Frankenstein Sundae, 354

In September 1849, Mary headed to the Continent for what would be her final time. Her son and daughter-in-law had preceded her, and Mary joined them in Paris. They moved then to the French Riviera, to Nice, where Mary, who was not well, sometimes nonetheless rode a donkey into the hills.

A donkey. And as I type that word, I remember how Mary and Bysshe and Claire—back in August 1814, the elopement—had sometimes traveled by donkey through France. They had run low on money fairly quickly and could no longer afford to travel by coach. We resolved to walk through France, wrote Mary in her account of their elopement, but as I was too weak for any considerable distance, and my sister could not be supposed to be able to walk as far as S*** [sic] each day, we determined to purchase an ass, to carry our portmanteau and one of us by turns.[1]

It seems that Shelley and Claire, on August 8, had gone to the ass market and purchased an ass.[2] Okay, I’m smiling as I type this. In some ways I’m still a fifth grader, I know.

But things didn’t work out. The ass seemed incapable of doing what they’d wanted it to do, and so, writes Mary, Finding our ass useless, we sold it before we proceeded on our journey and bought a mule ….[3] This doughty creature did better—bearing both their portmanteau and one of the women.

Then a few days later, Shelley twisted his ankle and ended up riding the mule himself, full-time. And in one remote village … As we prepared our dinner in a place, so filthy that the sight of it alone was sufficient to destroy our appetite, the people of the village collected around us, squalid with dirt, their countenances expressing every thing that is disgusting and brutal. They seemed indeed entirely detached from the rest of the world, and ignorant of all that was passing in it.[4]

And so I wonder … as Mary was riding through those Riviera hills, feeling ill, knowing that whatever malady had afflicted her was not going away—knowing that she never again would sit at her desk and imagine and create and feel the hours passing as briskly as a breeze—did her mind drift back to 1814, to that year when hope and love and life itself seemed eternal?

And while she was away, yet another play appeared on the London stage (the Adelphi Theatre), another play based on her most famous story, a play called Frankenstein; or the Model Man.[5]

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[1] History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 8: Travel Writing, ed. Jeanne Moskal,19.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 20.

[4] Ibid., 22.

[5] In Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, by Steven Earl Forry (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990), 227–50.