Shelley: The Pursuit (90 page)

26. Venus Anodyomene, Florence

16. The Platonist: Bagni di Lucca 1818

As Mary noted in her new journal, they were now at Calais for the third time in their lives. Shelley did not wish to linger in France, where he had learnt to expect dirty inns, unreliable coaches and ‘the nasal and abbreviated cacophony of the French’.
¹
Instead he decided to make with all possible speed for the Alps. Having decided after all to purchase a carriage at Calais on Friday, 13 March 1818, they mounted their baggage and set out to travel towards the Swiss border through Artois and Burgundy, deliberately circumventing Paris. The first leg of the journey was made largely by moonlight, and they had to tip the guards heavily at St Omer in order to enter the city walls so late at night. A woman shrieked from across the moat, demanding who the invaders were.
²
From St Omer, they passed through Rheims, Châlons-sur-Marne and Dijon, finally reaching Lyons at nearly midnight on the following Saturday, 21 March, where they had their first rest. Shelley wrote of their rapid progress to Hunt and Byron, and negotiated with a
voiturier
to drive them over the Alps to Milan.

Throughout the journey Shelley ignored French books, and concentrated on reading Schlegel’s essays on Shakespeare and the theatre, turning over in his mind the idea for a poetic drama. The weather was hot, and the sky over the Midi a radiant blue, and Shelley’s spirits rose steadily. On the evening before their departure from Lyons they sat discussing the Revolutionary times in the city with the
voiturier
who had witnessed action; and then went out to see the moon rise over the distant Alps and glitter in the water where the Saône flows into the Rhône.
³
The next day they drove into the foothills, and crossed the frontier at Les Echelles. Shelley’s books had to be submitted to the Sardinian censor, ‘a Priest who admits nothing of Rousseau, Voltaire etc. in the province’. ‘All such books’, he noted acidly, ‘are burned.’
⁴
As an Englishman on his travels, however, the eccentricities of Shelley’s library were eventually allowed to pass by.

The delay was eclipsed by the fantastic rockscapes and cliffs of the mountain pass outside Les Echelles, which reminded Shelley of a famous
mise en scène
in
Aeschylus: ‘The rocks which cannot be less than 1000 feet in perpendicular height, sometimes overhang the road on each side, and almost shut out the sky. The scene is like that described in the “Prometheus” of Aeschylus; vast rifts and caverns in granite precipices; wintry mountains, with ice and snow above; the loud sounds of unseen waters within the caverns; and walls of toppling rocks, only to be scaled, as he describes, by the winged chariot of the Ocean Nymphs.’
⁵
This image, and other ones from the previous Alpine expedition in summer 1816, now began to coalesce in Shelley’s mind around the subject of the Titan Prometheus, chained and welded to his rocky precipice. It was a mythic image which went back to the earliest of Shelley’s childhood romances, and now suddenly it found its appropriate physical setting. Mary’s outcast monster and her modern Prometheus had also been conceived in the mountains. But for the moment, surrounded by the bustle and irritation and delights of travel, the Aeschylean image lay dormant in Shelley’s imagination.

At Chambéry their carriage was again halted, half-way across the bridge, the French soldiers at one end, and Piedmontese at the other. Passports and books were pored over by customs men who maddened Shelley with their officiousness. For over an hour they refused to allow the carriage to move either backwards or forwards, and all the time it rained steadily. Finally a Swiss canon who had met Sir Timothy Shelley at the Duke of Norfolk’s, passed through the customs post, and with more charity than honesty assured the officials of Percy Shelley’s respectability and good connections. The carriage was allowed through, with its crates of heresy undisturbed. The rest of the day was spent at Chambéry, where the parents of their Swiss maid Elise had arranged to meet their daughter.

