Vindication (57 page)

Claire's second perfect bond was with her daughter, Allegra, a fair-haired child with a cleft chin like her father's. Claire's tragedy was not Byron but parting from Allegra, who was to belong to her father and to have the advantages of a peer's daughter. In Venice, in Byron's dissipated Palazzo Mocenigo, the once merry Allegra grew quiet and started wetting her bed. Byron, fancying she was not his child after all, proposed to make her his mistress when she grew up. A solution could have been for Claire to marry someone who would provide a home and adequate support, but she turned down an offer from the novelist Thomas Love Peacock; another from Maria Gisborne's son, Henry Reveley, now a steamship engineer; and yet another from Shelley's and Byron's friend, the Cornish adventurer Trelawny.

 

When the heirs of Wollstonecraft came together in ‘Carissima Pisa', they visited almost daily. Shelley used to arrive at Casa Silva at nine in the evening (when the children were in bed). Wollstonecraft's Margaret–dressed in chintz as ‘Mrs Mason'–read Aeschylus and Sophocles with him until
eleven. Shelley's poem ‘The Sensitive-Plant' (composed in March 1820) praised her at the age of forty-nine:

The Lady's way with plants recalls Mrs Mason's use of the gentlest herbals for her cures. She sprinkles water on plants which are faint, lifts their heads ‘with her tender hands', and props them up. She presides over the chrysalis of transformed lives: ‘many an antenatal tomb/ Where butterflies dream of the life to come'. The Shelley party came to Pisa bereft of five children: the Shelleys' premature baby girl had died soon after birth early in 1815; another girl, Clara, who had been much like Shelley her mother thought, had died in the summer of 1818; Allegra had been taken over by Byron, who refused Claire's pleas to see her; another girl of uncertain parents, registered as Elena Shelley, had been left in Naples where she was born; and then, the previous June, ‘Will-Mouse'–another of Shelley's ‘blue-eyed darlings'–had succumbed to Roman fever.

Mary Shelley had spent the summer of 1819 at Livorno with her mother's friend Mrs Gisborne, while Godwin turned his face away and reproached his daughter for lack of fortitude. ‘Alas!' Mary Shelley wrote in a new novel about a daughter's yearning for her father: ‘he, my beloved father, shunned me, and either treated me with harshness or a more heart-breaking coldness.' Something ‘malignant' seemed to have blinded him to her–in real life this would have been Mrs Godwin, who disliked her stepdaughter so much that she disliked Mrs Gisborne for her sympathy. Mary Shelley's novel
Matilda
, welling out of a dark pit during the second half of 1819, is a deathbed confession by the daughter of a disconsolate man who had lost his wife, the love of his life, in childbirth, shortly after their marriage. ‘Oh, my beloved father! Indeed you made me miserable beyond all words, but how truly did I even then forgive you, and how entirely did you
possess my whole heart while I endeavoured…to soften thy tremendous sorrows.' This was Mary Shelley's message to her father, who thought the incestuous love at the centre of the story too scandalous for publication. She had the discernment not to blame him: ‘often did quiescence of manner & tardiness in understanding & entering into the feelings of others cause him to chill & stifle those overflowings of mind from those he loved which he would have received with ardor had he been previously prepared'.

The loss of so many ties–mother, sister, children, as well as the chill of her father–left Mary shut off, even to Shelley, while the proximity of Claire, always a source of friction, was becoming intolerable. Mrs Mason, as ‘Minerva' (goddess of wisdom), saw the need to detach Claire from dependence on Shelley, and at the same time relieve one cause of Mary's depression while she nursed her sole remaining child, Percy Florence.

‘I made the most terrible mistakes so long as I was with the S[helley]s,' Claire admitted later. ‘As soon as I got into Lady Mountcashell's [Mrs Mason's] hands…I succeeded in all I undertook–but then I had confidence in her and obeyed her implicitly…She set me on the right path, which I have followed ever since.'

