Chapter Seven
Lucia returned to Vienna in May 1804, six months after her hurried departure to Italy. As she stepped out of the carriage in front of the house, a little boy, his eyes still puffy from the long journey, clung shyly to her travelling cape. Lucia’s maid, Margherita, and the rest of the staff—Teresa, Felicita and Marietta, the new cook—came rushing out to give him a festive welcome. They clapped their hands, hugged him and planted kisses on his cheeks.
Despite being a rather plain-looking four-year-old, Alvisetto (for this was now Massimiliano’s name) had a sweet expression and a searching gaze that made him seem somewhat older than his age. At first bewildered by the attention, he eventually joined in the merry clamour, as children do even when they are not quite sure what the fuss is all about. He was escorted to his room, where he found books and toys waiting for him. An extra bed was prepared for him in Lucia’s bedroom in case he should be afraid at night.
For a moment Lucia had the feeling she had walked into a different apartment from the one she had left, busier but also brighter and more spacious. Only after settling in did she realise that a row of buildings on the other side of Saint Stephen’s Square had been torn down during her absence. There was now twice as much light streaming in through the tall windows overlooking the square.
After a light meal, Lucia took advantage of the fine spring weather to go for a walk with Alvisetto to the Prater. They visited the Carousel and watched the swans. On their way to the icecream stand, she recognised Emperor Francis, dressed in tails, taking a stroll with his adjutant, Count Lamberti. A valet was following them discreetly, and she noticed in the distance the anonymous carriage in which they had driven to the park. She had heard about the emperor’s occasional incognito walks at the Prater, but to see him materialise so suddenly a few yards away from her gave her a start. Although she had been introduced to him on several occasions, and most recently in Baden, she felt that, given the circumstances, it was inappropriate, even a little foolish, to attract attention to herself with a curtsey. She walked away pretending not to recognise the emperor; after the first turn in the alley, she squeezed Alvisetto’s tiny hand and whispered to him who the important man was.
It was late afternoon by the time they walked back home. The sky was dark blue and the air was ripe with the fragrance of spring blossoms. A pleasant evening breeze gathered up and reddened Lucia’s cheeks. It felt good to be back in Vienna, walking hand-in-hand with her son as they made their way to Saint Stephen’s Square. She took her chance encounter with the emperor as a good omen.
Lucia’s worst fear had come true when she had arrived in Venice the previous autumn: Alvise had indeed found out about her secret child with Colonel Plunkett. What really passed between husband and wife—how Alvise confronted her, how she faced the ordeal, what they said to each other—can only be imagined: there is no trace of this crisis in their surviving correspondence. But the story was mentioned in other people’s diaries and letters, including this surprisingly detailed one, written to Princess Marie Louise Clary*13 by her sister Princess Flore de Ligne, who happened to be in Venice at the time of the scandal:
About a month ago [August 1803] Monsieur Mocenigo comes face to face with a four-year-old boy in someone’s house in Venice; he surmises, he guesses, and in the end he convinces himself that the child belongs to his wife. To be certain of this, he summons her to Venice. She throws herself at his feet, and confesses that the child is the fruit of her attachment to Monsieur de Plonquet [sic]. She begs for his mercy and forgiveness. He replies: “This child is yours, but since I am without children, he will be mine. I shall legitimise him and make him my heir.” The poor woman falls into the greatest affliction. She tells him such a step will disgrace her for ever, that she won’t be able to show her face, that it will cause an extraordinary scandal, etc., etc…The furious husband doesn’t listen, doesn’t want to listen, and threatens a separation if she doesn’t consent to all his demands…He tells her to go to the judge so that the child can be publicly legitimised. Madame Mocenigo, no longer able to reason, does all her nasty husband asks, and everything happens the way he has planned it. Now the poor woman can’t leave the house without being pointed at; as for him, his atrocious behaviour has earned him universal scorn and execration. The whole thing has made an incredible noise here…1
Did Lucia really throw herself at Alvise’s feet begging for mercy? The story making the rounds in Venice was no doubt embellished with details that are impossible to verify. It is certain, however, that after his initial shock, Alvise seized the opportunity to legitimise Lucia’s little boy and make him his heir, at the cost of giving false testimony. In an official statement to the Venice Patriarchy, Alvise declared the boy to be his and Lucia’s natural and legitimate son, “esse vere filium naturalem ac legitimum N. H. Aloysius et Lucia Mocenigo.”2 Next, he had a clerk at the Patriarchy change the boy’s baptismal records by wedging the name Alvise in front of his original Christian names (Massimiliano Cesare Francesco). Alvise’s deliberate tampering with Church documents did not go down well at the Patriarchy. Church officials knew that the boy was not Alvise’s “filium naturalem.” And evidently the time had passed when a high-ranking patrician could use his influence to make false statements to the Church with impunity—especially one whose reputation in Venice was still tainted by his association with the French. The Patriarchy blocked the legitimisation process stating that “the name ‘Alvise’ was inserted in violation of the truth and the laws of the synod.”3*14
Alvise brought Lucia and Alvisetto to the safe enclave of Alvisopoli to spare the family further embarassment. Paolina, ever the thoughtful sister, immediately came to visit with her own children so that Alvisetto could meet his cousins. “I am so deeply grateful to you for your show of affection at this moment,” Lucia wrote movingly after her sister had left.4
After four years spent in near seclusion with Signora Antonia, Alvisetto had a lot to contend with: new parents, a large family and a great deal of attention from everyone at Alvisopoli. And of course his new name—the traditional Mocenigo Christian name, borne by his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather. Lucia too, had so much to learn, so much ground to make up. It was exciting and overwhelming at the same time. During those first days with Alvisetto there were moments of pure joy and moments when she felt so awkward she could not even find the right tone of voice to use with her son or the proper attitude.
