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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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 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:

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.