Free The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman, Nicholas P. Klingaman Page B

claimed to have uncovered another plot, this one led
     by a small group of working men.
    To make matters worse, the price of bread was rising due to a shortage of grain from
     the war and the need to provision the Allied army of occupation. Well aware that he
     could ill afford to alienate the poor of Paris, who depended upon cheap bread, Louis
     issued an ordinance permitting foreign vessels to import grain without paying the
     usual duties. Then he hoped for a plentiful harvest.
    “The uneasiness of the court is indescribable,” reported an American correspondent
     in Paris, “the palace at night may be said to exhibit the aspect of a camp or of a
     besieged palace. A double line of guards surround it on all sides.” Patrols of gendarmes
     and the national guard kept watch in every street; coffee houses were cleared at 11 P.M. The London Star reported that ships bound for the United States from French harbors were full of
     prospective émigrés. “There was a strange feeling of unrest in the country,” concluded
     one observer, “and there were rumours of the return of Napoléon and of the massacre
     of nobles and priests.”
    *   *   *
    W HEN Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin arrived in Paris on May 8, she found her French hosts
     less than congenial. “The manners of the French are interesting, although less attractive,
     at least to Englishmen, than before the last invasion of the Allies,” she wrote to
     a friend; “the discontent and sullenness of their minds perpetually betrays itself.”
     Doubtless their resentment stemmed from the humiliation of 150,000 foreign troops
     on French soil, but Mary saw no reason why “they should regard the subjects of a Government
     which fills their country with hostile garrisons, and sustains a detested dynasty
     on the throne, with an acrimony and indignation of which that Government alone is
     the proper object.”
    Mary was traveling with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, their infant son, William,
     and her stepsister, Claire (nee Clara Mary Jane) Clairmont. Nineteen years old in
     the spring of 1816, Mary Godwin had met Shelley in 1813, and the two fell in love
     at once. The daughter of William Godwin, a writer notorious for his free thinking
     and philosophical anarchism—Godwin believed advancing human knowledge and morality
     would eventually render government obsolete—and noted feminist Mary Wollstonecraft
     (who died shortly after Mary was born), Mary grew up reading widely in the works of
     the philosophes , poets William Blake and Samuel Coleridge, and, of course, her parents.
    For his part, Shelley was a child of privilege who attended Oxford until the authorities
     expelled him for his public defense of atheism. In 1811, at the age of nineteen, he
     had married Harriet Wentworth, then only sixteen herself. Shelley soon tired of monogamy
     and began to spend much of his time at the home of William Godwin, whose philosophy
     he admired and whose daughter he subsequently pursued. When he learned that his daughter
     had fallen in love with a married man, Godwin decided to fall back upon conventional
     morality and forbade Mary to see Shelley. In late July 1814, the lovers ran off to
     Europe. By the time they returned in early 1815, Mary was pregnant. The child, born
     premature, lived only eleven days; Mary later dreamed she could bring her daughter
     back to life.
    Burdened by financial problems and wounded by the critical dismissal of an early poem,
     “Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude,” published in February 1816, Shelley decided
     to leave England. Accordingly, he and Mary (accompanied by Claire and three-month-old
     William) crossed the Channel in early May. Originally Shelley had planned to visit
     either Italy or Scotland, but Claire—who recently had become the lover of George Gordon,
     Lord Byron—convinced them to stay in Geneva instead, because that was where Byron
     would spend the summer. Shelley agreed; at least the cost of living in