A Venetian Affair (36 page)

So after all that had passed between them, this is how matters stood between Andrea and Giustiniana in 1763, the year the war ended with the treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg and peace finally returned to Europe.

In 1764 the Austrian Court recalled its ambassador to Venice and sent him into retirement. Count Rosenberg had made no headway in his painful dealings with his government over his new spouse. He and Giustiniana left Palazzo Loredan and moved to Klagenfurt in the Austrian province of Carinthia, where the Orsini-Rosenbergs had their family seat. Despite his declining health, the count continued to press Prime Minister Kaunitz to grant protection to his wife. Once they were back in Austria, the possibility that they would not be received at Court in Vienna loomed as the worst possible nightmare. Giustiniana decided to take matters into her own hands. She enlisted the help of Lord Stormont, the British ambassador to Vienna, who asked the secretary of state, Lord Sandwich, to sign a declaration reaffirming that the Wynnes were indeed from a “very noble and very ancient Family.”
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The statement was signed and sealed within a matter of days. Surely the irony was not lost on Giustiniana that the British, so maddeningly rigid when she had wanted to be presented to Court in London, were now so ready to help. Nonetheless, the Austrian government remained unimpressed. That summer Giustiniana wrote directly to Kaunitz:

Sir, it is with the greatest pain that I have learned of the
deadly grief my husband has had to suffer on my account. I
thought that such an authentic and honorable statement by the
King of England
²³
about my family as the one you received would
have sufficed as proof of its antiquity. . . . I have no fear that once
Her Majesty the Empress is informed of the truth she will not
want to take away from me what I have been given by God, who
wished me born a lady in a great nation and in a very old family.
Your Highness, you know the ways of the world so well—could
you not explain to Her Majesty the righteousness of my cause and
the fatal consequences that might otherwise occur? Sir, your sense
of justice is too well known for me to think that you might refuse
your powerful help to a Lady who implores it.
¹¹

The letter was sent at the end of July 1764 and was signed “Your humble and very obedient servant Countess de Rosenberg née Wynne.” Kaunitz, well aware that her husband was not well, was clearly buying time. His tactic was soon rewarded. Count Rosenberg died the following winter, and the vexing issue of their presentation to the Court disappeared.

Her husband now dead, Giustiniana was free to leave Austria. But where should she go? There was no compelling reason for her to rush back to Venice. She had no house to return to. She was not particularly eager to live with her mother and her sisters again, and her brothers were studying in England. So she remained in Klagenfurt, staying on for another five years. Little is known about her Austrian period. It seems she overcame the initial hostility of the local nobility and managed to establish cordial relations with the Rosenberg family. Her character would have led her to make the best of her stay and to gather as many interesting people around her as she could. Still, she must have remained an outsider in the eyes of the provincial Klagenfurt society: it is hard to imagine Giustiniana turning into a German-speaking Austrian countess. In the end, one suspects she stayed in Austria in no small part because she wanted to set her financial affairs in order and ensure for herself an income from her former husband’s estate that would give her the independence and the security she needed before she went back to Italy.

She returned to Venice around 1770. She was still only in her early thirties, and after six quiet years in Austria she was eager to lead a more engaging existence. However, she found that life in Venice had deteriorated greatly. Society had become stale. Cultural life was dead. Corruption was rife. Prostitution and gambling were out of control. These were all symptoms of a much deeper crisis. The Venetian ruling class seemed incapable of providing a sense of direction, of lifting its eyes beyond the lagoon that surrounded it. To Giustiniana, who had spent so much time abroad, the Republic must have appeared very old and tired—a wrinkled
grande dame
gazing out over the backwaters of Europe.

