She could still see them all as they set out from England—happy, hopeful, she, Shelley, baby William, the English nursemaid, and Claire, barely contained, leaning forward in her seat, striking sparks with her impatience. They left on the second day of May, and this time, the crossing was easy—Hermes, not Aphrodite, guiding their star, they joked. They took a carriage rather than walking across France to Switzerland this time. They had brought clothes, books, the baby, and they were older—she, eighteen; Shelley, twenty-three.
France was still desolate from the Napoleonic wars, and both Shelley and Claire were pushing for Geneva. Shelley insisted on crossing a steep pass over the Jura at dusk, the snow had come up over the wheels of the carriage, and they found themselves stuck and nearly trapped overnight. But in the end, some mountaineers heaved them through, and they pulled up at the Hotel d’Angleterre on Lake Geneva on the fourteenth of May, 1816, where they took the least expensive rooms, on the top floor of the hotel.
Byron wasn’t there yet. It turned out that he’d stopped at Waterloo to tour the battlefield, a melancholic exercise, he told Shelley. The defeat of Napoleon was also the death of the French Revolution. Byron said that as he’d walked through the mud there—his carriage, too, had gotten stuck up to the top of the wheels—he’d been overcome with the memory, the feeling, of that time when Napoleon was still their hero. A beautiful dreamer, almost a Werther, but a fighting version, the liberator come to carry freedom and equality to the world. Before it all turned to nightmare, first on the plains of Spain, then through Italy, all the way to Russia, with the dead stretching across the Continent from end to end.
And now Napoleon paced alone in the middle of the South Atlantic, France was in tatters, and Byron’s carriage, still splattered with mud, pulled up at the Hotel d’Angleterre. It was the twenty-fifth of May. His trip hadn’t been easy—he entered his age as “100” in the hotel register and went straight to his rooms.
“I am sorry you are grown so old,” Claire wrote that afternoon. “Indeed I suspected you were 200, from the slowness of your journey. . . . I am so happy.”
She’d been waiting for him, watching, patrolling the gardens, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in her hand—though what she should have been reading was Glenarvon, Lady Caroline Lamb’s explosive best seller that gave a lightly disguised version of her disastrous affair with him. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Lady Caroline had called him.
Or even if Claire had just taken heed of the epigraph from his own The Corsair:
He left a name to all succeeding times,
Link’d with one virtue and a thousand crimes.
But she didn’t, just kept writing witty little note after note that he didn’t bother to answer, nor did he emerge from his rooms. Maybe he was writing his beautiful, melancholic “Epistle to Augusta”: “My sister! my sweet sister!” It was true that Byron’s sister was one of his “thousand crimes,” but when she, Mary, read this poem, she felt again the sweetness that she’d glimpsed at his house in London that day.
“My whole life was a contest,” he wrote. Spoke of his “inheritance of storms.” She knew some of them: Born with a clubbed foot. Father, “Mad Jack,” first crazy, then dead. Mother banned from his school for her outbursts. Title inherited from “Wicked Lord William.” No brothers, no games at home, no one to turn to, with whom to say “us,” “our.”
Until Augusta:
I did remind thee of our own dear Lake,
By the old Hall which may be mine no more.
“Our own dear Lake.” Augusta’s, too. No explanation required. The only one in the world who could see it as he did. The only place,
. . . my own sweet sister, in thy heart
I know myself secure, as thou in mine.
And how could Claire compete with that? Claire, whose infatuation Byron would have scented from afar for what it was, both garden-variety and essentially impersonal. Cold. Little to do with him as a man with a “dear Lake,” and all to do with his “Fame . . . unsought.”
Though if Claire had once understood this deep need in his soul, or even read this poem instead of his outgrown Childe Harold, she might have turned out to be interesting to Byron after all. But Claire didn’t read much poetry, and, in her defense, was just seventeen.
. . .
When Byron finally emerged for a sail on Lake Geneva, Claire, on full alert, caught sight of him at once, and begged them to accompany her on a stroll down to the quay. When Byron saw them, he hopped gallantly out of his boat and limped toward shore. He’d managed to disguise his bad foot when she and Claire had visited him in London, and now she could see his frown as he struggled through the shallow water. He nodded briefly to her and Claire, and shook hands with much reserve with Shelley, who was equally ill-at-ease with his own role in this charade. It fell to her, Mary, to produce the small conversation—his journey, the hotel, the weather, which had been “rather bad.” It was the first nice day, they all agreed. That settled, Byron invited Shelley—pointedly, only—to dine with him that evening and then made his way back to his companion, the young doctor John Polidori, to help him bring in the boat.
That night, Shelley reported, things went better with the poets. Female distraction at bay, they relaxed in each other’s company and talked till dawn. Claire considered this a personal victory. It was she, after all, who’d produced Shelley. Byron would clearly take him as an extension of herself.
Though what Byron took Shelley for was a shield against her. She, Mary, was already noting how Byron stiffened whenever Claire came onto the scene. He rebuffed her various attempts at establishing herself as his public companion—a stroll by the lake, a cup of tea in the hotel dining room. Claire then sent him another note: “I have been in this weary hotel this fortnight & it seems so unkind, so cruel of you to treat me with such marked indifference. Will you go straight up to the top of the house this evening at half-past seven & I will infallibly be on the landing place & show you the room.”
He would, he did. It was still essentially lighthearted for him at that point. As he confessed to his sister, his confidante, Augusta, “Now—don’t scold—but what cd I do?—a foolish girl—in spite of all I cd say or do—wd come after me—or rather went before me—for I found her here . . . I cd not exactly play the Stoic w a woman—who had scrambled 800 miles to unphilosophize me.”
But though Byron was perfectly willing to accompany “a foolish girl”—his words—“to the top of the house”—hers—it was Shelley who’d captured his heart and mind that summer. They bought a small boat together, and moved out of the Hotel d’Angleterre, which, as May turned to June, was filling up with the kind of English tourists who both disapproved of the poets’ lifestyles and were dying for a peek into their rooms.
They found places to rent across the lake, a nice cottage for the Shelley party, and the grand Villa Diodati for Byron, about a ten-minute walk away, through vineyards, up a gentle hill. They all loved the fact that Milton had once spent a summer there, with his school friend Diodati. Byron and Shelley took advantage of a break in the continuing bad weather to sail the boat around the lake, visiting the Castle of Chillon, where they climbed down into the dungeon and read the names of the prisoners scrawled in desperation on the walls, and gazed on “a beam, now black and rotten, on which the prisoners were hung in secret,” as Shelley wrote to her. “I never saw a monument more terrible.”
They continued around the lake, on a pilgrimage to the sites where their beloved Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set his novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloése. Shelley told her afterward that one afternoon a storm had come up and the boat nearly capsized. Byron had learned that Shelley couldn’t swim—and “I knew [he] would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation.” Said he would have preferred to drown.
But his mood after the trip was anything but tragic. He’d been struck mute at first by his proximity to Byron, daunted by the other’s clear, far-ringing voice. Still he came back from their trip together with the only thing that could cure his various ailments, poetic inspiration. He wrote “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”:
I vow’d that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
Followed by the “The Daemon of the World”:
Floating on waves of music and of light,
The chariot of the Daemon of the World
Descends in silent power:
And then “Mont Blanc”:
—Is this the scene
Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young
Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea
Of fire envelop once this silent snow?
And as for Byron, he came back with “The Prisoner of Chillon”:
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are:—even I
Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.
—which Murray published and which sold out the first day.