Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

128 The Red Priest of Venice
manuscripts? I realized they were gifts for the Emperor of Austria. He
wanted to leave Italy and find a rich patron abroad.’’
Ezra had planned to join Olga in Turin, but again Dorothy was confined
to the hospital in Genoa for a hemorrhoid operation, and ‘‘he cdn’t
figure a way to do it wif decorum an elegance, wot she has so impressed on
him.’’ He asked Olga to critique the Adams Cantos about the New England
family that nurtured two presidents, John and John Quincy. ‘‘A
’specially beautiful bunch,’’ she wrote, ‘‘beginning ‘Revolution,’ said Mr.
Adams.’’ Sometime in December she joined Ezra in Rapallo, and ‘‘his pa
and ma gave her turkey and chocolates.’’
In February, she was back at the Chigi palazzo, installed in the green
brocade suite with canopied bed often reserved for the Queen of Belgium.
Count Chigi gallantly moved to a suite near the roof because—he told
Olga—he wanted an unobstructed view of a former lady love’s distant
palazzo. Olga’s relationship with the Count was one of mutual respect and
friendship, and a chaste one. When very young, the Count had married an
American—Bertha, the daughter of baritone Giuseppe Kaschmann. The
marriage was annulled after a few years, and since that time the Count had
admired many women but never settled his a√ections on another. He took
pleasure in promoting young romances and arranged a wedding in his
private chapel for two of the Accademia’s most promising students, Giuliana
Bordini and Riccardo Brengola, with the archbishop performing the
ceremony and himself giving the bride away.
At the time of Olga’s arrival, the Marchesa Fabiola Lenzoni, a middleaged,
aquiline and angular woman whose late husband had been one of the
Count’s closest friends, was the ceremonial matriarch presiding over the
household. She was particularly fond of her fox terriers and had named
each one for the notes of the musical scale—Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, and so
on—of the eleventh-century theoretician Guido d’Arezzo. (‘‘Ut’’ fed at
the table from the Marchesa’s own plate.)
While Olga was in Siena, she had rented the Venice house to her exotic
friend the Marchesa Luisa Casati, who was temporarily down on her
luck. (‘‘The last time I saw her at Capri, at the Duchesse de Clermont-
Tonnier’s, she was still gorgeous, with white ostrich plumes—a bit Mistinguettish—and
an enormous silver key,’’ Olga recorded.) Dorothea Watts,