Two weeks after their reunion, Alvisetto behaved badly during his lesson with his tutor—he was learning the alphabet—and Lucia told him he was going to have his dinner alone in his room and not at the table with her. “He started to cry uncontrollably so we left him to himself, thinking it was only a display of anger,” she wrote, seeking advice from her more experienced younger sister:
But the tutor took on a serious expression as he realised Alvisetto was crying not out of anger at all but because he was truly suffering. So he was moved to ask me that I forgive the child, which of course I immediately did. Alvisetto, however, would not stop weeping. Everyone in the house tried to comfort him, but the sobs kept coming and coming. He didn’t quiet down until much later, at which point he finished his lesson and, without anyone telling him, he got on his knees and asked the Lord to forgive him.5
Every day Lucia picked up new signs of Alvisetto’s sensitive nature:
When he passes workmen sweating in the fields he shakes his head and says “poor men…” The same thing happens if he sees peasants walking barefoot or with not enough clothes. He feels pain for the suffering of other people. Just the other day the village priest was preparing a show of tricks, and Alvisetto went to watch him get ready. The door to the back room was open and the priest was practising sticking a knife in his hand. He greeted Alvisetto with the thing still hanging from his palm. Alvisetto burst out crying convinced the priest was injured. But although he is sensitive, he is also very courageous, a combination that seems to foreshadow an excellent nature. When he injures himself it is always others who notice because of the bruises. He will say, “It’s nothing, I’ll never give you worries of that kind.” Nothing seems to frighten him. We stopped by a peasant’s house where there was music and dancing because one of them had married. Alvisetto loves music and dancing and he was busy watching the festa. Suddenly we heard a shot, and then another—the custom on these occasions is to fire pistols out the window. Well, Alvisetto didn’t bat an eyelid even though the shots were at very close range. All he wanted to know was how the pistols had fired and whether there would be more shots.6
In early April Lucia took Alvisetto with her to the thermal waters of Abano, in the Euganean Hills. She took a cure of mud baths to improve her circulation and invigorate her skin. Alvisetto did his homework in the morning and went out for walks with his mother in the afternoon. He seemed at ease with himself, happy with his new life and growing increasingly attached to his mother. In early May, the two of them finally made the week-long trip to Vienna. “The journey couldn’t have been a happier one,”7 Lucia wrote to her sister as soon as she arrived. “The little one had no trouble sleeping in different beds along the way, and I had taken the precaution of bringing a straw baby-mattress and some covers so that he was able to lie down and stretch his legs and sleep in the carriage as well.” Her only worry was Alvisetto’s constipation—an ailment with which Lucia was familiar. She prepared a bran-water and sugar solution when they stopped in Klagenfurt, and by the time they arrived home, in Vienna, he was in fine shape, if a little tired.
The news of the scandal surrounding Alvisetto had reached Vienna well before Lucia arrived there with her son. She had no intention of living in seclusion, and was not afraid to “show her face,” as Flore de Ligne had written; but she felt a lower profile was in order for the time being. Sadly, the one person whose company she would have treasured, Baron Vespa, had died while she was in Italy. Lucia had so much wanted her old friend to see her boy that she had pictured their encounter many times during the idle hours in the carriage on the journey up to Vienna. It occurred to her that at least poor Vespa was not going to have to fret over the latest imperial pregnancy—for the empress was expecting another child!
Lucia was determined to spend most of her time with Alvisetto, and to devote herself seriously to his education. He was three months shy of his fifth birthday, an age at which a boy of his social class had usually begun to read and write simple sentences and do basic arithmetic. But his education had been very rudimentary—a fact Lucia had become keenly aware of when Paolina’s well-trained children had visited them at Alvisopoli. “I know he lags behind his cousins,” she remarked defensively. “But it’s really not his fault, poor thing, if he can’t yet write.”8 While they were still in Italy, Lucia had arranged for him to take lessons to get him in the habit of studying. Now that he was finally settled in Vienna, however, a more structured education was called for. Alvise had already mentioned the possibility of sending Alvisetto to boarding school the following year, when he would be six—a prospect Lucia considered so awful she did not want to think about it. Until then, she was going to take matters in her own hands.
Lucia looked for guidance in the work of her beloved Madame de Genlis, whose two-volume Leçons d’une gouvernante à ses élèves, published thirteen years earlier, had become a classic textbook for home-schooling in all of Europe. It was based on her teaching experience in Paris and London and was really more useful to the tutor than to the student. A more accessible book for children was Arnaud Berquin’s L’Ami des enfants, a collection of short stories, each one with a specific pedagogical message about friendship, goodness, honesty, generosity—it was said his stories were written for children but should be read by adults. Berquin’s book was translated into many languages. The Italian translation was by Elisabetta Caminer, a Venetian journalist who had been a good friend of Lucia’s father. Lucia had a fond memory of Caminer, and since she was frustrated in her search for Italian educational books, she had Paolina send her the Italian version rather than ordering the original one in French. L’Ami des enfants was actually intended for children a little older than Alvisetto, who was still struggling with his As and Bs and could not be expected to appreciate Berquin’s moral teachings. On the other hand, he was certainly ready for Le Magasin des enfants, the pioneering collection of fables by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, which included the popular “Beauty and the Beast.” Leprince de Beaumont, who had tutored upper-class girls in London in her youth, used classical sources to write fables in a language that was accessible to children, and had none of the irony or cleverness associated with the genre. The book had wonderful illustrations, which no doubt helped.
Lucia worked out a routine for Alvisetto. Early morning prayers: Acts, Credo, Salve Regina and Confiteor. Then they read together in Italian—usually a story from Caminer’s translation of L’Ami des enfants. After that, they looked at German prints and picture books, and she gave him a short piece to memorise. When there was time, she taught him a simple geography lesson about the difference between mountains, plains, rivers, islands and peninsulas, and together they made drawings. As an alternative, she used a new method of teaching geography to children. “First we work on the plan of our apartment,” Lucia explained to her sister, “then we draw the plan of the building, and that of the city, then we move to the countryside and work on distances, and so on.”9 Teresa usually took Alvisetto out for a walk in the afternoon and when he returned there was still time for reading and story-telling. His favourite stories, however, were neither the pedagogical tales of Berquin nor the moral fables of Leprince de Beaumont, but the stories from the Old Testament. He often put Lucia to the test. “He’ll say: ‘Oh mother, tell me the story of the Creation again, or tell me the one about the fall from grace…’ And you know how few stories from the Scriptures I remember,” she reminded Paolina. “I wish my memory would serve me better on these occasions—if only you were here with me to guide me in these matters.”10
As much as Lucia wanted to be a good teacher to her son, it was not something she was trained to do. Nor did she have Paolina’s experience, as she readily admitted. Lesson-time was not always idyllic; she was often frustrated, and there were even bursts of anger on her part—followed by tearful reconciliations. In one typical scene, Lucia lost her patience because Alvisetto was not copying out the letters the way she had told him to. She raised her voice until she was scolding him:
Very quietly he started to cry and wrapped himself around me. “Please don’t shout at me,” he pleaded. “But I have to raise my voice if you don’t copy the letters the way you are supposed to,” I replied. “Do correct me, mother, but use a gentler voice,” he whispered. And I must recognise there was wisdom in his observation…11
In fact, Alvisetto was an intelligent little boy, with a logical and inquisitive mind. After his lessons with his mother, he often wandered back to the pantry and held forth among the maids and the kitchen staff, engaging them in rambling conversations and stating his opinions very firmly on everything from the difference between an island and a peninsula to the advantages and disadvantages of confession.
Lucia’s involvement in her son’s education led her to put some order in her own books, and to get rid of works that were “not suitable for the bedroom of a lady,” as she coyly put it to her sister.12 Despite her scarce knowledge of the Scriptures, she yearned to find a spiritual message in literature that would give her guidance in her turbulent life. Her interest in the important authors of the Enlightenment had waned—she found Voltaire was often too materialistic. And the literature of entertainment favoured by her father’s generation seemed excessively frivolous. Still, cleaning up her library was not always simple. It was hard enough to separate herself from the multi-volume memoirs of Maréchal de Richelieu, the prince of eighteenth-century libertines whose amorous escapades had delighted so many readers. But she found it even more difficult to destroy Jean-Baptiste Louvet’s Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas, a licentious novel that had been all the rage ten years earlier. She wrote to Paolina:
I was determined to burn it, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had the key to the library in my hand for a month and a half, and I kept telling myself I should get the book out and burn it. Then a young man I met asked me if he could borrow my copy and I told him I didn’t have it—a plain lie. So today I finally got around to burning the book—to make up for the lie, of course.13
With Alvisetto in Vienna, it was harder for Lucia to run the estate at Margarethen—and God knows it needed a vigilant eye. While she had been in Italy, her friend Maria Contarini had checked on the farm. She had reported that things were going “very badly” and that bringing any kind of order at Margarethen seemed “quite impossible.” She had mentioned “confusion and infightings, rivalries and thefts,” adding it was hard to understand who bore the greatest responsibility “as everyone there is equally implicated.”14
When Lucia finally went out to Margarethen with Alvisetto, she found things to be in even worse shape than she had imagined. The new German caretaker, a disabled war veteran who drank too much, had let the property deteriorate to the point that “rats have taken over the house, mattresses are full of holes and everything is in disorder.”15 The garden around the house had gone to seed. In the fields, the construction of drainage canals had stopped. The accounts were a mess. Corn and wheat production was so low that she could not even begin to pay the debt on the purchase of the estate. In fact, Count Harsch, who had not seen a single one of the 105,000 florins he was owed, took Alvise to court. “From a business point of view, things are not at all in good order,” Lucia concluded at the end of her detailed report to her husband. But she didn’t complain, and if she secretly damned Alvise for investing in such a poor property and then forcing her to look after it, this never came through in her correspondence.
Lucia hoped that, in the general disaster, her safflower experiment might provide some consolation. But the field she had planted not far from the house did not look at all as she expected: the plants had struggled to grow and only very few had the reddish puffs that yielded the desired powder. “Evidently the farmers in charge had better things to do than to keep an eye on such a silly experiment,” she noted with sarcasm. “They simply passed on the task to hired hands who were less than diligent. The cows from the adjoining pasture did the rest.” She was left with plenty of seeds, which she sent off to Paolina in the hope that she, at least, could make some money off them. “I would be so happy if your investment in the flower business were to be crowned with success.”16
Lucia’s dispiriting report convinced Alvise that it was time to sell the property and move his assets back to Italy. If he could get 200,000 florins for it, he reasoned, he would pay back his debt and still make a profit of 70,000 florins on a property he had owned for only three years. Lucia thought the price much too high as “the improvements made on the property are not so considerable.”17 As she secretly feared, there were no buyers. Alvise fell back on his second option, which was to keep the property and lease it. But even that solution proved elusive. After several false starts, Lucia concluded there was nothing to do but get down to work and give their swampy, rat-infested property another chance.
Lucia dismissed the manager and the accountant. A new team was sent up from Alvisopoli to reorganise the farm and get the accounts in order. The excavation of canals resumed. Alvise invested in a new cotton gin. Lucia cleaned up the house, had it repainted and got the garden ready for planting in early spring. She enlisted the cheerful Maria Contarini to help her improve the interior decoration, and brought furniture from Vienna. She also set up several treadle looms and embroidery frames, and put the women of the house to work, including Maria and herself. They made cotton shirts and camisoles, silk gilets, scarves and handkerchiefs. Lucia often sat up late making embroidery designs, and when she was particularly pleased with one, she carefully traced it on a slip of vellum paper and sent it to Paolina so that she might use it too.
The kitchen, too, was busier, as Lucia tried out new recipes with the help of the cook. She developed the habit of going in to make simple dishes such as veal gelées and quiches that she and Maria ate as snacks or light lunches. She tried her hand at desserts, with mixed results, and in the end stuck with her favourite one, a very rich and tasty crème au chocolat which she poured into little white and blue porcelain cups and left to cool off in the pantry, where she could easily sneak in whenever she felt a craving.
LUCIA’S CRÈME AU CHOCOLAT
Half a stick of chocolate
Four egg yolks
Four tbsps of sugar
Half a cup of flour
1/6 pint of cream
Chop the chocolate stick into small pieces and mix with two or three tablespoons of cream in a casserole on a low fire until the chocolate has melted. Let it cool for a while so that when you add the egg yolks they won’t curdle. Add the egg yolks, the sugar and the flour. Mix and slowly add the rest of the cream. Put the casserole back on the fire, and when it reaches boiling point and has started to thicken, pass the chocolate cream through a strainer and then pour into the cups and let it cool. Makes six cups.18
Despite Lucia’s efforts to improve life at Margarethen, it was usually a relief to get back to the city, away from the headaches of running the farm. In Maria, she found the close, intimate friend she had always longed for in Vienna. The two became inseparable, running around town like two young girls, and often dragging Alvisetto off with them, to his utter delight. Lucia realised that she had been so wrapped up in Vienna’s social life before that she hardly knew the city at all. They went to see the fabulous jewels in the Habsburg Treasury, they visited the celebrated cabinet de minéralogie, which reminded her of her summer in Valdagno twelve years earlier, and where she saw “certain rocks fallen from meteorological clouds—rocks that most experts here believe come from the moon.”19 They spent delightful afternoons studying the Renaissance masterpieces in Prince Liechtenstein’s collection, and made repeated visits to the first kangaroo on display in Vienna, drawn by “that bizarre pouch he has in front of his tummy.”20
Lucia had seen balloons rise in the air, but never one carrying passengers. So she was excited about the arrival in town of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, the most famous aeronaut of his time. Robertson was an eccentric and tireless Belgian self-promoter, who had first gained notoriety in 1796, during the Directoire, when he had presented the French government with a plan to send the British fleet up in flames with a giant miroir d’Archimède—an assemblage of mirrors that beamed solar rays on to a distant object. Eight years later his fame across Europe was mostly based on his flamboyant balloon flights—he had recently established an altitude record in Hamburg. In Vienna, he planned to mesmerise the crowd with his first parachute launch.
It was a beautiful spring day when Lucia and Alvisetto joined hundreds of Viennese at the Prater to see Robertson float down. At the last minute, however, Robertson decided to send up his young assistant, Michaud, while he watched from the ground. Michaud ascended to an altitude of about 900 feet. The long silence was broken by a cannon shot—the signal to Michaud that he had to cut himself loose from the balloon. The young apprentice slashed the ropes, the balloon soared away and for instant Lucia had the impression that the box carrying Michaud was about to crash to the ground. Suddenly, two parachutes unfolded—one was attached to Michaud and the other one to the box—and came down gently (Lucia had read they were made of silk from Lyon) to a spot that was just a short distance from where the balloon had risen. The crowd applauded as Michaud scrambled out of the box. Lucia and Alvisetto walked back home elated and entirely wrapped up in fantasies about airships and air-exploration.
Robertson went on to propose to the Austrian government a scheme for making a tour of the world with the Minerva, the fantastic airship he had designed. The balloon, with a diameter of 150 feet, was to be the largest ever made. The ship, decorated with two giant ornamental wings, would accommodate up to sixty scientists and carry a weight of 150,000 pounds. Robertson planned a fully furnished observatory, a recreation room for walking and gymnastics, a medicine room, a large store for water, wine and provisions, a kitchen, a theatre, a music room and a pilot’s cabin. And for good measure the ship would come equipped with “a small boat in which the passengers might take refuge in the event of the larger vessel falling in the sea.”21
Roberston hoped to demonstrate that aerial navigation was safer than sea navigation but the government in Vienna was not persuaded, and though it showered him with accolades and gifts, it passed on his offer and politely suggested he go fly his balloons elsewhere.
Alvise planned to join Lucia and Alvisetto in the autumn of 1804. His recent letters to his wife had been affectionate and warmer than usual. He sounded genuinely interested in Alvisetto’s health, in the progress of his education, in how he was adapting to his new life in Vienna. So much attention, after all that had passed between them, touched Lucia, and encouraged her to consider Alvise in a fresh light—not as the cold husband interested only in securing an heir, as some people thought of him, but as a deeply scarred man who yearned for the joys of fatherhood. Perhaps Lucia even hoped for a small miracle—that the fruit of her love for another man might rekindle her husband’s love for her. For the truth is that she missed Alvise and wanted him by her side. “I so much want to see him,” she confessed to Paolina. “It really is ridiculous the way I rush to the window every minute, and ask over and over if someone has heard the postilion blow his hunting horn.”22
Alvise and Lucia had not seen each other in nearly six months when he finally arrived in early November, and he seemed a changed man. He was no longer irritable as in the past. He did not brood or complain or raise his voice. He showed little inclination to go out in the evening, preferring to stay at home with the family. He was full of attentions for Lucia, and took Alvisetto for a walk every day, often stopping at the sherbet kiosk by the Court Theatre. He took his new role as father seriously, and showed appreciation for Lucia’s efforts in educating their son. Alvise being Alvise, his demeanour with the little boy was usually tempered by a certain rigidity. He was constantly putting Alvisetto to the test, not so much to verify his knowledge in this or that field as to gauge his moral fibre. One day, he promised to take him out for an ice cream. It started to rain, and Alvise said that since he had made his promise but did not want Alvisetto to get wet, he would send a servant to fetch the ice cream for him. “But you should bear in mind that he will get soaked on the way,” Alvise reminded him. “So it’s up to you. Do you still want him to go?” Not surprisingly, Alvisetto meekly answered, “No.”
Teresa stepped in to lighten the atmosphere. “You’ll see, his heart will be more content than if he had eaten his sherbet.”23
Another evening Alvisetto was getting ready to go to a children’s play. Alvise needled him: why didn’t he give up the play and stay home to keep him company? “Alvisetto did all he could to persuade his father to go with him to the theatre,” Lucia told Paolina, wondering whether Alvise was not pushing their son a little too hard. “But it was useless, so in the end he said he’d stay at home with his father. He added touchingly: ‘nothing makes me happier than seeing my father and my mother with a smile on their face.’”24
Despite the rigidities in Alvise’s character, he was warming to Alvisetto and enjoyed being with him. In fact it was hard to tell who was happier, father or son, when the weather was good and they could walk hand in hand to the kiosk for their sherbet. Alvise had looked forward to taking him to the sled races, but the winter was very cold, it seldom snowed and very few races were held. On the other hand, it was a great winter for ice-skating, and there was nothing Alvisetto enjoyed more than going with his father to watch the older kids speed by and bump into each other at the rink in the Prater. He also made his formal entrance in society—children’s society, that is—by attending his first bal d’enfants at Countess Neuwirth’s. It was the usual array of odd-looking youngsters. Feisty three-and four-year-olds in velvet suits were thrown in with lanky teenagers in military uniform, all making their way among columns of tasty sandwiches and a profusion of cakes and pastries. Alvisetto quickly overcame his shyness, piling his plate with delicious food and participating enthusiastically in all the games. He went home exhausted, and Teresa assured Alvise that the afternoon had been a triumph. “Everyone praised him because he behaved very well…They gave him a million kisses when he left, he made friends with all the children, and danced most of the time.”25
Lucia enjoyed describing these episodes of family life to her sister, and despite her occasional reservations about the way Alvise engaged Alvisetto, a feeling of gratitude towards her husband showed through her letters, mixed with the hope that their marriage regain some strength and a sense of purpose.
Before the winter was over, Alvise, perhaps remembering how he had missed home when his father had sent him to Rome to be educated by priests, gave up the idea of sending Alvisetto to the boarding school in Pressburg he had been in touch with. He was looking for a suitable tutor, he announced to the rest of the family, who would live with them and take charge of their son’s education.
He chose Francesco Vérand, a young man of about thirty, “very sweet, with excellent manners.” He had good references, spoke French and German well, and drew very beautifully. Everyone liked him from the start, and Lucia was glad to hand over to such a charming young man a responsibility she had held out of necessity. “Oh do say a prayer or two, my dear sister, so that Alvisetto’s first lessons are held under divine auspices.”26
On his first day Vérand “set about earning his pupil’s trust with the sweetest manners.”27 The following morning he left the house at nine o’clock next morning, telling Teresa he was going to the post office and would be back shortly. At midday he still had not returned. Lucia brought the issue to Alvise’s attention. He reassured her: it was his second day at work and he probably needed a little more time to move his things to the house. Lucia went out for a ride in the carriage and returned at three in the afternoon. Vérand was not at home. Alvise, Lucia and Alvisetto had a plate set for him at the table and went ahead with their dinner. Still no sign of Vérand. Later, they looked through his things, and found a beautiful drawing of a rose he had made for Alvisetto.
The next day, they got in touch with his previous employer, a French lady, a certain Madame Cavanac, but she had not heard from him either. It occurred to Lucia that perhaps Vérand was unhappy with his bed or his mattress and might have gone back to his previous lodgings. So they called on a Madame Lamoine, from whom Vérand had been renting a room while in the employ of Madame Cavanac, but there was no sign of him there either. Alvisetto came up with his own explanation: perhaps Vérand’s mother had been ill and, on his way to the post office, he received news that she was suddenly worse or perhaps had died and he was lying in the grass somewhere, stunned by grief.
Alvise and Lucia heard about a carriage crash and they contacted the police. Luckily, Vérand’s name was not on the list of casualties, but the police knew who he was because he had recently reported the theft of his purse. Alvise and Lucia made a more thorough search for clues among his things, and found a crumpled letter in which Vérand confessed to being overwhelmed by debt. Alvise made enquiries but no menacing creditors turned up, only a former landlady to whom he owed 400 florins from a time when he had been ill for six weeks—“a perfectly acceptable cause for contracting a debt,” Alvise remarked to Lucia. But in his letter, Vérand added woefully that he would rather “suffer a punishment” than carry the weight of his debt.
Alvise’s investigation revealed that the young man had no bad habits. He neither drank nor gambled and he was unattached. Everyone described him as honest, upright and devout, and said he had never failed in his duty. “Apparently,” a baffled Lucia wrote to Paolina, “his only weakness is his great sensitivity. Madame Lamoine told us that when she informed him of his brother’s death he fell to the ground and didn’t regain consciousness for three hours. What on earth might have happened to him? Did he seek refuge in a hermitage? Did he join a small religious sect? Or perhaps the army?”28
A week after the disappearance, a letter arrived from Pressburg, a hundred miles east of Vienna. In it, Vérand begged Alvise for his forgiveness. In the stolen purse, he explained, was a letter from his parents explaining they would not be able to help him repay his debt. On the morning he had walked out of the house on his way to the post office he had seen a man by the Danube with his stolen papers, so he had run after him. That was it: Vérand did not explain what had happened next, nor did he give a clue as to his whereabouts.
Two weeks later, a Capuchin friar whom Alvise and Lucia happened to know found Vérand wandering in the streets of Pressburg. He was hungry, poorly clad and with no money. The friar helped him find some food and a shelter, then he informed Alvise, who immediately sent Vérand a hundred florins, not without remarking that it was “quite a sum for the twenty hours he spent under our roof.”29 It turned out to be money well spent. Vérand came back to Vienna, was forgiven for disappearing, and welcomed back into the Mocenigo household. But not as Alvisetto’s preceptor. Alvise, impressed by his integrity and his language skills, took him on as his personal assistant. In mid April 1805 he headed back to Venice with his new secretary in tow.
The surprise dénouement of the Vérand affair forced Lucia to resume her role as her son’s teacher, which did not make her happy. It was one thing to read a story to Alvisetto or to practise spelling with him or to impart to him the occasional geography lesson, but quite another to be responsible for his formal education. And not so much because she would have preferred to spend her time differently, but because she felt she was not up to the task. She hired Herr Gartner to give Alvisetto German lessons, and he made rapid progress. But he lagged behind in Italian, French and arithmetic, which were Lucia’s responsibility. His penmanship, too, was still poor, “but then my own letters are even more crooked than his. He’s not learning from the best.”30
Alvise had insisted, upon leaving Vienna with Vérand, that during his absence Lucia apply for the Order of the Starred Cross, one of the most prestigious distinctions granted by the Habsburg Court, and one which he thought would nicely complete Lucia’s rise in Austrian society. At first she had been reluctant, fearing that such a request would needlessly attract attention and risk exposing her to an embarrassing refusal on the part of the court. But she gradually changed her mind as she learnt that a number of patrician ladies in Venice—including her mother-in-law, Chiara, with whom relations had cooled after the scandal of her love affair with Colonel Plunkett and the birth of Alvisetto—had applied to receive the order. “I feel that at this point I cannot put off making a request myself, all the more so since, unlike most of our Venetian friends, I have actually lived in Vienna for the past few years,” she explained to Paolina, begging her “not to say a word” about her step. “The order only proves you are born a patrician…though I hear it can be useful if one’s children run for offices that require patents of nobility.”31
Lucia was told by people knowledgeable about these matters that her request would probably be refused the first time around, and accepted the second—it was the usual practice. There was nothing for her to do but wait.
Paolina was hardly in a condition to appreciate the politics of Vienna etiquette. She had never really recovered since the death of Lucietta, and now she suffered from chronic fatigue and diarrhoea, and began to lose her voice. She was under the care of Doctor Zuliani, an old family doctor. Lucia had been treated by him in the past and she did not trust him. She had long concluded that Paolina’s chronic ailments were the result of her psychological frailty, and not the reverse, and that the only way to get her sister on the road to recovery was to consider all aspects of her health, including her medical history and that of their parents. Doctor Zuliani was too old-fashioned, Lucia argued, too set in his ways “to get your machinery back in good order.” Besides, he was hopelessly out of touch with the “new medicine” being practised in Vienna.
I used to have the highest opinion of him, but I don’t any more. How does he explain the pains in your chest? How does he explain your loss of voice? You know I believe the weakness of your nerves has a great deal to do with your general debility: to neglect this entirely, as Doctor Zuliani does, and to speak only of diarrhoea, does not predispose me to have much consideration for his ability.32
Lucia’s reference to the “new medicine” practised in Vienna was a way of introducing her sister to Herr Speck, the medical guru of Viennese society under whose spell she had recently fallen. Doctor Speck was a self-taught medicine man who had picked up much of what he knew while working as a lay nurse in the hospital of Maria Caelis in Rome as a young man. He treated his patients with what Lucia called “tonic remedies,” a vague term that covered everything from herbal infusions to natural laxatives. But Doctor Speck’s fame rested largely on the “miraculous powders” he prepared for his patients. The formulas varied according to the particular ailment and the patient’s constitution and medical history. He never revealed the composition of his remedies, but his devoted followers had a blind faith in his healing powers. The modest apartment out of which he worked was always crowded with society ladies waiting to pick up their little packets—small envelopes, each holding a single dose of the preparation. After one of her regular trips to Doctor Speck’s, Lucia wrote:
We stand by the heating stove in the tiny entrance hall, fill up the living room and often have to spill into the kitchen. He has brought about so many remarkable recoveries here in Vienna that he is looked upon as Aesculapius himself. And I believe in him so much that I take his powders without thinking twice about what he has put in them.33
In fact the number of Viennese ladies addicted to Doctor Speck’s powders was such that one saw them pulling out their envelopes and swallowing the contents at all hours of the day, in the streets, in the Prater, even at the theatre. Lucia saw Countess Korolyi, thin as a reed since her husband’s death, cross paths with another lady during their afternoon stroll as they both were about to take their powders. “They greeted each other, and with an air of complicity, raised their little envelopes ‘à l’honneur de notre Docteur Speck.’”34
In her effort to enlist Paolina, Lucia added the cautionary tale of poor Prince Liechtenstein: “He was gravely ill, Herr Speck got him back in health, he stopped taking his powder, became gravely ill again, and died.”35
Lucia convinced a reluctant Doctor Speck to prepare a powder for her sister—the doctor did not usually mix a preparation without visiting the patient first. It was reddish, very fine, and each dose looked like a generous pinch of paprika. She sent it off to Paolina, begging her to take it. Paolina had reservations, but she did not want to disappoint her solicitous older sister. “I am not hurt in the least by your hesitation,” Lucia reassured her. “By all means, show the powder to a chemist and he’ll easily tell you what’s in it. Adieu, every day I love you more, and I think you did the right thing not to take Speck’s powder without having it examined first.”36
This medical exchange between the two sisters, stretched over several months, echoed their discussion a decade earlier on the merits of giving birth in the chair, with Doctor Speck now in the role of guiding light in the place of Doctor Vespa. Lucia, ever the older sister, could be very insistent in pressing her point if she believed it was for the good of Paolina. And Paolina, in turn, had developed her own delicate ways of holding her position in the face of Lucia’s affectionate encroachments. Her shield, this time, was Doctor Zuliani, who gladly stepped into the breach, stating firmly that Paolina was not touching that reddish powder until Doctor Speck revealed its chemical components. But there the matter stood, for it was suddenly overshadowed by alarming news.
Bonaparte was back in northern Italy and his arrival, Paolina wrote, had everyone saying that the next war would be fought there. If war did break out and borders closed down, how would they stay in touch? Lucia reassured Paolina, mostly to reassure herself:
What is being said in Brescia about the break-out of hostilities in the near future is being said here in Vienna as well—all one sees at the theatre, these days, are plays with military themes. But I am convinced these fears are groundless and we shall have peace for several more years. The recent wars brought too much suffering for anyone to contemplate a renewal of hostilities. No one is about to close down the mountain passes, no one is about to declare war.37
This was wishful thinking on the part of Lucia, for Bonaparte had been stoking the fires of a new European crisis for some time. The Treaty of Amiens in 1802 had brought relative peace to continental Europe, and for two years the first consul had focused most of his energies on domestic affairs, modernising public administration, reforming the judicial system, building up public education and founding the Banque de France. His restlessness abroad, however, remained unabated, and he never lost a chance to push France’s borders and exasperate his neighbours, as if peace were merely a continuation of war by other means. In 1804 the British government, fed up with Bonaparte’s peacetime expansionism, financed a plot to assassinate him. When the plot failed, Bonaparte declared himself hereditary emperor, ostensibly to discourage further attempts on his life. He was crowned on 2 December 1805 in Paris by Pius VII. Emperor Napoleon set about creating an imperial aristocracy, lavishing high-sounding titles of nobility on members of his family and his most loyal generals. The Cisalpine Republic in northern Italy, the puppet-state over which he presided, became the Kingdom of Italy, and he was crowned in Milan on 26 May 1805. His stepson, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, became the kingdom’s viceroy.
The bulk of the French army was still assembled on the coast near Boulogne, apparently poised for an offensive against Britain. But Napoleon’s presence in Italy for the coronation ceremony suggested he had indeed changed his mind in favour of another continental war—certainly that was what everyone talked about: a new war in northern Italy.
