As I discussed in previous blog posts, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley named himself as the father of a baby girl in Naples in February 1819. Whether or not he was truly the father is unknown, but historians are certain that the mother couldn't have been his wife Mary Shelley. However, some people think the mother might have been Claire Clairmont, Mary's step-sister, who accompanied them to Italy. (The portrait to the left was painted in Rome by their friend Amelia Curran. Claire didn't care for this portrait.)
   Claire already had a daughter by Lord Byron, and she went with Shelley to Venice, ostensibly to visit her little daughter. So Claire was travelling with Shelley for several weeks without Mary, something which would raise eyebrows even today.
   In Venice, Claire and Shelley met the English consul-general, Richard Hoppner and his wife. 

This blog post is the seventh in my series about some enduring mysteries in the life of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Scroll down for links to the entire series.
  The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley, along with her step-sister Claire Clairmont and their two little children, spent the summer of 1818 in the resort town of Bagni di Lucca, in Italy.
   Naturally, their lovely villa came equipped with a cook and housemaid. They also had a nursemaid for the children. Mary's favourite nursemaid, the Swiss nanny Elise, was in Venice looking after Claire Clairmont’s daughter by Lord Byron, but an English girl named Milly stayed with them in Bagni di Lucca. And they had a man-servant, an Italian named Paoli Foggi.
   Foggi was more or less in charge of running the household, dealing with tradesmen, doing the shopping and so forth. When Shelley and Claire Clairmont decided to go to Venice because she was worried about leaving her daughter Allegra in Byron’s custody, Foggi went to the nearby town of Lucca to arrange for transportation.
  By the winter of 1819, the Shelleys were unhappy with Foggi, and dismissed him. Mary Shelley later explained that he had been stealing from them and furthermore, the nursemaid Elise Duvillard had “formed an attachment” to him; in other words, he’d gotten her pregnant and “we had them married.”
   In recalling these events, Mary Shelley wrote that Elise was “in danger of a miscarriage” when she married Paolo Foggi. The newly-married couple left the Shelleys’ service and went to Rome. Was Elise pregnant when she left? Had she miscarried? Or did she deliver her baby in Naples before leaving for Rome? If she had given birth to a living baby that winter, then Foggi could not have been the father, as Elise was in living in Venice most of the previous year, looking after Allegra.

There is an enduring literary mystery around Percy Bysshe Shelley and a baby girl born in Naples in the winter of 1818/19. The date on the birth certificate – December 27 – does not agree with the age given on her death certificate. 
   On both documents, the father of the child is given as Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley took financial responsibility for little Elena Adelaide even though she never lived with Percy and his wife Mary.
   The birth certificate, retrieved from the Neapolitan archives in the 1930’s, is reproduced here. You can just make out the name "Elena Adelaide" at the bottom in this image with an elaborately drawn "E" and "A" and "d"

 ​   Unfortunately the writing in this reproduction, taken from N.I. White's 1940 biography of Shelley, is very faint, but we are told that the mother's name is given as “Marina Padurin.’ You can see the large swoop-down of the letter "M" on the fourth line from the bottom.
  Ivan Roe, writing in 1955, said that “Godwin” has been misread as “Padurin,” “a slip resulting from unfamiliarity with the Italian script used in the certificate."   
  Yet subsequently, many biographers have reported that the name is given as “Marina (or Maria or Mary) Padurin.” Padurin is a Russian surname and no-one has suggested a Shelley connection to this name....
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