On Byron’s deliberate arrival, some twelve days after Shelley had come in hot haste to the hotel, the two sets of tourists forthwith acted as though they had met there by appointment. Joining their forces, the two sets of tourists became one party. When Byron and Polidori left the hotel, Shelley and the sisters left the hotel. When Byron and Polidori moved into the Villa Belle Rive, Shelley moved with the two girls into a little house near at hand. When Byron and Polidori migrated to the Villa Diodati, the sisters with Shelley migrated to the pretty cottage lying at the foot, and under the trees, of Diodati. As the inmates of the cottage repeatedly passed the whole night at Byron’s mansion, it is, of course, obvious that Mr. Froude was justified in saying Claire could not easily have been alone with Byron for a minute! From the day of Byron’s arrival at the Hotel Sécheron, the two inseparable parties were regarded as one party, by the visitors in the hotel, the gossip-mongers of every Genevese coterie, the idlers who, during Byron’s brief stay at the Sécheron, thronged and buzzed about the poets and their ladies, whenever they went (by daylight, or twilight, or at night) from the hotel down to the lake, or back from their boat to the hotel. Whispering that Mary (though styled Mrs. Shelley) was only the younger poet’s mistress, and that Claire was Mary’s sister in the fullest sense of the term, these idlers told one another, that Byron had found in the bright-eyed and brilliant brunette an agreeable substitute for his unforgiving wife. This was the tattle of the hotel, whilst the poets, Polidori, and the girls remained there. It is in the nature of such tattle, that, starting from imperfect truth, it passes quickly to egregious falsehood. Far worse things were soon said of the four young people by the Genevese gossip-mongers, than that Mary was Shelley’s goddess, and that Claire was Byron’s spouse in Free Love.