Shelley: The Pursuit (70 page)

Characteristically, Peacock in his ‘Memoir’ preferred to make no reference at all to either the Godwin debt, or Claire’s affair. Instead he gave a long circumstantial and totally irrelevant account of Shelley having left England because of a hallucination that Williams of Tremadoc had come to Bishopsgate to warn him of a plot by Sir Timothy and Captain Pilfold to imprison him. There is in fact a rather more mundane basis for this story in the circumstances of Shelley’s debts
two years later
in 1818 at Great Marlow. Peacock’s delightfully eccentric anecdote seems to be a mixture of polite subterfuge and the genuine confusion of aging memory.

When he wrote from Dover to Godwin, Shelley did not explain that Claire was with them, and he implied that he and Mary had been driven into exile ‘perhaps forever’. Perhaps he might return alone, for a few days, on strictly business affairs, but ‘to see no friend, to do no office of friendship, to engage in nothing which can soothe the sentiments of regret almost like remorse . . .’. He appealed once more to Godwin’s better feelings: ‘But I have been too indignant, I have been unjust to you. — forgive me. — Burn those letters which contain the records of my violence, & believe that however what you erroneously call fame
& honour separate us, I shall always feel towards you as the most affectionate of friends.’
⁸
Godwin did not write to Shelley for a month, and then it was only to receive no reply for a further four weeks. Shelley had dismissed him.

They caught the packet out of Dover on the afternoon of 3 May, Shelley just managing to seal and dispatch his letter to Godwin before the ropes were cast off. Travelling at a leisurely rate, they arrived in Paris on the 8th. Here they were held up by passport difficulties, since regulations had been tightened because of an escaped political prisoner. From their rooms in the rue Richelieu, Claire wrote amusingly to Byron that she had persuaded the ‘whole tribe of Otaheite philosophers’ to come with her — a laughing reference to the sunny pleasure-loving islanders of Tahiti. She also assured him that she had ten times rather be his male friend than his mistress. The letter was sealed in red wax with the impression of the Judgement of Paris — Shelley’s signet.

They were all glad, for their individual reasons, to be on the Continent again. Shelley was immensely relieved to escape the pressures of London, which had been making him physically ill with consumptive symptoms once more. He was also looking forward to the meeting with Byron which Claire promised. Much of Mary’s attention was taken up by the child, but she recalled the happy times of 1814, though noting shrewdly that the French population seemed more hangdog and oppressed since the restitution of the Bourbon dynasty of tyrants: ‘the discontent and sullenness of their minds perpetually betrays itself’.
⁹
Her phrase was taken from Shelley, the first significant political observation he had made for more than a year.

Claire’s thoughts were of course exclusively on Byron. She knew that making love with him had not changed his essentially casual attitude towards her, and already she had picked up, with that sensitivity which so delighted Shelley, a perfect echo of the Byronic
dégagement
. ‘I know not how to address you,’ she wrote, ‘I cannot call you friend for though I love you you do not feel even interest for me; fate has ordained that the slightest accident that should befall you should be agony to me; but were I to float by your window drowned all you would say would be “Ah voila” . . . .’ She knew that perhaps her greatest hold over him was simply her youth, and she played that card with delicacy and sincerity ‘. . . a few days ago I was eighteen; people of eighteen always love truly & tenderly; & I who was educated by Godwin however erroneous my creed have the highest adoration for truth.’
¹⁰
Between her and Shelley it seemed like a kind of conspiracy.

The journey to Geneva took another six days. They followed the main tourist route south-eastwards through Troyes, which now bored them, then Dijon and Poligny. In the Jura they found that spring was late in arriving. Tourists were not yet expected, and reluctant hospitality and snow greeted them.
But they pressed on, divided between awe at the scenery and irritation at the local population. At Les Rousses they hired a four-horse closed carriage, ten men to dig them out of drifts, and scandalized everyone by setting off at 6 in the evening. They huddled in stale rugs, snow pelting against the windows of the carriage, and darkness falling rapidly.
¹¹
Through the freezing windows, Mary recorded the first note in a theme that was to come to dominate her imagination during the next five months, ‘Never was a scene more awefully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road: no river or rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye, by adding the picturesque to the sublime. The natural silence of that uninhabited desert contrasted strangely with the voices of the men who conducted us, who, with animated tones and gestures called to one another in a patois composed of French and Italian, creating disturbance, where but for them, there was none.’
¹²

Then suddenly, they came down out of the snow and foreboding pines, and were jogging through the sweet lake air in the outskirts of Geneva. They forgot the icy desert wilderness, a dream of premonition, and gazed eagerly upon the bustling illuminated prettiness of the lake. But writing to Peacock the next morning, 15 May, Shelley recalled the same grim passage: ‘The trees in this region are incredibly large, but stand in scattered clumps in the white wilderness. Never was scene more awefully desolate as that which we passed in one evening of our last days journey.’
¹³

They drove straight to Monsieur Dejean’s Hotel d’Angleterre in the fashionable suburb of Secheron, the regular stopping point for all well-to-do English travellers passing by the Lake, and also Byron’s expected port of call. Shelley took an inexpensive set of rooms on the upper floor, and hired a small sailing boat for the duration of their stay. Their windows looked pleasantly southwards over the blueness of the lake, with the terraced vine fields opposite as yet showing no crop. Above them the haze of Alps stretched backwards and upwards in darker and darker tones until finally, above and beyond them all — when the morning light was clear — the single glittering white fang of Mont Blanc appeared. ‘We do not enter society here,’ wrote Mary, ‘yet our time passes swiftly and delightfully. We read Italian and Latin during the heats of noon, and when the sun declines we walk in the garden of the hotel, looking at the rabbits relieving fallen cockchaffers, and watching the motions of a myriad of lizards, who inhabit a southern wall of the garden.’ On most evenings, at about 6 p.m., all three of them embarked on the little boat and drifted over the lake for an hour or two. As they came in towards land, about 10 o’clock, Mary noted how the sweet scents of spring flowers and new-mown grass would blow across the
water to meet them. They hung limply over the sides of the boat and gazed down into the clear water as the pebbled bottom and innumerable fish rose up silently towards them. These details were later to be transferred into the mind of Victor Frankenstein as he ferried his young wife across the lake on the evening of his doomed marriage day.
¹⁴

Briefly, Shelley was overwhelmed by a strong feeling of homesickness which he himself found strange, and he expanded it in his letter to Peacock. The very beauty of the country around him reminded him of his feeling for English scenes, and he thought of the Lake poets, especially Wordsworth. ‘Our Poets & our Philosophers our mountains & our lakes, the rural lanes & fields which are ours so especially, are ties which unless I become utterly senseless can never be broken asunder. These and the memory of them if I never should return, these & the affections of the mind with which having once been united they are inseparably united, will make the name of England, my country dear to me forever, even if I should permanently return to it no more.’

Then, feeling better, he dismissed thoughts of exile and ‘sentimental gossip’, and ended briskly, ‘We are now at Geneva, where or in the neighbourhood we shall remain probably until the autumn. I shall return almost immediately, within a fortnight or three weeks, to attend to the least exertions which Longdill is to make for the settlement of my affairs — of course I shall see you then.’ Mary he noted was busy writing up a journal, otherwise she would have sent him a letter in Latin.
¹⁵

The long-awaited arrival of Byron, ten days later, soon put all thoughts of returning to grapple with business affairs far from Shelley’s mind. The Napoleonic carriage appeared at about midnight on 25 May, spattered with mud from a vigorous sightseeing trip. Byron and Dr Polidori had been over the battlefield of Waterloo, and up the Rhine among the wild and beautiful scenery that Shelley had observed in rather less comfort two summers before.

Polidori, who had been commissioned for £500 by Murray to keep a private diary of the trip, tended to give the impression that while he had been visiting the galleries, Byron had visited the chambermaids. In fact, Byron’s thoughts had been turning constantly and sadly to Augusta, who alone would have appreciated the sights that he did, the Rhine crags and castles, and in the loneliness of the early hours he had at last turned to poetry again. The opening section of Canto III of
Childe Harold
was already under way in his notebook. It was on the Rhine that a famous altercation between Byron and Polidori had already taken place. The young Polidori, still only aged 21, had turned abruptly on the poet after sourly reading a eulogium of Byron’s works, and asked what, pray, could Byron do better than
he
except write poetry. ‘First . . . I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door — Secondly, I can swim across that river to
yonder point — and thirdly, I can give you a d — d good thrashing.’
¹⁶
That, at any rate, was how Byron cared to recall the incident six years later. Byron was ready for a change of society.

Claire knew of their arrival within half an hour, for she had heard the carriage noise and bustle of servants, and checked the register where Byron, overcome with weariness, had put his age as 100. In the anxious note she sent up, Shelley’s complicity was again useful: ‘Direct under cover to Shelley for I do not wish to appear either in love or curious.’ But Byron went off to Geneva the following morning on business, and there was no contact between the two parties for the rest of the day, the Shelleys pursuing their usual routine on the lake in the evening. Claire decided that this diffidence on both sides was too ridiculous, and after staying up late that night, she wrote a piqued but thoroughly practical and straightforward note to him at 2 in the morning. ‘I have been in this weary hotel this fortnight and it seems so unkind, so cruel of you to treat me with such marked indifference. Will you go straight up to the top of the house this evening at ½ past seven & I will infallibly be on the landing place and show you the room.’
¹⁷
With that she went to bed.

The next morning, spotting Byron and Polidori rowing in from an excursion on the lake, she seized the opportunity and brought Shelley and Mary to walk along the
plage
. Byron disembarked, leaving Polidori to float offshore, and splashed up the beach with his slight limp. Here the famous introduction was at last made, Mr Shelley very formal and Lord Byron a little cool. The two poets were shy with each other, Claire’s presence adding awkwardness, but Byron hastily invited Shelley to dine alone with him that evening and with a quick bow to Mary and Claire, stumped back to see to the boat.

Polidori made up the third member of the party in the evening, and noted in his diary: ‘P[ercy] S[helley], the author of
Queen Mab
, came; bashful, shy consumptive; twenty-six; separated from his wife; keeps the two daughters of Godwin, who practise his theories; one L[ord] B[yron]’s.’
¹⁸
Shelley, with his pallor and his silence and his advanced theories, appeared to Polidori older than he was, but Byron felt he could relax in his company and the dinner was a success. From the final part of Polidori’s entry, it seems as if Claire’s invitation was finally taken up. Later Byron was to write with a rather assumed shrug to Augusta: ‘I was not in love, nor have any love left for any, but I could not exactly play the stoic with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me.’ He added, with a touch of self-pity which was more to the point, ‘beside I had been regaled of late with so many “two courses and a
desert
” (Alas!) of aversion, that I was fain to take a little love (if pressed particularly) by way of novelty.’
¹⁹
Claire did press particularly.

The next day, Polidori was properly introduced all round, and Byron and the
Shelleys began a regular arrangement of breakfasting together — a meal that was not altogether familiar to Byron. Polidori noted: ‘Was introduced by Shelley to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, called here Mrs Shelley . . . . No names announced, no ceremony, — each speaks when he pleases.’ There was something to be said for Shelley’s ‘theories’ after all. They boated and dined together with increasing frequency, and Shelley and Byron began to plan a whole summer spent together. At the Plainpalais, outside Geneva, they visited the bust and memorial of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and discovered a common enthusiasm.