Then to Moore there is talk of “a Venetian girl with large black eyes, a face like Faustina’s and the figure of a Juno—tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes flashing, and her dark eyes streaming in the moonlight;” while to Murray there is a long account of the affair with Margarita Cogni, the baker’s wife, with whom the draper’s wife disputed publicly for Byron’s favours:
“Margarita threw back her veil, and replied in very explicit Venetian: ‘You are not his wife: I am not his wife: you are his Donna and I am his Donna; your husband is a cuckold, and mine is another. For the rest what right have you to reproach me? if he prefers what is mine to what is yours, is it my fault? if you wish to secure him, tie him to your petticoat-string; but do not think to speak to me without a reply because you happen to be richer than I am.’ Having delivered this pretty piece of eloquence (which I relate as it was translated to me by a bye-stander), she went on her way, leaving a numerous audience with Madame Segati, to ponder at her leisure on the dialogue between them.”
And Byron goes on to tell other stories of Margarita’s jealousy, relating that “she had inordinate self-love, and was not tolerant of other women ... so that, I being at the time somewhat promiscuous, there was great confusion and demolition of head-dresses and handkerchiefs; and sometimes my servants, in ‘redding’ the fray between her and other feminine persons, received more knocks than acknowledgments for their peaceful endeavours.” And then follows the story of Margarita’s flight from her husband’s house to Byron’s palace, and her husband’s application to the police to restore her to him, and her second desertion of “that consumptive cuckold,” as she styled him in open court, and her final success in settling herself as a fixture in Byron’s establishment, without his formal consent, but with his indolent acquiescence.
She became his housekeeper, with the result that “the expenses were reduced to less than half, and everybody did their duty better.” But she also had an ungovernable temper, suppressed all letters in a feminine handwriting, threatened violence with a table-knife, and had to be disarmed by Fletcher; so that Byron at last tired of her and told her to go. She then went quietly downstairs and threw herself into the canal, but was fished out, brought to with restoratives, and sent away a second time. “And this,” Byron concludes, “is the story of Margarita Cogni, as far as it belongs to me.”
Like the story of Marianna Segati, it is hardly a story at all; and there seem to have been several other stories very much like it running concurrently with it. So, at all events, Byron told Augusta, who passed the news on to Hodgson, saying that her brother had written “on the old subject very uncomfortably, and on his present pursuits which are what one would dread and expect; a string of low attachments.” And if a picture of the life, drawn by an eye-witness, be desired, one has only to turn to Shelley’s letter on the subject to Thomas Love Peacock.
The subject of Shelley’s comments is the point of view and “tone of mind” of certain passages in “Childe Harold.” He finds here “a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly,” and he continues:
“Nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt and desperation. The fact is that, first, the Italian women with whom he associates are, perhaps, the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon—the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; Countesses smell so strongly of garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L. B. is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which are not only not named, but I believe, seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures. He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself; and contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts the nature and habits of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt and despair?... And he has a certain degree of candour while you talk to him, but, unfortunately, it does not outlast your departure. No, I do not doubt, and for his sake I ought to hope, that his present career must end soon in some violent circumstance.”
This, it is to be remarked, is the picture, not of an enemy, but of a friend—one who already admired Byron as the greatest poet of his generation, and was to learn to admire him as one of its greatest men: a man capable of doing great things as well as dreaming them. Evidently, therefore, it is, as far as it goes, a true picture, though there is something to be added to it—something which blackens, and also something which brightens it.
Byron, to begin with, was, during this dark period, as careless of his appearance as of his morals. It was not necessary to his facile conquests among the Venetian courtesans that he should be either sober or well-groomed. It may even, on the contrary, have been necessary that he should drink too much and go unkempt in order to live comfortably on their level. At all events he did drink too much—preferring fiery spirits to the harmless Italian wines—and indulged a large appetite for miscellaneous foods, and ceased his frequentation of the barber’s shop; with the result that the flesh, set free from its customary discipline, revolted and spread abroad, and Hanson, who came to Byron at Venice to settle about the sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman, reported to Augusta that he had found him “fat, immensely large, and his hair long.” James Wedderburn Webster, a few months later, heard of his “corpulence” as “stupendous;” and Byron, while objecting to that epithet, was constrained to admit that it was considerable.
There were limits, however, to his excesses; and if misconduct was sometimes three parts of life for him, there always remained the fourth part to be devoted to other activities and interests. Even at his most debased hours Byron never quite lost his love of literature and out-door exercise, or his genius for friendship with men of like tastes with himself, who judged him as they found him and not as his wife said that he was; so that a picture contrasting pleasantly from Shelley’s may be taken from Consul-General Hoppner, whom Byron took almost daily in his gondola to ride on the Lido: