Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [125]
She occasionally broke her routine in the city with a day-trip to the porcelain factories at Sèvres, or to Montmorency—she picnicked under the great chestnut tree where Jean-Jacques Rousseau used to take his meals. “They say it is 500 years old,” she noted in her diary. “The trunk is so large it takes four men to wrap themselves around it.”13 She spent a sunny day at Versailles, inspecting the restoration work on the palace, which had been devastated during the Revolution. She wandered over to Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon, also entirely restored. An old Swiss guard, in his harlequin-like uniform, appeared from nowhere and offered to take her around. It was getting late, but Lucia followed her kindly guide through the royal apartments, then out in the gardens. “He took me to the grotto, the garden theatre, the wood full of tall, leafy trees; finally we reached the make-believe farming village.” Lucia had heard so many descriptions of the Petit Trianon and the surrounding grounds, including Marie Antoinette’s whimsical “village,” that her visit took on a dreamy quality. The melancholy Swiss guard had come to France with Marie Antoinette in 1770 and had miraculously survived the years of turmoil. Having nowhere to go, he had stayed on as the unofficial custodian of the Petit Trianon, keeping the queen’s memory alive with little anecdotes and recollections he shared with visitors.
At the end of the tour, Lucia saw the old man fade in the gloaming as mysteriously as he had appeared. “It was a beautiful night,” she wrote in her diary, “and I made my way back [to the town of Versailles] by the light of the moon.”14
Lucia could not remember feeling so at peace with herself as she felt in that summer of 1813. “I sleep well,” she assured Paolina, “and my friends say I’ve even put on weight. I have a pleasing complexion and I feel good.”15 She only wished Alvisetto were more diligent in his studies, and more engaged in his spiritual life. “Oh, the boy has a good heart, and he does his prayers, and confesses, and takes communion, and that is all very well but it is not enough,” she complained to her sister. She found his attitude towards religion to be too perfunctory. “Devotion to the Creator needs a great deal of work, but [Alvisetto] lacks the necessary spiritual nourishment, and I worry that when he will reach the age of overwhelming passions he will not have the strength to hold on to his faith.”16
Father Laboudrie, his confessor, was having a hard time with Alvisetto as well. He did not find it easy to absolve him from his sins and allowed him to take communion only after serious penance—he was made to read for eight or fifteen days in a row, depending on the gravity of his sins, from the Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis. But from what we can guess, Alvisetto’s sins could not have been that terrible. They probably ranged from needling poor Vérand to doing sloppy homework.
At the end of the summer, Alvisetto faced his final examinations at the Lycée. Lucia suggested he pray for the intercession of Saint Ignatius “since his Jesuit schools were the best ever”17 but her son cheekily replied he had already done so on his own initiative. For his French essay, the mighty dissertation, Alvisetto was asked to draw “a comparison between a wounded soldier who devotes his last thoughts to his beloved general, and a man devoted to God, who willingly submits himself to a preordained destiny.” Alvisetto was not inspired. “He turned in a poor composition because he did not understand the question properly,” Lucia noted with annoyance.18 Saint Ignatius had not come to the boy’s rescue after all, leaving her to wonder whether he had, in fact, prayed to the great Jesuit scholar.
Alvisetto’s teachers showed unexpected mercy despite his poor showing in French, and allowed him to pass to the next grade, troisième. The school year started in early October, after a short break, and Lucia enlisted the help of the assiduous and ever-present Father Laboudrie to make sure his