The Monsters (22 page)

A portion of the tempest and of thee!

How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,

And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!

And now again ’tis black,—and now, the glee

Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth,

As if they did rejoice o’er a young earthquake’s birth.

On the tenth of June, Byron rented the much larger Villa Diodati, “the prettiest place on all the Lake,” he recalled, just
a ten-minute walk from Shelley’s new dwelling. From its second-floor balcony there was a stunning view of the water and the
mountains beyond, but the house also attracted Byron because it had associations with John Milton, a poet he particularly
admired. It had been the property of the Diodati family, one of whose members was Charles Diodati, Milton’s schoolmate and
only close friend. Their personalities had been opposites: Diodati was carefree and adventurous, Milton bookish and almost
antisocial. Milton had spent some time at Lake Geneva with Diodati before the present villa house was built. Tragically, Diodati
was destined to die young. In the elegy Milton had written for him, the poet said that they were “most intimate friends from
childhood on.” Their loving relationship had a deep resonance for Byron.

The new residences did not, however, guarantee privacy. Byron’s reputation had preceded him, and the news that he was now
involved with one or more of the Shelley group—famous in their own right—set the local rumor mills churning. English tourists
could keep up to date with the news from home by reading the gossipy
Galignani’s Messenger,
so they knew all about Byron, Caroline, Augusta, and Annabella. The chitchat about him was to be a continual nightmare for
Byron. Jacques Dejean, the hotel proprietor, rented telescopes to his guests so they could watch the comings and goings at
Villa Diodati. Some oglers mistook tablecloths hanging to dry over the balcony for petticoats—starting the story that the
women took them off when they visited Byron. The poet remembered it bitterly: “There is no story so absurd that they did not
invent it at my cost. I was watched by glasses [telescopes] on the opposite shore of the Lake, and by glasses too that must
have had very distorted optics. I was waylaid in my evening drives—I was accused of corrupting all the
grisettes
[young girls] in the Rue Basse. I believe that they looked upon me as a man-monster.” Unfortunately for those who hoped to
glimpse a spicy scene through their telescopes, “it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for
days to the house,” as Mary recalled. Despite—or perhaps because of—this, many now believed that Byron was sleeping with both
of the Godwin stepsisters. The Lutheran clergyman John Pye Smith, traveling in Switzerland that summer, wrote that on August
9, “at about a mile & a half from the town, we passed the house in which Lord Byron lives, in a sullen & disgraceful seclusion.
Besides his servants, his only companions are two wicked women. He sees no company; and Mr. Ferriere told us that no person
of respectability would visit him.” The poet Robert Southey repeated some of these rumors and added that Byron and Shelley
had formed a “League of Incest.” Byron never forgave him for it, though he later pointed out reasonably that since none of
them were actually blood kin to any of the others, incest could not have entered into their relations.

Lord Glenbie, another visitor to Geneva that summer, noted in his Swiss travel diary that Byron was being “cut” by everyone.
Byron summed up the downside of fame in the lines:

With false Ambition what had I to do?

Little with love, and least of all with Fame!

And yet they came unsought, and with me grew,

And made me all which they can make—a Name.

Because the Villa Diodati was larger than the Shelley cottage, it became the favored place for the five young people to gather.
Claire, who still had not revealed her pregnancy to anyone, hoped to put her relationship with Byron on a sounder basis—if
nothing else, to persuade him to acknowledge her as his mistress. The only way she knew how to do this was pursue him.

Byron evidently used Polidori as a kind of chaperone to make it difficult for Claire to catch him alone. Polidori, meanwhile,
developed a crush on Mary and sought to impress her with his knowledge of literature and science. Byron noticed this, and
on one occasion prompted Polidori to make a fool of himself. Early one afternoon, as the two men stood on the second-floor
balcony of the Villa Diodati, they saw Mary stroll up the hill toward the villa. Rain had made the ground slick and she was
having a little difficulty. Byron told Polidori, “Now you who wish to be gallant ought to jump down this small height, and
offer your arm.” At once, Polidori swung himself over the balcony rail, but when he dropped to the ground, he slipped badly
and sprained his ankle. Byron could not stifle his laughter, even though he helped carry Polidori inside and gave him a pillow
for his foot. It turned out to be a serious injury that hobbled Polidori for the rest of the year.

Polidori got his revenge. While the group was out boating, whether by design or accident, Polidori struck Lord Byron with
an oar on his knee. The blow was hard enough to cause Byron to turn his head away to hide the pain. As reported by Thomas
Moore, Byron’s friend and biographer:

After a moment he [Lord Byron] said, “Be so kind, Polidori, another time, to take more care, for you hurt me very much.”—“I
am glad of it,” answered the other; “I am glad to see you can suffer pain.” In a calm suppressed tone, Lord Byron replied,
“Let me advise you, Polidori, when you, another time, hurt any one, not to express your satisfaction. People don’t like to
be told that those who give them pain are glad of it; and they cannot always command their anger. It was with some difficulty
that I refrained from throwing you into the water; and, but for Mrs. Shelley’s presence, I should probably have done some
such rash thing.” This was said without ill temper, and the cloud soon passed away.

Byron did much of his best work late at night—he went to bed at dawn and did not get up until the afternoon—and the four others
adjusted to his schedule. For Shelley and Mary, this gave them the mornings to study and read and sail. Mary happily had Shelley
to herself: they had hired a twenty-one-year-old Swiss woman called Elise to help take care of William, and Claire was distracted
by her desperate pursuit of Byron.

Mary did, however, have a new rival for Shelley’s attention. Everything exotic and strange attracted Byron, and Shelley fell
into that category. When Byron finally rose from his bed, he often went sailing with Shelley in the boat the two of them had
purchased.

Byron was intensely stimulated by Shelley’s ideas and it showed in the outpouring of work he accomplished that summer—he completed
the third canto of
Childe Harold,
wrote
The Prisoner of Chillon,
and began
Manfred
. Their friendship had less influence on Shelley’s poetry; Byron may even have had an inhibiting influence on the younger
man, who later said, “I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending.”

Mary was not unaware of Byron’s handsome profile. She would later write of him, “Beauty sat on his countenance and power beamed
from his eye.” He and Shelley were such opposites: one fair, the other dark; the younger man frail and neurasthenic, the elder
robust and athletic. Shelley’s voice was high-pitched, while Byron’s was deep and dramatic. Nonetheless, for Mary, Byron’s
intellect was his true attraction. She was flattered by any signs that he admired her opinions.

The two men had contrasting attitudes toward women. Shelley wanted intellectual companions as well as lovers, whereas Byron
held women in low esteem and, with the exception of his sister, did not take them seriously. That attitude certainly extended
to Claire, who was merely a sex object to him.

When storms drove the five inside, they read aloud to one another or simply talked late into the night. Mary described those
wet evenings to Thomas Moore: “We often sat up in conversation till the morning light. There was never a lack of subjects,
and grave or gay, we were always interested.” Byron usually chose the topic of conversation and directed his remarks at Shelley,
showing that he didn’t care to hear the others’ views. Mary the Dormouse listened intently as Byron and Shelley discussed
art, literature, science, politics, and philosophy. The two men were fundamentally different in their view of humankind. Byron
believed that people were born with a set nature and they could choose only to deal with, protest, or endure their human conditions.
Shelley felt that people were more plastic—that they could succeed in perfecting themselves and overcome anything.

One night, the conversation turned to what Mary called “the nature of the principle of life.” The theory of vitalism, popular
among the Romantics’ contemporaries, held that an élan vital, or life force, distinguished living things from nonliving things.
Some thought that there was a connection between the élan vital and electricity. Byron, Shelley, and Polidori had heard of
Luigi Galvani, an Italian scientist, who had shown in 1786 that he could produce muscular contractions in dead frogs by touching
them with a pair of scissors during an electrical storm. In so doing, Galvani conjectured the existence of an “animal electricity”
that produced life. Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, carried the work a step farther. In 1803 Aldini performed experiments
on human corpses, using a Leyden jar. He claimed that by applying electricity, he could make dead bodies sit up, raise their
arms, clench their fists, and blow out candles placed before their mouths. Stories had circulated in Europe that dead bodies
had even been brought back to life.

