Looking within herself was Mary’s only solace, for Percy had now fixated on the loveliness of Jane Williams. She had a fine singing voice and he bought her a guitar. He wrote her a series of love poems, cautioning, “I commit them to your secrecy.” Shelley, however, showed them to Edward Williams, a liberal-minded husband like himself. In one poem, Percy summoned up another ménage à trois—he compares the three of them to characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Jane as Miranda, Edward as Ferdinand, and Percy as the ethereal spirit Ariel. He saw the Williamses’ happy marriage as an ideal that contrasted with his own. Mary did not learn of the poems until after Shelley’s death.
The death of Allegra gave a bad start to the summer, which only became worse as time went on. Mary had hoped Byron could join them in a repetition of 1816, but Byron had rented a large house up the coast at Livorno, where he was adding new cantos to his Don Juan. The Shelleys and the Williamses, along with three children and—as always—Claire, moved into a small house near a coastal village called San Terenzo. Casa Magni, which Mary had chosen reluctantly at Shelley’s urging, turned out to be a hateful place for her. It was literally on the beach, almost trapped between the land and the bay. “The sea came up to the door [and] a steep hill sheltered it behind,” Mary wrote. “The proprietor of the estate on which it was situated was insane.” He had uprooted olive trees that had been growing on the hillside and planted hardwood trees, an act that to the local people was a glaring manifestation of his madness. But Shelley thought the new trees made the location seem like England, and praised the house’s serenity and charm.
Mary recalled the location differently: “The gales and squalls that hailed our first arrival surrounded the bay with foam; the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared unremittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board ship.” The ground floor of the house was uninhabitable because the earthen floors had never been paved, so the group lived in close quarters on the upper floor, where there were only four rooms and a terrace. They were forced to eat in the hallway between rooms.
The exterior environment was scarcely more comforting. Mary found the local residents primitive and frightening. “Our near neighbors,” she wrote, “were more like savages than any people I ever before lived among. Many a night they passed on the beach, singing, or rather howling; the women dancing about among the waves that broke at their feet, the men leaning against the rocks and joining in their loud wild chorus. . . . Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves farther from civilization and comfort.” All this was compounded by the fact that Mary had discovered she was pregnant, and in view of what she had already experienced, was nervous about being far from any medical assistance.
Percy was writing little. He wrote in a letter, “I have lived too long near Lord Byron and the sun has extinguished the glow-worm.” When Byron had read him some of the new verses of Don Juan, Percy wrote to Mary: “I despair of rivalling Lord Byron . . . and there is no other with whom it is worth contending.” He added, “The demon of mistrust & of pride lurks between two persons in our situation poisoning the freedom of their intercourse. This is a tax and a heavy one which we must pay for being human. I think the fault is not on my side; nor is it likely, I being the weaker. I hope that in the next world these things will be better managed.”
With Trelawny along as his adviser, Shelley went to Genoa to take possession of the thirty-foot schooner he had ordered. Trelawny thought Shelley should learn to swim and had offered to give him lessons, but when Shelley stripped and jumped into a pool he had sunk to the bottom. Trelawny had to haul him out, and Shelley remarked, “I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell.”
A man who had known Shelley at Eton saw him at Genoa sitting on the seashore eating bread and fruit. “Shelley was looking careworn and ill; and, as usual, was very carelessly dressed,” the friend recalled. “He had on a large and wide straw hat, his long brown hair, already streaked with gray, flowing in large masses from under it, and presented a wild and strange appearance.”
Trelawny arranged for the boat to be moved to Lerici, a town on the same bay where Casa Magni stood. As a prank, Trelawny had named the boat Don Juan, which irked Shelley. (It was particularly annoying because Mary had been busy with the tedious task of making a fair copy for the printer of Byron’s great work.) Shelley tried to wash the name Don Juan off the sail where it had been painted, but eventually had to pay a local sailmaker to cut out the offending piece of cloth and sew in a new one. The name Shelley chose: Ariel. Shelley and Edward Williams began sailing immediately, assisted by a young English sailor named Charles Vivian. Shelley described his mood:
Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind
Than calm in water seen.
As usual Mary was having trouble during her pregnancy—ailments discounted by her husband, complaining to Claire, as “languor and hysterical affections.” Emotionally Mary felt isolated, for Shelley was now constantly around Jane Williams. Mary turned her anger against the surroundings. “No words can tell you,” she wrote to a friend, “how I hated our house & the country about it.”
On June 16, Mary suffered a near-fatal miscarriage. She later recalled her very strong sense that she was about to die: “I had no fear—rather though I had no active wish—I had a passive satisfaction in death—Whether the nature of my illness—debility from the loss of blood without pain, caused this tranquility of soul, I cannot tell—but so it was—& it had this blessed effect that I have never since anticipated death with terror.” This time Shelley rose to the occasion. With the help of Jane and Claire, he thrust Mary into a bath of freezing water and ice to stanch her bleeding. It worked and when a doctor arrived, he approved of the treatment. Shelley had saved her life.
