The Monsters (20 page)

But the affair was not moving quickly enough for Claire, and she cast aside any feigned delicacy to take the initiative. She
sent Byron a letter that plainly offered him her sexual favors: “Have you then any objection to the following plan? On Thursday
Evening we may go out of town together by some stage or mail about the distance of 10 or 12 miles. there we shall be free
& unknown; we can return early the next morning. I have arranged every thing here so that the slightest suspicion may not
be excited.” Many years later, Claire explained her actions:

I was young, and vain, and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent, so famous that people, and especially young people, hardly
considered him as a man at all, but rather as a god. His beauty was haunting as his fame, and he was all-powerful in the direction
in which my ambition turned. It seems to me almost needless to say that the attentions of a man like this, with all London
at his feet, very quickly completely turned the head of a girl in my position; and when you recollect that I was brought up
to consider marriage not only as a useless but as an absolutely sinful custom, that only bigotry made necessary, you will
scarcely wonder at the result, which you know.

It was not very difficult to get into Byron’s bed, and Claire soon found herself his mistress. Or as Byron later described
the affair, “if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours, there is but one way . . .” It meant little to Byron—he
insisted to Augusta, “I am not in love—nor have any love left for any.” But to Claire it was a transforming experience. Years
later she called the sexual experience perfect. She scribbled on a note to Byron: “God bless you—I
never
was so happy.” In old age, however, she would have another view of the situation. “I am unhappily the victim of a
happy passion;
I had one like all things perfect in its kind, it was fleeting and mine lasted ten minutes but these ten minutes have discomposed
the rest of my life.”

In fact her involvement with Byron in England was more like two months than ten minutes. Toward the end of it, she asked more
and more insistently what his address overseas would be. “I assure you,” she wrote, “nothing shall tempt me to come to Geneva
by myself since you disapprove of it [and] as I cannot but feel that such conduct would be highly indelicate.” In the end,
he gave her only the address, “Geneva, Poste Restante,” the equivalent of general delivery. That would not deter Claire, who
proved even more persistent than Caroline Lamb, and had another trump card to play: she was pregnant, a secret she would keep
until the summer.

Byron, though deeply in debt, had a coach specially built for his travels in Europe—an exact replica of the one Napoleon had
used. Virtually a palace on wheels, it was large enough to hold his bed, a traveling library, and a chest with a complete
dinner service for two. It required four to six horses to pull it, and drew crowds wherever Byron traveled. The bill for it
was five hundred pounds. It was characteristic of Byron that he never paid it. He fled England in April 1816. A mob of creditors
descended on his London home almost immediately, stripping it of everything of value.

I
busied myself to think of a story.—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the
mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood,
and quicken the beatings of the heart.
I
f
I
did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.

—Mary Shelley, introduction to
Frankenstein,
1831

M
ARY SHELLEY WROTE
the words above some fifteen years after the “haunted summer” of 1816 on Lake Geneva. Her journals for that crucial summer,
along with all but two letters, are lost—possibly destroyed intentionally in the image-cleansing effort that she and her daughter-in-law
undertook later. Their absence leaves a gap in our knowledge, and requires us to accept Mary’s explanation for the source
of her inspiration.

The forces that brought together the five young people who met at Byron’s villa are clear enough. Byron himself was fleeing
England and the scandal that enveloped his name. He intended to spend the summer relaxing, but not so far away that friends
from England could not visit him. France was less appealing to him now that the monarchy had been restored, and so he chose
Switzerland as a base. Claire, of course,
had
to pursue Byron because he was her love-trophy and the father of the child growing within her. Claire had disclosed the latter
fact to no one else as yet; instead, she enlisted Shelley and Mary as her companions by revealing only the first of her secrets:
she had become Byron’s lover.

But, still, why did Mary agree to go? It must have seemed like a repetition of her original elopement with Shelley, in which
Claire tagged along. Moreover, Mary now was nursing a five-month-old son, William, and that could not have made traveling
any easier. Shelley, still complaining of illness, had wanted to go to sunny Italy that summer, but—intrigued by the possibility
of meeting Byron—his intentions changed after Claire’s announcement. So Mary had to follow him, even if reluctantly, unaware
that she was heading toward her destiny, but perhaps sensing that Byron could help her accomplish what she had to do.

The spectre of her mother always hung over Mary, reminding her that she had an obligation to live up to her heritage, to prove
herself a worthy daughter. Now that Mary had incurred the displeasure of her revered father, it seemed even more important
for her to achieve something momentous, as her parents had. Living, studying, reading with Shelley had taught Mary a great
deal, and she was conscious of her ripening talents. Would it not be possible, she may have asked herself, that she could
learn even more from Byron, a man renowned for his creative genius?

The act of creation and the supremacy of imagination were, of course, of central concern to all the Romantic writers. From
her girlhood, Mary had listened to discussions of creativity among the visitors at her father’s home. Samuel Coleridge had
written that imagination is an “echo of the Infinite.” William Blake believed that man could become divine through love and
imagination, and he combined poetry and art to tap the deepest resources of the human psyche. Mary’s own creation, a man who
hoped to assume divine powers as the father of a brand-new race of humans, would be right in line with this creative tradition.

During that fateful summer in Geneva, nature showed the full force of its power. Byron, Shelley, and Mary all wrote letters
about the unusual weather. Byron complained, “We have had lately such stupid mists—fogs—rains—and perpetual density—that one
would think Castlereagh [a British Tory foreign minister hated by Byron] had the foreign affairs of the kingdom of Heaven
also—upon his hands.” Not since the year of Mary’s birth had the weather been this bad. Unknown to them, the frightening natural
phenomena were the result of a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) the year before. The
cataclysm literally tore the top off Mount Tambora, reducing its height by 3,600 feet and sending some thirty-five cubic
miles
of debris into the air—the greatest such disaster in recorded history. The dust particles dispersed in the atmosphere and
eventually circled the globe, cutting off the light of the sun, cooling air temperatures, and causing frequent storms.

