Free love between lovers of utmost refinement
came in in 1816 into stunning alignment.
Byron’s personal doctor, one John Polidori,
was writing, while Mary was writing the story
of Frankenstein, his book which he called The Vampyre,
a Vorlage fable that came to inspire
Bram Stoker to write about Dracula. This
all happened in Switzerland. Maybe the Swiss,
with Byron and Shelley, deserve lots of credit
for what Mary would write and what John, too, would edit,
creating great legends that prove tales of horror
can involve vices worse than of Sodom, Gomorrah.
Mary Godwin’s stepsister, the fair Claremont Claire,
who’d made love with both men deserves a small share
of credit for planning a great alibi
for Frankenstein, Dracula, strange succubi
whom sadists and masochists dream of, no pains
deterrents to them as they offer their veins
to a master created by John Polidori,
the stoker of interest in love that’s most gory,
which haters of vampires might take less amiss
if they knew that the cause of conception was Swiss.
I do not of course want to rain on the party
like the rain that inspired the great wife of Shelley,
but regret that what happened at Villa Diodati
produced little fire in this poet’s belly,
compared with the verses her husband has written,
but comparisons are of course odious and silly,
besides which, more people, I think, have been smitten
by the nightmare invented by Shelley’s fair filly.
The nightmare Mary Shelley famously created,
labeled Frankenstein,
foreshadows the state French President Macron recognizes,
that Huckabee calls France-en-stine,
a gesture towards a two-state solution generated by
political pollution.
On 7/25/25, the following was reported in the NYT in “Macron Recognizes a Palestinian State. But to What End?” The French president, expressing a moral obligation to address suffering in Gaza, made clear he had lost patience with the United States and Israel. The question is what effect he will have,” NYT, 7/25/25,
Roger Cohen writes:
In announcing French recognition of Palestinian statehood, President Emmanuel Macron of France expressed his growing outrage at Palestinian deaths and starvation in Gaza, but also incurred the hostility of the United States, Israel and much of the large French Jewish community.
Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, noted that France had not stated where the “Palestinian” state it will recognize would take form. “I can now exclusively disclose that France will offer the French Riviera & the new nation will be called ‘Franc-en-Stine,’” the ambassador wrote on X.
Tony Perrotet, author of The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe, writes (“Shores of Romances and Scandals,” NYT, 5/29/11):
A few centuries ago, Europe’s most adventurous bohemians flocked to Lake Geneva on the Swiss-French border to savor its inspiring mountain scenery and liberal political climate. The most notorious group arrived from England in May 1816, led by the 28-year-old celebrity poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Having earned the moniker “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” thanks to his debauched behavior and operatic romances with men and women (including his half-sister, Augusta), he was fleeing England in the wake of a scandalous separation from his wife.
His mode of transport was a replica of Napoleon’s coach, and with him were a bevy of footmen, his personal physician (an emotionally troubled young doctor with a bookish bent named John Polidori), a peacock, a monkey and a dog. He and his entourage were met in Geneva by a fellow group of literary wanderers helmed by the struggling poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, by the age of 23, had gained his own notoriety in England as an advocate of atheism and free love. He was accompanied by his brilliant and beautiful 18-year-old mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (she married Shelley later that year), and her alluring stepsister, Claire Claremont. (Also 18, she had been Byron’s lover back in England, and for a time, Shelley’s; it was Claire who had orchestrated the holiday meeting in Switzerland when she heard that Byron was traveling there).
Byron and Shelley got on famously and soon decided to rent adjacent summer houses in the hamlet of Cologny, about four miles north of Geneva. Byron took a grandiose villa with his doctor and servants, while Shelley, Mary and Claire settled into a more humble house by the lakefront.
The coterie was “the most brilliant and romantic circle of poets, writers and personalities which Switzerland — and Europe — has ever seen,” wrote the historian Elma Dangerfield in “Byron and the Romantics in Switzerland, 1816.” The claim may be a little overblown, but there is no question that it was a dazzling alignment of talent. When the group wasn’t sailing on Lake Geneva or making horseback excursions to medieval castles in the Alps, they were writing. That summer produced Mary Shelley’s’s Gothic classic “Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus”; an array of revered poems from Byron including “The Prisoner of Chillon”; and a sinister short story called “The Vampyre,” written by John Polidori and inspired by Byron, which would years later influence Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”….
Byron’s initial resistance to resuming his affair with the dark-eyed Claire did not last long. (“I never loved her nor pretended to love her,” he later wrote, “but a man is a man — & if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours — there is but one way.”) Sexual tensions festered as Dr. Polidori fell in love with Mary, and wild rumors began to spread among English visitors to Geneva. Curiosity seekers passed by in boats to peer at the women’s underwear on the washing lines — evidence, it was believed, that the Villa Diodati was a virtual bordello. Others would stop Byron on his evening rides to accuse him of corrupting the local girls and youth. The whole Swiss setup, one British newspaper reported back in London, was a sordid “league of incest.”….
In retrospect, the “Frankenstein summer” seems a fantastical interlude of happiness in lives marked by tragedy. In 1822, Percy Shelley drowned in Italy, at age 29; Dr Polidori had committed suicide the year before, at age 25. Claire’s daughter with Byron died at age 5, and only one of Mary Shelley’s four children with Percy survived. Byron died in Greece in 1824, at the ripe old age of 36.
The last survivor was the audacious Claire Clairmont, who lived to age 80. At the end of her life, she started a bitter memoir denouncing the practice of “free love,” which, she says, turned Byron and Shelley, “the two finest poets of England” into “monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery.” (The scrawled pages were discovered in 2009 by the biographer Daisy Hay in the New York Public Library, where the extensive Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle contains a marvelous array of manuscripts).
Today, such morbid ruminations are hard to sustain in the brilliant summer light reflecting from Lake Geneva. On my last night in Montreux, I headed down to the jazz festival and drank as many thimblefuls of wine as I could afford. Carpe diem — Byron and the Shelleys surely would have concurred — for how many summers do we have?
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at [email protected].
