10

A Series of Slight Quarrels

The pace quickened as the summer drew to its close. On 21 July 1816, the
Shelleys and Clairmont went on an excursion to Chamounix to see Mont
Blanc and the Mer de Glace; the trip provided material for both Percy
Shelley's 'Mont Blanc' and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. They returned
on the twenty-seventh.
On 14 August, M.G. Lewis, author of The Monk (1796), arrived for a
short visit. He translated for Byron some passages from Faust which
helped to inspire Manfred, told some ghost stories, and took part with
Byron and Percy Shelley in a philosophical discussion of ghosts - in
which neither Byron nor Lewis believed, much to Shelley's disgust.1 He
also added a codicil to his will: he had recently visited one of his
plantations in Jamaica, and introduced a number of reforms to make life
easier for his slaves; now he was worried about what might happen to
them after his death. So the codicil required his heirs to visit the estate at
least once every three years, encouraged them to make further reforms,
and forbade them, on pain of forfeiture, to make the lot of the slaves
harder. Lewis signed the document on 20 August; Byron, Shelley, and
Polidori witnessed it.2
On the twenty-sixth, Hobhouse arrived at last, bringing Scrope Davies
with him. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, the Shelleys left for
England, taking Clairmont with them, much to Byron's relief. Later on
the twenty-ninth, Byron left for Chamounix with Hobhouse, Davies,
and - this time - Polidori. They found one of Percy Shelley's scandalous
hotel-register entries, and Byron erased it. Hobhouse's diary for this trip
suggests that Polidori's observation of scenery was more detailed than
his own journal reveals: 'Dr P. made me before remark the singular
appearance of the vertical strata in some of the vast precipices on our
left.'3 The Alpine landscape must also have suggested a conversation on
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:41 PM
100 Byron: 1816

a current controversy in geology a few days later. Hobhouse recorded:

'Dr P spoke to me of the Huttonian and Wernerian theories and declared
himself for both as causes of phenomena.'4 James Hutton of Edinburgh
(1726-97) was a Vulcanist, holding that rocks such as granite were
igneous in origin, and the originator of uniformitarianism, the theory
that geological processes are uniform over time; Lyell and Darwin were
among his followers. Abraham Gottlob Werner (1750-1817) rejected
uniformitarianism for catastrophism and Vulcanism for Neptunism,
holding that all rocks had been formed by sedimentation. The conversa-
tion demonstrates the breadth of Polidori's interests, and also his mental
mobility, since the two theories are incompatible.5
The two men discussed medical matters as well. Polidori explained his
theory that goitres were caused by 'bad air.'6 (Whatever Byron and the
Shelleys may have thought of Polidori's verses on goitred idiots,
Hobhouse took this curious theory seriously. On a later tour of the
Bernese Alps with Byron, he would make some observations that
seemed to verify it.)7 Back at Diodati, Polidori predicted, on the strength
of an 'uneasiness' in Hobhouse's throat and head, that he would die of
apoplexy.8 Hobhouse had never liked him, and had tried to persuade
Byron not to hire him; this grim prognosis may have been the doctor's
revenge.
On 5 September, Davies went back to England with Byron's page,
Robert Rushton. On the day after he arrived, he visited Leigh to give her
some presents from her brother, and told her he thought that Byron
disliked Polidori and would take the first opportunity to dismiss him.9
The day Davies left, Polidori had taken up his journal again, after a
lapse of over two months. The entry under this date is very long; it was
apparently written over several days. It is a kind of summing-up of the
second half of the summer in the light of his imminent departure, for
Davies was right.
Byron would later write to his sister about his reasons for dismissing 1 0

Polidori: T had no use for him & his temper & habits were not good.' A s

Byron's health had improved, Polidori's uselessness to him had become

more obvious than ever. He had been on one of his fanatical diets during
the summer.11 By Hobhouse's arrival, however, he had at least given up
the heavy doses of laxatives that often accompanied his diets; on 9
September, Hobhouse was able to send Leigh a reassuring account of her
brother: 'A considerable change has taken place in his health; no brandy,
no very late hours, no quarts of magnesia, nor deluges of soda water.
Neither passion nor perverseness, even the scream has died away.'12
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:41 PM
A Series of Slight Quarrels 101

As Polidori's uselessness became more obvious, so did his bad temper.

