Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [133]
At the time of the burial, two young weeping willows had been planted over the graves as markers. Over the years, the trees had grown considerably, one towards the other, until their upper branches had joined. But now the willow on top of Marie Antoinette’s grave was losing its leaves. As the proprietor explained to Lucia, the roots, having grown eight feet deep, had reached the lime in which her body was thrown.
Louis XVIII arrived in Paris on 3 May. He was a supercilious sixty-year-old, overweight and overbearing; but he was also a stubborn negotiator, and not at all inclined to wear the constitutional straitjacket Talleyrand was fashioning for him. The draft constitution went back and forth between the new monarch and the president of the provisional government. By the time Louis XVIII installed himself at the Tuileries, he had curtailed the powers of Parliament and individual freedoms considerably. Talleyrand lamented the changes to his original draft, but in the end he was satisfied that sufficient guarantees ensured that France would not see a return to absolute monarchy. On the other hand, Emperor Alexander, who had moved from Talleyrand’s mansion to the Elysée palace, did not take the changes at all well, and thereafter refused to speak to his former host.
On 16 May Lucia went to court for a formal presentation to Louis XVIII. The point of this otherwise futile exercise was to attract the king’s attention during the brief moment when one was face to face with him—not always an easy task given the soporific atmosphere that usually hung over this ceremony. She described herself on her card as the wife of the former captain of Verona, remembering that Alvise, despite the Directoire’s vociferous protests, had treated the future king well back in 1795, when he was living in exile in Italy as the Comte de Lille. “The King receives like our dear old uncle Lorenzo, sprawled in his throne,” Lucia wrote to her sister. “The ladies shuffle by him in a long line; they are only allowed a curtsey. The King nods without saying a word, except to those whom he knows personally.” It turned out Lucia’s little trick with her card worked beyond her expectations. She could not resist showing off a bit to her younger sister:
The King saw me, examined me for a short while, and then exclaimed “Ah Lucietta! How are you! It’s been so long!” The tone of his voice was so cordial and his expression so friendly that he seemed genuinely pleased to see me after nineteen years. And fancy him remembering my Venetian nickname!43
In reality, the atmosphere at the new court was anything but cheerful. The king and his royal siblings were rather advanced in age, and soured by many years of exile. The haughty Duchess of Angoulème, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the king’s sister, restored stuffy rules of etiquette at the Tuileries that were a throwback to the ancien régime. “I really do not like the way we get pushed out of the room by the ushers after we have presented ourselves,”44 Lucia grumbled. There was no place to mingle, and the ladies were left to mill about with the servants outside the receiving chamber until their carriage appeared.
Leaving court one evening she overheard a lady say that Joséphine had died. “I could not bring myself to believe it,” she wrote in her diary. “I left in a hurry and came home immediately.”45 She could not sleep at all that night. The next morning, she sent word to Queen Hortense “to learn whether the Empress had in fact passed away.