Mrs Mason arranged for Claire to enter the household of a physician, Dr Antonio Boiti, who lived near the Pitti Palace in Florence. There, Claire gained experience teaching English, while learning German from Boiti's German mother-in-law. The idea was to prepare herself as an English teacher for a future with her brother who was teaching in Vienna.

Relieved of Claire, Mary still had to contend with the difficulties of living with a poet who reinvented himself repeatedly. He might rescue Emilia Viviani from her convent; better, he might send Mrs Mason dressed as a man to marry Emilia and spirit her away; or he might vibrate to the guitar he presented to a languid newcomer from British India, Jane Williams. On the top floor of the Palazzo Scotto overlooking the Arno, with Byron across the river at the grand Palazzo Lanfranchi, Shelley complained to his companions that marriage was hell.

Mary turned to writing: it was her form of survival. A semi-satiric story, ‘The Bride of Modern Italy', recreates Emilia as an empty-head who draws
a bemused young Englishman (a boyish Shelley) into the overblown romantic banalities of her dramas. Her convent is squalid; the nuns venal; and the girl too silly to invest herself with more interest than an Italian situation–a convent bride for sale–which Mary Shelley exposes with Godwinian acumen. She stood ready to tear the veil ‘from this strange world & pierce with eagle eyes beyond the sun–when every idea strange & changeful is another step in the ladder by which I would climb'. So she writes in her
Journals
on 8 February 1822. On Tuesday the 19th she reads her mother's
Travels
yet again, and the following Monday affirms her venturesome inheritance: ‘Let me fearlessly descend into the remotest caverns of my own mind–carry the torch of self knowledge into its dimmest recesses…Read Wrongs of Woman–…Claire departs–…spend the evening at Mrs Masons.'

Claire's departure from Pisa coincided with Byron's arrival. Claire hoped to convince him that she was a responsible person, independent of the Shelleys (whose capacity for childcare Byron questioned), and thus worthy to receive visits from Allegra. Byron, unconvinced or (in Claire's view) vindictive, placed Allegra beyond her mother's reach in a convent at Bagnacavallo, twelve miles from Ravenna. The four-year-old was labelled ‘vain' and ‘stubborn', faults the convent must correct ‘so far as nature allows'. Its rules required Allegra to remain to the age of sixteen. Byron ignored Claire's reminder of their agreement that their child would never be left without a parent till she was seven. He ignored, too, her pleas to be allowed to see Allegra (‘my life', Claire said), and the child's own pleas to see him.

With Mrs Mason's help, Claire wrote a letter to Byron to suggest placing Allegra in a different establishment in Pisa or at school in England, offering to pay all the expenses. No answer.

When Claire had premonitions of Allegra's death in the early months of 1822, Mrs Mason offered to fund a daring scheme: Claire was to enter the convent, steal the child and go to Australia. Sadly, Claire listened to the Shelleys, who counselled patience.

The Pisa coterie came to an end in a series of disasters in 1822. In April, Byron's banker in Ravenna informed him that Allegra was ill. He did not
go to her, nor tell Claire. She received the news of Allegra's death with the calm of one to whom nothing worse could happen. Claire would hate Byron for the rest of her life–beyond life, she said. The loss of her child, followed in July by Shelley's drowning in the Bay of Spezia (north of Pisa), stripped Claire of all that mattered. Vaccà diagnosed tubercular glands, but she could not afford to nurse her health. For Shelley's death put an end to support, and the equally sudden death of Mount Cashell in October 1822 put a stop to his wife's stipend. That autumn, Claire boarded the coach for Vienna, expecting to teach English alongside her brother. Charles Clairmont received her kindly and found her employment, yet no sooner did she begin to establish herself than she was tracked by Metternich's spies. They proclaimed her a dangerous radical for her ties with Shelley and Godwin, refused her a teaching licence, and gave her notice to leave Austria. That winter Claire grew ‘skeleton thin'. Mrs Mason, who feared ‘there was little to hope' of this ‘treacherous malady', and uneasy about the medication (sixteen pills a day), wrote twice to Byron to ask for aid. She was rudely refused.