Thunderstorms punctuate Mary’s novel just as they did her summer, and in the most prosaic of ways a storm played a part in
the novel’s creation: it forced the five friends indoors, where the contest began. Many years later on a return trip to Geneva
with her son, Mary would see her achievement as part of her time in Switzerland “when first I stepped out from childhood into
life.” Viewed in isolation, her novel appeared with all the unpredictable brilliance of a jagged bolt of lightning. But the
emotions surrounding that summer had come from a long-brewing storm that at long last liberated Mary’s creativity. She blossomed
with a masterpiece that made her Mary Wollstonecraft’s true daughter.

On May 2, 1816, the Shelley party—Percy, Mary, Claire and little William—set out from England. They retraced the route of
their elopement trip two years earlier, but this time had more money and could travel in style by closed carriage. Mary’s
spirits rose, for she was leaving behind her disapproving father as well as the melancholy she had felt on the anniversary
of the death of her first child.

When they reached France, Claire sent a note to Byron’s Geneva address, using Mary as bait: “you will I suppose wish to see
Mary who talks & looks at you with admiration; you will, I dare say, fall in love with her; she is very handsome & very amiable
& you will no doubt be blest in your attachment; nothing could afford me more pleasure.”

The travelers moved through France to the border with Switzerland, where they had to ascend a steep pass over the Jura Mountains.
Riding in a carriage drawn by four horses, with ten men walking alongside to steady it on the treacherous mountain road, they
left the town of Les Rousses just as night was falling. While snow pelted the windows and the men outside yelled commands
at each other, the carriage struggled up the rugged terrain. Mary, peering out, was thrilled by the awesome scenery, finding
it “desolate” yet “sublime.”

On May 14, the Shelley party descended from the peaks to the shore of Lake Geneva. They took a suite of rooms at the Hotel
d’Angleterre in Secheron, a suburb on the outskirts of Geneva. Mary was energized by the beauty of the snow-capped Alps that
hovered around them, “the majestic Mont Blanc, highest and queen of all.” Three days after their arrival, she wrote to Fanny
in exhilaration, “I feel as happy as a new-fledged bird, and hardly care what twig I fly to, so that I may try my new-found
wings.” She and Shelley rented a small sailboat and took it out on the lake. Mary treasured those happy moments, when if the
weather permitted they often stayed out till ten o’clock in the evening and on their return were “saluted by the delightful
scent of flowers and new mown grass, and the chirp of grasshoppers, and the song of the evening birds.” She and Shelley continued
their literary pursuits, reading and writing all morning long. Mary started to write a children’s book that she later gave
to her father to publish. The couple also began to translate Godwin’s
Political Justice
into French as another gift to the greedy philosopher, who sent Shelley a letter with the exciting news that Godwin had found
someone willing to purchase some of Shelley’s property, so that Shelley could give Godwin more money.

Like other tourists, they explored. The area around Geneva had many literary associations. Such people as John Milton, Voltaire,
the historian Edward Gibbon, and—for them, best of all—Rousseau had been born nearby or had lived in temporary homes along
the lake by the city. That summer, the well-known writer Madame de Staël, former participant in the French Revolution (who
had fled during the Terror), lived nearby, as usual hosting both intellectuals and the socially prominent at her salon. It
was a bracing atmosphere.

Meanwhile, Claire was anxious because Byron, who had left England before them, had not yet arrived. She visited the post office
and saw, uncollected, the letter she had sent him from Paris. She now left a second one, saying, “I leave this for you that
you may write me a little note when you do arrive.”

Byron was taking his time. His huge Napoleonic carriage (with the initials L. B. prominently painted on the sides) attracted
attention, and crowds gathered round it to catch a glimpse of the most notorious man in Europe. His estranged wife, Annabella,
who received news of him regularly, learned that “the curiosity to see him was so great that many ladies accoutred themselves
as chambermaids for the purpose of obtaining under that disguise a nearer inspection.”

Byron was accompanied by his longtime valet, Fletcher, and his personal physician, the young, handsome, and earnest John Polidori.
Polidori was as much interested in a literary career as a medical one, and unknown to Byron, the doctor had been promised
five hundred pounds by Byron’s own publisher to write an account of the poet’s European tour. When they left England, Polidori
began a journal to use as a source. Like other literary “evidence” about the group, it does not exist in original form. It
begins on April 24 and continues to the end of the year, but there is a significant and frustrating gap from June 30 to September
16. In addition, the diary was later copied and edited by Polidori’s sister, who burned the original after removing passages
she found improper—and because her brother was traveling with Byron, they must have been numerous.

Polidori was from a distinguished literary family. His Italian grandfather, Agostino Ansano Polidori, had combined literature
with medicine by writing a long poem in
ottava rima
on the human skeleton, titled
Osteologia
. John’s father, Gaetano, studied law, but went on to become a secretary for Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian Romantic poet.
He remained with Alfieri for four years and nursed him through a near-fatal illness, but it was rumored that the poet was
jealous of his assistant’s good looks, which attracted women. After parting ways with Alfieri, Gaetano went to England, where
he met and married Anna Maria Pierce, a governess. John William, the oldest of their four sons, was born on September 7, 1795.
Though Gaetano himself was not a devout Catholic, he raised his sons to be Roman Catholics, while the couple’s four daughters
were brought up in the Anglican Church. Catholics in England had freedom to worship in their faith at this time, but they
still lacked political rights. (Byron had spoken out for Catholic emancipation in the House of Lords.)