Lucia (39 page)

One evening in late April, at Marina Benzoni’s, Byron met Teresa Guiccioli, the young and beautiful wife of Count Guiccioli from Ravenna. Byron became completely besotted by the manipulative, twenty-year-old Teresa, and a few weeks later, at her beckoning, he followed her and her husband to Ravenna. Before leaving, he made sure Richard Hoppner, the British consul who had negotiated the lease with Lucia and took care of Byron’s business affairs in Venice, had enough cash to pay the second instalment of his three-year rent at Palazzo Mocenigo. But by early summer, the rumour was that Byron was so taken by his new love that he did not want to return to Venice, and was looking for an early release from his contract. Lucia became alarmed: she was counting on the income for the entire three years to put her accounts in order in Venice. The law was on her side and she was not about to offer any favours.

Alvisetto, meanwhile, had again disappeared. Lucia had approved a trip to Rome and Florence on the grounds that it would help him build up useful connections, on condition that Vérand go with him. Now she regretted sending them off. Alvisetto’s rare letters were vague and not very reassuring. What was he up to? Who was he seeing? “He never mentions any prominent Roman family and I hope he has not been negligent in forming honourable and useful relationships,” she wrote to Vérand. “Surely he must understand that such connections are useful in times of difficulty.”
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Vérand was not in the mood for Lucia’s long-distance lecturing. He complained to her that Alvisetto considered his presence a weight, and that he often excluded him from his social engagements and his amusements. Also, his brother was dying and he wished to travel to Lyon as soon as possible. Could he please be released of his duties? “Such hurry to go to Lyon is understandable,” Lucia replied with impatience, “but grant me the favour of going there after my son’s return to Venice (somehow my ears don’t like the sound of your proposal to leave him before bringing him back to me).” Alvisetto, unbeknownst to his mother, took it upon himself to grant his tutor a leave. Lucia was furious. “I cannot and will not consent to this,” she wrote to Vérand, who was already in Florence. “I expect to see my son returning as he left—I would be offended if it were otherwise. To change plans that were agreed to at the moment of separation is simply not right.”
³⁵
Vérand stopped in his tracks, fearful of incurring Lucia’s wrath; he suggested that
she
take a brief vacation and join Alvisetto in Florence. “It would be very pleasant to join him for at least part of the journey,” she replied with irritation, “but how could I possibly entertain a project that would take me away [from Alvisetto’s] business affairs, which are neither few nor easy to tend to. The voice of reason tells me that I must manage his properties as best I can. Let me be clear: if I go, who stays?”
³⁶

It was time for them to come back, Lucia insisted. They had been away three months; it was long enough. Alvisetto needed to be in Padua to prepare for his last year at university and his final exams. “Besides, he has completed the tour of all the beautiful cities in Tuscany; to linger would mean that he is staying only to amuse himself, which he can do at any time and in any place…I am alone here and I need assistance.”
³⁷

W
ith Alvisetto safely back in Padua and Vérand off to France, Lucia finally focused on the pressing problem presented by her glamorous but unreliable tenant. Under Teresa Guiccioli’s influence, Byron was growing critical of, even hostile to, the decaying city that had seduced and inspired him for more than two years. In Ravenna, removed from the vortex of dissipation, he was like a reveller waking up in the diaphanous early morning mist. He had lived too crazily; he had spent far too much money. The huge staff, the gondola, the horses he kept at the Lido, the
casini
(small pleasure houses) he rented in Venice and on the Brenta: such an extravagant set-up did not make sense to him any more. The most urgent step was to leave Palazzo Mocenigo and the two
casini.

