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

‘Boswellised’ as Byron would call it, though none had Boswell’s humour, humanity or genius. Seeing Byron embarking, Galt noticed that His Lordship manifested more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion. His dress was that of a metropolitan beau, with its own peculiarity of style, the physiognomy prepossessing and intelligent but with a terrible scowl. Byron, the embodiment of a poet, stood alone at the ship’s rails, leaned on the mizzen shrouds, seeming to study the gloomy rocks in the distance. Then after three days as his humour bettered he provided pistols, encouraging his fellow passengers and Galt to shoot at bottle tops as he uncorked vast quantities of champagne ‘in the finest condition’.
    As his horizons widened, so did his sense of entitlement. Preparing for an audience with the King of Sardinia, he purchased a most superb uniform of court dress, but had to settle for the sight of the royal family in a box at the opera, to which the British Minister, a Mr Hill, had brought him. Again, before arriving at Malta, he had a message sent to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball, believing that due to his rank he would be welcomed by a royal salute of guns. As the other passengers disembarked, Hobby and Byron waited on board and by dusk, when no such honour was forthcoming, they had to be rowed to the port, somewhat dejected and crestfallen.
    They were eventually received by the Governor, who arranged lodgings for them in a house belonging to a Dr Moncrieff, and were soon welcomed as gallants in English social circles. Determined to have some knowledge of Arabic for their ongoing journey, Byron bought an Arabic grammar book and engaged a tutor to give him lessons, his studies, however, halted by the emergence of ‘absurd womankind’. A ravishing beauty with translucent skin, golden hair and brilliant blue eyes, such was his new-found ‘Calypso’ in the person of the 26-year-old Mrs Constance Smith. Daughter of an Austrian baron, ‘select’ friend of the Queen of Naples and somewhat tepid wife of John Spencer Smith, Constance was a woman ‘touched with adventure’ and her story could easily have emanated from the pen of Lord Byron. In 1806 she had been arrested by the Napoleonic government in Venice and while being conveyed under heavy guard to a prison at Valenciennes in France, she was dramatically rescued by a Sicilian marquis who was in love with her and who had conceived this daredevil ingenious scheme. They travelled incognito from inn to inn, Constance in the disguise of a page boy, midnight escapades through windows, until finally the marquis secured a boat to ferry her across Lake Garda and thereafter to her family in Graz. Byron and she became inseparable and writing to his mother, towards whom he had become more cordial, he extolled the ‘extraordinary’ and ‘eccentric’ Constance. They were, he believed, on the brink of elopement to the Friuli Mountains, north of Venice, except that Constance was expected, as mother of two, to join her husband in England. Before their parting, Constance had relieved him of his large yellow diamond ring. Before setting sail, Byron challenged a Captain Cary to a duel, believing he had impeached his inamorata’s honour, but luckily for him, Hobhouse had huddled him onto a brig-of-war bound for Patras in Greece. Constance was poeticised as ‘Sweet Florence’ and in Childe Harold would be accorded the enchantments of ‘Calypso’, but after three weeks the ‘everlasting passion’ had faded, the spell was broken and Byron’s attachments would be transferred to beautiful young men ‘with all the Turkish vices’.
    Byron’s love at that time, whether towards young men or women, was always high-flown, bathed in romantic, glowing and sometimes furtive light and always ending in ennui with his departure towards new latitudes and new conquests.
    Albania,