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Chapter Nine

A YEAR IN PARIS

Lucia thought Alvisetto had grown “prodigiously” since she had last seen him. When he rushed to embrace her, clutching a bouquet of fresh flowers in one hand and a small portrait of Napoleon in the other (it was originally intended for Alvise), she was shocked to see that he was quite a bit taller than her. At close range, she also noticed the jumble of new teeth that crowded his mouth and had slightly altered his facial expression. After more hugging and kissing before a fretful Vérand and an over-excited Teresa, Lucia dragged Alvisetto off to the nearby church of Saint Sulpice for a prayer of thanksgiving; then the two went off, hand in hand, to the Tuileries Gardens.

On closer inspection, she realised her son had twice as many canines as he should, and they were growing one on top of the other. “One only notices when he opens his mouth or laughs,” she later assured Paolina. Still, the extra teeth were going to have to be pulled out. “I feel for the poor boy, and of course I worry the irons will damage the enamel on his other teeth.”1 The light dimmed on the way back home, and Lucia also noticed her son’s vision was not very good. He was probably a little short-sighted, she guessed. He would have to have his eyes checked for glasses.

Alvisetto and Vérand no longer lodged with the Humberts. In view of Lucia’s arrival, they had moved to an apartment in a petit hotel on a quiet street in Faubourg Saint Germain. The house belonged to Monsieur Minier, an etcher of some repute who lived on the ground and first floors with his wife. The Mocenigos were on the second and third floors. It was not a large apartment by any means. The antechamber was used as a dining room. On the southern side, a small living room overlooked the pretty garden tended by Madame Minier. Opposite to the living room, separated by a narrow corridor, was Lucia’s bedroom, which had a rather glamorous view of Jacques-Louis David’s house-studio (she occasionally glimpsed the great artist as he got in or out of his carriage). A staircase led to Alvisetto’s bedroom on the upper floor, next to which was Vérand’s room. Teresa, who had come to Paris with Lucia, slept in the maid’s room on the same floor. Despite the size, Lucia found the apartment to be adequate. One problem bothered her, however: the lack of shutters at her bedroom windows. Also, the gratings could not be secured, and banged when the wind picked up in the evening. She resolved the matter by sleeping in the living room, where it was quieter.

Once the joy of their reunion had worn off, Lucia focused on Alvisetto’s manners. She did not like what she saw. “He doesn’t hold himself well at the table,” she complained to her sister. “He tends to slouch or lean his head on his open hand. And he eats much too quickly.”2 She was disappointed by Vérand, who seemed entirely self-absorbed and fretted about mysterious ailments during much of the day. Alvisetto had lost respect for his old tutor, and teased him no end. Vérand, on his part, made no effort to engage the boy in conversation or stimulate his mind in any way. They had grown into an odd couple, and Lucia wondered what their daily tête à têtes could possibly have been like during all the time they had lived together.

One evening—Lucia happened to be out on a visit—Alvisetto came to the table with the penknife he used to sharpen his pencils, and left it open, beside his plate. At some point during dinner, Vérand asked him to pass him a lemon, and Alvisetto, rather rudely, told him to get it himself. Vérand lost patience and leaned over brusquely to grab the lemon. Fearing Vérand was about to strike him, Alvisetto jerked to the side. In the general confusion, the penknife found its way down Vérand’s sleeve. Within a matter of seconds, blood gushed out from his arm, his shirt turned crimson and a large stain spread on the tablecloth. Luckily the local surgeon was able to rush over and stop the haemorrhaging. Still, Vérand’s arm was a dreadful mess of yellows and blues. The next day Lucia called Professor Dubois, the Imperial Surgeon, to make sure a main artery had not been seriously punctured. “It cost me a gold louis but at least it has taken away the awful anxiety.” Vérand took to his room to nurse his blemished limb and did not come out for days. “You can imagine how Alvisetto was frightened by the whole incident,” she wrote to Paolina, ever the protective mother.3

Lucia was unhappy with the way Vérand had arranged Alvisetto’s schedule. Her son had to get up at five o’clock in the morning in order to study for two hours with one of his teachers before going off to school. In the afternoon, he crossed the Jardin du Luxembourg to attend riding class at the Manège Impérial. He was home by dinnertime, and then hung sleepily over his homework until ten or eleven o’clock. Lucia was not surprised to learn that his grades were poor: he was probably dozing off during most of his classes. She cancelled his early-morning tutorials at home so he could sleep an hour later and still have time for morning mass. She had to drag him to church: “My son is not very devout,” Lucia admitted to her sister, “and doesn’t appreciate long services at all.” He was always tugging at her sleeve, and whispering “Let’s go, let’s go.”4

During her first weeks in Paris, Lucia called on few people, mostly friends from Milan who worked for the government in one capacity or another. She did not feel at all compelled to make her way into society; she certainly did not have a leather notebook in which to annotate the names and addresses of the families she called on, as she had had in Vienna back in 1801. “The purpose of my visit here is to be with my son,” she told Paolina. “Thus I spend most of my time at home.”5 That was true only in part. Lucia had no intention of living as a recluse in Paris. She had plenty of time to explore the city when Alvisetto was at school. She loved walking through the Jardin du Luxemburg, where the roses were in full bloom. And she would use any excuse to cross the Tuileries Gardens and spend a couple of hours in the busy shops of the Passage Feydau or the Passage Panorama. After a session with her hairdresser, Monsieur Guillaume, she often stopped for a lemonade at the Café de la Foi or an ice cream at Tortoni’s, and if the sun was out she sometimes prolonged her little excursion by having lunch at Martin Restaurateur, a popular restaurant near the Palais Royal. “For only two francs,” she boasted, “I can have a soup, an entrée, a roast of some kind and vegetables and dessert.”6 She never neglected her daily devotions, usually going to mass at the local parish, Saint Jacques, or to Saint Sulpice, the most beautiful church in Faubourg Saint Germain, where she sometimes saw the formidable Madame de Genlis absorbed in prayer. The first time Lucia glimpsed her at her pew, she was dressed in black and wore a little straw hat, also black, and a red scarf over her shoulders. “I had been told she was tall, as tall as Madame Dupont; she may have been, but now she stands with a stoop and is very thin.”7 If Lucia was away from her neighbourhood at the time of prayer, she walked into the first church she encountered. She stopped by at weddings and funerals, mixing with strangers just to observe the faces around her; later she would jot down a description of the trembling young bride of a rich parfumier or the eighty grieving relatives of a wool merchant.

Lucia kept a diary in Paris which she filled with brief, factual entries. She described herself wandering around the tombstones at the Père Lachaise cemetery, or looking at the pictures at the Louvre, where she once worked herself into a fit of indignation at the sight of a painting of Palazzo Mocenigo which had once hung in the Chiesa della Carità in Venice. If Alvisetto had a free afternoon, she sometimes took him to the carousel at Place Vendôme or else to play ball under the great chestnuts in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Although Lucia was on leave from her position as lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta, she was nevertheless expected to pay her court to Empress Marie Louise at Saint Cloud—a duty she fulfilled with no enthusiasm, dropping by when she had nothing better to do, and possibly at a time when she knew the empress would not be receiving and she could simply leave a card. It did not always work, though, and several times she got stuck having to watch the king of Rome, Napoleon and Marie Louise’s two-year-old son, play in his imperial pen or make a mess of his dinner. Even less appealing than the visits to Saint Cloud were those to Madame Mère, Napoleon’s temperamental mother. Fortunately, a liveried servant usually ushered Lucia away saying the old lady was busy—“Madame est en affaires.”8 In contrast, Lucia was always glad to visit Empress Joséphine (Napoleon had allowed her to retain the title). She drove over to Malmaison a week after arriving in Paris, and took Alvisetto with her—Joséphine had heard so much about him she had told Lucia to bring him along so that he might play with her grandchildren (her daughter, Queen Hortense of Holland, was trapped in a miserable marriage with Napoleon’s younger brother, Louis, and often came to seek comfort at Malmaison). The empress received Lucia, Alvisetto and the trailing Vérand in the billiard room. A small parrot with the most colourful plumage was perched on her breast. The greetings had to be interrupted when the bird started to peck the flowers of a little bouquet fixed on Joséphine’s head, forcing her to remove three strings of pearls from her neck lest the parrot take aim at them next. Despite the confusion, Lucia did not overlook the exceptional quality of the pearls, estimating they were possibly worth 100,000 francs.

Lemon ices and biscuits were served in the garden-room, where other visitors were assembled. There were several relatives from the island of Martinique, and Madame d’Ahremberg, one of the empress’s faithful ladies-in-waiting. The large room gave out on to a terraced lawn with bushes of creamy-coloured roses bursting all around it. Beyond the formal garden and the greenhouses, fields of young wheat swayed in the afternoon breeze. One of the charms of Malmaison was the way it combined the intimacy of a garden, the grandeur of an English park and the rusticity of a working farm. Joséphine took Lucia to see the rhododendrons she had planted along the main alley and the elaborate new waterworks. Back at the house, they visited the refurbished apartment upstairs. “The bedroom is magnificent,” Lucia wrote:

The tapestry is a crimson velvet decorated with the most beautiful gold embroidery. The bed-cover is made of a delicate Indian muslin, also embroidered with gold filaments. The dressing table is in gold and vermilion. It’s worth at least 200,000 francs.9

Lucia had an open invitation to visit Joséphine, and the following months, Malmaison became a second home to her in Paris. She went once or twice a week, sometimes for lunch, sometimes for afternoon tea and a walk in the park, sometimes for dinner and a few hands of Boston. The company was always an interesting mix of Joséphine’s older friends from the periods of the Revolution and the Directoire and members of the new imperial aristocracy who had remained loyal to her even after the divorce from Napoleon. The atmosphere was relaxed, the entertainment very simple: billiards, cards, parlour games. It was not an especially brilliant society, nor did it have the presumption to be so. Still, Joséphine’s good taste, her languorous elegance, gave Malmaison a stylishness that was entirely absent from the pompous court at Saint Cloud.

It was mostly through her Malmaison connections that Lucia’s social life in Paris picked up and gained a sense of direction. In any other European city, being a single woman and a foreigner would probably not have worked to her advantage; but it did in Paris. Her company was sought after, and she began to move with ease in circles that were fairly typical of the twilight years of the Empire, where politicians and old soldiers mixed with the literary set in an atmosphere of general disenchantment.

General Baraguey d’Hilliers, whom she had not seen since their meeting in Vienna in the aftermath of Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz, and his wife, la Générale, welcomed her in their house as a long-lost friend. Retired General Sérurier invited her to his country estate outside Paris. “He’s a very good person, very hospitable,” she wrote to Paolina about the man who had handed Venice over to the Austrians on that cold and drizzly morning in January of 1798. “He recently bought a farm and lives there with his wife and brother.”10 At a small dinner given by Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, the former second consul, Lucia received the attentions of none other than Joseph Fouché, the ruthless minister of the interior.

Soon Lucia found her way into the literary salon of her long-time heroine, Madame de Genlis. There she met René de Chateaubriand, the great Romantic author. She was surprised by his “odd appearance”—the big head covered with black curls so out of proportion with the small, wiry body. He appeared very concentrated all the time, and Lucia was quite intimidated by “the intense look in his eyes.”11 But she did manage to hold his attention by telling him The Genius of Christianity had been the vicereine’s favourite reading during Petit cercle in Milan. Another frequent star guest was the geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who enthralled Lucia with his fascinating tales of exploration in South America.

Her most touching encounter in Madame de Genlis’s salon was with Dominique Vivant Denon, the artist, archaeologist and art connoisseur who had made his name in Egypt with Napoleon and was now the powerful director of the Louvre. Denon had been a close friend of Lucia’s father back in the 1790s in Venice, and when Andrea Memmo was confined to bed by his illness, he had come by every day to sit with him and give him the comfort of good conversation. At the time, Lucia’s difficult pregnancy was keeping her in Vienna, away from her dying father, and she always harboured a feeling of gratitude towards the young Frenchman who had kept him company until the end. Twenty years later, Lucia finally had a chance to meet Denon—the man everyone knew as “the Eye of Napoleon.” He welcomed Lucia warmly into his house-cum-museum, and gave her a tour of his cabinet, a treasure trove of “Egyptian objects, paintings, drawings, bronze sculptures, porcelains and even Indian furniture” that he had gathered during his travels.12 Of course, Lucia was not unaware that Denon was Napoleon’s principal adviser in the looting of artworks across Europe, most of which adorned the rooms of the Louvre. It was probably for the sake of her father’s memory that she chose not to dwell on this point—there is not a critical word about Denon in her diary or in her letters, even though she felt strongly about the issue of stolen art; especially art stolen in Venice.

It was Denon who introduced Lucia to David, her neighbour across the street and the most celebrated artist of his age. He had always been famous, as far as she could remember. In fact he was already famous back in the 1780s, when Angelica Kauffmann used to take her around to the ateliers of the major painters in Rome. Now he was Napoleon’s favourite artist, and had put his stark, neoclassical imprint on the aesthetics of the Empire. At the age of sixty-five, he was still working on a majestic scale. When Lucia went to see him at his studio, she was completely overwhelmed by the powerful painting he was completing, which was bursting with naked soldiers preparing for battle. She recognised the famous scene from antiquity: Leonidas and his 300 Spartans on their way to meet the Persian army at Thermopylae. Strong Leonidas, the saviour of Greece, stood among his men, sword drawn, staring straight into Lucia’s eyes. She wondered whether the artist was drawing a parallel between Leonidas and Napoleon. France’s system of alliances had come unhinged after the disastrous Russian campaign and the Empire was under threat everywhere in Europe. Was Napoleon, like the bearded Leonidas, the heroic defender of civilisation against the advance of the barbarians?

Lucia had never felt so free to organise her life as she did in the late spring of 1813, after settling in her Paris apartment. The combination of her independence and her exposure to so many people of talent energised her; at the age of forty-three she yearned to engage her mind more fruitfully. Conversations in prominent salons, however agreeable and stimulating, no longer seemed enough. She was attracted by the rigour that only an academic community could provide, and she eventually found what she was looking for at the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical gardens where many of the great French scientists gave public lectures.

It all started quite by chance. One afternoon, Lucia went to the Collège Duplessix to hear Jean Charles de Lacretelle, a renowned historian of the French Revolution, only to be turned away by an unpleasant clerk who told her the lecture was “for men only.” Instead of going home in a huff, she walked over to the nearby Jardin des Plantes, where women were evidently welcome. She heard Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire, an eminent zoologist, give a fascinating talk on quadrupeds. Lucia was hooked. Soon she was attending Saint Hilaire’s courses on fish, butterflies, shells and corals. Next, she enrolled in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s course on invertebrates, learning all she could possibly want to know about molluscs and giant squids. Professor Havy introduced her to mineralogy, and Professor Des Fontaines to botany. She became an assiduous and attentive student, took copious notes and revised every evening at home, while Alvisetto struggled with his homework.

Lucia chose not to share this part of her life with Paolina—there is no mention of lectures in her letters to her sister. It is hard to understand why she was secretive about an experience that was obviously so important to her, especially with her sister, whom she usually kept informed about every detail of her life, down to her bodily functions. But she evidently felt protective about this new development. In reading her brief diary entries, one senses a coyness about the whole enterprise of a late education, as if she did not want people to know about it back in Italy because she feared their condescending remarks.

By mid summer, Lucia was a familiar figure at the Jardin des Plantes, hurrying to her lectures, staying on after class to make a query or ask for some clarification, fetching a sample in the herb garden or checking the mushroom beds in the dank underground cellars. Professor Havy grew so fond of her he gave her a small collection of his quartzes. Professor Des Fontaines took her for educational walks in the garden, pointing out the most exotic trees and telling her their history. Professor Saint Hilaire called on her to assist him each time a shipment of specimens—reptiles, butterflies, insects—arrived from the Americas.

