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. 

   A year and a half later, Shelley paid another visit to Lord Byron, and Byron told him that Mr. Hoppner had sent him a letter with some shocking gossip. (Byron had held on to this gossip for a year before Shelley heard of it.)  To recap the gossip chain here: Shelley fired his manservant, Paolo Foggi. At the same time, Foggi married the Shelley's nursemaid, Elise Duvillard. The following summer, Elise was in Venice and gossiped about the Shelleys and Claire to the Hoppners. Mr. Hoppner wrote a letter to Byron which Byron showed to Shelley a year later. Most of Mr. Hoppner's letter is available online, here on page 20. (pdf)
​Shelley wrote a letter to Mary, telling her about the Hoppner letter:

   Shelley's very excited here, so I will recap. He is saying, "people said I slept with your sister, but meh, we've heard that before, amirite? I don't care if the Literary Review back in England hints that I've committed incest when they review my poetry, but what really upsets me is that anyone could think I'm the sort of person who could procure an abortion or abandon a child in a foundling home!"
​   First, let's pause to exclaim, along with Victorian-era Shelley biographer Thomas Cordy Jeaffreson, "Shelley said what to his wife?"

  No, the biggest outrage to everyone involved--Elise, the Hoppners, Byron and the Shelleys--was the imputation that Claire tried to obtain an abortion with Shelley's help (by bringing her to Venice) and when that failed, he abandoned the child. Everyone--the Shelleys, the Hoppners, even Byron--express their revulsion at this.
   Incidentally, at this time in Italy and in many places, churches made provision for desperate women to abandon their babies safely. (Of course when I say "safely," there was still a horrific infant mortality rate at the time). They could come to the church or foundling home in secrecy, deposit the baby anonymously in a device that resembled a lazy susan, and the baby would be taken into the foundling home and raised by nuns. 
   This kind of arrangement still survives in mainland China to this day. Parents can give up children whom they cannot provide for, or who are born out of wedlock, without fear of reprisal.
   However, Shelley did not dispose of Elena Adelaide in this fashion, although the possibility exists that he might have taken her from a foundling home. So, Shelley could have replied to the Hoppner letter with perfect honesty, "Hey, I never abandoned a child in a foundling home!" But he didn't say anything. He left it up to his wife, who had nothing to do with any of it. 
​   Shelley wrote Mary, as we have seen, repeating the details of the allegations. He then asked her to answer the Hoppner letter and defend his honour. which she promptly did, in a passionate letter. 
​   Most of Mary's letter is taken up with telling Mrs. Hoppner how much she loves Shelley and how inconceivable it is that anyone could believe this terrible gossip about her wonderful husband, gossip which is so dreadful she would rather die than repeat it:

   She also gave some background on Elise and Paolo Foggi, to explain why Mrs. Hoppner should never have believed them. As for the idea of Claire being pregnant, she pointed out that the three of them lived together, and although Claire was ill for a few days that winter, she couldn't have been in an advanced stage of pregnancy or given birth at home (which of course is where people gave birth back then) without Mary noticing.
   Mary asserts: "I am perfectly convinced in my own mind that Shelley never had an improper connexion with Claire... Claire had no child." 
​  Shelley buffs have said, "Ah-ha, she said, 'Claire had no child," she didn't say, 'there was no child.' And somebody must have had one, because there was a baby--Elena Adelaide." Further, Mary does not directly address the accusations about abandoning a child or attempted abortion, except to say it couldn't possibly be true and the idea is so vile  she can't even write the words.

    And so the story of Shelley and the mysterious lady and the mysterious baby basically ends there, except for a little bit more to do with Elise, which I discuss below.
   People who have tried to sort out truth from falsehood and fact from gossip in this affair are confounded by the behaviour of everyone involved.
   If Elise entered a shot-gun marriage with Paolo Foggi, why didn't they keep the baby?
   If it was Elise's baby, as some have suggested, why would Elise open this can of worms with anybody, and why wouldn't Shelley and Mary say, "there was a baby, and it is the baby of Elise and our rascally ex-servant"?
   Why would Shelley put his name on the birth certificate unless it was his child or unless he intended to adopt the baby and raise it as his own child. And if he needed or wanted to adopt a baby girl the night before he left Naples, why?
   If Claire was the mother, why was she content to abandon the child with a Neapolitan family? She was heart-broken when she had to give her daughter Allegra to Lord Byron to raise; she greatly regretted doing so.
   If Claire wasn't Shelley's mistress, why didn't Mary and Shelley insist that she write a letter to the Hoppners, telling them to stop spreading horrible gossip about her? These rumours affected her reputation as much as Shelley's and were more damaging for a lady than for a man.
   OTOH, if Claire was Shelley's mistress, why did Shelley turn to his wife to defend him and why did she agree to do it?
   If Elena Adelaide was a Neapolitan foundling whom Shelley adopted to help console Mary for the loss of their daughter Clara, why isn't that mentioned in the letter to the Hoppners? It would explain where the bizarre story came from and put the matter to rest.
    Why did Shelley leave it up to his wife, who didn't go to Venice, to insist that he and Claire didn't have an affair? Was he just too distraught? Was he implying that the whole worrisome, ghastly business was beneath his notice?  Is asking your wife to mop up a mess like this a very nice thing to do?
​   What if Shelley wanted Mary to write the denial precisely because she didn't know the whole truth? Whereas if he wrote a denial, he knew he would be lying about some or all of it?
   And don't forget the mysterious lady. Why was Shelley telling Lord Byron and others that he was being pursued by a mysterious lady?

   More perplexing behaviour: In 1820, Shelley and Mary were complaining that Paolo Foggi was blackmailing them and they had to resort to a lawyer to deal with it. Yet after Foggi was supposedly silenced, Foggi's wife Elise continued to write to Mary and ask for money. According to Mary, this was not an extortion letter, but a begging letter. As she told Mrs. Hoppner, "The other day I received a letter from Elise, entreating with great professions of love, that I should send her money!"
   As Shelley biographer Richard Holmes notes, "this was done in a quite innocent and beseeching way and without a hint of blackmail."  This is further evidence, as far as I'm concerned, that there never was a blackmail attempt--the supposed blackmail by Paolo Foggi was just an invention of Shelley's to explain why he had to see his lawyer in Pisa.

   A further mystery--a mystery in the sense that it goes against what we know of human nature--in 1822, Elise and Claire met again in Florence. They met almost every day for a number of weeks. This despite the horrible things Elise had supposedly told the Hoppners about her, which included: having an affair with her sister's husband, and insulting and taunting her sister Mary every day with how Shelley didn't love her any more. For what it's worth, Elise denied ever saying any of those things to the Hoppners.

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.

   Some scholars have speculated that Elise is the mother of Elena Adelaide. But if the Paolo-Elise marriage was a shotgun marriage, then why would they leave their baby behind and why did Shelley claim to be the father on the birth certificate? And, if Elena Adelaide was Elise’s child, why did she later claim that Shelley and Claire Clairmont had a baby and abandoned it in a foundling home? Why bring up these accusations if the baby was in fact her child, by Foggi or by Shelley?
   In June 1820 Shelley told his friends the Gisbornes: “The rascal Paolo [Foggi] has been taking advantage of my situation at Naples in December 1818 to attempt to extort money by threatening to charge me with the most horrible crimes.”
  Shelley does not specify what this “situation” was but it probably involves his Neapolitan “ward” Elena Adelaide.
   The odd thing about this, which I've never seen any biographers discuss, is that successful blackmailers say, “give me money or else I will spill the beans.” But Foggi and Elise had already spilled the beans—they had already told the English-consul general in Venice, Richard Hoppner, that Shelley had gotten Claire pregnant, attempted to abort the child in Venice, then she gave birth and they abandoned the baby in Naples. Hoppner was so scandalized by this gossip that he wrote Lord Byron:*
   “at the time the Shelleys were here [in Venice] [Claire] was with child by Shelley: you may remember to have heard that she was constantly unwell, & under the care of a Physician, and I am uncharitable enough to believe that the quantity of medicine she then took was not for the mere purpose of restoring her health. I perceive too why she preferred remaining alone at Este notwithstanding her fear of ghosts & robbers, to being here with the Shelleys.” The lurid details are here, on page 20 (pdf).  Hoppner says, "This account we had from Elise (the nursemaid) who passed here this summer..." 

