Footsteps by Richard Holmes
I never found the Villa Valsovano where Mary wrote this—it was allowed to fall into ruins at the turn of the century. But I found an old photograph of it, a large four-square Tuscan farm, with thick stone walls, plain square windows and a shallow tiled roof. It was set on sloping ground, within sight of the sea just south of Livorno, with its own garden and a little olive plantation. Mary recalled sitting on a garden seat in one of the stone arbours of the podere wall, listening to the peasants singing popular tunes from Rossini. She may well have written this journal entry there.
Above her, on the roof of the farmhouse, was the tower that Shelley had adopted as his study, and where he retreated to bask in the sun with his papers and books, trying to forget the misery below. In the photograph the tower shows up as a kind of greenhouse, mounted in the centre of the roof, with large hemispherical windows on each side, and what looks like the palisade of a little balcony. Here Shelley wrote his play about incest and patricide, The Cenci; and The Mask of Anarchy. At midday the tower grew so hot with the sun that Shelley alone could stand it, sitting half-naked at his desk. As I wandered about the little lanes of Monte Nero—I found Byron’s villa, of course: very grand, with statues on either side of the entrance steps—I realised that their “Scythrop’s tower” had become a local architectural fashion. All along the beach road were holiday villas, each with their Tuscan tower—Gothic turrets in pink or orange stucco, modernist blockhouses in white concrete, fairy-tale campanili with dark Tuscan tiles and arched windows and barley-sugar pillars.
Claire’s journal entry was made three years later, in 1822, shortly after Shelley’s death. She had finally decided to leave Italy for good—the first person of Shelley’s circle to act so decisively—and had set out by coach to stay with her brother Charles in Vienna. She may have had a brief affair with Trelawny—but her mind went back to other things. This is what she wrote on 20 September 1822 after leaving Florence for the last time:
We set out for Bologna. During the first part of the road I was too occupied with my own thoughts to attend to the scenery. I remembered how hopelessly I had lingered on Italian soil for five years, waiting ever for a favourable change, instead of which I was now leaving it having [lost every object—deleted] buried there every thing that I loved… Not withstanding the rain which came by fits very heavy, I walked up the steep hills, hoping by fatigue of body to dull the painful activity of mind…
So Claire’s last entry in her Italian journal—the fourteen remaining pages are blank—ends in streaming rain, clambering up the hills above Tagliaferro. She says she has buried “everything” that she loved: so not her child Allegra only, but also Shelley, and perhaps others too! Did she mean little Willmouse, of whom she was so fond? Did she mean Shelley’s mysterious “Neapolitan charge”? Who else did she mean? “Having buried everything that I loved “—not lost, but specifically “buried”. I puzzled over this internment of loved ones. And the “favourable change” she waited for during five long years: presumably that was a change in Byron’s attitude towards her and Allegra. But was this all? Was there also a change in Shelley’s attitude that she waited for?
To begin with, what I wanted to know about Claire was very simple. Had she ever slept with Shelley? There were at least three periods of their life together when this might have happened. During the ménage at Kentish Town in the spring and winter of 1814–15, after they had returned from the elopement, was the first. They were all very young—Claire only sixteen—Mary pregnant with her first child, and Hogg apparently in love with Mary. The extraordinary scenes of those months—rows, walk-outs, midnight terror sessions, hide-and-seek with the bailiffs—suggested intrigues and emotional cross-currents. But, as I learnt to expect at later moments of private drama, the relevant pages of journals and diaries were missing—either torn out, or lost, or subsequently destroyed. The whole six months can be summed up in a phrase from one of Claire’s own letters to her stepsister Fanny Imlay, written from Lynmouth on 28 May 1815, after she had been temporarily driven out by Mary: “so much discontent, such violent scenes, such a turmoil of passion and hatred.”
It can be added that when, a year later, Claire became Byron’s mistress in London, she made a point of saying that she did not believe in marriage and that Shelley would vouch for her character. Byron always accepted that Allegra was his child by Claire, but he also implied that he thought Shelley might previously have been Claire’s lover—and this was to prove, at the least, a source of jealousy and suspicion between the two poets. Nor did Claire, in her many subsequent and heart-breaking appeals to Byron, ever say that she had been a virgin when they met. None the less, Claire always declared that Byron had been the great love of her life—and she claimed it with a lasting bitterness that is utterly convincing.
