To make matters worse, the dreaded Morosinis were once again poking around, advising Mrs. Anna on what course to take. Encouraged by her mother, Giustiniana had continued to visit their palazzo despite Andrea’s old plea that she never be seen with his “enemies” again. For a long time he had turned a blind eye, but now the negotiations were so precarious that he insisted the Morosinis stay out of the picture. “I absolutely do not want [them] to meddle in our affairs.” And why was Mrs. Anna consorting with them anyway? Was she having second thoughts? Despite the persistent optimism he displayed to Giustiniana, Andrea, like his mother, became wary of Mrs. Anna’s true intentions.
While she privately continued to pursue a deal with the Memmos, in public Mrs. Anna became so negative about the chances of success that she even began to question the benefit of going forward. “She tells everyone that we are crazy, that I am a rogue, a liar, and a cheat, that it is not true that my parents are happy, and that I made it up in order to deceive you and your mother,” Andrea wrote in bafflement. “Luckily my parents could not be any sweeter. . . . By God, they are true heroes.”
Yet more mischief on the part of Mrs. Anna was on its way. A young Frenchman who went by the name of Comte de Chavannes arrived from Paris intending to spend part of the long Carnival season in Venice. He was charming and good-looking and had an air of sophistication about him that thrilled young Venetian ladies. He was immediately taken with Giustiniana when he was introduced to her. He plied her with gallantries, escorted her to the theater, danced with her, and took her to the Ridotto for some cardplaying. Mrs. Anna was delighted to see such a fine young man lavish her daughter with attention. Behind the scenes she did her best to facilitate Chavannes’s courtship even as she continued to be engaged— formally at least—in marriage negotiations with the Memmos.
The worst part for Andrea was that Giustiniana was not insensitive to the charm of the soi-disant Comte de Chavannes.
The Carnival of 1758 offered Giustiniana a pleasant break from the drama and the draining intensity of her relationship with Andrea. By the mid-eighteenth century the Carnival had become “a less raucous, more polite affair than its Rabelaisian antecedent.”2 Plebian celebrations like human pyramids and the war of fists, bullfights and regattas had been suppressed. Still, the streets and bridges were packed with jesters, fire-eaters, and prodigies of all kinds. Music and dances and drinking went on late into the night. The throngs were so thick that it was always a struggle to move from one place to another, but it was also easier to move anonymously through that crowd of dominoes.
Chavannes, who had decided to stay on through the festivities, was thrilled by the excitement and the licentiousness that filled the air, and Giustiniana could finally indulge the more coquettish side that she had repressed for so long. She enjoyed her time with the young Frenchman—the air of Paris always went to her head, even when she breathed it in Venice. And she did not shy away when he kissed her at the end of a happy evening—not just a French kiss on the lips, as Andrea later reminded her, shocked by her slovenliness, but a deep, long kiss “in the much more fervent Italian manner,” according to witnesses who had been quick to tell him. Didn’t she know people talked? Didn’t she realize her behavior risked jeopardizing all their plans for the future? What was she thinking “as she chatted continuously” with Chavannes in public? They were the talk of the town, Andrea reported reproachfully. Many people were already saying that Giustiniana was risking “losing her husband just to gallivant with a silly Frenchman who will soon be leaving Venice anyway.” And what about the pain she was inflicting on him? The last time he had seen them together, at the theater, he had had to run away in order not to see Chavannes “offer you his arm and you getting into his gondola and maybe even going to the Ridotto with him.” Not to mention those awful Italian kisses Andrea felt he would “never have the heart to erase” from his memory.
