A Venetian Affair

by Andrea Di Robilant

  Aroph was indeed a well-known medicament among alchemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and one finds several formulas for the potion in their writings. The basic ingredient was powdered saffron, which was believed to induce menstruation, and it was usually mixed with a paste of honey and myrrh. Casanova read all he could find on aroph in Paracelsus and in the Elementa Chemiae of the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave. The special brew, he learned, was not only supposed to bring on menstruation but also to loosen the outer rim of the womb, thereby facilitating the discharge of the fetus. It was to be applied at the top end of a cylinder and inserted “into [the] vagina in such a way as to stimulate the round piece of flesh at the top of her such-and-such.”9 This was to be done three or four times a day for a week. Casanova burst out laughing when he read these careful instructions.

  He went over to the Hôtel de Hollande and told Giustiniana of his latest discovery. In a typically Casanovian gesture, he supplied an addition of his own to the list of instructions: in order to make the potion more effective, it was necessary to mix it with freshly ejaculated semen. Giustiniana gave him a slanted look and asked if he was joking. Not at all: he would show her the manuscripts. She told him not to bother—she was hardly in the mood for reading the arcane theories of some alchemist she had never heard of.

  Casanova writes that Giustiniana “was very intelligent [but] the candour of her soul prevented her from suspecting a fraud.” 10 It seems more likely that she was simply at the end of her tether. They agreed to meet secretly in the garret of the Hôtel de Hollande when the rest of the lodgers had retired. In the meantime Casanova enlisted the help of the kitchen boy and Giustiniana’s chambermaid, Magdeleine (he had discovered they had been using the garret for their private amusement and blackmailed them into becoming his accomplices). A mattress was taken upstairs as well as blankets and pillows. On the appointed night, Casanova let himself into the hotel through a back door and made his way up to the rudimentary bedchamber carrying his alchemist’s paraphernalia. Shortly after eleven Giustiniana joined him upstairs. There were no preliminaries. The mood was very businesslike: “In our utter seriousness we appeared to be a surgeon getting ready to perform an operation and the patient who submits to it. [Giustiniana] was the operating surgeon. She sets the open box at her right then lies down on her back, and, spreading her thighs and raising her knees, arches her body; at the same time, by the light of the candle, which I am holding in my left hand, she puts a little crown of aroph on the head of the being who is to convey it to the orifice where the amalgamation is to be accomplished. . . . We neither laughed nor felt any desire to laugh, so engrossed were we in our roles. After the insertion was completed, the timid [Giustiniana] blew out the candle.” 11

  Needless to say, the magic potion did not work, on that night or the few others in which they met in the garret. In fact, Casanova never even experimented with aroph: unbeknown to Giustiniana, he brought along whatever homemade concoction he could put together at Cracovie en Bel Air before coming into town for his nocturnal exercises—usually just plain honey. Faced with yet another failure, Giustiniana finally gave up the idea of ridding herself of the fetus and instead turned her attention to finding a suitable place where she could deliver the baby clandestinely. It was a common enough practice. She had heard there were convents where young pregnant women could go. It was a matter of finding a friendly place where she could feel comfortable and where her secret would be kept safe.

  By the end of March the search had become frantic. The pressure from La Pouplinière was becoming unbearable. Giustiniana’s naturalization papers, signed by Louis XV, had arrived from Versailles.12 The Venetian documents were also ready and on their way to Paris. There was nothing to prevent the marriage from going ahead as planned in mid-April. Even the official portrait was near completion. And the impatient fermier général kept asking Giustiniana to set up an appointment with his dressmakers— which gave her a nightmarish vision of a busy band of seamstresses laying their searching hands all over her.

  This time Casanova came through for her. He turned for advice to the Countess du Rumain, a well-connected Parisian grande dame “who was more beautiful than pretty . . . and was loved for the sweetness of her character.”13 The countess was intrigued by Casanova’s divinatory powers (later on she too became an adept of the “abstruse sciences”), but she was also a practical woman and enjoyed using her influence to help others.

