My Only and Last Love: Byron's Unpublished Letters to Countess Teresa Guiccioli

by IRIS ORIGO

THREE years after Byron’s death the Contessa Teresa Guiccioli, the object of the poet’s last, longest, and perhaps deepest, attachment, wrote to Charles F. Barry that his letters to her were “a treasure of goodness, affection and genius, which for a hundred reasons I cannot now make public.” Thirty years later, however, roused to indignation by reading Leigh Hunt’s malicious book, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, she told John Murray that she did not care what the consequences to her own reputation might be, “so long as none of the documents and letters are lost, which can reveal the great and kind heart of Lord Byron in its true light.” And finally, on her deathbed in Italy in 1873, she is said to have expressed to her sister-in-law her desire that all her papers should be published. “The more Byron is known,” she said, “the better he will be loved.”

Since then seventy-five years have passed. And now, through the courtesy of Count Carlo Gamba, Teresa’s great-nephew, to whom she left her villa at Settimello and all its contents, Teresa’s papers and treasures have at last come to light. The treasures— Byron’s “relics” as she called them — still lie in the carved mahogany box in which Teresa kept them: the locket containing Teresa’s hair, which Byron was wearing when he died, and which Augusta Leigh sent back to Teresa; the miniatures which the lovers exchanged at parting; a piece of the wall hangings of the room in Palazzo Gamba where they used to meet; Byron’s handkerchief and a fragment of one of his shirts, and a crumbling rose leaf, with the twig of a tree and a small acorn, from Newstead Abbey.

American by birth. IRIS ORIGO spent most of her childhood in Florence, and since her marriage to the Marchese Antonio Origo, she has done her writing in Southern Tuscany and in Rome. Her books include a biography of Leopardi, with a preface by George Santayana; Allegra, a short study of Byron’s daughter; and the diary of her experiences on a Tuscan farm during the German occupation.

The papers in this collection have proved to be as exciting and interesting a hoard as the most exacting biographer could hope for. They include not only 156 of Byron’s love letters, mostly in Italian, to Teresa, and some of her answers, but Teresa’s “Vie de Lord Byron” — her unpublished account of his life in Italy, which she wrote in her old age and thought too intimate to be published during her lifetime.

In addition there are the documents of the Guiccioli lawsuits, containing a detailed account of the complicated circumstances which led to Teresa’s separation from her husband, and there are Pietro Gamba’s letters to his sister from Greece, besides many letters to her from Shelley, Lady Blessington, Lamartine, and many others. In short, we have at last the full story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli.

At the time of her meeting with the poet, Teresa was eighteen, and had been married for a little more than a year to Conte Alessandro Guiccioli, an eccentric and avaricious old patrician of Ravenna, forty years her senior. Byron, on his side, was more than ripe for a durable and deep attachment. After two years in Venice, for all his love-making and debauchery, he felt himself, more than ever, alone. In the midst of so many mistresses and uncompanionable boon companions, watched by so many inquisitive eyes, pursued by so many outstretched hands, he knew that he was still a foreigner — and gradually he even gave up the attempt to cease to be one. He withdrew almost entirely from “good Venetian society; he rode with English friends on the Lido; he made love when he must. But he was as much deprived of any human companionship, on equal terms, as if he had been living in the Sahara.

Copyright 1949, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

The story of his liaison with Teresa is not a wholly pleasant story, and it is difficult to tell it impartially. There is a temptation to take sides: either to portray Byron as an unscrupulous cad, seducing a pretty young woman who had fallen desperately in love with him, laughing at her in his letters to his friends, and gradually cooling off, to leave her abandoned and alone; or to depict Teresa as a designing minx who, tired of her elderly husband and her dreary provincial life, flung herself at Byron’s head until he was perforce obliged to turn a fugitive love affair into a “romance in the Anglo fashion.”

With these new papers before us, neither of these simplified versions will do. The actors too often speak out of part, and the story that emerges is too full of discrepancies and inconsistencies. Besides, there are a few minor points which, to my mind, even now remain obscure. I am still not quite certain about the motives of Count Guiccioli; I sometimes do not know what Byron meant; I am not always sure when Teresa is, or is not, speaking the truth. The reader too must guess, and draw his own conclusions. I have merely attempted to fill in the background — to complete the story with passages from Byron’s other letters at the time or from the accounts of his contemporaries, and to give such information as seemed necessary about the people, the setting, and the local history. I have carefully refrained from adding any imaginary details or touches of “local color”; any information here can be confirmed by some record.

For it is the papers themselves— the scribbled, passionate love letters, the painstaking police reports, the formal ecclesiastical decrees, the gossipy letters and diaries — that must tell the story. They provide a singularly intimate and unvarnished account of the daily life of this little group of people, one hundred and thirty years ago. Their passionate protestations, their jokes, their retractions and lies, their plans and disappointments, all that constituted the most private aspect of their lives— these are now laid before us in merciless detail.

Here is the story of two passionate, unstable human beings — one of them a great poet and a very odd man, the other a young woman of quite exceptional vitality and strength of will. They loved each other; they quarreled; they trampled ruthlessly on whatever stood in their way. Of the two, it was, curiously enough, Byron who occasionally played the moralist. Teresa, for all her convent school training, appears to have been unaware throughout that any moral problem was involved. They committed themselves, and they drew back again. One of them was often disloyal, the other sometimes insincere. Each of them in turn Byron in Ravenna, Teresa in the English circle in Pisa — had to conform, for the other’s sake, to the ways of a bewildering and alien society. As time wore on, one of them became plaintive, the other exasperated. But at all times they were extraordinarily alive; they galvanized everyone who came near them. In these letters, they are living still.

