Taking his carriage, together with his women, babes, and baggage, across the Channel, Shelley travelled leisurely from Calais through France, by the way of Rheims, Langres, and Lyons (whence he wrote to Leigh Hunt on 22nd March, 1818), Les Echelles, and crossing the Alps, entered Milan on an early day in April, 1818, from which last-named city Allegra was sent to Byron (at Venice), who, whilst expressing his readiness and wish to have care of the child, declined to receive the child’s mother. Baby Allegra was therefore sent to her father’s palazzo on the Grand Canal under the charge of the female servant, described by Moore in his Life of Byron as ‘a Swiss nurse, a young girl not above nineteen or twenty years of age, and in every respect unfit to have the charge of such an infant, without the superintendence of some more experienced person.’ The nurse, described thus slightingly by Moore, was Elise, who, on receiving instructions to convey the child to the palazzo, understood that she would return to her mistress at Milan, after seeing Allegra settled in her new home. As Mrs. Shelley had no wish to part with the girl, who, under maternal surveillance, had proved a sufficient nurse for Willie and Clara, she had no intention to be without Elise’s services for many days. In the absence, however, of a nurse, suitable or otherwise, for Allegra at Byron’s palazzo, Mrs. Shelley consented that Elise should remain in charge of Claire’s child at Venice, till another arrangement could be made for her care. Hence it came to pass that Mrs. Shelley was deprived of her proper nurse till the following August, when Elise returned to her mistress at Este.
It would be unreasonable to assume that the nurse who brought the child to the Palazzo Moçenijo had grounds for regarding Byron as the child’s father. Servants are required all the world over to do what they are told, without asking why or wherefore. Moreover, it is usual with employers to be at some pains to prevent their servants from discovering the why and wherefore of orders they are told to execute, for the furtherance of affairs of secresy. Some twenty months before Elise took Allegra to Venice, she (a young Swiss girl) had been hired at Geneva by Mrs. Shelley to act as her little boy’s nurse. Living with the Shelleys at Geneva, whilst the city was bubbling with hideous scandal about them, it is not to be imagined that Elise went to England without having heard something of the Genevese gossip to her employers’ discredit. Who was more likely to be waylaid and questioned by the scores of Genevese tattlers, bent on gathering evidence to the truth of stories, that had already passed from Switzerland to England? Coming to the girl’s ears, the gossip could not fail to make her suspicious respecting her master’s intimacy with the young lady, whom he styled his sister. If she had heard nothing of the gossip, she, anyhow, soon became an observer of facts that must have awakened her curiosity and suspicion.
Accompanying the Shelleys and Claire to England, she served them as nursemaid at Bath and Marlow. At Bath the quick-witted girl observed signs that Claire would soon be a mother. Soon it devolved on her to look after Claire’s infant as well as Mrs. Shelley’s little boy. Elise must have known that Allegra was Claire’s offspring; but the facts coming under the servant’s observation afforded her no information respecting the child’s paternity. On that point she was doubtless left to inference and conjecture. Though they could not help taking her in some degree into their confidence—at least, could not prevent her from seeing what went on under her own eyes, and drawing her own inferences from what she saw—it is not likely that Mary and Claire told their Swiss maid who was Allegra’s father. Several considerations must have disposed them to be silent to her on that point. Honour and prudence forbade them to confide so delicate a secret to the young nurse, who would be almost sure to let it out to her fellow-servants and the Marlow gossip-mongers, and write about it in her next letter to her friends at Geneva,—a secret which, if it were blabbed at Marlow, would soon be talked about in London, and travel to the ears of William Godwin and Mrs. Godwin, from whom both sisters were especially desirous to withhold the fact of Allegra’s birth. Moreover, whilst keenly alive to the reasons for withholding the secret from Elise, the sisters must have felt they could gain nothing by confiding it to her. Knowing that Elise would naturally receive with suspicion any story they might tell her about Allegra’s paternity, they knew that of all stories the truth was the story she was least likely to believe. The natural course for two ladies in so embarassing a position to take towards their young female servant, would be to tell her a more or less romantic fib, that would not greatly aggravate their trouble if she blabbed it to her familiars.
Probably Elise was told that her mistress’s sister was married under circumstances, that compelled her for the present to keep her marriage a profound secret. At the same time Elise was entreated, with tears and pathetic assurances of eternal gratitude for her fidelity, to guard the secret thus confided to her honour. Claire (a clever hand at fibbing, when fibs might serve her purpose) was just the girl to trick out such a story in the prettiest style, and Elise was just the quick-witted damsel to receive the confidence with a proper show of credulity, and laugh in her sleeve at it as mere fiction.
