A Venetian Affair

by Andrea Di Robilant

  Holed up in Holderness’s guest house, Giustiniana explored alternatives to marriage. One solution was to invest the small inheritance she had received from her father—fifteen hundred pounds—in order to generate an income she could live on instead of using that sum as a dowry. She admitted that such an arrangement might force her to live more modestly than was her taste: “I hate mediocrity . . . and I am not virtuous enough to live well in a lesser rank.” But at least she would no longer feel hostage to the imperative of a “good” marriage. There was no doubt in her mind that her future would feel less uncertain. In that sense, she would certainly “improve her condition.”

  She pictured Andrea raising his eyebrows as he read her letter in the privacy of his room at Ca’ Memmo. His protestations, she warned him, were not going to stop her: “You will scold me, of course, but I have already written to Paris to gather information. I understand that interest rates are much higher there. I will live here for the time being, and I shall have my seat at Court if I choose to wait long enough. And if I get bored I’ll move back to France, unless of course you should ask me to rush back to Venice.”

  Perhaps she was getting a little ahead of herself, she admitted. These were still little more than “barely sketched and rather confused ideas.” Andrea needn’t worry: she wasn’t giving up the plan “to ensnare” that English duke. Not yet, at least. But she was “disenchanted” with people of high rank and their society, and serious about wanting to take charge of her own life. She needed to keep her head clear, to weigh her options more realistically. Even though Mrs. Anna’s friends downstairs kept blabbing away about what an excellent husband she would find, she knew that the more time passed the harder it would be to find a match that would suit her. And the more she thought about cutting herself loose from the obsession with marriage, the more she liked the feeling: “If I keep on thinking in this manner, maybe these ideas will take shape after all.”

  There were also physical changes that needed to be taken into account. Giustiniana was still a very pretty young woman—“the belle of the belles,” as she said to Andrea with a lingering sense of entitlement. Now that her Parisian experiments in hairdressing were over her black curls again fell freely over her sweet, lively face, and her dark, beautiful eyes were as penetrating as ever. Yet the youthful glint that had warmed so many hearts in Venice and Paris and Brussels had lost some of its sparkle. Motherhood had left her a little rounder, too. “I’m becoming womanish,” she observed with a touch of sadness as her birthday approached. “I’m nearly twenty-three. The best part of my youth is behind me. . . . What beauty I had is probably fading.”

  Her sister Bettina was four years younger and bursting into full bloom. It was her turn now. She would be the one attracting all the attention when the Wynne sisters were launched into society. “She’s a beauty now, and she is kind and spirited without ever being affected,” Giustiniana remarked proudly. “We’ll see how she is received when we go out in public this winter. Her figure would certainly not be considered slight in Italy or France, but it is very much appreciated here.” Right behind Bettina was Tonnina, who would soon turn eighteen. The youngest of the three sisters had much matured since the days when she had stood passively in the arms of Alvise Renier. Giustiniana assured Andrea that he would scarcely recognize her: “She’s never been more beautiful or more charming. . . . If she doesn’t put on more weight, she will please very much. If you could see her bosom now, her arms, her hands, her natural whiteness, and the self-assurance she has gained with the help of some graceful manners she acquired in France.”

  As for the unmarried older sister, she was apparently quite ready to cede center stage: “I’m no longer tempted to please, and I really no longer wish to work hard to bring a man where I want him to be. I’m so tired of whimsical love, yet I feel I have lost the kind of sensibility one needs for a great passion. . . . Ah, you know me well enough. You know I’m meant for an unhappy life. The idea of marriage scares me more and more. I would never marry a man I admired so as not to make him unhappy. And I would never marry one I despised so as not to make us both unhappy.”

  This was Giustiniana’s life in London as she depicted it—a solitary life of reading and writing, a life into which “not a single man” ever strayed. And what of Andrea? He went to the theater. He attended amusing dinners at their friends’ palaces on the Grand Canal. And by his own admission he was enjoying a new season of gallantries. While she lived the life of a recluse, she complained, “you happily make love to the ladies.” Her tone was often self-mocking, and one feels that despite the complaining, she derived real pleasure from writing to Andrea. Her letters to him were more and more an outlet for her powers of observation, her sense of irony, and her humor.