2

THESE papers light up a facet of Byron’s character which, until now, has been little known: they show him living in an Italian setting. And the extent to which these new surroundings affected and changed him appears in a manner which is not only interesting but sometimes disconcerting.

Byron himself, indeed, tried to tell his friends about it: “Now I have lived among the Italians, — not Florenced and Romed and Galleried and Conversationed it for a few months, and then home again— but been of their families, and friendships and feuds, and loves, and councils, and correspondence, in a part of Italy least known to foreigners; and have been amongst them of all classes, from the Conte to the Contadino.” But neither his friends at the time nor his biographers paid much attention to all this. His life in Ravenna has been treated merely as part of the whole paraphernalia of conspiracy and romance in which the histrionic part of his nature delighted — one more scene in the great Italian performance, like the quarrels with the Fornarina or the swim across the Venetian Lagoon. Now it has become apparent that this was not the whole truth.

Byron’s letters are the letters of a foreigner, but they are also unmistakably those of a man of letters, and they contain certain amusing indications as to where and how he learned his Italian. What is disconcerting about these early letters is that their elaboration of phrase and their conventionality of idiom are matched by an almost equal, wholly unByronic, conventionality of sentiment. At first, indeed, this is so marked that one is inclined to wonder whether Byron is not merely overplaying his part; perhaps, in his desire to be the perfect cavaliere servente in the Italian manner, he has copied some phrases outright from a polite letter writer’s manual of Venice — or has allowed not only single words (as he frankly admits), but whole sentences, to be suggested by Lega Zambelli, the priest turned secretary. As the correspondence goes on he allows himself a lighter touch, more recognizably his own. But I think the reader will agree that the writer of these letters is an unfamiliar Byron.

For one thing, he is more deeply involved. If the adventure started like many others, with a mixture of physical attraction and contempt — if, indeed, he was faintly irritated, as well as flattered, by this new silly young woman who threw herself at his head — the relationship very soon changed, and held him. Its progress is revealed in these letters. But here, too, curiously enough, the feeling, although it is unquestionably genuine, is all within the Italian convention of the period. Passion, jealousy, storms, reconciliations, protestations of eternal fidelity (“your friend and lover forever" is the most frequent signature) — it is all, to English ears, strangely formal.

What is odd in these earlier letters, too, is a total absence of his usual flippancy and irony — with which, however, he made sufficiently free in his letters about the affair to his friends at home. Teresa did not either like or understand irony; and though occasionally, in the later letters, Byron does laugh at her, it is as one smiles at a child, who will not share the joke.

What is the explanation of all this? I think it is to be found in Teresa’s own character. Teresa was in some ways — like Caroline Lamb and Byron’s half-sister Augusta Leigh — a silly woman, but she was not a stupid one; and she had all the strength of a one-track mind. From the moment that her passion for Byron held her, she knew what she wanted, and it was a foregone conclusion that she would get it.

She persuaded her father, a simple and upright country gentleman, that nothing was wrong in her relations with Byron, long after the evidence of his senses must have told him the contrary. She defeated her husband’s complicated maneuvers and stood up to his brutality and violence. She imposed an acceptance of the situation (however much people might gossip behind her back) on the whole tight little society of Ravenna, and even on her own correct, affectionate family circle. And she imposed her will upon Byron himself. He struggled, he grumbled, and tried to laugh at her; but in the end he did what she wanted. “I have come, I have gone — I have come back, I have remained — it is more than a year that I have done nothing but obey you in every respect.”

Moreover, she succeeded in shaping this relationship according to her standards, her view of life. For in such cases it is always the narrower, but more positive, purpose that wins. A girl of nineteen, by her very limitations, her unawareness of any other world than that familiar to her, translated their passion into the only language that she knew; and her lover (first, we suspect, as a joke, a tour de force, then in all seriousness, and finally as a habit) made it his language, too. He became —this was what shocked and disconcerted Mrs. Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley so much — Italianized.

3

WHAT was the quality in Teresa which, in spite of her inexperience, her lack of sensitiveness, and her silliness, enabled her to achieve all this? It hardly seems worth while to examine in detail the controversy about her looks. From her contemporaries we have, on the one hand, such distressing adjectives as “chumpy” and “fubsy”; while on the other hand Shelley thought her “very pretty”; and Lady Blessington, “decidedly handsome. . . . Her complexion delicately fair, her hair of rich golden tint, her bust, and arms exquisitely beautiful.” Undoubtedly, at the time she met Byron, we must grant her brilliancy of color and complexion — what the Victorians called “bloom” — fine eyes and teeth, and beautiful arms and bust. But her legs were too short.

The real point, however, is not what her looks were, but what Byron thought of them. He thought her “fair as sunrise — warm as noon”; as pretty as Caroline Lamb and much gentler; and endearingly funny, too, in her sky-blue riding habit and her hat like Punch’s.

