Chapter Six
The watering season had already passed its peak when Alvise and Lucia arrived in the Austrian town of Baden on 5 September 1801, dusty and exhausted after their long journey from Molinato. They had stopped briefly in Vienna to leave the bulk of their luggage in temporary lodgings before embarking on the final leg to the fashionable resort on the edge of the Wienerwald, two hours south-east of the capital by post. Having travelled from the war-ravaged countryside in northern Italy, they were all the more dazzled by the elegant crowd strolling in the narrow streets. Every year at the end of the summer the emperor and the empress moved to Baden with their large family to take a restorative cure. Viennese society followed, and the Liechtensteins, the Schwartzenbergs, the Furstembergs, the Stahrembergs, the Pallfys, the Lobkowitzes, the Clarys and other grandees of the Habsburg Empire filled the alleys of the thermal station.
As soon as they had settled in their pleasant apartment off the main square, Alvise hurried to purchase tickets for that evening’s opera, only to find they had all been sold. After milling about with other disappointed late-comers in front of the theatre, hoping for a last-minute purchase, he glumly made his way back home. Lucia had noticed how even small nuisances of this kind had a way of exacerbating Alvise’s persistent feeling of exclusion. Four years had gone by since Venice had become a Habsburg dominion, but his reputation as a mauvais sujet, a bad subject of the Empire, still dogged him.1 He was, however, determined to gain acceptance in Vienna, and he continually reminded Lucia how important it was to establish good relations with the Imperial Court if they were to hold on to their land in Italy and make Molinato prosper. Moving from Venice to Vienna, making the hurried trip to Baden to catch the end of the season—it was all part of Alvise’s effort to establish himself in the Habsburg Empire, which he self-consciously referred to in his diary as his “adopted fatherland.”2
In Alvise’s mind, Lucia, being a more amiable and tactful person than he was, had an important part to play in upholding the good name of the Mocenigos in Austria. A few days after their arrival in Baden, he returned to Vienna to look for a suitable house to move into before winter, and left her to fend for herself until the end of the watering season. To Lucia’s chagrin, the handful of Venetian émigrés staying at the resort—most of them conservative patricians who had fled to Vienna after the fall of the Republic in 1797—were of little comfort. They treated her coldly, and many did not even acknowledge her presence when they met her in the street, considering Alvise’s collaboration with the French in 1797 as a betrayal of his class. The only matter of any interest to them was whether or not the Golden Book of the Venetian nobility, which Bonaparte had abolished after conquering the city, was going to be reintroduced by the Austrian government. Vienna had yet to reach a decision on this matter and Venetian émigrés, pining for their lost status, felt that Alvise and Lucia’s sudden arrival on the scene spelled trouble for their cause.
Fortunately, Lucia ran into some of her old Viennese friends. Her beloved Doctor Vespa, whom she had not seen in eight years, was still in Empress Maria Theresa’s service and was in Baden to monitor her eleventh pregnancy! Signor Boschetti, who had come many times to the apartment in Kohlmarkt to arrange Lucia’s hair for a small fee when he was a young apprentice, was now the undisputed king of Vienna hairdressers; and he, too, was in Baden, cutting and trimming and powdering the hair of society’s best. Of course neither Signor Boschetti nor Doctor Vespa would be able to open the doors of society for her. But they were precious sources of information; and they helped her master the social map of Baden.
Lucia faced an immediate practical problem: in Vienna, and by extension in Baden, it was not proper to be seen in public “in the company of a man other than her husband,” as she put it to her sister. Since Alvise was away and the Venetians would not speak to her, she rented a smart-looking horse-buggy to get around town until she made lady friends with whom she could go out.
She quickly became acquainted with the rules and rhythms of social life, pointing out to Paolina the occasional oddity, like the fact that everywhere in the Habsburg Empire one went out for the afternoon stroll at four o’clock, but in Vienna (and in Baden) one went out half an hour later. “At half past six it is time for the theatre, and it is usually over at nine. Then one either joins a small coterie or else one goes to one of the larger assemblies, though many simply retire to their homes.”3 Life in Baden had an intimate feeling, very different from the splendour of Vienna. Even the emperor and the empress stayed in a house on the main square that was anything but grand.
Still, the ladies were never casual about their toilettes. Within days of arriving, Lucia drew up her first Baden fashion report, noting that “all the dresses have a very high waist, are worn very tightly and have a long train.” The popular item of the season was an expensive bonnet à l’enfant,so called because it looked like a child’s bonnet. Lucia found them rather silly—an outdated throwback to the extravagant bonnets worn by the previous generation. Alvise, after seeing all the ladies wearing one, had insisted she have one too, but she had put her foot down. “They cost a hundred florins each,” she told Paolina. “It seemed such a waste of money that I begged him to dispense me from wearing one.”4
She attended the end of season’s bal masqué, a festive, informal waltzing party, where the empress mingled in the crowd of masked guests. There Lucia ran into Madame Wallis, whom she had not seen since their days together in Padua. Her husband, General Wallis, had since died, but she was still busy on the social scene and a good friend to have.
Madame Wallis told Lucia that the empress had heard she was in Baden and had spoken well about her. “She also asked whether I had kept my good looks during all these years,” Lucia could not help boasting to Paolina. “Don’t tell anyone, I am blushing even as I write this to you…But since you are another me, I feel I must keep you informed about what is said of us…”5
Lucia was soon a familiar figure, trotting along in her buggy on her way to the waters in the morning or taking her ride out at half past four in the afternoon. She began to enjoy exploring the small world of Baden and following its easy routine—it was a way to distract herself from the anxious thoughts about Massimiliano that never left her. The one thing she did not get used to, though, was the sulphurous water she had to drink every morning. It was warm and murky and smelled of rotten eggs washed in chlorine. “Simply bringing the glass close to my lips makes me want to throw up,” she complained.6 Nor was she enthusiastic about sitting with the other ladies in tepid pools of dirty water, especially after finding out that her Austrian companions thought nothing of taking their baths when they were menstruating. “Here women don’t really care one way or another,” she told Paolina in disgust.7
She was happiest out in the countryside, driving her buggy to nearby villages or taking walks in the woods that sloped down to the edge of the town. One of the rituals in Baden was the Monday afternoon excursion out to the gardens of Schonau, the beautiful property belonging to Baron Peter de Braun and his wife, Josephine. Baron de Braun was a very successful impresario who had started out in the business twenty years earlier and had risen to become the director of the Court Theatre. He was by far the most influential person in the world of musical entertainment, and one of the richest. At Schonau, de Braun had turned his flair for entertainment to garden design. He had landscaped his vast estate in the English manner, with rolling hills, leafy groves and natural grottoes. Clear, slow-moving streams connected a network of ponds on which small Ottoman vessels—caiques—carried visitors from shore to shore. The focal point of the gardens was the Temple of the Night, a neoclassical building symbolising death, which one reached by entering a maze of underground passages, similar to catacombs, inscribed with maxims for a virtuous life.
A large crowd pressed at Schonau’s entrance gate when Lucia arrived there on her first visit. She could not make her way through, but she heard Baron de Braun himself was going to lead a party of dignitaries across the lake, to the temple area. So she walked away from the crowd and over to a wharf where a smaller group of distinguished guests was already waiting for the Baron, ready to take up the seats in a small flotilla. Lucia stepped into the main boat, secured a seat for herself and waited until Baron de Braun appeared. Later, she described the excursion in detail to Paolina:
The Baron finally arrived, followed by a party of the highest nobility. The large caique then sailed across the lake, trailed by two smaller vessels tied together and carrying an orchestra that played music during the brief crossing. We glided straight into a vast cavern hidden behind a sheet of clear, pure falling water. Inside, a crowd of spectators stood watching us from a bridge, under which we passed smoothly. I saw the Emperor and the Empress, the Crown Prince and his sister, mingling among the visitors incognito and watching us pass by. They wore unexceptional clothes and as far as I could see they were not accompanied by any member of the Imperial retinue, nor by any of their servants. Still, I was able to recognise them because I had seen them only a few days earlier. We finally disembarked. [Baron de Braun] held a torch that made light for those in front, while the rest of us stumbled along in perfect darkness. The unevenness of the narrow, tortuous passageway, the sheer number of people pressing against each other, inspired universal silence, and I let myself be carried by the flow until I was seized by nervous giggles. My uncontrolled laughter was all one heard in that gloomy underworld. Luckily we came to a resting area, with water games and lighting effects produced by artificial fissures in the rocks. Musicians played wind instruments behind a veil of cascading water. Further down the passageway, rest rooms were carved into the limestone and illuminated by lamps of alabaster. The rest rooms were equipped to service twenty-four people of both sexes—here gentlemen and ladies use the same facilities. We continued our journey to the Temple of the Night and were soon enveloped by total darkness, an effect meant to enhance the contrast as we finally reached the temple itself. The building is formed by a circle of columns, sustaining an upper balustrade decorated with cupids. Alabaster lamps in the shape of pyramids illuminate the vaulted ceiling: a deep blue sky, with twinkling stars and a shiny moon. At one side stands a large crater, the Vase of Destiny. It is said that the vase glows in a particular way depending whether the answer to whatever thought is on your mind is yes or no. At the other side is the Book of Destiny, where those who want to question the vase must put down their name. Then a series of mysterious symbols on the ground lead one to the centre of the temple, where the Goddess of the Night stands on her chariot. I’ve never seen anything in such bad taste as that paltry wax statue being pulled by those scrawny little horses. Baron de Brown [sic] should have commissioned a better artist to do the work—Canova would have done a fine job. For a moment I was tempted to let the Vase of Destiny know what I thought about the Goddess of the Night. I caught myself just in time…8
Lucia emerged from that bizarre netherworld in a daze, and walked up to the main pond. She saw the villa standing on the other side of the water and headed towards it when she suddenly stopped in her tracks: tethered to the mooring near the house, a sleek Venetian gondola slapped and sloshed in the afternoon breeze. What was it doing there? Was this a dream or one of Baron de Braun’s fabulous stage tricks? Eventually, a rational explanation formed in her head: the gondola had probably been brought from Venice as a decoration, like the Ottoman caiques ferrying the visitors across the ponds. Yet for a long while she could not take her eyes away from that awkward trophy moored, a bit like herself, in waters so far away from home.
That evening, writing to Paolina about her day at Schonau, Lucia dwelt on the strangeness of that moment. For it was not a rudimentary Austrian version of a gondola, she insisted, but “an exact copy of the ones we have back at home.” Perhaps for that reason it had taken her so long “to let go of the illusion that I was in a familiar place with you; not in Venice of course, because of the bucolic surroundings, but perhaps somewhere along the Brenta canal.”9 She missed Paolina terribly, and told her how sorry she was to have deceived her the night before her departure. “If I had given in to my feelings and had hugged you tight, you would have guessed the truth,” she wrote tenderly. “The coldness I forced myself to display, and which I was so far from feeling, is the true measure of how hard it was for me to leave you.”10
From the beginning of their stay in Austria, it was clear to Lucia that Alvise had no intention of spending more time in Vienna than was strictly necessary. Indeed, his plan was to travel back and forth between Italy and Austria, but Molinato would continue to absorb most of his energies. Lucia, on the other hand, was to stay in Vienna, set up house with the help of her maid, Margherita, and lay the groundwork for their entrance in society. At the end of September, Alvise took a five-year lease on a pleasant apartment off Saint Stephen’s Square, with tall windows and a side view of the cathedral. It was not a grand or showy set-up, but it was elegant and spacious enough that she would be able to entertain adequately when the time was right. Lucia set about her task with diligence, even a certain meticulousness. She hired a cook, who installed himself with his wife; and two more maids, Teresa and Felicita, to assist Margherita. Checco the groom completed the staff. It felt a little awkward to have so many people working in an empty house, but she reminded herself she was merely planning ahead. Still, she was concerned that she was going to be living much of the time as a single woman in a city which, she soon discovered, treasured family unity—or at least the appearance of it.
Extending the kindness she had displayed in Baden, Madame Wallis went out of her way to introduce Lucia in Vienna. She organised a small birthday dinner at her house. Among the guests were Princess Stahremberg, Countess Maillath, Baroness Zois, Count Moravieff and Duke Albert of Saxony-Teschen, whom Lucia had heard so much about when she was still in Venice (grief-stricken after the loss of his wife, Archduchess Maria Christina, in 1798, the duke had commissioned a large funerary monument from Canova that was on its way to Vienna). These were the first names Lucia diligently wrote down, together with their addresses, in a brown leather notebook that was to become her personal social registry. She used those initial introductions to gain access to other illustrious houses, and planned her courtesy visits dividing the city up by areas and neighbourhoods. She called on an average of two to three houses a day, and always wrote down the address and the date. She drew a map and kept a precise tally.
Anxious to own property in Austria in order to demonstrate his allegiance to the Habsburgs, Alvise purchased Margarethen am Moos, a large estate a few hours south-east of Vienna that looked out on the plains stretching towards Hungary. Lucia was not enthused by what she saw when Alvise took her out to view the property before he left for Italy. The house was damp and austere-looking. The fields around it were soggy and teeming with mosquitoes. The garden had gone to seed long ago. She felt the place had never been happy. In medieval times, she discovered, Margarethen am Moos had been a frontier outpost. For centuries fierce Magyars had crossed the plains to make bloody incursions into Habsburg territory. In fact the main house had originally been built as a castle—a fortified quadrilateral with a tower and a moat and a rickety bridge over the water. The tower had been torn down in the eighteenth century by the Harsch family, the last owners, in an attempt to make the place a little more inviting. The facade was renovated in the Austrian neoclassical style. But the building never quite lost its dreariness.
Lucia tried to make the best of it, reminding herself, and her sister, that Alvise had purchased the estate principally “to satisfy his wish to own property” in Austria. “It is not intended as a country home at all, as Alvise doesn’t much like living in the country here.”11 If the estate at Margarethen am Moos was to serve a purpose, apart from making Alvise a landowner in Austria, it would be as a testing ground for crops and fertilisers and planting techniques that might eventually be used at Molinato.
One thing Lucia did not immediately realise, and which she discovered only after Alvise had left her in charge of the place, was that the Harsch family was still waiting to be paid. Alvise had sold part of Villabona to purchase a property in Austria, but in fact he had ploughed a substantial portion of the sale into Molinato. Once in Vienna, he had only enough cash remaining to make a down-payment of 25,000 florins to finalise the purchase of Margarethen. He signed an agreement to pay the balance of 105,000 florins within a year, hoping to raise the sum directly from the revenue of the estate. It was a risky gambit, but Alvise was convinced he could easily generate higher income by digging drainage ditches to improve cultivation, as he had done at Molinato, and by running the farm more efficiently. He drew up a work-plan before leaving for Italy, and instructed Lucia to supervise its implementation until he returned in the spring.
Every year, in late May and early June, Viennese society broke up into small clusters and moved to various summer retreats. Alvise promised Lucia that upon his return they would travel together for a few weeks down the Danube and up the Elbe, into Saxony, before returning to Margarethen for the harvest season. But in the end he backed out, on the grounds that he had too much to do in Molinato. Besides, he had already toured Saxony during his solitary travels across northern Europe.
Lucia decided to leave anyway—the alternative was to sit in a dusty and empty Vienna, or listen to the crickets and toads at Margarethen. In early July she visited Madame Wallis at her house near the thermal baths of Carlsbad, in Upper Bohemia. From Carlsbad, she continued on to Toeplitz, the seat of Prince Clary’s summer palazzo, where Giacomo Casanova—a close friend of her father’s—had been a frequent and popular dinner guest until his death four years earlier. She found the house still rang with echoes of his merry mischief.
Lucia followed the Elbe downstream, navigating through a romantic landscape “dotted with the ruins of feudal castles.” Often journeying alone, she kept up her spirits by taking copious notes and writing to her sister about the gardens along the river. “Flowers grow in great profusion and the wild roses and carnations are especially beautiful,” she reported. “There are fruit trees everywhere and the fruits are as tasty as they are back home. Flies, too, are as insolent as they are in our parts. I’m losing my patience with them even as I write this letter.”12 She was in Teschen on 7 August, and spent the night “in a magnificent castle on a rock, with a sweeping view of the most enchanting countryside.” The next day she arrived in Pillnitz, where she toured the beautifully landscaped gardens at the country estate of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony—those very same gardens, Lucia noted for her younger sister’s edification, where the emperor of Austria and the king of Prussia had met in 1792 to discuss “the war against France that eventually led to the downfall of our [Venetian] Republic.”13 In Dresden, she was a guest of the young von Metternichs. Count Clement, at twenty-eight a rising star in Austrian diplomacy, was Vienna’s minister to Saxony. He had married Eleanor von Kaunitz, daughter of Empress Maria Theresa’s minister, Anton von Kaunitz. Eleanor presented Lucia to court and took her to see the famous picture galleries, the cabinet of antiquities and the porcelain collections. The Metternichs also organised a day-trip to the renowned porcelain factories in Meissen. Dresden was the first Protestant city Lucia visited. She was fascinated by Protestant churches, which reminded her more of public theatres, with their galleries and parterres, than they did of Catholic churches.
She made her way back to Vienna via Prague, rushing a little as she had been away two months and was tired and eager to be home. She arrived on 4 September, a day earlier than scheduled, meaning to surprise Alvise, who was back in town, and had gone to Prince Colloredo’s for an evening of gambling. Lucia told Margherita and the rest of the staff to hide while she waited for him in a dark passageway that led to his apartment. When he returned home he found the house in total darkness. Lucia spoke from her hiding place. “He heard my voice but could not see me, and he was taken completely by surprise.”14 Her childlike delight was a measure of how glad she was to be home with her husband.
Alvise stayed the few weeks that were necessary to plan work at Margarethen. He was not happy with the way the farm was run. The soil was still too soggy in large parts of the estate and he ordered the digging of more drainage ditches. He oversaw the planting of different crops—wheat, barley, alfalfa—in the drier fields further away from the house, and he hired the manager of the local beer factory, Herr Schedel, to run day-to-day operations. But Lucia was to stay on top of things, and keep Alvise informed with detailed reports. She was also to go over accounts, in Vienna and Margarethen, and send balance-sheets at the end of each month. Having given his set of instructions, Alvise was off again, promising Lucia he was going to return in time to celebrate her saint’s day on 13 December.
Lucia never openly complained about Alvise’s long absences in her letters to Paolina, but traces of her disappointment were just below the surface. “It is very important here in Vienna to display family harmony,” she wrote, adding touchingly that “the appearance of it often generates the actual substance: leading the same life, spending a lot of time together—it helps bring two people closer, it helps them join their souls.”15 After all that had passed—the birth of Massimiliano, the death of Plunkett, the shock of Alvise’s return, the move to Vienna—Lucia was willing to make a new start with Alvise. By living together in “family harmony” she hoped they might generate “the actual substance.”
Was Alvise listening to Lucia? In his diary, he had proclaimed rather emphatically to himself that he was moving his “family” to Vienna. So far, he had moved only his wife. During that first year in Austria, he was with her a mere few weeks; and he was always on the go, always restless, clearly reluctant to put roots in his “adopted fatherland.” In the eyes of Lucia, Alvise was still, in many ways, the inscrutable, enigmatic person she had married fifteen years before. So it was not without a certain wistfulness that she set about organising her life in Vienna without him.
Running the households in Vienna and Margarethen, keeping the accounting books in good order and writing her reports to Alvise kept Lucia busy and gave a structure to her daily life. She actually enjoyed working with numbers and discovered she had quite a knack for good management, always looking for ways to run things more efficiently. The memory of her father’s uncertain finances during her youth had remained vivid and, perhaps as a reaction, she was generally parsimonious and very meticulous about keeping track of her personal expenses. She liked to follow a general rule she had picked up from Madame de Genlis, her favourite writer, and which she passed on to Paolina: “Divide your monthly stipend three ways: the first for alms-giving and charity, the second for clothes, the third for treats and entertainment such as coffee, tickets to the theatre, ice creams, toys for the children.”16
When she had time to spare, in between her regular trips out to Margarethen, she ran errands and went shopping for Paolina and her nieces and nephews. She was always wrapping packages of some kind or another to send to Italy—winter boots, clothes, books, toys. She once bought an amusing set of wax ice creams and sherbets for the children. Before sending them off to Paolina, she took the ice creams over to old Doctor Vespa, thinking a practical joke would cheer him up after the mild stroke he had suffered. It did—especially when he discovered she had also brought real vanilla ice cream, which he ate with delight.
In the evenings Lucia often went to one of Baron de Braun’s productions at the opera house. She was usually home for supper shortly after nine o’clock, arriving with her head full of dust raised by the evening traffic of carriages. Before going to bed, Margherita cleaned and combed her hair as they chatted about the day’s events.
As the winter season approached, her social schedule grew busier. “I have an assembly with dancing and supping at the Russian Embassy today,” she wrote to Paolina, showing off a bit. “Tuesday a ball at Court. Wednesday another ball at the Coblentz’s. Thursday I’ll be at Count Zichy’s and then at Prince Esterhazy’s.”17 Lucia discovered how ridiculously difficult it was, in these circumstances, to fix an appointment with Signor Boschetti. “I sent out for him at seven in the morning so that he could fix my hair today but he had apparently left the house at six because he had so many heads to do. His wife said thirteen messengers had come by before mine, and all to no avail.”18 She was grateful to have Margherita.
In general Lucia preferred large events to smaller gatherings because she was freer to leave when she wanted. She sometimes enjoyed the informality of dinners and soirées in private houses, but she seldom found the conversation stimulating. It could also be downright silly, with guests falling off their chairs with laughter for the most trivial reasons.
One evening, at Princess Clary’s, the assembled guests were evoking the good times they had had the previous summer at the Clarys’ palazzo in Toeplitz. Someone mentioned a play they had staged, adding that a Countess Golowkin’s acting had been especially pleasing.
“Oh, she couldn’t possibly have pleased the public because she is too ugly for words,” Count Hohental blurted out, unaware that the gentleman sitting just a few seats away was none other than Count Golowkin.
“Ah, but her ugliness is balanced by her spirit and her amiability,” Countess Hohental replied, realising her husband’s faux pas. But there was no stopping Count Hohental: “My dear, spirit and amiability count for little when one is that ugly.”
Count Golowkin lamely defended Countess Golowkin: “I agree no one would want her as a lover, but she will do as a wife.”
“Oh no no no! Not as wife and not as a lover,” Count Hohental insisted, mimicking poor Countess Golowkin’s traits. By this time the rest of the assembly was cracking up. Old Prince de Ligne could not hold his giggles any more and hobbled out to the billiard room in a fit of hysterical laughter. Count Hohental, still completely oblivious to what was going on around him, joined the Prince de Ligne and innocently enquired who the tiresome Russian in the drawing room was. “He is Count Go-lowkin,” the old Prince stammered, choking on his guffaws. Count Hohental turned red in the face. “Oh my, what a terrible thing I have done! And to think that I am always so careful not to cause the slightest displeasure around me.”19
Lucia no doubt had a laugh at the expense of the ugly Countess Golowkin. Yet by the time she reached home and sat down to describe the scene to her sister, an unpleasant after-taste had already blemished the pride she had felt at being invited to a soirée in one of the most exclusive houses of Vienna. How easy it was to fall prey to malevolent chit-chat or to be laughed at behind one’s back, she wrote, realising that no amount of compliments and fancy invitations were going to protect her from becoming herself a conversation piece—as indeed she was soon to be, and in that very drawing-room at Princess Clary’s.
Margarethen became a little less inhospitable after Lucia brought new furniture from Vienna, hung a few Venetian paintings and prints, and substituted the worn upholstery with more colourful fabrics. Her regular tours of inspection at their country estate became welcome pauses from the pressures of her social life. Herr Schedel’s wife, Maria, was a big, good-natured woman from a village near Verona, and Lucia enjoyed the long chats with her in the large country kitchen filled with the familiar smells of dishes from back home. Maria baked an excellent pan casalino, a bread typical of the Veneto. Lucia pronounced it “as good as the bread at Molinato.”20 She always took fresh loaves of it back to Vienna for her Venetian friends, winning over the more cantankerous émigrés with her deft pan casalino diplomacy.
“The milk, the butter, the cream at Margarethen are also excellent,” Lucia told Paolina. “I sleep ten hours in a row. I have a good appetite when I am out there, I have a rosy complexion and I feel very well.”21 Indeed, some of her Viennese lady friends said she had changed so much they would not have recognised her as the same person who had arrived in Vienna the year before.
“My grief, too, is finally lessening,” she added hesitantly. Three years after Maximilian’s death in the early-morning fog of the Walensee, Lucia realised she at last had the strength to look into the eyes of the colonel as he faltered to the ground, bullet-ridden—and hold her gaze. Even the absence of her little boy became a bit more bearable. She missed him terribly, but she did not worry as much about his well-being for she knew that with Signora Antonia he was in the best possible hands.
In Margarethen, Lucia’s main outdoor activity was to stand over muddy ditches and supervise work on the large-scale drainage system Alvise had devised. She planned a rose garden around the house that was going to keep her busy in the spring, and a sizeable vegetable patch to supply the household needs in Vienna. She also became fixated with the idea of making money by growing safflower, a plant that produced a red dye much in demand.
Lucia first heard about safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) from Doctor Vespa, who in turn had heard about it from Empress Maria Theresa. At the time, safflower was imported mostly from India and Egypt, and was very expensive. But a Tyrolean farmer by the name of Herr Colonna, who was related to a girl employed at the Imperial Palace, discovered he could grow safflower in colder climates too. It seemed a good business opportunity. The empress financed Herr Colonna with an imperial grant worth 700 florins, and the venture took off very promisingly. Lucia decided to get into the safflower business, even though Alvise was sure to react with scepticism. She encouraged Paolina to seize this chance to shore up her own family finances, and sent her two boxes of the precious seeds. “I would be so happy if I could get you to plant at least a field or two…It would look beautiful too—a carpet of red powder puffs. And once they wilt you gather the dead plants and sell them to the dyer.”22
Lucia enjoyed conjuring up schemes to make a little extra money for Paolina and herself. She drew up simple, commonsense business plans that required only minimal investments. Together they purchased a few geese, fattened them at Margarethen and sold them at the local market. With the profit, they bought a piglet that grew into a hefty sow and gave birth to more piglets. They owned a flock of sheep that grazed at Molinato until it was time to sell their wool. “The sow has recovered well,” ran a typical update on their small commerce.
She gave birth to seven piglets, which will soon be able to reproduce. What shall we do next, my dearest sister? I favour selling five of the seven piglets, and keeping two of the females so as to double the size of our business. As for the geese, I would use the profit from their sale to buy another four, unless you feel we can get a lamb for the same price…23
As the days grew colder and the freezing Austrian winter set in, Lucia reduced her trips to Margarethen. She could see herself staying out there “quite happily, surrounded by snow,”24 if Alvise were with her and she had friends to visit, or, even better, if Paolina and her children were visiting. But the prospect of being snowbound with the German staff for weeks was not so appealing. So she tucked herself in the town apartment, waiting for Alvise to come up from Molinato. She watched the first snow flurries swirling in the street below her windows. Despite the weather, she kept up her routine of dropping by two or three houses a day, dutifully writing down in her notebook the name of the family and the date of her visit.
In early December, Empress Maria Theresa had her ninth child. She named him Charles, like the emperor’s brother, the popular commander of Austria’s army under whom Plunkett had fought in Switzerland. It occurred to Lucia that nearly ten years had passed since she had given birth to Alvisetto while across the street from Kohlmarkt, in the Hofburg, the young empress was about to deliver Crown Prince Ferdinand. Since then, Theresa had given birth practically every year, and Doctor Vespa had always been at her side. He had followed this last pregnancy as well. But he was old, he had suffered a stroke, and when the time came to deliver the child, Theresa had called upon the services of a younger obstetrician. The empress had softened the blow by writing a very touching letter which the doctor had read so many times, tears streaming down his wrinkled old cheeks, that he knew most of it by heart. When Lucia went to check on him, he read it to her, “holding it open in his hand but looking at me all the time.”
“Dear Vespa,” the letter began, “a sense of duty and obedience has forced me to call on someone else on this occasion and God only knows how much I have suffered because of this.” The empress went on to assure him that she would not be at ease until she knew he was “happy and at peace.” Her greatest wish was to see him again soon, but if he chose not to come to see her after what had happened, at least he should let her know whether he was, in fact, happy and at peace. In the meantime she was pleased to announce to him that as a reward for his long service, the emperor was making him a baron. She signed “your very affectionate Theresa.”25
For once Alvise kept his promise and arrived in time for Lucia’s saint’s day on 13 December, only to find he was excluded from the official, ladies-only celebration. The custom in Vienna was for a close friend to give an open-ended lunch party at which lady-guests dropped by to exchange kisses and offer a small present to the honouree. Lucia was feted in the house of Marietta Contarini, a lively, warm-hearted woman, and one of the few Venetians who had welcomed her with open arms when she had arrived in Vienna. Maria was a cousin of Alvise’s, and she belonged to an old Venetian family which had given to the defunct Republic one more doge than the Mocenigos—eight against seven. In the old days, this unique ducal rivalry had been taken fairly seriously by the two families. Now, whenever someone brought it up in the conversation, as they did again during the lunch at Marietta’s, the story had a bittersweet note.
Lucia needed a little time to readjust to Alvise’s presence in the house after his long absences. But in the end she was always glad to have him with her, glad to be escorted out in society or at the theatre. Despite the chilly weather, they took long walks at the Prater, often lunching at the Lusthaus, the imperial hunting lodge at the end of a long alley which had been turned into a pleasant restaurant during the reign of Joseph II. When the first big snowfalls came, the white city became silent save for the muffled sounds of cab drivers and bells ringing. They went to the sled races, and Lucia picked up the habit of rubbing her nose with snow to prevent it from freezing. Apparently, she had seen the Russians do it. Or so she told Paolina.
Baron de Braun’s big production of the season at the Court Theatre was Cherubini’s Medea. All of Vienna turned up for opening night. Lucia, too, was walking a stage of sorts, and she did her best to put in a pleasing performance for her husband. Alvise was impressed at how gracefully she made her way through the glittering foyer, nodding and greeting and often introducing him as she went along. Lucia was much complimented, the production was splendid—a perfect evening, if one of Vienna’s renowned pickpockets, mingling among the theatregoers, had not disappeared with Alvise’s new embroidered wallet.
On Christmas Eve Alvise and Lucia attended midnight mass at Saint Stephen’s Cathedral with the highest-ranking nobility. Next day, her hair still in curlers, Lucia watched from her window as the emperor and empress arrived for Christmas mass. It was a dazzling show, the rich plumage of the mounted imperial guards mixing with the colourful uniforms of a hundred grenadiers. A crowd of onlookers filled the square and waited in silence throughout the mass, until the bells of Saint Stephen’s rang out, and Francis and Theresa emerged from the church, waving to the cheering populace. Lucia smiled at the thought of Paolina. “If only you were here with me this very instant,” she scribbled to her sister, “watching the Empress surrounded by chamberlains and guards as she steps into the imperial carriage…”26
In January the pace of social life in Vienna became dizzying, and Alvise and Lucia found themselves in a whirlwind of soirées, assemblies, dinners and balls. “All the houses in Vienna are open to us and I dare say it is impossible to be more ubiquitous than we are,” Lucia boasted to Paolina, listing her engagements as much to impress her sister as to keep track of her complicated schedule.
Sunday we have an assembly at Count Colloredo’s, Monday a soirée at Countess Lasranski’s, Tuesday an assembly at Count Trautsmandorff ’s, followed by a coterie at Countess Cageneck’s, Wednesday an assembly at the Cobentzels’, Thursday an assembly at Countess Lasranski’s, Friday a soirée at the Cobentzels’, Saturday an assembly at Countess Kollowrath’s, Sunday a dinner at Charles Zichy’s…Next week Duke Albert [of Saxony-Teschen] is giving a ball, and Alvise insisted I buy a new dress for the occasion. Forty sequins!27
For the first time Alvise and Lucia hosted their own social events as well. The week before Christmas they held an assembly starting around nine o’clock in the evening, after the theatre. Over 300 guests filled their apartment, drinking champagne and picking at the dishes prepared by the French cook with the help of Margherita, Teresa and Felicita. “Your assembly, my dear, is a veritable feast,” Princess Stahremberg whispered in Lucia’s ear at the sight of the merry crowd.28 In early January, they had a more intimate soirée, and a week later they hosted a ball—the final step in Lucia’s initiation after an apprenticeship that had lasted eighteen months.
