Lucia (27 page)

Minutes later, Baraguey d’Hilliers walked into the house exuding all the raw energy that came from a great victory on the battlefield. In the eight years since Lucia had last seen him in Venice, he had become one of Napoleon’s most trusted generals. Now he paced across her empty living room, strong and self-confident, filling her in on the details of the French triumph at Austerlitz. As he spoke, images from the past merged confusedly with the present. Lucia’s world had been overrun by Napoleon and his armies before. As Baraguey d’Hilliers rushed on with his narrative, she felt her life was about to be transformed once again.

The next day a messenger came to inform Lucia that an entire French squadron had pitched camp at Margarethen. “The captain has apparently taken over my room, while two officers and four
chasseurs
have fixed themselves up in the rest of the house.”
⁵⁸

Austria renounced all influence in Italy by signing the Treaty of Pressburg. Vienna ceded Venice and its possessions to Napoleon, as well as the German states of Baden, Bavaria and Wurtenberg. “We have peace at last,” she wrote to her sister. “This morning a Te Deum was sung in Saint Stephen’s.”
⁵⁹

On Lucia’s saint’s day, 13 December, Alvisetto woke his mother up with a bouquet of flowers, and recited a few German verses he had memorised for the occasion. It occurred to Lucia that she had made a little Austrian boy out of her son. Now she kissed him on the forehead, and wondered whether his French was fluent enough to hold him in good stead.

L
ucia was disappointed but not entirely surprised when Alvise did not come to Vienna to fetch her. In Milan, the young viceroy, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, was reorganising the Italian Kingdom according to Napoleon’s strict guidelines; Alvise felt he had to stay in Italy, in the hope that his past experience with the French would help him secure a prestigious assignment. It was not prudent, he explained, to leave while everyone was jockeying for position in the new administration.

Following her husband’s instructions, Lucia rented out the apartment in Vienna for the remaining part of their lease, and organised the sale of paintings, carpets and furniture. She failed to rent out Margarethen, however. Alvise had yet to finish paying for the estate and it made Lucia uncomfortable to leave an unsettled situation behind. She made sure farming schedules were in place and accounts more or less in order before leaving. “It is wise,” she told her sister, “to leave [our] affairs in this country in the best possible shape.”
⁶⁰
Thus it was not until the late autumn of 1806 that she was finally able to make the journey back to Italy. She took leave of the emperor and the empress and headed south on a rainy November day—she, Alvisetto and Margherita in the large travelling carriage, with the luggage, and Teresa, Marietta and Felicita, rather cramped, in the two-horse buggy driven by Checco. At a post-station where they stopped shortly after crossing the Alps, Lucia received a letter from Alvise: he had been appointed governor of Agogna, one of the twenty-four departments which now formed Napoleon’s new Kingdom of Italy, and she was to join him there as soon as possible.

Chapter Eight

LADY-IN-WAITING

N
ovara, the capital of Agogna, was a quiet, unpretentious city five hours from Milan by coach, on the way to Piedmont. Alvise set up offices in the newly established Prefecture on the square, and leased the main floor of an elegant
palazzo
owned by Countess Bellini, the local
grande dame,
where he was joined by Lucia and Alvisetto, Monsieur Vérand and the staff (Margherita, Teresa, Felicita and Checco). The district of Agogna was not among the larger or more important ones in the kingdom; Alvise was nonetheless satisfied because he was one of only a handful of Venetians called to serve in Napoleon’s government. He threw himself into work, staying at his office late when he was not travelling to the towns and villages under his jurisdiction.

“We have been well received,” Lucia wrote to Paolina soon after settling in. “Everyone here seems pleased with Alvise’s ability and fairness.” It was her own role she was a little uncertain about.

Initially, I thought we might open our house once a week. [Countess Bellini] assured me she would be the first to come if we decided to receive society. Then I heard the people here don’t generally fancy social gatherings so I told the Countess we were not yet ready. Now we tend to spend our evenings at home alone.
¹

What a contrast to life in the Kingdom’s capital! Prince Eugène and his young wife, Princess Augusta-Amelia of Bavaria, established a highly structured court at the royal palace in Milan, with rigid rules of etiquette borrowed from the Imperial Court in Paris. There were also suppers and balls in grand Milanese houses. “I hear these soirées can be quite glittering. The Viceroy usually makes an appearance and dances too; not the Vicereine, who has given up these amusements on account of her advanced pregnancy.”
²

There was not much regret in Lucia’s comments. Having just completed two exhausting, back-to-back moves, from Vienna to Alvisopoli and from Alvisopoli to Novara, she was content to lead a quiet life with her family now that circumstances had brought them all under the same roof again. Although she and Alvise had been married for twenty years, Lucia had spent many more days alone than in the company of her husband—indeed there were moments when she felt their life together had never really begun. And she did not look forward to the time when she would be summoned to the court in Milan to take on her duties as lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta—a prestigious assignment Alvise had sought for his wife to strengthen their ties to the ruling family.

M
onsieur Vérand was put in charge of Alvisetto’s education, the job for which he had originally been hired in Vienna. He wasted little time in expressing his displeasure at how much the boy had fallen behind in Latin and arithmetic, how easily he was distracted, and just how plain lazy he could be. Vérand started to keep a daily record of his pupil’s performance and general behaviour in a green and blue booklet known as “Alvisetto’s Journal.” Once a week, a tremulous Alvisetto took it to his parents so that they might judge his conduct, and discuss it with him. From the start, Vérand was quite harsh in his judgement, filling his reports with epithets like “disobedient,” “stubborn,” “ill-mannered,” “restless” and “capricious.” He noted sternly that the boy “laughs out loud without a reason, just like a child.”
³

The parents encouraged Vérand’s method because, as Lucia said, “loud reprimands and threats of awful punishments have produced no effects.” Alvisetto showed occasional signs of intelligence, she added, “but his mind is always elsewhere and it sometimes takes him three hours to do work that should take him no more than fifteen minutes. It is astonishing how he can seem an absolute prodigy at times, then days and days will go by without the slightest progress.”
⁴

Alvisetto’s uneven results made Lucia anxious. She knew Alvise wanted to send their son off to boarding school at the earliest opportunity, possibly to Paris, in order to acquire a proper French education. The prospect of a separation filled her with dread. The only way to delay Alvisetto’s departure, she felt, was to convince Alvise that the child was making progress in his studies. She put her faith in Vérand, conscious of the trust her husband had in him, and the two entered a silent pact to work Alvisetto hard in order to keep him at home as long as possible.

In Vienna, Lucia had grown accustomed to spending a good deal of time with her son, going over his lessons when she was not actually doing some teaching herself. She did not want to give up that part of their relationship entirely. Having relinquished prime responsibility for Alvisetto’s general education to Vérand, she nevertheless remained in charge of his religious studies, to make sure, she told her sister, that he received a solid Christian upbringing. Lucia ordered
The Life of Jesus
from a bookshop in Milan, and she and Alvisetto curled up together in bed every evening to read three chapters of the big volume. “I’m finding this book very useful. I had never read the life of Jesus as a whole but only in bits and pieces. In fact, what I knew of it usually came from the study of paintings and sculptures when we were young.”
⁵
On her own, she tackled the multi-volume
Histoire Ecclésiastique,
a heavy-going history of the Church. She also studied the gospel of Saint Paul.

Lucia’s decision to take on Alvisetto’s religious education reflected her increasing interest in the sacred scriptures. Her father, who had been such an inspiring intellectual mentor to her and Paolina in their youth, had paid distracted attention to their religious upbringing. Over the years, Lucia had come to regret this lacuna. She believed a deeper knowledge of the gospels and the history of Christianity would give sustenance to a spiritual yearning she felt was growing with time. It is hard to pinpoint the beginning of Lucia’s religious awakening: it was part of a general trend sweeping across Europe as a reaction to the secularism of the eighteenth century and the anti-clerical excesses of the French Revolution. Perhaps her embrace of religion was accelerated by the emotional turmoil caused by Alvisetto’s illegitimate birth, Plunkett’s death, the subsequent scandal and the child’s adoption by Alvise. Certainly the letters she wrote to Paolina from Vienna already testified to a strengthening of her faith. But it was in Novara that she started to observe church rituals with great diligence and devotion. Every day, during her first winter there, she got in the habit of bundling up and going off to attend early morning and evening services at the neighbourhood church of Saint Gaudentius—she much preferred the intimacy of the small parish church to the stateliness of the Duomo in the city’s main square. She also looked for new places of worship as she explored the city, and she was always eager to join mass in the church of a neighbourhood she was not yet familiar with. In the early spring, when it was warm enough to venture out in the countryside, the long walks she took with Alvisetto and Vérand often turned into impromptu pilgrimages to one of the ancient religious sanctuaries that dotted the hills around the city.

