Then I saw one of the Diodati residents, a debonair senior gentleman, drive his BMW into the estate. For some reason, the gate remained wide open behind him.
Nothing prevented my strolling down the driveway, until I found myself standing almost level with Byron’s terrace, drinking in its 180 degree views of the lake, which even the sprawl of Geneva’s stodgy UN buildings could not mar.
Through the window, I could see the ballroom-size Grand Salon. Now it was easy to imagine the bohemian coterie gathered there by candlelight to manically debate, carouse, and bed-hop that fateful summer. Byron’s reservations about resuming his affair with the buxom, gypsy-eyed Claire Claremont quickly crumbled. (“I never loved her nor pretended to love her,” he later wrote, “but a man is a man—& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours—there is but one way.”) When the elderly gardener discovered one of Claire’s slippers in the bushes one morning, he returned it to her with a polite bow. Sexual tensions were rife. Shelley and Claire had been intimate in England (he called her his “Little comet”). Dr. Polidori developed an infatuation with Mary, which was not returned. Mary confessed to being both attracted and repelled by Byron, but he found her cold. The homoerotic tension between Byron and Shelley added to the lively ambience.
English expats in Geneva let their erotic fantasies run wild regarding the secretive arts colony. Tourists even hired boats to marvel at the mixed-sex undergarments on the washing lines, proof that the Villa Diodati was a free-love commune, with the young ladies as virtual sex slaves. On one occasion, Byron was accosted on his evening ride by strangers and accused of corrupting Swiss youth. The Diodati menagerie, one British newspaper frothed rabidly, was a “league of incest.”
It was mid-June when the torrential storms began—an “almost perpetual rain,” Mary later recalled, with walls of lightning surging to and fro across the lake. The housebound friends read lurid German horror stories aloud to one another and discussed the latest scientific theories on galvanism, the life force, and animation. Wine flowed in generous quantities, as did laudanum, a tincture of opium. One night, when Byron recited a poem about ghosts, Shelley leaped up and ran howling into the rain, having hallucinated that Mary had sprouted demonic eyes in place of nipples. It was in this feverish, incestuous environment that Mary experienced her celebrated nightmare. She dreamed the plot of Frankenstein (as she recounted in the preface to the 1831 edition of her book) and then told the blood-soaked fable the next night to an enthralled audience around the fireside. Byron and Shelley encouraged her to write it as a novel.
As I was envisioning this classic tale of poetic inspiration, I heard a click behind me. The villa’s security gate had been automatically activated, and was whirring shut. I had to scramble to escape being entombed.
The Swiss mania for privacy was getting on my nerves. I hiked back down to the lakefront and crossed the busy highway. Then I threw myself into the crystalline water and began swimming. About two hundred yards out, I turned around. There was the Villa Diodati, completely exposed to my plebeian eyes.
“I can see you!” I yelled up at the proud owners. “I can see your villa!”
And then a water-skier nearly ran me down.
Byron Lane next to the Villa Diodati in Cologny, with Lake Geneva view.
CASUALTIES OF THE PEN
In the age before effective contraception, free love involved a harsh learning curve for women. The Swiss arts colony began to fracture in August, when Claire revealed that she was pregnant, and Shelley asked the wealthy Byron to take responsibility. “Is the brat mine?” Byron asked petulantly in one letter, before accepting that it must be. The Shelleys left Switzerland at the end of the summer so Claire could give birth in England, with Byron promising to support the child (which he did, with bad grace). He remained at the Villa Diodati until the autumn, making extended excursions in the Alps, then finally left for Italy, where he plunged further into the irreverent abyss.
Today, the “Frankenstein summer” seems a dreamlike interlude of contentment in lives blighted by tragedy. Six years later, in 1822, Shelley drowned in a boating accident in Italy, at age twenty-nine. Dr. Polidori had committed suicide the year before, at age twenty-five. Claire’s daughter with Byron would die at age five, and only one of Mary’s four children with Percy survived. (Another pregnancy, her fifth before age twenty-five, miscarried. Incidentally, Shelley’s deserted first wife, Harriet, also killed herself, carrying his child, in late 1816.) Byron died in Greece in 1824 at the ripe old age of thirty-six.
