Lucia (28 page)

Marchioness Barbara Litta, who, as Princess Augusta’s lady of honour, was in charge of protocol at the royal palace, warned Lucia to prepare herself for a demanding schedule, especially during those weeks when she would have to be in attendance at the palace from early morning until late at night. She was to draw a monthly salary with which to cover her expenses. The palace that was to house Princess Augusta’s twenty-four ladies-in-waiting was still being refurbished, but Marchioness Litta found her temporary lodgings in the house of Countess Cattaneo.

Lucia was immediately caught up in a whirlwind of activity. She rushed to the hairdresser, went shopping for clothes, introduced herself to the other ladies-in-waiting, who, she found out, were all Milanese but a few. She called on the most prominent families in town as well as the foreign dignitaries. And after a few days, the exacting Marchioness Litta was ready to present her to Princess Augusta—who was pregnant with her second child.

Lucia found the princess beautiful and charming. Despite her young age, she was at ease in her important role. She was also very much in love with Prince Eugène and absorbed by family life. When they had married, in Munich, in the spring of 1806—a marriage entirely orchestrated by Napoleon after his resounding victory at Austerlitz—Augusta had been in love with the Prince of Baden, to whom she had been promised, and had thrown herself at the feet of Empress Joséphine, imploring her not to impose the marriage with her son. In the end she had succumbed to powerful reasons of state—Napoleon crowned her father king of Bavaria—but then she had met the amiable Prince Eugène, and had liked him from the start. A year and a half later, with a child in the crib and a second one on the way, they were a handsome, loving couple.

Despite the difference in age—Lucia was nearing forty while Princess Augusta was only twenty-two—they got along well. The problem, she told Paolina one week into her job, was the nature of the work rather than her employer:

I lead the dullest existence, rushing from my apartment to Court and from Court to my apartment. What does one do at Court? Well, the evenings in which we have
Grand cercle
(“Large Circle”) we tend to sit around for about an hour before moving to the gaming room. When the card-playing is over the Princess rises, says a few nice words to us and I run back home as fast as I can. When we have
Petit cercle
(“Small Circle”), only those of us attached to the Court are invited. The evening usually begins with a session of baby-watching: we crowd around ten-month-old Joséphine, Princess of Bologna, as she plays in her pen. Very interesting…Then we move on to our usual card games and Madame de Sandizell
^*18
serves tea. The Princess chats with us familiarly when the playing is over and then retires, and so do I. This is what my life is like on Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from seven in the evening until about midnight. On Mondays a ball is held at one of the prominent Milanese houses and the Court is present. Which means I have Wednesday and Saturday evenings off. I spent last Wednesday evening sitting alone by the fire; today is Saturday and I’ll do the same as I am too exhausted to go to the opera. In fact I’m rather looking forward to going to bed early as I have only just now been informed that, starting tomorrow, I am on duty for the entire week!
⁹

To be “on duty” meant one had to be in attendance at the palace from the time the princess got up in the morning until she retired at night. So the following morning, a Sunday, Lucia arrived early at the royal palace to breakfast with Princess Augusta. They proceeded to mass, Lucia burdened by the weight of her long, heavy velvet mantle. She was allowed a short break to change into a more comfortable dress, but had to be back promptly at the palace for
Petit cercle
. During the rest of her week, she arrived at the palace at eleven wearing a
déshabillé.
She stayed with Princess Augusta for lunch and accompanied her on her early afternoon walk. “She loves to take long walks beyond the city limits,” Lucia noted with slight impatience:

We’re back by four, at which point I’m allowed to go home to change so that I can reappear for dinner on time, usually wearing a round dress. Marchioness Litta has had to reprimand the Milanese ladies, who have been rather negligent about arriving for dinner on time. The reason is that when they go home to change, many are tempted to eat at their own table rather than at Court.
¹⁰

After a gruelling week, always rushing to the hairdresser, changing clothes three times a day, coming home late and getting up early, Lucia was primed for release. At that week’s ball, she stayed until half past one in the morning and danced “like I haven’t danced in fifteen years.”
¹¹

L
ucia did what was expected of her, with diligence and grace; but she found it hard to muster any kind of enthusiasm for her job. She resented being kept away from Alvisetto, who was still in Novara, having enrolled as a day student in the Collegio Gallarino to study Italian, Latin, geography and mathematics. She did not complain to her husband because she feared his irritated reaction. But to her sister she confessed “how really awful this arrangement is for me.”
¹²

