Mission #1: Villa Diodati

Wednesday, I got up and marched myself to the exact opposite shore of Lake Geneva from my hotel to visit Byron's 1816 house in Cologny, Villa Diodati, which he named. Public transit goes everywhere, and could have taken me there easily, but I walked the whole way. You get to know a place better on foot. There's room for surprise on foot. You feel lost, then you find your way, and there's that pioneer sense of accomplishment from getting there without help. Anyway, I had the time, and Mary and Percy did not have busses, so it seemed worth it to walk the six kilometers from my red light district to the manicured residential district of Cologny at their speed.

Cologny is a hamlet of tasteful old and new houses hidden behind perfect foliage or shoulder-high stone walls. It sits diagonally on a slope above the lake. Some of the gates to driveways have gilded shields with the flags of foreign countries, like Qatar. You get there by a windy road that's too narrow for today's traffic, and people are driving fast, country club types speeding from one beautiful destination to the next. Eventually, the terrible but lovely road puts you out in a town square with an ancient church, a tea-room, a restaurant, and an old stone fountain marked "potable," as though expecting people on foot to wander in on their literary pilgrimages thirsty & weary & etc. Kids on the playground chatter away in English and French, and there's a boutique "American foods" grocery store next to the epicerie. Even the pedestrian crosswalk sign is charming and anglophilic. The silhouetted man has on a tiny bowler hat, so I pretended he was Eliot's Prufrock. (Bit too modern to be a Byron.)  I poked my head into the American foods store, but purchased picnic items from the epicerie. Filled canteen at sacred ancient but potable water fountain. Studied map. Onward through the windy roads and the hidden homes of the Genevois, with their stone walls and lovely hedges. Villa Diodati comes out of nowhere, at a perfectly ordinary (or Geneva-ordinary, which is terminally picturesque) bend in a road. You're just walking along spying on the roofs of houses, when the house behind the wall in front of you has a plaque at eye level commemorating it in French as the residence of Lord Byron, poete Anglais. I did a little double take, gawked, expected a soundtrack to kick in, and when it did not, I stepped backwards, then forwards, to do the arrival over again with appropriate reverence. I spied on every single observable detail of the not-very-observable lawn and garden of the Villa Diodati, which is now private apartments. They're very good at gardening to put off spies, these Genevois.

There's a lemon tree poking over the wall, and a greenhouse full of delicious looking things, and I had to stop spying when the gardener came out to do things with the lemon tree. You can't visit the house itself, but there's a public park next door, and they've set a stone bench in the exact spot where one can best view the mansion. I almost turned my ankle in the knotty grass, and thought of the stories of Percy turning his ankle that summer, which I have always ascribed to his ridiculous enthusiasm, but listen, the ground is bumpy there! (Or was he jumping out of a window heroically? I left my research back in New York, determined to do this all from memory.) Mary and Percy lived just below, in Montalegre (literally a stone's throw away), in a house that isn't there anymore called Maison Chapuis. But she got the dare to write Frankenstein in Diodati, so I am making my Byron monuments into Mary monuments. At the bottom of the lawn, there's a footpath worn into the ground. It would go down to the lake if there weren't other houses there now, and I pictured Mary & step-sister Claire cutting delicately through the grass in difficult shoes and long skirts. It is a storybook place, every inch. Next to the footpath, an electrical box bore the only jagged imagery I could find all day: a caution sign with a sketch of a skull, and I thought maybe Mary would've approved of the imagery, as well as the day, which was gorgeous and blue, with the clouds changing every ten minutes, the very opposite of her gloomy thunderous 1816 summer. I spent a few hours trawling the neighborhood. Studied the horizon she would have studied, the gleaming mountains. A couple of kids came rocketing down the park with cigarettes and one of them unzipped his fly and took a piss, grinning back at his friend. Some construction men sat on a bench and had their lunch. The clouds changed. Nothing whatsoever happened. I thought a little bit about Act 2, and then packed up my picnic and made my way back to the city, mission #1, check.