A Venetian Affair (27 page)

“Farsetti joined me here shortly after my arrival and immediately started to show off,” she complained to Andrea. “He was full of claims, full of jealousy. . . . I dismissed him a thousand times so that he would return to Paris, and a few times I was rather sharp. . . . I owe him a lot because he was full of attention for me [in the past]; but I cannot forgive his doggedness in loving me.” The poor man did not know what had hit him. Utterly stunned, he left Brussels the day after his arrival. As for Giustiniana, she continued to have fits of rancor even after his departure: “Ah, Memmo, that Signor Farsetti was deadly. . . . His envy, his designs. . . . No man has ever hurt me more. . . . The whole of Paris knew that he wanted to marry me and that I constantly had to refuse him. . . . [Ambassador Erizzo] always claimed it was Farsetti who messed up the deal with the old man. All I know is that he must have cried often for having taken me to him in the first place.”

After Farsetti left town, Giustiniana threw herself into Brussels’ festivities with a greater vengeance. Prince Charles, the attractive and amiable governor, was quick to notice her. “He looks at me, he laughs with me, he pays me a thousand compliments,” she reported. She was flattered by the prince’s attentions, but she knew a man of such lineage would always be beyond her reach. It was Charles’s closest friend, the Count de Lanoy—“handsome, broad-shouldered and full of spirit”—who caught her fancy instead. The attraction was mutual. Soon the young count was openly courting her. She did not discourage him. Her coquettish self was back, and she savored anew the pleasure of being wooed by a dashing young man.

“There is someone here whom I believe I would rather come to like if I were staying in Brussels longer,” she confessed to Andrea. “He’s always with the prince, but he does his best to see me as much as he can. And I must say I find him very lovable.” The count followed her everywhere. At the theater he always sat in a box next to hers, from which “he never ceases to look at me.” She had enticed him with her new liveliness and the “attitude of
petite-maîtresse
” she had adopted “to amuse myself.” Giustiniana’s attraction to him was easy to explain: “I found in him something which reminded me of my Memmo, and I liked him.”

After much chasing around, she and the count met in the merry confusion of a
bal masqué:
“I went, and, holding my mask up as I approached him, I pretended not to know him, took his hand, called him some English name, and asked him to take off his mask. He laughed at what he thought was my mistake, followed me around, and teased me a thousand times. He told me he loved me all the while he pretended to be the Englishman. Prince Charles then came toward me, and the three of us started a conversation that turned out to be very lively because, pretending not to recognize the prince behind his mask, I said a thousand crazy things.”

That night the count wore a cocked hat with a white feather, and a mask in the Venetian style. His resemblance to Andrea sent shivers down Giustiniana’s spine: “Oh God, Memmo. . . . He is your size, and he moves his head exactly the way you do. . . . He makes a thousand movements similar to yours. . . . And, if I may say so, even his wit is similar in tone to yours.” Despite the count’s insistence, though, Giustiniana never asked him to visit her at the hotel. “What say you about my success? It cost me something, ’tis true; but I wanted to put myself to the test, and I now find one can manage anything.”

As their stay in Brussels came to an end, the pleasant but somewhat futile flirtation with Count de Lanoy gave way to reveries of a deeper kind about Andrea. She was, she now realized, the victim of a well-known conundrum of the heart: drawn to men because they reminded her of her true love, she inevitably discarded them because they were not him. “Ah, dearest Memmo, where are you? In truth, I have little to thank you for: you have robbed me of any chance I might have had of loving someone else. . . . I love no one, and, by God, I have loved no one after my Memmo. And what is better still—and worse for them—is that I tell all my admirers: No, I shall never love anyone after my Memmo. One can love but once in a lifetime.”

Strangely, there is no deep sadness in these letters to Andrea. It is as if Giustiniana were beginning to draw strength from the very notion that she would never love anyone again the way she had loved and still loved him. The endurance of her feelings gave her a sense of security, even of well-being. It was not entirely paradoxical, for the dream of a life together was always with her, seemingly irrepressible. “Oh, dear Memmo, will you be able to make the long trip to London one day? In that case, good-bye to all our lovers, good-bye to our friends, good-bye to the whole world. . . . Don’t you think? I know: you don’t have money. But don’t worry, the day will come when we will both have some.”

Giustiniana’s spirits were up when the Wynnes left for London in mid-September. Apart from crossing the choppy Channel, the family was looking forward to the end of a very long and tumultuous journey. Lord Holderness had secured a temporary house for them in a pleasant part of London. He had also sent a French tutor, M. Verdun, over to Brussels to get acquainted with Giustiniana’s young brothers. Lord Holderness intended to send Richard and William, who were now fifteen and fourteen, up to Cambridge to get a proper education. Mrs. Anna was of a different mind, but this was no time to quibble. As for the “three Graces”—Giustiniana, Bettina, and Tonnina—Lord Holderness was already looking around for suitable matches. “A viceroy for me, or maybe a governor in America,” Giustiniana bantered. “Don’t laugh, and be patient. Giustiniana was born to be someone, you’ll see.”

