CHAPTER XXV
AT VENICE--THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER"S WIFE--DISSOLUTE PROCEEDINGS IN THE MOCENIGO PALACE--ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND REFORMATION
For six weeks or so in May and June 1817 Byron tore himself away from Marianna and visited Rome, where he dined with Lord Lansdowne, sat to Thorwaldsen for his bust, and gathered the materials for the Fourth Canto of "Childe Harold." He refused, however, for Marianna"s sake, to go on with Hobhouse to Naples, but hurried back to her, bidding her meet him half-way, and afterwards taking her, but not her husband, to a villa at La Mira, on the Brenta, a few miles out of Venice. It seems that the neighbours, less particular than the leaders of English society, yet including a marquis as well as a physician with four unmarried daughters, hastened to call, if not on the lady, at all events on him. Monk Lewis paid him a short visit, and Hobhouse, on his return from Naples, stayed for some time in a house close by, studying in the Ducal Library, and ama.s.sing the erudition which appears in his notes to "Childe Harold."
Praise of Marianna, however, disappears from Byron"s letters at this period; and one may infer from his comment on the news of the death of Madame de Stael that, if Marianna had ever made him happy, she had now ceased to do so.
"With regard to death," he then wrote to Murray, "I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes."
This is not the note of a man who has found happiness in love or even pleasure in dissipation. Apparently the novelty of the new experiences was wearing off; and Byron was becoming sick of the isolation and uneventfulness of his life. He had gone to Venice largely because there was no English society there--and yet he missed it; Hoppner, the Consul-General being almost his only English friend. He had access to Venetian society, and to some extent, mixed in it; but he did not find it interesting. He tired of the receptions alike of Signora Benzoni the worldly, and of Signora Albrizzi the "blue," at which, no doubt, he was stared at as a marvel of fascinating profligacy; and he also tired of Marianna Segati, who doubtless gave him an excuse for breaking off his relations with her; and then there followed a further and deeper plunge.
The departure of Hobhouse seems, as usual, to have given the signal. It was about the time of his departure that Byron gave up his lodging in the draper"s shop and moved into the Mocenigo Palace; and the letter in which Murray is advised that Hobhouse is on his way home continues thus:
"It is the height of the Carnival, and I am in the _estrum_ and agonies of a new intrigue with I don"t exactly know whom or what, except that she is insatiate of love, and won"t take money, and has light hair and blue eyes, which are not common here, and that I met her at the Masque, and that when her mask is off, I am as wise as ever. I shall make what I can of the remainder of my youth."
A vow which he kept after a fashion as innumerable pa.s.sages from innumerable letters prove--Moore, Murray, and James Wedderburn Webster receiving his confidences in turn. Venice, he a.s.sures the last named, "is by no means the most regular and correct moral city in the universe;" and he continues, describing the life there--not everybody"s life, of course, but the life with which he has chosen to a.s.sociate himself:
"Young and old--pretty and ugly--high and low--are employed in the laudable practice of Love-making--and though most Beauty is found amongst the middling and lower cla.s.ses--this of course only renders their amatory habits more universally diffused."
Then to Moore there is talk of "a Venetian girl with large black eyes, a face like Faustina"s and the figure of a Juno--tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes flashing, and her dark eyes streaming in the moonlight;" while to Murray there is a long account of the affair with Margarita Cogni, the baker"s wife, with whom the draper"s wife disputed publicly for Byron"s favours:
"Margarita threw back her veil, and replied in very explicit Venetian: "_You_ are _not_ his _wife_: _I_ am _not_ his _wife_: _you_ are his _Donna_ and _I_ am his _Donna_; _your_ husband is a cuckold, and _mine_ is another. For the rest what right have you to reproach me? if he prefers what is mine to what is yours, is it my fault? if you wish to secure him, tie him to your petticoat-string; but do not think to speak to me without a reply because you happen to be richer than I am." Having delivered this pretty piece of eloquence (which I relate as it was translated to me by a bye-stander), she went on her way, leaving a numerous audience with Madame Segati, to ponder at her leisure on the dialogue between them."
