Gatteschi returned to France full of plans to write a play which Mary had promised to translate and offer to the celebrated actor-manager, William Macready; she plotted, meanwhile, to obtain a job with one of the new railroad companies for Gatteschi’s friend, Carlo Guitera. Only a few kind words and a little gentle management were required, Mary wrote to Claire; why was she still so determined to think evil of their friends? What if Guitera, despite a pregnant wife, made himself charming to a prospective employer? (Lady Sussex Lennox, half-sister to one of Claire’s former pupils, was considering taking him on as tutor for her children.) Gently, Mary reminded Claire of their friend Augusta Goring, living nearby in Putney and bearing Trelawny’s children. This, now, seemed scandalous behaviour; was Guitera to be judged more harshly for the small crime of being a flirt?11
Claire, once her mind was made up, was not to be budged. By the end of the year, she believed she had proof which would convince even Mary of the danger of these friendships. On 28 December, she reported that Lady Sussex Lennox was heavily embroiled with both Gatteschi and Guitera, that she had taken on Gatteschi’s debts of some £400‚ and that Lord Sussex Lennox, mad with jealousy, had beaten Gatteschi up. The Italians, she added, were meanwhile assuring poor pregnant Madame Guitera that they were doing all they could to stay clear of Lady Sussex Lennox, who was, they ungallantly said, ‘too old to inspire love’. Oh, and Oswald Turner, grandson of Harriet de Boinville, had been driven into madness by the fiendish manipulations of Harriet and his mother Cornelia, Claire added as the icing to a letter she astonishingly considered ‘a very amusing one’.
Claire’s slanderous representation of old Madame de Boinville and Cornelia Turner served to convince Mary that her stepsister had temporarily lost her own wits. Gatteschi had recently told her that he was shocked by Claire’s strange appearance; grimly, Mary wrote back to warn her against blackening the character of their mutual friends. ‘I imagine you are scarcely aware how shocking and discreditable to her [Lady Sussex Lennox] are your details – let us draw a veil over them in mercy to our sex & forget them.’12
Peace was made during Claire’s visit to Putney at the beginning of 1845. With quiet success, Mary proved a point she had been striving to make for some time. When Claire was lodged above the stationer’s shop, not under her roof, they could enjoy each other’s company; it was only when they lived together that quarrels broke out. Returning to Paris in April, Claire expressed a gratitude which amounted almost to an apology It had been, she wrote with customary exaggeration on 7 May, ‘the only bright episode in my life’. Mary’s company had been ‘charming’, her conversation ‘so wise and so universal’ as to benefit all who had the pleasure of knowing her. With more warmth than she had shown for years, Claire sent fond wishes to Mary’s two dogs and added her hopes that Percy’s formal presentation at court by Lord de L’Isle and Dudley had gone well.
Mary had already discouraged Claire from sinking her legacy into Austrian land, presumably because she wished to join her brother Charles and his family in Vienna. It was during this honeymoon period after the visit to Putney that Mary put forward another idea: might Claire be interested in joining her scheme to buy and rent out an opera box? There was only one opera house in London; Mary had been told that the box would hold or increase its value while being rented out for £300 a year. Perhaps it was the theatrical connection which so enchanted Claire; certainly, she was determined to ignore the warnings which followed Mary’s discovery of the riskiness of such an investment. Mary chose instead to put her modest savings into the railways which were being spun over the countryside as fast as a spider’s web; Claire, by the end of June 1845, had decided to invest £4,000, a third of all she had been bequeathed, in a box on the Grand Tier. It was to prove a disastrous venture.
Claire’s visit had shown her that Mary was not living in such state as she had enviously supposed; as the summer of 1845 made a mockery of its name, she received increasingly doleful reports. Shelley’s surviving creditors were calling for payment; the Sussex tenants, their harvest ruined, were unable to pay the rents; Mary had been obliged to dismiss her manservant and could not even afford to stay in Cowes, where Percy was sailing his yacht with Aubrey Beauclerk’s nephew and namesake. It was a little humiliating, when she visited the Sussex estate in August, to be obliged to live with the Beauclerks at South Lodge because she had no home to call her own.
‘To spend little & give much …’ So she had written and she was determined to follow Burke’s precept. Some causes, however, seemed worthier than others. Richard Monckton Milnes was begged to request Sir Robert Peel to fulfil his predecessor’s promise of £100 to Isabella Booth, nursing a violent and now deranged husband; Mary’s sympathy for Gatteschi began to wane at last as he once again drew on her for funds while making no attempt to find employment. Charles Clairmont, who was visiting Claire in Paris with his family in the summer of 1845, seemed more deserving: Mary told Claire to turn a debt of £10 into gifts for Charles’s children. Heartily thanked, she had no idea of how harshly the Clairmonts were scrutinizing her life behind her back. Charles shuddered at the thought of Mary’s long association with such a ghastly tribe as the Robinsons of Paddington; Claire sniped at her superior manner and mournfully declared that Mary had always hated her. Young Wilhelm Clairmont, listening attentively, stored the gossip away, wondering what strange kind of woman this quasi-aunt in England must be.13
Mary’s plans to economize and recover her health by spending the autumn of 1845 on the Continent were arrested by a bombshell from Paris. Gatteschi’s pride had been stung by criticism of his relationship with Lady Sussex Lennox, his pocket by Mary’s increasing reluctance to subsidize his needs. As the summer ended, his letters changed their tone; Guitera dropped strong hints that only money would prevent use being made of the letters in which Mary had unguardedly poured out her heart to Gatteschi. ‘I cannot fathom his designs,’ she wrote in bewilderment to Claire on 15 September; her friends were on hand to explain that she was being subjected to blackmail. Alexander Knox, alerted either by Guitera or by Claire, was all for immediate action. To this, Mary was at first vigorously opposed. Yes, the shock had been terrible, but caution warned her against being precipitate. ‘Knox must not get it talked of among the English – my name wd get wind at least – the English are the people to avoid.’14
Claire, maliciously and inaccurately noting on the envelope of this letter that Mary had referred to ‘my Knox’, confirmation of a love-affair which she had long suspected, shared his unequivocal view of Gatteschi as a villain. Mary, pathetically, clung to the hope that his intentions were not so very wicked. Nevertheless, before the end of September, she had agreed to let Knox and a legal adviser take whatever steps were necessary to recover the damaging letters. ‘They were written with an open heart –’ she confessed, ‘& contain details with regard to my past history, which it wd. destroy me for ever if they ever saw light.’15 Distraught by the savage unpleasantness of Gatteschi’s latest demands, she gladly promised Knox to stop writing defensive replies. Instead, she asked him to send back a portrait of Gatteschi which she had treasured, not least for the young man’s exceptional beauty, ‘just done up & directed & sent without a word’.
Handsomely repaying all Mary’s past generosity to him, Knox became her chief guide and support in this nightmarish affair. The old cabinet noir system, allowing for the interception and examination of suspicious correspondence, still operated in France; it was notoriously employed in England in 1844 when the letters of Mazzini were seized and opened. Here, in Knox’s opinion, lay their only chance of getting the incriminating letters out of Gatteschi’s hands. He was a member of a revolutionary party; this would be a sufficient reason for the French police to take an interest in his mail. Mary, wishing no harm to the man who was now trying to blackmail her, shuddered at the possible consequences for him; Knox was both persistent and persuasive. Nothing could be done without authority from England; reluctantly, Mary agreed to see if the n
ecessary letter could be obtained from Lord Brougham, the former Lord Chancellor and noted legal reformer. She reached him by asking Trelawny to apply to Temple Leader, one of Brougham’s closest friends; by the end of September, Knox was in a position to enlist help from the formidable Gabriel Delessert, French Prefect of Police. The £250 which Mary guiltily sent Knox from the meagre income shared between herself and Percy was presumably the estimated cost of a complicated undercover operation.
‘Oh what an easy dupe I have been – & worse,’ Mary lamented on 1 October, in one of the many letters which Claire swore were being burned, just as she requested. Sick with apprehension and terrified that Percy might discover what was going on behind his back, she accompanied him to Brighton on a fortnight’s visit to see Horace Smith and his family. Here, while Percy flirted with young Rosalind and the Smiths expressed concern at his mother’s wan appearance, Mary fretted over Gatteschi’s betrayal. Perhaps Knox was right; the man was an out-and-out villain; she almost wished that Lord Sussex Lennox would go and beat him up again. Anything was better than the thought of the vengeance he might take: ‘we must not forget that he is vindictive unprincipled, & when desperate will stick at nothing he can do,’ she wrote to Claire on 9 October. In another letter written on the same day, her imagination ran riot among the possibilities. Gatteschi would use daggers instead of threats if he had the chance, she wrote; only terror of the guillotine or the galleys could subdue him now. ‘My letters must be got somehow – either by seizure or purchase – & then he must be left – As to helping him – there are others starving – but enough of that he must be crushed in the first place.’
Her wish was granted. On 11 October, two French newspapers announced in tones of strong disapproval that the homes of two Italian exiles (Gatteschi and Guitera were named) had been visited by the police and many of their private papers removed. Sceptical of the official reason, suspicious of an involvement in an Italian insurrection, the journalists expressed their disgust at such treatment of impoverished refugees.16 Le Messager, on 12 October, carried a defensive piece for which Delessert was probably responsible. Mary’s letters, safely returned to Knox’s keeping, were destroyed.
That, as far as Mary was concerned, marked the end of her connection to the Italian circle in Paris. There is a curious postscript to the story. Many years later, when Claire Clairmont and her niece were living in Florence, an after-dinner caller knocked at the door. Pauline (Paula) Clairmont found the visitor an entertaining companion, ‘clever – amiable and cultivated’, although a little deaf. His name, he told her, was Luigi Gatteschi; he was an old acquaintance of her aunt’s. Reminding her that they had met once before, when he had called and found her aunt out of the city‚ he demanded an interview with Claire. Paula may have missed the significance of his remark that he still possessed an excellent memory; Claire did not. Refusing to see him, she warned her niece that she would be thrown out of the house if she ever dared communicate with Gatteschi again. There, infuriatingly, the trail ends. Paula obeyed her aunt; no further mention of the old blackmailer has yet been found.17
It took Mary some time to recover her equilibrium. The possibility of a reprisal terrified her; what if Gatteschi discovered the part she had played? By the end of October, while bitterly reproaching herself for her folly – ‘to have wasted so disgracefully so much of Percy’s money – to have been so intimate with such a villain’ – she was eager to put the whole horrid business behind her. ‘I feel I shall never be the same person again after this,’ she told Claire. ‘God grant I may be a better one – for there is ample room for improvement.’18 Claire herself had never appeared in a better light; unaware of how diligently her revealing letters had been squirrelled away, Mary expressed her gratitude to ‘you who have ever shewn me so much kindness & whom I have so ill requited throughout’.19
It was a bad moment for Mary’s old friend Mrs Kenney to write and ask if her son Thomas Holcroft might be given some of Godwin’s letters for publication. Mary had never liked Holcroft and reticence, not publicity, was her preferred course after the Gatteschi incident. Sending as a sop the letters which Thomas Holcroft’s father had written to her own, Mary gave a hesitant answer to Mrs Kenney’s inquiries about the long-anticipated memoir of Godwin. Yes, she still regarded it as ‘a sacred task devolved on me’; no, she could not say when she would feel strong enough to undertake it.20 The probability is that she had already decided that non-publication was the wiser course.
*
‘O what a dupe I have been,’ Mary had wailed during her autumn of disillusionment. She was about to be duped again, and within days of congratulating herself on a fortunate escape. Protecting the reputations of those she loved had always been her vulnerable point. She had for some years been endeavouring to recover any correspondence which might damage Shelley’s now almost blameless reputation. Hearing from his publisher and friend Thomas Hookham that a large number of letters had come into the possession of a visitor to his Bond Street premises, she was quick to respond.
