"Margarita threw back her veil, and replied in very explicit Venetian: '_You_ are _not_ his _wife_: _I_ am _not_ his _wife_: _you_ are his _Donna_ and _I_ am his _Donna_; _your_ husband is a cuckold, and _mine_ is another. For the rest what right have you to reproach me? if he prefers what is mine to what is yours, is it my fault? if you wish to secure him, tie him to your petticoat-string; but do not think to speak to me without a reply because you happen to be richer than I am.' Having delivered this pretty piece of eloquence (which I relate as it was translated to me by a bye-stander), she went on her way, leaving a numerous audience with Madame Segati, to ponder at her leisure on the dialogue between them." And Byron goes on to tell other stories of Margarita's jealousy, relating that "she had inordinate self-love, and was not tolerant of other women ... so that, I being at the time somewhat promiscuous, there was great confusion and demolition of head-dresses and handkerchiefs; and sometimes my servants, in 'redding' the fray between her and other feminine persons, received more knocks than acknowledgments for their peaceful endeavours." And then follows the story of Margarita's flight from her husband's house to Byron's palace, and her husband's application to the police to restore her to him, and her second desertion of "that consumptive cuckold," as she styled him in open court, and her final success in settling herself as a fixture in Byron's establishment, without his formal consent, but with his indolent acquiescence. She became his housekeeper, with the result that "the expenses were reduced to less than half, and everybody did their duty better." But she also had an ungovernable temper, suppressed all letters in a feminine handwriting, threatened violence with a table-knife, and had to be disarmed by Fletcher; so that Byron at last tired of her and told her to go. She then went quietly downstairs and threw herself into the canal, but was fished out, brought to with restoratives, and sent away a second time. "And this," Byron concludes, "is the story of Margarita Cogni, as far as it belongs to me." Like the story of Marianna Segati, it is hardly a story at all; and there seem to have been several other stories very much like it running concurrently with it. So, at all events, Byron told Augusta, who passed the news on to Hodgson, saying that her brother had written "on the old subject very uncomfortably, and on his present pursuits which are what one would dread and expect; a string of low attachments." And if a picture of the life, drawn by an eye-witness, be desired, one has only to turn to Shelley's letter on the subject to Thomas Love Peacock. The subject of Shelley's comments is the point of view and "tone of mind" of certain passages in "Childe Harold." He finds here "a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly," and he continues: