A Venetian Affair (26 page)

Mon cher frère,

My dear Memmo, forgive me. I know you will forgive me in
the end. But still I begin by asking you to forgive me; to make it
easier for you to read my letter with a favorable attitude, I shall
first accept some blame. But the only crime I have committed is
not having written to you for so long; and if I prove to you, my
dear friend, that it was impossible for me to do so before, I think
you will want to forgive me. I love you, I am your friend; my
Memmo will always mean the same to me; and your letter, which
Farsetti showed me yesterday, which made me feel that despite
my enemies’ craftiness, despite all that was said about me, you
always held me innocent, even though my silence with you suggested I might be guilty, would have convinced me more than ever
of the excellence of your character—if I had needed any more
convincing. You are well worth my breaking the prohibition to
write to you. Let me rise to this renewed expression of respect and
friendship I receive from my Memmo, even if it means that everything might go to hell. I begged Farsetti with so much fervor that
he promised he would send you my letter; and so I write to you
stealthily, even as I am being watched, and I want to tell all my
story.

Here at last was the letter Andrea had been waiting for. Of course Giustiniana’s narrative was skillfully edited. She told him that the warnings and threats she had received from anonymous writers had compelled her to go into hiding. “All the necessary preparations have been made for your downfall,” she quoted from memory. “Go into hiding as soon as you can. This is a serious affair.” It had reached the point where she was seeing “poison everywhere.” La Pouplinière himself had told her their enemies were “capable of anything.” She had had no option but to escape somewhere. “The day before I left,” she added, recasting events in such a way as to make her tale more credible, “the old man’s dressmakers came by to take my measurements, and it was a good thing they came because it eased the suspicions instilled in him after my flight.” She described her trip to Conflans and her meeting with the “excellent and very amiable” Mother Eustachia—who, she added, was related to some of the best houses of France. At first the abbess had not wanted to take her in, Giustiniana told Andrea, contradicting Casanova’s version of the facts, but the sight of such “a nicely dressed young woman with jewels” had moved her. Mother Eustachia had questioned her intensely during the first few days, and eventually she had relented. “She could see I was still frightened, and since she cared for me, she stopped questioning me so as not to agitate me further.” Her identity would have remained a secret, Giustiniana claimed, if on May 23 she had not heard Father Jollivet speak in such a way as to force her to reveal who she was:

That day the confessor came to the abbess’s parlor and unwittingly started to tell her what I recognized was my own story—by
chance I was there keeping the abbess company—as if telling the
latest gossip from Paris. He talked about the girl’s flight just
before her wedding to a rich financier, he mentioned all the equivocal things being said about her, including the fact that she had
run away to give birth and that Monsieur de La Pouplinière was
convinced about it. Such were my surprise and my confusion that
without even realizing what I was saying I blurted out, “It is not
true. Miss Wynne is a lady who belongs to one of the oldest and
noblest families. Miss Wynne is an honorable young woman. I
am that young woman . . .” You can well imagine their surprise.
Both tried to explain to me how imprudent I had been in not having identified myself before, and they persuaded me to write to
my mother. Which I did.

La Pouplinière now came regularly to the convent, the letter went on. He was working hard to close down the Casanova trial. “God only knows what happened . . . because I know nothing about what Casanova is up to,” she assured him. In any case things looked promising on that front. “I believe I shall be cleared very shortly.” Of course there was again all this talk about the marriage, she wrote in conclusion. “The old man is waiting for everything to be over to marry me; but I am still unsure (and please leave me free to decide for myself ). I am not counting on it as much as others are, even though it does appear to be so close.”

In fact, it was not nearly as close as she thought.

Giustiniana left the convent sometime between the end of June and the beginning of July. Her return to Paris came on the heels of several weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations involving La Pouplinière, members of his family, and the office of Choiseul at Versailles. The Wynne Affair, as it was known, had caused such a commotion in Parisian society that the government was no longer well disposed toward Giustiniana, and her position was not improved by the fact that the British were pounding the French at Le Havre. Louis XV had signed her naturalization papers only three months before. But they had been intended to open the way for her marriage to La Pouplinière before the scandal. In the wake of her disappearance and the drama that had ensued, not to mention the fact that she still might be summoned as a codefendant in the trial of Casanova, her position was quite different. La Pouplinière’s relatives took advantage of this new mood of impatience at Court. They used their strong connections with the Choiseul camp to obtain nothing less than Giustiniana’s banishment from the country. There was no need for a dramatic announcement; the Wynnes were simply informed that their papers, which were expiring anyway, would not be renewed. Technically, of course, Giustiniana was now a naturalized citizen. But there was little point in challenging the powerful Choiseul. The time had clearly come to continue their journey to England.

Choiseul’s office convinced a reluctant La Pouplinière to go along with the decision by suggesting that Giustiniana might go abroad for a while, possibly no further than Brussels, and return to Paris once the situation had cooled down. To many it was clear that the old man had been fooled. “Monsieur de La Pouplinière flatters himself that the noise will die down as soon as she is out of the kingdom and that he will then manage to settle things more easily,” one observer wrote to Andrea. “I wouldn’t want him to be taken by surprise and led to rid himself, unwittingly, of Miss Wynne.”
²⁵

Giustiniana was confined to the Hôtel de Hollande from the day she left the convent until her departure to Brussels, initially set for July 14. “It is my mother’s idea, and you know one has to do things her way,” she told Andrea. Mrs. Anna hardly spoke to her daughter. She had been on the brink of an exceptional marriage only four months earlier; now the family had to suffer the humiliation of being kicked out of the country on Giustiniana’s account. The atmosphere in their apartment was tense. And the summer heat made packing their trunks all the more uncomfortable.

Mon cher frère,

We leave for Brussels having been dismissed by the minister,
probably thanks to the work of the old man’s relatives, who will
have had no trouble in convincing the authorities that it was wrong
for such a fortune to end up in the hands of an Englishwoman—
especially in these times. As an excuse, we were told that our
papers had expired and winter had been over for a long time. . . . I
cannot tell you how disgusted I am with this country and with
[La Pouplinière’s] household. . . . Oh, why are you not here to
advise me? Dear Memmo, how many woes I have suffered, how
many scares, how many slanders! My story is so unlike me. Never
mind . . . you will know all. . . . You have always been my best
friend and always will be. I still love you, Memmo. You know
that. I always wonder whether I shall ever find my Memmo
again. Shush, I know I shall one day. . . . I’ll write to you every
week. . . . While I appreciate your intention in reading my early
letters to many of your friends so they might see that what was
being said about me was very unlikely, I must confess that I feel
bad about the fact that what I wrote to you in private for only you
to read should be judged by others. Farewell, my Memmo; love
me and write me long letters.

The pressure on Giustiniana to testify at Casanova’s trial evaporated once it became clear she would be leaving town. La Pouplinière insisted that it would be “indecent” to summon her before the judge, offensive to her
and
to him, since after all he still intended to marry her. His embittered relatives saw that there was no point in dragging out the fight. Choiseul himself probably let it be known that he would be happy to see the Wynne Affair come to a swift conclusion. In the end, Giustiniana was spared a humiliating trip to court and her name was officially cleared. “The sentence that establishes my innocence is all I really [wanted],” she wrote to Andrea, greatly relieved.

There was one last, pathetic scene at the Hôtel de Hollande. A few days before her departure for Brussels, Giustiniana sent a note over to La Pouplinière thanking him for all he had done to get her out of her legal troubles. She also told him with a clarity she had never used before that it was foolish to continue talking about marriage even as she was packing her trunks. But since he persisted in holding on to that illusion, she felt compelled to refuse his hand. It was a strong letter and unambiguous for once. “Imagine a well-thought-out, well-crafted piece of work,” she proudly told Andrea.

The effect of her letter was not what she had expected: “The old man rushed over to see me, and his tears were the only answer I got from him.” Not at all resigned, La Pouplinière sent the Abbé de La Coste and Mme de Saint Aubin to talk things over with Giustiniana and her mother. But it was much too late in the game. Even Mrs. Anna, who had been such a keen supporter of her daughter’s marriage to the
fermier général,
could see through that shady, calculating couple. She gave them “a very rough dressing down” and accused them of giving the old man the runaround for their personal benefit. “She so treated them as scoundrels that they rushed off, saying ‘Madame hears no reason. . . . It is impossible to come to terms with her.’ ”

The Wynnes left Paris for Brussels around mid-July. They had certainly made their mark since arriving from Lyon nine months earlier, and Giustiniana, of course, had been the talk of the town during much of their stay. Now they were the enemy on the run— a disgraced English family fleeing through the back door in the stifling midsummer heat. Giustiniana was glad to escape, to leave it all behind her—the deception, the intrigue, the lying, the sheer awfulness of what she had lived through. As far as she was concerned, it was already part of the past. “I look upon this story with such indifference I feel it never happened,” she wrote to Andrea, who was apparently still somewhat “distressed” over the lost opportunity of a great marriage. She, on the other hand, was already looking ahead to their short stay in Brussels and their new life in London. After all she’d been through, she added with a bit of sarcasm, it shouldn’t be too hard for her “to ensnare an English duke.”

In her letters there was, of course, no mention of the baby she was leaving behind. Did she ever visit him before departing? Did she stay in touch with the people he had been entrusted to? One searches in vain for an answer in her correspondence: there is not even a hint as to what she was going through because of this separation. However intense her maternal feelings toward the child might have been, she forced herself to keep them secret. With Andrea so far away, she had no outlet for her pain. Casanova, to whom she had become so close in a short period of time, had already drifted out of her life by the time she left Paris. In his memoirs there is no mention of a final farewell between the two. He had simply moved on to his next adventure.

Meanwhile, the original traveling party had lost two of its members. Zandiri had returned to Venice, and Toinon, who had seemed destined for spinsterhood, announced to everyone’s surprise that she was staying in Paris because she was about to become engaged. So there was going to be a marriage after all. “Plain as she is, she has nonetheless managed to find a lover who will marry her as long as she has a virginity to lose,” a well-informed friend of the family wrote to Andrea. “She claims to be intact from that point of view, and so this happy wedding will take place shortly.”
²⁶

The Wynnes ended up staying in Brussels more than a month. They took rooms at the elegant Hôtel de l’Impératrice and waited for instructions from Lord Holderness. Giustiniana was determined to make the most of their stay. “I have decided to enjoy myself . . . and to humor my temperament,” she wrote, flaunting her brittle new gaiety. “I spend my time as best I can; I laugh at everything and often at myself.” Brussels was the ideal place to have some fun. It had the insouciance of a provincial capital governed by a wise and popular ruler, Prince Charles of Lorraine. Giustiniana, Bettina, and Tonnina were soon regulars at the theater and the opera. They dressed up, they danced, they flirted. “We are the beauties of the land,” she reported with a cheerfulness Andrea had not heard for months.

The dreary Farsetti quickly arrived to spoil the fun. Still obsessed with Giustiniana, he followed the Wynnes to Brussels convinced that the moment was finally his. He had stood by her during difficult times, he had lent her money, he had posted her love letters, he had tried to protect her from other suitors—as well as from her own imprudence. The time had come to claim Giustiniana for himself. But Giustiniana was tired of Farsetti’s nosy, self-righteous manner. Her resentment toward him, long stifled out of self-interest, was ready to burst.