Alvise was determined to send Alvisetto off to boarding school in Paris, for Napoleon wanted the sons of officials in the foreign kingdoms of the Empire to be educated in France. Lucia did not see what good could possibly come from sending her eight-year-old child far away from home. She lost no opportunity to underscore how miserable little boys were in boarding school, reminding her husband that Paolina’s two boys, Venceslao and Ferighetto, thirteen and eleven, had sadly lost their natural verve at their school in Padua.

The issue, however, went beyond Alvisetto’s education. Since joining the government in the Italian kingdom, Alvise had wholly embraced the Napoleonic cause. His earlier criticism of the French, which he had vented so many times as he struggled to gain the trust of the Habsburgs, was now a thing of the past. Napoleon had brought Europe to his feet. He was creating a new order, a modern society. The future, Alvise was now convinced, belonged to this extraordinary man he had met in Brescia a decade earlier. “I work twelve to fourteen hours a day,” he observed, “but it is worth it because I know that I am working for the hero of all time.”
¹³

Alvise was increasingly confident that the Italian kingdom was going to become an important part of Napoleon’s expanding empire; as a result, Alvisopoli would continue to prosper—a model estate in a model kingdom. He saw himself as the founder of a dynasty in a Napoleonic Europe, and he was seized with the notion that Alvisopoli would become, one day soon, an autonomous duchy within the kingdom—with himself as the first Duke of Alvisopoli. To set the seal on his political metamorphosis, Alvise commissioned a monumental statue of Napoleon from Angelo Pizzi, the much admired director of the sculpture department at Venice’s Arts Academy, and planned to place it in the centre of Alvisopoli’s main square—certainly not in the damp ground-floor hall of Palazzo Mocenigo, where it eventually came to rest.

Alvise grew impatient with those Venetians who felt a nostalgic attachment to the old Republic and who still referred to Venice as their “fatherland.” Among them was Lucia. She did not live in the past, as some of the more conservative old patricians did, but she had no sense of loyalty towards Napoleon or to the Kingdom of Italy, and certainly no great love for her duties at court. Lucia still thought of herself as a Venetian, and she felt the deepest attachment to her Venetian heritage. The Republic no longer existed, of course; there was no Venetian fatherland to speak of any more. But it survived as a spiritual place to which Lucia still felt deeply connected. It pained her to hear Alvise say, as he often did, that the Kingdom of Italy was his new fatherland and that he loved it “more than he loves Venice.” Although she was wary of “the self-inflicted suffering that comes from standing against destiny,” she found her husband’s constant praise of the emperor exaggerated and even jarring.
¹⁴

Lucia also cringed at the way Venetian ladies tried to please and befriend their Milanese counterparts, “to tie themselves” to the new kingdom, she noted with slight repulsion:

How many visits they pay, how many presents they give, how they seek a confidential tone in addressing women they hardly know, even using the familiar
tu.
Wrongly perhaps, I tie myself to no one. I lead a withdrawn life, never going out on those nights I am not on duty at Court. Ah, if only it were a
Petit cercle
of old friends! The thing is that I am nearing forty—and it’s too late for me to start all over again.
¹⁵

In the winter of 1809, a year after settling in Milan, Lucia moved into her rooms in Palazzo Visconti with the other ladies-in-waiting who were from out of town. She regretted not having the privacy of her own apartment, away from her colleagues, where she could put up her feet and entertain a few Venetian friends when she was not on duty. But she was also tired of moving her things from place to place: she had lived in four different apartments since arriving in town, “the last one so unbearably smelly”
¹⁶
that her clean, freshly painted rooms in Palazzo Visconti were a relief in that respect.

Princess Augusta personally gave Lucia the new uniform she was to wear at court during the day: a long, light-brown smock buttoned tightly around her neck. “Apparently the French word for it is
sarte,
” Lucia told her sister, complaining it made her look like a mother superior. “More and more I feel as if I were living in a nunnery.”
¹⁷

A
fter serving for two years in Agogna, Alvise was awarded the Iron Cross, an order established by Napoleon to gratify the new elite he was forging in his Empire, in consideration of his administrative achievements in Novara and Alvisopoli. Napoleon also made him a count (a non-hereditary title assigned on the basis of merit), and a senator of the Kingdom, a prestigious but largely ceremonial post. Alvise’s senatorial duties often brought him to Milan, but he spent the greater part of his time on his estates. All of his landholdings were now consolidated in one large agency, headquartered in Alvisopoli.

