Clients started to come, tapping nervously on the door. For a long time, I sent them away. I only wanted to go to San Lazzaro and work on the frescoes, so that I could see my baby.
Eventually, after a period of oblivion, I, like Venice, lifted my pale head and carried on. I walked mechanically to my studio. Soon I was working again. At first I painted Madonnas and babies but soon I hungered for new faces and let it be known that Cecilia Cornaro was accepting clients again. I worked faster than before to leave the truth behind. As I laid the paint on canvas the old alchemy started to work upon me. I had learnt to accept that even unhappy people and unhappy cities have their desires; these desires are still beautiful and can be painted. Indeed the artist can excavate them and bring them forth. My portraits from this period are among my best. They show, for the first time, the compassion I had learnt to feel for my fellow creatures because I was in need of it myself. They show an acceptance of weakness; they show the fragile beauty of hope. I became infected with a desire to be happy myself, to rewrite my story and to repaint the features on my own mask. I did not want to be an abandoned woman. In my new story, Byron had been my sexual adventure; I was the great sexual adventuress. With this fable, I escaped the pain of his abandonment most of the time.
But sometimes, when I felt the old skin-hunger, I took another lover. Then I would remember Byron and his usage. I lay wakeful on the divan, full of emptiness, while an uncomprehending man dozed beside me. I would rouse him roughly and send him away. I was more lonely beside him than on my own. When he had gone, I faced the truth. In those long nights I would be forced to see what had really happened to me. It was then that the suffering would come back to visit. It was as if Byron had just left me. The feelings were as fresh as ever. Such feelings are more dangerous in the dark, when the stars hang fat in the sky. I thought of how those same stars hung over the palace of Tepelene and over Byron somewhere in London, perhaps at Newstead, but certainly not thinking of me. Those nights I ran back to Miracoli, weeping through the streets, a solitary maddened figure, shameful as a rat. I threw myself upon my bed and I would rise in the morning, diminished in my own eyes.
But by day I would not acknowledge it. I was not able to swallow the fact of how he stopped loving me. It was as if I had no right to think about him, because he had withdrawn my heart’s rights, my rights to feel, to claim love. Stripped, nameless, voiceless, I crouched in an unnumbered cell, without the means to absorb or record what he had done to me. Even while I wove my new story in my mind, my body told me how to feel. A head of curled chestnut hair glimpsed in a crowd could still twist my liver before I even realised why. A couple embracing in a gondola could force tears from my eyes. I was too much alone and too sad with it. The beauty of Venice showed me an unbeautiful nullity inside me.
For years after that I tore through my days in order to sleep like the dead. While I slept memories of Byron circled round my bed like sharks. I hated waking. In that first moment of consciousness Byron was always there, plucking at my eyelids, prodding at my heart with a skewer. He crouched over my face, slapping his lazy erection on my eyelids while I pushed the hilt of his hips away from me. I never had enough sleep. He always forced me out of bed after a few hours. He was my last thought, too, leaking sadness into my dreams. I chased people out of my life in order to be alone. When I was alone, my loneliness spilled out of me like black blood. Scenting it, the cat would nuzzle my hand, jump on my lap, put his paws upon my shoulders and look into my eyes with Casanova’s tenderness. But Casanova’s love could not mend what Byron had broken.
Why did I still love Byron? I told you before. Because he emptied me. It felt like fainting. After being with him, I was depleted. I was too weak not to love him.
I am not stupid. I read what I have written about him. I know that I describe a monster. I would have liked him to be dead. But I was still in love with him, and frightened of his annihilating indifference to me. I still wanted him to die, with my name upon his lips.
I was not alone in this.
Chapter 5
So no ghe fusse vento, né fèmena mata,
non ghe sana mal tempo né mala giornata.
If there was no wind, and no crazy women,
there would be no bad weather or bad days.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Unlike the Venetians, the English have no secrets. It must be easy for their spies. The whole shabby spectacle of their lives is played out upon the stage: in their newspapers. Their gossip and scandal are not mischievous and light, as they are here in Venice, but cold and deadly for the English. Their gossip columns run with the blood and the misery of their victims. I am not surprised to hear of the number of suicides that result.
