A Venetian Affair

by Andrea Di Robilant

  The Abbé de Bernis had first met the Wynnes during his tenure as ambassador to Venice from 1753 to 1756. In those years he had also befriended Casanova and the two had shared a lover, a very intriguing and beautiful nun who used to escape under cover of darkness from the nunnery on the island of Murano to meet the two men in a casino rented by Bernis. (Casanova later claimed that the abbé had not always been an active participant in their sexual escapades, preferring to indulge in his taste for voyeurism.) Upon his return to Paris, Bernis had quickly risen to power under the sponsorship of Louis XV’s mistress Mme de Pompadour and had played a key role in the sudden redrawing of European alliances, which had led to war in the summer of 1756. But the vivid memories of his Venetian days had stayed with him even during his meteoric ascent at Versailles, and he had kept in touch with his old friends in Venice. So he had probably heard through the grapevine that the Wynnes were on their way to Paris. Given his interest in gossip and intrigue, he was also likely to know quite a bit about the ill-fated love story of Andrea and Giustiniana. There was no real need for an introduction from the French ambassador in Turin— Giustiniana was certainly aware of that. But she must also have felt that a letter of recommendation would be a useful reminder of their imminent arrival at a time when Bernis was surely distracted by grave affairs of state. In any case, she expressed her deep gratitude to the solicitous M. de Chevelin when she saw him at the theater on the eve of their departure. “He came to visit us in our box, and despite the presence of the English chargé d’affaires, he praised me very much and assured me he had written to Bernis.”

  At last the Wynnes departed. The traveling plan decided upon by Zandiri was to head northwest for the town of Susa, then veer sharply to the west and upward over the pass of Mont Cenis, at seven thousand feet. The party would then travel down the steep road that led to the valley of the Are, along the river to Modane, and west to where the Are meets the Isère, a few miles north of Chambéry. From there it would be a fairly easy ride to Lyon.

  Giustiniana did not feel well the day they left—bouts of nausea, mostly, as well as an incipient cold. The weather was not promising, and she was apprehensive about the passage over the Alps, even a little fearful. “I will write to you from Lyon,” she scribbled to Andrea as the carriage was being fitted out. “Remember to tell me everything with the same precision I use with you. . . . Dear Memmo, am I still your little one?”

  Giustiniana’s cold got progressively worse as they climbed toward Mont Cenis, and by the time they reached the rocky pass it had settled in her chest. The ride downhill into France was even more miserable. The wind kept blowing snow into the post chaise through cracks and openings, and as they made their uncomfortable descent she was wracked by a violent cough.

  The cold was so extreme I could no longer use my legs and feet and hands. I spent a whole day in that state, and by the time we got to [Lanslebourg] I couldn’t stand up anymore. I was sat down near the fire with other travelers, and soon I felt a fever coming on. We had to stay there for two whole days, as our luggage had not yet arrived, and I was in a most pathetic state the entire time. My nose bled profusely. I lost my voice. And I felt a terrible pain in my chest, together with the coughing and the fever. Still, I did not want to linger in that place, for the Savoyard doctors scared me even more than their unbearable mountains.

  At the height of her delirium, as the snow fell on the tiny mountain village, she dreamed of Venice and Andrea:

  I waited for you at the dock [at Ca’ Memmo], and after a long time you came into my boat. I reproached you for your scarce love, and full of passion I told you a thousand things. You apologized, my Memmo, by shedding many tears and holding me tightly in your arms without a word but with that rare expression on your face that I noticed when you arrived in Vicenza. What a moment! My tears joined yours, and I woke up. If this were the price to pay, I would want to be ill all the time. . . . You would be so tender with me, so loving. Oh Memmo, Memmo.

  The carriage with their luggage finally caught up with them at Lanslebourg, and the Wynnes continued their journey through Modane and Chambéry and on to Lyon. The skies gradually cleared. Giustiniana’s health improved every day, and as she regained her color, the daunting mountains behind her receded until they were little more than an unpleasant memory. “Mountains and more mountains. Terrible beds and awful food. . . . What a life!” she exclaimed. But at last she was in France. Lyon, where they planned to stay a few days, was known for its theater, its shops, and especially its beautiful silks. And beyond Lyon was Paris, a mere ten to twelve days away by regular coach.

  Giustiniana missed Andrea terribly, and she was disappointed to discover that the letter she was hoping to find in Lyon was still stuck in Geneva because he had not put enough stamps on it. (She had money sent to Geneva to have it forwarded to Paris.) “You can imagine the pain. . . . I reached Lyon longing for a letter from you, longing to hear whether poor Giustiniana still reigns in your heart as you reign in hers. . . . Ah, my Memmo, what are you up to? Where are you? . . . If only I had a compass that could tell me where you are.”

  Yet there was a lightheartedness in her tone that hadn’t been there in a long time. She sounded less frantic, her feelings less jumbled. It was as if the physical barrier, concrete and inexorable, that had come between them after the passage of the Alps allowed her to focus more easily on the road ahead.

  “Here all people talk about is fabrics,” she quipped after her first tour of the city. She bought two dresses, a formal one with an autumnal motif of yellow leaves and green velvet ribbons and a simpler one of striped satin with flowers, “which will do just fine for a déshabillé.”

  She was already in Paris.

  CHAPTER Six

  I had my hair done,” Giustiniana proudly announced in her first letter from the French capital.

  She had not even finished unpacking, and already she had summoned the coiffeur and his little army of stylists. “Don’t laugh: the hairdresser kept me in his clutches from ten in the morning until six in the evening, with no interruption for lunch.” He had snipped and trimmed and shaped her hair until about noon. Then his three assistants had planted “at least four hundred curling papers” about her head. In the afternoon, when the curls had set, the hairdresser had removed the papers, combing and puffing Giustiniana’s hair carefully while his wife prepared her unguents for an extra-large chignon: “She mixed eight ounces of cream with as many ounces of powder. I’m not teasing you. It’s absolutely true. They rub the mix into the hair, and thanks to the powder it grows into an enormous mass.” Giustiniana was thrilled with the result: “In truth no hairdo has ever suited me so well.” In Venice she had let her dark curls fall naturally around her face. Now she wanted to experiment with new styles, “and my hairdresser told me he will try a new one every time he combs me.”

  Alas, Parisian society was still officially in mourning for the death of the Duc de Luynes,1 the former governor of Paris and a distinguished member of the Court at Versailles, and she was not allowed to parade her new coiffure beyond the confines of their hotel.

  Upon arriving in Paris, Mrs. Anna had rented furnished rooms at the Hôtel d’Anjou, a comfortable house on the rue Dauphine, in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. To the right, their street led to the Seine, and then to the Tuileries Palace on the other side of the river. To the left, rue Dauphine wound its way past the bustling market and toward the old Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Wynnes occupied a large apartment on the ground floor. They had their own living room and dining room and were attended on by servants “with liveries, braids, and silver buttons.”

  During the journey to Paris, Giustiniana had always shared a room with Bettina or Tonnina, and sometimes with both. Now she fought hard—and successfully—to have one of her own. She was given a small “cabinet” with just enough space for a bed and a writing table. It had the disadvantage of being next to Mrs. Anna’s boudoir but came with a nice view of the inner court and garden. Besides,
it was somewhere she could finally have a little privacy after living in such close quarters with the rest of the family ever since they had left Venice.

  The innkeeper lived on the first floor with her three daughters, who were “rather coquettish and not all that ugly,” according to Giustiniana’s preliminary reckoning. They often invited their guests for a meal or some musical entertainment. Among the other lodgers, Prince Dolgorouki and another Russian aristocrat, whom Giustiniana rather mysteriously referred to as “the Muscovite,” immediately stood out: they dressed with flair, talked loudly in their native tongue, and brought a touch of cosmopolitan panache to the atmosphere of the hotel. Giustiniana also noticed a French officer, a royal mousquetaire. She thought him rather intriguing and not a bad-looking fellow, either. Unlike the noisy Russians, he spoke little and kept mostly to himself.