She took a house near Piazza San Marco and tried to build herself a new life as the widowed Countess Rosenberg. She called on old friends, and now that she was no longer the wife of the Austrian ambassador she was free to see Andrea again. She gathered a small
salon
around her and did what she could to interest herself in the life of the city. But her heart was not in it; the city no longer felt like home. Again one hears the echo of that earlier cry: “Venice is not for me!” She escaped when she could, often traveling to Paris and London. Each trip meant a tiring journey across Europe, but it gave her the oxygen she lacked in the stagnant atmosphere of the lagoon.

This was more than mere estrangement. Giustiniana felt increasingly vulnerable in Venice’s vice-ridden atmosphere. She started to gamble and, like many of her friends, soon lost control over her habit. By 1774 gaming was ravaging so many lives that the government decided to close down the Ridotto, where she and Andrea had spent so many memorable nights stealing kisses and watching others play cards. Illegal gambling houses sprang up overnight in private homes and the streets around Piazza San Marco. Giustiniana dragged herself from one seedy hovel to another in the worst company, spending her limited money and amassing enormous debts. In a single night of madness she lost more than three thousand florins—one and a half times her yearly income. Her life was rapidly falling apart.

To extricate herself from this downward spiral, she decided to spend more time in Padua, where life was not as decadent and had a gentler rhythm. Although it was a provincial town, it was strangely more cosmopolitan than Venice. Perhaps it had to do with the old university, which was going through one of its better moments, or maybe it was due to the proximity of the countryside and the pleasant life that revolved around some of the elegant villas nearby. The environment was certainly more stimulating for Giustiniana. She rented an apartment in a
palazzo
by the Duomo. With the help of loyal friends and her own determination, she gradually pulled herself together—and out of debt.

She retained the house in Venice and followed closely what went on in the city, even though it was increasingly with the eye of an observer one step removed from the action. Her connections abroad and her knowledge of languages made her the ideal chaperon for foreign travelers, especially the English. The writer William Beckford, who became a close friend, describes how happy he was to have been recommended to “the fascinating” Giustiniana.
¹²

When Archduke Paul and Archduchess Maria of Russia made a “private” visit to Venice in 1782 to honor the new commercial ties between the two states, she wrote a vivid account of what was possibly the last big extravaganza staged by the Republic. She wrote it in French, in the form of a long letter to her brother Richard, and it was published as a short book first in London and then in Venice. It was very well received in literary circles, and it remains immensely enjoyable to read today. Her old friend Casanova, who was back in Venice—now, ironically, working as a government informer and living in reduced circumstances—wrote her a fan letter praising her “easy and unpretentious style.”
¹³
She replied with a very formal thank-you note. Neither made the slightest reference to the past, nor did they renew their close friendship.

Writing was Giustiniana’s true calling. Her letters to Andrea bear testimony to her growing talent, of course, but now she devoted herself to the craft with more discipline and method. Her second book, also in French and published in London in 1785, was a collection of essays and reminiscences on a variety of topics, from education to the devastating effects of gambling. In one delightful chapter on the art of smiling there is a revealing passage that has its share of sorrow for the passing of time—she was then approaching fifty—but ends on a note of good-natured resignation:

Laugh heartily, charming and innocent youth! The age of
smiling will soon be upon you. That will be followed in turn by
the years of the expertly contrived smile: an air of peace and
serenity will often hide the truly agitated state of your soul. And
in your old age, when the book of passions is over, it will be too
late even to smile. Your face will have lost all of that soft elasticity that allowed your expressions to change with so much ease.
The Scissor of Time will have deepened those furrows drawn by
the passions of your life: they will have become wrinkles that will
never be erased. So what purpose could an awkward smile possibly have? It would only suggest ridiculous claims. An air of
thoughtfulness and kindness will be all you really need. That is
the natural order of things in the revolution that takes place on the
face of a woman.
¹⁴

Giustiniana established a pleasant, productive routine for herself. She wintered in Padua, making frequent forays into Venice. In the summer she moved to Alticchiero, a delightful villa on the southern bank of the Brenta, just a couple of miles from Padua, that belonged to her old friend Senator Angelo Querini. After his release from jail in 1763, the senator, disillusioned with Venetian politics, had retired to this “rustic house with no view.”
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Over the years, he had transformed it into an elegant country retreat devoted to classicism and the art of the “philosophical garden.”

