Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [152]
There 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.”52
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.54
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.
Lucia took possession of Palazzo Mocenigo in the autumn, after Alvisetto’s graduation. She was glad Byron and his exotic ménage had left: however glamorous, his stay had caused a lot of ill feeling. Still, she was far from regretting that he had come to live in Palazzo Mocenigo. His valuable English pounds had brought succour to the house at a time of hardship and uncertainty. Life was not going to be easy in the years ahead. She had learnt enough to know that Alvisopoli, which she once described to Paolina as “that most wretched estate,”56 would continue to drain energy and money. But the period of emergency she had lived through after Alvise’s death seemed behind her.
Alvisetto decided to surprise Lucia by secretly renovating her apartment during the summer, when she was in the country. Lucia got wind of the changes—of course she would—and she wrote to Paolina that she was reminded of when she was a young bride-to-be, living in Rome with her sister and their father, and Alvise was busy with masons and carpenters and painters preparing her apartment in Venice. “[Alvisetto] wants it to be more functional [but] I have not been told what instructions he has given—I hope he is not spending too much money.”57
There was one more pressing matter to attend to which Lucia had put in the back of her mind during the trying times following Alvise’s death but which now required her full attention: what to do with the monumental statue of Napoleon which her husband had commissioned ten years earlier from Angelo Pizzi with the intention of placing it in the main square at Alvisopoli. Pizzi had died in 1812, leaving the statue unfinished in a studio at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, a short way down the Grand Canal. After the return of the Austrians to Venice, the directors of the Accademia had started to pressure Lucia to take charge of the embarrassing sculpture. It now occurred