A Venetian Affair (15 page)

His happy thoughts soured, though, when he was told about a sudden change of plans: the Reniers had invited Giustiniana and a few other guests to leave Padua and travel to their villa at Mirano, another little town by the Brenta. Mrs. Anna would have to remain in Padua with Tonnina, who was convalescing after a brief illness, and it was a little odd that Giustiniana should have been asked to go without a chaperon. Andrea was miffed. After all, the Reniers knew very well that he and Giustiniana would soon be married. Even more irritating to him was the fact that Giustiniana herself felt inclined to go. “Do as you please,” he wrote to her peevishly, “but I want you to know that I don’t like this idea at all. . . . It is never a good thing to generate suspicions, and it would be utterly foolish to do so given our circumstances. . . . [Renier] should respect the fact that I don’t like you to go around without your mother.” He then took his complaint directly to Alvise Renier, listing “all the reasons why I dislike the idea of this little trip” and lamenting the indifference with which he felt Alvise could abuse him. Andrea expected to be treated with greater respect by Alvise, who was quite a bit younger than he. To treat his wife-to-be in such a fashion, he concluded bitterly, was nothing less than “the act of an uncivilized lout.”

Giustiniana was in a difficult spot. She wanted to please Andrea but felt he was being excessively protective of her and making things difficult. The Reniers had been kind to her family, and she didn’t see the point of making such a fuss. Andrea sensed that Giustiniana had neither the strength nor the inclination to say no to the trip to Mirano. He made some mild threats: “You will not have any news from me until you return to Padua. . . . And you will not see me until you come back to Venice.” In a final taunt he asked her to please tell him quickly whether she was going to Mirano or not so that he could make arrangements “to spend the next fifteen days or so in some other place and get some exercise, which I really need.” He added a postscript that was typical of Andrea. If there was no way out, if she really
had
to go to Mirano, “then I hope you will at least make the effort of staying close to Bonzio’s lover, that woman Donada, and to Bonzio himself if he should also come out there. Cultivate them as much as you can, and remember to always call him ‘Your Excellency.’ ”

In the end Giustiniana went to Mirano. Andrea swallowed his pride and informed her that he had little choice but to join her there as soon as possible: “I’ve explained to my young friend Renier that he cannot treat me like a radish. . . . I am sorry for everything I said to you. . . . It was all on account of the pain I felt. . . . To calm you down, and to bring you completely onto my side . . . I see no other solution but to come straight to Mirano.” Before leaving Venice, he made arrangements to take a room above the haberdashery in the main square of the little town and sent new instructions to Giustiniana: “As soon as you get [to Mirano], go to the
bottega
in the square and ask the owner for a letter addressed to a certain Battista. . . . I love you, my soul, I love you to excess. For this reason I will come to Mirano. . . . I must run now, hopefully to hear good news about our papers. . . . Everyone says we are already married. . . . Our wedding is all people are talking about.”

As soon as he reached his destination, he dashed off a note to Giustiniana, who had only just arrived at the Villa Renier herself: “I love you so much that I had to come despite all the objections. I am writing to you from Mirano, my soul, I am here, at the
bottega,
on the right-hand side of the arcade, near Signora Laura Angeloni’s haberdashery, just as I had said to you. I will not move from here. I don’t want to cause a scene that might make people talk about us. . . . I cannot wait to see you. Forgive my sloppy writing, my love, but I sleep as I write.”

The following morning Giustiniana arranged to walk by the arcade during the promenade. Andrea could hardly contain the joy of seeing her after so many weeks: “My God, what consolation. . . . I am out of my wits now that I am near you again, that I have seen you. I actually felt I was holding your hand tightly and talking to you and kissing you. . . . You can imagine the state I’m in right now! What shall we do, my little one? . . . Tomorrow is market day. If possible, I would like to see you at the very least. How are you? My God, this is killing me. . . . My mind, my soul, my entire body are in such turmoil now. . . . Oh Christ, I have this huge desire to press you against my chest! By God, I cannot stand it anymore. . . . I wish we could be alone for half an hour and live out our love’s apotheosis.”