  The arrival of the Wynne girls at the Hôtel d’Anjou did not go unnoticed, of course. But they behaved discreetly during their first days in Paris, as much on account of their own uncertain status in France as of the official mourning. Their loyalty to Britain was not very deeply felt—certainly Giustiniana never took sides in her letters to Andrea. Nevertheless, they were strangers in the land of the enemy and anxious to obtain an extension of their residency papers before venturing out into society. The Venetian ambassador, Niccolò Erizzo, was supposed to speed up matters, but he received the Wynnes with no great enthusiasm. He vaguely promised he would soon have them over for dinner and would talk to Bernis, the minister of foreign affairs on whom they had pinned their hopes, about obtaining permission for them to stay through the winter. But Giustiniana had the clear impression that Erizzo was not about to make a major effort on their behalf. “So far he has given me no reason to be satisfied with him,” she complained to Andrea, trading haughtiness for haughtiness. “His superficial and patronizing tone does not suit my character at all.” Erizzo’s behavior so piqued her, she added, that she was tempted to tell him not to bother with the papers at all. Bernis had always been courteous to them in Venice, and he would surely grant them the “small favor” they were asking, even without Erizzo’s intercession. She checked herself in the end, believing, like all proud Venetians, that an official step by their ambassador “means something after all.”

  Despite the “curfew,” Giustiniana wasted little time in preparing for her first sortie onto the Parisian scene. After the hairdresser’s visit, it was the dressmaker’s turn. She bought winter capes and shawls, equipped herself with many “ornaments,” and had a new morning déshabillé made of batavia, a delicate fabric she had purchased in Lyon. To keep herself warm, she added a muff and a stole in matching leather, with a fashionable motif of “birds from Lake Geneva.” In the privacy of her small room, Giustiniana tried on her new clothes.

  She also applied rouge to her cheeks for the first time.

  The late fall of 1758 was one of Paris’s strangest seasons. The war, now well into its third year, was not going well for France. The Grande Armée had suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of the Prussians. In America, the French were losing their colonies to the British. In India, too, they were retreating before the Union Jack. These endless military campaigns had defeated the Treasury. France was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the government was squeezing the people with intolerable taxes. Louis XV had benefited from a brief surge of sympathy in the wake of the assassination attempt against him the year before, when a deranged man by the name of Robert François Damiens had walked out of the crowd and stabbed him. The reprieve was over now, and his popularity was falling again. Mme de Pompadour, still the most influential force at court, was increasingly the object of public scorn. Posters denouncing her and the king appeared mysteriously around the city. The police cracked down ruthlessly on the populace. A person could be hanged for speaking the wrong word.

  At Versailles, the crusty aristocracy lived on a diet of whispers and murmurs about who was in favor at Court and clung to the tired daily rituals dictated by royal etiquette. But in the city, society life carried on more splendidly than it had in a long time, as if the gloom spreading from the battlefields needed to be exorcized with special éclat. Every night there were lavish dinners, the theaters were full, and the public bals de l’Opéra were such crowded affairs they often turned into glittering stampedes.

  Giustiniana could not resist the call for very long. When the period of mourning ended a week after her arrival in Paris, she was already dressed and coiffed à la française and eager to take a quick peek around and do a little showing off. After attending Sunday mass at the Church of Saint-Sulpice, she went for a spin in the Tuileries Gardens with Bettina and Tonnina. A crowd of carriages was out parading on the grounds despite the bitter cold. Later, when Giustiniana returned to the hotel, the flush of excitement still lingered. “We went around only twice in our déshabillé, and yet we were much looked at, and heard we were the most beautiful and best-looking women there,” she reported proudly. She thought her rivals unimpressive: “Not a single beauty, many average-looking women, and an infinite number of ugly ones.” But she was startled by the audacity of their décolletés: “All of them are naked . . . with nothing but a petit collier around their neck, covered by a tour de gorge.”

