Shelley: The Pursuit (53 page)

During this time, while they were prisoners in Paris, they walked in the Tuileries, ‘formal and uninteresting’, gazed at Notre Dame and had a glimpse of the pictures in the Louvre. Mary remained rather weak and ill and could not be made to eat much. But her world now revolved round Shelley, and she was perfectly content to curl up in his embrace, resting upon his bosom, indifferent to food and, according to their shared journal, ‘insensible to all future evil’. Sometimes she read him passages from Byron’s poems. ‘Our own perceptions
are the world to us,’ noted Shelley dreamily. On their first evening at the Hotel Vienne, Mary had opened to Shelley her precious box of papers, hitherto kept secret, which contained among other things her own earliest writings, and the love letters between Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Though Mary was not well, Shelley and she slept together on the sofa. On 4 August she reminded him that it was his birthday; he had forgotten. He was 22.

By Sunday, 7 August, the sixty pounds was secured in French money, and they determined on the plan to walk to Uri on Lake Lucerne, despite the fact that their host at the hotel thought they were mad to go alone in a countryside that was still disordered by the ravages of war. ‘Madame Sa Hote could not be persuaded’, wrote Mary in her first personal contribution to the journal, ‘that it was secure and delightful to walk in solitude in the mountains.’ But they were in high spirits and Mary was feeling better.

On Monday the 8th, Shelley and Jane went to the stables and purchased an ass, upon which they hopefully mounted their baggage, and departed from Paris. Over the next four days they walked steadily south-east through Guignes, where Napoleon had slept at the inn, Provins with its ruined citadel, Nogent and St Aubin, with vines in the fields, the first evidence of cultivation for many leagues, though the grapes were not ripe enough to pick. By Saturday they had reached Troyes, in the Haute Marne. They covered about thirty miles a day. Shelley sprained his ankle, and the ass refused to pull its weight and had to be exchanged for a mule, which was if anything less co-operative. They took turns riding it, until Shelley’s sprain made the girls refuse to let him dismount. The
auberges
were mostly filthy and not altogether friendly, the beds were ‘infinitely detestable’, and one evening they had nothing for supper but milk and sour bread. At the inn near Troyes, the innkeeper thought he had sized up the little party, and strongly insinuated that the unattached young lady, Jane, was destined to share his bed. Shelley dealt brusquely with the man, language on such occasion being no barrier; but the innkeeper’s rats were less easily deterred. Finally Jane shared Shelley’s bed as the solution to all problems. In the morning Mary wrote up the journal: ‘Jane was not able to sleep all night for the rats who as she said put their cold paws on her face — she however rested on our bed which her four-footed enemies dared not invade perhaps having heard the threat that Shelley terrified the man with who said he would sleep with Jane.’
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The countryside throughout their walk showed evidence of war, famine and crippling poverty. On the last long leg into Troyes, on Friday afternoon, they fell in with a man whose children had all been murdered by the Cossacks. They walked on through the gathering dusk and Shelley, riding on the mule, told them the story of the Seven Sleepers to beguile the time.

On Saturday morning Shelley and Jane went out and sold their mule, buying
in exchange a
voiture
which cost them five napoleons. They planned that this should take them as far as Neufchatel, where it could be resold. They had already lost fifteen napoleons on the ass, the mule and the saddles, and their finances were again looking very thin. Mary stayed behind at the inn and wrote letters. Shelley joined her and wrote to Harriet. He took up the theme of his last conversations with her, quite calmly and composedly, insisting that he was still completely true to her as a friend, and that he wanted her to rejoin him in his search for a community of like spirits which he hoped to set up on the Swiss lakes.

