A Venetian Affair: A true story of impossible love in the eighteenth century

*Andrea’s cousin by marriage and a close friend.

CHAPTER Two

Andrea and Giustiniana were so secretive during the first months of their clandestine relationship that only a handful of trusted friends knew what they were up to. As Andrea had predicted, Mrs. Anna eventually began to lower her guard and focus on possible new suitors for her eldest daughter. By the fall of 1754 the two lovers were seeing each other with great frequency and daring. They now had several locations at their disposal. N.’s casino was often available. Meneghetto Tiepolo had given them access to an apartment on the mezzanine of his palazzo. They also went to a woman named Rosa, who lived in a small and very simple house near the Wynnes and often let them have a room. Setting up a secret encounter was often the work of several days. It took reliable intelligence and good planning. Alvisetto shuttled furtively between the Wynnes’ house and Ca’ Memmo, delivering letters with the latest arrangements or news of an unexpected change of plan. Much was written about the dropping off and picking up of keys.

The feverish preparatory work, coupled with the constant fear of being caught, made their encounters all the more passionate. “How could they be so stupid,” Giustiniana noted with delight, “not to realize what refinement they bring to our pleasure by imposing all these prohibitions? [At the beginning of our relationship] I was always very happy to see you, of course, but the emotions I feel now, the sheer agitation, the overwhelming feeling of sweetness, were certainly not as intense.”

As their love deepened and their relationship became more sexual, jealousy too began to creep into their little world. Despite Mrs. Anna’s more relaxed attitude, Giustiniana was still not as free to move around town as Andrea was. This put her at a psychological disadvantage. Who was Andrea seeing when he wasn’t with her? She had his letters, of course, filled with detailed accounts of his daily activities. But how reliable were they? In her relative confinement in the house at Sant’Aponal she had plenty of time to work herself into a state of anxiety. A hint of unpleasant gossip was enough to send her into a rage.

One of Andrea’s best friends was his cousin Lucrezia Pisani, the young lady he had bumped into on the bridge as he was chasing Giustiniana. She was lively and attractive and popular among Andrea’s set. She often had interesting company at her house, and Andrea liked to drop by. His breezy reports on his visits there, however, made Giustiniana feel excluded. When she heard he was seeing Lucrezia more and more frequently on the days when they could not be together, she protested angrily. Andrea was taken aback by her attitude. Lucrezia was an old friend, he argued, an ally; she was one of the few who knew about their love affair. He reacted to Giustiniana’s indignation with even greater indignation:

What have I done to you? What sort of creature are you? What on earth are you thinking? And what doggedness! What cruelty! So now it would appear that I have been courting Lucrezia for the past ten days…. Well, first of all, the timing is wrong: she’s been in the countryside for the past several days. I would have gone with her. I chose not to. Meanwhile, I’ve been at home most of the time, evenings included. I’ve had lunch with her once. True, every time I have met her at the theater I have sat in her box…. But could I have sat alone or even with a single friend throughout an entire show? … I am mad to even defend myself. Yes, I like her company and I admit it. First of all because she is one of the easiest women to be around…. She is also witty, knowledgeable, clever. You can talk to her freely, and she often has good company…. Besides, she is your friend, she often asks about you with interest…. You are crazy, crazy, crazy. You will drive me mad with your endless suspicions. Still, I guess I must try to appease you in any case. So rest assured: I won’t be seen with her anymore. But where may I go? Anywhere I went there would be new gossip and new scenes…. By God, I will have to lock myself up in my room, under permanent surveillance, otherwise you still won’t believe me. But of course when no one sees me around people will start thinking that I’m enjoying myself even more secretively. What a life.

Giustiniana’s suspicions, however, were not entirely unjustified: there was talk around town that Lucrezia did indeed have a liking for Andrea that went beyond their old friendship. When Giustiniana’s mood did not improve, Andrea realized he would have to do something more drastic to placate her. He went about it in a manner that revealed his own penchant for intrigue:

This is a difficult thing to ask, but you are so easy, so free from prejudice, you have such a good spirit and are always so obliging with me that it is possible you might grant me this favor. Lucrezia torments me by always asking if she can see some of your letters to me—which I have never permitted her to do. Therefore I would like for you to write me a letter in French in which you praise her. You might add in passing that, while not jealous of her, you do think she is too intelligent not to realize that it would be preferable if I were not seen so often with her. She already knows all the love I have for you and your commitment to me. I assure you that the only reason I am asking you to do this is so that she will convince herself that I am in love with a woman more special than her…. If you’re not up to it, it doesn’t really matter. It’s enough that you love me.

Giustiniana was uncomfortable with this sort of game playing. A little deception to avoid Mrs. Anna’s controls and to meet Andrea on the sly was one thing. But she found his recourse to artifice for the sake of artifice a little unsettling. The ease with which he could transform himself from the most tender and loving companion to the craftiest manipulator was a trait that seemed embedded in his character. And whereas Lucrezia, an experienced operator herself, would probably not have given Andrea’s behavior great significance, Giustiniana found it much harder to understand. She too had a seductive side, a propensity to flirt with men both young and old. But excessive ambiguity made her ill at ease. She held fast to a rule of love that was not very common among other young Venetians: the exclusivity of romantic feelings. So she was stunned to hear, when she went over to the Morosinis’ for lunch shortly after the Lucrezia episode, that Andrea was also flirting with Mariettina Corner, another well-known seductress. Mariettina’s love life was complicated enough as it was: she was married to Lucrezia’s brother, had an official lover and was having an affair with yet a third man, Piero Marcello—a gambler and philanderer who happened to be a neighbor of the Wynnes’. Giustiniana was told that though Mariettina was carrying on the relationship with Piero, it was really Andrea she had her eyes on.

Again she confronted him, and again he blamed her for believing every scrap of gossip floating around the Morosinis’: “What are they telling you, these people with whom you seem to enjoy yourself so much? And why do you believe them if you know they hate me? You accuse me of making love to Mariettina…. But why is it you always fear I’m causing you offense with all the women I see?”

The story of Andrea’s presumed affair with Mariettina had all the ingredients of a Goldoni farce. It turned out that Andrea, at Mariettina’s request, had acted as a go-between in her secret romance with Piero. And Giustiniana—as Andrea was quick to remind her—had even encouraged him to take on that role because she felt that as long as Mariettina was busy with other men she would not present a threat to her. But Andrea’s comings and goings between the two lovers had provided the gossipmongers with plenty to talk about. In the ensuing confusion Giustiniana didn’t know whom to believe. Andrea acknowledged that “some people might well have thought Mariettina had developed an interest in me…. After all, I was constantly whispering in her ear and she was whispering in mine…. She talked to me, gestured to me, sat next to me while apparently not caring a hoot about [her lover], her husband—indeed the world.” He insisted it was all a terrible misunderstanding: he was innocent and Giustiniana was “stupid” if she bothered “to spend a moment on all this talk the Morosinis fill your head with.”

It wasn’t easy for her to dismiss the things she heard about Andrea, because so much of his life was invisible to her, out of reach. The rumors were all the more hurtful because they reverberated in circles to which she was admitted but to which she did not truly belong. Giustiniana knew or was acquainted with most of Andrea’s friends and was a welcome guest in the houses of many patrician families. But even though the veil of social discrimination was perhaps not as visible as elsewhere in Europe, it was very real; it governed Venetian society in subtle and less subtle ways—as in the case of marriage. When Giustiniana wrote to Andrea about his woman friends, there was often an undercurrent of anxiety that went quite beyond a natural romantic jealousy.

Still, she had her own little ways of getting back at him.

