![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. ![]() The most notorious group arrived from England in May 1816, led by the 28-year-old celebrity poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Most of us recall the harsh verdict of Harry Lime, the character played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man,” who declared that the country’s most creative achievement was the cuckoo clock.Ī 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. SWITZERLAND is rarely thought of as a wild artistic center.
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