CHAPTER XXIV
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:
“His fine eyes, his handsome horses, and his fame gained him the smiles of several young, lovely, and noble females, one of whom, in particular, performed a journey of more than a hundred miles for the pleasure of being present at a masked ball to which his Lordship was invited. Byron was apprised of the circumstance, but either from hauteur or shyness, declined an introduction. ‘Your poets are perfect clowns,’ cried the fair one, as she indignantly quitted the ball-room.”
And then again:
“Perhaps few cities could boast such an assemblage of lovely women as that which chance had collected at Milan in 1817. Many of them had flattered themselves with the idea that Byron would seek an introduction; but whether from pride, timidity, or a remnant of dandyism, which induced him to do exactly the contrary of what was expected, he invariably declined the honour. He seemed to prefer a conversation on poetical or philosophical subjects.”
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:
“If I do not speak to you of my own affairs, it is not from want of confidence, but to spare you and myself. My day is over—what then—I have had it. To be sure, I have shortened it.”