Byron asked his friend Alexander Scott, who was in Venice, to give notice to Lucia, adding that she could keep the entire rent for the second year, which had already been paid, if she rescinded the contract and he did not have to pay her the third and final instalment. Scott balked at the prospect of a legal brawl with one of Venice’s most prominent ladies: “Give up your houses! Discharge your servants! Oh my! I will wait for your second thoughts—a few days can make no difference, the less so as Mme Mocenigo is out of town.”
³⁸

Byron did indeed have second thoughts during the course of the summer. The ambiguity of his role in the odd arrangement with the Guicciolis was making his stay in Ravenna increasingly uncomfortable: he was in love with Teresa but he resented being turned into a gallant, a
cavalier servente
in the old and most decadent Venetian tradition. He decided to return temporarily to Venice until matters were cleared between Count Guiccioli and Teresa: after all, the rent at Palazzo Mocenigo was paid, the apartment was fully staffed and waiting for him. “I shall take it as a favour,” he wrote to Henry d’Orville, Hoppner’s assistant, “if you will have the goodness to inform my landlady that I (having changed my mind) do not intend quitting or giving up my house and establishments at present—and that they and the servants will continue to be present on the former footing…You will oblige me infinitely by keeping a tight hand over my ragamuffins.”
³⁹

Lucia found Byron installed again at Palazzo Mocenigo when she returned to Venice in late October from Este. She made it clear to Hoppner that, while Byron was free to leave at any time, she was not going to forsake 4,800 francs—the amount of the third instalment—just because her tenant had fallen for a trouble-making countess in Ravenna.

Lucia’s firmness added to Byron’s sombre mood. He wanted to leave Venice, but he felt trapped in it. He told friends different things: that he was going back to London, that he was leaving Europe, that he was joining Simón Bolivar in South America. “Alas! Here I am in a gloomy Venetian
palazzo,
never more alone than when alone,” he wrote to John Cam Hobhouse, his closest friend. “Unhappy in the retrospect—and at least as much in the prospect.”
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Matters between Byron and Lucia were further complicated by the “Gnoatto Affair,” as it became known in the small English community. In his happier Venetian days, Byron had been very generous with his money, giving to charity and helping out the many in need with whom he came into contact. He had lent a considerable sum to a staff member at Palazzo Mocenigo named Gnoatto, who had been unable to pay him back (though he had offered to return the money in monthly instalments). Byron transformed this minor episode into a telling example of Venetian trickery and became obsessed with it. He warned Lucia he would deduct the sum owed to him by Gnoatto from the third and final payment due in June 1820 if she did not either force him to pay it back or fire him. He threatened to take her to court and “to give her as many years work of it” as he could. “I am not even sure I will pay her at all,” he told Hoppner, “till she compels her scoundrelly dependent to do me justice—which a word from her would do.” Lucia saw no reason to send away a member of the staff because he had borrowed money from her tenant. Byron became cocky: “If Mother Mocenigo does as she ought to do—I may perhaps give up her house—and pay her rent into the bargain—if not—I’ll pay nothing and will go to law—I love a
lite.
”
⁴¹
He used the Italian word for lawsuit.

The brawl was becoming a little too heated for the cautious Hoppner, who hoped Byron would recover his money “without having recourse to the violent measures you propose with Madame Mocenigo and which, to say the truth, I do not think would altogether accord with your accustomed justice and liberality.”
⁴²
Byron, however, was determined to press on. On 22 April he wrote from Ravenna, where he had returned, to explain that “with regard to Gnoatto—I cannot relent in favour of Madame Mocenigo, who protects a rascal and retains him in her service.” But he was no longer so keen on a
lite,
he told Hoppner, as Venetian tribunals were corrupt and sentences never carried out. He would seek his own justice. “I repeat, not one farthing of the rent shall be paid until either Gnoatto pays me his debt—or quits Madame Mocenigo’s service…Two words from her would suffice to make the villain do his duty.”
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At the end of April, a month and a few days before the rent was due, Byron asked his lawyer, Castelli, to state his ultimatum to Lucia in person. Nothing came of it: Gnoatto did not reimburse the money and Lucia did not dismiss him. Hoppner ran through Byron’s instructions one more time, hoping the poet might change his mind
in extremis:
“I shall not pay Madame Mocenigo’s rent, which I believe comes due next month, without an order from you.”
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Byron was more fired up than ever: “we’ll battle with [Mother Mocenigo]—and her ragamuffin.”
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Two weeks later Byron backed down. His relationship with Teresa and Count Guiccioli had become so entangled—he was now living in Palazzo Guiccioli!—that he was anxious to ship his furniture and his animals to Ravenna and close the Venice chapter for good. He instructed Hoppner to pay Lucia the rent:

You may give up the house immediately and licentiate the servitors, and pray, if it likes you not, sell the gondola…Mother Mocenigo will probably try a bill of breakables…[I reckon] the new Canal posts and pillars, and the new door at the other end, together with the year’s rent, and the house given up without further occupation, are ample compensation for any cracking of crockery…She may be content, or she may be damned; it is no great matter which. Should I ever go to Venice again, I shall betake me to the Hostel or the Inn.
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An unexpected twist in the plot turned the finale of this whole affair into an
opera buffa.
On 1 June, Lucia sent her agent to collect the rent over at the English consular office. Hoppner went to fetch the sack with Byron’s cash and realised with horror that most of the money was gone and that he did not have enough to pay the rent. “We can only conclude that it was stolen,”
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he wrote to Byron, mortified. Byron found himself consoling the disheartened consul for the “disagreeable accident,” but insisted he “examine into the matter thoroughly, because otherwise you [will] live in a state of perpetual suspicion…in Venice and with Venetian servants anything is possible that savours of villainy.”
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Thus Lucia’s agent returned to Palazzo Mocenigo empty-handed. She sent a note back asking to know the cause of the delay, warning that she was going to sue if any difficulty arose. Hoppner answered that Byron had left insufficient funds with him, but that he would gladly pay part of the rent immediately—there was enough in the sack to pay half; he would then write to Byron asking for more money with the first post to Ravenna. Lucia stiffened and said that would not do. Hoppner, feeling partly responsible for the imbroglio, offered to pay the entire amount with his own money hoping Lucia would demur. Instead, she immediately accepted. Hoppner was taken aback: “I actually expected she would prefer waiting, but on the contrary she replied she wanted the money.”
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Lucia was not finished with the flustered British consul. She sent her agent over to Hoppner’s with a bill for 4,862 francs instead of the 4,800 agreed to in the contract, arguing the value of the gold
louis,
the currency in which the contract was stipulated, had increased. Hoppner was indignant. He refused to pay the extra sixty-two francs and hurled “considerable abuse” at the agent. But he soon regretted drawing his sword against Lucia to defend Byron’s interests: “In consequence of the affront put upon her…She will revenge herself by giving us as much trouble as she can, and I shall therefore leave her as little as possible of what does not belong to her before I make the house over to her.”
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He sold Byron’s gondola with great difficulty, and at a loss. “What is to be done? There is no money and in lieu of it plenty of misery and discontent.”
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T
here was a squalid little coda to the dispute. At the end of July, Lucia sent Byron a list of broken or missing items, including two valuable silver coffee pots. Hoppner, summering in Bassano, did not have the heart for another battle in the long war with Lucia. Whereas Byron was quitting Venice for good, the consul was staying on, and had nothing to gain from protracted warfare. “I do not like to expose myself unnecessarily to the old lady’s scurrility or the ill opinion she may express of me to others,” he admitted. “I am at wits’ end as well as the end of my money & little able to withstand the shock of the Mocenigo battery.”
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Byron felt sympathy for Hoppner and insisted he make clear to Lucia that he was merely acting as go-between: “State my words as my words; who can blame you when you merely take the trouble to repeat what I say?”
⁵³
He argued Lucia had no business asking to be reimbursed for breakables a year before the lease was up—a rather disingenuous position to take since he was telling everyone he was leaving Venice and did not intend to return. But Lucia’s relentlessness exasperated him. In his view, she was needlessly hounding him:

I have replenished three times over, and made good by the equivalent of the doors and canal posts any little damage to her pottery. If any articles [were] taken by mistake, they shall be restored or replaced; but I will submit to no exorbitant charge nor imposition. What she may do I neither know nor care: if they like the law they shall have it for years to come, and if they gain, what then? They will find it difficult to “shear the wolf” no longer [in Venice]. They are a damned, infamous set…a nest of whores and scoundrels.
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Lucia was in Padua attending to preparations for Alvisetto’s graduation. And with Byron away in Ravenna, Hoppner felt there was no point in pressing the matter of the breakables right away. He would take his time and deal with the problem in the autumn. By then, Alvisetto, a doctor in law, was sure to start taking charge of Mocenigo affairs. “I will settle personally with the young Count, the bastard, any disputes which may arise,”
⁵⁵
he assured Byron nastily.