Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [151]
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.”44 Byron was more fired up than ever: “we’ll battle with [Mother Mocenigo]—and her ragamuffin.”45
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.46
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,”47 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.”48
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.”49
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.”50 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