A Venetian Affair (32 page)

As Giustiniana battled her fever, the worst possible news arrived from Venice—it was extraordinary how untimely the mail could be. Evidently, the possibility of her return was not going to deter Andrea from carrying out his plan. He had already made his choice: he was going to pay court to M., the very one Giustiniana had been partial to despite her misgivings. Now she was sorry she had played along. Andrea did not make things any easier by pressing the point that he was merely following her suggestion. “I am, as you say, the principal cause of your current commitment, and I cannot complain,” Giustiniana accepted grudgingly. “But I would much rather think of you making love to all the ladies, as things were before. . . . I would much prefer you were unattached, even if it meant you would not be attached to me either. . . . Oh, how I wish that letter in which I chose your lover had gone astray.”

In mid-August the Venetian Embassy informed the Wynnes that they had been granted permission to return to Venice. The permit was valid for only eighteen months, but Mrs. Anna hoped it might be extended once they had settled there. The plan was to start the trip in September in order to avoid the worst of the summer heat. They would travel by the same route they had used on their outward journey to England: Calais, Brussels, Paris, Lyon, then eastward into Savoy, hoping to cross the Alps before the cold and arrive in northern Italy sometime in October. They would stop for eight to ten days in Padua while Mrs. Anna went on to Venice alone to find a suitable house for the family. In fact, Giustiniana added, marveling at how Andrea continued to be very much in Mrs. Anna’s good graces, her mother wished to know whether he could possibly secure them a temporary lodging in Padua through his family connections there.

After months of lethargy, the Wynne household came alive again. Mrs. Anna took command of operations, issuing orders to children and servants. A boat passage to France was secured. Clothes and linens were packed. Relatives and friends were notified of the imminent departure. Last-minute arrangements were worked out with Holderness, who did not appear especially sad to see them leave. While the rest of the city dozed off in the August heat, the house on Dean Street buzzed with activity.

The boys too were going back to Venice. Richard and William had spent but a few weeks at Cambridge in the spring, and Holderness would have liked them to return in the autumn, but Mrs. Anna managed to prevail. A tutor would travel with them to Italy to ensure their continued education, receiving a stipend of two hundred pounds a year plus room and board, all taken care of by the Wynne estate. “I can’t begin to tell you,” Giustiniana commented admiringly, “how Mother pulled it off.”

While the rest of the house was busy with preparations, Giustiniana remained under observation lest her poor health jeopardize the travel plans. “They’ve reached the point that they very nearly prescribe the exact number of words I may set down on paper,” she griped. After the drenching sweats, the worst seemed to be over. On August 19 she got out of bed for the first time in nearly two months. She felt very weak and was short of breath: “There is nothing worse than not being able to breathe: you can feel the most minute gradations of dying.” Still, she was confident she would recover in time for the journey. “Exercise and a breath of fresh air will bring relief,” she predicted. The prospect of returning to Italy was already improving her spirits.

Andrea was taken aback by the swiftness with which plans in London were changing. During the two years he and Giustiniana had been apart, their relationship had lived on through their letters. Knyphausen had been jealous because he had rightly sensed that things were not entirely over between them. Even as they had carried on their separate lives, they had continued to write to each other more as lovers than as friends. Yet, like all long-distance relationships, a large part of it had become imaginary—a dream world disconnected from reality. Giustiniana’s sudden return seemed disruptive to Andrea. It was not clear to him what she expected of him, and he was worried about how Giustiniana’s presence in Venice would affect his new relationship with M. Did she not realize they would be the talk of the town again? How should they behave in public?

Andrea’s fretting startled Giustiniana. She tried to reassure him. He need not worry so much about the two of them being in Venice together again: it was not her intention to settle there. The dazzling city of her youth—the Venice she had known with him— was part of her past. The memories were still there, of course; they were the best she had. But she wanted to put all that behind her. The gossip, the intrigue, the small-town pettiness: it was all too tiresome, too suffocating, too upsetting. As far as she was concerned, the fact that Mrs. Anna was going to rent a house there was merely incidental. “I am returning to Venice, but Venice is not for me. . . . If I thought I would have to live in Venice, I would not come. . . . Let it suffice for now, and don’t speak of this to any other living soul.”

