aloud from Wollstonecraft’s writings. All three felt heartened to have Mary’s mother as their fellow traveler. But for Jane, this renewed exposure to Wollstonecraft’s radicalism deepened her resolve to forge a new identity, distinct from her own mother. Like Mary and Shelley, she believed that they were all disciples of Wollstonecraft, but she was starting to think that she, Jane, was actually her truest heir. Shelley was a man, so he was in a different category, and though Mary was brilliant, she was sometimes weak—too weak, Jane thought, to be Wollstonecraft’s standard-bearer. After all, Mary had made many false steps (as Jane had noted in her diary): she had refused to bathe naked; she was frequently unwell; she had harbored doubts about their grand adventure. Jane, on the other hand, had remained loyal to their enterprise, priding herself on her strength and her determination.
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Page 12