In 1787, the beautiful Lucia is married off to Alvise
Mocenigo, scion of one of the most powerful Venetian families. But
their life as a golden couple will be suddenly transformed when
Venice falls to Bonaparte. We witness Lucia''s painful series of
miscarriages and the pressure on her to produce an heir; her
impassioned affair with an Austrian officer; the glamour and strain
of her career as a hostess in Vienna; and her amazing firsthand
account of the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. With his brave and
articulate heroine, Andrea di Robilant has once again reached
across the centuries, and deep into his own past, to bring history
to rich and vivid life on the page.
關於作者：
Andrea Di Robilant was born in Italy and educated at Le Rosey
and Columbia University, where he specialized in international
affairs. His first book, A Venetian Affair, was published by
Knopf in 2003. He currently lives in Rome with his wife and two
children and works for the Italian newspaper La Stampa.
目錄：
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Maps
PROLOGUE
1 ROME
2 PALAZZO MOCENIGO
3 VIENNA
4 THE FALL OF VENICE
5 COLONEL PLUNKETT
6 VIENNESE CAROUSEL
7 THE EDUCATION OF ALVISETTO
8 LADY-IN-WAITING
9 AYEAR IN PARIS
1O BYRON''S LANDLADY
Epilogue
Sources
Select Bibliography
Index
內容試閱：
Rome
In the winter of 1786, Andrea Memmo, the Venetian ambassador to
the Papal States, was visiting Naples with his daughters Lucia and
Paolina during the Carnival season, when he received a dispatch
from Venice that he had been waiting for anxiously. Alvise
Mocenigo, the only son of one of the wealthiest and most powerful
families of the Venetian Republic, agreed to marry Memmo’s oldest
daughter, fifteen-year-old Lucia.
Memmo was an experienced diplomat and he knew this letter was
only the first step in what promised to be a long and difficult
negotiation. Alvise’s personal commitment was no guarantee that the
proposal would actually go through, for he was on very bad terms
with his father, Sebastiano, and did not get on much better with
the rest of his family, whose approval of the marriage contract was
indispensable. The Mocenigo elders were irked by Alvise’s marital
freelancing. Moreover, they did not favour the prospect of an
attachment to the declining house of the Memmos, which had been
among the founding families of the Venetian Republic back in the
eighth century, but whose finances and political power had been
waning for some generations. Still, Memmo felt Alvise’s letter was
a promising start, and he was confident in his judgement that the
twenty-six-year-old scion of Casa Mocenigo was a son-in-law worth
an honest struggle. “For some time now he has shown real promise,”
he had explained to his closest friends, “and as I flatter myself
of foreseeing the future, I know my daughter will be well taken
care of.”[1] The wisest course, he had concluded, was to cultivate
Alvise directly, encouraging him to correspond with Lucia over the
heads of the surly Mocenigos it was Memmo who had convinced Alvise
to go ahead and declare himself for Lucia. Meanwhile, he was going
to exercise the full panoply of his diplomatic skills in an effort
to bring Alvise’s family over to his side; marrying Lucia off
without the consent of the Mocenigos in a clandestine ceremony was
out of the question.
The small travelling household in Naples was already dizzy with
excitement when Memmo, still clutching Alvise’s letter, summoned
Lucia to his quarters. It was not clear to the rest of the family
what the mysterious dispatch contained exactly, but it was plain to
all that it must carry portentous news. Lucia entered her father’s
room anxious and short of breath. Thirteen-year-old Paolina
followed, her eyes already swelling with tears of anticipation,
while Madame Dupont, their beloved governess, stood discreetly in
the background. After revealing with appropriate solemnity the
content of the dispatch, Memmo read out a draft copy of the
marriage contract. He then handed to Lucia a separate letter in
which Alvise, who was marrying for the second time, introduced
himself to his young bride-to-be. He professed to remember Lucia
from earlier days in Venice, though in truth he could only have had
a vague recollection of her as a little girl. Lucia did not have
any memory at all of Alvise. Standing in her father’s study, she
must have struggled to conjure up an image towards which she could
direct the rush of confusing emotions.
