Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [141]
Lucia worried about Alvisetto. She felt he was becoming nonchalant and lazy at a time when everyone should be giving all they had. He showed little interest in his studies and seemed to waste much of his spare time. Would he get any work done—she wondered—if he were not so closely supervised by Father Ménin at school and Vérand at home? Alvise, who had ambitious plans for him, was clearly disappointed. And Lucia, wishing to avoid a new confrontation with her husband over their son’s education, urged Alvisetto to shape up:
It upsets me that your father should have reason to complain about your aversion to study. You are sixteen, old enough to understand that the displeasure you give to your parents will ultimately be to your own detriment. What will you reap from so much idleness?5
Evidently Alvisetto enjoyed his relative autonomy in Padua from his loving but sometimes overbearing mother. When classes were over, he loitered about town, often joining other fellow students at the smoke-filled coffee shops, and incurring Vérand’s ineffectual reproaches. He was a gregarious type, and probably devoted a little too much time to leisure and too little to his studies. It was all fairly innocent. Lucia, however, insisted in micro-managing her son’s life from Venice. “I must discourage you from spending money at the coffee shop,” she nagged in one letter. “One ice cream a day is quite enough,” she told him in another. “Lingering at the coffee shop longer than is necessary to eat it is clearly not to a young man’s advantage.”6 And so on.
Lucia’s fretfulness turned into discomfiture when she learnt, from an unusually watchful Vérand, that Alvisetto’s sheets were covered with sticky spots. She told Vérand he should not shy away from lecturing her son at length against masturbation: “There will never be enough words with which to inspire real horror in him for those dreadful spots.”7 If Vérand carried out the task—and there is no reason to believe he would disregard such a strong injunction from Lucia—he must have elicited quite a few guffaws from the over-excited teenager in his charge.
At the end of the winter, Lucia’s excessive preoccupation with Alvisetto subsided momentarily because, like everyone else, she was distracted by the news that Napoleon had escaped from Elba. The fallen emperor reached the south of France on 1 March, headed north to Paris and three weeks later was back in power. For three months, Europe teetered between past and future. Once again the allies amassed their troops along the French border. Napoleon struck first, marching into Belgium and defeating the Prussians on 16 June. But two days later his army was beaten decisively by Wellington at Waterloo and he was forced to abdicate a second time. The nightmare of a Bonapartist resurrection receded as Napoleon was sent off to Saint Helena, a tiny speck in the southern Atlantic.
During Napoleon’s brief return to power the Austrians did not sit still. On the contrary, they accelerated their formal takeover of northern Italy. On 7 April, the newly formed Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia was integrated into the Habsburg Empire. Archduke John, brother of Emperor Francis, arrived in Venice to mark Austria’s assumption of power with the proper solemnity—yet another high mass in the basilica of Saint Mark took place on 7 May. The archduke hosted a masked ball at La Fenice and the next day he headed for Padua.
Vérand had written to Lucia warning that Alvisetto was so eager to show his Austrian heart he wanted to ride out on horseback to greet the archduke. “Don’t do it,” Lucia pleaded in a late-night note to her son:
Dear Alvisetto, I am just now back from the bal masqué at La Fenice and I beg you not to expose yourself to danger. Find a good spot from which to watch the imperial cortège, but please don’t ride out in the confusion