Andrea’s nightmare ended at Lent, when the Frenchman returned to Paris, apparently still pining for Giustiniana. The tireless Mrs. Anna pressed her daughter to keep up a correspondence with Chavannes and sit for a portrait to be sent on to him in Paris. But after the initial thrill Giustiniana had lost interest in her French suitor, wrote lazily to him, and looked for excuses every time the portraitist came by the house. His courtship had been a distraction for her, and now that all the craziness of Carnival was over she was ready to throw herself back into the arms of her true love. Andrea was relieved, but he could not resist carving out his pound of flesh in a long and rambling letter he wrote late into the night:
Listen to me: we all saw your mother rise from an unhappy and miserable station to become the wife of an English chevalier. Your mother does not have the best reputation. You have nasty relations and little dowry. You are a Catholic, and therefore one assumes nobody will want you back in England or in any case you will choose not to go. Your education does not please. The liberties you take are viewed with suspicion. You are a bright girl. How easy it would be for anyone—a man, or better still, a woman— to believe that all this time you have cultivated me out of self-interest when they see a nice young Frenchman . . . make love to you and be gallant and draw sighs from you at a time when you should appear particularly respectful of me. For heaven’s sake, it would have cost you nothing to tell that silly young fellow o f— your reputation would have gained so much. Of course a scene with your mother would have been costlier, but that too would have been manageable. And you would have earned so many points with me, my blessed Giustiniana. . . . Oh, never mind, but let this be the last “distraction” before our wedding. This time I will consider you innocent—I will not infer from this episode an easy yearning to please on your part or an overconfident attitude toward your Memmo in love, always good to you, full of respect for you, and blindly faithful. But if it happens again I promise nothing. . . . I still don’t know whether I will be a victim of the weakness husbands in love often fall prey to—jealousy. So far, my respect for you and the low opinion I have had of my rivals have spared me this curse, but who can tell what will happen in the future. . . . Remember that I marry you out of boundless love and deep esteem, and for this very reason I am convinced that my eternal happiness can come only from you. And that the only dowry you bring to me is your love, so perfectly sincere, and a character worthy of all my admiration. Remember that I give to you the love of my father, my mother, my brothers, my parents, my friends, the esteem . . . of the rest of my world, the advantages that come with me and my house, and maybe even more.
Giustiniana must have shown some regret for the forwardness she had displayed with Chavannes, for in his next letter Andrea was glad to declare the hostilities between them officially over. “Trêve donc des inutiles querelles,” he joked, using French to communicate the truce in their pointless quarrels. “I couldn’t be happier about it; stick to your resolutions, and everything will be fine.” He snickered at the portrait being shipped to Chavannes in Paris. Such poor quality, so few sittings . . . should he worry about the bad impression it might make among Parisians?
His truce with Giustiniana, however, did little to improve their overall prospects. Six months had gone by since the first contact between the Memmos and Mrs. Anna, and after initial encouraging signs, very little movement had occurred. The draft of the wedding contract had not even been presented to Signor Bonzio at the Avogarìa. Mrs. Anna was still dragging her feet and looking out for other options. The Memmos could not allow the negotiation to languish any longer: their prestige was in danger. Andrea felt it was time for another bold move: he decided to call on Consul Smith, who was again exerting a great deal of influence over Mrs. Anna.
Relations between Andrea and the consul had not improved since the previous year’s embarrassments. Though civil to each other in public, they had maintained their distance. Now Andrea realized he needed to have the consul on his side. Besides, he was happily married to Betty, and Andrea was no longer a threat. There was no reason why they should not be friends again. Except prid
e, of course; but in his dealings with the consul, Andrea had learnt that his pride could be overcome with the right amount of flattery. “We must work on the consul until he does our bidding,” he wrote to Giustiniana. “We must help him rid himself of that special dourness he harbors toward us.”
Andrea knew that the consul was facing serious financial and legal difficulties and could use some help from a well-connected patrician like himself. In his old age Smith had lost his keen commercial touch. A series of business deals had gone sour. Quite apart from the loss of money, these setbacks had tarnished his reputation. It was said in Venice and London that he had resorted to dishonest practices to patch up his damaged finances. While it was certainly true that his affairs were in disarray, Consul Smith seems to have been the victim of his own ingenuousness more than the avid perpetrator of shady schemes, as some of his enemies claimed. The consequences of one particular deal, in which he had been brazenly duped by a professional swindler, had been worrying him for many months.
