6 - Frightening Tales
from Part One
Summary
The pleasant routine which Byron and the Shelley party had established towards the end of May, and in the first ten days of June, and which they all hoped to continue once they were living close to each other, was hampered by the weather. On the journey to Geneva the Shelley party had been dismayed to find that Les Rousses, one of their stopping places in the French Jura, was still snowed up. The climate improved once they were out of the mountains and in Sécheron, but there are indications that it was hardly set fair. Mary remembered being out with the others on the lake and finding that the water had become distinctly choppy. A strong north-easterly wind had begun to blow which, together with the current of the out-flowing Rhone, was driving them back into Geneva. It was then that Byron, in what was perhaps an effort to distract his companions from some danger, said he would sing them an Albanian song (he was very often heard singing to himself). To their surprise he let out what Mary describes as a ‘strange wild howl’ and then laughed at their disappointment. It might have been from then on that he was known affectionately by them all as ‘Albé’, although another possible derivation of this nickname is the contraction of his title to ‘LB’. Albé was less imaginative than the teasing names Byron would later find for Shelley, one of which was Shiloh.
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- Information
- Byron in GenevaThat Summer of 1816, pp. 44 - 51Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011