In any case, the strength of physical attraction is not dependent only — or even chiefly—upon looks. Teresa and Byron suited each other. Every line of the correspondence confirms this; even in the later phase, when weariness and exasperation had crept in, there remain the little jokes of physical intimacy, half-unintelligible to any reader but one, and the pervading sense that, whatever else went wrong, that remained all right.

But even the most delightful physical relation is not, by itself, enough; the evenings, as Byron wrote at La Mira, always seem longer than the nights. What else was in Teresa that attracted him so strongly? I think it was her sheer vitality, her youthful high spirits. To self-conscious, complex human beings, there is something extremely restful in the company of people less highly organized than themselves; and Teresa possessed to the full not only the freshness and zest of youth but a certain childlike ruthlessness, a quality which Byron always found attractive. Life with her was uncomplicated, gay, and exciting. If she sometimes talked affected nonsense, it was the kind of nonsense that he found diverting— perhaps even, at first, a little touching; and it was leavened by so unlimited an admiration, so unrestrained a devotion! “Mio Byron!”

She was silly, and amoral too; she could not really believe that anything was wrong that did not cause anyone any pain. And she continued to be kind, even to the people she was deceiving.

But Teresa had, as I think these papers show, great staying power; she had guts and — for all her sentimentality — sense. It is now necessary, I think, to reconsider the previous estimate of her. The “nice, pretty girl without pretensions, goodhearted and amiable” of Mary Shelley’s description is evidently not enough; and still less Leigh Hunt’s “buxom parlour-boarder, composing herself artificially into dignity and elegance" (for Teresa had snubbed Mrs. Hunt). “Stupid,”says Ethel Colburn Mayne, “at once insensitive and sentimental . . . so obtuse that he could not shake her off.” “Insincere,” says her husband’s grandson, Alessandro Guiccioli, “with more calculation than sentiment, cold, selfish and comfort-loving.” In all these opinions there is, perhaps, a grain of truth. But the new papers confirm John Drinkwater’s assertion that Byron “had, on the whole, a more genuine and lasting respect for her than he had for any other woman in his life.”

Byron’s early letters have a distinct note of genuine passion. (In the later letters, passion fades and is replaced by a semiconjugal bond of half-humorous, resigned acceptance.) Teresa’s answers show, in the midst of much flowery rhetoric and exasperating romanticism, an equal passion and unexpected Hashes of both insight and shrewdness. They show above all an unquestioning, disinterested devotion; and in the long years in which she survived him, this devotion continued to manifest itself, in a fierce and irrepressible loyally.

Leigh Hunt, in his spiteful record of his own grievances, professed to believe that, during the last year at Pisa and Genoa, Byron found this devotion so cloying that Teresa at last became aware that he was tired of her. “In the course of a few months, she seemed to have lived as many years.” Harold Nicolson clearly implies that by then she had become nothing but an obstacle and a burden. I think that the truth was rather more complicated than this. To Lady Blessington, before leaving for Greece, Byron admitted that he was “worn out in feelings,” but at the same time he added, perhaps not without a wry smile, that if he and Teresa could be married, they would be “cited as an example of conjugal happiness.” This passage, in Teresa’s own copy of Lady Blessington’s book, is heavily underscored, and in the margin she has written “God bless him!”

4

THE letters of Byron and Teresa, as well as the greater part of the “Vie de Lord Byron,” are almost wholly concerned with the two lovers’ personal affairs, and throw little light on the other side of Byron’s life in Ravenna: his part in the Italian revolutionary movement. But in the other sources I have consulted — the minute and detailed police reports of the day, the archives of the Vatican and of Venice, Bologna, Ravenna, Florence, Forlì, and Pisa, the contemporary Memoirs of the Carbonari, and the works of Italian scholars — a good deal of information about Byron’s political activity has come to light.

This new information suggests that his part in the Romagna rising was greater than has generally been realized, and was actuated by much the same motives as his expedition to Greece. Had he remained in Italy a few years longer and met a Sanfedista bullet in the insurrection of 1831, he might have been the hero of the Italian, instead of the Greek, war of independence. As it is, his activities in Italy have always been slightly slurred over, or dismissed, while his Greek venture has been thrown into the limelight.

One reason for this comparative neglect is that the whole emphasis of his biographers, in writing of his life in Ravenna, has always been upon his liaison with Teresa or upon his literary work during this period. Byron’s own account of the Carboneria, and of his share in the Romagna insurrection — the notes, presumably, which he had in mind when he wrote to ’Thomas Moore: “Some day or other, if Dust holds together, I have been enough in the Secret (at least in this part of the country) to cast perhaps some little light upon the atrocious treachery which has replunged Italy into barbarism.” These notes, together with some others on more personal matters, he handed over in July, 1823, as he was sailing from Leghorn, to his Venetian friend Angelo Mengaldo — presumably not liking to put such dangerous papers into the hands of the Gambas, who were about to return to the Romagna. Mengaldo, however, burned the whole envelope, unopened, “on the shores of the Adriatic,” and with it, all that Byron could have told us about the secrets of the Carbonari.

The rising in which Byron took part was only a minor affair, but it was one of the first faint rumblings which, all over Europe, heralded the great revolutionary storm of 1848; and Byron’s name is still remembered by Italians as that of a friend of Italy and of her freedom.

