1816: the Grandest Tour

Switzerland: Chapter 6

That afternoon at Villa Diodati the wine was also flowing freely. While the unfortunate Polidori was confined to his bed upstairs, the rest of the party relaxed in the sitting room over several bottles of an Italian red vintage. Lord Byron's early travels, owing to Napoleon's wars, had taken him not through France but to the Mediterranean by sea. Consequently his Italian and Latin were superior to his French, and this preference extended to fruits of the vine. As he, Shelley, George, and Claire stretched out on the divans, swirling and sipping from their glasses, Mary, Robert, Hugh, and Tobias sat around a card table for a game of whist.

The talk was nothing unusual to begin with. Mary's card game was no barrier to her involvement in the conversation, and it ranged far and wide in the first hour: from the character of Geneva and its people, to a comparison of many European countries with England, and so on. After a certain time it was clear, to the more perceptive guests, that 'LB' was tiring of these conventional topics. They knew it was only a matter of time before the Byronic urge to shock and scandalize would emerge.

"Do you not think that women differ from country to country?" Byron said to Shelley, breaking a short silence.

"Certainly they do," Shelley answered, "just as the men."

Byron chuckled roguishly at his friend.

"You misprise me," he said. "I mean as lovers, dear boy."

"I thought as much," Shelley said with a knowing smile. "And I would have to give the same answer, though speaking from, er, limited experience."

George saw Shelley dart a brief glance at Mary, who was looking at her cards.

"But I should think you would know better than I, or any of us," Shelley went on with the same indulgent look. "I doubt anyone else here has roamed as far afield."

"I suppose not!" said Byron. "Our charming guests claim this is their first time out of Britain, and we have no cause to doubt them."

Everyone laughed, including George, who hoped his party wasn't the butt of some obscure joke. But the poet was warming to a different theme.

"No, women are everywhere different – and everywhere the same..." he said with a heroic and world-weary sigh.

Claire, his most devoted listener, gave a hardly perceptible, echoing sigh.

"The Turks much prefer boys to women, you know," he said, seeming to relish catching the others off-guard. "And having toured Constantinople myself, I think they may have a point."

George found the statement a little odd, but only Tobias looked up in true, undisguised horror. It was enough for Byron, who pivoted again.

"I had a mistress there for a while. She was quite young, bore me two bastards."

Byron's eyes flitted up to make sure his audience was rapt in attention.

"A darling little thing she was," he said. "But she was unfaithful – some friends of mine discovered it."

Mary's face was half skepticism, half morbid interest.

"And you know what they do to unfaithful women in Constantinople? Why, there's nothing better. They sewed her up a burlap sack and tossed her in the Bosporus."

Silence cut through the room like a chill wind. It was so complete that even Robert looked up from the card table. Shelley at last spoke up to voice everyone's thought:

"That seems rather... harsh. For a young mother," he said.

"It may seem so, it may indeed," said Byron, with the equanimity of someone discussing the finer points of landscape gardening. "But I say she most assuredly deserved her fate. She was of mean birth."