7

Travels with Byron

Byron's party landed in Ostend at 2 AM on 26 April. Polidori's first

impression of a foreign country was mixed: 'We were astonished at the
excellent inn and good treatment, except that I got a dreadful headache
from the smell of paint in my bedroom, and that the tea was perfumed.'1
Byron was more enthusiastic; Polidori observed that his patient's health
appeared to have improved dramatically with the change of scene: 'As
soon as he reached his room, Lord Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the
chambermaid.'2
In the morning, Polidori went to see the sights of Ostend, which he
found 'very like a Scotch town, only not quite so filthy.' There were also
more intriguing differences, notably 'books in every bookseller's win-
dow of the most obscene nature.'3 Southey would later claim that before
the publication of Don Juan, 'For more than half 4 a century English
literature had been distinguished by its moral purity ... There was no
danger in any book which bore the name of a respectable publisher, or
was to be procured at any respectable booksellers.' So three years before
the first cantos of Don Juan, the sight of Belgian bookstores might well
have given Polidori a shock. But he records only an unfortunate expense
when he did visit one shop: 'Obliged to buy two books I did not want,
because I let a quarto fall upon a fine girl's head while looking at her
eyes.'5
Byron's immediate destination was Geneva. There he would be joined
by Hobhouse, who would then travel with him to Italy, and by Claire
Clairmont, with whom he had had a brief affair before leaving London,
and who was travelling with Percy Shelley and her stepsister, Mary
Godwin. Byron and Polidori travelled through the kingdom of the
Netherlands (which included Belgium) and the German states to Co-
logne, and then up the Rhine to Switzerland, keeping out of France; as
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Travels with Byron 63

Byron explained to Hobhouse: 'we have not French passports - & no

desire to view a degraded country - & oppressed people.'6
Polidori's impressions of the trip, if not consistent with his first im-
pressions of Ostend, certainly display the same concerns. Most of the
towns they passed through, for example, did not live up to the standard
of public hygiene set by Ostend. The boxes of the theatre in Brussels
were 'dirty with filth'; the performance was poor because one of the stars
'was vomiting at home,' so that the rest of the cast was trembling in fear
of 'real showers of eggs' from the audience. 'Liege has a pretty neigh-
bourhood, but the town itself is filthy and disagreeable'; Cologne was
'dirty' and very decayed.'7 The countryside was better at first, except for
the people: 'the cottages comfortable white washed large windowed
shining with brass utensils internally & having only as many heaps of
dirt as there are inhabitants who certainly throw away all their clean-
liness upon the house fields roads & windows.' 8 Approaching Liege,
however, Polidori found the Tower orders miserable in perfection;
houses built of mud, the upper storeys of which are only built of beams,
the mud having fallen off. Bridges thrown over the dirt they were too idle
to remove. Dunghills at their doors, and ditches with black fetid water
before their first step.' The crossing into Prussia was marked mainly by a
complete inversion of the Belgian standards of personal and public
cleanliness: 'The people look cleaner, though everything else is dirty;
contrary to the Belgians, they seem to collect their cleanliness upon
themselves, instead of throwing it upon their cots, tins, trees, and
shrubs.'9
Literary filth also continued to catch Polidori's eye, as it had in Ostend.
In Brussels, he wrote: 'The indelicacy of these Belgians is gross; all kinds
of disgusting books publicly sold, and exposed to the eyes of all young
damsels - beastliness publicly exhibited on the public monuments -
fountains with men vomiting with effort a stream of water - and still
worse.'He seemed to encounter pornography at every turn: in the lobby
of the theatre, 'what was my wonder to stumble on a bookseller's shop,
where was an assemblage of delicacies fit for the modest, and wondrous
delicate!' In Lausanne, a bookseller showed him 'a fine collection of bad
books for four louis,' about the equivalent of four pounds, or two weeks'
salary for Polidori - pornography was clearly not cheap.10
In Ghent, he innocently stumbled upon something more than bad
books: tourized to the Roi d'Espagne, where, as in a coffee-house, I
found a room full of disreputable women and card-tables. This, instead
of the streets, is the lounge for such women.' And in Aix-la-Chapelle: 'A
German boy who led me about... on my asking him in broken German
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64 Byron: 1816

