Lucia (6 page)

One August afternoon, the antiquarian Johann Raiffenstein joined Kauffmann, Zucchi, Lucia and Paolina, and together they braved the heat to go see the new painting everyone was talking about in Rome. It was by Jean-Germain Drouais, the twenty-three-year-old protégé of Jacques-Louis David. He had won the Prix de Rome and had installed himself at the French Academy. Some critics thought his talent surpassed that of his famous mentor. The large canvas he had just completed depicted the Roman general Marius, wrapped in a scarlet robe, as he stared down at the soldier who had come to murder him in prison after the battle of Minturno. It was a stark, powerful picture in the neoclassical style, which clearly owed a great deal to the influence of “Monsieur David.” Lucia was struck by the fact that Drouais had reached such a level of artistic maturity at his young age.
^*3
“The great Marius is able to confound and send away the soldier who has come to kill him with no other weapon but the sheer strength and authority of his figure,” she reported to Alvise. “The general seems to be saying: ‘You would dare to kill Marius?’ It’s a powerful image, and a very beautiful one.”
⁵⁵

Alvise read Lucia’s Roman chronicles with pleasure. It was a way for him to feel close to her as he travelled from Venice to the Mocenigo estates on the mainland, checking on the late summer harvests. And yet he could not help notice that Lucia still remained slightly aloof. True, she filled her letters with declarations of love and devotion to him, and of loyalty to his family, but beneath the surface of her entertaining anecdotes, she kept a reserve about herself. When he prodded her to open her heart to him she was caught somewhat off guard. She turned to her father, but to no avail. So she told Alvise that if she seemed reticent it was because she feared creating excessive expectations. Why live in a dream world while they were still strangers “and then risk falling all of a sudden from on high?” While Alvise wanted her to be more expansive, she remained cautious about expressing “those feelings which I still can’t quite explain, given that all I know about you comes from a small portrait, from the flattering reports of others, from the very interesting things that you write to me and from the good things you do.” All of this, she said,

has encouraged me to hold you in esteem and to love you and to be grateful to you. It could be that I feel even more, but I don’t know for sure as I have no experience in these matters. I hope, for many good reasons, that I will adore you, for this is the way it should be. But give me time, and if it will happen, and no doubt it will, then my deeds will tell you even better than my words.
⁵⁶

Lucia was startled by her own candour.

I don’t even know how I could have said as much, and I assure you that no one else has tampered with this letter. My father told me: “I don’t want to be involved in this, just speak with your heart.” So I consulted my heart, and this is what came out, and I don’t even know if it’s right or wrong…Enough now, I hope you will soon be at the end of this eternal wait and that I will have the very fine pleasure of seeing you at last to tell you in person how much I wish to be your loving and loyal spouse.
⁵⁷

At Palazzo San Marco signs of the Memmos’ impending departure were everywhere. “People are busy filling trunks, carrying furniture down stairs, beating nails into crates and boxes,” Lucia wrote to Alvise with excitement. “Everything now tells me I will soon be leaving.”
⁵⁸
On 1 October, the new Venetian ambassador finally arrived in the vicinity of Rome, and the Memmos drove out to greet his convoy in a rented carriage drawn by six horses. They moved out of the
palazzo
and went to stay temporarily at the house of a Venetian friend next to the Ghetto. Memmo introduced his successor to Roman society even as he tried to sell him his furniture and silverware to reduce his debts.

As Lucia was making her last courtesy rounds, she received another jolt from Alvise. How should they meet, he wanted to know. Should they plan it or did she want him to surprise her by turning up unexpectedly somewhere along the way? Lucia did not hesitate: “I choose the latter course, even if it is the most dangerous.”
⁵⁹
Would it be Padua, she wondered dreamily, or perhaps Ferrara? What if Alvise were to journey as far south as Bologna? The waiting game had a new element of suspense.

Memmo had wanted the return journey to Venice to be something of an educational trip for his daughters. He had planned to visit Tuscany extensively, in order to observe from up close the innovative changes introduced by Grand Duke Leopold in agriculture and public administration; he had also arranged to spend some time in the duchies of Modena and Parma. But the long-delayed departure from Rome had forced him to curtail their itinerary rather drastically, leaving only a much reduced stay in Florence. Although Memmo was anxious to join Alvise in Venice to help and advise him on the details of the marriage, he lamented the brevity of their stop in Tuscany even more than his daughter suspected. “I love Florentine women,” he wrote wistfully to a friend in Florence. “How will I ever be able to gain your lovable ladies’ confidence in such a short time, let alone have any luck with them? I’m afraid it will be the same as with the gorgeous Neapolitan women, whom I met and admired and even fondled a little, before being forced away from them at the ripest moment.”
⁶⁰

Before leaving Rome for her surprise encounter with Alvise, Lucia took care of her personal appearance and hygiene. She went to the hairdresser and had two teeth pulled out “to clean up my mouth.” Her wisdom teeth were also bothering her, she reported candidly, “but the dentist has assured me that they won’t play any of their usual tricks on me.”
⁶¹

By early October, only one thing remained to be done before leaving. Pope Pius VI had to return Memmo’s credentials—an awkward task since Memmo had never made his
ingresso
and so had never formally presented those credentials. There was a further delay, just long enough for the Vatican to make its displeasure known to the Venetian Republic. But the Pope did not want this issue to mar his friendship with Memmo, of whom he was genuinely fond. He granted a long and very satisfactory audience to the whole family, which left a lasting impression on Lucia. “We were told the Pope never has such long conversations with women,” she wrote to Alvise. “He asked us many kind questions, and even spoke to me about you. I really couldn’t have wished for more.”
⁶²

In the previous nine months, Lucia had thought so much and so hard about Alvise, alone at night in bed or else gazing at his picture during the day, that he had become a very familiar presence in her life, even though his image remained necessarily blurred since she had never seen him. Or had she? The closer she came to meeting him, the more she felt she had met him before. It was a strange sensation. Was it a distant, dreamy fragment of her childhood memory or perhaps an illusion generated by her long wait? “I feel as if I will not be meeting you for the first time,” she ventured, “but I am not able to explain to you when or where I first saw you. The faster I reach you the happier I’ll be to see you, to talk with you, and to feel that happiness I yearn for—provided we will like each other…Will I find a note from you in Florence?”
⁶³

At last the Memmos left. It was the end of October and the weather had turned rainy and cold. They travelled up the Cassia, the old Roman road that was little more than a trail of mud and water, stopping the first night in Bagnaia, near Viterbo. Memmo complained about the perpetual rain even as he wrote detailed instructions to Chiarabba from his rocking carriage. Lucia was to be taken to a convent, where she would remain with her sister until the wedding. Memmo had concluded this was the most convenient solution since he would no longer be living at Ca’ Memmo, the old family home on the Grand Canal, but on Saint Mark’s Square, in one of the comfortable houses that were made available to the Procuratori di San Marco. Meanwhile, rooms needed to be prepared for the night of their arrival, relatives to be informed, food to be purchased, gondolas to be readied. “We shall be no more than twelve to fourteen for supper on our arrival as I want the girls to go to the convent that same evening. Adieu, my friend. I feel I can already touch Venice.”
⁶⁴

Alvise, meanwhile, had crossed the Apennines under rain and sleet to surprise Lucia in Siena, a city he loved. They met on the evening of the second day of the Memmos’ journey north. Did their first encounter rise to their best expectations? Did those expectations fall “from on high,” as Lucia feared could happen? There are no letters by either Lucia or Alvise describing the moment they had waited so long for. But Memmo made sure the event was recorded. “The bride and groom have met,” he solemnly announced to Signor Chiarabba. “And they are both happy with each other.”
⁶⁵
The next day they travelled to Florence, where they took rooms at the Locanda Vannini, on the Lungarno. The few days Alvise and Lucia spent together in Florence were very happy. They explored the city in a state of tender inebriation, taking walks up to the great villa at Poggio Imperiale, gazing at the sculptures and bronzes in the Galleria, visiting collections of pictures.

