Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [80]
Every year, in late May and early June, Viennese society broke up into small clusters and moved to various summer retreats. Alvise promised Lucia that upon his return they would travel together for a few weeks down the Danube and up the Elbe, into Saxony, before returning to Margarethen for the harvest season. But in the end he backed out, on the grounds that he had too much to do in Molinato. Besides, he had already toured Saxony during his solitary travels across northern Europe.
Lucia decided to leave anyway—the alternative was to sit in a dusty and empty Vienna, or listen to the crickets and toads at Margarethen. In early July she visited Madame Wallis at her house near the thermal baths of Carlsbad, in Upper Bohemia. From Carlsbad, she continued on to Toeplitz, the seat of Prince Clary’s summer palazzo, where Giacomo Casanova—a close friend of her father’s—had been a frequent and popular dinner guest until his death four years earlier. She found the house still rang with echoes of his merry mischief.
Lucia followed the Elbe downstream, navigating through a romantic landscape “dotted with the ruins of feudal castles.” Often journeying alone, she kept up her spirits by taking copious notes and writing to her sister about the gardens along the river. “Flowers grow in great profusion and the wild roses and carnations are especially beautiful,” she reported. “There are fruit trees everywhere and the fruits are as tasty as they are back home. Flies, too, are as insolent as they are in our parts. I’m losing my patience with them even as I write this letter.”12 She was in Teschen on 7 August, and spent the night “in a magnificent castle on a rock, with a sweeping view of the most enchanting countryside.” The next day she arrived in Pillnitz, where she toured the beautifully landscaped gardens at the country estate of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony—those very same gardens, Lucia noted for her younger sister’s edification, where the emperor of Austria and the king of Prussia had met in 1792 to discuss “the war against France that eventually led to the downfall of our [Venetian] Republic.”13 In Dresden, she was a guest of the young von Metternichs. Count Clement, at twenty-eight a rising star in Austrian diplomacy, was Vienna’s minister to Saxony. He had married Eleanor von Kaunitz, daughter of Empress Maria Theresa’s minister, Anton von Kaunitz. Eleanor presented Lucia to court and took her to see the famous picture galleries, the cabinet of antiquities and the porcelain collections. The Metternichs also organised a day-trip to the renowned porcelain factories in Meissen. Dresden was the first Protestant city Lucia visited. She was fascinated by Protestant churches, which reminded her more of public theatres, with their galleries and parterres, than they did of Catholic churches.
She made her way back to Vienna via Prague, rushing a little as she had been away two months and was tired and eager to be home. She arrived on 4 September, a day earlier than scheduled, meaning to surprise Alvise, who was back in town, and had gone to Prince Colloredo’s for an evening of gambling. Lucia told Margherita and the rest of the staff to hide while she waited for him in a dark passageway that led to his apartment. When he returned home he found the house in total darkness. Lucia spoke from her hiding place. “He heard my voice but could not see me, and he was taken completely by surprise.”14 Her childlike delight was a measure of how glad she was to be home with her husband.
Alvise stayed the few weeks that were necessary to plan work at Margarethen. He was not happy with the way the farm was run. The soil was still too soggy in large parts of the estate and he ordered the digging of more drainage ditches. He oversaw the planting of different crops—wheat, barley, alfalfa—in the drier fields further away from the house, and he hired the manager of the local beer factory, Herr Schedel, to run day-to-day