Every morning Lucia took Alvisetto to early mass, saw him off to school, then headed to the Jardin des Plantes following the banks of the Seine. She had given up her carriage soon after arriving in Paris to reduce her running costs, and she actually enjoyed the long walks along the river. In the afternoon, on her way back, she took the habit of stopping at the flower market to pick up some buttercups and bluebells, and popping into Félix’s, her favourite pâtisserie, to buy a small pastry or two. On those rare occasions when she headed home earlier than usual, she idled in the streets of Faubourg Saint Germain, gathering along the way the most eclectic collection of goods: a set of drawing pencils, for example, or a sou of nails, a set of candles, a pair of socks, a couple of pigeons to roast for dinner, some bottled water and always a good supply of dried figs and prunes to help her bowel movements.

She occasionally broke her routine in the city with a day-trip to the porcelain factories at Sèvres, or to Montmorency—she picnicked under the great chestnut tree where Jean-Jacques Rousseau used to take his meals. “They say it is 500 years old,” she noted in her diary. “The trunk is so large it takes four men to wrap themselves around it.”13 She spent a sunny day at Versailles, inspecting the restoration work on the palace, which had been devastated during the Revolution. She wandered over to Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon, also entirely restored. An old Swiss guard, in his harlequin-like uniform, appeared from nowhere and offered to take her around. It was getting late, but Lucia followed her kindly guide through the royal apartments, then out in the gardens. “He took me to the grotto, the garden theatre, the wood full of tall, leafy trees; finally we reached the make-believe farming village.” Lucia had heard so many descriptions of the Petit Trianon and the surrounding grounds, including Marie Antoinette’s whimsical “village,” that her visit took on a dreamy quality. The melancholy Swiss guard had come to France with Marie Antoinette in 1770 and had miraculously survived the years of turmoil. Having nowhere to go, he had stayed on as the unofficial custodian of the Petit Trianon, keeping the queen’s memory alive with little anecdotes and recollections he shared with visitors.

At the end of the tour, Lucia saw the old man fade in the gloaming as mysteriously as he had appeared. “It was a beautiful night,” she wrote in her diary, “and I made my way back [to the town of Versailles] by the light of the moon.”14

Lucia could not remember feeling so at peace with herself as she felt in that summer of 1813. “I sleep well,” she assured Paolina, “and my friends say I’ve even put on weight. I have a pleasing complexion and I feel good.”15 She only wished Alvisetto were more diligent in his studies, and more engaged in his spiritual life. “Oh, the boy has a good heart, and he does his prayers, and confesses, and takes communion, and that is all very well but it is not enough,” she complained to her sister. She found his attitude towards religion to be too perfunctory. “Devotion to the Creator needs a great deal of work, but [Alvisetto] lacks the necessary spiritual nourishment, and I worry that when he will reach the age of overwhelming passions he will not have the strength to hold on to his faith.”16

Father Laboudrie, his confessor, was having a hard time with Alvisetto as well. He did not find it easy to absolve him from his sins and allowed him to take communion only after serious penance—he was made to read for eight or fifteen days in a row, depending on the gravity of his sins, from the Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis. But from what we can guess, Alvisetto’s sins could not have been that terrible. They probably ranged from needling poor Vérand to doing sloppy homework.

At the end of the summer, Alvisetto faced his final examinations at the Lycée. Lucia suggested he pray for the intercession of Saint Ignatius “since his Jesuit schools were the best ever”17 but her son cheekily replied he had already done so on his own initiative. For his French essay, the mighty dissertation, Alvisetto was asked to draw “a comparison between a wounded soldier who devotes his last thoughts to his beloved general, and a man devoted to God, who willingly submits himself to a preordained destiny.” Alvisetto was not inspired. “He turned in a poor composition because he did not understand the question properly,” Lucia noted with annoyance.18 Saint Ignatius had not come to the boy’s rescue after all, leaving her to wonder whether he had, in fact, prayed to the great Jesuit scholar.

Alvisetto’s teachers showed unexpected mercy despite his poor showing in French, and allowed him to pass to the next grade, troisième. The school year started in early October, after a short break, and Lucia enlisted the help of the assiduous and ever-present Father Laboudrie to make sure his new teachers were not anti-clerical hangovers from the period of the Revolution. “They don’t have to be zealous Catholics,” she explained. “I just want to make sure that when they speak of religion, or things related to religion, they do so with respect.” Father Laboudrie assured her that Alvisetto’s principal teachers were “very pious.”19

Lucia had not planned to remain in Paris another full academic year, but Alvise urged her to stay on because travelling to Italy was risky. In August 1813, even Austria, France’s main ally, had declared war against her, immediately heading south to recover its Italian provinces. Prince Eugène was in no position to defend the Kingdom of Italy: after the Russian campaign, it had become very hard to enlist new conscripts, and what little remained of the Armée d’Italie was ridden with desertions. He had retreated to the enclave of Mantua, leaving the enemy to advance unopposed into northern Italy. The Austrians had taken Trieste, gaining access to the Adriatic, and by October, just as Alvisetto was starting his school year, they lay siege to Venice.

Alvise, meanwhile, was stuck in Milan: the Senate was back in session, though nobody knew for how long. He was also cut off from his estates, now under Austrian control, and could no longer draw an income from them. As he explained to Lucia, once he went through the savings in his account in Milan, he would not be able to send her money in Paris. “My advice to you is that you should stay where you are,” he wrote. “I must also impress upon you the need to make only the most necessary expenses from now on.”20

Napoleon came back to Paris for a few days in October, preparing to lead his tired army into yet another battle. Lucia went to court at Saint Cloud to be introduced to the emperor as lady-in-waiting to his stepson’s wife. When she was finally ushered before him, she found him slouching in his throne, looking listless and overweight. He perked up just a little when Lucia’s name was read out. “Ah, a Venetian lady,”21 he said, as if trying to summon some vague memory from the misty past. He said a few words in Italian to her before his gaze drifted again.

The emperor left town some days later. Lucia was at Malmaison, playing a game of Boston with Joséphine, when the news arrived that the Grande Armée had been torn to pieces at the battle of Leipzig by the coalition forces of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Sweden. Joséphine had stayed in bed late and had not come down until after lunch. She looked tired, Lucia noticed, and was hardly able to concentrate on her game.

In November the weather turned cold and windy. Lucia asked Monsieur Minier to put in shutters to stop the constant rattling and the icy draughts. He answered she would have to pay half the costs or else sign a longer lease. Lucia declined both offers: she was already short of money, and she could no longer count on regular remittances from Italy. Besides, it was not clear how long she would be staying in Paris and it made no sense to commit herself to a long lease just to get some shutters on the wall. She decided to look for another apartment. During the next four weeks she scoured the Faubourg Saint Germain, checking out leads, climbing up hundreds of stairs, visiting apartments that were either too dark or too small, too dirty or too expensive. She visited everything there was to rent around Place de la Sorbonne, rue de Vaugirard, rue de l’Enfer and rue de Sainte Geneviève—nearly thirty apartments according to her count—before she found suitable lodgings at number 13, rue de l’Estrapade, next to the church of Sainte Geneviève. It was a sunny, comfortable second-floor apartment. More importantly: there were shutters at the windows. The owners lived downstairs; madame did the washing for a fee, and prepared excellent meals that could be brought upstairs. The apartment came with stables, which Lucia did not need but might sublet to friends who had horses, and a small coach-house where she could park her bastardella, the old gig Checco had brought from Italy and which they used to drive out to Malmaison, when they could borrow a horse.

