Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [128]
“This reversal has truly mortified him,”26 Lucia told her sister, blaming herself for being so distracted by other matters. But she was mostly angry with Vérand, who should have been the first to alert her to Alvisetto’s difficulties. Instead, he had taken to his bed, debilitated by the boy’s poor showing, and he remained out of commission pretty much until Christmas, complaining about sweats, fevers, aches and a whistling noise in his head. “He moans all day and forces the help to wake up in the middle of the night to attend to his needs,” Lucia protested:
We all know he is just a victim of his own anxiety. Still, I had two doctors come to visit him. They told him, of course, that nothing was the matter, and to get out of bed and have some food. Monsieur Vérand is an angel when he is up and about, but he is pretty heavy going when he takes to his bed. And a useless financial burden, I might add.27
Monsieur Rougement, Alvise’s banker in Paris, had to turn Lucia away several times because not even a trickle of money was coming from Milan any more. The small additional savings from Lucia’s agricultural commerce had dried up. The stipend she was still entitled to as lady-in-waiting reached her with increasing irregularity. She was already running the household on a shoestring, and the prospects were not good. Encouraged by Alvise, she drew up a list of objects to be put up for sale: furniture and jewellery, for the most part, including a beautiful necklace of gold shells which she tried to sell to various jewellers. At the end of the list, she added Alvise’s gala Senate uniform which had surfaced, like old family flotsam, from one of the trunks after the move to the new apartment. It now hung in the entrance hall at rue de l’Estrapade, cumbersome and useless. It was the one item she was eager to get rid of.
On Christmas Eve, Lucia had a quiet dinner at home with Alvisetto, Vérand, Teresa and Checco. A boiled fish arrived from the landlady downstairs. Later, Vérand and Alvisetto read a few pages of the Zen brothers’ travels in the North Atlantic while Lucia curled up in the living room with a book she had picked up at Monsieur Foucault’s, one of the booksellers she visited regularly on rue Jacob. It was a guide for improving one’s marriage, written by a German pastor, Goliath Werner. The book had recently been translated in French and was selling briskly in the Paris bookstores. The full title was Peaceful Marriages: a key to forestall, prevent and even put an end to all divorces, quarrels and all matter of domestic woes. Whether she found Father Werner’s suggestions of any use Lucia does not say, but her choice of reading material is as good a measure as any of how frustrating her long-distance relationship with Alvise had become.
Shortly before midnight all books were put aside. Everyone bundled up and, braving the snow flurries, scurried over to the church of Saint Sulpice to attend Christmas mass.
The new year began on a subdued note. The news coming from the war area portended a vast and imminent catastrophe. Yet it was received with no great alarm; or so it seemed to Lucia, who sensed a strange torpor around her, and a widespread feeling of resignation. “It is very quiet,” she noted in her diary. “Parisians go out very little. People seem to prefer staying at home these days.”28 Lucia’s professors at the Jardin des Plantes were her principal companions. Her workload became