Lucia (30 page)

Later she learnt that a bronze of Napoleon was to drive the chariot—the two allegorical pieces were merely substituting while the statue was completed.
“Le char l’attend”
(the chariot awaits him) was a pun on the word “charlatan” making the rounds in Paris.
³⁵
Lucia had a good laugh when she heard it.

Despite her swollen feet, she was determined to continue what she referred to as the Madame Dupont Paris Tour, and devoted the next day to Saint Denis, the church of the kings of France, which her former governess had described many times to her. The damage from the revolutionary period was still visible on the facade as most of the statues were still headless. Her guide gave her a chilling account of what had occurred inside the church, which she passed on to Paolina.

The tombs of the kings were destroyed with sledgehammers and all the lead casings were taken away. The bones were extracted from the debris and scattered haphazardly in the local cemetery. The Jacobins brought heavy wagons into the church to cart off the lead bars that supported the roof, cracking the marble pavement as they came and went. Eventually, the roof crashed to the ground and destroyed the pavement completely.

Napoleon was having Saint Denis restored to its former splendour. He wanted his own mausoleum near those of the great French kings. Dozens of stonemasons, glassworkers and carpenters were at work when Lucia walked in. “The floor of the central nave is covered in shiny white marble while the side walls are black,” she described to her sister. “The great gothic windows have been refitted with the most beautiful glasswork. The atmosphere inside the church is again one of great dignity.” The Bonaparte mausoleum was below the ground level. “The door to His Majesty’s
caveau
[vault] is made of bronze-plated iron. There are three locks, each one covered by the head of a lion. Bumblebees, the emblem of the Bonapartes, are carved everywhere…”
³⁶

Another landmark in Madame Dupont’s Paris was the Bois de Boulogne. “Do you remember how she enthused us with her descriptions of a most agreeable park, where the ladies met to ride their horses?” she asked Paolina. It turned out the Bois was no longer a
bois.
“It was reduced to a vast moor during the Revolution as all the trees were cut down to make heating wood. I saw the new shoots coming through, though—for posterity’s delight.” At the end of her walk, Lucia joined a crowd of Italian friends for a picnic lunch at Bagatelle, an open-air restaurant that had been very fashionable in pre-revolutionary days and that was now struggling to come back into vogue:

There were sixty of us and we ate under a big tent pitched in a lovely meadow in front of the pavilion commissioned by the Comte d’Artois
^*19
during the reign of the last king and built in only forty days. It makes you sad to look at it now: everything is so dilapidated. All the furniture is missing. The walls and ceilings are in a state of utter neglect. The mirrors above the mantelpieces are the only thing left, though I doubt they are the original ones…
³⁷

But the garden outside the pavilion was lovely, and the day was warm and beautiful. Excellent food was served at a buffet
en plein air.
There were tasty cold soups, fresh eggs, mutton chops, roast chickens and Lucia’s favourite fowl dish,
pigeon à la crapaudine,
and delicious spring peas, salads and strawberries. Most of the people there would soon be journeying back to Italy and the thought of going home no doubt enhanced the festive mood. As the wine flowed, the company became louder and Lucia joined a group singing old Venetian songs.

That evening, back at the Hotel d’Europe, Lucia was in her study, still feeling flushed from the day’s sunshine, when Alvise came in to announce that he was enrolling Alvisetto in a school in Paris. “I feel as if I had been struck by a thunderbolt,” Lucia wrote to Paolina in desperation. Only a few days earlier, Alvise had told her that since Alvisetto was studying well in Milan, he had decided to postpone his transfer to Paris by a year or two. But in the meantime he had received a letter from Monsieur Vérand saying that in fact Alvisetto’s grades were not improving at all. Even worse, he was rude to his teachers. She told her sister:

That fateful letter has changed things around completely and my husband now tells me he has already written to Milan giving instructions to send Alvisetto to Paris without delay. I cannot bear the thought of not seeing him for God knows how many years. He will become a stranger to his own parents. I feel deeply wounded by this whole affair.

Alvise and Lucia spent the second half of May and the first half of June looking at schools, from the smallest ones, where six or seven pupils were taught by a master in the old Socratic manner, to the more structured
collèges
with as many as 500 students, which the emperor strongly supported. They also looked for lodging arrangements at religious establishments and various
pensionnats.
Lucia complained to Paolina:

This search is killing me, I can’t even imagine how hard it will be to say goodbye to him. Tears are streaming down my face even as I write to you and I’m afraid you will find their trace all over this paper. But you are my sister, and you are a mother, and I know that you understand what I feel.

Lucia wanted to enlist the help of a person who might yet dissuade Alvise. “It is hard to find the right man, though. The French are not going to embrace my cause, while the Italians, who do not share Alvise’s opinion, don’t have enough influence over him. And those who have settled here have by now embraced French culture.” It occurred to her that the one person who had “considerable sway” over Alvise and might yet dissuade him was Joséphine, who had returned from Navarre and was spending a few days at Malmaison before leaving for the waters at Plombières, in Savoy. Lucia went over for lunch and the former empress agreed to talk to Alvise. In the afternoon, they walked in the park and visited the exotic animals that Joséphine had collected in her private zoo. Lucia winced as she caught sight of Joséphine’s two black swans swimming in the pond. She feared they were a bad omen, but kept her mouth shut.

A few days later Lucia told Paolina that “the [former] Empress has spoken to Alvise, and apparently Princess Augusta has also talked to him. But I don’t know what will come of all this. Alvise has not said a word to me about these attempts to dissuade him, and he is not aware that I know about them.”
³⁸

In the end, Joséphine’s behind-the-scenes diplomacy helped to find a solution that was more acceptable to Lucia: Alvisetto would not go to boarding school but would lodge in a private house with Monsieur Vérand, and enrol in the prestigious Lycée Napoléon as a day student. “The separation will be painful but I shall be less anxious if Vérand is here,” Lucia conceded.
³⁹
Alvise agreed to a two-year trial period instead of the full eight years of secondary education; and he promised Alvisetto would return to Italy if the experiment was not a success. A pleasant room for him and Vérand was found in rue Chanoineuse, near Notre Dame, in the apartment of Monsieur Humbert, a professor at the Lycée, and his Alsatian wife. “She seems like a good woman and Alvisetto will be able to practise his German with her,” Lucia observed, trying to make the best of the situation.
⁴⁰

At the end of June, a dazed and travel-weary Alvisetto arrived in Paris with Vérand. Lucia was overjoyed to have him with her, and did not stop hugging and kissing him even though she already felt the pain of their imminent separation. A few days later, Princess Augusta informed her ladies-in-waiting they were all free to return to Milan. “She wants us to arrive in Italy before her, so it means we must leave right now,” Lucia explained to Paolina.
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As she helped Alvisetto settle in with the Humberts and prepare his school material, she noticed Alvise was growing agitated as the separation approached, though of course he tried not to show it. They were off in mid July, headed for the Swiss Alps. “I said goodbye to Alvisetto last night after putting him to bed,” Lucia wrote to her sister from the village of Morais, in the mountains near Geneva. “My poor little boy was in a terrible state, and wouldn’t stop crying.” Alvise insisted that it was all for Alvisetto’s own good, and reminded Lucia that when
he
was a little boy, his parents had sent him away to Rome for six years. Lucia found the comparison odd considering how miserable her husband had been as a child, but she let it go at that. “As I write,” she added, “the full moon is shining over this small village where we shall be spending the night but my heart is broken…”
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L
ucia took to her bed as soon as she reached Milan. She had felt progressively worse during her journey from Paris and she did not improve when she reached home. A persistent nausea settled over her, and she developed stomach pains which did not go away despite frequent bouts of vomiting. A rheumatic fever complicated her general condition. In the autumn, she also suffered a prolapse of the uterus which made it very uncomfortable to move around.

The doctors in Milan were confounded by Lucia’s mysterious ailments. She was prescribed the usual remedies: waters, mud cures, a meatless diet, no exercise. There was little improvement. The
palazzo
assigned to Princess Augusta’s ladies-in-waiting was temporarily unavailable and she ended up having to rent a “horrid” small apartment in Corso di Porta Rienza, on the road to Villa Bonaparte, from a man ominously called Signor Scorpioni. Alvise was away in the countryside and was not there to help with the move. Contributing to her general discomfort was the guilt she felt for leaving Alvisetto behind: it never went away, just like the nausea. Each letter she received from him tore her heart to pieces, and she longed to make the trip back to Paris even if she felt so awful. The doctors, however, were adamant: she should not even contemplate the idea of such a trip in her condition.

