Lucia (36 page)

The old diplomat had steered the conversation on to a dead track. Lucia’s fifteen minutes were up. “I realised he wanted me to take my leave, so I left.” She walked home feeling low and decided to make a detour to see if Alvisetto was still in the park. The sight of her gangly teenage son chasing the ball like a little boy put her in better spirits. The evening was warm and they tarried under the great leafy chestnuts, going over their latest sales, adding up figures and looking ahead to their long journey back to Venice. Later she wrote to her sister that on the way home from the Jardin du Luxembourg, Alvisetto gave her his arm for the first time.

The apartment was bursting with boxes and crates and trunks. All was ready. Lucia made her farewell rounds: Madame Sérurier, Madame Baraguey d’Hilliers, Madame Chateaubriand, Madame de Genlis, who gave her the four-volume biography of Henry IV. And then, of course, her new professor friends: Saint Hilaire, Laugier, Havy…Professor Des Fontaines came to rue de l’Estrapade to present Lucia with her well-earned certificate of botanical studies. He too gave her a book as a parting present:
Le Jeune Botaniste,
by Auguste Plée. An indispensable read, he said with emotion, for any aspiring botanist.

On 24 August, she took her leave from the king. “I was in such a rush I had to change in the carriage,” reads the last entry in Lucia’s Paris diary.

He seemed pleased to see me when I came up to him and curtsied. He said: “I thought you had left already. How are you?” I replied cheekily: “I would not have left before your saint’s day.” And His Majesty: “Well, then, I thank you very much.”
⁵⁷

The party left Paris on a sunny morning at the end of August (one day later than planned because Teresa objected to leaving on a Friday). Lucia, Alvisetto and Vérand travelled in the carriage with Signor Maccari; Checco and Teresa followed in the gig. In Fontainebleau, Lucia called for a stop to visit the chateau where Napoleon had abdicated. The next day they toured the cathedral of Sens. There were many more stops along the way, in Auxerre, Chalons, Macon. It took them ten days to reach Lyon; they travelled across the lush French countryside at a pleasant pace, never straining the horses. Occasionally Signor Maccari let Alvisetto take the reins; Checco and Teresa cheered him on from the gig. Lucia was pleased with the coachman, who was able to provide comfortable lodgings and plenty of good food along the way (she had asparagus nearly every day!). When the inn was crowded, Signor Maccari himself served the meal in the rooms.

After a rest in Lyon, they headed for the Alps. The air became cooler and crisper. In Chambéry they stopped for their last French meal: onion soup, beef
à la mode,
roast chicken with peas and potatoes, fricassée of lamb, cheese and pears and biscuits, and two bottles of good wine. They arrived rather stuffed at the border station after the village of Lanslebourg, where their papers were checked by Austrian guards—the Austrians had temporary control over Piedmont until the House of Savoy was reinstated. Lucia produced old documents showing she was an Austrian countess, and the party breezed through. They left at dawn the next day for the last climb up through the Mont Cenis Pass. Three mules pulled the carriage and one the gig. Lucia recognised the muleteer, a well-known figure to travellers. He had once carried Napoleon piggy-back after his carriage had crashed in the snow; the emperor had rewarded him with a pension and eighteen gold
napoléons.
The crossing was much easier now: there was a wide esplanade at the pass, and a good road leading down to Italy. It was a beautiful, clear day; Lucia and Alvisetto got out of the carriage to stretch a little and decided to walk down the mountain, carefully picking their way on the gravel. They reached the old frontier town of Susa in time for a hearty Piedmontese lunch, their first Italian meal in a long time: vermicelli soup, mushrooms from the neighbouring woods, roasted eels and spinach,
mascarpone
and grapes.

It took another ten days to cross northern Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic. On 25 September, four weeks after leaving Paris, the little convoy was met in Padua by Alvise, Paolina, her two boys, Venceslao and Ferighetto, and her youngest daughter, Marietta (Cattina, the eldest, was married and living in Bologna; Isabella had died while Lucia was in Paris). Alvise invited them all to lunch at the Croce d’Oro, the fancy restaurant in town; afterwards, they ambled over to Caffè Pedrocchi for ice creams.

They spent the night in Padua before making the last leg of the journey home. Lucia got up early the next day, went to wake all the children and took them out for breakfast. Everyone went to mass while Alvise made arrangements for their passage. Then they all piled up in a
peotina,
the typical flat-keeled Venetian transport vessel, and made the familiar journey down the Brenta Canal before heading out to Venice across the lagoon. It was a merry passage. “Paolina sang a lovely little aria.”
⁵⁸

Chapter Ten

BYRON’S LANDLADY

T
he 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.

A
lvisetto 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.

T
he 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. “
One
ice 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.

A
t 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.