Lucia (24 page)

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.

L
UCIA’S
C
RÈME AU
C
HOCOLAT

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.

A
lvise 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.”