From the time he settled in at the villa Diodati, Byron had been expecting John Cam Hobhouse, with whom he had always intended to move on to Italy. There had been numerous delays on Hobhouse's side but he eventually appeared on 26 August, and not alone, but with another close friend of Byron's, Scrope Berdmore Davies. The newcomers were just in time to meet Shelley, who was to leave for England three days later, on the morning of the 29th. The four men spent the intervening evenings together, with Claire and Mary staying behind in the Maison Chapuis. Claire's final visit to Diodati appears to have been on the 25th, when Lewis had left and Hobhouse and Davies had not yet arrived; but while she, Mary and Shelley were packing on the 28th, Byron called to say goodbye. This was probably a collective farewell, since in the letter she wrote to him on her way back home Claire said that she would have been happier to ‘have seen & kissed you once before I left’.

Slightly older than Byron, Hobhouse and Scrope Davies had first met him at Cambridge and transformed his time there with their warm friendship. The political views of the three men were similar and they were all members of a Whig club which Hobhouse had founded (he had also established an ‘Amiable Society’ but that had to be disbanded because its members were always quarrelling). If politics united them, they were bound together even more by long evenings of drinking and whoring, and it helped that Davies shared Byron's interest in sport, being a proficient boxer and crack shot. The tone within this group of wild young men about town was one which Byron clearly found congenial, although it is now hard to recover. A hint of it perhaps lies in the story he told when in 1819 Murray complained that in the first cantos of Don Juan there were ‘approximations to indelicacy’. The phrase reminded him, he said, of a quarrel at Cambridge between Scrope Davies and George Lamb whose mother, Lady Melbourne, had been notorious in her youth for the number of her lovers. Sir, Lamb had protested to Byron, he ‘hinted at my illegitimacy’, to which Davies had retorted, ‘Yes, I called him a damned adulterous bastard’.