Lucia (25 page)

Teresa stepped in to lighten the atmosphere. “You’ll see, his heart will be more content than if he had eaten his sherbet.”
²³

Another evening Alvisetto was getting ready to go to a children’s play. Alvise needled him: why didn’t he give up the play and stay home to keep him company? “Alvisetto did all he could to persuade his father to go with him to the theatre,” Lucia told Paolina, wondering whether Alvise was not pushing their son a little too hard. “But it was useless, so in the end he said he’d stay at home with his father. He added touchingly: ‘nothing makes me happier than seeing my father and my mother with a smile on their face.’”
²⁴

Despite the rigidities in Alvise’s character, he was warming to Alvisetto and enjoyed being with him. In fact it was hard to tell who was happier, father or son, when the weather was good and they could walk hand in hand to the kiosk for their sherbet. Alvise had looked forward to taking him to the sled races, but the winter was very cold, it seldom snowed and very few races were held. On the other hand, it was a great winter for ice-skating, and there was nothing Alvisetto enjoyed more than going with his father to watch the older kids speed by and bump into each other at the rink in the Prater. He also made his formal entrance in society—children’s society, that is—by attending his first
bal d’enfants
at Countess Neuwirth’s. It was the usual array of odd-looking youngsters. Feisty three-and four-year-olds in velvet suits were thrown in with lanky teenagers in military uniform, all making their way among columns of tasty sandwiches and a profusion of cakes and pastries. Alvisetto quickly overcame his shyness, piling his plate with delicious food and participating enthusiastically in all the games. He went home exhausted, and Teresa assured Alvise that the afternoon had been a triumph. “Everyone praised him because he behaved very well…They gave him a million kisses when he left, he made friends with all the children, and danced most of the time.”
²⁵

Lucia enjoyed describing these episodes of family life to her sister, and despite her occasional reservations about the way Alvise engaged Alvisetto, a feeling of gratitude towards her husband showed through her letters, mixed with the hope that their marriage regain some strength and a sense of purpose.

Before the winter was over, Alvise, perhaps remembering how he had missed home when his father had sent him to Rome to be educated by priests, gave up the idea of sending Alvisetto to the boarding school in Pressburg he had been in touch with. He was looking for a suitable tutor, he announced to the rest of the family, who would live with them and take charge of their son’s education.

He chose Francesco Vérand, a young man of about thirty, “very sweet, with excellent manners.” He had good references, spoke French and German well, and drew very beautifully. Everyone liked him from the start, and Lucia was glad to hand over to such a charming young man a responsibility she had held out of necessity. “Oh do say a prayer or two, my dear sister, so that Alvisetto’s first lessons are held under divine auspices.”
²⁶

On his first day Vérand “set about earning his pupil’s trust with the sweetest manners.”
²⁷
The following morning he left the house at nine o’clock next morning, telling Teresa he was going to the post office and would be back shortly. At midday he still had not returned. Lucia brought the issue to Alvise’s attention. He reassured her: it was his second day at work and he probably needed a little more time to move his things to the house. Lucia went out for a ride in the carriage and returned at three in the afternoon. Vérand was not at home. Alvise, Lucia and Alvisetto had a plate set for him at the table and went ahead with their dinner. Still no sign of Vérand. Later, they looked through his things, and found a beautiful drawing of a rose he had made for Alvisetto.

The next day, they got in touch with his previous employer, a French lady, a certain Madame Cavanac, but she had not heard from him either. It occurred to Lucia that perhaps Vérand was unhappy with his bed or his mattress and might have gone back to his previous lodgings. So they called on a Madame Lamoine, from whom Vérand had been renting a room while in the employ of Madame Cavanac, but there was no sign of him there either. Alvisetto came up with his own explanation: perhaps Vérand’s mother had been ill and, on his way to the post office, he received news that she was suddenly worse or perhaps had died and he was lying in the grass somewhere, stunned by grief.