Many years later, in 1827, she wrote to Jane Williams of her relationship with Byron:
I am unhappily the victim of a happy passion. I had one; like all things perfect in its kind, it was fleeting, and mine only lasted ten minutes, but those ten minutes have discomposed the rest of my life. The passion, God knows from what cause, from no fault of mine, however, disappeared; leaving no trace whatever behind it except my heart wasted and ruined as if it has been scorched by a thousand lightnings. You will, therefore, I hope, excuse my not following the advice you give me in your last letter, of falling in love…
It is sobering to find Claire still writing in this way of events that had taken place during one spring and summer, eleven years previously. But it also suggested to me that, whatever else, her relationship with Shelley was not of the same order of intensity. Nor was it likely to have involved a child—or, at least, not a child like Allegra, separated from her mother, and an endless source of Claire’s bitterness and recriminations. The relationship would have been of a different kind; and inevitably so, for while Claire had never lived with Byron for more than one night at a time she had lived more or less continuously under Shelley’s roof—despite everything that Mary had felt—from 1814 to 1820. At the very least they were old friends.
The second period when they might have been lovers was in that first summer in Italy, between August and October 1818. But it could not have been at the Bagni di Lucca in Mary’s presence, but rather two hundred miles away, on the other side of Italy, in the Euganean hills south-west of Venice.
Letters from Allegra’s nurse in Venice, Elise, had persuaded Claire that she must visit her child without Byron’s knowledge. Shelley decided to accompany her, leaving Mary and his own two children at Casa Bertini. The details of their journeyings and their scheme to deceive Byron, with the help of the British Consul at Venice, Richard Belgrave Hoppner, are characteristically involved, for Claire always had a genius for complicating life. But the upshot was that Shelley and Claire were alone together from the day they left Florence by vettura on 18 August to the day an exhausted Mary and two rather sick children arrived to rejoin them at the Villa Capuccini, at Este, in the Euganean hills, on 5 September. This was a total of nineteen days, or just under three weeks.
Shelley and Claire were again alone together at inns in Padua for several odd days during late September and early October, when Claire was “attending the medico” for some mysterious illness. And finally they were again alone at the Villa Capuccini, except for Elise and Allegra, for four days over the last weekend in October, while Mary remained in Venice.
The only adult witness to these unusually extended periods together was Elise, the nurse, at Este. And Elise was reliably reported to have said, some two years later, that Shelley and Claire had indeed been lovers, and that Claire had in fact conceived a child by Shelley. Her evidence has of course been bitterly disputed by everyone—most of all by Mary—and came to be known as “the Hoppner scandal”.
Once again, Claire’s journal covering the time at Este is missing. Both Shelley and Mary lovingly describe the villa, with its pergola and garden on the brow of a hill, and the summer-house where Shelley began both Julian and Maddalo and Prometheus U
The Hoppner scandal did not break until 1821, and then in a mass of conflicting evidence and testimony, a great deal of it concerned with what may have been a quite different problem: who were the father and mother of Shelley’s “Neapolitan charge”, a child registered in his and Mary’s name on 17 February 1819 at Naples? But what puzzled me at Venice, as I stifled in little rooms filled with the pungent odour of ancient backwaters, was the lack of evidence concerning their behaviour, which actually dated from the autumn of 1818. No letters or notes from Claire to Shelley are known. There are a number of agonised references in Shelley’s poems of the time which could be interpreted as alluding to Claire; but poetic evidence is, generally speaking, the least reliable, simply because it assumes the poet is speaking autobiographically—a perilous assumption at the best of times.
There is indeed one letter of Shelley’s to Claire, written from Venice on 25 September. But this appeared to be exclusively concerned with quite another, and very tragic event, the sudden death of baby Clara. I read this letter over and over in the published text.
“My dear Claire,” it begins, and proceeds to narrate the story of Clara’s convulsions on the journey with Mary to Venice; how they called first one, then a second doctor to the inn; how “in about an hour—how shall I tell you—she died—silently, without pain”. And how “this unexpected stroke reduced Mary to a kind of despair”. Well, that fact alone might lead Shelley to draw a veil over anything else. Yet it remained puzzling. Surely Shelley would have made some remark, some slight gesture, towards Claire? Unless of course there had been nothing special between them at this time after all. The letter ended simply, sadly and directly: “All this is miserable enough—is it not? But must be borne… And above all, my dear girl, take care of yourself. Your affectionate friend, PBS.”
Nothing more to be said, it would seem.
Venice disappointed me. The most religiously preserved of the North Italian cities, despite all the depredations of the sea, it seemed encrusted under so many other associations, so many waves of visitors and pilgrims, that my Romantics were quite lost. The Palazzo Mocenigo was like any other on the Grand Canal, and it was easier to imagine Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach dying here than Byron swimming races and climbing balconies. The Lido had been Shelley’s lovely, desolate
… bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds…
But this abandoned beach had become one of the great hotel fronts and rich playgrounds of the northern Adriatic. I returned like everyone else to San Marco and watched the pigeons swoop, and black battered gondolas ride uneasily at their posts. One post was empty; it stood bare out of the waters, worn by invisible ropes, as if something were missing.
