Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [104]
There was not much regret in Lucia’s comments. Having just completed two exhausting, back-to-back moves, from Vienna to Alvisopoli and from Alvisopoli to Novara, she was content to lead a quiet life with her family now that circumstances had brought them all under the same roof again. Although she and Alvise had been married for twenty years, Lucia had spent many more days alone than in the company of her husband—indeed there were moments when she felt their life together had never really begun. And she did not look forward to the time when she would be summoned to the court in Milan to take on her duties as lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta—a prestigious assignment Alvise had sought for his wife to strengthen their ties to the ruling family.
Monsieur Vérand was put in charge of Alvisetto’s education, the job for which he had originally been hired in Vienna. He wasted little time in expressing his displeasure at how much the boy had fallen behind in Latin and arithmetic, how easily he was distracted, and just how plain lazy he could be. Vérand started to keep a daily record of his pupil’s performance and general behaviour in a green and blue booklet known as “Alvisetto’s Journal.” Once a week, a tremulous Alvisetto took it to his parents so that they might judge his conduct, and discuss it with him. From the start, Vérand was quite harsh in his judgement, filling his reports with epithets like “disobedient,” “stubborn,” “ill-mannered,” “restless” and “capricious.” He noted sternly that the boy “laughs out loud without a reason, just like a child.”3
The parents encouraged Vérand’s method because, as Lucia said, “loud reprimands and threats of awful punishments have produced no effects.” Alvisetto showed occasional signs of intelligence, she added, “but his mind is always elsewhere and it sometimes takes him three hours to do work that should take him no more than fifteen minutes. It is astonishing how he can seem an absolute prodigy at times, then days and days will go by without the slightest progress.”4
Alvisetto’s uneven results made Lucia anxious. She knew Alvise wanted to send their son off to boarding school at the earliest opportunity, possibly to Paris, in order to acquire a proper French education. The prospect of a separation filled her with dread. The only way to delay Alvisetto’s departure, she felt, was to convince Alvise that the child was making progress in his studies. She put her faith in Vérand, conscious of the trust her husband had in him, and the two entered a silent pact to work Alvisetto hard in order to keep him at home as long as possible.
In Vienna, Lucia had grown accustomed to spending a good deal of time with her son, going over his lessons when she was not actually doing some teaching herself. She did not want to give up that part of their relationship entirely. Having relinquished prime responsibility for Alvisetto’s general education to Vérand, she nevertheless remained in charge of his religious studies, to make sure, she told her sister, that he received a solid Christian upbringing. Lucia ordered The Life of Jesus from a bookshop in Milan, and she and Alvisetto curled up together in bed every evening to read three chapters of the big volume. “I’m finding this book very useful. I had never read the life of Jesus as a whole but only in bits and pieces. In fact, what I knew of it usually came from the study of paintings and sculptures when we were young.”5 On her own, she tackled the multi-volume Histoire Ecclésiastique, a heavy-going history of the Church. She also studied the gospel of Saint Paul.
Lucia’s decision to take on Alvisetto’s religious education reflected her increasing interest in the sacred scriptures. Her father, who had been such an inspiring intellectual mentor to her and Paolina in their youth, had paid distracted attention to their religious upbringing. Over the years, Lucia had come to regret this lacuna. She believed a deeper knowledge of the gospels and the history of Christianity would