MARY'S DESPONDENCY AND BIRTH OF A SON.
Before the fatal illness of her child Willie, Mary had encountered an
old friend in Rome, and had renewed her acquaintance with Miss Curran
whom she had formerly known at her father's. Congenial tastes in
drawing and painting drew these ladies together, and Miss Curran did
or began portraits of Mary, Shelley, and, what was of more importance
to them at the time, of little Willie. The portraits of Mary and of
Shelley, unfinished, and by an amateur, are by no means satisfactory;
certainly not giving in Mary's case an idea of the beauty and charm
which are constantly referred to by her friends, and which seem to
have endured up to the time when, much later, an attack of small-pox
altered her appearance. The portrait of Mary, although not artistic,
is interesting as painted from life. Her oval face is here given with
the high forehead. The complexion described as delicate and white was
not in the gift of Miss Curran, who was not a colourist. To depict the
eyes grey, tending to brown near the iris, agrees with Shelley's,
"brown" and Trelawny's "grey" eyes, but the beauty of expression is
wanting. The mouth, thin and hard, might have caught a passing look,
but certainly not what an artist would have wished to portray; while a
certain stiffness of pose is not what one would expect in the
high-strung, sensitive Mary Shelley. The beauty of gold-brown hair was
not in the painter's power to catch. Mary was of middle height,
tending towards short; her hands were considered very beautiful, and
by some she was supposed to be given to displaying them, although
concealing them would have been difficult and unnecessary. Her arms
and neck were also beautiful. Leigh Hunt refers to her at the opera,
_décolletée_, with white, gleaming, sloping shoulders. Her "voice
the sweetest ever heard," added to her gifts of conversation,
described as resembling her father's with an added softness of manner
and charm of description, with elegance and correctness, devoid of
reserve or affectation. Cyrus Redding, who much admired and esteemed
her, obtained her opinion about Miss Curran's portrait of her husband,
for his article in the Galignani edition of Shelley. She considered it
by no means a good one, as unfinished, but with some striking points
of resemblance. She consented to superintend the engraving from it for
Galignani's volume, which was regarded as far more successful. Miss
Curran kindly assisted with advice.
While these portraits were being executed Mary was gaining the
sympathy of the painter, a boon soon much needed, for after the death
of her third child her courage for a while broke down entirely. In a
very delicate state of health at the time, she could not rouse herself
to think of anything but her losses. With no other child needing her
care, she could only abandon herself to inconsolable grief. Shelley
felt that he was out of her life for the first time; that her heart
was in Rome in the grave with her child. They revisited the Falls of
Terni, but the spirit had fled from the waters. They pass through
bustling Leghorn, and visit the Gisbornes, but the noise is
intolerable, and Shelley, ever attentive in such matters, finds a
house at a short distance in the country, the Villa Valsovano, down a
quiet lane surrounded by a market garden. Olives, fig trees, peach
trees, myrtles, alive at night with fire-flies, must have been
soothing surroundings to the wounded Mary, to whom nature was ever a
kind friend. Nor were they in solitude, for they were within visiting
distance of friends at Leghorn.
Two months after her loss she recommences her diary on Shelley's
birthday, this time not without a wail. She writes to Mrs. Hunt of the
tears she constantly sheds, and confesses she has done little work
since coming to Italy. She had read, however, several books of Livy,
Antenor, Clarissa, some novels, the Bible, Lucan's Pharsalia, and
Dante. Shelley is reading her _Paradise Lost_, and he is writing
the _Cenci_, where
That fair, blue-eyed boy,
Who was the lodestar of your life,
Mary tells us refers to William. Shelley wrote that their house was a
melancholy one, and only cheered by letters from England.
On September 18 Mary wrote to her friend, Miss Curran, that they were
about to move, she knew not whither. Then Shelley, with Charles
Clairmont, went to Florence and engaged rooms for six months, and at
the end of September Shelley returned and took his wife by slow and
easy stages to the Tuscan capital, for her health was then in a very
delicate state for travelling. There, in the lovely city of Florence,
on November 12, 1819, she gave birth to her son Percy Florence, who
first broke the spell of unhappiness which had hung for the last five
months like a cloud over them; he, as events proved, was to be her one
comfort with her memories, when the supreme calamity of her life fell
on her, and he was mercifully spared to be the solace of her later
years.