Lucia (29 page)

Milan was an emasculated capital. All the important decisions were made in Paris. Prince Eugène took his orders directly from Napoleon. Members of the government, senators, courtiers: everyone wanted to be in Paris rather than Milan. Carriages with travelling officials crowded the road to France across the Alps that was being enlarged. “There seems to be a permanent migration to the French court,” Lucia grumbled. “Every minute one dignitary or another is leaving town with the excuse that he must go fetch his orders.”
²²

In 1809, Prince Eugène travelled to Paris to be at his mother’s side as she faced one of the most trying periods in her life. Napoleon had made it clear to Empress Joséphine that there would come a time when she would have to step aside and allow him to marry a young European princess capable of bearing him an heir. After ruminating over the matter for many months, Napoleon decided the time for a divorce had come. It was not an easy decision; he remained deeply attached to his wife, even as they saw less and less of each other and other women came into his life. But having learnt that, contrary to what he had long assumed, he was not sterile—at the end of 1806 Eléanore de la Plaigne, one of his lovers, had given birth to a boy named Léon—he now wanted a legitimate son in order to ensure a Bonaparte dynasty. The divorce papers were signed on 14 December 1809, during a tense, tearful ceremony at the Tuileries. Joséphine read a note handed to her by the foreign minister, Prince Talleyrand, declaring that, since she could no longer hope to bear children, in the interest of France she was “happy to offer this greatest proof of her devotion and attachment.” The emperor, to the irritation of the Bonaparte brothers and sisters who had always detested her, paid one last homage to the woman “who has illuminated my life for fifteen years and whose memory shall always be present in my heart.”
²³

Joséphine retained the title of empress. She was given full ownership of Malmaison, the beautiful country palace outside Paris where she lived, and her yearly stipend rose to a combined three million francs, a huge sum of money even for a profligate spender like her. Behind the scenes, Talleyrand and the interior minister, Fouché, were already putting the finishing touches to Napoleon’s offer to marry Marie Louise, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Austrian emperor, Francis I. The news was leaked to the papers and in early February 1810, Lucia read about it in the Milanese gazettes.

Alvise joined the senate delegation that headed to Paris to congratulate the emperor on his marriage. Lucia was also making the trip: the vicereine was taking all her ladies-in-waiting with her to attend the wedding. At first, the thought of leaving Alvisetto threw Lucia into a state of turmoil. “I am desperate about this sudden departure and I can’t wait to be back,” she told her sister. “Oh, do write to my little boy, and give him the sound advice you give to your own children. I beg you to take my place in everything while I am gone.”
²⁴

However “desperate” she was, Lucia could not entirely stifle the excitement of going to Paris for the first time. “Ah, Paris! Paris!” she cried out, obviously thrilled and anxious at the same time.

Alvise had been to Paris twice before the Revolution, and he had described the city many times to Lucia. She was familiar with the major monuments and churches and famous landmarks through many Parisian novels she had read—especially those of Madame de Genlis. The Louvre, the Tuileries, Saint Germain, Notre Dame, the bridges over the Seine—were all part of Lucia’s mental map of Paris. The more vivid images of this imaginary landscape, however, had come to her from Madame Dupont, her childhood governess, who had enchanted her and Paolina with her wonderful tales of the city where she had grown up. Madame Dupont was still very much part of the family. After Lucia and Paolina were married, she had stayed in Venice, living as lady companion in several prominent Venetian houses. Lucia made a point of giving her a small monthly stipend to cover basic expenses, and she was always happy to see her whenever she was back in Venice. Now she had a mission to accomplish: discover Madame Dupont’s Paris. “I should so much like to find the places she often mentioned to us,” she told Paolina. “All the names changed after the Revolution and then again with the Directoire and the Empire. But I have her old address and the name of her parish and I shall do my best to uncover the original denominations.”
²⁵

Napoleon and Marie Louise were married by proxy in Vienna on 11 March 1810. Two days later, Lucia left Milan heading west, towards the French Alps. She paid for the trip with her salary. She and Countess Trotti, a fellow lady-in-waiting, shared the travel expenses. They bought a
bastardella,
a sturdy, four-wheel coach hitched to four horses, for fifty-two sequins. There were six passengers in all, as both Lucia and Countess Trotti brought a personal maid (Lucia had Margherita with her) and a servant. It took ten days to reach Paris. The journey went smoothly apart from the discomfort of being piled into a small coach for so long. The snows had melted in the mountains and the new road Napoleon had built over the pass of Mont Cenis was clear—the crossing of the Alps was faster now as it was no longer necessary to transfer to hand-carried
chaises
to get over the pass.

