A Venetian Affair

by Andrea Di Robilant

  Thee I crave as partner in writing these verses

  I essay to fashion for my good Memmo,

  whom thou, goddess, hast willed at all times

  to excel, endowed with all gifts.30

  Andrea entered new negotiations to marry his second daughter, Paolina, to Luigi Martinengo, heir to another big fortune. The talks proceeded laboriously and then stalled altogether when the inquisitors put the future groom under house arrest for his licentious behavior (Andrea complained that Luigi had “taken on a Roman slut” while declaring his love for Paolina). They eventually resumed, and the wedding took place in 1789. The price, however, was high: Andrea’s financial resources were so depleted that he was forced to cede Ca’ Memmo to the Martinengos as part of Paolina’s dowry.

  Now that he faced the prospect of living out his old age in solitude, Andrea seriously considered marrying again. He broached the idea with his old flame, Contarina, who was not against it. But the conversation apparently soured over practical arrangements and led, unexpectedly, to the end of their long affair. “After twenty-five years of gallantry, love, and friendship,” he wrote to Casanova bitterly, “. . . my relationship with Signora Contarina has suddenly ended on account of a trifling matter—and will not resume ever again.”31 He did not say what the trifling matter was.

  Casanova frowned at the lost opportunity. He reminded his old friend that Contarina was rich and could have helped finance Andrea’s renascent political career. Andrea was piqued: “You are wrong if you think she could have assisted me. . . . She is not as rich as she was. . . . I was going to marry her out of friendship, not out of material interest. . . . Naturally she would not have been a burden on me in any way, not even in bed—she would have had a separate apartment. I was not very keen on all that flabby flesh. . . . Good company, mutual assistance in our approaching old age, and nothing more. With time, the assurance of a comfortable life and good . . . food on the table—since you ask, I will tell you I am still a glutton, and though I eat less I still eat a lot since all my teeth are still healthy.”32

  Like an aging Don Juan, Andrea enjoyed gabbing about his active sex life with Casanova. “You cannot imagine what I have had to go through to cut off a useless correspondence with twenty ladies from different countries, all of whom wish me to believe they are endlessly in love with me,” he bragged. Venice, he added, offered more than enough distractions: “I spend my time with my lovable old lady friends, and with even more lovable young ones. They are beautiful and crazy, and they might not give me everything I ask, but they still give me plenty.”33

  When he turned sixty he explained the logic of his frantic womanizing to his old companion: “I need the release, and since I do not gamble and there is nothing I want to buy for myself and I cannot stand trying to reason with our politicians and having nothing more to read . . . I spend my time with the ladies. Oh, you should see, Casanova, how many gorgeous girls have suddenly appeared in our little world here since you left! Surely you understand me if I tell you I try with every one in the hope of succeeding with a few. Without ever losing my sleep or my appetite over them.” 34 In truth, he was not always up to par. To a less promiscuous friend than Casanova he once admitted offering a lady friend “a cock that was not as hard as she deserved.”35

  As the powerful procuratore di San Marco, Andrea seemed a strong candidate for the supreme office of doge. The old reformers—the friends of his youth—rallied around him in a futile burst of political activism. Andrea’s vanity was certainly flattered by this belated support, but he quickly saw the drawbacks of a candidacy. They were financial, to begin with: it would be a very costly political campaign, and he simply didn’t have the money to run. Furthermore, the Memmo family was on the way to extinction—neither Andrea nor his brothers had a male heir. Why bother to enter the race, he asked, if there would be no more Memmo descendents “to enjoy the glory” a corno, or ducal cap, would bring to the house? Finally, and perhaps most important, why give up the good life to spend his last years sequestered in the Ducal Palace? “Once elected doge,” he explained to Casanova, “if I should chance to see a countess or a marchionness with beautiful eyes and pretty tits, lighthearted and lively, how do you suppose I could have her without being able to seduce her with the tools that I, as procuratore, am still allowed to use? For pity’s sake, don’t take the pleasure of women away from me, for it will lighten my spirit when I am a hundred years old. . . . Doges cannot indulge in such divine treatment.”36

  For all his genuine misgivings, Andrea’s political ambition won the day. When the old doge, Paolo Renier, died in February 1789, he entered the race. For a moment, it looked as if he had a real chance of being elected by a reformist alliance. But it was much too late in the game. The dominant conservative forces in the old Venetian oligarchy coalesced to neutralize his candidacy. Andrea was outsmarted. On March 9, 1789—four months before the storming of the Bastille—the Maggior Consiglio elected a man so timorous of the weight that had been thrust onto his shoulders that he tearfully begged to be spared the honor. His name was Ludovico Manin, and he made history as Venice’s last doge.