There was, however, one drawback to the apartment: three sisters “of loose morals” lived next door, and attracted a constant flow of visitors. Lucia went to the Saint Germain police station to ask if there was any way to have the ladies evicted from the building. The officers looked at her as if she were a “madwoman.”22 She thought of turning down the apartment for the sake of Alvisetto. As she wrote to Paolina, it was hard enough steering him away from preying prostitutes in the streets in broad daylight, let alone on the same landing. One day, they were shopping near Palais Royal, when a woman in flashy clothes, her face covered by a veil, appeared from nowhere and accosted her fourteen-year-old boy, took his hand and whispered in a husky voice: “Voilà le jeune homme que j’adore”—“Look here at this adorable young man.” Lucia tore him away, casting a savage look at the face behind the veil. “I tell you, these street-women are out of control,” she complained to her sister. “They take no notice whatsoever of the prohibition to approach men in broad daylight.”23

In the end, Lucia took the apartment because winter was quickly setting in. Besides, she had already missed too many classes at the Jardin des Plantes, and she was eager to get back to her regular study pattern. She arranged to have the furniture and luggage moved, and by December, she and the rest of the household were settled in at rue de l’Estrapade.

The first snow fell early that year, and turned the streets and squares of the sprawling city into a sea of slush and mud. The Tuileries Gardens were immersed in a dense fog most of the day, and one barely made out the leafless trees lining the alley like spidery sentinels. Ice began to form in the two large basins. A young boy about Alvisetto’s age was usually in one of them, dangerously treading the thin surface. Passers-by stopped and threw coins at him to keep him on the ice and see if he would crash in the freezing water.

A feeling of resignation hung over the city, as if Parisians were conscious of the impending catastrophe and wished it would pass as quickly as possible. “They say carts filled with dead and wounded soldiers are already clogging the roads to Paris,” Lucia told her sister. “I don’t think it’s true. These rumours are surely the product of fear alone.”24 In a way, she was right: Napoleon was still fighting in the Rhineland, still winning some battles. But the official bulletins announcing more French victories were received in gloomy silence. It was no use trying to fool the people any more. A tattered army of young conscripts was not going to turn the tide against the enemy when the enemy was the rest of Europe. The Parisians were tired of war, and they were tired of Napoleon. And so was the once ultra-loyal Legislative Assembly. While the emperor led his men to Pyrrhic victories, back in Paris the ground was being prepared for his downfall.

The news from Italy was even more depressing for Lucia. Venice was still under siege by the Austrians, and she had not heard from her sister since October. Rumours spoke of widespread disease and starvation. Communications were still open between Paris and Milan, but Alvise’s letters were of little comfort. “For the most part,” she complained, “they are filled with reproaches to me.”25 He accused her of spending too much and paying scant attention to Alvisetto’s studies. Lucia could take “a little ill-humour” from her husband in such difficult times. She knew it was frustrating for him to be separated from his beloved Alvisopoli; she knew it was hard to witness the foundering of a kingdom in which he had invested so much. But why did he have to take it out on her? She was doing her best to lead a respectable life in Paris with minimum resources and no great help from him; and all of this to satisfy his obsessive desire to turn their son into a loyal subject of an Empire that was now collapsing.

Lucia was stung by the accusation of having been slack in supervising Alvisetto’s studies, perhaps because she felt it was at least partially true. She had been so busy looking for new lodgings, organising the move and keeping up with her heavy course load at the Jardin des Plantes that she had not immediately noticed Alvisetto’s rapidly declining performance at school. At the start of the year he had been sixth in the class, a very respectable ranking considering he was not a native French student; the second week he had already slipped into twelfth place, and by the third he was down to twenty-ninth, at the very bottom of his class, where he remained. One day she found her son in tears over his homework and finally woke up to the situation.

“This reversal has truly mortified him,”26 Lucia told her sister, blaming herself for being so distracted by other matters. But she was mostly angry with Vérand, who should have been the first to alert her to Alvisetto’s difficulties. Instead, he had taken to his bed, debilitated by the boy’s poor showing, and he remained out of commission pretty much until Christmas, complaining about sweats, fevers, aches and a whistling noise in his head. “He moans all day and forces the help to wake up in the middle of the night to attend to his needs,” Lucia protested:

We all know he is just a victim of his own anxiety. Still, I had two doctors come to visit him. They told him, of course, that nothing was the matter, and to get out of bed and have some food. Monsieur Vérand is an angel when he is up and about, but he is pretty heavy going when he takes to his bed. And a useless financial burden, I might add.27

Monsieur Rougement, Alvise’s banker in Paris, had to turn Lucia away several times because not even a trickle of money was coming from Milan any more. The small additional savings from Lucia’s agricultural commerce had dried up. The stipend she was still entitled to as lady-in-waiting reached her with increasing irregularity. She was already running the household on a shoestring, and the prospects were not good. Encouraged by Alvise, she drew up a list of objects to be put up for sale: furniture and jewellery, for the most part, including a beautiful necklace of gold shells which she tried to sell to various jewellers. At the end of the list, she added Alvise’s gala Senate uniform which had surfaced, like old family flotsam, from one of the trunks after the move to the new apartment. It now hung in the entrance hall at rue de l’Estrapade, cumbersome and useless. It was the one item she was eager to get rid of.

On Christmas Eve, Lucia had a quiet dinner at home with Alvisetto, Vérand, Teresa and Checco. A boiled fish arrived from the landlady downstairs. Later, Vérand and Alvisetto read a few pages of the Zen brothers’ travels in the North Atlantic while Lucia curled up in the living room with a book she had picked up at Monsieur Foucault’s, one of the booksellers she visited regularly on rue Jacob. It was a guide for improving one’s marriage, written by a German pastor, Goliath Werner. The book had recently been translated in French and was selling briskly in the Paris bookstores. The full title was Peaceful Marriages: a key to forestall, prevent and even put an end to all divorces, quarrels and all matter of domestic woes. Whether she found Father Werner’s suggestions of any use Lucia does not say, but her choice of reading material is as good a measure as any of how frustrating her long-distance relationship with Alvise had become.

Shortly before midnight all books were put aside. Everyone bundled up and, braving the snow flurries, scurried over to the church of Saint Sulpice to attend Christmas mass.

The new year began on a subdued note. The news coming from the war area portended a vast and imminent catastrophe. Yet it was received with no great alarm; or so it seemed to Lucia, who sensed a strange torpor around her, and a widespread feeling of resignation. “It is very quiet,” she noted in her diary. “Parisians go out very little. People seem to prefer staying at home these days.”28 Lucia’s professors at the Jardin des Plantes were her principal companions. Her workload became heavier. She had classes every day. In the evening she ate with Alvisetto and Vérand, then revised her notes until she was too tired to go on.

On her way home from the Jardin des Plantes, on the last day of Carnival, Lucia walked over to the boulevards hoping to see the masked revellers rushing by in open carriages—she thought it might remind her of the Venice carnival. But she only caught sight of a single cabriolet carrying three masked passengers, “and I heard they were paid by the police to display a little good humour.” That night, breaking her stay-at-home routine, she went to the masked ball at court in Saint Cloud. “I stayed until two,” she jotted down later. “The ladies wore a domino [cloak], the men wore tails. There were not many people at all.”29 Coming home she passed by the Barrière du Trone, one of the main Paris gateways into the city. “Sixteen cannons have been placed in addition to the usual two. I also counted fourteen ammunition carts.”30

She wondered whether Napoleon was already making preparations to defend the city.

Her visits to Joséphine were the one regular social engagement Lucia did not give up in the winter of 1814. At least once a week, she had Checco hire or borrow a horse, harness the gig and take her out to Malmaison. The empress often looked weak and she tired very quickly. One day—it was early February and the grounds were covered with snow—Lucia went over for dinner and they played their usual game of Boston. They talked about the terrible situation in Italy: there were uprisings in Milan and Joséphine worried about what might happen to Prince Eugène, his wife and the children, and whether they might make it safely back to Paris. She also asked after Alvisetto and was sorry to hear about his difficulties in school. She told Lucia to bring him with her on her next visit.

