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　　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 affai***ith 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.

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

　　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.

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　　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 lette***as

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 bette***ith

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 generati***. Still, Memmo felt Alvise’s lette***as

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 daughte***ill 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 c***ent 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 emoti***.

　　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 f***etting 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 c***ciousness. 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 othe***ill 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

negotiati*** 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

ou***edding 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 c***iderable 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

C***tantinople. 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 resp***ibilities 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

C***tantinople, serving as ambassador to the Porte. He sailed home

utterly distraught, a widowe***ith 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 less***, 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 C***, and who was more

interested in developing her granddaughters’ manners than their

intellect.

　　Ambassador Memmo, a learned and widely read man with a

c***iderable 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.

　　Life in ...

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媒体评论

　　“Di Robilant paints a vivacious picture of the Napoleonic

age.” —

The New Yorker

“What an amazing life, what a great

story! And it's so deftly told by Lucia's

great-great-great-great-grandson, who rummaged through his family's

papers and found genuine treasure.” —

The Washington Post Book

World

“Fascinating. . . . As with many engaging tales, this one

proved elusive and complex-perfect fodder for a historian of di

Robilant's imaginative bent.” —

W Magazine

“A rare treat. . .

. Filled with the pageantry of the aristocracy and the political

intrigue of countries at war. . . . History buffs should add this

volume to their list of must-reads.” —

The Free Lance-Star

(Newark)“

Lucia in the Age of Napoleon

is less a biography

than a ghost story; unsettling, exciting, almost unbelievable in

its immediacy. Lucia will become as vital a part of Venetian

history as Casanova, or Byron himself, or any of the Mocenigo doges

who lie entombed in San Giovani e Paulo, ‘each face finer &

more beautiful than the other’, as Effie Ruskin put it, ‘even in

old age’.” —Frances Wilson,

Sunday Telegraph

“Lucia's life is

an inspired choice for a parable of the end of the Venetian

republic … Her letters to her [sister Paolina] paint Napoleon's

Europe in all its grand and bloody colours … Andrea Di Robilant's

strengths are in his portraits of Venetians during their city's

worst times. He's not afraid to criticise Venice for the feckless

policy of unarmed neutrality, the tepid resistance and the

gibbering compliance that left her vulnerable to the steel-trap

war-machines of France and Austria. Venice's mistake, like Lucia's,

was to believe that she was beloved. For Napoleon, Venice was a

trinket. As he passed through, he ransacked her art and archives

with a sharp eye and a cool heart. To see that process personified

in a flawed and fascinating woman makes for a deeply engaging

read.” —

Independent on Sunday

“Well-composed . . . the

author’s meticulous attention to personal detail yields compelling

historical character sketches.” —

Kirkus Reviews

书籍介绍

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 affai***ith 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.