   ​So we know Elise and perhaps Paolo were in Venice, spilling the beans, by May of 1820 or earlier. (However, the Shelleys didn't know the Hoppners had heard this gossip til the following year.*)
   On June 15, Shelley made a flying visit to Livorno, then came back to Pisa and ordered Mary to pack up--they moved to Livorno. (Claire was living with an old friend from England at this point).
   Shelley biographers repeat the explanation that Shelley and Mary Shelley gave to the Gisbornes: They needed the services of their lawyer Frederico Del Rosso in Livorno because Paolo Foggi sent “threatening letters saying he would be the ruin of [Shelley] and “laid an information” that is, laid some charges against Shelley. Del Rosso dealt with it somehow and Foggi was ordered to leave Livorno “in four hours.”
   Was it that easy to "crush" and silence a lowly servant who was making life unpleasant for a high-born Englishman? And how would ordering Foggi to get out of town prevent him from spreading his rumours or attempting blackmail? Rather, it would ensure that he would be even angrier. If he had travelled from Naples, to Rome, to Venice and then to Livorno, why would being told to get out of Livorno shut him up? This doesn’t make much sense to me. But this is the version given in Shelley biographies.
   However, it appears the only source Shelley scholars have for the Foggi blackmail plot is the letters Percy and Mary Shelley wrote to the Gisbornes. No threatening letters have survived and unfortunately neither have Del Rosso’s office files. So we have Shelley, at the exact same time he gets word that Elena Adelaide is very ill and may be dying, telling his wife, “Honey, we've got to move to Livorno right away. That pest, Paolo Foggi. has been sending me threatening letters.” (The Gisbornes were in England at that time, so the Shelleys moved into their empty house.)
   Then Shelley comes back from the lawyer’s office and tells her, “Problem solved, honey. The lawyer told Foggi to get out of town.” Mary Shelley believes him and that’s what she writes to the Gisbornes.
   We know Shelley was hiding his arrangements about Elena Adelaide from Mary. He sent money for Del Rosso to pay for “expenses in Naples,” via the Gisbornes, and he told them, “If it is necessary to write again on the subject of Del Rosso”  to send a letter to the post office for “Mr. Jones” and he would pick it up there. However, now the Gisbornes were out of town and he had no-one to communicate with Del Rosso on his behalf. He seems to have genuinely very saddened and concerned about her, and this explains, I think, why he high-tailed it to Livorno. We know that at this time he told Del Rosso that if the baby survived her illness, he wanted to have her sent to him.

   So yes, Paolo Foggi complained and gossiped about Shelley, to who knows how many people, but was he really the reason Shelley had to see Del Rosso at the end of June 1820?
   In my forthcoming novel, A Different Kind of Woman, I have given the Shelleys some information of their own with which to threaten Foggi, to get him to be quiet.
   A year later, Shelley visited Lord Byron and Byron showed Shelley the letter from the Hoppners that he'd received eleven months before, detailing the rumours about Shelley and Claire and an abandoned baby. The result was two remarkable letters, one from Shelley to Mary and one from Mary Shelley to Mrs. Hoppner, which we’ll take a closer look at in the next post.
 
Next: “That my beloved Shelley should stand thus slandered!”
 
Shelley biographer Richard Holmes writes at length about the Elise/Claire/Elena Adelaide/Shelley mystery in his biography of Shelley and also in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. He believes Paolo Foggi began blackmailing Shelley as soon as Elena Adelaide died, but this means he would have got word of the girl's death weeks before Shelley did. If Foggi was in Livorno the same time Shelley was, how would he hear the news sooner? Shelley had a lawyer looking after his affairs and it still took at almost a month for him to hear the news. Livorno is 525 kilometres from Naples, If Foggi was in Naples when the baby died, how did he get to Livorno so quickly? Mary Shelley's diary indicates that Shelley told her about Paolo's blackmail plot on the 13th of June. My alternate theory is that Shelley got a letter from Del Rosso letting him know that he had heard from Naples and the baby was very ill, and he made up the story about Paolo Foggi. In some future post, I might write about how this fits into Shelley's life-long persecution complex.
​ 
*Actual timeline
May 1820 or earlier- Elise spills beans to Hoppners
June 9, 1820 -- Elena Adelaide dies 
Late June 1820 - Shelley receives word that Elena is very ill, does not know she is already dead
June 1820 – Shelley receives letters from Paolo, threatening to spill the beans?
Sept. 1820 – Hoppners tell Byron about the beans which were spilled
August 1821 – Shelley visits Byron and sees Hoppner letter