That night Andrea let himself into Villa Renier. At last he felt Giustiniana in his arms again, shivering with happiness and desire. This was how it was going to be—a life together, filled with their love for each other.

News from Venice suddenly shattered Andrea and Giustiniana’s dreamy world in Mirano. The examination of the marriage contract had come to a halt. This time it had nothing to do with Mrs. Anna’s demands or hesitations: her own past had surfaced to cast a disreputable shadow over her daughter’s future. Sifting through old records, Bonzio had discovered that in the early 1730s, before Sir Richard had arrived in Venice, Mrs. Anna had been “deflowered by a Greek”—these were the actual words the
primario
later used with Andrea. She had become pregnant, and nine months later a baby boy had been handed over to an orphanage. Mrs. Anna’s family had apparently taken the Greek man to court, but it was unclear whether the trial had ever taken place because Bonzio’s office had been unable to locate all the documents.

Andrea was stunned. Now it was clear to him why Mrs. Anna had been so shifty and difficult. All the while, as she had bad-mouthed Andrea and his family and made up excuses to slow the process, she had in fact been hiding this secret. Andrea was furious with her. He rushed back to Venice to see the
primario.
“The meeting lasted for two hours,” he reported back to Giustiniana, who was, if possible, even more distraught about the revelation than he was. “Bonzio had an extremely serious expression on his face. He seemed disgusted . . . and very well informed about everything that can be prejudicial to us: the year of the trial, the name of the Greek, the place where the suit was filed, the intervention of the
avogadore,
the boy sent to the orphanage, and, especially, every detail about your mother’s life.”

It is possible that the unctuous Bonzio had his own reasons for being upset. At the start of such negotiations it was expected—and certainly the Memmos had assumed the same in this case—that at some point it would be necessary to oil the bureaucratic machine a little by passing a few sequins to the
primario
under the table. Indeed, the general feeling among those who knew about the Memmo-Wynne negotiations was that with a bribe of one hundred sequins “the contract will surely be approved.” Over the previous months, however, Mrs. Anna’s delaying tactics had disheartened Bonzio and his colleagues to such an extent that, according to Andrea, “they did not expect to receive a single coin from her.” She had added insult to injury by telling people such as Zandiri, who had spread the word, that the Memmos would get the contract approved only by “drowning” Bonzio in gold. According to Andrea, the
primario
’s conclusions, while delivered to him in the most obsequious manner, could not have been more discouraging: “Your Excellency,” Bonzio had said to him, “if we were to find a document in which Mrs. Anna herself publicly declares to have been deflowered by that Greek, what could Your Excellency possibly want us to do? These are not matters for arbitration. We depend on the laws absolutely, and they are very strict, and if it turns out there was a public dispute at the Quarantìe
¹⁴
a mere twenty-five years ago—for it seems there was an appeal at the Quarantìe even if the case was never actually examined there— well . . . what would Your Excellency expect us to do in that case? Our honor is publicly committed, and we would find ourselves publicly exposed, and people would be right to assume that Your Excellency ‘is drowning the
primario
in gold,’ as they say.”

The message was clear, and the concluding allusion to Mrs. Anna’s comment made Bonzio’s little speech even more devastating. Once again, all their painstaking work had been torn apart. But unlike the Smith imbroglio, this storm would never blow over. Everyone knew that. The damaging court papers Bonzio referred to in his talk with Andrea were never actually produced. It is possible the
primario
did not even look for them. It was not worth his trouble anymore; enough of Mrs. Anna’s story had been resurrected from the dusty Venetian archives to seal the fate of the marriage petition, which never even reached the final stage
.

“This is our situation,” Andrea summed up sadly. “Could our misfortunes be any worse?”