Lucia received fresh news from Antonio Canova, the artist, who arrived in Vienna in mid June to install the mausoleum commissioned by Albert of Saxony-Teschen for his wife, the Archduchess Christina. Lucia had known him for many years and she had him over for lunch, eager to hear the latest from Italy. It was the season of white asparagus, the large, fleshy variety that was so popular with visitors, and Lucia went to the market expressly that morning to buy some. On the way home, she stopped to purchase a special vinegar aux fines herbes with which to dress it, and two bottles of white wine from the Rhineland. After singing the praise of the trusty white asparagus, the great sculptor turned to the subject of war. He described the gloom that was spreading back home, the memories of Napoleon’s past campaigns being still so vivid among the Italians. Turning to the mausoleum he was working on, a large monument in the shape of a pyramid costing 8,000 florins, he said the expense of bringing the artwork across the Alps in such uncertain times was so high it had put a serious dent in the sum he was taking home.*15 The great man grouched about working too hard and travelling too much, and in the end he confessed that he had not even begun work on a marble statue of Mary Magdalen that Alvise had commissioned for the new church in Alvisopoli for a fee of 10,000 ducats.38
Despite Canova’s discouraging outlook, Lucia continued to pray for peace. Austria, she informed Paolina, was preparing three armies: one under the command of the emperor, with General Mack at his side, and the other two under the command of Archduke Charles and Archduke John. “They say that he who wants peace prepares for war. Let us hope this proverb will once more be proven true.”39
The following month, however, Napoleon ordered the bulk of the Grande Armée to redeploy from Boulogne to the Rhine. Austria and its Continental allies—Russia, Sweden and Naples—responded by forming a new grand coalition with Britain. As the storm gathered during the summer of 1805, Lucia and Alvisetto saw the city empty itself. Viennese society broke ranks, and all the great families retreated to country estates scattered about the Habsburg Empire. Only government officials and military officers remained in the capital, preparing the country for war. Lucia felt she had the city to herself. “I hadn’t been to the Prater in a long time,” she wrote to her sister after a night stroll under a full moon.
Alvisetto and I walked for hours. We then went over to the Ramparts, and were both so entranced by the beautiful light of the moon that we didn’t want to return home. It occurred to me that the same moon was shining over you; but, philosopher that you are, you probably did not even notice her. I pictured you in your room, the blinds closed, with only the light of your candle flickering around you.40
Lucia much preferred being in Vienna than in Margarethen. Her trips out to the country, while necessary to keep track of business accounts, became increasingly burdensome. The drainage system still did not work properly, and after every rain-shower the grounds around the house remained waterlogged for days, attracting clouds of mosquitoes. “How can we possibly have purchased such a dump?”41 she asked out of sheer exasperation after arriving at the property one day and finding the house in disorder and the garden so flooded she had trouble getting inside. On that same visit she discovered the caretaker had scabies. She had gone to the kitchen to prepare her usual pots of crème au chocolat and had asked the man to stir for her while she went to fetch a cooking implement. “When I returned, I took the wooden spoon from him: that’s when I realised. You know how I dread that disease.*16 The doctor came over and confirmed my suspicions; but the caretaker refused to be taken to the hospital…He asked to be let go, and I immediately said yes.”42
At Margarethen, Lucia was seldom in the mood to appreciate even the sounds of nature. “The toads delight us with their croaking harmonies—the only recognisable noise around here,” she sneered. “That, and the hissing of bats.” A nightingale in the pheasantry had given her pleasure in the early part of summer. “But now the pheasantry is flooded and the bird has flown away.”43
Having given up hope of ever cultivating safflower in the swampy fields of Margarethen, she developed a new passion: Prunus cerasus, the lovely cherry tree she had originally seen cascading down the banks of the Elbe during her first summer in Austria. She now planted row upon row of Twieselbeerbaum†17 around the house; she pored over German agricultural almanacs to learn all there was to learn about this particular cherry tree; and she spent hours translating the abstruse technical texts into Italian. “It’s a good way to improve my German,” she remarked. This was the fifth summer in a row she was spending in the “dump,” away from her husband.
The growing noises of war soon caught up with her in the country. One day, in mid July, Alvisetto’s German instructor came back from his walk to the village and announced that recruiting officers had arrived. “I’d rather not have to witness those poor parents torn from their sons,”44 Lucia replied with anguish. The mood turned sombre in the house.
“Will they come to separate us as well?” Alvisetto asked his mother later that evening, at the dinner table.
“No,” she replied. “We shall always be together.”
“I feel much better now; I shall eat with greater appetite.”
After dinner, Alvisetto walked about the house with his big hat on—a peculiar habit he had recently developed and which his grandfather, Andrea, also had. Lucia watched her son come through the room as she sat at her writing desk. “His blood is truly Memmo blood,” she scribbled to her sister. “This thing he has about wearing his hat in the house has become a fixation. No doubt he’d keep it on all day if he weren’t made to take it off.”46
A few days later, Lucia was forced to break the promise she had made to Alvisetto about not leaving him alone: she had to go to Vienna to organise the move to a new apartment, a smaller place but with a nice view of the Danube, which she had let for six months. Alvisetto would not have it. “I am not going to be separated from my mother,” he insisted, tears swelling in his eyes. “I will go with you—don’t even speak of leaving me here if you don’t want to see me cry…”47 With that, he burst into tears.
Lucia stayed in Vienna only the time that was strictly necessary. Exhausted, her muscles aching from moving furniture around, she wrote to Paolina on 7 August: “Our new home is delightful. The river here is at its widest point.”48 She looked forward to moving in with Alvisetto and living there until the end of the following spring, by which time she hoped to return to Italy—provided war did not force her to change plans. While in Vienna, she learnt that she had been awarded the Starred Cross. It occurred to her that she now had a formal tie to the Habsburg Court. But the timing seemed so odd, what with war preparations by now in full swing.
Two days later she was back at Margarethen with Alvisetto. “The Austrian regiments are marching through the fields around us,” she reported. “It is said that General Mack is heading for the Tyrol on his way to Italy with His Majesty at the head of 100,000 men…”49 Alvisetto gave his own bit of strategic advice, drawing from his recently acquired knowledge of geography: “I believe the Russians should join the Imperial Army. I have seen on the map that the Russian Empire is very extended and may provide us with many troops.”50
In fact, the Russian army was already moving west, albeit at a woefully sluggish pace. In mid August, Lucia wrote that “friends who have just come from Russia and have a keen eye for military matters told me they saw 120–130,000 troops marching into Poland.”51 A week later, an Austrian cavalry battalion stopped in Margarethen. Three hundred soldiers camped in the fields around the house. Lucia found Alvisetto playing billiards with a group of officers belonging to General Mack’s regiment. The commanding officer said cheerfully that if the boy were old enough he would recruit him. “I shall only go to war to defend my papa and my mama,”52 Alvisetto snapped back. Everyone laughed, and Lucia let her son bask in the limelight a little longer before taking him up to bed.
General Mack entered Bavaria, France’s ally, on 11 September, then moved north, concentrating his troops between Ulm and Gunzburg, on the Upper Danube, about eighty miles east of the Black Forest, whence he expected Napoleon to appear. There Mack waited for the Russian reinforcements marching west from Poland. He estimated Napoleon headed an army of 70,000 men, and he wanted to crush that force before it reached Italy, the presumed theatre of war. Once the Russians joined him, he should easily have the upper hand. But General Kutuzov and his troops were moving too slowly. As Lucia wrote to her sister in mid September, the Russians were still in Polish Galicia.
Far worse was the fact that General Mack had made a terrible miscalculation: Napoleon had chosen to make Germany, not Italy, the main battleground of the new war, and planned to annihilate the Austrian forces before the Russian reinforcements arrived. On 25 September, when he crossed the Rhine north of the Black Forest, Napoleon was at the head of 210,000 men, not the 70,000 General Mack had expected. The Grande Armée wheeled south, then east, and, covering eighteen to twenty miles a day, reached the Danube in only two weeks, moving speedily to General Mack’s rear, between Ingolstadt and Donauworth, and cutting his line of retreat.
The Austrian high command, suddenly aware of the catastrophic position of its army, urged the Russians to rush westward. “I hear they are marching at an incredible speed now,” Lucia reported on 1 October. “Many of the troops travel by cart, and manage to cover up to 48–50 miles a day.”53But it was too late. The French attacked the Austrians during the second week of October, pushing them towards Ulm, and eventually forcing the bulk of General Mack’s army into the city. On 16 October, the French artillery opened fire. The Austrian commander realised his forces would not be able to withstand the siege without the support of the Russians, who were still a hundred miles away. He surrendered to Napoleon to avoid the complete destruction of his army. Some 50,000 Austrians were taken prisoner; the French had hardly any losses. Napoleon had again humiliated Austria. With his army practically intact, he made a run for Vienna, and on 13 November, he was sleeping in Schönbrunn Palace, the Habsburg summer residence near the capital. Emperor Francis and his court had fled days before. Vienna was entirely in the hands of the French.
Lucia returned from Margarethen to find the city swarming with blue uniforms. Her apartment along the Danube was requisitioned. “Nineteen men are camping out in ten rooms,”54 she complained, overwhelmed by the chaos in her house. But she was relieved to find three letters from Paolina, whom she had not heard from since August because of the disruptions caused by the war. “At last I have found you again.”55
Napoleon did not stay in Vienna. After a few days’ rest, he was off to chase the Russians and the rest of the Austrian army. On 3 December, Lucia told Paolina confidentially she had received “amazing news” that very evening from the battlefront, but could not share it with her “for fear that our correspondence be interrupted” by censors. “Peace may already be close at hand,” she added, biting her lip.56
The “amazing news,” of course, was that Napoleon had won a decisive victory against the combined forces of Austria and Russia in the plains around the village of Austerlitz.
Three days later, Lucia was at home discussing the latest events with a few Austrian friends. During dinner, a messenger brought her a note from a French commanding officer returning from the battlefield: General Baraguey d’Hilliers, who had commanded the French occupying forces in Venice in 1797. Having heard Lucia was in Vienna, he was eager to see her and wondered at what time he could visit her. When it became apparent that the general wished to come by that very evening, panic swept the room and the soirée quickly came to an end as Lucia’s guests “did not wish to compromise themselves by being introduced to him.”57
Minutes later, Baraguey d’Hilliers walked into the house exuding all the raw energy that came from a great victory on the battlefield. In the eight years since Lucia had last seen him in Venice, he had become one of Napoleon’s most trusted generals. Now he paced across her empty living room, strong and self-confident, filling her in on the details of the French triumph at Austerlitz. As he spoke, images from the past merged confusedly with the present. Lucia’s world had been overrun by Napoleon and his armies before. As Baraguey d’Hilliers rushed on with his narrative, she felt her life was about to be transformed once again.
The next day a messenger came to inform Lucia that an entire French squadron had pitched camp at Margarethen. “The captain has apparently taken over my room, while two officers and four chasseurs have fixed themselves up in the rest of the house.”58
Austria renounced all influence in Italy by signing the Treaty of Pressburg. Vienna ceded Venice and its possessions to Napoleon, as well as the German states of Baden, Bavaria and Wurtenberg. “We have peace at last,” she wrote to her sister. “This morning a Te Deum was sung in Saint Stephen’s.”59
On Lucia’s saint’s day, 13 December, Alvisetto woke his mother up with a bouquet of flowers, and recited a few German verses he had memorised for the occasion. It occurred to Lucia that she had made a little Austrian boy out of her son. Now she kissed him on the forehead, and wondered whether his French was fluent enough to hold him in good stead.
Lucia was disappointed but not entirely surprised when Alvise did not come to Vienna to fetch her. In Milan, the young viceroy, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, was reorganising the Italian Kingdom according to Napoleon’s strict guidelines; Alvise felt he had to stay in Italy, in the hope that his past experience with the French would help him secure a prestigious assignment. It was not prudent, he explained, to leave while everyone was jockeying for position in the new administration.
Following her husband’s instructions, Lucia rented out the apartment in Vienna for the remaining part of their lease, and organised the sale of paintings, carpets and furniture. She failed to rent out Margarethen, however. Alvise had yet to finish paying for the estate and it made Lucia uncomfortable to leave an unsettled situation behind. She made sure farming schedules were in place and accounts more or less in order before leaving. “It is wise,” she told her sister, “to leave [our] affairs in this country in the best possible shape.”60 Thus it was not until the late autumn of 1806 that she was finally able to make the journey back to Italy. She took leave of the emperor and the empress and headed south on a rainy November day—she, Alvisetto and Margherita in the large travelling carriage, with the luggage, and Teresa, Marietta and Felicita, rather cramped, in the two-horse buggy driven by Checco. At a post-station where they stopped shortly after crossing the Alps, Lucia received a letter from Alvise: he had been appointed governor of Agogna, one of the twenty-four departments which now formed Napoleon’s new Kingdom of Italy, and she was to join him there as soon as possible.