Lucia chose her dress with special care. She wanted to look fashionable without appearing too daring, mindful that Vienna was always at least a season behind Paris. She greeted her guests in a long white taffeta dress, rimmed at the bottom by a silk garland, also white. Over the dress, she wore a white knee-length tunic lined with two stripes of silver. She had long, light grey sleeves and a matching camisole, and wore a string of pearls mixed with Venetian glass beads. Her hair was combed backwards, into a bonnet crowned with a bouquet of large and fluffy white flowers. A light make-up gave her a natural look. “The French call it couleur intéressante,”29 she informed her sister in her next-day report, pleased that everything had gone smoothly and that her dress had been much admired. Was it too extravagant for Paolina’s taste? Lucia thought it probably was, given her sister’s habit of dressing so unassumingly. “But then we do have different tastes, don’t we? I like to be among the first to wear the latest fashion, because it always ends up being adopted by everyone else—especially if it comes from abroad. You, on the other hand, won’t even wear a coat if it looks too new. What can I say?” she asked teasingingly. “I think you’re wrong!”30
Alvise had every reason to be grateful for Lucia’s success in Vienna. The cloud that still hung over him when he had arrived a year and a half earlier had dissolved thanks largely to her amiable character and her determination. She had restored the Mocenigo name to respectability without appearing eager or calculating, and slowly she had built an ever-larger circle of friends. Her well-worn leather notebook bore testimony to her efforts. By the end of the winter she had paid 114 courtesy visits to all the important houses, criss-crossing the city from Prince de Ligne’s modest palace off the Place des Ecossais to Prince Esterhazy’s grand estate near the High Bridge over the Danube.
Lucia had also succeeded in the smaller but no less impressive feat of making peace with the grouchy Venetians, including old Francesco Labia, the dean of the émigrés, who had refused to speak to them when they had arrived. “Now he too wishes to be our friend,” she noted with satisfaction.31The Vienna government decided not to reinstate the Golden Book of the old Venetian nobility after all, but to give out Austrian titles instead, and only after a careful examination of each request. The more nostalgic Venetians felt rather glum about the irrevocable demise of that age-old symbol of the Republic. To cheer them up, Lucia often had them over for a plate of steaming polenta. “All Venetians must know our house is a second home to them,”32 Alvise proclaimed at one of these gatherings—enjoying his new role as much as his guests were enjoying the tasty polenta he had brought from the mills of Molinato.
Alvise did not really care about the Golden Book one way or another. The Venetian oligarchy was dead and gone, he always reminded Lucia, and there was no point in looking back. His home, now, was Molinato. For nearly a decade he had worked tirelessly to build a modern, self-sufficient community. He had poured huge amounts of money into the project, and had pursued his goal single-mindedly, always putting the needs of the estate above everything else, including the needs of his wife. Of course it was a grand design, the kind of utopian project that was usually the prerogative of wealthy princes and kings. But in a way, that is how Alvise saw himself: the founder of a small, enlightened republic that replaced in his heart the one he had lost. So he felt especially gratified when the Vienna government informed him that the emperor had granted his petition to give his domain of Molinato a new name: Alvisopoli, the city of Alvise.
Alvise returned to Italy at the end of January so he did not witness Lucia’s final consecration: her part in the Carousel, the most eagerly awaited event of the season. It was held two days after Mardi Gras, in the Winterreitschule, the beautiful riding school on the ground floor of the Imperial Palace. Twenty-four expert horsemen, selected from the great houses of the Empire, were divided into four quadrilles: two German, one Hungarian and one Polish. In the old days, when the Turks were Austria’s greatest enemy, the purpose of the game was to slice off a symbolic Moor’s head placed at the top-end of a pole. Now it was a far less gruesome affair. A ring had replaced the head of the Moor, and the real challenge was in performing a dazzling array of figures and sequences. An element of courtly love had also been added. Each horseman invited a dame to the Carousel. At the end of the performance she presented him with a silk scarf: the prize for his ability and a token of her love. Donner l’écharpe, the offering of the scarf, had replaced the head-chopping as the highpoint of the event.
Lucia had not anticipated an invitation to the Carousel as it was unusual for a foreigner to be asked. She was very flattered when Count Callenberg, of the Polish quadrille, asked her if she would accept giving the scarf to him. Callenberg had been a close friend and a comrade in arms of Maximilian’s, from whom he had taken over command of the 45th Infantry Regiment. In Vienna, he had become a friend and admirer of Lucia. Inviting her to participate in the Carousel was a way for the two of them to celebrate Maximilian’s memory—their secret, as it were.
The other dames in the Polish quadrille were Princess Lobkowitz, Countess Lanskranka and Princess Stahremberg, who had so complimented Lucia on the success of her assembly. Lucia was flattered to be the only foreign member of the Polish quadrille, and indeed of the entire Carousel. Later, it occurred to her that in the eyes of Vienna she was perhaps no longer a foreigner at all, now that Venice was part of the Habsburg Empire.
The Carousel was taken very seriously by all the participants. Lucia sensed the tension that was growing by the day. “The horsemen’s young wives,” she noted, “are exceedingly worried about how their husbands will perform.”33 During the daily practices, the Winterreitschule became society’s favourite meeting place, its colonnaded gallery turning into an elegant drawing-room filled with chattering guests. Even government officials and high-ranking ministers dropped by at the rehearsals to catch the latest gossip.
On the day of the Carousel, the hall was packed, the lower and upper gallery overflowing with spectators in their grand gala attire. The emperor and empress took their seats in the imperial stand at one end of the hall. At the other end, four trumpeters entered the arena, followed by a sea of fluttering feathers. The twenty-four horsemen in their flashy uniforms made their entrance into the great manège, or riding school, and lined up to salute their dames. The quadrilles broke up into beautiful arabesques with perfect timing and grace. The shiny blues and reds and yellows and greens of the different uniforms created a feast of colours as the horsemen burst into roaring charges and rumbling contre-danses. Lucia was overwhelmed by the spectacle. A beaming Callenberg steered his horse towards her, and she rose, lifting and waving the Polish banner. Callenberg then pulled out a scroll and read aloud the sonnet he had composed for her—not the greatest poetry, but an honest effort:
The trumpets blare,
The proud horseman
Enters the arena.
He has a natural instinct for battle:
He stiffens his chest, his arms and feet,
And firmly holds his steed.
The memory of ancient feats sharpens his skill
As he dashes the skull to the ground.
The soldier
Can taste victory,
But his heart is not satisfied,
And he stands uncertain.
“Shall I find glory in battle,” he asks,
“Or seek my destiny in your beautiful eyes?” 34
Lucia handed Callenberg his well-earned scarf. She took the scroll on which the sonnet was inscribed, pressing it to her heart.
That evening, at the bal masqué given by the twenty-four horsemen, the guests wore costumes from Valachia, Bukhovina, Morlaquia and other exotic lands of the Habsburg Empire. Only the waiters serving at the tables laden with cakes and pastries and ice creams and candied fruits seemed to have a proper, recognisable uniform. Lucia went as a young Greek from an island in the Ionian archipelago which had long been part of the Venetian Empire. Empress Maria Theresa asked her what she was dressed as. “A Dalmatian,” she fibbed, knowing how fond the empress was of Dalmatia.35 She was dressed as a Greek, but she did not forget she was in the heart of Austria.
Lucia looked forward to spending the summer and autumn in Venice. After two years in Vienna she was curious to see how the city had changed under the Austrians. Alvise was not going to open Palazzo Mocenigo since he planned to be in Alvisopoli most of the time, so she fancied taking a nice apartment in the Procuratìe, on Saint Mark’s Square, where her father had lived after they had returned from Rome fifteen years earlier. Would it be safe to take Massimiliano there some afternoons? He was going to be four in September. Would she recognise him? Would he remember her at all? For two years she had kept every loving thought about her little boy buried inside her. Now her mind was racing ahead, and she could not wait to hold him in her arms. So it was a shock for her to learn from Alvise that her trip to Italy had to be postponed until late autumn. Her presence at Margarethen during the time of harvest in the summer was required because he had lost confidence in the management there. Lucia accepted with the greatest reluctance—she felt she had done her duty in Vienna for the sake of the Mocenigo family.
There was more bad news. Paolina had recently given birth to another baby girl, Lucietta. Now Lucia learnt that the baby named in her honour had died of pneumonia, the same illness that had killed Alvisetto. She tried to console Paolina:
My dear sister, think of all the good you have given to that innocent soul who is now in heaven. I cannot stop the tears as I write these words but I do believe them to be true. And I’ll go so far as to say that you have now made your offering to the Lord and that you must believe it is for her own good. I know such an effort requires us to stifle our natural feelings, but you are capable of such Christian heroism…Remember this, my sister: you must think only about staying strong. You cannot let yourself go, for the sake of the other children. It is your duty now, and I live in the hope that you fulfil it.36
Lucia was quite hard on Paolina, perhaps because she feared her sister, who was the more fragile of the two, was letting herself fall apart.
We all have to walk down the same path, and to let yourself go like this to a loss that is Heaven’s will is not a Christian behaviour…Don’t lose control, don’t allow grief to become so overwhelming that it will destroy your health, because you will only hurt those who love you without bringing back to life those who have ceased to be mortals.37
Lucia spoke from her own experience, and in the steely words she addressed to Paolina one catches an echo of the struggle with the death of her own son. She warned Alvise that if Paolina gave the slightest sign of illness, she was getting on the first post to Venice, and was going to travel night and day by the Pontiebba road—the shortest route but the roughest—and he should not try to stop her. Her greatest fear was to see her sister succumb to her grief. “If such a thing should occur,” she pleaded with Paolina, “I beg you to inform me by special courier, or even better, by sending someone in person.”38
The summer in Margarethen was stressful enough, what with the staff not getting along, the accounts in disorder, and the German manager utterly unreliable. But the lack of any kind of distraction—no interesting excursions, no amusing guests—made the waiting even more nerve-racking. Lucia did a little gardening around the house, played cards with Margherita, read a new collection of moral essays by Madame de Genlis and ate large quantities of pan casalino. Her only break came in September, when she went to Baden for a cycle of mud baths and soakings, but that was hardly much fun: she had her period and did not bother to finish the cure. On her last night there, the empress invited her to her box at the theatre and she was surprised to find herself placed next to the emperor—a seating arrangement that would have made her quite boastful only a few months before, but which she now related rather matter-of-factly to her sister.
Back in Margarethen, Lucia found a letter from Alvise. He urged her to leave for Alvisopoli at once. He gave no explanation for the sudden rush, but his tone was harsh. A feeling of dread came over Lucia as she became certain that there was only one possible reason for such a cold summons on the part of her husband: he had discovered the truth about Massimiliano. During the following days she turned silent and numb as she packed her things. She left Margarethen on All Saint’s Day and headed for the mountains. The weather was cold and rainy and she no longer looked forward to the rough journey across the Alps.