After Byron's stay in Switzerland, several members in the supporting cast of the story of his life there did not fare too well. Matthew Lewis, for example, spent a year on the continent after leaving Diodati, visiting Rome, Florence and Naples (where he had a married sister), and in July 1817 again calling in on Byron, who by then was established in Venice. But Lewis was back in England in October of that year worrying about his slaves and in November he sailed again for Jamaica. His main aim on this trip was to institute further humanitarian reforms on a second plantation which he had previously only partly owned but to which he had now acquired the rights to do with as he pleased. It was on the road back from this second plantation that he stayed in an inn in which a couple of residents had recently died of yellow fever. Lewis took the ship back home in May 1818 but the fever declared itself while he was on board and he died in mid-ocean at the age of forty-two. While he was in Italy he had engaged a valet called Falcieri, a sturdily built Venetian with an imposing black beard who, according to Shelley's later report, had ‘stabbed two or three people’ but was nonetheless ‘the most goodnatured … fellow’. After Lewis's death, Falcieri – or Tita as he was known – made his way back to Italy, where he was taken on by Byron and became one of his most trusted servants. It was Tita who, along with Fletcher, was with Byron when he died in Greece.

By the time of Lewis's death, his old antagonist, Madame de Staël, had been gone almost a year. The summer of 1816 proved to be her last season at Coppet and in October she moved to Paris, disturbed to find the city still crawling with foreign troops. She began to exert herself in her usual way, seeing all the people that mattered and trying to persuade them that since the Allies’ quarrel was not with France but Bonaparte, it would make sense to liberate the capital as soon as possible. So active was she that her old friend the Duke of Wellington found himself forced to warn her to be more discreet.