Word: byronic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...annoyance of his mistress' husband, Byron's rooms at the Palazzo Guiccioli were soon "full of conspirational gear and mysterious documents . . . local liberals." Once, when the police were active, the Gambas even let Byron keep "a bag full of bayonets, some muskets, and some hundreds of cartridges." When the revolt finally fizzled (Byron always suspected it would), Byron, Teresa and the Gambas were exiled, at last settled down at Pisa...
There once more Byron could be close to the Shelley circle, which had gained a new recruit in dark, hawk-nosed, piratical Edward Trelawny (The Adventures of a Younger Son) who, to Byron's annoyance, looked and acted like a Byron hero. Trelawny discovered that Byron had nicknamed Shelley "The Snake...
...Shelley reminded him (he said) of a serpent that walked on the tip of its tail -so strange and rapid were his movements, so remote his habits-glistening, ubiquitous, and hard to capture." Trelawny did not discover that of him Byron had said: "If they could teach Trelawny to wash his hands and tell the truth, they would have some hope of turning him out a gentleman...