The previous year a man who went by the name of Captain John Wilford had taken over a merchant ship belonging to an English trading firm, changed her name from Nevis Planter to Fuller, and crisscrossed the Mediterranean buying and selling goods. Wilford had arrived in Venice to unload merchandise and, needing a large sum of money to finance his next expedition, had asked the consul to advance it. The unsuspecting consul had obliged him with a maritime loan drawn against the value of the ship. Wilford, however, had had no intention of paying him back. Upon his return to Venice he had secretly registered the Fuller—which wasn’t his to begin with—in the name of his fictitious children. The consul had sued Wilford, as had the legitimate owners of the ship, but to no avail. Wilford had taken advantage of a loophole in the Venetian maritime law to keep the boat. His “children” had materialized out of nowhere to produce a tearful performance at the trial, and the consul had never recovered his money. Wilford had added insult to injury by bragging all over town about how he had tricked the old man. It had been a trying experience for Smith.3
Andrea approached the consul in the aftermath of the Wilford incident, at a time when the old man felt distraught and vulnerable. He was glad to make peace with his young friend and promised to help sway Mrs. Anna. Andrea informed Giustiniana that the consul would soon be calling on her mother. He added that, in order to test his goodwill, he would ask him to give Giustiniana a small enameled snuffbox as a gift from him “so that your mother won’t realize it is from me. . . . Consider it my present to you on the day of my festa, which is tomorrow.” A few days later the consul called on Mrs. Anna as promised but failed to speak in defense of the two lovers. Andrea backed up his new ally, explaining to Giustiniana that “even though he came by your house expressly to speak to [your mother], in the end he decided not to push the point because he felt it was inopportune. But he did ask her how the contract was going . . . and she told him things were as good as they could possibly be at this time.” Andrea continued to press him. A few days later, he informed Giustiniana that the consul had finally “sworn” to him that he had had “a very long conversation with Mrs. Anna and that he had gained quite a lot already and was now confident he could bring her completely to our side, having shown the care and the zeal with which he continues to protect your house and you in particular.”
Andrea himself was not quite as sanguine as Consul Smith. Mrs. Anna’s attitude toward the lovers remained cold, and he was irritated by the way she spoke about his family in public and felt strongly that her behavior was not helping their cause. “You do remember, don’t you, how your mother went about saying that my close relations were horribly critical about us and how they were slandering her behind my back. Smith asked her what those accusations were based on since he knows the Memmos to be upright and wise and he is very much aware of our thinking on this whole matter. She was quite embarrassed and admitted she had no proof. She had heard . . . she had thought . . . so there. It turns out we Memmos are gentlemen after all, we have not dishonored her, we have not caused her family’s ruin, its collapse, its violent death.”
As Andrea drew the consul into the picture, he also edged himself back into the consul’s life, offering advice on how to disentangle himself from new legal disputes. Once again Andrea was at his most Machiavellian. He instructed Giustiniana “to cultivate Mr. Smith and his wife,” bearing in mind that “they probably believe we are already married one way or another, for I have done my best to excite their suspicion without ever stating things clearly.” Soon Andrea was able to report that he was once more “at the very center” of the consul’s activity. “Here I am, necessary to him, willing and helpful.”
There was a cruel edge to Andrea’s treatment of the consul. It was not just the arrogance of the young dealing with the old. There was a lingering hint of resentment, a suggestion that all was not entirely forgotten. Their rapprochement was borne of mutual convenience, and the two did not really recover their close relationship. Here is how Andrea described him to Giustiniana in a particularly mean-spirited letter: “I tell you: Smith is bound to do all he can for us unless he is the most ungrateful man on earth. For he surely would have lost at least fifteen thousand sequins, not to mention his peace of mind and his honor, if it had not been for my advice, which was the opposite of what he and his counselors had argued. So I will not ease the pressure on him. The worst part of it is that he really is an ass, that he doesn’t know how to handle a deal, that he’s English and old.”
