A Venetian Affair (21 page)

The week before Christmas, when hope for a favorable word from the French authorities had faded and the time left on their permit was running out, Choiseul informed the Wynnes that they would be allowed to stay through the winter and possibly even beyond. Giustiniana was greatly relieved. She had Prince Dolgorouki to thank for the permits: he had brought the case to the attention of a powerful general in the Grande Armée, Prince de Clairmont, under whom he had fought at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. All her friends at the Hôtel d’Anjou received the news with delight, especially Prince Dolgorouki, whose courtship of Giustiniana had become more pressing since the Muscovite had withdrawn from the field.

The nod from Choiseul instantly gave the Wynnes a more respectable status, and the elusive invitation to dine at the Venetian ambassador’s residence duly materialized. True, it was not the fanciest occasion—the only other guests were Tommaso Farsetti, a dour Venetian poet then living in Paris, and Signor Pizzoni, first secretary to the embassy. But Giustiniana managed to make the most of the small Venetian soirée by lavishing her attention on Farsetti, who claimed to know Monsieur de La Pouplinière very well. “Deftly, I hinted that I would be happy to meet [the old man],” she boasted to Andrea.

While she waited for Farsetti to come through, she renewed her old love of the theater, though the first thing she discovered, to her embarrassment, was that in Paris, unlike in Venice, it was “not considered
bon ton
to arrive late at the show.” On the whole, Parisians were just as obsessed with the stage as Venetians were. The Comédie Française and the Comédie Italienne, the two most popular theaters, were full to capacity every night. Many spectators had a genuine interest in the performance, but many more went to see and be seen. In their flamboyant suits and with their elegant coiffures, they put on such colorful and lively displays that it was sometimes hard to distinguish the stage from the floor.

The hit of the 1758–59 season was a tragedy in verse called
Hypermnestre,
by a young author, M. Lemierre, who was sponsored by the
Mercure de France,
the widely read monthly on culture and current affairs. Giustiniana made her Russian friends take her to the opening night. “All Paris was there,” she wrote to Andrea, who was keen to hear the latest on French theater even though his own project had never seen the light. “The tragedy was divine, and the applause went on forever. I was very moved and cried. The entire theater was moved. How well the French act!” The star of the evening was Mlle Clairon, the most celebrated, ambitious, talented, and spoiled prima donna of her day. Giustiniana had heard about her back in Venice, and she was glad to report that the great actress was indeed “a true prodigy.”

Giustiniana was eager to explore the city in earnest. Two months after she had arrived in Paris, her world had still not expanded far beyond the Hôtel d’Anjou. Mrs. Anna did not encourage her daughters to broaden their circle of friends and was constantly reining them in. So when Giustiniana did go out with her sisters, it was usually in the company of their Russian friends.

Princess Galitzine was the main organizer of their evenings at the theater. It was an open secret that she was smitten with Mlle Clairon. “People say she loves her with a tender passion,” Giustiniana wrote. “She trembles when she sees her, she becomes pale, she is beside herself. . . . She always has her over for dinner. . . . People say she has spent more than a thousand francs on this
comédienne.
” The princess commissioned Charles Van Loo, first painter of the king, to do a portrait of Mlle Clairon. He painted her as Medea standing atop a chariot, a dripping dagger in her hand, her two dead children at her feet, and Jason’s expression filled with terrible wrath. The unveiling of the painting at the artist’s studio at the Louvre became an event in itself. “A crowd of admirers has seen Van Loo’s masterpiece, and never has a painting been praised so unanimously,” glowed the art critic of the
Mercure de France,
quite mesmerized by Jason’s “fiery eyes” and the slain bodies of the two infants “that still tremble before us.”
³
Giustiniana went to see the painting with the princess and her large train of squabbling Russians, and she was not quite so impressed. “It cost six thousand francs,” she remarked. “The colors are pretty, the characters meaningful; still, there
are
defects.”

Yet despite her criticism, indeed despite the affected annoyance that often filled her descriptions of her friends, the pleasure of feeling more and more connected to the Parisian scene began to come through her weekly reports to Andrea. True, she occasionally tired of running around town with the Russians. She wanted to shine in the famous literary
salons
and at the elegant dinners she kept hearing about. “I would like to meet ladies, I would like to meet men of intelligence, literary people as well as members of the Court. I would like to be received in the good houses of Paris. But with my mother here, and two sisters in tow, it’s impossible. . . . Ah, if only we were traveling together, you and I, what a difference it would make! But who knows? That day may yet come.” Waiting for the day when she and Andrea might converse with Diderot and the Encyclopédistes in the drawing room of a Mme du Deffand or show themselves off among the
crème de la
crème
of French aristocracy, Giustiniana could nevertheless console herself with the fact that she saw plays everyone talked about, read the new books, and was up to date with the latest gossip at Versailles. The trusty
Mercure de France
kept her abreast of the great debates of the day, whether they touched on the celebrated polemic between Rousseau and d’Alembert about the corrupting influence of the theater, the controversial vaccine against small-pox, or even the imminent appearance of Mr. Halley’s comet in the eastern sky. As for pure distraction, she could always count on the latest installment of the unending comedy unfolding at the Hôtel d’Anjou.

Around Christmas, Prince Dolgorouki and the Muscovite quarreled badly over Giustiniana, and events took a grave turn. She was frantic—and perhaps a little thrilled as well—“at the thought that very shortly I will be the topic of every conversation in Paris.”

The row blew up shortly after the
mousquetaire
episode. Dolgorouki was ten years older than the Muscovite and had neither his grace nor his good looks. He was making little progress in his pursuit of Giustiniana. She found him charmless, meddlesome, and excessively irascible—a real nuisance at times. Dolgorouki was under the impression—not an entirely false one—that he was making little headway because Giustiniana was still attracted to the Muscovite. So he told her that he had heard the Muscovite slight her in public and that he had been compelled to come to her defense. Giustiniana quickly informed the Muscovite, “and he had a fit, protesting his innocence and insisting [Dolgorouki] was only acting out of jealousy. . . . He stormed off in a fury.”

After dinner that night a doleful Dolgorouki told her that he and the Muscovite were to fight a duel. He added, in a rather macabre voice, that he was “happy about it.” Giustiniana begged him to give up such a crazy idea. He and the Muscovite had been the closest friends; they were even related. Besides, had he not considered how it would affect her reputation? She enlisted the help of the innkeeper and the other guests in the hotel, but Dolgorouki remained deaf to their pleas. So she went to the Muscovite and “with tears in my eyes” implored him not to fight. After much pleading and cajoling on her part, he agreed to avoid Dolgorouki for four or five days to see if his rival would calm down and the episode could be forgotten. This did not work. On Christmas Day, Giustiniana wrote to Andrea in a state of great agitation. The Muscovite had tried to stay away from Dolgorouki, but the latter had become a “beast.” He had provoked and attacked the Muscovite at every opportunity. He had accused him in front of the other guests of being “fickle and thoughtless” and “unworthy” of courting her—this at a time when the Muscovite had already put an end to his clawing ambushes in dark corners of the hotel.

One evening the two Russians came to blows in the common room, up in the innkeeper’s apartment. Guards had to be called in, and both men were put under surveillance. Under pressure from the Russian Embassy, Dolgorouki and the Muscovite agreed to sign a document renouncing their intention to duel. But the matter did not end there. Though dueling was illegal in France, many people still felt it was the only honourable way of resolving a conflict of that nature. “They will either fight or face infamy,” Giustiniana worried. “Surely they will lose the respect of their regiment if they don’t.” The Russians kept quiet, but word had it that the duel had simply been postponed. They would travel secretly to Flanders to fight, and if that became impossible they would wait until spring and duel after they returned to Russia. Thus the dramatic
dénouement
was postponed just in time for the New Year’s visit to Versailles.

The Court had announced that on the first of January the king would bestow the prestigious Cordon Bleu on eight new members of the Order of the Holy Spirit. The Wynnes planned to attend the ceremony with Ambassador Erizzo and remain in Versailles until evening to witness the
dîner du Roi.
On the appointed day, Mrs. Anna and her three daughters (the boys stayed in Paris with Toinon) left the Hôtel d’Anjou dressed in their very best gowns and beautifully coiffed. The ride took about an hour. Once in Versailles, they stopped at an inn to refresh themselves and pick up Ambassador Erizzo before going to the palace. He was running late, so they arrived halfway through the mass. The crowd was so thick that they couldn’t reach the inner chapel. But even from afar the youthful, forty-eight-year-old king looked magnificent. “He is a very handsome man . . . very grand and majestic,” wrote Giustiniana. Despite the distance between them, she was sure he had cast “the most graceful and unaffected glance” upon her and her sisters.

The Wynnes and the ambassador went back to the inn in the town of Versailles to wait for the next ceremony. There they were joined by the Russian contingent minus the Muscovite, who was still avoiding Dolgorouki. A Galitzine prince, cousin of the princess, had come in his place but fell asleep upon arriving and snored through the meal, which Giustiniana predictably found “bad, long and very boring. . . . Nobody had anything amusing to say. Everyone yawned or slept.” At last they returned to the palace and filed into the Antichambre du Grand Couvert, where the king and queen, their backs to the fireplace, dined with their immediate family as a crowd of visitors slowly rustled by. “The room is rather small, not very well lit, and rather unremarkable,” she later wrote to Andrea. “There were so many people we were not directly in the king’s view; yet he saw us and observed us attentively. . . . He has very beautiful eyes, and he fixes them on one so intently that one cannot sustain his gaze for long.”

At around eleven, while the crowd still milled about in the palace, Giustiniana went to rest in the carriage. It had been a long day, and she was tired. While she waited for the others in the dark, her thoughts drifted back to the handsome king and the way he had looked at her. “Then I closed my eyes and slept until Paris.”

Shortly after the New Year, Giustiniana was with her mother at the Comédie Italienne when she heard loud cheers coming from a box near theirs. It was her old friend Casanova, “making a magnificent appearance.” She pointed him out to Mrs. Anna, who smiled and beckoned to him with her fan. Mrs. Anna had not seen him since he had preyed on her sixteen-year-old daughter. Five years later and so far away from Venice, she was not unhappy to see him again. Besides, he was now a celebrity. Everyone wanted to meet him.

Back in November 1756, sixteen months after he had been thrown into jail thanks to Andrea’s mother, Casanova had staged a spectacular escape from the prison of the Leads. With the aid of a rudimentary pike he broke a hole in the ceiling of his cell, clambered onto the roof of the Ducal Palace, worked his way down to an adjacent canal, and left Venice under cover of darkness. He walked for days across the Venetian mainland territories, steering clear of the police patrols sent to hunt him down. Famished and exhausted after covering more than two hundred miles, he eventually reached the northern city of Bolzano, where he rested for a week. He then crossed the Alps at the Brenner Pass, traveled to Munich, and from there went on to Paris—this last leg in comfort, having found a means of transport and pleasant company. He arrived in Paris on January 5, 1757— the very day of the assassination attempt on the king.

The first person he went to see was his old “comrade in arms,” the Abbé de Bernis, then at the height of his power. The foreign minister gave him a warm welcome and filled his pocket with a roll of louis d’or, and later that year he sent him on an intelligence-gathering mission to Dunkirk. Upon his return, Casanova convinced the cash-starved French government to launch a national lottery, which he had devised with Giovanni Calzabigi, a financial wizard working for the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The project was a success, and Casanova’s cut of the ticket sales brought him a steady income.

The following year the government, desperate to revive the sagging price of French bonds and stave off financial collapse, entrusted him with a highly sensitive mission. The idea was to sell twenty million francs’ worth of those rapidly depreciating bonds on the Amsterdam market at a limited loss and use the cash to purchase securities from a country with better credit. After several weeks of negotiations with Dutch brokers and frantic exchanges with the French government, Casanova pulled it off by convincing his counterparts that a peace treaty between the Great Powers was imminent and it therefore made sense to buy French bonds at a discount. He raised a huge amount of cash for France and in the process helped to revive the French securities market.