Reprinted with permission. One of the Locals Summer vacations, traveling with the family, what bothered me was being a tourist—I didn't like being conspicuous, I wanted to pass as one of the locals, to speak the local dialect with no trace of an accent. Invisibility was my ideal. My secret ambition—to be a spy. In fantasy, I would parachute behind enemy lines, and then—disguised, let's say, as the shy, unobtrusive village chimney sweep— engage in daring acts of sabotage.
Later, while being awarded the Croix de guerre , I would modestly downplay my exploits, crediting my fallen comrades. As a matter of fact, my career in espionage never really got off the ground, although in practicing for it I learned to be circumspect, and of course to be always careful in everything I say.
It was on this day in that poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned. He had spent the past four years traveling around Italy with his wife, and it was during this period that he wrote almost all of his most famous poems, including Prometheus Unbound He was living in La Spezia, on the west coast of Italy, at the time of his death. Shelley had just bought a schooner two months earlier. The boat was twenty-four feet long, with twin masts, and it was called Don Juan , after the poem by his friend Lord Byron.
He often spent mornings sitting on the boat as it lay anchored in the bay, reading and writing as he bobbed up and down with the waves. When the weather got nice, Shelley started taking his boat on short outings, and he was looking forward to making a few longer trips with his wife during the summer.
He wrote in a letter to a friend, "[My boat] is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel We drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world.
