Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [139]
Later, Lucia went out with Alvisetto looking for familiar places—it seemed like the easiest way to lift their spirits. They went over to Ca’ Memmo at San Marcuola, walked down the Frezzeria to Saint Mark’s Square and made their way home passing by the church of San Moisè and Campo Santo Stefano. It was hardly a cheerful tour. Many shops were boarded up. The streets were filthy and malodorous, and a querulous moan rose from the beggars lining the walls. Mangy mongrels and skinny cats roamed the back alleys fighting for miserable scraps of food. Several times they ran into Austrian soldiers patrolling the streets and yelling orders in German.
Alvisetto remained in Venice but a few weeks before it was time for him to enrol in Father Ménin’s seminary in Padua. He took lodgings with Vérand in a private house within walking distance from the school. Lucia helped him settle in, making sure he had proper clothes and shoes for the winter, a new pair of eyeglasses and the necessary school material. Sensitive as ever to shifting political circumstances, she reminded her son that it would be wise “to set aside a few hours every day to practise German.” She urged Vérand to speak to him in that language as often as possible, suggesting they read out loud in the evening from a good German play “so as to enhance his familiarity with dialogue.”1 But there she stopped, whereas Alvise was already making enquiries about the best German universities for his son: Gottingen, Leipzig, Berlin…There were, of course, a number of excellent institutions in Prussia and in the Austrian Empire; but there was plenty of time to make a decision—it was going to be another two years before Alvisetto graduated from school—and Lucia saw no reason to rush things. As in the past, she wondered whether it was really necessary to send him so far away to further his studies.
Lucia soon started to miss their life in Paris—the freedom they had enjoyed, their cosy routine, their walks at the Jardin du Luxembourg. Venice, her beloved Venice, now seemed so restrictive and isolated from the rest of the world. A few brave hostesses, like her old friends Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi and Marina Benzoni (who had danced half-naked under the Liberty Tree in 1797), still kept their houses open and did their best to create an air of intellectual vivacity and cosmopolitanism. But their salons were run on a shoestring, with stale biscuits and bad wine served as refreshments. And the conversation sounded inevitably provincial compared to the exchanges Lucia had had at her Parisian soirées.
Alvise was rarely in Venice, spending nearly all of his time travelling to his estates. The Mocenigo properties on the mainland were in dreadful condition. The floods had devastated the harvest of 1814. Famine and disease were crippling the farming system and causing terrible human loss. The situation at Alvisopoli was especially dismal because of the high water-levels there. The sheep flocks had been wiped out and most of the cattle had died of starvation. The fields, so recently reclaimed, were reverting to marshland. The town had deteriorated to unspeakable squalor. Ghostly crowds of starving labourers, their wives and children in tow, roamed the land begging for work and food. Alvise’s utopian project was collapsing. If the Austrians did not reduce the crushing fiscal burden imposed on Alvisopoli during Napoleon’s rule, allowing a little breathing space to get the agricultural cycle going again, Alvise would be forced to declare bankruptcy and lose the property—a prospect that darkened his mood considerably.
To Lucia, it felt as if she had regressed to that earlier period of her marriage when she lived a lonely life at Palazzo Mocenigo, fighting to save her pregnancies while her mother-in-law came down from her apartment to watch over her. The difference was that Lucia was