Chapter Two

PALAZZO MOCENIGO

Lucia woke up in her sunlit bedroom at Palazzo Mocenigo. Her chambermaid, Maria, brought her a silver tray with a cup of hot chocolate and a note from Alvise. He was in the habit of leaving very early in the morning for a busy day of work, and though he usually took care to leave an affectionate line or two for his wife, she never quite knew when he might reappear. At times it was only a matter of a few hours before his gondola came gliding to the riva of the palazzo, but often enough he simply vanished, as he had done on that rainy morning in Florence, leaving only vague hints as to his whereabouts and when he should be expected home. The house messengers and gondoliers, however, always knew where to find him. So Lucia sent off a brief reply to his note: “I am just getting up, my beloved…Love me and come back to me quickly…I feel so lost when you are away from me.”¹

They had been married over a month, but Lucia still felt very disorientated in the sprawling Palazzo Mocenigo. Upon returning to Venice after her four years in Rome, everything had seemed so immediately familiar to her: the shimmering profile of the palaces, the noisy traffic on the water, the raw smell coming up from the canals as the tide ebbed and flowed. So it was somewhat unsettling to be living in such a vast and mysterious house, where so many generations of Mocenigos had lived and died, and not at Ca’ Memmo, the smaller, more intimate palazzo further up the Grand Canal, beyond the bend of the Rialto, where she had grown up and which she had always considered her home.

On the evening of the Memmos’ arrival in Venice after the long journey from Rome, Lucia was whisked off with her sister to Santa Maria della Celestia, a fashionable convent next to the church of San Francesco della Vigna. Every day, she received a stream of chattering relatives in the parlour; when Alvise’s handsome face appeared through the wooden grid, she was always overcome by a flush of excitement. But the Mocenigos continued to hold up the contract and Lucia had to remain in the convent longer than expected.

The difficulties came, as always, from Alvise’s father, the moody, unpredictable Sebastiano, who suddenly refused to give the marriage his final blessing after promising he would. Memmo guessed this new delay had something to do with the fact that Giovanni Mocenigo, Sebastiano’s older brother, was very ill: after his death, Sebastiano would become the titular head of the Mocenigo family, and would therefore be able to put a personal stamp on the marriage contract.

Weeks passed with no final settlement in sight. Memmo waited “philosophically,” as he liked to put it. Alvise stopped by the convent in between sessions of the Senate and business meetings for visits that always seemed too short to Lucia. She reprimanded him gently “for those brief minutes you spend with me that do not satisfy me.” He was often distracted, in a hurry to leave, and though she understood he was a busy man with increasing responsibilities, she found his “indifference” wounding. “I have wanted to complain about this to you,” she confessed in a note she slipped to him through the grid, “[but] when I see you, my heart is overcome by such turmoil that I grow ever more desperate.” She feared Alvise’s comings and goings might be a foretaste of their future life together. “For pity’s sake,” she begged him, “allow me to spend as much time as possible with you in the future and to always accompany you on your trips.”² Alvise sent her magnificent clothes, bouquets of fresh flowers, baskets of fruit and silver cups brimming with delicious ice creams, but as much as she appreciated these gifts, they did little to assuage her anxiety.

Giovanni Mocenigo died at the end of February 1787. As Memmo had predicted, Sebastiano, now the head of the family, announced he was removing his last reservations. At his insistence, however, a new contract was drawn up and Memmo had to agree to pay Alvise a monthly stipend until he inherited the Mocenigo fortune upon Sebastiano’s death. The contract was signed at the end of March, a few days before Lucia’s seventeenth birthday. In mid April the dressmakers made their first appearance at Celestia and a festive atmosphere filled the convent. Lucia’s residual reserve dissolved completely. “How strongly I wish to tie the knot that will join me to my adorable husband and allow me at last to tell him ‘I love you’ again and again,” she wrote to Alvise, beaming with anticipation.³

On a sunny morning in early May, five months after entering the convent, she bid farewell to the nuns, and stepped into the bridal gondola in the full regalia of a splendid Venetian bride, her silk dress studded with gems and lined with tiny white pearls. The wedding cortège glided slowly up the Grand Canal, spawning a long swath of colourful boats of different sizes. Along the waterway, the crowd clapped and cheered—Evviva la sposa! Evviva la sposa! (Long live the bride!)—while loaves of bread and flasks of wine from the hills of Friuli were handed out to the populace. The parade passed beneath Palazzo Mocenigo, decked out with banners flying the family crest—two roses against a white and blue background—then moved upstream past the Rialto bridge, to the old church of San Marcuola, in the square adjacent to Ca’ Memmo, where Alvise and Lucia were married. After the ceremony, Memmo hosted a lavish banquet at which the newly-weds were toasted with poems and accolades. As the feast wore on, he rejoiced at the success of his tenacious diplomacy. “There is no more perfect marriage,” he proclaimed, “than the one between my daughter and Alvise Mocenigo.”⁴ Alvise led his bride on to the master gondola of Ca’ Mocenigo and together they glided back down the Grand Canal to their new home.

Palazzo Mocenigo was made up of three connected palaces facing south at the point where the Grand Canal begins its final turn before heading towards the Basin of Saint Mark. The palaces were built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the heyday of the Republic, and were renovated many times. As a result, the various facades formed a disharmonious but impressive whole that reflected the family’s steady accretion of money and power over the course of six centuries. It was an intimidating world for a seventeen-year-old bride to enter, filled as it was with the mementoes of a rich and often glorious history. The Mocenigos had given seven doges to the Republic, and Mocenigo admirals and diplomats had helped to expand and protect the Venetian Empire. Room after room was filled with venerable trophies: a picture of a famous battle scene, a corno dogale (doge’s cap) under a glass casing, the rusty scimitars wrested from the Turks. In the years of Venice’s decline, the Mocenigos were among the few great families that had managed, through marriages of convenience and land acquisitions on the mainland, to hold on to their fortune and actually increase it. By the end of the eighteenth century they owned immense estates in the provinces of Padua, Rovigo, Verona and in the northern region of Friuli. Their yearly income was well over 100,000 ducats, making them one of the five richest families in Venice.

The aggregate wealth of the 200 or so families inscribed in the Golden Book of the Venetian patriciate, on the other hand, had suffered steady erosion. Many of these nobili, or patricians, were so impoverished that they had long ago lost their palaces, and were housed and fed in special wards funded by the government. By the 1780s the oligarchy which had ruled Venice for nearly a thousand years had become ossified and terribly in-bred, too weak and brittle to face the powerful winds of change that were gathering force in France and would soon bring down the Republic of Saint Mark. In the early 1760s there had been a timid attempt at reform, aimed at broadening the base of political power to make the system more democratic, but the dominant conservative families had been quick to quash it. Instead of allowing new blood and energy to breathe life into its decrepit body, the oligarchy chose to remain a closed, withered caste. A few wealthy families continued to ensure their pre-eminence through patronage, corruption and inter-marriage. And the Mocenigos were certainly among them—of their seven doges, three were elected in the eighteenth century.

Alvise and Lucia’s apartment at Palazzo Mocenigo was on the mezzanine floor and looked directly out on the Grand Canal. It was spacious and elegantly furnished, with sunlight streaming in from the large windows over the water. There was a bedroom, a library-studio, a drawing room, a dining room and a small study adjoining the bedroom where Lucia could write and paint and take lessons—Alvise had granted her special request. The chambermaid, Maria, and the rest of the small staff lived in the servants’ quarters in the back. The apartment was quite independent from the rest of the house, a safe harbour, as it were, in the much vaster universe of Palazzo Mocenigo, with its grand staircases, its endless halls, its numerous apartments distributed on four floors where a crowd of Mocenigo relatives lived on more or less friendly terms.

It is easy to see how Lucia could feel lost in those new surroundings. She had hoped Alvise would be her guide and protector, but he was seldom at her side, always rushing to a function, a business meeting and other, more mysterious encounters. His elusiveness unsettled her from the very start of their marriage. The letters and notes she wrote to him those first few weeks of their life together are those of a very young wife in love with her husband, who wants to make him happy more than anything else in the world, and yet struggles to find her right place in his life. “My most beloved Alvise, it seemed to me you were not in your usual sweet humour when you woke up,” she wrote to him one morning. “I am a little worried as I am unable to trace the cause of this change.” She felt observed by the family yet also isolated, and she spent a good portion of the day wandering through the palazzo in the hope of suddenly coming upon Alvise, or walking down the steps to the docking on the Grand Canal where her husband’s gondola was usually moored. “Your Lucietta will be waiting for you around two o’clock at the riva,” she would scribble tenderly, only to receive an apologetic note back from Alvise saying he had been delayed at the Senate. One day, as she walked by a room where Alvise was receiving one of his agents, she stifled the impulse to walk in, but she could not resist dashing off a note to him as soon as she reached her apartment: “It is a cruel thing to pass by one’s husband and not be able to stop to see him and hug him…Come home quickly.” She sometimes wrote in French, perhaps to make her complaints sound more light-hearted: “I wanted to begin by scolding you but I am unable to scold my dear husband; I will only say this: my heart ached when I did not find you home, I wish to see you as soon as possible and I kiss you with all my heart.”⁵ During the first months of her marriage, Lucia did not have the comfort of Paolina’s company. Memmo planned to marry his youngest daughter off to Luigi Martinengo delle Palle, scion of a well-known family from Brescia, so he left her in the care of the nuns at Celestia while he negotiated the contract. Paolina was not yet fifteen and her father worried about the risks of an early pregnancy. He felt it would be “another two years before she can give birth without danger”⁶ so he pressed matters to finalise a settlement with the Martinengos while setting a later wedding date. His finances were so depleted, however, that he was forced to give away Ca’ Memmo, the venerable family palazzo on the Grand Canal, as part of Paolina’s dowry. He moved into the comfortable residence on Saint Mark’s Square that came with the position of procuratore di San Marco. He planned to open up the elegant saloni only for occasional entertainment, and live cosily in the smaller apartment on the mezzanine floor, where he now hung his large portrait, flanked by those of Lucia and Paolina, all of which had just arrived from Rome having been “excellently painted by my excellent Kauffmann.”⁷ It was shaping up as a perfect cocoon for his old age.

In many ways the three Kauffmann paintings captured a family scene that already belonged to the past. Memmo was a loving, devoted father, but the future of his daughters, which had been uppermost in his mind, was less of a worry now that Lucia was married and Paolina was on the way to the altar. Indeed Memmo briefly contemplated the idea of getting married himself, with Contarina Barbarigo, a life-long friend and lover; but the two of them squabbled over the marriage arrangement and nothing came of it. So Memmo went back to his numerous lady companions. “I am still oppressed by beautiful women,” he confided to a friend with gleeful incredulity:

In lieu of a cock that is no longer as hard as I wish it to be, I have very hard fingers with which I can happily satisfy all my crazy girls…Alas they all want to fall in love with me but I don’t want to hear anyone talk to me about love or faithfulness. I’ve gone back to what I once was…I want as many women as I can have and would be bored to death if I only had one.⁸

As he vigorously chased his youth, Memmo, who was nearing sixty, also kept his eye on the doge’s rapidly declining health. The idea of crowning his political career with the ducal cap flattered his vanity. “I am complimented at all times as [the doge’s] much desired successor,” he noted proudly.⁹ In Lucia’s new world, however, Alvise was now the ultimate authority; and his stature, both within the Mocenigo family and outside, was growing fast. Sebastiano, his father, was still the head of the family. But he was an old man in poor health, with an unsavoury past. Alvise, on the other hand, was gaining confidence and respect among his peers. He was elected Savio di Terraferma, a political office with supervisory responsibilities on the mainland. It was a prestigious appointment for a young patrician who wanted to pursue a career in government. Alvise was also earning a reputation as an able administrator with a keen interest in the development of modern agriculture. And as the only male heir of the Mocenigo dynasty, he was already looked upon as the de facto representative of the family interests within the Venetian oligarchy.

The pressure on Lucia to ensure the future glory of the Mocenigos by producing a healthy baby boy started immediately. Chiara, Lucia’s mother-in-law, lived in her own apartment in Palazzo Mocenigo, and often dropped by to keep her daughter-in-law company, staying on for a cup of chocolate or a lunch à deux. On such occasions, it was never very long before she turned to her favourite subject. Indeed it sometimes seemed it was her only topic of interest. Lucia wondered whether Chiara had been made to feel the same pressure from the Mocenigos when she was a young spouse. The survival of the dynasty had depended on her as well, and she had acquitted herself by giving birth to Alvise. Even though she had had a stressful life with her husband, suffering in silence as he humiliated her and made a fool of himself in the main courts of Europe, she had never lost her deep sense of loyalty to the family she had married into. Over and over, during her visits and in her notes and letters, she impressed upon Lucia the urgency of giving Alvise a son.

Alvise too was evidently keeping up the pressure: a month after the wedding, Lucia, barely seventeen, was already pregnant. It was a difficult pregnancy from the start and she was unwell for most of the first three months. The physical discomfort was made even worse by all the fuss her new relatives created around her. She missed her intimate conversations with Paolina. Most of all, she missed the comforting company of her mother, whose fading memory she now cherished even more lovingly than in the past.

The pain became more severe as the summer advanced, and by early August Lucia had her first miscarriage. Memmo, feeling his daughter’s pain but well aware of the unpleasant suggestions that came with an aborted pregnancy, remarked with sadness that the loss of the child was the only blemish on an otherwise exemplary marriage.

When the family pressure on Lucia resumed in the autumn, she was in many ways a changed woman, as if the miscarriage had put her life into sharper focus. Her letters to Alvise show that she had shed much of her shyness, and gained a greater sense of purpose and resolve. She was going to work even harder at loving her husband and giving him a son. True, she still spent most of her time with her maid, Maria, giving half-hearted instructions to the staff and waiting for her increasingly busy husband to come home. But now she ventured out to the theatre and visited childhood friends from before her Roman years. She also became more demanding and more passionate in her love notes to Alvise. “A dangerous wind has been blowing for the past half hour and I hope this means you have decided not to travel [to the mainland],” she wrote to her husband at the Senate. “My dearest Alvise, give me this great token of your love: arrange matters in such a way that I shall see you at the theatre tonight and I assure you that you will make my happiness.” How exasperating it was, she wrote to him another day, that Alvise was conducting business “in this very same palazzo” and yet “we cannot see each other and kiss.” And yet another time: “Oh please wrap up your endless talks and come rejoice in the presence of the one who loves you with all her soul.” To her delight, she noticed her sweet calls were often effective: Alvise would steal away from his endless chores and duties, suddenly appearing at the riva, and Lucia would have her treasured moment of triumph. There was a new playfulness between them, as when, shortly after an amorous encounter, she sent an envelope to Alvise containing a square piece of paper no bigger than a stamp on which she had scrawled in tiny writing and in French—the language of love and mischief:

Aimez-vous Lucille?

Elle vous adore^*4 10

By the end of the winter of 1788, less than a year after the wedding, Lucia was pregnant again. Her mother-in-law started to hover while the family circle tightened around her. This time Lucia felt more in control of herself, and happy, although her happiness was tempered by the experience she had had only a few months before. She took the greatest care to carry out as best she could what she now accepted as her highest duty: “My beloved husband, rest assured that I am taking every precaution I can to make our happiness even more perfect, and I move about as little as possible.”¹¹

By late spring, the crucial first three months had passed with no sign of danger, and Lucia, having obtained a green light from the family obstetrician, felt confident enough to travel out to Dolo, a lovely village on the river Brenta where the Mocenigos and other patrician families had summer houses. Lucia spent her days quietly, getting herself acquainted with the house. Le Scalette was a Renaissance villa, long and narrow, situated on the bank of the river and separated from the clear, slow-moving water by a pathway that led directly to the village half a mile away. In the back of the house was a formal garden with box hedges and potted lemons and decorative statues. Beyond it, fields of wheat and maize extended inland as far as the eye could see. Lucia had the house cleaned and scrubbed from top to bottom, she brought paintings from Venice with which to redecorate the bedrooms, she stocked up the kitchen with supplies of coffee, sugar and flour and had Alvise send more silverware. To better enjoy the cool, she had the dining table moved out to the loggia, which overlooked the Brenta on one side and the garden on the other.

Once the house was in order, she rested and nursed her growing belly. She embroidered shirts for Alvise, played cards, took slow walks to Dolo, stopping at the busy coffee house where other holidaymakers gathered for a little gossip. She paid visits to her neighbours and made a point of cultivating Mocenigo friends and relatives who lived close by. Her mother-in-law frequently came to see her from nearby Padua, bringing baskets of fresh fruit and vegetables. Lucia sometimes asked her father, who was also in Padua for the summer, to come over for lunch so he and Chiara could entertain themselves by talking about old times while she played lady of the house. “I want to describe to you the meal I gave your mother and my papa today,” she wrote proudly to Alvise, listing the items on the menu, which included “rice with quails, red meat, cutlets with sauce, mushrooms in casserole, fresh vegetables, salami, salad…”¹²

Alvise came and went. In the course of the summer he visited the Mocenigo estates, checking on the crops, going through the accounts, settling disputes among the farmers. But he was also busy with his new duties as Savio di Terraferma: touring government houses, hospitals and technical schools where he gave speeches, spoke to the teachers, encouraged the students and gave out prizes. On occasion he travelled to Verona, where his father, to everyone’s surprise, had been appointed governor—his first assignment after the long period of confinement in Brescia. Sebastiano had worked hard behind the scenes to be readmitted into active political duty. “We will see his resurrection after all,”¹³ Memmo noted wryly, not realising he would soon regret that very “resurrection.”

Sebastiano’s acrimony towards Alvise softened, at least for a while, and Lucia was “very disappointed” not to be able to travel to Verona to take advantage of this rare “moment of peace between my dear husband and his father.” She longed to be with Alvise but she did not want to weigh on him. “Tonight I will savour the only good thing I have left: to dream of you and think of you all the time…Adieu my dearest one. I want to give you a kiss even as I write you this letter. So here it is, where I mark this dot • Adieu my love.”¹⁴

Alvise’s complicated relationship with Sebastiano reminded Lucia how fortunate she was that her husband and her father got along so well. Memmo had a soft spot for Alvise and he supported his budding political career. He had watched him grow increasingly alienated from the obtuse conservatism of his own family. In spite of his brooding, introverted personality, Alvise was fast becoming something of a rallying figure in the reformist camp, and Memmo felt that if the Republic was ever to revive its fortunes it would be thanks to progressive young men like his son-in-law. In turn, Alvise saw Memmo—one of the few survivors of a band of reformers who had come of age during the heyday of the Enlightenment—as his political mentor. He sought his advice and cultivated his friendship. And of course it warmed Lucia’s heart to see the relationship between them blossom. “However, to make me completely happy,” she warned her husband, “you must assure me that all of this is not on my account but rather because you truly wish to consider him both a friend and a father.”¹⁵

In the same way, she hoped Alvise would be a friend and a father “to our own dear son, who is still so tiny and yet, with his little movements inside me, bids me to tell you that he hugs you very hard.”¹⁶ Those eager “little movements” continued through August then gradually ceased. Alvise rushed back to Le Scalette as soon as he received news that his wife was again in pain. By the time he arrived the sadness in Lucia’s stunned gaze confirmed his worst fears. Memmo arrived from Padua to be with his daughter. “My good girl has had a second miscarriage,” he wrote with a heavy heart. “She is recovering after the usual pains.”¹⁷

Lucia’s recovery was in fact much slower than her father had anticipated. Two miscarriages in a year had taken their toll on her, undermining her self-confidence and throwing her into a period of depression. Memmo suggested Alvise take Lucia on a long trip: it was sure to distract his daughter and could turn into a useful educational experience for his son-in-law. As soon as Lucia was well enough to travel, they left for Tuscany, staying first at the Bagni di Lucca for a restorative water cure, then moving on to Pisa, Livorno and Florence, where Alvise was able to have a first-hand look at the economic progress achieved under Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, younger brother of Emperor Joseph II of Austria. As he followed their journey from a distance, Memmo remarked proudly that his son-in-law “could not be a better husband to his wife, whom he adores and who loves him back.”¹⁸

Alvise wanted to continue the trip as far as Rome and possibly even Naples. He was keen to visit San Leucio, the model community King Ferdinand IV—who had thrown confetti at Lucia and Paolina in Naples—had built around a flourishing silk factory near the slopes of Vesuvius. However, the trip had to be cut short. The political scene in Venice was in turmoil. Worst of all, tensions between the Mocenigos and the Memmos had suddenly flared.

While Alvise and Lucia were still in Tuscany, the health of Paolo Renier, a corrupt and unpopular doge, rapidly deteriorated. Aspiring candidates for the ducal throne began to campaign behind the scenes, including Memmo, who prowled around the Senate with the assurance of an old cat. “People say the Doge will soon be dead and that I will be elected to replace him,” he boasted, adding he would run only if he were spared the need to spend “the usual grandiose sums of money, which I do not have.”¹⁹ He wanted to run as the candidate of a reformist coalition. But if the election became a costly contest in which the candidate with the most money had the best chances, he would withdraw.

From the beginning, the campaign took a promising turn for Memmo. There was a fairly widespread perception among the more enlightened Venetians that the Republic had reached a critical point in its drawn-out decline, and that the coming election was going to be of great importance—a last chance, as it were, to set the stage for those elusive yet long due reforms that might reverse the downward spiral. The sprawling bureaucracy had to be streamlined. The powerful, over-privileged guilds that were stifling trade had to be confronted. On the mainland, the modernisation of agriculture, the one development that showed real promise, had to be encouraged and accelerated. And it was also urgent to lift Venice’s overseas dominions from their wretched backwardness—the province of Dalmatia, on the opposite shore of the Adriatic Sea, was so poor it had become an embarrassment for the Republic.^*5 But nothing would change if the oligarchy itself did not change by opening itself up to families of more recent wealth which rightly clamoured for representation. Memmo, a true child of the Enlightenment who had devoted his public life to the improvement of government, was keenly aware of what needed to be done. The like-minded patricians who saw him as the best hope to rejuvenate the sclerotic Venetian State, stepped out of the shadows of inertia to rally around him. They were a larger number than expected, and the conservative camp was taken by surprise. “We’ll see a Memmo elected doge after all!” the candidate chirped.²⁰ Then a challenge arose from a completely unexpected quarter.

Sebastiano Mocenigo, galvanised by his political “resurrection” in Verona, brazenly decided to play for the highest stakes. He knew he had but a few years to live and this was the last chance he would ever have to be elected doge. On the face of it, it looked like an impossible challenge, but this quirky, contorted man had often deluded himself in the past. If Memmo intended to run without spending a ducat, Sebastiano, on the other hand, intended to plunder the Mocenigo fortune now at his disposal, in order to win the contest. He moved back to Venice and began to plot his campaign from a casino he had in a back street behind Saint Mark’s Square, with the help of a few fellow conservatives who thought a rich Mocenigo could well block the rise of Memmo. Memmo himself was completely taken aback by Sebastiano’s challenge. He recoiled at the idea of running against a man “in whose house I have a daughter,” and hoped the strong opposition to Sebastiano would force his rival to withdraw. Sebastiano’s surprise candidacy had indeed generated quick opposition, and serious worry for the disrepute he would bring to the office. Sebastiano, however, was obstinate. He knew he could count on support from the families in Verona, a city whose political importance was growing. He promised money to impoverished patricians who had lost everything but their voting rights, and spread the rumour that he intended to create a slush fund worth 30,000 ducats to spend during the campaign. Those rumours produced the intended result. As one informer told the Inquisitors, “the opposition of many patricians to Sebastiano Mocenigo is melting by the hour.”²¹

When Alvise and Lucia arrived in Venice after their long trip south, the doge, though in agony, was still alive, but the city was already divided in two camps. The coffee houses and wine shops were filled with political chatter. Figurines with caricatures of the two candidates circulated from hand to hand. Satirical epigrams such as this one were posted on the walls near Saint Mark’s:

Memmo wants to be doge without spending a lira,

Shrewdly he distributes his bows for free…

And would you believe who else

Now strives for the Ducal crown?

Bastian Mocenigo, who governs Verona

And brought Venetians such disrepute

With his terrible vices,

Enough to horrify any man of good sense,

Let alone a good Christian…²²

Doge Paolo Renier died on 13 February 1789. The authorities did not divulge the news, not wishing to disrupt the Carnival, but word spread quickly among the ruling families and the campaign went into full gear. According to Memmo, “all the people in authority bluntly intervened to convince Mocenigo to withdraw…but he remained obstinate and followed no one’s advice.”²³ Sebastiano promised up to eight silver ducats to impoverished patricians for their vote. He ordered that bread and wine be handed out at all the ferry stops along the Grand Canal and coins distributed in the Mocenigo neighbourhood of San Samuele. He was so sure of victory, it was said, that he had already given orders to deck out as many as sixty-four ceremonial vessels for the splendid cortège he was planning for his accession to the ducal throne.

Alvise watched with great discomfort as his father made a spectacle of himself instead of staying quietly on the sideline, grateful that the Republic had allowed him back into the fold. He feared Sebastiano’s unreasonable bid would stain the family reputation precisely at a time when he was trying to restore the prestige of the Mocenigos; he worried, too, about the effect of his father’s antics on his own career. If his father persisted in his design, Alvise would have no choice but to stand by him in the name of the family, and participate in an electoral struggle against Memmo, the “friend and father” with whom he felt a much greater political affinity.

Government informers making the rounds of taverns and coffee shops picked up rumours about Alvise’s “hesitancy” and his “wariness at taking a firm stance” in favour of his father. This factor, more than any other, changed the dynamic of the contest. Alvise was not a novice: he was a rising political star and the future standard-bearer of the Mocenigos. His vacillation cast a pall over Sebastiano’s candidacy, which collapsed like a pack of cards. On 2 March, the death of Doge Renier was finally announced. A day later, an informer reported that there was “universal silence around Sebastiano Mocenigo’s candidacy and all the people close to him stay away from those discussing the matter.” The following day another report stated “there are no more meetings in Sebastiano Mocenigo’s casino. One only hears the complaint of those patricians who won’t be receiving their money.” By 7 March, the candidacy was dead, and Sebastiano was “in a state of great affliction on account of the insuperable difficulties he encountered.”²⁴

Even though Sebastiano lost his bid, he inflicted serious damage on Memmo, who was unable to turn the situation to his advantage. The conservative patricians who opposed him quickly put forward a new candidate, Ludovico Manin, a weak and ineffectual man from a very wealthy family in Friuli. It was an uninspiring, uncontroversial choice, and on 9 March, four months before the taking of the Bastille in Paris—the first of a series of events that would ultimately have a catastrophic impact on Venice—Manin was elected doge.

If Memmo was disappointed at having been outmanoeuvred in a game at which he usually excelled, he did his best not to show it. “I am at peace with myself,” he assured his friends, even as he blasted the obtuseness of his fellow politicians. But Memmo’s peace of mind did not last long for he soon had to put all his energy in salvaging Paolina’s marriage contract with the Martinengos, which was suddenly thrown into jeopardy when the Inquisitors put Luigi, the future groom, under house arrest for licentious behaviour. While his family was negotiating in earnest with Memmo, Luigi had started a very public and scandalous relation with another woman—“a Roman slut,” Memmo noted in disgust. The matter would have been best left to the families to solve, but the Inquisitors, with their obsessive inclination to interfere in private matters, took it upon themselves to have Luigi arrested. Despite all the effort he had put in the transaction, Memmo now realised he might well have to annul the marriage contract. But Luigi, “that great ass,” was putting on a pathetic show, claiming to be devoted to Paolina. “He raves deliriously about wanting her back and promises all kinds of things,” Memmo complained.²⁵ To make matters more unpleasant, the Martinengos, who had already taken possession of Ca’ Memmo and had begun to refurbish it even though the wedding had not yet taken place, were faced with the prospect of having to give it back. So they demanded that Memmo reimburse at least part of the 10,000 ducats they had spent on house improvements.

Meanwhile, what to do with Paolina? She was still confined at Celestia with the nuns, but now Memmo was forced to consider bringing her to live with him in his alcove at Saint Mark’s Square if the marriage fell through—a solution he was not happy with because he felt increasingly protective of his new privacy. Despite his best efforts to resist emotional attachments, he was in fact succumbing to the charms of a young woman. “In love at sixty? Yes sir!” he admitted. Her name was Dinda Petrocchi Orsini and she was only twenty years old. Memmo had met this enticing young beauty in Rome when she was still unhappily married. “Now she has fled from the arms of her husband to fall into mine,” he grinned.²⁶

Alvise emerged from the 1789 election with his prestige unscathed by his father’s debacle. Indeed, he was now regarded as the de facto head of the family, if not formally, at least from a political standpoint. Not yet thirty, he was a player to be reckoned with. His speeches at the Senate had enhanced his reputation as an able and even inspiring young politician. Inevitably, his increased responsibilities—both on the family front and the public one—weighed on his relationship with Lucia. But she was fast learning the rules of the game. She was, after all, the daughter of one of the most respected statesmen in Venice, and she had experienced first-hand the demands a political career placed on the family. “I console myself with the thought that you are happy to stay long hours at the Senate,” she assured Alvise without a trace of irony, “since you have a real love for the affairs of your fatherland.”²⁷

Lucia, meanwhile, worried about fulfilling her own task. To improve the chances of a successful pregnancy, Alvise thought it would be useful for Lucia to continue the water cures she had begun in Lucca during their trip to Tuscany. He sent her to spend the summer in Valdagno, a fashionable little town north of Vicenza, at the foot of the Alps. Valdagno was set in a region Lucia remembered well from her childhood summers. When her father was away in Constantinople, she spent the hottest months with her mother at Castel Gomberto, the country estate five miles down the road from Valdagno that belonged to her mother’s family, the Piovene. Castel Gomberto was a handsome neo-Palladian villa with a formal garden, a long rectangular fishpond and a huge elm tree that provided a refreshing shade in July and August. It was a warm, friendly house, filled with sweet memories of her mother. Thus Lucia’s dread of being separated again from Alvise for weeks at a time during her stay in Valdagno was mitigated by the prospect of frequent visits to Castel Gomberto to be with her Piovene uncles and aunts.

Lucia took rooms at the Casa Valle, a comfortable house in the main square of Valdagno, with a fenced-in rose garden in the back whence a path led directly to a little house at the source of the curative waters. Lucia’s days revolved around the schedule that had been arranged for her by the local doctor to fortify her body in order to carry her next pregnancy to its conclusion. “My health is good,” she dutifully reported to Alvise after settling in. “The water cure is following its course and the doctor seems pleased.”²⁸

In the afternoons, when she did not ride a carriage to Castel Gomberto, she explored the trails in neighbouring woods, taking walks, she wrote to Alvise, “which I cannot wait to show you.”²⁹ Occasionally, a football game was organised in the town square to amuse the summer residents or a travelling theatre company might put on a show. The surrounding mountains were known for the great variety of their mineral ores. They attracted geologists and amateur collectors of rocks and gems from inside the Venetian Republic and abroad, and the mineral collections on display in several curiosity shops were the principal attractions in Valdagno. In the evenings, visitors came by Casa Valle to exchange niceties, and brought a bouquet of freshly cut flowers, a plate of figs or perhaps a basket of mushrooms from the nearby woods. Lucia often put together a round of tombola, her favourite society game, though “I lose most of the time,” she complained to her husband, “without even the comfort of hearing you read out the numbers with your usual grace.”³⁰

During those summer evenings at Valdagno the talk often drifted to the extraordinary events taking place in Paris. France’s absolute monarchy had effectively collapsed after the storming of the Bastille and the establishment of the Convention to draft a constitution. Naturally, these dramatic developments were also at the centre of animated discussions back in Venice, where conservative patricians expressed their alarm while the more progressive-minded Venetians followed the beginnings of the French Revolution with the hope that the winds blowing from Paris might ultimately have a beneficial influence on the old Republic as well. Alvise, a devoted reader of Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau, kept Lucia abreast of the news. His comments on the situation unfolding in France were sympathetic but cautious—he was not a revolutionary, either by temperament or political conviction.

Lucia knew the discussions taking place in Venice made it more difficult for Alvise to journey out to Valdagno, but in her reveries she imagined him riding his carriage into the little town. Every jingling bell made her blood rush and her head turn. “My darling Alvise, it is so hard to be away from you! I cannot help feeling envious each time I see a married couple.” But as the summer wore on, the chances of luring him there grew increasingly remote. “Tomorrow an aerostatic balloon will lift off from our garden,” she announced as a last resort. “I don’t know what else to offer to encourage you to come…”³¹

The one thing that kept her spiritually connected with Alvise that summer at Valdagno were the books that he recommended to her. At his suggestion, she read La Nouvelle Héloïse, the epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau published thirty years earlier yet still very popular. The book tells the story of two star-crossed lovers. In brief, Saint-Preux, a middle-class tutor, falls in love with Julie, his aristocratic pupil, who in turn falls in love with him. It is an impossible passion. Julie is promised to another man of her same station, whom she marries out of a sense of duty. Saint-Preux leaves on a long journey abroad, but eventually returns and is engaged as tutor of Julie’s children. Everyone seems content in this ménage. Beneath the surface, however, the echoes of the earlier passion still reverberate, and Julie realises, as her death nears, that she has never stopped loving Saint-Preux. “You can imagine how eager I am to read it after the description you gave me of the writer and the theme of the book,”³² Lucia wrote to Alvise as she delved into the thick 800-page tome.

There are many ways to read Rousseau’s classic novel. Tearful readers across Europe were certainly captivated by the sheer power of the passion between Saint-Preux and Julie, and the sexual tension underlying the book. And one can easily imagine Lucia in bed, propped up against her cushions, reading by candlelight into the night. Of course, unlike Julie she was in love with her husband. But she yearned to be loved back with the same intensity, whereas Alvise’s long absences left her unsteady—a feeling that was no doubt enhanced by the difficulty she was having in giving birth. “Please love me, Alvise,” she pleaded touchingly. “If only you knew how deep my feelings for you have reached inside my heart you would understand why I believe I have a right to demand equal love in return.”³³

By the end of August, as the temperature finally cooled a little and the countryside around Valdagno took on a golden hue, Lucia realised that Alvise was not going to come out to see her. In her last letter from Casa Valle before returning to Venice she made no effort to conceal her disappointment:

I received your latest this evening: very nice letter, amusing, filled with interesting news, and I thank you. But how is it that there is not the slightest word about a visit here, nor do you mention the love you said you felt for me. Oh God, forgive me if I sound reproachful, but you surely realise that the thing I am most interested in is also the thing I most lack. This is the cause of my bitterness. You won’t like this letter—how could you?—but you can forgive my sincerity.³⁴

Lucia heard that Alvise, back in Venice, was gambling at the Ridotto, the famous gaming-house closed by the Inquisitors back in the 1770s and now open again and attracting crowds of derelict patricians, ruffians and cheats. Gambling was a real scourge among Venetians. Countess Rosenberg, Memmo’s first love and life-long friend, had written an essay describing the ravages of this addiction, which had deeply affected Lucia.^*6 Alvise admitted to her that he played cards for money and was not always lucky. “I am very disturbed by these continual losses,” she wrote back in alarm, reminding him that until his father died they only had a relatively small stipend to live on.

You know we have little money. I don’t expect you to force yourself away from the gaming table but don’t go anxiously looking for it either. Let conversation be your entertainment of choice, and for God’s sake always keep that nefarious thought of “earning one’s money back” as far away from your mind as possible. Forgive me if I insist in giving you this advice: I do it only for your own sake.³⁵

Alvise was also spending some of his time—Lucia seems to have been unaware of this at the time—in the arms of Foscarina, the beautiful wife of a well-known Venetian senator. Foscarina was, by her own definition, “the most open-minded authority in the art of seduction.” Whether she seduced Alvise or he seduced her is unclear. In any case, while Lucia was away taking the waters, they began a light-hearted affair made of intimate conversations and furtive encounters. Their love notes were more practical than passionate. “My dearest Eige”—this was the nickname Foscarina gave Alvise—“my husband is at home and it would be unwise to receive you here now,” read one. “Drop me a line tomorrow morning and we shall arrange to see each other,” read another. On one occasion she sent word to him that she was alone at home all evening “so choose the time that is most convenient for you.” In the beginning she treated Alvise’s occasional lapses—a missed appointment, an unanswered note—with deliberate levity. “If I were one of those women who take the affairs of the heart seriously, then I should have reason to quarrel with you,” she once reprimanded him gently. “But it is of little importance to us, so let us laugh about it—we can’t go wrong…And let us keep trading our little confessions. The freshness of our conversation will continue to amuse us.”

It did not amuse them for very long. Foscarina liked to conduct her affairs efficiently and she quickly lost patience with Alvise’s disappearing acts. “After receiving two passionate notes from you, I waited for you like an ass until eight o’clock,” she wrote in anger, “thinking that if you couldn’t come you would at least send word, out of politeness if not affection.” The affair got out of hand. She accused Alvise of “running around too much and getting very little done, at least as far as I am concerned.” During one of their earlier, sweeter encounters, Alvise, in jest, had slipped off Foscarina’s wedding band and taken it home. Now she demanded to have it back, and she asked for all her letters as well. “I’ll send you my manservant and as soon as he returns, I’ll send him back with all your notes, which I have already gathered…Let us put an end to this story and let us stay friends…Adieu, and remember my wedding band.”³⁶

Alvise never returned Foscarina’s letters—Lucia found them years later among his private papers. It is unclear whether he ever even gave the ring back. “I am still waiting,” an exasperated Foscarina complained some time after the end of their affair. In any case it was over by the time Lucia returned to Venice after her summer in Valdagno.

In September, preparations began at last for Paolina’s wedding. Memmo, still frolicking happily in the arms of the beautiful Dinda Orsini, now a fixture in the family, had managed to disentangle the imbroglio with the Martinengos, making it possible for the chastened groom, Luigi, to marry his youngest daughter. Lucia was happy to have her sister just a short gondola ride away, at Ca’ Memmo, the old family palazzo that now belonged to Paolina’s in-laws. And no one was more pleased than Lucia to hear, a few months after the wedding, that Paolina was expecting a child. Yet as the pregnancy progressed, it is difficult to imagine that Lucia did not also feel a growing sense of emptiness in her life. She certainly did not resign herself to childlessness, but the thought of that empty crib at Palazzo Mocenigo must have made it hard to keep her anxiety at bay.

Alvise’s frustration at not yet having an heir was deepened by his dissatisfaction at the way his father, Sebastiano, was running the family estate. Alvise was now responsible for the day-to-day management of the immense properties on the mainland and he received an adequate though by no means generous salary on which he and Lucia lived. But Sebastiano kept his son on a very short leash and this made for constant attrition between the two. Unlike his father, Alvise had a true passion for agriculture, or, as Memmo once said, a “talent for growing things.” He was fascinated by the development of new crops, the problems of irrigation, the possibilities introduced by machinery. He toured the country fairs and read the increasingly influential agricultural magazines.

The Venetian mainland territories stretched all the way east to the duchy of Milan and included the fertile plains along the river Po. The agricultural revolution that was taking place there was as advanced as it was in England at that time, and it was transforming the Venetian economy. Vast tracts of desolate, marshy land in the Po delta were being reclaimed; new fertilisers and new crops were increasing yield and variety; the development of mechanical equipment was lowering production costs. To men like Alvise, the future of the Republic depended on how quickly and efficiently the agricultural revolution would spread. But his father was of another generation. He was not interested in modernisation. Much to Alvise’s dismay he seemed content to exploit the land inefficiently and with minimal effort, leaving everything in the hands of incapable and often dishonest agents. The result was wastefulness on a grand scale, and a decline in income so rapid that Alvise, who would soon inherit the family holdings, realised it might lead to financial catastrophe in a matter of a few years. However, he knew that he would never turn his old father into a champion of agricultural reform and that their relationship was too encrusted with bad feelings for the two of them ever to work together in harmony. Sebastiano, on his part, viewed Alvise’s attempts to introduce improvements as the encroachments of an ungrateful son on God-given parental rights. “What truly pains me,” he told Alvise, “is that I cannot even invoke the duty of a son, because I would not be listened to. Even worse, I would be treated with disdain and scoffed at, this being the manner in which sons treat their parents today.”³⁷

By the spring of 1790 Alvise had had enough and he took a decision that had a far-reaching impact on his life. Using the name of a conniving friend, he secretly leased from his own father a vast tract of marshy land that belonged to the Mocenigos. The property, Molinato, was 1,800 hectares in all, and it sloped from the hills of southern Friuli down towards the Adriatic Sea, near the town of Portogruaro. It was a relatively small portion of the Mocenigo land holdings, but large enough to grow extensive crops once the land had been reclaimed. When Alvise signed the lease, the property was still mostly made up of soggy marshes filled with natural drainage and overflowing canals from neighbouring properties.

The lease started on 1 August 1790. That summer, Alvise took Lucia to visit Molinato under the scorching sun. They reached the property by sailing up the small canals that criss-crossed the wetlands along the coast. Lucia was stunned at the sight of such a wild and inhospitable territory. At the centre of the property was a forlorn hamlet inhabited by a few wretched families—sixty people at the most, including women and children. They were desperately poor, had a sickly, yellowish complexion and stood in the mud with their swollen bellies, swatting flies and staring at the newcomers. The air was so unhealthy that the agent Alvise hired, Checco Locatelli, obtained in writing that he did not have to live in the filthy hamlet; he would settle in Cordovado, a village inside the ruins of a Roman army camp some five miles up the road, where the Mocenigos owned a farmhouse.

Alvise did his best to reassure Lucia. He had already planned an elaborate drainage system to reclaim the marshes. He would settle the land by bringing in more labourers with their families, increase the livestock (there were fewer than a hundred scraggy cows), and plant rows of willows and poplars and vineyards until Lucia would no longer recognise the place. If the land proved productive, and the income increased, then he would make even larger investments, and maybe one day build a whole town on those very bogs, something along the lines of San Leucio, the model estate created by the king of Naples and about which he had heard so much. He envisioned an ideal rural community inspired by the progressive philosophers of the Enlightenment yet adapted to a rapidly changing economic environment; a modern agricultural and manufacturing centre with proper housing for the workers and their families, schools and training facilities, and good health care. But all that was in the future, when they would have more money at their disposal. For the time being, and given the small resources he could count on, Alvise developed a short-term plan with Locatelli: they were going to plant wheat, rye and sorghum on the drier fields further away from the coastline while they started to drain the lower marshes. This would allow them to raise cash and offset the cost of the lease, of digging canals, of new machinery and stock.

Despite her initial dismay, Lucia agreed to stay on for a few months and she set to work with pioneering spirit. Alvise was often away, meeting suppliers, calling on middlemen and visiting fairs. Lucia, meanwhile, reorganised the house, which had been left in a state of semi-abandon by Alvise’s father. She replaced all the rusty and “completely useless” appliances—the old stove, the water tank, the laundry basin, the casseroles and pans. She started keeping accounts and discovered she was good at cutting expenses. She also learnt to manage a much larger staff than the one at Palazzo Mocenigo or the summer villa on the Brenta. It was not always easy. The old caretaker, for one, was a hot-tempered man who drank and cursed, and resented the new occupants of the house. He did not get along at all with the house manager and threatened to kill him several times. Lucia confronted the caretaker sternly, obtaining a promise from him “that he will not abuse [us] with either words or deeds.” Locatelli, the experienced agent of the estate, warned Lucia that the caretaker was not to be believed. But she worried, correctly, about the consequences of sending him away. “If I left this man with no food and no place to go he might well become desperate and take revenge upon those who caused his ruin,” she wrote to Alvise. In the end she followed her instinct: she did not send the man away, and it does not appear he caused her further trouble. But it was during such tense moments that she most missed her husband, “wishing [your] return for a thousand reasons.”³⁸

Lucia had rarely felt so isolated as during those first months at Cordovado. When she was frantic for company, she rode her carriage to Portogruaro, an attractive little town with a bustling waterfront just off the main square where one boarded the burchiello, the water ferry to Venice. But she usually stayed at home, catching up on the reading she had planned for herself. Alvise had given her a beautifully bound two-volume French translation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In truth, the choice had left Lucia a little baffled, as her interests ran in a different direction; but it occurred to her, only partly in jest, that Molinato was her desert island and that she might draw strength from Crusoe’s ingenuity. Another novel she had enjoyed after La Nouvelle Héloïse was Countess Rosenberg’s Les Morlacques, a romantic tale of love and death set in the rugged mountains of Dalmatia. She was keen to have a copy with her at Cordovado and told Alvise to send one up from Venice. “You might ask Papa to lend us one of his,” she added, knowing her father kept several copies of Countess Rosenberg’s books at home.³⁹

Although Lucia enjoyed novels, she was also interested in books on the education of children. She had brought with her from Venice Madame de Genlis’s Le Siècle passé, a book on the teaching of history. Madame de Genlis, whom Lucia would meet and befriend years later in Paris, was a prolific writer and educator. She came from an impoverished aristocratic family in Burgundy and had become quite a celebrity in the Parisian salons thanks to her wit and distinguished manners. Appointed governess of the Duke of Chartres’s daughters, she handled herself so well that she was promoted to governess of his sons, one of whom was the future king, Louis Philippe. What most intrigued Lucia was how Madame de Genlis revolutionised traditional teaching methods, drawing her students out and engaging them in a dialogue. She taught botany during walks in the garden and in the countryside; she taught history with the help of magic lantern slides to make the lessons more vivid and entertaining; she taught literature by staging small plays and organising readings. Her progressive thinking had led her to welcome the fall of the absolute monarchy in France despite her links to the royal house, and to throw in her lot with the Girondins, the moderate party that was soon to be overpowered by the more militant Jacobins in Paris. In the isolation of Cordovado, this whiff of subversion must have made Madame de Genlis’s books even more exciting.

Lucia put in a number of other requests for educational books to Alvise, should he find himself “with a little extra money in his pocket.” One in particular she hoped he could purchase for her was Instruction d’un père à ses enfants sur la nature et la religion, by Abraham Trembley, a Swiss naturalist known in scientific circles for his studies on the fresh water polyp—the hydra—which he believed to be the missing link between the animal and the vegetable world. Trembley, who was influenced by his fellow countryman Rousseau, later became an educator and a philosopher interested in the connections between nature and human development. His two-volume work was written in very simple, “elementary” prose, Lucia explained to her husband. The first volume dealt with natural history, biology and geology; the second one focused on ethics and physics. Despite Lucia’s painstaking instructions, Alvise managed to send her the wrong book, and though she was “quite grateful” to see that he had “so promptly tried to please” her, she told him frankly, and with a touch of irritation: “It’s not the book I wanted.”⁴⁰

Lucia’s sudden interest in pedagogy reflected a change in her feelings about motherhood. Heretofore she had seen it essentially as a duty she had to fulfil. A fully matured woman of twenty-one, she now had a strong, natural desire to have a child. In the autumn, she left Cordovado with a new determination. She was going to do everything in her power to avoid another miscarriage, and she was going to be ready when her child was born: ready to love him, to nurture him, to raise him. She visited Doctor Calvi, a respected obstetrician in Padua. He recommended repeated immersions in cold water to fortify her constitution, so she asked Alvise to send a large wooden wash-tub directly to Le Scalette, their villa on the banks of the Brenta.

All during the spring and summer of 1791 she stayed at Le Scalette, devoting herself to her daily ablutions. “I fervently hope they will have a positive effect,” she wrote to Alvise. To increase her daily exercise, she took regular walks to the village of Dolo and to the Tiepolos and Grittis, who lived down the road. She took up riding again for the first time since her lessons in Rome at the Villa Borghese, and she asked Maria, her maid, to send her riding clothes up from Venice, including “boots, fustian trousers, scarlet bodice, black cummerbund, corset, girdle and my round, cloth riding hat.” The evenings at Le Scalette were quiet: a game of cards, a piece of music at the clavichord, the occasional tombola with the staff. She gently complained about Alvise’s absences: “If only you were here with me, my sweet…Do not abandon me so frequently; I never married to live in such a cruel condition.”⁴¹

Memmo was a frequent guest that summer, checking on his daughter’s health and bringing news of Paolina, who was nursing a healthy baby girl, Caterina, nicknamed Cattina. Le Scalette was a house he knew very well. Thirty years earlier, Countess Rosenberg, then still Giustiniana Wynne, had spent a summer there with her mother and her siblings (they had rented the house from the Mocenigos), and Memmo, then a bachelor, had snuck in and out of the house to meet with the young woman he loved so passionately. Now Countess Rosenberg was dying of cancer in nearby Padua and a distraught Memmo wanted to be close to her. He visited her often, and Lucia sometimes went along, shocked to see her father’s first love so “infinitely degraded.”⁴² The countess died in August, and Lucia could not help noticing how her father too had aged during the summer, often complaining about his splitting headaches, his bad circulation and the gout that tormented his feet. Although Dinda Orsini, his young lover, still provided some consolation to him, their ties were gradually loosening.

The news from France occupied much of the conversation at Le Scalette. The Constituent Assembly drafted the Constitution, but King Louis XVI, unwilling to accept the end of absolute monarchy, secretly fled from Paris and headed for the northern border. His aim was to march back into France with the help of the Austrians and re-establish his rule. But he was recognised in the town of Varennes and brought back in ignominy to the Tuileries, losing the little loyalty he still had among Parisians. He and the Queen, Marie Antoinette, were placed under house arrest, while a stream of émigrés fled from France and pressed foreign rulers to intervene militarily.

Emperor Leopold II of Austria, whom Memmo had met when he was still Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, was especially concerned about the turn of events in France because Marie Antoinette was his younger sister. He was travelling through Padua that summer, on his way to Vienna with his other sister, Maria Carolina, Queen of the Two Sicilies, and her husband, King “Big Nose” Ferdinand IV. The question on everyone’s lips was whether the emperor, who had been on the throne but one year, was going to declare war against France. “There are some here who believe he is ready to wage it,” Lucia reported to Alvise in Venice as the Senate made preparations to receive the emperor. “But others feel he will think twice about intervening as long as his sister is in the hands of the rebels.”⁴³ A few weeks later, Leopold issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, enjoining other European countries to restore the French monarchy with the force of arms.

During the course of the summer, while Lucia was at Le Scalette taking her cold baths, it was Alvise’s turn to succumb to the beguiling Dinda Orsini, whom he had met on several occasions in the company of his father-in-law. He courted her discreetly, obviously aware he was endangering not just his marriage but his relationship with Memmo; Dinda resisted him at first, even as she acknowledged her tenderness for him. “There is no doubt that both you and I feel something that goes beyond friendship, but I don’t want to go looking for what it is,” she said, wary of an affair that could lead to trouble if it were discovered. But Alvise pressed ahead, sending her flirtatious notes and unabashed declarations of love. “Oh God, how does one answer when you speak to my heart so firmly and obligingly,” Dinda asked, while making sure the fire of their budding passion was well stoked.

Despite his feelings for Dinda, Alvise evidently complied with his marital duties during his sporadic visits to Le Scalette because by the end of the summer Lucia was pregnant again. Among the first to congratulate her upon her return to Palazzo Mocenigo in the autumn was her mother-in-law, Chiara. “I hope your health is perfect,” she told her, adding frankly that she should “take care to do all you need in order to become a mother, thereby consoling this family which sees in you its only means of survival.”⁴⁴

Upon learning his wife might yet give him an heir, Alvise returned to the family fold, giving Lucia the kind of attention she had always asked of him. Dinda expertly withdrew from the scene, not without reminding Alvise how right she had been to resist his courtship.

I dare not imagine what you would be going through now had I taken advantage of our blind passion…My dearest Alvise, I swear to you that I have been a tyrant to myself in this story, but now that I see you happily at the side of a wife, and one so highly esteemed in our country, I am proud of myself…Adieu, my Mocenigo, and for pity’s sake burn all these letters of mine.⁴⁵

At the end of the third month the familiar pains in her lower abdomen started again and within a few days Lucia had her third miscarriage. This time the experience was physically and mentally debilitating. An air of gloom spread in the house. Her mother-in-law lamented “the doleful circumstance” that was blighting her son’s marriage and invited Lucia to seek strength in religion, “from which we must always expect the best.”⁴⁶ Lucia tried to pull herself together, but her heart was broken. At a time when she most needed Alvise, he was again running away from her. “When we are not together,” she wrote to him, “your letters are the greatest comfort to me. I have written to you every day yet I have received only one letter…Think about this. I ask that my love for you be fully returned.”⁴⁷ If Alvise had to be on the mainland much of the time, as he claimed, why could she not join him in Vicenza, in Padua, wherever he pleased? Alvise was evasive. There never seemed to be enough time.

The truth was simpler and more terrible. After the miscarriage, the “blind passion” between Alvise and Dinda, long frustrated, exploded with full force, taking on the pace of a frantic affair. Despite Dinda’s repeated entreaties, Alvise never destroyed the evidence of their secret relationship, which they conducted between Venice, Padua and Vicenza in the winter and early spring of 1792. “Tonight we cannot see each other, but I’ll be at our usual place tomorrow evening at six o’clock, I give you my word,” reads one of the fragments that has come down to us. “I beg you not to come here,” reads another. “Find the most secret alcove where we can meet, then write to me and send your note by means of our usual gondolier.” From Padua, Dinda wrote: “God knows when we shall be able to see each other again. For the time being I cannot leave and will be here for another month at least. I will keep you up to date. Please make sure no one sees my letters in your house because my handwriting is well known by all the people around us.” A month later she was back from Padua and staying, of all places, at Ca’ Memmo, from where she dashed off this note:

I want to see you. I must tell you something and you must come without fail. You can come here. Nobody suspects we are lovers and you will surely find a pretext to come. After all, it’s just a visit…Adieu, Dinda.⁴⁸

Alvise received the note at Palazzo Mocenigo as he was preparing to leave for the mainland. He wrote back saying they could meet at his house later on: Lucia would be at the theatre with her sister, Paolina. That evening, Lucia went to the theatre thinking Alvise had already left town. When she arrived, she noticed one of the gondoliers from Ca’ Memmo dropping off her sister. This is Lucia’s account of what followed, from a letter she wrote to Alvise recapping the events of the day:

The gondolier tells me he has just seen you and that you are still in Venice, in our heretofore beloved home…I inform my sister, who was already in her box, that I will avail myself of her gondolier…I fly home…What happened next I cannot even begin to repeat, and in any case we both know it well enough, even though we clearly see the matter from two different perspectives.⁴⁹

What the scene was like at Palazzo Mocenigo and how Alvise explained why he was alone in the company of Dinda when Lucia arrived—these remain unanswered questions. All we can infer is that the affair became known and that it caused the first serious crisis in their marriage. Lucia did not indulge in self-pity for it was not in her character, but in the next days and weeks she felt deeply humiliated at having to suffer in silence “unending expressions of sympathy.” Everyone had envied her marriage, she noted angrily, yet she “had been living in the most unenviable position for the last four years, nine months and fourteen days.”⁵⁰

It is hard to gauge how close Alvise and Lucia came to breaking up their marriage, or if such a possibility was even discussed. If it was, one may assume that Memmo—who was by then entirely over his own infatuation with Dinda—stepped into the fray to comfort his daughter and salvage a union he had worked so hard to bring together. Certainly Lucia did not have any options of her own as long as Alvise wanted the marriage to continue, and he did. His relationship with Dinda, as far as we know, came to an end. He and Lucia resumed their life together, but the scar on their marriage bore witness to a serious wound.

To encourage a reconciliation, Alvise organised a long summer journey through Carinthia, Bavaria and the Rhineland, all the way to Vienna. Emperor Leopold II had died unexpectedly in March after reigning less than two years. Alvise and Lucia would arrive in the Habsburg Empire in time for the coronation of the new emperor, Francis II, who was already at war with revolutionary France. Alvise was keen to stop in Vienna to study the new Austrian government up close. But there was a more personal reason for visiting the capital on the way back. Alvise wanted to get the best possible medical advice with regard to Lucia’s difficulty in carrying forth a pregnancy, and there was no greater authority at the time than Giuseppe Vespa, a Tuscan doctor whom Emperor Leopold had brought with him from Florence two years earlier and had appointed official obstetrician of the Imperial Court. If anyone was going to help Lucia give him an heir, Alvise felt, it was Doctor Vespa.