Until I saw him again, the rest of Byron’s story was played out for me in the newspapers, with their ‘eye-witness’ narratives and their anonymous letters from distressed gentlewomen – and in a dreadful novel by one Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron’s story was also recounted to me viva voce by my English clients who came to Venice full of fresh tales about him. Some of them had even met him. Mostly, though, they got their information as I did, hovering breathlessly over the accounts of others and listening to the word-of-mouth legend-making that seemed to occupy all of London.
So Byron’s style of lovemaking was wrenched from the privacy of my memory and put on the stage for all to see. ‘I am at your mercy,’ he would say sometimes, to the women, apparently. But he meant, ‘I am, for the moment, at your service. And you are at my disposal.’ He would not be denied. It was always urgent, the ladies reported. He could not bear to be rejected.
You see, there is this other side to the Byronic hero. It is the motherless child, in search of a tender feminine hand to stroke his wild hair and wrap his wounds. She alone can cut a chasm through the flinty breast and rescue the tender lover weeping inside. She is at once mother and lover, ministering angel and submissive mistress. The persona of this woman, whom he painted again and again, was what sold Byron’s books in their thousands. Every woman who read about her wanted to be her, and to perform the gentle sacrifice for him.
‘Me! Me!’ exclaimed a thousand women, ten thousand women after Childe Harold was published. ‘Let it be me!’
Women, women. Byron was no longer frightened of them. He frightened them instead. He had developed a famous ‘undertook’ to assault feminine sensibilities. One woman, at least, complained of being unable to breathe after five minutes in his devastating company. Another droplet was added to the rich brew of his reputation. The men were jealous of him, the women of each other. It was put about that Lady Caroline Lamb, upon meeting him, wrote in her diary, ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’ A few days later, apparently, she wrote underneath, ‘That beautiful pale face is my fate.’ I felt a bolt in my stomach when I read about this. I had thought the same thing when I saw him for the first time. Instead of writing it in a diary I had painted it on canvas.
Lady Caroline lived with her husband and her mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, whom Byron, apparently, greatly admired. My London informants told me that Byron was always in Lady Melbourne’s clever, cool company. Caro acted, drew, loved Latin and Greek, French and Italian. I studied an engraving of her: she appeared almost androgynous with her short curls and large dark eyes. I wondered if she resembled young Nicolo Giraud. She was, it seemed, a celebrated eccentric, given to rages and odd behaviours. Normally I have little use for women like that – professional prime donne. If I had met her, Caro Lamb would have felt the sting of my tongue. I might well have refused to paint her. I’m sure she could never sit still. Of course, I never met her, but she was the next woman in Byron’s life, so I included her in my researches. And the more I heard about her, the more my opinion of her softened. Finally I saw her as someone to pity. After all, she was not so different from me.
Even so, I could never understand what perversity drew Byron into her bed. I knew that a woman who took the initiative in the intellectual passions was a horror to him. Caroline did not seem t
o be his type. Nevertheless, provoked, it seems that he took her, though in perfect coolness. The affair was the sensation of London. Both lovers played to the public gallery. Caroline followed him around, sent him a ciuffo of pubic hair, made scenes, twice ran away from home in one-sided elopements. Hobhouse was forced to intervene to save his friend from being carried off. He would turn terracotta with embarrassment when I asked him about the ciuffo later.
‘Really? She really did that?’
‘Yes, and she expected the same in exchange. She told him to be careful with the scissors in the process.’
Byron quickly tired of Lady Caroline’s histrionics and conspired with her family to have her exiled to Ireland. He began what seems to have been a languid affair with the forty-year-old Lady Oxford, wife of Edward Harley, fashionable and voluble in pink pearls, so voluble that she was given the nickname of ‘Silence’. Byron was just one of a series of lovers – a fact so well-known that her brood of assorted children were sometimes described as the Harleian Miscellany.