  After his electoral defeat, Andrea threw himself back into work. Interestingly, he focused his efforts on Dalmatia—the very same region that had inspired Giustiniana to publish her novel, Les Morlacques, only the year before. The backwardness of this Venetian territory just across the Adriatic had become a vexing problem for the Republic and a real embarrassment. Andrea worked tirelessly on a plan to improve living conditions in those poor, disease-ridden provinces. After much prodding and cajoling, he was finally able to get a package of agricultural and administrative reforms approved by the Senate in 1791, around the time Giustiniana died.

  Andrea’s own health had already started to deteriorate. Gangrene was slowly spreading in one of his legs, and before the year was out he was confined to his rooms at Ca’ Memmo. It was not just the atrocious pain that made the ensuing months so hard to bear; he was dying a poor man. There was very little left of the Memmo possessions; many of them had been wasted on an expensive political career. Even the family palazzo in which he was dying was no longer his. “Memmo is destitute,” wrote a friend sadly. “He has had to give up his gondola too.”37

  It took Andrea another year to die. An endless stream of friends and former lovers came to see him as he lay slowly rotting in his bed, surrounded by medicines and surgical instruments and confabulating doctors. Among the well-wishers was a French artist and traveler by the name of Dominique-Vivant Denon, who later went to Egypt with Napoleon Bonaparte and became the founding director of the new Musée du Louvre. The man who would one day be known as “the Eye of Napoleon” kept a detailed record of Andrea’s last days. “I went over to see poor Memmo this evening,” he wrote to a friend on October 15, 1792. “It looks quite bad, and he knows it.” Two days later: “His old lovers insist his blood is excellent. . . . But the disease keeps gaining ground.” On October 26 Denon ran into Memmo’s doctor, who said nothing “but lifted his eyes to the sky.” He went back to see Andrea on November 1: “They amputated his big toe. . . . It is what I call uselessly tormenting the victim. At this point one must either amputate the leg or let him die as peacefully as possible.”38

  Andrea’s ordeal lasted another two months. He died on January 27, 1793.

  Four years later Bonaparte invaded northern Italy. With the French Army fast approaching, the Venetian Senate voted hurriedly for surrender and the Republic died a swift and inglorious death.

  1 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 e
ighteenth-century flavor, though I eliminated excessive capitalization and made changes in the punctuation in order to facilitate the reader’s ease and comprehension.

  2 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.

  3 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.

  4 Andrea’s cousin by marriage and a close friend.

  5 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,”3 he later wrote in his History of My Life. But he never bore a grudge toward the sons.

  6 Clearly a different N. from the one who was lending them the casino.

  7 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.

  8 The consul had a villa at Mogliano Veneto, on the mainland.

  9 General William Graeme, a Scotsman, had succeeded Marshal Johann Matthias Shulenburg that very same year (1756). Throughout its history the Republic hired non-Venetians to lead its land forces.

  10 Goldoni wrote his Villeggiatura trilogy for the Carnival season of 1756.

  11 In July 1757 Andrea and Giustiniana contacted the religious authorities at the Patriarchal Chancery in order to begin the process leading to a clandestine union (choosing witnesses, gathering sworn statements), but it is unclear how far they went before giving up on the idea. In the archives of the Patriarchal Chancery there is a folder with their names in the register of secret marriages, but the contents have been removed.1

  12 Though frail, Pietro went on to live until the age of 93. He died on February 14, 1772.4

  13 Antonio Maria Zanetti was an important collector and dealer of Venetian artists. He was a friend and at times a rival of Consul Smith.5

  14 The Republic’s judicial council. It was made up of forty patricians.

  15 See p. 98.

  16 Richard and William, fourteen and thirteen, often sneaked out of the hotel to get their own taste of Paris. Richard in particular was having his first sexual experiences and often relied on Casanova to get him out of trouble. “He showed me a chancre,” Casanova recounts, “of a very ugly kind, which he had acquired by going all by himself to a place of ill fame. He asked me to speak to his mother and persuade her to have him treated, complaining that Signor Farsetti, after refusing him four louis, had washed his hands of the matter. I did as he asked, but when I told his mother what the trouble was she said it was better to leave him with the chancre he had, which was his third, for she was sure that after he was cured of it he would simply go and get another. I had him cured at my expense, but his mother was right. At the age of fourteen his profligacy knew no bounds.”6

  17 This remarkable letter from Giustiniana to Casanova was sold at auction in Paris at Maison Drouot on October 12, 1999. The sale was brought to my attention by the dean of Casanova specialists, Helmut Watzlawick. The present owner of the letter, who has asked to remain anonymous, has kindly allowed me to print its contents.

  18 The Prince of Wales did not marry Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg until September 8, 1761. By that time he had already succeeded his grandfather as George III.

  19 Giustiniana wrote to Andrea that she saw at Northumberland House “a famous painting by Titian of a Cornaro family.” That is indeed how the family in the painting was identified at the time. Recent scholarship has revealed that it is actually a portrait of the Vendramin family.

  20 Giustiniana wrote that Knyphausen was twenty-eight when she met him, but according to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biografie he was born on August 3, 1729, and was therefore two years older.

