Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
Later in the month, when Claire learned what Byron had done, she was furious. For her it was a disaster, and she wrote Byron
a harsh letter, accusing him of breaking the promise he had made to her at the Villa Diodati that Allegra would always remain
with one of her parents. She added an attack on convents and convent education, parroting Shelley’s hostility to religion
and its effect on Italian women. She claimed that such schooling was responsible for “the state of ignorance & profligacy
of Italian women, all pupils of Convents. They are bad wives & most unnatural mothers, licentious & ignorant they are the
dishonour & unhappiness of society.” She accused Byron of condemning Allegra “to a life of ignorance & degradation,” depriving
her of the advantages of “belonging to the most enlightened country in the world.” (She meant England, though as Byron was
certainly aware, Parliament had just passed the Six Acts, designed to stamp out freedom of the press and political dissent.)
Claire entreated Byron to let Allegra enter an English boarding school, offering to pay for it herself. Ironically, considering
that Claire herself would convert to Roman Catholicism in her old age, she also accused Byron of having Allegra adopt a different
religion in order to cut her off from her own mother and her friends.
Byron forwarded Claire’s attack to Hoppner, with the notation, “The moral part of this letter upon the
Italians
&c. comes with an excellent grace from the writer [who] planted a child in the N [Naples]
foundling
&c.” He was referring to the story that Claire and Shelley abandoned the child of their union to an orphanage in Naples.
As for the charges Claire made against Catholicism, they only goaded Byron into stubbornness. He would write to Thomas Moore
in March 1822, “I am no enemy of religion, but the contrary. As a proof, I am educating my natural daughter a strict Catholic
in a convent of Romagna; for I think people can never have
enough
of religion, if they are to have any. I incline, myself, very much to the Catholic doctrines.” This sounds very much like
Byron professing mock piety merely for effect—as he himself was aware, for in a similar letter a few days later, he added,
“I am afraid that this sounds flippant, but I don’t mean it to be so. . . . Still, I do assure you that I am a very good Christian.”
Hoppner, for one, approved of Byron’s decision, writing him,
Whether the convent in which you have placed her be well conducted or not, we of course . . . cannot be supposed competent
to judge; but if we may form any opinion of the merits of a boarding school education in England from what we know of the
child’s Mama, I can have little hesitation in saying the convent is not likely to be worse. On the other question of religion
it is one on which there naturally must be a diversity of opinion.
At the beginning of August, Shelley’s health had improved enough so that he set out to visit Byron in Ravenna and to check
on Allegra. Shelley had sent Byron a copy of a new poem,
Adonais,
his memorial to John Keats, who had died in April at the age of twenty-six, three years younger than Shelley. Shelley attached
a note in which he belittled his own work in comparison to Byron’s: “I send you—as Diomed gave Glaucus his brazen arms for
those of gold—some verses I wrote on the death of Keats.” In the poem, Shelley blamed bad reviews for Keats’s untimely death.
Byron was not an admirer of Keats’s poetry, but of course he loathed reviewers, who had savaged the first two cantos of
Don Juan
. (
The British Critic:
“a narrative of degrading debauchery in doggrel rhyme.”
The Eclectic Review:
“poetry in which the deliberate purpose of the Author is to corrupt by inflaming the mind, to seduce to the love of evil
which he has himself chosen as his good.”)
On the way to Byron’s, Shelley stopped at Livorno, where Claire had gone to bathe in the sea to cure an attack of what was
said to be scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. Shelley arrived late in the evening of August 3. He spent the next day, his twenty-ninth
birthday, with Claire. Her journal entry read: “Saturday August 4th. S’s Birthday 29 yrs. Rise at five—Row in the Harbour
with S—Then call upon the Countess Tolomei. Then we sail into the sea. A very fine warm day. the white sails of ships upon
the horizon looked like doves stooping over the water. Dine at the Giardinetto. S—goes at two.” Shelley kept this detour a
secret from both Mary and Byron.
When Shelley arrived at Ravenna, Byron showed him a letter he had received from Hoppner about a year before. This was the
source of Byron’s belief that Claire had given birth to Shelley’s child in Naples; that Shelley abandoned it in the foundling
hospital; that Shelley had previously tried to get an abortion for Claire and had kept Mary in the dark about the whole matter.