  Casanova told the Countess du Rumain the whole story. At the end, he asked if she knew of a safe refuge where Giustiniana could deliver the baby. The countess wasted no time. She contacted another friend, Madame de Mérinville, who was evidently quite experienced in such matters, and begged her to receive Giustiniana as soon as possible as her pregnancy was already so advanced. The financial and logistical arrangements were worked out by the countess, Madame de Mérinville, and Casanova, who claimed he gave Giustiniana 200 louis to pay for transportation and expenses during her stay at the convent. Within a few days everything was ready. La Pouplinière’s dressmakers visited Giustiniana at the Hôtel de Hollande on April 3 and discussed various ideas for her wedding trousseau. It was a brief, preliminary meeting—no searching hands. Early the following morning she made her escape to the convent in Conflans.

  Giustiniana left two letters behind—one for her mother and one for La Pouplinière. To both she wrote that she had been forced into hiding because of the constant threats she kept receiving by those who opposed the marriage. It was not just her reputation that was being sullied; she feared for her life. Under such circumstances she could not possibly go ahead with the marriage, and she would not reveal her hiding place until it had been called off. To mislead the police, she said she was staying within the city of Paris.

  As Giustiniana settled into her spare room at the convent, fear and confusion took over at the Hôtel de Hollande. When Mrs. Anna finished reading Giustiniana’s letter, she immediately suspected Casanova of kidnapping her daughter. Ambassador Erizzo, who had admonished the Wynnes against having anything to do with him, was also convinced of Casanova’s involvement. Casanova, of course, feigned complete ignorance about Giustiniana’s whereabouts. In fact, he even appeared for dinner at the Hôtel de Hollande the very day of her disappearance, asking with a perfectly straight face why everyone was wearing such a sullen expression and whether Giustiniana was upstairs in her room. The next day Mrs. Anna drove out to Petite Pologne with Farsetti and begged Casanova to tell her where her daughter was. Again he assured her he didn’t have a clue and promised he would do all he could to help find her. A few days later Mrs. Anna, with the full blessing of Ambassador Erizzo, sued Casanova for conspiring to kidnap her daughter.

  Soon Giustiniana was able to reassure her family. She befriended the uncle of Mother Eustachia’s chambermaid, who worked at the convent, and paid him to take her letters into town and deliver them to another intermediary, a man she referred to as “the Savoyard,” who posted the sealed envelopes at different mailboxes around Paris. Giustiniana assured Mrs. Anna and her siblings that she was well but insisted she would not reveal her hideout until she was sure she would not have to marry La Pouplinière. Communicating with Casanova was easier: she sent her letters for him directly to Countess du Rumain via Mother Eustachia. She was deeply grateful to him and to his lady friend, she wrote. She had found peace at the convent and the abbess was very kind. There were books to read and plenty of time to rest, though she complained that the absolute confinement imposed by Mother Eustachia weighed on her spirits at times.

  In Paris, meanwhile, the inquiry into the ill-fated trip to Reine Demay’s was slowly moving forward. Antoine Raymond de Sartine—a rising star in the city’s judiciary, whom Louis XV would soon name chief of police—summoned Casanova for an informal talk at his private home. He told him he was going to have to answer the very serious charge of having solicited Demay to perform an abortion on Giustiniana. But if he was innocent, he should tell him the whole truth—tell him why Gi
ustiniana had disappeared and where—and the entire matter would be quickly settled. Casanova assured Sartine that the charges were false. “Alas, Monsieur, there is no question of abortion; other reasons prevent her from returning to her family. But I cannot tell you more without a certain person’s consent, which I shall try to obtain.” 14

  Casanova realized that his vague explanations had not convinced the magistrate and he would soon find himself in very serious trouble unless he told him the truth about why Giustiniana had run away. But he needed to have Countess du Rumain’s permission. He went to her the next day, and, pragmatist that she was, she called on Sartine and told him the whole story herself. Giustiniana was indeed pregnant, she explained, but no abortion had been performed; she was now waiting to deliver in a convent near Paris and would go back to her mother after the baby was born.

  Sartine was an understanding man; he knew the ways of the world. He listened carefully to what the countess said. It was all he needed to know; they could count on his discretion. A few days later Casanova was summoned for a formal deposition before the presiding judge, who was none other than Sartine himself. He admitted going to the Opera Ball wearing a black domino on the night that was mentioned in the suit but denied ever paying a visit to Reine Demay. As for Giustiniana, he said, “neither I nor any member of her family ever thought she was pregnant.”15

  Sartine spared Casanova an arrest warrant but advised him not to leave Paris until the case was closed. For good measure, Casanova dropped a handsome bribe of three hundred louis into the lap of the court clerk. Shortly after his testimony, Castelbajac sidled up to Casanova with an offer: Demay was ready to retract her accusation—claiming she had mistaken his identity—in exchange for a hundred louis. The midwife appeared at his house in Petite Pologne a few days later in the company of a conniving witness and, after taking a look at Casanova, said loudly that he was not the man she was looking for: “I have made a mistake.”16 She was not the only one trying to make some quick money from the sordid episode. Mrs. Anna’s lawyer, M. Vauversin, also stepped into the fray, secretly offering Casanova advice on how to counter his client’s suit against him.

  Delighted at the opportunity his enemies were handing him, Casanova sent a detailed report to Sartine on all the financial shenanigans. In short order, Demay was arrested and imprisoned at the Grand Châtelet for attempted extortion; Castelbajac was sent to the Bicêtre, a prison just south of Paris, for his complicity in the affair; and M. Vauversin was temporarily disbarred, much to Mrs. Anna’s discomfiture.

  Casanova could breathe again, but despite the arrest of two of the claimants he was still not cleared and the two cases that had been brought against him remained pending. Giustiniana’s disappearance continued to be a topic of gossip in Paris throughout the spring of 1759. “You would not believe, sir, the noise this affair has made here,” one of Andrea’s correspondents wrote. Several weeks after her escape “she still remains the news of the day in a country that usually thrives only on novelty. If poor Miss Wynne had wanted people to know she was in town, I can assure you she would have been very satisfied, for I can’t remember anyone being talked about so much.”17

  Inside the court, Casanova had testified that pregnancy was not the cause of Giustiniana’s disappearance. But of course the talk outside the court was that she was indeed expecting a child. How else could one explain her sudden bolting and, even more so, her refusal to emerge from hiding? Her own explanation—that she was running away from threats and a marriage she couldn’t face— simply did not make sense. The substance of Castelbajac and Reine Demay’s depositions soon became general knowledge. An anonymous and very derogatory pamphlet on Giustiniana made the rounds. Andrea’s name cropped up frequently in conversations around town as the presumed father. And La Pouplinière, of course, was made to look like a fool.

  Inevitably, rumors about the causes of Giustiniana’s disappearance reached Venice as well. Andrea did not quite know what to believe. He had stopped receiving letters from her after she had gone into hiding. His friends were asking whether what they heard was true. He did not know what to say. Her mysterious behavior had left him defenseless in the face of the most insidious attacks. Utterly confused, he resorted to reading excerpts of some of Giustiniana’s earlier letters out loud to prove to others that she had harbored misgivings about the marriage and might well have fled out of sheer panic. But beyond defending Giustiniana’s honor, what was he to believe? Could it be that she was really pregnant? If so, who was the father?

  Andrea’s attempts to get credible information from his friends in Paris were frustrated. “You must let me know once and for all precisely what has occurred,” he urged Casanova, to no avail. Farsetti was not much help either. He wrote to Andrea about Giustiniana’s “enemies” but never provided a convincing picture of what was actually going on, probably being in the dark himself. Farsetti seemed more interested in denigrating Casanova at every opportunity: “If she had never met that man or if she had sent him away as I told her to do, she would be married by now.”18

  Even more disquieting than Casanova’s prevarications and Farsetti’s petulant letters was the short note Ambassador Erizzo sent Andrea in reply to his frantic queries. Erizzo was a respected statesman, a senior member of the Venetian ruling class. Even though Andrea belonged to a younger generation, the ambassador always addressed him as one of his own. His harsh words must have weighed heavily on Andrea’s heart.

  Esteemed Friend,

  I had the honor of receiving two letters in which you urge me to tell you what has happened to your beautiful Miss Wynne, who has not written to you for many days, and who, to your surprise, is beginning to be talked about in the most equivocal manner; and so you would like me to give you an accurate report on what has occurred. I very much wish I were in a position to oblige you; but the anecdotes are numerous and of such a nature that I would be compelled to write for two hours—and this after I have just finished writing a long dispatch. Suffice it to say that her conduct was ridiculous and imprudent in the extreme, and if she had sought advice from sensible people everything would have been settled. I believe it is entirely superfluous to say more since it would appear, if what I have been told is correct, that you are in a better position to inform me than I am to inform you. It is believed, among other things, that she has rushed to Venice or wherever you might have told her to go. Please forgive me.19

  April turned into May. The days grew longer and warmer. The countryside around Conflans teemed with new life. Spring showers washed over the lush green hills and the air was sweet with the scent of lilac. Inside the convent, Giustiniana waited peacefully for the birth of her child. She had grown close to Mother Eustachia despite their difference in age; the abbess was nearly thirty years her senior. During their long conversations, she had talked to her as if to an older sister about her love for Andrea, the hardships they had faced together, her uncertainty about the future. Little by little the spiritual quality of the place had affected Giustiniana. She was more at ease with herself despite a natural trepidation as her labor approached. Many hours passed in prayer, and the amiable Father Jollivet often took her confession. It was a difficult time, but Mother Eustachia and Father Jollivet made her feel a little less alone.

  At the end of May, Mother Eustachia informed Countess du Rumain and Casanova that Giustiniana had given birth to a baby boy. The delivery had not presented special problems, and the mother was in good health. No official record of the birth has survived. The boy’s destiny remains a mystery. Even his name is unknown. Mother Eustachia arranged for the child to be sent “to a place where he would be properly cared for”20—perhaps a local peasant family or else an orphan’s home, as was the custom in such cases. Giustiniana never mentioned him in her correspondence. She certainly never spoke of him to Andrea. Only a handful of people knew what had happened at Conflans, and the secret would have died with them had Casanova not betrayed it in his memoirs some thirty years later.

  Giustin
iana could now reveal her whereabouts and go back to her family after a short period of recovery. But her return had to be negotiated with as much skill and diligence as had been used to organize her disappearance. As soon as she was fit to be seen in public again—albeit only behind the grille of the convent parlor— she wrote to her mother and told her where she was. Mother Eustachia also contacted Mrs. Anna, explaining that she had just discovered Giustiniana’s real identity. The letter, dated May 27, is a little triumph in the art of deception:

  Mlle Justiniana Wynne finally opened up to me yesterday evening. She told me, Madame, that you are presently living at the Hôtel de Hollande, rue Saint-André-des-Arts. Had I known this before, I could have spared you so many worries. She has been with us ever since coming here on April 4. You mustn’t begrudge me my taking her in. I did not dare expose a young woman of her age and station to the dangers of wandering alone in search of other communities, certain as I was that someone would soon come to claim her. Yet nobody came to ask for her. . . . She has seen no one in the parlor and has received no letters. She has conducted herself with great piety here. She has a charming character. I love her with all my heart, and I would be handing her back with the greatest regret if I didn’t know it was for her greater happiness. I would be delighted, Madame, to give you a token of my respect at any time, and I have the honor of being your very humble and very obedient servant.

  Sister de Mérinville, abbess of Conflans21

  The letters drew a stream of people to Conflans. Mrs. Anna arrived at the convent the very next day. She was accompanied by M. de La Pouplinière, who had his personal train of followers: M. de Maisonneuve; his confidant, the Abbé de La Coste; and his notary, Maître Fortier, who had come to take a sworn deposition from Mother Eustachia in order to establish the exact date of Giustiniana’s arrival at the convent and the length of her stay. Father Jollivet also gave testimony that he had “taken confession many times” from Giustiniana.22 Amidst the general confusion, La Pouplinière advised Mrs. Anna to have notarized copies made of Mother Eustachia’s letter to her and Father Jollivet’s deposition as soon as she got back to Paris. It was important, he explained, to protect Giustiniana’s reputation with official documents.