In Paris, Lucia was immediately drawn back into the circle of Italians “who have come here in droves from the kingdom.”
²⁶
Prince Eugène and Princess Augusta were there to welcome her and the other ladies-in-waiting, and the travelling Milanese court soon resumed its daily rituals under the watchful eye of Marchioness Litta. Before she knew it, Lucia was getting in and out of round dresses (day-wear),
douillettes
(quilted silk over-garments) and negligees (morning gowns), and following the Princess around, as if she had never left Milan. Prince Eugène, having weathered the stressful divorce between Napoleon and his mother, took a new pleasure in chaperoning his flock of rustling ladies. Each night, he gave out seats in the boxes assigned to him at the Comédie Française. “The choice of plays is horrible, the acting very common,”
²⁷
Lucia opined, after seeing a production of Molière’s
L’Avare
—clearly she found it hard to enjoy Paris on such a short leash.

Archduchess Marie Louise, meanwhile, was on her way from Vienna. She stopped frequently along the way to wave at the crowds and reply to all the speeches that were made in her honour. “The word in Paris,” Lucia told Paolina, “is that she is poised and quick and wins everyone over wherever she goes.” Napoleon was waiting for her at the castle of Compiègne, an hour out of Paris. He supervised the expensive decoration of her apartment and personally chose the works of art that adorned the rooms, including Canova’s beautiful
Psyché
about to be kissed by Cupid. “I hear he is in a complete tizzy over her and frets over a thousand details. He sat at length in the carriage he sent to Strasbourg for her, just to make sure her seat was comfortable.”
²⁸

When the archduchess stepped out of her carriage at Compiègne, Napoleon took her straight to her apartments. To the surprise, and indeed the disbelief of many dignitaries who had come to greet the future empress, they did not emerge until the following day. Having been assured that the marriage by proxy in Vienna was valid in the eyes of the Church, Napoleon wasted no time in putting his feisty young wife to the task.

The following week, their civil marriage was celebrated at Saint Cloud, and the next day they were married in a religious ceremony at the Tuileries, where the
salon carré
of the Louvre was transformed for the occasion in a dazzling imperial chapel. At Napoleon’s request, the ritual was the same that had been followed forty years earlier for the wedding of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

The emperor and the empress returned to Compiègne for their honeymoon in a state of complete enthralment—Marie Louise even took to making coffee for her husband every morning and within days she was calling him silly nicknames like “Nana” and “Popo.”
²⁹
Napoleon gave every indication that he intended to linger in the arms of his wife at their countryside castle while important state papers piled up in his study. Prince Eugène and Princess Augusta, summoned to Compiègne with the rest of the court, brought their own vast retinue. Lucia felt her cloistered days were back:

I have been living like a monk since the day I arrived. Our residence has the appearance of a dormitory. The rooms open out on to this long corridor where lonely ladies-in-waiting pace up and down waiting for instructions. We pay each other visits, going from cell to cell. Our schedule is intense and rigid: we cannot leave the house even when we are not on duty all day long. [In the morning] we have breakfast together in the refectory. Then we walk over to the Empress’s quarters, and there we wait for their majesties to walk before us on their way to chapel. We follow the Empress. But only Princess Augusta, her maids of honour and those of us who are on duty are allowed to follow the Empress all the way inside.
³⁰

Like all Habsburgs, Marie Louise was a fervent Catholic. Napoleon, anxious to please his wife, showed an unusual devoutness during the numerous religious ceremonies that began to take place at court. A rather startled Lucia, who well remembered young Bonaparte’s early crusade against the Pope when he first conquered Italy, reported that the emperor “seems completely absorbed by his prayers.” At Marie Louise’s request, all meat was forbidden at court during the week preceding Easter, and Napoleon extended the injunction to all the restaurants in the area of Compiègne, to make sure that wily dignitaries did not circumvent the court’s order.