about the baths, led me to a very different place. I was astonished to find
myself in certain company.'11
In short, his account of his discovery of Europe suggests (despite
Charlotte's censorship) that it was also, beginning perhaps with the
incident in Dover, a discovery of sexuality. (One must remember,
however, that his surviving earlier letters are all addressed to his father
or to his sister Frances, with whom he would not be likely to discuss sex.
Taylor had not hesitated to send him the story of the adulterous sleep-
walker, so he cannot have been entirely innocent.) No doubt he was
influenced by the conversation and example of Byron, who was not only
the most famous poet of the age, but also one of its most notorious
libertines, and who had at least one more adventure with a chamber-
maid en route, at Cologne.12 The example of Napoleon, as mediated by
Byron, may also have had some influence: at the Chateau du Lac, outside
Brussels, Byron and Polidori 'saw the bed where Josephine, Marie
Louise, and the Queen of Holland, have been treading fast on one
another's heels.'13
Whatever the reason, Polidori suddenly appears to have developed a
highly discriminating eye for women. In Bruges, he found them 'gener-
ally pretty,' though the 'Flemish face has no divinity - all pleasing more
than beautiful.' Later he decided that he had been too generous: 'The
women of Brabant and the Netherlands are all ugly to the eye after the
piquant begins to pall, for there are no regular beauties or beauty of
expression, except that levity which tells of lightness of cares and youth.'
In Ghent, he 'saw all the women of the village' and found them 'all ugly
without exception.' By Antwerp, however, they were 'better-looking'; in
Malines, they were still improving, and in St. Juliers, 'many of them
[were] very beautiful.' In Cologne, his Ostend adventure more or less
repeated itself: he went into a bookstore and found 'a fine woman': 'Had
a long confab. Bought more books than I wanted.'14 (His clumsiness also
returned in Cologne, though in the cathedral, not a bookstore: Tn falling
down a step I broke a glass, for which they at first would not take
anything - which at last cost me three francs.' He added proudly that he
had 'Kept countenance amazingly well.')15
The character of the sexuality Polidori was discovering is not unusual,
but is worth commenting on because of the role it would come to play in
his works. It is a sexuality of domination, not just in Byron's treatment of
chambermaids or Napoleon's treatment of queens, but also in Polidori's
repeated judgments on women's looks. It is exotic. And it is, on the
whole, dirty, obscene, beastly, unmentionable or unexposable, commer-
cialized and yet forbidden, even dangerous - especially to those one
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Travels with Byron 65

