Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [73]
“We have taken the city,” General Hotze wrote in his report, “thanks in large measure to the successful operation carried out by Graf Plunkett at his own initiative and with the help of his excellent troops.”14
In the early summer, Lucia received a letter from Maximilian telling her he was happy to be alive after falling with his horse over a precipice:
During the fall I managed to free myself of the stirrups and I landed, miraculously, on soft, marshy ground. I hardly felt the blow. The crowd of people peering down from the roadside were sure I was dead. I returned to our camp and rested. The next day I felt much better and rode from morning until evening to check all our positions.
This rare letter from her lover must have made Lucia very happy, though she told her sister with discomfiture that it was “not enough for Plunkett to face the daily dangers of bloody battles—he also risks his life in deadly accidents!”15
Lucia entered the final period of her pregnancy in the summer of 1799, and on 9 September she gave birth to a boy. Two weeks later the baby was christened in the church of Santa Maria Zobenigo, and declared son of parents unknown. However, the name inscribed in the birth registry—Massimiliano Cesare Francesco—left no doubt as to who the father of the little boy was. The Venice Patriarchy, which had control over the birth registry, certainly knew his true identity, and Lucia must have hoped the church would bury this secret as it had so many others. She put little Massimiliano in the care of a warm, friendly woman, Signora Antonia. Nothing else is known about the early stages of Lucia’s relationship with her son, though one longs to know whether she made furtive visits to cradle him, whether she nursed him as she had Alvisetto. As in the case of her love affair with Maximilian, she carefully covered her tracks, for she was sure that if the truth ever came out, she would be ruined.
Lucia had only a vague idea where Plunkett was when their child was born. But the military records tell us the story in detail. After the battle of Winterthur, the Austrians advanced towards Zurich and took the city in mid June, opening up the road to southern Germany. Archduke Charles headed towards the Rhineland, while General Hotze and Maximilian remained south of Zurich, waiting for their Russian allies led by General Suvorov to take over their position. The Russians, however, were slow in coming, and all during the summer Maximilian fought to hold the line along the Linthe, skirmishing daily with General Masséna’s troops on the other side of the river. When Masséna realised that Suvorov was on his way to join the Austrian contingent, he decided to strike before the Russians’ arrival. In the early morning, the French, hidden by the fog rising above the Walensee, attacked the Austrians near the village of Schannis. Maximilian was not with his men but a few miles north, at General Hotze’s headquarters in Kaltenbrunner. As soon as he learnt about the butchery taking place at Schannis he rode at full gallop towards the scene. General Hotze went with him, taking a small escort. As they approached the northern shore of the Walensee, the fog became thicker and suddenly they found themselves in a rain of bullets, vainly trying to seek cover from the invisible enemy. General Hotze was killed first. Then Maximilian was hit and fell to the ground, gravely wounded. He died in the arms of one of his soldiers on 25 September, two days after his son’s christening at Santa Maria Zobenigo.
The battle raged on all day as the French gained control of the right bank of the Linthe, then lost it, then gained it again. As the two armies clashed, Maximilian’s men fought hard to retrieve his body. All day long, as the battle line shifted, they carried the corpse with them and protected it. At the end of the day, the battle was lost. They retreated to the village of Lichtensteig and gave their beloved commandant “a burial worthy of a brave man.”16
Alvise reappeared in Venice in the late summer