“I tried to persuade him to come in for something to eat, but he declined my invitation—he had work to do at the questura. I made myself a simple lunch of spaghetti tossed in butter and Parmesan and settled down at the kitchen table with Napoléon’s Sisters: Caroline, Pauline, and Elisa, by Maria Pellegrini, the book I’d borrowed from Vittorio Castellani’s office. I read first the chapters on Elisa’s period in Lucca. I already knew a reasonable amount about those years from my biographies of Paga...nini, but this time I was getting the story from Elisa’s perspective. A strong-willed, ambitious woman, Elisa had formidable reserves of energy, which had barely been tapped before her arrival in Tuscany. She had previously maintained a salon in Paris, at which writers like Chateaubriand and Louis de Fontanes had read from their works while their hostess reclined on a sofa, fanning herself coquettishly, but apart from that she had done very little with her life except marry Felice Baciocchi—and that was hardly a great achievement.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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