Writing from Bagni di Lucca on 17th August, 1818, to Mrs. Gisborne, immediately after Shelley and Claire had started for Venice to see Byron, Mrs. Shelley (vide Shelley Memorials) says, ‘Shelley and C[laire] are gone; they went to-day to Venice on important business’ (how cautiously the writer refers to the business!); ‘and I am left to take care of the house. Now, if all of you, or any of you, would come and cheer my solitude, it would be exceedingly kind.’ At the Bagni di Lucca, Shelley and his wife had taken horse-exercise almost every evening, having Claire for their companion in their rides, till she hurt her knee in falling from her horse:—an accident that for a time incapacitated her for exercise in the saddle.
Mrs. Shelley and Claire went together to the conversazione, where they were so vastly amused by the whimsical braggart,—an Englishman who, speaking Italian fluently with his national accent and intonation, told the sisters how at Lisbon he, fighting on foot with the brace of pistols, that never missed fire or aim, put to flight thirty well-armed and well-mounted robbers. Whilst Mrs. Shelley was listening with outward civility and secret amusement to this man of valour and brave speech, Claire’s dark eyes overflowed with fun and piquant gaiety, as she whispered a saucy speech in her sister’s ear.
In November and December, 1819, Shelley and the sisters were staying at Florence in the pension, whence Mrs. Shelley wrote one of her most amusing letters to Mrs. Gisborne.
In the letter she wrote for Mrs. Hoppner’s eyes (the letter, some of whose passages were copied and dressed not long since by Mr. Froude for the readers of the Nineteenth Century) for the exculpation of Shelley and Claire, from the revolting charge that came to his ears at Ravenna in the August of 1821, Mrs. Shelley blazed into sisterly wrath at the suggestion that Claire was capable of the wickedness with which she was charged:—
‘I will add,’ writes the indignant sister to Mrs. Hoppner, from Pisa, on 10th August, 1821, ‘that Claire has been separated from us for about a year. She lives with a respectable German family at Florence. The reasons for this were obvious. Her connexion with us made her manifest as the Miss Clermont’ (sic in Froude’s transcript; but Mr. Froude is proverbially inaccurate in handling manuscripts) ‘the mother of Allegra. Besides, we live much alone. She enters much into society there; and, solely occupied with the idea of the welfare of her child, she wished to appear such that she may not be thought in after times to be unworthy of fulfilling the maternal duties. You ought to have paused before you tried to convince the father of her child of such unheard-of atrocities on her part. If his generosity and knowledge of the world had not made him reject the slander with the ridicule it deserved, what irretrievable mischief you would have occasioned her!’
It is of the woman, who writes in this strain of Claire’s devotion to her child, and strenuous efforts to qualify herself to be a good mother to her offspring, that Mr. Kegan Paul makes the staggering, though possibly correct, announcement that she thought her sister unfit to have the charge of Allegra.
It has been already told how Claire was by her sick sister’s side, when the latter was dropping into the ill-health, which preceded her miscarriage at San Terenzo. In the well-known letter to Mrs. Gisborne from Pisa (dated 15th August, 1822,—five weeks and three days after Shelley’s death), Mrs. Shelley makes repeated mention of her sister and nurse. Claire was the sedulous and loving nurse, who administered the brandy and eau-de-Cologne, and applied the vinegar, that kept her sister from fatal fainting, during the seven long hours of her most imminent danger. It was from anxiety for the patient, no less than from ignorance of the way in which it should be used, that Claire (in the doctor’s absence) lacked the courage to use the ice, which at the close of those hours Shelley himself applied so freely and effectually. The helpful, bright, sweet-voiced, tender-handed Claire remained at the Casa Magni, when Shelley had gone off to Leghorn and Pisa, leaving his wife in her weakness, to brood with unutterable melancholy over her previsions of approaching calamity. The saddest hours Mary spent in that season of deepening gloom, were the hours when Claire was not by her side, to divert her thoughts, and cheer her spirits. As soon as Claire and Jane Williams had started for their evening walk, Shelley’s wife was revisited by the feeling that disaster would speedily befall her only remaining child. Possessed by wretchedness, whilst gazing on one of the fairest scenes of all Italy, Mary used to pace slowly up and down the seaward terrace, sinking momentarily from deep to deeper dejection, during the needful absence of the sister and friend, whose society just enabled her to endure the growing burden of grief and care, that without their sympathy would have been unendurable. Such was the service of love Claire is known, by the evidence of letters, to have rendered her sister.
