Shelley: The Pursuit (100 page)

The only day-to-day record of the Shelley household during the months of December and January is Mary’s journal. This shows that Shelley made a great effort to busy them all with sightseeing during the first three weeks, and visits were arranged to the ancient theatre at Herculaneum on Saturday the 5th, and by boat through the Bay of Baiae on Tuesday the 8th, calling at the Mare Morto, the Elysian Fields, and the Cavern of the Sibyl. Shelley was still gathering images to reappear in his poems: ‘the sea . . . was so translucent that you could see the hollow caverns clothed with the glaucous sea-moss, & the leaves & branches of those delicate weeds that pave the unequal bottom of the water’;
¹⁶
while Mary merely noted, ‘The Bay of Baiae is beautiful; but we are disappointed by the various places we visit.’
¹⁷
On Sunday the 13th they went to the opera, and the next Tuesday they visited Virgil’s tomb. On Wednesday the 17th they made an
afternoon and evening expedition to the volcanic head of Vesuvius, which turned out to be almost traumatic. Mary exhausted herself, Claire was practically abandoned by her guides in the dark, and Shelley became extremely ill during the descent by torchlight, with an agonizing pain in his side, and virtually collapsed at the guides’ hermitage in ‘a state of intense bodily suffering’. He nevertheless managed to write it up in one of his most brilliant descriptive letters to Peacock the following morning.

Three days before Christmas, Shelley organized yet one more expedition, this time to Pompeii. In the ruined city, Shelley walked brooding through the streets, mentally noting the mosaics, the ‘little winged figures & small ornaments of exquisite elegance’, and the Greek bas-reliefs of Egyptian angels in the temples. He approved of the number and grandeur of the public buildings. Under the portico of the Temple of Jupiter, the party camped for luncheon, ‘we sate & pulled out our oranges & figs & bread & apples (sorry fare you will say) & rested to eat’.
¹⁸
They munched in silence, gazing out over the blueness of the bay and the mountains of Sorrento. It was beautiful and yet disquieting. ‘Every now & then we heard the subterranean thunder of Vesuvius; its distant deep peals seemed to shake the very air & light of day which interpenetrated our frames with the sullen & tremendous sound.’

They returned by the eastern gate, as the sun set and the shadows lengthened, and walked among the exquisitely carved marble tombs which stand along either side of the consular road. He noted on the stucco wall of one of the tombs ‘little emblematic figures of a relief exceedingly low, of dead or dying animals & little winged genii, & female forms bending in groups in some funeral office’. It seemed to him suddenly as if these were not like English tombs, hiding decay, but like ‘voluptuous chambers for immortal spirits’.

Mary’s journal for the rest of December and all January is confined to the barest entries, usually recording books read by her or Shelley — Dante, Livy and Winckelmann’s
History of Ancient Art
— and frequently entering nothing more than the date. This silence in fact covers an extreme personal crisis for Shelley, and December 1818 is the date attached to one of his most despairing and self-pitying lyrics, ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples’.

Alas! I have nor hope nor health,

Nor peace within nor calm around,

Nor that content surpassing wealth

The sage in meditation found,

And walked with inward glory crowned . . . .

I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care . . . .
¹⁹

Other
manuscript fragments dating from this period included the ‘Invocation to Misery’, and the unfinished stanza beginning ‘My head is wild with weeping’.
²⁰
Shelley was also probably working on the Maniac section of ‘Julian and Maddalo’ at this time, and the story of the Pisan ‘Marenghi’ who was forced into life-long exile in the Maremma in reparation for an unknown crime.
²¹

Writing twenty years afterwards, Mary chose to indicate this period of crisis without fully explaining the cause. But of her own emotional separation from Shelley she is remarkably frank.

At this time, Shelley suffered greatly in health. He put himself under the care of a medical man, who promised great things, and made him endure severe bodily pain, without any good results.
[2]
Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness, and often greatly enjoyed our wanderings in the environs of Naples, and our excursions on its sunny sea, yet many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy, — and then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been more alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe them, such would not have existed. And yet, enjoying as he appeared to do every sight or influence of earth or sky, it was difficult to imagine that any melancholy he showed was aught but the effect of the constant pain to which he was a martyr.

We lived in utter solitude.
²²

After the disastrous expedition to Vesuvius on the 17th, Shelley wrote three letters to friends in England just before Christmas. They were to Peacock, to Hunt and to Hogg, and they show, without giving any direct reason, that Shelley was extremely depressed and, for the first time in Italy, lonely and homesick. His letter to Peacock, after completing the magnificent Vesuvius description, ended mournfully: ‘I have depression enough of spirits & not good health, though I believe the warm air of Naples does me good. We see absolutely no one here — Adieu.’
²³
Most of his letter to Hunt, the first one for many weeks, consisted of a rather morbid defence of his own character against the supposed attacks of Southey in the
Quarterly Review
. It ended somewhat abruptly urging
that Hunt should bring himself and Peacock as soon as possible to Italy in the spring: ‘Now pray write directly, addressed as usual to Livorno, because I shall be in a fever till I know whether you are coming or no. I ought to say, I have neither good health or spirits just now, & that your visit wd be a relief to both.’
²⁴
The letter to Hogg, briefest of all, contained a sketch of their journeyings and a violent attack on Italian women, who ‘are disgusting with ignorance and prostitution’, and the strong implication that somehow ‘We shall meet again soon’.
²⁵
Neither the letter to Hunt or Hogg mentioned Claire, or any of the servants, or gave any indication of Mary’s bad spirits. In fact nothing that Shelley wrote at the time goes any way to explain the real causes of his misery. Yet physical illness and depression were symptoms, rather than causes, of Shelley’s unhappiness. His mysterious troubles at Naples arose from practical problems and difficulties of the most tangible human kind. Not until eighteen months after he had left Naples, did Shelley write a confidential letter to the Gisbornes which gives the basis for an explanation. ‘My Neapolitan charge is dead. It seems as if the destruction that is consuming me were as an atmosphere which wrapt & infected everything connected with me. The rascal Paolo has been taking advantage of my situation at Naples in December 1818 to attempt to extort money by threatening to charge me with the most horrible crimes. He is connected with some English here [i.e. Livorno] who hate me with a fervour that almost does credit to their phlegmatic brains, & listen & vent the most prodigious falsehoods. An ounce of civet good apothecary to sweeten this dunghill of a world.’
²⁶

This brief paragraph, despite references which may at first appear obscure, gives the essence of Shelley’s problem. It indicates that he was in some kind of personal entanglement during the winter at Naples — ‘my situation’; that the result of this was a child whom he regarded as his responsibility — ‘my Neapolitan charge’ and that there had been an element of impropriety which was grave enough for his servant Paolo Foggi to threaten to use his knowledge as the basis for blackmail. The blackmail element is important, for it affected a good deal of Shelley’s subsequent life in Italy. Paolo was sufficiently sure of his knowledge and advantage to require Shelley to employ against him an Italian lawyer, Signor del Rosso of Livorno, from June 1820 until at least February 1821.
²⁷

Of the child, we now know certain definite facts. It was a little girl, and Shelley twice registered himself as her father in official documents at Naples. The first document was a state registration paper, signed on 27 February 1819. It states that Elena Adelaide Shelley, daughter of Percy B. Shelley, was born at 250 Riviera di Chiaia on 27 December 1818 at 7 p.m. The second document was a certificate of baptism, which states that the child of Percy B. Shelley was baptized Elena Adelaide Shelley on 27 February 1819. There is also a third document in the Neapolitan State archive. This is a death certificate that states
that Elena Schelly [
sic
] died at No. 45 Via Vico Canale, Naples on 9 June 1820, giving her age as 15 months 12 days.
²⁸
[3]

To the bare dates in these documents, it is also possible to add a number of circumstantial facts of equal certainty. On 27 December, the day given as Elena’s birth, Shelley, Mary, Claire, Milly Shields, Elise and Paolo were all resident at 250 Riviera di Chiaia.
²⁹
On 28 February 1819, the day after Elena was registered by Shelley and baptized, the Shelley household left Naples, never to return.
³⁰
That is to say, Shelley, Mary, Claire and Milly left; for Paolo and Elise had married and were no longer with them. On 9 June 1820, the day of Elena’s death in Naples, the Shelleys were at the Bagni di Pisa; and three days later, on the 12th, Paolo Foggi first began his blackmail attempts by letter.
³¹
Elise’s whereabouts is not known at this time; she may have been in Naples, Rome or Florence; but later in the summer of 1820 she was back in Venice working at her old job as a servant and companion to an English lady, probably a Miss Fairhill. Paolo no longer seems to have been with her.
³²
So much then, is clear about the general outline of Shelley’s ‘situation at Naples in December 1818’.

But from this point, the evidence is highly confusing. Shelley had registered as Elena’s father. But then who was her mother? Why did the circumstances of her birth make him so desperately unhappy, and leave him open to blackmail? Why did he not register her birth until two months after the event? And why did he leave her behind in Naples with, presumably, the Italian foster parents who lived at 45 Vico Canale?

The documents in the state archive do not help to answer the question of Elena’s maternity. For they state that Elena’s mother was Mary Godwin Shelley. This was patently a falsification on Shelley’s part, for otherwise the child would never have been left in Naples, and there would be no mystery and no blackmail. Moreover there is no mention of Elena in any of Mary’s letters or journal at this or any other time, and one cannot be certain that she knew about the baby’s existence until the beginning of the Foggi blackmail in June 1820. Even then there is no absolute evidence that Shelley gave her all the details of Foggi’s threatened revelations; though it seems likely that she knew of Elena, who was
by then dead. On the whole, though, it would appear that Mary probably knew about this baby and Shelley’s ‘situation’ from the time that they were in Naples in December.

If Elena Adelaide Shelley’s mother was not Mary, who was she? One answer to this question appears in a notorious exchange of letters written in September 1820 on the other side of Italy, between Shelley’s old friend the British Consul at Venice, and Lord Byron. During the intervening period, the Hoppners had for a time looked after Allegra, while Claire had struggled with Byron (by post) to reassert her right to visit her child. On 10 September 1820, Byron wrote from Ravenna to Richard Belgrave Hoppner at Venice: ‘. . . I regret that you have such a bad opinion of Shiloh [Shelley]; you used to have a good one. Surely he has talent and honour, but is crazy against religion and morality . . . . His
Islam
had much poetry. You seem lately to have got some notion against him. Clare writes me the most insolent letters about Allegra; see what a man gets by taking care of natural children! Were it not for the poor little child’s sake, I am almost tempted to send her back to her atheistical mother . . . .’
³³

Hoppner, who had originally been so helpful and sympathetic to the Shelleys had indeed contracted ‘a notion’ against them, as he proceeded to elaborate in a return letter to Byron, of 16 September 1820. It will be observed that the date on which he says he first heard his revelation falls somewhere in the period of June or July of 1820, and thus corresponds to the commencement of Paolo’s blackmail threats to Shelley at this period. The letter is given at length, for despite its obvious antagonism towards Shelley, it vividly substantiates what is already known about the stresses and strains within his household, and confirms and clarifies what have up to now remained at best hints and clues in the narrative. Belgrave Hoppner wrote to Byron: