Chapter Ten
The happiness of seeing Venice again faded rapidly as Lucia entered the Basin of Saint Mark and glided up the Grand Canal. An eerie silence had replaced the customary din across the waterway. There was no traffic, no busy confusion. A tenebrous gleam shone off the mournful palaces. Many were empty and in disrepair, as if the owners had fled leaving them to crumble slowly in the brackish tidal waters of the lagoon. After passing the first bend, the party moored at the rickety dock and clambered out of the gondola. Palazzo Mocenigo looked run-down and inhospitable: the walls were peeling, the air was dank, the plants in the courtyard were going to seed. Entire floors of the palazzo were still shut, and the forlorn gaze of the staff betrayed the vicissitudes suffered during the siege.
Later, Lucia went out with Alvisetto looking for familiar places—it seemed like the easiest way to lift their spirits. They went over to Ca’ Memmo at San Marcuola, walked down the Frezzeria to Saint Mark’s Square and made their way home passing by the church of San Moisè and Campo Santo Stefano. It was hardly a cheerful tour. Many shops were boarded up. The streets were filthy and malodorous, and a querulous moan rose from the beggars lining the walls. Mangy mongrels and skinny cats roamed the back alleys fighting for miserable scraps of food. Several times they ran into Austrian soldiers patrolling the streets and yelling orders in German.
Alvisetto remained in Venice but a few weeks before it was time for him to enrol in Father Ménin’s seminary in Padua. He took lodgings with Vérand in a private house within walking distance from the school. Lucia helped him settle in, making sure he had proper clothes and shoes for the winter, a new pair of eyeglasses and the necessary school material. Sensitive as ever to shifting political circumstances, she reminded her son that it would be wise “to set aside a few hours every day to practise German.” She urged Vérand to speak to him in that language as often as possible, suggesting they read out loud in the evening from a good German play “so as to enhance his familiarity with dialogue.”1 But there she stopped, whereas Alvise was already making enquiries about the best German universities for his son: Gottingen, Leipzig, Berlin…There were, of course, a number of excellent institutions in Prussia and in the Austrian Empire; but there was plenty of time to make a decision—it was going to be another two years before Alvisetto graduated from school—and Lucia saw no reason to rush things. As in the past, she wondered whether it was really necessary to send him so far away to further his studies.
Lucia soon started to miss their life in Paris—the freedom they had enjoyed, their cosy routine, their walks at the Jardin du Luxembourg. Venice, her beloved Venice, now seemed so restrictive and isolated from the rest of the world. A few brave hostesses, like her old friends Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi and Marina Benzoni (who had danced half-naked under the Liberty Tree in 1797), still kept their houses open and did their best to create an air of intellectual vivacity and cosmopolitanism. But their salons were run on a shoestring, with stale biscuits and bad wine served as refreshments. And the conversation sounded inevitably provincial compared to the exchanges Lucia had had at her Parisian soirées.
Alvise was rarely in Venice, spending nearly all of his time travelling to his estates. The Mocenigo properties on the mainland were in dreadful condition. The floods had devastated the harvest of 1814. Famine and disease were crippling the farming system and causing terrible human loss. The situation at Alvisopoli was especially dismal because of the high water-levels there. The sheep flocks had been wiped out and most of the cattle had died of starvation. The fields, so recently reclaimed, were reverting to marshland. The town had deteriorated to unspeakable squalor. Ghostly crowds of starving labourers, their wives and children in tow, roamed the land begging for work and food. Alvise’s utopian project was collapsing. If the Austrians did not reduce the crushing fiscal burden imposed on Alvisopoli during Napoleon’s rule, allowing a little breathing space to get the agricultural cycle going again, Alvise would be forced to declare bankruptcy and lose the property—a prospect that darkened his mood considerably.
To Lucia, it felt as if she had regressed to that earlier period of her marriage when she lived a lonely life at Palazzo Mocenigo, fighting to save her pregnancies while her mother-in-law came down from her apartment to watch over her. The difference was that Lucia was now the mistress of the vast and mostly empty house: Chiara had moved out of Palazzo Mocenigo after quarrelling with Alvise and lived across town, at Santa Maria Formosa, with a monthly stipend from her son.
There were times, Lucia complained to her sister, when she felt her only reliable, if unpleasant, company were the rats in her apartment. While Lucia was still in Paris, Paolina had come over to Palazzo Mocenigo to fill in the holes, but evidently the paper fillings had not been enough. Every night, bands of famished rodents scurried across the bedroom floor and scratched the crumbling wooden legs of the bed. “A very large one kept me up all night,”2 Lucia complained to her sister in a typical note.
On the few occasions when Alvise was at home, he could be very impatient with Lucia; but she had reached a point in her life when she was weary of taking the extra step to accommodate her husband’s surliness. They had lived apart for so much of their married life that neither had learnt to live with the other’s moods and rhythms and habits, and they no longer had the energy to try to make things better between them. Tempers flared easily, and the arguing was fairly constant.
The tension between them was deepened by a new revelation: Alvise had an illegitimate daughter living on the mainland. When Lucia and Alvisetto were in Vienna, Alvise had had an affair with Carolina Faldi, wife of Piero Faldi, a family friend. Carolina had given birth to a girl who was christened Luigia in honour of Alvise—Alvise being the Venetian equivalent of Luigi. She was now a boarder at a school for girls in Montagnana (incidentally, the same town near which Colonel Plunkett’s regiment was encamped when he had met Lucia sixteen years earlier). Alvise cared deeply for his daughter. He often went to see her, and he made sure she and her family were well provided for.
One night, the shouting at Palazzo Mocenigo became so loud, the words uttered by husband and wife so awful, that Alvise felt compelled to call in Paolina to try to bring back a minimum of civility to his marriage. Paolina rushed over, and on her way in she was shocked to see the frightened looks on the faces of the staff. Alvise and Lucia seemed shaken. Paolina heard them out separately, and grew even more dismayed when she realised how deeply they could still hurt each other after nearly thirty years of marriage. Lucia had criticised Alvise for his ceaseless womanising, and Alvise had lashed back by attacking her own morality and by bringing up a past they had both worked so hard to bury. They had lost control over themselves, hurling insults to each other in a vortex of mutual recrimination. How could she possibly bring true peace between them, Paolina wondered. “In the beginning, it was not my sister’s intention to offend you,” she wrote the next day to Alvise, “nor do I think you wished to offend her by giving your humiliating reply.” But they had gone too far to resolve matters by simply telling each other they were sorry: an exchange of perfunctory apologies would be meaningless at this stage. There was only one way of putting such awfulness behind them, Paolina concluded: “To erase all memory of what happened.”3 They should try to look into each other’s eyes, she said, as if they had never spoken those words.
The winter of 1814–15 turned out to be especially harsh. The cold brought more hunger and disease and a deadly air hung over the lagoon. Lucia’s old governess, the beloved Madame Dupont, died of pneumonia. And Paolina lost little Marietta to tertian fever—her third daughter to die after Isabella and baby Lucia. “Big” Lucia was heartbroken for her sister. She commissioned a tall marble cross from the funerary sculptors over on the Fondamenta Nuove, the embankment that faced the new cemetery on the island of San Michele, and asked Alvisetto to compose an inscription in Latin verse to honour his ten-year-old cousin. “Please avoid a generic composition,” she pleaded. “Write about her real virtues and qualities. And don’t rush through this: set some time aside to concentrate on the task.”4 To inspire him, Lucia sent him a page filled with ideas. Alvisetto tried his best, or so he assured his mother; but the proper words would not come to him. He eventually gave up the task and she had to do it for him.
Lucia worried about Alvisetto. She felt he was becoming nonchalant and lazy at a time when everyone should be giving all they had. He showed little interest in his studies and seemed to waste much of his spare time. Would he get any work done—she wondered—if he were not so closely supervised by Father Ménin at school and Vérand at home? Alvise, who had ambitious plans for him, was clearly disappointed. And Lucia, wishing to avoid a new confrontation with her husband over their son’s education, urged Alvisetto to shape up:
It upsets me that your father should have reason to complain about your aversion to study. You are sixteen, old enough to understand that the displeasure you give to your parents will ultimately be to your own detriment. What will you reap from so much idleness?5
Evidently Alvisetto enjoyed his relative autonomy in Padua from his loving but sometimes overbearing mother. When classes were over, he loitered about town, often joining other fellow students at the smoke-filled coffee shops, and incurring Vérand’s ineffectual reproaches. He was a gregarious type, and probably devoted a little too much time to leisure and too little to his studies. It was all fairly innocent. Lucia, however, insisted in micro-managing her son’s life from Venice. “I must discourage you from spending money at the coffee shop,” she nagged in one letter. “Oneice cream a day is quite enough,” she told him in another. “Lingering at the coffee shop longer than is necessary to eat it is clearly not to a young man’s advantage.”6 And so on.
Lucia’s fretfulness turned into discomfiture when she learnt, from an unusually watchful Vérand, that Alvisetto’s sheets were covered with sticky spots. She told Vérand he should not shy away from lecturing her son at length against masturbation: “There will never be enough words with which to inspire real horror in him for those dreadful spots.”7 If Vérand carried out the task—and there is no reason to believe he would disregard such a strong injunction from Lucia—he must have elicited quite a few guffaws from the over-excited teenager in his charge.
At the end of the winter, Lucia’s excessive preoccupation with Alvisetto subsided momentarily because, like everyone else, she was distracted by the news that Napoleon had escaped from Elba. The fallen emperor reached the south of France on 1 March, headed north to Paris and three weeks later was back in power. For three months, Europe teetered between past and future. Once again the allies amassed their troops along the French border. Napoleon struck first, marching into Belgium and defeating the Prussians on 16 June. But two days later his army was beaten decisively by Wellington at Waterloo and he was forced to abdicate a second time. The nightmare of a Bonapartist resurrection receded as Napoleon was sent off to Saint Helena, a tiny speck in the southern Atlantic.
During Napoleon’s brief return to power the Austrians did not sit still. On the contrary, they accelerated their formal takeover of northern Italy. On 7 April, the newly formed Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia was integrated into the Habsburg Empire. Archduke John, brother of Emperor Francis, arrived in Venice to mark Austria’s assumption of power with the proper solemnity—yet another high mass in the basilica of Saint Mark took place on 7 May. The archduke hosted a masked ball at La Fenice and the next day he headed for Padua.
Vérand had written to Lucia warning that Alvisetto was so eager to show his Austrian heart he wanted to ride out on horseback to greet the archduke. “Don’t do it,” Lucia pleaded in a late-night note to her son:
Dear Alvisetto, I am just now back from the bal masqué at La Fenice and I beg you not to expose yourself to danger. Find a good spot from which to watch the imperial cortège, but please don’t ride out in the confusion of carriages and horses. I am counting on you. I don’t want to have to worry about this.8
After some grumbling, Alvisettto relented and watched the archduke’s cortège from a safe place, with Vérand at his side.
Spring turned into summer on a hopeful note. The rain that year did not spoil the wheat and corn, and the harvest season looked more promising than it had in a long time. Then, in early July Alvise received the news he had been hoping for: the payment of property taxes on Alvisopoli was suspended, pending the completion of a new cadastral survey ordered by the government. It was a huge relief. Perhaps the worst was over; if there were no more rains during the rest of the summer Alvisopoli might yet be saved. Lucia urged her son to “pray that Heaven hold back the scourge that will otherwise cause famine and disease.”9
Heaven, it turned out, struck in a wholly unexpected way.
In late August Alvise was suddenly ill, with terrible pains in his stomach. His condition deteriorated very rapidly. He was rushed back to Venice and the best doctors were called in to see him, but nothing seemed to stop or even slow down the disease—probably a tumour. Alvise felt life slipping away from him: he called in the family notary and asked that he take down a new will. He was so weak he hardly had the strength to sign his name. Quite mysteriously and to everyone’s relief, he suddenly recovered and was soon back on his feet—a pale wraith with lingering pains, but so surprised to be alive as to be in relatively good spirits.
Alvise made a triumphant return to Alvisopoli, and Lucia was genuinely moved by the display of affection shown to him by the alvisopolitani. She reported to Paolina:
His carriage was escorted into town by a large crowd amid cries of hooray. The throng of cheering labourers was led by Alvisetto on horseback. The town itself looked lovely, as everyone had put flowerpots and festoons at their windows. At the big house, Alvise was greeted with bouquets and sonnets. Mass was held in the small, beautifully decorated church. A few verses on his recovery were recited with a musical arrangement. Alvise sat in the front pew with Alvisetto, while I was seated to the side. After the Te Deum, Alvise walked out into the cheering crowd. A big lunch was served at the house. Alvise ordered that another table be laid out for twenty-six poor people, and Alvisetto served them food and gave each one a few coins. There were fireworks in the evening and the alvisopolitani danced late into the night.10
Although Alvise diligently took the ounce of quinine the doctors prescribed him, the pains never really left him and soon increased, especially in the middle of the day. He returned to Venice towards the end of the autumn, in time for Emperor Francis’s first official visit. But he was too ill to participate in the many functions and festivities. He was especially disappointed not to be in Saint Mark’s Square to witness the return of the four bronze horses taken to Paris by Napoleon. In December the illness spread again very quickly and this time there was nothing much to be done. Alvise died on Christmas Eve 1815. His body was taken to Alvisopoli. He had wanted a small, private ceremony at his estate rather than a grand funeral in Venice. On a cold and bleak winter morning, family and close friends gathered in the little church. The town square was filled with a silent and stunned crowd of alvisopolitani who had come out to mourn the estate’s founding father.
Alvise’s will was unsealed two days after his death. He urged Lucia “to forget all the displeasures I may have caused [you] and for which I am truly sorry.” Henceforth and until her death, she was to receive a generous monthly stipend from his estate. As a proof of his affection and esteem, he named her sole guardian of Alvisetto, “my most beloved only child, universal heir of all my movable and immovable properties, stores, capitals, credits, moneys and stocks.”11 In writing his signature at the bottom of the page, Alvise had scratched the paper so weakly with his quill there was only the faintest trace of ink, and his name was a barely legible scrawl.
Lucia was moved by Alvise’s unexpected words of contrition, and even more so by the unconditional embrace of Alvisetto as his own son. In a way, his love for the boy had led him back to the love he had once felt for the young girl he had married so many years ago. Before dying, he did what Paolina had asked him to do: he forgot “the displeasures” of their life together, and asked Lucia to do the same. More surprisingly, he asked her to take up his life-work. Lucia had seen how Alvise had struggled over the years. Now it was suddenly her turn to take charge and the task ahead must have seemed daunting.
“I have already been to see Mama’s portrait, and those of all the aunts and uncles and cousins, and ancestors,”12 Lucia wrote to her sister shortly after arriving at Castel Gomberto. In the spring following Alvise’s death she took Alvisetto and Vérand to the big house near Vicenza that belonged to her mother’s family, the Piovene. She had to get away from Alvisopoli—from the vociferous crowd of creditors, petitioners, agents and labourers that besieged her all day long. “I want things to be run as if my husband were still here,” she had repeated over and over after taking charge of Alvise’s affairs.13 But it would not do: every day dozens of decisions needed to be made that would affect the future of the estate and the people who worked and lived on it. Crushed by her new responsibilities, Lucia had escaped to Castel Gomberto, a place filled with memories, good feelings and domestic comforts. “It has warmed my heart to find the house as it always was…There are plenty of good beds, many guests, no shortage of linen and silverware.”14
Every morning she drove out to Valdagno to take the waters. The skies were often stormy, with lightning and thunder, but the atmosphere in the house was always merry. In the large drawing room, there were games of billiards, draughts, cards and bingos of every possible kind. Vérand usually played the piano, Lucia caught up with her numerous relatives and Alvisetto received the undivided attention of his Piovene cousins. Lucia was relieved to see that he was in much better spirits than he had been after his father’s death.
Not long after Alvise’s funeral, Alvisetto had returned to Padua with Vérand to resume his studies. It had not been easy for him. He had struggled with his grief and had started to act out of character. “I went to visit him in Padua,” Lucia later told Paolina. “At first he seemed anxious to be with me; but then he became distant, as if to underline his independence from me…He was bossy and uncaring. Everything had to be done his way and for his pleasure…I was hurt but I noticed he, too, often cried.”15 After a few days at Castel Gomberto, Lucia was happy to report, Alvisetto was again his old self, “respectful of his mother and her authority over him.”
Lucia continued to be haunted by some of the words in Alvise’s will, especially by his plea to forget all those “displeasures” he had caused her. He was not asking her for Christian forgiveness—it would not have been like him. Indeed, his words had nothing to do with religion. This was a matter between Alvise and Lucia alone, between husband and wife. Going through his papers, Lucia found many packets of letters written to him by different lovers over the course of several decades—there were hundreds of letters, notes, small pieces of paper, and in many handwritings. She knew some of the women who had written them, especially those from the early years of their marriage; but many were complete strangers. At certain times—when she had been away, in Vienna, in Milan, even in Paris—he clearly had had more than one relationship going on. How did he manage all those parallel lives? How did he distribute his feelings? There was a genuine wonder mixed in with the pain caused by all that correspondence. So much of his life had been unknown to her.
Lucia did not return the letters, but neither did she throw them away. Instead, she put them in order, catalogued them by “author” and tied them in neat little bundles before storing them away in the attic of Palazzo Mocenigo. However, there is at least one set of letters missing from the collection: those of Carolina Faldi, the mother of Alvise’s daughter, Luigia. In his will, Alvise spoke very tenderly about Luigia and showed an enduring attachment to her family. He left 12,000 gold sequins for her dowry, provisions for her education and for living expenses if she did not marry. Alvise entrusted Lucia with the responsibility of carrying out this part of his will. During their dealings, Carolina Faldi may have asked to have her letters back, in which case Lucia probably obliged her.
Lucia stayed at Castel Gomberto until the end of June, when her curative cycle at nearby Valdagno was completed. She did not look forward to the difficulties and complications that awaited her at Alvisopoli and the other Mocenigo estates. But there was no more time for delay. Harvest season was nearing and she was determined not to let the agents and farmers undermine her authority at the beginning of her tenure. She ordered all the wheat cut by the end of July and had it spread out under the sun until it was time to sell it at auction at the local fairs. She decided the selling price and approved every contract after careful review. “Soon I will have the linen seeds laid out in the sun too,” she wrote to Paolina. “The silk is being treated and will shortly be ready for market.”16 In August she supervised the corn harvest; in September she moved to the estates further south for the grape harvest. After three years of crippling disruptions, the sprawling Mocenigo farming empire was beginning to function again, albeit at reduced capacity. Lucia was perfectly aware this was only the start of a long and uncertain struggle. She had the weather to thank if the harvest was not spoiled that year, and she knew it. But in her letters to Paolina she showed a new confidence, and a barely disguised satisfaction with her initial accomplishments.
Lucia remained very active in the early autumn, during the tilling and sowing season. When the autumn rains began, the water had to be drained immediately to save the new crops and avoid the unwholesome stagnation. More ditches were dug, existing levees were reinforced. She laid out plans to plant more poplars and willows along the roads and canals, and to embellish the town with catalpas and acacias, laurel hedges and flower beds. She invested in a mulberry plantation to revamp the silk-producing factory. She started work on a rose garden in the back of the main house, planting the many specimens brought back from Paris, and she surveyed the park begun years earlier with Alvise to see where to place the exotic trees she had picked out with Professor Des Fontaines.
All this activity, she knew, was forcing her to neglect Alvisetto, who had started his last year at the seminary in Padua. Fearful that her son might not understand why she was suddenly so absent, she entreated Vérand to explain to him “how busy I have to be here at Alvisopoli, making sure all the work proceeds as it should and plans are laid out for the future.” She was so taken up by her work that even her letters to Vérand—not an especially useful adviser on agricultural matters—became excuses to ramble on about “the general inertia” that slowed everything down in the fields or her doubts about whether this or that agent was running things as well as he should. “We have honest but not very enterprising workers,” she complained. The agents and stewards were weak, she said, while she was still looked upon with too much suspicion to be truly effective. “If only we had a person of real authority here, who could act as a permanent spur, then we might obtain, if not all we should, at least half of it, which would be enough to turn the tide.” She was endlessly frustrated by the wastefulness and lack of organisation. “Our agents want the oxen to work all day long except when the men in the fields take a long break for lunch and have a rest. Why don’t they break up the hours so the animals also have a chance to rest but the work in the fields is not interrupted for so long?” There was no risk in confiding her thoughts to Vérand; but in Alvisopoli she kept them to herself for she felt, quite understandably, that her position was still too tenuous to impose her views on men who were perhaps set in their ways but were far more experienced than her. With the frustrations, however, came moments of exhilaration as well. Again, to Vérand: “Yesterday I went to supervise the sowing of corn seeds. All the labourers lined up and then advanced together. It was a beautiful sight.” And later that day she walked over to the main granary to make sure no one had removed supplies before they went to market. She caused quite a commotion by suddenly ordering that all the stocked wheat be weighed in her presence. The process took several hours, and not everyone was happy. But it was a way of showing that she cared and that she could be taken seriously. “Despite the clouds of dust, I decided to stay until it was over. It was dark when we finished, but I was still there, holding up the lamp for them.”17
In the winter of 1817 Alvisetto received his patents of nobility from the Imperial Court in Vienna. He was now Count of the Austrian Empire and Magnate of Hungary, the twin titles granted to Alvise during the first period of Austrian rule in Venice (1798–1805). These were heady documents for an impressionable seventeen-year-old, and they no doubt strengthened his sense of loyalty to the Habsburg crown. Vienna, not Paris or Milan, was the powerful and alluring capital of his new world.
Emperor Francis named one of his younger brothers, Archduke Rainier, viceroy of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia. In the spring Rainier came to Venice on his first official visit. Alvisetto was eager to be seen in a flashy new Austrian uniform on that occasion, and he enlisted his mother to help him find the proper one. Lucia was still recovering from a long and debilitating bout of tertian fever: perhaps the stress of the previous summer and autumn had weakened her more than she realised, for she was bedridden during much of the winter, and even suffered a dangerous relapse in March. Still, she understood more than anyone else how important it was for Alvisetto to have the right attire. She wrote to friends in Vienna asking for a book she remembered which had figurines wearing all the uniforms of the Habsburg Empire. Once she had identified the right uniform she had it copied “with the precise colours, the embroidery properly highlighted…the headgear with all its embellishments, as well as the épée and scabbard.”18 The sketch was rushed off to the tailor just in time for Alvisetto to make his good impression on the imperial delegation.
The harvest in the summer of 1817 was very poor compared to the previous year. Rainfalls caused large-scale floods that seriously harmed the crops. The levee along the main canal at Alvisopoli burst and it took weeks to rebuild it, while hundreds of acres remained under water. Travelling from one estate to another was problematic because the roads and tracks were muddy. And every new drop of water made things worse. Lucia was so fearful of more rainfall she hardly slept any more. “I pray the Lord Almighty he will free me of the anxiety the weather is causing me,” she told Paolina, adding that the agents were taking it out on her.19 Even Giovanni Lazzaroni, general manager of the Mocenigo Agency and Alvise’s right-hand man for many years, “is no longer well-disposed towards me and thinks ill of what I do.”20
In his will, Alvise had requested that a specific number of masses be celebrated in his memory in the little church of Alvisopoli. Now Lucia discovered with dismay that his wish had been disregarded. Lazzaroni explained there was simply not enough money in the Agency’s coffers to pay for the extra services and offerings. Lucia reacted with anger and guilt. “It fills me with sorrow,” she told Lazzaroni, “to learn that our income is not sufficient to do things the way my poor husband had laid out, and to have to remain silent…”21
Alvisetto did not improve the general atmosphere when he graduated rather ingloriously from the seminary at the end of the summer. “He could easily have distinguished himself more,” Lucia snapped, clearly irritated by her son’s lack of diligence. What was she going to do with him now? “God willing he will keep away from poisonous occasions,” she wrote to Vérand, “[as you know] his youthful fervour is so much greater than his strength of character.”22 After briefly considering the possibility that Alvisetto join her in running the Agency, Lucia returned to the original plan of sending him to university. She was encouraged in this choice by Mattia Soranzo Mocenigo, a distant cousin with a reputation for wisdom whom Alvise had named “consultant” to his wife in his will. Alvise’s old project of sending Alvisetto to a prestigious university in Germany was quickly discarded. Lucia wanted him to be close at hand so that he could visit her often and gain familiarity with Alvisopoli and the other estates. It was decided he would study law at the university of Padua. “Alvisetto too seems comfortable with the idea,”23 she observed.
Vérand felt this was the right moment to make a long-delayed journey to France to attend to pressing family business of his own. After all, Alvisetto was eighteen years old and out of school; he could easily do without his supervision for a few months. But Vérand underestimated the degree to which Lucia, so completely absorbed by work, had come to rely on him with regard to Alvisetto. She nipped Vérand’s plan in the bud:
You well understand how important your continued assistance to my son is at an age in which proper counselling is especially needed. The supervision on the part of an honest and wise educator is necessary to keep him away from all those dangers and enticements that lurk in the path of a young man…To abandon him at this early stage would be tantamount to losing at once all the gains obtained by your good governance.24
Lucia was under tremendous pressure. The summer’s poor harvest at Alvisopoli meant more resources would have to be transferred from the other Mocenigo estates to avoid sinking further into debt. She received an even harder blow in February, when the government rejected Alvise’s petition to have the fiscal burden on Alvisopoli reduced. Lucia spent the rest of the winter with lawyers and family advisers trying to reverse the decision. “I find myself absolutely unable to submit myself to such an excessive burden,” she declared in her final statement to the authorities, adding that if the order were not repealed she would be “forced to give up the estate.”25
Alvisopoli was not her only worry. The situation in Venice continued to deteriorate. The combination of trade barriers and the rise of Trieste as Vienna’s favoured port in the Adriatic had crippled the local economy. During his visit to the city, Archduke Rainier had written back to Vienna that he was stunned to find such poverty and squalor. Shops were still closed. Housing and health conditions were appalling. The active population was declining quickly. The streets were filled with beggars, rubbish and debris from crumbling buildings. Four years had gone by since the end of the siege. The Austrians had been running the city ever since, yet they had done little to lift Venice out of its dismal situation.
Lucia, who relied on her income from family properties in the city to run Palazzo Mocenigo, could no longer afford the maintenance costs and living expenses. The sprawling palazzo was falling into disrepair. She had already closed off entire floors because she could not afford to heat them in the winter, giving up room after room in her losing struggle with rats. She would soon have to start dismissing the staff; she might even have to abandon Palazzo Mocenigo, as so many families had already done with their palaces. But this depressing state of affairs was shaken up by an unexpected business opportunity.
Lucia had met Lord Byron a few times at the soirées given by Albrizzi and Benzoni, but their acquaintance had remained superficial. Byron had arrived in Venice in November of 1816, and for a year and a half he had led a dissolute and extravagant life, mostly, though not exclusively, in the arms of Marianna Segati, the “light and pretty”26 young wife of the draper in the Frezzeria in whose house he was lodging. During the same period, Lucia was completely preoccupied with the running of her affairs on the mainland and was seldom in town.
By the early spring of 1818, however, Byron’s year-long affair with Marianna Segati came to an end. Word was that he wished to leave the house in the Frezzeria and was seeking more substantial quarters, possibly with a view of the Grand Canal. A wealthy foreign tenant was just what Lucia needed to ease the crushing financial burden and hold on to Palazzo Mocenigo. When she heard Byron was looking for spacious lodgings on the Grand Canal, she pricked up her ears. But it turned out that Fabio Gritti was already arranging the lease of a palazzo on the Grand Canal beyond the Rialto bridge, at San Marcuola. The deal was practically sealed, and Byron was already writing to his friends in London that he was moving into Palazzo Gritti.
How Lucia managed to unthread Byron’s deal with the Grittis is not entirely clear. It appears that Mattia Soranzo Mocenigo, the family adviser, played a central role in bringing about the new arrangement. Mattia was one of the poet’s few Venetian friends. He knew, of course, that Lucia was in dire financial straits, and he persuaded Byron to reconsider his agreement with the Grittis, reminding him, no doubt, that Palazzo Mocenigo was more prestigious and better located on the Grand Canal. The Grittis did not put up much resistance to protect their lucrative lease. Fabio Gritti was a cousin of Lucia’s on her father’s side, and a close friend. He had helped and advised her during the most difficult times after Alvise’s death, and he bowed out gracefully.
On 1 June, Byron settled into the piano nobile of Palazzo Mocenigo. Months later, when his relationship with Lucia soured, he complained about having been “seduced”27 by Mattia Soranzo Mocenigo into making a deal with her. But in the late spring of 1818 he was enthralled by the prospect of living in such a fabled palazzo. “It is four, and the dawn gleams over the Grand Canal and unshadows the Rialto,” he wrote soon after moving in. “I must go to bed; up all night…it’s life, though, damn, it’s life.”28
Expensive life, to be sure. Lucia asked a very high price: 4,800 francs a year—roughly the equivalent of 200 pounds sterling. It was a large amount as it was, but a huge one relative to the depressed Venetian economy. Byron was undeterred: he signed a three-year lease—a considerable commitment on the part of such a restless traveller. Further, he agreed to pay each year’s full rent in advance every month of June. For Lucia, this was manna from heaven. She was going to keep Palazzo Mocenigo after all. Her famous and very wealthy new tenant also agreed to hire several members of the house staff, including Tita, one of the family gondoliers.*21
Lucia gladly moved her belongings into a small apartment on the mezzanine floor and, much relieved by the way matters had resolved themselves in Venice, travelled back to the mainland, where more good news awaited her. Her desperate appeal regarding the excessive taxes on Alvisopoli had been granted: “The royal government”—she read—“is pleased to inform you that the suspension of tax payments will continue until further notice.”29 With a lightened heart, she went off to Valdagno for her yearly water cures and then settled in Alvisopoli during the long, hot months of July and August to supervise the wheat and corn harvests. Towards the end of the summer, she moved to Este, from where she took care of affairs at the nearby estates.
Lucia saw little of her son during his first year at university. When the summer term was over, Vérand left for France while Alvisetto travelled south towards Ferrara with other fellow students. It was his first taste of real freedom. He seldom gave news of himself, though he was occasionally spotted in one town or another by friends of the family who were thoughtful enough to inform Lucia. All the same, she worried that he might fall in with “a band of oafs” and wondered how he got by since “he doesn’t have any money to travel.”30
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 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.”34
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
With 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 serventein 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 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.”43
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 and discontent.”51
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 to her that her friend Canova might come to her rescue for the sake of old times, and she wrote to him asking if she could not by any chance interest him “in a piece of the purest marble of Carrara.” She never mentioned the word “Napoleon” in her letter, trusting Canova, who had initially been approached by Alvise for the job, knew very well what she was talking about. Obliquely, she reminded him the statue could easily take on a different profile “from the one initially pursued.” And if he was not interested himself, would he not show it to someone he could recommend? “As my son’s guardian,” she added at the end of her pitch, “it would give me great pleasure to enter into negotiation with you. We would be exchanging favours, as it were. For I am certain that if you were to look for a nice piece of marble you would not find a finer one as this. Furthermore, the work was already begun, and rather well. My son is not eager to see it finished, though, and he has left me free to sell it for a sum which I am sure will be agreeable to you.”58
Canova, however, was not a taker, and Lucia resigned herself to have the statue (which was rather more finished than she had led Canova to believe) transported the short distance up the Grand Canal to Palazzo Mocenigo, and placed in a shadowy corner at the far end of the androne. It made no sense to attract the attention of the Austrian authorities any further by shipping the disgraced colossus all the way to Alvisopoli; its bulky presence in Venice was cumbersome enough.
Alvisetto obtained a cadetship with the Austrian army and left for his military service, unaware he was following in his real father’s footsteps. He had matured during his last year at university, growing into an affable young man, with a good mind and a solid education. He was eager to do well in the world, and looked forward to a successful career in the Austrian administration after his tour of military duty. His loyalty to Vienna was unquestioned, but, like Lucia, he felt his Venetian roots very strongly. Soon his mother would cease to be his legal guardian. As head of the Mocenigo dynasty, he would take over from her the responsibility of running the family estate. Would he be up to the task? To Lucia, of course, he remained in many ways a boy. “He is young and I fear he is still a little green,” she reasoned with Paolina, “but he has no bad habits and no major character flaws so I suppose there is reason to be hopeful.”59