Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [148]
Lucia was still in Este, making last-minute arrangements for the grape harvest, when Alvisetto reappeared at last, and very much in a hurry to meet the enrolment deadline for the new academic year. They went to Padua together for the start of the term, both of them staying at the run-down old Memmo palazzo on Prato della Valle, which Lucia and Paolina had recently inherited upon the death of their uncle Lorenzo. Lucia headed to Venice in late October, in time to tuck herself into her mezzanine apartment before the cold season set in. She asked Paolina to make sure her rooms were ready and her bed made. “Most importantly, check to see if all the holes in my bedroom have been properly filled in—and not just with paper…”31
Lucia found Palazzo Mocenigo transformed by Byron’s colourful menagerie. Inside the porch he had set up a noisy little zoo: several types of bird, dogs, two monkeys, a fox and a wolf. All of them lived in large cages that cluttered the access to the canal and terrified anyone passing by. The atmosphere was even more chaotic upstairs, on the piano nobile. Byron had collected up to fourteen servants, including his cook, Stevens, and his valet, William Fletcher. A former clerk at the British Consulate, Richard Edgecombe, managed the household: he paid salaries, bought groceries and kept the accounts. He was always rushing, always very obsequious every time Lucia ran into him in the courtyard. Byron’s two-year-old daughter, Allegra, and her shy governess, Elise, were the latest additions to this eclectic and very rambunctious little court.
The lady of the house, as it were, was Margherita Cogni, the illiterate young wife of a country baker, whom Byron had met while summering at La Mira, on the Brenta Canal, the year before. Byron’s torrid affair with the very sensual Margherita had accelerated the break-up with Marianna Segati. After the poet moved to Palazzo Mocenigo, Margherita, known as La Fornarina (the baker’s wife), left her husband, came to Venice and joined the crowded ménage living on the piano nobile. Margherita had a fiery temperament, was loud and theatrical, and made hysterical scenes over the merest trifle. Byron explained to his friends that she had forced herself into the household without his consent, but that every time he angrily told her to leave “she always finished by making me laugh with some Venetian pantaloonery or another.”32
By the time Lucia returned to Palazzo Mocenigo in the autumn of 1818, however, Margherita had worn out Byron’s patience. She took her leave with a final, pyrotechnical performance, shrieking and yelling and slicing the air with a large knife. Alerted by the racket, Lucia went to her balcony and saw the frenzied Margherita leap into the freezing waters of the Grand Canal. “All of this was for the sake of effect and not real stabbing or drowning,” Byron observed coolly. “She was fished out without much damage except throwing Madame Mocenigo into fits.”33
Lucia did not usually intrude upon Byron’s life nor did she comment on his style of living—not in her letters at least. A certain distance, she felt, was the prerequisite for keeping their relationship on a sound, business-like footing. She kept an eye on him discreetly and limited herself to appropriate enquiries about beds and mattresses, linen and silverware. During the first year of the lease, every thing went smoothly despite the noise, the confusion, the constant coming and going, not to mention the wild cawing and barking in the porch. But the atmosphere changed in the spring of 1819, and what had been a perfect landlady–tenant relationship soon turned into a fierce confrontation.
One evening in late April, at Marina Benzoni’s, Byron met Teresa Guiccioli, the young