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Nicolò Giraud (1795-?) is known for being the pederastic beloved of Lord Byron at the age of 15 or 16. He met the poet during the latter's stay in Athens, probably around 1810. He was also the brother-in-law of the Roman painter Giovanni Battista Lusieri, an assistant of Lord Elgin in taking the marble bas-reliefs, the Elgin Marbles, from the Parthenon.
Byron and the boy spent a great deal of time together, riding and swimming at the Pireus every day. In a letter from August 23, 1810 to his good friend John Cam Hobhouse written at the Capuchin monastery of Mendele near Athens where he was residing, Byron states:
But my friend, as you may easily imagine, is Nicolò , who by-the-by, is my Italian master, and we are already very philosophical. I am his 'Padrone' and his 'amico', and the Lord knows what besides. It is about two hours since, that, after informing me he was most desirous to follow him (that is me) over the world, he concluded by telling me it was proper for us not only to live, but 'morire insieme' . The latter I hope to avoid - as much of the former as he pleases.
Byron wrote to a friend that he and the boy were having anal sex (in code, "the Pl. & opt. C." short for "coitum plenum et optabilem"). As a result of their copious couplings, the boy developed an anal rupture, for which Byron consulted an English doctor passing through the area. Giraud was devoted and loyal and nursed Byron through a serious bout of fever, probably a case of malaria.
Byron later saw to Giraud's education by paying for his schooling in a monastery on the island of Malta, and in his will left the boy the sum of 7000 pounds sterling, a fortune to last him a lifetime:
To Nicolò Giraud of Athens, subject of France, but born in Greece, the sum of seven thousand pounds sterling, to be paid from the sale of such parts of Rochdale, Newstead, or elsewhere, as may enable the said Nicolò Giraud (resident at Athens and Malta in the year 1810) to receive the above sum on his attaining the age of twenty-one years.
Notes
- Drummond Bone, The Cambridge Companion to Byron p.111