Figuring thus pleasantly in Mrs. Shelley’s letters, Claire shows forth no less agreeably in the series of Shelley’s letters, that appear in Mr. Buxton Forman’s edition of the poet’s prose writings. At the Bagni di Lucca, in July and August, 1818, Claire and Mary are regular attendants of the Sunday conversazioni, though they refrain from dancing for reasons known doubtless to themselves, whilst Shelley is uncertain whether they decline to dance from philosophy or Protestantism. Leaving Mary and her babes at the Bagni in August, Shelley and Claire go off to Venice, performing part of the journey in the almost springless one-horse cabriolet, that causing Shelley much discomfort fatigues Claire exceedingly. Falling in with a German, who has just recovered from an attack of malarial fever caught in the Pontine Marshes, Shelley is disposed to travel in his company to Padua, when Claire, by her entreaties, prevails on him to avoid the stranger from whom he may catch the fever, dreaded by tourists in Italy. At Venice, where she is received cordially by the Hoppners, and avoided by Allegra’s father, Claire is seen flitting hither and thither, on foot or by gondola, under Shelley’s brotherly escort. By-and-by, when Mary has come with her babes to Este, the sisters are with Shelley at the villa Byron has lent them;—the house where Mary’s little Clara sickens of the illness, so soon to end in death at Venice. When the Shelleys move southward, Claire has her seat in the heavily laden coach, travelling with them to Rome, and in their company taking her first cursory view of the manifold attractions of the Holy City. Shelley having preceded them by a few days, the sisters journey together to Naples with little Willie and his nurse, and with Paolo for the charioteer of their private carriage. At Resina, when Shelley and Mary mount mules for the ascent, Claire seats herself in the chair in which she is carried up Vesuvius ‘on the shoulders of four men, much like a member of Parliament after he has gained his election, and looking’ (says Shelley in his letter of 22nd December, 1818, to Peacock) ‘with less reason, quite as frightened.’ At Rome with the Shelleys, when their boy’s death plunges them in wretchedness, Claire is their companion and comforter in the ensuing months of despair. In the autumn of 1819 she is with them at Florence, where it amuses Shelley to observe how Lady Mountcashel’s daughter, fickle as the breeze, is alternately in love and out of humour with Claire, who is in the highest and brightest of her changeful spirits at the delightful prospect of setting off in a day or two for Vienna.
Whether this trip was made for business as well as for pleasure does not appear; but whilst fruitful of delightful anticipations, the run to the Austrian capital may have had a graver purpose. For, set on being a self-dependent and self-sustaining young woman, Claire is seldom without a new scheme for the achievement of her purpose. She means to establish herself as a teacher of languages and music. She will sing herself into universal fame as an operatic prima donna. She will condescend for a while to be the resident governess of a family of the highest quality. Writing and talking of her as la fille aux mille projêts, Shelley is ready at all times to aid her with sympathy, counsel, and money, in furtherance of each and all of her various schemes for finding suitable employment. Participating in her hopes, he shares her disappointments. Words cannot express his disdain for the mental narrowness, and moral debasement, and perverse wickedness of the gentlewoman who, after arranging to take Claire for her governess, avoided the compact, on being told of Miss Clairmont’s recent entanglement with Lord Byron, and of the relation in which she stood to Byron’s illegitimate daughter.
Shelley’s attachment to Claire is the more remarkable, because the same fervour and capriciousness, that so often set her at discord with Mary, rendered her at times alike unruly and unreasonable to him. Alternating between the highest of high spirits and the most dismal moods of despondency, Claire suffered also from a temper, whose freakish vehemence might well have made Shelley despair of keeping on good terms with her. But though she often hurt and incensed him, she never extinguished his fondness for her. Probably Shelley liked her all the better for being as quick to twit and flout him into a pet, as clever in rallying and coaxing him back into good temper. Possibly the wayward Claire saw she confirmed him in his attachment to her, by whipping him every now and then into transient mutiny against her influence. In moments of resentment Shelley could write angrily and disparagingly of Claire. But all the same it stands out clear upon the record that in eight long years he never revolted steadily against the charming girl and brilliant woman, of whom Byron wearied in much less than the same number of months. ‘Claire is with us,’ Shelley wrote to John Gisborne, from the Casa Magni, on 18th June, 1822, ‘and the death of her child seems to have restored her to tranquillity. Her character is somewhat altered. She is vivacious and talkative; and though she teases me sometimes, I like her,’