[Sidenote: Zulietta, Margherita Cogni.] Lord Byron also gave up his life to paid Venuses: he filled the Mocenigo Palace with those Venetian beauties, who had " taken refuge," according to him, "under the _fazzioli._" Sometimes, perturbed by a feeling of shame, he fled, and spent the night on the water in his gondola. He had, as his favourite sultana, Margherita Cogni, surnamed, from her husband's condition, the Fornarina[130]: "Very dark, tall"--it is Lord Byron who speaks--"the Venetian face, very fine black eyes. She was two-and-twenty years old.... "In the autumn, one day, going to the Lido... we were overtaken by a heavy squall. . . . . . . ....On our return, after a tight struggle, I found Margarita on the open steps of the Mocenigo Palace, on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair, which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows and breast. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her hair and dress about her thin tall figure, and the lightning flashing round her, and the waves rolling at her feet, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the sybil of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment except ourselves. On seeing me safe, she did not wait to greet me.... but calling out to me, '_Ah! can' della Madonna, ne este il tempo per andar' al' Lido!_--Ah! dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to the Lido?' ran into the house," etc. In these two stories of Rousseau and Byron, one feels the difference in social position, character and education between the two men. Through the charm of the style of the author of the _Confessions_ peeps something vulgar, cynical, in bad form, in bad taste; the obscenity of expression peculiar to that period still further spoils the picture. Zulietta is superior to her lover in elevation of feeling and in habitual elegance: it is almost a fine lady smitten with the puny secretary of a paltry ambassador[131]. The same inferiority appears again when Rousseau arranges to bring up, with his friend Carrio, at their common expense, a little girl of eleven years whose favours, or rather whose tears, they were to share. Lord Byron bears himself differently: he shines forth with the manners and the fatuousness of the aristocracy; a peer of Great Britain, playing with the woman of the people whom he has seduced, he raises her to himself by his caresses and the magic of his talent Byron arrived in Venice rich and famous: Rousseau landed there poor and unknown; everybody knows the palace that blabbed the errors of the noble heir of the English commodore[132]: no _cicerone_ could point out to you the house in which the plebeian son of the humble clock-maker of Geneva hid his pleasures. Rousseau does not even speak of Venice; he seems to have lived in it without seeing it: Byron has sung it admirably[133].