As Andrea and Giustiniana struggled to clear up the misunderstanding about his role in their friends’ affair, Mariettina threw one of her celebrated balls on the Giudecca—an island separated from the southern side of Venice by a wide canal, where patricians had pleasure houses with gardens and vineyards. This was one of the major social events of the season. Preparations went on for days. Young Venetian ladies had a notorious taste for luxury. They liked to wear rich and elaborate but relatively comfortable outfits, so they could move with greater ease during the minuets and furlane, a popular dance that originated from the Friuli region. They spent hours having their hair coiffed into tall beehives, which they decorated with gems and golden pins. Their long fingernails were polished in bright colors. They drenched themselves with exotic perfume and chose their beauty spots with special care (the appassionata was worn in the corner of the eye, the coquette above the lip, the galante on the chin, and the assassina—the killer—in the corner of the mouth).1 They carried large, exquisitely embroidered fans and wore strings of pearls and diamonds. High heels had long been out of fashion: Venetian ladies preferred more sensible low evening shoes, often decorated with a diamond buckle. These were fabulously expensive but very comfortable, especially for dancing. Men wore the traditional French costume: silk long jacket, knee-length culottes, and white stockings. Elaborate cuffs and jabots of lace from the island of Burano gave a Venetian touch to their attire. Their elegant evening wigs were combed and groomed for the occasion.

Mariettina’s ball offered a chance for Andrea and Giustiniana to see each other and clarify things once and for all. But Giustiniana, still feeling vexed by the whole imbroglio, was not in the mood for such a demanding social event. She sent this note to Andrea just as he was dressing for the evening:

If the bad weather continues I will certainly not come to Marietta Corner’s festa. You know my mother and how she fears the wind. She has warned that she will not cross the canal if there is the slightest bit of wind. In the end it is probably better that such a reasonable pretext should excuse me from coming as I believe you and I would both have a terrible time…. Still I will try to convince my mother to get over her fear—I hope you will acknowledge my goodwill. I have already opted for a new course: henceforth you will be able to do as you please; I will neither complain nor bother you with accusations. When you will cause me displeasure I will try to convince myself that you won’t have done so out of ill will but because you do not believe I am sensitive to those things…. By the way, all those pleas for forgiveness and that habit you have of carrying on exactly in the same manner even though you know you offend me—I really cannot stand it. The truth is, I will continue to give you proof of my real affection while you will hurt me more and more. And who knows if all my suffering will change you one day…. Good-bye now, Memmo. I would not want to keep you from your toilette.

In the end Giustiniana did not prevail over her mother—if she ever tried—and she did not go to Marietta’s ball. The next day she sent Andrea this bittersweet note: “I did not write to you this morning because I felt you might be tired after last night and needed your sleep. The bad weather prevented me from coming, but as I told you I believe in the end it was for the better. Today I was half hoping I would see you at the window at Ca’ Tiepolo, but I guess I fooled myself. This evening we are going to Smith’s. I will write to you tomorrow. I have nothing else to ask you except to love me much—if you can. Farewell.”

Andrea always reacted defensively, even impatiently, to Giustiniana’s outbursts of jealousy. He was not immune to similar feelings, but in the abstract he espoused what he considered a “philosophical” approach. “It is practically impossible for me to be jealous,” he explained:

Not because I have such high esteem for myself that I do not recognize others might be worthy [of your attentions]. No, the reason is that I don’t want to believe you are flighty or coquettish or fickle or careless or mean. If ever there came a point in which I really did nurture doubts about you … then I would simply think of you as a different woman. The pain I would feel on account of your transformation would certainly be intense, but to me you would no longer be the lovable, the rarest Giustiniana. And by losing what ignited my deepest love and continues to nourish it, I would lose all feeling for you and return to the Memmo I was before meeting you.

This was the theory. In reality Andrea was fairly quick to lose his cool when other young men prowled around Giustiniana. He was particularly wary of Momolo Mocenigo, better known as Il Gobbo—the Hunchback—on account of a slight curvature of his spine, but in fact rather good-looking and quite the ladykiller. “He was the handsomest of all the patrician gamesters at the Ridotto,” Casanova wrote in his memoirs.2 When he was not taking bets at his faro table, Il Gobbo hung around the theaters, where he bothered the ladies and tried to make mischief. He especially enjoyed gallivanting with Giustiniana, and her willingness to indulge him annoyed Andrea to no end. Once, after catching her yet again in “a very long conversation” with him, he let her have it: “Everyone knows Il Gobbo for the first-class whoremonger that he is. You should know he once [told me] in front of other people that I should be thankful to him because he chose not to seduce you even though you showed a certain kindness to him…. I refused to give in to such abuse, and I dare say my reaction did not make him very happy…. But why did you have to go talk to him without your mother? Why speak to him practically in the ear? Why whisper to him that you were going to San Moisè so he could then come and tell me with a tone that so displeased me?”

