Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [122]
Although Lucia was on leave from her position as lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta, she was nevertheless expected to pay her court to Empress Marie Louise at Saint Cloud—a duty she fulfilled with no enthusiasm, dropping by when she had nothing better to do, and possibly at a time when she knew the empress would not be receiving and she could simply leave a card. It did not always work, though, and several times she got stuck having to watch the king of Rome, Napoleon and Marie Louise’s two-year-old son, play in his imperial pen or make a mess of his dinner. Even less appealing than the visits to Saint Cloud were those to Madame Mère, Napoleon’s temperamental mother. Fortunately, a liveried servant usually ushered Lucia away saying the old lady was busy—“Madame est en affaires.” 8 In contrast, Lucia was always glad to visit Empress Joséphine (Napoleon had allowed her to retain the title). She drove over to Malmaison a week after arriving in Paris, and took Alvisetto with her—Joséphine had heard so much about him she had told Lucia to bring him along so that he might play with her grandchildren (her daughter, Queen Hortense of Holland, was trapped in a miserable marriage with Napoleon’s younger brother, Louis, and often came to seek comfort at Malmaison). The empress received Lucia, Alvisetto and the trailing Vérand in the billiard room. A small parrot with the most colourful plumage was perched on her breast. The greetings had to be interrupted when the bird started to peck the flowers of a little bouquet fixed on Joséphine’s head, forcing her to remove three strings of pearls from her neck lest the parrot take aim at them next. Despite the confusion, Lucia did not overlook the exceptional quality of the pearls, estimating they were possibly worth 100,000 francs.
Lemon ices and biscuits were served in the garden-room, where other visitors were assembled. There were several relatives from the island of Martinique, and Madame d’Ahremberg, one of the empress’s faithful ladies-in-waiting. The large room gave out on to a terraced lawn with bushes of creamy-coloured roses bursting all around it. Beyond the formal garden and the greenhouses, fields of young wheat swayed in the afternoon breeze. One of the charms of Malmaison was the way it combined the intimacy of a garden, the grandeur of an English park and the rusticity of a working farm. Joséphine took Lucia to see the rhododendrons she had planted along the main alley and the elaborate new waterworks. Back at the house, they visited the refurbished apartment upstairs. “The bedroom is magnificent,” Lucia wrote:
The tapestry is a crimson velvet decorated with the most beautiful gold embroidery. The bed-cover is made of a delicate Indian muslin, also embroidered with gold filaments. The dressing table is in gold and vermilion. It’s worth at least 200,000 francs.9
Lucia had an open invitation to visit Joséphine, and the following months, Malmaison became a second home to her in Paris. She went once or twice a week, sometimes for lunch, sometimes for afternoon tea and a walk in the park, sometimes for dinner and a few hands of Boston. The company was always an interesting mix of Joséphine’s older friends from the periods of the Revolution and the Directoire and members of the new imperial aristocracy who had remained loyal to her even after the divorce from Napoleon. The atmosphere was relaxed, the entertainment very simple: billiards, cards, parlour games. It was not an especially brilliant society, nor did it have the presumption to be so. Still, Joséphine’s good taste, her languorous elegance, gave Malmaison a stylishness that was entirely absent from the pompous court at Saint Cloud.
It was mostly through her Malmaison connections that Lucia’s social life in Paris picked up and gained a sense of direction. In any other European city,