BYRON'S RELATIONS WITH THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI AND HER HUSBAND AT RAVENNA
Countess Guiccioli speaks of Byron's regard for her as "the serious
attachment which he had wished to avoid, but which had mastered his whole
heart, and induced him to live an isolated life with the person he loved
in a town of Romagna, far from all that could flatter his vanity and from
all intercourse with his countrymen." The account is not altogether
inaccurate, but it omits one important fact: the Countess's own resolute
insistence that Byron's society was essential to her happiness and even to
her life.
At first, it seems clear, his sole objective was the seduction of his
neighbour's wife. He was engaged, as he thought, upon an affair not of
sentiment but of gallantry; and he had no idea that his neighbour's wife,
having consented to be seduced, would expect him to dance attendance on
her for ever afterwards. So much seems evident from the letter in which he
complains of being dragged to Ravenna in a blazing Italian June. His
mistress, however, had compelled him to come by pleading illness; and she
did not scruple to repeat that plea as often as she found any difficulty
in getting her own way. "I am ill--so ill. Send for Lord Byron or I shall
die;" that was the refrain which helped her to reorganise her life.
Having joined her at Ravenna, Byron, as we have seen, accompanied her to
Bologna. It was at Bologna that he wrote the love letter, quoted in the
preceding chapter, in Madame Guiccioli's copy of "Corinne." From Bologna,
too, he wrote to Murray, asking him to use his influence to procure Count
Guiccioli a nomination as British Vice-Consul--an unsalaried office which
would entitle him to British protection in the event of political
disturbances; and at Bologna, finally, occurred Countess Guiccioli's
second diplomatic indisposition.
"Some business," she told Moore, "having called Count Guiccioli to
Ravenna, I was obliged by the state of my health, instead of
accompanying him, to return to Venice, and he consented that Lord
Byron should be the companion of my journey. We left Bologna on
September 15.... When I arrived at Venice, the physicians ordered that
I should try the country air; and Lord Byron, having a Villa at La
Mira, gave it up to me, and came to reside there with me. At this
place we passed the Autumn."
At this place, too, the plot began to thicken in a manner which throws
light upon Count Guiccioli's character. He wrote proposing that Byron
should lend him £1000; and when Byron refused to do anything of the kind,
seeing that the Count was a richer man than he, he demanded that the
Countess should return to him; so that letters of October 29 and November
8 contain these significant passages:
"Count G. comes to Venice next week, and I am requested to consign his
wife to him, which shall be done--with all her linen."
"Count G. has arrived in Venice, and has presented his spouse (who had
preceded him two months for her health and the prescriptions of Dr.
Aglietti) with a paper of conditions, regulations of hours and conduct
and morals, &c., which he insists on her accepting, and she persists
in refusing. I am expressly, it would seem, excluded by this treaty,
as an indispensable preliminary; so that they are in high discussion,
and what the result may be I know not, particularly as they are
consulting friends."
The view of the friends--that is to say of the Italy of the period--was
that morals were of little but appearances of great importance. Married
women might have lovers--one lover at a time--but their amours must be
conducted in their own homes and under their husbands' patronage. By
running away with their lovers they put themselves in the wrong; and the
men who ran away with them showed themselves ignorant of the manners of
good society; so that Countess Belzoni, who knew all about the draper's
wife and the baker's wife and the promiscuous debaucheries of the
Mocenigo Palace, remarked to Moore, who was passing through Venice at the
time: "It is such a pity, you know. Until he did that, he had been
behaving with such perfect propriety."
So the debate proceeded; the girl wife and the sexagenarian husband giving
each other pieces of their several minds, and the friends offering good
advice to both of them, while Byron, who was excluded from the Council
Chamber, sat below and wrote to Murray:
"As I tell you that the Guiccioli business is on the eve of exploding
in one way or the other, I will just add that, without attempting to
influence the decision of the Contessa, a good deal depends upon it.
If she and her husband make it up you will, perhaps, see me in England
sooner than you expect; if not, I shall retire with her to France or
America, change my name, and live a quiet provincial life. All this
may seem odd, but I have got the poor girl into a scrape; and as
neither her birth, nor her rank, nor her connections by birth or
marriage are inferior to my own, I am in honour bound to support her
through: besides, she is a very pretty woman--ask Moore--and not yet
one and twenty."
That, once again, is not the language of a man whom an invincible passion
has swept off his feet. It is the language of the man who lets himself be
loved rather than of the man who loves--the man who will preserve an even
mind whether he retains his mistress or loses her, and whose affection for
her only carries him to the point of saying that, whatever happens, at any
rate he will not treat her badly. It is a point, at any rate, beyond that
to which his affection for Miss Clairmont ever carried him; but it is
hardly the furthest point to which it is possible for love to go.
* * * * *
"With some difficulty, and many internal struggles, I reconciled the lady
with her lord," is the language in which Byron relates the upshot of the
negotiations. "I think," he continues, "of setting out for England by the
Tyrol in a few days"; but only six days later he has changed his plans.
"Pray," he then writes to Murray, "let my sister be informed that I am not
coming as I intended: I have not the courage to tell her so myself, at
least not yet; but I will soon, _with the reasons_." And about the reasons
there is, of course, no mystery.
Count Guiccioli, having gained the day, had carried his wife off to
Ravenna, and Byron had missed her more than he had expected. Hoppner
writes of him as "very much out of spirits, owing to Madame Guiccioli's
departure, and out of humour with everybody and everything around him." He
had had his belongings packed for his return to England, and had even
dressed for the journey, but had changed his mind, and unpacked and
undressed again at the last minute; and Madame Guiccioli, in the meantime,
had had her third diplomatic indisposition, and threatened yet again to
die unless Byron were brought to her. So that presently, on January 2,
1820, we find Byron back again at Ravenna, and giving Moore a curious
explanation of his movements:
"After her arrival at Ravenna the Guiccioli fell ill again too; and at
last her father (who had, all along, opposed the _liaison_ most
violently till now) wrote to me to say that she was in such a state
that _he_ begged me to come and see her--and that her husband had
acquiesced, in consequence of her relapse, and that _he_ (her father)
would guarantee all this, and that there would be no further scenes in
consequence between them, and that I should not be compromised in any
way. I set out soon after and have been here ever since. I found her a
good deal altered, but getting better."
At first he seems to have supposed that he was merely a visitor like
another; and a letter to Hoppner, dated January 20, shows him uncertain as
to the duration of his stay:
"I may stay a day, a week, a year, all my life; but all this depends
upon what I can neither see nor foresee. I came because I was called,
and will go the moment that I perceive what may render my departure
proper. My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor
the microscopic accuracy of the close to such _liaisons_; but 'time
and the hour' must decide upon what I do."
Here, yet again, one detects a note of hesitation incompatible with
perfect love. The very letter, however, which expresses the hesitations
also contains directions for the forwarding of his furniture, which looks
as though Byron already foresaw and accepted his fate. He was destined, in
fact, to live with the household of the Guicciolis on the same terms on
which he had previously lived with the household of the Segatis--engaging
an apartment in their mansion, and paying a rent to the husband while
making love to the wife--and to be what the Italians call a _cicisbeo_ and
the English a tame cat. He admits, in various letters, that that is his
position, and that he does not altogether like it. "I can't say," he tells
Hobhouse, "that I don't feel the degradation;" but he nevertheless submits
to it, describing himself to Hoppner as "drilling very hard to learn how
to double a shawl," and giving the same correspondent a graphic picture of
his first appearance in his new character:
"The G.'s object appeared to be to parade her foreign lover as much as
possible, and, faith, if she seemed to glory in the scandal, it was
not for me to be ashamed of it. Nobody seemed surprised; all the
women, on the contrary, were, as it were, delighted with the excellent
example. The Vice-legate, and all the other Vices, were as polite as
could be; and I, who had acted on the reserve, was fairly obliged to
take the lady under my arm, and look as much like a Cicisbeo as I
could on so short a notice, to say nothing of the embarrassment of a
cocked hat and sword, much more formidable to me than it ever will be
to the enemy."
A picture in which no one's part is dignified, and no one's emotions are
strained to a tense pitch, but everybody is happy and comfortable in an
easy-going way. One gets the same impression from Byron's reply to
Murray's suggestion that he should write "a volume of manners, &c. on
Italy." There are many reasons, he says, why he does not care to touch
that subject in print; but he assures Murray privately that the Italian
morality, though widely different from the English, has nevertheless "its
rules and its fitnesses and decorums." The women "exact fidelity from a
lover as a debt of honour, while they pay the husband as a tradesman, that
is not at all." At the same time, he adds, "the greatest outward respect
is to be paid to the husbands, not only by the ladies, but by their
_serventi_," so that "you would suppose them relations," and might imagine
the _servente_ to be "one adopted into the family."
