Describing Hugh Person's courtship of Armande, the narrators of VN's novel Transparent Things (1972) mention the battlements of Armande's Dragon (as they call Drakonita, a skiing resort near Witt):
Friday morning. A quick Coke. A belch. A hurried shave. He put on his ordinary clothes, throwing in the turtleneck for style. Last interview with the mirror. He plucked a black hair out of a red nostril.
The first disappointment of the day awaited him on the stroke of seven at their rendezvous (the post-office square), where he found her attended by three young athletes, Jack, Jake, and Jacques, whose copper faces he had seen grinning around her in one of the latest photographs of the fourth album. Upon noticing the sullen way his Adam's apple kept working she gaily suggested that perhaps he did not care to join them after all "because we want to walk up to the only cable car that works in summer and that's quite a climb if you're not used to it." White-toothed Jacques, half-embracing the pert maiden, remarked confidentially that monsieur should change into sturdier brogues, but Hugh retorted that in the States one hiked in any old pair of shoes, even sneakers. "We hoped," said Armande, "we might induce you to learn skiing: we keep all the gear up there, with the fellow who runs the place, and he's sure to find something for you. You'll be making tempo turns in five lessons. Won't you, Percy? I think you should also need a parka, it may be summer here, at two thousand feet, but you'll find polar conditions at over nine thousand." "The liittle one is right," said Jacques with feigned admiration, patting her on the shoulder. "It's a forty-minute saunter," said one of the twins. "Limbers you up for the slopes.'"
It soon transpired that Hugh would not be able to keep up with them and reach the four-thousand-foot mark to catch the gondola )ust north of Witt. The promised "stroll" proved to be a horrible hike, worse than anything he had experienced on school picnics in Vermont or New Hampshire. The trail consisted of very steep ups and very slippery downs, and gigantic ups again, along the side of the next mountain, and was full of old ruts, rocks, and roots. He labored, hot, wretched Hugh, behind Armande's blond bun, while she lightly followed light Jacques. The English twins made up the rear guard. Possibly, had the pace been a little more leisurely, Hugh might have managed that simple climb, but his heartless and mindless companions swung on without mercy, practically bounding up the steep bits and zestfully sliding down the declivities, which Hugh negotiated with outspread arms, in an attitude of entreaty. He refused to borrow the stick he was offered, but finally, after twenty minutes of torment, pleaded for a short breathing spell. To his dismay not Armande but Jack and Jake stayed with him as he sat on a stone, bending his head and panting, a pearl of sweat hanging from his pointed nose. They were taciturn twins and now merely exchanged silent glances as they stood a little above him on the trail, arms akimbo. He felt their sympathy ebbing and begged them to continue on their way, he would follow shortly. When they had gone he waited a little and then limped back to the village. At one spot between two forested stretches he rested again, this time on an open bluff where a bench, eyeless but eager, faced an admirable view. As he sat there smoking, he noticed his party very high above him, blue, gray, pink, red, waving to him from a cliff. He waved back and resumed his gloomy retreat.
But Hugh Person refused to give up. Mightily shod, alpenstocked, munching gum, he again accompanied them next morning. He begged them to let him set his own pace, without waiting for him anywhere, and he would have reached the cableway had he not lost his bearings and ended up in a brambly burn at the end of a logging road. Another attempt a day or two later was more successful. He almost reached timberline – but there the weather changed, a damp fog enveloped him, and he spent a couple of hours shivering all alone in a smelly shippon, waiting for the whirling mists to uncover the sun once more.
Another time he volunteered to carry after her a pair of new skis she had just acquired – weird-looking, reptile-green things made of metal and fiberglass. Their elaborate bindings looked like first cousins of orthopЙdie devices meant to help a cripple to walk. He was allowed to shoulder those precious skis, which at first felt miraculously light but soon grew as heavy as great slabs of malachite, under which he staggered in Armande's wake like a clown helping to change properties in a circus arena. His load was snatched from him as soon as he sat down for a rest. He was offered a paper bag (four small oranges) in exchange but he pushed it away without looking.
Our Person was obstinate and monstrously in love. A fairy-tale element seemed to imbue with its Gothic rose water all attempts to scale the battlements of her Dragon. Next week he made it and thereafter established himself as less of a nuisance. (Chapter 14)
At the beginning of his poem On Leaving Newstead Abbey (1803) Byron mentions "thy battlements, Newstead:"
Why dost thou build the hall, Son of the winged days? Thou lookest
from thy tower to-day: yet a few years, and the blast of the desart
comes: it howls in thy empty court.-OSSIAN.
I.
Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle:
Thou, the hall of my Fathers, art gone to decay;
In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle
Have choak'd up the rose, which late bloom'd in the way.
2.
Of the mail-cover'd Barons, who, proudly, to battle,
Led their vassals from Europe to Palestine's plain,
The escutcheon and shield, which with ev'ry blast rattle,
Are the only sad vestiges now that remain.
3.