Another evening, Andrea was at home nursing a fever and a terrible sore throat when he suddenly learned that the “first-class whoremonger” was on his way to meet Giustiniana. He became so upset that he dashed out of the house, ran across town, and burst into the busy gambling rooms of the Ridotto. “I looked for you everywhere, and I finally found you in the same room where [Il Gobbo] had just been,” he wrote to her angrily and with a good deal of self-pity. The incident, he assured Giustiniana, had “redoubled the flames that were already engulfing my throat.”

Still, Il Gobbo was a lesser irritant than Piero Marcello, the handsome coureur de femmes who was courting Mariettina Corner but also had eyes for Giustiniana. Andrea considered Piero to be frivolous and vain, the sort of young man who would buy a new coat and then “make a ruckus just to attract attention to it.” Piero’s gondola was often moored at the same dock as the Wynnes’. “How appearances can trick one,” Andrea noted, for he was worried people might wrongly assume that Piero was visiting Giustiniana and her sisters, when in fact Piero simply lived nearby. Indeed, some already referred to them as “Piero Marcello’s girls.” Piero not only flirted with Giustiniana, he also needled Andrea in public, wondering aloud whether he and Giustiniana were secretly still seeing each other. The two nearly came to blows over her, as Andrea reported to Giustiniana with more than a hint of braggadocio in this account of their confrontation:

PIERO: Are you jealous of me? Oh … but I have no designs on her. True, when women call me it is hard for me to resist…. But I am your friend, I would not betray you. I stay away from my friends’ women. And if you have the slightest suspicion, I will never see her again.

ANDREA: Who do you think you are, the Terror of the World? Do you really think I’m afraid of losing Giustiniana to you? If she were crazy, like all your previous lovers were, if she wanted your money, … if she had all the weaknesses, all the silliness, all the prejudices of the average woman, if she could not tell the true value of better men, if she were a coquette or worse, then, yes, I probably wouldn’t trust her. But my dear Piero, who do you think you’re dealing with?

Andrea concluded, “I told him these things with my usual straightforwardness, so that after affecting surprise he turned the whole thing into a joke.”

Things did not end there. Days later Andrea saw Piero and Giustiniana talking to each other again. He gave her a stern warning: “Now I speak to you as a husband: I absolutely do not want you to show in public that you know Piero Marcello. I was very sorry that Mariettina, noticing that I was trying to see with whom you were laughing, came over and whispered into my ear: ‘She’s laughing with Piero down there.’”

Even after such a reprimand Andrea would not admit to being the slightest bit jealous:

I’ve told you a hundred times: I don’t forbid you to see Piero out of jealousy…. But I absolutely do not want you to look at him in public or even say hello, all the more so because he affects an equivocal manner that I simply don’t like and that I find insolent in the extreme…. Piero and Momolo are not for you…. Piero frets while Momolo affects his usual mannerisms, both with the same end: to make people believe that there has been at least a little bit of intimacy with all the women they are barely acquainted with. And for this reason the two of them are a real nuisance to young lovers.

Despite the misunderstandings and squabbles that ensued, Andrea and Giustiniana’s relationship deepened through the spring and summer of 1755 to the point that very little else seemed to matter to them anymore. All their energies were devoted to making time for themselves and finding places to meet. They had become experts at escaping the restrictions imposed on them and moved stealthily from alcove to alcove. Their love affair consumed their life, and it gradually transformed them.

Giustiniana had been known as a lively and gregarious young woman. The affectionate nickname inglesina di Sant’Aponal conjured up a refreshing image of youth and grace. Soon after returning to Venice, Giustiniana, being the eldest, had begun to share with her mother the duties of a good hostess while Bettina, Tonnina, Richard, and William were still under the care of Toinon. This role had come naturally to her. She had felt at ease in their drawing room or over at the consul’s, delighting everyone with her charm. But by 1755 she was tired of all that, tired of performing onstage. She hardly recognized herself. “Coquetry was all I really cared for once,” she told Andrea in a moment of introspection. “Now I can barely manage to be polite. Everything bores me. Everything annoys me. People say I have become stupid, silly; that I am hopeless at entertaining guests. I realize they’re right, but I don’t much care.” She spent her days writing letters to Andrea, worrying about whom he was seeing, planning their next meeting—where, at what time, and, always, what to do with the keys. When she did go out with her mother—to lunch at the consul’s, or to church, the theater, the Ridotto—the people she chose to talk to, what she said, how she said it: everything she did, in one way or another, related to Andrea.

The affair had become all-consuming for Andrea as well. “My love, you govern my every action,” he confessed to her. “I do not think, I do not feel, I do not see anything but my Giustiniana. Everything else is meaningless to me…. I simply cannot hide my love for you from others anymore.” He still made the usual rounds—a family errand, a trip to the printer Pasquali on behalf of the consul, a lunch at Ca’ Tiepolo, and in the evening a visit to the theater. But his life outside the secret world he shared with Giustiniana no longer seemed very stimulating or even much fun. After the death of his uncle Andrea the year before, Ca’ Memmo had received fewer visitors and had ceased to be the scintillating intellectual haven of years past. At this time, too, Andrea’s mother, obsessed about Casanova’s influence on her three boys, finally had her way and convinced the inquisitors to have him arrested.* The heated, late-night conversations at the crowded malvasìe on the latest book from Paris or the new play by Goldoni had lost their most entertaining participant.

Andrea’s personal project for establishing a French theater in Venice was going nowhere, and Giustiniana worried that she might be the main cause of his lack of progress: “Are you not working on it because of me? Dear Memmo, please don’t give up. If only you knew how much I care about your affairs when your honor is at stake. Especially this project, which, given its scale, the detailed manner in which you planned it, and the excellence with which you carried out every phase, was meant to establish your reputation. And to think that my feelings for you—true as they are—might have caused you so much damage. I am mortified.” Andrea admitted that he had made little progress and “all the people involved” in the project were furious with him. “They say I have been taking them for a ride all along. The talk of the town is that the theater project has fallen through because of my excessive passion for you. By God, I couldn’t care less. I only wish to tell you that I love you, my heart.” Sweetly, he added that he would now start working on it again “because it will feel I will be doing something for you. [After I received your letter] I dashed off to the lawyers to get them started again. They weren’t in the office, but I shall find them soon enough.” In the end, despite fitful efforts, the project never got off the ground.

Andrea kept up with his mentor Carlo Lodoli, the Franciscan monk who continued to hold sway among the more open-minded members of the Venetian nobility. Now that he was no longer Lodoli’s student, Andrea saw him less often, but he was anxious that Giustiniana should also benefit from the mind that had influenced him so profoundly. He encouraged his old teacher to visit her as much as possible and draw her into his circle of followers. Giustiniana always welcomed these visits, starved as she was of new books and new ideas in the restricted intellectual environment her mother fostered at home. Most of all she delighted in the chance to spend time with a person who knew the man she loved so well. When Lodoli came to visit, it was as if he brought Andrea with him—at least in spirit. “He just left,” Giustiniana reported to her lover. “He kept me company for a long time, and we spoke very freely. I appreciated our conversation today immensely—more than usual. He is the most useful man to society…. But beyond that, he talked a lot about you and he praised you for the virtues men should want to be praised for—the goodness of your soul and the truthfulness of your spirit.”

For several years Consul Smith’s library had been a second home for Andrea. He continued to visit the consul regularly during his secret affair with Giustiniana, helping him catalogue his art and book collections. Nearly two years had gone by since the two lovers first met in that house. As Andrea worked, he luxuriated in tender memories of those earlier days, when they had been falling in love among the beautiful pictures and the rare books. “Everything there [reminds] me of you…. Oh God, Giustiniana, my idol, do you remember our happiness there?”