A Venetian Affair: A true story of impossible love in the eighteenth century
A Venetian Affair: A true story of impossible love in the eighteenth century
Andrea di Robilant
The true story of forbidden love in eighteenth-century Venice between an Italian noble and the brilliant, illegitimate daughter of an English baronet.In 1754 Andrea Memmo, the dashing and gifted scion of a distinguished catholic family, fell in love with illegitimate English beauty, Giustiniana Wynne. This match went against every convention of their day; it was an 'impossible love'.The lovers chased each other through peeling palazzos, ballrooms, salons, theatres and gambling dens, rubbing shoulders with legendary figures such as Canaletto and their friend, Casanova. Increasingly desperate, they decided Giustiniana should marry to conceal their relationship. A summer passed in flirting with the English Consul, Joseph Smith, but he soon saw through the deception and the affair became public.The consequences were disastrous. Casanova was imprisoned for his 'pernicious' influence. Disgraced, Giustiniana left for Paris, where she launched herself into society in the hunt for a new husband. Her love for Memmo had lingering consequences that were to break this match, and she left again for London, hoping to build a new life, but a different fate lay in store…Andrea di Robilant is Andrea Memmo’s great great great grandson. The idea to write A Venetian Affair was planted when his father discovered Andrea's letters to Giustiniana mouldering in the attic of the family's crumbling Venetian palazzo. His father's violent murder inspired di Robilant to fulfil his father's dream to write about the lovers, and this fascinating, romantic tale is the result of di Robilant’s dedication and passion.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
A Venetian Affair
A True Story of Impossible Love
in the Eighteenth Century
ANDREA DI ROBILANT
Dedication (#ulink_deeac146-3740-525e-b388-df9d5dd1da2a)
In memory of my father,Alvise di Robilant
Contents
Cover (#u92b68733-a954-5a33-9ba7-8ecc4cb14374)
Title Page (#u4eb0ed66-d12d-5478-9ccb-9ac949838e72)
Dedication (#uecf2ccc9-d6a7-5224-a204-8591be04fc82)
Prologue (#u2a14ddc5-f0cd-558b-84b1-30df949a39fb)
Chapter One (#u9b72496a-cd20-597f-960b-0c4080792017)
Chapter Two (#u75eb9bc0-b3f5-5857-8603-d02968fef9c5)
Chapter Three (#u449625b4-5161-5c6e-a528-87ea43095726)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Profile of Andrea di Robilant (#litres_trial_promo)
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)
Q and A (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
A Critical Eye (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#litres_trial_promo)
Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_8a907118-5aed-5234-a1ef-40641f9b993f)
Some years ago, my father came home with a carton of old letters that time and humidity had compacted into wads of barely legible paper. He announced that he had found them in the attic of the old family palazzo on the Grand Canal, where he had lived as a boy in the twenties. Many times, my father had enthralled my brothers and me with stories from his enchanted childhood—there had been gondola rides and children’s tea parties and picnics at the Lido, and in the background the grown-ups always seemed to be drinking champagne and giving fancy-dress balls. Equally romantic to us, though much more melancholy, was his account of how my grandparents’ lavish and extravagant lifestyle had begun fraying at the edges. By the early thirties, art dealers were dropping by more and more frequently. Large empty patches appeared on the walls. Pieces of antique furniture were carried out of the house. Even the worn banners and rusty swords our fierce ancestors had wrested from the hated Turks were sold at auction. Eventually, my spendthrift grandfather sold off the palace floor by floor, severing the family ties to Venice and leaving my father so bereft that he yearned for his Venetian heritage for the rest of his life. He never lived in Venice again, but even as an older man he continued to make nostalgic pilgrimages to the places of his childhood and especially to that grand old house, which had long ceased to belong to us, but where the family still kept a few old boxes and crates.
The di Robilant family is actually of Piedmontese origin. The Venetian connection was established at the end of the nineteenth century when Edmondo di Robilant, my very tall and rather austere great-grandfather from Turin, married my great-grandmother Valentina Mocenigo, a formidable Venetian grande dame with beautiful black eyes and a very sharp tongue. The Mocenigos were one of the old ruling families of Venice—“they gave seven doges to the Republic” my father never tired of repeating to us children. Of course, the glorious days of the Venetian Republic were long gone when my great-grandparents married, but the last Mocenigos still had palaces and money and beautiful paintings. So the impecunious di Robilants moved to Venice after World War I and fairly quickly ran through what remained of the Mocenigo fortune.
My father, having grown up in the fading grandeur of Palazzo Mocenigo, came to revere his Venetian ancestry more than the Piedmontese. To him the box of letters was a small treasure he had miraculously retrieved from his Venetian past. And I remember well the look of cheerful anticipation he had on his face when he arrived at our house in Tuscany and placed it on the dining room table for all the family to see.
The letters were badly frayed and had wax marks and purplish traces of wine on them. They looked intriguing. They were not the usual household inventories that occasionally surfaced, like timeworn family flotsam, in some forgotten recess of the palazzo in Venice. We pried them open one by one and soon realized they were intimate love letters that dated back to the 1750s. Some pages were covered with mysterious hieroglyphs that added mystery to my father’s discovery. We spent a rainy weekend cracking the strange cipher and trying to make some sense of the first fragments we were able to read. I remember we were wary of delving into secrets buried so long ago. Yet we labored on because the spell was irresistible.
At the end of that long weekend I went back to Rome, where I was then working as a journalist, while my father took on the task of deciphering and transcribing the cache of one hundred or so letters in his possession. What eventually emerged from his painstaking labor was the remarkable love story between our ancestor Andrea Memmo, scion of one of the oldest Venetian families, and Giustiniana Wynne, a bright and beautiful Anglo-Venetian of illegitimate birth. The letters revealed a deep romantic passion that was at odds with the gallant, lighthearted lovemaking one often thinks of as typical of the eighteenth century. It was also, very clearly, a clandestine relationship: the curious-looking dots and circles and tiny geometric figures scribbled across the pages were a graphic testimony to the fear the two lovers must have felt lest their letters fall into the wrong hands.
When my father began to dig around Andrea and Giustiniana’s story, he soon found traces of their romance in the public archives in Venice, Padua, and even Paris and London. It turned out that students of eighteenth-century Venice had first become acquainted with the relationship through the writings of Giacomo Casanova, who had been a close friend of both Andrea and Giustiniana. In the first years of the last century Gustav Gugitz, the great Casanova scholar, identified the Mademoiselle XCV who figures prominently in Casanova’s memoirs as Giustiniana.
(#litres_trial_promo) Then, in the twenties, Bruno Brunelli, a Venetian historian, found two small volumes of handwritten copies of letters from Giustiniana to Andrea in the archives in Padua. He wrote a book based on those letters and lamented the fact that he had not found Andrea’s letters as well. He consoled himself with the notion that they could not possibly have been “as absorbing as Giustiniana’s.” Judging from her correspondence, he said, it did not appear that Andrea “had the temperament of a great lover.”
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Other Casanova specialists were drawn to Andrea and Giustiniana. Many combed old bookshops and antique stores hoping to find Andrea’s letters, but in vain. The stash my father had stumbled upon as he rummaged in the attic of Palazzo Mocenigo proved to be the missing part of the story—the other voice. Clearly these letters had at some point been returned to Andrea by Giustiniana and preserved by the family; but they were by no means all of Andrea’s letters. Many had been burnt, and many more had probably been left to rot and then thrown away. But those we had were rich enough to provide a far more complete picture of the love story—and to disprove Brunelli’s contention about Andrea’s temperament as a lover.
Once my father finished transcribing the letters, he tried to publish them. Time went by, and I wondered whether he would ever complete his project. My father did not have the natural inclination to put together a book: his real talent was in telling a good story. Over the years I heard him talk about Andrea and Giustiniana again and again as he polished their romance into a perfect conversation piece. How vividly he comes back to me now, glass of red wine in hand, charming dinner guests with yet another elegant account of his Venetian love story. He revered Andrea, who went on to become one of the last in a long line of Venetian statesmen. And, lady’s man that he was, he adored Giustiniana—for her looks, her spirit, and her lively intelligence. My father rooted for them with genuine affection even as he explained to his listeners, who were perhaps not sufficiently well versed in Venetian laws and customs, that it had been “un amore impossibile”—an impossible love. It was unthinkable in those days for a prominent member of the ruling elite such as Andrea to marry a girl with Giustiniana’s murky lineage. She had been born out of wedlock, her mother’s background was checkered at best, and her father was an obscure English baronet and a Protestant to boot. For this reason, my father would explain, they saw each other in secret and often wrote to each other using their strange alphabet. Whereupon he would bring his audience to a peak of excitement by scribbling a few words in the private code of Andrea and Giustiniana.
In the end the treasured letters became, above all else, an excuse for my father to ramble on about his heroes and the city he loved so much. And they probably would have remained just that if events had not taken a sad and completely unexpected turn. In January 1997 an intruder entered my father’s apartment in Florence and bludgeoned him to death. It was a senseless, incomprehensible act—a violent end for a gentle, life-loving man. After the funeral my brothers and I stayed in Florence for a week in the hope of being of some assistance to the investigation. During those difficult days the story of Andrea and Giustiniana could not have been further from my mind—until it suddenly appeared in the local newspapers. The carabinieri had found my father’s laptop computer open on his worktable, so they had seized it as evidence, together with the floppy disks on which he had transcribed the letters. They went on to leak information about Andrea and Giustiniana to the press.
(#litres_trial_promo) In an even more bizarre twist, the carabinieri sent a few agents up to Venice to check into possible leads.
The murder investigation led nowhere, and two years later it was abandoned. My father’s belongings, including Andrea’s original letters, the discs with the transcriptions, and the notes on the cipher, were returned to us. By that time I had moved to Washington as the new correspondent for the Italian daily La Stampa. But I made a promise to myself that I would do my best to carry out my father’s original plan to publish the letters in one form or another once my assignment in the United States was over. My resolve was further strengthened when I found another trove of letters in a library just a short distance away from my new posting as foreign correspondent.
James Rives Childs was an American diplomat and scholar who developed a minor passion for Giustiniana as a result of his studies on Casanova. In the early fifties he was in Venice looking for the unexpected nugget that might enrich his collection of Casanoviana. He came upon a small volume of letters from Giustiniana to Andrea, which added another fascinating chapter to their love story. He never got around to publishing them, although a few excerpts appeared in his newsletter, Casanova Gleanings. Ambassador Childs died in 1988, having bequeathed his collection—including Giustiniana’s letters—to his alma mater, Randolph Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia, a mere two hours away from Washington, D.C. That part of Virginia was already very familiar to me. Childs—the coincidence would have delighted my father—came from Lynchburg, where my mother had grown up (she attended Randolph Macon Women’s College). So for me the quest that had begun several years earlier with the letters my father had found in the attic of his childhood home in Venice ended, rather eerily, a few miles up the road from my mother’s birthplace in America.
The early 1750s—the period when Andrea and Giustiniana first met—was a particularly poignant moment in Venice’s long twilight. The thousand-year-old Republic was less than five decades away from its swift collapse before Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading army. Signs of decline had been evident for a long time, and no reasonable Venetian believed the Serenissima, as the Republic had been known for centuries, could reclaim the place it had once occupied among the powerful nations of the world. Yet Venice did not seem like a civilization that was drawing its last breath. On the contrary, it was living a vibrant, even self-confident old age. The economy was growing. The streets were busy, and the stores were filled with spices, jewelry, luxurious fabrics, and household goods. On the mainland, agriculture and stock farming underwent revolutionary changes, and wealthy Venetians built grand villas on their country estates. The population was rising, and Venice, with its 140,000 inhabitants, was still one of the most populous cities in Europe. An experienced and generally conservative government composed of a maze of interlocking councils and commissions (whose members derived from the most powerful families) ran the city in a manner that had altered little for centuries. Venice’s ruling class remained an exclusive caste, whose symbol was the Golden Book—the official record of the Venetian patriciate. Its obstinate refusal to let new blood into its ranks, coupled with a deep-seated resistance to change after such a long and glorious history, was weakening its hand. But, as one historian has observed, “the future of this state founded on an intelligent form of paternalism still seemed assured.”
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The middle years of the eighteenth century also saw an extraordinary flowering of the arts that hardly fits the image of a dying civilization. In fact, it turned out to be the last, glorious burst of Venice’s creative genius, and what a feast it was—Tiepolo at work on his celestial frescoes at Ca’ Rezzonico, Goldoni writing his greatest comedies, Galuppi filling the air with his joyful music. There had never been more amusements and distractions in Venice. One pictures the endless Carnival, the extravagant balls, and the theaters fairly bursting with boisterous spectators. The stage was flourishing: there were seven major theaters operating in the 1750s and they were filled with rowdy crowds every night. The most popular meeting place of all, however, was the Ridotto, the public gambling house that was famous across Europe. Venetians were in the grip of a massive gambling addiction, and they were especially hooked on faro, a card game similar to baccarat (“faro” stood for “pharaoh,” and was the king card). There were several gambling rooms at the Ridotto, with as many as eighty playing tables in all. They opened up on a long, candlelit hall—the sala lunga—where an eclectic crowd of masked men and women mingled and gossiped about who was piling up sequins that night and who was piling up debt.
The mask, perhaps more than anything else, was the symbol of those carefree days. It had become, by then, an integral part of the Venetian attire, like wigs and fans and beauty spots. Masks came in two kinds: the more casual black or white moreta, that covered only the eyes, and the “cloaked” mask, or bautta, which hid the entire head down to the shoulders. Venetians were allowed to wear masks in public from October until Lent, with the exception of the novena—the nine-day period before Christmas—and everyone wore one, from the doge down to the women selling vegetables at the market. The custom added a little mystery and intrigue to everyday life.
The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) between the major European powers would soon come to darken spirits and change the atmosphere in the city. The Venetian Republic, neutral throughout this long conflict, which put an end to French expansionism and marked the rise of Great Britain as the dominant power, was going to feel adrift and ultimately lost after the war. But until then there prevailed a sense that things would go on unchanged as they had for centuries and that life should therefore be enjoyed to the fullest.
In those happier years the house of Consul Joseph Smith, a rich English merchant turned art collector, was one of the busiest and most interesting places on the Venetian scene—a meeting point of fashionable artists, intellectuals, and foreign travelers. It was in Smith’s art-filled drawing room at Palazzo Balbi, on the Grand Canal, that Andrea met Giustiniana sometime in late 1753. He was twenty-four; she was not yet seventeen. Andrea was tall and vigorous—handsome in a Venetian sort of way, with the long, aquiline nose that was typical of many patrician profiles. His sharp mind was tuned to the new ideas of the Enlightenment, and he was possessed of the natural self-confidence that came with his class—assured as he was of his place in the Venetian oligarchy. His elders already looked upon him as one of the brightest prospects of his generation. And indeed he must have seemed quite the dashing young man to a girl eight years his junior—wise beyond his age and so much at ease in Consul Smith’s rather intimidating salon. But Giustiniana too stood out in those assemblies. Behind that innocent, awestruck gaze was a lovely girl brimming with life. She was bright, alert, and possessed of a quick sense of humor. Andrea was instantly taken with her. She was so different from the other young women of his set—familiar, in a way, for after all she was a Venetian born and raised, yet at the same time very distinctive, even a little exotic, not only on account of her English blood but also because of her unique character.
Andrea and Giustiniana met again and again at Consul Smith’s. The physical attraction between them was plain to see: soon they could not bear to be apart. But something deeper was going on, too, more magical and mysterious: it was the blending of two souls that were very different and nevertheless yearned for each other. “My passion for him swallowed everything else in my life,”
(#litres_trial_promo) Giustiniana recalled many years later. Andrea too was overwhelmed by his feelings in a way he had never been before.
Alas, the earliest part of their love story has remained blurred. If they wrote letters to each other during that time—as is probable—those letters have never surfaced. But in the later correspondence there are echoes of their first enchanted days together, as they chased each other in the rooms of Palazzo Balbi searching for a darkened corner where they could hold each other and kiss in the full rapture of new love.
From the very beginning the love story of Andrea and Giustiniana bore a note of defiance toward the outside world. Carried along by the sheer power of their feelings, they pursued a relationship in the face of social conventions that were clearly stacked against them. It is true that by the mid–eighteenth century, as pre-Romantic stirrings spread through Venetian society, young men and women who loved each other were beginning to challenge the rigid customs of the aging Republic. The number of clandestine marriages, secretly sanctioned by the Church, saw a considerable increase in those years. But the costs of breaking the rules were still very high. As one historian has put it, “Any patrician who attempted a secret marriage put himself quite inevitably in direct conflict with his family and institutions. By bringing dishonor on himself he renounced any political career and lost the privilege of seeing his own children recognized as members of the patriciate. He might lose all economic assistance from the family and be disinherited.”
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The clandestine marriages that did take place mostly involved impoverished patricians or members of the lesser nobility, who did not have much to lose by defying their elders. To Andrea, with his family history, his education, his strong sense of duty toward the Republic, the idea of secretly marrying Giustiniana seemed completely irrational. Apart from the shame it would have brought on his family, it was hard to see how the marriage would have survived from a practical point of view. Where would they have lived? What would they have lived on? Despite her youth and her intense emotions, even Giustiniana was realistic enough to see that if they fought the time-honored customs of the Republic they would be crushed.
A few months into their affair, Giustiniana’s mother stepped in. Mrs. Anna had one pressing task, which was to find a suitable husband for her eldest daughter. This meant she had to keep Giustiniana at a safe distance from hot-blooded young Venetian patricians—who might try to seduce her for the sake of intrigue and entertainment but would never marry her—while she looked out for a sensible if less glamorous match. She could not allow Giustiniana to wreck her plans with a relationship that in her eyes had no future and would only bring dishonor upon the family. So in the winter of 1754 she told Andrea never to call on Giustiniana at their house again and forbade the two lovers from seeing each other.
Mrs. Anna’s ban seemed to spell the end of their forbidden love. But their timeworn letters have continued to surface over the years—in the archives in Padua, in the attic at Palazzo Mocenigo, at Randolph Macon College—to reveal that in fact this was only the beginning of a remarkable love story.
CHAPTER One (#ulink_5ee4c0e2-f78a-5cb7-9669-bedff8f3800b)
Early in the evening Andrea caught up with Giustiniana at the theater. She was radiant in her brocaded evening cape, and the anxious way she was looking around for him made her seem lovelier than ever. She smiled as she saw him, and they exchanged a few signals from a safe distance, apparently without raising Mrs. Anna’s suspicions. After the play, Andrea followed mother and daughter to the Ridotto, keeping close to the walls of the narrow streets and casting nervous glances ahead. In the gambling halls, among the late-night crowd of masked men and women hovering around the faro tables, he had a much harder time avoiding Mrs. Anna as she flitted in and out of the shadows in the candlelit rooms. He was terrified she might suddenly come upon him and make a horrible scene. Unnerved by all the difficulties, he finally gave up and went home without having had his cherished moment alone with Giustiniana.
That night he hardly slept, shifting restlessly in his bed, wondering if he had abandoned the Ridotto too abruptly and not made it sufficiently clear to Giustiniana why he was leaving the scene. The next morning he rose early and wrote to her at once:
My beloved,
I am very anxious to know whether your mother noticed anything last night—any act of imprudence on my part—and if you yourself were satisfied or had reason to be cross. Everything is so uncertain. At the theater things didn’t go badly, but at the Ridotto—I don’t know how it all ended at the Ridotto. As long as I was in your mother’s range I tried to conceal myself—as you probably saw. And rest assured that when I did not show myself to you it was because Mrs. Anna was looking in my direction. Once you left the rooms I no longer saw our tyrant and imagined we had lost her for good—your own gestures seemed to suggest as much…. But I asked around and was told she was still there…. I waited a while to see for myself, and sure enough there she was again. So I resolved to put myself out of her sight.
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Mrs. Anna clearly hoped that, thanks to her intervention, the passion so perilously ignited in the house of Consul Smith would subside before any irreparable damage was done to her daughter. But she had wrenched them apart just as they were falling deeply in love. Their need to be together was stronger than any obstacle she could put in their way; the thrill of their forbidden relationship only drew them closer. As Andrea pointed out to Giustiniana, her mother’s relentless watch and the atmosphere of general disapproval she helped to foster around them made their desire to be together “even more obstinate.” In fact, there had been no separation to speak of in the wake of Mrs. Anna’s pronouncement. The two lovers continued to look for each other ever more frantically, playing a highly charged game of hide-and-seek in the streets of Venice, at the theater, among the crowd at the Ridotto.
It is easy to see Mrs. Anna in the role of the insensitive and overly censorious mother—a tyrant, as the two lovers called her. But she had good reason to be firm. She was a woman of experience who had worked hard to gain respectability, and she well understood the intricate workings of Venetian society, in which the interests of the ruling families were supreme. She was also very much aware of Andrea’s special place in that society—and what a formidable opponent he was in her struggle to protect her daughter.
The Memmos were among the founding fathers of Venice in the eighth century—historians have even traced the lineage of Andrea’s family as far back as the gens Memmia of Roman times. There was a Memmo doge as early as the year 979, and over the next eight centuries the family contributed a steady flow of statesmen and high-ranking public servants to the Republic. By Andrea’s day they were still very influential in Venetian politics—an elite within the elite, at a time when many other patrician families living in the city had become politically irrelevant.
(#ulink_c5e62026-0e7c-5b32-b5c7-778fee5ef8af) But they were not among the richest families; by the 1750s, their income had dwindled to about 6,000 ducats a year, and they would have needed at least double that amount to face comfortably the expenditures required of a family of such elevated rank (the wealthiest families had incomes ten times as large). They earned barely enough from their estates on the mainland to live with the necessary decorum at Ca’ Memmo, the large family palazzo at the western end of the Grand Canal.
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Andrea’s father, Pietro Memmo, was a gentle, virtuous man long weakened by ill health. His mother, Lucia Pisani, came from a wealthy family that had given the Republic its greatest and most popular admiral—the fierce Vettor Pisani, who had saved Venice from the Genoese in the fourteenth century. Pietro was always a rather remote figure—he and Andrea could find little to say to each other—and Lucia was not especially warm with her children either; her stiff manner was fairly common among the more old-fashioned patrician ladies of that time. Nevertheless, she was by far the more forceful of the two parents, and Andrea felt closer to her than he did to his father. The one person in the family he truly adored was Marina, his older sister by six years: a sensitive, kind-hearted young woman whom he could always confide in. Andrea had two brothers: Bernardo, who was one year younger than him, and Lorenzo, who was four years younger. The three boys, being fairly close in age, spent much of their time together when they were growing up. There was also a younger sister, Contarina.
The family patriarch was Andrea Memmo, Andrea’s venerable uncle, known for his courage and strength of character; he had been imprisoned and tortured by the Turks while he was ambassador to Constantinople in 1713. The senior Andrea served the Republic with great distinction and ended his political career as procuratore di San Marco, the second most prestigious position in government after the supreme office of doge. He went on to become a respected elder statesman whom his peers considered “possibly the greatest expert in Venetian matters.”
(#litres_trial_promo) He died at the age of eighty-six in 1754—the same year Andrea and Giustiniana’s secret love affair began.
Andrea’s uncle ruled over the family with a steady hand for decades, overseeing everything from political alliances to business decisions, from household expenses to the education of the younger Memmos. During his long stewardship, Ca’ Memmo was known for its strong attachment to tradition. But it was also considered a progressive house where writers, artists, and composers were always welcome. The new ideas from Paris, especially the political writings of Montesquieu (Venetians had a predilection for anything involved with the machinery of government), were discussed spiritedly at the dinner table.
(#ulink_2711b777-5f2d-57ba-91fb-47163b9dcaa6) Their friend Goldoni, the great playwright, was a frequent lunch guest. So was the German composer Johann Adolph Hasse, the “divine Saxon” who had married the diva Faustina Bordoni and ran the music conservatory at the Incurabili, one of the hospices where young orphans were trained as musicians and singers.
Very early on, Andrea senior had chosen his favorite nephew and namesake as his successor. Over the years he instilled in him a sense of duty toward family and nation that would remain with him all his life. And he prepared him for a career in the service of “our wise Venetian Republic, which has seen the largest and wealthiest kingdoms fall over the past ten centuries and more, and yet has managed to stand firm amid everyone else’s misfortune.”
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Andrea received his first formal education from Eugenio Mecenati, a Carmelite monk who worked as preceptor in several patrician families. But his mind wasn’t really turned on until he met Carlo Lodoli, a fiery and charismatic Franciscan monk. During the 1740s Lodoli established himself as Venice’s controversial resident philosopher. He was a brilliant scholar and teacher, equally at ease talking to his students about astronomy, philosophy, or economics. Lodoli’s great passion was architecture, a field in which he applied the principles of utilitarianism to develop his own visionary theories about function and form. Wrapped in his coarse habit, the monk had a rugged, unkempt look about him that could be quite intimidating: “The red spots on his face, his wild hair, his unshorn beard, and those eyes like burning coals—he very nearly scared off the weaker spirits,”
(#litres_trial_promo) Andrea wrote many years later. Lodoli’s disciples came from the more enlightened families in Venice. He never wrote books but kept students under his spell through the force of his personality and the probing power of his Socratic “conversations.” His mission, as he saw it, was to open the mind of young patricians. The Venetian authorities were wary of the strong influence the monk had on his disciples. But Lodoli was not interested in subverting the established political order, as his conservative critics suggested: he wanted to improve it—by improving the men who would soon be called upon to serve the Republic.
Andrea remained devoted to Lodoli all his life, but the moral rigor of the Franciscan, his ascetic lifestyle, could be a little hard going. It is easy to see why Andrea’s sensual side was somewhat starved in his company, and why he spent more and more of his time in the splendid house-museum of Consul Smith on the Grand Canal, just a short walk down the street from Ca’ Memmo. He spent hours studying the vast collection of paintings and sculptures the consul had assembled over the previous thirty years and happily buried himself in the library—an exceptional treasure trove of classics and moderns in beautifully bound volumes.
Smith had arrived in Venice in the early years of the century, when the city still attracted a good number of foreign merchants and businessmen. He had gone to work for the firm of his fellow Englishman Thomas Williams and had been successful enough to take over the company when Williams retired a few years later and returned to England. Smith went on to build a considerable fortune trading in the East, buying goods from Venetian merchants and selling them on the British market. In 1717 he married Catherine Tofts, a popular singer who had made a name for herself in the London theaters before coming to Venice. Wealthy and well connected, Catherine was certainly the major drawing card of the Smith ménage in the early years of their marriage. But over time she gradually withdrew from society, perhaps never recovering from the loss of their son, John, who died in 1727 at the age of six.
As his business flourished, Smith purchased Palazzo Balbi, which he had rented ever since his arrival in Venice, and commissioned the architect Antonio Visentini, a friend and protégé, to renovate the façade. After some plotting within the English community in Venice and a great deal of pleading with the government in London, he eventually obtained the consular title in 1740. Much to his chagrin, he never became the British Resident (ambassador).
Consul Smith would probably have long faded into history had he not branched out into art and become one of the greatest dealers of his time. He made a habit of visiting artists, many of whom had studios a short walk away from his home. Smith had a good eye, and he delighted in friendly haggling. His collection included beautiful allegorical paintings from Sebastiano Ricci and Giovan Battista Tiepolo, grand vistas by Francesco Guardi, intimate scenes of Venetian life by Pietro Longhi, and several exquisite portraits by Rosalba Carriera. But his special admiration was reserved for Canaletto’s clean and detailed views of the city, and over the years he developed a close professional relationship with the great Venetian vedutista.
Smith combined the eye of an art lover with the mind of a merchant. He realized he was living at the heart of an extraordinary artistic flowering and was in a unique position to turn his patronage into a profitable business. He commissioned works from his favorite artists and sold them to wealthy English aristocrats just as the fashion of collecting art was spreading. (He was so successful in marketing his beloved Canaletto that the artist eventually moved to London to paint views of the Thames for his growing clientèle.) In the process, Smith built up his own collection, enriching it with important paintings by old masters. Works by Bellini, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Rubens adorned the walls of his palazzo. Books, perhaps even more than paintings, were his true passion. He purchased valuable editions of the great classics as well as original manuscripts and drawings, and he participated directly in the publishing boom that was taking place in Venice. Smith invested in Giovan Battista Pasquali’s printing shop and bookstore, and together they published the works of Locke, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot and his fellow Encyclopédistes (the first volumes of the revolutionary Encyclopédie appeared in 1751). Pasquali’s shop soon became a favorite gathering place for the growing Venetian book crowd. “After having enjoyed the fresh air and shared the pleasures of Saint Mark’s Square,” wrote the French traveler Pierre Jean Grosley, “we would go to Pasquali’s shop or to some other bookseller. These shops serve as the usual meeting point for foreigners and noblemen. Conversations are often seasoned with that Venetian salt which borrows a great deal from Greek atticism and French gaiety without being either.”
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Smith’s drawing room was, in a way, an extension of Pasquali’s shop in more elegant surroundings. It was the center of the small English community (and it somehow never lost its touch of English quaintness). But more important, it was a place where artists, intellectuals, and Venetian patricians could congregate in an atmosphere of enlightened conviviality. Carlo Goldoni dedicated one of his plays—Il filosofo inglese—to Smith. In his flattering introduction, he wrote: “All those who enter your house find the most perfect union of all the sciences and all the arts. You are not a lover who merely gazes with admiration but a true connoisseur who is keen to share the meaning and beauty of the art around him. Your good taste, your perfect knowledge have inspired you to choose the most beautiful things, and the courage of your generous spirit has moved you to purchase them.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Andrea spent many happy days at Palazzo Balbi. It was in the consul’s library that he learned his Vitruvius, studied Palladian drawings, and pored over the latest volume of the Encyclopédie (he got into the habit of copying out long passages to better absorb the spirit of French Enlightenment). Smith, his only child having died so many years earlier, developed a genuine affection for Andrea and as he grew older came to depend on him as a confidant and assistant. By 1750 he was already in his seventies. He had lost his sure touch in business transactions, and his weakened finances would only get worse. Having no heir and less and less money, he conjured up the deal of his lifetime—an ambitious plan to sell his huge art collection and his library to the British Crown.
(#litres_trial_promo) He enlisted Andrea to help him catalogue all his paintings and books.
Under the influence of Goldoni, Andrea also developed a strong interest in the theater. During the season, which ran from October through May, he went to the theater practically every night. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the raucous debate that was raging between conservative and progressive critics. Though Goldoni was twenty years older than Andrea, he enjoyed the young man’s company, regarding him not just as a promising member of the ruling class but also as a possible ally in his crusade in favor of plays that were closer to the everyday life of Venetians. In 1750 he dedicated his Momolo cortesan to Andrea, telling him he hoped that together they would “rid the stage of the obscene and ill-conceived plays”
(#litres_trial_promo) produced by his conservative rivals. With Goldoni’s encouragement, Andrea started to work in earnest on the idea of opening a new theater entirely dedicated to French plays, from Molière’s classics to the light comedies of Marivaux. The goal, he said, was “to improve our own theater … and lift the common spirit in an honest way.”
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While Andrea waited patiently for his turn to serve as a junior official in the Venetian government, his days were filled with his work for Smith, his new theater project, and the increasing load of family responsibilities being thrust upon his shoulders by his aging uncle. There was still plenty of time for evening strolls and gallantries in Campo Santo Stefano and Piazza San Marco, late-night discussions in the coffeehouses and malvasìe (wine shops that specialized in the sale of malmsey) and even the occasional trip to the Ridotto—though Andrea was never much of a gambler and went there mostly to meet friends and survey the scene.
Among his new friends was Giacomo Casanova, who returned to Venice in 1752 after his first trip to Paris. He and the three Memmo brothers were often seen together at one of the popular malvasìe, where they drank until late, played cards, and boisterously panned the latest play by the Abbé Pietro Chiari, Goldoni’s chief conservative rival. Andrea’s mother was not happy about her sons’ friendship with Casanova. She saw him as a dangerous atheist with low morals who was bound to corrupt her children, and she alerted the authorities through her political connections. It turned out that the Inquisitori di Stato—the secretive three-member committee that oversaw internal security—viewed Casanova much in the same light and were already compiling a hefty dossier on him. Indeed, the band of merry revelers was being watched by the few shopworn informers still on the government payroll, one of whom confidently explained in his report that what bound Casanova and his friends was the fact that “they are philosophers of the same ilk … Epicureans all.”
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In spite of his busy life and his many distractions, Andrea’s sense of duty to the Republic was so ingrained in his mind that he saw his passion for architecture, his love of the theater, and his knowledge of painting and drawing not as ends unto themselves but as additional endowments that he would put to practical use during his public service. It did not occur to him to seek a different road from the one his uncle Andrea had set for him. He clearly considered marriage from the same perspective. Before meeting Giustiniana, Andrea had enjoyed a number of affairs. He loved the company of women and from a young age was much in demand among his female friends—he was also quite a dancer, which helped. But he had had no great romance or lasting relationship. He knew and accepted the fact that he was bound to marry a young woman from his own social class and that the families would seal the marriage after long negotiations that would have little to do with the feelings of the bride and the groom. Everything young men like Andrea had been taught at home “underscored the irrationality of choices made solely on the basis of sentimental feelings.”
