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morning prayers: Acts, Credo, Salve Regina and Confiteor. Then they read together in Italian—usually a story from Caminer’s translation of L’Ami des enfants. After that, they looked at German prints and picture books, and she gave him a short piece to memorise. When there was time, she taught him a simple geography lesson about the difference between mountains, plains, rivers, islands and peninsulas, and together they made drawings. As an alternative, she used a new method of teaching geography to children. “First we work on the plan of our apartment,” Lucia explained to her sister, “then we draw the plan of the building, and that of the city, then we move to the countryside and work on distances, and so on.”9 Teresa usually took Alvisetto out for a walk in the afternoon and when he returned there was still time for reading and story-telling. His favourite stories, however, were neither the pedagogical tales of Berquin nor the moral fables of Leprince de Beaumont, but the stories from the Old Testament. He often put Lucia to the test. “He’ll say: ‘Oh mother, tell me the story of the Creation again, or tell me the one about the fall from grace…’ And you know how few stories from the Scriptures I remember,” she reminded Paolina. “I wish my memory would serve me better on these occasions—if only you were here with me to guide me in these matters.”10

As much as Lucia wanted to be a good teacher to her son, it was not something she was trained to do. Nor did she have Paolina’s experience, as she readily admitted. Lesson-time was not always idyllic; she was often frustrated, and there were even bursts of anger on her part—followed by tearful reconciliations. In one typical scene, Lucia lost her patience because Alvisetto was not copying out the letters the way she had told him to. She raised her voice until she was scolding him:

Very quietly he started to cry and wrapped himself around me. “Please don’t shout at me,” he pleaded. “But I have to raise my voice if you don’t copy the letters the way you are supposed to,” I replied. “Do correct me, mother, but use a gentler voice,” he whispered. And I must recognise there was wisdom in his observation…11

In fact, Alvisetto was an intelligent little boy, with a logical and inquisitive mind. After his lessons with his mother, he often wandered back to the pantry and held forth among the maids and the kitchen staff, engaging them in rambling conversations and stating his opinions very firmly on everything from the difference between an island and a peninsula to the advantages and disadvantages of confession.

Lucia’s involvement in her son’s education led her to put some order in her own books, and to get rid of works that were “not suitable for the bedroom of a lady,” as she coyly put it to her sister.12 Despite her scarce knowledge of the Scriptures, she yearned to find a spiritual message in literature that would give her guidance in her turbulent life. Her interest in the important authors of the Enlightenment had waned—she found Voltaire was often too materialistic. And the literature of entertainment favoured by her father’s generation seemed excessively frivolous. Still, cleaning up her library was not always simple. It was hard enough to separate herself from the multi-volume memoirs of Maréchal de Richelieu, the prince of eighteenth-century libertines whose amorous escapades had delighted so many readers. But she found it even more difficult to destroy Jean-Baptiste Louvet’s Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas, a licentious novel that had been all the rage ten years earlier. She wrote to Paolina:

I was determined to burn it, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had the key to the library in my hand for a month and a half, and I kept telling myself I should get the book out and burn it. Then a young man I met asked me if he could borrow my copy and I told him I didn’t have it—a plain lie. So today I finally got around to burning the book—to make up for the lie, of course.13

With Alvisetto in Vienna, it was harder for Lucia to run the estate at Margarethen—and