Alvise’s declaration called for an immediate reply. Memmo
startled Lucia a second time by asking her to write to her future
husband at once, and without his help. He would read the letter
over, he assured her, but she had to set it down herself, letting
her heart speak out and never forgetting to use her head. Lucia
obediently retired to her room, and in her neat, elegant
handwriting, penned her first letter to Alvise, a letter so
poignant yet also so thoughtful and mature that it deserves to be
quoted in full:
"My most esteemed spouse, my good father having informed me of
your favourable disposition towards me, and having told me of your
worthy qualities, I will confess to you that in seeing myself so
honoured by your letter, and having been informed that you have
agreed to the marriage contract which my own father read to me at
length, I felt such agitation in my heart that for a brief moment I
even lost consciousness. And now that I am writing to you I am so
troubled, my father not wishing to suggest even one convenient word
to me, that I feel embarrassed to the point that I don’t quite know
how to express myself. I thank you very much for the kindness you
have shown me, for the good impression you have formed of me and
which I shall endeavour yet to improve by the proper exercise of my
duties. I know my good fortune, as well I should, and I will strive
to become worthy of it. I am certain that my father, and indeed my
loving uncles, in carrying forth this marriage, have had my
happiness in mind, which means that in you I shall find all that a
spouse may desire. I do not have the strength to say more, except
that I have no other will than that of my father’s, nor do I wish
to have one, just as in the future I will only wish to have
yours."[2]
It would have been pleasant to linger in Naples—the seaside
gaiety of this port-city so reminded the Memmos of Venice. They had
been feted with lunches and dinners in the homes of the Neapolitan
nobility, they had visited the porcelain factories at Capodimonte,
gone out to Pozzuoli to view the antiquities, made a tour of the
Catacombs and had walked through the magnificent stables of King
Ferdinand IV, the primitive but jocular monarch known as Re Nasone,
King Big Nose. On the night of the gran mascherata, “the great
masquerade,” the King had spotted Lucia and Paolina in the packed
crowd at Teatro San Carlo and had thrown handfuls of coloured
confetti at them, giggling and clapping his hands when the two
girls had thrown some back at him. Circumstances, however, had
suddenly changed, and Memmo was anxious to return to Rome to push
the deal on Lucia’s marriage forward before it lost momentum.
Lucia, too, longed to be back in Rome, at the Venetian embassy in
the Palazzo San Marco, among her things and in the company of her
friends. Each additional day spent in Naples made her feel a little
more unhinged. Her father had explained how complicated the
negotiations might prove, going so far as to admit to Lucia that
the deal was not yet sealed because of the opposition of the
Mocenigos. With trepidation, she now wrote to Alvise beseeching him
“to come to terms with your family before any official notice of
our wedding is published . . . I must confess that I would be
extremely mortified if your family did not acknowledge me as your
very obedient and affectionate spouse.”[3]
Memmo drove out to the royal palace at Caserta to take formal
leave of the King of Naples and his touchy Austrian wife, Queen
Maria Carolina, as soon as it was convenient to do so without
giving the impression of a rushed departure. Meanwhile he sent a
small portrait of Lucia to Alvise. He had wanted to have a new
miniature painted in Naples, but there was not enough time to
arrange a sitting. So he sent an old one, of Lucia as a little
girl, causing his daughter considerable discomfiture. “For heaven’s
sake, don’t trust that picture,” she pleaded with Alvise. “My
father had it painted years ago in order to take it with him to
Constantinople. You might find me changed for the worse when you
see me, and I wouldn’t want to suffer such disadvantage after a
possibly favourable judgement on your part.”[4]
Finally, on 11 March, Memmo, Lucia, Paolina and Madame Dupont
crammed their luggage in a rented carriage and headed north for
Rome, leaving the hazy silhouette of Vesuvius behind them. “There I
hope to receive your portrait, and there, I’m afraid, mine will be
painted,” Lucia wrote spiritedly to Alvise in a note she dashed off
before leaving.[5] She was already addressing him as her amatissimo
sposo, her beloved spouse.
Although not yet sixteen, Lucia was already a young woman of
uncommon poise. As the older of the two sisters she had taken on
quite effortlessly some of the duties and responsibilities that
would have been her mother’s as the wife of the ambassador. Five
years had gone by since Elisabetta Piovene Memmo had died in Venice
of a “gastro-rheumatic fever,” leaving her two young daughters, ten
and eight, stunned with grief. Elisabetta had been ill for some
time. She was a frail woman, who suffered nervous breakdowns and
often took to her bed. She drank vinegar every morning for fear of
putting on weight and developed what the doctors described as “a
bilious temperament.”[6] When she died, Memmo was in
Constantinople, serving as ambassador to the Porte. He sailed home
utterly distraught, a widower with two young daughters to
raise.
Lucia and Paolina’s education had been somewhat haphazard during
his absence. The girls were taught basic reading and writing
skills, they received piano and singing lessons, learnt a little
French, but their schooling was unimaginative and perfunctory.
Elisabetta became less reliable as her health declined, and the two
sisters fell increasingly under the authority of their strict
grandmother, Lucia Pisani Memmo, who lived upstairs from them at
Ca’ Memmo, the family palazzo on the Grand Canal, and who was more
interested in developing her granddaughters’ manners than their
intellect.
Ambassador Memmo, a learned and widely read man with a
considerable knowledge of history and philosophy and an abiding
passion for architecture, embraced the opportunity to educate his
daughters, in part because he had been an absent father. “My girls
are still a little rough around the edges,” he confided to his
friends, but under his care they would surely become “very
beautiful and very educated.”[7] He did not want to stay in Venice
after the death of his wife because it would only sharpen his
misery. So he welcomed his appointment to the ambassadorship in
Rome, where he moved with his daughters in 1783, at the age of
fifty-four.
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