Lucia (37 page)

Vérand had written to Lucia warning that Alvisetto was so eager to show his Austrian heart he wanted to ride out on horseback to greet the archduke. “Don’t do it,” Lucia pleaded in a late-night note to her son:

Dear Alvisetto, I am just now back from the
bal masqué
at La Fenice and I beg you not to expose yourself to danger. Find a good spot from which to watch the imperial cortège, but please don’t ride out in the confusion of carriages and horses. I am counting on you. I don’t want to have to worry about this.
⁸

After some grumbling, Alvisettto relented and watched the archduke’s cortège from a safe place, with Vérand at his side.

S
pring turned into summer on a hopeful note. The rain that year did not spoil the wheat and corn, and the harvest season looked more promising than it had in a long time. Then, in early July Alvise received the news he had been hoping for: the payment of property taxes on Alvisopoli was suspended, pending the completion of a new cadastral survey ordered by the government. It was a huge relief. Perhaps the worst was over; if there were no more rains during the rest of the summer Alvisopoli might yet be saved. Lucia urged her son to “pray that Heaven hold back the scourge that will otherwise cause famine and disease.”
⁹

Heaven, it turned out, struck in a wholly unexpected way.

In late August Alvise was suddenly ill, with terrible pains in his stomach. His condition deteriorated very rapidly. He was rushed back to Venice and the best doctors were called in to see him, but nothing seemed to stop or even slow down the disease—probably a tumour. Alvise felt life slipping away from him: he called in the family notary and asked that he take down a new will. He was so weak he hardly had the strength to sign his name. Quite mysteriously and to everyone’s relief, he suddenly recovered and was soon back on his feet—a pale wraith with lingering pains, but so surprised to be alive as to be in relatively good spirits.

Alvise made a triumphant return to Alvisopoli, and Lucia was genuinely moved by the display of affection shown to him by the
alvisopolitani.
She reported to Paolina:

His carriage was escorted into town by a large crowd amid cries of hooray. The throng of cheering labourers was led by Alvisetto on horseback. The town itself looked lovely, as everyone had put flowerpots and festoons at their windows. At the big house, Alvise was greeted with bouquets and sonnets. Mass was held in the small, beautifully decorated church. A few verses on his recovery were recited with a musical arrangement. Alvise sat in the front pew with Alvisetto, while I was seated to the side. After the Te Deum, Alvise walked out into the cheering crowd. A big lunch was served at the house. Alvise ordered that another table be laid out for twenty-six poor people, and Alvisetto served them food and gave each one a few coins. There were fireworks in the evening and the
alvisopolitani
danced late into the night.
¹⁰

Although Alvise diligently took the ounce of quinine the doctors prescribed him, the pains never really left him and soon increased, especially in the middle of the day. He returned to Venice towards the end of the autumn, in time for Emperor Francis’s first official visit. But he was too ill to participate in the many functions and festivities. He was especially disappointed not to be in Saint Mark’s Square to witness the return of the four bronze horses taken to Paris by Napoleon. In December the illness spread again very quickly and this time there was nothing much to be done. Alvise died on Christmas Eve 1815. His body was taken to Alvisopoli. He had wanted a small, private ceremony at his estate rather than a grand funeral in Venice. On a cold and bleak winter morning, family and close friends gathered in the little church. The town square was filled with a silent and stunned crowd of
alvisopolitani
who had come out to mourn the estate’s founding father.

A
lvise’s will was unsealed two days after his death. He urged Lucia “to forget all the displeasures I may have caused [you] and for which I am truly sorry.” Henceforth and until her death, she was to receive a generous monthly stipend from his estate. As a proof of his affection and esteem, he named her sole guardian of Alvisetto, “my most beloved only child, universal heir of all my movable and immovable properties, stores, capitals, credits, moneys and stocks.”
¹¹
In writing his signature at the bottom of the page, Alvise had scratched the paper so weakly with his quill there was only the faintest trace of ink, and his name was a barely legible scrawl.

Lucia was moved by Alvise’s unexpected words of contrition, and even more so by the unconditional embrace of Alvisetto as his own son. In a way, his love for the boy had led him back to the love he had once felt for the young girl he had married so many years ago. Before dying, he did what Paolina had asked him to do: he forgot “the displeasures” of their life together, and asked Lucia to do the same. More surprisingly, he asked her to take up his life-work. Lucia had seen how Alvise had struggled over the years. Now it was suddenly her turn to take charge and the task ahead must have seemed daunting.

“I
have already been to see Mama’s portrait, and those of all the aunts and uncles and cousins, and ancestors,”
¹²
Lucia wrote to her sister shortly after arriving at Castel Gomberto. In the spring following Alvise’s death she took Alvisetto and Vérand to the big house near Vicenza that belonged to her mother’s family, the Piovene. She had to get away from Alvisopoli—from the vociferous crowd of creditors, petitioners, agents and labourers that besieged her all day long. “I want things to be run as if my husband were still here,” she had repeated over and over after taking charge of Alvise’s affairs.
¹³
But it would not do: every day dozens of decisions needed to be made that would affect the future of the estate and the people who worked and lived on it. Crushed by her new responsibilities, Lucia had escaped to Castel Gomberto, a place filled with memories, good feelings and domestic comforts. “It has warmed my heart to find the house as it always was…There are plenty of good beds, many guests, no shortage of linen and silverware.”
¹⁴

Every morning she drove out to Valdagno to take the waters. The skies were often stormy, with lightning and thunder, but the atmosphere in the house was always merry. In the large drawing room, there were games of billiards, draughts, cards and bingos of every possible kind. Vérand usually played the piano, Lucia caught up with her numerous relatives and Alvisetto received the undivided attention of his Piovene cousins. Lucia was relieved to see that he was in much better spirits than he had been after his father’s death.

Not long after Alvise’s funeral, Alvisetto had returned to Padua with Vérand to resume his studies. It had not been easy for him. He had struggled with his grief and had started to act out of character. “I went to visit him in Padua,” Lucia later told Paolina. “At first he seemed anxious to be with me; but then he became distant, as if to underline his independence from me…He was bossy and uncaring. Everything had to be done his way and for his pleasure…I was hurt but I noticed he, too, often cried.”
¹⁵
After a few days at Castel Gomberto, Lucia was happy to report, Alvisetto was again his old self, “respectful of his mother and her authority over him.”

Lucia continued to be haunted by some of the words in Alvise’s will, especially by his plea to forget all those “displeasures” he had caused her. He was not asking her for Christian forgiveness—it would not have been like him. Indeed, his words had nothing to do with religion. This was a matter between Alvise and Lucia alone, between husband and wife. Going through his papers, Lucia found many packets of letters written to him by different lovers over the course of several decades—there were hundreds of letters, notes, small pieces of paper, and in many handwritings. She knew some of the women who had written them, especially those from the early years of their marriage; but many were complete strangers. At certain times—when she had been away, in Vienna, in Milan, even in Paris—he clearly had had more than one relationship going on. How did he manage all those parallel lives? How did he distribute his feelings? There was a genuine wonder mixed in with the pain caused by all that correspondence. So much of his life had been unknown to her.

Lucia did not return the letters, but neither did she throw them away. Instead, she put them in order, catalogued them by “author” and tied them in neat little bundles before storing them away in the attic of Palazzo Mocenigo. However, there is at least one set of letters missing from the collection: those of Carolina Faldi, the mother of Alvise’s daughter, Luigia. In his will, Alvise spoke very tenderly about Luigia and showed an enduring attachment to her family. He left 12,000 gold sequins for her dowry, provisions for her education and for living expenses if she did not marry. Alvise entrusted Lucia with the responsibility of carrying out this part of his will. During their dealings, Carolina Faldi may have asked to have her letters back, in which case Lucia probably obliged her.

L
ucia stayed at Castel Gomberto until the end of June, when her curative cycle at nearby Valdagno was completed. She did not look forward to the difficulties and complications that awaited her at Alvisopoli and the other Mocenigo estates. But there was no more time for delay. Harvest season was nearing and she was determined not to let the agents and farmers undermine her authority at the beginning of her tenure. She ordered all the wheat cut by the end of July and had it spread out under the sun until it was time to sell it at auction at the local fairs. She decided the selling price and approved every contract after careful review. “Soon I will have the linen seeds laid out in the sun too,” she wrote to Paolina. “The silk is being treated and will shortly be ready for market.”
¹⁶
In August she supervised the corn harvest; in September she moved to the estates further south for the grape harvest. After three years of crippling disruptions, the sprawling Mocenigo farming empire was beginning to function again, albeit at reduced capacity. Lucia was perfectly aware this was only the start of a long and uncertain struggle. She had the weather to thank if the harvest was not spoiled that year, and she knew it. But in her letters to Paolina she showed a new confidence, and a barely disguised satisfaction with her initial accomplishments.

Lucia remained very active in the early autumn, during the tilling and sowing season. When the autumn rains began, the water had to be drained immediately to save the new crops and avoid the unwholesome stagnation. More ditches were dug, existing levees were reinforced. She laid out plans to plant more poplars and willows along the roads and canals, and to embellish the town with catalpas and acacias, laurel hedges and flower beds. She invested in a mulberry plantation to revamp the silk-producing factory. She started work on a rose garden in the back of the main house, planting the many specimens brought back from Paris, and she surveyed the park begun years earlier with Alvise to see where to place the exotic trees she had picked out with Professor Des Fontaines.

All this activity, she knew, was forcing her to neglect Alvisetto, who had started his last year at the seminary in Padua. Fearful that her son might not understand why she was suddenly so absent, she entreated Vérand to explain to him “how busy I have to be here at Alvisopoli, making sure all the work proceeds as it should and plans are laid out for the future.” She was so taken up by her work that even her letters to Vérand—not an especially useful adviser on agricultural matters—became excuses to ramble on about “the general inertia” that slowed everything down in the fields or her doubts about whether this or that agent was running things as well as he should. “We have honest but not very enterprising workers,” she complained. The agents and stewards were weak, she said, while she was still looked upon with too much suspicion to be truly effective. “If only we had a person of real authority here, who could act as a permanent spur, then we might obtain, if not all we should, at least half of it, which would be enough to turn the tide.” She was endlessly frustrated by the wastefulness and lack of organisation. “Our agents want the oxen to work all day long except when the men in the fields take a long break for lunch and have a rest. Why don’t they break up the hours so the animals also have a chance to rest but the work in the fields is not interrupted for so long?” There was no risk in confiding her thoughts to Vérand; but in Alvisopoli she kept them to herself for she felt, quite understandably, that her position was still too tenuous to impose her views on men who were perhaps set in their ways but were far more experienced than her. With the frustrations, however, came moments of exhilaration as well. Again, to Vérand: “Yesterday I went to supervise the sowing of corn seeds. All the labourers lined up and then advanced together. It was a beautiful sight.” And later that day she walked over to the main granary to make sure no one had removed supplies before they went to market. She caused quite a commotion by suddenly ordering that all the stocked wheat be weighed in her presence. The process took several hours, and not everyone was happy. But it was a way of showing that she cared and that she could be taken seriously. “Despite the clouds of dust, I decided to stay until it was over. It was dark when we finished, but I was still there, holding up the lamp for them.”
¹⁷

I
n the winter of 1817 Alvisetto received his patents of nobility from the Imperial Court in Vienna. He was now Count of the Austrian Empire and Magnate of Hungary, the twin titles granted to Alvise during the first period of Austrian rule in Venice (1798–1805). These were heady documents for an impressionable seventeen-year-old, and they no doubt strengthened his sense of loyalty to the Habsburg crown. Vienna, not Paris or Milan, was the powerful and alluring capital of his new world.