Two days after Mary’s miscarriage, Shelley wrote a letter to the Gisbornes, complaining that Mary did not understand him: “I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not. . . . It is the curse of Tantalus, that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers, should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.” He mentioned how pleasant it was to have Jane Williams around, for she had “an elegance of form and motions that compensate in some degree for [her] lack of literary refinement.” Mary’s dawning awareness of Shelley’s feeling toward the cheerful, fun-loving Jane only added to the depression she suffered as a result of the miscarriage.
From childhood Percy had been susceptible to visions and waking dreams. Mary herself had employed prophetic dreams in the plot of Frankenstein; now her husband’s fate was presaged by a series of apparitions. Percy began to see ghosts.
The first appeared one clear evening while Shelley and Edward Williams were on the terrace of Casa Magni, enjoying the view of the moonlight on the water. Suddenly Shelley seized his friend’s arm and stared out to sea. Alarmed, Williams asked if he were in pain. Shelley answered, “There it is again—there!” Williams looked but saw nothing. It took a while for Shelley to recover, but when he did he said he had seen a naked child rising from the sea, clapping her hands, and smiling at him. It was reminiscent of the last visit he had with Allegra, playing with her in the convent. Williams had to argue forcibly to convince Shelley that it was a hallucination. In his journal, Williams attributed the incident to Shelley’s “ever wandering and lively imagination.” Later Shelley told Mary that he had met himself, his doppelgänger, on the terrace of Casa Magni. It had stopped and asked him, “How long do you mean to be content?”
“Shelley had often seen these figures when ill,” Mary wrote, but Jane Williams, of whom Mary remarked that she “has not much imagination & is not in the slightest degree nervous,” also reported a vision of Shelley’s double. From inside the house, she saw Percy walk past the window that opened onto the t
errace, and a few seconds later, he crossed her view again, walking in the same direction. Jane was startled, because there was no way he could have done this without crossing back. (She actually thought Shelley might have jumped off the balcony to achieve what she had seen.) Later she discovered that Shelley had not even been at the house at the time this occurred. Even Byron told Thomas Moore that he had seen Shelley “walk into a little wood at Lerici,” when (he discovered later) Shelley was at that time actually in some other place. Already he seemed to have become a disembodied spirit.
One night Shelley woke the entire household with his screams, resulting, he claimed, not from a nightmare but a “vision.” As he lay in bed, ghostly figures of Edward and Jane had entered into his room, their bodies stained with blood and their bones sticking out. “They could hardly walk,” Mary later recalled, and “Edward said —‘Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house, & it is all coming down.’” Percy said he had run to the window and seen the sea approaching. Then he had a second vision: he saw himself over Mary’s bed, strangling her—a reprise of the scene from Frankenstein in which the monster kills Victor’s bride.
Percy was so disturbed by these images that he asked Edward Trelawny to obtain some prussic acid—Polidori’s poison of choice—for him. He told Trelawny that it would “be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest.”
Shelley’s hallucinations and wild mood swings were reflected in the poem that he was working on just before he died: The Triumph of Life. In it, the unnamed Poet is guided by no less a figure than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher who had inspired those who sparked and—like Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Mary, Percy, and Byron—admired the French Revolution. Rousseau, in the poem, says he has awakened from a long sleep:
Whether [my] life had been before that sleep
The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell
Like this harsh world in which I wake to weep,
I know not. . . .
Shelley was disillusioned with his life, and in the poem he appears to be struggling to write for himself a rationale for existence. His only happy times at Casa Magni seem to have been listening to Jane Williams playing the guitar and sailing on his new boat.
In June, Leigh Hunt and his family finally arrived in Italy. Shelley and Edward Williams put to sea in the newly christened Ariel, planning to meet the Hunts at Livorno. On his desk, Shelley left his manuscript with the final words of an unfinished composition: “Then, what is life? I cried —”
The Ariel reached Livorno on the night of July 1. The next day Shelley greeted Hunt and his family, whom he had not seen in four years. He accompanied them to Pisa, where Byron had arranged for the new arrivals to stay at his palazzo. Shelley sent letters to both Mary and Jane Williams from Pisa—the last he would ever write. The one to Mary contains pessimistic news. Hunt’s wife was not expected to live; Byron’s interest in the magazine had waned because Teresa’s father and brother had been exiled and now Byron wanted to leave Tuscany, taking Teresa with him to America, to Switzerland . . . he was not sure; finally, Hunt needed money to begin publication, and Percy would have to borrow it from Byron. “I have not a moments leisure—but will write by next post,” he concluded, sounding the same as ever. To Jane Williams, Percy wrote a note more suitable for a beloved wife: “I fear you are solitary & melancholy at Villa Magni. . . . How soon those hours past, & how slowly they return to pass so soon again, & perhaps for ever, in which we have lived together so intimately so happily!—Adieu, my dearest friend—I only write these lines for the pleasure of tracing what will meet your eyes.—Mary will tell you all the news.”