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Andrea’s world—rich and varied and challenging but also largely predictable—was suddenly shaken up when Giustiniana stepped into it in late 1753. She came from another sphere entirely, having just returned with her mother and siblings from London, where they had traveled to collect the family inheritance after the death of Sir Richard, her beloved father. During her yearlong absence, she had blossomed into a lively and very attractive young woman. The Wynnes had a two-year, renewable residency permit; they were not Venetian citizens and therefore, like all other foreigners, had to obtain a special authorization to stay in the city. They settled in a rented house in the neighborhood of Sant’Aponal and at first led a quiet life, mostly within the small English community.
Sir Richard Wynne had left his native Lincolnshire distraught after the death of his first wife, Susanna. He journeyed across Europe and arrived in Venice in 1735 “to dissipate his affliction for the loss of his lady,”
(#litres_trial_promo) as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, famed and restless English traveler disapprovingly put it during one of her many stays in Venice. He was soon introduced “by his gondolier” to Anna Gazzini, a striking twenty-two-year-old Venetian with a less-than-immaculate past. Anna had actually been born on Lefkos, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea, where her father, Filippo Gazzini, had once settled to trade, but the family returned to Venice when she was still a little girl.
Anna became Sir Richard’s lover soon after they met. Two years later, she gave birth to a baby girl who was baptized Giustiniana Francesca Antonia Wynne on January 26, 1737, in the Church of San Marcuola. Sir Richard doted on his daughter. He did not return to England, married Anna in 1739, and legalized Giustiniana’s status six years later. (The legalization papers refer to Anna’s father as “Ser Filippo Gazzini, nobleman from Lefkos,”
(#litres_trial_promo) but this belated claim to nobility had a dubious ring to it even back then.) Anna gave birth to two more daughters: Mary Elizabeth in 1741 and Teresa Susanna in 1742, known as Bettina and Tonnina. Their first son, Richard, was born in 1744, followed by William in 1745. A fourth daughter, Anna Amelia, was born in 1748 and died two years later.
Mrs. Anna must not have been much fun to be around. Perhaps to atone for sins of her youth, she became a fierce Catholic who dragged her children to church and pestered her Anglican husband endlessly to convert. She was a strict disciplinarian, bent on giving as traditional an education as possible to Giustiniana and her younger brothers and sisters: music, dance, French, and little else. Sir Richard was quite content to leave the upbringing of the children to his wife and retreat to his well-stocked library. As his gout worsened, he withdrew from family life even more. Many years later, Giustiniana remembered him sitting with a book in his favorite armchair “the six months of the year he didn’t spend in bed.”
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Despite his poor physical condition, Sir Richard developed a close bond with Giustiniana. They shared a love of literature, and he gave her the keys to his library. From a young age she read eagerly but with no guidance or method, moving randomly from travel books to La Fontaine’s fables to heavy-going tomes such as Paolo Sarpi’s history of the Council of Trent—a book the Inquisition had banned for its sympathetic view of the Reformation. Giustiniana was caught reading it secretly. From the little we know of Sir Richard, he must have chuckled at his daughter’s temerity. Anna, on the other hand, had a fit and threatened to lock Giustiniana up in a convent.
Sir Richard died in 1751, and the following year Mrs. Anna dragged her five children to London to claim their inheritance. It was a long, tedious journey. Many years later, Giustiniana would remember only the dirty hotels, the bad food, and “all those churches [in Germany] so heavy with ornaments.” But she loved London—“the parks, the noise in the streets, the pretty hats … and the general air of opulence”—and she would have gladly stayed on. “I had learned English well enough, was rather good at handling a fork, and was expecting to put my new skills to good use.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs. Anna, however, was there for the money. When she finally got her hands on some of it, thanks to the intercession of the children’s guardian, Robert d’Arcy, Earl of Holderness, a former British Resident in Venice, the family packed up once more and headed home—this time taking the more pleasant route, via Paris.
Giustiniana was not yet sixteen when she arrived in Paris with her mother and her brothers and sisters. But she did not go unnoticed during her brief stay. Casanova met her in the house of Alvise Mocenigo, the Venetian ambassador. Forty years later, he still had a vivid memory of that first encounter. “Her character,” he wrote in his memoirs, “was already delineated to perfection in her beautiful face.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Giustiniana loved Parisian life—“the theater, the elegance of men, the rouge on women’s cheeks”
(#litres_trial_promo)—but Mrs. Anna was anxious to get back to Venice, so they made their way home, taking with them a French governess, Toinon, who was much loved for her skill in combing the girls’ hair.
The return of the Wynne sisters—“le inglesine di Sant’Aponal,”
(#litres_trial_promo) as they quickly became known—generated a certain amount of excitement among the young men in town. Sure enough, Casanova—who had also returned to Venice in the meantime—came knocking at their door shortly after they had settled in, claiming that he had fallen in love with Giustiniana. Mrs. Anna, aware of his reputation and keen to keep her daughter out of trouble, turned him firmly away. (In his History of My Life, Casanova claimed that Giustiniana then wrote him a charming letter “which made it possible for me to bear the affront calmly.”
(#litres_trial_promo)) Mrs. Anna had every intention of keeping her daughters on a very short leash, and Giustiniana, who was just beginning to enjoy the pleasures of society, discovered, to her dismay, that their life in Venice “had been reduced to a small circle indeed.” Much of their time was spent at home, “where we went on about Paris and London.”
(#litres_trial_promo) It was all rather glum.
The house of Consul Smith, one of the few Mrs. Anna allowed her daughters to frequent, was their link to the world. The consul, who had known Sir Richard well, was one of the most prominent foreign residents in town. He had seen the Wynne children grow up and had promised his old friend he would watch over his family and help Mrs. Anna sort out her finances. Palazzo Balbi became a second home to the young Wynnes, a place removed from their dreary house at Sant’Aponal, filled with beautiful objects, where the conversation had a cosmopolitan quality that reminded them of Paris and London. The consul, for his part, looked upon the Wynne children with avuncular affection. He was especially pleased with Giustiniana, who always brought a breath of fresh air to his house. “Mister Smith shared with me his love for his paintings, his antiquities, his library in order to enrich my passion for learning,”
(#litres_trial_promo) she later reminisced. One suspects he also rather enjoyed parading through his magnificent rooms with such a lovely young girl on his arm.
During one of her visits to Palazzo Balbi the consul introduced Giustiniana to his dashing young assistant. As soon as Mrs. Anna heard about her daughter’s infatuation, she became very anxious. Since the death of Sir Richard, she had lived in the fear that the respectability she had so stubbornly built up over the years might abate, leaving her and her family exposed to insidious and materially damaging forms of social discrimination. Her fear was well founded. Even in the relatively tolerant atmosphere of eighteenth-century Venice, many people still made a point of remembering that Lady Wynne was in fact the daughter of a “Greek” merchant. And there were lingering rumors about the amorous adventures of her youth: some even murmured that she had given birth to a child before taking up with il vedovo inglese—the English widower. Now she was a widow herself, living in a rented house with five children and with past sins to hide, and it is easy to see why she felt her position in society was so precarious—all the more so since she was in Venice at the pleasure of the authorities. Her residency permit might not be renewed or might even be revoked. So she had to act judiciously to maintain the standing Sir Richard had bequeathed to her.
However detestable her unyielding attitude must have seemed to the two lovers, it was certainly justified in the eyes of the English community. Consul Smith was fond of both Andrea and Giustiniana, but he was a practical man. When Andrea confided in him he sympathized with the lovers to a point. Nonetheless, he was very much on Mrs. Anna’s side. The few Venetian families with whom the Wynnes socialized also supported her—especially the powerful Morosinis, with whom the Memmos had a long-running political feud and whom Andrea detested. But her chief ally, as opposed as they were in character and inclination, was Andrea’s mother. Lucia saw, perhaps more clearly than the rest of the Memmos, the material disadvantages that a union with Giustiniana would bring to an old house which needed to reinvigorate its weak finances. And she feared the political damage the Memmos would suffer if her eldest and most promising son ever betrayed the family and crossed the inquisitors by marrying a woman beneath his rank.
The difference between the two mothers was that Lucia simply wanted to make sure Andrea did not get it into his head to marry Giustiniana. If in the meantime he dallied with her, as young men often did before settling down, it was no great worry to her and would not damage his future prospects. Mrs. Anna, on the other hand, was fighting a daily battle to prevent any contact between the lovers that might taint the family’s reputation and jeopardize her daughter’s chances of a respectable marriage.
Mrs. Anna was losing the battle. Andrea’s courtship was assiduous, visible to everyone, and highly compromising. He saw Giustiniana every day at the Listone in Piazza San Marco, where Venetians gathered for their evening stroll, and often later on as well, at one of the theaters. He frequently moored his gondola to the narrow dock below the Wynnes’ house and called on Giustiniana in full view of the family. In the winter of 1754 Mrs. Anna finally confronted him. She caused a terrible scene, declaring Andrea persona non grata in their house and making it clear she never wanted to see them together again. All communication was forbidden: letters, messages, the merest glance. It had to finish, she yelled—and sent him on his way.
News of Mrs. Anna’s dramatic stand traveled quickly around town. Andrea referred to the scene as his cacciata funesta
(#litres_trial_promo)—his fateful banishment, and the starting point of all their misery.
Mrs. Anna was a fierce watchdog, always on the alert and obsessively suspicious. She kept a close eye on her eldest daughter and did not let her go out without a chaperon—usually herself. Her spies were planted wherever the lovers might seek to escape her gaze, both within the English set and among Venetian families, and she kept her ears constantly pricked for gossip about the lovers. Venice was a small world. Everyone knew who was losing his fortune at the Ridotto on a particular night and who was having an affair with whom. Andrea and Giustiniana were aware of the risk they were taking in defying Mrs. Anna’s ban; they had to be extremely careful about whom they spoke to and what they said. At a deeper level, they knew the future offered little promise of an end to their difficulties. But it was too soon, and they were too young, to worry about the future. For all the trouble their love had already caused, only one thing mattered to them in the winter and spring of that year: exploiting every opportunity to be together.
Just as Mrs. Anna resorted to the Venetian arts of intelligence, Andrea set up a small network of informers to obtain daily information about Giustiniana’s movements. His chief spy was Alvisetto, a young servant in the Wynne household, who was not always dependable because his fear of Mrs. Anna was sometimes stronger than his loyalty to his secret paymaster. He had the unfortunate habit of disappearing during his missions, leaving Andrea flustered and clueless on a street corner or at the side of a bridge. “Alvisetto did not make it to our appointment and I went looking for him all morning in vain,” he complained. “Poor us, Giustiniana. Sometimes I lose all hope when I think in whose hands we have put ourselves.”
Alvisetto was also the chief messenger, and he shuttled back and forth between Andrea and Giustiniana with letters and love notes. Occasionally, the gondoliers of Ca’ Memmo would moor at a dock near the Wynnes’ to drop off or pick up an envelope. If Mrs. Anna was at home, the two lovers would fall back on “the usual bottega for deliveries,” a general store around the corner from Giustiniana’s home, run by a friendly shopkeeper. When Andrea’s message could not wait—or if the urge to see her was irrepressible—he would appear at the window of Ca’ Tiepolo, the imposing palazzo across a narrow waterway from the Wynnes’ more modest house.
Ca’ Tiepolo belonged to one of the oldest and grandest Venetian families. Its wide neoclassical façade stood majestically on the Grand Canal. From the side window of the mezzanine it was possible to look directly across to the Wynnes’ balcony. The ties between the Tiepolos and the Memmos went back many centuries. Andrea was a good friend of the young Tiepolos and especially close to Domenico, better known by his nickname Meneghetto, who was among the few to know from the start that Andrea’s love affair with Giustiniana was continuing in secret. Meneghetto was happy to help, and Andrea often dropped by after sending Giustiniana precise instructions. “After lunch,” he advised her in one note, “find an excuse to come out on the balcony. But for heaven’s sake be careful about your mother. And don’t force me to edge out as far as the windowsill because she will certainly see me.”
Andrea’s portable telescope was very useful. He would point it in the direction of Giustiniana’s balcony from a campiello, a little square, across the Grand Canal, to check whether she was at home or to find out whether she might be getting ready to go out or, best of all, to watch her as she leaned lazily over the balcony, her hair wrapped in a bonnet, watching the boats go by. When he observed her from such a distance—about a hundred yards—Giustiniana was not always aware Andrea was spying on her. “Today I admired you with my canocchiale [telescope],” he announced to her mischievously. “I don’t really care if your mother saw me…. After all, the rules merely state that I cannot come into your house and that I cannot write to you.”
From a purely technical point of view he was also within bounds when, thanks again to the benevolence—and the sweat—of his gondoliers, he came down the Grand Canal and signaled to Giustiniana from the water. On days when she was confined to the house and they had no other way of seeing each other, Andrea’s sudden appearance at her neighbor’s window or the familiar plashing of the Memmo gondola down below was a welcome consolation. “Come by the canal as my mother doesn’t want me to go out,” she would plead. “And make an appearance at Ca’ Tiepolo as well, if you can.”
They developed their own sign language so they could communicate from a distance during the evening walk at the Listone or at the theater or, later in the night, at the gambling house. “Touch your hair if you’re going to the Ridotto,” he instructed her. “Nod or shake your head to tell me whether you plan to go to the piazza.” These little signals sometimes caused confusion if they were not worked out in advance. They also had to be given very discreetly, lest they set off Mrs. Anna’s alarm bells. “When you left the theater,” Andrea wrote anxiously, “you signaled something to me just as your mother turned around, and I think she might have noticed that. If this were the case it could damage us, since she might also have noticed all the other gestures we had made to each other from our boxes.” Despite his occasional burst of bravado, Andrea remained deeply worried not just by what Mrs. Anna might have seen but also by what she thought she might have seen. He went to such extremes to avoid creating false impressions that he sometimes sounded like an obstinate stage manager. “You must realize that if your mother catches you laughing with someone she can’t see, she will assume that you are laughing with me,” he once said to her in a huff. “So try to be careful next time.”
Andrea fretted constantly about how dangerous it was to write to each other. If their correspondence ever fell into the wrong hands, there would be an explosion “that would reduce everything to a pile of rubble.” Still he deluged Giustiniana with letters and notes, often filling them with practical advice and detailed descriptions of his frantic chases around town. “We are completely mad…. If only you knew how afraid I am that your mother might find out we are seeing each other again.”
It was a glorious adventure. There were times when they managed to get close enough to steal a quick embrace in an alcove at the Ridotto or in the dark streets near the theaters at San Moisè, and the thrill was always powerful. “Last night, I swear,” Andrea wrote to his beloved the morning after one of these rare encounters, “you were so heated up, oh so heated up, such a beautiful girl, and I was on fire.” But in the beginning they tended to hold back. They made their moves with deliberation. They kept each other at a safe distance: lovemaking was mostly limited to what their eyes could see and what their eyes could say.
It is easy to imagine how, in a city where both men and women wore masks during a good portion of the year, the language of the eyes would become all-important. And what was true in general was especially true for Andrea and Giustiniana on account of the rigid restrictions that had been imposed on them. Andrea was being very literal when he asked anxiously, “Today my lips will not be able to tell you how much I love you…. But there will be other ways…. Will you understand what my eyes will be saying to you?” What their eyes said was not always sweet and not always clear. With such strong emotions at play, it could take days to clear up a misunderstanding precipitated by a wrong look or an averted gaze. One night, Andrea returned to Ca’ Memmo after a particularly frustrating attempt to make contact with Giustiniana. It had taken him all evening and a great deal of effort and ingenuity to find her at one of the theaters. Yet in the end she had displayed none of the usual complicity that made even the briefest encounter a moment of joy. In fact, she had been so annoying as to make him wish he had not seen her at all:
Yesterday I tried desperately to see you. Before lunch the gondoliers could not serve me. After lunch I went looking for you in Campo Santo Stefano. Nothing. So I walked toward Piazza San Marco, and when I arrived at the bridge of San Moisè I ran into Lucrezia Pisani!
(#ulink_d38da269-32cb-5424-ae19-c00026cae825)I gave her my hand on the bridge, and then I saw you. I left her immediately and went looking for you everywhere. Finally I found you in the piazza. I sent Alvisetto ahead to find out whether you were on your way to the opera or to the new play at the Teatro Sant’Angelo, so that I could rush over to get a box in time. Then I forged ahead and waited for you, filled with desire. Finally you arrived and I went up to my box so that I could contemplate you—not only for the sheer pleasure I take in admiring you but also in the hope of receiving a sign of acknowledgment as a form of consolation. But you did nothing of the sort. Instead you laughed continuously, made loud noises until the end of the show, for which I was both sorry and angry—as you can well imagine.
A few days later Andrea tracked her down after yet another chase along crowded streets and across canals. This time the reward was well worth the pursuit:
I caught sight of your mother and hoped you would be with her. I looked for you left and right. Nothing. Your mother left, I followed. She went to San Moisè, I went to San Moisè. In fact, I got so close to her that we would have bumped into each other at the entrance of a bottega if I had not been so quick…. [Later] I waited in vain for Alvisetto, whom I had instructed to follow your mother…. Then I got your letter telling me that you would be going to San Benetto, so I rushed over only to realize with regret that you had already arrived and that the opera had begun…. Oh Lord, what will Giustiniana say…. Let’s see how she will treat me…. Goodness, there she is, that naughty girl [who wouldn’t look at me] the other evening…. Will she look at me this time or won’t she…. Come, look this way my girl! … And little by little I began to feel better. And then much better when I moved into that other box because I could see you and you could see me so well and with no great danger that your mother might notice every little gesture between us.
As an overall strategy, Andrea felt it was important to convince Mrs. Anna that the love between him and Giustiniana had indeed subsided and that she could finally let her guard down. It would be easier for them to find ways to see each other. So whenever Mrs. Anna took her daughter to a place where there was a good chance they might see him, Giustiniana was to feign complete disinterest:
Sometimes, in taking risks, one must be willing to be la dupe de soi-même. So arrange things in such a way that she will feel she is forcing you to go to all the places where she knows you might run into me, such as San Benetto or the Ridotto…. And when the weather is nice, show little interest, even some resistance, to taking a walk to the square…. Believe me, our good fortune depends on the success of our deception…. To avoid coming to San Benetto, all you have to do is tell her you don’t feel well. As for the Ridotto, you can say, “In truth, Mother, it bores me too much. Besides, we have no one to speak to and I don’t feel like playing [cards]. And we don’t make a good impression anyway, walking around with no other company. So let me go to bed.” And if she refuses and takes you out with her, you will see me and she will say, “Giustiniana doesn’t fret about Memmo anymore.”
In public Andrea and Giustiniana behaved like two strangers. Yet if their relationship was ever to develop, if they were to make arrangements in order to meet somewhere safely and actually spend time together, they were going to need more reliable allies than Alvisetto—friends willing to take the risk of giving them cover and providing them with rooms where they could see each other in private. Andrea worked hard to identify those who might be most useful to them. He gave precise instructions to Giustiniana as to how she should behave to bring this or that friend over to their side. But his instructions were not always clear. When Giustiniana innocently told a potential ally that she no longer loved Andrea when in fact Andrea had asked her to say the opposite, he gave her a sharp rebuke: “As soon as I do a good piece of work, you ruin it for me. The truth is … and I am very sorry to have to say this, you have not been up to my expectations.”
Andrea could be equally hard when he thought Giustiniana was not keeping enough distance from possible enemies. He was wary of the young Venetian nobles who hung around the Ridotto and who delighted in gossip and intrigue. It was important not to give them a reason to unleash their malicious tongues. As a rule, he explained to Giustiniana, “it is good for us to have the greatest number of friends and the least number of enemies.” But there was no need to be closer to that crowd than was strictly necessary. And he criticized her when he saw her displaying too much friendliness to acquaintances he did not consider trustworthy.
He was especially suspicious of the Morosinis, who had always sided with Mrs. Anna in her battle against the two lovers—merely to spite him, Andrea thought. The Wynnes were often lunch guests at Ca’ Morosini on Campo Santo Stefano, and Giustiniana’s persistent socializing with the enemy infuriated Andrea. She had to choose, he finally said to her, between him and “those Morosini asses”:
I know it is a lot to ask, but I can ask no less…. I must put you through this test, and I shall measure your love for me by it…. Giustiniana, I shall be very disappointed if you disregard my wish. I have never met anyone so impertinent and so false toward both of us…. They like you merely because you amuse them…. By God, you will not be worthy of me if you lower yourself to the point of flattering these…. stupid enemies of mine…. these rigid custodians of Giustiniana who spy for your mother…. They are evil people with no human qualities and no respect for friend-ship…. Forgive me for speaking this way to you, but I am so angry that I cannot stand it anymore.
In the early stages, Andrea had a patronizing tone toward Giustiniana and a tendency to take control of every aspect of their relationship. He was, of course, several years older than she, and it was fairly natural that he should take the lead while she deferred to his judgment. But over the months she grew more confident in her ability to conceal and deceive. And in spite of Andrea’s occasional hectoring, she began to enjoy plotting behind her mother’s back. She took a more active role in planning their meetings and often marveled at her own audacity: “Truly, Memmo, I do not recognize myself. I do things I never would have done. I think in ways so different that I do not seem to be myself anymore.”
It was Giustiniana who eagerly informed Andrea that N., a friend on whom they had worked hard to bring over to their side, had finally agreed to let them meet at his casino, one of the little pleasure houses that were all the rage in those years and were Venice’s very practical answer to a diffuse desire for comfort and pleasure. (There were as many as 150 such casini in the city, which were used as boudoirs, as seditious salons, and—quite often—as discreet love nests.) “I’ve made arrangements for Friday,” she wrote self-confidently. “We can’t see each other before. I didn’t feel I could press him and so I let him choose the date. He has become my friend entirely and confides his worries to me and even vents his domestic frustrations.”
Their excitement grew every day in anticipation of the moments they would spend together. It was not enough anymore to exchange loving glances and signals from afar. If Giustiniana had become much bolder in just a few weeks, it was because her yearning was now so powerful. She longed to be kissed by Andrea, to be held in his arms. And their scheming was finally producing results. Here is Giustiniana, three days before their secret appointment at N.’s casino:
Friday we shall meet—at least we know as much. But my God, how the time in between will seem interminable! And afterward what? Afterward I shall think about our next meeting so that I shall always be having sweet thoughts about you…. Tell me, Memmo, are you entirely happy with me? Is there any way I can give you more? Is there something in my behavior, in my way of life that I might change to suit you better? Speak, for I shall do anything you want. I cannot think of anything more precious than to see you happy and ever closer to me. I never thought it was possible to love with such violence.
The following evening Alvisetto appeared in Giustiniana’s room bearing a reply from her lover. “My soul,” Andrea wrote, “what a complete delight it will be. Love me, adore me…. I deserve it because I know your heart so well. Oh Lord, I am so dying to see you that I am jumping out of my skin.” Alvisetto also handed to Giustiniana a small, delicately embroidered fan—a gift to make the waiting more bearable. In order to avoid raising Mrs. Anna’s suspicions, Andrea suggested that Giustiniana ask her aunt Fiorina to pretend the fan was for her. In the past Mrs. Anna’s sister had shown a certain amount of sympathy for her niece’s predicament. Andrea, always in search of reliable allies, felt this subterfuge would not only allay whatever doubts Mrs. Anna might have about his gift but also give them a sense of how much Aunt Fiorina was prepared to help them in the future.
On Thursday, the day before their meeting, Alvisetto delivered a long, tender letter to Andrea:
And so, my dear Memmo, tomorrow we shall be together. And what, in the whole world, could be more natural between two people who love each other than to be together? I could go on forever, my sweet. I am in heaven. I love you. I love you, Memmo, more than I can say. Do you love me as much? Do you know I have this constant urge to do well, to look beautiful, to cultivate the greatest possible number of qualities for the mere sake of pleasing you, of earning your respect, of holding on to my Memmo…. Be warned, however, that your love for me has made me extremely proud and vain…. Where does one find a man so pleasant, so at ease in society, yet at the same time so firm, so deeply understanding of the important things in life? Where does one find a young man with such a rich imagination who is also precise and clearheaded in his thinking, so graceful and convincing in expressing his ideas? My Memmo, so knowledgeable in the humanities, so intelligent about the arts, is also a man who knows how to dress and always cuts quite a figure and knows how to carry himself with grace…. he is a man who possesses the gift of being at once considerate and bold. And even if at times he goes out of bounds, he does it to satisfy the natural urges of his youth and his character. And therein lies the path to happiness. You are wild as a matter of principle, as a result of hard reasoning. Aren’t you the rarest of philosophers? …. And what have you done, what do you do to women? Just the other day N. said to me: How did you manage to catch that fickle young man? And I was so proud, Memmo.
As for the fan, she added, “I will ask Fiorina to accept it in my place. I don’t know whether she is on our side or not, but at least she seems willing to fake it.”
The morning after their meeting at N.’s, Giustiniana, enthralled by the sweetest memories of the previous evening, wrote to Andrea entirely in French—not the language she knew best but the one she evidently felt was most appropriate in the lingering afterglow of their reunion:
Ah, Memmo, so much happiness! I was with you for close to two hours; I listened to your voice; you held my hand, and our friends, touched by our love, seem willing to help us more often. After you had left, N. told me how much you love me. Yes, you do love me, Memmo, you love me so deeply. Tell me once more; I never tire of hearing you say it. And the more direct you are, the more charmed I shall be. The heart doesn’t really care much for detours. Simplicity is worth so much more than the most ornate embellishments. You are the most charming philosopher I have ever listened to…. If only I could be free … and tell the world about my love! Ah, let us not even speak of such a happy state. Farewell, I take leave of you now. When shall I see you? Tell me, are you as impatient as I am?
She added teasingly:
Oh, by the way, I have news. My mother received a marriage proposal for me from a very rich Roman gentleman…. Isn’t it terrible, Memmo? Aren’t you at least a little bit jealous? And what if he is as nice as they say … and what if my mother wanted him…. I can’t go on. Not even in jest…. I am all yours, my love. Farewell.
(#ulink_e2ef772d-65be-5e20-b7a5-de7d601648d6)In order to avoid burdening the general reader with repetitive notes I have not sourced each quotation drawn from the correspondence between Andrea and Giustiniana (unless otherwise specified), hoping that a short note on the various sets of letters, to be found after the text on page 293, will make it easy enough for readers with a bibliographical interest to know where the quotation comes from. The reader may also wish to know that in translating the letters from Italian into English I did my best to preserve their original eighteenth-century flavor, though I eliminated excessive capitalization and made changes in the punctuation in order to facilitate the reader’s ease and comprehension.
(#ulink_184ca770-3ac1-52fb-b16e-03340c4964d7)Regardless of political influence, twenty-four families were considered founding families of Venice, and of these, twelve traced their roots to early Christianity and called themselves “apostolic.” The Memmos were among these twelve.
(#ulink_a656c2c8-3041-5a78-a384-211e7d3425d0)Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois was published in Venice in 1749. Montesquieu himself had come to Venice to study its laws and system of government. He was run out of town by the inquisitors and legend has it that he threw all his notes into the lagoon as he made his escape toward the mainland. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also a familiar figure, having been secretary to the French ambassador in Venice in 1743–1744.
(#ulink_4c0746cb-bd4b-5d9a-b9a4-b9a695a0c07b)Andrea’s cousin by marriage and a close friend.
CHAPTER Two (#ulink_bfd71fff-2961-5a86-8edc-25acd0867beb)
Andrea and Giustiniana were so secretive during the first months of their clandestine relationship that only a handful of trusted friends knew what they were up to. As Andrea had predicted, Mrs. Anna eventually began to lower her guard and focus on possible new suitors for her eldest daughter. By the fall of 1754 the two lovers were seeing each other with great frequency and daring. They now had several locations at their disposal. N.’s casino was often available. Meneghetto Tiepolo had given them access to an apartment on the mezzanine of his palazzo. They also went to a woman named Rosa, who lived in a small and very simple house near the Wynnes and often let them have a room. Setting up a secret encounter was often the work of several days. It took reliable intelligence and good planning. Alvisetto shuttled furtively between the Wynnes’ house and Ca’ Memmo, delivering letters with the latest arrangements or news of an unexpected change of plan. Much was written about the dropping off and picking up of keys.
The feverish preparatory work, coupled with the constant fear of being caught, made their encounters all the more passionate. “How could they be so stupid,” Giustiniana noted with delight, “not to realize what refinement they bring to our pleasure by imposing all these prohibitions? [At the beginning of our relationship] I was always very happy to see you, of course, but the emotions I feel now, the sheer agitation, the overwhelming feeling of sweetness, were certainly not as intense.”
As their love deepened and their relationship became more sexual, jealousy too began to creep into their little world. Despite Mrs. Anna’s more relaxed attitude, Giustiniana was still not as free to move around town as Andrea was. This put her at a psychological disadvantage. Who was Andrea seeing when he wasn’t with her? She had his letters, of course, filled with detailed accounts of his daily activities. But how reliable were they? In her relative confinement in the house at Sant’Aponal she had plenty of time to work herself into a state of anxiety. A hint of unpleasant gossip was enough to send her into a rage.
One of Andrea’s best friends was his cousin Lucrezia Pisani, the young lady he had bumped into on the bridge as he was chasing Giustiniana. She was lively and attractive and popular among Andrea’s set. She often had interesting company at her house, and Andrea liked to drop by. His breezy reports on his visits there, however, made Giustiniana feel excluded. When she heard he was seeing Lucrezia more and more frequently on the days when they could not be together, she protested angrily. Andrea was taken aback by her attitude. Lucrezia was an old friend, he argued, an ally; she was one of the few who knew about their love affair. He reacted to Giustiniana’s indignation with even greater indignation:
What have I done to you? What sort of creature are you? What on earth are you thinking? And what doggedness! What cruelty! So now it would appear that I have been courting Lucrezia for the past ten days…. Well, first of all, the timing is wrong: she’s been in the countryside for the past several days. I would have gone with her. I chose not to. Meanwhile, I’ve been at home most of the time, evenings included. I’ve had lunch with her once. True, every time I have met her at the theater I have sat in her box…. But could I have sat alone or even with a single friend throughout an entire show? … I am mad to even defend myself. Yes, I like her company and I admit it. First of all because she is one of the easiest women to be around…. She is also witty, knowledgeable, clever. You can talk to her freely, and she often has good company…. Besides, she is your friend, she often asks about you with interest…. You are crazy, crazy, crazy. You will drive me mad with your endless suspicions. Still, I guess I must try to appease you in any case. So rest assured: I won’t be seen with her anymore. But where may I go? Anywhere I went there would be new gossip and new scenes…. By God, I will have to lock myself up in my room, under permanent surveillance, otherwise you still won’t believe me. But of course when no one sees me around people will start thinking that I’m enjoying myself even more secretively. What a life.
Giustiniana’s suspicions, however, were not entirely unjustified: there was talk around town that Lucrezia did indeed have a liking for Andrea that went beyond their old friendship. When Giustiniana’s mood did not improve, Andrea realized he would have to do something more drastic to placate her. He went about it in a manner that revealed his own penchant for intrigue:
This is a difficult thing to ask, but you are so easy, so free from prejudice, you have such a good spirit and are always so obliging with me that it is possible you might grant me this favor. Lucrezia torments me by always asking if she can see some of your letters to me—which I have never permitted her to do. Therefore I would like for you to write me a letter in French in which you praise her. You might add in passing that, while not jealous of her, you do think she is too intelligent not to realize that it would be preferable if I were not seen so often with her. She already knows all the love I have for you and your commitment to me. I assure you that the only reason I am asking you to do this is so that she will convince herself that I am in love with a woman more special than her…. If you’re not up to it, it doesn’t really matter. It’s enough that you love me.
Giustiniana was uncomfortable with this sort of game playing. A little deception to avoid Mrs. Anna’s controls and to meet Andrea on the sly was one thing. But she found his recourse to artifice for the sake of artifice a little unsettling. The ease with which he could transform himself from the most tender and loving companion to the craftiest manipulator was a trait that seemed embedded in his character. And whereas Lucrezia, an experienced operator herself, would probably not have given Andrea’s behavior great significance, Giustiniana found it much harder to understand. She too had a seductive side, a propensity to flirt with men both young and old. But excessive ambiguity made her ill at ease. She held fast to a rule of love that was not very common among other young Venetians: the exclusivity of romantic feelings. So she was stunned to hear, when she went over to the Morosinis’ for lunch shortly after the Lucrezia episode, that Andrea was also flirting with Mariettina Corner, another well-known seductress. Mariettina’s love life was complicated enough as it was: she was married to Lucrezia’s brother, had an official lover and was having an affair with yet a third man, Piero Marcello—a gambler and philanderer who happened to be a neighbor of the Wynnes’. Giustiniana was told that though Mariettina was carrying on the relationship with Piero, it was really Andrea she had her eyes on.
Again she confronted him, and again he blamed her for believing every scrap of gossip floating around the Morosinis’: “What are they telling you, these people with whom you seem to enjoy yourself so much? And why do you believe them if you know they hate me? You accuse me of making love to Mariettina…. But why is it you always fear I’m causing you offense with all the women I see?”
The story of Andrea’s presumed affair with Mariettina had all the ingredients of a Goldoni farce. It turned out that Andrea, at Mariettina’s request, had acted as a go-between in her secret romance with Piero. And Giustiniana—as Andrea was quick to remind her—had even encouraged him to take on that role because she felt that as long as Mariettina was busy with other men she would not present a threat to her. But Andrea’s comings and goings between the two lovers had provided the gossipmongers with plenty to talk about. In the ensuing confusion Giustiniana didn’t know whom to believe. Andrea acknowledged that “some people might well have thought Mariettina had developed an interest in me…. After all, I was constantly whispering in her ear and she was whispering in mine…. She talked to me, gestured to me, sat next to me while apparently not caring a hoot about [her lover], her husband—indeed the world.” He insisted it was all a terrible misunderstanding: he was innocent and Giustiniana was “stupid” if she bothered “to spend a moment on all this talk the Morosinis fill your head with.”
It wasn’t easy for her to dismiss the things she heard about Andrea, because so much of his life was invisible to her, out of reach. The rumors were all the more hurtful because they reverberated in circles to which she was admitted but to which she did not truly belong. Giustiniana knew or was acquainted with most of Andrea’s friends and was a welcome guest in the houses of many patrician families. But even though the veil of social discrimination was perhaps not as visible as elsewhere in Europe, it was very real; it governed Venetian society in subtle and less subtle ways—as in the case of marriage. When Giustiniana wrote to Andrea about his woman friends, there was often an undercurrent of anxiety that went quite beyond a natural romantic jealousy.
Still, she had her own little ways of getting back at him.
As Andrea and Giustiniana struggled to clear up the misunderstanding about his role in their friends’ affair, Mariettina threw one of her celebrated balls on the Giudecca—an island separated from the southern side of Venice by a wide canal, where patricians had pleasure houses with gardens and vineyards. This was one of the major social events of the season. Preparations went on for days. Young Venetian ladies had a notorious taste for luxury. They liked to wear rich and elaborate but relatively comfortable outfits, so they could move with greater ease during the minuets and furlane, a popular dance that originated from the Friuli region. They spent hours having their hair coiffed into tall beehives, which they decorated with gems and golden pins. Their long fingernails were polished in bright colors. They drenched themselves with exotic perfume and chose their beauty spots with special care (the appassionata was worn in the corner of the eye, the coquette above the lip, the galante on the chin, and the assassina—the killer—in the corner of the mouth).
(#litres_trial_promo) They carried large, exquisitely embroidered fans and wore strings of pearls and diamonds. High heels had long been out of fashion: Venetian ladies preferred more sensible low evening shoes, often decorated with a diamond buckle. These were fabulously expensive but very comfortable, especially for dancing. Men wore the traditional French costume: silk long jacket, knee-length culottes, and white stockings. Elaborate cuffs and jabots of lace from the island of Burano gave a Venetian touch to their attire. Their elegant evening wigs were combed and groomed for the occasion.
Mariettina’s ball offered a chance for Andrea and Giustiniana to see each other and clarify things once and for all. But Giustiniana, still feeling vexed by the whole imbroglio, was not in the mood for such a demanding social event. She sent this note to Andrea just as he was dressing for the evening:
If the bad weather continues I will certainly not come to Marietta Corner’s festa. You know my mother and how she fears the wind. She has warned that she will not cross the canal if there is the slightest bit of wind. In the end it is probably better that such a reasonable pretext should excuse me from coming as I believe you and I would both have a terrible time…. Still I will try to convince my mother to get over her fear—I hope you will acknowledge my goodwill. I have already opted for a new course: henceforth you will be able to do as you please; I will neither complain nor bother you with accusations. When you will cause me displeasure I will try to convince myself that you won’t have done so out of ill will but because you do not believe I am sensitive to those things…. By the way, all those pleas for forgiveness and that habit you have of carrying on exactly in the same manner even though you know you offend me—I really cannot stand it. The truth is, I will continue to give you proof of my real affection while you will hurt me more and more. And who knows if all my suffering will change you one day…. Good-bye now, Memmo. I would not want to keep you from your toilette.
In the end Giustiniana did not prevail over her mother—if she ever tried—and she did not go to Marietta’s ball. The next day she sent Andrea this bittersweet note: “I did not write to you this morning because I felt you might be tired after last night and needed your sleep. The bad weather prevented me from coming, but as I told you I believe in the end it was for the better. Today I was half hoping I would see you at the window at Ca’ Tiepolo, but I guess I fooled myself. This evening we are going to Smith’s. I will write to you tomorrow. I have nothing else to ask you except to love me much—if you can. Farewell.”
Andrea always reacted defensively, even impatiently, to Giustiniana’s outbursts of jealousy. He was not immune to similar feelings, but in the abstract he espoused what he considered a “philosophical” approach. “It is practically impossible for me to be jealous,” he explained:
Not because I have such high esteem for myself that I do not recognize others might be worthy [of your attentions]. No, the reason is that I don’t want to believe you are flighty or coquettish or fickle or careless or mean. If ever there came a point in which I really did nurture doubts about you … then I would simply think of you as a different woman. The pain I would feel on account of your transformation would certainly be intense, but to me you would no longer be the lovable, the rarest Giustiniana. And by losing what ignited my deepest love and continues to nourish it, I would lose all feeling for you and return to the Memmo I was before meeting you.
This was the theory. In reality Andrea was fairly quick to lose his cool when other young men prowled around Giustiniana. He was particularly wary of Momolo Mocenigo, better known as Il Gobbo—the Hunchback—on account of a slight curvature of his spine, but in fact rather good-looking and quite the ladykiller. “He was the handsomest of all the patrician gamesters at the Ridotto,” Casanova wrote in his memoirs.
(#litres_trial_promo) When he was not taking bets at his faro table, Il Gobbo hung around the theaters, where he bothered the ladies and tried to make mischief. He especially enjoyed gallivanting with Giustiniana, and her willingness to indulge him annoyed Andrea to no end. Once, after catching her yet again in “a very long conversation” with him, he let her have it: “Everyone knows Il Gobbo for the first-class whoremonger that he is. You should know he once [told me] in front of other people that I should be thankful to him because he chose not to seduce you even though you showed a certain kindness to him…. I refused to give in to such abuse, and I dare say my reaction did not make him very happy…. But why did you have to go talk to him without your mother? Why speak to him practically in the ear? Why whisper to him that you were going to San Moisè so he could then come and tell me with a tone that so displeased me?”
Another evening, Andrea was at home nursing a fever and a terrible sore throat when he suddenly learned that the “first-class whoremonger” was on his way to meet Giustiniana. He became so upset that he dashed out of the house, ran across town, and burst into the busy gambling rooms of the Ridotto. “I looked for you everywhere, and I finally found you in the same room where [Il Gobbo] had just been,” he wrote to her angrily and with a good deal of self-pity. The incident, he assured Giustiniana, had “redoubled the flames that were already engulfing my throat.”
Still, Il Gobbo was a lesser irritant than Piero Marcello, the handsome coureur de femmes who was courting Mariettina Corner but also had eyes for Giustiniana. Andrea considered Piero to be frivolous and vain, the sort of young man who would buy a new coat and then “make a ruckus just to attract attention to it.” Piero’s gondola was often moored at the same dock as the Wynnes’. “How appearances can trick one,” Andrea noted, for he was worried people might wrongly assume that Piero was visiting Giustiniana and her sisters, when in fact Piero simply lived nearby. Indeed, some already referred to them as “Piero Marcello’s girls.” Piero not only flirted with Giustiniana, he also needled Andrea in public, wondering aloud whether he and Giustiniana were secretly still seeing each other. The two nearly came to blows over her, as Andrea reported to Giustiniana with more than a hint of braggadocio in this account of their confrontation:
PIERO: Are you jealous of me? Oh … but I have no designs on her. True, when women call me it is hard for me to resist…. But I am your friend, I would not betray you. I stay away from my friends’ women. And if you have the slightest suspicion, I will never see her again.
ANDREA: Who do you think you are, the Terror of the World? Do you really think I’m afraid of losing Giustiniana to you? If she were crazy, like all your previous lovers were, if she wanted your money, … if she had all the weaknesses, all the silliness, all the prejudices of the average woman, if she could not tell the true value of better men, if she were a coquette or worse, then, yes, I probably wouldn’t trust her. But my dear Piero, who do you think you’re dealing with?
Andrea concluded, “I told him these things with my usual straightforwardness, so that after affecting surprise he turned the whole thing into a joke.”
Things did not end there. Days later Andrea saw Piero and Giustiniana talking to each other again. He gave her a stern warning: “Now I speak to you as a husband: I absolutely do not want you to show in public that you know Piero Marcello. I was very sorry that Mariettina, noticing that I was trying to see with whom you were laughing, came over and whispered into my ear: ‘She’s laughing with Piero down there.’”
Even after such a reprimand Andrea would not admit to being the slightest bit jealous:
I’ve told you a hundred times: I don’t forbid you to see Piero out of jealousy…. But I absolutely do not want you to look at him in public or even say hello, all the more so because he affects an equivocal manner that I simply don’t like and that I find insolent in the extreme…. Piero and Momolo are not for you…. Piero frets while Momolo affects his usual mannerisms, both with the same end: to make people believe that there has been at least a little bit of intimacy with all the women they are barely acquainted with. And for this reason the two of them are a real nuisance to young lovers.
Despite the misunderstandings and squabbles that ensued, Andrea and Giustiniana’s relationship deepened through the spring and summer of 1755 to the point that very little else seemed to matter to them anymore. All their energies were devoted to making time for themselves and finding places to meet. They had become experts at escaping the restrictions imposed on them and moved stealthily from alcove to alcove. Their love affair consumed their life, and it gradually transformed them.
Giustiniana had been known as a lively and gregarious young woman. The affectionate nickname inglesina di Sant’Aponal conjured up a refreshing image of youth and grace. Soon after returning to Venice, Giustiniana, being the eldest, had begun to share with her mother the duties of a good hostess while Bettina, Tonnina, Richard, and William were still under the care of Toinon. This role had come naturally to her. She had felt at ease in their drawing room or over at the consul’s, delighting everyone with her charm. But by 1755 she was tired of all that, tired of performing onstage. She hardly recognized herself. “Coquetry was all I really cared for once,” she told Andrea in a moment of introspection. “Now I can barely manage to be polite. Everything bores me. Everything annoys me. People say I have become stupid, silly; that I am hopeless at entertaining guests. I realize they’re right, but I don’t much care.” She spent her days writing letters to Andrea, worrying about whom he was seeing, planning their next meeting—where, at what time, and, always, what to do with the keys. When she did go out with her mother—to lunch at the consul’s, or to church, the theater, the Ridotto—the people she chose to talk to, what she said, how she said it: everything she did, in one way or another, related to Andrea.
The affair had become all-consuming for Andrea as well. “My love, you govern my every action,” he confessed to her. “I do not think, I do not feel, I do not see anything but my Giustiniana. Everything else is meaningless to me…. I simply cannot hide my love for you from others anymore.” He still made the usual rounds—a family errand, a trip to the printer Pasquali on behalf of the consul, a lunch at Ca’ Tiepolo, and in the evening a visit to the theater. But his life outside the secret world he shared with Giustiniana no longer seemed very stimulating or even much fun. After the death of his uncle Andrea the year before, Ca’ Memmo had received fewer visitors and had ceased to be the scintillating intellectual haven of years past. At this time, too, Andrea’s mother, obsessed about Casanova’s influence on her three boys, finally had her way and convinced the inquisitors to have him arrested.
(#ulink_f6e80933-b740-5e52-a0d5-a471d508ad5c) The heated, late-night conversations at the crowded malvasìe on the latest book from Paris or the new play by Goldoni had lost their most entertaining participant.
Andrea’s personal project for establishing a French theater in Venice was going nowhere, and Giustiniana worried that she might be the main cause of his lack of progress: “Are you not working on it because of me? Dear Memmo, please don’t give up. If only you knew how much I care about your affairs when your honor is at stake. Especially this project, which, given its scale, the detailed manner in which you planned it, and the excellence with which you carried out every phase, was meant to establish your reputation. And to think that my feelings for you—true as they are—might have caused you so much damage. I am mortified.” Andrea admitted that he had made little progress and “all the people involved” in the project were furious with him. “They say I have been taking them for a ride all along. The talk of the town is that the theater project has fallen through because of my excessive passion for you. By God, I couldn’t care less. I only wish to tell you that I love you, my heart.” Sweetly, he added that he would now start working on it again “because it will feel I will be doing something for you. [After I received your letter] I dashed off to the lawyers to get them started again. They weren’t in the office, but I shall find them soon enough.” In the end, despite fitful efforts, the project never got off the ground.
Andrea kept up with his mentor Carlo Lodoli, the Franciscan monk who continued to hold sway among the more open-minded members of the Venetian nobility. Now that he was no longer Lodoli’s student, Andrea saw him less often, but he was anxious that Giustiniana should also benefit from the mind that had influenced him so profoundly. He encouraged his old teacher to visit her as much as possible and draw her into his circle of followers. Giustiniana always welcomed these visits, starved as she was of new books and new ideas in the restricted intellectual environment her mother fostered at home. Most of all she delighted in the chance to spend time with a person who knew the man she loved so well. When Lodoli came to visit, it was as if he brought Andrea with him—at least in spirit. “He just left,” Giustiniana reported to her lover. “He kept me company for a long time, and we spoke very freely. I appreciated our conversation today immensely—more than usual. He is the most useful man to society…. But beyond that, he talked a lot about you and he praised you for the virtues men should want to be praised for—the goodness of your soul and the truthfulness of your spirit.”
For several years Consul Smith’s library had been a second home for Andrea. He continued to visit the consul regularly during his secret affair with Giustiniana, helping him catalogue his art and book collections. Nearly two years had gone by since the two lovers first met in that house. As Andrea worked, he luxuriated in tender memories of those earlier days, when they had been falling in love among the beautiful pictures and the rare books. “Everything there [reminds] me of you…. Oh God, Giustiniana, my idol, do you remember our happiness there?”
In reality, Andrea stopped at the consul’s more out of a sense of duty and gratitude than for pleasure. The old man could be demanding. “When he starts talking after his evening tea, he never stops,” Andrea reported with a sense of fatigue. “He generally asks me to stay on even while he has himself undressed.” These man-to-man ramblings often touched on the Wynnes, and on several occasions Andrea could not help but notice with amusement the vaguely lustful tone Smith had begun to use when he talked about Giustiniana.
Inevitably, as Andrea and Giustiniana’s lives became more entwined and inextricable, so the hopelessness of their situation gradually sank in, bringing with it more tension and crises. Andrea filled his letters with declarations of love and devotion, but he never offered much to look forward to—there was no long-term plan that, however vague, might allow Giustiniana to dream about a future together. Instead, he made offhand remarks about how much simpler it would be if she were married to someone else or, better still, if she were a young widow “so that we wouldn’t have to take all these precautions and I could show the world how much I adore you.”
Giustiniana was having a harder time than Andrea. Her letters, always more impulsive and emotional than his, grew wilder as she swung between bliss and despair. Venice could seem such a hostile place—a watery labyrinth of mirrors and shadows and whispers. She could not get a grip on Andrea’s life or, as a consequence, on her own. The more time passed, the more she felt she was losing her way. Again and again she was overcome by waves of jealousy that brought her to breaking point.
Caterina (Cattina) Barbarigo was a great beauty and a notorious femme fatale. She held court in a casino that was much in vogue among progressive patricians and viewed with suspicion by the inquisitors. Though older than Andrea—she was married and the mother of two beautiful daughters—she liked surrounding herself with promising young men. He, in turn, was delighted to be drawn into her circle of friends—even at the cost of hurting Giustiniana’s feelings. “All day you’ve been at Cattina Barbarigo’s, haven’t you?” she asked accusingly. “Enough, I shan’t complain about it. But why have I not seen you? Why have I not received a line from you? Now that I think of it, it is perhaps better not to have received a note from you because you probably would have written late at night, in haste, and maybe only out of a sense of duty. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will write to me with greater ease.” But there was no letter on the following day, or the next, or the one after that. On the fourth day of silence her anxiety turned into rage:
You should be ashamed of yourself, Memmo. Could one possibly behave worse toward a lover one claims to be desperately in love with? I write to you on Saturday, and you don’t answer because you are at Barbarigo’s house. Sunday I never see you even though I spend the entire day at my window. And no letter—even though you know very well that on Mondays I go out and you should want to find out what the plan is in order to see me. Or perhaps you did write to me but your friend could not deliver? Do you suppose I will believe that you could not find another way of getting a letter to me, considering I had been two days without any news about you? … My mother has been ill for many days, and we could have been seeing each other with fewer precautions. But no—Memmo is having fun elsewhere. He does not even think about Giustiniana except when a compelling urge forces him to. What must I think? I hear from all sides about your new games and your oh-so-beloved old friendships.
Naturally, Andrea pleaded complete innocence: “For heaven’s sake, don’t be so mean. What rendezvous are you talking about? What have I done to merit such scorn? My dear sweet one, you must quiet down. Trust me or else you’ll kill me.” He explained, rather obliquely, that tactical considerations and nothing else occasionally forced him to be silent for a few days or to interrupt the flow of letters. But she should never forget that if he sometimes made himself scarce, it was for her sake and certainly not because he was chasing young ladies around: “You know I love you, and for that very reason, instead of complaining about your perpetual diffidence, I only worry about your position. I would have written to you every day to tell you what I was up to, but you know how afraid I am about writing to you—your mother is capable of all sorts of beastliness. All I care about is making sure the members of your household and our enemies and the crowd of people that follow every step we take do not discover our relationship by some act of imprudence on our part.”
Giustiniana was not reassured by Andrea’s words. In fact, his shifty attitude was making her more upset and more defiant:
How could you swear to me that all you cared about was my position, when in fact you were merely trying to get away from me using prudence as a pretext to rush over to see N.
(#ulink_4616de5b-b18e-5387-81c7-d2aa54ff4b2a)? Don’t be so sure of the power you have over me, for I shall break this bond of ours. I have opened my eyes at last. My God! Who is this man to whom I have given my deepest love! Leave me, please leave me alone. I’m just a nuisance to you. Before long you will hate me. You villain! Why did you betray me? … Everyone now speaks of your friendship with N. At first you explained yourself, and so I was at peace again and I even allowed you to be seen with her in public … and after our reconciliation you rushed off to see her again. What greater proof of your infidelity? Damn you! I am so angry I cannot even begin to say all I want…. Don’t even come near me, I don’t want to see you…. Now I see why you told me to pretend that our friendship was over; now I plainly see how fake your sincerity was, your infamous caution…. Now I know you. Did you think you could make fun of me forever? Enough. I cease to be your plaything.
Were the rumors true? Was Andrea pursuing N., or was Giustiniana working herself into a spiral of groundless jealousy? Whatever was going on, Andrea had clearly underestimated the depth of Giustiniana’s desperation. He suddenly found himself on the defensive, struggling to contain her rage: “How can I describe to you the state I am in, you cruel woman? My mind is busy with a thousand thoughts. I’m agitated and worried about a thousand questions. And you, for heaven’s sake, find nothing better to do than to treat me in the most inhuman way. Where does it all come from? What have I done to deserve all this? … Can it be that you still don’t know my heart? … Come here, my sweet Giustiniana, speak freely to your Memmo.”
Andrea understood more plainly now that as long as Giustiniana felt locked into a relationship with no future she would only become more anguished and more intractable and their life would become hell. But he remained ambivalent: “Tell me if you want to get yourself out of this situation you’re in. Tell me the various possibilities, and however much they might be harmful to me, if they will make you happy…. Speak out, and you will see how I love you.” Was he conjuring up the idea of an elopement? Was he beginning to consider a secret marriage, with all the negative consequences it would have entailed? If so, he was going about it in a very circuitous and tentative way, as if this were merely a short-term device to placate Giustiniana’s wrath. In fact, already in his next letter he retreated to his older, more traditional position: their happiness, as far as Andrea was concerned, hinged on finding Giustiniana a husband. “Alas, until you are married and I am able to see you more freely, there won’t be much to gain. Meanwhile let us try to hurt each other as little as possible.”
Giustiniana, however, had not exhausted her rage. Andrea’s letters suddenly seemed so petty and predictable. Where was the strong, willful young man she had fallen so desperately in love with? In the increasingly frequent isolation of her room at Sant’Aponal, she decided to put an end to their love story. Better to make a clean break, as painful as it would be, than to endure the torture Andrea was inflicting upon her.
This is the last time I bother you, Memmo. Your conduct has been such that I now feel free to write you this letter. I do not blame you for your betrayal, your lack of gratitude, the scarcity of your love, your scorn. No, Memmo. I was very hurt by all this, but I’ve decided not to complain or to wallow in vindictive feelings. You know how much I have loved you; you know what a perfect friend I have been to you. God knows that I had staked my entire happiness on our love. You knew it. Yet you allowed me to believe that you loved me with the same intensity…. And now that I know you, that I see how you tricked me, I give you an even greater token of my passion by breaking this tenacious bond. After all your abuse, your disloyalty, I was already on the verge of abandoning you. But your scorn of the last few days, the lack of any effort on your part to explain yourself, your continuous indulgence in the things you know make me unhappy, your complete estrangement have finally made me see that you could not hope for a better development. I have opened my eyes, I have learned to know you and to know me, and I have become adamant in my resolution never to think again about a man capable of such cruelty, such contempt, such utter disloyalty to me.
So everything between us is over. I know I cannot give you a greater pleasure than this…. And I also know that my peace of mind, my well-being, maybe even my life will depend on this break. I shall never hate you (see how much I can promise), but I will feel both pleasure and displeasure in your happiness as well as in your misfortunes. I will say more: I will never again love anyone the way I have loved you, ungrateful Memmo. You will oblige me by handing over all my letters … as they serve no other purpose than to remind me of my weakness and your wickedness. So please give them back so that I may burn them and remove from my sight everything that might remind me of all I have done for such an undeserving man.
Here is your portrait, once my delight and comfort, which I don’t want anywhere near me. Ask the artist
(#ulink_64c275c5-45dd-543f-bfea-2c385688ed46)to bring me the one you had commissioned of me—I will pay for it in installments and keep it. Your vanity has already been sufficiently satisfied as it is. Everyone knows how much I have loved you. Please don’t let me see you for another few days. I know how good our several days’ separation has been for me, and I have reason to believe that I will benefit by extending it. I forgive you everything. I have deserved this treatment because I was foolish enough to believe that you were capable of a sincere and enduring commitment; and I guess you are not really to blame if you can’t get over your own fickleness, which is so much a part of your nature. I ask neither your friendship nor a place in your memory. I want nothing more from you. Since I can no longer be the most passionate lover, I don’t want to be anything else to you. Adieu, Memmo, count me dead. Adieu forever.
Giustiniana’s dramatic break cleared the air. Within days the poisonous atmosphere that had overwhelmed them dissolved and they were in each other’s arms again, filled with love and desire. Giustiniana even laughed at her own foibles:
Oh God, my Memmo, how can I express these overflowing emotions? How can I tell you that … you are my true happiness, my only treasure? Lord, I am crazy. Crazy in the extreme. And what about all that happened to me in the last few days? Do you feel for me? … With my suspicions, my jealousy, my love…. Only you can understand me because you know my heart and the power you have over it…. I don’t know how my mood has changed so quickly, and why I even run the risk of telling you this! No, I really don’t know what’s happening to me…. Anyway, we’ll see each other tomorrow. Meanwhile I think I’ll just go straight to bed. After having been wrapped up in sweet thoughts about my Memmo and so full of him, I couldn’t possibly spend the rest of the evening with the silly company downstairs!
Andrea was so eager to hold Giustiniana in his arms again that even the twenty-four-hour wait now seemed unendurable to him. Alone in his room at Ca’ Memmo he let himself drift into erotic fantasies, which he promptly relayed to his lover:
Oh, my little one, my little one, may I entertain you with my follies? Do you have a heart to listen? I am so full of dreams about you that the slightest thing is enough to put me into a cosmic mood. For example, I read one of your letters … and I focus on a few characters in your handwriting and I begin to stare at them and I tell myself: here my adorable Giustiniana wrote … and sure enough I see your hand, your very own hand, oh Lord, I kiss your letter not finding anything else to kiss, and I press it against me as if it were you, oh, and I hug you in my mind, and it’s really too much; what to do? I cannot resist any longer. Oh my Lord, oh my Lord, now another hand of yours is relieving me, oh, but I can’t go on…. I cannot say more, my love, but you can imagine the rest…. Oh Lord, oh Lord…. I speak no more, I speak no more.
In such moments of playful abandon Andrea felt he was capable of doing “even the most irresponsible thing … yes … I feel this urge to take you away and marry you.” And when he opened up that way, Giustiniana always gave herself completely: “My Memmo, I shall always be yours. You enchant me. You overwhelm me. I will never find another Memmo with all the qualities and all the defects that I love about you. We are made for each other so absolutely. All that needs to happen is for me to become less suspicious and for you to moderate that slight flightiness, and then we’ll be happy.”
After these moments of ecstasy, however, the gloominess of their situation would steal over their hearts once more. Andrea wondered how their relationship could possibly survive. “We will never have a moment of peace and quiet. Meanwhile, you, believing as you do in everything you hear. Good Lord, I don’t know what to do anymore! You will never change as long as I have to be away from you. I see that it is impossible for you to believe that I am all yours, as I am, and it is impossible to change your mother, or your situation, so what am I to do?” he asked Giustiniana with quiet desperation. “I don’t know how to hold on to you.”
(#ulink_9ee72e2a-c905-5db8-956d-3b70db3624d2)It is probable that a combination of factors determined Casanova’s arrest on July 25, 1755—his openly proclaimed atheism, his dabbling with numerology, his reputation as an able swindler of a rather gullible trio of old patricians. Lucia Memmo’s pressure on the inquisitors also played a role. Certainly Casanova was convinced of this. “His [Andrea’s] mother had been a party to the plot that sent me to prison,”
(#litres_trial_promo) he later wrote in his History of My Life. But he never bore a grudge toward the sons.
(#ulink_a9a2d341-ca10-5dc5-88b7-08a88ef5a993)Clearly a different N. from the one who was lending them the casino.
(#ulink_71ec9091-ebc2-581f-bcfb-67e3fe886fc1)Andrea had commissioned a portrait from “Nazari,” possibly Bartolomeo Nazzari (1699–1758), a fashionable artist in Venice at the time and a protégé of Consul Smith. Alas, the portrait has never been found.
CHAPTER Three (#ulink_09fa1f13-d29b-5089-b1db-918e28ea71b6)
In early December 1755, news quickly spread that Catherine Tofts, the elusive wife of Consul Smith, had died after a long illness. She had once been an active and resourceful hostess, often giving private recitals in her drawing room. There is a lovely painting by Marco Ricci, one of Smith’s favorite artists, of Catherine singing happily with a chamber orchestra. But the picture was painted shortly after her marriage to Smith and before the death of her son. As the years went by, she was seen less and less (Andrea never mentions her in his letters). Toward the end of her life it was rumored that she had lost her mind and her husband had locked her up in a madhouse.
Smith organized a grand funeral ceremony, which was attended by a large contingent of Venice’s foreign community (the Italians were absent because the Catholic Church forbade the public mourning of Protestants). A Lutheran merchant from Germany, a friend of the consul, recorded the occasion in his diary: “Signor Smith received condolences and offered everyone sweets, coffee, chocolate, Cypriot wine and many other things; to each one he gave a pair of white calfskin gloves in the English manner.” Twenty-five gondolas, each with four torches, formed the procession of mourners. The floating cortege went down the Grand Canal, past the Dogana di Mare, across Saint Mark’s Basin, and out to the Lido, where Catherine’s body was laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery: “The English ships moored at Saint Mark’s saluted the procession with a storm of cannon shots.”
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The consul was eighty years old but still remarkably fit and energetic. He had no desire to slow down. By early spring gossips were whispering that his period of mourning was already over and he was eager to find a new wife—a turn of events that caused quite a commotion in the English community.
John Murray, the British Resident, had had a prickly relationship with Smith ever since he had arrived in Venice in 1751. Smith had vied for the position himself, hoping to crown his career by becoming the king’s ambassador in the city where he had spent the better part of his life. But his London connections had not been strong enough to secure it, and Murray, a bon vivant with a keener interest in women and a good table than in the art of diplomacy, had been chosen instead. “He is a scandalous fellow in every sense of the word,” complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who, rather snobbishly, preferred the company of local patricians to that of her less aristocratic compatriots. “He is not to be trusted to change a sequin, despised by this government for his smuggling, which was his original profession, and always surrounded with pimps and brokers, who are his privy councillors.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Casanova, predictably, had a different view of Murray: “A handsome man, full of wit, learned, and a prodigious lover of the fair sex, Bacchus and good eating. I was never unwelcome at his amorous encounters, at which, to tell the truth, he acquitted himself well.”
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Smith did not hide his disappointment. In fact he went out of his way to make Murray feel unwelcome, and the new Resident was soon fussing about the consul with Lord Holderness, the secretary of state, himself an old Venice hand and a friend to the Wynnes: “As soon as I got here I tried to follow your advice to be nice to Consul Smith. But he has played so many unpleasant tricks on me that I finally had to confront him openly. He promised me to be nice in the future—then he started again, forcing me to break all relations.”
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Catherine’s death and, more important, Smith’s intention to marry again brought a sudden thaw in the relations between the Resident and the consul. Murray conceived the notion that his former enemy would be the perfect husband for his aging sister Elizabeth, whom he had brought over from London (perhaps Murray also calculated that their marriage would eventually bring the consul’s prized art collection into his hands). Smith was actually quite fond of Betty Murray. He enjoyed her frequent visits at Palazzo Balbi. She was kind to him, and on closer inspection he found she was not unattractive. Quite soon he began to think seriously about marrying “that beauteous virgin of forty,” as Lady Montagu called her.
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Murray and his sister were not alone in seeing the consul in a new light after Catherine’s death. Mrs. Anna too had her eye on him, because she felt he would be the perfect husband for Giustiniana: Smith could provide her daughter a respectable position in society as well as financial security. Furthermore, he had been a friend of the family for twenty years, and he would surely watch over the rest of the young Wynnes—at least for the short time that was left to him. After all, wasn’t such a solution the best possible way to fulfill the promise he had made to look after Sir Richard’s family? Mrs. Anna began to lure the consul very delicately, asking him over to their house more frequently, showing Giustiniana off, and dropping a hint here and there. She set out to quash the competition from Betty Murray while attempting to preserve the best possible relations with her and her brother. Inevitably, though, tensions in their little group rose, and Betty Murray reciprocated by drawing the consul’s attention to the fact that, as far as she could tell, Giustiniana still seemed very much taken with Andrea.
At first Giustiniana was stunned by her mother’s plan, but she knew that the matter was out of her hands. And although she was only eighteen, she did not express disgust at the idea of marrying an octogenarian. She was fond of Smith, and she also recognized the material advantages of such a marriage. But all she really cared about was how the scheme would affect her relationship with Andrea. Would it protect their love affair, or would it spell the end? Would it be easier for them to see each other or more difficult? The consul was so old that the marriage was bound to be short-lived. What would happen after he died?
Andrea had often said, sometimes laughing and sometimes not, that their life would be so much happier if only Giustiniana were married or, even better, widowed. It had been fanciful talk. Now, quite unexpectedly, they contemplated the very real possibility that Giustiniana might be married soon and widowed not long after. Andrea became quite serious. He set out his argument with care:
I want you to understand that I want such a marriage for love of you. As long as he lives, you will be in the happiest situation…. You will not have sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law and God knows who else with whom to argue. You will have only one man to deal with. He is not easy, but if you approach him the right way from the beginning, he will eagerly become your slave. He will love you and have the highest possible regard for you…. He is full of riches and luxuries. He likes to show off his fortune and his taste. He is vain, so vain, that he will want you to entertain many ladies. This will also open up the possibility for you to see gentlemen and be seen in their company. We will have to behave with great care so that he does not discover our feelings for each other ahead of time.
Andrea began to support Mrs. Anna’s effort by dropping his own hints to Smith about what a sensible match it would be. Giustiniana stepped into line, though warily, for she continued to harbor misgivings. As for the consul, the mere prospect of marrying the lovely girl he had seen blossom in his drawing room put him into a state of excitement he was not always able to contain. Andrea immediately noticed the change in him. “[The other evening] he said to me, ‘Last night I couldn’t sleep. I usually fall asleep as soon as I go to bed. I guess I was all worked up. I couldn’t close my eyes until seven, and at nine I got up, went to Mogliano,
(#litres_trial_promo) ate three slices of bread and some good butter, and now I feel very well.’ And to show me how good he felt he made a couple of jumps that revealed how energetic he really is.”
Word about a possible wedding between the old consul and Giustiniana began to circulate outside the English community and became the subject of gossip in the highest Venetian circles. Smith did little to silence the talk. “He is constantly flattering my mother,” Giustiniana wrote to Andrea. “And he lets rumors about our wedding run rampant.” Andrea told Giustiniana he had just returned from Smith’s, where a most allusive exchange had taken place in front of General Graeme,
(#litres_trial_promo) the feisty new commander in chief of Venice’s run-down army, and several other guests:
[The consul] introduced the topic of married women and after counting how many there were in the room he turned to me:
“Another friend of yours will soon marry,” he said.
“I wonder who this friend might be that he did not trust me enough to tell me,” I replied.
“Myself…. Isn’t that the talk of the town? Why, the General here told me that even at the doge’s …”
“… Absolutely, I was there too. And Graeme’s main point was that having mentioned the rumor to you, you did nothing to deny it.”
“Why should I deny something which at my old age can only go to my credit?”
Andrea had come away from the consul’s rather flustered, not quite knowing whether Smith had spoken to him “truthfully or in jest.” He asked Giustiniana to keep him informed about what she was hearing on her side. “I am greatly curious to know whether there are any new developments.” No one really knew what the consul’s intentions were—whether he was going to propose to Giustiniana or whether he had decided in Betty’s favor. It was not even clear whether he was really interested in marriage or whether he was having fun at everyone’s expense. Giustiniana too found it hard to read Smith’s mind. “He was here until after four,” she reported to her lover. “No news except that he renewed his invitation to visit him at his house in Mogliano and that he took my hand as he left us.”
Andrea feared Smith might be disturbed by the rumors, ably fueled by the Murray clan, that his affair with Giustiniana was secretly continuing, so he remained cautious in his encouragement: perhaps the consul felt he needed more time; his wife, after all, had only recently been buried. Mrs. Anna, however, was determined not to lose the opportunity to further her daughter’s suit, and she eagerly stepped up the pressure.
In the summer months wealthy Venetians moved to their estates in the countryside. As its maritime power had started to decline in the sixteenth century, the Venetian Republic had gradually turned to the mainland, extending its territories and developing agriculture and manufacture to sustain its economy. The nobility had accumulated vast tracts of land and built elegant villas whose grandeur sometimes rivaled that of great English country houses or French châteaux. By the eighteenth century the villa had become an important mark of social status, and the villeggiatura—the leisurely time spent at the villa in the summer—became increasingly fashionable. Those who owned a villa would open it to family and guests for the season, which started in early July and lasted well into September. Those who did not would scramble to rent a property. And those who could not afford to rent frantically sought invitations. A rather stressful bustle always surrounded the comings and goings of the summer season.
Venetians were not drawn to the country by a romantic desire to feel closer to nature. Their rather contrived summer exodus, which Goldoni had ridiculed in a much-applauded comedy earlier that year at the Teatro San Luca,
(#litres_trial_promo) was a whimsical and ostentatious way of transporting to the countryside the idle lifestyle they indulged in during the winter in the city. In the main, the country provided, quite literally, a change of scenery, as if the burchielli, the comfortable boats that made their way up the Brenta Canal transporting the summer residents to their villas, were also laden with the elaborate sets of the season’s upcoming theatrical production.
Consul Smith had been an adept of the villeggiatura since the early twenties, but it was not until the thirties that he had finally bought a house at Mogliano, north of Venice on the road to Treviso, and had it renovated by his friend Visentini. The house was in typical neo-Palladian style—clear lines and simple, elegant spaces. It faced a small formal garden with classical statues and potted lemon trees arranged symmetrically on the stone parterre. A narrow, well-groomed alley, enclosed by low, decorative gates, ran parallel to the house, immediately beyond the garden, and provided a secure route for the morning or evening walk. The consul had moved part of his collection to adorn the walls at his house in Mogliano, including works by some of his star contemporaries—Marco and Sebastiano Ricci, Francesco Zuccarelli, Giovan Battista Piazzetta, Rosalba Carriera—as well as old masters such as Bellini, Vermeer, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Rubens. “As pretty a collection of pictures as I have ever seen,”
(#litres_trial_promo) the architect Robert Adam commented when he visited Smith in the country.
The consul had often invited the Wynnes to see his beautiful house at Mogliano. Now, in the late spring of 1756, he renewed his invitation with a more urgent purpose: to pay his court to Giustiniana with greater vigor so that he could come to a decision about proposing to her, possibly by the end of the summer. Mrs. Anna, usually rather reluctant to make the visit on account of the logistical complications even a short trip to the mainland entailed for a large family like hers, decided she could not refuse.
The prospect of spending several days in the clutches of the consul did not particularly thrill Giustiniana. She told Andrea she wished the old man “would just leave us in peace” and cursed “that wretched Mogliano a hundred times.” But Andrea explained to her that Smith’s invitation was a good thing because it meant he was serious about marrying her and was hopefully giving up on the spinsterish Betty Murray. Giustiniana continued to dread the visit—and the role that, for once, both Andrea and her mother expected her to play. Her anguish only increased during the daylong trip across the lagoon and up to Mogliano. But once she was out in the country and had settled into Smith’s splendid house, she rather began to enjoy her part and to appreciate the humorous side of her forced seduction of il vecchio—the old man. The time she spent with Smith became good material with which to entertain her real lover:
I’ve never seen Smith so sprightly. He made me walk with him all morning and climbed the stairs, skipping the steps to show his agility and strength. [The children] were playing in the garden at who could throw stones the furthest. And Memmo, would you believe it? Smith turned to me and said, “Do you want to see me throw a stone further than anyone else?” I thought he was kidding, but no: he asked [the children] to hand him two rocks and threw them toward the target. He didn’t even reach it, so he blamed the stones, saying they were too light. He then threw more stones. By that time I was bursting with laughter and kept biting my lip.
The visit to Mogliano left everyone satisfied, and even Giustiniana returned in a good mood. Smith was by now apparently quite smitten and intended to continue his courtship during the course of the summer. As this would have been impossible if the Wynnes stayed in Venice, he suggested to Mrs. Anna that she rent from the Mocenigo family a pleasant villa called Le Scalette in the fashionable village of Dolo on the banks of the Brenta, a couple of hours down the road from Mogliano. Smith himself handled all the financial transactions, and since the rental cost would have been high for Mrs. Anna it is possible that he also covered part of the expenses.
Needless to say, Giustiniana was not happy about the arrangement. It was one thing to spend a few days at Mogliano, quite another to have Smith hovering around her throughout the summer. Meanwhile, where would Andrea be? When would they be able to see each other? She could not stand the idea of being separated from her lover for so long. Andrea again tried to reassure her. There was nothing to worry about: it would probably be simpler to arrange clandestine meetings in the country than it was in town. He would come out as often as possible and stay with trusted friends—the Tiepolos had a villa nearby. He would visit her often. It would be easy.
In the meantime Andrea decided he needed to spend as much time as possible with the consul in order to humor him, allay his suspicions, and steer him ever closer toward a decision about Giustiniana. It soon became apparent that the consul, too, wished to keep his young friend close to him. He said he wanted Andrea at his side to deal with his legal and financial affairs but he was probably putting him to the test, observing him closely to see if he still loved Giustiniana. Never before had he seemed so dependent on him. The two of them became inseparable—an unusual couple traveling back and forth between Venice and Mogliano, where Smith’s staff was preparing the house for the summer season, and making frequent business trips to Padua.
Giustiniana was left to brood over her future alone. She complained about Andrea’s absences from Venice and dreaded the uncertainty of her situation. She did not understand his need to spend so much time with that “damned old man.” She felt they were “wasting precious time” that they could be spending together. Yet her reproaches always gave way to words of great tenderness. During one of Andrea’s overnight trips to the mainland with the consul, she wrote:
You are far away, dear Memmo, and I am not well at all. I am happier when you are here in town even when I know we won’t be speaking because I always bear in mind that if by happy accident I am suddenly free to see you, I can always find a way to tell you. You might run over to see me; I might see you at the window…. And so the time I spend away from you passes less painfully…. But days like this one are very long indeed and seem never to end…. Though I must say there have been some happy moments too, as when I woke up this morning and found two letters from you that I read over and over all day. They gave me so much pleasure…. I still have other letters from you, which I fortunately have not yet returned to you—those too were brought out and given a “tour” today. And your portrait—oh, how sweetly it occupied me! I spoke to it, I told it all the things that I feel when I see you and I am unable to express to you when I am near you…. My mother took me out with her to take some fresh air, and we went for a ride ever so lazily down the canal. And as by chance she was as quiet as I was, I let myself go entirely to my thoughts. Then, emerging from those thoughts, I looked around eagerly, as if I were about to run into you. Every time I saw a boat that seemed to me not unlike yours, I couldn’t stop believing that you might be in it. The same thing happened when we got back home—a sudden movement outside brought me several times to the window where I always sit when I hope to see you…. The evening hours were very uncomfortable. We had several visitors, and I could not leave the company. But in the end they did not bother my heart and thoughts so much because I went to sit in a corner of the room. Now, thank God, I have retired and I am with you with all my heart and spirit. This is always the happiest moment of the evening for me. And you, my soul, what are you doing in the country? Are you always with me? Tonnina now torments me because she wants to sleep and is calling me to bed. Oh, the fussy girl! But I guess I must please her. I will write to you tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be sweet if I could dream I was with you? Farewell, my Memmo, farewell. I adore you…. Memmo, I always, always think of you, always, my soul, yes, always.
As the villeggiatura approached, Giustiniana’s anxiety increased. Andrea still spent most of his time with the consul, working for their future happiness, as he put it. But there was no sign that the consul was any closer to a decision. Furthermore, the idea of spending the summer in the countryside deceiving the old man disconcerted her. She grew pessimistic and began to fear that nothing good would ever come of their cockamamie scheme. Andrea was being unrealistic, she felt, and it was madness to press on: “Believe me, we have nothing to gain and much to lose…. We are bound to commit many imprudent acts. He will surely become aware of them and will be disgusted with both you and me. You will have a very dangerous enemy instead of a friend. As for my mother, she will blame us as never before for having disrupted what she believes to be the best plan she ever conceived.” The two of them carried on regardless, Giustiniana complained—she by ingratiating herself to the consul every time she saw him “as if I were really keen to marry him,” thereby pleasing her mother to no end, and Andrea by “lecturing me all day that I should take him as a husband.” But even if she did, even if the consul, at the end of their machinations, asked her to marry him and she consented, did Andrea really think things would suddenly become easier for them or that the consul would come to accept their relationship? “For heaven’s sake, don’t even contemplate such a crazy idea. Do you believe he would even stand to have you in his house or see you next to me? God only knows the scenes that would take place and how miserable my life would become, and his and yours too.”
In June, as Giustiniana waited for the dreaded departure to the countryside, Andrea’s trips out of town increased. There was more to attend to than the consul’s demands: his own family expected him to pay closer attention to the Memmo estates on the mainland now that his uncle was dead. As soon as he was back in Venice, though, he immediately tried to comfort Giustiniana by reiterating the logic behind their undertaking. He insisted that there was no alternative: the consul was their only chance. He argued for patience and was usually persuasive enough that Giustiniana, by her own admission and despite all her reservations, would melt “into a state of complete contentment” just listening to him speak.
Little by little she was beginning to accept the notion that deception was a necessary tool in the pursuit of her own happiness. But the art of deceit did not come naturally to her. When she was not in Andrea’s arms, enthralled by his reassuring words, her own, more innocent way of thinking quickly took over again, and she would panic: “Oh God, Memmo, you paint a picture of my present and my future that makes me tremble. You say Smith is my only chance. Yet if he doesn’t take me, I lose you, and if he does take me, I can’t see you. And you wish me to be wise…. Memmo, what should I do? I cannot go on like this.”
“Ah, Memmo, I am here now and there is no turning back.”
In early July, after weeks of preparations, the Wynnes had finally traveled across the lagoon and up the Brenta Canal and had arrived at Le Scalette, the villa the consul had arranged for them to rent. The memory of her tearful separation from Andrea in Venice that very morning—the Wynnes and their small retinue piling onto their boat on the Grand Canal while Andrea waved to her from his gondola, apparently unseen by Mrs. Anna—had filled Giustiniana’s mind during the entire boat ride. She had lain on the couch inside the cabin, pretending to sleep so as not to interrupt even for an instant the flow of images that kept her enraptured by sweet thoughts of Andrea. Once they arrived at the villa and had settled in, she cast a glance around her new surroundings and had discovered that the house and the garden were actually very nice and the setting on the Brenta could not have been more pleasant. “Oh, if only you were here, how delightful this place would be. How sweetly we could spend our time,” she wrote to him before going to bed the first night.
The daily rituals of the villeggiatura began every morning with a cup of hot chocolate that sweetened the palate after a long night’s sleep and provided a quick boost of energy. It was usually served in an intimate setting—breakfast in the boudoir. The host and hostess and their guests would exchange greetings and the first few tidbits of gossip before the morning mail was brought in. Plans for the day would be laid out. After the toilette, much of which was taken up by elaborate hairdressing in the case of the ladies, the members of the household would reassemble outdoors for a brief walk around the perimeter of the garden. Upon their return they might gather in the drawing room to play cards until it was time for lunch, a rather elaborate meal that in the grander houses was usually prepared under the supervision of a French cook. Afternoons were taken up by social visits or a more formal promenade along the banks of the Brenta, an exercise the Venetians had dubbed la trottata. Often the final destination of this afternoon stroll was the bottega, the village coffeehouse where summer residents caught up with the latest news from Venice. After dinner, the evening was taken up by conversation and society games. Blindman’s bluff was a favorite. In the larger villas there were also small concerts and recitals and the occasional dancing party.
Giustiniana did not really look forward to any of this. As soon as she arrived at Le Scalette she was seized by worries of a logistical nature, wondering whether it would really be easier for her to meet Andrea secretly in the country than it had been in Venice. She looked around the premises for a suitable place where they could see each other and immediately reported to her lover that there was an empty guest room next to her bedroom. More important: “There is a door not far from the bed that opens onto a secret, narrow staircase that leads to the garden. Thus we are free to go in and out without being seen.” She promised Andrea to explore the surroundings more thoroughly: “I will play the spy and check every corner of the house, and look closely at the garden as well as the caretaker’s quarters—everywhere. And I will give you a detailed report.”
The villa next door belonged to Andrea Tron, a shrewd politician who never became doge but was known to be the most powerful man in Venice (he would play an important role in launching Andrea’s career). Tron took a keen interest in his new neighbors. As an old friend of Consul Smith, he was aware that the death of Smith’s wife had created quite an upheaval among the English residents. Like all well-informed Venetians, he also knew about Andrea and Giustiniana’s past relationship and was curious to know whether it might still be simmering under the surface. He came for lunch and invited the Wynnes over to his villa. Mrs. Anna was pleased; it was good policy to be on friendly terms with such an influential man as Tron. She encouraged Giustiniana to be sociable and ingratiating toward their important neighbor. In the afternoon, Giustiniana took to sitting at the end of the garden, near the little gate that opened onto the main thoroughfare, enjoying the coolness and gazing dreamily at the passersby. Tron would often stroll past and stop for a little conversation with her.
Initially Giustiniana thought his large estate might prove useful for her nightly escapades. She had noticed that there were several casini on his property where she and Andrea could meet under cover of darkness. But thanks to her frequent trips to the servants’ quarters, where she was already forming useful alliances, she had found out that Tron’s casini were “always full of people and even if there should be an empty one, the crowds next door might make it too dangerous” for them to plan a tryst there.
In the end it seemed to her more convenient and prudent to make arrangements with their trusted friends, the Tiepolos: their villa was a little further down the road, but Andrea could certainly stay there and a secret rendezvous might be engineered more safely. Giustiniana even went so far as to express the hope that they might be able to replicate in the countryside “another Ca’ Tiepolo,” which had served them so well back in Venice. She added—her mind was racing ahead—that when Andrea came out to visit it would be best “if we meet in the morning because it is easy for me to get up before everyone else while in the evening the house is always full of people and I am constantly observed.”
As Giustiniana diligently prepared the ground for a summer of lovemaking, she did wonder whether “all this information might ever be of any use to us.” Andrea was still constantly on the move, a fleeting presence along the Brenta. When he was not with the consul at Mogliano, he was traveling to Padua on business, visiting the Memmo estate, or rushing back to Venice, where his sister, Marina, who had not been well for some time, had suddenly been taken very ill. Giustiniana might hear that Andrea was in a neighboring village, on his way to see her. Then she would hear nothing more. Every time she started to dream of him stealing into her bedroom in the dead of night or surprising her at the village bottega, a letter would reach her announcing a delay or a change of plans. So she waited and wrote to him, and waited and wrote:
I took a long walk in the garden, alone for the most part. I had your little portrait with me. How often I looked at it! How many things I said to it! How many prayers and how many protestations I made! Ah, Memmo, if only you knew how excessively I adore you! I defy any woman to love you as I love you. And we know each other so deeply and we cannot enjoy our perfect friendship or take advantage of our common interests. God, what madness! Though in these cruel circumstances it is good to know that you love me in the extreme and that I have no doubts about you: otherwise what miserable hell my life would be.
A few days later she was still on tenterhooks:
I received your letter just as we got up from the table and I flew to a small room, locked myself in, and gave myself away to the pleasure of listening to my Memmo talk to me and profess all his tenderness for me and tell me about all the things that have kept him so busy. Oh, if only you had seen me then, how gratified you would have been. I lay nonchalantly on the couch and held your letter in one hand and your portrait in the other. I read and reread [the letter] avidly, and for a moment I abandoned that pleasure to indulge in the other pleasure of looking at you. I pressed one and the other against my bosom and was overcome by waves of tenderness. Little by little I fell asleep. An hour and a half later I awoke, and now I am with you again and writing to you.
Andrea was finally on his way to see Giustiniana one evening when he was reached by a note from his brother Bernardo, telling him that their sister, Marina, was dying. Distraught, he returned to Venice and wrote to Giustiniana en route to explain his change of plans. She immediately wrote back, sending all her love and sympathy:
Your sister is dying, Memmo? And you have to rush back to Venice? … You do well to go, and I would have advised you to do the same…. But I am hopeful that she will live…. Maybe your mother and your family have written to you so pressingly only to hasten your return…. If your sister recovers, I pray you will come to see me right away…. And if she should pass away, you will need consolation, and after the time that decency requires you will come to seek it from your Giustiniana.
In this manner, days and then weeks went by. Eventually, Giustiniana stopped making plans for secret encounters. There were moments during her lonely wait when she even worried about the intensity of her feelings. What was going on in his mind, in his heart? She had his letters, of course. He was usually very good about writing to her. But his prolonged absence disoriented her. She needed so much to see him—to see him in the flesh and not simply to conjure his image in a world of fantasy. “I tremble, Memmo, at the thought that my excessive love might become a burden on you,” she wrote to him touchingly. “… I have no one else but you … Where are you now, my soul? Why can’t I be with you?”
While she longed for Andrea to appear in the country, Giustiniana also forced herself to be graceful with the consul. He called on the Wynnes regularly, coming by for lunch and sometimes staying overnight at Le Scalette, throwing the household into a tizzy because of his surprise arrivals and the late hours he kept. He took Giustiniana out on walks in the garden and spent time with the family, lavishing his attention on everyone. There was no question in anybody’s mind that the old man was completely taken with Giustiniana and that he was courting her with the intention of marriage. Even the younger children had come to assume that the consul had been “tagged” and already “belonged” to their older sister, as Giustiniana put it in her letters to Andrea.
As she waited for her lover, Giustiniana watched with mild bewilderment the restrained embraces between her sister Tonnina and her young fiancé, Alvise Renier, who was summering in a villa nearby. “Poor fellow!” she wrote to Andrea. “He takes her in his arms, holds her close to him, and still she remains indolent and moves no more than a statue. Even when she does caress him she is so cold that merely looking at her makes one angry. I don’t understand that kind of love, my soul, because you set me on fire if you so much as touch me.” She was being a little hard on her youngest sister. After all, Tonnina was only thirteen and Alvise little older than that; it was a fairly innocent first love. But of course every time Giustiniana saw them together she longed to be in the arms of her impetuous lover.
Mrs. Anna, unaware of the heavy flow of letters between Le Scalette and Ca’ Memmo, could not have been more pleased at how things were developing. With Andrea out of the way, the consul seemed increasingly comfortable with the idea of marrying Giustiniana. It was not unrealistic to expect a formal proposal by the end of the season. The other summer residents followed with relish the comings and goings at the Wynnes’. The consul’s visits were regularly commented upon at the bottega in Dolo, as was Andrea’s conspicuous absence. Were they still seeing each other behind the consul’s back, or had their love affair finally succumbed to family pressures? Giustiniana’s young Venetian friends often put her on the spot when she appeared to fetch her mail. However circumspect she had to be, she could not give up the secret pleasure of letting people know, in her own allusive way, that she still loved Andrea deeply. “Today we were talking about how the English run away from passions whilst the Italians seem to embrace them,” she reported. “I was asked somewhat maliciously what I thought of the matter. I replied that life is quite short and that a well-grounded passion for a sweet and lovable person can give one a thousand pleasures. In such cases, I said, why run away from it? The same person pressed on: ‘What if that passion is strongly opposed or if it is hurtful?’ I answered that once a passion is developed it must always be sustained…. Must I really care about what these silly people think? I have too much vanity to disown in public a choice that I have made.”
The consul’s repeated visits—and Andrea’s continued absence—created an air of inevitability about her future marriage that took its toll on Giustiniana. In public, she did her best to put on a brave front. But as soon as she was alone the gloomiest premonitions took hold of her. The hope that when it was all over—when the marriage had taken place—she would be free to give herself completely to the man she loved sustained her through the performance she was putting on day after day. But she could not rid herself of the fear that for all their clever scheming, once the consul married her she would not be able to see Andrea at all. As an English friend summering by the Brenta whispered to her one day, “I know my country well, and I am quite sure the first person Smith will ban from his house will be Memmo.” She wrote to Andrea:
Alas, I know my country too! So what is to be done? Wait until he dies to be free? And in the meantime? And afterward? He might live with me for years, while I cannot live without you for a month…. True, any other husband would stop me from seeing you without having the advantages Smith has to offer, including his old age…. But everything is so uncertain, and it seems to me that the future can only be worse than the present. Of course it would be wrong for the two of us to get married. I wouldn’t want your ruin even if it gave me all the happiness I would feel living with you. No, my Memmo! I love you in the most disinterested and sincerest way possible, exactly as you should be loved. I do not believe we shall ever be entirely happy, but all the same I will always be yours, I will adore you, and I will depend on you all my life…. So I will do what pleases you, [but remember] that if Smith were to ask for my hand and my Memmo were not entirely happy about it I would instantly abandon Smith and everything else with him, for my true good fortune is to belong to you and you alone.
In August Marina’s health briefly improved and Andrea was finally free to go to the country to see Giustiniana. He was not well—still recovering from a bad fever that had forced him to bed. But he decided to make the trip out to Dolo anyway and take advantage of the Tiepolos’ open invitation. Giustiniana was in a frenzy of excitement. “Come quickly, my heart, now that your sister’s condition allows you to…. I would do anything, anything for the pleasure of seeing you.” It was too risky for Andrea to visit her house, so she had arranged to see him in the modest home of the mother of one of the servants, thanks to the intercession of a local priest in whom she had immediately confided. “I went to see it, and I must tell you it’s nothing more than a hovel,” she warned, “but it should suffice us.” Alternatively, they could meet in the caretaker’s apartment, which was reached “by taking a little staircase next to the stables.”
These preparations were unnecessary. Andrea arrived by carriage late in the night, exhausted after a long detour to Padua he had made on behalf of the ever-demanding consul. He left his luggage at the Tiepolos’ and immediately went off to surprise Giustiniana by sneaking up to her room from the garden.
The following morning, after lingering in bed in a joyful haze, she scribbled a note and sent it to Andrea care of the Tiepolos: “My darling, lovable Memmo, how grateful I feel! Can a heart be more giving? Anyone can pay a visit to his lover. But the circumstances in which you came to see me last night, and the manner and grace you showed me—nobody, nobody else could have done it! I am so happy and you are wonderful to me. When will I be allowed to show you all my tenderness?”
Giustiniana fretted about Andrea’s health. He had not looked well, and she feared a relapse: “You have lost some weight, and you looked paler than usual…. I didn’t want to tell you, my precious, but you left me worried. For the love of me, please take care of yourself. How much you must have suffered riding all night in the stagecoach, and possibly still with a fever…. My soul, the pleasure of seeing you is simply too, too costly.” Yet she was so hungry for him after his long absence that she could hardly bear not to see him now that he was so close: “Maybe you will come again this evening…. Do not expose yourself to danger, for I would die if I were the cause of any ailment…. If you have fully recovered, do come, for I shall be waiting for you with the greatest impatience, but if you are still not well then take care of yourself, my soul. I will come to see you; I will … ah, but I cannot. What cruelty!”
Andrea settled in at the Tiepolos’ for the rest of summer. His health fully regained and his sister apparently out of immediate danger, he was anxious to catch up on the time not spent with Giustiniana. They were soon back to their old routine, working their messengers to exhaustion and conniving with trusted allies to set up secret meetings. Giustiniana’s muslins were swishing again as she rushed off on the sly for quick visits to the “hovel”—which she now called “our pleasure house”—or to the caretaker’s, to the Tiepolos’, or even to the village bottega if they were feeling especially daring. When they were not together, they sent notes planning their next escapade. Giustiniana was in heaven. There were no worries in her mind, no dark clouds in the sky: “Am I really entirely in your heart? My Memmo, how deeply I feel my happiness! What delightful pleasure I feel in possessing you. There were times, I confess, in which I doubted my own happiness. Now, Memmo, I believe in you completely, and I am the happiest woman in the world. What greater proof of tenderness, of friendship, of true affection can I possibly want from you, my precious one? My heart and soul, you are inimitable. And it will be a miracle if so much pleasure and joy do not drive me entirely mad.”
In the tranquil atmosphere of the Venetian summer, when the days were held together by card games, a little gossip, and an evening trottata, the sudden burst of activity between the Tiepolos’ villa and Le Scalette did not go unnoticed. There was much new talk about Andrea and Giustiniana among the summer crowd. Even certain members in the Wynne household grew worried. Aunt Fiorina, always sympathetic to their cause, had been aware of the intense correspondence between the two lovers over the course of the summer but had refrained from making an issue of it. When she learned that Andrea and Giustiniana were actually seeing each other, however, she put her foot down and subjected her niece to “a long rebuke.” The stakes with the consul were too high for them to be playing such a dangerous game, she explained.
Fiorina’s alarm presaged worse things to come. Andrea went back to Venice on family business for a few days. Giustiniana wrote to him several times, but the letters never reached him; her messenger had been intercepted. Someone in the Wynne household—perhaps in the servants’ quarters—had betrayed Giustiniana and handed the letters over to Mrs. Anna. The last lines of a frantic message to Andrea are the only fragment that has survived to give us a sense of the panic and chaos that ensued:
… the most violent remedies. It is known that I have written to Venice, but not to whom! Everyone, my Memmo, is spying on me…. Don’t abandon me now, and don’t take any chances by writing to me. I won’t lose you, but if something violent were to happen, I feel capable of anything. If you leave me I shall die, my soul!
Alas, Mrs. Anna knew very well to whom Giustiniana had written in Venice because she was also in possession of some of Andrea’s letters—letters she had intercepted before they could be delivered to her daughter. She confronted Giustiniana, shaking with anger. “All day was an absolute hell—if Hell can really be that horrible,” Giustiniana wrote to Andrea a few days later, when she was finally able to seclude herself (“I must write to you where and when I can”). At the height of her fury Mrs. Anna threatened to sue Andrea and “expose him as a seducer who upsets peaceful families,” she raged, “for the letters I have in my hands prove that he is just that.” Giustiniana pleaded for mercy with such force and conviction that eventually she managed to calm her mother down. In tears, Mrs. Anna withdrew her threat but warned her daughter there would not be another reprieve: “I will have you watched all the time, I will keep my eyes wide open, I will know everything. And remember that I have enough in my hands to ruin Signor Memmo.”
The worst was avoided—what could have been more nightmarish than seeing their love story torn to shreds in a courtroom? But the betrayal had suddenly exposed the secret life of the two lovers. The places they met, their secret arrangements, their promises of lifelong love and devotion—everything was now known to Mrs. Anna. She had a list of the names of their messengers and accomplices. There was not much she could do about the Tiepolos except prohibit her daughter from setting foot in their house. But within the Wynne household, retribution was swift. The servants who had abetted the lovers were given a scolding and punished harshly. Alvisetto, who had been in on the whole thing from the start, was sent away.
There is something deeply sad about Alvisetto’s dismissal, which reminds us to what degree a servant’s life was in the hands of his padrone—his master. In general the master of the house and his wife had a formal, even distant relationship with the servants. But the younger members of the household had a closer rapport with the house staff. They would often appear in the servants’ quarters to trade gossip or ask a favor. And it was not uncommon for a daughter of the house to confide some of her secrets to a maid (or for a son to seek sexual favors). But it was always an imbalanced and ultimately ambiguous relationship. And there was often as much room for treachery as there was for connivance—on both sides. After all, Giustiniana found her allies in the kitchen at Le Scalette, but she had probably found her betrayer there as well. Goldoni made fun of the complicated relations between masters and servants in one of his most popular plays. But poor Alvisetto was nothing like “the wily and dumb” Truffaldino, the main character in A Servant for Two Masters. One has the feeling that, all along, he had been forced by Giustiniana and Andrea to cooperate with them against his better judgment. Now he was being made to pay, very dearly, for a mess that was not of his making. And they could do nothing to save him.
The two lovers managed to resume communications within a few days. Giustiniana barricaded herself in a kindly peasant’s home on the property, where she hastily scribbled her notes to Andrea. But seeing each other was out of the question, given the circumstances. “Ah, Memmo, what must I do? … Will I ever see you again? I love you more than ever, but I am losing you! … Help me, tell me what to do.” It was not long before they found a solution. Andrea suggested he write a letter to Mrs. Anna, professing his undying love for Giustiniana and offering to marry her in a couple of years if Consul Smith did not make an offer. It was a bluff: Andrea and Giustiniana both knew he was not planning to make good on the promise. But he thought it would convince Mrs. Anna that his intentions were honorable and she might therefore allow them to see each other. It was a risky strategy for a short-term gain. Nevertheless, Giustiniana agreed to the plan and decided to bring her aunt Fiorina in on it to a point—telling her about the letter Andrea wished to write to Mrs. Anna but without explaining to her that it was a deception. Aunt Fiorina responded with mixed feelings. “There is no denying that Memmo loves you and that he is a gentleman,” she said to her niece. His proposal was “very reasonable.” The problem, as she saw it, was getting Mrs. Anna to consider listening to him. But she was willing to help.
Even with Aunt Fiorina on their side, Giustiniana felt that, in the end, success or failure hinged on Andrea finding the right tone and words with which to address her mother. Her instructions to him were very precise—and they showed a considerable determination to take charge of the situation.
You will begin your letter by complaining that I have not written to you. You will tell me that you know in your heart that I love you deeply. You will assure me that you love me in the extreme and that to prove it you had written to my mother because you wanted her to hear an important suggestion you had to make—at which point you will copy the letter you have prepared for her. The most important thing (and here, my dear, you need to be artful and I want you to trust me) is to show yourself resolute in offering to write up a document in which, as you have said, you will promise to marry me in two years if Smith or some better party does not come along and propose to me. Give several reasons why it would be advantageous for me to marry you and add that it is your deep love for me that brings you to make this proposition, which you already know will be embraced by me with all my heart. And say you will have to wait because your present circumstances do not allow you to go through with the proposal at this time but in two years things should happen that could make us happy and comfortable for the rest of our lives…. [Add] that we would be very careful to keep this promise a secret.
It is hard to imagine that deep in her heart Giustiniana, though fully aware it was all a scheme, did not hope it would all actually come true, and that in two years’ time she would be married to Andrea. If she did, she kept it to herself.
Andrea struggled over a first draft. Giustiniana showed it to Fiorina, who was “satisfied with [Andrea’s] sentiments” but a little daunted by the resentment he expressed toward Mrs. Anna. “She told me to tell you that to seduce that woman one must flatter her—not be aggressive.” She asked Andrea to try again. “My love,” she added to encourage him, “what happiness will come our way if we manage to deceive her! Either Smith will marry me, in which case we won’t need [the subterfuge], or he won’t marry me, in which case she certainly won’t take away from the man whom she thinks will one day marry me the freedom to be with me from time to time.”
Andrea’s second draft, however, was even more disappointing.
