From Aix-les-Bains to Lake Geneva: Chasing Mary Shelley

I left Aix-les-Bains at 7:42 that night. For three nights in a row, I had sat out on the balcony of my place on rue de Genève, watching the sun drop behind the hills until the light was gone. The church spire outside my window had become my only companion—I knew every crack in its stone face from staring too long between cigarettes. The ashtray beside me was spilling over. Time felt stretched so thin it cut. I kept folding and unfolding the train schedule until the paper softened, the ink smudged dark across my thumbs.

Vespers bells at 6:17 PM. Moved after sitting for four hours, twenty-two minutes. Legs: pins and needles. Door: metal, self-locking. The stairwell was wood, about fifteen steps, and there was no handrail. At the bottom, the cobblestones were wet from the rain. The air was close to freezing, and the yellow lamps hardly cut through more than a few yards of mist.

Inhaled. Immediate bronchial spasm lasting 47 seconds. Oxygen deprivation caused involuntary laughter. Chest pain rated 7/10. Confirmation of consciousness: complete.

The train carved its way through fog that swallowed the valleys whole. My breath clouded the glass. The night pressed close, heavy with memory. I was not chasing Lake Geneva’s boulevards. I was chasing Mary Shelley.

Thinking about that haunted summer of 1816, when eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin, not yet wearing Shelley's name, conceived a story that inspired many across centuries, make me feel inadequate. How could she know that Villa Diodati would become her cathedral of creation? I imagine her there, motherless since birth, her inheritance a hollow space where love should have lived. The sky that summer was a mourner draped in ash, weeping storms against the windows while inside, Byron's voice cut through candlelight, demanding ghost stories to fill their confinement. Did Mary feel her mother's ghost at her shoulder as she conjured her creature? Did she know she was stitching together not just a monster but her own immortality? From that darkness came Frankenstein, born like Mary herself into a world that would never quite understand the pain of its creation.

I think of Mary at eighteen: grief in one hand, creation in the other. What kind of spirit can carry that weight and still breathe? Could any of us, raised on noise and distraction, endure silence long enough to make something timeless out of pain?

That is why I went to the lake. Not to claim her story, but to try to feel its pulse. To imagine her in that storm: candle smoke thick in the air, thunder shuddering the floorboards, rain dripping through the shutters. What did they eat? How long did the silences last?

We keep remaking that summer—books, films, lectures—but the truth of it is lost. Still, I hold onto Elle Fanning’s face in Mary Shelley: candlelight catching youth and grief at once, colliding into something that endures.

At the edge of Lake Geneva, its waters black and whipped by wind, I did not find ghosts. I found myself leaning into the hush they left behind. And perhaps that is the point. Stories do not belong to us. We keep them alive only by breathing into their silence.