Byron took Polidori to Coppet with him, but not Shelley. It is very unlikely that the latter would have been unwelcome there, attractive and eloquent young poet as he was; or indeed that Madame de Staël would not have been interested to meet Mary. During her relatively recent stay in London, she had made sure not to miss seeing Mary's father, William Godwin, and she must have known that Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had lived a precarious life in Paris during the early years of the revolution, just as she herself had. It would be anachronistic to attribute to de Staël the ‘feminism’ for which Wollstonecraft laid the foundations, but the heroine of Corinne is in many ways an emancipated figure and, at the beginning of chapter 3 of De l'Allemagne, de Staël writes: ‘Nature and society impose on women a habit of suffering and it seems to me undeniable that today they are in general worth more than men’. Much of her life was devoted to demonstrating that proposition and, by being herself so determinedly forceful and prominent, she did a great deal to assert women's rights.

What de Staël and the daughter of Wollstonecraft might have said to each other remains a matter for speculation because, for whatever reasons (the most powerful of which was probably Coppet's English visitors), Shelley decided against going there. ‘Madame de Staël is here,’ he told his friend Hogg, ‘& a number of literary people whom I have not seen, & indeed have no great curiosity to see, unwilling as I am to pay the invidious price exacted by all, to range oneself according to peculiar parties.’ As an alternative diversion he decided the time was ripe for the trip to Chamonix with Mary and Claire and he hired from Geneva a young Swiss woman to stay behind in Montalègre and look after William. Called Louise Duvillard, she was always known by the Shelleys as Elise, and she would play a very important role in their future lives.