Alvise and Lucia heard about a carriage crash and they contacted the police. Luckily, Vérand’s name was not on the list of casualties, but the police knew who he was because he had recently reported the theft of his purse. Alvise and Lucia made a more thorough search for clues among his things, and found a crumpled letter in which Vérand confessed to being overwhelmed by debt. Alvise made enquiries but no menacing creditors turned up, only a former landlady to whom he owed 400 florins from a time when he had been ill for six weeks—“a perfectly acceptable cause for contracting a debt,” Alvise remarked to Lucia. But in his letter, Vérand added woefully that he would rather “suffer a punishment” than carry the weight of his debt.

Alvise’s investigation revealed that the young man had no bad habits. He neither drank nor gambled and he was unattached. Everyone described him as honest, upright and devout, and said he had never failed in his duty. “Apparently,” a baffled Lucia wrote to Paolina, “his only weakness is his great sensitivity. Madame Lamoine told us that when she informed him of his brother’s death he fell to the ground and didn’t regain consciousness for three hours. What on earth might have happened to him? Did he seek refuge in a hermitage? Did he join a small religious sect? Or perhaps the army?”
²⁸

A week after the disappearance, a letter arrived from Pressburg, a hundred miles east of Vienna. In it, Vérand begged Alvise for his forgiveness. In the stolen purse, he explained, was a letter from his parents explaining they would not be able to help him repay his debt. On the morning he had walked out of the house on his way to the post office he had seen a man by the Danube with his stolen papers, so he had run after him. That was it: Vérand did not explain what had happened next, nor did he give a clue as to his whereabouts.

Two weeks later, a Capuchin friar whom Alvise and Lucia happened to know found Vérand wandering in the streets of Pressburg. He was hungry, poorly clad and with no money. The friar helped him find some food and a shelter, then he informed Alvise, who immediately sent Vérand a hundred florins, not without remarking that it was “quite a sum for the twenty hours he spent under our roof.”
²⁹
It turned out to be money well spent. Vérand came back to Vienna, was forgiven for disappearing, and welcomed back into the Mocenigo household. But not as Alvisetto’s preceptor. Alvise, impressed by his integrity and his language skills, took him on as his personal assistant. In mid April 1805 he headed back to Venice with his new secretary in tow.

The surprise dénouement of the Vérand affair forced Lucia to resume her role as her son’s teacher, which did not make her happy. It was one thing to read a story to Alvisetto or to practise spelling with him or to impart to him the occasional geography lesson, but quite another to be responsible for his formal education. And not so much because she would have preferred to spend her time differently, but because she felt she was not up to the task. She hired Herr Gartner to give Alvisetto German lessons, and he made rapid progress. But he lagged behind in Italian, French and arithmetic, which were Lucia’s responsibility. His penmanship, too, was still poor, “but then my own letters are even more crooked than his. He’s not learning from the best.”
³⁰

A
lvise had insisted, upon leaving Vienna with Vérand, that during his absence Lucia apply for the Order of the Starred Cross, one of the most prestigious distinctions granted by the Habsburg Court, and one which he thought would nicely complete Lucia’s rise in Austrian society. At first she had been reluctant, fearing that such a request would needlessly attract attention and risk exposing her to an embarrassing refusal on the part of the court. But she gradually changed her mind as she learnt that a number of patrician ladies in Venice—including her mother-in-law, Chiara, with whom relations had cooled after the scandal of her love affair with Colonel Plunkett and the birth of Alvisetto—had applied to receive the order. “I feel that at this point I cannot put off making a request myself, all the more so since, unlike most of our Venetian friends, I have actually lived in Vienna for the past few years,” she explained to Paolina, begging her “not to say a word” about her step. “The order only proves you are born a patrician…though I hear it can be useful if one’s children run for offices that require patents of nobility.”
³¹

Lucia was told by people knowledgeable about these matters that her request would probably be refused the first time around, and accepted the second—it was the usual practice. There was nothing for her to do but wait.

