Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [82]
In general Lucia preferred large events to smaller gatherings because she was freer to leave when she wanted. She sometimes enjoyed the informality of dinners and soirées in private houses, but she seldom found the conversation stimulating. It could also be downright silly, with guests falling off their chairs with laughter for the most trivial reasons.
One evening, at Princess Clary’s, the assembled guests were evoking the good times they had had the previous summer at the Clarys’ palazzo in Toeplitz. Someone mentioned a play they had staged, adding that a Countess Golowkin’s acting had been especially pleasing.
“Oh, she couldn’t possibly have pleased the public because she is too ugly for words,” Count Hohental blurted out, unaware that the gentleman sitting just a few seats away was none other than Count Golowkin.
“Ah, but her ugliness is balanced by her spirit and her amiability,” Countess Hohental replied, realising her husband’s faux pas. But there was no stopping Count Hohental: “My dear, spirit and amiability count for little when one is that ugly.”
Count Golowkin lamely defended Countess Golowkin: “I agree no one would want her as a lover, but she will do as a wife.”
“Oh no no no! Not as wife and not as a lover,” Count Hohental insisted, mimicking poor Countess Golowkin’s traits. By this time the rest of the assembly was cracking up. Old Prince de Ligne could not hold his giggles any more and hobbled out to the billiard room in a fit of hysterical laughter. Count Hohental, still completely oblivious to what was going on around him, joined the Prince de Ligne and innocently enquired who the tiresome Russian in the drawing room was. “He is Count Go-lowkin,” the old Prince stammered, choking on his guffaws. Count Hohental turned red in the face. “Oh my, what a terrible thing I have done! And to think that I am always so careful not to cause the slightest displeasure around me.”19
Lucia no doubt had a laugh at the expense of the ugly Countess Golowkin. Yet by the time she reached home and sat down to describe the scene to her sister, an unpleasant after-taste had already blemished the pride she had felt at being invited to a soirée in one of the most exclusive houses of Vienna. How easy it was to fall prey to malevolent chit-chat or to be laughed at behind one’s back, she wrote, realising that no amount of compliments and fancy invitations were going to protect her from becoming herself a conversation piece—as indeed she was soon to be, and in that very drawing-room at Princess Clary’s.
Margarethen became a little less inhospitable after Lucia brought new furniture from Vienna, hung a few Venetian paintings and prints, and substituted the worn upholstery with more colourful fabrics. Her regular tours of inspection at their country estate became welcome pauses from the pressures of her social life. Herr Schedel’s wife, Maria, was a big, good-natured woman from a village near Verona, and Lucia enjoyed the long chats with her in the large country kitchen filled with the familiar smells of dishes from back home. Maria baked an excellent pan casalino, a bread typical of the Veneto. Lucia pronounced it “as good as the bread at Molinato.”20 She always took fresh loaves of it back to Vienna for her Venetian friends, winning over the more cantankerous émigrés with her deft pan casalino diplomacy.
“The milk, the butter, the cream at Margarethen are also excellent,” Lucia told Paolina. “I sleep ten hours in a row. I have a good appetite when I am out there, I have a rosy complexion and I feel very well.”21 Indeed, some of her Viennese lady friends said she had changed so much they would not have recognised her as the same person who had arrived in Vienna the year before.
“My grief, too, is finally lessening,” she added hesitantly. Three years after Maximilian’s death in the early-morning fog of the Walensee, Lucia realised she at last had the strength to look into the eyes of the colonel as he