Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [96]
Lucia enjoyed describing these episodes of family life to her sister, and despite her occasional reservations about the way Alvise engaged Alvisetto, a feeling of gratitude towards her husband showed through her letters, mixed with the hope that their marriage regain some strength and a sense of purpose.
Before the winter was over, Alvise, perhaps remembering how he had missed home when his father had sent him to Rome to be educated by priests, gave up the idea of sending Alvisetto to the boarding school in Pressburg he had been in touch with. He was looking for a suitable tutor, he announced to the rest of the family, who would live with them and take charge of their son’s education.
He chose Francesco Vérand, a young man of about thirty, “very sweet, with excellent manners.” He had good references, spoke French and German well, and drew very beautifully. Everyone liked him from the start, and Lucia was glad to hand over to such a charming young man a responsibility she had held out of necessity. “Oh do say a prayer or two, my dear sister, so that Alvisetto’s first lessons are held under divine auspices.”26
On his first day Vérand “set about earning his pupil’s trust with the sweetest manners.”27 The following morning he left the house at nine o’clock next morning, telling Teresa he was going to the post office and would be back shortly. At midday he still had not returned. Lucia brought the issue to Alvise’s attention. He reassured her: it was his second day at work and he probably needed a little more time to move his things to the house. Lucia went out for a ride in the carriage and returned at three in the afternoon. Vérand was not at home. Alvise, Lucia and Alvisetto had a plate set for him at the table and went ahead with their dinner. Still no sign of Vérand. Later, they looked through his things, and found a beautiful drawing of a rose he had made for Alvisetto.
The next day, they got in touch with his previous employer, a French lady, a certain Madame Cavanac, but she had not heard from him either. It occurred to Lucia that perhaps Vérand was unhappy with his bed or his mattress and might have gone back to his previous lodgings. So they called on a Madame Lamoine, from whom Vérand had been renting a room while in the employ of Madame Cavanac, but there was no sign of him there either. Alvisetto came up with his own explanation: perhaps Vérand’s mother had been ill and, on his way to the post office, he received news that she was suddenly worse or perhaps had died and he was lying in the grass somewhere, stunned by grief.
Alvise and Lucia heard about a carriage crash and they contacted the police. Luckily, Vérand’s name was not on the list of casualties, but the police knew who he was because he had recently reported the theft of his purse. Alvise and Lucia made a more thorough search for clues among his things, and found a crumpled letter in which Vérand confessed to being overwhelmed by debt. Alvise made enquiries but no menacing creditors turned up, only a former landlady to whom he owed 400 florins from a time when he had been ill for six weeks—“a perfectly acceptable cause for contracting a debt,” Alvise remarked to Lucia. But in his letter, Vérand added woefully that he would rather “suffer a punishment” than carry the weight of his debt.
Alvise’s investigation revealed that the young man had no bad habits. He neither drank nor gambled