Shelley: The Pursuit

  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.

  After some ten days of delay, during which time no news was heard from Como, Shelley received a letter from Byron announcing somewhat abruptly that the invitation to Milan was unsuitable and ill-advised, that he had no wish to see Claire, but that he would send a messenger to collect the child. Some indication of Byron’s attitude is revealed in another letter, to his friend Cam Hobhouse, in which he referred to the subject of Allegra with studied flippancy: ‘A clark can bring the papers’, he wrote, talking of necessities to be brought from England in the spring, ‘(and, bye-the-bye, my shild, by Clare, at the same time. Pray desire Shelley to pack it carefully), with tooth-powder, red only; magnesia, soda-powders, tooth-brushes, diachylon plaster, and any new novels good for anything.’17 Byron seems to have been particularly sensitive to the scandalous talk that was circulating about his life in the demi-monde of Venice; and the Shelleys themselves had heard much colourful gossip even in Milan.

  Caught between Byron and Claire, and with the immediate prospect of Byron’s messenger arriving to collect the child, Shelley was once again placed in a position where he could only mediate. His response, given at length in a letter written back to Byron on the same day, 22 April, was prompt and well judged, expressed in terms both graceful and firm that showed Shelley at his most diplomatic and mature. On the immediate issue he was definite: ‘If your messenger arrives before Clare [sic] and you have come to an understanding on this subject, I shall detain him until further orders, unless your instructions are explicit that he shall not stay.’ To this he added: ‘You write as if from the instant of its departure all future intercourse were to cease between Clare and her child. This I cannot think you ought to have expected, or even to have desired.’ He then argued with disarming candour against Byron’s attempt to shirk the real nature of his emotional responsibilities towards both child and mother. ‘I know the arguments present in your mind on this subject; but surely, rank and reputation, and prudence are as nothing in comparison to a mother’s claims . . . . I assure you, my dear Lord Byron, I speak earnestly, and sincerely. It is not that I wish to make out a case for Clare; my interest, as you must be aware, is entirely on the opposite side. Nor have I in any manner influenced her. I have esteemed it a duty to leave her to the impulse of her own feelings in a case where, if she has no feeling, she has no claim. But in truth, if she is to be brought to part with her child, she requires reassurance and tenderness. A tie so near the heart should not be rudely snapt. It was in this persuasion that I hoped (I had a thousand other reasons for wishing to see you) that you would have accepted our invitation to the Pliniana. Clare’s pain would then have been mitigated by the prospect of seeing her child with you, and she would have been reassured of the fears which your letter had just confirmed, by the idea of a repetition of the visit. Your conduct must at present wear the aspect of great cruelty, however you justify it to yourself. Surely, it is better if we err, to err on the side of kindness, than of rigour. You can stop when you please; and you are not so infirm of purpose that soothing words, and gentle conduct need betray you in essential matters further than you mean to go.’[1]

  Byron may have felt that Shelley was more interested in Claire’s cause than he pretended to be; and for himself, he was not at all sure how firm his purpose was in ‘essential matters’. In any case, to stay under the same roof with Claire was now an impossibility. Whatever other concessions he made, he always steadfastly refused to see Claire again. Nevertheless Shelley’s calm reasonings and reproaches had considerable effect. When Byron wrote again, on the 27th, it was in a kinder and more compromising tone, promising to take the greatest personal interest in the child if she came to Venice, and assuring Shelley that Claire would be permitted to visit Allegra during the summer. Subsequently Shelley held him to his word, and the arrangement was honoured.18

  Shelley’s letter had also succeeded in amusing and flattering Byron on the question of scandalous gossip, with which Byron was initially c
oncerned. ‘This is the common lot of all who have distinguished themselves among men,’ he informed Byron. ‘When Dante walked through the streets, the old women pointed at him, and said, “That is the man who went to Hell with Virgil; see how his beard is singed.” Stories unlike this, but to the full as improbable and monstrous, are propagated of you at Venice; but I know not wherefore you should regard them.’19