I heard it all, every whisper, every drop of malice. All this time, my English lords and ladies came rustling stiffly into my studio in Venice for portraits. They knew nothing of my relationship with Byron, but, given a glass of vin santo and a comfortable chair, they began to talk, and it was always of London’s great triangular scandal, that of Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford. It seemed to me that Byron was living inside a malevolent bubble. Like Venice, he had only transparent walls to protect him. Against London’s ravening gossips he had no defence.
From Lady Oxford’s house, Byron sent Caroline a definitively cool letter, insultingly fastened with his new lover’s seal. Caroline had plans for that letter. Meanwhile, her behaviour worsened. In her rustic exile, Caroline burned an effigy of Byron while village girls, dressed in white, danced around the pyre. She herself, dressed as a page, placed on the fire a basket containing his books, his ring, copies of his letters, a lock of his hair. It was not his hair, in fact. It was a servant’s chestnut curl she had cherished since the day he sent it at the height of their affair. Even then, he had begrudged her a hair of his head. When she asked for another curl, he sent her one of Lady Oxford’s. Caroline had the buttons of her servants’ livery inscribed with the motto: Ne ‘Crede B’ – Don’t Believe Byron.
Caroline came back to London. A confrontation was inevitable, and it came. At a ball, Caroline approached Byron. He spoke to her negligently and turned away. Shortly afterwards Caroline was seen to pick up a pair of scissors. Accounts were confused. The one I heard most often was that Byron suggested that Caroline turn the blade on herself rather than on him, having already struck his heart. That sounded like him, I thought, yes, he would say that. Caroline ran away with the scissors, and returned spattered with blood, having been cut slightly in a scuffle with some ladies who tried to remove her weapon from her. Other stories were circulated that she had cut herself on a custard-dish.
I soon realised that Hobhouse hated Caroline. Describing the excesses of her behaviour truly pained him. With some difficulty, he explained to me that Byron had made one dreadful mistake with Caroline. In the time of their intimacy she had squeezed the truth out of him. She knew of the Greek love. When the time came for revenge, she was ready with potentially fatal revelations.
Hobhouse told me how Caro assaulted Byron with threatening letters. Knowing Byron, I doubt if he bothered to read them. His desk was heaped every morning with other, less predictable, and more entertaining correspondence. He had started to receive hundreds of billets-doux– from respectable married women offering to flee their husbands, from aristocratic ladies, from provincial spinsters, from chorus girls and actresses. He kept these letters in a trunk labelled ‘Anonymous Effusions’. Miss MacDonald of Clifton begged a lock of his hair. Miss Baldry of Pimlico confessed, ‘I adore you.’ Meanwhile Henrietta d’Ussières beseeched him in letters, and in agony columns, to let her be his ‘sister’.
Even with Caroline out of the picture, Byron was still on everyone’s lips. He fuelled the flames. He published a new poem, The Giaour, an Oriental tale of a Venetian-style Harold; the hero bore the same pale, haunted face and the same bitter smile. My faithful English clients sent me a first edition ‘to continue your education, Madame Cecilia, in the beauties of the English imagination’.
I seized the book and took it to my chair by the window. Hours later, I looked up, drained. I realised that I had not once reached for my dictionary. For The Giaour Byron had merely retraced his old steps. I knew the vocabulary already from Harold. So did the English public. They adored it. Byron’s Giaour would run through fourteen editions by 1815.
Again, it would be Hobhouse who eventually explained to me what happened next in the astonishing drama that Byron lived out apart from me.
Byron’s half-sister, Augusta, came to see him. Her marriage to her feckless cousin George Leigh had left her destitute and with a tribe of unruly children. She appealed to Byron for help. No one was less able to give it. His own debts were on the point of forcing him to flee to the Continent a second time.
