CHAPTER XXV
AT VENICE—THE AFFAIR WITH THE BAKER’S WIFE—DISSOLUTE PROCEEDINGS IN THE MOCENIGO PALACE—ILLNESS, RECOVERY AND REFORMATION
For six weeks or so in May and June 1817 Byron tore himself away from Marianna and visited Rome, where he dined with Lord Lansdowne, sat to Thorwaldsen for his bust, and gathered the materials for the Fourth Canto of “Childe Harold.” He refused, however, for Marianna’s sake, to go on with Hobhouse to Naples, but hurried back to her, bidding her meet him half-way, and afterwards taking her, but not her husband, to a villa at La Mira, on the Brenta, a few miles out of Venice. It seems that the neighbours, less particular than the leaders of English society, yet including a marquis as well as a physician with four unmarried daughters, hastened to call, if not on the lady, at all events on him. Monk Lewis paid him a short visit, and Hobhouse, on his return from Naples, stayed for some time in a house close by, studying in the Ducal Library, and amassing the erudition which appears in his notes to “Childe Harold.” Praise of Marianna, however, disappears from Byron’s letters at this period; and one may infer from his comment on the news of the death of Madame de Staël that, if Marianna had ever made him happy, she had now ceased to do so.
“With regard to death,” he then wrote to Murray, “I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.”
This is not the note of a man who has found happiness in love or even pleasure in dissipation. Apparently the novelty of the new experiences was wearing off; and Byron was becoming sick of the isolation and uneventfulness of his life. He had gone to Venice largely because there was no English society there—and yet he missed it; Hoppner, the Consul-General being almost his only English friend. He had access to Venetian society, and to some extent, mixed in it; but he did not find it interesting. He tired of the receptions alike of Signora Benzoni the worldly, and of Signora Albrizzi the “blue,” at which, no doubt, he was stared at as a marvel of fascinating profligacy; and he also tired of Marianna Segati, who doubtless gave him an excuse for breaking off his relations with her; and then there followed a further and deeper plunge.
The departure of Hobhouse seems, as usual, to have given the signal. It was about the time of his departure that Byron gave up his lodging in the draper’s shop and moved into the Mocenigo Palace; and the letter in which Murray is advised that Hobhouse is on his way home continues thus:
“It is the height of the Carnival, and I am in the estrum and agonies of a new intrigue with I don’t exactly know whom or what, except that she is insatiate of love, and won’t take money, and has light hair and blue eyes, which are not common here, and that I met her at the Masque, and that when her mask is off, I am as wise as ever. I shall make what I can of the remainder of my youth.”
A vow which he kept after a fashion as innumerable passages from innumerable letters prove—Moore, Murray, and James Wedderburn Webster receiving his confidences in turn. Venice, he assures the last named, “is by no means the most regular and correct moral city in the universe;” and he continues, describing the life there—not everybody’s life, of course, but the life with which he has chosen to associate himself:
“Young and old—pretty and ugly—high and low—are employed in the laudable practice of Love-making—and though most Beauty is found amongst the middling and lower classes—this of course only renders their amatory habits more universally diffused.”