loves. No doubt this is why he admired sexual domination: such sinister

forces obviously require firm handling.
Polidori also devotes a good deal of space in his journal to the more
conventional attractions of the grand tour, particularly scenery and art;
but his responses to them are in most cases merely conventional - as
l
scrupulously conventional as his treatment of attendants: 'Voituriers ...
have eight francs of drink-money a day, being two, which being too
much according to the Guide du Voyageur en Europe, where it is said 1 /i
fr., we showed it to our courier, who was in a passion.'16
The guidebook Polidori relied on for his responses to scenery seems to
have been Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757): he treats the landscape almost exclusively
in the terms of eighteenth-century aesthetics. As he goes up the Rhine,
he finds 'Scenes increasing in sublimity' as far as Bingen; 'The scenery
after Bingen gains in beauty what it loses in sublimity.' After Lipstadt,
'The scene was very fine: to the right, beautiful; to the left, it had a
tendency to sublimity; on one side, hills covered to the top with trees; on
the other, mountains with bald pates.' His comments are so academic, in
fact, that they suggest a lack of interest in the scenery actually in front of
him. Sometimes this boredom shows through his stock response: 'the
beautiful, after the almost sublime, palls, and man is fastidious.' Some-
times it is even explicit: Lake Geneva 'a little disappointed me, as it does
not seem so broad as it really is, and the mountains near it, though
covered with snow, have not a great appearance on account of the height
[of the] lake itself.'17 Byron later remembered Polidori as, unlike himself,
disappointed by the scenery of the Rhine.18
Polidori's comments on European art are more voluminous but
equally conventional. Even his apologies for ignorance (which are, of
course, implicit claims to originality) look conventional: a Rubens in
Ghent had 'none of his gay draperies that I, no connoisseur, thought
were constituents of Rubens.'19 A picture by a little-known artist excited
his particular admiration, perhaps because of its Catholic subject:
The most beautiful painting I have yet seen is here (though I
probably shall not be held out in my opinion by connoisseurs)
- by Pollent, representing the trial of the true Cross upon a sick
lady ... Not even the splendid colouring of Rubens can make
his pictures, in my [eye], equal to it.20
Byron accompanied Polidori to all the churches and museums, but did
not enjoy them. He affected the same pose Polidori did, of not know-
ing much about art but knowing what he liked. He frankly did not like
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66 Byron: 1816

very much of it: 'as for churches - & pictures,' he complained to his
sister,
I have stared at them till my brains are like a guide-book: - the
last (though it is heresy to say so) don't please me at all - I
think Rubens a very great dauber - and prefer Vandyke a
hundred times over - (but then I know nothing about the
matter) Rubens' women have all red gowns and red shoulders
- to say nothing of necks - of which they are more liberal than
charming - it may all be very fine - and I suppose it must be
Art - for - I'll swear - 'tis not Nature.21
At this time, Rubens was highly regarded by British artists and collec-
tors,22 but there lingered an insular resistance to the fleshliness of his
work. In 1781, Viscount Torrington had complained that 'all his male
figures are coarse and his women wet nurses.'23 Henry Fuseli expanded
on the same complaint in a Royal Academy lecture of 1810: 'His male
forms, generally the brawny pulp of slaughtermen; his females, hillocks
of roses in overwhelmed muscles, grotesque attitudes, and distorted
joints, are swept along in a gulph of colours, as herbage, trees, and
shrubs are whirled, tossed and absorbed by inundation.'24 Fuseli, no
colourist himself, seems to have interpreted Rubens's brilliant coloura-
tion as a symptom of sexual frenzy.
There are hints that Polidori was sometimes as bored as Byron: in
Ghent, 'There were many more pictures [than he has just described], but
I cannot remember; seeing so many crowded in the Gallery put others
out of my head.'25 After Antwerp, he had little more to say about
pictures, though he never lost his interest in bookstores. He certainly
agreed with Byron about the relative merits of Rubens and Vandyke
(who was not generally quite so highly regarded).26 One Rubens, the
side-piece of a Crucifixion in Antwerp, caught his attention. His com-
ment on it is a grotesque version of Torrington's complaint: 'a woman
rising from the dead - surely a woman large as Guy Warfner's giant]
wife, if ever he had one; [with] caricature physiognomies, and most
hellish egregious breasts, which a child refuses, with horror in its face.'27
Such a revulsion from the maternal may be an expression of the dread of
incest, or of a fear of the loss of personal identity, the merging with the
mother, characteristic of the oral stage. Without more evidence, it is
impossible to say which anxiety is dominant here; both find expression
in Polidori's later work.
The high point of the trip for both Byron and Polidori was their visit to
Waterloo on 4 May. Byron had not planned to go there, but they had to
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Travels with Byron 67