Mary Shelley returned to Lake Geneva as a famous middle-aged author in 1840, and found Cologny eerily intact but populated by ghosts. “There were the terraces, the vineyards, the upward path threading them, the little port where our boat lay moored,” she wrote. “I could mark and recognize a thousand slight peculiarities, familiar objects then, forgotten since, replete with recollections and associations. Was I the same person that lived there, the companions of the dead? For all were gone …”
The final word was had by the irrepressible Claire Clairmont, who lived to age eighty. In her dotage, she began to write a memoir about her experiment with free love in Switzerland. The first pages were discovered in 2009 by the biographer Daisy Hay in the New York Public Library—so on my return to Manhattan sometime later, I visited the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, a dark, hushed room with felt-inlaid desks and marble busts of the poets, where I requested Claire’s musings.
The librarian first brought me some other fragments from the Lake Geneva interlude, including an original letter from Shelley that arrived at the Villa Diodati that fateful summer. (Scribbling from the Hotel Ville de Londres in Chamonix on July 22, he describes for Byron a muleback jaunt into the Alps, and enthuses about hearing an avalanche among the “palaces of Nature.” In a cheeky mood, Shelley had signed the hotel register in ancient Greek, putting his profession as “Democrat, Philanthropist and Atheist.” The words were so volatile at the time, writes biographer Richard Holmes, they were interpreted by enemies back in London as “Revolutionary” and “Pervert.”)
At last I was presented with the folio of Claire Clairmont’s papers. The stack of letters and notes had not been indexed, but luckily what I was looking for was near the top: a selection of yellowed pages in Claire’s small, neat handwriting, tattooed with her subsequent corrections, deletions, and annotations, some of which were barely legible.
These papers are a record of the effects and workings of the free love system such as the writer of these papers beheld with her own eyes—this is no hearsay record.…
The words were written around 1879 when she was a septuagenarian living in Florence and were intended as the introduction to a book-length work—she died after writing only a half dozen pages. The radical ideals of free love were out of fashion with Victorians, to say the least, but the feelings are deeply personal. Bitterness seeps from every line. Claire viciously denounces Shelley and Byron and their self-serving idea of sexual freedom, which left a trail of wreckage among the women who fell into their orbit:
Under the influence of the doctrine and belief in free love I saw the first two poets of England … the most refined and honorable specimens of the age, become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery.… Under the influence of free love Lord B(yron) became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenseless women who under the influence of free love … had loved him.
She reserves her most intense attacks for Shelley, whose advocacy of sexual liberation turned women’s lives into “a perfect hell.” Piecing together references in letters, biographer Richard Holmes deduces that Claire and Percy became lovers again in 1818, when they were traveling in Italy away from Mary, and that Claire miscarried in Naples. The 1822 death of her young daughter by Byron, Alegra, is still shocking today. While she was under his supposed care, he had sent her to an Italian nunnery at the age of four and refused to allow Claire to visit her, even as she sickened and wasted away.
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As a single woman with a damaged reputation, Claire would have needed a good deal of money to compete with such company—or a few years’ supply of the pill.
DOWN AND OUT IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND
Our skirmishes with the moneymeisters of Switzerland grew more intense when we followed the Romantics into the Alps, where the machinery for separating travelers from their cash has been honed by centuries of experience. Once again, it was Byron who had forged the way for millions of sightseers. In 1816, after the Shelleys had left, he took an extended horseback tour of the Bernese Oberland with his Cambridge chum, John Hobhouse, marveling at waterfalls and glaciers (“like a frozen hurricane,” Byron wrote of one). The poet did manage to forget some of his angst in the celestial mountain scenery. Crossing one high pass, he cheered up so much that he “made a snowball and threw it at Hobhouse,” reports the historian Emily Dangerfield. (“It is not known whether Hobhouse returned it.”) They ended up in the village of Lauterbrunnen, where the snow-capped mountains loom in perfect chocolate-box formation. Today, well-heeled travelers arrive here from all over the world—and so, slavishly, did we.
