Word: shelley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...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...
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...
Life in Pisa was seldom dull. Sometimes Shelley saw visions. He alarmed one friend by pointing to the sea one day and saying: "There it is again-there!" He said he saw "a naked child," Byron's dead daughter, Allegra, "rise from the sea and clap its hands as in joy. . . ." Once in an absent-minded moment he "glided" stark naked through the room where his wife was entertaining friends...