Byron in Love by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online

masking the fact that political idealism does not tally with the horror of war. As he saw it, there were no winners, all were eventual victims and this conviction would be tellingly rendered both in Childe Harold and Don Juan , the foe, the victim and the fond ally fighting for all but fighting in vain, corpses to feed the ravens and fertilise the fields.
    His letters were also filled with the observations and playfulness of a young man adapting himself to the habits of another country–‘I loves oranges, and talks bad Latin to the monks…and I goes into society (with my pocket pistols), and I swims in the Tagus…and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhoea and bites from the mosquitoes,’ he wrote to his friend Francis Hodgson. Hobhouse and he, being of such contrasting dispositions, saw things differently, Hobhouse disgusted by lasciviousness and Byron enthralled by it. For Hobhouse, the women, nasty and frightful, were ‘the ugliest race of animals’, whereas for Byron, the Portuguese and Spanish belles, with their glossy black hair and large black eyes, their gift of intrigue, were irresistible, replacing the ‘Lancashire witches’ in his affections.
    So the party of men, Rushton, Fletcher, old Joe Murray, Hobby and Byron, travelled and bickered, searched for rooms in inns and in the headquarters of the defeated royalist militia. Byron and Hobhouse would leave their cards with various ambassadors and consuls, sometimes to no avail, and arriving in Seville they were obliged to take lodgings with the two unmarried Beltram sisters. They went ‘supperless and dinnerless’ as Hobhouse noted and even worse, were crammed into one little bedroom, not at all the salubrious setting that Byron would have liked. But very soon the charms of the sisters compensated, especially Donna Josepha, the elder, who became his ‘preceptress’ in love, a passion they furthered with the aid of a dictionary.
    In the Governor’s box at a bullfight in Cadiz, Byron was both captivated and repelled, the savagery, the ceremony, the blood-lust of the spectators, more shocking than the disembowelling of man or beast, the effect on him so profound that he devoted eleven stanzas of Childe Harold to this Sabbath death. In the Cathedral he vented his wonted repugnance for art, hating the works of Velázquez and Murillo, blaspheming all art, unless it reminded him of something, and feeling as if he might spit on the representations of saints. But Donna Josepha had furnished him with sweet moments and sweet memories and on his departure for Cadiz, she had cut off a lock of her hair, three feet in length, which he sent to his mother to be ‘retained’ until he returned home, though perversely vowing that he would never return to England again.
    His ambiguity about his native land revealed itself at every twist and turn and standing on the quayside with Hobby, witnessing the celebratory landing of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Lord Wellington, Byron railed at the sight of Wellesley charioteering over the French flag, because Napoleon was and would remain Byron’s god. He held with Charles Fox’s creed that the fall of the Bastille was the greatest and best event in the history of the world.
    Poised for adventures in the East and the Socratic pleasures, intending to ‘cull as many hyacinths as possible’, he sent Joe Murray home, along with Rushton, asking his mother to show the lad kindness, saying he would have taken him but that young boys were not safe among the Turks.
    On the packet Townshend to Malta in August, Byron caught the attentions of John Galt, a Scotsman who having failed as entrepreneur and smuggler, had taken up the trade of literature and became one of the many who attached themselves to Byron, studied his every mood and wrote down his Quixotic conversation in order to preserve him in their own distinctive aspic.