Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [118]
Alvisetto was spending the summer of 1812 on a farm in Annières with Vérand. The boy had not seen his parents in two years, and his letters were becoming more poignant each month. “Oh darling mother,” he wrote from the countryside south of Paris, “have pity on me and give me news about you. I would give everything I have to receive a letter from you now…”49 Lucia did not have the courage to tell him it was going to be another year until they could be reunited, as she had been placed on duty at court for the duration of the winter trimester. Even if her health permitted, she would not be able to make the journey to Paris before April of the following year. Alvise had promised his son a trial period of two years. The two years had passed, yet he showed no sign of wanting to confront the issue, let alone journey to Paris; and he lost his patience for very little.
Alvisetto was assembling a small library and he wrote several times to his father asking him if he could post him a few history books he had in Milan. There was one book in particular he was very keen to have: a classic account of the travels of Niccolò and Antonio Zen, two Venetian navigators who had explored the North Atlantic in the fourteenth century. Alvise complained to a bewildered Lucia:
[Our son] is so insistent. He’s asked me a thousand times about these books, and a thousand times I’ve told him that the cost of sending them would be greater than their value. I’m determined not to let him have them. For the following reasons: 1) to punish him for his insistence, 2) to force him to be more compliant, 3) and to be more obedient, 4) and to be more tolerant, 5) I spend all I spend and still it’s not enough?50
Alvise no longer spoke to his mother, Chiara. Their relationship had deteriorated over the ownership of some properties, and though a financial settlement was reached after a long and hurtful litigation, a reconciliation did not follow. Lucia regretted this state of affairs. She was no longer close to Chiara, as she had been as a young daughter-in-law, but she had remained in touch with her throughout the dispute between mother and son. She had also encouraged Alvisetto to keep up a correspondence with his grandmother. When Alvise learnt what was going on behind his back, he became enraged:
Alvisetto is still of an age in which he is not allowed to send letters that are not read by his parents. I must remind you that [the boy is Chiara’s] grandson because he is my son. This means I stand between him and her. However much she hates me and tries to harm me, I shall always respect and love my mother because that is an immoveable law of nature. But [Alvisetto] is not her son. He is bound to me, and he must not try to get on with someone who is so obviously and so powerfully my enemy.51
What was gnawing at Alvise? His conflict with his mother surely cast a shadow over his life, making him short-tempered and intolerant with the people he was closest to. He was also under extreme pressure to find money to pay the huge taxes the Napoleonic government was levying on property to finance its military expenditures. Increasingly, Alvise was forced to use the profits from his other estates to sustain his very expensive projects at Alvisopoli. Nor did it cheer him to see more and more farm hands—boys he had seen grow into strong young men and who thought of themselves as alvisopolitani above all else—recruited by the army and dragged off to some faraway battlefield on the eastern front. By 1812, Alvise was losing his early enthusiasm for Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy. His mood may well have been coloured by an increasing pessimism about the future.
At the end of the summer, Prince Eugène left Italy at the head of his Armée d’Italie to join forces with Napoleon, who was on his way to Moscow. Joséphine arrived in