Byron in Love (14 page)

As with all of his work, it was not the poetry itself that would be reviewed but the man.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
thought it an infernal work, ‘a filthy and impious poem' whose offences speak the wilful and determined spite of an ‘unrepenting, unsoftened, smiling, sarcastic, joyous sinner, brutally fiendish, inexpiably mean'. But Byron would not be silenced and Murray quaked as new and even more incriminating verses reached him.

Byron seethed with creativity yet found it inadequate to soothe the rage and restlessness within and so the round of pleasure and debauch continued, the several women having no name at all, but comprising one vast, female, gargantuan vortex. Then a surprising transformation, his falling in love at the very instant when he had decided to turn away from it.

Where English bile and publishers' pusillanimousness had failed with regard to
Don Juan
, the entreaties of this muse-to-be succeeded. Countess Guiccioli had read a pirated French translation of cantos of the poem and found it ‘abominable', wresting from Byron the promise that he would not continue with it. His blood ‘all meridian', his heart likewise, he agreed, or as he put it in a letter to Hobhouse, ‘As I am docile, I yielded.'

On 2 April 1819, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, coming into a fashionable salon in Venice, realised that her destiny was sealed by the sight of the ‘celestial apparition' sitting on a sofa. The apparition was Byron, who in slight sulk had placed himself, along with his friend Alexander Scott, on the sofa, opposite the entrance, determined not to mingle. It was at Countess Benzoni's weekly
conversazione
that the Countess, a vivacious woman of sixty, who was rumoured to have been one of Byron's conquests, asked him to meet the young woman who had just arrived with her husband Count Alessandro Guiccioli. Teresa, three months pregnant at the time, was in mourning for the deaths of her mother, one of her sisters and an infant that had only survived four days. Byron was reluctant, saying he did not wish to meet any more women, ugly or beautiful. But Scott and the Countess prevailed upon him and crossing the room he was introduced to Teresa as ‘Peer of England and its greatest poet'. In her
Vie de Lord Byron
written long after, she wrote that she had been captivated by the melody of his voice and the smile which Coleridge had also likened to ‘the opening of the gate of Heaven'.

Hearing that she was from Ravenna, Byron's interest quickened because Ravenna was ‘a poetical place', since it housed the tomb and monument of Dante and Francesca da Rimini. So while invoking the names of Petrarch and Dante, the flame was lit and Teresa recalled that when she left that room with her husband, she was already shaken to her soul.

Count Guiccioli, proud, acquisitive and manic, forty years her senior, was something of a satyr, suspected of two assassinations, thought to have poisoned his first wife Contessa Zinanni, whose great wealth compensated for the disparity of their ages and her physical imperfections. He also begot six children by their maid Angelica, whom he later married, her death leaving him free to propose to Teresa Gamba, daughter of a Count Ruggero from an ancient Romagna family. Six months out of a convent, Teresa would later say that she had been ‘sold' into marriage by the importunity of her mother and others, but to her future husband she wrote effusive letters, adding kisses that she would not send to a brother. He was ‘her adorable husband' and now Byron was to become her adorable
cicisbeo
, the
cavaliere servente
that every married woman in Italy believed herself entitled to.

At their first encounter, they spoke of Dante and Petrarch and the following day a boatman ferried her to Byron's gondola and then to a private ‘casino' where the constraints of mourning were soon forgotten. Before a week has passed she is calling him
Mio Byron
, disdaining all discretion in the salons and publicly affirming her claims on him. The Count maintained his customary aloofness, but he did advance the day of their departure, to one of their villas on the Po, causing Teresa such agitation that she sought out Byron in his box at the opera, during a performance of Rossini's
Otello
. As Teresa would write later, in that ‘atmosphere of melody and harmonious passion' she broke the news to him and was helped into her gondola by both husband and lover, deriving courage ‘from the silence and the starlight'. One of her preliminaries, as he told Hobhouse, was that Byron must promise never to leave Italy. He had no intention of leaving Italy, but he did not choose to be frittered down into a regular
cicisbeo
, except that he already was. To her he was writing: ‘Everything depends on you, my life, my honour, my love. To love you is my crossing of the Rubicon and has already decided my fate.'