  She had been out only a couple of hours, but she had surveyed the scene with a reporter’s eye, noticing how the delicate silk scarves always matched the dresses. There were fewer hoops than when she had been in Paris six years earlier, and they were not as wide. “And all the ladies wear muffs that are covered with capon feathers that also match the color of their dress.” She was certainly relieved that she had made her purchases in Lyon and did not have to go out in her old and rather passé Venetian dresses.

  If she indulged in these descriptions, it was because, apart from her own love of beautiful fabrics and clothes, she knew of Andrea’s keen interest in the latest Parisian fashions. “The men are magnificent,” she assured him. “Their velvet suits are adorned with rich embroidery. Most wear black velvet with a gold or silver waist-coat and no frills. But the really fashionable men wear a pensée suit lined with the soft black wool of baby lambs taken straight from the mother’s womb. Muffs are lined with Siberian wolf ’s hair, which is very long and white and bristly.” She also kept Andrea up to speed on the latest in men’s hairstyles: a large toupee, combed à la cabriolet—“wavy, without many curls, ending with a frisé and firmed up with a small metal bar in the back.” And if he really wanted to impress his friends at the Listone, Andrea should consider having the heels of his black buckled shoes painted bright red—a little touch she found especially chic.

  The gorgeous clothes, the stylish hairdos, the sheer luxury and flamboyance of the spectacle she had glimpsed outside the hotel dazzled Giustiniana. Even the carriages she found “truly beautiful,” so finely lacquered in black and gold, with “painted bouquets of flowers that seem embroidered onto them.” If only she could share that splendid stage with Andrea. Together they would charm Parisian society with their youthful good looks and clever conversation. “Why are you not with me?” she asked from the quiet of her room in Paris.

  In moments of greater lucidity—and greater melancholy— Giustiniana saw clearly how the great distance that now separated them made “my longing for your love all the more ridiculous.” From her new vantage point she was also able to appreciate more fully all that Andrea had meant to her: “You revealed all the mysteries of life to me. You gave thunder to my soul. You made my spirit delicate and noble. . . . You were my guide in everything, my Memmo, a huge presence in me always.” Her own “foolhardiness” in once deceiving him haunted her still. There were times when she longed to regain “the innocence of when you first met me.” Yet despite her “despicable” behavior of the previous summer, she still dared “to claim those feelings you had for me in another time.” She was not about to give up on him, no matter how irrational her enduring love seemed to her at times. And so she was left to contend with the confusion in her heart: “I love you;
I am afraid; I am angry with myself; I call upon Philosophy to help me, yet I also despise her; and so my soul is torn.”

  Initially Giustiniana’s letters from Paris took time to reach Andrea because he had not yet returned to Venice and she was never quite sure where she should mail them. After their final separation in Brescia, he had lingered on the mainland, visiting friends and building up his contacts. In recent years he had neglected his political career to the point that his younger brother Bernardo had already entered government service while Andrea still had no official occupation. Now Andrea’s first appointment by the government appeared to be imminent—word had it he would be named savio agli ordini, a junior commissioner with responsibility for maritime affairs (the position was also used to train promising young patricians in the art of administration). He needed to redirect his energies toward the duties and responsibilities that befitted a young member of the ruling class. True to his character, he also indulged in what Giustiniana teasingly called his “amusements and distractions” during his tour of the Venetian mainland territories. As the rising hope of an old and prestigious family, he was fêted everywhere he went, and he was also, inevitably, introduced to young women looking to be married—though he dutifully assured Giustiniana that none of them could replace her in his heart.

  Curled up in her cabinet at the Hôtel d’Anjou, Giustiniana read Andrea’s reports on his “little travels” with a mixture of delight and apprehension. All those young ladies he glibly mentioned in his letters . . . was it true she had not been replaced in his heart? And what about the beautiful and mysterious “nun” he wrote about? Giustiniana was having nightmares about her: “You were in her arms. . . . Yes, I even heard you shout your happiness. . . . You had penetrated the convent, you had struggled to get through the iron bars. . . . And finally there was the beautiful nun. . . . Ah, I can see you now with her. . . . I only wanted to put an end to your delight, to upset your pleasure; instead I suddenly fainted and went completely numb. Then I woke up, and I was soaked with tears and sweat.”