But he had to pay it. The papal Court decreed a separation, fixing Madame Guiccioli's allowance at £200 a year, but, at the same time, ordained with that indifference to liberty and justice which distinguishes Churches whenever they attain temporal power, that the wife whose injuries it was professing to redress, should not be allowed to live with her lover, but must either reside in the house of her parents or get her to a nunnery. She went on July 16 to a villa about fifteen miles from Ravenna. Byron visited her there twice a month, but continued to occupy his hired apartment in her husband's house--a fact which by itself sufficiently justifies his reiterated protests that the manners and customs of Italy are beyond the comprehension of the English. A letter to Moore dated August 31 gives us his own view of his proceedings as well as of the relations which he conceives to subsist between genius and disorder: "I verily believe that nor you nor any man of poetical temperament can avoid a strong passion of some kind. It is the poetry of life. What should I have known or written had I been a quiet mercantile politician or a lord-in-waiting? A man must travel and turmoil, or there is no existence. Besides, I only meant to be a Cavalier Servente, and had no idea it would turn out a romance in the Anglo fashion." So that we find Byron launched yet again on a new way of life--the last before his final and famous transference of his energies from love to revolutionary politics. Evidently it was a relief to him to find himself a lover instead of a cavaliere servente--even at the risk of having a dagger planted, on some dark night, between his shoulder blades. Evidently, too, he loved "the lady whom I serve" better than he had loved her at the beginning of the liaison, and better than he was to love her towards the end of it. But, even so, it was no absorbing love that possessed him--no love that diverted his thoughts from morbid introspection, or made him feel that, merely by loving, he had fulfilled his destiny and played a worthy part in life. On the contrary he could write in the Diary which he then kept for six weeks or so: "I go to my bed with a heaviness of heart at having lived so long, and to so little purpose;" and he could compose the well-known epigram: _Through life's road, so dim and dirty, I have dragged to three-and-thirty. What have these years left to me? Nothing--except thirty-three._ Nationalism, movements, risings, revolutions, and the rest of it might well seem a welcome excitement to a man so _blasé_ and so inured to sensations that love, though he vowed that he "loved entirely" could not lift him to a more exalted frame of mind than that; and his attachment to Madame Guiccioli may well have gained an element of permanence from the fact that she belonged to a family of conspirators in league against priests and kings. CHAPTER XXVIII