FROM GENEVA TO VENICE—THE AFFAIR WITH THE DRAPER’S WIFE

As long as Hobhouse remained with Byron nothing memorable happened. There was a good deal of the schoolmaster about Hobhouse, though he could sometimes unbend in a non-committal way; and in the presence of schoolmasters life is seldom a drama and never an extravaganza. The change, therefore, in the manner of Byron’s life did not occur until, tiring of his friend’s supervision, he declined to accompany him to Rome. In the meantime, first at Milan and then at Verona, he held up his head, and passed like a pageant through the salons of the best continental society.

Milan, he told Murray, was “very polite and hospitable.” He parted there from Polidori, who was expelled from the territory on account of a brawl with an Austrian officer in a theatre; and he dined with the Marquis de BrÊme—an Italian nobleman equally famous for his endeavours to popularise vaccination and suppress mendicity—to meet Monti the Italian poet and Stendhal the French novelist. “Never,” wrote Stendhal of that meeting, “shall I forget the sublime expression of his countenance; it was the peaceful look of power united with genius.” And a long account of Byron’s sojourn at Milan was contributed by Stendhal to the Foreign Literary Gazette.

The introductions, Stendhal says, “passed with as much ceremonious gravity as if our introducer had been de BrÊme’s grandfather in days of yore ambassador from the Duke of Savoy to the court of Louis XIV.” He describes Byron as “a dandy” who “expressed a constant dread of augmenting the bulk of his outward man, concealed his right foot as much as possible, and endeavoured to render himself agreeable in female society;” and he proceeds to relate how female society sought to make itself agreeable to him:

And then again:

The explanation of his aloofness, Stendhal thought, might be that he “had some guilty stain upon his conscience, similar to that which wrecked Othello’s fame.” He suspected him of having, in a frenzy of jealousy, “shortened the days of some fair Grecian slave, faithless to her vows of love.” That, it seemed to him, might account for the fact that he so often “appeared to us like one labouring under an access of folly, often approaching to madness.” But, of course, as this narrative has demonstrated, Stendhal was guessing wildly and guessing wrong; and the thoughts which really troubled Byron were thoughts of the wreck of his household gods, and the failure of his sentimental life, and perhaps also of the failure of Miss Clairmont’s free offering of a naÏve and passionate heart to awaken any answering emotion in his breast, or do more than tide him over the first critical weeks following upon the separation. So he wrote Moore a long letter from Verona, relating his kind reception by the Milanese, discoursing of Milanese manners and morals, but then concluding:

From Verona, too, he wrote on the same day to his sister, saying, after compliments and small-talk: “I am also growing grey and giddy, and cannot help thinking my head will decay; I wish my memory would, at least my remembrance.” All of which seems to show Byron defiant, but not yet reckless, preferring, if not actually enjoying, the society of his equals, and still paying a very proper regard to appearances. The change occurred when he got to Venice and Hobhouse left him there. Then there was a moral collapse, just as if a moral support had been withdrawn—a collapse of which the first outward sign was a new kind of intrigue.

Hitherto his amours had been with his social equals; and the daughters of the people had, since his celebrity, had very little attraction for him. Now the decline begins—a decline which was to conduct him to very degraded depths; and our first intimation of it is in a letter written to Moore within a week of his arrival. He begins with a comment on the decay of Venice—“I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation”—and he proceeds:

And so on at some length. Our only other witness to Marianna’s charms and character—a manuscript note to Moore’s Life quoted in Murray’s edition of the Letters—describes her as “a demon of avarice and libidinousness who intrigued with every resident in the house and every guest who visited it.” It is possible—it is even probable—that this description, made from a different point of view than Byron’s, fits her. Byron’s enthusiasm was for her physical, not her moral, attributes; and it does not appear that he was under any illusion as to the latter. The former, however, fascinated him; and we find him dwelling on them, in letter after letter, to Murray as well as Moore—the publisher, indeed, being the first recipient of the confidence that “Our little arrangement is completed; the usual oaths having been taken, and everything fulfilled according to the ‘understood relations’ of such liaisons.” Which means, very clearly, that the draper’s wife has become the poet’s mistress, with the knowledge of her husband, and to his pecuniary advantage.

The story is not one on which to dwell. It is less a story, indeed, than a string of unrelated incidents. Though spun out and protracted, it does not end but leaves off; and of the circumstances of its termination there is no record. Marianna’s avarice may have had something to do with it. So may her habit, above referred to, of intriguing with all comers. But nothing is known; and the one thing certain is that, though Byron was attracted, sentiment played no part in the attraction. It would seem too that he was only relatively faithful.

One gathers that from the account which he gives to Moore of a visit received from Marianna’s sister-in-law, whom Marianna caught in his apartment, and seized by the hair, and slapped:

Whereupon enter Signor Segati himself, “her lord and master, and finds me with his wife fainting upon the sofa, and all the apparatus of confusion, dishevelled hair, hats, handkerchiefs, salts, smelling-bottles—and the lady as pale as ashes, without sense or motion.” And then, explanations more or less suitable having been offered and accepted, “The sister-in-law, very much discomposed at being treated in such wise, has (not having her own shame before her eyes) told the affair to half Venice, and the servants (who were summoned by the fight and the fainting) to the other half.”

And so forth, and so forth. It is all very vulgar, and none of it of the faintest importance except for the sake of the light which it throws on Byron’s mind and disposition, though its importance is, from that point of view, considerable. It shows Byron sick of sentiment because sentiment has failed him and played him false, but grasping at the sensual pleasures of love as the solid realities about which no mistake is possible. It shows him, moreover, socially as well as sentimentally, on the down grade, consorting with inferiors, and in some danger of unfitting himself for the company of his equals.

The reckless note of the man resolved to enjoy himself, or at any rate to keep up the pretence that he is doing so, although his heart is bankrupt, is struck in one of the letters to Augusta. It refers to a previous letter, not published, in which the tidings of the “new attachment” has already been communicated, and to a letter addressed, some time previously, to Lady Byron; and it continues:

Which is to say that he wishes Lady Byron to be told, totidem verbis, and on authority which she cannot question, that, having lived connubially with both, he very much prefers the draper’s wife to her. And so, no doubt, he did; for though the draper’s wife, as well as Lady Byron, had her faults, they were the faults of a naughty child rather than a pedantic schoolmistress, and therefore less exasperating to a man in the mood to which Byron had been driven. She might be—indeed she was—very jealous and very violent; but at least she did not assume airs of moral superiority and deliver lectures, or parade the heartlessness of one who is determined to be always in the right.

So that Byron delighted to have her about him. “I am very well off with Marianna, who is not at all a person to tire me,” he told Murray in one letter; and in another he wrote: “She is very pretty and pleasing, and talks Venetian, which amuses me, and is naÏve, and I can besides see her, and make love with her at all or any hours, which is convenient to my temperament.” Just that, and nothing more than that; for such occasional outbursts of sentiment and yearnings after higher things as we do find in the letters of this date leave Signora Segati altogether on one side.

There is something of sentiment, for instance, in a letter to Mrs. Leigh informing her that Miss Clairmont has borne Byron a daughter. The mother, he says, is in England, and he prays God to keep her there; but then he thinks of the child, and continues:

There is sentiment there; and there also is sentiment, although of a different kind, in a letter written at about the same date to Moore:

This is a strikingly interesting, because an unconsciously prophetic, passage. Byron’s ultimate efforts to “do something”—something quite unconnected with literature—is the most famous, and some would say the most glorious, incident in his life. We shall come to it very soon, and we shall see how his constitution, so sorely tried by an indiscreet diet and excessive indulgence in all things from love to Epsom Salts, just allowed him to begin his task, but did not suffer him to finish it. Enough to note here that Byron saw the better even when he preferred the worse, and never lost faith in himself even in his most degraded years, but always looked forward, even then, to the day when he would shake off sloth and sensuality in order to be worthy of his higher self.

He divined that the power to do that would be restored to him in the end—that social outlawry, though it might daze him, could not crush him—that it would come to be, in the end, a kind of education, and a source of self-reliance. But not yet, and not for a good many years to come. Before the moral recovery could begin, the moral collapse had to be completed; and the affair with the draper’s wife was only the first milestone on the downward path. We shall have to follow him past other milestones before we see him turning back.