Alvise encouraged these outings. Much of his work as governor of Agogna depended on his good relations with local church officials. Napoleon’s first invasion of northern Italy, back in 1796, had been so fiercely anti-clerical it had caused a great deal of acrimony and even violence between the French troops and the local peasantry. The emperor had since made peace with Rome and signed a Concordat in 1801, but relations with the clergy remained tense throughout the Kingdom of Italy, especially in the smaller cities and towns, where the influence of the church was deeply embedded. Alvise soon discovered that the cooperation of parish priests was indispensable in enforcing the conscription quotas to fill the ranks of the Armée d’Italie, the new Italian army Napoleon had placed under the command of Prince Eugène. In return for the priests’ help, Alvise obtained an exemption for young married men. This earned him the gratitude of the population.

In March 1807, Princess Augusta gave birth to her first-born, a little girl she and Prince Eugène named Joséphine, like her grandmother. Alvise ordered that the city be illuminated by a thousand torches. The bishop sang a Te Deum in the Duomo. He also agreed to a special request by Alvise: the display of the sacred host to the congregation. It was a notable concession, and yet another example of how relations with the Church were improving in Alvise’s district.

A
s spring turned into early summer, Lucia travelled throughout the region of the Agogna. She crossed wide green valleys, filed through narrow gorges and climbed mountains to visit ancient villages mostly inhabited by women and children, the men having gone over the mountains to look for work in France and Switzerland. The villagers were poor but very dignified. She reported to her sister:

They survive on a simple diet of chestnuts and milk, yet they have healthy complexion and appear very robust. The women wear unusual and rather beautiful clothes and fix their long hair in elaborate ways. They are very hospitable—and I was very fortunate to make it back home without succumbing to chestnut indigestion.
⁶

Paolina was always in Lucia’s thoughts during these excursions for she had the most natural impulse to share with her sister everything that was new and strange and interesting. One day, as Lucia crossed the dry bed of the Agogna, she found a pebble in the perfect shape of a heart. She sent it to Paolina, with these words: “Dear sister, how truly happy I would be if only I could live with you.” The dialogue between them never ceased, and made their separation a little more bearable.

At the time, Lucia was under the spell of an unusual book by Madame de Genlis,
Les Savinies.
It was set in an imaginary Swiss romantic landscape and told the story of two sisters who loved each other very much and lived happily together until one of the two was married off. The other sister became twice jealous: first, because her sister now loved someone else, and second, because, in the past, she too had had feelings for the same man. The husband-to-be left town on business, and the future bride, noticing her sister’s sadness, got her to speak her mind. Realising she was the cause of her misery, she renounced her marriage and vowed never to see the man again. The other sister blamed herself for confessing the truth and died of grief. The surviving Savinie asked to be buried with her sister, and soon followed her to the grave.

Lucia gave her sister a long, rambling account of the story. She drew a parallel between her love for Paolina and that of the two Savinies, although she quickly added that the comparison referred only to their “happy life together,” before the intrusion of the husband-to-be. The moral of Madame de Genlis’s tale was clear, she concluded: “Reason must temper even the most innocent love.”
⁷
But a closer reading of the letter makes one wonder whether Lucia was not also making a veiled, perhaps even unconscious reference to Maximilian Plunkett, whom both she and her sister had loved in their own way (Paolina’s relationship with “the worthy colonel” remained platonic). After Maximilian’s death, Lucia never once mentioned his name in her letters to Paolina—at least not in those which have survived. And writing about the two Savinies is probably the closest she ever came to evoking his memory in her correspondence with her sister.

B
y the end of 1807 the quiet provincial life began to lose its early appeal. Lucia complained:

We are immersed in permanent fog. I spend all of my time in my room and I am bored to death. Alvise stays all day at the Prefecture and my son is busy studying. During my first year here I explored the city and the region; this year I have nothing left to describe except this one room where I take my meals, I sleep, I get dressed, I read, I write and I receive occasional guests.
⁸

Her humdrum days in Novara came abruptly to an end in early January 1808, when, as Alvise had predicted, she was summoned to the court in Milan to take up her duties as lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta. She hurriedly packed her luggage, bade farewell to her husband, her son and the house staff, and was off to the capital.