My Memmo, this is not the sort of letter that will get us what we want…. It is weak and useless, so you will understand why I haven’t shown it to my mother and not even to my aunt. The other one was stronger and would have served our purpose wonderfully if you had simply deleted the few lines in which you insulted my mother…. In this one I see only the lover…. So write a new letter or rewrite the first one the way I told you to…. Send it immediately…. My aunt has already asked me if it had arrived, and it would be a pity if she saw us so unhurried in a matter of such importance
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Andrea di Robilant
The true story of forbidden love in eighteenth-century Venice between an Italian noble and the brilliant, illegitimate daughter of an English baronet.In 1754 Andrea Memmo, the dashing and gifted scion of a distinguished catholic family, fell in love with illegitimate English beauty, Giustiniana Wynne. This match went against every convention of their day; it was an 'impossible love'.The lovers chased each other through peeling palazzos, ballrooms, salons, theatres and gambling dens, rubbing shoulders with legendary figures such as Canaletto and their friend, Casanova. Increasingly desperate, they decided Giustiniana should marry to conceal their relationship. A summer passed in flirting with the English Consul, Joseph Smith, but he soon saw through the deception and the affair became public.The consequences were disastrous. Casanova was imprisoned for his 'pernicious' influence. Disgraced, Giustiniana left for Paris, where she launched herself into society in the hunt for a new husband. Her love for Memmo had lingering consequences that were to break this match, and she left again for London, hoping to build a new life, but a different fate lay in store…Andrea di Robilant is Andrea Memmo’s great great great grandson. The idea to write A Venetian Affair was planted when his father discovered Andrea's letters to Giustiniana mouldering in the attic of the family's crumbling Venetian palazzo. His father's violent murder inspired di Robilant to fulfil his father's dream to write about the lovers, and this fascinating, romantic tale is the result of di Robilant’s dedication and passion.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
A Venetian Affair
A True Story of Impossible Love
in the Eighteenth Century
ANDREA DI ROBILANT
Dedication (#ulink_deeac146-3740-525e-b388-df9d5dd1da2a)
In memory of my father,Alvise di Robilant
Contents
Cover (#u92b68733-a954-5a33-9ba7-8ecc4cb14374)
Title Page (#u4eb0ed66-d12d-5478-9ccb-9ac949838e72)
Dedication (#uecf2ccc9-d6a7-5224-a204-8591be04fc82)
Prologue (#u2a14ddc5-f0cd-558b-84b1-30df949a39fb)
Chapter One (#u9b72496a-cd20-597f-960b-0c4080792017)
Chapter Two (#u75eb9bc0-b3f5-5857-8603-d02968fef9c5)
Chapter Three (#u449625b4-5161-5c6e-a528-87ea43095726)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Profile of Andrea di Robilant (#litres_trial_promo)
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)
Q and A (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
A Critical Eye (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#litres_trial_promo)
Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_8a907118-5aed-5234-a1ef-40641f9b993f)
Some years ago, my father came home with a carton of old letters that time and humidity had compacted into wads of barely legible paper. He announced that he had found them in the attic of the old family palazzo on the Grand Canal, where he had lived as a boy in the twenties. Many times, my father had enthralled my brothers and me with stories from his enchanted childhood—there had been gondola rides and children’s tea parties and picnics at the Lido, and in the background the grown-ups always seemed to be drinking champagne and giving fancy-dress balls. Equally romantic to us, though much more melancholy, was his account of how my grandparents’ lavish and extravagant lifestyle had begun fraying at the edges. By the early thirties, art dealers were dropping by more and more frequently. Large empty patches appeared on the walls. Pieces of antique furniture were carried out of the house. Even the worn banners and rusty swords our fierce ancestors had wrested from the hated Turks were sold at auction. Eventually, my spendthrift grandfather sold off the palace floor by floor, severing the family ties to Venice and leaving my father so bereft that he yearned for his Venetian heritage for the rest of his life. He never lived in Venice again, but even as an older man he continued to make nostalgic pilgrimages to the places of his childhood and especially to that grand old house, which had long ceased to belong to us, but where the family still kept a few old boxes and crates.
The di Robilant family is actually of Piedmontese origin. The Venetian connection was established at the end of the nineteenth century when Edmondo di Robilant, my very tall and rather austere great-grandfather from Turin, married my great-grandmother Valentina Mocenigo, a formidable Venetian grande dame with beautiful black eyes and a very sharp tongue. The Mocenigos were one of the old ruling families of Venice—“they gave seven doges to the Republic” my father never tired of repeating to us children. Of course, the glorious days of the Venetian Republic were long gone when my great-grandparents married, but the last Mocenigos still had palaces and money and beautiful paintings. So the impecunious di Robilants moved to Venice after World War I and fairly quickly ran through what remained of the Mocenigo fortune.
My father, having grown up in the fading grandeur of Palazzo Mocenigo, came to revere his Venetian ancestry more than the Piedmontese. To him the box of letters was a small treasure he had miraculously retrieved from his Venetian past. And I remember well the look of cheerful anticipation he had on his face when he arrived at our house in Tuscany and placed it on the dining room table for all the family to see.
The letters were badly frayed and had wax marks and purplish traces of wine on them. They looked intriguing. They were not the usual household inventories that occasionally surfaced, like timeworn family flotsam, in some forgotten recess of the palazzo in Venice. We pried them open one by one and soon realized they were intimate love letters that dated back to the 1750s. Some pages were covered with mysterious hieroglyphs that added mystery to my father’s discovery. We spent a rainy weekend cracking the strange cipher and trying to make some sense of the first fragments we were able to read. I remember we were wary of delving into secrets buried so long ago. Yet we labored on because the spell was irresistible.
At the end of that long weekend I went back to Rome, where I was then working as a journalist, while my father took on the task of deciphering and transcribing the cache of one hundred or so letters in his possession. What eventually emerged from his painstaking labor was the remarkable love story between our ancestor Andrea Memmo, scion of one of the oldest Venetian families, and Giustiniana Wynne, a bright and beautiful Anglo-Venetian of illegitimate birth. The letters revealed a deep romantic passion that was at odds with the gallant, lighthearted lovemaking one often thinks of as typical of the eighteenth century. It was also, very clearly, a clandestine relationship: the curious-looking dots and circles and tiny geometric figures scribbled across the pages were a graphic testimony to the fear the two lovers must have felt lest their letters fall into the wrong hands.
When my father began to dig around Andrea and Giustiniana’s story, he soon found traces of their romance in the public archives in Venice, Padua, and even Paris and London. It turned out that students of eighteenth-century Venice had first become acquainted with the relationship through the writings of Giacomo Casanova, who had been a close friend of both Andrea and Giustiniana. In the first years of the last century Gustav Gugitz, the great Casanova scholar, identified the Mademoiselle XCV who figures prominently in Casanova’s memoirs as Giustiniana.
(#litres_trial_promo) Then, in the twenties, Bruno Brunelli, a Venetian historian, found two small volumes of handwritten copies of letters from Giustiniana to Andrea in the archives in Padua. He wrote a book based on those letters and lamented the fact that he had not found Andrea’s letters as well. He consoled himself with the notion that they could not possibly have been “as absorbing as Giustiniana’s.” Judging from her correspondence, he said, it did not appear that Andrea “had the temperament of a great lover.”
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Other Casanova specialists were drawn to Andrea and Giustiniana. Many combed old bookshops and antique stores hoping to find Andrea’s letters, but in vain. The stash my father had stumbled upon as he rummaged in the attic of Palazzo Mocenigo proved to be the missing part of the story—the other voice. Clearly these letters had at some point been returned to Andrea by Giustiniana and preserved by the family; but they were by no means all of Andrea’s letters. Many had been burnt, and many more had probably been left to rot and then thrown away. But those we had were rich enough to provide a far more complete picture of the love story—and to disprove Brunelli’s contention about Andrea’s temperament as a lover.
Once my father finished transcribing the letters, he tried to publish them. Time went by, and I wondered whether he would ever complete his project. My father did not have the natural inclination to put together a book: his real talent was in telling a good story. Over the years I heard him talk about Andrea and Giustiniana again and again as he polished their romance into a perfect conversation piece. How vividly he comes back to me now, glass of red wine in hand, charming dinner guests with yet another elegant account of his Venetian love story. He revered Andrea, who went on to become one of the last in a long line of Venetian statesmen. And, lady’s man that he was, he adored Giustiniana—for her looks, her spirit, and her lively intelligence. My father rooted for them with genuine affection even as he explained to his listeners, who were perhaps not sufficiently well versed in Venetian laws and customs, that it had been “un amore impossibile”—an impossible love. It was unthinkable in those days for a prominent member of the ruling elite such as Andrea to marry a girl with Giustiniana’s murky lineage. She had been born out of wedlock, her mother’s background was checkered at best, and her father was an obscure English baronet and a Protestant to boot. For this reason, my father would explain, they saw each other in secret and often wrote to each other using their strange alphabet. Whereupon he would bring his audience to a peak of excitement by scribbling a few words in the private code of Andrea and Giustiniana.
In the end the treasured letters became, above all else, an excuse for my father to ramble on about his heroes and the city he loved so much. And they probably would have remained just that if events had not taken a sad and completely unexpected turn. In January 1997 an intruder entered my father’s apartment in Florence and bludgeoned him to death. It was a senseless, incomprehensible act—a violent end for a gentle, life-loving man. After the funeral my brothers and I stayed in Florence for a week in the hope of being of some assistance to the investigation. During those difficult days the story of Andrea and Giustiniana could not have been further from my mind—until it suddenly appeared in the local newspapers. The carabinieri had found my father’s laptop computer open on his worktable, so they had seized it as evidence, together with the floppy disks on which he had transcribed the letters. They went on to leak information about Andrea and Giustiniana to the press.
(#litres_trial_promo) In an even more bizarre twist, the carabinieri sent a few agents up to Venice to check into possible leads.
The murder investigation led nowhere, and two years later it was abandoned. My father’s belongings, including Andrea’s original letters, the discs with the transcriptions, and the notes on the cipher, were returned to us. By that time I had moved to Washington as the new correspondent for the Italian daily La Stampa. But I made a promise to myself that I would do my best to carry out my father’s original plan to publish the letters in one form or another once my assignment in the United States was over. My resolve was further strengthened when I found another trove of letters in a library just a short distance away from my new posting as foreign correspondent.
James Rives Childs was an American diplomat and scholar who developed a minor passion for Giustiniana as a result of his studies on Casanova. In the early fifties he was in Venice looking for the unexpected nugget that might enrich his collection of Casanoviana. He came upon a small volume of letters from Giustiniana to Andrea, which added another fascinating chapter to their love story. He never got around to publishing them, although a few excerpts appeared in his newsletter, Casanova Gleanings. Ambassador Childs died in 1988, having bequeathed his collection—including Giustiniana’s letters—to his alma mater, Randolph Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia, a mere two hours away from Washington, D.C. That part of Virginia was already very familiar to me. Childs—the coincidence would have delighted my father—came from Lynchburg, where my mother had grown up (she attended Randolph Macon Women’s College). So for me the quest that had begun several years earlier with the letters my father had found in the attic of his childhood home in Venice ended, rather eerily, a few miles up the road from my mother’s birthplace in America.
The early 1750s—the period when Andrea and Giustiniana first met—was a particularly poignant moment in Venice’s long twilight. The thousand-year-old Republic was less than five decades away from its swift collapse before Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading army. Signs of decline had been evident for a long time, and no reasonable Venetian believed the Serenissima, as the Republic had been known for centuries, could reclaim the place it had once occupied among the powerful nations of the world. Yet Venice did not seem like a civilization that was drawing its last breath. On the contrary, it was living a vibrant, even self-confident old age. The economy was growing. The streets were busy, and the stores were filled with spices, jewelry, luxurious fabrics, and household goods. On the mainland, agriculture and stock farming underwent revolutionary changes, and wealthy Venetians built grand villas on their country estates. The population was rising, and Venice, with its 140,000 inhabitants, was still one of the most populous cities in Europe. An experienced and generally conservative government composed of a maze of interlocking councils and commissions (whose members derived from the most powerful families) ran the city in a manner that had altered little for centuries. Venice’s ruling class remained an exclusive caste, whose symbol was the Golden Book—the official record of the Venetian patriciate. Its obstinate refusal to let new blood into its ranks, coupled with a deep-seated resistance to change after such a long and glorious history, was weakening its hand. But, as one historian has observed, “the future of this state founded on an intelligent form of paternalism still seemed assured.”
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The middle years of the eighteenth century also saw an extraordinary flowering of the arts that hardly fits the image of a dying civilization. In fact, it turned out to be the last, glorious burst of Venice’s creative genius, and what a feast it was—Tiepolo at work on his celestial frescoes at Ca’ Rezzonico, Goldoni writing his greatest comedies, Galuppi filling the air with his joyful music. There had never been more amusements and distractions in Venice. One pictures the endless Carnival, the extravagant balls, and the theaters fairly bursting with boisterous spectators. The stage was flourishing: there were seven major theaters operating in the 1750s and they were filled with rowdy crowds every night. The most popular meeting place of all, however, was the Ridotto, the public gambling house that was famous across Europe. Venetians were in the grip of a massive gambling addiction, and they were especially hooked on faro, a card game similar to baccarat (“faro” stood for “pharaoh,” and was the king card). There were several gambling rooms at the Ridotto, with as many as eighty playing tables in all. They opened up on a long, candlelit hall—the sala lunga—where an eclectic crowd of masked men and women mingled and gossiped about who was piling up sequins that night and who was piling up debt.
The mask, perhaps more than anything else, was the symbol of those carefree days. It had become, by then, an integral part of the Venetian attire, like wigs and fans and beauty spots. Masks came in two kinds: the more casual black or white moreta, that covered only the eyes, and the “cloaked” mask, or bautta, which hid the entire head down to the shoulders. Venetians were allowed to wear masks in public from October until Lent, with the exception of the novena—the nine-day period before Christmas—and everyone wore one, from the doge down to the women selling vegetables at the market. The custom added a little mystery and intrigue to everyday life.
The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) between the major European powers would soon come to darken spirits and change the atmosphere in the city. The Venetian Republic, neutral throughout this long conflict, which put an end to French expansionism and marked the rise of Great Britain as the dominant power, was going to feel adrift and ultimately lost after the war. But until then there prevailed a sense that things would go on unchanged as they had for centuries and that life should therefore be enjoyed to the fullest.
In those happier years the house of Consul Joseph Smith, a rich English merchant turned art collector, was one of the busiest and most interesting places on the Venetian scene—a meeting point of fashionable artists, intellectuals, and foreign travelers. It was in Smith’s art-filled drawing room at Palazzo Balbi, on the Grand Canal, that Andrea met Giustiniana sometime in late 1753. He was twenty-four; she was not yet seventeen. Andrea was tall and vigorous—handsome in a Venetian sort of way, with the long, aquiline nose that was typical of many patrician profiles. His sharp mind was tuned to the new ideas of the Enlightenment, and he was possessed of the natural self-confidence that came with his class—assured as he was of his place in the Venetian oligarchy. His elders already looked upon him as one of the brightest prospects of his generation. And indeed he must have seemed quite the dashing young man to a girl eight years his junior—wise beyond his age and so much at ease in Consul Smith’s rather intimidating salon. But Giustiniana too stood out in those assemblies. Behind that innocent, awestruck gaze was a lovely girl brimming with life. She was bright, alert, and possessed of a quick sense of humor. Andrea was instantly taken with her. She was so different from the other young women of his set—familiar, in a way, for after all she was a Venetian born and raised, yet at the same time very distinctive, even a little exotic, not only on account of her English blood but also because of her unique character.
Andrea and Giustiniana met again and again at Consul Smith’s. The physical attraction between them was plain to see: soon they could not bear to be apart. But something deeper was going on, too, more magical and mysterious: it was the blending of two souls that were very different and nevertheless yearned for each other. “My passion for him swallowed everything else in my life,”
(#litres_trial_promo) Giustiniana recalled many years later. Andrea too was overwhelmed by his feelings in a way he had never been before.
Alas, the earliest part of their love story has remained blurred. If they wrote letters to each other during that time—as is probable—those letters have never surfaced. But in the later correspondence there are echoes of their first enchanted days together, as they chased each other in the rooms of Palazzo Balbi searching for a darkened corner where they could hold each other and kiss in the full rapture of new love.
From the very beginning the love story of Andrea and Giustiniana bore a note of defiance toward the outside world. Carried along by the sheer power of their feelings, they pursued a relationship in the face of social conventions that were clearly stacked against them. It is true that by the mid–eighteenth century, as pre-Romantic stirrings spread through Venetian society, young men and women who loved each other were beginning to challenge the rigid customs of the aging Republic. The number of clandestine marriages, secretly sanctioned by the Church, saw a considerable increase in those years. But the costs of breaking the rules were still very high. As one historian has put it, “Any patrician who attempted a secret marriage put himself quite inevitably in direct conflict with his family and institutions. By bringing dishonor on himself he renounced any political career and lost the privilege of seeing his own children recognized as members of the patriciate. He might lose all economic assistance from the family and be disinherited.”
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The clandestine marriages that did take place mostly involved impoverished patricians or members of the lesser nobility, who did not have much to lose by defying their elders. To Andrea, with his family history, his education, his strong sense of duty toward the Republic, the idea of secretly marrying Giustiniana seemed completely irrational. Apart from the shame it would have brought on his family, it was hard to see how the marriage would have survived from a practical point of view. Where would they have lived? What would they have lived on? Despite her youth and her intense emotions, even Giustiniana was realistic enough to see that if they fought the time-honored customs of the Republic they would be crushed.
A few months into their affair, Giustiniana’s mother stepped in. Mrs. Anna had one pressing task, which was to find a suitable husband for her eldest daughter. This meant she had to keep Giustiniana at a safe distance from hot-blooded young Venetian patricians—who might try to seduce her for the sake of intrigue and entertainment but would never marry her—while she looked out for a sensible if less glamorous match. She could not allow Giustiniana to wreck her plans with a relationship that in her eyes had no future and would only bring dishonor upon the family. So in the winter of 1754 she told Andrea never to call on Giustiniana at their house again and forbade the two lovers from seeing each other.
Mrs. Anna’s ban seemed to spell the end of their forbidden love. But their timeworn letters have continued to surface over the years—in the archives in Padua, in the attic at Palazzo Mocenigo, at Randolph Macon College—to reveal that in fact this was only the beginning of a remarkable love story.
CHAPTER One (#ulink_5ee4c0e2-f78a-5cb7-9669-bedff8f3800b)
Early in the evening Andrea caught up with Giustiniana at the theater. She was radiant in her brocaded evening cape, and the anxious way she was looking around for him made her seem lovelier than ever. She smiled as she saw him, and they exchanged a few signals from a safe distance, apparently without raising Mrs. Anna’s suspicions. After the play, Andrea followed mother and daughter to the Ridotto, keeping close to the walls of the narrow streets and casting nervous glances ahead. In the gambling halls, among the late-night crowd of masked men and women hovering around the faro tables, he had a much harder time avoiding Mrs. Anna as she flitted in and out of the shadows in the candlelit rooms. He was terrified she might suddenly come upon him and make a horrible scene. Unnerved by all the difficulties, he finally gave up and went home without having had his cherished moment alone with Giustiniana.
That night he hardly slept, shifting restlessly in his bed, wondering if he had abandoned the Ridotto too abruptly and not made it sufficiently clear to Giustiniana why he was leaving the scene. The next morning he rose early and wrote to her at once:
My beloved,
I am very anxious to know whether your mother noticed anything last night—any act of imprudence on my part—and if you yourself were satisfied or had reason to be cross. Everything is so uncertain. At the theater things didn’t go badly, but at the Ridotto—I don’t know how it all ended at the Ridotto. As long as I was in your mother’s range I tried to conceal myself—as you probably saw. And rest assured that when I did not show myself to you it was because Mrs. Anna was looking in my direction. Once you left the rooms I no longer saw our tyrant and imagined we had lost her for good—your own gestures seemed to suggest as much…. But I asked around and was told she was still there…. I waited a while to see for myself, and sure enough there she was again. So I resolved to put myself out of her sight.
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Mrs. Anna clearly hoped that, thanks to her intervention, the passion so perilously ignited in the house of Consul Smith would subside before any irreparable damage was done to her daughter. But she had wrenched them apart just as they were falling deeply in love. Their need to be together was stronger than any obstacle she could put in their way; the thrill of their forbidden relationship only drew them closer. As Andrea pointed out to Giustiniana, her mother’s relentless watch and the atmosphere of general disapproval she helped to foster around them made their desire to be together “even more obstinate.” In fact, there had been no separation to speak of in the wake of Mrs. Anna’s pronouncement. The two lovers continued to look for each other ever more frantically, playing a highly charged game of hide-and-seek in the streets of Venice, at the theater, among the crowd at the Ridotto.
It is easy to see Mrs. Anna in the role of the insensitive and overly censorious mother—a tyrant, as the two lovers called her. But she had good reason to be firm. She was a woman of experience who had worked hard to gain respectability, and she well understood the intricate workings of Venetian society, in which the interests of the ruling families were supreme. She was also very much aware of Andrea’s special place in that society—and what a formidable opponent he was in her struggle to protect her daughter.
The Memmos were among the founding fathers of Venice in the eighth century—historians have even traced the lineage of Andrea’s family as far back as the gens Memmia of Roman times. There was a Memmo doge as early as the year 979, and over the next eight centuries the family contributed a steady flow of statesmen and high-ranking public servants to the Republic. By Andrea’s day they were still very influential in Venetian politics—an elite within the elite, at a time when many other patrician families living in the city had become politically irrelevant.
(#ulink_c5e62026-0e7c-5b32-b5c7-778fee5ef8af) But they were not among the richest families; by the 1750s, their income had dwindled to about 6,000 ducats a year, and they would have needed at least double that amount to face comfortably the expenditures required of a family of such elevated rank (the wealthiest families had incomes ten times as large). They earned barely enough from their estates on the mainland to live with the necessary decorum at Ca’ Memmo, the large family palazzo at the western end of the Grand Canal.
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Andrea’s father, Pietro Memmo, was a gentle, virtuous man long weakened by ill health. His mother, Lucia Pisani, came from a wealthy family that had given the Republic its greatest and most popular admiral—the fierce Vettor Pisani, who had saved Venice from the Genoese in the fourteenth century. Pietro was always a rather remote figure—he and Andrea could find little to say to each other—and Lucia was not especially warm with her children either; her stiff manner was fairly common among the more old-fashioned patrician ladies of that time. Nevertheless, she was by far the more forceful of the two parents, and Andrea felt closer to her than he did to his father. The one person in the family he truly adored was Marina, his older sister by six years: a sensitive, kind-hearted young woman whom he could always confide in. Andrea had two brothers: Bernardo, who was one year younger than him, and Lorenzo, who was four years younger. The three boys, being fairly close in age, spent much of their time together when they were growing up. There was also a younger sister, Contarina.
The family patriarch was Andrea Memmo, Andrea’s venerable uncle, known for his courage and strength of character; he had been imprisoned and tortured by the Turks while he was ambassador to Constantinople in 1713. The senior Andrea served the Republic with great distinction and ended his political career as procuratore di San Marco, the second most prestigious position in government after the supreme office of doge. He went on to become a respected elder statesman whom his peers considered “possibly the greatest expert in Venetian matters.”
(#litres_trial_promo) He died at the age of eighty-six in 1754—the same year Andrea and Giustiniana’s secret love affair began.
Andrea’s uncle ruled over the family with a steady hand for decades, overseeing everything from political alliances to business decisions, from household expenses to the education of the younger Memmos. During his long stewardship, Ca’ Memmo was known for its strong attachment to tradition. But it was also considered a progressive house where writers, artists, and composers were always welcome. The new ideas from Paris, especially the political writings of Montesquieu (Venetians had a predilection for anything involved with the machinery of government), were discussed spiritedly at the dinner table.
(#ulink_2711b777-5f2d-57ba-91fb-47163b9dcaa6) Their friend Goldoni, the great playwright, was a frequent lunch guest. So was the German composer Johann Adolph Hasse, the “divine Saxon” who had married the diva Faustina Bordoni and ran the music conservatory at the Incurabili, one of the hospices where young orphans were trained as musicians and singers.
Very early on, Andrea senior had chosen his favorite nephew and namesake as his successor. Over the years he instilled in him a sense of duty toward family and nation that would remain with him all his life. And he prepared him for a career in the service of “our wise Venetian Republic, which has seen the largest and wealthiest kingdoms fall over the past ten centuries and more, and yet has managed to stand firm amid everyone else’s misfortune.”
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Andrea received his first formal education from Eugenio Mecenati, a Carmelite monk who worked as preceptor in several patrician families. But his mind wasn’t really turned on until he met Carlo Lodoli, a fiery and charismatic Franciscan monk. During the 1740s Lodoli established himself as Venice’s controversial resident philosopher. He was a brilliant scholar and teacher, equally at ease talking to his students about astronomy, philosophy, or economics. Lodoli’s great passion was architecture, a field in which he applied the principles of utilitarianism to develop his own visionary theories about function and form. Wrapped in his coarse habit, the monk had a rugged, unkempt look about him that could be quite intimidating: “The red spots on his face, his wild hair, his unshorn beard, and those eyes like burning coals—he very nearly scared off the weaker spirits,”
(#litres_trial_promo) Andrea wrote many years later. Lodoli’s disciples came from the more enlightened families in Venice. He never wrote books but kept students under his spell through the force of his personality and the probing power of his Socratic “conversations.” His mission, as he saw it, was to open the mind of young patricians. The Venetian authorities were wary of the strong influence the monk had on his disciples. But Lodoli was not interested in subverting the established political order, as his conservative critics suggested: he wanted to improve it—by improving the men who would soon be called upon to serve the Republic.
Andrea remained devoted to Lodoli all his life, but the moral rigor of the Franciscan, his ascetic lifestyle, could be a little hard going. It is easy to see why Andrea’s sensual side was somewhat starved in his company, and why he spent more and more of his time in the splendid house-museum of Consul Smith on the Grand Canal, just a short walk down the street from Ca’ Memmo. He spent hours studying the vast collection of paintings and sculptures the consul had assembled over the previous thirty years and happily buried himself in the library—an exceptional treasure trove of classics and moderns in beautifully bound volumes.
Smith had arrived in Venice in the early years of the century, when the city still attracted a good number of foreign merchants and businessmen. He had gone to work for the firm of his fellow Englishman Thomas Williams and had been successful enough to take over the company when Williams retired a few years later and returned to England. Smith went on to build a considerable fortune trading in the East, buying goods from Venetian merchants and selling them on the British market. In 1717 he married Catherine Tofts, a popular singer who had made a name for herself in the London theaters before coming to Venice. Wealthy and well connected, Catherine was certainly the major drawing card of the Smith ménage in the early years of their marriage. But over time she gradually withdrew from society, perhaps never recovering from the loss of their son, John, who died in 1727 at the age of six.
As his business flourished, Smith purchased Palazzo Balbi, which he had rented ever since his arrival in Venice, and commissioned the architect Antonio Visentini, a friend and protégé, to renovate the façade. After some plotting within the English community in Venice and a great deal of pleading with the government in London, he eventually obtained the consular title in 1740. Much to his chagrin, he never became the British Resident (ambassador).
Consul Smith would probably have long faded into history had he not branched out into art and become one of the greatest dealers of his time. He made a habit of visiting artists, many of whom had studios a short walk away from his home. Smith had a good eye, and he delighted in friendly haggling. His collection included beautiful allegorical paintings from Sebastiano Ricci and Giovan Battista Tiepolo, grand vistas by Francesco Guardi, intimate scenes of Venetian life by Pietro Longhi, and several exquisite portraits by Rosalba Carriera. But his special admiration was reserved for Canaletto’s clean and detailed views of the city, and over the years he developed a close professional relationship with the great Venetian vedutista.
Smith combined the eye of an art lover with the mind of a merchant. He realized he was living at the heart of an extraordinary artistic flowering and was in a unique position to turn his patronage into a profitable business. He commissioned works from his favorite artists and sold them to wealthy English aristocrats just as the fashion of collecting art was spreading. (He was so successful in marketing his beloved Canaletto that the artist eventually moved to London to paint views of the Thames for his growing clientèle.) In the process, Smith built up his own collection, enriching it with important paintings by old masters. Works by Bellini, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Rubens adorned the walls of his palazzo. Books, perhaps even more than paintings, were his true passion. He purchased valuable editions of the great classics as well as original manuscripts and drawings, and he participated directly in the publishing boom that was taking place in Venice. Smith invested in Giovan Battista Pasquali’s printing shop and bookstore, and together they published the works of Locke, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot and his fellow Encyclopédistes (the first volumes of the revolutionary Encyclopédie appeared in 1751). Pasquali’s shop soon became a favorite gathering place for the growing Venetian book crowd. “After having enjoyed the fresh air and shared the pleasures of Saint Mark’s Square,” wrote the French traveler Pierre Jean Grosley, “we would go to Pasquali’s shop or to some other bookseller. These shops serve as the usual meeting point for foreigners and noblemen. Conversations are often seasoned with that Venetian salt which borrows a great deal from Greek atticism and French gaiety without being either.”
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Smith’s drawing room was, in a way, an extension of Pasquali’s shop in more elegant surroundings. It was the center of the small English community (and it somehow never lost its touch of English quaintness). But more important, it was a place where artists, intellectuals, and Venetian patricians could congregate in an atmosphere of enlightened conviviality. Carlo Goldoni dedicated one of his plays—Il filosofo inglese—to Smith. In his flattering introduction, he wrote: “All those who enter your house find the most perfect union of all the sciences and all the arts. You are not a lover who merely gazes with admiration but a true connoisseur who is keen to share the meaning and beauty of the art around him. Your good taste, your perfect knowledge have inspired you to choose the most beautiful things, and the courage of your generous spirit has moved you to purchase them.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Andrea spent many happy days at Palazzo Balbi. It was in the consul’s library that he learned his Vitruvius, studied Palladian drawings, and pored over the latest volume of the Encyclopédie (he got into the habit of copying out long passages to better absorb the spirit of French Enlightenment). Smith, his only child having died so many years earlier, developed a genuine affection for Andrea and as he grew older came to depend on him as a confidant and assistant. By 1750 he was already in his seventies. He had lost his sure touch in business transactions, and his weakened finances would only get worse. Having no heir and less and less money, he conjured up the deal of his lifetime—an ambitious plan to sell his huge art collection and his library to the British Crown.
(#litres_trial_promo) He enlisted Andrea to help him catalogue all his paintings and books.
Under the influence of Goldoni, Andrea also developed a strong interest in the theater. During the season, which ran from October through May, he went to the theater practically every night. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the raucous debate that was raging between conservative and progressive critics. Though Goldoni was twenty years older than Andrea, he enjoyed the young man’s company, regarding him not just as a promising member of the ruling class but also as a possible ally in his crusade in favor of plays that were closer to the everyday life of Venetians. In 1750 he dedicated his Momolo cortesan to Andrea, telling him he hoped that together they would “rid the stage of the obscene and ill-conceived plays”
(#litres_trial_promo) produced by his conservative rivals. With Goldoni’s encouragement, Andrea started to work in earnest on the idea of opening a new theater entirely dedicated to French plays, from Molière’s classics to the light comedies of Marivaux. The goal, he said, was “to improve our own theater … and lift the common spirit in an honest way.”
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While Andrea waited patiently for his turn to serve as a junior official in the Venetian government, his days were filled with his work for Smith, his new theater project, and the increasing load of family responsibilities being thrust upon his shoulders by his aging uncle. There was still plenty of time for evening strolls and gallantries in Campo Santo Stefano and Piazza San Marco, late-night discussions in the coffeehouses and malvasìe (wine shops that specialized in the sale of malmsey) and even the occasional trip to the Ridotto—though Andrea was never much of a gambler and went there mostly to meet friends and survey the scene.
Among his new friends was Giacomo Casanova, who returned to Venice in 1752 after his first trip to Paris. He and the three Memmo brothers were often seen together at one of the popular malvasìe, where they drank until late, played cards, and boisterously panned the latest play by the Abbé Pietro Chiari, Goldoni’s chief conservative rival. Andrea’s mother was not happy about her sons’ friendship with Casanova. She saw him as a dangerous atheist with low morals who was bound to corrupt her children, and she alerted the authorities through her political connections. It turned out that the Inquisitori di Stato—the secretive three-member committee that oversaw internal security—viewed Casanova much in the same light and were already compiling a hefty dossier on him. Indeed, the band of merry revelers was being watched by the few shopworn informers still on the government payroll, one of whom confidently explained in his report that what bound Casanova and his friends was the fact that “they are philosophers of the same ilk … Epicureans all.”
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In spite of his busy life and his many distractions, Andrea’s sense of duty to the Republic was so ingrained in his mind that he saw his passion for architecture, his love of the theater, and his knowledge of painting and drawing not as ends unto themselves but as additional endowments that he would put to practical use during his public service. It did not occur to him to seek a different road from the one his uncle Andrea had set for him. He clearly considered marriage from the same perspective. Before meeting Giustiniana, Andrea had enjoyed a number of affairs. He loved the company of women and from a young age was much in demand among his female friends—he was also quite a dancer, which helped. But he had had no great romance or lasting relationship. He knew and accepted the fact that he was bound to marry a young woman from his own social class and that the families would seal the marriage after long negotiations that would have little to do with the feelings of the bride and the groom. Everything young men like Andrea had been taught at home “underscored the irrationality of choices made solely on the basis of sentimental feelings.”
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Andrea’s world—rich and varied and challenging but also largely predictable—was suddenly shaken up when Giustiniana stepped into it in late 1753. She came from another sphere entirely, having just returned with her mother and siblings from London, where they had traveled to collect the family inheritance after the death of Sir Richard, her beloved father. During her yearlong absence, she had blossomed into a lively and very attractive young woman. The Wynnes had a two-year, renewable residency permit; they were not Venetian citizens and therefore, like all other foreigners, had to obtain a special authorization to stay in the city. They settled in a rented house in the neighborhood of Sant’Aponal and at first led a quiet life, mostly within the small English community.