travel out of their way, to Brussels, for repairs to the coach, which kept
breaking down. 28 While they were waiting for the repairs, they visited
the battlefield.
Throughout the trip, Polidori appears to have been most impressed by
the destruction the French army had wrought. Many of the marks of it
were still very fresh, and his comments about it are often reminiscent of
his father's. In Antwerp, as everywhere else, he heard 'dreadful com-
plaints of French vandalism'; in the cathedral there, pictures had been
stolen, altars, tombs, and monuments had been smashed, columns had
been defaced 'by these encouragers of the fine arts. So great was the ruin
that there were five feet of fragments over the church.' 29 In Cologne, the
shattered roof of the cathedral was 'a staring monument over Gallic
ruin[!]'30 The founder of a museum, 'with a tear in his eye,' told Polidori
that 'The revolutionary Gauls ... had destroyed many very valuable
relics.'31 In Avenches, the ancient Aventicum, 'The mosaic in a barn,
probably once of a temple, was pretty perfect till the Gallic cavalry came
and turned it into a stable ... little now remains.' 32 The terms Gaul and
Gallic reflect Polidori's classical bent as well as his attitude towards the
French.
But his attitude was ambivalent. If Napoleon destroyed, he also built,
and his conquerors also destroyed. Byron found his naval basins at
Antwerp 'very superb - as all his undertakings were' 33 - and as well they
might have been: they had cost £2 million when they were built in 1803
as a base for the invasion of England. 34 (Neither Byron nor Polidori
mentions the purpose for which the basins were built.) Polidori admired
the arsenals at Antwerp: 'the finest works I ever saw, now useless
through our jealousy.' 35 On the Rhine below Coblentz, they 'passed over
a road first cut by Aurelius, Theodoric, and Buonaparte. B[uonaparte]'s
name is everywhere. Who did this? N[apoleon] B[uonaparte]. Who that?
He.' At Mainz, there was another 'Fine road ... made by Nfapoleon],' but
'his name has been erased from the inscription on the column commem-
orative of the work. Insolence of power!' 36
Besides, Polidori felt that 'the gallantry, the resolution, and courage,
which the French displayed' at Waterloo 'would alone ennoble the cause
in which they fought.' He was especially impressed by what he heard
from their guide at Waterloo about Napoleon's own courage - that he
was 'cool and collected' throughout the battle, and turned only 'momen-
tarily pale' when the Prussians approached. Polidori was equally im-
pressed by what he heard about Napoleon's hardihood - that he 'only
took one glass of wine from the beginning of the battle to the end of his
flight.' He also admired Napoleon's power in its own right, as did Byron:
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68 Byron: 1816

at the Chateau du Lac, 'I sat down on two chairs on which had sat he who
ruled the world at one time. Some of his eagles were yet remaining on the
chairs. The servant seemed a little astonished at our bowing before
them.' 37
On 18 June 1815, some 185,000 men had fought at Waterloo; 47,000
had been killed or wounded (Byron's cousin Frederick Howard was
among those killed). Less than a year later, Byron and Polidori found the
field strangely peaceful. There was no sign of desolation to attract the
passer-by,' Polidori wrote. The peasant whistled as blithely, the green
of Nature was as deep, and the trees waved their branches as softly, as
before the [18th]. The houses were repaired.'38 Byron 'saw around [him]
the wide field revive / With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring /
Come forth her work of gladness to contrive. ' 39 But there were still plenty
of souvenirs to be had; as Polidori told his family: 'Got something for all
of the conquereds dress at Waterloo for myself a cuirass helm & sabre of
the mighty cuirassiers & some gold & silver lace for my mother &
sisters.'40 Byron bought a 'heap of trophies.'41
They visited the spot where Howard's body had been temporarily
buried, before its removal to England. They wrote their names, among
those of other tourists, both 'cits and lords,' on the wall of the chapel at
Hougoumont.42 And before they left, Byron mounted 'a Cossack horse'
and Polidori a more modest 'Flemish steed'43 for 'a delightfull ride' over
the battlefield.44 'We rode off the field, my companion singing a Turkish
song - myself silent, full gallop cantering over the field, the finest one
imaginable for a battle.'45
Byron, who had seen other battlefields in his first pilgrimage, was not
quite so enthusiastic about this one: The Plain at Waterloo is a fine one -
but not much after Marathon & Troy - Cheronea - & Platea. - - Perhaps
there is something of prejudice in this - but I detest the cause & the
victors - & the victory.'46
In Brussels, Byron and Polidori also met Pryse Lockhart Gordon
(b. 1762), an old family friend of Byron's then living in Brussels.47
Polidori showed Gordon and his son Byron's Napoleonic coach; Mrs
Gordon showed Byron and Polidori her album, which contained some
autograph verses by Scott, 'where he says Waterloo will last longer than
Cressy and Agincourt.' 'How different!' Polidori remarked. They only
agree in one thing - that they were both in the cause of injustice.'48 His
point seems to be that the Hundred Years' War, of which Crecy (1346)
and Agincourt (1415) were the two most famous English victories, was
caused largely by English claims to sovereignty over France. The verses
are from Scott's The Field of Waterloo:
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Travels with Byron 69

