Any reader of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, or Trollope’s The Way We Are Now, will readily recognize this mood. In August 1816, the year without summer, two friends came to visit Byron at the villa Deodati, on Lake Geneva, where temporarily he made his home.

Slightly older than Byron, Hobhouse and Scrope Davies had first met him at Cambridge and transformed his time there with their warm friendship. The political views of the three men were similar and they were all members of a Whig club which Hobhouse had founded (he had also established an ‘Amiable Society’ but that had to be disbanded because its members were always quarrelling). If politics united them, they were bound together even more by long evenings of drinking and whoring, and it helped that Davies shared Byron’s interest in sport, being a proficient boxer and crack shot. The tone within this group of wild young men about town was one which Byron clearly foundcongenial, although it is now hard to recover. A hint of it perhaps lies in the story he told when in 1819 Murray complained that in the first cantos of Don Juan there were ‘approximations to indelicacy’. The phrase reminded him, he said, of a quarrel at Cambridge between Scrope Davies and George Lamb whose mother, Lady Melbourne, had been notorious in her youth for the number of her lovers. Sir, Lamb had protested to Byron, he ‘hinted at my illegitimacy’, to which Davies had retorted, ‘Yes, I called him a damned adulterous bastard’. As this riposte might suggest, the relationship between the three friends was not always smooth sailing.

Another incident Byron remembered took place at Brighton in 1808 where an ‘infinitely intoxicated’ Davies, after having exchanged angry words, attempted to throttle Hobhouse, who retaliated by stabbing his assailant in the arm. Covered in blood and bubbling with fury, Davies then wanted to either shoot Hobhouse or himself, the latter alternative being one that Byron said he was willing to support as long as his own pistols were notused since, in the case of suicide, they would be forfeited to the Crown. Butwith the dawning light, wiser counsels prevailed and a doctor was called to dress Davies’s wound, so that ‘the quarrel was healed as well as the wound – & we were all friends as for years before and after’.3 The truth of these last words had been demonstrated when Hobhouse and Davies stood by their friend after his wife had left, and there were movements in society to ostracise him. They visited Byron regularly and were the ones who had accompanied him down to Dover when he left England in April, waving goodbye as his ship left the quay.

David Ellis, Byron in Geneva, That Summer of 1816

What was it?

This is how the subject of “Saint Gregory’s Well” comes up in the play (Two Gentlemen of Verona): the moment Proteus sets eyes on Valentine’s beautiful Silvia, he, too, falls in love with her, head over heels. The gullible Valentine does not notice this. He is distracted by a fellow named Thurio, also rich and naive, who is in town — also from Verona — and he, too, is trying to win Silvia’s hand. Worse luck, Thurio has been given the nod by her father, the Duke. Proteus decides to get rid of him.

Proteus is frank with us. He says, “Already I have been false to Valentine, and now I must be unjust to Thurio”. He already has Thurio eating out of his hand. Thurio is even more dense than Valentine: he believes the perfidious Proteus will make a plea on his behalf to Silvia. Deciding that a private planning session with Proteus would be a good idea, he asks Proteus where the two of them should meet. And now we have it: Proteus says “At Saint Gregory’s Well”. Proteus — which is to say the playwright — has picked a terrifying place according to my Venetian’s friend’s grandmother. He has directed his rival to go there, in the dead of night, and with no means to return to the safety of the city.

What place was this Pozzo di San Giorgio?

“In the devastating plague of 1575-76, thousands of the afflicted were brought the the Lazaretto (a hospice cum quarantine outside city walls). Inside the walled and gated compound of the Lazaretto, many thousands would die. For the dead, who required a Christian burial in whatever way it could be arranged in such desperate times, an internment in consecrated ground needed to be close at hand. Bodies were piled in carts and taken to the ever expanding churchyard of the Saint Gregory’s church, just across the road from the gate. There had first been trenches there, but soon great pits were dug, and the carts would simply back up and dump out their grim contents, day after day, month after month. Saint Gregory’s became a Hell on Earth. It was not a fountain, or a water source, but only c churchyard with a massive gaping hole in the ground filled with rotting bodies of the dead.

For many years following, people would avoid this place, especially at night, and it grew into a kind of wilderness where robbers lay in wait on travelers going by land in the direction of Brescia and The Veneto.

This was the Well of Saint Gregory’s. An apt place indeed to meet at night someone you may wish to kill, or merely frighten.

While I never quite learned the precise details, I suspect the name of the street in which I once dwelt in Lisbon, rua do poço dos negros, probably has a similar etymology: a hole in the ground where dead Africans — presumably unchristian — were dumped.

Quotes from Richard Paul Roe, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy.

Her parents were Fumikazu Saeki, a man from a samurai family, and Kikuno Kaneko, the daughter of a peasant, and because they were not officially married, Fumiko could not be registered. Her circumstances as an unregistered child made her “invisible to educational authorities,” and she was not technically allowed to attend school. Some schools eventually permitted her to attend classes, but she was not called in attendance, did not receive report cards, and was ineligible to receive the official certificate of graduation at the end of a class year. Despite these difficulties, including frequent gaps in her attendance, she did very well in school. After Fumiko’s father left, her mother was involved with several other men, but none of these relationships led to better living circumstances and they were nearly always extremely impoverished. Kikuno even considered selling Fumiko to a brothel, claiming that it would be a better life for her, but she abandoned this plan when it turned out that Fumiko would be sent far away to another region of Japan.