The Hoppners had learned this from Elise and believed it. Byron tended to believe the story, but was not sure that Elise was
a credible witness.
Shelley wrote to Mary and asked her to deny the story “which you only can effectually rebut.” Though Mary was in no position
to refute or confirm it, she wrote a long letter, claiming that Elise’s story was a malicious lie. She explained that Elise
had been put up to this slur by her husband, Paolo Foggi. Mary passionately asserted that her marriage had “ever been undisturbed.”
Neither her letter nor the one Shelley sent to her mentioned the origin of the baby Elena herself. There is no record of whether
Claire was informed about this exchange. Byron kept Mary’s letter and may not have shown it to the Hoppners, who afterward
kept the story in circulation.
Aside from that matter, Byron cheered Shelley up and imposed his routine on him for the next ten days. Byron arose at midday
and the two talked until six; afterward they went riding and sat up all night in conversation. Shelley wrote to Peacock complaining
about the sense of inferiority he felt when he was with Byron. “I write nothing, and probably shall write no more. It offends
me to see my name classed among those who have no name. If I cannot be something better, I had rather be nothing.”
Percy visited Allegra in the convent before he left Ravenna. He went alone; never once did Byron visit his daughter there,
although the Countess Guiccioli did. Percy had always loved Allegra, seeing her as part of his family, and he spent three
hours at the convent. He brought her a gift of a gold chain and some sweets, noticing that she shared the sweets with a friend
and the nuns, “not much like the old Allegra.” Discipline was supposedly strict at the convent, but Shelley saw no evidence
that it was severe. “Her light & airy figure & her graceful motions were a striking contrast to the other children there—she
seemed a thing of a finer race & a higher order,” he wrote. After overcoming Allegra’s initial shyness, he was soon running
and skipping with her through the garden. “Before I went away,” he wrote Mary, “she made me run all over the convent, like
a mad thing.” The nuns were apparently retiring for their afternoon naps, and mischievously Allegra began ringing the large
bell that was the signal for them to assemble. Shelley noted that “it required all the efforts of the prioresses to prevent
the spouses of God to render themselves dressed or undressed to the accustomed signal. Nobody scolded her for these
scappature
[escapades]: so I suppose that she is well treated as far as temper is concerned.”
He did have some criticisms, blaming Allegra’s paleness on the fact that the convent did not serve vegetarian meals, and the
religious atmosphere, of course, was not to his liking. He noted that Allegra “knows certain orazioni by heart & talks &
dreams
of Paradise & angels & all sorts of things—and has a prodigious list of saints—and is always talking of the Bambino. This
fuora
will do her no harm—but the idea of bringing up so sweet a creature in the midst of such trash till sixteen!” When Shelley
asked Allegra whether she had a message for her father, the girl answered that he should come and visit her and bring “la
mammina
with him.” She was referring to Teresa. Shelley never told Claire that her daughter had virtually forgotten her.
Shelley had made the trip to Ravenna with more than Allegra in mind. Both he and Byron had felt the sting of unfavorable reviews;
now Shelley proposed they cooperate in a venture that would enable the two of them to strike back. They would invite Leigh
Hunt to join them in Pisa and start a liberal political journal that would not be subject to the harsh restrictions on the
press that were currently part of British law. Byron was thinking of leaving Ravenna in any case, for the Gambas, including
Teresa, had been forced to flee after the Austrian authorities discovered a Carbonari plot.
On the way home, Shelley stopped at Florence, where he met the countess. Shelley described her as “a very pretty sentimental,
innocent, superficial Italian, who has sacrifized [
sic
] an immense fortune to live for Lord Byron; and who, if I know any thing of my friend, of her, or of human nature will hereafter
have plenty of leisure & opportunity to repent of her rashness.” The countess, in turn, had her own impression of Shelley
at this time:
It was said that in his adolescence he was good-looking—but now he was no longer so. His features were delicate but not regular—except
for his mouth which however was not good when he laughed, and was a little spoiled by his teeth, the shape of which was not
in keeping with his refinement. . . . He was also extraordinary in his garb, for he normally wore a jacket like a young college
boy’s, never any gloves nor polish on his boots—and yet among a thousand he would always have seemed the most finished of
gentlemans [
sic
]. His voice was shrill—even strident and nevertheless it was modulated by the drift of his thoughts with a grace, a gentleness,
a delicacy that went to the heart. . . . Perhaps never did anyone ever see a man so deficient in beauty who could still produce
an impression of it. . . . It was the fire, the enthusiasm, of his Intelligence that transformed his features.