In our Hotel Oberland, the menu stipulated that diners would be charged $1 per glass for tap water. A whole carafe of tap water (crass indulgence!) was $3. An extra pat of butter, 50 cents. More bread? $3. Use of the bathroom was a relatively modest 50 cents. The owners took their own dinner in a back room, scowling at any guests who interrupted. We imagined them counting their coins, the gnomes of Lauterbrunnen.
We did have one small victory—petty, yes, but strangely satisfying. The city council of Lauterbrunnen gives out a “Guest Card” to those who are already paying for one of their hotels, which entitles the bearer to such extravagant discounts as one dollar off entry to the municipal swimming pool. (“Reduction is for adults only!”) After a long day hiking in the Alps, we stumbled down to the pool entrance and claimed our dollar off, which the attendant, a battle-hardened woman in shorts, granted with an indignant snort. Her concrete pool was a genuine blue-collar refuge (it seems that even in Switzerland there are truck drivers and hotel cleaners) where leathery women with dragon tattoos were chain-smoking in the sun.
After a swim, I went back to the kiosk to buy a glass of sweet strawberry wine, apparently the local specialty. But instead of my credit card, I pulled by mistake the Guest Card from my wallet, which almost gave the attendant a coronary.
“You cannot use the guest discount for wine!”
I shrugged. “I didn’t mean to—it was an accident.”
“No! You tried for a discount! You tried!”
I dropped my voice conspiratorially. “Actually, I’ve heard that in Lauterbrunnen you sometimes give free wine to tourists.”
She blanched. “No free wine in Lauterbrunnen.”
“Yes,” I repeated. “Free wine!”
From then on, whenever I went up to the kiosk, I took out my guest card.
“Free ice creams for tourists in Lauterbrunnen?”
“Free hotdogs for tourists in Lauterbrunnen?”
After three days of this, she finally cracked a smile.
On the train out of Switzerland, I opened the Geneva newspaper and saw a promising report: “Bar Owner Attacked with Knife After Presenting the Check.” Apparently the customer deemed the bill so excessive he drew a knife on the publican. I wondered if this swank establishment was introducing an entirely new charge on tourists. The mind boggled at the possibilities. Was there now a cost for using the plates? Napkins? Why not the table and chair? Whatever it was, the customer had been pushed too far.
Luckily, this being Switzerland, nobody was hurt.
Chapter Six
“LITTLE DEATH”
IN VENICE
The Covert Casanova Tour
I had arranged to collect in Venice a package the weight of an anvil—all twelve volumes of Casanova’s memoirs, which provide a native son’s insider tips for visiting his home town.
Consider his thoughts on accommodation. In the winter of 1753, Giacomo Casanova, then an insatiable twenty-eight-year-old, needed a short-term rental in central Venice where he could entertain a ravishing young nun he identifies as M.M. (Her real name, historians have discerned, was almost certainly Marina Morosini.) Like many other aristocratic girls in Venice, M.M. had been sent to a convent by her family so they could avoid paying a marriage dowry, and she chafed at her fate. With golden hair that hung down to her knees, winsome blue eyes, alabaster skin “so white that it verged on pallor” and (of course) “two superb rows of teeth,” this enterprising Bride of Christ had made the first advance, according to Casanova, by dropping him a love note after a church service on the island of Murano. Several furtive meetings followed, where the pair agreed it would be safer to tryst in the heart of Venice. A common inn was out of the question. Casanova wanted private rooms. Specifically, he required a casino—one of the city’s secretive apartments designed for the pursuit of “love, good food, and the joys of the senses.” He scoured the winding alleyways inspecting the options, before deciding on the most sumptuous and expensive of all, near the theater of San Moisé by St. Mark’s Square. It had five rooms, including an octagonal boudoir with mirrors on the ceiling, white marble fireplaces, and porcelain tiles from the Orient that depicted an athletic array of erotic positions. The extravagant price included a chef, who would deliver meals (“game, sturgeon, truffles, oysters, and perfect wine”) from the kitchen via a revolving dumbwaiter, so the occupants and their guests could keep their identities hidden.