Elise was to play an important part in Shelley’s life in Italy during the next years, and something of her background is now known. Elise’s mother had married twice. The family life had been a disturbed one, and in her early twenties Elise had had an illegitimate child. Her mother and her stepfather had agreed to look after it, when Elise went off to make a new life with the Shelleys in 1816. This fact perhaps accounts for her willingness to leave Switzerland in the first place, and also why Shelley himself regarded her as a highly suitable nurse for both Mary’s and Claire’s children. She understood such extra-matrimonial matters. Her own little girl, whose age is uncertain, was called Aimée, and the stepfather’s name was Romieux. But Elise’s maiden name is unknown.
⁶
Claire liked Elise, and described her as ‘a very superior Swiss woman of about thirty, a mother herself’.
⁷
Elise was not, as has often been conjectured, an innocent working-class maidservant in her teens. She was a woman of some education, with sexual experience, and was in fact the oldest member of Shelley’s party by four or five years. The parallel with Elizabeth Hitchener is obvious, and her
possible importance in the triangular relationship between Mary, Claire and Shelley thus becomes partially evident. There is no record of Elise’s personal appearance, or of her attractions, and nothing that Shelley wrote at this time seems to imply more than his complete trust in her. She was almost one of the family.

After Chambéry, which they left on Saturday, 28 March, the carriage ploughed through the snow over Mount Cenis and along the Napoleonic route across the Pont du Diable. Shelley was in high spirits, and sang all the way according to Claire, his voice echoing off the cascades of frozen ice, the snow cliffs and the precipices. His songs were improvised snatches of atheistical verse, about gods being ‘hung on every tree’, and he joked gleefully about the Promethean possibilities of the landscape, and the world of mythic monsters, asserting ‘that the Mountains are God’s
Corps de Ballet
of which the Jungfrau is Mademoiselle Milanie’.
⁸
They came down into the sunlit meadows and primroses of Susa the next day, and reached Turin and went to the opera on 1 April. Finally, on the 4th, they reached their first objective in Italy, Milan, with its splendid theatre, its opera house and its cathedral bristling with white pinnacles and statuary. Their first monument in Italy was a symbolic one: ‘a ruined arch of magnificent proportions in the Greek taste standing in a kind of road of green lawn overgrown with violets and primroses’. Shelley was delighted to be shown round it by a
blonde
Italian girl, as he stressed to Peacock, who seemed to him like Fuseli’s Eve.
⁹
Perhaps he had re-entered the Paradise.

Settling themselves at a small apartment in the Locande Reale, they embarked on a whirl of operatic and balletic evenings in Milan. Shelley wrote to England to inform his friends of their safe arrival, and general health and high spirits. He was planning, he told Peacock, a tragedy on the subject of Tasso’s madness, which he intended to take the whole summer writing, once they got settled in a house: ‘I thirst to be settled that I may begin.’ During the day Claire wrote long notes on the power of the Italian ballet, which swept both her and Shelley off their feet. ‘It is full of mad and intoxicating joy, which nevertheless is accompanied by voluptuousness.’ They saw an adaptation of
Othello
, and Maria Pallerini, dancing Desdemona, was described by Claire in terms that reflect upon Shelley’s poetry: ‘Her walk is more like the sweepings of the wind than the steps of a mortal, and her attitudes are pictures.’
¹⁰
It was something of this combination of liquid line and sculptural frieze that Shelley was trying to achieve in his writing. Italy at first acquaintance seemed to awake so many correspondences and resonances in Shelley’s mind that it came like a revelation; he barely had time to ask after ‘Cobbett and politics’, or the proofs for his own forthcoming volume, to be entitled
Rosalind and Helen
. Even the papist cathedral offered itself to him in the most vivid and sympathetic way. ‘It is built of white marble
& cut into pinnacles of immense height & the utmost delicacy of workmanship, & loaded with sculpture. The effect of it, piercing the solid blue with those groups of dazzling spires relieved by the serene depth of this Italian Heaven, or by moonlight when the stars seem gathered among those sculptured shapes is beyond anything I had imagined architecture capable of producing.’ Inside, the sombre luxury of the stained glass, the ‘massy granite columns overloaded with antique figures & the silver lamps that burn forever’ seemed to him like a ‘gorgeous sepulchre’. Curiously none of this repelled him, and there was one particular spot in the aisles behind the high altar where the light was ‘dim and yellow under the storied window’, which he visited regularly in the afternoons to read Dante whom he had selected for his guide into Italian literature. He was reading the
Purgatorio
.
¹¹

More mundane things pleased him and Mary too: the pensione was very reasonable, and the cost of basic foods seemed very low, ‘the finest bread, made of sifted flour the whitest & the best I ever tasted is only
one English penny
a pound’.
¹²
Only a few luxuries — including, unfortunately, tea — were ludicrously expensive.

Now Shelley had finally arrived in Italy with his not inconsiderable entourage, two problems immediately presented themselves. First, to find and lease a house where they might all settle in congenial surroundings. Second, to present little Allegra to Lord Byron and help reach a satisfactory agreement for Claire. Until these things were settled, the possibility of getting on with his drama on the madness of Tasso remained at a distance, although he was busily reading up ‘Lives’ by Giovanni Manso (1619) and Pietro Serassi (1785), which he had found in the Milan bookshops.
¹³
Shelley and Mary decided that if they could find a suitable house on Lake Como, which lay some six hours’ ride to the north, both problems would be solved. Byron could be invited to visit them there from Venice and collect his child. Accordingly over the weekend of 10–13 April, leaving Claire with the nurses and the children, they visited the steep surrounds of the lake together. They admired the masses of laurel and wild fig trees, the plantations of olives and lemons, and the smart villas of the Milanese nobility, and they decided to lease the Villa Pliniana, ‘so called from a fountain which ebbs & flows every three hours described by the younger Pliny which is in the courtyard’. The rooms of the villa were huge, empty and echoing and in an advanced state of disrepair; it stood in a solitary position giving precipitously on to the lake, surrounded by gloomy black rocks, waterfalls and huge cypress trees. The garden was full of snakes.

Shelley at least was enthusiastic and applied for the lease; but Mary seems to have felt uncomfortable in the place, and there was a curious incident involving Shelley’s pistols which did not reassure her. She carefully omitted all reference
to it in her journal, but on their return to Milan on Sunday evening Shelley told Claire one version of it which was noted in her diary.

When they were at Como S thought he would take a walk to some solitary place that he might fire off his pistol which had been loaded during our whole Journey. In walking he observed two men to follow him & when he had got pretty far he stopped till they came up to him. They said they were Police & must take him into Custody as it was forbidden to any one to be carrying Arms about as he was. He expostulated but they persisted in carrying him before the Prefect. This gentleman when he heard that Shelley was an Englishman and his intention with regard to the pistol behaved with the greatest politeness but said he should keep the pistol safe in his custody till he had heard from Madame Shelley that her husband had no intention of shooting himself through the head. Mary having certified this — the Pistol was rendered.
¹⁴

No explanation of why Shelley was followed in the first place by the police, or why the prefect thought Shelley was contemplating blowing out his own brains was forthcoming. Claire merely noted that it was ‘a curious adventure’.

Writing the following day to Peacock, Shelley seems to have undergone a temporary disillusionment with the Italians: ‘The men are hardly men, they look like a tribe of stupid and shrivelled slaves, & I do not think I have seen a gleam of intelligence in the countenance of man since I passed the Alps. The women in enslaved countries are always better than the men; but they have tight laced figures, & features & mien which express (O how unlike the French!) a mixture of the coquette and the prude that reminds one of the worst characteristics of English women.’
¹⁵
They now spent their time reading, or playing chess or taking evening carriage rides round the Corso while waiting for the result of the lease application. Shelley wrote to Byron and invited him, somewhat prematurely, to the Villa Pliniani: ‘If you would come and visit us — and I don’t know where you could find a heartier welcome — little Allegra might return with you.’
¹⁶
From Claire he passed on a message asking if Byron had received the lock of Allegra’s hair which she had sent. He moved on from the
Purgatorio
to the
Paradiso
.