Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [114]
Later she learnt that a bronze of Napoleon was to drive the chariot—the two allegorical pieces were merely substituting while the statue was completed. “Le char l’attend” (the chariot awaits him) was a pun on the word “charlatan” making the rounds in Paris.35 Lucia had a good laugh when she heard it.
Despite her swollen feet, she was determined to continue what she referred to as the Madame Dupont Paris Tour, and devoted the next day to Saint Denis, the church of the kings of France, which her former governess had described many times to her. The damage from the revolutionary period was still visible on the facade as most of the statues were still headless. Her guide gave her a chilling account of what had occurred inside the church, which she passed on to Paolina.
The tombs of the kings were destroyed with sledgehammers and all the lead casings were taken away. The bones were extracted from the debris and scattered haphazardly in the local cemetery. The Jacobins brought heavy wagons into the church to cart off the lead bars that supported the roof, cracking the marble pavement as they came and went. Eventually, the roof crashed to the ground and destroyed the pavement completely.
Napoleon was having Saint Denis restored to its former splendour. He wanted his own mausoleum near those of the great French kings. Dozens of stonemasons, glassworkers and carpenters were at work when Lucia walked in. “The floor of the central nave is covered in shiny white marble while the side walls are black,” she described to her sister. “The great gothic windows have been refitted with the most beautiful glasswork. The atmosphere inside the church is again one of great dignity.” The Bonaparte mausoleum was below the ground level. “The door to His Majesty’s caveau [vault] is made of bronze-plated iron. There are three locks, each one covered by the head of a lion. Bumblebees, the emblem of the Bonapartes, are carved everywhere…”36
Another landmark in Madame Dupont’s Paris was the Bois de Boulogne. “Do you remember how she enthused us with her descriptions of a most agreeable park, where the ladies met to ride their horses?” she asked Paolina. It turned out the Bois was no longer a bois. “It was reduced to a vast moor during the Revolution as all the trees were cut down to make heating wood. I saw the new shoots coming through, though—for posterity’s delight.” At the end of her walk, Lucia joined a crowd of Italian friends for a picnic lunch at Bagatelle, an open-air restaurant that had been very fashionable in pre-revolutionary days and that was now struggling to come back into vogue:
There were sixty of us and we ate under a big tent pitched in a lovely meadow in front of the pavilion commissioned by the Comte d’Artois*19 during the reign of the last king and built in only forty days. It makes you sad to look at it now: everything is so dilapidated. All the furniture is missing. The walls and ceilings are in a state of utter neglect. The mirrors above the mantelpieces are the only thing left, though I doubt they are the original ones…37
But the garden outside the pavilion was lovely, and the day was warm and beautiful. Excellent food was served at a buffet en plein air. There were tasty cold soups, fresh eggs, mutton chops, roast chickens and Lucia’s favourite fowl dish, pigeon à la crapaudine, and delicious spring peas, salads and strawberries. Most of the people there would soon be journeying back to Italy and the thought of going home no doubt enhanced the festive mood. As the wine flowed, the company became louder and Lucia joined a group singing old Venetian songs.
That evening, back at the Hotel d’Europe, Lucia was in her study, still feeling flushed from the day’s sunshine, when Alvise came in to announce that he was enrolling Alvisetto in a school in Paris. “I feel as if I had been struck by a thunderbolt,” Lucia wrote to Paolina in desperation.