Casanova’s choice, it transpired, was a great success. On the appointed evening, M.M. slipped from her island convent—a feat that evidently was not over-difficult—and was escorted in a gondola to San Marco by her first lover, a mature French ambassador named Joachim de Bernis, who graciously encouraged the adventure. For safety, M.M. had disguised herself as a boy, wearing black satin breeches and a pink waistcoat embroidered with gold thread; her long blonde hair was plaited down her back. The androgyny only increased Casanova’s desire when the group met in the Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo behind a famous equestrian statue. Thanking the ambassador for his broad-mindedness, Casanova and M.M. retired to the five-star casino, where a candlelit feast duly materialized. The twenty-two-year-old novice, Casanova fondly recounts in the second volume of his memoir, The Story of My Life, “was astonished to find herself receptive to so much pleasure, for I showed her many things she had considered fictions … and I taught her that the slightest constraint spoils the greatest pleasures.”
The pair met regularly for months, swapping oysters in their mouths, then making love while M.M.’s older consort, the French ambassador, spied on them through a peephole. Eventually, the ambassador was invited for a ménages à trois, then later à quatre when another young nun, C.C. (Caterina Capretta), joined in.
Naturally, I became fixated on lodging us in a former casino. Unfortunately, like Casanova, I couldn’t actually afford it. But as Giacomo must also have decided, Venice has never been a city for half measures.
The island republic has always held a place of honor in Europe’s erotic imagination. For eleven giddy centuries, from 697 to 1797, it flourished as the boudoir of Europe. Its strategic location on trade routes to the East filled the city with luxuries and allowed Venetians a level of sensual indulgence that was the envy of the Continent. By the 1700s, as Venice’s maritime empire crumbled, its reputation for decadent pleasures only grew, as merchant dynasties squandered their fortunes with abandon. The eighteenth century became a long, golden twilight, when the whole baroque city qualified as a red-light district, and travelers flocked here to cruise the canals with powdered courtesans and taut gondoliers. They rented crumbling palazzos, flirted at masked balls, gamboled in the bawdy houses, and recovered from their exertions in the stue, or Turkish baths. The city’s pornography was revered, and the latest raunchy sonnets of Giorgio Baffo were passed in handwritten form around coffeehouses such as the Florian. In 1778, one particular Ven
etian love song, “La Biondina in Gondoleta,” “The Blonde in a Gondola,” became a hit throughout Europe. (This eighteenth-century model of “The Girl From Ipanema” ran: “Oh my God, what beautiful things I said and did, I won’t be so happy again in all my life …”) In short, Venice was locked in a perpetual Carnival, where figures in tricorn hats, cloaks, and long-beaked masks—quickly becoming a Venetian cliché, but originally taken from mischievous characters in Commedia dell’Arte theatrical shows—swept along the misty alleys in search of anonymous encounters. Poets attributed the rampant sensuality to the city’s all-surrounding fluidity, whose canals suggested a well-lubricated paradise. Later, the French poet Apollinaire would go so far as to dub Venice the pudenda of Europe.
No figure sums up the era’s hedonistic frenzy more than Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, the ultimate, well, “Casanova,” who cut a swathe through an apparently willing female population. (Not to mention a trail of unplanned pregnancies; the nun C.C, Caterina Capretta, for one, nearly died from a hemorrhage following either a miscarriage or home abortion.) In recent years, Casanova has been so mythologized in literature and film that some even assume he is a fictional character. It’s hard to think academically of a man who has been played for comedy by Tony Curtis, Donald Sutherland, and Heath Ledger, and has even been portrayed in a Bob Hope movie. In fact, Casanova the man lived from 1725 to 1798, and most of his affairs—his passions for milkmaids and princesses, his liaison with a female singer who was masquerading as a castrato, the incestuous seduction of his illegitimate daughter—have been documented by modern historians and his best-disguised lovers clearly identified.
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