CHAPTER Five

On the morning of October 2, 1758, Mrs. Anna and her five children, accompanied by Signor Zandiri and Toinon, left the familiar city of Padua in two hired carriages—one for luggage, one for passengers—and took the road to Vicenza, their first stop on the long, uncomfortable journey across Europe. It would take them three to four days just to reach the end of Venetian territory, which extended westward all the way to the city of Brescia and a little beyond. Then they would travel through the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdom of Piedmont, make the arduous crossing of the Alps, descend toward Lyon, and finally head straight north for Paris. It was a daunting prospect, and not just because of the length of the journey (three to four weeks) and the size of the party. The cramped circumstances and the loud clatter of the carriage as it sped along the uneven dirt track made travel by coach an exhausting experience. The posts along the road, where horses were changed and the passengers could stretch and take a breath of fresh air and have a meal, were often rather seedy places. There were bound to be delays as well—a wounded horse, a broken wheel, a sudden rainstorm. And then there was the tedious everyday paperwork: rooms had to be booked and horses hired, and the right documents—passports, entry permits, exit permits—had to be in order every time one crossed a border. Zandiri was there for that; Mrs. Anna, believing it was more prudent and practical to travel with an adult male, had asked him to come along and manage the trip as far as Paris.

Huddled inside the crowded coach, Giustiniana was oblivious to her physical discomfort. As the city walls of Padua gradually disappeared from view, she drifted into melancholy thoughts. She was leaving the world she had lived in all her life. And she was leaving the man who for so long had been at the center of that world as her lover, her best friend, her guiding hand. As the carriage barreled down the road, she fixed her mind on Andrea to keep herself from feeling lost.

When the negotiations on the marriage contract had collapsed, Mrs. Anna had decided to leave Venice at once and seek a new life for herself and her children in London. What would be the point of staying on in the wake of the scandal? Giustiniana’s prospects of finding a husband in the Republic were ruined. And Mrs. Anna’s past, which she had fought so hard to bury and forget, had suddenly resurfaced to humiliate the whole family. So she had packed her belongings and uprooted her children with the same determination she had shown in the past, as she had struggled to preserve the respectability Sir Richard had bequeathed to her upon his death.

She was in a hurry now to cross the Alps before winter set in. The onset of the war would make their journey even more uncertain than it might otherwise have been, since they would be traveling through France as British subjects—and France and Great Britain were enemies. But Mrs. Anna counted on the good auspices of the Abbé de Bernis, the former French ambassador to Venice who was now foreign minister. Once they were safely in London, Lord Holderness, the children’s guardian, would introduce them to their English relatives and help them settle down. He might possibly arrange a presentation to Court. Seven years after Sir Richard’s death, his family was going home.

During their final days in Venice, Andrea and Giustiniana had been inseparable. Mrs. Anna’s hostility toward Andrea had mellowed as the separation neared, and she had allowed him to take the boat trip from Venice to Padua with the family. In Padua, where the Memmos owned a large property, he had escorted Giustiniana around town as last-minute preparations were made for the trip. Andrea had even taken his meals with the Wynnes in an atmosphere of general reconciliation. After his final, wrenching farewell with Giustiniana, he had galloped ahead of the carriage to wave one last time from the bridge at the Gate of Santa Sofia. But Giustiniana had already withdrawn into her shell.

The Wynnes arrived at their inn in Vicenza very late that night. Giustiniana felt drained and completely disoriented. After a light dinner she went to her room and wrote to Andrea about the confusion in her heart:

Mon cher frère,

Where am I, sweet Memmo? How awful is my pain! What
desperation! Oh I do love you, alas; and I cannot cease telling
you even in the first moments of our separation! How I have penetrated your being. . . . How I have felt! Ah, there is no point in
telling you. I am desperate. . . . I did not have the strength to call
you back when you drew away from me, so I followed you with
my soul. I heard you stopped at the Bridge of Santa Sofia, but I
did not see you.

