Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [150]
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.”40
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