Shelley: The Pursuit (142 page)

Another interesting aspect was that what lawyers call the ‘sting’ of the libel — its sharpest and most wounding clement — appeared in a different light to Mary than it had done to Shelley. To the accusation that Claire had been his mistress, Shelley reacted exactly as might have been expected in the circumstances — somewhat wearily and somewhat enigmatically, as of an issue long since talked to a standstill between him and Mary. What seemed to scald him to the point of incoherent pain, was the fact that he should have been accused of
cruelty
: either to Claire, or to Mary, or worst of all to an illegitimate child.

Elise says that Clare was my mistress — that is all very well & so far there is nothing new: all the world has heard so much & people may believe or not believe as they think good. — She then proceeds to say that Clare was with child by me — that I gave her the most violent medicines to procure abortion… [etc.
concerning the foundling hospital]. . . . In addition she says that both I & Clare treated
you
in the most shameful manner — that I neglected & beat you
[4]
& that Clare never let a day pass without offering you insults of the most violent kind in which she was abetted by me. . . . When persons who have known me are capable of conceiving me — not that I have fallen into a great error & imprudence as would have been the living with Clare as my mistress — but that I have committed such unutterable crimes as destroying or abandoning a child — & that my own — imagine my despair of good — imagine how it is possible that one of so weak & sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet through this hellish society of men. [
There follow three lines heavily inked out in the manuscript
.]
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As one considers the seven long years in which Shelley had struggled to live peaceably and fruitfully with Mary and Claire, and the grimly repeated blows of the death of his children, Clara, William, Elena, to name no others, this sense of outrage and injured innocence seems wholly understandable and largely genuine. Only in the final phrases — ‘this hellish society of men’ — does one detect a certain melodrama. It was the same defensive melodrama which is familiar from the time of the letters to Elizabeth Hitchener right down to the letters to Southey from San Giuliano. What had Shelley to be defensive about? Surely it was that he regretted ever having agreed to foster out his ‘Neapolitan charge’ to Italian parents in Naples.
[5]

Mary’s letter of refutation to Mrs Hoppner is much more extensive and impassioned than Shelley’s — as Shelley had intended that it should be. Yet it seems clear that for her the ‘sting’ of the business lay in the fundamental accusation that Shelley and Claire had been lovers. Thus at the key points of her letter, a wholly different emphasis emerges:

She says Clare was Shelley’s mistress, that — upon my word, I solemnly assure you that I cannot write the words, I send you a part of Shelley’s letter that you may see what I am now about to refute — but I had rather die than copy anything so vilely, so wickedly false, so beyond all imagination fiendish.

I am perfectly convinced in my own mind that Shelley never had an improper connexion with Clare…[etc. concerning the rooms at Naples, and Claire’s illness]… Clare had no child — the rest must be false — but that you should believe it — that my beloved Shelley should stand thus slandered in your minds — he the gentlest and most humane of creatures, is more painful to me, oh far more painful than any words can express.

It is all a lie — Claire is timid; she always showed respect even for me poor dear girl!…[etc. concerning Mary’s perfect trust in Shelley]…I will add that Clare has been separated from us for about a year. She lives with a respectable German family at Florence. . . .
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It is not necessary to go into detail about the partially false impression Mary gives on several points, for they are all wholly in character. One would not expect her to explain fully the alternating visits which had taken place constantly between Claire and Shelley since autumn 1820; nor would one expect her to say anything other than that ‘the union between my husband and myself has ever been undisturbed. Love caused our first imprudence…has increased daily, and knows no bounds.’ Mary’s loyalty to Shelley was always faultless.

But it is the general weight of Mary’s letter that is most significant: she did not believe that Shelley and Claire were lovers, and more than this, she found even the consideration of such a possibility unbearably painful. This radical divide in feeling and response to the Hoppner accusations between Shelley and Mary is, humanly speaking, the most informative truth to emerge from this notoriously ambiguous exchange of letters.

