My Only and Last Love: Byron's Unpublished Letters to Countess Teresa Guiccioli

by IRIS ORIGO

THE winter months of 1820-1821 were spent by Teresa in her father’s house in Ravenna - and by Byron in the Palazzo Guiccioli, visiting her every day. It was a very different winter from the previous one. Then the love affair was in its most stormy phase: although they were living in the same house, their meetings had been uncertain and perilous, their love-making frustrated by quarrels and mutual reproaches, and their future completely uncertain. In public they had still maintained the semi-formal relationship of a lady and her cavaliere servente, driving together in Teresa’s coach-and-six, and attending the theater and the carnival balls.

This winter they were never to be seen at the Ravenna parlies, and had settled down to a semiconjugal domestic routine, unbroken by emotional storms. In all this period from November, 1820, to July, 1821, we have only one letter from Byron to Teresa. Some others may have been lost; but it seems more probable that, seeing his dama in privacy every day — for Teresa, though living under her father’s roof, had her own apartment — Byron felt no need to exchange frequent love letters.

Teresa writes of this period as having been a singularly happy one — and she kept, to the day of her death, among her “Byron relics,” a small piece of the wall hangings of the room where Byron spent his evenings with her.

“He now saw his friend,” she says, “released at last from a dangerous and unbearable position and living under her father’s protection, in a dwelling even more noble and comfortable than the one she had left in Palazzo Guiccioli; he saw her happy and cherished by her whole family; and his happiness was increased by finding himself also the object of the regard and liking of the whole town.”

Teresa has supplied in detail the strict routine of Byron’s life at this time. Since he worked all night at his studies, he seldom went to bed before dawn, and consequently got up very late — breakfasting on a cup of sugarless tea and the yolk of a raw egg, without bread. He then read or wrote letters until his afternoon ride, which took place regularly two hours before sunset, and almost invariably in the company of Pietro Gamba. The two young men rode in the Pineta and indulged in pistol practice — often with a handful of ragamuffins and beggars following them and picking up the silver coins the gentlemen threw into the air to shoot at.

At sundown Byron went home again and dined frugally — “like a Pythagorean philosopher” — while reading, or talking to his dogs; he rested for half an hour and then went to spend the rest of the evening until eleven o’clock in Teresa’s drawing room, in conversation, with a little music on the pianoforte or the harp. Frequently they were joined by Teresa’s father and brother.

During the winter and early spring of 1821 Casa Gamba was the center of the political plots of the Romagna, and Byron was as deeply involved as the rest of the family. Day after day, the narrow streets of Ravenna were the scene of meetings between men of opposing parties, sometimes under the cloak of temporary fraternization, sometimes in open conflict. One evening the Papal Guards would be drinking in a tavern with a group of friends — Guards and Carbonari together waking the echoes with their songs. But the next night there would be a shot in the dark, a sudden cry, and one of the soldiers was murdered. Then would come reprisal: the arrest or assassination of a Liberal to pay for the previous night’s treachery.

Armed guards entered the houses of those the government considered suspect, turning the whole place upside down in their search for arms and compromising papers. If anything suspicious was found, immediate arrest followed; the victims were taken off to one of the state fortresses, where interminable interrogation awaited them, often followed by exile or execution.

The post bags were searched and their contents duly reported to Rome and Vienna by the government spies. “I wonder if they can read them,” wrote Byron, “when they have opened them! If so, they may see, in my most legible hand, that I think them damned scoundrels and barbarians, their emperor a fool, and themselves more fools than he; all of which they may send to Vienna, for anything I care. They have got themselves masters of the Papal palace and are bullying away; but some day or other they will pay for it.”

A date for the rising of the insurgents of the Romagna was fixed for February 15; they were to join the Neapolitan revolutionary troops in an effort to liberate the Papal States. But the Austrians, perhaps having had word of the plan, sent 40,000 Austrian troops across the Po before the cities of the Romagna had succeeded in uniting their scattered volunteers.

On the 24th of February the Pope issued a decree, warning all good Catholics to abstain from taking part in the forthcoming rising. On March 7 the undisciplined Neapolitan troops found themselves face to face, in the plain of Rieti, with the Austrian army — and fled, almost before a shot was fired. In Naples, the greater part of the deputies deserted the Parliament, and by March 23 the Austrian troops had occupied Naples.

The Papal Government, thanks to its ubiquitous spies, was well informed by now of the names of its enemies. For a few weeks it remained inactive — completing its plans and its lists. Then, quite suddenly, it acted. At Forlì, scores of arrests were made; a new batch of Liberals was exiled or imprisoned. It seemed inevitable that the Gambas should be included in their number.

After some weeks of painful suspense, the blow fell. On the evening of July 10 as he was coming home from the theater, Pietro Gamba was arrested and was escorted to the frontier of the state. The next morning his rooms were searched, but Teresa had been warned in time, and was able to destroy any compromising papers. Since the principal object of the measures against the Gamba family was to provoke the departure of Byron - whom no one dared to molest directly — Count Gamba, too, was added to the list of exiles, and ordered to leave the state within twenty-four hours. It was presumed that Teresa, who was now living under her father’s protection, would go with him, and that Byron’s departure would therefore be ensured.

Teresa, reluctant to leave Byron and genuinely worried about his safety, let her father go off alone in the early morning to Filetto, where he was to put his affairs in order before crossing the frontier next day. Early in August, Teresa joined him in Florence, hoping that a decree from Rome might allow him to return to Ravenna, and herself with him. But instead she found him and her brother making their preparations for an immediate departure for Switzerland.

2

At THIS troubled moment Shelley arrived in Ravenna to visit Byron. His impressions of Byron were wholly favorable. “He has . . . completely recovered his health, and lives a life totally the reverse of that which he led at Venice. . . . This attachment,” he told Mary, “has reclaimed him from the excesses into which he threw himself with carelessness and pride, rather than taste.” And in a subsequent letter: ”L.B. is greatly improved in every respect. In genius, in temper, in moral views, in health, in happiness. The connexion with La Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him.”

Byron enlisted Shelley’s aid to persuade Teresa and her young brother not to go to Switzerland but to settle in Pisa instead. On August 17, Shelley left Ravenna, taking Teresa the following letter: —

BYRON TO CONTESSA GUICCIOLI

RAVENNA, August 16th 1821
MY LOVE: —
My letters have arrived. So there is little to keep me here. My intention is to take a house in Pisa where there will be apartments for your family — and for me — separate—but near. If that does not please you — tell me—and we will take a separate house for each of us. . . . This letter will be taken to you by the Englishman who is here now, and is leaving tomorrow. He will explain to everyone many things difficult and lengthy to set down in writing, which is not my talent in a language not barbarous. When all is decided, I will send a part of the household with the heavier effects, furniture, etc., needed for the house — then I will come with the others.
Greet Papa and Pietro.
I am always
[BYRON]

P.S. If you have found an apartment in Prato and can find a house for me, it will do as well — but Pisa would be a more agreeable place to stay in - according to what I am told. I am leaving Ravenna so unwillingly — and so persuaded that my departure can only lead from one evil to a greater one—that I have no heart to write any more just now.

On August 21, Shelley arrived in Florence and at once called upon Contessa Guiccioli, attempting to reassure her about Byron’s safety. “Your letter.” Teresa wrote to Byron, “your promises, your friend’s visit, the assurances he has given me that I shall soon see you again, and that he on his part will at once take an apartment in Pisa for you, have given back to me a partial tranquillity—but complete tranquillity will only return to me on the day I see you again. My Byron, I am aware how great a sacrifice this move will be to you. How shall I be able to show you my gratitude? I have only affection to give you, and that cannot be increased. I am very sorry to see that you are so reluctant to leave Ravenna, and have such forebodings for the future — but what else can be done?

“I vow that if it were allowed me I would fly to Ravenna, with the firm resolution of never leaving again, for my whole life, provided you too were willing to remain there. Since I have known you, I have had no other desire than to be where you are — and in your heart. But reason clearly shows that Papa will not be recalled for the present.”

Shelley succeeded in securing a house in Pisa - the Palazzo Lanfranchi on the Lungarno— but for over two months, Byron delayed his departure from Ravenna on one pretext or another.