Seated quietly to the side, sometimes making clear copies of Byron’s poems that could be sent to his publisher (Byron hated
this kind of tedious work, which both Mary and Claire did for him), Mary filed away everything she heard. She was not completely
ignorant of modern science, though her father had not made it a part of her education. As a girl, she might have heard Humphry
Davy discuss his experiments with light, heat, and gases at her father’s house, although Godwin indicated what he thought
of science when, referring to Davy, he said, “What a pity such a man should degrade his vast talents to Chemistry.” But living
with Shelley, a science enthusiast from boyhood, had broadened Mary’s knowledge.

What Mary brought to the summer was a lifetime of reading. Just during 1815 and the summer of 1816, she read works by Goethe,
Schiller, Calderon, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, Alfieri, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Matthew “Monk” Lewis, as well as Byron
and Shelley. Many novels, most of them in the popular Gothic genre, were also on her reading lists—as indeed they were for
the other members of the group as well. The Romantic writers and thinkers did not view the genre with disdain, but rather
embraced it as part of their revolt against eighteenth-century rationalism. Gothic authors, they felt, were tapping into deep,
primal feelings.

On June 16, the weather was particularly dramatic and as the five huddled around the fireplace of the Villa Diodati, Byron
selected a volume of German ghost stories (called “flutter” stories because of their effect on the hearts of readers) translated
into French. The book was
Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d’histoires d’apparitions de spectres, revenants, fantomes, etc.
The word
fantasmagorie
describes the theatrical art of making ghosts and other phenomena appear through optical illusions. The spectacle was invented
in 1798 when the Belgian Étienne Gaspard Roberts staged a show using lanterns and transparent slides to project images. The
shows frightened and delighted audiences with visions of disembodied heads, skeletons, and spectral figures. Mary and Shelley
had in fact attended one of these spectacles in London on December 28, 1814, at the same performance where they had heard
Andrew Crosse’s lecture on electricity. Mary must have remembered that occasion when Byron read the title of the book, for
she was fond of words, and she had noted “phantasmagoria” in her journal eighteen months earlier.

The tales in the book Byron now read from were written in the same spirit as Roberts’s show. Byron obviously chose them for
the effects he could create, reading in his sonorous, emotional voice. Anyone who has ever been in an isolated house during
a storm knows the feelings the imagination can produce in that situation. Every lightning flash and thunderclap made Byron’s
listeners jump. Each movement of the shadows thrown by the candles added to the nervous tension.

One of the stories in the collection concerned twin sisters, one of whom had died. A young duke arrives at the castle of the
dead girl’s father; he relates that he has recently seen her in Paris. The girl’s father has her grave opened because he wonders
if she may have been “re-animated.” The body is still there, but a year after the girl’s death, it has remained uncorrupted.
At the climax of the story, at the surviving girl’s wedding, the dead sister appears and takes her place as the lover of the
groom. Mary could not have helped noting the comparison between herself and Claire, who had competed with her for Shelley
earlier, and had now returned to intrude again. But before Mary had much time to ponder any parallels, Byron began another
tale, one that he must certainly have known spookily mirrored Mary and Percy’s own situation. This was “La Revenant,” about
a girl who defies her father by marrying someone he does not approve of; later she loses her baby and then is abandoned by
her husband. Through it all, thunder cracked and the moaning of winds provided a sort of lamenting chorus.

Recalling that fateful evening years later, Mary did not describe herself as being particularly disturbed by the tales. Instead,
she said they “excited in us a playful desire of imitation.” Byron, pleased with their reaction, suggested that each of them
write a ghost story. To Mary, for some reason, he gave added encouragement. “You and I,” he told her “will publish ours together.”
Byron was not in the habit of putting himself on an equal basis with a woman, and certainly not from the standpoint of writing
ability, so he may very well have said this simply to annoy Claire or Polidori, who clearly would have liked to publish something
as Byron’s equal. But once said, a die was cast. (Mary herself ignored Claire’s role in the contest when she wrote later,
“There were four of us.”)