Alvisetto, nearly ten, moved to Milan to be with his mother for a year, before finally going off to boarding school. He had spent a satisfactory year at the Collegio Gallarino in Novara. His teachers were pleased by his effort and he had matured. “He’s not as restless as he was when we first moved back to Italy,” Lucia noted. “Alvise is also quite happy with his conduct though he would like him to be more dedicated to schoolwork.”
¹⁸
The plan was still to send him to Paris, but Alvise agreed to let him spend a year in Milan to assuage Lucia’s anxiety.

Vérand moved to Milan as well, to supervise Alvisetto’s lessons, as Lucia was at court most of the day. She hired a kind, well-mannered Austrian music teacher who turned out to be Carl Thomas Mozart, the eldest son of Wolfgang Amadeus. When his famous father had died, in 1791, Carl Thomas was only six. At thirteen, he was sent to work as an apprentice in a commercial firm in Livorno. His dream, he told Lucia, was to start a piano business, but he had not been able to raise the necessary capital. He had gone back to studying music and for the past four years had made a living by giving piano lessons in Milan. “Of course he’s not his father,” Lucia told Paolina rather cruelly. “But he’s very sweet, plays well enough, and he teaches in German, so Alvisetto can practise the language.”
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Lucia’s life at court resumed its dull and predictable pace after the summer furlough. She continued to do her duty without any special affection for the kingdom she served, and she still kept her distance from the scheming Milanese ladies who hovered around Prince Eugène and Princess Augusta. It occurred to her that the viceroy and the vicereine were probably the people she had grown fondest of in the period she had been in Milan. They were not an especially lively couple, but she came to value their kindness and consideration.

Lucia’s relationship with Princess Augusta revolved a great deal around clothes, as the Vicereine was constantly giving her rich gala dresses, more informal round dresses and easy-to-wear
déshabillés
from the best houses in Paris. The fabrics were among the finest, the colours fashionable, the gold and silver linings and bordures always of the best quality. Princess Augusta gave Lucia two or three dresses at a time, and she always remembered her birthday and her saint’s day. Lucia loved beautiful clothes and liked to be
à la page,
and of course she had plenty of opportunities to wear her new dresses. But she accumulated so many of them that she did not know where to store them any more. “[The Princess] is so generous with all of us and of course I am grateful for everything she gives me,” she told Paolina, “but I have reached the point where a new dress fails to excite much interest in me.”
²⁰

Somewhat to her surprise, Lucia found that clothes were often Prince Eugène’s preferred topic of conversation as well. “The Viceroy called me to his room last night,” she wrote to Paolina conspiratorially,

He said: “In the last few days I’ve looked at many waistcoats and have chosen several for myself. There is one I like especially, and I’ve ordered a cut of the same fabric for you to make a dress. You know the fashion is now for men and women to wear matching dresses and waistcoats…”
²¹

The fabric was a beautiful
velours cachemire,
with a flower pattern embroidered in the Ottoman style. Lucia was flattered to be the object of Prince Eugène’s attentions, and she enjoyed the light flirtation between them. But she found it odd, and vaguely frustrating, that the Prince did not wish to discuss more serious matters.

Fashion, of course, was what the ladies-in-waiting mostly talked about among themselves and with Princess Augusta during the afternoon stroll or after their game of cards at
Petit cercle
. There were tedious disquisitions on the merit of short sleeves over long sleeves, on the latest designs from Paris, on the colours in vogue that season. Conversation was seldom lively and never brilliant. No one touched politics. Very little was mentioned about art, literature or even music. In the early days of the Cisalpine Republic, when poets and artists had been drawn to Milan by the young Bonaparte, the intellectual life had been quite vibrant. But after the proclamation of the Empire and the transformation of the Cisalpine Republic into the Kingdom of Italy, the monotonous rituals of royal etiquette imported from Paris created a soporific atmosphere.