Yes, Agincourt may be forgot,

And Cressy be an unknown spot,
And Blenheim's name be new;
But still in story and in song,
For many an age remember'd long,
Shall live the towers of Hougomont,
And field of Waterloo.49

Mrs Gordon asked Byron to add some verses of his own, and he obliged
her with the first two of the Waterloo stanzas from Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, which he had apparently composed the previous day on his
trip to the field.50
The visit to the Gordons provided the occasion for the one mild
expression of umbrage in this part of Polidori's journal. Polidori wrote
that they 'were graciously received': 'Lord B[yron] as himself, I as a tassel
to the purse of merit.'51 Polidori was always acutely conscious of his
status, but thanks to Byron's condescension, he was not at first bothered
by it. A few days before meeting the Gordons, he had written to Frances:
'I am very pleased with Lord Byron I am with him on the footing of an
equal every thing alike at present here we have a suit of rooms between
us I have my sitting room at one end he at the other.' He knew, however,
that Byron was his poetic as well as his social superior, and in Byron's
company, his sense of the importance of poetry was growing. In his letter
to Frances, he took up again the question of the different ways of
winning glory, which he had discussed while trying to persuade his
father to let him go to fight for Italy, but this time he gave a quite different
answer. He had gone over to what he had seen earlier as his father's side:

The people amongst whom we are at present dwelling is one

that has much distinguished itself in the noblest career the race
for liberty but that tends little to the ennobling of a people
without the sun of literature also deigns to shine upon them. It
was not the warlike deeds the noble actions of the Greeks &
Romans or Modern Italians that has rescued these names from
the effacing daub of oblivion if it had not been for their poets
their historians & their philosophers their heroes would in
vain have struggled for fame their actions would have been
recorded in the dusty legends of monks & consequently have
been forgotten like those of the Belgians Carthaginians &
others - How many fine actions of modern times will be buried
in oblivion from the same want - & how many merely sec-
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70 Byron: 1816

ondary characters will be handed down with an halo round

their deeds reflected from the pages of historic genius. 52
By the time Polidori and Byron had reached the Rhine, Polidori's sense
of his double inferiority led to an argument between them. There are
three versions of the incident, all apparently deriving from Byron, but
(except that Byron is always the winner) all different: they suggest the
evolution that a good story can go through as it is told and retold. In the
biography of Byron by his friend Thomas Moore (1830), it takes this
form:
'After all,' said the physician, 'what is there you can do that I
cannot?' - 'Why, since you force me to say,' answered the
other, T think there are three things I can do which you
cannot.' Polidori defied him to name them. 'I can,' said Lord
Byron, 'swim across that river - I can snuff out that candle
with a pistol-shot at the distance of twenty paces - and I have
written a poem of which 14,000 copies were sold in one day.' 53
This version exaggerates the admittedly remarkable success of The Cor-
sair, of which 10,000 copies were sold the day it was published. 54
In 1822, Byron told Thomas Medwin a more symmetrical version of
the anecdote, which underestimates the success of his poem:
Polidori, who was rather vain, once asked me what there was
he could not do as well as I? I think I named four things: - that
I could swim four miles - write a book, of which four thousand
copies should be sold in a day - drink four bottles of wine -
and I forget what the other was, but it was not worth
mentioning. 55
(Byron may have told the same version to Edward John Trelawny, who
spelled out Byron's fourth accomplishment in the margin of Medwin's
book: '& dup[e] four women.') 56
The most pointed and also the most circumstantial version is the one
Byron told Edward Williams, also in 1822:
Being once in a house together on the Rhine, Lord B. was
reading at a window that overlooked that River, when Polidori
turning abruptly to him, after having read a great eulogium of
his works, said, 'and, pray, what is there excepting writing
poetry that I cannot do better than you?' Lord B. answered
cool[l]y that there were three things - First, said he, I can hit
with a pistol the keyhole of that door - Secondly, I can swim
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Travels with Byron 71

