The pleasant routine which Byron and the Shelley party had established towards the end of May, and in the first ten days of June, and which they all hoped to continue once they were living close to each other, was hampered by the weather. On the journey to Geneva the Shelley party had been dismayed to find that Les Rousses, one of their stopping places in the French Jura, was still snowed up. The climate improved once they were out of the mountains and in Sécheron, but there are indications that it was hardly set fair. Mary remembered being out with the others on the lake and finding that the water had become distinctly choppy. A strong north-easterly wind had begun to blow which, together with the current of the out-flowing Rhone, was driving them back into Geneva. It was then that Byron, in what was perhaps an effort to distract his companions from some danger, said he would sing them an Albanian song (he was very often heard singing to himself). To their surprise he let out what Mary describes as a ‘strange wild howl’ and then laughed at their disappointment. It might have been from then on that he was known affectionately by them all as ‘Albé’, although another possible derivation of this nickname is the contraction of his title to ‘LB’. Albé was less imaginative than the teasing names Byron would later find for Shelley, one of which was Shiloh. Now associated for most of us with a battle in the American Civil War, this was the biblical name which the 64-year-old Joanna Southcott, a well known English visionary and mystic, had said she would give to the new Messiah when she gave birth to him on 19 October 1814, an event of which there had been no further news by the time she died three months after it was supposed to take place.

By the middle of June what had been uncertain weather had given way to the frankly bad. Summer storms are not unusual in the Geneva area but that year there were an exceptional number of them, and it was often cold as well as wet. The summer of 1816 is in fact famous in meteorological history because there was so little of it, not only in Switzerland but elsewhere in the northern hemisphere.