Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Peacock’s letter sealed, and other notes sent off to his bankers, Brookes & Co., and to his publisher Ollier, Shelley helped with packing their trunks. He had a row with the landlord who wanted them to pay for panes of glass broken by the sirocco, but Shelley had preferred to sit in the draught.56 On the 27th he made the final arrangements for little Elena and signed the forms of birth registration and baptism. The next day they set off late, at 2 in the afternoon, with a new Italian servant, Vincenzo, driving the carriage, which was harnessed with their own horses.

  The time for hurrying had long since passed, and the Shelleys spent five nights on the road to Rome. At Gaeta they passed a whole day walking by the seashore in the sunshine, picnicking in the woods. They stayed at an old inn built on the site of one of Cicero’s summer villas, precipitously overhanging the sea, and skirted in groves of olives and oranges. They played chess on the inn terrace, and Shelley leant back in his chair gazing at ‘an emerald sky of leaves starred with innumerable globes of ripening fruit’. In the bay was an island which was called the ‘promontory of Circe’.

  In the afternoon of 5 March they at last drew towards the Celestial City whose presence was announced by the wild, melancholy landscape of shattered aqueducts which commences at Albano, ‘arches after arches in unending lines stretching across the uninhabited wilderness, the blue defined outline of the mountains seen between them; masses of nameless ruins standing like rocks out of the plain; and the plain itself with its billowy & unequal surface announced the neighbourhood of Rome’.57 This time there was no hawk.

  [1] In some ways the situation had reverted to the time when Filippo Brunelleschi first entered the Holy City to study the architecture of the Pantheon, and found foxes running through the streets. See Vincent Cronin, The Flowering of the Renaissance, 1969, Ch. 1.

  [2] The medical man was a Scottish surgeon, Dr J. Bell, but Shelley did not actually put himself under his direction until about the middle of January 1819. Dr Bell diagnosed ‘a disease of the liver’ for which he prescribed ‘mercury and Cheltenham salts’ to be be used with much caution, together with daily riding exercise. Shelley was not under a medical man during the first five or six weeks of their stay in Naples, as Mary seeks to imply, and his physical disease was clearly in part the result of mental stress during these weeks, as Mary largely seeks to disguise.

  [3] The birth registration in the State Archives of Naples was first discovered and printed in photostat by N. I. White in 1947. There are a number of interesting minor points about this document. It is made out in official hand, and signed personally by Shelley and two witnesses, but not by Mary Shelley. Mary’s name is given on the document as ‘Maria Padurin’, an Italian mispronunciation of Mary Godwin which Shelley did not bother to correct. Shelley correctly gave his own age and address, but he allowed Mary’s age to be entered as 27 — when she was in fact 21. The only woman in Shelley’s household who was in her late 20s was Elise. In the certificate of baptism, which was made out by the parish priest of St Joseph at Chiaia, and not signed by Shelley, Mary’s name is more correctly given as Maria Godwin. When the death certificate was made out on 10 June 1820, little Elena’s age was given as from the day of baptism.

  [4] Byron had called her, simply, ‘a damned bitch’ which was for him almost an endearment.

  [5]It is probable that a good doctor at this time, without having the aid of chemical tests, could have diagnosed a definite pregnancy by the end of ten weeks. But even this goes outside the timescale for Foggi’s paternity, and it still does not cover illness caused by a threatened miscarriage. Mary, incidentally, announced her pregnancies to Shelley as definite after three months. They conceived a child in February 1819, she announced at the end of May; and it was born in November.

  [6] On 19 April 1822, Claire wrote to Mary: ‘I wish you would write me back what you wish Elise to say to you and what she is to say to Mad. H. I have tried in vain to compose it.’ Claire, p. 279, h. 3.