What did she have in mind? “I have a project, and I will tell you everything,” she said. “But I cannot speak now. . . . Allow me to remain silent for a while more. . . . I will tell you in person.” She never spelled out what her mysterious project was. From what she had told Andrea in the previous months about her desire for independence and a large enough income to get by on, it is plausible that she wanted to set up house on her own, cultivate the people she liked, and continue to travel at leisure. Where would she eventually live? Not in Venice, if she could avoid it. There were many small cities on the mainland territories of the Venetian Republic where it was possible to lead a pleasant life in the company of interesting, lively friends: Padua, of course, and Vicenza, Treviso and many others.

Part of the difficulty in imagining such a future was due to the fact that she was exploring a little-tested terrain. Other women in her social class were pioneering a similar lifestyle in the Venetian Republic, but they were either wealthy or divorced or both. It would be substantially harder for Giustiniana to manage on her small income. One also gets the feeling that she deliberately kept her project vague because she wanted Andrea to fit into it in some way. As a lover? As a friend? As her
cher frère
? Those questions she left unanswered.

Giustiniana was equally vague about her relationship with Knyphausen, which she had successfully kept hidden from Mrs. Anna. Andrea asked how his “rival” was taking the news of her sudden departure from London—an unsubtle way of shifting some of the burden of guilt onto Giustiniana by reminding her that she too had her own relationship to tend. She gave him little satisfaction on that count. “He loves me,” she wrote hurriedly, “of that I am certain. You will know everything upon my arrival.” Not a word about her own feelings.

The date of departure was fixed for the second week in September. Soon the rush was on: “I don’t have a free moment because we have so many visits and my duties take up all my time during these last days here.” Her letters became increasingly hasty and confused. Last-minute instructions were mixed with bursts of anxiety. She asked Andrea to call on Consul Smith to tell him they were arriving—she had never forgotten that “he was always a friend to me”—and also on her dear aunt Fiorina, whom she promised to buy a dress when they stopped in Paris; and on “all those whom you believe to be my friends.” The passage across the Channel was constantly on her mind: “You cannot imagine how scared I am of it and how ill it makes me feel.” Could he also remember to make arrangements for the house in Padua? “One must try to please [my mother], for after all she is still the same woman she once was. But now I believe she cannot get in the way of a pure and decent friendship [between us], nor does she plan to. Not after all the tokens of friendship you have given me.”

Giustiniana knew that the difficulties in her relationship with Andrea would not come from her mother anymore but from what she called, with evident annoyance, his own new “lifestyle.” “I regret more and more the advice I gave you to attach yourself to Signora M.,” she confessed, “because I respect her too much and because she is the only one who is capable of kidnapping a friend away from me. . . . But we’ll talk about all that.” Andrea had never been very clear about his feelings for M. Did he love her? Giustiniana made a show of backing off, assuring Andrea she felt she had no claim on him anymore: “I want only friendship and sound advice from you, and I believe I deserve these.” But her hope ran much deeper than that, and Andrea’s lukewarm response to the news of her return made her departure all the more unsettling: “Will you be glad to see me after all? Will you still look fondly upon the woman you have been treating as a sister and a friend?” In her last letter to Andrea from London, dated September 5, she wrote, “You will see how much weight I have put on. But even if I had grown more beautiful, would it have made a difference? . . . I long to know whether you’ll be happy to see me arrive. I am your friend, you know, and I would be so disappointed if, given such faint expectations on my part, I were to find you cold or little satisfied. . . . In the meantime, you may reassure your lady friends that I am not in a position to be feared. Farewell.”

