A Venetian Affair (35 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have seen the light if my father, Alvise di Robilant, had not discovered the letters of Andrea Memmo to Giustiniana Wynne. By the time of his death in 1997, he had spent many hours decoding and transcribing the letters and had done considerable research on the main characters of this story. The material he collected, his notes, and, above all, the many conversations we had about his discovery have inspired me throughout the writing of
A Venetian A fair
. It is his book, too, in more ways than I can say.

I first mentioned the story of Andrea and Giustiniana to Michael Carlisle, an old friend from Columbia University, in a long and rather rambling e-mail I sent to him in the winter of 2000. His enthusiastic response was crucial in getting me started on this project. Within a matter of days he became my agent, sold the book proposal, and set me to work. His encouragement and support have been unstinting.

My publisher, Sonny Mehta, took a gamble on a first-time author. I am deeply grateful to him for taking it. From day one it has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with all the people involved in the making of this book at Knopf. Deborah Garrison has been a devoted editor, stepping in nimbly to egg me on or to help me out. Her assistant, Ilana Kurshan, has been an effective and cheerful coordinator of our busy transatlantic correspondence.

I spent a year in Venice with my family to write
A Venetian A fair
. Claudio Saracco let us stay in his lovely little house at Campiello agli Incurabili and turned out to be a delightful and undemanding landlord. Most of the book was written at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, off Campo Santa Maria in Formosa. I could not have dreamed of finding a more pleasant atmosphere in which to work. My sincerest thanks go to Giorgio Busetto, the indefatigable director of the foundation, and to his wonderful staff.

The first person to ever write extensively about Andrea and Giustiniana was the Venetian historian Bruno Brunelli. His book,
Casanova Loved Her,
published in 1924, was based in large part on Giustiniana’s letters to Andrea. A lot of rich material has surfaced since then, apart from the letters discovered by my father, so it was possible for me to write a more complete and possibly more accurate account of their love story. Yet I always felt I was working in Brunelli’s shadow, and
A Venetian
A fair,
perhaps inevitably, owes much to the lingering appeal of his book.

Rebecca Williamson, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has written perceptively about Giustiniana, gave me helpful guidance and advice. The architectural historian Susanna Pasquali, of the University of Ferrara, shared with me her knowledge about Andrea’s later correspondence. I also benefited from the suggestions of a happy band of
casanovisti:
Helmut Watzlawick, Giuseppe Bignami, and Furio Luccichenti. My greatest thanks go to Nancy Isenberg, of the University of Rome. Nancy has developed quite a passion for Andrea and Giustiniana’s story over the years. She has shared her considerable knowledge with me generously and enthusiastically, and has made important contributions to the final shape of my work.

A Venetian A fair
has been at the center of my family’s life for three years. My young sons Tommaso and Sebastiano have been devoted supporters of the book even as they knew it was taking much of my time away from them. To my wife, Alessandra, I owe the most: for joining me in a project that has meant so much to me, and sharing in the many joys and the occasional miseries that have accompanied the writing of this book.

Epilogue

Giustiniana’s return to Venice after more than two years abroad was not a festive homecoming. Amid all the fuss over the Wynnes’ staggered arrival in the city, with Mrs. Anna’s fastidious search for an apartment and the bureaucratic difficulties over the entry permit, not to mention Andrea’s panicky state and M.’s suspiciousness, one can easily imagine the chattering men at the Listone indulging in snide little jokes about the return of the
inglesine
while the ladies chuckled behind their embroidered fans.

Even the small English community, which had always been a haven for Mrs. Anna and her children, received them with a certain reserve. Joseph Smith, now well into his eighties, was in the process of resigning his consulship. He had settled into his new marriage and was obsessively taken up with the sale of his large art and book collection to the new English monarch, George III. The aging Lady Montagu was her usual mordant self; according to a shocked young English visitor by the name of Thomas Robinson, she had also become “scurrilous in the highest degree.”
¹
Ambassador Murray, who had been quite happy in the company of the Wynnes in the past, casting his interested gaze on the girls, now plainly made fun of them in his dispatches to London. Mrs. Anna and her daughters were contributing “not a little” to the city’s “amusements,” he wrote to Lord Holderness. “Their manner of going on has been so very outré that I have no thoughts at present of visiting them, as I don’t care to be an eye-witness to the ruin of a family when there is no possibility of saving them.”
²

It was not just the atmosphere in the English community that felt different. The city as a whole had changed while the Wynnes had been away. The long war combined with Venice’s isolation had dampened spirits and accentuated a general feeling of stagnation. The more enlightened Venetians had lost their earlier enthusiasm for modernizing the state. Father Lodoli, the charismatic Franciscan monk, had left Venice in semiexile and was living out his last days in a state of destitution on the mainland. Little if anything remained of the hopeful band of reformists whom he had nurtured in the years before the war. The Tribunal of the Inquisitors had strengthened its oppressive presence in everyday life, and the secretive Council of Ten—the executive branch of government— ruled with a growing disregard for the Maggior Consiglio, the assembly of patricians that for centuries had been the very heart of the Republic.