  Andrea teased Giustiniana about his flirtations in Venice—had they not renewed their vow “to tell each other everything” after the Paris scandal? Yet he now confessed that there was one young woman in particular who was vying to become his favorita. The problem, he explained, was that the lady in question was very jealous of Giustiniana and could not stand to see her picture still hanging so prominently among Andrea’s collection of portraits and miniatures. In fact, she had demanded its prompt removal. He sheepishly admitted that he had given in to her request. Giustiniana skewered him for this act of betrayal with a comic description that was all the more admirable given the circumstances:

  Imagine making such a demand! And worse, having it fulfilled! I’m furious about this. It is too awful! Too horrendous! My heart is filled with rage. . . . What now? My portrait is no longer in the middle of all those pictures of gorgeous sultanas that enlivened that extraordinary cabinet? . . . My glory hath been crushed, and now I have been thrown into the chaotic throng of your old mistresses! . . . Oh, you unfortunate portrait! Your reign is over. . . . And so you are left to dangle from the victorious chariot of a rival. . . . My dear Memmo, as you can see. . . . I hold the destiny of my exiled portrait close to my heart. And the consequences of this shameful removal make me tremble, for I can gauge the power of the person who now occupies you by the quality of the sacrifice you have made (you will forgive my vanity).

  Giustiniana took a guess. “Quick: tell me her name,” she quizzed him nervously. “Admit the belle coquette is M.C.” And indeed it turned out that it was Marietta Corner, the same young woman who had caused her so much grief in the early days of her relationship with Andrea. This time Giustiniana was not going to let her heart be torn apart by pangs of jealousy. She tried to laugh about it, to treat Andrea’s dalliance with Marietta as lighthearted comedy: she wanted to show herself in command of her emotions. “I take pity on you, my dear Memmo,” she went on, “for you are dealing with someone who has only her beauty to offer, and surely she will bore you very soon. I know you well. . . . I bet she’ll use gentle violence on you by asking to read my letters so as to calm her anxiety, real or fake as it may be. . . . Well, if that’s so I’ll turn very mean and tell you that I love you with the greatest intensity. . . . I will also tell you freely that I’m sure I shall never be forgotten by my Memmo.”

  Her jocular tone did not entirely mask her sadness. A whole year had passed since she had last seen Andrea. So much had happened in both their lives, yet he was still at the center of hers. She loved him—“horribly” was the word she had used—and she was not ready to be pushed into the background by another woman. Did she seriously feel threatened by Marietta? Probably not. She knew Andrea too well to fear that he might attach himself to a woman who had, as she put it, “only her beauty to offer.” But all his light talk about portraits being shifted around was hurtful. Even though she hid the pain so artfully, it still showed through her persiflage in the most touching ways. She could go on at length poking fun at her rival, making sarcastic remarks, ridiculing the whole affair; then, practically in the same breath, she would start writing about the two of them again. She would soon be presented to Court. What would he like her to wear? What colors did he have in mind? “I thought
I might wear pensée or yellow, the color dark-haired women use in France. I could wear a satin dress lined with marten furs—I have some beautiful ones. . . . But tell me what you’d like. . . . See, I fret over these little things as if I were still there with you.”

  The distance between them, however, was real, and news traveled even more erratically than usual on account of the war. There were plenty of opportunities for delayed information to play havoc with their lives. It was autumn—Giustiniana had left Paris three months before—when Andrea first heard of a nasty anonymous pamphlet about her that had apparently made the rounds in the French capital at the time of the Castelbajac-Demay affair. Andrea never actually read the incriminating “brochure,” but, from what he was told, he understood that it contained a description of Giustiniana’s behavior that was very much at odds with the one she had given to him back in June. It was only hearsay, of course, but Andrea was assailed by unpleasant doubts all over again. He confronted Giustiniana with the rumors he was hearing. Coldly, he asked if he should be writing to her at all.