Byron began making plans to move from the Palazzo Guiccioli (where he still resided, despite everything that had occurred)
to Pisa. The mother superior of the convent, hearing of Byron’s intended departure, invited him to visit Allegra before he
left. The nun enclosed a note in Allegra’s own childish handwriting (in Italian), showing how precocious she was, since she
was not quite five:
My Dear Papa —
It being fair-time I should so much like a visit from my Papa, as I have many desires to satisfy; will you not please your
Allegrina who loves you so?
Byron never answered the letter and did not visit. Instead, he passed Allegra’s letter on to a friend, calling it “sincere
enough but not very flattering—for she wants to see me because it ‘is the fair’ to get paternal Gingerbread—I suppose.” On
October 29, Byron left Ravenna. He left behind the more decrepit animals—a goat with a broken leg, a fish-eating heron, an
old mutt, two ugly monkeys, and a badger on a chain. He also left behind unpaid bills and lastly, his four-year-old daughter
in the convent, discarded as easily as the rest.
At the same time Byron arrived in Pisa, Claire was leaving the city for Florence, where she was to start a new life looking
after someone else’s children. “Just before Empoli,” she wrote in her journal, “we passed Lord B—and his travelling train.”
It was hard to miss Byron’s caravan, which consisted of his enormous carriage and several wagons carrying his personal possessions
as well as the menagerie of animals he did bother to transport. He caused quite a stir as he passed through the villages along
the road from Ravenna to Pisa. Byron did not see Claire, but through the window of the public coach in which she traveled,
she caught a look at his pale, handsome face. She would never see him again.
I
n Pisa, Byron received the reviews of cantos 3, 4, and 5 of
Don Juan
—no better than the previous ones.
The British Critic:
“spawned in filth and darkness”;
The Edinburgh Magazine:
“poisoning the current of fine poetry . . . ribaldry and blasphemy.”
By February of 1822, Claire was planning to take a job as a governess in Vienna, where her brother Charles now lived. This
would mean she might not be able to see Allegra for a long time, so once again she pleaded with Byron, begging him to allow
her to visit her daughter. “My dear Friend, I conjure you do not make the world dark to me, as if my Allegra were dead.” Byron’s
refusal was a factor in changing Claire’s mind: instead of going to Vienna, she remained in Florence.
In the early spring Claire’s concern about Allegra increased. She even hatched a plan to remove the child from the convent
with the aid of a forged letter. She tried to enlist the Shelleys in the plot, which had echoes in the past: Mary Wollstonecraft
had kidnapped her sister from her husband; Shelley had wanted to rescue his own sister from school. For once, Mary and Percy
acted like grown-ups and turned down Claire’s plan. Mary further tried to dissuade her by pointing out that Allegra was in
a part of Italy that was relatively free of disease. She also warned Claire that it was unwise to irritate Byron, who was
wealthy and had powerful friends. “L. B. would use any means to find you out,” she wrote, and if Shelley were involved in
the scheme, Byron might challenge him to a duel. “Another thing I mention,” wrote Mary. “Spring is our unlucky season. No
spring [since 1815] has passed for us without some piece of ill luck.”
Shelley, of course, was hoping to establish the new literary journal with Byron, and needed his financial support. He did,
however, go to Byron and ask him to make some gesture that would placate Claire. Claire, who heard about this after the fact,
said Byron merely responded with “a shrug of impatience, and the exclamation that women could not live without making scenes.”
Claire dropped the kidnapping plans, but on April 9, she wrote Mary again to express her fears: “I am truly uneasy for it
seems to me some time since I have heard any news from Allegra. I fear she is sick.” Claire’s intuition was on target this
time, for Allegra was indeed very ill. Four days later, Byron’s Italian banker, who had recommended the convent school, was
informed by the reverend mother that Allegra was suffering from a fever. A physician from Ravenna, Dr. Rasi, had been called
in and feared that Allegra was suffering from typhus, which was raging in the area.