A few months after her return, Giustiniana witnessed at first hand a turning point in the drift of the Venetian Republic toward an increasingly authoritarian government in the hands of the Council of Ten. Her friend Angelo Querini, a decent, civic-minded young senator who had been (with Andrea) among Lodoli’s most ardent followers, was charged with conspiring against the Republic and thrown into jail. Querini was hardly a revolutionary: his ambition was to give back to the Maggior Consiglio some of the authority that had been usurped by the Council of Ten. His arrest came as a stern warning to the reformers of his circle, and it helps to explain the more prudent approach Andrea would adopt in his political career.

In her letters from Padua, Giustiniana had told Andrea she intended to live as quietly as possible while she stayed in Venice. But as Murray’s disobliging remarks remind us, it was not long before she was causing a certain commotion in town. Thomas Robinson, the twenty-two-year-old son of Lord Grantham who had been so surprised by Lady Montagu’s loose tongue, was quite taken with Giustiniana when he met her in the fall of 1760—to the point that he apparently wanted to marry her. From the very beginning, however, the fact that he was a Protestant and Giustiniana a Catholic was seen as an insurmountable obstacle. The young Englishman was soon out of the picture: in early spring he left Venice—the last stop on his Italian tour—and made his way back to London.

Shortly after Robinson’s departure, however, Giustiniana startled everyone by accepting the hand of Count Philip Orsini-Rosenberg, the imperial ambassador of Austria to the Venetian Republic. It was a remarkable coup; certainly that is how everyone around her perceived it. The count, a seventy-year-old widower, came from a very aristocratic Austrian family that claimed to descend from the Roman clan of the Ursini. He was ending his long diplomatic career with a luxurious posting, housed in the magnificent embassy on the Grand Canal.

His wife, Maria von Kaunitz, had died in 1755, a year after their arrival in Venice. After a brief period of mourning, the count had given himself over to a fairly dissolute life and was to be found gambling with his friends at the Ridotto when he was not chasing young actresses at the theater or visiting his favorite courtesans. Giustiniana’s reappearance on the scene changed all that. The count must have known her from the old days—he had probably met her at Consul Smith’s early on, when her love affair with Andrea had been the talk of the town. But now he saw her in a new light: She was a mature young lady of twenty-four, with experience quite beyond her age. Her lively spirit enchanted him, and those “womanish” features she had complained so much about undoubtedly did as well. He fell in love with her, as other older men had before him.

Giustiniana must have been a little stunned to receive a proposal from a man of such exalted station. Of course, she had said that marriage “was not for her,” that she prized her independence more than the security provided by a husband. But she had expressed those thoughts when she was still trying to make room in her life for Andrea, groping for an unconventional solution to an unconventional situation. Now her long affair was over, and she was doing her best to put it behind her. She needed to be practical, and she might well have concluded that her quest for independence required a detour through a few years of married life.

Ambassador Murray, so quick to dismiss the Wynnes when they had returned to Venice, deemed the news of such importance as to warrant a diplomatic notice to William Pitt himself. “The conversation of the town is taken up about a marriage which is shortly expected between Count Rosenberg and the eldest Miss Wynne,”
³
he wrote to the Great Commoner, treating the information as a matter of official significance, as indeed it was: Giustiniana, after all, was marrying an important minister of a Great Power with which Britain was still at war.

Andrea, still entangled in his complicated affair with M., must have appreciated the logic behind Giustiniana’s snap decision: after all, he had always encouraged her to marry an old man and the
cher frère
in him surely saw the practical benefits of her situation. But it is hard to imagine that the news did not set off a certain amount of inner turmoil in the old lover.

The count and Giustiniana were married on November 4, 1761. The ceremony probably took place at the embassy. There was no fanfare, not even a public notice: it was a rushed, hushed affair in the presence of a priest, a few intimate friends, and her family (one imagines Mrs. Anna smiling, happy at last). Still, everyone in town knew about it. Lady Montagu was no longer on hand to deliver a pointed remark on the event, having finally returned home to England upon her husband’s death, but her Venetian friend Chiara Michiel made sure she was kept informed: “Monsieur de Rosenberg married Giustiniana without declaring her either wife or ambassadress. . . . Such a marriage is well below his rank . . . but is worthy of his heart.”
⁴
Lady Montagu replied rather philosophically, “Your words are subtle and just and noble, and I understand all that.”
⁵

Giustiniana, now Countess Rosenberg, settled into the elegant
palazzo
the Austrian government had leased from the Loredan family. As long as her husband was alive, she was guaranteed a very comfortable life. After his death, she would not inherit his possessions, which were already destined to her stepson, but the count set up a small trust that would give her an income of 2,000 Austrian florins a year for as long as she kept his name. That would be enough for her to live decorously, though not in luxury.

Her social rank, however, remained ambiguous. She was Countess Rosenberg in the eyes of her husband, but she was not—as Chiara Michiel had been quick to underline—the “ambassadress.” Nor had the marriage put an end to all the talk about her questionable titles of nobility. The snobbery and condescension were depressing and terribly familiar to Giustiniana.