The part that Byron played in Italy was important to himself. One of the ingredients was, of course, a certain pleasure in the whole mise en scène: he enjoyed the encounters in the Pineta with the bands of conspirators who cheered him as he rode by; he enjoyed the camaraderie of their banquets.

And beneath all this, there was something more. The motive which underlay the Italian venture and the Greek one was the same: a desire for rehabilitation in the eyes of his countrymen. The smallest scrap of news from England, the slightest breath of approval or criticism, had for Byron a reality which nothing in his life abroad ever acquired. In vain did he declare that he had shaken off the dust of the country which had misunderstood and insulted him; in vain did he achieve fame and success all over the Continent. Never could he rid himself of the nagging conviction that the only true criterion of fame and success, the only true achievement, lay in the opinion of Englishmen, at home. Always he remained what he called himself in signing the visitors’ book in the Armenian monastery at Venice: “Lord Byron, inglese.”

This constant preoccupation with English opinion is, perhaps, the key to much of his public behavior abroad. “If I live,”he told Lady Blessington (and Teresa has marked the passage), “and return from Greece with something better and brighter than the reputation or glory of a poet, opinions may change, as the successful are always judged favourably in our country; my laurels may cover my faults better than the bays have done.” For Byron had to the full the intellectual’s admiration for the man of action. “A man, he told Teresa, “ought to do more for society than write verses.” And elsewhere he had written: “If I live ten years more, you will see that I am not finished with. I don’t mean in literature, for that is nothing, and — strange as it may seem — I don’t believe that was my vocation.”

When in the Ravenna Journal, on his thirty-third birthday, he deplores the passing of the years, “not so much for what I have done, as for what I might have done,” it was not of literary achievement that he was thinking. It was — at Ravenna as at Missolonghi — a “nobler aim.” The Italian venture — undertaken with a similar mixture of motives, a similar irresolution and conflict, fraught with a similar exasperation with the people whose cause he was defending — was the prelude to the Greek tragedy.

5

TERESA GUICCIOLI was very reluctant, on that April evening, to go to Casa Benzoni. She had arrived in Venice only two days before, she was tired from the journey, and she was, moreover, in deep mourning for both her mother and her sister. Her husband, as usual, had insisted on going to the theater—"it was for him a necessity” — but to go on to Contessa Benzoni’s conversazione seemed to her superfluous. She argued with her husband in the gondola, but finally, she tells us, gave way “merely out of obedience,”with tears in her eyes, making him promise that they would not stay more than a few minutes. Hardly had she entered, however, when she saw sitting on the sofa opposite the door, beside another young man, a figure that seemed to her “a celestial apparition.” This meeting “sealed the destiny of their hearts.”

The effect on Byron seems to have been somewhat less immediate. When Contessa Benzoni wished to introduce him, he refused, saying, “You know that I do not wish to meet any more ladies; if they are ugly because they are ugly, and if they are pretty because they are pretty.” It was only after a good deal of persuasion from his hostess and from another guest, Alexander Scott, the British vice-consul — who said that surely he might make one exception, in a salon where beauty was far from common — that he gave way and allowed himself to be taken across the room and be introduced as “Pair d’Angleterre et son plus grand poète.”

“This introduction,” says Teresa, “placed on Byron’s lips one of those charming smiles which Coleridge so much admired and called the Gate of Heaven.”He sat down beside her and they began to talk — about Venice and Ravenna, and also, says Teresa proudly, “with enthusiasm and assurance” about Dante and Petrarch. “But already the subject of their conversation had become an accessory,” and when Guiccioli at last came across the room to tell Teresa that the “few minutes” of their visit had long since elapsed, “she rose to leave as if in a dream — and on crossing the threshhold of the palace she realized that she no longer felt as tranquil as she had on entering. These mysterious attractions are too shaking to the soul and make one afraid!”

At this point Teresa’s official narrative becomes somewhat vague. She speaks of meetings every evening at the theater and afterwards at supper, of conversations always more intimate and more inexhaustible, of long gondola rides across the Lagoon, of sunsets at the Lido. “This existence,” says Teresa, “seemed to them entirely natural and was already becoming necessary!” But all the details are shrouded in a golden haze of romantic sentiment.

Fortunately, however, we possess another document which is considerably more informative. It is Teresa’s “Confession to her husband. “I then fell attracted to him, she says, after describing their first meeting, “by an irresistible force. He became aware of it, and asked to see me alone the next day. I was so imprudent as to agree, on condition that he would respect my honor: he promised and we settled on the hour after dinner, in which you [Count Guiccioli] took your rest. At that time an old boatman appeared with a note, in an unknown gondola, and took me to Mylord’s gondola, where he was waiting, and together we went to a casino of his. I was strong enough to resist at that first encounter, but was so imprudent as to repeat it the next day, when my strength gave way— for B. was not a man to confine himself to sentiment. And, the first step taken, there was no further obstacle in the following days.”

The long absences in her gondola, Teresa explained, were rendered possible by the presence of “a companion with whom she always went out, who had been a governess in the house and with whom she practiced the French language.” This is the first appearance of another important character in the story: Fanny Silvestrini, the confidante. Though she may well have been a governess in Casa Guiccioli in her youth, this does not appear to have been her only profession, and at this time, most conveniently, she was the mistress of Lega Zanibelli, who was Count Guiccioli’s steward and who subsequently passed into Byron’s service.