  [7] For the background to the problem posed by Elena Adelaide Shelley, see Medwin’s extraordinary account of the ‘lady’ who followed Shelley to Naples and died there, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, pp. 204-10 which seems to suggest some confused knowledge of the affair; also N.I. White’s discussion, Shelley, II, pp. 71-83; Ivan Roe, Shelley, the Last Phase, 1953, pp. 161-81; and Ursula Orange, ‘Elise, Nursemaid to the Shelleys’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin VI, 1955. White’s hypothesis that Elena was simply a casual ‘adoption’ is inadequate to meet the mysteriousness of the affair, the persistence of blackmail and many other contradictory factors, or the emotional intensity and complication of the case. It was Miss Orange who first suggested the liaison between Shelley and Elise, and sketched the salient considerations of the solution. For further remarks concerning Shelley and Claire at this time, see Appendix I.

  In hope by him great benefite to gaine,

  And uncontrolled freedome to obtaine.

  Faerie Queene, Book V, Canto Il, xxxii–iii.

  Talus eventually bludgeons the Giant over a cliff into the sea, which as Shelley observed, ‘is the usual way in which power deals with opinion’. Spenser did not have Shelley’s egalitarian sympathies.

  [8] Spenser’s meaning, as also his bias, is plain. The Giant observes that ‘realmes and nations run awry’,

  All which he undertooke for to repaire

  In sort as they were formed aunciently,

  And all things would reduce unto equality.

  Therefore the vulgar did about him flocke . . .

  Like foolish flies about a honey-crocke,

  [9] In his celebration of the ‘perpetual commerce with external nature’, Shelley forgot or at least suppressed the great limitations to Greek society with respect to women and slaves, which he had so carefully defined in his introduction to the Symposium. The neologism ‘unpaithric’, from the Greek ‘upaithrios’ meaning ‘open-air, roofless’ is correctly assigned to Shelley in the Oxford English Dictionary.

  Appendix to Chapter 18

  It is my belief that this story of Shelley’s ‘situation at Naples’ in the winter of 1818, constructed from logical inferences based on a survey of the known facts, is the truth as far as it goes. There are however two further broad lines of consideration.

  In the first place, it has to be accepted that because of the thinness of our knowledge about Elise Foggi, there are certain unresolved problems. These may be summarized as follows:

  1. It is difficult to know out of what mixture of bitterness and loyalty towards the Shelleys Elise should tell the Hoppners the ‘Claire scandal’ without mentioning her own illegitimate child. The desire for revenge, ‘transference’ from her own case, and very probably jealousy of Claire — but not, significantly enough, blackmail (like Paolo) — obviously motivated her. But one would like to know more, especially of Elise’s movements through Italy in 1819–20, and of her ‘superior’ character as Claire called it years afterwards. It is still possible that some information remains to be gleaned from hitherto unknown records of Elise’s family at Chambéry.

  2. One would also like to know more of the day-to-day life of Shelley’s travelling entourage in April 1818. The relevant evidence here is very scanty. The only noticeable points are Mary’s sudden decision to send away Elise rather than Milly Shields to Venice; Shelley’s alarming and apparently suicidal behaviour in the woods near Lake Como; and Shelley’s remarks in his letters passim about the sexual attractiveness of Italian women, who seemed at one moment to delight him and the next to disgust him. There is also his statement to Byron about the rights of the mother of an illegitimate child — ‘if she has no feeling, she has no claim’ — but at the time this was clearly directed at Claire, and could have no bearing until the decision to send Elena Adelaide out to foster parents in December. Mary’s letters and journal are not helpful; nor is the only other source, Claire’s diary, which merely describes opera-going, sightseeing and endless games of chess. It is true that the diary is not yet available in manuscr
ipt for the last eight days of April (Elise departed from Milan on 28 April), but this is less promising than it might be supposed (vide Chapter 16, reference no. 36). Altogether the evidence for April, though in some ways suggestive, is really very bare; nor is it likely that there is anything further to be found by way of sources.

  It is unlikely that either of these problem areas will ever be fully resolved; but as they are essentially questions not of contrary evidence, but simply of paucity of evidence, they cannot in the final consideration be taken as substantial objections. The great weight of the other factual and circumstantial evidence very largely overwhelms them.