Sir Richard Wynne had left his native Lincolnshire distraught after the death of his first wife, Susanna. He journeyed across Europe and arrived in Venice in 1735 “to dissipate his affliction for the loss of his lady,”
(#litres_trial_promo) as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, famed and restless English traveler disapprovingly put it during one of her many stays in Venice. He was soon introduced “by his gondolier” to Anna Gazzini, a striking twenty-two-year-old Venetian with a less-than-immaculate past. Anna had actually been born on Lefkos, a Greek island in the Ionian Sea, where her father, Filippo Gazzini, had once settled to trade, but the family returned to Venice when she was still a little girl.
Anna became Sir Richard’s lover soon after they met. Two years later, she gave birth to a baby girl who was baptized Giustiniana Francesca Antonia Wynne on January 26, 1737, in the Church of San Marcuola. Sir Richard doted on his daughter. He did not return to England, married Anna in 1739, and legalized Giustiniana’s status six years later. (The legalization papers refer to Anna’s father as “Ser Filippo Gazzini, nobleman from Lefkos,”
(#litres_trial_promo) but this belated claim to nobility had a dubious ring to it even back then.) Anna gave birth to two more daughters: Mary Elizabeth in 1741 and Teresa Susanna in 1742, known as Bettina and Tonnina. Their first son, Richard, was born in 1744, followed by William in 1745. A fourth daughter, Anna Amelia, was born in 1748 and died two years later.
Mrs. Anna must not have been much fun to be around. Perhaps to atone for sins of her youth, she became a fierce Catholic who dragged her children to church and pestered her Anglican husband endlessly to convert. She was a strict disciplinarian, bent on giving as traditional an education as possible to Giustiniana and her younger brothers and sisters: music, dance, French, and little else. Sir Richard was quite content to leave the upbringing of the children to his wife and retreat to his well-stocked library. As his gout worsened, he withdrew from family life even more. Many years later, Giustiniana remembered him sitting with a book in his favorite armchair “the six months of the year he didn’t spend in bed.”
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Despite his poor physical condition, Sir Richard developed a close bond with Giustiniana. They shared a love of literature, and he gave her the keys to his library. From a young age she read eagerly but with no guidance or method, moving randomly from travel books to La Fontaine’s fables to heavy-going tomes such as Paolo Sarpi’s history of the Council of Trent—a book the Inquisition had banned for its sympathetic view of the Reformation. Giustiniana was caught reading it secretly. From the little we know of Sir Richard, he must have chuckled at his daughter’s temerity. Anna, on the other hand, had a fit and threatened to lock Giustiniana up in a convent.
Sir Richard died in 1751, and the following year Mrs. Anna dragged her five children to London to claim their inheritance. It was a long, tedious journey. Many years later, Giustiniana would remember only the dirty hotels, the bad food, and “all those churches [in Germany] so heavy with ornaments.” But she loved London—“the parks, the noise in the streets, the pretty hats … and the general air of opulence”—and she would have gladly stayed on. “I had learned English well enough, was rather good at handling a fork, and was expecting to put my new skills to good use.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs. Anna, however, was there for the money. When she finally got her hands on some of it, thanks to the intercession of the children’s guardian, Robert d’Arcy, Earl of Holderness, a former British Resident in Venice, the family packed up once more and headed home—this time taking the more pleasant route, via Paris.
Giustiniana was not yet sixteen when she arrived in Paris with her mother and her brothers and sisters. But she did not go unnoticed during her brief stay. Casanova met her in the house of Alvise Mocenigo, the Venetian ambassador. Forty years later, he still had a vivid memory of that first encounter. “Her character,” he wrote in his memoirs, “was already delineated to perfection in her beautiful face.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Giustiniana loved Parisian life—“the theater, the elegance of men, the rouge on women’s cheeks”
(#litres_trial_promo)—but Mrs. Anna was anxious to get back to Venice, so they made their way home, taking with them a French governess, Toinon, who was much loved for her skill in combing the girls’ hair.
The return of the Wynne sisters—“le inglesine di Sant’Aponal,”
(#litres_trial_promo) as they quickly became known—generated a certain amount of excitement among the young men in town. Sure enough, Casanova—who had also returned to Venice in the meantime—came knocking at their door shortly after they had settled in, claiming that he had fallen in love with Giustiniana. Mrs. Anna, aware of his reputation and keen to keep her daughter out of trouble, turned him firmly away. (In his History of My Life, Casanova claimed that Giustiniana then wrote him a charming letter “which made it possible for me to bear the affront calmly.”
(#litres_trial_promo)) Mrs. Anna had every intention of keeping her daughters on a very short leash, and Giustiniana, who was just beginning to enjoy the pleasures of society, discovered, to her dismay, that their life in Venice “had been reduced to a small circle indeed.” Much of their time was spent at home, “where we went on about Paris and London.”
(#litres_trial_promo) It was all rather glum.
The house of Consul Smith, one of the few Mrs. Anna allowed her daughters to frequent, was their link to the world. The consul, who had known Sir Richard well, was one of the most prominent foreign residents in town. He had seen the Wynne children grow up and had promised his old friend he would watch over his family and help Mrs. Anna sort out her finances. Palazzo Balbi became a second home to the young Wynnes, a place removed from their dreary house at Sant’Aponal, filled with beautiful objects, where the conversation had a cosmopolitan quality that reminded them of Paris and London. The consul, for his part, looked upon the Wynne children with avuncular affection. He was especially pleased with Giustiniana, who always brought a breath of fresh air to his house. “Mister Smith shared with me his love for his paintings, his antiquities, his library in order to enrich my passion for learning,”
(#litres_trial_promo) she later reminisced. One suspects he also rather enjoyed parading through his magnificent rooms with such a lovely young girl on his arm.
During one of her visits to Palazzo Balbi the consul introduced Giustiniana to his dashing young assistant. As soon as Mrs. Anna heard about her daughter’s infatuation, she became very anxious. Since the death of Sir Richard, she had lived in the fear that the respectability she had so stubbornly built up over the years might abate, leaving her and her family exposed to insidious and materially damaging forms of social discrimination. Her fear was well founded. Even in the relatively tolerant atmosphere of eighteenth-century Venice, many people still made a point of remembering that Lady Wynne was in fact the daughter of a “Greek” merchant. And there were lingering rumors about the amorous adventures of her youth: some even murmured that she had given birth to a child before taking up with il vedovo inglese—the English widower. Now she was a widow herself, living in a rented house with five children and with past sins to hide, and it is easy to see why she felt her position in society was so precarious—all the more so since she was in Venice at the pleasure of the authorities. Her residency permit might not be renewed or might even be revoked. So she had to act judiciously to maintain the standing Sir Richard had bequeathed to her.
However detestable her unyielding attitude must have seemed to the two lovers, it was certainly justified in the eyes of the English community. Consul Smith was fond of both Andrea and Giustiniana, but he was a practical man. When Andrea confided in him he sympathized with the lovers to a point. Nonetheless, he was very much on Mrs. Anna’s side. The few Venetian families with whom the Wynnes socialized also supported her—especially the powerful Morosinis, with whom the Memmos had a long-running political feud and whom Andrea detested. But her chief ally, as opposed as they were in character and inclination, was Andrea’s mother. Lucia saw, perhaps more clearly than the rest of the Memmos, the material disadvantages that a union with Giustiniana would bring to an old house which needed to reinvigorate its weak finances. And she feared the political damage the Memmos would suffer if her eldest and most promising son ever betrayed the family and crossed the inquisitors by marrying a woman beneath his rank.
The difference between the two mothers was that Lucia simply wanted to make sure Andrea did not get it into his head to marry Giustiniana. If in the meantime he dallied with her, as young men often did before settling down, it was no great worry to her and would not damage his future prospects. Mrs. Anna, on the other hand, was fighting a daily battle to prevent any contact between the lovers that might taint the family’s reputation and jeopardize her daughter’s chances of a respectable marriage.
Mrs. Anna was losing the battle. Andrea’s courtship was assiduous, visible to everyone, and highly compromising. He saw Giustiniana every day at the Listone in Piazza San Marco, where Venetians gathered for their evening stroll, and often later on as well, at one of the theaters. He frequently moored his gondola to the narrow dock below the Wynnes’ house and called on Giustiniana in full view of the family. In the winter of 1754 Mrs. Anna finally confronted him. She caused a terrible scene, declaring Andrea persona non grata in their house and making it clear she never wanted to see them together again. All communication was forbidden: letters, messages, the merest glance. It had to finish, she yelled—and sent him on his way.
News of Mrs. Anna’s dramatic stand traveled quickly around town. Andrea referred to the scene as his cacciata funesta
(#litres_trial_promo)—his fateful banishment, and the starting point of all their misery.
Mrs. Anna was a fierce watchdog, always on the alert and obsessively suspicious. She kept a close eye on her eldest daughter and did not let her go out without a chaperon—usually herself. Her spies were planted wherever the lovers might seek to escape her gaze, both within the English set and among Venetian families, and she kept her ears constantly pricked for gossip about the lovers. Venice was a small world. Everyone knew who was losing his fortune at the Ridotto on a particular night and who was having an affair with whom. Andrea and Giustiniana were aware of the risk they were taking in defying Mrs. Anna’s ban; they had to be extremely careful about whom they spoke to and what they said. At a deeper level, they knew the future offered little promise of an end to their difficulties. But it was too soon, and they were too young, to worry about the future. For all the trouble their love had already caused, only one thing mattered to them in the winter and spring of that year: exploiting every opportunity to be together.
Just as Mrs. Anna resorted to the Venetian arts of intelligence, Andrea set up a small network of informers to obtain daily information about Giustiniana’s movements. His chief spy was Alvisetto, a young servant in the Wynne household, who was not always dependable because his fear of Mrs. Anna was sometimes stronger than his loyalty to his secret paymaster. He had the unfortunate habit of disappearing during his missions, leaving Andrea flustered and clueless on a street corner or at the side of a bridge. “Alvisetto did not make it to our appointment and I went looking for him all morning in vain,” he complained. “Poor us, Giustiniana. Sometimes I lose all hope when I think in whose hands we have put ourselves.”
Alvisetto was also the chief messenger, and he shuttled back and forth between Andrea and Giustiniana with letters and love notes. Occasionally, the gondoliers of Ca’ Memmo would moor at a dock near the Wynnes’ to drop off or pick up an envelope. If Mrs. Anna was at home, the two lovers would fall back on “the usual bottega for deliveries,” a general store around the corner from Giustiniana’s home, run by a friendly shopkeeper. When Andrea’s message could not wait—or if the urge to see her was irrepressible—he would appear at the window of Ca’ Tiepolo, the imposing palazzo across a narrow waterway from the Wynnes’ more modest house.
Ca’ Tiepolo belonged to one of the oldest and grandest Venetian families. Its wide neoclassical façade stood majestically on the Grand Canal. From the side window of the mezzanine it was possible to look directly across to the Wynnes’ balcony. The ties between the Tiepolos and the Memmos went back many centuries. Andrea was a good friend of the young Tiepolos and especially close to Domenico, better known by his nickname Meneghetto, who was among the few to know from the start that Andrea’s love affair with Giustiniana was continuing in secret. Meneghetto was happy to help, and Andrea often dropped by after sending Giustiniana precise instructions. “After lunch,” he advised her in one note, “find an excuse to come out on the balcony. But for heaven’s sake be careful about your mother. And don’t force me to edge out as far as the windowsill because she will certainly see me.”
Andrea’s portable telescope was very useful. He would point it in the direction of Giustiniana’s balcony from a campiello, a little square, across the Grand Canal, to check whether she was at home or to find out whether she might be getting ready to go out or, best of all, to watch her as she leaned lazily over the balcony, her hair wrapped in a bonnet, watching the boats go by. When he observed her from such a distance—about a hundred yards—Giustiniana was not always aware Andrea was spying on her. “Today I admired you with my canocchiale [telescope],” he announced to her mischievously. “I don’t really care if your mother saw me…. After all, the rules merely state that I cannot come into your house and that I cannot write to you.”
From a purely technical point of view he was also within bounds when, thanks again to the benevolence—and the sweat—of his gondoliers, he came down the Grand Canal and signaled to Giustiniana from the water. On days when she was confined to the house and they had no other way of seeing each other, Andrea’s sudden appearance at her neighbor’s window or the familiar plashing of the Memmo gondola down below was a welcome consolation. “Come by the canal as my mother doesn’t want me to go out,” she would plead. “And make an appearance at Ca’ Tiepolo as well, if you can.”
They developed their own sign language so they could communicate from a distance during the evening walk at the Listone or at the theater or, later in the night, at the gambling house. “Touch your hair if you’re going to the Ridotto,” he instructed her. “Nod or shake your head to tell me whether you plan to go to the piazza.” These little signals sometimes caused confusion if they were not worked out in advance. They also had to be given very discreetly, lest they set off Mrs. Anna’s alarm bells. “When you left the theater,” Andrea wrote anxiously, “you signaled something to me just as your mother turned around, and I think she might have noticed that. If this were the case it could damage us, since she might also have noticed all the other gestures we had made to each other from our boxes.” Despite his occasional burst of bravado, Andrea remained deeply worried not just by what Mrs. Anna might have seen but also by what she thought she might have seen. He went to such extremes to avoid creating false impressions that he sometimes sounded like an obstinate stage manager. “You must realize that if your mother catches you laughing with someone she can’t see, she will assume that you are laughing with me,” he once said to her in a huff. “So try to be careful next time.”
Andrea fretted constantly about how dangerous it was to write to each other. If their correspondence ever fell into the wrong hands, there would be an explosion “that would reduce everything to a pile of rubble.” Still he deluged Giustiniana with letters and notes, often filling them with practical advice and detailed descriptions of his frantic chases around town. “We are completely mad…. If only you knew how afraid I am that your mother might find out we are seeing each other again.”
It was a glorious adventure. There were times when they managed to get close enough to steal a quick embrace in an alcove at the Ridotto or in the dark streets near the theaters at San Moisè, and the thrill was always powerful. “Last night, I swear,” Andrea wrote to his beloved the morning after one of these rare encounters, “you were so heated up, oh so heated up, such a beautiful girl, and I was on fire.” But in the beginning they tended to hold back. They made their moves with deliberation. They kept each other at a safe distance: lovemaking was mostly limited to what their eyes could see and what their eyes could say.
It is easy to imagine how, in a city where both men and women wore masks during a good portion of the year, the language of the eyes would become all-important. And what was true in general was especially true for Andrea and Giustiniana on account of the rigid restrictions that had been imposed on them. Andrea was being very literal when he asked anxiously, “Today my lips will not be able to tell you how much I love you…. But there will be other ways…. Will you understand what my eyes will be saying to you?” What their eyes said was not always sweet and not always clear. With such strong emotions at play, it could take days to clear up a misunderstanding precipitated by a wrong look or an averted gaze. One night, Andrea returned to Ca’ Memmo after a particularly frustrating attempt to make contact with Giustiniana. It had taken him all evening and a great deal of effort and ingenuity to find her at one of the theaters. Yet in the end she had displayed none of the usual complicity that made even the briefest encounter a moment of joy. In fact, she had been so annoying as to make him wish he had not seen her at all:
Yesterday I tried desperately to see you. Before lunch the gondoliers could not serve me. After lunch I went looking for you in Campo Santo Stefano. Nothing. So I walked toward Piazza San Marco, and when I arrived at the bridge of San Moisè I ran into Lucrezia Pisani!
(#ulink_d38da269-32cb-5424-ae19-c00026cae825)I gave her my hand on the bridge, and then I saw you. I left her immediately and went looking for you everywhere. Finally I found you in the piazza. I sent Alvisetto ahead to find out whether you were on your way to the opera or to the new play at the Teatro Sant’Angelo, so that I could rush over to get a box in time. Then I forged ahead and waited for you, filled with desire. Finally you arrived and I went up to my box so that I could contemplate you—not only for the sheer pleasure I take in admiring you but also in the hope of receiving a sign of acknowledgment as a form of consolation. But you did nothing of the sort. Instead you laughed continuously, made loud noises until the end of the show, for which I was both sorry and angry—as you can well imagine.
A few days later Andrea tracked her down after yet another chase along crowded streets and across canals. This time the reward was well worth the pursuit:
I caught sight of your mother and hoped you would be with her. I looked for you left and right. Nothing. Your mother left, I followed. She went to San Moisè, I went to San Moisè. In fact, I got so close to her that we would have bumped into each other at the entrance of a bottega if I had not been so quick…. [Later] I waited in vain for Alvisetto, whom I had instructed to follow your mother…. Then I got your letter telling me that you would be going to San Benetto, so I rushed over only to realize with regret that you had already arrived and that the opera had begun…. Oh Lord, what will Giustiniana say…. Let’s see how she will treat me…. Goodness, there she is, that naughty girl [who wouldn’t look at me] the other evening…. Will she look at me this time or won’t she…. Come, look this way my girl! … And little by little I began to feel better. And then much better when I moved into that other box because I could see you and you could see me so well and with no great danger that your mother might notice every little gesture between us.
As an overall strategy, Andrea felt it was important to convince Mrs. Anna that the love between him and Giustiniana had indeed subsided and that she could finally let her guard down. It would be easier for them to find ways to see each other. So whenever Mrs. Anna took her daughter to a place where there was a good chance they might see him, Giustiniana was to feign complete disinterest:
Sometimes, in taking risks, one must be willing to be la dupe de soi-même. So arrange things in such a way that she will feel she is forcing you to go to all the places where she knows you might run into me, such as San Benetto or the Ridotto…. And when the weather is nice, show little interest, even some resistance, to taking a walk to the square…. Believe me, our good fortune depends on the success of our deception…. To avoid coming to San Benetto, all you have to do is tell her you don’t feel well. As for the Ridotto, you can say, “In truth, Mother, it bores me too much. Besides, we have no one to speak to and I don’t feel like playing [cards]. And we don’t make a good impression anyway, walking around with no other company. So let me go to bed.” And if she refuses and takes you out with her, you will see me and she will say, “Giustiniana doesn’t fret about Memmo anymore.”
In public Andrea and Giustiniana behaved like two strangers. Yet if their relationship was ever to develop, if they were to make arrangements in order to meet somewhere safely and actually spend time together, they were going to need more reliable allies than Alvisetto—friends willing to take the risk of giving them cover and providing them with rooms where they could see each other in private. Andrea worked hard to identify those who might be most useful to them. He gave precise instructions to Giustiniana as to how she should behave to bring this or that friend over to their side. But his instructions were not always clear. When Giustiniana innocently told a potential ally that she no longer loved Andrea when in fact Andrea had asked her to say the opposite, he gave her a sharp rebuke: “As soon as I do a good piece of work, you ruin it for me. The truth is … and I am very sorry to have to say this, you have not been up to my expectations.”
Andrea could be equally hard when he thought Giustiniana was not keeping enough distance from possible enemies. He was wary of the young Venetian nobles who hung around the Ridotto and who delighted in gossip and intrigue. It was important not to give them a reason to unleash their malicious tongues. As a rule, he explained to Giustiniana, “it is good for us to have the greatest number of friends and the least number of enemies.” But there was no need to be closer to that crowd than was strictly necessary. And he criticized her when he saw her displaying too much friendliness to acquaintances he did not consider trustworthy.
He was especially suspicious of the Morosinis, who had always sided with Mrs. Anna in her battle against the two lovers—merely to spite him, Andrea thought. The Wynnes were often lunch guests at Ca’ Morosini on Campo Santo Stefano, and Giustiniana’s persistent socializing with the enemy infuriated Andrea. She had to choose, he finally said to her, between him and “those Morosini asses”:
I know it is a lot to ask, but I can ask no less…. I must put you through this test, and I shall measure your love for me by it…. Giustiniana, I shall be very disappointed if you disregard my wish. I have never met anyone so impertinent and so false toward both of us…. They like you merely because you amuse them…. By God, you will not be worthy of me if you lower yourself to the point of flattering these…. stupid enemies of mine…. these rigid custodians of Giustiniana who spy for your mother…. They are evil people with no human qualities and no respect for friend-ship…. Forgive me for speaking this way to you, but I am so angry that I cannot stand it anymore.
In the early stages, Andrea had a patronizing tone toward Giustiniana and a tendency to take control of every aspect of their relationship. He was, of course, several years older than she, and it was fairly natural that he should take the lead while she deferred to his judgment. But over the months she grew more confident in her ability to conceal and deceive. And in spite of Andrea’s occasional hectoring, she began to enjoy plotting behind her mother’s back. She took a more active role in planning their meetings and often marveled at her own audacity: “Truly, Memmo, I do not recognize myself. I do things I never would have done. I think in ways so different that I do not seem to be myself anymore.”
It was Giustiniana who eagerly informed Andrea that N., a friend on whom they had worked hard to bring over to their side, had finally agreed to let them meet at his casino, one of the little pleasure houses that were all the rage in those years and were Venice’s very practical answer to a diffuse desire for comfort and pleasure. (There were as many as 150 such casini in the city, which were used as boudoirs, as seditious salons, and—quite often—as discreet love nests.) “I’ve made arrangements for Friday,” she wrote self-confidently. “We can’t see each other before. I didn’t feel I could press him and so I let him choose the date. He has become my friend entirely and confides his worries to me and even vents his domestic frustrations.”
Their excitement grew every day in anticipation of the moments they would spend together. It was not enough anymore to exchange loving glances and signals from afar. If Giustiniana had become much bolder in just a few weeks, it was because her yearning was now so powerful. She longed to be kissed by Andrea, to be held in his arms. And their scheming was finally producing results. Here is Giustiniana, three days before their secret appointment at N.’s casino:
Friday we shall meet—at least we know as much. But my God, how the time in between will seem interminable! And afterward what? Afterward I shall think about our next meeting so that I shall always be having sweet thoughts about you…. Tell me, Memmo, are you entirely happy with me? Is there any way I can give you more? Is there something in my behavior, in my way of life that I might change to suit you better? Speak, for I shall do anything you want. I cannot think of anything more precious than to see you happy and ever closer to me. I never thought it was possible to love with such violence.
The following evening Alvisetto appeared in Giustiniana’s room bearing a reply from her lover. “My soul,” Andrea wrote, “what a complete delight it will be. Love me, adore me…. I deserve it because I know your heart so well. Oh Lord, I am so dying to see you that I am jumping out of my skin.” Alvisetto also handed to Giustiniana a small, delicately embroidered fan—a gift to make the waiting more bearable. In order to avoid raising Mrs. Anna’s suspicions, Andrea suggested that Giustiniana ask her aunt Fiorina to pretend the fan was for her. In the past Mrs. Anna’s sister had shown a certain amount of sympathy for her niece’s predicament. Andrea, always in search of reliable allies, felt this subterfuge would not only allay whatever doubts Mrs. Anna might have about his gift but also give them a sense of how much Aunt Fiorina was prepared to help them in the future.
On Thursday, the day before their meeting, Alvisetto delivered a long, tender letter to Andrea:
And so, my dear Memmo, tomorrow we shall be together. And what, in the whole world, could be more natural between two people who love each other than to be together? I could go on forever, my sweet. I am in heaven. I love you. I love you, Memmo, more than I can say. Do you love me as much? Do you know I have this constant urge to do well, to look beautiful, to cultivate the greatest possible number of qualities for the mere sake of pleasing you, of earning your respect, of holding on to my Memmo…. Be warned, however, that your love for me has made me extremely proud and vain…. Where does one find a man so pleasant, so at ease in society, yet at the same time so firm, so deeply understanding of the important things in life? Where does one find a young man with such a rich imagination who is also precise and clearheaded in his thinking, so graceful and convincing in expressing his ideas? My Memmo, so knowledgeable in the humanities, so intelligent about the arts, is also a man who knows how to dress and always cuts quite a figure and knows how to carry himself with grace…. he is a man who possesses the gift of being at once considerate and bold. And even if at times he goes out of bounds, he does it to satisfy the natural urges of his youth and his character. And therein lies the path to happiness. You are wild as a matter of principle, as a result of hard reasoning. Aren’t you the rarest of philosophers? …. And what have you done, what do you do to women? Just the other day N. said to me: How did you manage to catch that fickle young man? And I was so proud, Memmo.
As for the fan, she added, “I will ask Fiorina to accept it in my place. I don’t know whether she is on our side or not, but at least she seems willing to fake it.”
The morning after their meeting at N.’s, Giustiniana, enthralled by the sweetest memories of the previous evening, wrote to Andrea entirely in French—not the language she knew best but the one she evidently felt was most appropriate in the lingering afterglow of their reunion:
Ah, Memmo, so much happiness! I was with you for close to two hours; I listened to your voice; you held my hand, and our friends, touched by our love, seem willing to help us more often. After you had left, N. told me how much you love me. Yes, you do love me, Memmo, you love me so deeply. Tell me once more; I never tire of hearing you say it. And the more direct you are, the more charmed I shall be. The heart doesn’t really care much for detours. Simplicity is worth so much more than the most ornate embellishments. You are the most charming philosopher I have ever listened to…. If only I could be free … and tell the world about my love! Ah, let us not even speak of such a happy state. Farewell, I take leave of you now. When shall I see you? Tell me, are you as impatient as I am?
She added teasingly:
Oh, by the way, I have news. My mother received a marriage proposal for me from a very rich Roman gentleman…. Isn’t it terrible, Memmo? Aren’t you at least a little bit jealous? And what if he is as nice as they say … and what if my mother wanted him…. I can’t go on. Not even in jest…. I am all yours, my love. Farewell.
(#ulink_e2ef772d-65be-5e20-b7a5-de7d601648d6)In order to avoid burdening the general reader with repetitive notes I have not sourced each quotation drawn from the correspondence between Andrea and Giustiniana (unless otherwise specified), hoping that a short note on the various sets of letters, to be found after the text on page 293, will make it easy enough for readers with a bibliographical interest to know where the quotation comes from. The reader may also wish to know that in translating the letters from Italian into English I did my best to preserve their original eighteenth-century flavor, though I eliminated excessive capitalization and made changes in the punctuation in order to facilitate the reader’s ease and comprehension.
(#ulink_184ca770-3ac1-52fb-b16e-03340c4964d7)Regardless of political influence, twenty-four families were considered founding families of Venice, and of these, twelve traced their roots to early Christianity and called themselves “apostolic.” The Memmos were among these twelve.
(#ulink_a656c2c8-3041-5a78-a384-211e7d3425d0)Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois was published in Venice in 1749. Montesquieu himself had come to Venice to study its laws and system of government. He was run out of town by the inquisitors and legend has it that he threw all his notes into the lagoon as he made his escape toward the mainland. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also a familiar figure, having been secretary to the French ambassador in Venice in 1743–1744.
(#ulink_4c0746cb-bd4b-5d9a-b9a4-b9a695a0c07b)Andrea’s cousin by marriage and a close friend.
CHAPTER Two (#ulink_bfd71fff-2961-5a86-8edc-25acd0867beb)
Andrea and Giustiniana were so secretive during the first months of their clandestine relationship that only a handful of trusted friends knew what they were up to. As Andrea had predicted, Mrs. Anna eventually began to lower her guard and focus on possible new suitors for her eldest daughter. By the fall of 1754 the two lovers were seeing each other with great frequency and daring. They now had several locations at their disposal. N.’s casino was often available. Meneghetto Tiepolo had given them access to an apartment on the mezzanine of his palazzo. They also went to a woman named Rosa, who lived in a small and very simple house near the Wynnes and often let them have a room. Setting up a secret encounter was often the work of several days. It took reliable intelligence and good planning. Alvisetto shuttled furtively between the Wynnes’ house and Ca’ Memmo, delivering letters with the latest arrangements or news of an unexpected change of plan. Much was written about the dropping off and picking up of keys.
The feverish preparatory work, coupled with the constant fear of being caught, made their encounters all the more passionate. “How could they be so stupid,” Giustiniana noted with delight, “not to realize what refinement they bring to our pleasure by imposing all these prohibitions? [At the beginning of our relationship] I was always very happy to see you, of course, but the emotions I feel now, the sheer agitation, the overwhelming feeling of sweetness, were certainly not as intense.”
As their love deepened and their relationship became more sexual, jealousy too began to creep into their little world. Despite Mrs. Anna’s more relaxed attitude, Giustiniana was still not as free to move around town as Andrea was. This put her at a psychological disadvantage. Who was Andrea seeing when he wasn’t with her? She had his letters, of course, filled with detailed accounts of his daily activities. But how reliable were they? In her relative confinement in the house at Sant’Aponal she had plenty of time to work herself into a state of anxiety. A hint of unpleasant gossip was enough to send her into a rage.
One of Andrea’s best friends was his cousin Lucrezia Pisani, the young lady he had bumped into on the bridge as he was chasing Giustiniana. She was lively and attractive and popular among Andrea’s set. She often had interesting company at her house, and Andrea liked to drop by. His breezy reports on his visits there, however, made Giustiniana feel excluded. When she heard he was seeing Lucrezia more and more frequently on the days when they could not be together, she protested angrily. Andrea was taken aback by her attitude. Lucrezia was an old friend, he argued, an ally; she was one of the few who knew about their love affair. He reacted to Giustiniana’s indignation with even greater indignation:
What have I done to you? What sort of creature are you? What on earth are you thinking? And what doggedness! What cruelty! So now it would appear that I have been courting Lucrezia for the past ten days…. Well, first of all, the timing is wrong: she’s been in the countryside for the past several days. I would have gone with her. I chose not to. Meanwhile, I’ve been at home most of the time, evenings included. I’ve had lunch with her once. True, every time I have met her at the theater I have sat in her box…. But could I have sat alone or even with a single friend throughout an entire show? … I am mad to even defend myself. Yes, I like her company and I admit it. First of all because she is one of the easiest women to be around…. She is also witty, knowledgeable, clever. You can talk to her freely, and she often has good company…. Besides, she is your friend, she often asks about you with interest…. You are crazy, crazy, crazy. You will drive me mad with your endless suspicions. Still, I guess I must try to appease you in any case. So rest assured: I won’t be seen with her anymore. But where may I go? Anywhere I went there would be new gossip and new scenes…. By God, I will have to lock myself up in my room, under permanent surveillance, otherwise you still won’t believe me. But of course when no one sees me around people will start thinking that I’m enjoying myself even more secretively. What a life.
Giustiniana’s suspicions, however, were not entirely unjustified: there was talk around town that Lucrezia did indeed have a liking for Andrea that went beyond their old friendship. When Giustiniana’s mood did not improve, Andrea realized he would have to do something more drastic to placate her. He went about it in a manner that revealed his own penchant for intrigue:
This is a difficult thing to ask, but you are so easy, so free from prejudice, you have such a good spirit and are always so obliging with me that it is possible you might grant me this favor. Lucrezia torments me by always asking if she can see some of your letters to me—which I have never permitted her to do. Therefore I would like for you to write me a letter in French in which you praise her. You might add in passing that, while not jealous of her, you do think she is too intelligent not to realize that it would be preferable if I were not seen so often with her. She already knows all the love I have for you and your commitment to me. I assure you that the only reason I am asking you to do this is so that she will convince herself that I am in love with a woman more special than her…. If you’re not up to it, it doesn’t really matter. It’s enough that you love me.
Giustiniana was uncomfortable with this sort of game playing. A little deception to avoid Mrs. Anna’s controls and to meet Andrea on the sly was one thing. But she found his recourse to artifice for the sake of artifice a little unsettling. The ease with which he could transform himself from the most tender and loving companion to the craftiest manipulator was a trait that seemed embedded in his character. And whereas Lucrezia, an experienced operator herself, would probably not have given Andrea’s behavior great significance, Giustiniana found it much harder to understand. She too had a seductive side, a propensity to flirt with men both young and old. But excessive ambiguity made her ill at ease. She held fast to a rule of love that was not very common among other young Venetians: the exclusivity of romantic feelings. So she was stunned to hear, when she went over to the Morosinis’ for lunch shortly after the Lucrezia episode, that Andrea was also flirting with Mariettina Corner, another well-known seductress. Mariettina’s love life was complicated enough as it was: she was married to Lucrezia’s brother, had an official lover and was having an affair with yet a third man, Piero Marcello—a gambler and philanderer who happened to be a neighbor of the Wynnes’. Giustiniana was told that though Mariettina was carrying on the relationship with Piero, it was really Andrea she had her eyes on.
Again she confronted him, and again he blamed her for believing every scrap of gossip floating around the Morosinis’: “What are they telling you, these people with whom you seem to enjoy yourself so much? And why do you believe them if you know they hate me? You accuse me of making love to Mariettina…. But why is it you always fear I’m causing you offense with all the women I see?”
The story of Andrea’s presumed affair with Mariettina had all the ingredients of a Goldoni farce. It turned out that Andrea, at Mariettina’s request, had acted as a go-between in her secret romance with Piero. And Giustiniana—as Andrea was quick to remind her—had even encouraged him to take on that role because she felt that as long as Mariettina was busy with other men she would not present a threat to her. But Andrea’s comings and goings between the two lovers had provided the gossipmongers with plenty to talk about. In the ensuing confusion Giustiniana didn’t know whom to believe. Andrea acknowledged that “some people might well have thought Mariettina had developed an interest in me…. After all, I was constantly whispering in her ear and she was whispering in mine…. She talked to me, gestured to me, sat next to me while apparently not caring a hoot about [her lover], her husband—indeed the world.” He insisted it was all a terrible misunderstanding: he was innocent and Giustiniana was “stupid” if she bothered “to spend a moment on all this talk the Morosinis fill your head with.”
