Shelley: The Pursuit (104 page)

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 distinguished 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

For Shelley Rome too worked steadily on his health with restorative powers. By the end of March it was ‘materially better’ though his spirits were ‘not the most brilliant in the world’. He seems to have attributed this to the continuing solitariness of their situation from English society, though at other times he expressed his relief at avoiding the English. Italian society offered some compensations, however, as he explained to Peacock in a gently provocative description of Italian women. He had, once again, changed his opinion on that score, and garlic was less in evidence.

The Romans please me much, especially the women: . . . Their extreme innocence & naïveté, the freedom and gentleness of their manners,
the total absence of affectation makes an intercourse with them very like an intercourse with uncorrupted children, whom they resemble often in loveliness as well as simplicity. I have seen two women in society here of the highest beauty, their brows & lips and the moulding of the face modelled with sculptural exactness, & the dark luxuriance of their hair floating over their fine complexions — and the lips — you must hear the commonplaces which escape from them before they cease to be dangerous.
⁶

After the initial burst of touristic enthusiasm, the Shelley household began to fall into a regular routine. A drive or a ride in the Borghese Gardens became an almost daily custom, and Claire frequently spent whole mornings there delighting in the mixture of formality and wilderness, ‘extensive with a variety of green shady nooks, with fountains and statues’. She found a special place on the steps of the Temple of Aesculapius where she would sit and read Wordsworth.
⁷
Mary also liked the carriage part of these visits, but one has the impression that she tired easily, and preferred visits to galleries and museums nearer the Corso, and sketching expeditions with little Willmouse in the Forum or the Colosseum. She was also reading a lot, Shakespeare and Livy.

For Shelley, the spirit of Rome gradually came to condense itself into three magical gardens of archaeology: — the Forum, the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla. He walked over the first two daily and prompted Claire to write in her diary: ‘In ancient times the Forum was to a city what the soul is to the Body.’ Shelley’s favourite was moonlight walks, and on these he would sometimes go alone, and sometimes take one or other of the girls. From a comparison of Mary’s journal and Claire’s diary it would seem that he preferred on the whole not to take them together. Best of all he preferred to go alone. ‘I walk forth in the purple & golden light of an Italian evening & return by star or moonlight thro this scene. The elms are just budding, & the warm spring winds bring unknown odours, all sweet from the country. I see the radiant Orion through the mighty columns of the temple of Concord,
[1]
& the mellow fading light softens down the modern buildings of the Capitol the only ones that interfere with the sublime desolation of the scene. On the steps of the Capitol itself stand two colossal statues of Castor & Pollux, each with his horse; finely executed though far inferior to those of Monte Cavallo, the cast of one of which you know we saw together in London — This walk is close to our lodging, & this is my evening walk.’
⁸

Of
all the monuments and marble fragments in the Forum, it was the Arch of Titus, standing at the eastern end of the Via Sacra, and the Arch of Constantine standing below it in the south-western corner of the Piazza di Colosseo, which exerted the most deep and continuous interest. Titus, a single triumphal arch erected in AD 81 to commemorate the capture of Jerusalem, was called in medieval times the Arch of the Seven Lamps, because of the magnificent reliefs on the interior of the portico depicting the triumphal Roman chariot carrying off slave and spoils and the huge seven-branched Jewish candlestick. Constantine, a massively vulgar triple arch erected in AD 315, shows the decline of the Roman classic ideal, but is luxuriously decorated by a brilliant series of earlier reliefs, ripped from the monuments of Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, and packed between the eight Corinthian columns of the supporting façade. It was this marvellously clear, vigorous, set of epic reliefs and sculptures which filled Shelley’s imagination with a vision of effortlessly achieved symbolic power. He was deeply impressed by the clarity of their carved line, and the grace of their hovering presences. They were not merely sculpture, they were ballet suspended in stone, and they offered him an example and an inspiration. From these he saw how images could be made both to retain their humanity, and express divinity, superhuman force and eternal power or potential. In two of the carvings he found specific images — the triumph, the chariot and the winged angels — which he was able to incorporate directly into his work. Shelley first described these carvings in detail in his letters and his Roman notebook, and later transferred them into his poetry.