Paolina was hardly in a condition to appreciate the politics of Vienna etiquette. She had never really recovered since the death of Lucietta, and now she suffered from chronic fatigue and diarrhoea, and began to lose her voice. She was under the care of Doctor Zuliani, an old family doctor. Lucia had been treated by him in the past and she did not trust him. She had long concluded that Paolina’s chronic ailments were the result of her psychological frailty, and not the reverse, and that the only way to get her sister on the road to recovery was to consider all aspects of her health, including her medical history and that of their parents. Doctor Zuliani was too old-fashioned, Lucia argued, too set in his ways “to get your machinery back in good order.” Besides, he was hopelessly out of touch with the “new medicine” being practised in Vienna.

I used to have the highest opinion of him, but I don’t any more. How does he explain the pains in your chest? How does he explain your loss of voice? You know I believe the weakness of your nerves has a great deal to do with your general debility: to neglect this entirely, as Doctor Zuliani does, and to speak only of diarrhoea, does not predispose me to have much consideration for his ability.
³²

Lucia’s reference to the “new medicine” practised in Vienna was a way of introducing her sister to Herr Speck, the medical guru of Viennese society under whose spell she had recently fallen. Doctor Speck was a self-taught medicine man who had picked up much of what he knew while working as a lay nurse in the hospital of Maria Caelis in Rome as a young man. He treated his patients with what Lucia called “tonic remedies,” a vague term that covered everything from herbal infusions to natural laxatives. But Doctor Speck’s fame rested largely on the “miraculous powders” he prepared for his patients. The formulas varied according to the particular ailment and the patient’s constitution and medical history. He never revealed the composition of his remedies, but his devoted followers had a blind faith in his healing powers. The modest apartment out of which he worked was always crowded with society ladies waiting to pick up their little packets—small envelopes, each holding a single dose of the preparation. After one of her regular trips to Doctor Speck’s, Lucia wrote:

We stand by the heating stove in the tiny entrance hall, fill up the living room and often have to spill into the kitchen. He has brought about so many remarkable recoveries here in Vienna that he is looked upon as Aesculapius himself. And I believe in him so much that I take his powders without thinking twice about what he has put in them.
³³

In fact the number of Viennese ladies addicted to Doctor Speck’s powders was such that one saw them pulling out their envelopes and swallowing the contents at all hours of the day, in the streets, in the Prater, even at the theatre. Lucia saw Countess Korolyi, thin as a reed since her husband’s death, cross paths with another lady during their afternoon stroll as they both were about to take their powders. “They greeted each other, and with an air of complicity, raised their little envelopes
‘à l’honneur de notre Docteur Speck.’”
³⁴

In her effort to enlist Paolina, Lucia added the cautionary tale of poor Prince Liechtenstein: “He was gravely ill, Herr Speck got him back in health, he stopped taking his powder, became gravely ill again, and died.”
³⁵

Lucia convinced a reluctant Doctor Speck to prepare a powder for her sister—the doctor did not usually mix a preparation without visiting the patient first. It was reddish, very fine, and each dose looked like a generous pinch of paprika. She sent it off to Paolina, begging her to take it. Paolina had reservations, but she did not want to disappoint her solicitous older sister. “I am not hurt in the least by your hesitation,” Lucia reassured her. “By all means, show the powder to a chemist and he’ll easily tell you what’s in it. Adieu, every day I love you more, and I think you did the right thing not to take Speck’s powder without having it examined first.”
³⁶

This medical exchange between the two sisters, stretched over several months, echoed their discussion a decade earlier on the merits of giving birth in the chair, with Doctor Speck now in the role of guiding light in the place of Doctor Vespa. Lucia, ever the older sister, could be very insistent in pressing her point if she believed it was for the good of Paolina. And Paolina, in turn, had developed her own delicate ways of holding her position in the face of Lucia’s affectionate encroachments. Her shield, this time, was Doctor Zuliani, who gladly stepped into the breach, stating firmly that Paolina was not touching that reddish powder until Doctor Speck revealed its chemical components. But there the matter stood, for it was suddenly overshadowed by alarming news.

Bonaparte was back in northern Italy and his arrival, Paolina wrote, had everyone saying that the next war would be fought there. If war did break out and borders closed down, how would they stay in touch? Lucia reassured Paolina, mostly to reassure herself: