Lucia (17 page)

Joséphine’s four-day visit to Venice had a bizarre coda. She was met on the mainland by Dandolo, the president of the Committee of Public Safety, who promised her jewels worth 100,000 ducats if she managed to keep Bonaparte on the side of Venice during his negotiations with the Austrians. Joséphine took him with her to Passariano and convinced Bonaparte to grant Dandolo an interview. The pharmacist made an outlandish offer he was in no position to make: if peace should fail and France were to go back to war with Austria, he said, Venice would provide him with 18,000 men and several million ducats. Bonaparte made a few vague promises to get rid of Dandolo, who misread the situation completely and sent reassuring dispatches back to his friends in the government. Tommaso Zorzi, a wealthy grocer and himself a member of the Committee of Public Safety, also travelled to Passariano, where he presented Joséphine with a priceless diamond ring as a token of the city’s gratitude. She introduced him to Bonaparte, who gave Zorzi lunch and walked with him in the gardens of Villa Manin, the estate which belonged to the deposed Doge Ludovico Manin, and which now served as the French headquarters at the peace talks.

Clearly, Bonaparte’s supporters in Venice were losing their heads. The growing uncertainty surrounding the peace talks at Passariano was creating a climate of suspicion and fear inside the government. There were rumours of a plot to murder a hundred patricians in their sleep, simply as a show of force on behalf of the most extreme Jacobins. Alvise followed these strange developments with growing dismay. He was further troubled when Bonaparte recalled General Baraguey d’Hilliers up to Passariano. Alvise had grown to appreciate this engaging, energetic soldier who was often easier to deal with than some of his over-agitated colleagues in the government, and who had managed the difficult task of preserving peace in the city. He and
la Genérale
were frequent guests at Palazzo Mocenigo.

Baraguey d’Hilliers’s successor, General Antoine Balland, was known as the man who had drowned in blood the Easter uprising in Verona the previous year. He was soon to demonstrate his incompetence in Venice as well. In early October, government informers picked up the rumour that a lawyer by the name of Giovanni Pietro Cercato was conspiring to deliver Venice to the Austrians. When Cercato was arrested, maps, money and false documents were found in his house. “The fatherland is safe,”
Il Monitore
proclaimed the next day. “The treacherous plot that was to bloody this city, oppress the sovereignty of the people and leave it in chains at the feet of despots, has been uncovered.”
¹⁷
But the Committee of Public Safety, already in the throes of collective paranoia, felt incapable of handling the Cercato case, and asked General Balland to intervene. General Balland overreacted: instead of assessing the seriousness of the threat, he declared a state of siege, suspended government meetings and brought out his soldiers from the barracks. Not satisfied, he announced that he was taking fifty hostages until the matter was cleared. Alvise’s name was on the list and that same night, the National Guard went to Palazzo Mocenigo and arrested him. He was taken to the island of San Giorgio, directly across the Basin of Saint Mark, and locked up with forty-nine fellow hostages.

Cercato turned out to be a two-bit schemer with very flimsy connections to Vienna. The conspiracy threat had been wildly overblown. Balland realised his mistake and released all the hostages three days after their arrest. Alvise was relieved to return to Palazzo Mocenigo alive. He was also fuming after such a display of incompetence on the part of the authorities. The next day, at the government’s morning session, he insisted that all the hostages receive a complete and public rehabilitation. A motion was approved unanimously, and the hall broke out in applause.

The hopelessly confused state of affairs in Venice—the phoney conspiracy, the state of siege, the taking and releasing of hostages—irritated Bonaparte no end. But more irksome news was on the way to Passariano. Under the aegis of the inept Balland, the municipal government organised a congress of representatives from the former Venetian territories to decide whether to join the Cisalpine Republic Bonaparte had founded, with Milan as its capital. The congress was held in mid October, and the delegates voted unanimously in favour of annexation to the Cisalpine Republic—this at a time when Bonaparte was preparing to hand a large chunk of the former Venetian territories over to Austria.

Bonaparte was furious with Balland for allowing this to happen, and immediately replaced him with the more experienced General Jean Sérurier, a trusted old officer from the pre-revolutionary military school. Sérurier did not come alone: 10,000 French soldiers crossed the lagoon aboard hundreds of transport vessels and took over the city. They were to complete the pillage of Venice’s art treasures and ensure, when the moment came, a peaceful transfer of power to the Austrians.

The Treaty of Campoformio, named after a small village near Passariano, was signed on 17 October, the same day Sérurier arrived in Venice. The contents were even more devastating for Venice than the secret agreement reached in Leoben at the beginning of 1797. In exchange for peace and the recognition of the Cisalpine Republic, Austria obtained not just the eastern territories of the former Venetian Republic, but also Venice itself. There was nothing left of the sovereign Venetian state. The details of the treaty were not immediately made public, but chilling rumours quickly spread in Venice, and led to one last desperate attempt to prevent the city from falling into the hands of Vienna.

At the end of October the government held a referendum on independence. Those in favour narrowly prevailed. What remained of the pro-French party decided to appeal above Bonaparte’s head, to the Directoire. Dandolo and three fellow municipalists secretly headed to Paris carrying the referendum results, as well as wads of cash with which to persuade the notoriously corrupt Directors. Bonaparte, who was back at his headquarters in Milan, heard about the plan and sent his men chasing after the Venetians. Dandolo and his party were caught before they could reach the French border, and taken to Bonaparte with their hands and feet tied.

The Bonapartists in Venice having lost all credibility, Sérurier asked Alvise to head a five-member commission to liquidate the affairs of the municipal government, shut down
Il Monitore,
settle all outstanding accounts, recall all diplomatic envoys and prepare the city for the arrival of the Austrians. The French occupation force gradually withdrew to the mainland during the month of December, and in early January 1798, Sérurier hauled down the French flag and departed with his staff, to the relief of most Venetians. On 18 January, despite the cold wind blowing in from the Adriatic, an expectant crowd gathered on the
piazzetta
to greet the new Austrian governor of Venice, the fifty-six-year-old veteran field commander General Olivier Wallis. Alvise and his fellow commissioners handed the keys of the city to the general, who proceeded into the great basilica of Saint Mark, followed by Austrian officers in their white uniforms. The Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Giovanelli, who had looked on with horror as some of his fellow Venetians danced to the Carmagnole around the Liberty Tree only six months before, intoned a Te Deum.

Chapter Five

COLONEL PLUNKETT

G
eneral Wallis established his headquarters in Padua rather than Venice so as to have a stronger presence on the mainland. He speedily imposed Austrian rule over the former Republic with the assistance of conservative patricians who had fled to Vienna during the Bonapartist occupation and now had returned to take positions of responsibility in the new administration. Alvise knew all along that his collaboration with the French was going to cost him a period in purgatory; but he had not expected the degree of acrimony he and Lucia were subjected to during the first months of 1798, not so much by the Austrians—in fact relations with Wallis and his wife, Josephine, were friendly—but by those fellow Venetians who had reclaimed their position of privilege under the shadow of the House of Austria. They were ostracised everywhere. Many former colleagues from the Senate stopped exchanging even the most perfunctory greetings with Alvise. Those who mentioned his name, he complained, did so only “to say horrible things.”
¹
He spent as little time as possible in Venice, visiting one by one all the Mocenigo estates he had necessarily neglected during the last phase of the Republic. Lucia moved out to Padua, where there was less hostility towards her, and settled into the run-down Memmo
palazzo
with Paolina and her four children.
^*12
The two sisters had spent some happy times there during their childhood, when their father was governor of the city, and the return to that old family house alleviated the feeling of loss and displacement.

At a soirée given by Madame Wallis at the Governor’s Palace, Lucia and Paolina were introduced to an engaging Austrian officer of Irish descent, Baron Maximilian Plunkett. Although still in his early thirties, Plunkett was a battle-hardened colonel and one of General Wallis’s most trusted military aides. He had come to Italy after the Treaty of Campoformio at the head of the 45th Infantry Regiment, setting up camp near the village of Montagnana, between Este and Padua. He was always rushing in and out of the Governor’s Palace, advising General Wallis and staying on for meals and evening entertainment. Lucia was attracted by the mixture of Irish ruggedness and Austrian courtliness. He was not especially handsome, but she sensed the vigour in him, the courage, the discipline. She noticed how his generous character softened the qualities that made him a good soldier: he was warm and charming, and the more they saw each other the more she felt at ease with him.

Maximilian had an unusual background. He came from a prominent Irish family of soldiers, many of whom had emigrated to the Continent over the previous 200 years—at the end of the eighteenth century there were Plunkett officers in both the Austrian and the French armies. Maximilian’s father, Thomas Plunkett, had joined the Austrian army as a young man, quickly rising through the ranks to become one of Empress Maria Theresa’s favourite generals. His mother, Mary D’Alton, also came from a well-known family of Irish soldiers. Maximilian, one of nine brothers and sisters, was born in Linz in 1768. He was ten years old when his father died. Yet a career in the Austrian army was never in doubt. Still a teenager, he joined the 20th Infantry and went off to fight the Turks in the Ukraine. After the French Revolution, he was transferred to the western front, along the Rhine, and was badly wounded in the battle of Mainz. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, he took command of the 45th Infantry and joined Wallis’s occupation force in Italy.

The company of Lucia and Paolina gave Maximilian a welcome respite from his life at the military camp. He delighted in their bright conversation and bonded easily with both of them. They formed an unconventional trio; when they were not spending the evening at the Wallis residence, they were happy to stroll together down the main street in Padua, look into curiosity shops or savour ices at one of the cafés. Lucia absorbed Maximilian’s energy. She felt alive again, eager to be part of the world around her. She had not felt such longing since the death of her son three years earlier, and a sense of gratitude enhanced her admiration for Maximilian. Paolina’s presence did not inhibit her: on the contrary, it gave her the strength she needed to embrace her feelings.

Lucia and Maximilian fell in love in the spring of 1798 under the wary gaze of General Wallis and the more benevolent one of Madame Wallis. As a token of her affection, she gave the colonel, as she often called him, a cluster of decorative cordons and tassels she had secretly embroidered during the winter, with which to embellish the flag of his regiment—a gift which moved him deeply, and endeared her to his officers, who wrote her an enthusiastic “thank you” note. Evidently the relationship was widely known about in Austrian circles.

From the beginning of his assignment in Italy, General Wallis had felt it was in everyone’s interest to send Alvise abroad for a while, ostensibly to mark Vienna’s displeasure at his earlier ties to the French but really more to remove him from a hostile environment. Lucia and Maximilian’s burgeoning relationship may have encouraged the general to speed up the paperwork. In June he issued passports for Alvise and Lucia “to take the waters”
²
in Tuscany. It is unclear how much Alvise knew at the time about his wife’s romantic involvement—he was seldom in Padua and only for brief stop-overs. In any case, he seemed glad to leave for he was tired of living as a pariah in his own homeland. A period of exile in Tuscany was sure to turn into a useful experience. It would allow him to observe up-close the progress of agriculture in Tuscany and to borrow ideas with which to improve productivity on his own estates.

Lucia was desperate at having to separate herself from the man she was just beginning to love. She was not even sure she would ever see Maximilian again. What if his regiment were transferred before she came back? What he if he had to go back to the front? How would they keep in touch? As a parting gift, Maximilian gave her a lovely writing set—a small inkwell and a quill made of finely blown glass from Murano. But how safe would it be to write to him?

T
he Grand Duchy of Tuscany was as pleasant a land of exile as Alvise could have hoped for. In travelling from Venice to the baths in Lucca and then on to Florence, he and Lucia had moved from one Habsburg dominion to another—Archduke Ferdinand being Emperor Francis’s younger brother. But unlike the rest of northern and central Italy, Tuscany had remained fairly untouched by Bonaparte’s invading armies and the strife that had come in their wake. “One enjoys perfect tranquillity here [in Florence],” Lucia wrote to her sister, longing for news of the colonel. “The people seem delighted with their government and the Archduke is universally esteemed.” The inn where they had settled was entirely satisfying: “We have an excellent cook, proper bathrooms and even carriage service.”
³
From her room at the Corte d’Inghilterra, she had a full view of the Arno, with the Ponte Vecchio further downstream and olive groves shimmering on the other side of the river, up to the Belvedere.

Alvise and Lucia fell into an easy routine, visiting picture galleries and calling on Florentine friends from their youth. They watched the picturesque boat races down the Arno, which seemed quaint affairs in comparison to the magnificent Venetian regattas down the Grand Canal. “Four little vessels and a rather thin show…”
⁴
Lucia commented. There was something endearingly
passé
in the way the Florentine ladies liked to dress “three years behind everyone else.” Some of the clothes she had brought down from Venice were frowned upon as being “excessively jacobinesque”—especially the airy, Grecian-style tunics which became fashionable in Paris during the Directoire, and which Lucia had occasionally worn during the French occupation.

Life was slow yet the atmosphere was cosmopolitan. Florence was a haven for Italian families escaping from either the French or the Austrians. Arch-conservative Roman aristocrats mixed with Bonapartist democrats. The most prominent refugee was Pope Pius VI, who had been run out of Rome by French troops a few months earlier, and was living temporarily in the charter-house overlooking the city. Lucia remembered the elderly pontiff with affection from her Roman days, when he had confirmed her and Paolina in Saint Peter’s basilica, and she made a special effort to seek him out. “He lives in the most unhappy state, sustained only by his faith and his courage,”
⁵
she reported to her sister. But he had brightened up at the memory of his good friend Memmo and was curious to know “how the two of us have done in the world.”