  In the second place, there is the further broad consideration that this is still not the whole story. I have deliberately left out from the body of the narrative any further speculation on Claire’s and Shelley’s relations at this time. I have done this because, whereas I regard the inference that Shelley and Elise were the parents of Elena Adelaide as not only warrantable but virtually certain from the facts, I do not feel there is anything like sufficient evidence to make similar kinds of inference about Claire’s possible pregnancy. For the record, however my belief, after considering all relevant facts at present available,1 and also the general pattern of Shelley’s and Claire’s life in Italy, stands as follows.

  Brought closely together by the mutual worries over Allegra and Elise, Shelley and Claire became lovers during the nineteen days spent alone on the road to Venice, and at Este in August and September 1818. Claire conceived a child by Shelley. She may then have made some early attempts to bring on her period, probably without Shelley’s knowledge, at Padua. Elise, who was with Claire, may have known or suspected this. Later in September, they were dismayed at the turn of events caused by little Clara’s death, and agreed not to tell Mary until some later date. The child, after all, would not be due until June 1819. But the pregnancy made Claire frequently ill and weak, and such exertion as the expedition to Vesuvius endangered it. On 26–27 December at Naples, as recorded in Mary’s journal, Claire was ‘unwell’. I believe that her ‘illness’ was in fact a miscarriage at four months, but that Mary remained ignorant of it exactly as Elise had said. The reason for Mary being told and further upset had now disappeared. She was never told; at least not until after 1820. Elise’s child might conceivably have been born on that very same day; or, far more likely, shortly afterwards, in January 1819. But at any rate Shelley decided to commemorate that grim day, 27 December, with the more joyful fact of little Elena’s safe arrival, by registering the child’s birth at that date. This also served to cover up the reasons for medical attendance at 250 Riviera di Chiaia after Christmas. Hence the otherwise inexplicable coincidence of Elena’s birth and registration and Claire’s illness coming on the same day.

  Yet Claire and Elise may well have been brought to bed simultaneously, unlikely as this might appear. It is given a curious kind of support in one of the poems that Shelley wrote a few months later at Rome. Biographical evidence drawn directly from a literary work is always highly suspect, but the reader must consider for himself how far the reference could possibly be coincidental. In the notorious Act I Scene 3 of Shelley’s Italian horror play, The Cenci, the perverse Count delivers the news of his two sons’ death at a festive banquet at which his wife, daughter and fellow-nobles are in attendance. He announces these deaths as if it were a piece of good news, and proposes a toast. His wife faints, and the whole assembly rise up in confusion and horror. What somehow makes the Count’s announcement doubly macabre is the fact that both Rocco and Cristofano are reported to have died on the same night, one stabbed and one crushed. This coincidence Cenci gloatingly refers to as the work of ‘most favouring Providence’. But the shock awaits in the last lines of his speech. Both his children died, says Cenci —

  All in the self-same hour of the same night;

  Which shows that Heaven has special care of me.

  I beg those friends who love me, that they mark

  The day a feast upon their calendars.

  It was the twenty-seventh of December:

  Ay, read the letters if you doubt my oath.2

  In my opinion the only reason for Shelley to single out that crucial date with such transparent bitterness was to commemorate, once more, the loss of two of his own children, both delivered on the same night. One by Claire through miscarriage, and the other by Elise, through the marriage and machinations of Paolo Foggi. Two children lost to him on 27 December, through Heaven’s special care.

  Finally, if it is objected that Shelley would never have made two women pregnant simultaneously, and certainly not in the same household, it is as well to consider his situation in the winter of 1814–15. Harriet’s and Mary’s babies were born at approximately two and a half months interval; moreover Mary’s being only seven months was so premature that it was virtually a miscarriage, and of course it died. The similarity could hardly have escaped Shelley, and his sense of being hounded by fate — if not by anything more diabolic — could hardly have been lessened. I believe this double-horror was the direct source of some of Shelley’s imagery in the poetry of early 1819, and in a more diffused way, throughout his later Italian writing.

  Be all this as it may, the biographical proof remains completely inadequate, and I have not incorporated it or referred to it again in the body of my text. I leave this sad subject to the keeping of later, and I hope, kindly, scholars. For the time being the reader must judge for himself how far the narrative tends to confirm or contradict this further hypothesis, and in particular how far the emotional stress between Shelley, Mary and Claire is commensurate with the bitter and unhappy memories of such an event.