Percy returned to Livorno, where Trelawny was preparing to take Byron’s new boat, the Bolivar, down the coast to Lerici. The plan was that they would all make the trip together, Shelley and Edward Williams in the Ariel and Trelawny in the larger vessel. However, the port authorities detained Trelawny because he did not have proper papers. Shelley and Williams decided to leave without him.
With only young Charles Vivian as crew, they set sail on the afternoon of July 8. As evening approached, a storm blew up. The crews of the Italian fishing fleet, seeing the ominous signs, made for port. One fisherman reported that he noticed the Ariel was having difficulty. He said he offered to take the passengers on board his own boat but they refused. He warned them to lower their sails but they paid no attention to this advice. The Ariel was never seen again.
Mary, still weak from her miscarriage, waited at the Casa Magni with Jane Williams. Each day they sat on the terrace, expecting the Ariel’s sails to come around the promontory to the north of the bay. Then a letter from Hunt arrived, addressed to Percy, asking whether he had gotten back safely, “for they say that you had bad weather after you sailed Monday and we are anxious.” As she read those words, Mary dropped the letter. Jane picked it up, saw the contents, and cried, “Then it is all over!”
Mary pulled herself together, saying, “No, my dear Jane. It is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful—come with me, we will go to Leghorn [Livorno] . . . & learn our fate.” They crossed the bay to Lerici and took the mail coach to Pisa. When they arrived, Mary’s nervousness returned. She knew that the Hunts were at Byron’s palazzo, but “the idea of seeing Hunt for the first time for four years under such circumstances, & asking him such a question was so terrific to me that it was with difficulty that I prevented myself from going into convulsions.”
It was midnight by the time they arrived at Byron’s. “I had risen almost from a bed of sickness for this journey,” Mary recalled. “I had traveled all day.” She was exhausted and terrified, and showed it. Byron recalled her appearance:
I never can forget the night that [Shelley’s] poor wife rushed into my room at Pisa, with a face pale as marble, and terror impressed on her brow, demanded with all the tragic impetuosity of grief and alarm, where was her husband! Vain were all our efforts to calm her; a desperate sort of courage seemed to give her energy to confront the horrible truth that awaited her; it was the courage of despair. I have seen nothing in tragedy on the stage so powerful, or so affecting, as her appearance, and it often presents itself to my memory. I knew nothing then of the catastrophe, but the vividness of her terror communicated itself to me, and I feared the worst.
Trelawny accompanied Mary and Jane back to Casa Magni, where they and Claire could only wait for news. They kept up their hopes by suggesting that Shelley and Williams might have only been blown off course. They sent messengers along the coast seeking information. Trelawny returned to Livorno, where he learned that two bodies had washed up on shore. They were virtually unrecognizable because they had been in the water ten days, and most of the flesh had been eaten by fish. Trelawny recognized the boots on Williams’s corpse and found in a pocket on the other body two books Shelley had been reading: Keats’s poetry and the plays of Sophocles. The bodies were immediately buried on the beach, with quicklime sprinkled in the graves, because of Italian health regulations.
On the night of June 19, Trelawny returned to Casa Magni to break the news.
I went up the stairs, and, unannounced, entered the room. I neither spoke, nor did they question me. Mrs. Shelley’s large grey eyes were fixed on my face. I turned away. Unable to bear this horrid silence, with a convulsive effort she exclaimed: “Is there no hope?”
I did not answer, but left the room, and sent the servant with the children to them. The next day I prevailed on them to return with me to Pisa. The misery of that night and the journey of the next day, and of many days and nights that followed, I can neither describe nor forget.
Grief left Mary virtually paralyzed, and Trelawny took charge of the funeral arrangements. The bodies were to be exhumed from their rough graves and cremated. Trelawny had a portable iron crematorium built, and brought frankincense, salt, wine, and oil to sprinkle on the bodies. On the fifteenth of August, he, Byron, and Hunt stood by as Edward Williams’s corpse was disinterred. Byron was shocked by its appea
rance: “Are we to resemble that?” he exclaimed. “Why it might be the carcase of a sheep for all I can see.”
The next day they dug up Shelley. His corpse was also badly decomposed, “a dark and ghastly indigo,” but Trelawny consoled himself that the scenery, “lonely and grand,” was so much like Shelley’s poetry, “that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us.” Byron asked Trelawny to save the skull for him, but Trelawny remembered the story that Byron had used a skull as a drinking cup, and put the entire body to the torch. The materials they sprinkled on the corpse made the flames glow with incandescence. Even so, Byron was so distressed by the smell that he stripped off his clothes and threw himself into the sea—the only place where his limp did not hinder him. He headed for his boat the Bolivar, anchored a mile and a half offshore. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage, while Trelawny watched the fire for four hours. In the open air, wine had to be added to the fire to coax it —“more wine,” said Trelawny, “than he [Shelley] had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver . . . the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.” After cooling the iron container in the sea, they gathered the ashes and found that the heart had remained intact. Byron had returned, and the three men set off to eat and drink. Hunt remembered, “We sang, we laughed, we shouted. I even felt a gaiety the more shocking, because it was real and a relief.”
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