Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [123]
General Baraguey d’Hilliers, whom she had not seen since their meeting in Vienna in the aftermath of Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz, and his wife, la Générale, welcomed her in their house as a long-lost friend. Retired General Sérurier invited her to his country estate outside Paris. “He’s a very good person, very hospitable,” she wrote to Paolina about the man who had handed Venice over to the Austrians on that cold and drizzly morning in January of 1798. “He recently bought a farm and lives there with his wife and brother.”10 At a small dinner given by Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, the former second consul, Lucia received the attentions of none other than Joseph Fouché, the ruthless minister of the interior.
Soon Lucia found her way into the literary salon of her long-time heroine, Madame de Genlis. There she met René de Chateaubriand, the great Romantic author. She was surprised by his “odd appearance”—the big head covered with black curls so out of proportion with the small, wiry body. He appeared very concentrated all the time, and Lucia was quite intimidated by “the intense look in his eyes.”11 But she did manage to hold his attention by telling him The Genius of Christianity had been the vicereine’s favourite reading during Petit cercle in Milan. Another frequent star guest was the geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who enthralled Lucia with his fascinating tales of exploration in South America.
Her most touching encounter in Madame de Genlis’s salon was with Dominique Vivant Denon, the artist, archaeologist and art connoisseur who had made his name in Egypt with Napoleon and was now the powerful director of the Louvre. Denon had been a close friend of Lucia’s father back in the 1790s in Venice, and when Andrea Memmo was confined to bed by his illness, he had come by every day to sit with him and give him the comfort of good conversation. At the time, Lucia’s difficult pregnancy was keeping her in Vienna, away from her dying father, and she always harboured a feeling of gratitude towards the young Frenchman who had kept him company until the end. Twenty years later, Lucia finally had a chance to meet Denon—the man everyone knew as “the Eye of Napoleon.” He welcomed Lucia warmly into his house-cum-museum, and gave her a tour of his cabinet, a treasure trove of “Egyptian objects, paintings, drawings, bronze sculptures, porcelains and even Indian furniture” that he had gathered during his travels.12 Of course, Lucia was not unaware that Denon was Napoleon’s principal adviser in the looting of artworks across Europe, most of which adorned the rooms of the Louvre. It was probably for the sake of her father’s memory that she chose not to dwell on this point—there is not a critical word about Denon in her diary or in her letters, even though she felt strongly about the issue of stolen art; especially art stolen in Venice.
It was Denon who introduced Lucia to David, her neighbour across the street and the most celebrated artist of his age. He had always been famous, as far as she could remember. In fact he was already famous back in the 1780s, when Angelica Kauffmann used to take her around to the ateliers of the major painters in Rome. Now he was Napoleon’s favourite artist, and had put his stark, neoclassical imprint on the aesthetics of the Empire. At the age of sixty-five, he was still working on a majestic scale. When Lucia went to see him at his studio, she was completely overwhelmed by the powerful painting he was completing, which was bursting with naked soldiers preparing for battle. She recognised the famous scene from antiquity: Leonidas and his 300 Spartans on their way to meet the Persian army at Thermopylae. Strong Leonidas, the saviour of Greece, stood among his men,