Zulietta, Margherita Cogni.
Lord Byron also gave up his life to paid Venuses: he filled the Mocenigo Palace with those Venetian beauties, who had " taken refuge," according to him, "under the fazzioli." Sometimes, perturbed by a feeling of shame, he fled, and spent the night on the water in his gondola. He had, as his favourite sultana, Margherita Cogni, surnamed, from her husband's condition, the Fornarina[130]:
"Very dark, tall"—it is Lord Byron who speaks—"the Venetian face, very fine black eyes. She was two-and-twenty years old....
"In the autumn, one day, going to the Lido... we were overtaken by a heavy squall. . . . . . . ....On our return, after a tight struggle, I found Margarita on the open steps of the Mocenigo Palace, on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair, which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows and breast. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her hair and dress about her thin tall figure, and the lightning flashing round her, and the waves rolling at her feet, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the sybil of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment except ourselves. On seeing me safe, she did not wait to greet me.... but calling out to me, 'Ah! can' della Madonna, ne este il tempo per andar' al' Lido!—Ah! dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to the Lido?' ran into the house," etc.
In these two stories of Rousseau and Byron, one feels the difference in social position, character and education between the two men. Through the charm of the style of the author of the Confessions peeps something vulgar, cynical, in bad form, in bad taste; the obscenity of expression peculiar to that period still further spoils the picture. Zulietta is superior to her lover in elevation of feeling and in habitual elegance: it is almost a fine lady smitten with the puny secretary of a paltry ambassador[131]. The same inferiority appears again when Rousseau arranges to bring up, with his friend Carrio, at their common expense, a little girl of eleven years whose favours, or rather whose tears, they were to share.
Lord Byron bears himself differently: he shines forth with the manners and the fatuousness of the aristocracy; a peer of Great Britain, playing with the woman of the people whom he has seduced, he raises her to himself by his caresses and the magic of his talent Byron arrived in Venice rich and famous: Rousseau landed there poor and unknown; everybody knows the palace that blabbed the errors of the noble heir of the English commodore[132]: no cicerone could point out to you the house in which the plebeian son of the humble clock-maker of Geneva hid his pleasures. Rousseau does not even speak of Venice; he seems to have lived in it without seeing it: Byron has sung it admirably[133].
You have seen in these Memoirs what I have said of the relations of imagination and destiny that seem to have existed between the historian of René and the poet of Childe Harold. Here I point to another of those conjunctures so nattering to my pride. Does not the dark-haired Fornarina of Lord Byron bear a certain family likeness to the fair-haired Velléda of the Martyrs, her elder?
Velléda.
"'Hidden among the rocks, I waited some time, but nothing appeared. Suddenly, my ear was struck by sounds which the wind carried to me from the middle of the lake. I listened and distinguished the accents of a human voice; at the same time I discovered a skiff poised on the crest of a wave; it came down again, disappeared between two billows, and then showed itself once more on the summit of a heavy swell; it approached the shore. A woman was steering; she sang as she struggled against the storm and seemed to sport amidst the winds: one would have thought that they were in her power, from the manner in which she seemed to defy them. I saw her throw into the lake by turns, as a sacrifice, pieces of linen, sheep's fleeces, cakes of wax and little gold and silver grindstones.
"Soon she touched land, sprang on shore, fastened her bark to the trunk of a willow and darted into the wood, leaning on the poplar oar which she held in her hand. She passed quite close to me without seeing me. Her figure was tall; a dark, short, sleeveless tunic scarce served to veil her nudity. She carried a golden sickle slung from a brass girdle and her head was encircled with an oaken branch. The whiteness of her arms and complexion, her blue eyes, her rosy lips, her long fair hair that waved dishevelled in the air bespoke the daughter of the Gauls and contrasted, by their gentleness, with her proud and fierce gait She sang words full of terror in a melodious voice, and her uncovered breast rose and fell like the foam of the waves[134].'"
I should blush to show myself between Byron and Jean-Jacques, without knowing what place posterity will award me, if these Memoirs were to appear during my life; but, when they see the light, I shall have gone and for all time, like my illustrious predecessors, to a distant shore; my shade will be delivered to the breath of opinion, vain and light like the little that will remain of my ashes.
Rousseau and Byron had one feature in common in Venice: neither showed any feeling for the arts. Rousseau, who had wonderful gifts for music, does not seem to know that, near Zulietta, there existed pictures, statues, monuments; and yet with what charm do those master-pieces mate with love, whose object they divine and whose flame they increase! As to Lord Byron, he "loathes the infernal din" of Rubens' colours, he "spits upon" all the pictures of saints with which the churches are glutted; he never met a picture or statue coming within a league of his thought. He prefers to those deceitful arts the beauty of a few mountains, a few seas, a few horses, a certain Morean lion and a tiger which he saw supping in Exeter Change. Is there not a little prejudice in all this?