They did not like it, and moved into villas on the other side of the Rhone, only to discover that the Hotel d'Angleterre overlooked them, and that its obliging landlord had set up a large telescope so that his visitors might survey their proceedings the more commodiously. This obliged them to move again--Byron to the Villa Diodati, and Shelley to the Maison Chapuis or Campagne Mont Allègre--and there at last they were able, as the party of the Libertins in the Geneva of the Reformation put it, to "live as they chose without reference to the preachers." To much that they did there the preachers, even those of Calvin's time, could have taken no exception. They talked--the sort of talk that would have been high over the heads of their censors of the d'Angleterre; they rowed on the lake, and sang in their boat in the moonlight; they read poetry, and wrote it. Shelley pressed Byron to read Wordsworth; and he did so, with results which are apparent in the Third Canto of "Childe Harold," where we find the Wordsworthian conception of the unity of man with Nature reproduced and spoiled, as Wordsworth most emphatically insisted, in the reproduction. There was a week of rain during which the friends decided to fleet the time by writing ghost stories, and Mary Godwin wrote "Frankenstein." There was also a circular tour of the lake, undertaken without the ladies, in the course of which Shelley had a narrow escape from drowning near Saint Gingolph. These things were a part, and not the least important part, of the diversions which helped Byron to defy the slanderers whom he could not answer. So was his short trip to the Oberland with Hobhouse. And, finally, meaning so little to him that one naturally keeps it to the end and adds it as a detail, there was the "affair" with Miss Jane Clairmont. On this branch of the subject he wrote to Mrs. Leigh, who had heard exaggerated rumours: "As to all these 'mistresses,' Lord help me--I have had but one. Now don't scold; but what could I do?--a foolish girl, in spite of all I could say or do, would come after me, or rather went before--for I found her here--and I have had all the plague possible to persuade her to go back again; but at last she went. Now, dearest, I do most truly tell thee that I could not help this, that I did all I could to prevent it, and have at last put an end to it. I was not in love, nor have any love left for any; but I could not exactly play the Stoic with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophise me. Besides, I had been regaled of late with so many 'two courses and a _desert_' (Alas!) of aversion, that I was fain to take a little love (if pressed particularly) by way of novelty."