Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [108]
The issue, however, went beyond Alvisetto’s education. Since joining the government in the Italian kingdom, Alvise had wholly embraced the Napoleonic cause. His earlier criticism of the French, which he had vented so many times as he struggled to gain the trust of the Habsburgs, was now a thing of the past. Napoleon had brought Europe to his feet. He was creating a new order, a modern society. The future, Alvise was now convinced, belonged to this extraordinary man he had met in Brescia a decade earlier. “I work twelve to fourteen hours a day,” he observed, “but it is worth it because I know that I am working for the hero of all time.”13
Alvise was increasingly confident that the Italian kingdom was going to become an important part of Napoleon’s expanding empire; as a result, Alvisopoli would continue to prosper—a model estate in a model kingdom. He saw himself as the founder of a dynasty in a Napoleonic Europe, and he was seized with the notion that Alvisopoli would become, one day soon, an autonomous duchy within the kingdom—with himself as the first Duke of Alvisopoli. To set the seal on his political metamorphosis, Alvise commissioned a monumental statue of Napoleon from Angelo Pizzi, the much admired director of the sculpture department at Venice’s Arts Academy, and planned to place it in the centre of Alvisopoli’s main square—certainly not in the damp ground-floor hall of Palazzo Mocenigo, where it eventually came to rest.
Alvise grew impatient with those Venetians who felt a nostalgic attachment to the old Republic and who still referred to Venice as their “fatherland.” Among them was Lucia. She did not live in the past, as some of the more conservative old patricians did, but she had no sense of loyalty towards Napoleon or to the Kingdom of Italy, and certainly no great love for her duties at court. Lucia still thought of herself as a Venetian, and she felt the deepest attachment to her Venetian heritage. The Republic no longer existed, of course; there was no Venetian fatherland to speak of any more. But it survived as a spiritual place to which Lucia still felt deeply connected. It pained her to hear Alvise say, as he often did, that the Kingdom of Italy was his new fatherland and that he loved it “more than he loves Venice.” Although she was wary of “the self-inflicted suffering that comes from standing against destiny,” she found her husband’s constant praise of the emperor exaggerated and even jarring.14
Lucia also cringed at the way Venetian ladies tried to please and befriend their Milanese counterparts, “to tie themselves” to the new kingdom, she noted with slight repulsion:
How many visits they pay, how many presents they give, how they seek a confidential tone in addressing women they hardly know, even using the familiar tu. Wrongly perhaps, I tie myself to no one. I lead a withdrawn life, never going out on those nights I am not on duty at Court. Ah, if only it were a Petit cercle of old friends! The thing is that I am nearing forty—and it’s too late for me to start all over again.15
In the winter of 1809, a year after settling in Milan, Lucia moved into her rooms in Palazzo Visconti with the other ladies-in-waiting who were from out of town. She regretted not having the privacy of her own apartment, away from her colleagues, where she could put up her feet and entertain a few Venetian friends when she was not on duty. But she was also tired of moving her things from place to place: she had lived in four different apartments since arriving in town, “the last one so unbearably smelly”16 that her clean, freshly painted rooms in Palazzo Visconti were a relief in that respect.
Princess Augusta personally gave Lucia the new uniform she was to wear at court during the day: a long, light-brown smock buttoned tightly around her neck. “Apparently the French word for