“QUEEN OF MARBLE AND OF MUD”
The clear sky of Italy, the constant cloudless sky. Once more the
caravan of three went down towards the lands of forgetfulness and
sunshine. The babies and nursemaids who this time went with it, were
hardly any drag on its rapid and whimsical progress.
Milan was reached by way of the Mont Cenis, where the first halt was
made to await news of Byron to whom Shelley had written informing him of
the arrival of his daughter. Shelley passed his days in the Cathedral
reading the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_, in a solitary spot behind the
altar where the light of day beneath the storied window is yellow and
dim. Churches no longer inspired in him the horror they used to do. He
was surprised to find that since he had suffered so keenly, no place now
seemed to fit his feelings better or to be a finer background to the
greatness of human passions than a church. In the company of Dante, and
in the midst of a symphony of warm, rich colours, the Catholic religion
no longer seemed to be the invention of charlatans.
Byron’s answer came. Nothing on earth would induce him to see Claire,
and he would leave at once any town to which she should come. As to the
child, he was willing to undertake the charge of its education, but his
possession must be absolute. Shelley considered that this condition was
cruel, and pleaded with Byron to soften it. But Byron, who above all
things dreaded scenes with Claire, refused to cede an iota. A Venetian
met in Milan gave tidings that the “English Lord” was leading a life of
debauchery, and keeping a whole harem. Such news was hardly reassuring
for Allegra’s education, and Shelley begged Claire to give up all idea
of help from Byron rather than let him have the child. As usual he
undertook to pay for everything himself. But Claire, proud of Allegra’s
birth, wanted to obtain for her all the advantages of it. She had every
confidence in Elise the Swiss nurse who had brought the baby up, and she
decided to send them both to Venice. In spite of Shelley’s affectionate
remonstrances Allegra was handed over to her father.
* * *
Disquieting news of the child soon came to trouble Claire. Byron had
only kept it a few weeks. At first very proud of its beauty and of
seeing it admired and made much of by the Venetians on the Piazza, he
soon tired of this and allowed Mrs. Hoppner, wife of the English Consul,
to take charge of it. Who was this Mrs. Hoppner? Elise wrote that she
was a very kind lady, but Claire began to suffer from terrible remorse.
During a whole year she had never been parted from the child for a
single hour. She adored it. Allegra was the only creature in the whole
world she could call her very own, since her family renounced her, and
her lover refused to see her. Shelley, unable to bear the sight of her
misery, offered to go with her to Venice. Mary consented to the
arrangement in spite of her dislike at seeing these two start on a
journey together. Paolo, the servant, who was energetic and seemed
reliable, went with them as courier. In order not to irritate Byron who
had forbidden Claire to enter any town where he might happen to be, it
was decided that she should stop at Padua and wait there the upshot of
Shelley’s embassy. But finding herself so near to Allegra, she could not
resist going on. She thought that by keeping her presence secret she
could manage to see the child, and so she and Shelley took a gondola and
went down the Brenta. They crossed the lagoon in the middle of the
night, in a violent storm of wind, rain and lightning, while in the
distance the lights of Venice shone dimly behind a curtain of mist.
The next morning they went to the Hoppners who received them with
courtesy and kindness. Mrs. Hoppner sent at once for Elise and the baby.
She was much grown, was pale, and had lost a great deal of her
liveliness, but was as beautiful as ever. Then they had a long
conversation on the subject of Byron. The Hoppners, worthy people of
conventional ideas, young lovers much excited by all the intrigues going
on round them though humanized a little by Venetian indulgence, related
with many head-shakes:
From the third day of his arrival Byron had provided himself, as he
liked to boast, with a gondola and a mistress. The mistress was Marianna
Segati, wife of a cloth-merchant, who was the poet’s landlord, for he
had let rooms to Byron in his house. A most imprudent proceeding, but
the cloth-business was doing badly. Marianna was twenty-two, had
splendid black eyes, and a delicious voice. Although belonging to the
middle classes, she was received by the aristocracy of Venice on account
of her singing. That she should lose her heart to the noble lord who was
as generous as he was handsome, and who lived under the same roof, was
as inevitable as are the simplest chemical reactions. As to the Merchant
of Venice, Byron was free with his ducats, and Venetian morals always
permitted _one_ lover. Mrs. Hoppner, a friendly little woman with
intelligent eyes, had told this story with that mixture of Christian
sorrow and mundane relish which the virtuous employ in talking of the
vicious. Her husband, with many hums and haws, added that this was not
all. The Venetian populace circulated a tale that somewhere in the city
the English Lord had a closed villa, in which, one Muse not sufficing
him, he had gathered together the whole Nine. A legendary history was
growing up concerning Byron, and the travelling British spoke with bated
breath of Nero and Heliogabalus. The lower classes adored him, and at
Carnival time the women took advantage of their masks and dominoes to
hook themselves on to his person.
Such gossip was far from reassuring to Claire. She asked what ought she
to do? The Consul advised her above all things not to let Byron suspect
she was in Venice, for he often expressed his extreme horror of her
arrival.
At three o’clock Shelley went to the Palazzo Mocenigo to call on Byron,
who was delighted to see him, Shelley being perhaps the only man in the
world with whom Byron would talk seriously and as crowned head to
crowned head. Even when told of the reason for Shelley’s journey, and
Claire’s great desire to see the child again, he remained calm and
reasonable. He said he understood perfectly Claire’s anxiety, but that
he could not send Allegra back to her, because the Venetians who already
accused him of capriciousness, would say he had grown tired of her.
However, he would think the matter over, and find some way to arrange
everything. On which, he invited Shelley to go for a ride with him along
the Lido.
The gondola took them across the lagoon, and they disembarked on the
long, sandy island which defends Venice from the Adriatic. Nothing grows
here but sea-wrack and thistle. They found Byron’s horses waiting for
them. Shelley loved all wild and solitary places, and this gallop along
the edge of the sea was delightful to him. Only the knowledge that
Claire, at the Hoppners’, anxiously awaited his return, spoiled his
pleasure.
Byron inveighed against the stupidity of the English. Those who came to
Venice persecuted him with their curiosity, and even offered money to
his servants to allow them to see his bedroom. Then he spoke of
Shelley’s own misfortunes with many protestations of friendship. “Had I
been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, I would have moved
heaven and earth to get you back your children.”
This led him on to speak of the wickedness of humanity which he judged
to be infinite. “Men are filled with hatred of one another, to expect or
hope for anything else is the mark of the visionary.”
“Why?” asked Shelley. “You appear to believe that man is the victim of
his instincts without being able to direct them. . . . My faith is quite
different. I think that our will creates our virtue. . . . And though
wickedness may be natural that does not prove it to be invincible.”
Byron pointed out the patrician city that the setting sun suffused with
gold and sombre purple. “Let us get into the gondola again,” he said, “I
want to show you something.” When they had glided for some moments over
the lagoon, “Look over to the west. Don’t you hear the clang of a bell?”
Shelley, looking, saw on a small island a windowless, deformed, and
dreary building, and on the top of it an open tower in which a bell
swung in black relief against the crimson sky. With the splash of the
oars seemed to mingle distant, stifled cries for help.
“That,” Byron said, “is the madhouse. Every evening when I cross the
water at this hour, I hear the bell clanging the maniacs to vespers.”
“No doubt that they may thank the Creator for his mercy towards them?”
“Always the same Shelley!” laughed Byron. “Infidel and blasphemer! You
who can’t swim, beware of providence! But you spoke just now of
vanquishing our instincts. Does it not seem to you that this spectacle
rather is an image of our life? Conscience is the bell that calls us to
virtue. We obey it like the madmen without knowing why. Then the sun
sets, the bell stops, it is the night of death.”
He looked towards Venice, which, huddled in the twilight, had become a
rose-tinged grey.
“We Byrons,” said he, “die young . . . on my father’s side, and on my
mother’s as well. . . . It’s all the same to me, but I intend first to
enjoy my youth.”
* * *
The next day Shelley, who had come to Byron filled with forebodings, was
agreeably surprised to find him quite reasonable. He offered to lend
Shelley and Claire for two months a villa he owned at Este, and to allow
Allegra to go and stay there with her mother. Shelley joyfully accepted
this generous offer, and he wrote to Mary to come at once and join them:
“I have been obliged to decide on all these things without you.
I have done for the best; and, my own beloved Mary, you must
soon come and scold me if I have done wrong, and kiss me if I
have done right, for I am sure I do not know which, and it is
only the event that will show. We shall at least be saved the
trouble of introduction, and have formed acquaintance with a
lady (Mrs. Hoppner) who is so good, so beautiful, so angelically
sweet, that were she as wise too, she would be quite a Mary, but
she is not very accomplished. Her eyes are like a reflection of
yours; her manners are like yours when you know and like a
person. . . . Kiss the blue-eyed darlings for me, and do not let
Willmouse forget me. Ca cannot recollect me.”
Mary’s journey was slow and disagreeable. At Florence she was held up by
passport difficulties. The baby Clara, who was cutting her teeth,
suffered from heat, fatigue and the change of milk; when Este was
reached, she was dangerously ill.
During fourteen days she remained in a state of fever. The doctor seemed
a stupid fellow, and Mary decided to go on to Venice that she might call
in a better one. At Fusina the Austrian custom-house officers stopped
them and attempted to prevent them from crossing the lagoon. Shelley,
who had gone to meet them at Padua, insisted with extraordinary violence
on passing, and rushed for a gondola. The baby had curious convulsive
twitchings of the eyes and mouth. During the voyage she was almost
unconscious. When the hotel was reached her condition was still more
alarming. Examined by a doctor, he said at once there was no hope.
Within an hour she died silently and without pain.
Mary found herself standing in the hall of a strange inn with her dead
child in her arms. Mr. Hoppner came and took her and Shelley away to his
own house. The next morning Shelley carried the little corpse in a
gondola for burial on the Lido, and Mary tried to shake off her grief.
It was one of Godwin’s doctrines that only weak and cowardly natures
abandon themselves to sorrow, which could not last did we not feed it in
secret by finding a sort of painful vanity in our sufferings. His
daughter shared his ideas on this point. The day after little Ca was
buried, she wrote in her journal:
“_Sunday, September 27._ Read fourth canto of _Childe Harold_.
It rains. Go to the Doge’s Palace, Ponte dei Sospiri, etc. Go to
the Academy with Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner, and see some fine
pictures, call at Lord Byron’s and see the Fornarina.”
* * *
The Fornarina was Byron’s latest mistress, a peasant woman with a face
of the fine antique Venetian type. “You will see how beautiful she is,”
Byron had told Shelley. “Very fine black eyes and the figure of a Juno,
wavy black hair which reflects the moonlight: one of those women who
would go to hell for love. I like that sort of animal, and I should
certainly have preferred Medea to any other woman in the world.”
Certainly this beautiful baker’s wife was a strange sort of animal, and
quite untamable. She was so fierce that all the servants were terrified
of her, even Tita, the gigantic gondolier. She was jealous,
insupportable, and false as the devil, besides being perfectly
ridiculous from the moment she had insisted on replacing her veil and
shawl by fashionable gowns and hats with ostrich feathers. Byron flung
these into the fire every time he saw them, and then she went out and
bought others. But he put up with her follies because she amused him. He
liked her vivacity, her Venetian dialect, her violence. Her coarse and
animal nature was, he imagined, more of a rest to him than anything else
after intellectual labour. Thanks to her his poem advanced with a
splendid motion, with something of the wild and natural movement of the
sea or the passionate love of a woman.
To the Shelleys, who were ultra-refined, this magnificent animal was
highly displeasing. They exchanged sorrowful glances. During the few
days they spent in Venice, Shelley became better acquainted with Byron’s
mode of life and he judged it with severity. The Poet admitted to his
orgies the lowest women picked up by his _gondolieri_ in the streets.
Then, despising himself, he decreed that man is despicable. His cynicism
now appeared to Shelley to be nothing but a graceful mask for his
sensuality.
At length the Shelleys went back to Este, depressed by their return
there without their little girl. Yet the house was cheerful. In the
garden a vine-covered pergola led to a summer-house which Shelley made
his study. From thence you saw the ruins of the ancient castle of Este
in the foreground, then, like a green sea, Lombardy’s waveless plains,
on which cities and villages seemed like islands bounded by vaporous air
. . . in the distance many-domed Padua, a peopled solitude, and the
towers of Venice glittering in the sunshine against a sapphire sky.
He worked hard. He had begun _Prometheus Unbound_, a lyrical drama on
the Book of Job. He tried to fix in verse light as wing-beats the
melancholy beauty of these autumn days. But no sooner had the
intoxicating joy of composition faded than he felt himself once more
alone and forgotten. It seemed to him that in the frail bark which
carried beneath an alien sky his group of youthful exiles Misery stood
at the helm.