And Byron goes on to tell other stories of Margarita"s jealousy, relating that "she had inordinate self-love, and was not tolerant of other women ... so that, I being at the time somewhat promiscuous, there was great confusion and demolition of head-dresses and handkerchiefs; and sometimes my servants, in "redding" the fray between her and other feminine persons, received more knocks than acknowledgments for their peaceful endeavours."
And then follows the story of Margarita"s flight from her husband"s house to Byron"s palace, and her husband"s application to the police to restore her to him, and her second desertion of "that consumptive cuckold," as she styled him in open court, and her final success in settling herself as a fixture in Byron"s establishment, without his formal consent, but with his indolent acquiescence.
She became his housekeeper, with the result that "the expenses were reduced to less than half, and everybody did their duty better." But she also had an ungovernable temper, suppressed all letters in a feminine handwriting, threatened violence with a table-knife, and had to be disarmed by Fletcher; so that Byron at last tired of her and told her to go. She then went quietly downstairs and threw herself into the ca.n.a.l, but was fished out, brought to with restoratives, and sent away a second time.
"And this," Byron concludes, "is the story of Margarita Cogni, as far as it belongs to me."
Like the story of Marianna Segati, it is hardly a story at all; and there seem to have been several other stories very much like it running concurrently with it. So, at all events, Byron told Augusta, who pa.s.sed the news on to Hodgson, saying that her brother had written "on the old subject very uncomfortably, and on his present pursuits which are what one would dread and expect; a string of low attachments." And if a picture of the life, drawn by an eye-witness, be desired, one has only to turn to Sh.e.l.ley"s letter on the subject to Thomas Love Peac.o.c.k.
The subject of Sh.e.l.ley"s comments is the point of view and "tone of mind"
of certain pa.s.sages in "Childe Harold." He finds here "a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly," and he continues:
"Nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt and desperation. The fact is that, first, the Italian women with whom he a.s.sociates are, perhaps, the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon--the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; Countesses smell so strongly of garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L. B.
is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He a.s.sociates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which are not only not named, but I believe, seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures. He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself; and contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts the nature and habits of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt and despair?... And he has a certain degree of candour while you talk to him, but, unfortunately, it does not outlast your departure. No, I do not doubt, and for his sake I ought to hope, that his present career must end soon in some violent circ.u.mstance."
This, it is to be remarked, is the picture, not of an enemy, but of a friend--one who already admired Byron as the greatest poet of his generation, and was to learn to admire him as one of its greatest men: a man capable of doing great things as well as dreaming them. Evidently, therefore, it is, as far as it goes, a true picture, though there is something to be added to it--something which blackens, and also something which brightens it.
Byron, to begin with, was, during this dark period, as careless of his appearance as of his morals. It was not necessary to his facile conquests among the Venetian courtesans that he should be either sober or well-groomed. It may even, on the contrary, have been necessary that he should drink too much and go unkempt in order to live comfortably on their level. At all events he did drink too much--preferring fiery spirits to the harmless Italian wines--and indulged a large appet.i.te for miscellaneous foods, and ceased his frequentation of the barber"s shop; with the result that the flesh, set free from its customary discipline, revolted and spread abroad, and Hanson, who came to Byron at Venice to settle about the sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman, reported to Augusta that he had found him "_fat_, immensely large, and his hair long." James Wedderburn Webster, a few months later, heard of his "corpulence" as "stupendous;" and Byron, while objecting to that epithet, was constrained to admit that it was considerable.
There were limits, however, to his excesses; and if misconduct was sometimes three parts of life for him, there always remained the fourth part to be devoted to other activities and interests. Even at his most debased hours Byron never quite lost his love of literature and out-door exercise, or his genius for friendship with men of like tastes with himself, who judged him as they found him and not as his wife said that he was; so that a picture contrasting pleasantly from Sh.e.l.ley"s may be taken from Consul-General Hoppner, whom Byron took almost daily in his gondola to ride on the Lido:
"Nothing could be more delightful than these rides on the Lido were to me. We were from half to three quarters of an hour crossing the water, during which his conversation was always most amusing and interesting.
