Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [48]
Alvise was ecstatic and Lucia, though exhausted, was happy and relieved. After six years of marriage and three major miscarriages, she had produced at last the heir the Mocenigos had been anxiously waiting for. Everything had gone well. Lucia had delivered in bed, as planned, and Doctor Vespa had arrived just in time to supervise the delivery and savour his triumph. Lucia recovered very quickly and Vespa dispensed her from lying in the dark the first few days—a practice he often required on the grounds that daylight made it difficult to rest. He decided not to truss up her belly, as was usually done. “If the binding is too tight it prevents the normal functioning of the uterus, and if it is too loose it is useless,” he explained. “Besides, it creates excessive heat around the lower parts, which is never a good thing.”41 Vespa made sure Lucia was all settled and rushed off to attend to the empress’s needs.
Propped up against a wall of comfortable pillows, Lucia soon picked up her correspondence with Paolina. Alvisetto, she said, was giving her all sorts of satisfactions. He lost his umbilical cord on the third day, which she saw as “a sign of strength and health.” Six days later he shed all his milk crusts—another “sign of robustness.” The outlook for breastfeeding was promising too:
I haven’t had the joy of giving him my own milk yet but I understand it will happen very soon. The milk we are drawing from my breast we are giving to the wet-nurse’s daughter. [In two days] I will put my feet on the ground for the first time, and lie on the chaise-longue while they make my bed up.42
As she ended her letter she heard the thundering blast of 300 cannon announcing the christening of Archduke Ferdinand, the son of Emperor Francis II and Empress Maria Theresa. From her bed, Lucia could see the candles the Viennese had put at their windowsills to welcome the imperial heir. She also heard the crowds in the streets below “expressing their joy with boisterous chants”—a little too boisterous for Lucia’s taste, as they often kept her awake.
It was not until two full weeks after Alvisetto’s birth that Lucia announced to Paolina: “I am nursing my child and I am the happiest woman.”43 When she held her baby boy at her breast and felt him gently tugging at her nipple, she said, her fulfilment was complete. Doctor Vespa came by to check on Alvisetto and monitor Lucia’s condition, and resume his cosy chitchat. The empress was having difficulty with her milk. “Apparently she is envious that I am nursing my son,” Lucia reported with a hint of mischievous pride. The post brought packets of congratulatory letters from Venice, mostly from Mocenigo aunts and uncles and cousins. And nobody was genuinely more enthused than her mother-in-law, Chiara, who now claimed to have known all along that Lucia was going to deliver a baby boy: “My darling Lucietta, I cannot begin to tell you the joy I feel for this birth which, I can now reveal to you, my soul had presaged. I hope with all my heart that the two of you will remain in perfect health, and no doubt the good blood with which you have imbued your son will ensure this. Believe me, the arrival of this sweet baby has consoled this family, and us parents, no end.”44
Only echoes of the outside world had reached Lucia during the bitter cold winter. She had been far too absorbed by her apprehensive musings about motherhood to pay more than scant attention to the war of Austria and Prussia against France. Nevertheless, she had been shocked to learn, back in January, about Louis XVI’s beheading in Paris. She was also aware, thanks to Doctor Vespa’s briefings, of the court’s anxiety for the fate of Queen Marie Antoinette, herself a Habsburg and the aunt of Emperor Francis II. The Austro-Prussian offensive