‘That he should hate her as he does, I cannot understand,' Mrs Mason confided to Mary Shelley, ‘–I could not hate the Devil so, if he had torn out my heart with his claws & trampled on it with his cloven foot.'

Those looking for the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on Claire Clairmont might be drawn to her unconventional relations with Shelley and Byron, and the illegitimate child she had adored. More significant, though, for women of the future is Claire's silence in 1823 when she went to Russia to become a governess. It seemed insane for a tubercular young woman to travel north into the Russian winter, ‘my ice cave' she called it. Still, she had to earn her living, and earn it in a far-off place where no one knew her ‘dark history'. At this point, when her life was almost destroyed, there was this silence. Friends thought they would never see her again, but silence, in so powerful a character, has a different quality, as Mary Shelley, back in London, guessed. Mary did believe in Claire's endurance, and she was right. For Mary too had a character concealed, of necessity, underground. ‘My thoughts,' she told herself, ‘are a sealed treasure which I can confide to none.'

The surface silence, the non-events as lives seem to unravel, can be their most momentous events–however unrecorded. When Claire Clairmont lived on with her secret in the alien ice cave, cut off and alone, distrusted at first as a stranger, she shed tried and familiar narratives of sexual surrender, abandonment and unrequited love, together with the motherhood that had been taken from her. During her five years in Russia, she stripped herself of feminine hopes and the marriage story. She knocked M. de Villeneuve's verses to her ‘out of his hand and would not read them,' she said, ‘for I am tired of learning that I am charming'. A fellow-tutor in Moscow, a German intellectual called Herman Gambs, fell in love with her. He reminded her of Shelley, he was delightful, but she had to refuse him. For she had become something else, a fiercely independent creature who could endure. ‘My soul,' she jotted, ‘seems to have been regenerated in the fountains of adversity into which it fell; there is a vigour and elasticity in my spirit which it never knew even in the spring of life.'

It's this strength to remake herself that's of the same ilk as Mary Wollstonecraft's, as well as her educational theories that Claire now put into practice. Mary Wollstonecraft had mocked a showcase education. She had pictured gratified Mammas who listen with astonishment to unintelligible words, ‘the parrot-like prattle, uttered in solemn cadences, with all the pomp of ignorance and folly. Such exhibitions only serve to strike the spreading fibres of vanity through the whole mind.' In the same way, Claire mocked Russian education. ‘They educate a child by making the external work upon the internal, which is, in fact, nothing but an education fit for monkies, and is a mere system of imitation–I want the internal to work upon the external; that is to say, that my pupil should be left at liberty as much as possible, and that her own reason should be the prompter of her actions.'

As Claire taught day by day in Moscow and St Petersburg, managing the demands of employers and mourning in silence for Allegra, she learnt a professional discipline, and came to regard herself as a champion of her sex. This silence in her life recalls the midnight reflections of Mary Wollstonecraft when she was a governess and a stranger in Ireland, and recalls too Margaret Mount Cashell's ‘days of adversity' when she had
sloughed off her aristocratic life and wandered through German towns till she came to the medical school at Jena.

Claire Clairmont's letters have not yet had their due. ‘You write the most amusing & clever letters in the world,' Mary Shelley acknowledged. ‘If your letters are ever published, all others that were published before, will fall in the shade, & you will be looked on as the best letter writer that ever charmed their friends–Is this glory?' Here Claire recounts her domestic trials in Russia:

The apparent spontaneity of her letters modulates into a Queen of the Night attitudinising, the comic edge of coloratura extravagance, recalling the stylised plaint of the Mozart and Rossini arias that Claire Clairmont continued to perform in the drawing-rooms of St Petersburg and Moscow.