No more doth old Robert, with harp-stringing numbers,
Raise a flame, in the breast, for the war-laurell'd wreath;
Near Askalon's towers, John of Horistan slumbers,
Unnerv'd is the hand of his minstrel, by death.
4.
Paul and Hubert too sleep in the valley of Cressy;
For the safety of Edward and England they fell:
My Fathers! the tears of your country redress ye:
How you fought! how you died! still her annals can tell.
5.
On Marston, with Rupert, 'gainst traitors contending,
Four brothers enrich'd, with their blood, the bleak field;
For the rights of a monarch their country defending,
Till death their attachment to royalty seal'd.
6.
Shades of heroes, farewell! your descendant departing
From the seat of his ancestors, bids you adieu!
Abroad, or at home, your remembrance imparting
New courage, he'll think upon glory and you.
7.
Though a tear dim his eye at this sad separation,
'Tis nature, not fear, that excites his regret;
Far distant he goes, with the same emulation,
The fame of his Fathers he ne'er can forget.
8.
That fame, and that memory, still will he cherish;
He vows that he ne'er will disgrace your renown:
Like you will he live, or like you will he perish;
When decay'd, may he mingle his dust with your own!
George Gordon, Lord Byron's estate at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire was the home of the Byron family for hundreds of years. It was originally built as a monastery in Sherwood Forest in the 1170s. Newstead then ceased to be an abbey in 1539 during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monastaries. In 1540 Newstead Abbey was then granted to "Sir John Byron the Little, with the great beard". Sir John's portrait is still hanging at Newstead.
When Byron's great uncle "Wicked" Lord Byron died, George Gordon Byron (as he was born) inherited the title and the substantial estate as the sixth Baron Byron.
The buildings were grand and the estate opulent, but it decayed substantially during Byron's life. The property was rented out to others through much of Byron's ownership and at other times he tried to sell it. The value and earnings of Newstead Abbey certainly funded much of Byron's travels and his extravangant lifestyle.
Armande believes that Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu:
In a diary he kept in fits and starts Hugh wrote that night in Versex:
"Spoke to a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a romantic tumult never felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule aurait juré avec la dernière syllabe de mon prénom. I believe Byron uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very noble Oriental milieu. Charmingly sophisticated, yet marvelously naive. Chalet above Witt built by father. If you find yourself in those parages. Wished to know if I liked my job. My job! I replied: "Ask me what I can do, not what I do, lovely girl, lovely wake of the sun through semitransparent black fabric. I can commit to memory a whole page of the directory in three minutes flat but am incapable of remembering my own telephone number. I can compose patches of poetry as strange and new as you are, or as anything a person may write three hundred years hence, but I have never published one scrap of verse except some juvenile nonsense at college. I have evolved on the playing courts of my father's school a devastating return of service - a cut clinging drive - but am out of breath after one game. Using ink and aquarelle I can paint a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence with all the mountains of paradise reflected therein, but am unable to draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the blazing windows of a villa by Plam. I have taught French in American schools but have never been able to get rid of my mother's Canadian accent, though I hear it clearly when I whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Déjanire that I may mount sur mon bûcher. I can levitate one inch high and keep it up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree. I possess a doctor's degree in philosophy, but have no German. I have fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In short I am an all-round genius.' By a coincidence worthy of that other genius, his stepdaughter had given her the book she was reading. Julia Moore has no doubt forgotten that I possessed her a couple of years ago. Both mother and daughter are intense travelers. They have visited Cuba and China, and such-like dreary, primitive spots, and speak with fond criticism of the many charming and odd people they made friends with there. Parlez-moi de son stepfather. Is he très fasciste? Could not understand why I called Mrs. R.'s left-wingism a commonplace bourgeois vogue. Mais au contraire, she and her daughter adore radicals! Well, I said, Mr. R., lui, is immune to politics. My darling thought that was the trouble with him. Toffee-cream neck with a tiny gold cross and a grain de beauté. Slender, athletic, lethal!" (Chapter 9)
In his Universitetskaya poema ("The University Poem," 1927) VN mentions Bayron khromonogiy (lame Byron), a Cambridge student who swam across the Hellespont to lose some weight:
А жил я в комнате старинной,
но в тишине её пустынной
тенями мало дорожил.
Держа московского медведя,
боксёров жалуя и бредя
красой Италии, тут жил
студентом Байрон хромоногий.
Я вспоминал его тревоги,--
как Геллеспонт он переплыл,
чтоб похудеть. Но я остыл
к его твореньям... Да простится
неромантичности моей,--
мне розы мраморные Китса
всех бутафорских бурь милей.
I lived within an antique chamber,
but, inside its desert silence,
I hardly savoured the shades’ presence.
Clutching his bear from Muscovy,
esteemed the boxer’s fate,
of Italic beauty dreaming
lame Byron passed his student days.
I remembered his distress –
his swim across the Hellespont
to lose some weight.
But I have cooled toward his creations …
so do forgive my unromantic side –
to me the marble roses of Keats
have more charm than all those stagey storms. (10)