enabled Shelley to raise funds. Then they moved slowly across
war-wasted France, Mary and Claire, in black silk dresses,
riding by turns on a mule, and Shelley walking. Childish
happiness glows in their journals. From Troyes Shelley wrote
to the abandoned Harriet, in perfect good faith, pressing her
to join them in Switzerland. There were sprained ankles, dirty
inns, perfidious and disobliging drivers--the ordinary
misadventures of the road, magnified a thousand times by their
helplessness, and all transfigured in the purple light of youth
and the intoxication of literature. At last they reached the
Lake of Lucerne, settled at Brunnen, and began feverishly to
read and write. Shelley worked at a novel called 'The
Assassins', and we hear of him "sitting on a rude pier by the
lake" and reading aloud the siege of Jerusalem from Tacitus.
Soon they discovered that they had only just enough money left
to take them home. Camp was struck in haste, and they
travelled down the Rhine. When their boat was detained at
Marsluys, all three sat writing in the cabin--Shelley his
novel, Mary a story called 'Hate', and Claire a story called
'The Idiot'--until they were tossed across to England, and
reached London after borrowing passage-money from the captain.

The winter was spent in poverty, dodging creditors through the
labyrinthine gloom of the town. Chronic embarrassment was
caused by Shelley's extravagant credulity. His love of the
astonishing, his readiness to believe merely because a thing
was impossible, made him the prey of every impostor. Knowing
that he was heir to a large fortune, he would subsidise any
project or any grievance, only provided it were wild enough.
Godwin especially was a running sore both now and later on; the