A Venetian Affair (18 page)

In Vercelli, the Wynnes arrived haggard and exhausted in the middle of the night and left before dawn the next morning. They stopped for lunch and changed horses in the “wretched” hamlet of Livorno Ferraris and spent the last night in the old border town of Chivasso before making the straight run over the undulating plain of the Po valley, all the way to the bustling capital of Piedmont.

Turin was the center of a growing young state ably ruled by King Charles Emmanuel III. Giustiniana had visited it once already, on her return journey from London six years earlier. She loved this sturdy little city at the feet of the Alps. The avenues were neat and clean, the squares were pretty, the symmetry of the city’s layout softened by the curves of the late baroque palaces and churches: “The city has a beautiful appearance, and, though small, it is organized in the most graceful way possible. Beautiful streets, beautiful houses, beautiful setting, and charming surroundings.”

Unlike the Venetians, Charles Emmanuel III had taken advantage of his kingdom’s neutrality in the war to turn his attention to domestic improvements and reform. Political debate was lively. Intellectual and scientific associations were multiplying. True, social life was a little stiff, certainly by Venetian standards. But there was nothing provincial about the city. Giustiniana could not help but notice that, unlike Venice, Turin was a busy place with a growing sense of its own importance.

When she arrived there in the early afternoon of October 20, however, she had little desire for sight-seeing. She wanted to know whether Andrea’s letter was waiting for her at the Venetian Embassy and what was the quickest way of getting her hands on it. The Wynnes were held up for several hours at customs outside the city gates because Mrs. Anna fussed and argued with the officers. Giustiniana grew so impatient that she convinced Zandiri to go on ahead and announce their arrival to the Resident, Giannantonio Gabriel. Zandiri returned clutching Andrea’s letter. The irony was not lost on the poor man. “I was never your go-between in Venice,” he hissed. “Now I am reduced to being one here.”

Giustiniana stifled a laugh and ran off “trembling” to read the letter.

It was not what she had expected; certainly not what she had hoped for, and she replied heatedly:

Every sentence of that letter produced its share of tears! Oh
yes, I am truly and completely unhappy. I have adored you, I
have betrayed you for weakness, I have consequently deceived
you, I have at times hated you, I have admired you, and I have
fallen in love with you again and I love you now—and I am honest with you and I always will be. Do you doubt my friendship
now? Come, Memmo, don’t o fend me; don’t make me lose heart.
I would like to be just a friend to you; I would like to harbor nothing but fraternal feelings; but I love you—even though I now
understand I will never have a hold on your heart. What do you
want me to do with your
admiration
for me if I love you? Hear it
one more time: I am jealous, and I still expect from you what you
will not give to me—out of deliberation as well as necessity.

Andrea’s letters from this period are lost, so it is impossible to know what, exactly, he was writing to her, but Giustiniana’s reaction to his words certainly gives us a sense of what they felt like to her. Clearly he did not respond to her outpourings with enough enthusiasm. He seemed evasive, perhaps even a little ambiguous. All she could think of was how to get her letters to him and stay in touch. He, on the other hand, was not nearly as meticulous. She did not even know where to send her next letter. Why was there no forwarding address? How could he be so forgetful? And then the needless cruelty of telling her he had met a young nun who would certainly have “reawakened his senses” if his heart had not been Giustiniana’s: “The Nun! Why do you imagine she might awaken your senses? . . . You add: If Giustiniana were not so much in your heart. Oh believe me, Memmo, he who imagines feelings already has those feelings. The portrait you sketch for me is much too seductive.”

Giustiniana was struggling to stay calm. She felt the need to declare her love loudly and incessantly and claimed the right to tell Andrea—her
cher frère
now, but still the man she loved more than anyone in the world—how afraid she was of losing him entirely:

Forgive me, but you must understand all my weakness even as
I thank you for your sincerity—which I continue to beseech of you
for a thousand reasons. I am always looking for tokens of your
love; and I might still need to do so. Your character, your words,
your noble actions are always such that whatever will happen to
us you will always have the strongest, truest interest in me; but I
fear that eventually your heart will be possessed by a much
stronger feeling—and that I will not be the object of that feeling.
I am crazy; I go looking for my own misery. Yes, but can anyone
say it will not be that way? That is the only certainty. . . . Ah,
Memmo, pity me. I really need your counsel.