The Court in Vienna, not officially informed of the marriage, expressed deep misgivings. Prime Minister Anthon von Kaunitz, a cousin of Rosenberg’s deceased first wife, involved himself personally in the matter and begged the ambassador to tell him exactly how things stood. Here is the count’s reply—an extraordinary “confession,” at once poignant and pathetic, by an old libertine in love with a much younger woman:

Sir, the trust and very special esteem I have always had for
your Excellency make me seize with joy the opportunity I am
o fered to open my heart to you and make the disclosure you ask
of me. It is true that I have married Miss Giustiniana Wynne in
secret,
²²
and the marriage will remain such as long as I shall be
ambassador. But it is not true that she is the daughter of an
English merchant. Chevalier Wynne, who died a Catholic some
ten years ago in Venice, was a gentleman and belonged to one of
the oldest houses of Wales. He was traveling in Italy when he
married the daughter of Count Gazzini. After his death Lord
Holderness was appointed governor of the family—just fifteen days ago the two Wynne [brothers], who are still minors,
received written orders to return to England, where the eldest has
an income of 6,000 pounds sterling from his estate. I say all this
so Your Excellency may see that the family is very noble and I
hold indisputable proof.
⁶

The count added that if this were still deemed insufficient, the Austrian Court should consider the following information as final proof of Giustiniana’s aristocratic lineage: “Andrea Memmo, a Venetian nobleman belonging to one of the oldest families, was ready to marry her with the full consent of his entire family, but Mme Wynne did not grant her consent because he was a very disturbed young man. Similarly, Lord Grantham’s son wished to marry her last year, but the young lady refused him as he was a Protestant.”

The count “implored” the prime minister to grant his “protection” to Giustiniana, but Kaunitz was not impressed by the clarifications he received—he probably had less biased information to rely on than the one his old ambassador provided him. He left Count and Countess Orsini-Rosenberg hanging.

It cannot have been an easy period for Giustiniana, no matter how used she had become to this type of social ostracism. Was her disappointment lessened by the joys of marriage? It is difficult to imagine Giustiniana falling deeply in love with the count, but she might well have felt a growing affection and respect for this distinguished old man who was willing to put himself on the line for love of her. Despite the difference in age, people certainly assumed that the marriage was consummated and the relationship was physical, not only because of Rosenberg’s reputation as a sexually active septuagenarian but because his young wife quickly became pregnant. “One hears the beautiful Giustiniana will soon give a new fruit to the world,”
⁷
Lady Montagu chuckled from London, eager to stay abreast of things in Venice. If it is true she became pregnant after marrying Count Rosenberg, then she must have lost the child—presumably to Vienna’s great relief.

As the new Countess Rosenberg, Giustiniana was isolated on all sides. Not only was she not accepted by her husband’s government, she was also cut off from Venetian society, for if Vienna did not recognize her as the wife of the Austrian ambassador, the Venetian authorities certainly did. As a foreign dignitary she was not allowed to come into direct contact with local patricians. The law was a residue of a past age. Yet it had lived on, much to the distress and irritation of the ambassadorial corps, and was being enforced with even greater severity than usual since the beginning of the war. If she and Andrea communicated at all at this point, it had to be in secret, as so often in the past.

In early 1763, however, they did see each other publicly at the house of a mutual friend, and the inquisitors deemed the episode “very serious in all its circumstances.”
⁸
Andrea had just been elected to the position of savio di terraferma, with administrative duties on the mainland territory. One of his first and most delicate assignments was the resolution of a dispute with the Austrian government over the postal system. Giustiniana suggested she might be able to help, using her husband’s connections, and they discussed the issue in front of other guests that evening. She then sent him a note on the matter. He was imprudent enough to reply.

Andrea realized his mistake, or perhaps he was tipped off that a government informer was about to denounce him for having communicated with the wife of a foreign ambassador. In any event, he went directly to the Tribunal of the Inquisitors and confessed his crime. The Tribunal stated that his action deserved “the sternest and most solemn punishment” but spared him in the end on account of his “spontaneous confession.” There was a final warning, however: “In the future you will refrain from any contact whatsoever with the wife of [the] ambassador and with the family of that wife as well . . . and you are prohibited from going near her at public functions and celebrations. . . . You are hereby also informed that an attentive eye will always be watching you.”
⁹

The reprimand was so severe—and so reminiscent of his “fateful banishment” a decade earlier—that one has to wonder whether Andrea and Giustiniana were again seeing each other on the quiet and the information had reached the inquisitors. Alternatively, it is possible that the count himself tipped off the authorities preemptively, to make sure that Andrea would stay away from his young wife. Whatever the case, Andrea must have taken the rebuke seriously. His career was on track by then—he was moving ahead under the aegis of Andrea Tron, the powerful procuratore di San Marco who had been the Wynnes’ neighbor back in the summer of 1756—and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to tarnish his reputation by breaking a law of the Republic, no matter how obsolete he may have considered it.