Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [35]
Memmo was a frequent guest that summer, checking on his daughter’s health and bringing news of Paolina, who was nursing a healthy baby girl, Caterina, nicknamed Cattina. Le Scalette was a house he knew very well. Thirty years earlier, Countess Rosenberg, then still Giustiniana Wynne, had spent a summer there with her mother and her siblings (they had rented the house from the Mocenigos), and Memmo, then a bachelor, had snuck in and out of the house to meet with the young woman he loved so passionately. Now Countess Rosenberg was dying of cancer in nearby Padua and a distraught Memmo wanted to be close to her. He visited her often, and Lucia sometimes went along, shocked to see her father’s first love so “infinitely degraded.”42 The countess died in August, and Lucia could not help noticing how her father too had aged during the summer, often complaining about his splitting headaches, his bad circulation and the gout that tormented his feet. Although Dinda Orsini, his young lover, still provided some consolation to him, their ties were gradually loosening.
The news from France occupied much of the conversation at Le Scalette. The Constituent Assembly drafted the Constitution, but King Louis XVI, unwilling to accept the end of absolute monarchy, secretly fled from Paris and headed for the northern border. His aim was to march back into France with the help of the Austrians and re-establish his rule. But he was recognised in the town of Varennes and brought back in ignominy to the Tuileries, losing the little loyalty he still had among Parisians. He and the Queen, Marie Antoinette, were placed under house arrest, while a stream of émigrés fled from France and pressed foreign rulers to intervene militarily.
Emperor Leopold II of Austria, whom Memmo had met when he was still Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, was especially concerned about the turn of events in France because Marie Antoinette was his younger sister. He was travelling through Padua that summer, on his way to Vienna with his other sister, Maria Carolina, Queen of the Two Sicilies, and her husband, King “Big Nose” Ferdinand IV. The question on everyone’s lips was whether the emperor, who had been on the throne but one year, was going to declare war against France. “There are some here who believe he is ready to wage it,” Lucia reported to Alvise in Venice as the Senate made preparations to receive the emperor. “But others feel he will think twice about intervening as long as his sister is in the hands of the rebels.”43 A few weeks later, Leopold issued the Declaration of Pillnitz, enjoining other European countries to restore the French monarchy with the force of arms.
During the course of the summer, while Lucia was at Le Scalette taking her cold baths, it was Alvise’s turn to succumb to the beguiling Dinda Orsini, whom he had met on several occasions in the company of his father-in-law. He courted her discreetly, obviously aware he was endangering not just his marriage but his relationship with Memmo; Dinda resisted him at first, even as she acknowledged her tenderness for him. “There is no doubt that both you and I feel something that goes beyond friendship, but I don’t want to go looking for what it is,” she said, wary of an affair that could lead to trouble if it were discovered. But Alvise pressed ahead, sending her flirtatious notes