Park Yol and Fumiko published two magazines publicizing the problems experienced by Koreans under Japanese rule. During Korean pogroms in the wake of the Kanto earthquake they were arrested and sentenced to death on trumped up charges of intended assassination of the Crown Prince. Their death sentences were commuted by Hirohito to life imprisonment. Fumiko tore up the imperial pardon. ‘You toy with people’s lives, killing or allowing to live as it suits you…. Am I to be disposed of according to your whims?” She died in prison, presumably by suicide, perhaps foreshadowed by her tanka:

One’s limbs
may not be free
and yet—
if one has but the will to die,
death is freedom.

The photo, when first published, occasioned an uproar that this unwanted, unregistered Japanese woman allowed herself to be sexually used by an (inferior) Korean man, thereby dishonoring her nation.

After her death, her body was retrieved by Park’s brother, taken to Korea and buried in the Park family plot. Fumiko was wanted in the end.

Chiefly taken from Hélène Bowen Raddeker, Resistance to Difference:
Sexual Equality and its Law-ful and Out-law (Anarchist) Advocates in Imperial Japan, and Gusts of Popular Feeling.

Stumbled upon while reading Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

A British inspector general of consulates reported in 1937 that consuls in China were likely to burn out sooner than in other countries. In the previous 25 years, he wrote, eight had died in their posts, three had committed suicide, four had retired because of ill health, three had been certified insane and committed to asylums, four had been invalidated out of the service, ten had been compulsorily retired for reasons ranging from “eccentricity” to marriage with a Chinese, nine had resigned, four had breakdowns or serious illnesses that impaired their efficiency, and one had been killed in a motoring accident.

Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, Mark R. Peattie, The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937

難波津に咲くやこの花冬ごもり今は春べと咲くやこの花

Naniwazu ni
saku ya kono hana
fuyugomori
ima wa harube to
saku ya kono hana

At Naniwa Bay,
How these flowers have blossomed!
Imprisoned by winter,
Now, with the coming of spring
How these flowers have blossomed!

From Kokinshu, a 920 AD imperial collection of poems.

Sakuya-hime is the wife of the god Ninigi. She met him on the seashore and they fell in love; Ninigi asked Oho-Yama, the father of Sakuya-hime for her hand in marriage. Oho-Yama proposed his older daughter, Iwa-Naga-hime, instead, but Ninigi had his heart set on Sakuya-hime. Oho-Yama reluctantly agreed and Ninigi and Ko-no-hana married. Because Ninigi refused Iwa-Naga, the rock-princess, human lives are said to be short and fleeting, like the sakura blossoms, instead of enduring and long lasting, like stones.

Shrines have been built on Mount Fuji for Sakuya-hime. It is believed that she will keep Mount Fuji from erupting, but shrines to her at Kirishima have been repeatedly destroyed by volcanic eruptions.

We were in an old Portuguese town, you and I, somewhere in Alentejo, perhaps Elvas, or perhaps somewhere in the Algarve, like Tavira. We explored during the day and at night came to eat at a place where singers performed during dinner. One of them was a legend, a woman in her late 50s, but still attractive, tall, and slim, dark-eyed and dark-haired, a well-know singer, subject of a cult novel and a cult film based upon it. We flirted, she and I, in a kind of knowing resignation for what we knew was inevitable — everyone expected this to happen — while you encouraged us on. When alone together, we were very sad, you and I, it was over between us, and this time, at last, there was no going back. It was better that way and yet still sad.

I woke up, it was still dark, and lay in bed for a long time, basking in the sweet sadness of the dream.

Thus introduced to his first doubts, Roberto was to acquire more the following day. Returning to collect his pack in that wing of the castle where he had slept the first nights with his Monferrini, he had trouble orienting himself along the corridors and courtyards. He was going along a passage when he realized he had taken a wrong turn, and at the end of the hall he saw a mirror dulled with dirt, in which he spied himself. But as he approached, he realized that his self had, certainly, his face, but wore gaudy Spanish style clothing, and his hair was gathered in a little net. Further, this self, at a certain point, no longer faced him, but withdrew to one side.

It was not a mirror. It was in fact a window with dusty panes overlooking an external rampart from which a stairway descended towards the courtyard. So he had seen not himself, but someone very like him, whose trail he had now lost. Naturally, he thought at once of Ferrante. Ferrante had followed him to Casale, or had preceded him, and perhaps belonged to another company of the regiment, or to one of the French regiments, and while Roberto was risking his life at the outwork, the other was reaping God knows what advantages from the war.

Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before

There is something which I wish you to take into consideration, it is that Mata Hari and Madame Zelle MacLeod are two completely different women.  Today, because of the war, I am obliged to live under and to sign the name of Zelle, but this woman is unknown to the public.  I consider myself to be Mata Hari. For 12 years,  I have lived under this name. I am known in all the  countries and I have connections everywhere.  That which is permitted to Mata  Hari—dancer—is certainly not permitted to  Madame Zelle MacLeod.  That which happens to Mata Hari, they are the  events which do not happen to Madame Zelle. The  people who address one do not address the other. 

Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, in prison, to her captor, accuser, and interrogator

Pat Shipman, Femme Fatale: A New Biography of Mata Hari

A European, no matter where he  may have been born, becomes an entirely different creature in the Indies than he  would have been had he stayed home… The European man who goes to the Indies removes his old self, as it were, in order to assume a new self.

W. L. Ritter, Indische Letteren, 1856