  21 A small town in the Veneto.

  22 In the register of secret marriages at the Patriarchal Chancery there is indeed a dusty old folder with the names of Giustiniana and Count Rosenberg scribbled on it. Unfortunately, as in the case of the folder related to Giustiniana and Andrea, the papers are missing.

  23 She is referring to the document signed by Lord Sandwich.

  24 See p. 49.

  25 It was Giuseppe Perlasca, a well-known physician in Venice, who wrote that Elisabetta had “a bilious temperament” and was “frail on account of her abuse of vinegar, which she had taken in large quantities for a very long time early in the morning and on an empty stomach for fear of growing fat.” She had developed “a yellowish mucus, itchy patches all over her body, insomnia, yellow blemishes.” In addition, “her uterus was severely damaged, she had splitting headaches and gastro-rheumatic fevers.” Perlasca ordered her to drink lemon juice and linseed oil, but she apparently drank only wine. Much to his frustration, she refused to be bled. A chronicler of those times, the Abbé Carlo Zilli, claims (see his manuscript memoirs quoted in Brunelli, Un’amica del Casanova, p. 260) that Perlasca attributed the actual cause of death “to the excessive amounts of mercury” his chief rival, the physician Fantuzzi, had prescribed to Elisabetta to remedy the consequences of a sexual indiscretion. Needless to say, this bit of information did not find its way into Perlasca’s ten-page report to Andrea on Elisabetta’s death, though it was apparently on everyone’s lips in Venice.25

  NOTES

  A Note on Sources

  The letters on which I have based A Venetian A fair do not make a complete set. In Chapters 1 to 4 I have relied on Andrea’s original letters to Giustiniana, which are still in my family’s possession. Those letters are undated, and their exact chronological order is unknown. I have used them in the order that seemed to me most logical, but it is quite possible that certain events—minor ones, I hope—occurred either before or after the time in which I have set them. This section also contains several letters from Giustiniana to Andrea from the period 1756–1757. Chapters 5 to 9, on the other hand, are based entirely on Giustiniana’s letters to Andrea. These are not the original manuscripts but handwritten copies that I suspect date back to the end of the eighteenth century. Of these, two incomplete and overlapping sets are available to the public. One is in the Biblioteca Civica di Padova (Bruno Brunelli used this set to write Un’amica del Casanova, his book about Giustiniana, published in 1924). The other was purchased in Venice by James Rives Childs in the early fifties and is now at Mr. Childs’s alma mater, Randolph Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia. There exists at least one other set, identical to the one in Ashland, which is the property of Giuseppe Bignami, a Genoese collector.

  It is unclear who transcribed the original letters from Giustiniana to Andrea and why he or she did so. I am inclined to believe that Andrea returned the letters to Giustiniana and someone in her entourage—possibly Bartolomeo Benincasa— transcribed them later on, perhaps with the idea of publishing them as an epistolary novel when the two protagonists were no longer alive. But until the original letters by Giustiniana surface, we will not know how faithful the copies really are. Of course, historians have by now corroborated most of the events in this extraordinary tale. But it is quite possible that the mysterious transcriber of the original letters indulged in a little editing for the sake of convenience.

  Prologue

  Gustav Gugitz, “Eine Geliebte Casanovas,” Zeitschrift für Bucherfreunde (1910), 151–171; and Giacomo Casanova und sein Lebensroman (V
ienna: Strache, 1921), pp. 228–261. Gugitz does not explain why Casanova chose to call Giustiniana’s mother Madame XCV and Giustiniana Miss XCV. James Rives Childs suggests that the initials stood for “Xè’l Cavalier Vinne,” Venetian for “It is Chevalier Wynne”; see Francis L. Mars, “Pour le dossier de Miss XCV,” Casanova Gleanings 5 (1962): 21. More simply, the X could stand for the Latin preposition “ex”; in this case the initials could mean “formerly of Chevalier Wynne.” The letter “w” does not exist in the Italian alphabet and in the eighteenth century was often transcribed as “v.”

  Bruno Brunelli, Un’amica del Casanova (Naples: Remo Sandron, 1924), 21.

  “L’epistolario, ultimo giallo,” La Nazione, January 22, 1997, iii.

  Jean Georgelin, Venise au siècle des lumières (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1978), 18.

  Giustiniana Wynne, Pièces morales et sentimentales (London: J. Robson, 1785), 36.

  Luca De Biase, “Vincoli nuziali ed extramatrimoniali nel patriziato veneto in epoca goldoniana: i sentimenti, gli interessi,” Studi Trentini di Scienze Storiche, vol. LXI, no. 4 (1982): 363. On the topic of clandestine marriages, see Gaetano Cozzi, “Padri, figli e matrimoni clandestini,” La Cultura, no. 2–3 (1976): 169–213; and “Causarum matrimoniorum clandestinorum,” Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Inquisitori di Stato, envelopes 528–534.