The Love Affairs of Lord Byron Part 20

"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 a.s.sented from a desire to oblige her. His n.o.ble 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 princ.i.p.al interests were political--as were also those of the Gamba family--and the police had their eyes on them in consequence. His princ.i.p.al 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 G.o.ds 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 cla.s.sical 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 att.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, is the note there; but, on the other hand, pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sions 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Edgc.u.mbe points as circ.u.mstantial proof that, even when he was paying his suit to Madame Guiccioli, Byron's heart was in England, with Mary Chaworth.

Three years had pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion; 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 pa.s.sion 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. Edgc.u.mbe 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.

CHAPTER XXVII

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 ent.i.tle 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sages:

"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."