Giustiniana went to bed exhausted, lay awake all night, and the next morning continued to write:

I have not been able to stop thinking about our whole history
together. I have lost a great deal, my Memmo . . . and nothing
can possibly bring any consolation to me now except the knowledge that my confession (which probably no other woman would
have been able to make) has at least eliminated the extreme pain
you would have felt at the moment of our separation had you
believed you were losing a faithful Giustiniana. . . . Yet I am sure
that if they hadn’t kept me away from you for so long I would
never have given you an opportunity to accuse me of infidelity. . . .
But let us not talk about this anymore.

Bad weather forced the Wynnes to stay in Turin a full week. The heavy autumn rains had swelled the Dora River outside the city, and there was the added risk of flooding. The high mountains west of the city were covered with snow, and Giustiniana feared a “difficult journey” over the Alps. She tried to make the best of the situation, though, and with the help of the Venetian Resident, Mr. Gabriel, she and her sisters blended effortlessly into Turin life. They received guests at the embassy, members of the small English community for the most part. They visited palaces and churches. Occasionally the skies cleared and they rode a carriage out to the Valentino Royal Park—“which is really more of a grand alley with a view of the Po and the hills in the background.” In the evening, Mr. Gabriel took them to the opera.

Giustiniana found the Turinese to be “very sociable, though they adhere to the most rigid etiquette, and extremely reserved.” She was struck by the fact that “ladies may not go out in their carriage in the company of a male escort.” And gallantry, she added, perhaps with her old Venetian friends in mind, was “conducted terribly.” The formality of Turinese society she ascribed to the influence of the court of Charles Emmanuel III, “which is most serious-minded.”

Luckily the king and his family were at their country estate in Venaria, so Giustiniana could look around the Palazzo Reale at leisure. She wandered for hours in the grand halls, taking her time to inspect “every apartment,” and although she did not particularly like the sumptuous rococo style of the furniture, she loved the openness of the space, the sweeping perspective, “the long enfilade of rooms that offers such a pleasant view”—an effect that was more difficult to achieve in the smaller Venetian
palazzi.
As royal palaces went, the Palazzo Reale was modest in size, in keeping with the sobriety of the House of Savoy, “yet it is certainly more beautiful than [Versailles]. Everyone says so.”

Over the years the king had assembled an impressive collection of drawings and paintings by Italian and other European masters. He was very proud of his recent acquisition
The Woman with
Dropsy,
a masterpiece by Flemish artist Gerrit Dou, which had received a great deal of publicity. Now that she was suddenly face to face with the famous painting, Giustiniana could compare it to a similar work of Dou’s,
A Sick Woman Being Visited by the Doctor,
which belonged to Consul Smith.
¹
She thought the latter far superior, perhaps out of loyalty to her old friend. “Next time you see Smith,” she wrote to Andrea, “please tell him I defended his painting in front of many people who wanted to stone me to death.”

Far away from Venice, Giustiniana looked for connections with the more familiar world she had shared with Andrea. And she sometimes found them in the most unexpected places. Shortly after arriving in Turin, she met Filiberto Ortolani, a young scholar and collector and a dear friend of Andrea’s who had studied in Venice with Lodoli and had fallen under his spell. They connected immediately. “I told him I knew him well [through you], and he said he knew me well through the same channel, and we quickly became best friends in the world. I went to see his apartment, his rooms. . . . He gave me a few things to read, he talked about Lodoli, he talked about you a great deal. . . . He is a very good man.” She could speak to Ortolani about Andrea “with great liberty,” so she sought his company as much as possible. When they were together, deep in conversation and reminiscence, she easily lost track of the time.

