The Countess, indeed, in supplying Moore with biographical material, showed herself at her wit's end to devise excuses for Byron's delay, not too wounding to her vanity; and Shelley, at the time, showed a tendency to reconsider his estimate of their relations: "La Guiccioli," he wrote in October, "is a very pretty, sentimental, innocent Italian, who has sacrificed an immense fortune for the sake of Lord Byron, and who, if I know anything of my friend, of her, and of human nature, will hereafter have plenty of leisure and opportunity to repent her rashness." It was a harsh judgment, based in part, no doubt, on what Shelley had been told of Byron's treatment of Miss Clairmont; but it indicated a real danger-spot. Byron had ceased to love passionately, if he had ever done so, and he did not love blindly. We need not, indeed, accept Miss Clairmont's statement that, at the end, he was "sick to death of Madame Guiccioli," and that it was chiefly for the purpose of escaping from her that he joined the Greek insurgents. That utterance was the voice of a jealous woman endeavouring to appease her own affronted pride. But though there was no question of Byron's giving Madame Guiccioli a rival of her own sex, she was now destined to encounter the rivalry, hardly less serious, of his political interests and ambitions. All through the period of his residence at Ravenna things had been working towards that conclusion; and the circumstances of the removal showed how near they had now got to it. "We were divided in choice," Byron wrote to Moore, "between Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visitors; for which reason, after writing for some information about houses, upon hearing that there was a colony of English all over the cantons of Geneva, &c., I immediately gave up the thought, and persuaded the Gambas to do the same." Which is true enough as far as it goes, but is something less than the whole truth, since it omits to mention the increasing seriousness in Byron's character, and his new tendency to transfer the bitterness of his indignation from the authors of his own wrongs to the political tyrants of the political school of Metternich.