The consul may have lost his ability to handle a deal, but his word still carried weight with Mrs. Anna, who was mindful that the young Chavannes had been sucked back into the Parisian whirlwind and no longer seemed seriously interested in Giustiniana. Besides, she had found out that, contrary to his claim, he was not really a count. After a long winter lull, negotiations suddenly began to move forward again. In the early spring of 1758 Mrs. Anna, under pressure from the Memmos, finally instructed Signor Faccini to present a draft of the marriage contract to Signor Bonzio, the primario, for preliminary scrutiny. Andrea was thrilled: “How happy we shall be. Yes, I am sure of it now, my little one.”
Anticipating a wedding agreement, the lovers’ temptation to see each other became irresistible. Andrea paraded up and down the Grand Canal in his gondola two or three times a day. He was delighted to see her at her balcony again: “. . . and with that nightcap of yours, oh dearest, oh my rarest Giustiniana, my desire for you. . . . I feel I cannot resist it.” Yet a treacherous winter chill was still in the air, and he warned her to be careful. “ For heaven’s sake, don’t come to the window,” he pleaded one morning. “It is still too cold.” A few days later he sent another worried note: “Ask one of the maids or a houseboy to watch for me in your place. They can call you as soon as they see me from afar. Otherwise I will worry too much.”
It started with a splitting headache. Then a fever set in and Giustiniana’s temperature rose, and then came the dreaded stomach pains. Andrea followed the progress of the illness from the window at the Tiepolos’ with increasing agitation: “You seemed to be burning last night, and the way you repeatedly put your hand to your forehead gave me so much grief.” Andrea was in a state of great agitation. It was the second time Giustiniana had fallen seriously ill in the space of six months. She was again subjected to a debilitating cycle of leech-induced bloodletting by Dr. Trivellati, one of Venice’s leading physicians. Her mother force-fed her the usual supplement of garlic, which Andrea insisted was “really very bad” for her. It was hard for him to communicate with her and to get credible news on her health. His sister Marina’s death was recent enough that a creeping fear reinforced Andrea’s anxiety about Giustiniana’s health. Most nights he returned home late after wandering aimlessly around town, stopping at friends’ “and talking about you while the others played cards.” In his room he would battle the cold and his sleeplessness by pacing back and forth in front of the fire. Or he would wrap himself in blankets and stay up writing by the stove until the chimi
ng of the first call to mass. Images of Giustiniana kept him awake: “You cannot imagine how my heart is filled with worries and endless pangs of anxiety and how my mind is full of thoughts of terrible things that surely will not happen. . . . Now I see my Giustiniana in a bed, her head so hot, her body wracked by fluxions and fever and pains and debilities of all sorts . . . without her Memmo, without a hope of having him near even for a moment.”
A chance encounter with Dr. Trivellati in the street provided the first relief: “He told me your pulse had slackened after the last bout of fever. He said he had decided to go ahead and draw more blood now that your headache has subsided somewhat and you have had a copious clearing out. How his words, so precise and truthful, have consoled me.”
In spite of all the bloodletting, which probably weakened Giustiniana more than the actual ailment, her health gradually improved. As the weather warmed, she returned to the balcony. She looked pale and thin under her beribboned nightcap, but she smiled in the bright sunshine and squinted and waved to her lover down below. As she recovered, deeper stirrings came back to her as well, and with them the usual logistical problems. Ever since Andrea was spotted leaving her house, Rosa had been reluctant to help the two lovers. She claimed to be ill and made herself generally unavailable. Andrea pleaded with her so forcefully she finally agreed to let them use their room “one more time,” with the understanding that it would be the last.
A Venetian Affair Page 12