  Giustiniana’s heart sank. Why was Andrea needlessly digging up the past, throwing at her the sad debris of her Paris debacle? His cruelty wounded her: “Your friendship is so unpredictable, you give credence to the most horrible things so easily. . . . I shall only tell you this: no such brochure against me exists and the ill-informed people who are spreading this around with the object of hurting me are misleading you. Believe in your Giustiniana, who has never debased herself to the point of hiding the truth from you. She tells you she is innocent of all the accusations that have been made against her. . . . I will force you to be my friend in spite of yourself and your mistresses. . . . I have lost your heart, but I have not deserved all the rest.”

  There was no reply for nearly a month, and this silence broke her even more than the accusations. Then one day she found a clutch of three letters from Andrea waiting for her at the Venetian Embassy. She was overwhelmed with happiness:

  So many riches to bring me joy! You remember me and I find you are still my friend, and maybe something more? My poor Memmo, you are still mine, then! How much we have lost, both of us, in robbing ourselves of our hopes and dreams! You seem to have lost your aptitude for refined pleasures; I have no true enjoyment left and cannot find a man I like as much as you, nor will I ever. In the passion I used to feel for you there were a thousand combinations that kept my mind and my soul perpetually excited. Oh, I loved you so! And by God, I do not feel my heart has yet been emptied of all that passion. I make this wager: that if I should ever come close to you again I will love you madly, if only you will allow me to.

  In mid-November the Wynnes moved to a smaller house on Dean Street, near Soho Square. It had been “elegantly furnished” by the previous occupant, the paramour of “one of the richest men in England.” But they felt a little cramped in their new home— something that was not likely to improve the atmosphere in the house very much. Dean Street itself was a busy commercial lane. The neighborhood was respectable but no longer as fashionable as it had once been—occasionally one even caught a whiff of the crowded taverns and seedy bathhouses of Drury Lane, just a couple of streets away. For some time, what was known as the “polite end of town” had been moving to the west of Soho, toward Grosvenor Square and Cavendish Square.

  The two boys, Richard and William, were still living with the family in the house on Dean Street. Holderness had arranged for them to go up to Cambridge shortly after their arrival in London, but Mrs. Anna had resisted in the hope of providing them with a Catholic education (in this she was abetted by an Irish priest she had known during her first stay in London, who had now reappeared in their life). Holderness, of course, would hear nothing of it. Mrs. Anna made hysterical scenes and even threatened to follow the boys to Cambridge. Tensions in the house were always high. Increasingly wrapped up in his political schemes, Holderness visited less and less often. “I fear his lordship will soon be disgusted with my mother,” Giustiniana worried. “She is inconceivably mad.”

  The bad feelings between Holderness and Mrs. Anna were exacerbated by the difficulties he was facing in getting the papers for the Wynnes’ formal presentation at Court. Mrs. Anna’s ancestry was again an issue; her title of nobility seemed as dubious in London as it had in Venice. More paperwork was needed; dispatches had to travel to and from Venice across war-torn Europe. It was all terribly time-consuming. Again Giustiniana enlisted Andrea to help speed things up. “Imagine this to be one of your many projects,” she said to encourage him, adding that her mother was especially “grateful” to him. “She sends her regards and begs you to continue to assist us. . . . How different from what she once was like! If only she had known you then the way she knows you now, she could have spared herself, and us, so much pain.”

  The Venetian authorities might also have been somewhat hesitant to vouch for Mrs. Anna’s title of nobility lest Andrea and Giustiniana take advantage of their seal of approval and resuscitate their marriage plan. Giustiniana felt it was crucial to disabuse them on this point: “They must be absolutely certain that not only are we not planning to return to Venice . . . but we could not possibly be thinking of getting married because we have come to understand the permanent damage we would be inflicting upon ourselves. . . . We will never marry, not even if you came to London. Besides, I hate the idea of marriage too much even to think about it.”