My dearest Harriet, I write to you from this detestable Town. I write to show you that I do not forget you. I write to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at least find one firm & constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear, by whom your feelings will never be willfully injured. From none can you expect this but me. All else are either unfeeling & selfish . . . .I will write at length from Neufchatel or Uri. . . . Direct your letters‘d’etre laisses à la Bureau de Poste Neufchatel’ [
sic
] until you hear again. . . . You shall know our adventures more detailed, if I do not hear at Neufchatel that I am soon to have the pleasure of communicating to you in person, & of welcoming you to some sweet retreat I will procure for you in the mountains.
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To this he added that she should bring two deeds, connected with their legal separation, and the settlement of an annuity on Harriet and the children. Supported by the love and affection of Mary and Jane, and busy with the excitement of their expedition, Harriet’s pain and misery was obviously quite unreal to him. His letter was perfectly genuine in intention, and yet perfectly unfeeling. Only in reference to Peacock, who had sided sharply with Harriet during the separation crisis, did Shelley display any emotion. He knew that Peacock was helping Harriet: ‘I have written to Peacock to superintend money affairs — He is expensive inconsiderate & cold; but surely not utterly perfidious & unfriendly and unmindful of our kindness to him. Besides interest will secure his attention to these things.’
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Peacock was unmoved by Shelley’s bitterness at this time, and always took his swings of mood for granted, though between Harriet and Mary Godwin, there was never any doubt as to his preference.

Harriet had moved back to her father’s at Chapel Street, and continued to correspond with Mrs Nugent in Dublin, and to look after her child. She kept in
touch with John Williams at Tremadoc, and tried to sort out Shelley’s unpaid bills there, and also in London. She drew heavily on the remainder of the loan in Shelley’s bank account. A week after receiving Shelley’s letter from Troyes, she wrote to Mrs Nugent: ‘Mr Shelley is in France. You will be surprised to find I am not with him: but times are altered, dear friend, and tho’ I will not tell you what has passed, still do not think that you cloud your mind with your sorrows. Every age has its cares. God knows, I have mine. Dear Ianthe is quite well. She is fourteen months old, and has six teeth.’
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Nothing on earth would have dragged her to visit the Godwin daughters on the Swiss lakes.

Meanwhile, collecting his impressions of France at the inn at Troyes, Shelley was appalled by the frightful desolation they had witnessed. ‘Village after village entirely ruined & burned; the white ruins towering in innumerable forms of destruction among the beautiful trees. The inhabitants were famished; families once perfectly independent now beg their bread in this wretched country. No provisions, no accommodation; filth, misery & famine everywhere.’
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They determined to make as rapidly as they could for Switzerland, and left in their little carriage at 4 on Sunday morning.

Trundling down the valley of the river Aube, where the country changed abruptly, they found themselves surrounded by sunlit, vine-hung hillsides, with sudden little expanses of green meadows, ‘intermixed with groves of poplars and white willow, and spires of village churches which the Cossacks had still spared’. It filled them with delight, and suddenly relaxed, they got out of the carriage and slept for two hours in the shade of a wood belonging to a neighbouring château. Shelley rummaged in his baggage at Jane’s request, and gave her one of his notebooks to use as a diary. It was the one he had started at Bracknell in the spring, when studying Italian with Cornelia Turner. She turned it round and started at the other end, heading it on the inside cover: ‘Will you try what Fortune will for you’, and sketching a face.
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During the next three days they pushed on through Langres, where there was a numerous and vulgar set come for the fair; through Champlitte, where Shelley found a little girl so lovely that he tried to persuade her father to let them take her in the carriage; through Besançon with its ‘stupendous brown rocks’ — the first hint of the Alpine foothills — and a ruined castle perched above the gorge; and up as far as Mort, where they passed the night fitfully, on Wednesday, 17 August, in the inn kitchen, the beds too crawling with lice to sleep in. During the evening, Shelley and Mary went out and sat on the rocks, and read Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Mary, a Fiction
. ‘We sleep all night by the Kitchen fire,’ recorded Jane, ‘Shelley much disturbed by the creaking door, the screams of a poor smothered child & the fille who washed the glasses.’
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On Thursday they hoped to get to Pontarlier, within striking distance of the
Swiss border, but when they stopped in a pinewood at midday to rest in the shade, their
voiturier
, who had become increasingly irritated with Shelley during the last few days, drove on ahead without them. Mary’s journal merely says that the driver pretended that it was all a mistake, and told many lies. What actually happened was recorded by Jane when she wrote up her diary, probably several years later. It made a telling
vignette
.