  Shelley might have been less nonchalant if he had known some of the details of Byron’s modus vivendi at Venice. The massive grey-stone Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal, a few hundred yards from San Marco, had seen a stream of buxom and disreputable ladies, and was the centre of much brawling, drinking and political subversion. At this time Byron had just broken off with one courtesan, Marianna La Segati, and attached himself to another, Margarita Cogni. The latter was a voluptuous black-eyed baker’s wife, ‘fit to breed gladiators from’, as he had boasted to a friend. He added drily, in a letter to Hobhouse: ‘. . . my old “relazione” is over, but I have got several new ones (and a Clap, which is nearly well at present).’20 Byron, now 30 years old, was indulging in what was to be in fact his last thoroughly libidinous household, with a wildness that began to approach desperation. By the end of the year 1818, in which he had begun his greatest poem, Don Juan, he was to be discovered morosely climbing the balcony of an 18-year-old Italian heiress at midnight. He afterwards told Medwin that he was indifferent to the outcome of the affair, and did not care whether the police officer had come to have him shot or married.21 Flippancy had become a last refuge. If Byron had not visited Hell with Virgil, it was nevertheless a curiously Venetian kind of Paradise, some of the squalid sublimity of which was caught in the first poem of his maturity, Beppo.[2]

  Shelley added in his letter of the 22nd two strictly practical offers. One was to waive all questions of Allegra’s expenses, which in the circumstances was a generosity he could ill afford. The other was that Allegra’s nurse Milly Shields should go with the child to Venice; ‘Allegra has an English nurse, a very clean and good-tempered woman, whom, in case of a termination of these melancholy differences, I can safely recommend to you.’

  On 27 April Claire celebrated her twentieth birthday in a rather dismal way, and news reached Shelley that the application for the lease on Villa Pliniana had not succeeded. This was possibly something to do with the unfortunate impression he had made on the local prefect, but the exact reason is not known. The failure of the Lake Como plan had a decisive influence on the shape of Shelley’s life for the next nine months. He became virtually a tourist, constantly on the move, and until his arrival at Naples in the winter of 1818–19, rarely stayed for more than a few weeks in any one part of the country. Shelley revelled in the constant change of scenery and impressions, and wrote a series of long letters to Peacock which together compose a brilliant Italian travelogue, and are comparable with the great travel letters of Dickens, Trollope and Lawrence. Yet the restless life of the tourist, with its discomforts and expense, was certainly not what Mary and Shelley had planned in the previous autumn. The loss of the Pliniana was eventually to have another more terrible effect, on the children of the family. The immediate consequence of this came on the 28th, when Shelley, unable to press Byron any further with the Lake Como plan, persuaded Claire to release Allegra, and the child departed for Venice in company with Byron’s messenger Merryweather and a nurse. Claire, wrote Shelley, ‘is wretchedly disconsolate, and I know not how I shall calm her, until the return of post’. He planned with Mary to leave Milan at once, to travel southwards to Pisa where ‘I shall attempt to divert Claire’s melancholy by availing myself of some introductions’.

  There was one interesting, and perhaps significant minor change of plan. It was not Milly Shields, but Elise who was sent with Allegra. This was despite the fact that it was Milly who had always been Allegra’s nurse. Shelley’s explanation is given in passing to Byron, but it suggests that the decision was perhaps Mary’s rather than Claire’s or his own. ‘Her attendant is not the servant I alluded to in my last letter; but a Swiss, who has attended my own children, in whom Mrs S. entirely confides, and who even quits us somewhat unwillingly, and whom Mary parts with solely that Clare and yourself may be assured that Allegra will be attended almost with a mother’s care.’22 Why Mary should have thought it more suitable and convenient that Elise should leave their entourage is not immediately evident. Perhaps it was simply felt that as a ‘superior woman’ Elise might be better able to cope with the exigencies of Byron’s household than the young Milly. But one may also detect in the sudden reversal of Shelley’s stated plan a degree of force in Mary’s decision. From subsequent events it seems clear that by the end of April 1818, Mary was glad to have the chance of removing Elise to a safer distance from their circle.

  After a last night at the opera, and the dispatch of brief letters of direction to Hogg and Peacock, they left Milan on the morning of 1 May. To Hogg, Shelley wrote in his old Alastor style, that the lake had ‘those green banks for the sake of which you represented me as wandering over the world. You are more interested in the human part of the experience of travelling; a thing which I see little and understand less, and which if I saw and understood more I fear I should be little able to describe.’23 Later on, however, he was to write amusingly both to Peacock and to Hogg of his impressions of the Italians, especially the Italian women.

  The depleted party, with Claire huddled miserably in the carriage corner, giving vent to fits of moodiness and pique, travelled south-westwards through the plain of Palma. They gazed at the panorama of high meadow grass and wild festoons of vines, which were trained to climb the trees like ivy; and after stopping off at Modena and Bologna, they climbed into the Apennines, before finally descending into the chestnut valleys of the Arno towards Pisa. Amid the Apennines, where they spent one night in a desolate inn, Shelley was struck by the wildness of the landscape, and felt that ‘the imagination cannot find a home in it’.24 Claire listened to the wind which howled dismally, and was taken by a sudden terror that the whole carriage would be blown away.25 Shelley once more drew them together with a grimly humorous speculation about mountain monsters. He jotted down a fragment beginning, ‘Listen, listen, Mary mine, To the whisper of the Apennine’, in which when night falls the mountain itself comes alive and ‘walks abroad with the storm’. The thought seemed to cheer them up.26

  Skirting the Florentine plain, they followed the road along the Arno and came directly into Pisa on 7 May, putting up at the main inn, the Tre Donzelle. The Tre Donzelle stood just across the Ponte Mezzo, at the centre of the long curve of riverside buildings which has made up the city of Pisa since medieval times.[3] They visited the Leaning Tower and the Baptistry, but despondently observed the chain gangs of Italian convicts working in the streets under armed guard, and the curious ghost-like emptiness and dilapidation of the streets — ‘a large disagreeable city almost without inhabitants’. They moved on after a few days towards the sea. This was their first unpromising introduction to the city, apparently so inhospitable, which was eventually to become their home in Italy.

  The port of Livorno, three hours’ ride to the east on the ‘blue and tranquil Mediterranean’, was at least more sociable with a small but semi-permanent colony of expatriate English, among whom were Shelley’s connections, the Gisbornes. This was his first contact in Italy with the international set of radicals and liberals who had moved in the Godwinian circles during the heady days of the nineties, and some of whom he had met, more locally, in Ireland six years before. At the age of 20 Maria Gisborne had been drawn into friendship with Godwin and Holcroft in London through her first husband, Mr Reveley, a merchant with liberal tendencies. After Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, Maria had helped Godwin nurse his young daughter Mary. She was a beautiful and educated woman, and after Reveley’s own death in 1799, Godwin had actually proposed marriage to her. Although she had refused, the friendship had been maintained. In 1800, she married John Gisborne, also a businessman, and went abroad w
ith him and her young son, the following year, to Rome. Letters had continued to pass between the Gisborne and Godwin households. The Gisbornes had been living in Livorno since 1815, and Maria, now aged 48, was widely read in both Spanish and Italian literature, and held something of a minor salon among the more cultivated English at the port. For his part, John Gisborne had been somewhat overshadowed by his clever and maturely attractive wife, and had been forced into the role of retired homme d’affaires and tolerated bore. His letters however show him to have been quite otherwise, an intelligent and reasonable man, and a reliable ally. The Gisbornes were to become some of Shelley’s closest friends in Italy, and to help him both with his writing and with his ceaseless domestic complications. None the less it was characteristic that he accepted from the start the boorish estimate of John, while making use of his services, and addressed most of his conversation and letters to Maria. Only four years later did John Gisborne’s true value become plain to Shelley. Henry Reveley, Maria’s son by her first marriage, training as a marine engineer in Livorno, was also to be involved in Shelley’s affairs.

  On that first evening, Shelley, Mary and Claire at once made their introductions, and during the following fortnight the Gisbornes walked and took tea with them constantly. The Gisbornes’ house, the Casa Ricci in Via Genesi, quickly became their postal address, and they were advised about the surrounding countryside and spas, and recommended to take advantage of the fresh vegetables and unseasonable strawberries with which Mary regaled Marianne and Leigh Hunt.27 Mary’s first impression of them was, ‘reserved, yet with easy manners’, which she liked.28 Shelley’s was more resplendent: ‘we have made some acquaintance with a very amiable and accomplished lady Mrs Gisborne, who is the sole attraction in this most unattractive of cities’.29 On the Gisbornes’ advice, Shelley left Livorno on his own on 26 May to make inquiries for a house at the popular and at that time fashionable spa at the Bagni di Lucca, one day’s ride away, high in the valley of the Lima which flows through the centre of the Apennines. Besides its remedial springs, the Bagni di Lucca boasted several comfortable inns, a casino where dances and dinners were given regularly, and a score of solid summer villas discreetly withdrawn into their separate gardens among the steep, wooded slopes which clustered above the town and its bridge. Among many other English people, Byron was to spend a season here, ensconced in one of the largest villas set back into the hillside.