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the horsewhip. Mind you, our fair student of Tasso may— may succeed...” He laughed. “There is a tide in the affairs of women which, taken at the flood, leads God knows where...”
    The topic suddenly lost interest for him. Handing the glasses back to me, he said of them with a haughty touch, “They’re well enough. I just wish they spied out something more entertaining than water and doctors. Well, sir, since I presume you know my name, perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me yours—and your business here.”
    “My name is Joseph Bodenland, Lord Byron, and I am from Texas, in America, the Lone Star State. As for my business—well, it is of a private nature, and has to do with Mrs.—I mean, with Mary Godwin.”
    He smiled. “I had observed that you were not a damned Englisher. As long as you are not from London, Mr. Bodenland, like all the rest of the tedious world—and as long as your business is not with me, and mercifully private, to boot—perhaps you will honor me by joining me in a glass of claret. We can always shoot each other later, if needs be.”
    “I hope not, as long as the rain holds off.”
    “You will find, if you are long here, that, in this terrible spot, Mr. Bodenland, the rain holds up, but seldom off. Every day contains more weather than a week in Scotland, and weeks in Scotland can drag on for centuries, believe me! Come!”
    As if in support of his wild statement, rain began to fall heavily. “The sky squelches like a grouse-moor! Let’s get in!” he said, limping rapidly ahead of me.
    We went into his villa, I in sheer delight and excitement and, I think, he in some relief at having someone new to talk to. What a spellbinder he was! We sat and drank before a smoldering fire while we conversed. I have tried to convey a pale memory of our meeting, but further than that I cannot go. The range of his talk was beyond me—even when not particularly profound, it was salted with allusions, and the connections he drew between things I had hitherto regarded as unconnected were startling. Then, though he boasted of this and that, it was with an underlying modesty which often spilled over into self-mockery. I was at a temporal disadvantage, for some things to which he made reference were unknown to me.
    At least I gathered a few facts, which drifted down like leaves amid the mellow August of his talk. He lived in the Villa Diodati with his doctor, “Polly,” the Italian, Polidori, and his retinue. The Shelley manage was established close by—“Just a grape’s stamp across the vineyard,” as he put it—in a property called Campagne Chapuis: the Villa Chapuis, as I was later to hear it called, more grandly. “My fellow reprobate and exile” (that was how he designated Shelley) was established with two young women, Mary Godwin and her half sister, Claire Claremont. Byron raised both his eyebrow and his glass when referring to Claire Claremont.
    Prompted by his remark, I recalled that Byron was now in exile. There had been a scandal in London—but scandals gathered as naturally round Byron as clouds round Mont Blanc. He had left England in disgust.
    Beneath his glass lay a sheet of paper, sopping up wine. I thought to myself, if I could only get that back to 2020, how much it would be worth! And I asked him if he found his present abode conducive to the writing of poetry.
    “This is my present abode,” he said, tapping his head. “How much longer I shall stay in it and not go out of it, who knows! There seems to be some poetry rattling about in there, rather as air rattles about in the bowels, but to get it out with a proper report—that’s the trick! The great John Milton, that blind justifier of God to man, stayed under this very roof once. Look what it did to him— Paradise Regained ! The greatest error in English letters, outside of the birth of Southey. But I have news today that Southey is sick. Tell me something that cheered you recently, Mr. Bodenland. We don’t have to