She was gone, with a husband, violently sensual, to whom she still was in thraldom, providing that whetstone of jealousy and uncertainty that maddens lovers. Venice now became ‘sea Sodom', he had tired of promiscuous concubinage and Ravenna was where he was going, but wishing first to be ‘sure' of her and not to be a laughingstock. His blood ‘all meridian', he was in no doubt that this wild and headlong passion was fraught with danger and uncertainty. She consumes his thoughts as he pictures her, a princess, beyond the Mountains, walking by the banks of the River Po, whereas he, alone and unsure, is a mere Stranger of the land.

Meanwhile in Ravenna, she is struck down with a mysterious illness, swoons, has a consumptive cough, her only consolation being that sometimes her spirit skims over the Venetian lagoon to be with him. They found intermediaries for these bulletins to be passed in secrecy; Fanny Silvestrini, another histrionic woman and Teresa's former governess, dispatched Byron's epistles, while Padre Spinelli, a former priest, was waiting to receive them and deliver them in secret to Teresa at the Palazzo Guiccioli.

Byron set out on 1 June 1819, across the Veneto, passing through Padua and stopping at Ferrara, where a particular inscription,
Implora Pace
, on a tombstone in the Certosa Cemetery struck him as being fitting for his own tombstone, not wishing, as he wrote to John Murray, to be ‘pickled' and sent home.

Teresa's instructions to him along the way become vague and contradictory, these vacillations unnerving him, so much so that from Padua he is writing to Hoppner: ‘I am proceeding in no very good humour–for La Guiccioli's instructions are rather calculated to produce an éclat and perhaps a scene.' He insinuated that the ‘Charmer' should have been less liberal with her favours in Venice.

It was on that broiling journey, which he likened to ‘conscription', that he completed the beautiful lyric, ‘Stanzas to the Po', enshrining Teresa as a ‘lady of the land', but unable to conceal how utterly he had succumbed.

However, his ardour was somewhat challenged by a letter from Teresa after he arrived in Bologna and felt ‘like a sausage'. She proposed a different plan for their meeting, as the Count had surprised her by suggesting that they move to another of his estates at a moment's notice. He was now the weary and waiting suitor, having to suffer the hospitality and drearying anecdotes of the local nobles, debating with himself whether he should continue on his journey or return to Venice.

Teresa's illness proved to have been a miscarriage and briefly reverting to more satiric mode, Byron, in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird, said he was ‘certes' that the foetus was not his. Hobhouse, who had been apprised of her charms, including her quick temper and her enigmatic heart, is warning him not to go after this ‘terra firma' lady, but to keep with the Venetian naiads.

Two days later, bewildered and lovesick, he sets out for Ravenna, arriving on 10 June 1819, which was a holy day, pavements strewn with rose petals, streets covered in awnings, palaces draped with tapestries and brocades, all of which he took to be auspicious. He is installed in yet another cheerless inn, awaiting word from Teresa, who at that very same moment is writing to ask him to postpone his visit, as she has had a serious relapse and foresees difficulties at seeing him alone. She tempers his disappointment by saying that she does not feel she ‘deserves' the attentions of one so noble as he.

But Byron having trudged so far is in no mood to return and writes to say he is entirely and eternally hers. Next day the Count pulls up outside the humble little inn in his coach-and-six, to fetch Byron to the palace. The bedside scene with Teresa flushed, fevered, coughing blood, a husband, a lover and a host of nervous relatives, merely heightened the operatic tableau.

Each day Byron is permitted two visits, Teresa and he rarely alone, relatives all too willing to take him to Dante's tomb, to the Byzantine mosaics in San Apollinare, to the library with Dante's manuscripts, except that his heart is too heavy for any sightseeing. Love has its martyrs and he is one of them, writing her letter after letter in the small stifling bedroom, sentiments not too different from those that the young coachman might be penning in his stable–if he loses her what will become of him–their few moments of happiness have cost too much, he is alone, completely alone, she once so dear, so pure, seems nothing now but a menacing and perfidious shadow. Preferring death to uncertainty, he asks her to elope with him, guessing as he put it that her reply would be ‘divinely written' but would end in a negative, and so it did. Should he, he then asked, leave Ravenna? She dissimulated, her next letter a charming discourse on his poem
The Lament of Tasso
, curious as to what secret suffering had produced such beautiful lines and particularly wishing to know who was the origin and inspiration for the heroine Leonora.

With her courtesan's gifts for surprising him, Teresa rose from her sickbed, greeting him on the staircase, then stepping into his closed carriage for a drive to the
pineta
woods. The Count and entourage followed in a carriage behind. For the lovers there followed an idyllic interlude, the woods to which they rode each evening once a backdrop for Boccaccio's amours and now for them ‘delicious, dangerous, ecstatic love'. Byron the poet and Teresa the would-be poet enshrined their memories of that place and that time.

In
Don Juan
, which he resumed a year later, he would recall the pines and thickets of the ‘immemorial woods', his unsurpassed happiness at the twilight hour. Teresa gave her own heady version, their dismounting to sit under the resinous pines, the sweet smell of thyme and other herbs, lingering until the sounds of the vesper bells from the Duomo came faintly through the trees, when they would ride back, then part, certain to meet later on at the theatre or at a soirée.

Now that she was seen abroad his jealousy was further inflamed, not only was he jealous of the inscrutable husband, but of those men she acknowledged from her box at the opera: ‘My thoughts cannot find rest in me…I have noticed that every time I turned my head towards the stage you turned your eyes to look at that man…but do not fear, tomorrow evening I shall leave the field clear to him. I have no strength to bear a fresh torment every day.' Teresa loved these declarations, wrote on the margins ‘magnifique, passione, sublime', and kept them for her
Vie
, that histrionic and glorified record of their relationship. To Hobhouse, however, he was more despairing, saying his hair was half grey, admitting to a weariness and asking if he could trust the morrow. Augusta was told of his new conquest–‘She is pretty–a great coquette–extremely vain–excessively affected–clever enough–without the smallest principle–with a good deal of imagination and some passion.'

Gossip began to circulate, Mylord's reason for staying on in Ravenna was because of his hopeless love for the Countess and moreover, the time chosen for his calls on Teresa coincided exactly with the siesta hours of the husband. From Rome her young brother Count Pietro Gamba, who had been informed of Byron's courtship, wrote to say that he trembled for her peace, she whose heart was so pure and so noble, warning her against any intimate tie with a man so strange and of so doubtful a reputation, one who in spite of his rank was rumoured to have been a pirate in the East. Teresa's reply confirmed her indifference to strictures and her innate mettle:

Anonymous letters reached Count Guiccioli. Skittish verses portraying him as a cuckold were circulating along with mischievious tattle. At one grand gathering the women insisted that Byron was so beautiful, that their men should agree to have him exiled. Fearing the moment when they must be parted, Teresa had a relapse and managed to convince her husband that the doctors of Ravenna were not skilful enough, that she was only half cured and needed to go to Venice to consult with one Dr Aglietti, whom Byron had summoned to Ravenna earlier on and who had diagnosed her condition perfectly, prescribing leeches and Peruvian bark. The Count curiously gave his permission, saying she might travel with her maid and her manservant, Byron as ‘her travelling companion' to follow in his own coach. From Venice, Teresa wrote daily to her husband swearing constancy, complaining of a little cough, a bad headache, piles, indignant at any suggestion that she might deceive him.

When the Count, along with his son by an earlier marriage and a train of servants, arrived unexpectedly at the Palazzo Mocenigo, all semblance of graciousness had gone. Determined to pluck out the worm that he believed was gnawing at her heart, he had prepared a document outlining her faults and misdemeanours. He had also a set of rules, essential to her future behaviour. She must not be late in rising, must not be fussy in lacing and washing, must busy herself in household matters, striving towards the greatest cleanliness, be prudent in spending, allowing time for reading and music, receiving as few visitors as possible, be docile with her husband, submitting her own views provided that they were sweet, modest and tentative. Teresa's reply was neither sweet, modest nor tentative. She asked to be given a horse with everything necessary for riding and to receive without discrimination any visitor who might come.