In September, Byron wrote to Moore: “I am in all the sweat, dust and blasphemy of a universal packing of all my things, furniture, etc., for Pisa, whither I go for the winter.” Teresa, he said, had been obliged to follow her father, “because the Pope’s decree of separation required her to reside in casa paterna, or else, for decorum’s sake, in a convent. As I could not say with Hamlet ‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ I am preparing to follow them. It is awful work, this love, and prevents all a man’s projects of good or glory. I wanted to go to Greece lately (as everything seems up here) with her brother, who is a very fine brave fellow (I have seen him put to the proof) and wild about liberty. But the tears of a woman who has left her husband for a man, and a weakness of one’s own heart, are paramount to these projects and I can hardly indulge them.”

3

WHEN Byron at last—on November 2, 1821 — arrived in Pisa, he introduced Teresa to a little group of English people who seemed to her very odd. There was Trelawny, that hawk-like sailor, dark as an Arab, with flashing eyes, loquacious and violent — an embodiment of Byron’s Corsair. There was that tall, thin, bony Shelley who walked about the Pisa streets reading an encyclopedia, or lay motionless at the bottom of a pool in the Arno when a friend tried to teach him to swim; and there was Mary, his grave bluestocking wife who spent her mornings studying Greek with an exiled Greek prince.

Byron rode with the men in the forest, and once a week entertained them at a dinner party, “with a grace, a generosity, an affability, which has never been surpassed.”

It is hardly surprising that Teresa, who until then had only known the convent school of Santa Chiara and the conversazioni of Ravenna and Venice, did not know what to make of them all. The Shelleys and their friends the Williamses were sorry for her, and kind. Shelley offered to give her English lessons; Mary took her out driving. They thought her “a nice pretty girl without pretensions, good-hearted and amiable.”But she was never really at her ease with them.

She made some pathetic attempts to adapt herself to the mysterious standard of the company in which she now found herself. She painstakingly sang the very bad verses which Byron had written to a Hindu air— “Oh, my lonely lonely lonely pillow!”; she removed her previous ban upon the completion of “Don Juan ”; she even attempted to rival Mary’s studiousness, by learning some Roman history. “But,” she wrote to Byron, “will you love me more when I know by heart the names of the river Trebbia, of Lake Trasimene and of Cannae? If you will, my memory will accomplish miracles!”

She had, meanwhile, other matters to trouble her. When the Gambas arrived in Pisa, as exiles from the Papal States, the government of Tuscany granted them a permit to reside there for two months (which later on was extended, with some difficulty, to four) but at the same time ordered the local police to keep them under constant supervision. At first they reported that the Gamba family “was behaving in a very reserved manner. The lady, who is very attractive, has only gone out a few times with her father.” But a little later on they observed that Count Gamba’s house was becoming a regular meeting place for exiled Ravennati, whose ostensible position in the Count’s household was only a cloak for their political activities.

At the beginning of the year Count Guiccioli, after having paid to his wife for six months the allowance ordered by the Pope, had sent her a most disquieting letter, in which he actually asked her to return to him.

She sent him an unequivocal refusal. “I must repeat to you that I am perfectly happy in my present situation and I think that no other would ever suit me again. When one has attained the tranquillity I now enjoy, at the cost of so many sacrifices and so much suffering, it is not easy to renounce it.”

Count Guiccioli retorted by sending the Pope a petition in which he pointed out that the rescript had been granted only on condition that Teresa should lead “the worthy life which becomes an honest and noble wife separated from her husband. . . . It is repugnant not only to the Rescript but to every law,” the Count continued, “that a wife separated from her husband should be supported by him however and wherever her fancy and luck may take her.”

Soon after this petition the Count, who had a spy among Byron’s servants, from whom he received regular reports, was able to send the further news that, the Gamba family having been told to leave Pisa, Teresa was now actually living under the same roof with Byron, in a villa at Montenero, near Leghorn.

Guiccioli was successful: on July 11 the Pope, “in order to dissuade the imprudent young woman from a life which, she boasted, made her happy,” revoked his earlier rescript and suspended Teresa’s allowance.

4

THE “ villeggiatura ” at Montenero, where Byron and Teresa stayed from the end of May to the beginning of July, was not wholly agreeable. The Villa Dupuy, a large, square, “flimsy-built villa,”stood at the end of a long, dusty road in the suburbs of Leghorn.

The summer, unfort unately, was an unusually hot one, and though Byron and Teresa tried to counteract the glare in their hot rooms by hanging damp green boughs against the windows, and to refresh themselves by eating a succession of water ices, the heat told heavily upon their health and spirits. Moreover in June the water supply gave out, so that every drop, “even for the most common domestic uses,” had to be fetched on muleback from a spring in the hills, over a mile away.

It is clear from Teresa’s account that Byron was at this time sunk in one of his dark moods of melancholy. It was not only that he was sometimes bored by Teresa — and certainly not that he had ceased to feel affection for her. On the contrary, all the evidence points to his having shown her — except in waves of moodiness or exasperation— a more simple kindliness than ever before. Now, as in the early days at La Mira, her chief charm for him was her warmhearted naturalness. “I feel with an Italian woman as if she were a fullgrown child, possessing the buoyancy and playfulness of infancy with the deep feelings of womanhood.”

But a full-grown child with the feelings of a woman is an exacting companion, and Byron was now, very often, too tired to respond. “The truth is, my habits are not those requisite to form the happiness of any woman. I am worn out in feelings, for, though thirty-six, I feel sixty in mind, and am less capable than ever of those nameless attentions that all women, but above all, Italian women, require.” ¹

He could not, simply could not, keep up the eternal stream of tenderness, of endearments, of little kindnesses which, Teresa said, “made the world a Paradise for me.” He was “distrait and gloomy” at meals; he forgot to bring her any flowers; he shut himself up for longer and longer hours in his study — and came out, to find her in tears.

He wrote a long letter to Edward Ellice, asking for information about the opportunities in South America (“Is it true that for a thousand dollars a large tract of land may be obtained?”), and with the members of his household he discussed the subject so freely that Guiccioli wrote to his lawyer to inform him that Byron was sailing to America.

Teresa, who loyally ascribed this new plan to “a profound disgust in Byron’s loyal and noble soul” at the lack of freedom in Europe, took it for granted that she and her brother would both go with him. “Neither of them would have hesitated to cross the Atlantic.” But nothing in Byron’s letters suggests that he had any such intention. “I had, and still have, thoughts of South America,” he wrote some weeks later to Moore, “but am fluctuating between it and Greece. I should have gone, long ago, to one of them, but for my liaison with Countess G.i. She would be delighted to go too, but I do not choose to expose her to a long voyage, and a residence in an unsettled country.” Yet it was becoming increasingly evident that the Gamba family, at least, would have to go somewhere, since they would not be allowed to stay on in Tuscany much longer.

In July the Gambas were warned that unless they left the country within three days, a final sentence of banishment would be passed on them. Whereupon Byron at once wrote to the Governor of Leghorn that he preferred to leave the state himself, in their company. “I will not remain any longer in a place where my friends are persecuted, and a refuge is denied to the unfortunate.” He asked, however, for a short delay, so that he might first settle his affairs; and meanwhile the whole party returned to Pisa.

Here tragedy awaited them. At midnight on July 13, Teresa, who was standing on her balcony in Palazzo Lanfranchi with her maid, looking out at the moonlight on the Lungarno, saw a carriage come hurrying up to the door. The maid called, “ Who is it?” “Me— Mary Shelley— pray open at once.” Teresa hurried down. Mary, “as white as marble,” stood in the doorway. “ Where is he? Sapete alcuna cosa di Shelley?” But they knew nothing—and poor Mary and Jane Williams got into their carriage again, and drove on through the night to Leghorn. It was only after another five days of torturing uncertainty, when the two bodies were at last washed up on the shore, that they were certain of the truth.

The rest of the tragedy, up to the final burning of the bodies, on the Tuscan shore, is too well known, and too indirectly connected with this story, to be repeated here. But certainly Shelley’s death, which so deeply changed the lives of all the members of that little community, affected Byron and Teresa no less than the rest. “The fine spirit that had animated and held them together was gone.”

The rest of Byron’s stay at the Palazzo Lanfranchi — nearly three months, until on September 28 he and Teresa set off for Genoa — was a time of waiting and indecision.

Leigh Hunt, with his Marianne and their brood of six, was firmly established on the ground floor of Palazzo Lanfranchi. They did not like it; they did not like Teresa; and Teresa did not like them. It was, indeed, hardly to have been expected. Mrs. Hunt — one of the most uncompromisingly British matrons who have ever set foot upon the Continent - was as intransigent in her middle-class independence as in her moral outlook. Everything about the life in Palazzo Lanfranehi was to her not only unfamiliar but distasteful — and she did not hesitate to show it. Perhaps if Teresa had been extremely cordial to her, if she had petted and praised the Hunts’ dirty, ill-mannered, and precocious children, Marianne might have been mollified. But Teresa and Byron did nothing of the kind.

Nevertheless, so long as they were all together at Palazzo Lanfranchi, Byron did sometimes try to be friendly. In the mornings he would go down to the garden singing, and would call “Leontius” at the window of Hunt’s study. But the truth was that neither Hunt nor Byron was able for a moment to forget that the poorer poet since Shelley’s death — was wholly dependent upon the richer one. Hunt had come to Italy, at Shelley’s bidding, to edit the new joint periodical, The Liberal, full of the highest hopes. “We will divide the world between us, like the Triumvirate.” But Shelley died, The Liberal from the first number was a failure and there in Pisa were the Hunts, completely on Byron’s hands.

For nearly three months this inharmonious party lived together at Palazzo Lanfranchi, with all their tempers growing thinner. During the first weeks Byron went on hoping that the Gambas might be allowed to return to Pisa, or even Ravenna; then, as that hope failed, he took the advice of Mr. Hill, the British Minister in Genoa, and decided to go there.

5

IT MIGHT have been expected, after so much friction at Pisa, that Byron, and still more Teresa, would have been only too glad to leave the Hunts behind them. But Byron was still committed to The Liberal; the Hunts had no other means of support; and so he wryly made the best of taking the whole “kraal” to Genoa with him. “The death of Shelley left them totally aground; and I could not see them in such a state without using the common feelings of humanity, and what means were in my power, to set them afloat again.”

Byron’s villa was on a hill outside Albaro and had a fine view of the harbor. It was large enough to contain two entirely separate apartments (as Teresa is again careful to emphasize). The Villa Negrotto, which the Hunts were to share with Mary Shelley, was some little distance down the hill.

According to Teresa, the routine of daily life at Casa Saluzzo was very much like life in Pisa, except that, mereifully, the Hunts were now more than a mile away. Byron’s household was entirely separate from the Gambas’, even for meals, since he greatly preferred reading to Teresa’s chatter or to the prosy, if amiable, conversation of her father — and there seems to have been some tacit agreement by which Teresa did not even go into Byron’s rooms without an invitation, but waited for him to call on her or join her in the garden.

Throughout the winter, Teresa says, she became increasingly and unhappily aware that, for Byron, Albaro was only a halting place, an inn upon the road. And Pietro Gamba wrote: “ I once saw him nearly on the point of departure [for America]. He often felt the want of some other occupation than that of writing, and frequently said that the public must be tired of his compositions and that he was certainly more so.”

But where he should go next, he had still no idea. He played for a while with a plan of settling in the South of France; he thought of “taking a run down to Naples (solus, or at most cum sola)” to gather material for two or more Cantos of “Childe Harold.” “He exhausted himself,”says Trelawny, “in planning, projecting, beginning, wishing, intending, postponing, regretting and doing nothing.”

Trelawny, who considered even the most foolish action better than inaction, lost patience, and went off for a riding tour in the Maremma. Meanwhile — without Teresa’s knowledge— Byron was already in correspondence with a Committee for Greece which had been formed in London, and had offered them his services. In March he received a note from one of its members, Edward Blaquière, stating that he proposed to call on Byron, together with the Greek representative in London, Andreas Luriottis, on his way to Greece. Byron replied that the would be delighted to see them, “and the sooner the better.”

Characteristically, he told Pietro to break the news to Teresa as best he could. The scenes of despair succeeded one another. When Teresa was with Byron, she wept and pleaded; and at night, “unable to find rest, she took up her pen and wrote to him.”

Even a less irritable man than Byron might well have felt some exasperation, and it must have been in the mood induced by a succession of such incidents that he relieved his feelings to Kinnaird: —

“I am doing all I can to get away, but I have all kinds of obstacles thrown in my way by ‘the absurd womankind,’who seems determined on sacrificing herself in every way, and preventing me from doing any good. . . . She wants to go to Greece too! forsooth, a precious place to go to at present. Of course the idea is ridiculous, as everything must then be sacrificed to keep her out of harm’s way. . . . There never was a man who gave up so much to women, and all I have gained by it has been the character of treating them harshly. . . . If I left a woman for another woman, she might have cause to complain, but really when a man merely wishes to go on a great duty, for a good cause, this selfishness on the part of the ‘ feminie’ is rather too much.”

Such letters — for there were two similar ones to Hobhouse — were outbursts of spleen, such as Byron had always been subject to. “However, I will go, (‘d—n my eye, I will go ashore’).” But it is probable that to Teresa herself — since he was both weak and, in the presence of suffering, kind — he presented a decent appearance of tenderness and regret. And his depression, which she naturally put down wholly to his sorrow at leaving her, did not need to be assumed. For now that he had definitely committed himself to heroism and glory, he was seized by one of his customary revulsions of feeling. His forthcoming expedition seemed to him not only ridiculous and futile; he felt an unconquerable premonition that it would also be fatal.

With such thoughts haunting him, it was more than a little irritating to have to deal, besides, with Teresa’s heroics. He almost preferred the moments when she clung weeping round his neck to those when, “trying to be worthy of him,”she would make a hero of him perforce, and talk about nobility and self-sacrifice.

One person at Albaro, however, was now completely happy: dear, candid, enthusiastic Pietro, the “thorough Liberty boy,”was busying himself with preparations for the journey. Old Count Gamba was happier, too, for at last he had permission to return home. Soon he would be back in his own familiar world - riding in the cool early morning along the banks of the green canals; looking at his crops; talking to his peasants; discussing local politics with his old friends. Only one proviso had been attached to his return: he must take Teresa with him. And now, owing to Byron’s Greek plan, that problem, too, was solved. She would go home with him and take her mother’s place; and surely, when once the parting was over and Byron was away in Greece, common sense would return to her. She might even consider her husband’s proposals and go back to him; at any rate, once she was living respectably at home, the Pope would restore her allowance.

As the date of Byron’s departure approached, Teresa no longer cared what happened to her. Again and again she made him repeat the same promise: he would send for her if he could — and if not, he would come back soon and never leave her again. He promised, and she pretended to believe him. But, she says, it was not easy to be brave when he himself looked so unhappy and so very ill. He had become very thin; the curls which she had always so much admired were wispy and streaked with gray; and he hardly attempted to conceal his depression and indecision. What seemed to her strangest, most ominous of all, was the date he had chosen: he who had never made any secret of his superstitious feelings, who had never been willing to do anything of the slightest importance on the 13th of the month, deliberately chose to sail upon this date.

On July 12, Byron spent the whole day receiving callers and settling his affairs, and did not even go near Teresa. “I have not seen L.B. at all today,” she wrote to Mary Shelley, “but from Lega I have just heard that perhaps he will not get off tomorrow. Only a few hours more! — and yet, since that moment, I have breathed a little more freely.”

But when the next morning came, the departure did take place. “ The fatal day,”says the “Vie,”“arrived at last. In order to sleep on board, he was to leave Albaro at 5 o’clock. From 3 to 5 he stayed with Madame Guiccioli-and he asked Mrs. Shelley to come and stay with her at 5, so that she should not be alone after he had gone.”

From the garden terrace the two women — from both of whom the sea had taken all that they loved best —watched the ungainly little brig which lay becalmed in the bay. The next morning Teresa, half dazed with sorrow, set off with her father for the Romagna. Halfway across the pass, at midday, she felt so faint that he told the coachman to stop. They got out, and sitting on a stone, she scribbled a desolate little note of farewell to Byron.

Before finally sailing from Genoa, Pietro sent Teresa a kind but hurried fraternal note. But Byron did not write; there was nothing left to say.

It was not until he got to Leghorn that, at the end of another letter to Teresa from her brother, he sent her a few last words: —

MY DEAREST TERESA:—
I have but a few moments to say that we are all well—and thus far on our way to the Levant. Believe that I always love you and that a thousand words could only express the same idea.
Ever dearest yours
[BYRON]

And with that meager farewell, on July 23, 1823, Byron was off to Greece. Nine months later, on April 19, 1824, Byron died at Missolonghi.