across that river to yonder point - and thirdly, I can give you a
d-d good thrashing. Polidori acknowledged his excellence by
leaving the room.57
This is likely to be the most accurate version of the anecdote, since
Williams apparently recorded it in his diary the day he heard it. Moore
probably heard his version from Mary Shelley some fourteen years after
she had heard it from Byron, and the inaccuracy of the references to
Polidori in her introduction to Frankenstein makes one hesitate to trust
her memory. Medwin's book is notoriously unreliable. But whatever
form the incident took, it cannot have done much to soothe Polidori's
feelings. If Polidori was beginning to play the role of the rebellious son
with Byron, then Byron, who had recently been deprived of his own
daughter, was ready in return to play the role of the domineering father.
(It is no wonder that Polidori did not enjoy the Rhine as much as Byron
did.)
Byron's contempt and Polidori's resentment may have been aggra-
vated by the awareness of both that Polidori was useless to Byron as a
doctor. He wrote to Hobhouse from Coblentz that 'Lord Byron's health is
greatly improved, his stomach returning rapidly to its natural state,' but
he knew that he could not take the credit for it: 'Exercise and peace of
mind, making great advances towards the amendment of his corps
delabre, leave little for medicine to patch up. His spirits, I think, are also
much improved.'58 This was probably just as well, since the kind of
medicine Polidori had learned from Gregory would have been likely to
aggravate, rather than patch up, Byron's condition. Anorexics are all too
likely to seize nature by the throat, even without medical
encouragement.
Polidori did have two opportunities to practise his profession on the
trip to Geneva. The first time the coach broke down, at Lo-Kristy outside
Ghent, he went for the blacksmith, found him 'sick of a fever,' and
treated him for it.59 Byron, writing to Hobhouse two days later, re-
marked, 'I dare say he is dead by now' - the first of a long series of jokes
about Polidori's medical skills.60
At Mannheim, Polidori himself was 'Taken very ill with a fever.' He
recovered enough to proceed to Carlsruhe, but there he felt 'very ill' with
Headache, vertigo, tendency to fainting, etc' Following a Gregorian
approach, he gave himself ipecac (an emetic), magnesia and lemon acid
(laxatives), and opium. But the medicine at first had 'no effect,' and soon
he was so ill that he could not walk. A second dose of magnesia and
lemon acid, however, eventually produced a 'violent effect,' and he felt
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72 Byron: 1816

'better on the whole, though weak.' 61 Byron was irritated by the delay:
'Poor Polidori is devilish ill -1 do not know with what - nor does he - but
he seems to have a slight constitution - & is seriously laid up - if he does
not get well soon - he will be totally unfit for travelling.' He was also
irritated at having to ask Hobhouse to bring 'a largish bottle of the
strongest Pot Ash' because 'that Child and Childish Dr. Pollydolly con-
trived to find it broken, or to break it at Carlsruhe.' But as Polidori
recovered his health, Byron recovered his good humour, and when they
arrived at Geneva, he seemed on the whole pleased with his physician:
'Polidori has been ill - but is much better - a little experience will make
him a very good traveller - if his health can stand it.'62 The roles of doctor
and patient seem to have been reversed.

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