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This explains my estrangement. While with you I was solely occupied by endeavouring not to think or feel, for had I done either I should not have been so calm as I daresay I appeared.... Nothing but my Father could have drawn me to town again; his claims only prevent me now from burying myself in the country. I have known no peace since July. I never expect to know it again. Is it not best, then, that you forget the unhappy
M. W. S.?
We hear no more of this painful episode. It did not put a stop to Jane’s intercourse with Mary. Friendship, in the old sense, could never be. But, to the end of Mary’s life, her letters show the tenderness, the half-maternal solicitude she ever felt for the companion and sharer of her deepest affliction.
Another distraction came to her now in the shape of an invitation to Paris, which she accepted, although she was feeling far from well, a fact which she attributed to depression of spirits, but which proved to have quite another cause.
Journal, April 11 (1828).—I depart for Paris, sick at heart, yet pining to see my friend (Julia Robinson).
A lady, an intimate friend of hers at this time, who, in a little book called Traits of Character, has given a very interesting (though, in some details, inaccurate) sketch of Mary Shelley, says that her visit to Paris was eagerly looked forward to by many. “Honour to the authoress and admiration for the woman awaited her.” But, directly after her arrival, she was prostrated on a sick—it was feared, death-bed. Her journal, three months later, tells the sequel.
Journal, July 8, Hastings.—There was a reason for my depression: I was sickening of the small-pox. I was confined to my bed the moment I arrived in Paris. The nature of my disorder was concealed from me till my convalescence, and I am so easily duped. Health, buoyant and bright, succeeded to my illness. The Parisians were very amiable, and, a monster to look at as I was, I tried to be agreeable, to compensate to them.
The same authoress asserts that neither when she recovered nor ever after was she in appearance the Mary Shelley of the past. She was not scarred by the disease (“which in its natural form she had had in childhood”), but the pearly delicacy and transparency of her skin and the brightness and luxuriance of her soft hair were grievously dimmed.
She bore this trial to womanly vanity well and bravely, for she had that within which passeth show—high intellectual endowments, and, better still, a true, loving, faithful heart.