It was a miserable time made sadder by the death of Signora Antonia, the woman who had raised Alvisetto in Venice during the first years of his life. “I shall never forget how much I owe her for the loving way in which she took care of you when you were a little child,” she wrote to her son. “In death one cannot pray for oneself, you know that; but remember that the soul of the dead can draw relief from the mortification of those who remain behind. You can show your own attachment to Signora Antonia by offering her your tears and your prayers.”
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P
rincess Augusta and Marchioness Litta came to Lucia’s rescue, reducing her duties at the royal palace to a minimum. The other ladies-in-waiting agreed to pick up the slack and substitute when it was her turn to be on duty. Princess Augusta regularly exempted her from the afternoon walk. In the evening, whether at
Petit cercle
or
Grand cercle,
Lucia usually sat in the back seats so she could make an early exit. “They all cooperate for my well-being,” Lucia assured an increasingly worried Paolina. When she was not at work she stayed at home. “I rarely take a coach, I don’t call on people, I don’t go shopping and never go out after lunch or dinner. Today I came home early, had lunch, rested. I went back to the palace in the evening for
cercle
but I was home by ten thirty. I ate a bowl of soup, undid my hair, undressed and am now in bed.”
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A whole year passed without any serious signs of improvement. After going through a long list of Milanese and Venetian physicians, Lucia decided to consult Cavalier Paletta, a medicine man who was frowned upon by mainstream doctors for his unorthodox remedies. Paletta argued the prolapse of the uterus was caused by the weakness of the muscles and ligaments sustaining it, and recommended Lucia “insert a dose of iron-rich ochre” into her vagina.
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She was to drink great quantities of the “acidulous” mineral water of Recoaro, near Vicenza, and apply to her loins the ferruginous deposits of that water. Lucia started the cure immediately, making frequent trips to Vicenza. For good measure she started rubbing her loins with holy water of the Blessed Virgin which Paolina had sent from a sanctuary near the town of Caravaggio. Within weeks she started to feel better. “The uterus is rising at last,” Lucia was relieved to notice.
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She was uncertain as to the cause of her general improvement but she did not miss the opportunity to tell her sister that it was surely due to the miraculous water she had sent her. Her appetite returned, and she was able to hold her food down—except, of course, when she over-indulged, as when she ate “a plate of mushrooms, some fried fennel and grilled perch, in addition to various meat dishes and wine.” Not surprisingly, she spent the night “vomiting in great abundance.” “I know you are scolding me,” she sheepishly told her sister. “You are right to do so.”
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Lucia’s health problems did not keep her away from her “little transactions”—Alvise’s affectionate but somewhat dismissive term for the small farming investments she had been making over the past decade. Every year, she made a small profit by selling potatoes she grew in two fields she rented from the agency in Alvisopoli. She also raised a few pigs for
prosciutto
and she kept a flock of sheep for their wool. Her earnings were enough to pay Madame Dupont’s stipend, to make a few charitable donations, to help Paolina when she was in need, and to spend a little on herself without having to ask Alvise for money.

In addition to her pigs and sheep, she now invested in a pair of six-month-old calves. Alvise, without showing great enthusiasm for Lucia’s commercial activity, had never openly discouraged it, allowing his impatience to grow until it erupted over the matter of the two calves. Signor Locatelli, the agency’s general manager, had rather innocently suggested to Lucia that she send her two calves to pasture over to the Valli Mocenighe, the large estate near Este where most of the cattle was raised, so she could feed them at no cost. Now a year had passed and Alvise told Lucia he did not want her doing business outside of Alvisopoli, adding that he wanted to buy the two calves from her at the same price for which she had purchased them since they had been fed on his land. Lucia answered curtly that she was selling on the market. One of Alvise’s agents sold the two calves for her, at zero profit, later admitting that he had sold them to the agency. Lucia told her sister that she was furious: