FLORENCE SPENCER SMITH

Mrs. Spencer Smith was the daughter of an Austrian Ambassador and the wife of an English Minister Plenipotentiary. “Married unhappily, yet has never been impeached in point of character,” says Byron in a letter to his mother. There are no details forthcoming about that, however. All that one can affirm is that her husband only appears as a shadowy figure in the background of her adventures, leaving the leading rÔle to other men, while he serves his country at the other end of Europe.

He was a younger brother of Sir Sidney Smith, who had checked Napoleon’s victorious career at Acre. Napoleon, it is said by some French writers, loathed the very name of Smith after that calamity, held all the Smiths jointly and severally responsible for it, and swore to wreak his vengeance on the first Smith who fell into his hands. Consequently, the same writers add, when he heard that a Mrs. Smith was staying at Venice—a city then in his power—he felt that his long-delayed hour of triumph had come, and gave his orders accordingly.

That version of the story, however, is too good to be true. Mrs. Spencer Smith, in fact, was suspected, whether rightly or wrongly, of having played some part, as a secret agent, in some conspiracy against Napoleon. She had been betrayed, or denounced; she was being watched; and she walked, unaware of her danger, into the snare that had been set. Venice, it had seemed to her, would be a safe place of refuge when the over-running of northern Italy by the French armies made it awkward for her to remain at the Baths of Valdagno, where she had been staying for the benefit of her health. Her sister, Countess Attems, lived at Venice, and she went to visit her.

She was young, accomplished, beautiful—“like one of those apparitions,” says the Duchesse d’AbrantÈs, “which come to us in our happiest dreams.” She spoke seven languages, and looked down demurely—“a habit,” the Duchesse d’AbrantÈs continues, “which only added to her charms.” A Sicilian boy of twenty, the Marquis de Salvo, begged for an introduction, was presented, and fell in love. He had hardly done so—he had not even declared himself—when he lighted upon his chance of proving his devotion by rendering help in time of trouble.

General Lauriston, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, arrived at Venice with a commission to act as Military Governor in his pocket; and then the trouble began. Mrs. Spencer Smith was sent for by the Chief of Police and requested to leave the town and take a residence in the country. She had hardly begun to look for one when there arrived four gendarmes, with the intimation that she was to remain in her apartment, and that they were to see that she did so. The Marquis de Salvo then volunteered to call on the Chief of Police and inquire the meaning of this rigorous measure. The Chief of Police first talked vaguely to him about Napoleon’s prejudice against the name of Smith, and then hinted that there might be more specific reasons for his severity. He added that his orders were to conduct Mrs. Smith under an escort to Milan; “and I rather fancy,” he concluded, “that she is to be detained in the fortress of Valenciennes.”

That was the boy’s chance. He was a boy in years, but a man in courage and resource. He ran to Mrs. Spencer Smith, repeated what he had been told, and promised that he would save her.

At first she hesitated. He would be taking a risk, she said, which he had no right to take. He probably expected a reward which her “principles” would not permit her to grant. But the boy, as it happened, was as chivalrous as he was brave. Perhaps he loved noble actions for their own sake. At all events he loved adventure; and here was the prospect of an adventure such as rarely comes the way of a youth fresh from school. As for the risks, he said, he did not fear them. As for reward, he would not ask for any. If Mrs. Spencer Smith would let him save her she should be saved. He had thought the matter out, and made his plans. All that was necessary was that she should take a maid with her whom she could trust. Everything else might be left to him.

Then Florence Spencer Smith thanked Salvo, and promised to accept his aid. She too was of the age at which one is grateful to life for adventures; and, if she must choose between the two evils, well then she would rather be compromised than locked up. So she made sure of her maid, and got into the carriage which the gendarmes provided. There were five of them, including the brigadier; and Salvo sought, and obtained, leave to ride with them in the vague character of “friend of the family.” The gendarmes, he found, were excellent fellows, quite unsuspicious, and very sympathetic. The brigadier was specially sympathetic because he was lost in admiration of Mrs. Smith’s faithful maid; and Salvo, having carefully thought out his coup, watched all the chances.

It had been agreed that Mrs. Smith should plead ill health, and ask to be allowed to journey by short stages. No objections were raised—probably because of the pleasure which the brigadier took in the society of the maid—and the party halted, first at Verona, and then at Brescia. At Verona nothing could be done. An Italian friend, whom Salvo implored to meet and help him, failed to keep the appointment, guessing why he was wanted, and fearing Napoleon’s long arm. He must, therefore, act alone; and the question was whether he could find a means of getting Mrs. Smith on board a boat and across the Lake of Garda. Probably he could if he could first see her alone and concert a scheme with her. So he galloped off to the lake side, hired two boats, and bought a post chaise, in which he proposed to drive Mrs. Smith up into the mountains, and over the frontier into Austria. Then he galloped back, told the brigadier that he was obliged to return to Venice, and begged to be allowed to say good-bye to Mrs. Smith without witnesses.

The brigadier, who liked to be alone with the maid, could quite understand that the marquis liked to be alone with the mistress. He winked a wicked eye, called the marquis “a sad dog,” and gave permission. Salvo winked back at him, as if admitting the impeachment of sad doggedness, and, in the brief interview which the brigadier supposed to be consecrated to sentiment, told Mrs. Smith what he had plotted, and how she herself must act.

He would return, after night-fall, with a rope ladder. In order to avoid the suspicions of the inquisitive, he would make that rope ladder with his own hands. He would pack it up into a parcel, and Mrs. Smith must lower a piece of string with which to draw it up. The parcel would also contain a boy’s costume, as a disguise for her, and a dose of laudanum with which to drug the maid’s evening drink in case she were not a party to the conspiracy. He would come again at eleven, wearing a cocked hat, and enveloped in a military cloak. Mrs. Smith, understanding who was there, must then make the ladder fast and climb down to him.He came; and things happened more or less as he had planned them. The maid, in particular, was magnificently loyal. She offered to attend her mistress in her flight; and, when told that that could not be, she handed out her mistress’ jewels, helped in securing the ladder to the verandah, promised to remove it after it had served its purpose, and then tossed off the soporific of her own accord, so that it might be physically impossible for her to answer questions for some hours to come—incidentally also, no doubt, in order to give the brigadier the excuse which he would naturally desire for acquitting her of all complicity in the escape.

Mrs. Smith descended the ladder half way, and then fell off it; but Salvo had expected that. He caught her in his arms, and they got into their carriage and were off. The gates of the town were closed; but Salvo bluffed his way through them in an instant, with the help of his military cloak and head-gear.

“What in thunder do you mean by keeping me waiting? I’m the colonel of the twenty-fifth. You were warned to look out for me. You’ll hear of this again, my man. Open the gate at once, and let me through.”

Thus the boy swore in the full-blooded military style of the period. The gate was thrown open for him with profound apologies. He whipped up the horses, and galloped to Salona, where the boats were ready. They embarked, taking their carriage with them, and crossed to Riva. There they got into the carriage again, and galloped on to Trent, where a sleepy official, much in wrath at this disturbance of his slumbers, proceeded to make trouble about their passports, which were only approximately in order. The only course, since time pressed, and pursuers were on their track, was to leave the chaise behind and slip away surreptitiously in a country cart which an inn-keeper offered to sell them.

The pursuers, indeed, were hard upon their heels; but happily the morning sun was in their eyes. The fugitives saw them before they were seen, and drove their cart down from the mountain road through the forest to the torrent, so that the horsemen missed them and rode past them. After that, they abandoned their cart, and travelled by cross country roads and mountain paths, continually in peril of arrest, but always escaping as if by a miracle. A peasant, to whom they appealed for food and shelter, proposed to conduct them to the nearest police station, but was melted to tenderness by Mrs. Smith’s tears and pitiful entreaties. They read the offer of a reward for their capture posted on the walls. They hid themselves for two days in a mountain chapel. They were stopped, and questioned, and mistaken for other more romantic fugitives—an Italian Princess who was said to have eloped with an Italian bookseller’s assistant. They disguised themselves as peasants, and travelled in the midst of the real peasants’ flocks of sheep. Not until after many days’ wanderings did they reach Austrian territory, declare their true identity, and claim the protection of the law; and even so their troubles were not over.

Austria, at that date, had not yet recovered either morally or materially from the shock of Austerlitz, and dared not stand openly between Napoleon and his prey. The fugitives had to be arrested before they could be saved. Salvo was, for a while, locked up, like a criminal, in the deepest dungeon of a Styrian Castle; and Mrs. Smith was smuggled out of the country, under the name of Frau MÜller—first to Riga, and thence to England, where Salvo ultimately joined her. Queen Charlotte thanked him publicly for the service so gallantly rendered to a British subject; and he made his best bow and withdrew, remembering his promise to expect no other recompense.

Such is the story of Mrs. Smith’s adventure as told, first by Salvo himself, who wrote a book about it, and then by the Duchesse d’AbrantÈs, who devoted a long section of her Memoirs to it. One repeats it, partly for its own sake and partly because the romance of it explains how the heroine of it appealed to Byron’s imagination.

She was the first really interesting—or, at all events, the first really remarkable—woman whom he had met. The women whom he had previously known had been very conventional young persons of the upper middle classes. Even Mary Chaworth had been bourgeoise, or must have seemed so in comparison with Mrs. Spencer Smith. To meet her was to encounter, for the first time, the amazing realities of life, and to find more romance in them than even a poet dared to dream of without reality to prompt him. And she was married, and it made no difference—or none except that, being married, she had more liberty, and could be more audacious than a spinster. “Since my arrival here,” Byron writes—still to his mother—“I have had scarcely any other companion.” There is an unmistakable note of self-complacency in the confession. Byron’s “passion for a married woman” was evidently signalling to him, as such a passion has signalled to many a young man before and after him, that, now at last, he was grown up.

Galt says that the attachment was merely “Platonic.” Possibly Galt was right, though his evidence goes for nothing, seeing that Byron looked down upon him from far too Olympian a height to be in the least likely to confide in him. The impression which Mrs. Spencer Smith, from the little that we know about her, gives is that of the type of the favourite heroine of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones’ more serious plays—a woman, that is to say, who shows herself of a very “coming-on” disposition until a certain point is reached, but then stops suddenly short, being frightened and abashed by her own temerity. She asked Byron for his ring—the ring which the Spanish lady had asked him for in vain—and he gave it to her. “Soon after this I sailed for Malta, and there parted with both heart and ring,” is his own way of putting it; and as Galt knew that she had got the ring, there seem to be grounds for the conjecture that she showed it and boasted of it.

Anything else, however, it would be idle to conjecture, even though we have “Childe Harold” and sundry “Lines” to help us in the quest.

The suggestion in “Childe Harold” is that Mrs. Spencer Smith made love to Byron in vain:

“Fair Florence found, in sooth, with some amaze,
One who, ’twas said, still sighed to all he saw,
Withstand, unmoved, the lustre of her gaze——”

The suggestion in the “Lines” is different:

“Oh, lady! When I left the shore,
The distant shore which gave me birth,
I hardly thought to grieve once more,
To quit another spot on earth:
“Yet, here amidst this barren isle,
Where panting Nature droops the head,
Where only thou art seen to smile,
I view my parting hour with dread.”

We must make what we can of that; and it really matters very little what we make of it. This “passion for a married woman” was an inevitable stage of the sentimental pilgrimage. Byron was bound to halt there for a little while, if not for long; and it was not to be expected that he would, like Ulysses, stuff his ears with wool while passing the Siren’s Isle. That is not the way of poets, and that is not the way of youth. He was bound, too, to fancy, for a moment, that the passion meant a great deal to him, even though, in fact, it meant but little; for that also is the way of youth and poets. And hardly less inevitable, though both of them knew that no hearts were being broken was the idea that Fate was cruel to decree their parting, and that, while they acted wisely, they must also suffer for their wisdom. And therefore:

“Though Fate forbids such things to be,
Yet by thine eyes and ringlets curled!
I cannot lose a world for thee,
But would not lose thee for a World.”

And therefore again, just two months later:

“The spell is broke, the charm is flown!
Thus is it with Life’s fitful fever:
We madly smile when we should groan;
Delirium is our best deceiver.
Each lucid interval of thought
Recalls the woes of Nature’s charter;
And He that acts as wise men ought,
But lives—as Saints have died—a martyr.”

That is all; and the story which the lines half cover up and half disclose is clearly of very little consequence. Mrs. Smith had enjoyed her flirtation, and had had verses written to her—much better verses than had been addressed to any of the belles of Southwell. Byron had posed, not knowing for certain whether he posed or not, had undergone a necessary experience, and had passed through the fire unhurt. The experiences which were really to matter to him were yet to come—though not immediately; and he had hardly finished writing verses to Mrs. Spencer Smith when he began writing verses to the Maid of Athens.