From the very beginning of their new life apart, Giustiniana addressed her letters to “Mon cher frère,” my dear brother—a semantic device designed to put some distance between them and somehow ease the disentanglement of their feelings. She was quick to admit it was a weak subterfuge: “I will call you mon cher frère, but you will still be everything to me.”

In reality this new form of address masked a deeper change in their relationship, which had actually occurred a few weeks before her departure from Venice. Giustiniana never spoke very openly or clearly about the matter in her letters to Andrea; she never mentioned a name or a place or a specific date. But she said enough to leave us in no possible doubt. At some point in 1758, either shortly before the revelations about Mrs. Anna or, more probably, in their aftermath, she had tired of the endless waiting game. She had tired of being isolated, tired of being shuttled back and forth between Venice and Padua, tired of being forcefully kept away from the man she loved. For a moment she had even tired of Andrea and his seemingly futile machinations. She had felt the utter hopelessness of her situation just as she had two years before, after their dramatic failure with Consul Smith. And for a short period of time— she called it her “moment of weakness”—she had given in to the gallantry of another man.

For all we know it was a brief affair, probably a matter of a few weeks. Her feelings for Andrea had not died, however, and when her fling was over she had gone back to him more in love than she had been in a long time. Andrea himself had learned of the deception only later that summer. After Mrs. Anna’s sudden decision to drag the family to London, Giustiniana had confessed her betrayal to Andrea, believing, in a contorted sort of way, that by painting herself as fickle and weak she would somehow diminish “the terrible pain” he would feel at their separation.

Andrea had forgiven Giustiniana—he was never a resentful man. But their relationship was not the same after her “cruel and spontaneous confession.” Giustiniana had allowed someone else to come between them, and this shadow had lingered on. There had been lies, and then there had been remorse. But even after Andrea had forgiven her, even after their tearful farewell in Padua, Giustiniana continued to damn herself. “I despise my life and I despise myself even more,” she wrote to him that first night in Vicenza, contemplating “the unhappy combination of events that has ruined me in your eyes.”

Despite the changes in their relationship, Andrea and Giustiniana were still very much together when the Wynnes left Venice in the autumn. They saw themselves as a couple and intended to meet soon. They still talked about spending their life together—one way or another. In fact, they were already working on a new scheme.

Their most urgent goal was to thwart Mrs. Anna’s plan to settle in London. Giustiniana had agreed with Andrea to try to extend their stay in Paris for as long as possible and hopefully to avoid reaching London at all. In Paris, Giustiniana was to aim her powers of seduction at Alexandre Le Riche de La Pouplinière, an aging widower, great music lover, and one of the richest
fermiers
généraux,
the famously wealthy French tax collectors. It looked very much like a variation on the plan they had tried unsuccessfully on Consul Smith two years earlier.

Monsieur de La Pouplinière had been Andrea’s idea. Exactly a decade before, the old tax collector had been at the center of the notorious
scandale de la cheminée.
The Duc de Richelieu, a powerful figure at the court of King Louis XV and a flamboyant womanizer, had seduced Monsieur de La Pouplinière’s beautiful and much younger wife. The duke and the tax collector happened to be neighbors in Paris. To facilitate the secret encounters with his new lover, the duke had had a secret passageway built in a huge fireplace that led directly into Madame de La Pouplinière’s music room. The tax collector eventually discovered the ploy and banished his wife from his household. The episode had caused a huge scandal at the time—as much because of the affair itself as because of what was perceived as La Pouplinière’s unnecessarily cruel treatment of his wife. The
fermier général
had never remarried while his wife was alive, but she had recently died and Andrea had heard from his Venetian friends in Paris that the old man, now well into his sixties, was looking for a new young wife.

Monsieur de La Pouplinière was probably not uppermost in Giustiniana’s mind the day she left Padua. But she had gone along with the idea when Andrea had discussed it before her departure. As at the beginning of their relationship, perhaps on account of the guilt she still felt for her “moment of weakness,” she was again deferring to his judgment. She promised absolute transparency: “Let God separate us forever if I do not tell you everything that happens to me. And you must do the same with me even at the cost of hurting me.” She yearned to please him in the hope of possessing him again completely. “You will know everything, and I shall win back your tenderness—you will see . . .”