It wasn’t easy for her to dismiss the things she heard about Andrea, because so much of his life was invisible to her, out of reach. The rumors were all the more hurtful because they reverberated in circles to which she was admitted but to which she did not truly belong. Giustiniana knew or was acquainted with most of Andrea’s friends and was a welcome guest in the houses of many patrician families. But even though the veil of social discrimination was perhaps not as visible as elsewhere in Europe, it was very real; it governed Venetian society in subtle and less subtle ways—as in the case of marriage. When Giustiniana wrote to Andrea about his woman friends, there was often an undercurrent of anxiety that went quite beyond a natural romantic jealousy.
Still, she had her own little ways of getting back at him.
As Andrea and Giustiniana struggled to clear up the misunderstanding about his role in their friends’ affair, Mariettina threw one of her celebrated balls on the Giudecca—an island separated from the southern side of Venice by a wide canal, where patricians had pleasure houses with gardens and vineyards. This was one of the major social events of the season. Preparations went on for days. Young Venetian ladies had a notorious taste for luxury. They liked to wear rich and elaborate but relatively comfortable outfits, so they could move with greater ease during the minuets and furlane, a popular dance that originated from the Friuli region. They spent hours having their hair coiffed into tall beehives, which they decorated with gems and golden pins. Their long fingernails were polished in bright colors. They drenched themselves with exotic perfume and chose their beauty spots with special care (the appassionata was worn in the corner of the eye, the coquette above the lip, the galante on the chin, and the assassina—the killer—in the corner of the mouth).
(#litres_trial_promo) They carried large, exquisitely embroidered fans and wore strings of pearls and diamonds. High heels had long been out of fashion: Venetian ladies preferred more sensible low evening shoes, often decorated with a diamond buckle. These were fabulously expensive but very comfortable, especially for dancing. Men wore the traditional French costume: silk long jacket, knee-length culottes, and white stockings. Elaborate cuffs and jabots of lace from the island of Burano gave a Venetian touch to their attire. Their elegant evening wigs were combed and groomed for the occasion.
Mariettina’s ball offered a chance for Andrea and Giustiniana to see each other and clarify things once and for all. But Giustiniana, still feeling vexed by the whole imbroglio, was not in the mood for such a demanding social event. She sent this note to Andrea just as he was dressing for the evening:
If the bad weather continues I will certainly not come to Marietta Corner’s festa. You know my mother and how she fears the wind. She has warned that she will not cross the canal if there is the slightest bit of wind. In the end it is probably better that such a reasonable pretext should excuse me from coming as I believe you and I would both have a terrible time…. Still I will try to convince my mother to get over her fear—I hope you will acknowledge my goodwill. I have already opted for a new course: henceforth you will be able to do as you please; I will neither complain nor bother you with accusations. When you will cause me displeasure I will try to convince myself that you won’t have done so out of ill will but because you do not believe I am sensitive to those things…. By the way, all those pleas for forgiveness and that habit you have of carrying on exactly in the same manner even though you know you offend me—I really cannot stand it. The truth is, I will continue to give you proof of my real affection while you will hurt me more and more. And who knows if all my suffering will change you one day…. Good-bye now, Memmo. I would not want to keep you from your toilette.
In the end Giustiniana did not prevail over her mother—if she ever tried—and she did not go to Marietta’s ball. The next day she sent Andrea this bittersweet note: “I did not write to you this morning because I felt you might be tired after last night and needed your sleep. The bad weather prevented me from coming, but as I told you I believe in the end it was for the better. Today I was half hoping I would see you at the window at Ca’ Tiepolo, but I guess I fooled myself. This evening we are going to Smith’s. I will write to you tomorrow. I have nothing else to ask you except to love me much—if you can. Farewell.”
Andrea always reacted defensively, even impatiently, to Giustiniana’s outbursts of jealousy. He was not immune to similar feelings, but in the abstract he espoused what he considered a “philosophical” approach. “It is practically impossible for me to be jealous,” he explained:
Not because I have such high esteem for myself that I do not recognize others might be worthy [of your attentions]. No, the reason is that I don’t want to believe you are flighty or coquettish or fickle or careless or mean. If ever there came a point in which I really did nurture doubts about you … then I would simply think of you as a different woman. The pain I would feel on account of your transformation would certainly be intense, but to me you would no longer be the lovable, the rarest Giustiniana. And by losing what ignited my deepest love and continues to nourish it, I would lose all feeling for you and return to the Memmo I was before meeting you.
This was the theory. In reality Andrea was fairly quick to lose his cool when other young men prowled around Giustiniana. He was particularly wary of Momolo Mocenigo, better known as Il Gobbo—the Hunchback—on account of a slight curvature of his spine, but in fact rather good-looking and quite the ladykiller. “He was the handsomest of all the patrician gamesters at the Ridotto,” Casanova wrote in his memoirs.
(#litres_trial_promo) When he was not taking bets at his faro table, Il Gobbo hung around the theaters, where he bothered the ladies and tried to make mischief. He especially enjoyed gallivanting with Giustiniana, and her willingness to indulge him annoyed Andrea to no end. Once, after catching her yet again in “a very long conversation” with him, he let her have it: “Everyone knows Il Gobbo for the first-class whoremonger that he is. You should know he once [told me] in front of other people that I should be thankful to him because he chose not to seduce you even though you showed a certain kindness to him…. I refused to give in to such abuse, and I dare say my reaction did not make him very happy…. But why did you have to go talk to him without your mother? Why speak to him practically in the ear? Why whisper to him that you were going to San Moisè so he could then come and tell me with a tone that so displeased me?”
Another evening, Andrea was at home nursing a fever and a terrible sore throat when he suddenly learned that the “first-class whoremonger” was on his way to meet Giustiniana. He became so upset that he dashed out of the house, ran across town, and burst into the busy gambling rooms of the Ridotto. “I looked for you everywhere, and I finally found you in the same room where [Il Gobbo] had just been,” he wrote to her angrily and with a good deal of self-pity. The incident, he assured Giustiniana, had “redoubled the flames that were already engulfing my throat.”
Still, Il Gobbo was a lesser irritant than Piero Marcello, the handsome coureur de femmes who was courting Mariettina Corner but also had eyes for Giustiniana. Andrea considered Piero to be frivolous and vain, the sort of young man who would buy a new coat and then “make a ruckus just to attract attention to it.” Piero’s gondola was often moored at the same dock as the Wynnes’. “How appearances can trick one,” Andrea noted, for he was worried people might wrongly assume that Piero was visiting Giustiniana and her sisters, when in fact Piero simply lived nearby. Indeed, some already referred to them as “Piero Marcello’s girls.” Piero not only flirted with Giustiniana, he also needled Andrea in public, wondering aloud whether he and Giustiniana were secretly still seeing each other. The two nearly came to blows over her, as Andrea reported to Giustiniana with more than a hint of braggadocio in this account of their confrontation:
PIERO: Are you jealous of me? Oh … but I have no designs on her. True, when women call me it is hard for me to resist…. But I am your friend, I would not betray you. I stay away from my friends’ women. And if you have the slightest suspicion, I will never see her again.
ANDREA: Who do you think you are, the Terror of the World? Do you really think I’m afraid of losing Giustiniana to you? If she were crazy, like all your previous lovers were, if she wanted your money, … if she had all the weaknesses, all the silliness, all the prejudices of the average woman, if she could not tell the true value of better men, if she were a coquette or worse, then, yes, I probably wouldn’t trust her. But my dear Piero, who do you think you’re dealing with?
Andrea concluded, “I told him these things with my usual straightforwardness, so that after affecting surprise he turned the whole thing into a joke.”
Things did not end there. Days later Andrea saw Piero and Giustiniana talking to each other again. He gave her a stern warning: “Now I speak to you as a husband: I absolutely do not want you to show in public that you know Piero Marcello. I was very sorry that Mariettina, noticing that I was trying to see with whom you were laughing, came over and whispered into my ear: ‘She’s laughing with Piero down there.’”
Even after such a reprimand Andrea would not admit to being the slightest bit jealous:
I’ve told you a hundred times: I don’t forbid you to see Piero out of jealousy…. But I absolutely do not want you to look at him in public or even say hello, all the more so because he affects an equivocal manner that I simply don’t like and that I find insolent in the extreme…. Piero and Momolo are not for you…. Piero frets while Momolo affects his usual mannerisms, both with the same end: to make people believe that there has been at least a little bit of intimacy with all the women they are barely acquainted with. And for this reason the two of them are a real nuisance to young lovers.
Despite the misunderstandings and squabbles that ensued, Andrea and Giustiniana’s relationship deepened through the spring and summer of 1755 to the point that very little else seemed to matter to them anymore. All their energies were devoted to making time for themselves and finding places to meet. They had become experts at escaping the restrictions imposed on them and moved stealthily from alcove to alcove. Their love affair consumed their life, and it gradually transformed them.
Giustiniana had been known as a lively and gregarious young woman. The affectionate nickname inglesina di Sant’Aponal conjured up a refreshing image of youth and grace. Soon after returning to Venice, Giustiniana, being the eldest, had begun to share with her mother the duties of a good hostess while Bettina, Tonnina, Richard, and William were still under the care of Toinon. This role had come naturally to her. She had felt at ease in their drawing room or over at the consul’s, delighting everyone with her charm. But by 1755 she was tired of all that, tired of performing onstage. She hardly recognized herself. “Coquetry was all I really cared for once,” she told Andrea in a moment of introspection. “Now I can barely manage to be polite. Everything bores me. Everything annoys me. People say I have become stupid, silly; that I am hopeless at entertaining guests. I realize they’re right, but I don’t much care.” She spent her days writing letters to Andrea, worrying about whom he was seeing, planning their next meeting—where, at what time, and, always, what to do with the keys. When she did go out with her mother—to lunch at the consul’s, or to church, the theater, the Ridotto—the people she chose to talk to, what she said, how she said it: everything she did, in one way or another, related to Andrea.
The affair had become all-consuming for Andrea as well. “My love, you govern my every action,” he confessed to her. “I do not think, I do not feel, I do not see anything but my Giustiniana. Everything else is meaningless to me…. I simply cannot hide my love for you from others anymore.” He still made the usual rounds—a family errand, a trip to the printer Pasquali on behalf of the consul, a lunch at Ca’ Tiepolo, and in the evening a visit to the theater. But his life outside the secret world he shared with Giustiniana no longer seemed very stimulating or even much fun. After the death of his uncle Andrea the year before, Ca’ Memmo had received fewer visitors and had ceased to be the scintillating intellectual haven of years past. At this time, too, Andrea’s mother, obsessed about Casanova’s influence on her three boys, finally had her way and convinced the inquisitors to have him arrested.
(#ulink_f6e80933-b740-5e52-a0d5-a471d508ad5c) The heated, late-night conversations at the crowded malvasìe on the latest book from Paris or the new play by Goldoni had lost their most entertaining participant.
Andrea’s personal project for establishing a French theater in Venice was going nowhere, and Giustiniana worried that she might be the main cause of his lack of progress: “Are you not working on it because of me? Dear Memmo, please don’t give up. If only you knew how much I care about your affairs when your honor is at stake. Especially this project, which, given its scale, the detailed manner in which you planned it, and the excellence with which you carried out every phase, was meant to establish your reputation. And to think that my feelings for you—true as they are—might have caused you so much damage. I am mortified.” Andrea admitted that he had made little progress and “all the people involved” in the project were furious with him. “They say I have been taking them for a ride all along. The talk of the town is that the theater project has fallen through because of my excessive passion for you. By God, I couldn’t care less. I only wish to tell you that I love you, my heart.” Sweetly, he added that he would now start working on it again “because it will feel I will be doing something for you. [After I received your letter] I dashed off to the lawyers to get them started again. They weren’t in the office, but I shall find them soon enough.” In the end, despite fitful efforts, the project never got off the ground.
Andrea kept up with his mentor Carlo Lodoli, the Franciscan monk who continued to hold sway among the more open-minded members of the Venetian nobility. Now that he was no longer Lodoli’s student, Andrea saw him less often, but he was anxious that Giustiniana should also benefit from the mind that had influenced him so profoundly. He encouraged his old teacher to visit her as much as possible and draw her into his circle of followers. Giustiniana always welcomed these visits, starved as she was of new books and new ideas in the restricted intellectual environment her mother fostered at home. Most of all she delighted in the chance to spend time with a person who knew the man she loved so well. When Lodoli came to visit, it was as if he brought Andrea with him—at least in spirit. “He just left,” Giustiniana reported to her lover. “He kept me company for a long time, and we spoke very freely. I appreciated our conversation today immensely—more than usual. He is the most useful man to society…. But beyond that, he talked a lot about you and he praised you for the virtues men should want to be praised for—the goodness of your soul and the truthfulness of your spirit.”
For several years Consul Smith’s library had been a second home for Andrea. He continued to visit the consul regularly during his secret affair with Giustiniana, helping him catalogue his art and book collections. Nearly two years had gone by since the two lovers first met in that house. As Andrea worked, he luxuriated in tender memories of those earlier days, when they had been falling in love among the beautiful pictures and the rare books. “Everything there [reminds] me of you…. Oh God, Giustiniana, my idol, do you remember our happiness there?”
In reality, Andrea stopped at the consul’s more out of a sense of duty and gratitude than for pleasure. The old man could be demanding. “When he starts talking after his evening tea, he never stops,” Andrea reported with a sense of fatigue. “He generally asks me to stay on even while he has himself undressed.” These man-to-man ramblings often touched on the Wynnes, and on several occasions Andrea could not help but notice with amusement the vaguely lustful tone Smith had begun to use when he talked about Giustiniana.
Inevitably, as Andrea and Giustiniana’s lives became more entwined and inextricable, so the hopelessness of their situation gradually sank in, bringing with it more tension and crises. Andrea filled his letters with declarations of love and devotion, but he never offered much to look forward to—there was no long-term plan that, however vague, might allow Giustiniana to dream about a future together. Instead, he made offhand remarks about how much simpler it would be if she were married to someone else or, better still, if she were a young widow “so that we wouldn’t have to take all these precautions and I could show the world how much I adore you.”
Giustiniana was having a harder time than Andrea. Her letters, always more impulsive and emotional than his, grew wilder as she swung between bliss and despair. Venice could seem such a hostile place—a watery labyrinth of mirrors and shadows and whispers. She could not get a grip on Andrea’s life or, as a consequence, on her own. The more time passed, the more she felt she was losing her way. Again and again she was overcome by waves of jealousy that brought her to breaking point.
Caterina (Cattina) Barbarigo was a great beauty and a notorious femme fatale. She held court in a casino that was much in vogue among progressive patricians and viewed with suspicion by the inquisitors. Though older than Andrea—she was married and the mother of two beautiful daughters—she liked surrounding herself with promising young men. He, in turn, was delighted to be drawn into her circle of friends—even at the cost of hurting Giustiniana’s feelings. “All day you’ve been at Cattina Barbarigo’s, haven’t you?” she asked accusingly. “Enough, I shan’t complain about it. But why have I not seen you? Why have I not received a line from you? Now that I think of it, it is perhaps better not to have received a note from you because you probably would have written late at night, in haste, and maybe only out of a sense of duty. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will write to me with greater ease.” But there was no letter on the following day, or the next, or the one after that. On the fourth day of silence her anxiety turned into rage:
You should be ashamed of yourself, Memmo. Could one possibly behave worse toward a lover one claims to be desperately in love with? I write to you on Saturday, and you don’t answer because you are at Barbarigo’s house. Sunday I never see you even though I spend the entire day at my window. And no letter—even though you know very well that on Mondays I go out and you should want to find out what the plan is in order to see me. Or perhaps you did write to me but your friend could not deliver? Do you suppose I will believe that you could not find another way of getting a letter to me, considering I had been two days without any news about you? … My mother has been ill for many days, and we could have been seeing each other with fewer precautions. But no—Memmo is having fun elsewhere. He does not even think about Giustiniana except when a compelling urge forces him to. What must I think? I hear from all sides about your new games and your oh-so-beloved old friendships.
Naturally, Andrea pleaded complete innocence: “For heaven’s sake, don’t be so mean. What rendezvous are you talking about? What have I done to merit such scorn? My dear sweet one, you must quiet down. Trust me or else you’ll kill me.” He explained, rather obliquely, that tactical considerations and nothing else occasionally forced him to be silent for a few days or to interrupt the flow of letters. But she should never forget that if he sometimes made himself scarce, it was for her sake and certainly not because he was chasing young ladies around: “You know I love you, and for that very reason, instead of complaining about your perpetual diffidence, I only worry about your position. I would have written to you every day to tell you what I was up to, but you know how afraid I am about writing to you—your mother is capable of all sorts of beastliness. All I care about is making sure the members of your household and our enemies and the crowd of people that follow every step we take do not discover our relationship by some act of imprudence on our part.”
Giustiniana was not reassured by Andrea’s words. In fact, his shifty attitude was making her more upset and more defiant:
How could you swear to me that all you cared about was my position, when in fact you were merely trying to get away from me using prudence as a pretext to rush over to see N.
(#ulink_4616de5b-b18e-5387-81c7-d2aa54ff4b2a)? Don’t be so sure of the power you have over me, for I shall break this bond of ours. I have opened my eyes at last. My God! Who is this man to whom I have given my deepest love! Leave me, please leave me alone. I’m just a nuisance to you. Before long you will hate me. You villain! Why did you betray me? … Everyone now speaks of your friendship with N. At first you explained yourself, and so I was at peace again and I even allowed you to be seen with her in public … and after our reconciliation you rushed off to see her again. What greater proof of your infidelity? Damn you! I am so angry I cannot even begin to say all I want…. Don’t even come near me, I don’t want to see you…. Now I see why you told me to pretend that our friendship was over; now I plainly see how fake your sincerity was, your infamous caution…. Now I know you. Did you think you could make fun of me forever? Enough. I cease to be your plaything.
Were the rumors true? Was Andrea pursuing N., or was Giustiniana working herself into a spiral of groundless jealousy? Whatever was going on, Andrea had clearly underestimated the depth of Giustiniana’s desperation. He suddenly found himself on the defensive, struggling to contain her rage: “How can I describe to you the state I am in, you cruel woman? My mind is busy with a thousand thoughts. I’m agitated and worried about a thousand questions. And you, for heaven’s sake, find nothing better to do than to treat me in the most inhuman way. Where does it all come from? What have I done to deserve all this? … Can it be that you still don’t know my heart? … Come here, my sweet Giustiniana, speak freely to your Memmo.”
Andrea understood more plainly now that as long as Giustiniana felt locked into a relationship with no future she would only become more anguished and more intractable and their life would become hell. But he remained ambivalent: “Tell me if you want to get yourself out of this situation you’re in. Tell me the various possibilities, and however much they might be harmful to me, if they will make you happy…. Speak out, and you will see how I love you.” Was he conjuring up the idea of an elopement? Was he beginning to consider a secret marriage, with all the negative consequences it would have entailed? If so, he was going about it in a very circuitous and tentative way, as if this were merely a short-term device to placate Giustiniana’s wrath. In fact, already in his next letter he retreated to his older, more traditional position: their happiness, as far as Andrea was concerned, hinged on finding Giustiniana a husband. “Alas, until you are married and I am able to see you more freely, there won’t be much to gain. Meanwhile let us try to hurt each other as little as possible.”
Giustiniana, however, had not exhausted her rage. Andrea’s letters suddenly seemed so petty and predictable. Where was the strong, willful young man she had fallen so desperately in love with? In the increasingly frequent isolation of her room at Sant’Aponal, she decided to put an end to their love story. Better to make a clean break, as painful as it would be, than to endure the torture Andrea was inflicting upon her.
This is the last time I bother you, Memmo. Your conduct has been such that I now feel free to write you this letter. I do not blame you for your betrayal, your lack of gratitude, the scarcity of your love, your scorn. No, Memmo. I was very hurt by all this, but I’ve decided not to complain or to wallow in vindictive feelings. You know how much I have loved you; you know what a perfect friend I have been to you. God knows that I had staked my entire happiness on our love. You knew it. Yet you allowed me to believe that you loved me with the same intensity…. And now that I know you, that I see how you tricked me, I give you an even greater token of my passion by breaking this tenacious bond. After all your abuse, your disloyalty, I was already on the verge of abandoning you. But your scorn of the last few days, the lack of any effort on your part to explain yourself, your continuous indulgence in the things you know make me unhappy, your complete estrangement have finally made me see that you could not hope for a better development. I have opened my eyes, I have learned to know you and to know me, and I have become adamant in my resolution never to think again about a man capable of such cruelty, such contempt, such utter disloyalty to me.
So everything between us is over. I know I cannot give you a greater pleasure than this…. And I also know that my peace of mind, my well-being, maybe even my life will depend on this break. I shall never hate you (see how much I can promise), but I will feel both pleasure and displeasure in your happiness as well as in your misfortunes. I will say more: I will never again love anyone the way I have loved you, ungrateful Memmo. You will oblige me by handing over all my letters … as they serve no other purpose than to remind me of my weakness and your wickedness. So please give them back so that I may burn them and remove from my sight everything that might remind me of all I have done for such an undeserving man.
Here is your portrait, once my delight and comfort, which I don’t want anywhere near me. Ask the artist
(#ulink_64c275c5-45dd-543f-bfea-2c385688ed46)to bring me the one you had commissioned of me—I will pay for it in installments and keep it. Your vanity has already been sufficiently satisfied as it is. Everyone knows how much I have loved you. Please don’t let me see you for another few days. I know how good our several days’ separation has been for me, and I have reason to believe that I will benefit by extending it. I forgive you everything. I have deserved this treatment because I was foolish enough to believe that you were capable of a sincere and enduring commitment; and I guess you are not really to blame if you can’t get over your own fickleness, which is so much a part of your nature. I ask neither your friendship nor a place in your memory. I want nothing more from you. Since I can no longer be the most passionate lover, I don’t want to be anything else to you. Adieu, Memmo, count me dead. Adieu forever.
Giustiniana’s dramatic break cleared the air. Within days the poisonous atmosphere that had overwhelmed them dissolved and they were in each other’s arms again, filled with love and desire. Giustiniana even laughed at her own foibles:
Oh God, my Memmo, how can I express these overflowing emotions? How can I tell you that … you are my true happiness, my only treasure? Lord, I am crazy. Crazy in the extreme. And what about all that happened to me in the last few days? Do you feel for me? … With my suspicions, my jealousy, my love…. Only you can understand me because you know my heart and the power you have over it…. I don’t know how my mood has changed so quickly, and why I even run the risk of telling you this! No, I really don’t know what’s happening to me…. Anyway, we’ll see each other tomorrow. Meanwhile I think I’ll just go straight to bed. After having been wrapped up in sweet thoughts about my Memmo and so full of him, I couldn’t possibly spend the rest of the evening with the silly company downstairs!
Andrea was so eager to hold Giustiniana in his arms again that even the twenty-four-hour wait now seemed unendurable to him. Alone in his room at Ca’ Memmo he let himself drift into erotic fantasies, which he promptly relayed to his lover:
Oh, my little one, my little one, may I entertain you with my follies? Do you have a heart to listen? I am so full of dreams about you that the slightest thing is enough to put me into a cosmic mood. For example, I read one of your letters … and I focus on a few characters in your handwriting and I begin to stare at them and I tell myself: here my adorable Giustiniana wrote … and sure enough I see your hand, your very own hand, oh Lord, I kiss your letter not finding anything else to kiss, and I press it against me as if it were you, oh, and I hug you in my mind, and it’s really too much; what to do? I cannot resist any longer. Oh my Lord, oh my Lord, now another hand of yours is relieving me, oh, but I can’t go on…. I cannot say more, my love, but you can imagine the rest…. Oh Lord, oh Lord…. I speak no more, I speak no more.
In such moments of playful abandon Andrea felt he was capable of doing “even the most irresponsible thing … yes … I feel this urge to take you away and marry you.” And when he opened up that way, Giustiniana always gave herself completely: “My Memmo, I shall always be yours. You enchant me. You overwhelm me. I will never find another Memmo with all the qualities and all the defects that I love about you. We are made for each other so absolutely. All that needs to happen is for me to become less suspicious and for you to moderate that slight flightiness, and then we’ll be happy.”
After these moments of ecstasy, however, the gloominess of their situation would steal over their hearts once more. Andrea wondered how their relationship could possibly survive. “We will never have a moment of peace and quiet. Meanwhile, you, believing as you do in everything you hear. Good Lord, I don’t know what to do anymore! You will never change as long as I have to be away from you. I see that it is impossible for you to believe that I am all yours, as I am, and it is impossible to change your mother, or your situation, so what am I to do?” he asked Giustiniana with quiet desperation. “I don’t know how to hold on to you.”
(#ulink_9ee72e2a-c905-5db8-956d-3b70db3624d2)It is probable that a combination of factors determined Casanova’s arrest on July 25, 1755—his openly proclaimed atheism, his dabbling with numerology, his reputation as an able swindler of a rather gullible trio of old patricians. Lucia Memmo’s pressure on the inquisitors also played a role. Certainly Casanova was convinced of this. “His [Andrea’s] mother had been a party to the plot that sent me to prison,”
(#litres_trial_promo) he later wrote in his History of My Life. But he never bore a grudge toward the sons.
(#ulink_a9a2d341-ca10-5dc5-88b7-08a88ef5a993)Clearly a different N. from the one who was lending them the casino.
(#ulink_71ec9091-ebc2-581f-bcfb-67e3fe886fc1)Andrea had commissioned a portrait from “Nazari,” possibly Bartolomeo Nazzari (1699–1758), a fashionable artist in Venice at the time and a protégé of Consul Smith. Alas, the portrait has never been found.
CHAPTER Three (#ulink_09fa1f13-d29b-5089-b1db-918e28ea71b6)
In early December 1755, news quickly spread that Catherine Tofts, the elusive wife of Consul Smith, had died after a long illness. She had once been an active and resourceful hostess, often giving private recitals in her drawing room. There is a lovely painting by Marco Ricci, one of Smith’s favorite artists, of Catherine singing happily with a chamber orchestra. But the picture was painted shortly after her marriage to Smith and before the death of her son. As the years went by, she was seen less and less (Andrea never mentions her in his letters). Toward the end of her life it was rumored that she had lost her mind and her husband had locked her up in a madhouse.
Smith organized a grand funeral ceremony, which was attended by a large contingent of Venice’s foreign community (the Italians were absent because the Catholic Church forbade the public mourning of Protestants). A Lutheran merchant from Germany, a friend of the consul, recorded the occasion in his diary: “Signor Smith received condolences and offered everyone sweets, coffee, chocolate, Cypriot wine and many other things; to each one he gave a pair of white calfskin gloves in the English manner.” Twenty-five gondolas, each with four torches, formed the procession of mourners. The floating cortege went down the Grand Canal, past the Dogana di Mare, across Saint Mark’s Basin, and out to the Lido, where Catherine’s body was laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery: “The English ships moored at Saint Mark’s saluted the procession with a storm of cannon shots.”
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The consul was eighty years old but still remarkably fit and energetic. He had no desire to slow down. By early spring gossips were whispering that his period of mourning was already over and he was eager to find a new wife—a turn of events that caused quite a commotion in the English community.
John Murray, the British Resident, had had a prickly relationship with Smith ever since he had arrived in Venice in 1751. Smith had vied for the position himself, hoping to crown his career by becoming the king’s ambassador in the city where he had spent the better part of his life. But his London connections had not been strong enough to secure it, and Murray, a bon vivant with a keener interest in women and a good table than in the art of diplomacy, had been chosen instead. “He is a scandalous fellow in every sense of the word,” complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who, rather snobbishly, preferred the company of local patricians to that of her less aristocratic compatriots. “He is not to be trusted to change a sequin, despised by this government for his smuggling, which was his original profession, and always surrounded with pimps and brokers, who are his privy councillors.”
(#litres_trial_promo) Casanova, predictably, had a different view of Murray: “A handsome man, full of wit, learned, and a prodigious lover of the fair sex, Bacchus and good eating. I was never unwelcome at his amorous encounters, at which, to tell the truth, he acquitted himself well.”
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Smith did not hide his disappointment. In fact he went out of his way to make Murray feel unwelcome, and the new Resident was soon fussing about the consul with Lord Holderness, the secretary of state, himself an old Venice hand and a friend to the Wynnes: “As soon as I got here I tried to follow your advice to be nice to Consul Smith. But he has played so many unpleasant tricks on me that I finally had to confront him openly. He promised me to be nice in the future—then he started again, forcing me to break all relations.”
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Catherine’s death and, more important, Smith’s intention to marry again brought a sudden thaw in the relations between the Resident and the consul. Murray conceived the notion that his former enemy would be the perfect husband for his aging sister Elizabeth, whom he had brought over from London (perhaps Murray also calculated that their marriage would eventually bring the consul’s prized art collection into his hands). Smith was actually quite fond of Betty Murray. He enjoyed her frequent visits at Palazzo Balbi. She was kind to him, and on closer inspection he found she was not unattractive. Quite soon he began to think seriously about marrying “that beauteous virgin of forty,” as Lady Montagu called her.
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Murray and his sister were not alone in seeing the consul in a new light after Catherine’s death. Mrs. Anna too had her eye on him, because she felt he would be the perfect husband for Giustiniana: Smith could provide her daughter a respectable position in society as well as financial security. Furthermore, he had been a friend of the family for twenty years, and he would surely watch over the rest of the young Wynnes—at least for the short time that was left to him. After all, wasn’t such a solution the best possible way to fulfill the promise he had made to look after Sir Richard’s family? Mrs. Anna began to lure the consul very delicately, asking him over to their house more frequently, showing Giustiniana off, and dropping a hint here and there. She set out to quash the competition from Betty Murray while attempting to preserve the best possible relations with her and her brother. Inevitably, though, tensions in their little group rose, and Betty Murray reciprocated by drawing the consul’s attention to the fact that, as far as she could tell, Giustiniana still seemed very much taken with Andrea.
At first Giustiniana was stunned by her mother’s plan, but she knew that the matter was out of her hands. And although she was only eighteen, she did not express disgust at the idea of marrying an octogenarian. She was fond of Smith, and she also recognized the material advantages of such a marriage. But all she really cared about was how the scheme would affect her relationship with Andrea. Would it protect their love affair, or would it spell the end? Would it be easier for them to see each other or more difficult? The consul was so old that the marriage was bound to be short-lived. What would happen after he died?
Andrea had often said, sometimes laughing and sometimes not, that their life would be so much happier if only Giustiniana were married or, even better, widowed. It had been fanciful talk. Now, quite unexpectedly, they contemplated the very real possibility that Giustiniana might be married soon and widowed not long after. Andrea became quite serious. He set out his argument with care:
I want you to understand that I want such a marriage for love of you. As long as he lives, you will be in the happiest situation…. You will not have sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law and God knows who else with whom to argue. You will have only one man to deal with. He is not easy, but if you approach him the right way from the beginning, he will eagerly become your slave. He will love you and have the highest possible regard for you…. He is full of riches and luxuries. He likes to show off his fortune and his taste. He is vain, so vain, that he will want you to entertain many ladies. This will also open up the possibility for you to see gentlemen and be seen in their company. We will have to behave with great care so that he does not discover our feelings for each other ahead of time.
Andrea began to support Mrs. Anna’s effort by dropping his own hints to Smith about what a sensible match it would be. Giustiniana stepped into line, though warily, for she continued to harbor misgivings. As for the consul, the mere prospect of marrying the lovely girl he had seen blossom in his drawing room put him into a state of excitement he was not always able to contain. Andrea immediately noticed the change in him. “[The other evening] he said to me, ‘Last night I couldn’t sleep. I usually fall asleep as soon as I go to bed. I guess I was all worked up. I couldn’t close my eyes until seven, and at nine I got up, went to Mogliano,
(#litres_trial_promo) ate three slices of bread and some good butter, and now I feel very well.’ And to show me how good he felt he made a couple of jumps that revealed how energetic he really is.”
Word about a possible wedding between the old consul and Giustiniana began to circulate outside the English community and became the subject of gossip in the highest Venetian circles. Smith did little to silence the talk. “He is constantly flattering my mother,” Giustiniana wrote to Andrea. “And he lets rumors about our wedding run rampant.” Andrea told Giustiniana he had just returned from Smith’s, where a most allusive exchange had taken place in front of General Graeme,
(#litres_trial_promo) the feisty new commander in chief of Venice’s run-down army, and several other guests:
[The consul] introduced the topic of married women and after counting how many there were in the room he turned to me:
“Another friend of yours will soon marry,” he said.
“I wonder who this friend might be that he did not trust me enough to tell me,” I replied.
“Myself…. Isn’t that the talk of the town? Why, the General here told me that even at the doge’s …”
“… Absolutely, I was there too. And Graeme’s main point was that having mentioned the rumor to you, you did nothing to deny it.”
“Why should I deny something which at my old age can only go to my credit?”
Andrea had come away from the consul’s rather flustered, not quite knowing whether Smith had spoken to him “truthfully or in jest.” He asked Giustiniana to keep him informed about what she was hearing on her side. “I am greatly curious to know whether there are any new developments.” No one really knew what the consul’s intentions were—whether he was going to propose to Giustiniana or whether he had decided in Betty’s favor. It was not even clear whether he was really interested in marriage or whether he was having fun at everyone’s expense. Giustiniana too found it hard to read Smith’s mind. “He was here until after four,” she reported to her lover. “No news except that he renewed his invitation to visit him at his house in Mogliano and that he took my hand as he left us.”