  Their subtle diplomacy did not produce results. There was, briefly, some talk about a possible presentation in the future. “Presently all seats at Court are occupied, and not until the Prince of Wales’s wedding might there be room for me.”18 But those vague hopes soon flagged. The Wynnes “could not have come to London through a better door,” as Giustiniana had put it so enthusiastically, but a month and a half after their arrival, they still languished on the fringe of London society.

  It was partly to relieve the tension in the house that Mrs. Anna accepted an invitation from a friend of the family to spend a few days in the country. It was hardly the sort of adventure to lift Giustiniana’s spirits: she had no particular longing to be in the countryside, and she was tired of making polite conversation with Mrs. Anna’s dreary little set. “They are of course very good people, with the best possible hearts, and so enchanted by us they would do for us anything we pleased. . . . But unlike what you might think, they are not to my taste.” No doubt Giustiniana would have preferred to stay home rather than trundle out to the country with the rest of the family. In the end she went “to make Mother happy” and hoped “to alleviate the boredom” by reading more of those “new English books” she had told Andrea about.

  The five-day visit to the country turned out to be even more dreadful than Giustiniana had anticipated: “I was bored to death. Imagine a crowd of pompous councillors and self-important English barristers. The horror!” The food was lousy and the company unspeakably dull. She was forced to escape to the garden so many times that she caught her first English cold.

  In late November Lady Holderness finally came to town, to the immense relief of the three Wynne sisters. She immediately invited them over to take a good look at the young Venetian girls her busy husband had entrusted to her care. There followed a more formal invitation to her first “assembly” of the season.

  Lady Holderness was an attractive woman of about forty, with a pleasant manner and a warm smile. Giustiniana was touched “by her ladyship’s goodness.” She found her “still beautiful and very charming”—the sort of woman only “a truly fickle man or else a husband could ever tire of.” There was an advantage, she explained to Andrea, to being shown in society by such a fine lady: “I hear there is great impatience to see Bettina; and we are expected to make a charming impression.” They had waited around the house for too long, but there was some compensation in hearing that “the country is curious in the extreme to see us, including the princesses, who have been asking about us.”

  There was a good deal of wishful thinking in all this. London society was
terribly stuffy and exclusive—far more than Paris society—and it was not about to swing its doors wide open to the Wynne girls. True, there was some curiosity about them, especially Giustiniana. “There is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be handsomer than my Lady Coventry,” Horace Walpole wrote to a friend with anticipation. But it was the sort of curiosity reserved for the amusing and the vaguely exotic. Even Walpole was mindful that a different young beauty threatened Lady Coventry at the end of every summer “and they are always addled by winter.” 7

  A year had passed since Lady Montagu had sent her acidulous missive to her daughter, Lady Bute, whose influence in society was rising in tandem with that of her husband in politics. Now it was Lady Bute’s turn to regale her mother with unflattering reports on the Wynnes in action. And Lady Montagu, sitting in her rented palazzo in Venice, made it sound as if she could not wait for the next installment of her favorite saga: “I am very much diverted with the adventures of the Three Graces lately arrived in London. . . . I am heartily sorry their mother has not learning enough to write memoirs.” 8

  Giustiniana’s initial burst of excitement at the prospect of going out in the world soon exhausted itself as she attended a string of “boring dinners” and “unbearable assemblies.” She spared Andrea the details of these tedious evenings for fear of “passing my distaste on to you.” With one partial exception: her evening at the home of Lady Northumberland, the most celebrated London hostess. Thanks to Lady Holderness, the Wynne sisters had received the coveted invitation. This time Giustiniana was suitably impressed by the grandeur of the scene. “The house is very large, magnificent, richly lit up and one can see the most beautiful paintings,” she conceded. But she went on to describe herself wandering among a tired and aimless crowd. There were at least a thousand people at Northumberland House that night: “Some of them played cards out of sheer duty, others ambled distractedly, and everyone was bored. I was certainly in that number. . . . What was the use of hearing people say how pretty we were or clap their hands at a curtsey only less clumsy than those one ordinarily sees here?”