One outburst seems to have been inspired by a determination to prove
himself useful. He accused a local apothecary of selling Byron some 'bad
magnesia'; when the apothecary came to answer the accusation he was
'impudent, 'so Polidori knocked off his hat and broke his glasses.13 The
apothecary had him arrested for calumny and assault.14 Polidori suc-
cessfully repelled the charge of calumny: the court only 'made me pay 12
florins for the broken spectacles and costs.' He considered it a triumph.15
Another row with the locals occurred while Polidori was out for a
drive with a man named Lloyd, whom he had met at the Genevan
Liberal Society. It appears not to have been Polidori's fault, but the
enthusiasm with which he describes it is disturbing - the journal sud-
denly stops being a series of jottings and returns to the fuller narrative
style with which it began:
We went out visiting one day, and, in returning in his gig, he
touched a horse of a row of carts. The carter struck me upon
my back with his whip; I jumped down, and six jumped at me.
I fortunately was between a wheel and a hedge, so that they all
could not reach. Lloyd, seeing this, jumped down also; then
three left me and went to him, and another untied a piece of
his wagon with which, while I defended myself from the two
(one with a whip), he struck me while fortunately my arm was
striking a blow, so that it did but just touch my face. He lifted
again; I sprang back, and with all the force of my leap struck
him with my fist in his face. His blow fell to the ground, and
with his hand to his nose he retreated. They then seized stones
to throw, but we closed with them; they could not throw above
two, when we saw an English carriage we knew coming. We
called, they came, and immediately the boisterous [(they)] were
calm. Some who tried to divide us got blows also.16
He drew a discouraging political conclusion from these encounters:
'Here their liberty only makes them insolent,' as he wrote to his radical
friend Taylor.17
Not surprisingly, he refers less fully to his quarrels with the other
members of the Diodati circle. He does mention that he 'threatened to
shoot Sfhelley] one day on the water.'18 Moore gives a fuller account of
what appears to be the same incident, which he blames on the 'jealous
pique of the Doctor against Shelley.' Shelley beat Polidori in a sailing
match; Polidori 'ook it into his head that his antagonist had treated him
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:41 PM
102 Byron: 1816

with contempt,' and challenged him to a duel. Shelley, who had already
told him the story of his refusing to fight a duel against his landlord,
treated him with contempt: Moore says that he 'only laughed' in re-
sponse to the challenge. Byron put an end to the incident by telling
Polidori: 'Recollect, that though Shelley has some scruples about duell-
ing, I have none; and shall be, at all times, ready to take his place.' 19 Both
Byron and Shelley took double roles in this little drama of sibling rivalry:
Polidori was jealous because he felt Shelley had replaced him as Byron's
protege, so Byron offered to replace Shelley as Polidori's antagonist.
Polidori had only a single role, that of the impotent and jealous younger
son.
Moore attributes an even more serious incident to the same jealousy.
Polidori does not mention it at all. His jealousy, Moore says, led him to
indulge in 'intemperate remonstrances, which Lord Byron indignantly
resented; and the usual bounds of courtesy being passed on both sides,
the dismissal of Polidori appeared, even to himself, inevitable.' He
looked on this as 'nothing less than ruin,' and went to his room to poison
himself. He was just wondering whether to leave a note when Byron
'tapped at the door and entered, with his hand held forth in sign of
reconciliation.' Polidori burst into tears. According to Moore, he later
'declared that nothing could exceed the gentle kindness of Lord Byron in
soothing his mind and restoring him to composure.' 20 Polidori's second
suicide attempt would not be interrupted.
Polidori preferred to dwell on Byron's gentle kindness rather than on
his teasing. On 3 September, when his departure really was inevitable,
he described his employer's behaviour to Taylor as 'kind liberal &
gentlemanly. Subject to bad temper it is sometimes disagreeable but that
is all.' 21 On the twentieth, after he had left, he wrote to his father: 'We
have parted, finding that our tempers did not agree, he propos[ed] it & it
was settled, there was no immediate cause, but a continued series of
slight quarrels. I believe the fault, if any, has been on my part, I am not
accustomed to have a master, & there fore my conduct was not free &
easy.' 22 Polidori was accustomed to being dominated by a father-figure,
and to rebelling against him, but he could hardly be expected to com-
ment on this to his father, or to a father-figure like Taylor, even if he were
aware of it.
Byron agreed with Polidori's generous assessment of him: 'It was
Polidori's own fault that we did not agree,' he told Medwin. He did add:
'I was sorry when we parted, for I soon get attached to people.' 23 And he
sometimes took a more even-handed view of their parting. He wrote to
Murray early in 1817: 'his remaining with me was out of the question -1
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:41 PM
A Series of Slight Quarrels 103

have enough to do to manage my own scrapes - & as precepts without

example are not the most gracious homilies - I thought it better to give
him his conge.'24 He could be as ambivalent as his employee.
Byron's friends were not as ready to be fair: they saw the fault as
Polidori's alone. On 15 September, the day before Polidori left,
Hobhouse wrote in his diary:

Helped Dr. Polidori to settle his involved accounts with Lord

Byron, and took leave of him. He does not answer to Madame
de Stael's definition of a happy man, whose capacities are
squared with his inclinations. Took leave of him, poor fellow!
He is anything but an amiable man, and has a most unmeas-
ured ambition, as well as inordinate vanity; the true ingre-
dients of misery.25

(De Stael's definition of happiness, which Hobhouse has slightly mis-

quoted, is in her Reflexions sur le suicide.)And a week earlier, Percy
Shelley, who had been talking to Hobhouse, had ended a letter to Byron:
'I hope that [Hobhouse] has destroyed whatever scruples you might
have felt, in dismissing Polidori. The anecdote which he recounted to me
the evening before I left Geneva made my blood run cold.'27 Unfor-
tunately, Hobhouse did not confide this blood-curdling anecdote to his
diary. It is only fair to add that Shelley's blood was easily curdled.
Shelley may also have believed that Polidori had injured his health,
perhaps by administering ether on the night of 18 June. Clairmont, at
least, believed this. She wrote to Byron on 12 September: 'I am sure you
will be very sorry to hear poor Shelley has dreadful health violent
spasms in the head; this is all that vile & nauseous animal Polidori's
doing - he will do you some mischief so pray send him away & hire a
steady clever physician; with your health you must not be without
one.'28 Clairmont's bad opinion can only have done Polidori good, but it
came too late to save his job.
After Hobhouse had helped him with his accounts, Polidori found that
he had seventy Napoleons or pounds (the two units were roughly
equivalent): fifty in salary and twenty for travelling expenses. This was a
generous amount: £50 for less than five months works out to more than
£120 a year. (In 1823, when Byron hired Francesco Bruno to accompany
him to Greece as his physician - a more onerous, even a dangerous
assignment - he offered him only £100 a year, which was still considered
generous.)29 Byron had also made Polidori a gift of money towards
buying a watch.30
Brought to you by | UCL - University College London
Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:41 PM
104 Byron: 1816

Polidori settled some debts. Apparently it was only then - on the day
before his departure - that he decided, as he told his father, 'to walk over
Italy & seeing the medical establishments see if there proves a good
opportunity to settle ...'31 De Stael gave him three letters of recommen-
dation, including one to the Countess of Westmorland, who was at Rome
and might want an English physician.
He took his leave of his Genevan acquaintances, apparently rather
sullenly: 'Wished nobody good-bye: told them, though, I was going.'
They were more forthcoming: 'Madame Bfrelaz?] wept, and most
seemed sorry.' 32 He sent his trunks on ahead to Milan and set out on foot
at six the next morning, alone.

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London

Authenticated
Download Date | 7/4/18 1:41 PM