In the meantime Elise saw what she saw, and (though only a poor Swiss nursemaid) had a right to draw inferences from what she saw. It did not escape the smart girl’s notice that, whilst living affectionately with Claire, Shelley seemed to care for her little girl, quite as much as he cared for Mrs. Shelley’s little boy,—that he nursed little Allegra, and sung to her, for the half-hour at a time, just as though she were his own infant. Is it not told in Julian and Maddalo by Shelley himself, how he delighted in his sister Claire’s babe, and
‘nursed
Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first
To this bleak world;’
and in the ‘lovely toy’s’ infancy made himself ‘her antient play-fellow?’ Under these circumstances, Elise may well have come to the conclusion that Allegra’s ‘antient play-fellow’ was also her young father. Elise’s disposition to take this view of the case would not have been less strong, had she known how Shelley had provided for Claire and her child by his will. Though I am dealing conjecturally with mere inferences from admitted facts, I have little doubt that Elise took this view of Allegra’s paternity at Marlow, that she went with the child to Italy under the same impression, and that she held to the same opinion on delivering the little girl into Byron’s custody at Venice. To show by documentary evidence that, before starting from Milan with Allegra in her charge, Elise had been expressly informed of the child’s relation to Byron, would take nothing from the strength of my suspicion that, in conveying Allegra to her father, Elise imagined herself to be conveying Shelley’s child to the famous Lord Byron, in order that he should make arrangements for the child’s future education:—it having been determined (for reasons obvious to Elise’s imagination) that her master had better not figure as principal in arrangements, so likely to fix the little girl’s paternity on him. Readers who concur with the present writer in this suspicion (which, in the absence of evidence sufficient for transmuting suspicion to conviction, is offered as nothing more than a reasonable hypothesis), will concur with him also in regarding Elise’s misconception and the circumstances of Allegra’s transference from the Shelleys’ care to her father’s keeping, as the source of the subsequent story (believed by the Hoppners, who had it in some shape or other from Elise and her husband) that Claire had given birth to a child by Shelley, which he had sent to a Foundling Hospital.
Of one thing there must now be an end in Shelleyan biography,—the practice of writing about Claire, as though she were a sort of fallen woman, to whom the Shelleys in their magnanimity showed great kindness, though she had scarcely any claim upon them for protection. As the family coach (so heavily laden with babies, and baggage, and womankind) rolled through France, Claire (so recently acknowledged as their sister by Shelley and Mary in their Six Weeks’ Tour)—Claire, to whom Shelley had assigned in his will no less than 12,000l. of his scarcely ample estate—never thought of herself as aught else than Mrs. Shelley’s sister. On the other hand, though these children of the same home were only sisters-by-affinity, Mary Shelley had no disposition to think herself anything else than Shelley’s wife and Claire’s sister. If blood is thicker than water, habit is stronger than either; and the two girls (still only quite young girls) had been habituated from childhood to think of one another as sisters. Taught from the same books and by the same governess, playing with the same toys, placed for punishment in opposite corners of the same room, whipt with the same rod, kissed every night by the same ‘papa,’ these children of different parents, but the same home, had been trained to think of one another as sisters, and nothing else than sisters. Of course they had their tiffs and quarrels. Without blood, they were far more sisters to one another, than those sisters of the whole blood, Eliza and Harriett Westbrook. Nor may Claire be regarded as a sister who, like the too vehemently maligned Eliza, fixed herself on a younger sister and her husband, and would not allow them to throw her off. Claire and Mary (as Mr. Kegan Paul shows by the evidences which he contradicts in his text) were girls of about the same age, though Claire was probably some months older. Shelley never came to dislike Claire. There were moments when he admired her, delighted in her, loved her; but never an hour in which he regarded her with aversion, though the vivacious girl was given to rally, flout, mock, cross him till he fairly lost his temper. In the last month of his life (18th June, 1822), Shelley (vide Forman’s edition of Shelley’s Prose Works) wrote from Lerici of this wayward, piquant, charming creature, ‘She is vivacious and talkative; and though she teases me sometimes, I like her.’ How greatly he cared for her is shown by the munificence with which he provided for her and her child by his will.
Going with them to Italy as their sister, Claire (one or two flying trips excepted) was incessantly with Shelley and her sister for the first twenty months of their life in Italy. During the last two years and a half of the term,—when she had taken to giving music and language lessons in Florence, and was in that capital the animating spirit of the little circle of admirers whom she drew about her by her riant beauty and brilliant style, her wit and accomplishments, her gaiety and irresistible sprightliness,—she looked to ‘the Shelleys’ (whether they were living in a villa or on a flat) as her home. No doubt she received great kindness from the Shelleys; but no less certain is it that she repaid them in kind. If she was unhappy, raging against Byron, dismally wretched (as the too vehemently happy often are in the intervals between periods of elation), she made a rush for ‘home,’ On the other hand, when the Shelleys were languishing and in trouble, their first thought was to signal for Claire, to fly over to them and brighten them. When Mary was sickening for the illness, that resulted, at the Casa Magni, in her miscarriage shortly before the fatal boat accident, Claire was by her side. It was ill for Mary Godwin’s fame, when Mr. Froude the other day published a few scraps of ineffectual writing, in evidence that she cordially disliked the sister, with whom she was merely having a tiff. Far worse will it be for Mary Shelley’s reputation for sincerity and feminine loyalty, should it ever appear from scraps of her writing that, whilst living with every show of affection for her sister, she was thinking unamiably of her, and putting notes to her discredit in a secret record.
Of course, on leaving England for the last time, Mrs. Shelley had no wish to have Claire perpetually with her, nor any expectation that she and her husband would have Allegra’s mother on their hands, in a certain sense, for more than four years. On the failure of the negotiations with Byron, it was, of course, Mrs. Shelley’s hope that her lovely sister, after reconciling herself to Byron’s aversion of her, would win the love of some more stedfast admirer, and pass from girlish lightness to matronly honour. In case Claire should not marry, it was doubtless hoped alike by Shelley and his wife that, after seeing the world for awhile under their protection, and completing her education, she would strike out a career for herself. That the two young (quite young) women had their disagreements of opinion and conflicts of temper in Italy, even as they had bickered and clashed (whilst loving one another abundantly) in former time, was a matter of course with two girls, so self-dependent and fervid, so sensitive and quick-tempered. But one needs only to look at published letters for a superabundance of evidence that Claire’s intercourse with the Shelleys from the spring of 1818 to the Midsummer of 1822, though ruffled now and again by gusts of impetuosity and passages of superficial discord, was the intercourse of near relations, held together by the usual forces of mutual liking and genuine attachment.