Yes, something was missing all right. Something so small that I did not realise it until I was in Rome, sitting one day in the long grass of the Forum. The text of Shelley’s letter to Claire was not quite complete, as published. The three dots in the penultimate sentence had an editorial note attached: “one line is here erased.” This is common in Shelley’s letters, and is usually of little significance; when checked against the manuscript the erasure or deletion is minor. But here the manuscript was in America, and could not immediately be checked. It was only some time later that I recovered the full text, held by the Pforzheimer Library of New York. The end of Shelley’s letter from Venice, to Claire at the Villa Capuccini, now read very differently. This is what it said: “All this is miserable enough—is it not? But must be borne. Meanwhile forget me & relive not the other thing—And above all, my dear girl, take care of yourself. Your affectionate friend, PBS.”
So there, after all, was exactly that gentle but secret message between them that I had expected. The additional sentence crossed through in contemporary ink—either by Shelley, therefore, or most likely by Claire herself. The very deletion carries its own implication. It does not prove of course that they were lovers at Este; but it does show that Shelley shared something secret and special with Claire, and that now—with little Clara’s death and Mary’s despair—the situation had changed, and he wished to damp it down. “Forget me & relive [or revive] not the other thing”: but if Claire were pregnant (as Elise was to say) it might not have been so easy.
There was a third period when Shelley and Claire might have been lovers: the time between October 1820 and March 1822 when she left Shelley’s household (partly as a result of the Hoppner scandal) and went to stay as a lodger and governess with the Italian family of Dr Bojti in Florence. In the week this parting occurred Claire wrote in her journal: “Think of thyself as a stranger & traveller on the earth, to whom none of the many affairs of this world belong, and who has no permanent township on the globe.”
She was desolate and lonely, and it is clear that life had little meaning without Shelley—except for the endless, nagging possibility that she might still do something to get Allegra back from Byron.
During these next eighteen months Shelley and Claire met frequently—often in secret at Livorno, or at Pugnano outside Pisa. They also corresponded, with Claire using the poste restante at Pisa, and a false name—the wonderfully banal “Mr Joe James”—on Shelley’s instructions, so that Mary should not know of it. Once again, most of these letters have disappeared, but a revealing set of five from Shelley to Claire remain for the final months of their separation between December 1821 and March 1822. It is evident from these that Shelley was missing Claire greatly, and the tone of affection and regret is set by the opening paragraph of a letter of 11 December:
My dearest friend, I should be very glad to receive a confidential letter from you—one totally the reverse of those I write you; detailing all your present occupation & intimacies, & giving me some insight into your future plans. Do not think that my affection or anxiety for you ever cease, or that I ever love you less although that love has been & still must be a source of disquietude to me… Tell me dearest [deleted] what you mean to do, and if it should give you pleasure come & live with us.
Claire of course did finally come to live with them again, four months later in April 1822, at Casa Magni. Yet it is clear that, but for Allegra’s death, Mary would never have assented to it: she was finished for ever with any radical ménage. To those outside Shelley’s immediate circle it was obvious how strange and difficult the triangle of relations between the three had become. Claire’s protectress at Pisa, Mrs Mason—the erstwhile Lady Mountcashell, once a pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft in Ireland—could see the situation in a calm and commonsense light. She could see that Claire would never marry or make an independent life of her own, and that Mary would never be able to enjoy a normal marriage, until Shelley and Claire were permanently separated. She wrote as tactfully as she could to Shelley in May 1822:
I wish Claire had some determined project, but her plans seem unsettled as ever, and she does not see half the reasons for separating herself from your society that really exist… I regret Mary’s loss of good health and spirits, but hope it is only the consequence of her present situation [ie her pregnancy], and therefore merely temporary, but I dread Claire’s being in the same house for a month or two…
“I dread Claire’s being in the same house”—strong words. And words which brought me back once more to Casa Magni. For it was here that I began to realise that the question of Shelley and Claire as lovers, in a simple sexual sense, was a very superfi
What did Shelley himself say about this relationship? He too was inclined to treat the sexual side—and all the speculation it aroused—with a certain nonchalance, even with flippancy. On the occasion of the Hoppner scandal he admits that “the living with Claire as my mistress” would have been a “great error & imprudence” but not a “crime”. In no sense would it have been a moral evil, such as “abandoning a child”—explicitly Claire’s supposed baby—an act which he always most vehemently and convincingly denied. Yet even when writing to Mary at such a tense moment he most carefully avoids actually denying that he and Claire had ever been lovers. Indeed, he is almost teasing on the subject, with a flash of the old rebellious, coat-trailing Shelley of much earlier days. He tells the appalled Mary: “Elise says that Claire was my mistress—that is all very well & so far there is nothing new: all the world has heard so much and people may believe or not believe as they think good.”