Yet for all her resolutions, for all her valiant efforts to harness her feelings for Andrea, Giustiniana had little control over the sheer sadness that kept assailing her. If only she could give in to her emotions from time to time . . . “Your
tenderness,
Memmo! Oh God, may I speak to you this way? Do you allow me to do so? I have not shed a tear after those I shed with you in Padua, but I am immersed in desperation. Oh God! What will happen to me, and to you, Memmo? . . . I can only speak to you of love. Allow me to surrender for a few moments to my excessive feelings.”

After a sleepless first night away from Andrea, she added this rambling postscript to her letter as she waited for their little convoy to get started again:

I wept a great deal [all during the night] and was inconsolable. I made a thousand plans to go back to you if you do not
find a way to your Giustiniana. What misery is mine! You are
always on my mind, and at this very moment I am kissing your
little portrait. Let me speak to you about my passion. I shall be
wiser when I will have persuaded myself that I am far from you;
but will I ever be able
not
to talk to you about my passion? You
allowed me to talk about it again, and now I feel it with such
power that it is impossible for me to bury it. May I hope, mon cher
frère, to find the words ‘I love you’ in the letter I will receive from
you in Turin or Lyon? Write long letters to me, be my friend
always, love me as much as you can. I owe you so much. I feel
close to you in all those things to which my soul will always be
sensitive. May God give me a fortune so that I can run of to live
wherever you may be. . . . Farewell, my love. Take care of yourself for me, take care of yourself for Giustiniana, who is so
unhappy now but will soon be near you and happy again.

Andrea and Giustiniana found themselves in each other’s arms much sooner than they could possibly have expected. A short distance outside Vicenza the axle of the carriage in which the Wynnes were traveling cracked and the vehicle crashed to the ground, damaging the luggage carriage as well. All the passengers came out of the wreckage unscathed, if a little shaky. Back at the inn, a dejected Zandiri informed the Wynnes that fixing the carriages could take as much as four days.

Giustiniana seized her chance: she summoned a messenger and dashed off a note to Andrea, who was still in Padua on business, telling him to join her in Vicenza immediately. “My mother thanks the Virgin for having saved us,” she quipped. “I thank her because I am not moving from here.” He could justify his sudden appearance in Vicenza, she added, by telling Mrs. Anna that having heard of the accident he wished to make sure Giustiniana and the rest of the family were all right. “If I get to see you again, I will certainly believe in miracles. Let me say no more. I want the lackey to fly to you immediately.”

Andrea arrived at the inn the next day, wearing an appropriately worried expression, and inquired about the Wynnes. Mrs. Anna was resting, and she exploded when she heard that Andrea was downstairs, cursing him and even accusing him of having somehow orchestrated the entire incident. Zandiri, who was already beside himself because of the delay, slammed the door of his room in Andrea’s face and refused to speak to him. Not to be outdone by Mrs. Anna, Zandiri then threatened to kill Andrea, who had already prudently retreated to a nearby inn. Giustiniana sent her lover a dramatic report of what had happened after he had quit the scene:

A firestorm, my dear Memmo, a terrible firestorm. My mother
is so furious she says she wants to notify the authorities. . . . She
treated me abominably and I suffered in a thousand different
ways, but when all the composure I had in me was finally
exhausted I gave in to my anger. . . . [Zandiri] said loudly that
he wanted to knife you. . . . I told him you would have him caned
very soon, and he answered he would have you caned first. Everyone in the next room heard each word, as there were no other
noises in the house. We cannot see each other here anymore. Go to
Venice, take legal action, and, if you can, try to arrange things
in such a way that [Zandiri] will be arrested tomorrow. He did
threaten to kill you.