The following Sunday, Lucia and Alvisetto went to Malmaison for lunch. Queen Hortense’s children were also there and he played with them in the afternoon. The sun came out and Lucia took a short walk with Joséphine, but after a few minutes the empress was exhausted and they made their way back. A week later, Lucia went back alone: “She was unwell and received me in her beautiful bedroom. She was lying on the muslin bedspread and had drawn a white silk blanket over her, with gold braids and frills. The window curtains were also drawn.”31

Lucia did not return to Malmaison until a fortnight later, when she was received by the principal lady-in-waiting and the chamberlain: Joséphine’s breathing difficulties had apparently worsened and she was not seeing anyone. On the way home, Lucia and Checco were caught in “a column of twenty to twenty-five carts carrying wounded soldiers and headed for Saint Germain.”32 The rumour was that the French army was falling back on Paris and that the final battle might take place just outside the city.

That night—the night of 29 March—Lucia was kept awake by the constant beating of drums as Napoleon’s troops entered Paris and marched through Faubourg Saint Germain and then headed south, in the direction of Fontainebleau. Around half past three in the morning, Alvisetto came into her room sleepy-eyed, asking what was the matter. He settled by the windowsill until dawn, watching the exhausted, poorly clad soldiers marching down the street.

The allied armies had by then reached the eastern city limits. Only days before, Austria, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain had signed the Treaty of Chaumont which bound them to fight on until the final overthrow of Napoleon. Even at this hopeless hour, the emperor was convinced he could outmanoeuvre the much stronger enemy by moving south and east, to Fontainebleau, and attack the allies from the rear. But while he laid out his military strategy, Talleyrand, the wily survivor of so many political seasons, was again taking charge of France’s destiny, secretly negotiating with the enemy to save Paris from an allied attack and prepare the ground for the emperor’s deposition.

At seven in the morning, Lucia left the house in rue de l’Estrapade with Alvisetto as she did every day, and went to early mass at the church of Saint Jacques. The last soldiers had marched out of town and the streets were strangely quiet. When they emerged from the church, the street was again filled with troops, but they belonged to the National Guard. Lucia heard the rumble of cannon shot; she pointed out to Alvisetto the flashes of cannon-fire to the right of Montmartre, and the tall columns of smoke rising at Vincennes.

The Lycée was closed that morning. Instead of returning home, Lucia and Alvisetto joined the stunned crowd that was gathering silently in the street and followed the aimless flow. The stores were bolted and shop-signs were erased or painted over to mislead looters on the prowl. Lucia spotted a few bedraggled soldiers making their way home from the battlefield near Vincennes. There was great confusion but not chaos. Well-organised police patrols maintained order. The women wore little black hats as a sign of mourning and several frowned at the flowery headgear Lucia had put on unthinkingly when she had left the house early in the morning. Alvisetto was too embarrassed to continue, and insisted they go home.

Cannon-fire boomed all day in the distance and subsided in the evening. Lucia stayed up all night, too anxious to fall asleep. Next morning, she learnt the French authorities had signed the capitulation of Paris. By midday the allied vanguard entered the city. Lucia went back to the street with Alvisetto. The atmosphere had changed overnight, and a new, unbridled energy was spreading very fast. Within minutes she spotted “at least twenty men and women wearing the white cockade,” the symbol of the royalists. “Excited young men on horseback shouted, ‘Long live the Bourbons!’”

As soon as the allied vanguard had taken control of the city, the high command marched into Paris at the head of a well-disciplined army. Emperor Alexander of Russia led the convoy, with King Frederick William of Prussia and Prince Schwartzenberg, who was standing in for Emperor Francis of Austria, still several days away from Paris. “Ninety thousand soldiers marched in perfect order,” Lucia reported in her diary, frankly impressed by the glittering parade. “The cavalry looked superb, the horsemen in high uniform riding beautiful steeds. They wore a green sprig in their helmet and a white band around their arm. The mighty Cossacks came next, and then an endless column of carriages and carts carrying weapons and munitions.”

The contrast with the tattered French army that had left town on its way to Fontainebleau could not have been sharper.

Foreign soldiers marched to Place Vendôme and then gradually filled the Champs Elysées. Thousands of Parisians lined the avenues to watch the spectacle. “Many shouted ‘Bravo! Long live the Bourbons!’ and waved their white handkerchiefs.” Lucia noticed that the same men were inciting the crowd at different points in the streets. They were most certainly Bourbon agents “still gauging the size of royalist support.” Someone in the swelling crowd attracted Lucia’s attention to the long rope that was being passed down the line towards Place Vendôme, where Napoleon’s statue stood atop the great bronze column. “Everyone started to follow the rope with their eyes. After a while, word came back that the noose had already been placed around Napoleon’s neck, and the statue was going to be pulled down.”33 Lucia was suddenly afraid of being caught in a wave of street violence. She took Alvisetto’s hand and turned around to go home.

The allied troops were still filling the Champs Elysées. Lucia and Alvisetto walked against the flow, stopping briefly in front of the Palais des Tuileries, where a small crowd was waiting for something to happen: rumour had it that one of the allied leaders might come out to salute the Parisians. But no one came out, and after a short rest, mother and son moved on, their slow trek home occasionally interrupted by the nervous canter of a stray horse on the cobblestones.

Napoleon was in Fontainebleau when he learnt that Paris had capitulated. It was too late to outmanoeuvre the enemy. There was nothing more to be done. The emperor handed himself over to the French Provisional Government. It fell to its president, Talleyrand, to proclaim the deposition of Napoleon and the end of the Empire, and to ensure a smooth transition of power. The next day, 31 March, Lucia transcribed in her diary the announcement made by Baron Pasquier, chief of the Paris Police:

The events of the war have brought to your doorstep the armies of the coalition. Their number and their strength made it impossible for our troops to continue defending the capital, and the commanding officer was forced to capitulate. It has been a very honourable capitulation. A longer resistance would have endangered the safety of people and properties. At this momentous time, I beseech you to remain calm and peaceful…34

Lucia, however, continued to be restless; she felt the pull of the street, the need to witness the extraordinary metamorphosis taking place in Paris. On 1 April, two days after the final allied victory, she ventured with Checco past the eastern Barrière Saint Martin, on the road to Meaux. They reached Belleville Heights, left the carriage on the road and clambered up the hill until they came upon a wide-open plain. Clusters of curious onlookers were picking their way among the charred and still smoking remains of the battle. The bulky carcasses of dead horses were scattered in the field and the air was filled with the stench of rotting flesh. Mercifully, dead and wounded soldiers had been carried away, but a band of Cossacks was still guarding a group of disgruntled, worn-out French prisoners who had been crammed into a makeshift corral.

Lucia saw a sudden commotion near the prisoners’ camp. A woman had been looking for her husband; she had brought a bundle of civilian clothes she hoped to pass on to him so that he might try to escape. The other prisoners started pulling and tearing at the bundle, and eventually they grabbed the poor woman and manhandled her savagely until the guards intervened. Frightened by the violence, Lucia backed off and hurried down the hill with Checco.

On the way back to town, hundreds of carriages and carts were caught in an endless traffic jam. In the noisy, dusty confusion, Lucia saw “white cockades and kerchiefs everywhere.” To avoid being stuck in traffic all the way into Faubourg Saint Germain, she and Checco made a wide detour passing by Place Vendôme. “The statue [of Napoleon] was still standing and there were no ropes dangling from its sides,”35 she jotted down in her diary when she got home.

The energy released by the sudden collapse of the Empire spent itself peacefully in the streets of Paris. Except for isolated incidents, the city remained relatively calm. There were few excesses on the part of the occupation forces, and no major outbreaks on the part of the Parisian crowd. The initial surge of vindictive feelings against Napoleon had subsided fairly quickly. Indeed, not only was the emperor’s statue still standing on the bronze column in Place Vendôme when Lucia drove by, but “many people had climbed up the spiral staircase inside the column and had stepped out on to the capital to enjoy the view.”36

The Lycée reopened after a two-day interruption. Every reference to Napoleon had been taken down and replaced by the words “Public School.” “In times of Revolution we can do no better than to get back to our studies,”37 one of Alvisetto’s teachers, Monsieur Leclerc, told Lucia as he welcomed her son back to class. She followed his dictum, and resumed her own courses at the Jardin des Plantes, happy to be back in the company of her erudite professors.

In the days immediately following the armistice, Emperor Alexander was the principal guarantor of peace and security in Paris. As Baron Pasquier, the chief of police, confirmed in his proclamation of 31 March, “[the emperor of Russia] has given the municipal authorities every assurance of his benevolent protection of the people of this capital city.” It could not have been otherwise: the city teemed with Russians. Hundreds of officers were put up in private houses, many in the elegant streets of Faubourg Saint Germain. They were flush with cash; indeed, Lucia was still unable to retrieve money from the bank because all the money available went to pay the salaries of Alexander’s officers. In those early spring days, as Paris regained its colours, Russian soldiers filled the cafés and restaurants and theatres. The proprietor of the fashionable Restaurant Véry boasted to Lucia he was making “10,000 francs a night off General Platow’s Cossacks.”38

Emperor Alexander, the “benevolent protector,” was a popular attraction in Paris. Among the victorious allied leaders, Frederick William of Prussia was only a king, while the other emperor, the dour Emperor Francis of Austria, reached the capital long after every one else. But Alexander’s stardom was not merely a question of rank. There was a genuine curiosity among Parisians for the liberal emperor who had conquered Napoleon. Lucia was not immune to it, and on the way home from class, she often mingled with the ogling crowd stationed under the emperor’s windows. “Today I saw him come home on horseback, dressed in a simple green uniform, with only a small escort,”39 she wrote in her diary, quite taken by the emperor’s simple ways. She was even more impressed when Alexander put an end to his soldiers’ high-flying lifestyle with the start of Holy Week. Easter and Orthodox Easter happened to coincide in 1814. According to Lucia, the Russian emperor was “a model of piety.” He abstained from eating “not just meat but also eggs, milk and butter, out of respect for Catholics.”40 After having indulged their palates at Véry’s, his officers were limited to a diet of “potatoes, beans, dried prunes, etc…” and were forbidden to go to the theatre.

At first, Alexander lived with his retinue on the top floors of Talleyrand’s large mansion on Place de la Concorde because the palace of the Elysée, which he would eventually occupy, was still being refurbished. Talleyrand was quite happy to move down to the mezzanine floor with his staff in exchange for the privilege of having the emperor and his principal advisers at such close quarters. He and Alexander dined together most evenings. Their associates collaborated closely.

With one eye on France’s best interests and the other on his own political survival, Talleyrand had quickly concluded that the preferable outcome of Napoleon’s debacle was a return to Bourbon authority, this time held in check by a parliamentary constitution which he immediately set about drafting. Alexander was not at all keen to see a Bourbon back on the throne in France, and especially not the arch-conservative pretender Louis XVIII, younger brother of the decapitated Louis XVI, who was on his way to Paris and making large claims already. It was only because Talleyrand waved before Alexander the draft of his liberal constitution that the Russian emperor finally resigned himself to a Bourbon restoration.

On 12 April, two days after Easter, Lucia was again in Place Vendôme to see the Comte d’Artois, Louis XVIII’s brother, make a triumphant entry in Paris. He was “dressed up” as a National Guard, Lucia pointedly wrote, with the royal blue cordons as the only embellishment. From Place Vendôme, the Bourbon vanguard moved directly to the Palais des Tuileries, and soon the Comte d’Artois came out to greet the very large crowd from deposed empress Marie Louise’s balcony. The crowd refused to go away after he had gone back inside, but continued to clap and cheer, demanding that he come out again. Lucia found the scene rather distasteful: “It reminded me of the theatre.”41

Talleyrand had accurately read the mood of the people, who seemed to welcome the idea of a return to the monarchy. Lucia was never a royalist, let alone a Bourbon sympathiser, yet she had always felt a deep sorrow for the fate of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. She went looking for the common grave at the old Cimetière de la Madeleine where the decapitated bodies of the king and queen had been dumped twenty-one years earlier. The cemetery had long been abandoned, but some years previously the owner of the house next door had managed to purchase a plot of land which included the burial ground. Since then, he had tended the two graves, pulling out weeds, planting flowers and growing a protective hedge. “The owners are a very nice family, and they gladly take around those who ask to see the enclosure,” Lucia wrote to Paolina. “The proprietor also showed me the diamond-studded box the King of Prussia gave him as a token of his esteem and appreciation for what he had done.”42

At the time of the burial, two young weeping willows had been planted over the graves as markers. Over the years, the trees had grown considerably, one towards the other, until their upper branches had joined. But now the willow on top of Marie Antoinette’s grave was losing its leaves. As the proprietor explained to Lucia, the roots, having grown eight feet deep, had reached the lime in which her body was thrown.

Louis XVIII arrived in Paris on 3 May. He was a supercilious sixty-year-old, overweight and overbearing; but he was also a stubborn negotiator, and not at all inclined to wear the constitutional straitjacket Talleyrand was fashioning for him. The draft constitution went back and forth between the new monarch and the president of the provisional government. By the time Louis XVIII installed himself at the Tuileries, he had curtailed the powers of Parliament and individual freedoms considerably. Talleyrand lamented the changes to his original draft, but in the end he was satisfied that sufficient guarantees ensured that France would not see a return to absolute monarchy. On the other hand, Emperor Alexander, who had moved from Talleyrand’s mansion to the Elysée palace, did not take the changes at all well, and thereafter refused to speak to his former host.

On 16 May Lucia went to court for a formal presentation to Louis XVIII. The point of this otherwise futile exercise was to attract the king’s attention during the brief moment when one was face to face with him—not always an easy task given the soporific atmosphere that usually hung over this ceremony. She described herself on her card as the wife of the former captain of Verona, remembering that Alvise, despite the Directoire’s vociferous protests, had treated the future king well back in 1795, when he was living in exile in Italy as the Comte de Lille. “The King receives like our dear old uncle Lorenzo, sprawled in his throne,” Lucia wrote to her sister. “The ladies shuffle by him in a long line; they are only allowed a curtsey. The King nods without saying a word, except to those whom he knows personally.” It turned out Lucia’s little trick with her card worked beyond her expectations. She could not resist showing off a bit to her younger sister:

The King saw me, examined me for a short while, and then exclaimed “Ah Lucietta! How are you! It’s been so long!” The tone of his voice was so cordial and his expression so friendly that he seemed genuinely pleased to see me after nineteen years. And fancy him remembering my Venetian nickname!43

In reality, the atmosphere at the new court was anything but cheerful. The king and his royal siblings were rather advanced in age, and soured by many years of exile. The haughty Duchess of Angoulème, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the king’s sister, restored stuffy rules of etiquette at the Tuileries that were a throwback to the ancien régime. “I really do not like the way we get pushed out of the room by the ushers after we have presented ourselves,”44 Lucia grumbled. There was no place to mingle, and the ladies were left to mill about with the servants outside the receiving chamber until their carriage appeared.

Leaving court one evening she overheard a lady say that Joséphine had died. “I could not bring myself to believe it,” she wrote in her diary. “I left in a hurry and came home immediately.”45 She could not sleep at all that night. The next morning, she sent word to Queen Hortense “to learn whether the Empress had in fact passed away.” When the news was confirmed Lucia was overcome with sorrow. An air of mystery had surrounded Joséphine’s illness from the beginning. Lucia had seen the empress fade but the topic of her health was always left untouched, and now suddenly she was dead—apparently after taking a chill during a walk in the garden with Emperor Alexander. When Lucia arrived at court in the evening, she was late and the doors to the king’s apartments were closed. Other ladies were waiting outside. She joined two old friends of Joséphine, both in tears. The three of them wondered whether Napoleon, who was living in exile on Elba, had been informed.*20

The following day Lucia, dressed in mourning, gathered the final draft of her letter of condolences to Prince Eugène—she had stayed up late writing several versions—and drove out with Alvisetto to Queen Hortense’s palace, where Eugène was staying before returning to his wife and children in Bavaria. It was a very emotional leave-taking; both Hortense and Eugène were crushed by the death of their mother. For Lucia, it was also the last formal act of her brief career as lady-in-waiting to a court that had vanished under the ruins of Napoleon’s Empire.

In the darkest hour, just before the final collapse, Napoleon had ordered Eugène to cross the Alps and come to the defence of France. Eugène had resisted the call from his stepfather because his wife was about to give birth again. Furthermore, by remaining in the Kingdom of Italy at the head of a much reduced Armée d’Italie, he had hoped to lay a claim to the kingdom, or at least a portion of it, in any redrawing of the European map. But during the preliminary talks held by the great powers in Paris in April and May 1814 after Napoleon’s demise, it became clear that northern Italy would fall under Austria’s control in one form or another. By the time Eugène hurried back to Paris to assist his dying mother, his kingdom had disintegrated. Mob violence in the streets of Milan culminated on 20 April with the gruesome lynching of Eugène’s unpopular finance minister, Giuseppe Prina. Lucia learnt that Alvise had managed to leave Milan safely and reach Alvisopoli, but she knew little else, and communications remained very fragmented.

During the following weeks Lucia became obsessed with one question: what future lay in store for Venice? At the end of April the Austrians finally lifted the siege but the city was prostrate after six months of isolation, hunger and disease. The death of the Republic seventeen years earlier, Lucia confided to her diary, was still “a thorn in my heart.” There was, she knew, very little chance of resurrecting it. But she felt it was wrong to give up all hope. “Surely this is the time to try,” she told her sister, “what with all the European sovereigns gathered here [in Paris] at once.” If the Bourbon monarchy had been restored—so went her argument—why not imagine that the Republic of their elders might also be? In a moment of enthusiasm, she wrote to her Venetian friends still in Milan begging them to underwrite a petition to the allies “for the rebirth of our Republic.” She reminded them that the Genoese had already taken a similar step. “It will perhaps prove useless, but at least [we] will not have to blame [ourselves] for not having made every possible effort.”46

It was a valiant but doomed endeavour. The allies did not have the slightest interest in reviving the Republic of old. “Everywhere I am told that Venice will be ceded back to Austria,” she observed sadly. Clearly, Emperor Francis was the person she should try to see: she asked for an interview and was received on 24 May. Lucia lobbied hard on behalf of Venice, reminding the emperor that the city had greatly suffered and would need special attention to get back on its feet. Indeed, why not make it an important administrative centre, a regional capital of the Austrian Empire? Why not make it the official residence of a Habsburg archduke? Lucia pressed on, carried away by her own arguments. “But all the Emperor did, after each suggestion I made, was to repeat: ‘Please stay calm, Madam, have no fear.’”47

Shortly after her useless meeting with Emperor Francis, Lucia ran into a Milanese acquaintance who had lost no time in converting to the Habsburg cause. He congratulated her on the happy prospects of Venice under Austrian rule. Lucia replied with indignation that she was a republican. “I will certainly adapt to the new situation,” she wrote in her diary. “But I remain inconsolable.”48 Frustrated at her inability to do something for Venice, she went to the foreign ministry’s archives to see whether she could not at least retrieve stolen documents that had belonged to her family. With the help of a friendly archivist, she found stack upon stack of letters and parchments pertaining to the history of the old Venetian Republic. Rummaging through the mouldy papers, she pulled out her father’s correspondence with the doge when he was ambassador to Constantinople. She asked the complicit archivist if she could take the letters, and hurried home with her prize. Emboldened by this stroke of good luck, she wrote to Talleyrand, now Louis XVIII’s foreign minister, asking for an interview to discuss what steps should be taken to have all the archives taken by Napoleon shipped back to Venice. There was no reply. Talleyrand was busy preparing the Congress of Vienna and had very little time on his hands. “He probably thought I was just another foreigner asking for a favour,”49 Lucia concluded. She made one more attempt. This time, however, she added to her name the old Austrian titles she had never used, not forgetting the Starred Cross of the Habsburg Empire she had received just before leaving Vienna in 1806, and sent in the request, curious to see whether Talleyrand would pay her more attention.

The Treaty of Paris was signed at the end of May, formally ending hostilities with France, which was now reduced to its pre-Revolution frontiers. The allied troops withdrew from the capital, and a long line of kings, chancellors, diplomats and generals flowed back to the various European capitals. Emperor Alexander left town in a huff, so peeved was he at the way things had turned out (though not without having made arrangements to purchase Joséphine’s fabulous art collection).

“London, Vienna, Milan: these days everyone seems to be going somewhere,”50 Lucia observed, capturing the end-of-season atmosphere. It was time to begin planning her own departure. There was no longer any point in staying in Paris for Alvisetto’s education after Napoleon’s fall—even Alvise conceded as much. Besides, their son was not exactly shining at school. His teachers worried about his lack of zeal and his indifference to his studies. Lucia, on her part, had lost all patience with him: it was a struggle to get him up in the morning (and she had her own classes to attend!), he was slow with homework and she was always having to go fetch him at the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he stopped to play ball on his way home from riding school. “I don’t know how to educate Alvisetto,” she burst out in frustration to Paolina. “What he needs is a man of knowledge and authority”51—an obvious dig at Alvise, so absent from their lives, but also at Vérand, who had been of such little use around the house and rather a weight on her. “What with all his ailments, cures, convalescences, I hardly ever see him out of bed.” It was, she concluded, “very, very, very necessary”52 to send Alvisetto off to boarding school once they were back in Italy, possibly somewhere near Venice, like Padua.

Unlike her listless son, Lucia was ever more diligent in the pursuit of her studies at the Jardin des Plantes, as if determined to soak up as much knowledge as possible, no matter how haphazardly, before returning to Italy. When crates arrived from overseas, carrying all manner of reptiles, birds and insects, she was always on hand to help Professor Saint Hilaire sort out hundreds of specimens. He taught her the art of vivisection and how to handle live animals, including snakes—a requirement for the certificate in anatomy she was working towards. She passed her chemistry course with Professor Laugier and her mineralogy course with Professor Havy with flying colours. But botany was the subject she grew passionate about, and Professor Des Fontaines’s course absorbed her more than any other.

Lucia got up before dawn every morning and walked down the still deserted quais along the Seine to be at the Jardin des Plantes in time for Des Fontaines’s class at six o’clock. After the lecture, she usually went to collect samples and cuttings on the grounds, carrying a tin tray slung over her shoulder. Jean Thonin, the legendary chief gardener, helped her select the seeds of trees that had recently arrived from North America and which he thought might do well at Alvisopoli: silver maple and red maple, canoe birch, Easter red cedar, American sweet gum and other fast-growing species. Professor Des Fontaines compiled a list of plants and shrubs for Lucia to take to Italy and sent her to Monsieur Noisette, who oversaw the nursery in rue Jacob. She assembled a considerable botanical collection in boxes that were piling up in the entrance at rue de l’Estrapade. Her 200 rose cuttings covered an eclectic variety: she mentions the pinkish Anemone Rose, the tie-dyed Rose Panachée (Rosa variegata), one she calls “Rose Bissone” (“with its sweet smell of pineapple and raspberry gelée”) and the fashionable Rosa multiflora, a prolific shrub with white and pink flowers “that grows like a vine.”53 It had come from China only two years before and was already very popular among Parisian rose-lovers.

She completed her botany requirements with Monsieur Dupont, the Serviteur des Roses at the Jardin des Plantes. He was a cheerful man who tended to his 457 species of rose with great devotion. In his extraordinary garden, which was just then reaching its fullest profusion, Dupont taught Lucia the art of grafting. His wife, Louise, had died twelve years earlier, and he had buried her heart in a corner of the garden where low ivy now grew, in the shape of a heart. Dupont added in a whisper that he wanted his own heart to be buried next to that of his wife.

