Lucia (21 page)

F
rom the beginning of their stay in Austria, it was clear to Lucia that Alvise had no intention of spending more time in Vienna than was strictly necessary. Indeed, his plan was to travel back and forth between Italy and Austria, but Molinato would continue to absorb most of his energies. Lucia, on the other hand, was to stay in Vienna, set up house with the help of her maid, Margherita, and lay the groundwork for their entrance in society. At the end of September, Alvise took a five-year lease on a pleasant apartment off Saint Stephen’s Square, with tall windows and a side view of the cathedral. It was not a grand or showy set-up, but it was elegant and spacious enough that she would be able to entertain adequately when the time was right. Lucia set about her task with diligence, even a certain meticulousness. She hired a cook, who installed himself with his wife; and two more maids, Teresa and Felicita, to assist Margherita. Checco the groom completed the staff. It felt a little awkward to have so many people working in an empty house, but she reminded herself she was merely planning ahead. Still, she was concerned that she was going to be living much of the time as a single woman in a city which, she soon discovered, treasured family unity—or at least the appearance of it.

Extending the kindness she had displayed in Baden, Madame Wallis went out of her way to introduce Lucia in Vienna. She organised a small birthday dinner at her house. Among the guests were Princess Stahremberg, Countess Maillath, Baroness Zois, Count Moravieff and Duke Albert of Saxony-Teschen, whom Lucia had heard so much about when she was still in Venice (grief-stricken after the loss of his wife, Archduchess Maria Christina, in 1798, the duke had commissioned a large funerary monument from Canova that was on its way to Vienna). These were the first names Lucia diligently wrote down, together with their addresses, in a brown leather notebook that was to become her personal social registry. She used those initial introductions to gain access to other illustrious houses, and planned her courtesy visits dividing the city up by areas and neighbourhoods. She called on an average of two to three houses a day, and always wrote down the address and the date. She drew a map and kept a precise tally.

Anxious to own property in Austria in order to demonstrate his allegiance to the Habsburgs, Alvise purchased Margarethen am Moos, a large estate a few hours south-east of Vienna that looked out on the plains stretching towards Hungary. Lucia was not enthused by what she saw when Alvise took her out to view the property before he left for Italy. The house was damp and austere-looking. The fields around it were soggy and teeming with mosquitoes. The garden had gone to seed long ago. She felt the place had never been happy. In medieval times, she discovered, Margarethen am Moos had been a frontier outpost. For centuries fierce Magyars had crossed the plains to make bloody incursions into Habsburg territory. In fact the main house had originally been built as a castle—a fortified quadrilateral with a tower and a moat and a rickety bridge over the water. The tower had been torn down in the eighteenth century by the Harsch family, the last owners, in an attempt to make the place a little more inviting. The facade was renovated in the Austrian neoclassical style. But the building never quite lost its dreariness.

Lucia tried to make the best of it, reminding herself, and her sister, that Alvise had purchased the estate principally “to satisfy his wish to own property” in Austria. “It is not intended as a country home at all, as Alvise doesn’t much like living in the country here.”
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If the estate at Margarethen am Moos was to serve a purpose, apart from making Alvise a landowner in Austria, it would be as a testing ground for crops and fertilisers and planting techniques that might eventually be used at Molinato.

One thing Lucia did not immediately realise, and which she discovered only after Alvise had left her in charge of the place, was that the Harsch family was still waiting to be paid. Alvise had sold part of Villabona to purchase a property in Austria, but in fact he had ploughed a substantial portion of the sale into Molinato. Once in Vienna, he had only enough cash remaining to make a down-payment of 25,000 florins to finalise the purchase of Margarethen. He signed an agreement to pay the balance of 105,000 florins within a year, hoping to raise the sum directly from the revenue of the estate. It was a risky gambit, but Alvise was convinced he could easily generate higher income by digging drainage ditches to improve cultivation, as he had done at Molinato, and by running the farm more efficiently. He drew up a work-plan before leaving for Italy, and instructed Lucia to supervise its implementation until he returned in the spring.

