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 Staël, 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 assuming 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 pass 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 passing 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.
[Illustration: _Countess Guiccioli._]
"I became acquainted with Lord Byron," she wrote to Moore, "in the
April of 1819; he was introduced to me at Venice by the Countess
Benzoni at one of that lady's parties. This introduction, which had so
much influence over the lives of us both, took place contrary to our
wishes, and had been permitted by us only from courtesy. For myself,
more fatigued than usual that evening on account of the late hours
they keep at Venice, I went with great repugnance to this party, and
purely in obedience to Count Guiccioli. Lord Byron, too, who was
averse to forming new acquaintances--alleging that he had entirely
renounced all attachments, and was unwilling any more to expose
himself to their consequences--on being requested by the Countess
Benzoni to allow himself to be presented to me, refused, and, at last,
only assented from a desire to oblige her. His noble and exquisitely
beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his manners, the
thousand enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so different
and so superior a being to any whom I had hitherto seen that it was
impossible he should not have left the most profound impression upon
me. From that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at
Venice, we met every day."
The girl Countess's maiden name was Teresa Gamba; and she had been married
to her elderly husband for his money. He was in his sixtieth year, and was
worth about £12,000 a year. In his youth he had collaborated with Alfieri
in the establishment of a national theatre. Now his principal interests
were political--as were also those of the Gamba family--and the police had
their eyes on them in consequence. His principal establishment was at
Ravenna; and he was on the point of starting for Ravenna, breaking the
journey at various mansions which he possessed upon the road, on the
evening on which his wife, acting "purely in obedience," to his
instructions, attended the reception at which she lost her heart.
He removed her from Venice a very few days afterwards; but by that time
the mischief was done, and it was not the heart only that had been lost.
Byron had pressed his suit with impetuous precipitation, and Countess
Guiocioli had yielded--without, as it would seem, the least idea that
there could be any harm in her doing so.
Morality, as has been said, is a matter partly of geography and partly of
chronology; and, in the Italy of those days, no woman got credit for
fidelity unless she had a lover, as well as a husband, to be faithful to.
So Madame Guiccioli punctuated her departure with fainting fits, and then
wrote Byron appealing letters, begging him to follow her as soon as she
had prepared the minds of her relatives to receive him.
To do so occupied her until the first days of June; and the further
development of events may be best related in extracts from Byron's
letters:
"About the 20th I leave Venice, to take a journey into Romagna; but
shall probably return in a month."
This to Murray, as early as May 6. On May 20, we find him still going, but
not yet gone: "Next week I set out for Romagna, at least in all
probability." On June 2, a letter addressed to Hoppner from Padua shows
that he has started, but that, the favours he sought having been accorded
to him at Venice, he is not very anxious to take a hot and dusty journey
for the purpose of following up the intrigue:
"Now to go to Cuckold a Papal Count, who, like Candide, has already
been 'the death of two men, one of whom was a priest,' in his own
house is rather too much for my modesty, when there are several other
places at least as good for the purpose. She says they must go to
Bologna in the middle of June, and why the devil then drag me to
Ravenna? However I shall determine nothing till I get to Bologna, and
probably take some time to decide when I am there, so that, the Gods
willing, you may probably see me again soon. The Charmer forgets that
a man may be whistled anywhere _before_, but that _after_, a journey
in an Italian June is a Conscription, and therefore she should have
been less liberal in Venice, or less exigent at Ravenna."
That letter is the first which throws light on the vexed question whether
Byron really loved Madame Guiccioli, or merely viewed her as an eligible
mistress. It is to be observed, however, that his conduct was less cynical
than his correspondence, and that the Countess, on her part, saw no reason
for suspecting insincerity. "I shall stay but a few days at Bologna," is
his announcement when he gets there; and the Countess relates his arrival:
"Dante's tomb, the classical pine wood, the relics of antiquity which
are to be found in that place, afforded a sufficient pretext for me to
invite him to come, and for him to accept my invitation. He came, in
fact, in the month of June ... while I, attacked by a consumptive
complaint, which had its origin from the moment of my quitting Venice,
appeared on the point of death.... His motives for such a visit became
the subject of discussion, and these he himself afterwards
involuntarily divulged; for having made some inquiries with a view to
paying me a visit, and being told that it was unlikely he would ever
see me again, he replied, if such were the case, he hoped that he
should die also; which circumstance, being repeated, revealed the
object of his journey."
The narrative adds that Count Guiccioli himself begged Byron to call in
the hope that his society might be beneficial to his wife's health; and it
is, at all events, certain that Byron's arrival was followed by a
remarkably rapid recovery, explicable from the fact, set forth by Byron,
that her complaint, after all, was not consumption but a "fausse couche."
The husband's attitude, however, puzzled him. "If I come away with a
Stiletto in my gizzard some fine afternoon," he writes, "I shall not be
astonished;" and he proceeds:
"I cannot make _him_ out at all, he visits me frequently, and takes me
out (like Whittington the Lord Mayor) in a coach and _six_ horses....
By the aid of a Priest, a Chambermaid, a young negro-boy, and a female
friend, we are enabled to carry on our unlawful loves, as far as they
can well go, though generally with some peril, especially as the
female friend and priest are at present out of town for some days, so
that some of the precautions devolve upon the Maid and Negro."
That, it will be agreed, is rather the language of Don Juan than of a
really devout lover; but there is more of the lover and less of the Don
Juan in the letters which succeed. In the letter to Murray, for instance,
dated June 29:
"I see my _Dama_ every day at the proper and improper hours; but I
feel seriously uneasy about her health, which seems very precarious.
In losing her I should lose a being who has run great risks on my
account, and whom I have every reason to love, but I must not think
this possible. I do not know what I _should_ do if she died, but I
ought to blow my brains out, and I hope that I should. Her husband is
a very polite personage, but I wish he would not carry me out in his
Coach and Six, like Whittington and his Cat."
And still more in a letter to Hoppner dated July 2:
"If anything happens to my present _Amica_, I have done with passion
for ever, it is my _last_ love. As to libertinism, I have sickened
myself of that, as was natural in the way I went on, and have at least
derived that advantage from vice, to _love_ in the better sense of the
word. _This_ will be my last adventure. I can hope no more to inspire
attachment, and I trust never again to feel it."
But then, in a letter to Murray, dated August 9, there is a relapse and a
change of tone:
"My 'Mistress dear,' who hath 'fed my heart upon smiles and wine' for
the last two months, set out for Bologna with her husband this
morning, and it seems that I follow him at three to-morrow morning. I
cannot tell how our romance will end, but it hath gone on hitherto
most erotically--such perils and escapes--Juan's are a child's play in
comparison."
Gallantry, not passion, is the note there; but, on the other hand, passion
and not gallantry prevails in the letter to the Countess, written on a
blank page of her copy of "Corinne," which Byron had read in her garden in
her absence:
"My destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of
age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had stayed there, with
all my heart, or, at least, that I had never met you in your married
state.
"But all this is too late. I love you and you love me--at least you
_say so_, and _act_ as if you _did_ so, which last is a great
consolation in all events. But _I_ more than love you, and cannot
cease to love you."
"Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us--but
they never will unless you _wish_ it."
A series of contradictions with which we must be content to be perplexed;
though perhaps they indicate nothing except that Byron changed his mind
from time to time, and was more in love on some days than on others. And
that, of course, it may be urged, is pretty much the same as saying that
he was not, in the fullest sense of the words, in love at all.
That his feelings for the Countess differed from his feelings for the
wives of the baker and the draper is, indeed, clear enough. Otherwise he
would not have drawn the invidious distinction which we have seen him
drawing between the "libertinism" of the earlier intrigues and the
"romance" of the later one. Those passions had depended solely on the
senses; into this one sentiment and intellectual sympathy entered. That is
what his biographers are thinking of when they say that the new attachment
either lifted him out of the mire or, at least, prevented him from
slipping back into it. That, in particular, is what Shelley meant when he
wrote of Byron as "greatly improved in every respect" and apparently
becoming "a virtuous man," and added, by way of explanation: "The
connection with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him."
But that, after all merely signifies that Byron, having a lady instead of
a loose woman for his mistress, had to forswear sack and live cleanly--a
thing which the painful effects of his excesses on his health had already
disposed him to do. It does not signify that he had found a love which
filled his life, or healed his wounds, or effaced the memories of his
earlier loves; and there is, in fact, a poem of the period to which Mr.
Richard Edgcumbe points as circumstantial proof that, even when he was
paying his suit to Madame Guiccioli, Byron's heart was in England, with
Mary Chaworth.
* * * * *
Three years had passed since he had seen her. Her mind had been
temporarily deranged by her troubles, but she had recovered. She had been
reconciled to her husband, and was living with him at Colwick Hall, near
Nottingham. Close to the walls of that old mansion flows the river Trent;
and Byron wrote the lines beginning:
"_River that rollest by the ancient walls,
Where dwells the Lady of my love, when she
Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me._"
The common supposition is that the river invoked is the Po, and that the
lady referred to is Madame Guiccioli; but that can hardly be. Seeing that
Madame Guiccioli was, at this time, beseeching Byron to come to her arms
at Ravenna, her recollection of him could hardly be described as "fair and
fleeting." The allusion is evidently to an anterior passion; and Madame
Guiccioli's place in the poem comes in a later stanza:
"_My blood is all meridian: were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be,
In spite of tortures, ne'er to be forgot,
A slave again to Love--at least of thee._"
And then again:
"_A stranger loves the Lady of the land,
Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood
Is all meridian, as if never fanned
By the bleak wind that chills the polar flood._
"_'Tis vain to struggle--let me perish young--
Live as I lived, and love as I have loved:
To dust if I return, from dust I sprung,
And then, at least, my heart can ne'er be moved._"
The conclusion here clearly is that Byron is committed to passion because
his temperament compels it, and is very grateful to Madame Guiccioli for
loving him, but that if Mary Chaworth should ever lift a little finger and
beckon him, he would leave Madame Guiccioli and go to her.
So Mr. Edgcumbe argues; and he makes out his case--a case which we shall
find nothing to contradict, and something to confirm when we get back to
our story.