Lucia secretly hoped that once Alvise had taken care of the most urgent tasks on his estates, he would travel to Paris and help her organise the family’s trip back to Italy. She even fantasised that the two might steal a quick trip to London: “It would be wonderful to make a dash,” she confided to her sister. “The opportunity is unique as we are so close and, for once, at peace.”54 But Alvise was too tied up with his affairs, what with the harvest coming up and the perennial threat of summer rains. The accounts were in such disarray that he could not send her money for the journey and instructed her to finance the trip by selling everything she could: furniture, jewellery, clothes, and even his old Senate uniform—if she could find a buyer for it.

It was a tough task. The Russians had left town, and the English tourists who were starting to arrive in Paris were much more careful with their money. She made the rounds of all the jewellers she knew hoping to sell the set of shells she had been trying to get rid of for months. She finally sold it to an Englishman through the concierge of the Hotel de l’Europe for 700 francs. Lucia was quite pleased with herself as that style of jewellery was no longer fashionable and she would never have sold it to a Parisian. She was also able to sell the beds, two chests of drawers and a cupboard. But she had no luck with Alvise’s Senate uniform, not even among Bonaparte die-hards. She instructed Alvisetto to undo the embroidery so she could at least sell the gold thread and the silver buttons; then she had Mademoiselle Neppel, her seamstress, unmake the uniform and she sold the pieces of cloth to the tailor, Monsieur Robert. With the proceeds from the sale she bought ten pairs of gloves, a box of dried figs and one of dried apricots.

In the end, Lucia raised enough cash to purchase two horses for the gig, which Checco would be driving back to Italy with Teresa, and to hire a carriage. The coachman, Signor Maccari, a genial Florentine, was to manage the trip, providing meals and lodgings along the way. There was still a little cash left for one last shopping spree. Socks, shoes, shirts, fabrics, dried foods: Venice had been under siege for six months and Lucia had heard there still was a penury of the most basic goods. She longed to be home. “I can’t wait to sleep in my own room,” she told Paolina, “though I fear there will be many rats as the apartment has been empty for so long. Make sure that proper stops are put into cracks and holes.” As much as she loved Paris, she felt the constant pull of her Venetian roots. “This is a great city but I prefer the one I was born in, and I hope to spend the few years of life I still have surrounded by our beloved lagoons.”55

In the midst of last-minute preparations, Lucia received a call from the foreign ministry: though very busy preparing for the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand was willing to see Lucia for a petit quart d’heure d’entretien, the note said—a brief fifteen-minute interview. Two elderly generals were already sitting in the waiting room when she arrived. A few minutes later, they were joined by the Prince de Rohan, a wrinkled gentleman from the oldest house of Brittany, who engaged Lucia in amiable chit-chat—his daughter had apparently been escorted by a Mocenigo in Venice at the time of the Republic—until it was her turn to go in. Talleyrand was polite but distant, and he made it plain he was a very busy man. Right away Lucia asked him how he thought Venice should proceed in its petition to obtain the papers belonging to the Republic, which, she added pointedly, “I know to be in France.”

Talleyrand:

Ah, but when Venice and Milan were joined [in the Kingdom of Italy] the papers were assigned to Milan.

Lucia:

Sir, I saw them in the archives here in Paris.

Talleyrand:

Well, they are merely in consignment.

Lucia:

But they are here…

Talleyrand:

In consignment…

Lucia:

May I at least put in a petition to retrieve the papers?

Talleyrand:

They belong to Milan, and since they are here only in consignment it really is not possible to do so. Milan belongs to Vienna now.

Lucia:

So Venice should eventually make the request to Vienna?

Talleyrand:

Everything to Vienna…(Changing subject) Your father must have known [French ambassador] Choiseul Gouffier in Constantinople…

Lucia:

He might, though I remember he was there at the time of [Ambassador] Saint Priest…

Talleyrand:

Of course, Saint Priest…56

The old diplomat had steered the conversation on to a dead track. Lucia’s fifteen minutes were up. “I realised he wanted me to take my leave, so I left.” She walked home feeling low and decided to make a detour to see if Alvisetto was still in the park. The sight of her gangly teenage son chasing the ball like a little boy put her in better spirits. The evening was warm and they tarried under the great leafy chestnuts, going over their latest sales, adding up figures and looking ahead to their long journey back to Venice. Later she wrote to her sister that on the way home from the Jardin du Luxembourg, Alvisetto gave her his arm for the first time.

The apartment was bursting with boxes and crates and trunks. All was ready. Lucia made her farewell rounds: Madame Sérurier, Madame Baraguey d’Hilliers, Madame Chateaubriand, Madame de Genlis, who gave her the four-volume biography of Henry IV. And then, of course, her new professor friends: Saint Hilaire, Laugier, Havy…Professor Des Fontaines came to rue de l’Estrapade to present Lucia with her well-earned certificate of botanical studies. He too gave her a book as a parting present: Le Jeune Botaniste, by Auguste Plée. An indispensable read, he said with emotion, for any aspiring botanist.

On 24 August, she took her leave from the king. “I was in such a rush I had to change in the carriage,” reads the last entry in Lucia’s Paris diary.

He seemed pleased to see me when I came up to him and curtsied. He said: “I thought you had left already. How are you?” I replied cheekily: “I would not have left before your saint’s day.” And His Majesty: “Well, then, I thank you very much.”57

The party left Paris on a sunny morning at the end of August (one day later than planned because Teresa objected to leaving on a Friday). Lucia, Alvisetto and Vérand travelled in the carriage with Signor Maccari; Checco and Teresa followed in the gig. In Fontainebleau, Lucia called for a stop to visit the chateau where Napoleon had abdicated. The next day they toured the cathedral of Sens. There were many more stops along the way, in Auxerre, Chalons, Macon. It took them ten days to reach Lyon; they travelled across the lush French countryside at a pleasant pace, never straining the horses. Occasionally Signor Maccari let Alvisetto take the reins; Checco and Teresa cheered him on from the gig. Lucia was pleased with the coachman, who was able to provide comfortable lodgings and plenty of good food along the way (she had asparagus nearly every day!). When the inn was crowded, Signor Maccari himself served the meal in the rooms.

After a rest in Lyon, they headed for the Alps. The air became cooler and crisper. In Chambéry they stopped for their last French meal: onion soup, beef à la mode, roast chicken with peas and potatoes, fricassée of lamb, cheese and pears and biscuits, and two bottles of good wine. They arrived rather stuffed at the border station after the village of Lanslebourg, where their papers were checked by Austrian guards—the Austrians had temporary control over Piedmont until the House of Savoy was reinstated. Lucia produced old documents showing she was an Austrian countess, and the party breezed through. They left at dawn the next day for the last climb up through the Mont Cenis Pass. Three mules pulled the carriage and one the gig. Lucia recognised the muleteer, a well-known figure to travellers. He had once carried Napoleon piggy-back after his carriage had crashed in the snow; the emperor had rewarded him with a pension and eighteen gold napoléons. The crossing was much easier now: there was a wide esplanade at the pass, and a good road leading down to Italy. It was a beautiful, clear day; Lucia and Alvisetto got out of the carriage to stretch a little and decided to walk down the mountain, carefully picking their way on the gravel. They reached the old frontier town of Susa in time for a hearty Piedmontese lunch, their first Italian meal in a long time: vermicelli soup, mushrooms from the neighbouring woods, roasted eels and spinach, mascarpone and grapes.

It took another ten days to cross northern Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic. On 25 September, four weeks after leaving Paris, the little convoy was met in Padua by Alvise, Paolina, her two boys, Venceslao and Ferighetto, and her youngest daughter, Marietta (Cattina, the eldest, was married and living in Bologna; Isabella had died while Lucia was in Paris). Alvise invited them all to lunch at the Croce d’Oro, the fancy restaurant in town; afterwards, they ambled over to Caffè Pedrocchi for ice creams.

They spent the night in Padua before making the last leg of the journey home. Lucia got up early the next day, went to wake all the children and took them out for breakfast. Everyone went to mass while Alvise made arrangements for their passage. Then they all piled up in a peotina, the typical flat-keeled Venetian transport vessel, and made the familiar journey down the Brenta Canal before heading out to Venice across the lagoon. It was a merry passage. “Paolina sang a lovely little aria.”58

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