During this period, according to Teresa, Byron showed occasional moods of “ melancholy and preoccupation,” which she liked to attribute to his sense of duty and his “knowledge of the human heart.” But she frankly admits that she herself was quite simply and wholeheartedly happy. “She had known too little of life to reflect — and she gave up her soul entirely where her heart led.”

It would appear, however, that even Byron — accustomed as he was to easy conquests — was slightly taken aback by the extreme facility and publicity of this one. “She is pretty,” he wrote to his friend John Cam Hobhouse on April 6, “but has no tact; answers aloud when she should whisper; talks of age to old ladies who wish to pass for young, and this blessed night horrified a correct company at the Benzoin’s by calling out to me ‘Mio Byron,’ in an audible key, during a dead silence of pause in the other prattlers, who stared and whispered to their respective serventi!” All the fans fluttered, and Teresa was delighted. She was far too pleased with the conquest of the most celebrated figure in Venice to wish to keep it to herself.

Byron’s private meetings with Teresa, however, were very few, “We had but ten days,” he wrote to Douglas kinnaird, “to manage all our little matters in,” and added in a later letter that “the essential part of the business” had only lasted “four continuous days.” “Earthly Paradises,” wrote Teresa sadly, “cannot be expected to endure.” She was suddenly informed by her husband that they would be leaving two days later for their country estate on the Po, and was so much dismayed that she at once hurried off, in the company of an old family friend, to the theater, in the hope of meeting Byron and telling him the sad news herself. She did indeed meet him in the lobby and “almost involuntarily followed him into his box and told him of her troubles.” “This box,” she adds, “was generally used by men only, and was always the target of Venetian curiosity; one can imagine that this was increased a hundredfold by the young lady’s presence!”

When the Count went to the theater and found his wife in Byron’s box, he showed no traces of jealousy, but invited Lord Byron to visit them in Ravenna; and when the moment for departure to Ravenna arrived, it was on Byron’s arm that Teresa descended into her gondola — while once again he promised to rejoin her as soon as possible.

6

THE estate to which Count Guiccioli was taking his wife, on their way back to Ravenna, Cà Zen, was one he had recently bought from the Zeno family. It lay at the mouth of the Po, in a desolate marsh. “With no one to speak to, without music, almost without books, waiting for the Count to come back from his business expeditions,” Teresa now spent her days remembering the delights of Venice and writing long, unhappy letters to her lover. These, she tells us, she look to the post at the neighboring village of Loreo, sending them under cover to the obliging Fanny Silvestrini.

The original of Byron’s first letter to Teresa, together with his next three letters, is enclosed in a folder inscribed, in Teresa’s hand, ”4 letters from Lord Byron. First series. From our first acquaintance to his arrival in Ravenna.” On another small sheet of paper is written: “The address I gave him to write to me in Ravenna:

Al Signor Don Gaspare Perelli Ravenna.”

This obliging priest was living in Ravenna, and continued to be of considerable assistance to the two lovers after Byron’s arrival. “By the aid of a Priest,”Byron was writing to Sir Richard Hoppner, the British consul, in June, “a Chamber-maid, a young Negro-boy, and a female friend, we are enabled to carry on our unlawful loves.”

THE FIRST LETTER

VENICE, April 22nd, 1819
MY DEAREST LOVE : —
Your dearest letter came today and gave me my first moment of happiness since your departure. My feelings correspond only too closely to the sentiments expressed in your letter, but it will be very difficult for me to reply in your beautiful language to your sweet expressions, which deserve an answer in deeds rather than words. I flatter myself, however, that your heart will be able to suggest lo you what and how much mine would like to say to you. Perhaps if I loved you less it would not cost me so much to express my thoughts, but now I have to overcome the double difficulty of expressing an unbearable suffering in a language foreign to me. Forgive my mistakes; the more barbarous my style, the more will it resemble my Fate away from you. You who are my only and last love, who are my only joy, the delight of my life — you who are my only Hope — you who were, at least for a moment, all mine — you have gone away — and I remain here alone and desolate. There, in a few words, is our story! It is a common experience, which we must bear like so many others, for love is never happy, but we two must suffer more, because your circumstances and mine are equally extraordinary. But I don’t want to think of all this, let us love

When Love is not Sovereign in a heart, when everything does not give way to him, when all is not sacrificed to him, then it is Friendship — Esteem — what you will — but no longer Love.
You vowed to be true to me and I will make no vows to you; let us see which of us will be the more faithful. Remember, when the time comes that you no longer feel anything for me, that you will not have to put up with my reproaches; I shall suffer, it is true, but in silence. I know only too well what a man’s heart is like, and also, a little, perhaps, a woman’s; I know that Sentiment is not in our control, but is what is most beautiful and fragile in our existence. So, when you feel for another what you have fell for me, tell me so sincerely — I shall cease to annoy you — I shall not see you again — I shall envy the happiness of my rival, but shall trouble you no more. This, however, I promise you: You sometimes tell me that I have been your first real Love — and I assure you that you shall be my last Passion. I may well hope not to fall in love again, now that everything has become indifferent tome. Before I knew you, I felt an interest in many women, but never in one only. Now I love you, there is no other woman in the world for me.
You talk of tears and of our unhappiness; my sorrow is within; I do not weep. You have fastened on your arm a likeness that does not deserve so highly; but yours is in my heart, it has become part of my life, of my soul; and were there another life after this one, there too you would be mine — without you where would Paradise be? Rather than Heaven without you, I should prefer the Inferno of that Great Man buried in your city, so long as you were with me, as Francesca was with her lover.
My sweetest treasure — I am trembling as I write to you, as I trembled when I saw you — but no longer — with such sweet heartheats. I have a thousand things to say to you, and know not how to say them, a thousand kisses to send you — and, alas, how many Sighs! Love me — not as I love you, for that would make you too unhappy — love me not as 1 deserve, for that would be too little — but as your Heart commands. Do not doubt me — I am and always shall be your most tender lover
BYRON

VENICE, April 22nd, 1819
P.S. How much happier than I is this letter, which in a few days will be in your hands — and perhaps may even be brought to your lips. With such a hope I am kissing it before it goes. Goodbye — my soul.

April 23rd, 4 o’clock
At this moment two other letters of yours have come! The irregularity of the post has been a great trouble to us both—but pray, my Love, do not lose faith in me. When you do not get news from me, believe that I am dead, rather than unfaithful or ungrateful. I will answer your dearest letters soon. Now the post is going — I kiss you ten thousand times.

On the superscription is added, in Byron’s hand: “Written 22 April 1819. April 28, 1820. I have re-read it in Ravenna, after a year of most singular events.”

BYRON TO CONTESSA GUICCIOLI

VENICE, April 25th, 1819
MY LOVE : —
I hope you have received my letter of the 22nd, addressed to the person in Ravenna of whom you told me, before leaving Venice. You scold me for not having written to you in the country — but — how could I? My sweetest treasure, you gave me no other address but that of Ravenna. If you knew how great is the love I feel for you, you would not believe me capable of forgetting you for a single instant. You must become better acquainted with me — perhaps one day you will know that although I do not deserve you, I do indeed love you. . . .
My Treasure — my life has become most monotonous and sad; neither books, nor music, nor Horses (rare things in Venice but you know that mine are at the Lido) — nor dogs — give me any pleasure; the society of women does not attract me; I won’t speak of the society of men, for that I have always despised. For some years I have been trying systematically to avoid strong passions, having suffered too much from the tyranny of Love. Never to feel admiration — and to enjoy myself without giving too much importance to the enjoyment in itself — to feel indifference towards human affairs — contempt for many, but hatred for none — this was the basis of my philosophy. I did not mean to love any more, nor did I hope to receive Love. You have put to flight all my resolutions — now I am all yours — I will become what you wish — perhaps happy in your love, but never at peace again. You should not have reawakened my heart — for (at least in my own country) my love has been fatal to those I love — and to myself. But these reflections come too late. You have been mine — and whatever the outcome, I am, and eternally shall be, entirely yours. I kiss you a thousand and a thousand times — but

Love me — as always your tender and faithful
B[YRON]

7

TERESA meanwhile, after a short stay in another of her husband’s new estates, near Pomposa, had arrived in Ravenna. But she says that the violent emotions of the last few weeks, her depression since her separation from Byron, and the discomfort of the journey had so much affected her health that she fainted several times on the way and, on getting home, immediately took to her bed. She then gave herself up to a mysterious illness, whose symptoms she poetically described as consisting chiefly of a consumptive cough (this was a hereditary ailment in her family) and of frequent swoons, “in which her spirit skimmed over the Venetian lagoons.”On returning to consciousness, she would speak of “melodious sounds, perfumes of unfamiliar sweetness, and smiles of a celestial countenance,”and reproved her anxious relatives, who were gathered round her bed, for awakening her from “such a delicious dream.”

The more prosaic truth, however, is that she was having a miscarriage which had begun at Pomposa — a fact she took considerable pains to conceal, by attempting to erase, both in a letter of Fanny’s and in one of Byron’s, the word miscarriage (which is, however, still legible in both instances) and substituting for it the word illness. It is difficult to understand why she took so much trouble — since at this early date the baby could not possibly have been Byron’s — “Unless she thought it more romantic to be suffering from consumption.

Byron himself felt no such delicacy, and on May 15 he was writing to Kinnaird: “It was my intention to have left Venice tomorrow on my journey to R[avenna] — but the Lady has miscarried and her recovery seems more remote than was expected.”

And in a later letter he added: “I can’t tell whether I was the involuntary Cause of the miscarriage, but certes I was not the father of the Active, for She was three months advanced before our first —, and whether the Count was the parent or not I can’t imagine, perhaps he can.”

BYRON TO CONTESSA GUICCIOLI

[VENICE, May 3rd, 1819]
MY SOUL : —
This time friendship has prevailed over love, and Fanny has been more fortunate than I in seeing your writing, your very dear letter from Ravenna, however, caused me great grief by telling me that you had been ill, although I still trust that this will not bring about other consequences; and it is in this hope that I am writing to ask you to send me more precise news about the state of your health. I attributed your illness to riding— but you write as if there were some other cause and do not tell me the real reason. Pray clear up the mystery, which you have not wanted to tell the doctors.
Fanny has already come back from Treviso. I am waiting for your answer to know when to undertake my journey and how to behave on my arrival. Remember that I have no other object in taking this journey than that of seeing you — and loving you. I neither seek nor want diversions — introductions — Society — all very tedious things. It would suit me better to be with you in a desert, rather than without you in Mahomet’s paradise, which is considerably more agreeable than ours.
I shall seek you, you alone; if only I can see you for a few moments every day, I shall be able to spend the rest of the time with your image; if there were to be a minute in which I did not think of you, I would consider myself unfaithful. Our love and my thoughts will be my sole companions, books and horses my only distractions, except for a little trip to Rimini, in order not to break a promise made to a friend in England three years ago that, if ever I should see that city, I would send him any tradition about the story of Francesca (if any such remain there) beside what is to be found in Dante. This story of a fatal love, which has always interested me, now interests me doubly, since Ravenna holds my heart.
I long to embrace you and leave the rest to fate, which cannot be cruel, so long as it leaves me your love. I kiss you with all my soul — a thousand and a thousand times—and am eternally your lover.
[BYRON]

P.S. This is my third letter—to the address given — I trust in God that none has gone wrong.

From the last letter it would appear that Byron was only awaiting his mistress’s instructions, to set off for Ravenna. But when they came, her plans for their meeting were so childishly imprudent and impracticable that he decided to put off his departure. “I am still required to set out,”he told Kinnaird, “but my instructions were a little confused, and though I am really much in love, I see no great use in not adopting a little caution.”

The experienced Fanny did not fail to observe Mylord’s reluctance with dismay, and hastened to send her young friend some prudent advice. She fully realized what Teresa was still too inexperienced to know: that Byron, like most libertines, was a stickler for public behavior. “Remember that he is your severest censor.”

So Byron stayed on in Venice, and Teresa waited.

8

AT LAST, on June 1, Byron did get off. “The die is cast,”he had written to Hobhouse, “and I must (not figuratively but literally) pass the Rubicon. . . . Everything is to be risked, for a woman one likes.”Before he had reached Padua, however, he was already regretting his decision, and was writing to Hoppner in a thoroughly bad temper. The letter which he had received from Teresa just before starting, he said, had been more than a little disquieting.

“La G.’s instructions are rather calculated to produce an éclat — and perhaps a scene— than any decent iniquity. . . . To go to Cuckold a Papal Count who, like Candide, has already been ‘the death of two men, one of whom was a priest,’in his own house, is rather too much for my modesty when there are several other places at least as good for the purpose. She says they must go to Bologna in the middle of June, and why the devil then drag me to Ravenna? . . . The Charmer forgets that a man may be whistled anywhere before, but that after — a Journey in an Italian June is a Conscription and therefore she should have been less liberal in Venice, or less exigent at Ravenna.”

By June 6 he was in Bologna — “where I am settled like a sausage and shall be broiled like one if the weather continues.”

There was no news from Teresa. Why could the tiresome woman not write? Should he go on or return to Venice? The nights were oppressive and the rooms at the Albergo del Pellegrino intolerably stuffy and hot. He told Hoppner to prepare for his return. But in the morning he woke up in a different mood: he was already halfway; he would go on, after all, and see what Teresa was about. On the outside cover of his letter to Hoppner he scribbled the words: “I am just setting off for Ravenna, June 8th, 1819. I changed my mind this morning and decided to go on.”

It was on the morning of June 10 that Byron’s great gaudy traveling-coach — adorned with his coat of arms and large enough to hold his bed, his traveling-library, and a vast assortment of china, linen, and plate —drew up at the Porta Sisi of Ravenna. The coach, the travelers were told, might proceed no further, for it was the feast of Corpus Domini, and on that day the narrow streets, shaded by great awnings which gave them the appearance of enclosed galleries, were kept clear for the passage of the procession to the Cathedral square. The pavements were strewn with flower petals, and the façades of the palaces were hung with tapestries and brocades, and adorned with gold-framed mirrors and holy pictures, and even with portraits of the owners’ ancestors, so that the whole city looked like one vast drawing room.

Unwillingly, in the midst of the curious, jostling crowd, Byron descended. His eyes fell at once upon an extremely pretty young woman, and with a flourish he asked her the way to the inn. She told him and then — for Ravenna was a very small town and he had lighted upon a friend of Teresa’s — she at once hastened to Palazzo Guiccioli, to tell Teresa about her encounter. “‘Never,’ she exclaimed, ‘had she met a man of such beauty.’ The Countess fell assured that it could only be Lord Byron.”

Teresa was at that moment engaged in writing a letter to her lover (whom she believed to be still in Bologna) contradicting her previous pressing invitations and begging him to postpone his visit. She had had a relapse, with high fever, and feared that the difficulties of seeing Byron while she was still unwell would be insuperable — and besides, she added, she did not feel that she “deserved” so great an attention. But now that at last Byron had come, all her doubts and hesitations were forgotten.

Byron, meanwhile, took up his abode in the uncomfortable little inn in the Via di Porta Sisi, which was the best that the city could afford, and waited for Teresa’s bidding, after sending her the following letters: —

BYRON TO CONTESSA GUICCIOLI

June 10th, 1819
MY TREASURE : —
Here I am, in Ravenna. If you can arrange to see me I shall be happy — if not, I have at any rate not broken my word — and I hope at least to hear that your health is better.
Always,
[BYRON]

June 10th, 1819
MY LOVE : —
I have been to the theater without finding you — and was sorry to hear that you are still weak. Your husband came to see me in the box and replied courteously to the few inquiries I dared to make at that moment. Count Z[inanni] then turned up and was so insistent that I should go to his box that I could not avoid paying that call without being rude — and I did go there for a moment.
My sweetest Soul — believe that I live for you alone —and do not doubt me. I shall stay here until I know what your wishes really are: and even if you cannot arrange to see me I shall not go away. I beseech you to command me as entirely and eternally yours. I would sacrifice all my hopes for this world and all that we believe we may find in the other—to see you happy. I cannot think of the state of your health without sorrow and tears. Alas, my Treasure! How much we endured — — and shall still have to endure! And you so young —so beautiful — so good — you have had to suffer through my fault — what a thought!
I kiss you a thousand thousand thousand times with all my soul.
[BYRON]

P.S. I sent you a note this evening by means of P[erelli]. But the bearer did not find him until midnight. I am writing now after the theater before going to bed. I hope you will receive both.

Byron’s first visit to Teresa took place on the day after his arrival, “although it was a Friday and he did not like to do anything important on that day.” Guiccioli himself had come to fetch him in his coach, and had accompanied him to Teresa’s bedside, where she, feverish and flushed and “surrounded by friends and relations,” was not able to speak to him alone even for a moment. “He returned home,” she tells us, “extremely melancholy.”

That first week in Ravenna, indeed, was not a happy time. The sleepy little provincial town to which Byron was to become so much attached had, at first sight, little to offer the traveler. The members of the local nobility, to whom his letters of introduction were addressed, hastened to call upon their distinguished visitor and to take him to see their sights: Dante’s tomb, the Rotonda, the great Byzantine mosaics in S. Apollinare in Classe, the fine manuscripts in the library. But Byron at best was not much of a sight-seer, and now he was far too much preoccupied with Teresa to care about anything else. He seems to have made this only too clear to his hosts.

“The common opinion,” wrote Conte Giulio Rasponi acidly to Count Francesco Rangone, “is that the Palazzo Guiccioli has impressed him more than the Rotonda and the ruins of Theodoric. In any case his stay is a good thing for the town and for the people who see him, although his manner of life and preoccupation with his affections do not often render him accessible. I have not failed to offer him my humble services in various forms, but he, very much reserved, has only made a very limited use of them.”

For indeed Teresa took up all his thoughts. After reading the daily letters that he wrote to her at this time, it seems no longer possible to maintain that this was only a halfhearted relationship. Grudgingly as he had come to Ravenna, flippantly as he still wrote about the affair to his English friends, it is plain that he was now completely absorbed by Teresa.

There is in his letters not only an unmistakable note of passion but a curious lack of self-confidence, a deep discomfort. “I am a foreigner in Italy,” he told Teresa, “and still more a foreigner in Ravenna, and naturally little versed in the customs of the country. I am afraid of compromising you.” All day, except in the few hours that he could be with her, he sat in the hot, dingy little inn and wondered why he had come and whether he could remain. Did Teresa really care for him? And even if she did, what could come of it all?

Everyone in Ravenna was prodigiously civil — but it was not for them that he was there. Moreover, accustomed as he was to dealing with husbands, there was something singularly disconcerting about the old Count. He, also, was only too civil — but what lay beneath his formal, halfironic courtesy? “I cannot make him out at all,” Byron wrote to Hoppner; “he visits me frequently and takes me out (like Whittington the Lord Mayor) in a coach and sir horses. The fact appears to be, that he is completely governed by her — and for that matter, so am I.” The letter ends: “My coming — going — and everything depends upon her entirely.”

By June 14, Teresa was better, and was up when Byron came to see her, but in the evening she was obliged to send him some bad news. The Abate Perelli, who had transmitted their letters, had gone off to the country with Teresa’s uncle. Byron was greatly upset.

BYRON TO CONTESSA GUICCIOLI

June 14th, 1819
Perhaps I am mistaken — my Love—but this sudden country expedition of your uncle’s with P[erellij makes me afraid that we have been betrayed — and that P[erelli] has been taken off to the country to interrupt our correspondence. Passion makes me fear everything and everyone. If I lose you, what will become of me? Was this journey planned before my arrival — or not? If not, I feel very suspicious. In any case, how shall we manage to get our letters? How shall I be able to get even this one to you, without risk of a discovery which would be sad for you — and for me, fatal. In losing me you lose very little — but I am unlikely to survive a break with you. Until now the fruits of my journey have been rather bitter—but if you are pleased, I do not regret what I am suffering — for I am suffering for your sake.
Love has its martyrs like Religion — with this difference, that the victims of Love lose their Paradise in this world, without reaching it in the other, while the devout of the other faith gain by the change.
Meanwhile — my Love — tell me what I am to do? Remain here — or return to Bologna? If trouble arises, there is only one adequate remedy — that is, to go away together — and for this a great Love is necessary — and some courage. Have you enough?
I can already anticipate your answer. It will he long and divinely written — but it will end in a negative. . . .
[BYRON]

Byron was right. Teresa’s answer was long, poetic, and full of numerous good reasons why she should not run away with him. Nor, indeed, did he yet grasp, perhaps, how unheard-of a thing he was asking. The essence of serventismo, he was to realize later, was that the lady should stay with her husband. But, after this letter of his, he had no right to complain later on that he had been inveigled into “a romance in the Anglo fashion.” It was be who had first desired it.

(To be continued)