There was finally perhaps one sentence which indicated that Mary realized that to mention Elena would explain everything, but that it was, both for her and for Shelley, too costly a revelation. At almost the end of this long letter she wrote: ‘I swear by the life of my child, by my blessed and beloved child, that I know these accusations to be false.’ The use of that ‘know’ is oddly emphatic in the context, and the particular oath by which Mary vowed it — the life of her now only remaining child — is one that is inconceivable that she would have used except in the most grave and perfect sincerity. The one way in which Mary could ‘know’ such a thing, is through absolute certainty about the true parentage and fate of the supposedly ‘foundling’ child.

Having written in the meantime to Mary about the possibility of ‘prosecuting Elise in the Tuscan tribunals’, Shelley was obviously relieved and delighted on the reception of Mary’s letter to Mrs Hoppner which reached him on 15 or 16 August. There was no more talk of legal prosecutions, and having referred to the Hoppners as the probable source of a critical attack in the
Literary Gazette
, he dismissed the whole business: ‘So much for nothing.’ His letters and notes to Mary were, towards the latter end of his stay at Ravenna, notably cheerful and affectionate. In one he thanked her warmly for a kind birthday present of her picture in miniature which ‘I will wear for your sake upon my heart’; and in
this and other letters he dispensed with the usual ‘My dear Mary’, and addressed her simply as ‘My dearest love’.
⁴⁴

Mary’s reply was never delivered to the Hoppners as Byron promised, but was found in his Lordship’s papers, with seal broken, after his death. Yet it is clear that the real value of Mary’s letter for Shelley, was not
vis-à-vis
Hoppner — but
vis-à-vis
Byron. Shelley had not the slightest interest in or respect for the Hoppners; he must have known if they believed Elise’s version of the truth in the first place, no amount of eloquence from Mary — whom they always regarded as the injured and innocent party anyway — would alter them. The person whose opinion he was vitally interested in was Byron. It was Byron’s reading of the letter, and Byron’s conviction concerning Shelley, Claire and Mary, which was all-important. Shelley’s relationship with Elise was quite irrelevant to this, and something for Shelley to discuss with Byron between midnight and 5 a.m. if he so chose. Mary’s letter proved above all to Byron that Mary was still completely loyal to Shelley, and that the relationship between the two, however difficult, was still alive. The importance of this fact was shown in Shelley’s one reference to the Hoppner affair in later correspondence with Byron. Discussing the arrangements to be made for Claire and Allegra, Shelley wrote from Pisa: ‘I speak freely on this subject, because I am sure you have seen enough to convince you that the impressions, which the Hoppners wished to give you of myself and Mary, are void of foundation.’
⁴⁵
What Byron had seen was Mary’s passionately loyal letter. The real outcome of the whole Hoppner scandal was simply to convince Byron of the tested solidarity between Shelley and Mary.

All the rest of Shelley’s visit to Ravenna followed from this. Byron suddenly announced that he was going to move palaces to Tuscany. Shelley’s aid was enlisted to persuade La Guiccioli — who wished to go to Switzerland and taste the pleasures of foreign travel — that Tuscany was preferable. After a little discussion, and considerable homework, Shelley turned in an extremely elegant letter in flowing and gallant Italian which detailed the full hideousness of English snobbery, prejudice and inquisitiveness in Switzerland, especially at Geneva, and most especially when presented with something as outlandish as Lord Byron on the Lac Leman in the company of a lady. By way of example, Shelley called to mind at length their unfortunate experiences of 1816.
⁴⁶
The letter worked splendidly; the countess, together with her charming and malleable brother Pietro Gamba, acquiesced to Tuscany; in return she put Shelley under a courtly obligation not to depart from Ravenna until Lord Byron’s emigration westwards was assured.

Exactly where in Tuscany Byron should establish himself was a question of some delicacy over which Shelley spent much thought. He communed on paper with Mary: ‘I am afraid he would not like Florence on account of the English. —
What think you of Lucca for him —
he
would like Pisa better, if it were not for Clare, but I really can hardly recommend him either for his own sake or for hers to come into such close contact with her. — Gunpowder & fire ought to be kept at a respectable distance from each other. — There is Lucca, Florence, Pisa, Sienna, — and I think nothing more. — What think you of Prato or Pistoia for him…?’
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Byron and Shelley worked over the possibilities together, Byron half playing with the idea, Shelley determined to get his Lordship safely transported and housed somewhere near Pisa. But it took time, and patience and tact. In the mornings, Shelley was given the freedom of Byron’s state carriage, and he rode to the sites of Ravenna his face peering through the windows above the Byron coat-of-arms. In the Chiesà St Vitale he was fascinated by a section of haphazardly stained marble that had formed a perfect human outline, ‘a pure anticipated cognition of a Capuchin’ as he put it; and the excavated basement filled with ‘a sort of vaporous darkness, and troops of prodigious frogs’.
⁴⁸
Later he visited Dante’s tomb, with its famous sculptured relief, very life-like to Shelley, with one eye half closed like Il Diavolo Pacchiani.
⁴⁹

Shelley’s only source of discomfort in Byron’s presence was a slight but persistent sense of social patronage. As writers he felt they could talk frankly, and as equals; they disagreed for example on Byron’s supposed principles of literary criticism. As friends, they both indulged freely in confidences, especially from Byron’s side. But as social animals there was a sense of strain; Shelley was always aware of the Byron coat-of-arms on the door. ‘Lord Byron and I are excellent friends, & were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claims to a higher station than I possess — or did I possess a higher than I deserve, we would appear in all things as such, & I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case — The demon of mistrust & of pride lurks between two persons in our situation poisoning the freedom of their intercourse. . . .’
⁵⁰
This source of friction was to increase steadily in the coming months. In this way, it is curious that Shelley’s reservations about Byron in Italy were very much analogous to Keats’s hesitations about Shelley in London. Byron hardly seems to have been aware of the difficulty.

On 11 August, Byron announced abruptly that he had decided on Pisa. There can be no doubt that Shelley was the decisive factor in his choice. Delighting in his victory, he immediately offered to act as Byron’s agent, and lease a suitable palazzo, and so it was agreed. Shelley half expected Byron to change his mind the next day, but on the contrary Byron became more enthusiastic with every night of talk which passed. Shelley was now anxious to return to Pisa, but one expedition remained — a visit to Allegra at the convent of Bagnacavallo some forty miles outside Ravenna. This was suddenly arranged for him, after long and
inexplicable delays, some three days before his departure. Shelley spent an afternoon with the little girl, now taller and more serious, and full of talk of Paradise and Angels. Shelley was prepared to indulge these nunnish fancies, though he was appalled at ‘the idea of bringing up so sweet a creature in the midst of such trash till sixteen!’ Drawing on his experiences of Emilia at St Anna, Shelley conveyed to Byron ‘such information as to the interior construction of convents as to shake his faith in the purity of those receptacles’.

Shelley remembered Allegra with much affection from the days at Marlow, and later at Venice. He brought her a little gold chain as a present, conversed with her in Italian, gravely asked to view her little bed, her chair at dinner and her ornamented play-cart in the convent garden. She was dressed in white muslin, with a little apron and black trousers made of silk; her hair was as dark and profuse as ever, and her eyes deep blue. Later they ran about together in the garden playing hide-and-seek until finally, somewhat over-excited, Allegra was found ringing the bell to summon the nuns from their cells, but nobody seemed to be cross. As he was taking his leave, Shelley asked if she had any message he could take to her father. ‘Che venga farmi un visitino, e che porta seco
la mammina
.’ Shelley winced inwardly at this, and he did not deliver the latter part of the message. But Allegra, who had not seen Claire for over three years, was almost certainly referring to Teresa Guiccioli, and not her real
mammina.
Shelley did not see Allegra again, and Allegra never left her convent.
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