E
very year, in late May and early June, Viennese society broke up into small clusters and moved to various summer retreats. Alvise promised Lucia that upon his return they would travel together for a few weeks down the Danube and up the Elbe, into Saxony, before returning to Margarethen for the harvest season. But in the end he backed out, on the grounds that he had too much to do in Molinato. Besides, he had already toured Saxony during his solitary travels across northern Europe.

Lucia decided to leave anyway—the alternative was to sit in a dusty and empty Vienna, or listen to the crickets and toads at Margarethen. In early July she visited Madame Wallis at her house near the thermal baths of Carlsbad, in Upper Bohemia. From Carlsbad, she continued on to Toeplitz, the seat of Prince Clary’s summer
palazzo,
where Giacomo Casanova—a close friend of her father’s—had been a frequent and popular dinner guest until his death four years earlier. She found the house still rang with echoes of his merry mischief.

Lucia followed the Elbe downstream, navigating through a romantic landscape “dotted with the ruins of feudal castles.” Often journeying alone, she kept up her spirits by taking copious notes and writing to her sister about the gardens along the river. “Flowers grow in great profusion and the wild roses and carnations are especially beautiful,” she reported. “There are fruit trees everywhere and the fruits are as tasty as they are back home. Flies, too, are as insolent as they are in our parts. I’m losing my patience with them even as I write this letter.”
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She was in Teschen on 7 August, and spent the night “in a magnificent castle on a rock, with a sweeping view of the most enchanting countryside.” The next day she arrived in Pillnitz, where she toured the beautifully landscaped gardens at the country estate of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony—those very same gardens, Lucia noted for her younger sister’s edification, where the emperor of Austria and the king of Prussia had met in 1792 to discuss “the war against France that eventually led to the downfall of our [Venetian] Republic.”
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In Dresden, she was a guest of the young von Metternichs. Count Clement, at twenty-eight a rising star in Austrian diplomacy, was Vienna’s minister to Saxony. He had married Eleanor von Kaunitz, daughter of Empress Maria Theresa’s minister, Anton von Kaunitz. Eleanor presented Lucia to court and took her to see the famous picture galleries, the cabinet of antiquities and the porcelain collections. The Metternichs also organised a day-trip to the renowned porcelain factories in Meissen. Dresden was the first Protestant city Lucia visited. She was fascinated by Protestant churches, which reminded her more of public theatres, with their galleries and parterres, than they did of Catholic churches.

She made her way back to Vienna via Prague, rushing a little as she had been away two months and was tired and eager to be home. She arrived on 4 September, a day earlier than scheduled, meaning to surprise Alvise, who was back in town, and had gone to Prince Colloredo’s for an evening of gambling. Lucia told Margherita and the rest of the staff to hide while she waited for him in a dark passageway that led to his apartment. When he returned home he found the house in total darkness. Lucia spoke from her hiding place. “He heard my voice but could not see me, and he was taken completely by surprise.”
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Her childlike delight was a measure of how glad she was to be home with her husband.

Alvise stayed the few weeks that were necessary to plan work at Margarethen. He was not happy with the way the farm was run. The soil was still too soggy in large parts of the estate and he ordered the digging of more drainage ditches. He oversaw the planting of different crops—wheat, barley, alfalfa—in the drier fields further away from the house, and he hired the manager of the local beer factory, Herr Schedel, to run day-to-day operations. But Lucia was to stay on top of things, and keep Alvise informed with detailed reports. She was also to go over accounts, in Vienna and Margarethen, and send balance-sheets at the end of each month. Having given his set of instructions, Alvise was off again, promising Lucia he was going to return in time to celebrate her saint’s day on 13 December.

Lucia never openly complained about Alvise’s long absences in her letters to Paolina, but traces of her disappointment were just below the surface. “It is very important here in Vienna to display family harmony,” she wrote, adding touchingly that “the appearance of it often generates the actual substance: leading the same life, spending a lot of time together—it helps bring two people closer, it helps them join their souls.”
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After all that had passed—the birth of Massimiliano, the death of Plunkett, the shock of Alvise’s return, the move to Vienna—Lucia was willing to make a new start with Alvise. By living together in “family harmony” she hoped they might generate “the actual substance.”