Hookham’s visitor was a personable, intelligent and unscrupulous forger who had presented himself to John Murray several years earlier as Byron’s legitimate son, the child of a secret marriage in Cadiz in 1809, when Byron was twenty-one. Byron was said to have acknowledged this son in a conveniently lost letter written from his deathbed to Augusta Leigh. Major George Gordon de Luna Byron had impressed Murray with his elegance and plausibility; his claims of birth acquired additional credibility in 1844 when he met Byron’s half-sister and was rewarded with an encouraging note about his plan to collect materials for a life of his father. Armed with what amounted almost to a guarantee from Augusta, the Major gained access to many of Byron’s original letters and became skilled at copying his hand; he also obtained possession of some of the letters which Mary and Shelley had written to each other in the early years and which had been lost after their departure from Marlow. Here, too, the Major had been practising his copying skills. Too shrewd to part with originals when copies could fetch a good price, he became an artful concocter of plausible fakes.
Mary was easily persuaded that the letters Major Byron had acquired were authentic. Scarred by her experience with Gatteschi, she mocked Hookham’s credulity in believing that the letters would be freely given. ‘He wont give any letters – of that be assured,’ she told him on 30 October. She was ready to offer £20 for a batch, much though it angered her to pay for what she regarded as stolen property. On 10 November, the Major acknowledged receipt of £30 for an unspecified number of letters. Peacock, asked for advice, scolded her for being so gullible; Mary refused to listen. Hookham was told that she would pay a pound for any letter from Shelley to her and half a crown for whatever others Major Byron had for sale. Doubtful of the authenticity of the documents she had already purchased, she hoped by patience to obtain the originals. By March 1846, at least eighteen letters were in her hands, several of which she could identify as copies. Sick with worry that the Gatteschi experience was to be repeated, she scrawled a distraught letter to Hookham.
I am sure this man has many more letters – in time I hope to get them – he will come again – & you can say – that there were many more of Shelley’s letters. I cannot write more. Don’t raise the mans hopes about money or he will become impracticable – at first he hoped for hundreds had he got those he would have grasped at thousands – now he is obliged to content himself with units he has many more manage to get them.21
A six-month silence ensued.
Mary was holidaying in Baden-Baden in September, together with her friend Mrs Hare, when Hookham sent word that a certain ‘Mr Memoir’ – this was one of Byron’s aliases – had advised him that the Major was ready to sell some more of his collection. He had also demanded the return of the letters Mary had already bought; his intentions were unclear.
Given courage by distance, Mary decided to let him do his worst. If the Major wanted his forgeries back, let him take them, and make as many more copies as he like
d. She urged Hookham to discuss the situation with her dear friend Alexander Knox, who would, she was sure, support her decision. And no, she did not want Thomas Holcroft to feel he needed to do anything about ‘Mr Memoir’ on her behalf. She sent her thanks to Mr Holcroft for his offer and his letter, ‘disgusting’ though its contents had been.‡ She did not want Mr Holcroft to meet Mr Knox. She did not, above all, want to be drawn into a scandal. ‘The great thing will be [to] avoid police reports & police Magistrates.’ It was only a year since newspaper accounts of the raid on the homes of Gatteschi and Guitera; she was afraid that the old story would be raked up as soon as any public investigation of a new blackmailing plot began.22 She did, as a precaution, send Hookham a letter of authority by the same post, stating her wish that he should take possession of any copied letters which legally belonged to her: ‘they are mine by law & cannot in any way be published by anyone else,’ she wrote, identifying her main source of worry, that Byron would carry out his threat of publishing whatever she refused to buy at the price he named.
Almost two years later, at the beginning of 1848, Mary’s worst fear seemed about to be realized when the Athenaeum advertised a new life of Lord Byron. It promised to contain ‘numerous letters’, the free use of all manuscripts and, most alarmingly, ‘a mass of anecdotes’ provided by, among others, Mrs Shelley.23 A week passed before Major Byron’s publishers, discovering that much of his material had been unofficially obtained from John Murray, returned it and agreed, in the face of legal action, not to proceed with the book.
Mary Shelley Page 72