But this was an Arcadian state of things too good to last. Exactly how or
why it came to an end one does not know; but probably because, while the
Countess was too vehemently in love to control the expression of her
feelings, Byron's European importance overshadowed her husband, made him
feel foolish, and challenged him to assert himself. Whatever the reason,
the arrangement only remained idyllic for about four months, and then, in
May 1821, there began to be talk of divorce, "on account of our having
been taken together _quasi_ in the fact, and, what is worse, that she does
not _deny_ it."
She was so far from denying it, indeed, that she protested that it was a
shame that she should be the only woman in Romagna who was not allowed to
have a lover, and declared that, unless her husband did allow her to have
a lover, she would not live with him. Her family took her part, saying
that her husband, having tolerated her infidelity for so long, had
forfeited, his right to make a fuss about it. The ladies of Ravenna, and
the populace, also made the business theirs, and supported the lovers, on
general principles, because they were of the age for love and the husband
was not, and also because Count Guiccioli was an unpleasant person and
unpopular.
He was, indeed, not only unpleasant and unpopular, but also reputed to be
a desperate and dangerous character, careful, indeed, of his own elderly
skin, but quite capable of hiring bravos to assassinate those who crossed
his path. "Warning was given me," Byron writes to Moore, "not to take such
long rides in the Pine Forest without being on my guard;" and again:
"The principal security is that he has not the courage to spend twenty
scudi--the average price of a clean-handed bravo--otherwise there is
no want of opportunity, for I ride about the woods every evening, with
one servant, and sometimes an acquaintance, who latterly looks a
little queer in solitary bits of bushes."
The peril of violence may have been the greater because the Count could
not find a lawyer willing to take up his case; the advocates declining, as
one man, to act for him on the ground that he was either a fool or a
knave--a fool if he had been unaware of the liaison and a knave if he had
connived at it and "waited for some bad end to divulge it." The stiletto,
however, remained in its sheath, and the matter, after all, was settled in
the Courts. The Countess, supported by her family, applied for the
separation which she had previously resisted; and the Count, on his part,
resisted the separation which he had previously demanded, raising
particular objections to the claim that he should pay alimony.
But he had to pay it. The papal Court decreed a separation, fixing Madame
Guiccioli's allowance at £200 a year, but, at the same time, ordained with
that indifference to liberty and justice which distinguishes Churches
whenever they attain temporal power, that the wife whose injuries it was
professing to redress, should not be allowed to live with her lover, but
must either reside in the house of her parents or get her to a nunnery.
She went on July 16 to a villa about fifteen miles from Ravenna. Byron
visited her there twice a month, but continued to occupy his hired
apartment in her husband's house--a fact which by itself sufficiently
justifies his reiterated protests that the manners and customs of Italy
are beyond the comprehension of the English. A letter to Moore dated
August 31 gives us his own view of his proceedings as well as of the
relations which he conceives to subsist between genius and disorder:
"I verily believe that nor you nor any man of poetical temperament can
avoid a strong passion of some kind. It is the poetry of life. What
should I have known or written had I been a quiet mercantile
politician or a lord-in-waiting? A man must travel and turmoil, or
there is no existence. Besides, I only meant to be a Cavalier
Servente, and had no idea it would turn out a romance in the Anglo
fashion."
So that we find Byron launched yet again on a new way of life--the last
before his final and famous transference of his energies from love to
revolutionary politics.
Evidently it was a relief to him to find himself a lover instead of a
cavaliere servente--even at the risk of having a dagger planted, on some
dark night, between his shoulder blades. Evidently, too, he loved "the
lady whom I serve" better than he had loved her at the beginning of the
liaison, and better than he was to love her towards the end of it. But,
even so, it was no absorbing love that possessed him--no love that
diverted his thoughts from morbid introspection, or made him feel that,
merely by loving, he had fulfilled his destiny and played a worthy part in
life. On the contrary he could write in the Diary which he then kept for
six weeks or so: "I go to my bed with a heaviness of heart at having lived
so long, and to so little purpose;" and he could compose the well-known
epigram:
_Through life's road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragged to three-and-thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing--except thirty-three._
Nationalism, movements, risings, revolutions, and the rest of it might
well seem a welcome excitement to a man so _blasé_ and so inured to
sensations that love, though he vowed that he "loved entirely" could not
lift him to a more exalted frame of mind than that; and his attachment to
Madame Guiccioli may well have gained an element of permanence from the
fact that she belonged to a family of conspirators in league against
priests and kings.