  19. A Roman Spring: 1819

  In Rome Shelley took rooms at the Palazzo Verospi, No. 300 Corso. The Corso was perhaps the most fashionable address in the city, an immensely long narrow street of hotels, churches, palazzos, banks and villas diversified by small colonnaded piazzas swarming with market stalls and barrows. It was really an extension of the Via Flamini, stretching from the northern gate to the foot of the Capitoline Hill, and it had become the social centre of the city, so that in the evenings the close stucco walls and yellow stone façades echoed with the continuous clatter of smart carriages taking the air. To the west, across the Tiber, lay the Vatican, and to the south stretched the ruins of ancient Rome, the Forum and Colosseum, the Palatine Hill and about a mile beyond the massive arched remains of the Baths of Caracalla. The Palazzo Verospi stood on the west side of the Corso, just below the Piazza Colonna, some ten minutes’ walk from the Forum and only about three minutes from what was to become Shelley’s favourite building in Rome, the Pantheon.

  For all of them the return to Rome seemed like a return to life. They embarked on a massive and strenuous routine of high tourism, in the mornings concentrating on the Roman ruins, the galleries and the private collections of paintings and statues like those in the Villa Borghese. Sculpture and carving of every kind especially attracted them. In the afternoons and evenings they joined the fashionable routes as well, driving through the Monte Cavallo and the Gardens of the Quirinal and the Borghese, and visiting the great marble fountains of Piazza Navona and the Trevi. Perhaps surprisingly, both Shelley and Mary were fascinated by the ritual aspects of the Vatican, and they attended Papal services at St Peter’s on several festive occasions. Mary wrote in her journal for the second Saturday in Rome, ‘Walk to the Baths of Caracalla. Meet the Pope.’1

  Claire now began a new diary, Mary started writing letters again, and Shelley abandoned Winckelmann’s History of Art to read Euripides and Lucretius. His thoughts had turned back to Prometheus Unbound. Mary took drawing lessons, Claire took singing lessons and little Willmouse became vociferously Italian crying out ‘O Dio che bella’ whenever he saw anything he liked or was supposed to like.2 Social calls were paid by Lord Guildford, Dr and Mrs Bell and later by Sir William Drummond. The Shelleys’ most regular port of visitation became the salon of the ageing Signora Marianna Dioniga, ‘a di
stinguished painter, antiquary, authoress, and member of academies innumerable’ who held mild soirées at No. 310 Corso.3 Judging by the regularity of their evenings spent there, this Roman blue-stocking must have been a favourite of Shelley’s; though Mary, who was slightly jealous of her, later described her to Maria Gisborne as ‘very old, very miserly, & very mean’. Claire described one perhaps typical evening, ‘go to the conversazione of the Signora Marianna Dioniga where there is a Cardinal and many unfortunate Englishmen who after having crossed their legs & said nothing the whole Evening, rose all up at once, made their bows, & filed off . . . .’4 Though no doubt she was cheerfully making the worst of it.

  But Mary was echoing the general sentiment when she wrote to Marianne Hunt, ‘Rome repays for everything. — How you would like to be here! We pass our days in viewing the divinest statues in the world . . . my letter would never be at an end if I were to try to tell a millionth part of the delights of Rome — but it has such an effect on me that my past life before I saw it appears a blank & now I begin to live — In the churches you hear the music of heaven & the singing of Angels.’ In mentioning William’s Italian, Mary revealed a glimpse of past troubles: ‘[Willmouse] has quite forgotten French for Elise has left us — She married a rogue of an Italian servant that we had and turned Catholic — Venice quite spoiled her and she appears in the high road to be as Italian as any of them. She has settled at Florence.’ But her high spirits and relief after Naples was well caught in her P.S.: ‘Shelley & Clare desire with me a thousand kind loves to Hunt & Bessy — Do you ever see Hogg — how he would scream & beat his sides at all the fine things in Rome — it is well that he is not or he would have broken many a rib in his delights or at least bruised them sorely.’5