The stay at Compiègne turned into the most tedious sojourn for everyone except the imperial couple. Occasionally, it was enlivened by a hunt in the surrounding woods. The event was never much fun for Lucia but at least it was an opportunity to leave the palace and get some fresh air:

Today we rushed through the woods in an open buggy, though we never actually saw the hunters, among whom was the Emperor. The Empress followed the hunt in her carriage, and we followed her. After six hours we stopped for a picnic lunch. I had a plate of asparagus and drank a glass of champagne.
³¹

During her stay at Compiègne, Lucia managed to take two days off to visit the former empress, Joséphine, in the duchy of Navarre, sixty miles east of Paris. The small chateau of Navarre, to which Napoleon had in effect exiled his former wife for the duration of the wedding celebrations, was very run-down. The walls needed painting and the rooms seemed to lack proper furniture. There was, all about the house, a melancholy atmosphere of impermanence. But it quickly dissolved once Lucia stepped out into the gardens, which were nicely kept and very beautiful; she wondered if a caring gardener had made a point of preserving the structure and design of the lawns and the hedges and the flower beds while the chateau was left in a state of semi-abandon.

Joséphine had always seemed younger than her years, but now she looked old and worn, and her teeth were so black she barely opened her mouth when she spoke. Still, she was as amiable and warm-hearted as Lucia remembered her from their previous meeting in Venice in 1797. Soon the two were talking like old friends, and Lucia could not help mentioning how much she missed Alvisetto, and how she hated the idea of sending him off to boarding school in Paris. Joséphine could not have been more sympathetic: she knew what it meant to live separated from one’s children, and she told Lucia how much she had relied on Eugène and her daughter Hortense when going through the awful experience of her divorce from Napoleon. “We had the most pleasant time together,”
³²
Lucia later wrote to Paolina. The next day Joséphine, escorted by four imperial guards, took Lucia to Louvieux, six miles up the road, to see a textile plant. They spent a few carefree hours looking at new spinning machines and frames and designs, and running their hands over the beautiful fabrics.

After a month in Compiègne, Empress Marie Louise wondered aloud why so many Italian ladies were still following her around, and when she was told they were Princess Augusta’s ladies-in-waiting, she let it be known that they were no longer required to stay. To her relief, Lucia moved back to Paris and took rooms with Alvise at the Hotel d’Europe, in rue de Richelieu. Princess Augusta gave her ladies some time off in the city before returning to Italy, and Lucia at last had an opportunity to explore Madame Dupont’s Paris. “I want to see where she lived! I have the same curiosity as those visitors who rush to the birthplace of a Voltaire or a Rousseau—only more so since she was so much more important to us.”
³³

Lucia’s quest was only partially successful: though she reached Madame Dupont’s neighbourhood, and wandered in very familiar terrain, she never found rue du Maçon, where her governess had grown up. The names of the streets were the main obstacle: none of them matched the ones Madame Dupont remembered from her youth. The urban landscape had also changed. During the Revolution, buildings had been destroyed, while churches had been turned into stables or barracks. Lucia wrote to Paolina:

Tell Madame I crossed Pont Saint Michel. She would not recognise it as all the side-buildings on the bridge have been torn down and replaced by two wide pavements. I recognised rue de la Houchette because I remembered Madame describing it as “small and crooked,” but today it is called something else. At the church of Saint Severin, I found a ninety-four-year-old man sitting by the front door—they live to a very old age where Madame comes from! He told me the church was reopened in 1802. It is quite beautiful inside, with as many as five naves. I asked about Madame Dupont’s family. The old man seemed to remember her father but he said they lived in rue du Foin, not rue du Maçon…
³⁴

Lucia made her way back towards her hotel in rue de Richelieu, which was known as rue de la Loi during the Revolution and the Directoire, and had only just regained its original name. As she passed through the tree-lined esplanade in front of the Invalides, she suddenly recognised the proudly pouting lion of Venice, which the French had taken in 1797, as he looked down at the indifferent passers-by from the top of a fountain. On the spur of the moment, and despite having already walked for several hours, Lucia headed in the direction of Place du Carousel, for she remembered hearing that the great bronze horses Bonaparte had removed from the basilica in Saint Mark’s Square had been placed on the top of the new
arc de triomphe.
And sure enough, there they were, cantering awkwardly in the Parisian sky. They seemed small and ungainly from the ground. As Lucia stood there, increasingly indignant, her head turned upwards and her eyes squinting in the glare of the sun, she realised the horses were hitched to a gold-plated chariot. It was driven by two allegorical statues so entirely out of proportion they made the poor horses look rather like dogs.