Byron had not seen Augusta for years. It seems that the reunion was ecstatic, excessively so. I can well imagine that Byron was physically delighted by her. Later, I saw her portrait, which was full-face, and I thought it might have been a painting of Byron himself in a long wig. Hobhouse would tell me that Augusta had the Byron profile, the frowning eyebrows, the same chestnut curls, the full chin, the pouting, flexible lips. ‘She was as shy as he was,’ said Hobhouse. ‘She had the same talent for mimicry and she loved, she adored, to laugh. She even affected a little lisp on her “r” just like him.’
If you ask me, Byron’s love for Augusta was less incest and more an extreme form of narcissism. With this thought, of course, I preserved myself from jealousy. I theorised that it was natural for him to love someone who was the image of himself. Augusta was the nearest creature in existence to Byron, in blood, style and spirit. Why, if I saw her, I said to myself, I might well conceive a passion for her too! And perhaps, for Byron, there was a touch of exoticism in having her – yet another way for him to make himself an outlaw. Hobhouse would explain that in England, at that time, incest was the fashionable aristocratic vice. It carried a maximum six-months sentence, and even its social stigma was tinged with romance. It was part of the taboo-breaking, passion-sweltering, love-beyond-control spirit of the age, the spirit defined by Childe Harold. So incest was not excluded from the drawing rooms of English society. I thought that it was perhaps a peculiarly English tendency: a delicious frisson to refresh the native dullness without contaminating the blood of the aristocracy.
‘I am not over-fond of resisting temptations,’ Byron had often quoted from Vathek. In fact, I doubt if he ever resisted a single one. Within days, it seemed, the love between sister and brother ignited into sensuality. Byron knew no other way to be intimate with a woman, and from Augusta, it seems, he craved the most intense intimacy, the most extravagant proofs of love. With the Byron features, it was rumoured that Augusta had also inherited the irritable, unreliable and urgent Byron libido, and the inability to restrain herself, and, more importantly, an inability to see why she should restrain herself.
Hobhouse, of course, watched with concern, warned Byron of disaster. This new, old, unique love was hard to shake, but, eventually, perhaps exhausted, Byron tried. He sent Augusta away and, according to my English clients, now toyed with another married woman, Lady Frances Webster. He was writing a new Turkish tale, The Bride of Abydos, in which his heroine Zuleika loves her brother, Selim. The Bride was dashed off, Byron boasted, to anyone who would listen, in just four desperate days. Vathek, I recalled, had taken Beckford just three. I remembered Byron’s keen interest in this feverish feat of creativity.
Augusta was pregnant, and still he could not keep away from her. He stopped trying. With Augusta to tempt and soothe him, Byron wrote pages of verse every day. The public was still hungry for Byronic heroes who were adepts of the jewelle
d sword and disastrously dextrous also with the ladies. Byron kept them breathless with a series of swashbuckling love-stories, starting with The Corsair. Written in ten days, it sold ten thousand copies upon publication, and twenty-five thousand within a month. I didn’t bother to read my copy, which arrived with the predictable affectionate inscription from my client. I knew what I would see and I did not like it well enough to repeat the experience.
Byron took Augusta to Newstead, but her increasing pregnancy made it necessary for her to go home. Newstead, slipping ever further into ruin, was no place for a confinement. I saw in The Times that a daughter, Medora (the heroine of The Corsair), was born on April 15th 1815. I realised that it was exactly nine months after the reunion of the brother and sister.
The new father now wrote Lara, the eponymous hero of which resembled Conrad, who resembled Childe Harold, who resembled Byron.
It was all just a little too obvious.
Then, suddenly, the mood of Society changed. I heard a different, reproachful tone of voice among my English clients. I saw the querulous comments emerging in the press. I received uncertain letters from my English clients. Byron had gone too far. It seemed to me that the fashionable world of London felt slapped in its stiff powdered face. Its indulgence had been abused. Byron’s poetry, which had seemed so fresh and brave, in this new light looked shameless and mocking. The whispering chorus in the gallery fed on all the evidence that Byron carelessly scattered in their path and puffed up its collective chest in indignation. It was no longer, it seemed, quite the thing, to be slavishly devoted to the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron.
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