Andrea feared Smith might be disturbed by the rumors, ably fueled by the Murray clan, that his affair with Giustiniana was secretly continuing, so he remained cautious in his encouragement: perhaps the consul felt he needed more time; his wife, after all, had only recently been buried. Mrs. Anna, however, was determined not to lose the opportunity to further her daughter’s suit, and she eagerly stepped up the pressure.
In the summer months wealthy Venetians moved to their estates in the countryside. As its maritime power had started to decline in the sixteenth century, the Venetian Republic had gradually turned to the mainland, extending its territories and developing agriculture and manufacture to sustain its economy. The nobility had accumulated vast tracts of land and built elegant villas whose grandeur sometimes rivaled that of great English country houses or French châteaux. By the eighteenth century the villa had become an important mark of social status, and the villeggiatura—the leisurely time spent at the villa in the summer—became increasingly fashionable. Those who owned a villa would open it to family and guests for the season, which started in early July and lasted well into September. Those who did not would scramble to rent a property. And those who could not afford to rent frantically sought invitations. A rather stressful bustle always surrounded the comings and goings of the summer season.
Venetians were not drawn to the country by a romantic desire to feel closer to nature. Their rather contrived summer exodus, which Goldoni had ridiculed in a much-applauded comedy earlier that year at the Teatro San Luca,
(#litres_trial_promo) was a whimsical and ostentatious way of transporting to the countryside the idle lifestyle they indulged in during the winter in the city. In the main, the country provided, quite literally, a change of scenery, as if the burchielli, the comfortable boats that made their way up the Brenta Canal transporting the summer residents to their villas, were also laden with the elaborate sets of the season’s upcoming theatrical production.
Consul Smith had been an adept of the villeggiatura since the early twenties, but it was not until the thirties that he had finally bought a house at Mogliano, north of Venice on the road to Treviso, and had it renovated by his friend Visentini. The house was in typical neo-Palladian style—clear lines and simple, elegant spaces. It faced a small formal garden with classical statues and potted lemon trees arranged symmetrically on the stone parterre. A narrow, well-groomed alley, enclosed by low, decorative gates, ran parallel to the house, immediately beyond the garden, and provided a secure route for the morning or evening walk. The consul had moved part of his collection to adorn the walls at his house in Mogliano, including works by some of his star contemporaries—Marco and Sebastiano Ricci, Francesco Zuccarelli, Giovan Battista Piazzetta, Rosalba Carriera—as well as old masters such as Bellini, Vermeer, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Rubens. “As pretty a collection of pictures as I have ever seen,”
(#litres_trial_promo) the architect Robert Adam commented when he visited Smith in the country.
The consul had often invited the Wynnes to see his beautiful house at Mogliano. Now, in the late spring of 1756, he renewed his invitation with a more urgent purpose: to pay his court to Giustiniana with greater vigor so that he could come to a decision about proposing to her, possibly by the end of the summer. Mrs. Anna, usually rather reluctant to make the visit on account of the logistical complications even a short trip to the mainland entailed for a large family like hers, decided she could not refuse.
The prospect of spending several days in the clutches of the consul did not particularly thrill Giustiniana. She told Andrea she wished the old man “would just leave us in peace” and cursed “that wretched Mogliano a hundred times.” But Andrea explained to her that Smith’s invitation was a good thing because it meant he was serious about marrying her and was hopefully giving up on the spinsterish Betty Murray. Giustiniana continued to dread the visit—and the role that, for once, both Andrea and her mother expected her to play. Her anguish only increased during the daylong trip across the lagoon and up to Mogliano. But once she was out in the country and had settled into Smith’s splendid house, she rather began to enjoy her part and to appreciate the humorous side of her forced seduction of il vecchio—the old man. The time she spent with Smith became good material with which to entertain her real lover:
I’ve never seen Smith so sprightly. He made me walk with him all morning and climbed the stairs, skipping the steps to show his agility and strength. [The children] were playing in the garden at who could throw stones the furthest. And Memmo, would you believe it? Smith turned to me and said, “Do you want to see me throw a stone further than anyone else?” I thought he was kidding, but no: he asked [the children] to hand him two rocks and threw them toward the target. He didn’t even reach it, so he blamed the stones, saying they were too light. He then threw more stones. By that time I was bursting with laughter and kept biting my lip.
The visit to Mogliano left everyone satisfied, and even Giustiniana returned in a good mood. Smith was by now apparently quite smitten and intended to continue his courtship during the course of the summer. As this would have been impossible if the Wynnes stayed in Venice, he suggested to Mrs. Anna that she rent from the Mocenigo family a pleasant villa called Le Scalette in the fashionable village of Dolo on the banks of the Brenta, a couple of hours down the road from Mogliano. Smith himself handled all the financial transactions, and since the rental cost would have been high for Mrs. Anna it is possible that he also covered part of the expenses.
Needless to say, Giustiniana was not happy about the arrangement. It was one thing to spend a few days at Mogliano, quite another to have Smith hovering around her throughout the summer. Meanwhile, where would Andrea be? When would they be able to see each other? She could not stand the idea of being separated from her lover for so long. Andrea again tried to reassure her. There was nothing to worry about: it would probably be simpler to arrange clandestine meetings in the country than it was in town. He would come out as often as possible and stay with trusted friends—the Tiepolos had a villa nearby. He would visit her often. It would be easy.
In the meantime Andrea decided he needed to spend as much time as possible with the consul in order to humor him, allay his suspicions, and steer him ever closer toward a decision about Giustiniana. It soon became apparent that the consul, too, wished to keep his young friend close to him. He said he wanted Andrea at his side to deal with his legal and financial affairs but he was probably putting him to the test, observing him closely to see if he still loved Giustiniana. Never before had he seemed so dependent on him. The two of them became inseparable—an unusual couple traveling back and forth between Venice and Mogliano, where Smith’s staff was preparing the house for the summer season, and making frequent business trips to Padua.
Giustiniana was left to brood over her future alone. She complained about Andrea’s absences from Venice and dreaded the uncertainty of her situation. She did not understand his need to spend so much time with that “damned old man.” She felt they were “wasting precious time” that they could be spending together. Yet her reproaches always gave way to words of great tenderness. During one of Andrea’s overnight trips to the mainland with the consul, she wrote:
You are far away, dear Memmo, and I am not well at all. I am happier when you are here in town even when I know we won’t be speaking because I always bear in mind that if by happy accident I am suddenly free to see you, I can always find a way to tell you. You might run over to see me; I might see you at the window…. And so the time I spend away from you passes less painfully…. But days like this one are very long indeed and seem never to end…. Though I must say there have been some happy moments too, as when I woke up this morning and found two letters from you that I read over and over all day. They gave me so much pleasure…. I still have other letters from you, which I fortunately have not yet returned to you—those too were brought out and given a “tour” today. And your portrait—oh, how sweetly it occupied me! I spoke to it, I told it all the things that I feel when I see you and I am unable to express to you when I am near you…. My mother took me out with her to take some fresh air, and we went for a ride ever so lazily down the canal. And as by chance she was as quiet as I was, I let myself go entirely to my thoughts. Then, emerging from those thoughts, I looked around eagerly, as if I were about to run into you. Every time I saw a boat that seemed to me not unlike yours, I couldn’t stop believing that you might be in it. The same thing happened when we got back home—a sudden movement outside brought me several times to the window where I always sit when I hope to see you…. The evening hours were very uncomfortable. We had several visitors, and I could not leave the company. But in the end they did not bother my heart and thoughts so much because I went to sit in a corner of the room. Now, thank God, I have retired and I am with you with all my heart and spirit. This is always the happiest moment of the evening for me. And you, my soul, what are you doing in the country? Are you always with me? Tonnina now torments me because she wants to sleep and is calling me to bed. Oh, the fussy girl! But I guess I must please her. I will write to you tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be sweet if I could dream I was with you? Farewell, my Memmo, farewell. I adore you…. Memmo, I always, always think of you, always, my soul, yes, always.
As the villeggiatura approached, Giustiniana’s anxiety increased. Andrea still spent most of his time with the consul, working for their future happiness, as he put it. But there was no sign that the consul was any closer to a decision. Furthermore, the idea of spending the summer in the countryside deceiving the old man disconcerted her. She grew pessimistic and began to fear that nothing good would ever come of their cockamamie scheme. Andrea was being unrealistic, she felt, and it was madness to press on: “Believe me, we have nothing to gain and much to lose…. We are bound to commit many imprudent acts. He will surely become aware of them and will be disgusted with both you and me. You will have a very dangerous enemy instead of a friend. As for my mother, she will blame us as never before for having disrupted what she believes to be the best plan she ever conceived.” The two of them carried on regardless, Giustiniana complained—she by ingratiating herself to the consul every time she saw him “as if I were really keen to marry him,” thereby pleasing her mother to no end, and Andrea by “lecturing me all day that I should take him as a husband.” But even if she did, even if the consul, at the end of their machinations, asked her to marry him and she consented, did Andrea really think things would suddenly become easier for them or that the consul would come to accept their relationship? “For heaven’s sake, don’t even contemplate such a crazy idea. Do you believe he would even stand to have you in his house or see you next to me? God only knows the scenes that would take place and how miserable my life would become, and his and yours too.”
In June, as Giustiniana waited for the dreaded departure to the countryside, Andrea’s trips out of town increased. There was more to attend to than the consul’s demands: his own family expected him to pay closer attention to the Memmo estates on the mainland now that his uncle was dead. As soon as he was back in Venice, though, he immediately tried to comfort Giustiniana by reiterating the logic behind their undertaking. He insisted that there was no alternative: the consul was their only chance. He argued for patience and was usually persuasive enough that Giustiniana, by her own admission and despite all her reservations, would melt “into a state of complete contentment” just listening to him speak.
Little by little she was beginning to accept the notion that deception was a necessary tool in the pursuit of her own happiness. But the art of deceit did not come naturally to her. When she was not in Andrea’s arms, enthralled by his reassuring words, her own, more innocent way of thinking quickly took over again, and she would panic: “Oh God, Memmo, you paint a picture of my present and my future that makes me tremble. You say Smith is my only chance. Yet if he doesn’t take me, I lose you, and if he does take me, I can’t see you. And you wish me to be wise…. Memmo, what should I do? I cannot go on like this.”
“Ah, Memmo, I am here now and there is no turning back.”
In early July, after weeks of preparations, the Wynnes had finally traveled across the lagoon and up the Brenta Canal and had arrived at Le Scalette, the villa the consul had arranged for them to rent. The memory of her tearful separation from Andrea in Venice that very morning—the Wynnes and their small retinue piling onto their boat on the Grand Canal while Andrea waved to her from his gondola, apparently unseen by Mrs. Anna—had filled Giustiniana’s mind during the entire boat ride. She had lain on the couch inside the cabin, pretending to sleep so as not to interrupt even for an instant the flow of images that kept her enraptured by sweet thoughts of Andrea. Once they arrived at the villa and had settled in, she cast a glance around her new surroundings and had discovered that the house and the garden were actually very nice and the setting on the Brenta could not have been more pleasant. “Oh, if only you were here, how delightful this place would be. How sweetly we could spend our time,” she wrote to him before going to bed the first night.
The daily rituals of the villeggiatura began every morning with a cup of hot chocolate that sweetened the palate after a long night’s sleep and provided a quick boost of energy. It was usually served in an intimate setting—breakfast in the boudoir. The host and hostess and their guests would exchange greetings and the first few tidbits of gossip before the morning mail was brought in. Plans for the day would be laid out. After the toilette, much of which was taken up by elaborate hairdressing in the case of the ladies, the members of the household would reassemble outdoors for a brief walk around the perimeter of the garden. Upon their return they might gather in the drawing room to play cards until it was time for lunch, a rather elaborate meal that in the grander houses was usually prepared under the supervision of a French cook. Afternoons were taken up by social visits or a more formal promenade along the banks of the Brenta, an exercise the Venetians had dubbed la trottata. Often the final destination of this afternoon stroll was the bottega, the village coffeehouse where summer residents caught up with the latest news from Venice. After dinner, the evening was taken up by conversation and society games. Blindman’s bluff was a favorite. In the larger villas there were also small concerts and recitals and the occasional dancing party.
Giustiniana did not really look forward to any of this. As soon as she arrived at Le Scalette she was seized by worries of a logistical nature, wondering whether it would really be easier for her to meet Andrea secretly in the country than it had been in Venice. She looked around the premises for a suitable place where they could see each other and immediately reported to her lover that there was an empty guest room next to her bedroom. More important: “There is a door not far from the bed that opens onto a secret, narrow staircase that leads to the garden. Thus we are free to go in and out without being seen.” She promised Andrea to explore the surroundings more thoroughly: “I will play the spy and check every corner of the house, and look closely at the garden as well as the caretaker’s quarters—everywhere. And I will give you a detailed report.”
The villa next door belonged to Andrea Tron, a shrewd politician who never became doge but was known to be the most powerful man in Venice (he would play an important role in launching Andrea’s career). Tron took a keen interest in his new neighbors. As an old friend of Consul Smith, he was aware that the death of Smith’s wife had created quite an upheaval among the English residents. Like all well-informed Venetians, he also knew about Andrea and Giustiniana’s past relationship and was curious to know whether it might still be simmering under the surface. He came for lunch and invited the Wynnes over to his villa. Mrs. Anna was pleased; it was good policy to be on friendly terms with such an influential man as Tron. She encouraged Giustiniana to be sociable and ingratiating toward their important neighbor. In the afternoon, Giustiniana took to sitting at the end of the garden, near the little gate that opened onto the main thoroughfare, enjoying the coolness and gazing dreamily at the passersby. Tron would often stroll past and stop for a little conversation with her.
Initially Giustiniana thought his large estate might prove useful for her nightly escapades. She had noticed that there were several casini on his property where she and Andrea could meet under cover of darkness. But thanks to her frequent trips to the servants’ quarters, where she was already forming useful alliances, she had found out that Tron’s casini were “always full of people and even if there should be an empty one, the crowds next door might make it too dangerous” for them to plan a tryst there.
In the end it seemed to her more convenient and prudent to make arrangements with their trusted friends, the Tiepolos: their villa was a little further down the road, but Andrea could certainly stay there and a secret rendezvous might be engineered more safely. Giustiniana even went so far as to express the hope that they might be able to replicate in the countryside “another Ca’ Tiepolo,” which had served them so well back in Venice. She added—her mind was racing ahead—that when Andrea came out to visit it would be best “if we meet in the morning because it is easy for me to get up before everyone else while in the evening the house is always full of people and I am constantly observed.”
As Giustiniana diligently prepared the ground for a summer of lovemaking, she did wonder whether “all this information might ever be of any use to us.” Andrea was still constantly on the move, a fleeting presence along the Brenta. When he was not with the consul at Mogliano, he was traveling to Padua on business, visiting the Memmo estate, or rushing back to Venice, where his sister, Marina, who had not been well for some time, had suddenly been taken very ill. Giustiniana might hear that Andrea was in a neighboring village, on his way to see her. Then she would hear nothing more. Every time she started to dream of him stealing into her bedroom in the dead of night or surprising her at the village bottega, a letter would reach her announcing a delay or a change of plans. So she waited and wrote to him, and waited and wrote:
I took a long walk in the garden, alone for the most part. I had your little portrait with me. How often I looked at it! How many things I said to it! How many prayers and how many protestations I made! Ah, Memmo, if only you knew how excessively I adore you! I defy any woman to love you as I love you. And we know each other so deeply and we cannot enjoy our perfect friendship or take advantage of our common interests. God, what madness! Though in these cruel circumstances it is good to know that you love me in the extreme and that I have no doubts about you: otherwise what miserable hell my life would be.
A few days later she was still on tenterhooks:
I received your letter just as we got up from the table and I flew to a small room, locked myself in, and gave myself away to the pleasure of listening to my Memmo talk to me and profess all his tenderness for me and tell me about all the things that have kept him so busy. Oh, if only you had seen me then, how gratified you would have been. I lay nonchalantly on the couch and held your letter in one hand and your portrait in the other. I read and reread [the letter] avidly, and for a moment I abandoned that pleasure to indulge in the other pleasure of looking at you. I pressed one and the other against my bosom and was overcome by waves of tenderness. Little by little I fell asleep. An hour and a half later I awoke, and now I am with you again and writing to you.
Andrea was finally on his way to see Giustiniana one evening when he was reached by a note from his brother Bernardo, telling him that their sister, Marina, was dying. Distraught, he returned to Venice and wrote to Giustiniana en route to explain his change of plans. She immediately wrote back, sending all her love and sympathy:
Your sister is dying, Memmo? And you have to rush back to Venice? … You do well to go, and I would have advised you to do the same…. But I am hopeful that she will live…. Maybe your mother and your family have written to you so pressingly only to hasten your return…. If your sister recovers, I pray you will come to see me right away…. And if she should pass away, you will need consolation, and after the time that decency requires you will come to seek it from your Giustiniana.
In this manner, days and then weeks went by. Eventually, Giustiniana stopped making plans for secret encounters. There were moments during her lonely wait when she even worried about the intensity of her feelings. What was going on in his mind, in his heart? She had his letters, of course. He was usually very good about writing to her. But his prolonged absence disoriented her. She needed so much to see him—to see him in the flesh and not simply to conjure his image in a world of fantasy. “I tremble, Memmo, at the thought that my excessive love might become a burden on you,” she wrote to him touchingly. “… I have no one else but you … Where are you now, my soul? Why can’t I be with you?”
While she longed for Andrea to appear in the country, Giustiniana also forced herself to be graceful with the consul. He called on the Wynnes regularly, coming by for lunch and sometimes staying overnight at Le Scalette, throwing the household into a tizzy because of his surprise arrivals and the late hours he kept. He took Giustiniana out on walks in the garden and spent time with the family, lavishing his attention on everyone. There was no question in anybody’s mind that the old man was completely taken with Giustiniana and that he was courting her with the intention of marriage. Even the younger children had come to assume that the consul had been “tagged” and already “belonged” to their older sister, as Giustiniana put it in her letters to Andrea.
As she waited for her lover, Giustiniana watched with mild bewilderment the restrained embraces between her sister Tonnina and her young fiancé, Alvise Renier, who was summering in a villa nearby. “Poor fellow!” she wrote to Andrea. “He takes her in his arms, holds her close to him, and still she remains indolent and moves no more than a statue. Even when she does caress him she is so cold that merely looking at her makes one angry. I don’t understand that kind of love, my soul, because you set me on fire if you so much as touch me.” She was being a little hard on her youngest sister. After all, Tonnina was only thirteen and Alvise little older than that; it was a fairly innocent first love. But of course every time Giustiniana saw them together she longed to be in the arms of her impetuous lover.
Mrs. Anna, unaware of the heavy flow of letters between Le Scalette and Ca’ Memmo, could not have been more pleased at how things were developing. With Andrea out of the way, the consul seemed increasingly comfortable with the idea of marrying Giustiniana. It was not unrealistic to expect a formal proposal by the end of the season. The other summer residents followed with relish the comings and goings at the Wynnes’. The consul’s visits were regularly commented upon at the bottega in Dolo, as was Andrea’s conspicuous absence. Were they still seeing each other behind the consul’s back, or had their love affair finally succumbed to family pressures? Giustiniana’s young Venetian friends often put her on the spot when she appeared to fetch her mail. However circumspect she had to be, she could not give up the secret pleasure of letting people know, in her own allusive way, that she still loved Andrea deeply. “Today we were talking about how the English run away from passions whilst the Italians seem to embrace them,” she reported. “I was asked somewhat maliciously what I thought of the matter. I replied that life is quite short and that a well-grounded passion for a sweet and lovable person can give one a thousand pleasures. In such cases, I said, why run away from it? The same person pressed on: ‘What if that passion is strongly opposed or if it is hurtful?’ I answered that once a passion is developed it must always be sustained…. Must I really care about what these silly people think? I have too much vanity to disown in public a choice that I have made.”
The consul’s repeated visits—and Andrea’s continued absence—created an air of inevitability about her future marriage that took its toll on Giustiniana. In public, she did her best to put on a brave front. But as soon as she was alone the gloomiest premonitions took hold of her. The hope that when it was all over—when the marriage had taken place—she would be free to give herself completely to the man she loved sustained her through the performance she was putting on day after day. But she could not rid herself of the fear that for all their clever scheming, once the consul married her she would not be able to see Andrea at all. As an English friend summering by the Brenta whispered to her one day, “I know my country well, and I am quite sure the first person Smith will ban from his house will be Memmo.” She wrote to Andrea:
Alas, I know my country too! So what is to be done? Wait until he dies to be free? And in the meantime? And afterward? He might live with me for years, while I cannot live without you for a month…. True, any other husband would stop me from seeing you without having the advantages Smith has to offer, including his old age…. But everything is so uncertain, and it seems to me that the future can only be worse than the present. Of course it would be wrong for the two of us to get married. I wouldn’t want your ruin even if it gave me all the happiness I would feel living with you. No, my Memmo! I love you in the most disinterested and sincerest way possible, exactly as you should be loved. I do not believe we shall ever be entirely happy, but all the same I will always be yours, I will adore you, and I will depend on you all my life…. So I will do what pleases you, [but remember] that if Smith were to ask for my hand and my Memmo were not entirely happy about it I would instantly abandon Smith and everything else with him, for my true good fortune is to belong to you and you alone.
In August Marina’s health briefly improved and Andrea was finally free to go to the country to see Giustiniana. He was not well—still recovering from a bad fever that had forced him to bed. But he decided to make the trip out to Dolo anyway and take advantage of the Tiepolos’ open invitation. Giustiniana was in a frenzy of excitement. “Come quickly, my heart, now that your sister’s condition allows you to…. I would do anything, anything for the pleasure of seeing you.” It was too risky for Andrea to visit her house, so she had arranged to see him in the modest home of the mother of one of the servants, thanks to the intercession of a local priest in whom she had immediately confided. “I went to see it, and I must tell you it’s nothing more than a hovel,” she warned, “but it should suffice us.” Alternatively, they could meet in the caretaker’s apartment, which was reached “by taking a little staircase next to the stables.”
These preparations were unnecessary. Andrea arrived by carriage late in the night, exhausted after a long detour to Padua he had made on behalf of the ever-demanding consul. He left his luggage at the Tiepolos’ and immediately went off to surprise Giustiniana by sneaking up to her room from the garden.
The following morning, after lingering in bed in a joyful haze, she scribbled a note and sent it to Andrea care of the Tiepolos: “My darling, lovable Memmo, how grateful I feel! Can a heart be more giving? Anyone can pay a visit to his lover. But the circumstances in which you came to see me last night, and the manner and grace you showed me—nobody, nobody else could have done it! I am so happy and you are wonderful to me. When will I be allowed to show you all my tenderness?”
Giustiniana fretted about Andrea’s health. He had not looked well, and she feared a relapse: “You have lost some weight, and you looked paler than usual…. I didn’t want to tell you, my precious, but you left me worried. For the love of me, please take care of yourself. How much you must have suffered riding all night in the stagecoach, and possibly still with a fever…. My soul, the pleasure of seeing you is simply too, too costly.” Yet she was so hungry for him after his long absence that she could hardly bear not to see him now that he was so close: “Maybe you will come again this evening…. Do not expose yourself to danger, for I would die if I were the cause of any ailment…. If you have fully recovered, do come, for I shall be waiting for you with the greatest impatience, but if you are still not well then take care of yourself, my soul. I will come to see you; I will … ah, but I cannot. What cruelty!”
Andrea settled in at the Tiepolos’ for the rest of summer. His health fully regained and his sister apparently out of immediate danger, he was anxious to catch up on the time not spent with Giustiniana. They were soon back to their old routine, working their messengers to exhaustion and conniving with trusted allies to set up secret meetings. Giustiniana’s muslins were swishing again as she rushed off on the sly for quick visits to the “hovel”—which she now called “our pleasure house”—or to the caretaker’s, to the Tiepolos’, or even to the village bottega if they were feeling especially daring. When they were not together, they sent notes planning their next escapade. Giustiniana was in heaven. There were no worries in her mind, no dark clouds in the sky: “Am I really entirely in your heart? My Memmo, how deeply I feel my happiness! What delightful pleasure I feel in possessing you. There were times, I confess, in which I doubted my own happiness. Now, Memmo, I believe in you completely, and I am the happiest woman in the world. What greater proof of tenderness, of friendship, of true affection can I possibly want from you, my precious one? My heart and soul, you are inimitable. And it will be a miracle if so much pleasure and joy do not drive me entirely mad.”
In the tranquil atmosphere of the Venetian summer, when the days were held together by card games, a little gossip, and an evening trottata, the sudden burst of activity between the Tiepolos’ villa and Le Scalette did not go unnoticed. There was much new talk about Andrea and Giustiniana among the summer crowd. Even certain members in the Wynne household grew worried. Aunt Fiorina, always sympathetic to their cause, had been aware of the intense correspondence between the two lovers over the course of the summer but had refrained from making an issue of it. When she learned that Andrea and Giustiniana were actually seeing each other, however, she put her foot down and subjected her niece to “a long rebuke.” The stakes with the consul were too high for them to be playing such a dangerous game, she explained.
Fiorina’s alarm presaged worse things to come. Andrea went back to Venice on family business for a few days. Giustiniana wrote to him several times, but the letters never reached him; her messenger had been intercepted. Someone in the Wynne household—perhaps in the servants’ quarters—had betrayed Giustiniana and handed the letters over to Mrs. Anna. The last lines of a frantic message to Andrea are the only fragment that has survived to give us a sense of the panic and chaos that ensued:
… the most violent remedies. It is known that I have written to Venice, but not to whom! Everyone, my Memmo, is spying on me…. Don’t abandon me now, and don’t take any chances by writing to me. I won’t lose you, but if something violent were to happen, I feel capable of anything. If you leave me I shall die, my soul!
Alas, Mrs. Anna knew very well to whom Giustiniana had written in Venice because she was also in possession of some of Andrea’s letters—letters she had intercepted before they could be delivered to her daughter. She confronted Giustiniana, shaking with anger. “All day was an absolute hell—if Hell can really be that horrible,” Giustiniana wrote to Andrea a few days later, when she was finally able to seclude herself (“I must write to you where and when I can”). At the height of her fury Mrs. Anna threatened to sue Andrea and “expose him as a seducer who upsets peaceful families,” she raged, “for the letters I have in my hands prove that he is just that.” Giustiniana pleaded for mercy with such force and conviction that eventually she managed to calm her mother down. In tears, Mrs. Anna withdrew her threat but warned her daughter there would not be another reprieve: “I will have you watched all the time, I will keep my eyes wide open, I will know everything. And remember that I have enough in my hands to ruin Signor Memmo.”
The worst was avoided—what could have been more nightmarish than seeing their love story torn to shreds in a courtroom? But the betrayal had suddenly exposed the secret life of the two lovers. The places they met, their secret arrangements, their promises of lifelong love and devotion—everything was now known to Mrs. Anna. She had a list of the names of their messengers and accomplices. There was not much she could do about the Tiepolos except prohibit her daughter from setting foot in their house. But within the Wynne household, retribution was swift. The servants who had abetted the lovers were given a scolding and punished harshly. Alvisetto, who had been in on the whole thing from the start, was sent away.
There is something deeply sad about Alvisetto’s dismissal, which reminds us to what degree a servant’s life was in the hands of his padrone—his master. In general the master of the house and his wife had a formal, even distant relationship with the servants. But the younger members of the household had a closer rapport with the house staff. They would often appear in the servants’ quarters to trade gossip or ask a favor. And it was not uncommon for a daughter of the house to confide some of her secrets to a maid (or for a son to seek sexual favors). But it was always an imbalanced and ultimately ambiguous relationship. And there was often as much room for treachery as there was for connivance—on both sides. After all, Giustiniana found her allies in the kitchen at Le Scalette, but she had probably found her betrayer there as well. Goldoni made fun of the complicated relations between masters and servants in one of his most popular plays. But poor Alvisetto was nothing like “the wily and dumb” Truffaldino, the main character in A Servant for Two Masters. One has the feeling that, all along, he had been forced by Giustiniana and Andrea to cooperate with them against his better judgment. Now he was being made to pay, very dearly, for a mess that was not of his making. And they could do nothing to save him.
The two lovers managed to resume communications within a few days. Giustiniana barricaded herself in a kindly peasant’s home on the property, where she hastily scribbled her notes to Andrea. But seeing each other was out of the question, given the circumstances. “Ah, Memmo, what must I do? … Will I ever see you again? I love you more than ever, but I am losing you! … Help me, tell me what to do.” It was not long before they found a solution. Andrea suggested he write a letter to Mrs. Anna, professing his undying love for Giustiniana and offering to marry her in a couple of years if Consul Smith did not make an offer. It was a bluff: Andrea and Giustiniana both knew he was not planning to make good on the promise. But he thought it would convince Mrs. Anna that his intentions were honorable and she might therefore allow them to see each other. It was a risky strategy for a short-term gain. Nevertheless, Giustiniana agreed to the plan and decided to bring her aunt Fiorina in on it to a point—telling her about the letter Andrea wished to write to Mrs. Anna but without explaining to her that it was a deception. Aunt Fiorina responded with mixed feelings. “There is no denying that Memmo loves you and that he is a gentleman,” she said to her niece. His proposal was “very reasonable.” The problem, as she saw it, was getting Mrs. Anna to consider listening to him. But she was willing to help.
Even with Aunt Fiorina on their side, Giustiniana felt that, in the end, success or failure hinged on Andrea finding the right tone and words with which to address her mother. Her instructions to him were very precise—and they showed a considerable determination to take charge of the situation.
You will begin your letter by complaining that I have not written to you. You will tell me that you know in your heart that I love you deeply. You will assure me that you love me in the extreme and that to prove it you had written to my mother because you wanted her to hear an important suggestion you had to make—at which point you will copy the letter you have prepared for her. The most important thing (and here, my dear, you need to be artful and I want you to trust me) is to show yourself resolute in offering to write up a document in which, as you have said, you will promise to marry me in two years if Smith or some better party does not come along and propose to me. Give several reasons why it would be advantageous for me to marry you and add that it is your deep love for me that brings you to make this proposition, which you already know will be embraced by me with all my heart. And say you will have to wait because your present circumstances do not allow you to go through with the proposal at this time but in two years things should happen that could make us happy and comfortable for the rest of our lives…. [Add] that we would be very careful to keep this promise a secret.
It is hard to imagine that deep in her heart Giustiniana, though fully aware it was all a scheme, did not hope it would all actually come true, and that in two years’ time she would be married to Andrea. If she did, she kept it to herself.
Andrea struggled over a first draft. Giustiniana showed it to Fiorina, who was “satisfied with [Andrea’s] sentiments” but a little daunted by the resentment he expressed toward Mrs. Anna. “She told me to tell you that to seduce that woman one must flatter her—not be aggressive.” She asked Andrea to try again. “My love,” she added to encourage him, “what happiness will come our way if we manage to deceive her! Either Smith will marry me, in which case we won’t need [the subterfuge], or he won’t marry me, in which case she certainly won’t take away from the man whom she thinks will one day marry me the freedom to be with me from time to time.”
Andrea’s second draft, however, was even more disappointing.
My Memmo, this is not the sort of letter that will get us what we want…. It is weak and useless, so you will understand why I haven’t shown it to my mother and not even to my aunt. The other one was stronger and would have served our purpose wonderfully if you had simply deleted the few lines in which you insulted my mother…. In this one I see only the lover…. So write a new letter or rewrite the first one the way I told you to…. Send it immediately…. My aunt has already asked me if it had arrived, and it would be a pity if she saw us so unhurried in a matter of such importance
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Andrea Robilant
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: The true story of forbidden love in eighteenth-century Venice between an Italian noble and the brilliant, illegitimate daughter of an English baronet.In 1754 Andrea Memmo, the dashing and gifted scion of a distinguished catholic family, fell in love with illegitimate English beauty, Giustiniana Wynne. This match went against every convention of their day; it was an ′impossible love′.The lovers chased each other through peeling palazzos, ballrooms, salons, theatres and gambling dens, rubbing shoulders with legendary figures such as Canaletto and their friend, Casanova. Increasingly desperate, they decided Giustiniana should marry to conceal their relationship. A summer passed in flirting with the English Consul, Joseph Smith, but he soon saw through the deception and the affair became public.The consequences were disastrous. Casanova was imprisoned for his ′pernicious′ influence. Disgraced, Giustiniana left for Paris, where she launched herself into society in the hunt for a new husband. Her love for Memmo had lingering consequences that were to break this match, and she left again for London, hoping to build a new life, but a different fate lay in store…Andrea di Robilant is Andrea Memmo’s great great great grandson. The idea to write A Venetian Affair was planted when his father discovered Andrea′s letters to Giustiniana mouldering in the attic of the family′s crumbling Venetian palazzo. His father′s violent murder inspired di Robilant to fulfil his father′s dream to write about the lovers, and this fascinating, romantic tale is the result of di Robilant’s dedication and passion.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.