Was Alvise listening to Lucia? In his diary, he had proclaimed rather emphatically to himself that he was moving his “family” to Vienna. So far, he had moved only his wife. During that first year in Austria, he was with her a mere few weeks; and he was always on the go, always restless, clearly reluctant to put roots in his “adopted fatherland.” In the eyes of Lucia, Alvise was still, in many ways, the inscrutable, enigmatic person she had married fifteen years before. So it was not without a certain wistfulness that she set about organising her life in Vienna without him.

Running the households in Vienna and Margarethen, keeping the accounting books in good order and writing her reports to Alvise kept Lucia busy and gave a structure to her daily life. She actually enjoyed working with numbers and discovered she had quite a knack for good management, always looking for ways to run things more efficiently. The memory of her father’s uncertain finances during her youth had remained vivid and, perhaps as a reaction, she was generally parsimonious and very meticulous about keeping track of her personal expenses. She liked to follow a general rule she had picked up from Madame de Genlis, her favourite writer, and which she passed on to Paolina: “Divide your monthly stipend three ways: the first for alms-giving and charity, the second for clothes, the third for treats and entertainment such as coffee, tickets to the theatre, ice creams, toys for the children.”
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When she had time to spare, in between her regular trips out to Margarethen, she ran errands and went shopping for Paolina and her nieces and nephews. She was always wrapping packages of some kind or another to send to Italy—winter boots, clothes, books, toys. She once bought an amusing set of wax ice creams and sherbets for the children. Before sending them off to Paolina, she took the ice creams over to old Doctor Vespa, thinking a practical joke would cheer him up after the mild stroke he had suffered. It did—especially when he discovered she had also brought real vanilla ice cream, which he ate with delight.

In the evenings Lucia often went to one of Baron de Braun’s productions at the opera house. She was usually home for supper shortly after nine o’clock, arriving with her head full of dust raised by the evening traffic of carriages. Before going to bed, Margherita cleaned and combed her hair as they chatted about the day’s events.

As the winter season approached, her social schedule grew busier. “I have an assembly with dancing and supping at the Russian Embassy today,” she wrote to Paolina, showing off a bit. “Tuesday a ball at Court. Wednesday another ball at the Coblentz’s. Thursday I’ll be at Count Zichy’s and then at Prince Esterhazy’s.”
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Lucia discovered how ridiculously difficult it was, in these circumstances, to fix an appointment with Signor Boschetti. “I sent out for him at seven in the morning so that he could fix my hair today but he had apparently left the house at six because he had so many heads to do. His wife said thirteen messengers had come by before mine, and all to no avail.”
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She was grateful to have Margherita.

In general Lucia preferred large events to smaller gatherings because she was freer to leave when she wanted. She sometimes enjoyed the informality of dinners and soirées in private houses, but she seldom found the conversation stimulating. It could also be downright silly, with guests falling off their chairs with laughter for the most trivial reasons.

One evening, at Princess Clary’s, the assembled guests were evoking the good times they had had the previous summer at the Clarys’
palazzo
in Toeplitz. Someone mentioned a play they had staged, adding that a Countess Golowkin’s acting had been especially pleasing.

“Oh, she couldn’t possibly have pleased the public because she is too ugly for words,” Count Hohental blurted out, unaware that the gentleman sitting just a few seats away was none other than Count Golowkin.

“Ah, but her ugliness is balanced by her spirit and her amiability,” Countess Hohental replied, realising her husband’s
faux pas.
But there was no stopping Count Hohental: “My dear, spirit and amiability count for little when one is
that
ugly.”

Count Golowkin lamely defended Countess Golowkin: “I agree no one would want her as a lover, but she will do as a wife.”

“Oh no no no! Not as wife and not as a lover,” Count Hohental insisted, mimicking poor Countess Golowkin’s traits. By this time the rest of the assembly was cracking up. Old Prince de Ligne could not hold his giggles any more and hobbled out to the billiard room in a fit of hysterical laughter. Count Hohental, still completely oblivious to what was going on around him, joined the Prince de Ligne and innocently enquired who the tiresome Russian in the drawing room was. “He is Count Go-lowkin,” the old Prince stammered, choking on his guffaws. Count Hohental turned red in the face. “Oh my, what a terrible thing I have done! And to think that I am always so careful not to cause the slightest displeasure around me.”
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