Word: byron
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...this time Byron was 30, looked 40. His face was pale, bloated, sallow. "The knuckles of his hands were lost in fat. . . . With his long, greying curls, his rings and brooches, the outmoded clothes he wore, he suggested ... an expatriate of dubious propensities but distinguished origins. . . ." He also suggested Proust's Baron de Charlus...
Cicisbeo. Meanwhile Byron had found time to write The Prisoner of Chilian, several cantos of Childe Harold, Manfred, Beppo, was working on Don Juan. One day at a party he met the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, wife of a big Romagnol landowner...
...tactless, "a sort of Italian Caroline Lamb." She horrified one gathering, wrote Byron, "by calling out to me 'mio Byron' in an audible key, during a dead silence. ..." Mary Shelley found Teresa "a nice, pretty girl" but "her legs, in fact, were far too short for the weight they carried...
Presently Byron moved in with the Guiccioli at their Ravenna palazzo. At last he was a full-fledged cavaliere servente, a cicisbeo, an official gigolo whose prior rights, by old Italian custom, are fully recognized by the husband. Wrote Byron: "I have been an intriguer, a husband, a whoremonger, and now I am a Cavaliere Servente-by the holy! it is a strange sensation." Sometimes he grumbled: "I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan War." He added that he was "drilling very hard to learn how to double a shawl"-a gallantry all well-trained cicisbei...
...Risorgimento. Everywhere patriotic Italians, with deathless heroism and the blessings of English liberals, were conspiring to upset the rudiments of order which Austria had almost succeeded in imposing on parts of the Peninsula. Teresa Guiccioli's father and brother, the Gambas, were patriots and revolutionists. Encouraged by them, Byron joined the Carbonari...