Word: byronism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Said Byron: "An amazon ... a fine animal ... a gentle tigress...
When Marianna moved in as Byron's housekeeper, his expenses were cut in half. Byron employed "about fourteen servants . . . besides a floating population of Venetian parasites. Unnamed and unnumbered his concubines came and went. . . ." He was surrounded with harlots and pimps and gondoliers and their . . . families. Shelley remarked with chill disdain that among Byron's boon companions were "wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named, but I believe even conceived in England...
...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...