Lucia (33 page)

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.”
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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.

T
he 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.”
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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,”
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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.

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

H
er 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.”
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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.”