Giustiniana’s friendship with Querini went back to the 1750s, but in those days her heart had belonged entirely to Andrea. She had kept in touch with Querini over the years—they shared many of the same friends, Andrea certainly being the first among them—but their paths had seldom crossed again until she left Venice for Padua. When finally they had the opportunity to spend time in each other’s company it was perhaps too late for a full-blown romance between them. Yet their friendship acquired a romantic tinge it never lost. At Alticchiero, Giustiniana was always more than a guest: she was the lady of the house.

In homage to her beloved senator she composed a lovely guidebook to the villa and the garden—an enlightened and highly entertaining tour of the Querini estate. It was published in Padua in 1787 with excellent prints of the sculptures that adorned the property.

There was another man in Giustiniana’s life at that time, very different from the senator. Count Bartolomeo Benincasa was an impoverished adventurer running away from a failed marriage in his native Modena when he arrived in the Venetian Republic sometime around 1780 and found his way into Giustiniana’s circle of friends. He was a restless soul with literary ambitions, which she admired, and he was also ten years younger than she. In little time he joined her household and became her secretary and administrator, and perhaps her lover as well.

Benincasa was the opposite of Querini: verbose, affected, and shady, he made pocket money passing information to the inquisitors about the senator and his guests at Alticchiero. Yet despite his duplicity, he remained devoted to Giustiniana until the end. In 1788, with his help, she published her only novel,
Les Morlacques,
a romantic tale of love and death set in the rugged mountains of Dalmatia. The book is imbued with social commentary inspired by Rousseau on the evils of the city and the essential goodness of man in nature, but the pathos she brought to the story—not to mention the vampires and fairies that populate its pages—are the product of an imagination that in many ways already belonged to the nineteenth century.

Les Morlacques
was her greatest literary success. By 1790, at the age of fifty-three, Giustiniana was at the top of her game: beloved hostess, respected intellectual, accomplished writer. She had not remarried but seemed content with the affection of Querini and the devotion of Benincasa and her many friends. Describing her small salon in Padua, where men of sciences, writers, and artists mingled with foreign travelers, Casanova, who had moved on to Dux, in Bohemia, and was at last scribbling away at his memoirs, wrote that Giustiniana, though sadly not rich, nevertheless “shines for her wisdom and all the social virtues she possesses.”
¹⁶

She would not enjoy her triumph for long. The illness that took her to her grave the following year—most likely cancer of the uterus—was already spreading inside her. She battled with it for nine months and suffered excruciating pain. An anguished Benincasa dutifully related the progress of the illness in letters to family and friends. Giustiniana’s twelve-year-old niece, Betsey, who was summering in the countryside north of Padua with her family, the Richard Wynnes, wrote in her diary: “The poor Countess is to die. There is no remedy for her. Papa says they are all in a very great distress about it.”
¹⁷

As death neared Andrea too arrived in Padua—an old friend drawn to his first love. He was “distraught” by the sight of her ravaged body and the pain she was suffering, and he grieved quietly at her bedside. During the night “she started hemorrhaging again”; a priest was called in and “she was given extreme unction.”
¹⁸
In the diaphanous early morning light Andrea bid her his final farewell.

Giustiniana died on August 22, 1791, in the house she had rented for the summer: a small, elegant
palazzo
with a pretty garden. Benincasa wrote a long, tearful report on her death for the inquisitors. Querini nursed “the bitter wound”
¹⁹
in his heart and placed a marble bust of Giustiniana in the garden at Alticchiero. She was buried in the Church of San Benedetto in Padua. Her brother Richard, who was with her at the time of her death, had a small memorial tablet placed in the church, high above the entrance portal.