Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [127]
There was, however, one drawback to the apartment: three sisters “of loose morals” lived next door, and attracted a constant flow of visitors. Lucia went to the Saint Germain police station to ask if there was any way to have the ladies evicted from the building. The officers looked at her as if she were a “madwoman.”22 She thought of turning down the apartment for the sake of Alvisetto. As she wrote to Paolina, it was hard enough steering him away from preying prostitutes in the streets in broad daylight, let alone on the same landing. One day, they were shopping near Palais Royal, when a woman in flashy clothes, her face covered by a veil, appeared from nowhere and accosted her fourteen-year-old boy, took his hand and whispered in a husky voice: “Voilà le jeune homme que j’adore”—“Look here at this adorable young man.” Lucia tore him away, casting a savage look at the face behind the veil. “I tell you, these street-women are out of control,” she complained to her sister. “They take no notice whatsoever of the prohibition to approach men in broad daylight.”23
In the end, Lucia took the apartment because winter was quickly setting in. Besides, she had already missed too many classes at the Jardin des Plantes, and she was eager to get back to her regular study pattern. She arranged to have the furniture and luggage moved, and by December, she and the rest of the household were settled in at rue de l’Estrapade.
The first snow fell early that year, and turned the streets and squares of the sprawling city into a sea of slush and mud. The Tuileries Gardens were immersed in a dense fog most of the day, and one barely made out the leafless trees lining the alley like spidery sentinels. Ice began to form in the two large basins. A young boy about Alvisetto’s age was usually in one of them, dangerously treading the thin surface. Passers-by stopped and threw coins at him to keep him on the ice and see if he would crash in the freezing water.
A feeling of resignation hung over the city, as if Parisians were conscious of the impending catastrophe and wished it would pass as quickly as possible. “They say carts filled with dead and wounded soldiers are already clogging the roads to Paris,” Lucia told her sister. “I don’t think it’s true. These rumours are surely the product of fear alone.”24 In a way, she was right: Napoleon was still fighting in the Rhineland, still winning some battles. But the official bulletins announcing more French victories were received in gloomy silence. It was no use trying to fool the people any more. A tattered army of young conscripts was not going to turn the tide against the enemy when the enemy was the rest of Europe. The Parisians were tired of war, and they were tired of Napoleon. And so was the once ultra-loyal Legislative Assembly. While the emperor led his men to Pyrrhic victories, back in Paris the ground was being prepared for his downfall.
The news from Italy was even more depressing for Lucia. Venice was still under siege by the Austrians, and she had not heard from her sister since October. Rumours spoke of widespread disease and starvation. Communications were still open between Paris and Milan, but Alvise’s letters were of little comfort. “For the most part,” she complained, “they are filled with reproaches to me.”25 He accused her of spending too much and paying scant attention to Alvisetto’s studies. Lucia could take “a little ill-humour” from her husband in such difficult times. She knew it was frustrating for him to be separated from his beloved Alvisopoli; she knew it was hard to witness the foundering of a kingdom in which he had invested so much. But why did he have to take it out on her? She was doing her best to lead a respectable life in Paris with minimum resources and no great help from him; and all of this to satisfy his obsessive desire to turn their son into a loyal subject of an Empire that was now collapsing.
Lucia was stung by the accusation of having been slack in supervising Alvisetto’s studies, perhaps because