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
amassing 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 Staël 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 passages from
innumerable letters prove--Moore, Murray, and James Wedderburn Webster
receiving his confidences in turn. Venice, he assures 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 associate 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 classes--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 canal, 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 passed
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
Shelley's letter on the subject to Thomas Love Peacock.
The subject of Shelley's comments is the point of view and "tone of mind"
of certain passages 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 associates 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 associates 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 circumstance."
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 appetite 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 Shelley'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 passages 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
passions 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 scum 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, assures
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 pass 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
prostitutes 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 constitution, 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, passes 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 passage 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 prostitutes 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.