On our way to Pontarlier, we came to a clear running shallow stream, and Shelley entreated the Driver to stop while he from under a bank could bathe himself — and he wanted Mary to do the same as the Bank sheltered one from every eye — but Mary would not — first, she said it would be most indecent, and then also she had no towel and could not dry herself — He said he would gather leaves from the trees and she could dry herself with those but she refused and said how could he think of such a thing.
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Shelley behaved, said Jane delightedly, ‘just as if he were Adam in Paradise before his fall’. Clearly Mary was not so delighted. As for the
voiturier
, he thought Shelley was touched. They walked on during the afternoon, and took a lift in a hay-cart. The moon slid down below the woody horizon before they reached Pontarlier, where the
voiturier
had a thousand excuses — all falsehood.
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But the beds were clean for the first time in France.

The next day, Friday the 19th, they caught their first glimpse of the Alps. ‘Hill after hill is seen extending its craggy outline before the other, and, far behind all, towering above every feature of the scene, the snowy Alps; they are 100 miles distant; they look like those accumulated clouds of dazzling white that arrange themselves on the horizon in summer.’ Jane thought they were white flaky clouds too at first sight, but then after a long and steady examination — ‘yes, they were really the Alps’. They gazed and gazed as their carriage rattled down towards Neufchatel, through upland meadows and pines and outcrops of bare rock. Their new Swiss
voiturier
insisted on talking though: ‘it was like discord in music,’ thought Jane, ‘his associations with the mountains were those of butter and cheese — how good the pasturage was for the cows — & the cows yielded good milk & then the good milk made good cheese . . .’.
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But still, after the French, there was freedom in his countenance.

Shelley had the idea for a romance forming in his mind, about a small community of idealists living cut off from the world in a secret valley somewhere in the Near East. The Alps were transformed into an even more exotic vision, as he wrote a few days later:

After many days of wandering the Assassins pitched their tents in the valley of Bethzatanai. . . . The mountains of Lebanon had been divided to their base
to form this happy valley; on every side their icy summits darted their white pinnacles into the clear blue sky, imaging, in their grotesque outline, minarets, and ruined domes, and columns worn with time. . . . Meteoric shapes, more effulgent than the moonlight, hung on the wandering clouds and mixed in discordant dance around the spiral fountains. Blue vapours assumed strange lineaments under the rocks and among the ruins, lingering like ghosts with slow and solemn step.
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At Neufchatel on Saturday morning, they found nothing at the Poste Restante; nothing from Harriet, and much more serious, no remittances from Hookham or Peacock or Shelley’s solicitor. Once again, they were virtually without money. Shelley hastily sold off their carriage to the
voiturier
, and went into town to negotiate a loan at a bank. He was not very hopeful, but to the astonishment and consolation of Jane and Mary at the inn, he returned within two hours ‘staggering under the weight of a large canvas bag full of silver’. Shelley later wrote in the journal, referring to himself in the third person, as was the communal idiom: ‘Shelley alone looks grave on the occasion, for he alone clearly apprehends that francs and louis d’or are like the white and flying clouds of noon, that is gone before one can say “Jack Robinson”.’ The Swiss banker’s advance was worth about thirty-eight pounds, though Jane had the vague idea that it was a round fifty pounds. Shelley booked cheap seats on the local diligence, and they left at dawn on Sunday, travelling towards Lucerne, with misty views of the St Gothard. Their inn room, after Zoffingen, was graced with a glass case of stuffed birds, which they glared at disapprovingly, and Shelley was in a ‘jocosely horrible’ humour. On this day, there was the first sign of Jane’s moody temperament; there was a brief quarrel, and Mary and Shelley went to look at the cathedral at Soleure alone, and, in an irritable state themselves, they found it very modern and stupid. The disagreement was patched up by Shelley: Mary recorded, ‘Shelley and Jane talk concerning Jane’s character’, without further comment. Jane’s diary has the page torn between Sunday the 21st and Tuesday the 23rd.
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