Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [76]
In Alvise’s mind, Lucia, being a more amiable and tactful person than he was, had an important part to play in upholding the good name of the Mocenigos in Austria. A few days after their arrival in Baden, he returned to Vienna to look for a suitable house to move into before winter, and left her to fend for herself until the end of the watering season. To Lucia’s chagrin, the handful of Venetian émigrés staying at the resort—most of them conservative patricians who had fled to Vienna after the fall of the Republic in 1797—were of little comfort. They treated her coldly, and many did not even acknowledge her presence when they met her in the street, considering Alvise’s collaboration with the French in 1797 as a betrayal of his class. The only matter of any interest to them was whether or not the Golden Book of the Venetian nobility, which Bonaparte had abolished after conquering the city, was going to be reintroduced by the Austrian government. Vienna had yet to reach a decision on this matter and Venetian émigrés, pining for their lost status, felt that Alvise and Lucia’s sudden arrival on the scene spelled trouble for their cause.
Fortunately, Lucia ran into some of her old Viennese friends. Her beloved Doctor Vespa, whom she had not seen in eight years, was still in Empress Maria Theresa’s service and was in Baden to monitor her eleventh pregnancy! Signor Boschetti, who had come many times to the apartment in Kohlmarkt to arrange Lucia’s hair for a small fee when he was a young apprentice, was now the undisputed king of Vienna hairdressers; and he, too, was in Baden, cutting and trimming and powdering the hair of society’s best. Of course neither Signor Boschetti nor Doctor Vespa would be able to open the doors of society for her. But they were precious sources of information; and they helped her master the social map of Baden.
Lucia faced an immediate practical problem: in Vienna, and by extension in Baden, it was not proper to be seen in public “in the company of a man other than her husband,” as she put it to her sister. Since Alvise was away and the Venetians would not speak to her, she rented a smart-looking horse-buggy to get around town until she made lady friends with whom she could go out.
She quickly became acquainted with the rules and rhythms of social life, pointing out to Paolina the occasional oddity, like the fact that everywhere in the Habsburg Empire one went out for the afternoon stroll at four o’clock, but in Vienna (and in Baden) one went out half an hour later. “At half past six it is time for the theatre, and it is usually over at nine. Then one either joins a small coterie or else one goes to one of the larger assemblies, though many simply retire to their homes.”3 Life in Baden had an intimate feeling, very different from the splendour of Vienna. Even the emperor and the empress stayed in a house on the main square that was anything but grand.
Still, the ladies were never casual about their toilettes. Within days of arriving, Lucia drew up her first Baden fashion report, noting that “all the dresses have a very high waist, are worn very tightly and have a long train.” The popular item of the season was an expensive bonnet à l’enfant, so called because it looked like a child’s bonnet. Lucia found them rather silly—an outdated throwback to the extravagant bonnets worn by the previous generation. Alvise, after seeing all the ladies wearing one, had insisted she have one too, but she had put her foot down. “They cost a hundred florins each,” she told Paolina. “It seemed such a waste of money that I begged him to dispense me from wearing one.”4
She attended the end of season’s bal masqué, a festive, informal waltzing party, where the empress mingled in the crowd of masked guests. There Lucia ran into Madame Wallis, whom she had not seen since their days together in Padua. Her husband, General