Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [136]
Lucia got up before dawn every morning and walked down the still deserted quais along the Seine to be at the Jardin des Plantes in time for Des Fontaines’s class at six o’clock. After the lecture, she usually went to collect samples and cuttings on the grounds, carrying a tin tray slung over her shoulder. Jean Thonin, the legendary chief gardener, helped her select the seeds of trees that had recently arrived from North America and which he thought might do well at Alvisopoli: silver maple and red maple, canoe birch, Easter red cedar, American sweet gum and other fast-growing species. Professor Des Fontaines compiled a list of plants and shrubs for Lucia to take to Italy and sent her to Monsieur Noisette, who oversaw the nursery in rue Jacob. She assembled a considerable botanical collection in boxes that were piling up in the entrance at rue de l’Estrapade. Her 200 rose cuttings covered an eclectic variety: she mentions the pinkish Anemone Rose, the tie-dyed Rose Panachée (Rosa variegata), one she calls “Rose Bissone” (“with its sweet smell of pineapple and raspberry gelée”) and the fashionable Rosa multiflora, a prolific shrub with white and pink flowers “that grows like a vine.”53 It had come from China only two years before and was already very popular among Parisian rose-lovers.
She completed her botany requirements with Monsieur Dupont, the Serviteur des Roses at the Jardin des Plantes. He was a cheerful man who tended to his 457 species of rose with great devotion. In his extraordinary garden, which was just then reaching its fullest profusion, Dupont taught Lucia the art of grafting. His wife, Louise, had died twelve years earlier, and he had buried her heart in a corner of the garden where low ivy now grew, in the shape of a heart. Dupont added in a whisper that he wanted his own heart to be buried next to that of his wife.
Lucia secretly hoped that once Alvise had taken care of the most urgent tasks on his estates, he would travel to Paris and help her organise the family’s trip back to Italy. She even fantasised that the two might steal a quick trip to London: “It would be wonderful to make a dash,” she confided to her sister. “The opportunity is unique as we are so close and, for once, at peace.”54 But Alvise was too tied up with his affairs, what with the harvest coming up and the perennial threat of summer rains. The accounts were in such disarray that he could not send her money for the journey and instructed her to finance the trip by selling everything she could: furniture, jewellery, clothes, and even his old Senate uniform—if she could find a buyer for it.
It was a tough task. The Russians had left town, and the English tourists who were starting to arrive in Paris were much more careful with their money. She made the rounds of all the jewellers she knew hoping to sell the set of shells she had been trying to get rid of for months. She finally sold it to an Englishman through the concierge of the Hotel de l’Europe for 700 francs. Lucia was quite pleased with herself as that style of jewellery was no longer fashionable and she would never have sold it to a Parisian. She was also able to sell the beds, two chests of drawers and a cupboard. But she had no luck with Alvise’s Senate uniform, not even among Bonaparte die-hards. She instructed Alvisetto to undo the embroidery so she could at least sell the gold thread and the silver buttons; then she had Mademoiselle Neppel, her seamstress, unmake the uniform and she sold the pieces of cloth to the tailor, Monsieur Robert. With the proceeds from the sale she bought ten pairs of gloves, a box of dried figs and one of dried apricots.
In the end, Lucia raised enough cash to purchase two horses for the gig, which Checco would be driving back to Italy with Teresa, and to hire a carriage. The coachman, Signor Maccari, a genial Florentine, was