Alvise left on a rainy morning. There were no tearful goodbyes: he slipped out of town leaving an affectionate note behind. If Lucia was hurt she did her best not to show it. She protested:

Well done, Mister spouse! You dump me right when we are having our best time together without even a word of warning? I forgive you because I understand. But it doesn’t mean your absence is less painful to me now that I have enjoyed your dearest, sweetest company…I thank you for everything, and at this anxious moment I can only wish you a safe journey, hoping God will protect you from the rain and other more dangerous hazards.

Florence seemed empty without Alvise. “It was strange to revisit some of the same places we went to without the company of my dear husband,” she wrote to him the first night they were apart. “I was assailed by such stirring memories. Enough now, when shall I see you again? It is all I can think of.” She was sharing the hotel room with her sister, the person she had been closest to all her life and from whom she would soon be separated.

Paolina doesn’t want me to write any more, she says she wants to sleep…After all that has happened, will I be able to sleep? I don’t think so. Not until I will be sure that you have safely arrived in Bologna and then in Ferrara and after that in Padua and finally in Venice…Adieu my beloved husband.
⁶⁶

Chapter Two

PALAZZO MOCENIGO

L
ucia woke up in her sunlit bedroom at Palazzo Mocenigo. Her chambermaid, Maria, brought her a silver tray with a cup of hot chocolate and a note from Alvise. He was in the habit of leaving very early in the morning for a busy day of work, and though he usually took care to leave an affectionate line or two for his wife, she never quite knew when he might reappear. At times it was only a matter of a few hours before his gondola came gliding to the
riva
of the
palazzo,
but often enough he simply vanished, as he had done on that rainy morning in Florence, leaving only vague hints as to his whereabouts and when he should be expected home. The house messengers and gondoliers, however, always knew where to find him. So Lucia sent off a brief reply to his note: “I am just getting up, my beloved…Love me and come back to me quickly…I feel so lost when you are away from me.”
¹

They had been married over a month, but Lucia still felt very disorientated in the sprawling Palazzo Mocenigo. Upon returning to Venice after her four years in Rome, everything had seemed so immediately familiar to her: the shimmering profile of the palaces, the noisy traffic on the water, the raw smell coming up from the canals as the tide ebbed and flowed. So it was somewhat unsettling to be living in such a vast and mysterious house, where so many generations of Mocenigos had lived and died, and not at Ca’ Memmo, the smaller, more intimate
palazzo
further up the Grand Canal, beyond the bend of the Rialto, where she had grown up and which she had always considered her home.

On the evening of the Memmos’ arrival in Venice after the long journey from Rome, Lucia was whisked off with her sister to Santa Maria della Celestia, a fashionable convent next to the church of San Francesco della Vigna. Every day, she received a stream of chattering relatives in the parlour; when Alvise’s handsome face appeared through the wooden grid, she was always overcome by a flush of excitement. But the Mocenigos continued to hold up the contract and Lucia had to remain in the convent longer than expected.

The difficulties came, as always, from Alvise’s father, the moody, unpredictable Sebastiano, who suddenly refused to give the marriage his final blessing after promising he would. Memmo guessed this new delay had something to do with the fact that Giovanni Mocenigo, Sebastiano’s older brother, was very ill: after his death, Sebastiano would become the titular head of the Mocenigo family, and would therefore be able to put a personal stamp on the marriage contract.

Weeks passed with no final settlement in sight. Memmo waited “philosophically,” as he liked to put it. Alvise stopped by the convent in between sessions of the Senate and business meetings for visits that always seemed too short to Lucia. She reprimanded him gently “for those brief minutes you spend with me that do not satisfy me.” He was often distracted, in a hurry to leave, and though she understood he was a busy man with increasing responsibilities, she found his “indifference” wounding. “I have wanted to complain about this to you,” she confessed in a note she slipped to him through the grid, “[but] when I see you, my heart is overcome by such turmoil that I grow ever more desperate.” She feared Alvise’s comings and goings might be a foretaste of their future life together. “For pity’s sake,” she begged him, “allow me to spend as much time as possible with you in the future and to always accompany you on your trips.”
²
Alvise sent her magnificent clothes, bouquets of fresh flowers, baskets of fruit and silver cups brimming with delicious ice creams, but as much as she appreciated these gifts, they did little to assuage her anxiety.

Giovanni Mocenigo died at the end of February 1787. As Memmo had predicted, Sebastiano, now the head of the family, announced he was removing his last reservations. At his insistence, however, a new contract was drawn up and Memmo had to agree to pay Alvise a monthly stipend until he inherited the Mocenigo fortune upon Sebastiano’s death. The contract was signed at the end of March, a few days before Lucia’s seventeenth birthday. In mid April the dressmakers made their first appearance at Celestia and a festive atmosphere filled the convent. Lucia’s residual reserve dissolved completely. “How strongly I wish to tie the knot that will join me to my adorable husband and allow me at last to tell him ‘I love you’ again and again,” she wrote to Alvise, beaming with anticipation.
³

On a sunny morning in early May, five months after entering the convent, she bid farewell to the nuns, and stepped into the bridal gondola in the full regalia of a splendid Venetian bride, her silk dress studded with gems and lined with tiny white pearls. The wedding cortège glided slowly up the Grand Canal, spawning a long swath of colourful boats of different sizes. Along the waterway, the crowd clapped and cheered—
Evviva la sposa! Evviva la sposa!
(Long live the bride!)—while loaves of bread and flasks of wine from the hills of Friuli were handed out to the populace. The parade passed beneath Palazzo Mocenigo, decked out with banners flying the family crest—two roses against a white and blue background—then moved upstream past the Rialto bridge, to the old church of San Marcuola, in the square adjacent to Ca’ Memmo, where Alvise and Lucia were married. After the ceremony, Memmo hosted a lavish banquet at which the newly-weds were toasted with poems and accolades. As the feast wore on, he rejoiced at the success of his tenacious diplomacy. “There is no more perfect marriage,” he proclaimed, “than the one between my daughter and Alvise Mocenigo.”
⁴
Alvise led his bride on to the master gondola of Ca’ Mocenigo and together they glided back down the Grand Canal to their new home.

P
alazzo Mocenigo was made up of three connected palaces facing south at the point where the Grand Canal begins its final turn before heading towards the Basin of Saint Mark. The palaces were built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the heyday of the Republic, and were renovated many times. As a result, the various facades formed a disharmonious but impressive whole that reflected the family’s steady accretion of money and power over the course of six centuries. It was an intimidating world for a seventeen-year-old bride to enter, filled as it was with the mementoes of a rich and often glorious history. The Mocenigos had given seven doges to the Republic, and Mocenigo admirals and diplomats had helped to expand and protect the Venetian Empire. Room after room was filled with venerable trophies: a picture of a famous battle scene, a
corno dogale
(doge’s cap) under a glass casing, the rusty scimitars wrested from the Turks. In the years of Venice’s decline, the Mocenigos were among the few great families that had managed, through marriages of convenience and land acquisitions on the mainland, to hold on to their fortune and actually increase it. By the end of the eighteenth century they owned immense estates in the provinces of Padua, Rovigo, Verona and in the northern region of Friuli. Their yearly income was well over 100,000 ducats, making them one of the five richest families in Venice.

The aggregate wealth of the 200 or so families inscribed in the Golden Book of the Venetian patriciate, on the other hand, had suffered steady erosion. Many of these
nobili,
or patricians, were so impoverished that they had long ago lost their palaces, and were housed and fed in special wards funded by the government. By the 1780s the oligarchy which had ruled Venice for nearly a thousand years had become ossified and terribly in-bred, too weak and brittle to face the powerful winds of change that were gathering force in France and would soon bring down the Republic of Saint Mark. In the early 1760s there had been a timid attempt at reform, aimed at broadening the base of political power to make the system more democratic, but the dominant conservative families had been quick to quash it. Instead of allowing new blood and energy to breathe life into its decrepit body, the oligarchy chose to remain a closed, withered caste. A few wealthy families continued to ensure their pre-eminence through patronage, corruption and inter-marriage. And the Mocenigos were certainly among them—of their seven doges, three were elected in the eighteenth century.

