The moment he was well, he was seen again at the Venetian receptions, which he had so long forsaken. Thus he met the beauty of the season, a lovely blonde, seventeen years of age, just married to a noble greybeard, the Count Guiccioli. The Pilgrim admired the lady’s figure, her bust and arms in particular. The very first day he slipped into her hand, as he took leave, a note which she adroitly concealed. It was an assignation. She came. He who said he adored her was a great Poet, young, handsome, highly born, and rich. Though surrounded by all that makes life desirable, she instantly gave herself to him without a struggle.
A few days later, the Count took his wife to Ravenna, and Teresa begged Byron to go too. “The charmer forgets that a man may be whistled anywhere _before_ but that _after_—a journey in an Italian June is a conscription, and therefore she should have been less liberal in Venice, or less exigent at Ravenna.” The notion of romantic and constant love was odious to him. He did not budge, and was rather proud of his strength of mind.
From Ravenna she wrote again that she was very ill, and, where an appeal to love had failed, an appeal to pity succeeded. Don Juan set off, but not without stopping at Ferrara and other towns on the way, to sample the local beauties. Although making a show of indifference and even of boredom, he was very glad to join Teresa. Intelligent women such as Lady Byron or Claire got on his nerves: he had too great a contempt for the sex to ask from a mistress intellectual companionship. The bakers’ wives and other wantons of Venice were of a species too far below him. But the Countess Guiccioli united a restful and affectionate stupidity with the elegance of a well-born woman. She kept and held without too much trouble this Everlasting Rover. Don Juan now played the part of a faithful and devoted sick-nurse. “Were I to lose her,” he wrote, “I should lose a being who has run great risks for my sake, and whom I have every reason to love—but I must not think this possible. I do not know what I _should_ do were she to die, but I ought to blow my brains out, and I hope that I should.”
When his conquering Conquest had to leave Ravenna for Bologna, he followed. He had become the classic _cicesbeo_: “But I can’t say I don’t feel the degradation of it. Better to be an unskilful Planter, an awkward settler, better to be a hunter, or anything, than a flatterer of fiddlers and fan carrier of a woman . . . and now I am _cavalier’ sirvente_! By the holy! It’s a strange sensation.”