Lucia had an ulterior motive in seeking out Pius VI. The convent of Celestia, in Venice, where she and her sister had lived during their childhood after their mother’s death and again, later on, as they waited for their marriage contracts to go through, was now off-limits to them as a result of the restrictive policies adopted by the local religious authorities after the arrival of the Austrians. In the face of unceasing turmoil, Lucia was not prepared to lose touch with the one place that had always offered her safe haven. She appealed to the Pope for a special permission to visit the enclosed nuns, and was relieved when he granted a written authorisation to enter the convent once a week. “The permission is for both of us,” she informed Paolina. “I couldn’t wait to tell you. It has given me such comfort.”
⁶

T
he lazy Florentine summer came alive in early August with the stunning news that Lord Nelson had sunk Bonaparte’s fleet off the coast of Egypt. After his triumphant Italian campaign, Bonaparte had returned to Paris planning to invade England but had shelved the idea after taking a disparaging close look at the French fleet assembled in the Channel. Instead, he had decided to weaken England by conquering Egypt and threatening the route to India. Soon after his first, successful landing, lack of food and the hostility of the local population had convinced him to set sail again in search of a safer harbour. Lord Nelson had intercepted Bonaparte’s dispatch to the Directoire with his new plans. On 1 August he had come upon the French squadron at Aboukir and destroyed it.

It was hard to imagine the invincible Bonaparte stranded in a faraway desert, without a fleet left with which to sail home; but Lucia had, in Naples’s minister to Florence, the Duke of Sangro, an excellent source of information (Naples was Lord Nelson’s base in the Mediterranean). She filled her reports to Paolina with precise facts and figures, as if only hard news could convey the reality of what had occurred. “The English took nine ships, including a frigate,” she wrote in one meticulous account only days after the event.

Two ships went up in flames and sank, including one which carried all the riches [Bonaparte] had seized in Malta. Only eight French ships managed to get away. But then the Turks massacred the French soldiers as they hit the shore, leaving 4,000 dead in the sand and 1,500 wounded.
⁷

With Bonaparte seemingly out of play, Alvise and Lucia became more certain that their future lay in the German-speaking Habsburg Empire. They even embarked on a German-language course. As Lucia explained to Paolina, “[German] will become increasingly necessary to us.”
⁸
Alvise, though talented, showed a singular lack of patience with grammar and put in an average effort. Lucia took the lessons very seriously, but then she had an incentive to learn the language quickly.

At the end of September, nearly three months after she and Alvise had settled in Florence, Maximilian paid a secret visit to Lucia. Preparations were made through Paolina, who had become a fully fledged go-between in the affair. Lucia did not write directly to her lover, and those few notes she received from him she destroyed immediately. Her sister’s help was indispensable. It was through her that she sent Maximilian a detailed map of Florence—a copy of the one she used—in order to plan their meetings with the greatest possible accuracy. Lucia’s letters to Paolina hint in the vaguest terms that they managed to have a few perfect days to themselves—certainly nothing occurred during Maximilian’s stay in Florence to spoil their reunion, and it is possible Alvise was away on a work-related trip somewhere in the Tuscan countryside. In one letter Lucia wrote to Paolina, Maximilian added his own playful note:

It is from Florence, my dear lady, that I write to you but even as I begin to address you these few words, your sister is already pulling the pen away from my hand. I do want to tell you that I have never been happier…If Lucia were not reading these lines I would tell you all the wonderful things she says about you. Forgive this hurried scribble; and tell those adorable creatures of yours I detest them as I detest their mother. Adieu, Madame, someone next to me is forcing me to stop writing, otherwise I would fill all four sides…
⁹

As the two lovers took walks in the public gardens and visited churches in search of art treasures, Lucia was seeing with new eyes many of the sites she had first discovered with Alvise back in 1786. They made a few purchases together—Florentine fans for Paolina and her two daughters, and a set of paper fish and a rod for the two boys. “The Colonel can teach them how to use the magnet attached to the hook,”
¹⁰
Lucia reassured her sister. She added, rather mischievously, that she was showing off her German by whispering a few well-practised sentences to her lover. “But I beg you not to tell a soul about the German lessons I am taking,” she insisted, suddenly worried by the possibility that some malicious gossip back in Venice or Padua might draw a connection between her friendship with the colonel and her sudden enthusiasm for the German language. “I wouldn’t want people laughing behind my back.”
¹¹