Violently In Love

The Princess out of school

Detail from The Funeral of Shelley,  Louis Édouard Fournier, 1889.

Byron did go swimming, but this was not an uncaring act. He is often characterised as indifferent to Percy's death due to recounting the funeral dispassionately in a letter to Hobhouse, but this was his characteristic mode when he wished to distance himself from something he had found distressing. Additionally, Hobhouse hated Shelley and would not have had much sympathy for him going out in bad weather against the advice of seasoned italian sailors. Byron's later reflections were much more harrowing, and his actions spoke volumes.

In actual fact, he had poured a lot of resources into both finding the bodies, paying Italian authorities for the treatment of their remains, and helping and funding Trelawney planning the funerals. He had also helped him to source frankincense and other aromatics to stifle the smell of burning flesh, and he was very upset by how Shelley and the others no longer resembled their living selves at all. He acted the stoic after the fact, but at the time of the cremations, he stripped off his clothes and waded into the water to escape the visuals and the literal smell of his friend burning. Leigh Hunt and Edward Trelawney fought over claiming Shelley's heart (or a lump of organ meat that refused to burn), and Byron literally had to embarrass Hunt into giving it to Mary later.

This "swim" actually turned into a four hour fete of physical endurance that made him seriously ill. Byron was suffering from intense sunburn and also heat stroke after the exertion in the summer sun, something that took such a toll on him that he remarked several times in letters to friends that he had never physically recovered from it. Through today's lens we can conjecture that this could even have been the start of the delicate state of health that caused him to succumb to the illness that killed him some months later in Greece.

Immediately after Percy's death, Byron funded Mary Shelley and her child both staying in Pisa with the Hunts and, when she decided to return to England, shipping hers and Percy's things home with her. Some weeks later he also sent her the money to travel home in comfort, but Leigh Hunt stole this money and lied to her that Byron had never sent it (by this time he was on his way to Greece), casting a pall over their very close friendship.

“Triumph of Death”, c. 1460

panel from the series“Triumphs” attributed to Girolamo da Cremona (15th century)

tempera and oil on panel