Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [10]
Word of Lucia’s impending marriage had already spread in Rome by the time the Memmos returned from their Neapolitan journey. Naturally, members of the household at Palazzo San Marco had been the first to know. Abbé Sintich, Lucia’s tutor, congratulated her warmly upon her arrival, followed by Memmo’s faithful secretary, Abbé Radicchio, the house manager, Signor Ceredo, Zanmaria the cook, down the line of maids to Zannetto Organo, Memmo’s young footman, who had been little more than a boy when they had all travelled down from Venice three years before. In her room Lucia found a pile of letters and notes from friends and relatives. To her relief, her father dispensed her from replying to every one, as it would have taken too much time away from her lessons with Abbé Sintich. But Lucia was soon overwhelmed by a stream of visiting Roman ladies, some of whom came to embrace the father as much as the daughter—according to Memmo’s own count, he was happily involved with no fewer than six of them at the same time.
All this attention unsettled Lucia. “The causes of such a triumph certainly have more to do with you than with me,” she wrote to Alvise with modesty. “How many compliments I have received! And why? Because fate has decreed that I should have an excellent gentleman like you for a husband.” Would she be up to the daunting task ahead of her? “I do not doubt you have many good qualities…I only hope that patience be among them, so that you may tolerate those defects which I will strive to eliminate as quickly as possible by following your loving advice.”21
It was not enough to feel every day the anxiety of marrying a man she had never seen; she also had to contend with the depressing thought of being unwanted and unloved by her new family. The Mocenigos’ immediate disapproval of the marriage and Sebastiano’s outright opposition to it caused Lucia much pain. She begged Alvise to be more conciliatory, to cede ground in order to find peace:
I heard about your family’s wrath, for which I am so sorry…I beseech you to use respect towards your father and your uncle so as to calm them down. Give in to some of their demands so that we may live in tranquillity…I pray to God that all these problems I have caused may be resolved before our wedding takes place.22
On 1 April 1786, a full five weeks after learning the name of the man who was to become her husband, the small portrait of Alvise she had been promised finally arrived with the morning courier. She rushed to her room “blushing,” she later confessed to Alvise, and sat there gazing at the small image: it was a portrait of him at sixteen, a handsome youth with a broad forehead, who looked mature even at such a young age. “Everyone assures me you look very much the same ten years later and this rather startles me,” she said, openly flirting with him for the first time. “I can assure you that I am very pleased with it.” Lucia was so transfixed by this image of Alvise that it took her some time to realise there was another miniature attached to it. It was a twin portrait of herself, which Alvise had had copied from the old miniature Memmo had given him, and embellished. It showed a beaming Lucia holding in her arms a bouquet symbolising their betrothal. “You could not have had a kinder thought,” she wrote back, very touched. “And the bouquet could not have been richer or more beautiful.”23 She resolved to wear the twin miniatures around her neck at the large dinner her father was planning in honour of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland.
Meanwhile, Lucia’s portrait, which Alvise was waiting for with equal impatience, was lagging behind. She had begun to sit for Remondini, a Genoese portraitist in vogue among the Roman aristocracy, after returning from Naples. But she had interrupted the sessions because a nasty sty in her right eye had puffed up