The Wynne caravan set off from Dean Street in mid-September. Mrs. Anna squeezed into the coach with her five children. The tutor hired by Lord Holderness would join them later on in Italy. But they had a new traveling companion, Miss Tabitha Mendez, an unmarried lady they had met shortly after arriving in London who had become a friend of the family. She intended to spend a year traveling in Italy and was happy to hitch a ride with the Wynnes. “She is thirty-two years old, ugly, comes from a Christian family, has assets worth twenty thousand lire,” Giustiniana noted rather unkindly. She could be a little clinging “but is well read and rather witty,” and it would be nice if Andrea could “pay her some attention” as she planned to stay in Venice for a month.

The passage to France was delayed for several days due to a mix-up in the booking arrangements. A vessel was eventually found, and this time the crossing went smoothly despite Giustiniana’s fear of the sea. They arrived in Calais on September 22.
“Le
plus dangereux est achevé,”
she wrote to Andrea, switching to French as soon as she was on French soil. “The worst is over.” She also shifted to the formal mode of address,
vous,
as if a strange new reserve impelled her to put some distance between them at the start of the journey that would reunite them.

The original plan had entailed traveling to Brussels first, but the Wynnes changed their itinerary to make up for lost time and headed straight for Paris instead. Giustiniana feared the change might cause her to lose some precious letters from Andrea: “I have written to Brussels to request they be forwarded to me in Paris—in case you have sent me a few, as I asked you to.”

A year had gone by since the Wynnes had left Paris under a cloud. On the surface not much had changed. France was still losing the war. The king was increasingly unpopular. Mme de Pompadour was losing her power and her health. There was growing disarray in Versailles, but the sprawling city was as restless and vibrant as ever. After four years of war, it was still the world capital of entertainment and fashion.

To Giustiniana, however, Paris seemed very different. She felt disconnected—an intruder in familiar surroundings. Ambassador Erizzo had returned to Venice. Casanova was in Genoa after having spent most of the year in Germany. Farsetti was still in town, but Giustiniana had no desire to see him. She knew, of course, that La Pouplinière had married. Now she learned that the new young wife, Thérèse de Mondran, had ousted the “old sultana,” Mme de Saint Aubin, as well as most of her husband’s extended family, from the house. The Abbé de La Coste had been paid off and sent packing too. In fact, of all the actors embroiled in the sordid Wynne affair, he was probably the one who had suffered the worst ending. In January of that year he had been jailed at the Bastille for forging lottery tickets and had been sentenced to “imprisonment in perpetuity.” One of La Pouplinière’s nephews saw La Coste “chained in public squares, an iron collar around his neck, and a sign over his stomach exposing him as a counterfeiter, his hat on the ground in front of him so that passersby might throw in a coin.”
¹

The Wynnes were in Paris for a week. It gave them just enough time to organize the long trip to Italy and make a few purchases. Giustiniana was not in good shape. She had not fully recovered from her summer illnesses. Also, she was disturbed by the ghosts of her recent past, which still lingered in the city. She tried to distract herself by taking short walks and doing some shopping. She bought the dress for Fiorina and also looked, in vain, for a special pair of long muffs Andrea had asked her to buy him, which were still fashionable in Venice but had already gone out of style in Paris. “You can blame [the French],” she wrote irritably. “They have decreed that such muffs are no longer
à la mode
and have made them impossible to find.”

Shortly before leaving Paris, Giustiniana received a letter that caused a pang of anxiety to rip through her. Andrea declared he could not wait to see her. He offered to come out to meet her, possibly somewhere in northern Italy. This was so unexpected. And what did it really mean? She was tempted to send him a detailed itinerary of their trip. “I will trace the road we will follow and the time it will take before I will see you again,” she wrote, suddenly overcome with excitement. By the time the Wynnes left Paris, though, she had given up on the idea. She was afraid of building up her expectations. She never sent him the details.

Nevertheless, the fantasy of Andrea appearing along the road smiling sweetly and beckoning her into his arms stayed with Giustiniana throughout the several-day trip to Lyon. Her heart was full of him when she arrived in the city. She went looking for his muffs during their brief stopover, and this time she found them. She packed them in her trunk with the idea of buying a nice gift box when she got to Italy. As she put them away, she felt the strangeness of holding in her hands something that would soon belong to him. “I hope you will be happy with them,” she wrote.