دختر لُرد بایرون

CHAPTER FOUR

Lord Byron’s daughter

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On January 21st 1817 Claire Clairmont, nineteen years old, had a baby daughter in a town called Bath in England. The baby’s father was the poet Lord Byron, but he was not Claire’s husband. They were lovers for a while but then Byron went to Italy. He did not love Claire and he did not want to be with her. So Claire lived with Byron’s friends - the poet Shelley, his wife Mary, and their two children. Claire and Mary were half-sisters; they had the same father but different mothers. Shelley liked children very much and he felt a strong love for Claire’s baby. He hoped that his friend Byron would help Claire and her daughter. From Bath he wrote to him:

Claire has a very beautiful girt. Her hair is fair and her eyes are blue… Claire calls her Alba.

Byron wanted to see his baby daughter and he asked Shelley to bring her to Italy. Shelley wanted to live in Italy too, so he and his family, and Claire and her baby, all travelled there. The baby was a year old and now she was called Allegra because Byron liked the name.

In Italy Claire decided to give Allegra to Byron because she thought that the daughter of an English lord would have a good future. Shelley said to her: ‘No, don’t do it, Claire, or you will never see your daughter again.’ But Byron was rich and Claire thought that Allegra would have a better life with him. Of course, she did not want to give Allegra to Byron, and when she sent the child to him in Venice, she was very unhappy. In a letter to a friend she wrote:

In the spring of 1818 I sent my little darling to her father. She was the only thing that I loved in the world.

It was a terrible mistake. Allegra lived with her father in a big house called the Palazzo Mocenigo. It was full of strange animals, and even stranger people. After a while Lord Byron understood that it was not a good home for a child. So he gave Allegra to an English family in Venice, and in August Claire saw her there. Then Byron said that Claire and her baby and Shelley’s family could stay at his villa near a town called Este. For two months Claire was happy there with Allegra. But Byron also said that she must bring Allegra to him in Venice in the autumn. So in October Allegra went back to her father, and Claire never saw her again.

Allegra stayed in Venice for eight months with different families. Then Byron took her to the city of Bologna. He wrote to Shelley:

She is tike me. She has white skin. Her voice is soft and she can’t say the letter ‘r’.

For many months he sent no news to Claire about her daughter. Then she heard that Allegra was with her father in a town called Ravenna. She wrote to him, ‘I want to see my daughter - please!’ But he said no. Claire wrote a lot of letters like this to Byron, but he did not answer them. She was very unhappy.

When Allegra was four years old, Byron sent her to a convent school near Ravenna. The nuns were kind and loved her very much. But the convent was strange to her. The walls were white and cold, the rooms were empty, and sometimes she was cold because there was no fire. Every day she did the same things at the same time, This quiet life was very different from her life with Byron.

Claire was now very angry. She did not like convent schools, and she was sure that Allegra was always cold and lonely. She wrote an angry letter to Byron: ‘My child must be with one of her parents,’ she said. He did not answer the letter. He thought that the convent was good for Allegra, and he told the nuns that Claire must never visit the child. They must lock the doors to stop her. But he said that Shelley could see Allegra because he was his friend. So one day Shelley went to visit Allegra at the convent. He wrote in his diary:

She is tall and pale. But her eyes ere very blue, and she has a lot of blond hair. She is beautiful and very different from the other children. I ran and played with her in the garden. She is very light and fast. I gave her some sweets and I asked her, ‘What shall I say to your Mama?’ She answered in Italian, ‘Tell her to send me a kiss and a beautiful dress.’ Then I asked her, ‘What shall I say to your Papa?’ And she answered, ‘Tell him to visit me and to bring Mama with him.’

But Papa did not visit her and Mama did not come.

On June 6th 1821 Claire dreamt that Allegra was ill. She thought that her daughter was going to die and she would never see her again. Take her away from the convent,’ she wrote to Byron. But he said no. Of course, Claire wanted to go to the convent and take Allegra away, but this was very difficult. Byron was a rich and famous lord and the people in the convent did what he wanted. They locked the doors.

And then Allegra got a fever. The doctor came and gave her some medicine. For a while she was better and the nuns hopped that she would live. But she died on April 21st 1822. She was five years and three months old.

Shelley was afraid to tell Claire that Allegra was dead. He thought that she would try to kill herself. But one evening Shelley, Mary, and some friends were talking about Allegra when Claire come into the room. At once everybody stopped talking, and she knew.

“Allegra’s dead, isn’t she,” she said.

So Shelley told her the sad story. She was very unhappy and wanted to die. Shelley was also unhappy. He loved Allegra like a daughter and he could not forget her. Two weeks after Allegra died, he was with one of his friends on the balcony of a house by the sea. Suddenly he saw a child with long, fair hair and very blue eyes. She was coming out of the sea and she was smiling at him. In the moonlight he saw that she wanted to come to him.

“Look, there it is,” he said to his friend. “Can you see her? Look-there!” But his friend saw nothing. It was Allegra’s ghost.

And fifty years after Allegra died, Claire wrote to a friend:

I can never forget my darling child. But did she really die? Byron and Shelley said that she died, but I have heard that she is alive. Some people say that they have seen her. I am sure that she is alive.

Claire died in 1879 when she was eighty-one years old. Her tombstone is in the cemetery of Santa Maria dell’Antella at Bagno a Ripoli.