John William Polidori  

"June 17.—Went into the town; dined with Shelley etc. here. Went after dinner to a ball at Madame Odier's; where I was introduced to Princess Something and Countess Potocka, Poles, and had with them a long confab. Attempted to dance, but felt such horrid pain was forced to stop. The ghost-stories are begun by all but me.

[This date serves to rectify a small point in literary history. We all know that the party at Cologny—consisting of Byron and Polidori on the one hand, and of Shelley and Mrs. Shelley and Miss Clairmont on the other—undertook to write each of them an independent ghost-story, or story of the supernatural; the result being Byron's fragment of The Vampyre, Polidori's complete story of The Vampyre, and Mrs. Shelley's renowned Frankenstein. Shelley and Miss Clairmont proved defaulters. It used to be said that Matthew Gregory Lewis, author of The Monk, had been mixed up in the same project; but this is a mistake, for Lewis only reached the Villa Diodati towards the middle of August. Professor Dowden states as follows: "During a few days of ungenial weather which confined them to the house [by "them" Shelley and the two ladies are evidently meant, and perhaps also Byron and Polidori] some volumes of ghost-stories, Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d' Histoires d' Apparitions, de Spectres, Revenans, etc. (a collection translated into French from the German) fell into their hands, and its perusal probably excited and overstrained Shelley's imagination." Professor Dowden then proceeds to narrate an incident connected with Coleridge's Christabel, of which more anon; and he says that immediately after that incident Byron proposed, "We will each write a ghost-story"—a suggestion to which the others assented. It is only fair to observe that Professor Dowden's account corresponds with that which Polidori himself supplied in the proem to his tale of The Vampyre. But Polidori's Diary proves that this is not absolutely correct. The ghost-stories (prompted by the Fantasmagoriana, a poor sort of book) had already been begun by Byron, Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, and Miss Clairmont, not later than June 17, whereas the Christabel incident happened on June 18. Byron's story, as I have already said, was The Vampyre, left a fragment; Shelley's is stated to have been some tale founded on his own early experiences—nothing farther is known of it; Mrs. Shelley's was eventually Frankenstein, but, from the details which have been published as to the first conception of this work, we must assume that what she had begun by June 17 was something different: of Miss Clairmont's story no sort of record remains.

The Countess Potocka, whom Polidori mentions, was a lady belonging to the highest Polish nobility."

--The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori (1911) by John William Polidori edited by William Michael Rossetti.