Sometimes he would bring with him any new book he had received, and read to me the pa.s.sages which most struck him. Often he would repeat to me whole stanzas of the poems he was engaged in writing, as he had composed them on the preceding evening; and this was the more interesting to me because I could frequently trace in them some idea which he had started in our conversation of the preceding day, or some remark the effect of which he had evidently been trying upon me.
Occasionally, too, he spoke of his own affairs, making me repeat all I had heard with regard to him, and desiring that I would not spare him, but let him know the worst that was said."
The two reports must be read, of course, not as contradicting but as supplementing one another; so that a just estimate of the actual situation may not be very difficult to arrive at.
Byron, it is important to remember, though he had so many adventures, was only thirty years of age; and at thirty even a man of genius is still very young; and a very young man is always apt, given the provocation, to challenge public attention by going to the devil conspicuously and with a blare of trumpets. He may or may not like, and therefore nurse, the idea that he has tied his life up into such a knot that nothing but death--his own death or another"s--can untie it; but he is quite ready, as a rule, to accept the tangle, if not to welcome it, as an excuse for a sensational plunge into the abysms of debauchery. And this is especially so if his pa.s.sions are strong, and if his private affairs have been a public pageant, watched, whether for praise or censure, by innumerable eyes.
Both those conditions were fulfilled in Byron"s case. Consequently he set out to swagger to the devil--as cynical now as he had once been sentimental--convinced, or at any rate affecting to be convinced, that, in a so-called love affair, nothing mattered but the sensual satisfaction; promiscuous in his habits and careless of his health--pleased to let Lady Byron know that he found more pleasure in the society of the sc.u.m of the stews of Venice than in hers--delighted also to think that the community at large were shocked by his dissolute proceedings. We have just seen him asking his sister to inform his wife what he was doing and how he was living. His friend Harness, who had long since lost sight of him, a.s.sures us that one of his great joys was to send defamatory paragraphs about himself to the continental newspapers in the hope that the English press would copy them, and that the world would believe him to be even worse than he was. He was vicious, that is to say, and he was also, as the Duc de Broglie called him, a "fanfaron of vice."
It was a phase which he had to pa.s.s through, but no more; for such a man could not possibly go on living such a life for long. The real risk for his reputation was that he should die before the phase was finished, die in a house which was little better than a brothel, with Venetian prost.i.tutes tearing each other"s hair and scratching each other"s faces by his bedside. The end, indeed, might easily have come in that ignominious fashion; for he had a recurrence of the malaria to which he had been liable ever since his first journey to Greece, and, in view of the liberties which he had taken with his const.i.tution, it is rather surprising that he recovered from it. Still, he did recover; and, whether ill or well, he never quite lost sight of the better possibilities.
His harem claimed his days, but not, as a rule, his nights. There came, pretty regularly, an hour when the revelry ceased and the domestic female companions were packed off to their several beds; and then pens and ink and ardent spirits were set before Byron, and he wrote. It was, indeed, just when his life was most dissolute that his genius was brightest. He wrote "Manfred," the poem in which he responded to the challenge of his calumniators, and showed that he could, if he chose, cast a halo round the very charge with which they had sought to crush him. He wrote the Fourth Canto of "Childe Harold," in which we see the last of the admired Byronic pose. He began "Don Juan," the poem in which the sincere cynic, who has come to cynicism by way of sentiment, pa.s.ses with a light step from the pathetic to the ribald, and, attacking all hypocrisies, from those of Mrs.
Grundy to those of the Holy Alliance, brushes them impatiently away like cobwebs.
Byron, in short, remained a fighter even in the midst of his self-indulgences; and for the fighter there is always hope.
Self-indulgence brings satiety, but fighting does not, when it can be seen that the blows are telling; and there could be no question of the effect of Byron"s blows. Though the sea rolled between him and his countrymen, he shocked them as they had never been shocked before. Regarding him as the wickedest of wicked men, they admitted that his was a wickedness that had to be reckoned with, which was exactly what he wished and had intended.
Perhaps he shocked them more for the fun of the thing than as the conscious champion of any particular cause; but that does not matter. The greatest builders are nearly always those who are building better than they know; and the building, at any rate, saved Byron from suffering too much harm from the loose manner of his life, and helped him to await his opportunity.
"I am only a spectator upon earth, until a tenfold opportunity offers. It may come yet," he wrote to Moore about this time. The pa.s.sage is enigmatical, and may only refer to some dream of vengeance cherished against Lady Byron and her advisers. On the other hand, it may just as well be a second reference to that resolution to "do something,"--something which "like the cosmogony or creation of the world will puzzle the philosophers of all ages,"--formulated in the letter to Moore already quoted. The letter, at all events, is quickly followed by news of the illness already mentioned, and of which there is a more or less particular account in one of the letters to Murray:
"You ask about my health: about the beginning of the year I was in a state of great exhaustion, attended by such debility of stomach that nothing remained upon it; and I was obliged to reform my "way of life," which was conducting me from the Yellow leaf to the Ground, with all deliberate speed. I am better in health and in morals, and very much yours ever,
"B."
This change in the "way of life" meant, of course, in the first instance, the restoration of the draper"s and baker"s wives to the baker and draper respectively, and the return of the professional prost.i.tutes to the places in which they normally plied their trade. It also meant, in the second place, the courtship of the Countess Guiccioli, a branch of the subject to be dealt with in a separate chapter.
CHAPTER XXVI
IN THE VENETIAN SALONS--INTRODUCTION TO COUNTESS GUICCIOLI
Even at the time when the draper"s and baker"s wives were quarrelling over their claims to his attentions--even at the time when the baker"s wife was routing the rest of the harem, and threatening violence with carving-knives--Byron never quite lost his foothold in the Venetian salons. There were two such salons, such as they were--that of the Countess Albrizzi, who aspired to be literary, and was styled the Venetian de Stael, and that of the Countess Benzoni, who aspired, in modern parlance, to be smart; and Byron was welcome in both of them, and could even wound the feelings of either hostess by preferring the receptions of her rival.
Both hostesses knew, of course, how he spent the time which he did not spend with them. They saw the draper"s wife in his box at the theatre; they saw the baker"s wife frolicking with him at the Carnival; they heard shocking stories of the "goings on" at the Mocenigo Palace. But they considered that these matters were not their business--or at all events did not concern them very much. They knew that English milords were mad, and that men of genius were mad; and, as Byron was both of these things, they could pardon him for possessing a double dose of eccentricity.
Moreover, in a country in which most wives as well as most husbands were unfaithful, the fuss made about Lady Byron"s grievances, whatever they might be, appeared ridiculous. Why, they asked themselves, looking at the matter from their Italian view-point, could not Lady Byron take a lover and be happy instead of a.s.suming the airs of a martyr, organising a persecution, and hiring lawyers to throw mud? And they noted, too, that Byron had picturesque ways of demonstrating that, though he followed depraved courses, he was, at the bottom of his heart, disgusted with them, and profoundly conscious of his capability of walking in sublimer paths.
"An additional proof," says Moore, "that, in this short, daring career of libertinism, he was but desperately seeking relief for a wronged and mortified spirit, and
"_What to us seem"d guilt might be but woe_,"--
is that, more than once, of an evening, when his house has been in the possession of such visitants, he has been known to hurry away in his gondola, and pa.s.s the greater part of the night upon the water, as if hating to return to his home."
Allowances, it was clear (to the ladies), must be made for a man (or at all events for a milord and a poet) who, even when pa.s.sing from the arms of a draper"s to a baker"s wife, could thus search for, even if he could not "set up,"
"_a mark of everlasting light Above the howling senses" ebb and flow_."
They made the allowances, therefore, showing that, even if they sometimes disapproved, they were always ready to forgive when the footman threw open the door and announced the return of the prodigal. To Countess Albrizzi, on these occasions, "his face appeared tranquil like the ocean on a fine Spring morning," while his hands "were as beautiful as if they had been works of art," and his eyes "of the azure colour of the heavens, from which they seemed to derive their origin." This, though Countess Albrizzi was nearly sixty years of age; so that one can readily imagine the impression made upon Countess Guiccioli, whose husband was sixty, but who was herself little more than seventeen.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Countess Guiccioli._]