Lucia (18 page)

L
ucia’s happiness was suddenly eclipsed by the news she had long been dreading. Plunkett had kept it to himself all along, so as not to spoil their time together, but at the end of his stay in Florence he confessed that he had been given the command of the newly formed 60th Regiment based in Theresienstadt in Bohemia, and would soon be on his way to Austria to resume fighting the French.

“We shall be losing our worthy friend,”
¹²
Lucia wrote poignantly to Paolina in her last letter from Florence.

By the end of the summer, Alvise and Lucia were making preparations to leave as well. Alvise, growing restless in Florence, had wanted to spend the winter in Naples, but the arch-conservative Bourbon monarchy denied him passports. Fortunately General Wallis decided his brief exile had lasted long enough and granted him permission to visit his estates on the Venetian mainland. In mid October, Lucia returned to Padua. She was able to see Maximilian again on several occasions during the autumn and early winter before he left.

W
ith Bonaparte still stranded in Egypt, Vienna decided the time was right to strike back at the French and recover its territorial losses in Italy and southern Germany. In January 1799, Maximilian received his marching orders: he was to join forces with General Hotze, in the Voralberg, at the head of two elite battalions from the 60th Regiment. The objective was to take the city of Zurich, a pivotal stronghold for the control of southern Germany. General Hotze, with Maximilian’s help, was to protect the right flank of the advancing 80,000-strong Austrian army, led by Archduke Charles.

When Maximilian left Padua, heading for the snow-bound Alps, Lucia was expecting his child. She was only a few weeks pregnant and it is quite possible she did not broach the subject before his departure because she herself was not yet sure of her condition. After the first couple of months, when she no longer had any doubts, communications with Maximilian’s regiment were fragmentary at best, and it is unlikely she would have informed him in a letter that had few chances of reaching him and which risked being read by others along the way.

Lucia may well have contemplated seeking the help of an abortionist but it was always a dangerous road to undertake. Besides, the memory of her painful miscarriages, not to mention the death of Alvisetto, probably contributed to push the thought away from her. In the absence of any evidence about how she handled her pregnancy, the simplest explanation seems the truest: she was deeply in love with Plunkett and she decided to have their child no matter what the consequences might be. In any case, she never tried to pass him off as Alvise’s issue—husband and wife had probably ceased to be lovers.

Having made her choice, she was relieved to learn that Alvise was about to embark on a long journey abroad. All his adult life he had been trained to govern, to participate in the affairs of Venice. A year had passed since the Austrians had taken power, yet he continued to be isolated. He felt useless, unable to fit in the new ruling class that was being groomed by Vienna. His trips to the countryside became increasingly frantic and soon he was overcome by what he called his
rage de voyager,
his irrepressible urge to travel as far and as long as his heart required. He had experienced such mad wanderlust before in his life, most notably when he had run away from Venice and his family after the humiliating divorce from his cousin, Pisana Mocenigo, and had travelled in Italy and France. This time he conceived a grand journey across the Habsburg Empire.

In late March, when Lucia was already in her fourth month and it was becoming increasingly difficult to dissimulate her pregnancy, Alvise obtained his travelling papers: they stated he was “moving to London with two servants and journeying through Trieste, Lubiana, Graz, Linz, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg.”
¹³
It was unclear when he would be coming back. Lucia chose not to tell him she was carrying her lover’s child.

It was not a rare thing for married women to have children out of wedlock and there were well-tested ways to give birth discreetly. A pregnant woman might stay on in the countryside long after the end of the
villeggiatura
or she might return to her family of origin for a prolonged stay. Or she might enter a convent “to restore her nerves,” as the expression went. Still, the strain on Lucia must have been excruciating, not just because of the daily complexities involved in a clandestine pregnancy but also because of the uncertain future she and her child would face. Was Maximilian coming back from the war? Would she ever have the courage to tell Alvise she had given birth to someone else’s child? Would her son or her daughter have to be given away to adoptive parents?

Photo Insert

1. Andrea Memmo, Lucia’s father, was elected Procuratore di San Marco, the most prestigious political office in the Venetian Republic after the one of doge, in 1785, when he was serving as ambassador in Rome.

2. Sebastiano Mocenigo, Lucia’s father-in-law, was a complicated man and a difficult father. His rampant homosexuality and outrageous behaviour during his tenures as ambassador to Madrid and to Paris put an end to his diplomatic career: Maria Theresa of Austria refused to accept his credentials as ambassador to Vienna.

3. This ivory miniature of Lucia and her sister, Paolina, when they were little girls was commissioned in the mid-1770s. Their father probably took it with him to Constantinople, where he served as ambassador for four years (1779–82), to lessen the pain of his separation from his two daughters, who remained in Venice with their mother.

4 and 5. Lucia (left) and Paolina, aged sixteen and fifteen, sat for Angelica Kauffmann in the summer of 1786, in the artist’s studio in Rome.

6. In the same year Alvise Mocenigo wrote to Andrea Memmo asking for the hand of his daughter Lucia. This is Lucia’s reply to her future husband—a man ten years older than her, whom she did not know and who had already been married and divorced.

7. As Venetian Ambassador to Rome, Andrea Memmo and family lived in Palazzo San Marco, the “immense palace.” The Venetian ambassador lived in one wing, the Venetian cardinals in the other—an arrangement that led to constant bickering about keys and bills.

8. “I feel so lost when you are away from me,” Lucia wrote to her husband, Alvise, shortly after moving into Palazzo Mocenigo, the sprawling family home on Venice’s Grand Canal. It was, indeed, an intimidating world to enter for a seventeen-year-old bride, with its grand staircases, its endless halls and its innumerable apartments distributed on four floors, where a crowd of Mocenigo relatives lived on fairly unfriendly terms.