A
lvise and Lucia’s apartment at Palazzo Mocenigo was on the mezzanine floor and looked directly out on the Grand Canal. It was spacious and elegantly furnished, with sunlight streaming in from the large windows over the water. There was a bedroom, a library-studio, a drawing room, a dining room and a small study adjoining the bedroom where Lucia could write and paint and take lessons—Alvise had granted her special request. The chambermaid, Maria, and the rest of the small staff lived in the servants’ quarters in the back. The apartment was quite independent from the rest of the house, a safe harbour, as it were, in the much vaster universe of Palazzo Mocenigo, with its grand staircases, its endless halls, its numerous apartments distributed on four floors where a crowd of Mocenigo relatives lived on more or less friendly terms.

It is easy to see how Lucia could feel lost in those new surroundings. She had hoped Alvise would be her guide and protector, but he was seldom at her side, always rushing to a function, a business meeting and other, more mysterious encounters. His elusiveness unsettled her from the very start of their marriage. The letters and notes she wrote to him those first few weeks of their life together are those of a very young wife in love with her husband, who wants to make him happy more than anything else in the world, and yet struggles to find her right place in his life. “My most beloved Alvise, it seemed to me you were not in your usual sweet humour when you woke up,” she wrote to him one morning. “I am a little worried as I am unable to trace the cause of this change.” She felt observed by the family yet also isolated, and she spent a good portion of the day wandering through the
palazzo
in the hope of suddenly coming upon Alvise, or walking down the steps to the docking on the Grand Canal where her husband’s gondola was usually moored. “Your Lucietta will be waiting for you around two o’clock at the
riva,
” she would scribble tenderly, only to receive an apologetic note back from Alvise saying he had been delayed at the Senate. One day, as she walked by a room where Alvise was receiving one of his agents, she stifled the impulse to walk in, but she could not resist dashing off a note to him as soon as she reached her apartment: “It is a cruel thing to pass by one’s husband and not be able to stop to see him and hug him…Come home quickly.” She sometimes wrote in French, perhaps to make her complaints sound more light-hearted: “I wanted to begin by scolding you but I am unable to scold my dear husband; I will only say this: my heart ached when I did not find you home, I wish to see you as soon as possible and I kiss you with all my heart.”
⁵
During the first months of her marriage, Lucia did not have the comfort of Paolina’s company. Memmo planned to marry his youngest daughter off to Luigi Martinengo delle Palle, scion of a well-known family from Brescia, so he left her in the care of the nuns at Celestia while he negotiated the contract. Paolina was not yet fifteen and her father worried about the risks of an early pregnancy. He felt it would be “another two years before she can give birth without danger”
⁶
so he pressed matters to finalise a settlement with the Martinengos while setting a later wedding date. His finances were so depleted, however, that he was forced to give away Ca’ Memmo, the venerable family
palazzo
on the Grand Canal, as part of Paolina’s dowry. He moved into the comfortable residence on Saint Mark’s Square that came with the position of procuratore di San Marco. He planned to open up the elegant
saloni
only for occasional entertainment, and live cosily in the smaller apartment on the mezzanine floor, where he now hung his large portrait, flanked by those of Lucia and Paolina, all of which had just arrived from Rome having been “excellently painted by my excellent Kauffmann.”
⁷
It was shaping up as a perfect cocoon for his old age.

In many ways the three Kauffmann paintings captured a family scene that already belonged to the past. Memmo was a loving, devoted father, but the future of his daughters, which had been uppermost in his mind, was less of a worry now that Lucia was married and Paolina was on the way to the altar. Indeed Memmo briefly contemplated the idea of getting married himself, with Contarina Barbarigo, a life-long friend and lover; but the two of them squabbled over the marriage arrangement and nothing came of it. So Memmo went back to his numerous lady companions. “I am still oppressed by beautiful women,” he confided to a friend with gleeful incredulity:

In lieu of a cock that is no longer as hard as I wish it to be, I have very hard fingers with which I can happily satisfy all my crazy girls…Alas they all want to fall in love with me but I don’t want to hear anyone talk to me about love or faithfulness. I’ve gone back to what I once was…I want as many women as I can have and would be bored to death if I only had one.
⁸