Titans of History полностью

“Mad, bad and dangerous to know,” as Lady Caroline Lamb famously described him, the poet had no qualms about scandalizing society. “It may be now and then voluptuous—I can’t help that” was Byron’s insouciant response to claims that Don Juan was a “eulogy of vice.” Byron, living (by his own admission) in “an abyss of sensuality,” was infamous for his aura of tortured depravity and for the drinking orgies held with his friends, garbed in monks’ habits, amid the Gothic ruins of Newstead Abbey. “There never existed a more worthless set,” was the verdict of the war hero the duke of Wellington.

A domineering mother and a childhood of sexual abuse by his nurse May Gray had thwarted his capacity for relationships; he constantly thirsted for new sensations and new lovers, whether male or female. He fell passionately in love and became equally swiftly disillusioned. Augusta Leigh, whose own daughter was probably Byron’s, was the great love of his life, but she was also his half-sister. To all other women he could be monstrously cruel. He had an anguished relationship with his great friend Shelley’s sister-in-law, Claire Clairmont, whom he made pregnant and then rejected. The much-loved daughter of this affair Byron placed in an Italian convent, where she died at age five. Byron’s marriage to the humorless Annabella Milbanke was a disaster. It broke down irretrievably after less than a year amid talk of Byron’s marital violence, incestuous relationships and bisexuality—rumors so scandalous that they forced him in 1816 to leave England and the baby daughter of this marriage, Augusta Ada, never to return.

In Venice Byron swam home at night along the Grand Canal, pushing a board with a candle on it to light his way. The man who had kept a bear in his rooms at Cambridge lived in a palazzo that was a veritable menagerie. Shelley once listed the members of the household: “ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon … [and] I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens and an Egyptian crane.”

Visitors flocked to see the poet. Some found him grown fat and gray, but his vigor was restored by a passionate affair with a radical young Italian countess. Restless once again, Byron launched himself into yet another campaign: the fight for Greek independence from the Turks. He poured his money and his soul into the project. But at Missolonghi in Greece, weakened by a life of dissipation and excess, Byron caught a fever and died. Such was the end, at the age of just thirty-six, of the poet whose magnificent defiance of petty convention had outraged and enraptured Europe for a generation.

BALZAC

1799–1850

I find people very impertinent when they say I am deep and then try to get to know me in five minutes. Between you and me, I am not deep but very wide, and it takes time to walk around me.

Balzac, in a letter to Countess Maffei (1837)

Honoré de Balzac was one of the most prolific of literary giants. His masterpiece, La Comédie humaine, is made up of nearly 100 works which contain more than 2000 characters and together create an alternative reality that extends from Paris to the provincial backwaters of France. Balzac’s works transformed the novel into a great art form capable of representing life in all its detail and color, so paving the way for the ambitious works of writers such as Proust and Zola. Balzac, the plump, amiable, workaholic genius, was in many respects the father of the modern novel.

As the unremarkable child of a beautiful but unpleasant mother and a self-indulgent father, Balzac did not seem marked for greatness. After school he worked as a legal clerk, but this did not excite a young man with grand ambition but little direction in which to channel it, and around the age of nineteen he decided to become a writer. He went to Paris, determined to adopt a lifestyle appropriate to his new calling. He ran up great debts cultivating the image of a literary man about town, frequently dodging his creditors and flirting with bankruptcy.

One important thing was lacking: success. Balzac’s first work, Cromwell, a verse tragedy about the leader of the English Commonwealth, was a failure that made his family despair. By 1822 he had written several more, equally unsuccessful, works. His output throughout the 1820s consisted of slushy or sensational potboilers and historical romances in the style of Sir Walter Scott. Some were published under pseudonyms, others under no name at all. None gave any indication that Balzac was about to become a literary titan.