Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [103]
Austria renounced all influence in Italy by signing the Treaty of Pressburg. Vienna ceded Venice and its possessions to Napoleon, as well as the German states of Baden, Bavaria and Wurtenberg. “We have peace at last,” she wrote to her sister. “This morning a Te Deum was sung in Saint Stephen’s.”59
On Lucia’s saint’s day, 13 December, Alvisetto woke his mother up with a bouquet of flowers, and recited a few German verses he had memorised for the occasion. It occurred to Lucia that she had made a little Austrian boy out of her son. Now she kissed him on the forehead, and wondered whether his French was fluent enough to hold him in good stead.
Lucia was disappointed but not entirely surprised when Alvise did not come to Vienna to fetch her. In Milan, the young viceroy, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, was reorganising the Italian Kingdom according to Napoleon’s strict guidelines; Alvise felt he had to stay in Italy, in the hope that his past experience with the French would help him secure a prestigious assignment. It was not prudent, he explained, to leave while everyone was jockeying for position in the new administration.
Following her husband’s instructions, Lucia rented out the apartment in Vienna for the remaining part of their lease, and organised the sale of paintings, carpets and furniture. She failed to rent out Margarethen, however. Alvise had yet to finish paying for the estate and it made Lucia uncomfortable to leave an unsettled situation behind. She made sure farming schedules were in place and accounts more or less in order before leaving. “It is wise,” she told her sister, “to leave [our] affairs in this country in the best possible shape.”60 Thus it was not until the late autumn of 1806 that she was finally able to make the journey back to Italy. She took leave of the emperor and the empress and headed south on a rainy November day—she, Alvisetto and Margherita in the large travelling carriage, with the luggage, and Teresa, Marietta and Felicita, rather cramped, in the two-horse buggy driven by Checco. At a post-station where they stopped shortly after crossing the Alps, Lucia received a letter from Alvise: he had been appointed governor of Agogna, one of the twenty-four departments which now formed Napoleon’s new Kingdom of Italy, and she was to join him there as soon as possible.
Chapter Eight
LADY-IN-WAITING
Novara, the capital of Agogna, was a quiet, unpretentious city five hours from Milan by coach, on the way to Piedmont. Alvise set up offices in the newly established Prefecture on the square, and leased the main floor of an elegant palazzo owned by Countess Bellini, the local grande dame, where he was joined by Lucia and Alvisetto, Monsieur Vérand and the staff (Margherita, Teresa, Felicita and Checco). The district of Agogna was not among the larger or more important ones in the kingdom; Alvise was nonetheless satisfied because he was one of only a handful of Venetians called to serve in Napoleon’s government. He threw himself into work, staying at his office late when he was not travelling to the towns and villages under his jurisdiction.
“We have been well received,” Lucia wrote to Paolina soon after settling in. “Everyone here seems pleased with Alvise’s ability and fairness.” It was her own role she was a little uncertain about.
Initially, I thought we might open our house once a week. [Countess Bellini] assured me she would be the first to come if we decided to receive society. Then I heard the people here don’t generally fancy social gatherings so I told the Countess we were not yet ready. Now we tend to spend our evenings at home alone.1
What a contrast to life in the Kingdom’s capital! Prince Eugène and his young wife, Princess Augusta-Amelia of Bavaria, established a highly structured court at the royal palace in Milan, with rigid rules of etiquette borrowed from the Imperial Court in Paris. There were also suppers and balls in grand Milanese houses. “I hear these soirées can be quite glittering. The Viceroy usually makes an appearance and dances too; not the Vicereine,