Word: byronism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...only Englishman at the hotel. Already installed was the son of the "exceedingly respectable Member for New Shoreham," Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with his mistress, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her stepsister, Byron's ex-mistress, Claire Clairmont. "Like many professional libertines," says Author Quennell, "Byron had a deep regard for the domestic proprieties," distrusted Shelley's brand of radicalism-"all green tea and fine feelings. ..." But he was reassured when he observed that Shelley was "as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room." Soon they were having a fine romantic time together. One midnight Byron...
...circle was shortly joined by Matthew Gregory ("Monk") Lewis, a "boyish-looking man, with large, bulging, curiously flattened eyeballs which projected from his cranium like the eyes of an insect." Lewis was the author of the best-selling shocker, The Monk. So shocked was Byron that he complained that the book was filled with "the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary...
Chief discomfort for Byron was Claire Clairmont, an "assiduous concubine," who could not understand that "he had succumbed through boredom." Once Byron showed her some of his sister's letters. Claire told Mary and Shelley that they were written in cipher. Shelley saw nothing unusual in that, thought the ciphers "most likely were used to convey news of his [Byron's] illegitimate children." While Claire went off to England to have one by him, Byron went off to Italy...
Nothing Like It. "I know not how it is," Byron was soon writing from Venice, "my health growing better, and my spirits not worse, the 'besoin d'aimer' came back upon my heart . . . and, after all, there is nothing like it." This time the besoin d'aimer took the form of Marianna Segati, wife of Byron's landlord, who ran a draper's shop at the sign of Il Corno (the horn), soon changed by his apprentices into II Corno Inglese (horns by Byron). Marianna has been described as a "demon of avarice...
Life became even more exciting when Byron met Margarita Cogni, La Fornarina (the Little Oven), "a fierce product of Venetian slums and backways." Marianna tried to 'defend her prior rights against Margarita, but was crushed by superior logic...