⁂
A few days later there was great commotion at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Every one was on edge expecting the arrival of the noble lord. Claire was tremulous in spite of her audacity, Shelley, in the happiest spirits, was impatient. He was not shocked by the affair between Byron and Claire. On the contrary he hoped to see the same ties formed between Byron and his sister-in-law as existed between himself and Mary.
The Shelleys were not disappointed by Byron’s first appearance. His beauty was extraordinary. To begin with, you were struck by his air of pride and intellect; next, you noticed the moonlight paleness of his skin, his splendid dark blue eyes, his black and slightly curling hair, the perfect line of his eyebrows. The nose and chin were firm and well-drawn, the mouth full and voluptuous. His only defect appeared in his walk. “Club-footed” was said of him. “Cloven-footed” he insinuated of himself, for he preferred to be considered diabolic rather than infirm. Mary saw that his lameness embarrassed him, for whenever he had to take a few steps before spectators he made some satanic jest. In the register-book of the hotel, against the word “age” he wrote “a hundred.”
Byron and Shelley got on well together. Byron was glad to find him a man of his own class, who in spite of hardships had retained the charming ease of manner peculiar to the young aristocrat. His cultivation was astounding. Byron, too, had read enormously, but without Shelley’s serious application. Shelley had read to know, Byron had read to dazzle, and Byron was perfectly well aware of the difference. He felt, too, the instant conviction that Shelley’s will was a force, a bent bow, while his own floated loose on the current at the mercy of his passions and of his mistresses.
Shelley, the least vain of men, did not observe this admiration for him, which Byron took care to hide. While listening to the third canto of Childe Harold he was moved to enthusiasm and discouragement. In the superb energy of the poem, which rose and swelled, irresistibly like a flood, he recognized genius and despaired of ever equalling it.
But if the poet filled him with admiration, the man filled him with astonishment. He had expected a Titan in revolt, and he found a wounded aristocrat fully alive to the pleasures and pains of vanity, which seemed to Shelley so puerile. Byron had outraged convention, but, all the same, he believed in it. It had stood in the path of his desires, and he had flung it aside, but with regret. That which Shelley had done ingenuously, he had done consciously. Banished from society, he valued nothing so much as social success. A bad husband, it was only to legitimate love that he paid respect. His mouth overflowed with cynicism, but it was by way of reprisals, not from conviction. Between marriage and depravity he recognized no middle path. He had sought to terrify his compatriots by acting an audacious part, but only because he had despaired of conquering them by acting a traditional one.
Shelley looked to women as a source of exaltation, Byron as a pretext for idling. Shelley angelic, too angelic, venerated them. Byron human, too human, desired them and talked of them in the most contemptuous fashion. “It is the plague of these women,” said he, “that you cannot live with them or without them. . . . I cannot make up my mind whether or not women have souls. My beau-ideal would be a woman with talent enough to understand and value mine, but not sufficient to be able to shine herself.”
The upshot of certain of their conversations was surprising. Shelley, mystical without knowing it, managed to scandalize Byron, a Don Juan in spite of himself.
This did not prevent them from being excellent company one for the other. When Shelley, always a great fisher of souls, tried to win over his friend to a less futile conception of life, Byron defended his point of view by brilliant paradoxes which delighted Shelley the artist, as much as they pained Shelley the moralist. Both were passionately fond of the water. They bought a boat, keeled and clinker-built, in which they went on the lake every evening with Mary, Claire, and Byron’s medical attendant, the handsome young Italian, Polidori. Byron and Shelley, sitting silent, would ship their oars to follow with their gaze fleeting shapes amidst the moon-lit clouds; Claire would sing, and her warm, delicious voice carried their thoughts with it over the starry waters in a voluptuous flight.
One night of strong wind Byron, defying the storm, said he would sing them an Albanian song. “Now be sentimental and give me all your attention.” It was a strange wild howl that he gave forth, laughing the while at their disappointment, who had expected a wild Eastern melody. From that day onward Mary and Claire named him “the Albaneser,” and “Albé” for short.