History of a Six Weeks' Tour

Paris, August 1814: a week in a hotel

The travellers reach Paris after two days on the road from Calais. Mary is unwell from the heat. They learn that no Paris hotel will let rooms for a night or two, so they take an apartment for a week. The rooms are dear and not very pleasant: a bedroom, a closet with a bed, and an anteroom they use as a sitting room.

The heat keeps them indoors until the afternoon. On the first evening they walk to the Jardin des Tuileries, and Mary dislikes it: the trees are clipped into shapes and there is no grass. She much prefers the Boulevards, wide and lined with trees. She admires the Porte Saint-Denis, and fears the armies that had just occupied Paris may since have damaged it.

The week feels like a prison. When a small sum of money arrives, they decide to walk across France, with a donkey to carry the luggage and whoever is tired. Percy and Claire buy the animal at the donkey market on Monday 8 August. A Madame L'Hôte calls to warn them that disbanded soldiers are roaming the country. They go anyway, in a cab from the hotel door, with the donkey following behind.

The donkey can hardly carry the small bag, let alone a rider. They dismiss the cab at the city gate and walk on in the dusk, merry enough, and reach Charenton at about ten. The donkey is sold there the next morning and a mule bought for ten napoleons, gold coins of the day. The journal notes that all three were dressed in black silk.

The party left something behind in Paris: a box of papers. Mary Shelley later suspected that its letters were the ones a man calling himself George Byron used to try to blackmail her in 1845.

Walking through a country just invaded

Earlier that year, the armies allied against Napoleon had crossed this country on their way to Paris. The journal records what they left. Nogent-sur-Seine has been wrecked by the Cossacks, the Russian cavalry. Houses have been burned and cattle killed. Mary writes that the sight gave a sting to her hatred of war.

At the village of Echemine the cottages have no roofs, only blackened beams. The villagers have not heard that Napoleon has been deposed. They say they are afraid to rebuild in case the Cossacks come back. Two leagues on, at Pavillon, the people are already repairing their houses, and Mary wonders what makes the difference.

The war also left stories. At Guignes the travellers sleep in the room where Napoleon and some of his generals had slept during the campaign, and the old woman of the house is proud of it. Leaving Troyes, their driver points out a battlefield and insists the French won. When asked how the Russians then got into Troyes, he says they took a roundabout route.

Paris again, May 1816

Letter I opens with a second arrival in Paris, on 8 May 1816. The party is held there for two days while the French authorities sign their passports. Again no one will let rooms by the day, so again they must take them for a week. They have no letters of introduction and no friends in the city, and mostly stay in the hotel.

Mary finds the French sullen and resentful towards the English. Their government, she writes, keeps troops in France and props up a hated royal family on its throne. She thinks the French are right to be angry, and that the government alone deserves it. From Paris the route runs back through Troyes, then south through Dijon and over the Jura in snow to Geneva. Mary and Percy travelled with their baby son William and with Claire Clairmont, who was following Lord Byron to Geneva.

Byron, Chillon and the road to Frankenstein

Lord Byron is in the book by name only once. The journal was written up in 1817, and on the Rhine it sends readers to the third canto of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which describes the same stretch of river. The travellers read those verses with delight, it says.

Letter III, signed S., describes a sail round the Lake of Geneva with an unnamed companion. The companion was Byron, who toured the lake with Percy Bysshe Shelley in the last days of June 1816. At the Castle of Chillon the letter describes the dungeon cut below the lake, its seven columns and the iron rings for prisoners. Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon at Ouchy during the same trip.

Letter IV climbs to the glacier of Montanvert above Chamonix, which it also calls the Sea of Ice. The Chamonix trip of July 1816 gave Mary Shelley material for Frankenstein. In the novel, published a few weeks after this book, Victor Frankenstein climbs alone to the same glacier. There the creature comes bounding towards him across the ice.