Giustiniana had been spending the afternoon with her new friend one day when she suddenly realized she was late for the opera. She picked up Bettina and Tonnina and rushed to the performance wearing a large, frilly bonnet à la française (she wore her traveling dress under her cloak, as most of their trunks were still packed). The house was full when the three girls made their entrance (Mrs. Anna had stayed home), and the show was well under way. Not that the Turinese were paying much attention to the singing: “The three of us—my sisters and I—were the real show in the theater,” Giustiniana bragged. “Everyone was staring at us.” Not because they were more beautiful—she conceded that there were many beautiful women in Turin, “if horribly done up”—but simply because they were from out of town. “The mere fact of being foreigners here is enough to earn us praise.”

Chevalier B., captain of the Royal Guards, stared at Giustiniana with such intensity he made her blush. He took a seat right in front of her, in the box that belonged to the Marquise de Prié, a lover of music and a prominent member of Turinese society, whom Giustiniana had briefly encountered in Venice some years before.

“Mademoiselle, do not move,” the captain cried out. “You look exactly like the woman who was my very first passion.”

Giustiniana curtsied and turned further away.

“Yes, I can see the very same features to which I am so sensitive,” the captain insisted, calling on the marquise to take a look for herself.

Again Giustiniana curtsied, but the man wouldn’t give up. So she finally blurted out in her uncertain French, “Sir, if what you say is true you put me in the odd position of having to either consider your taste to be poor or feel flattered by a vanity I don’t believe to be justified.”

Delighted by Giustiniana’s reply, the marquise stepped in at her side: “Ah,
mon Dieu,
she is charming! How well she has answered! I was right to say that by the sheer look of her one could guess she had spirit.”

The captain continued relentlessly to compare Giustiniana to his first love: “I can assure you, Countess Castelli was a beautiful dame. And here I see the same eyes, the same significant features, those eyelashes, that silhouette, that same serious yet seductive look . . .”

“She might well have been very beautiful,” Giustiniana interrupted, by now rather enjoying this impromptu duet, “and I might indeed have some slight resemblance to her without of course having her charms, Monsieur. But I am surprised you should find the resemblance so perfect. I am of the opinion that one never encounters such resemblances to the people one loves.”

“Well, Mademoiselle, you can therefore appreciate your own power over me if it is God’s will that what I see in you is only an illusion.”

By this time a small crowd had gathered under their boxes and clapped at Giustiniana’s repartees while she feigned annoyance and made endless curtsies. The marquise laughed and applauded her new young friend. Nobody was paying much attention to the singers on stage.

“I know you, Mademoiselle,” the marquise whispered to Giustiniana. “I had the privilege of seeing you in Venice, and people spoke well of you.”

“And I, Madame, had the privilege of admiring you more than anyone else, even though everyone who sees you admires you.” Turning to the besotted captain, she said, “Here is the most beautiful dame I have ever seen, and the most agreeable; so I question your good taste: How can you talk about an old passion in such gorgeous company?”

The captain was not to be daunted, and turned again to Giustiniana: “Mademoiselle, this particular triumph of yours is but a measure of your charm. Though I stand next to the most beautiful lady of the land, I only have eyes for you. If only God willed that you be my last passion just as your look-alike was my first! I am certain it would be so if you stayed on [in Turin].”

Giustiniana dismissed the hopeless suitor and turned again to the marquise, who wanted to know if she and her family were on their way back to Venice.

“No, no, we have left. We are going to London.”

“I understand,” the captain interrupted. “You are engaged to someone in Venice.”

“It could well be, Monsieur.”

“I knew it. . . . Those eyes are not meant to be useless; there is a fire in them that needs to be tended. Ah, who is the happy man? I must meet him, I must at least make myself useful to him. . . . Mademoiselle, please appoint me your personal secretary. . . .”

Giustiniana laughed off his histrionics, but the marquise, too, now wanted to know the name of the mysterious man in Venice.