A Venetian Affair (13 page)

They stopped seeing each other at Rosa’s. It was too risky. Meanwhile, the negotiations had stalled. The times called for maximum prudence. Yet Andrea continued to write, mostly in cipher now, to keep Giustiniana abreast of developments.

Even before the Zandiri incident, Mrs. Anna had made a series of demands that were clearly at odds with the goodwill displayed by the Memmo family. Andrea was especially incensed by her insistence on the inclusion of a clause stating that if the contract were not approved, all correspondence between Andrea and Giustiniana would have to cease by order of the court. Mrs. Anna was trying to protect her daughter’s chances of marrying someone else, and Faccini told the Memmos she insisted on having her way on that point. Andrea protested vehemently: “What a foolish request! If I agreed to it, my family would immediately think: Ah, then Andrea is not so attached to Giustiniana after all.”

It was not so much the specific clause that worried Andrea. He felt that Mrs. Anna’s attitude was self-defeating: by negotiating as if the contract would never be approved, she would inevitably undermine the whole effort. He sent Giustiniana a message explaining that the Memmos would not respond to Mrs. Anna’s requests until she had made clear the names of all her counsels. “Then I will reason with them. . . . Don’t worry, my beloved wife. . . . I have thought of everything.” Andrea had in fact lost all confidence in Faccini, who kept him out of the loop and came to Ca’ Memmo “his belly sticking out, asking to speak to my mother alone without having talked things over with me first.” Not only was he hurt, he thought his exclusion unwise: he, more than anyone else, could help finesse the agreement since he knew what both families wanted.

The difficulties raised by Mrs. Anna made the Memmo camp nervous because they had already put their reputation on the line. “My mother is now desperately worried that the news that she has lifted the
contraddizione
will become public too soon,” Andrea complained, twisting the facts a little. His father, of course, had lifted it—he was the titular head of the Memmo clan and was the only person entitled to do so. To tell Giustiniana that his
mother
had done it was technically incorrect but rather revealing about who was really in charge of the negotiation. Lucia Memmo, however, was no longer as optimistic as she had been. She feared her family would be dragged into quicksand. Why was Mrs. Anna not pressing for the contract to go forward? Andrea’s mother feared “very much” that she was stalling simply because she was afraid it would not be approved—which Mrs. Anna had in fact already said to several people outside the negotiating circle.

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.”
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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 pride, 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.”