Nearly two months in Brussels had indeed invigorated her. Only a few days before she and her family left Brussels, however, the Parisian nightmare was suddenly brought back to her by the shocking news that La Pouplinière had married a young and pretty woman, Thérèse de Mondran, in a rushed ceremony in Paris. Giustiniana had never met her, but it turned out that the Abbé de La Coste and Mme Saint Aubin had been plotting in favor of this marriage even as they had been pleading with Giustiniana at the Hôtel de Hollande. Undoubtedly bruised, Giustiniana nevertheless maintained her sense of humor: “I heard, to my surprise, I must confess, about the marriage that was arranged for him in a flash. . . . I then remembered that the other old man, Smith, had done the same. . . . I haven’t any luck with these old men.”

CHAPTER Eight

The crossing from Calais to Dover took no more than a few hours, but the sea was rough and the passage seemed interminable. Giustiniana was hugely relieved when she stepped ashore and felt the firmness of the ground beneath her feet. She had sat belowdecks with the rest of the family and had been “sick to death” as the boat had pitched and crashed in the murky Channel waters. Now, as she stood safely on the windswept pier, in full view of the chalky white cliffs, the dizziness and nausea abated and her natural color returned. It felt strange to be back in England— the Wynnes’ “other” home. But it felt good, too. Seven years had gone by since she had last come to her father’s country. She had been a young girl then, and Sir Richard had died only a few months before. This time it was different: she was coming to find a husband. She was coming to stay.

A government coach sent by Lord Holderness met them at Canterbury. The family traveled to London in great comfort. They were dropped off at “one of the prettiest houses” near Saint James’s Park, which was to serve as their temporary home. The Wynnes were not accustomed to such luxury. “We could not have come to London through a better door,” Giustiniana exclaimed, beaming. Holderness at once sent his personal secretary to see them settle in, and in the evening he appeared at the house himself.

He was not a very handsome man. He had a large nose, a sagging jaw, and a skin condition over much of his face that made his appearance somewhat “offensive” to the more squeamish.
¹
He carried himself with an air of such gravity that he came off as slightly pompous. Nevertheless, he welcomed Giustiniana and her siblings “like a father” (he was cooler toward Mrs. Anna) and announced that his wife, Lady Mary, would be back from the country the following month and would introduce them to society. He would personally make sure they were soon presented to Court as well. Until then, it would be good form if Giustiniana, Bettina, and Tonnina stayed mostly around the house.

Holderness’s directive must have sounded excessively rigid to these cosmopolitan girls who had danced till dawn in Paris and Brussels, but it was no time to show resistance: they were entirely in his hands. Besides, he had explained that he was imposing this temporary confinement for their benefit. That first night Giustiniana went to bed exhausted but reassured—even flattered—by the solicitude of this important man.

Robert d’Arcy, Fourth Earl of Holderness, had indeed reached a position of considerable power and influence, much to the surprise of some of his contemporaries. In the mid-forties, after he returned to London from his diplomatic posting in Venice, he joined the Society of Dilettanti and became a busy bachelor on the London social and artistic scene—he cultivated a passion for opera and masquerades that he had picked up in Venice. In 1749 he was named ambassador to The Hague. There he married Mary Doublet de Groeneveldt, the daughter of a prominent Dutch businessman. He seemed destined for an honorable if not particularly brilliant diplomatic career in His Majesty’s service. But the Duke of Newcastle, then prime minister, “fetched”
²
him from his post at The Hague in 1751, and, at the age of thirty-one, Holderness was appointed secretary of state alongside William Pitt the Elder.

His meteoric rise caused many to shake their heads in disbelief. Pitt himself considered Holderness a “futile”
³
young man. Horace Walpole described him as a lightweight and a “blabberer”—though he acidly acknowledged that the young secretary of state at least “did justice to himself and his patrons, for he seemed ashamed of being made so considerable for no reason but because he was so inconsiderable.”
⁴

Holderness had enough ability to hold on to what was given to him, and he remained a loyal protégé of the Duke of Newcastle for most of the decade. But by the end of 1759, after three years of war, he was looking over his mentor’s shoulder to the growing “peace party” that was gathering at Leicester House around the Earl of Bute, the rising star in Parliament (and future prime minister under George III).

Bute knew all about the Wynnes through his mother-in-law, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was still living in Venice. She had sent her daughter a warning about Mrs. Anna and her children just as they had set off on their journey across Europe the previous October:

My dear child,

I am under a sort of necessity of troubling you with an impertinent letter. Three fine ladies (I should say four including the Signora Madre) set out for London a few days ago. . . . As they have
no acquaintance there, I think it very possible (knowing their assur
ance) that some of them may try to make some by visiting you, perhaps in my name. Upon my word I never saw them except in public
and at the Resident’s, who, being one of their numerous passionate
admirers, obliged his wife to receive them. . . . I have said enough
to hinder your being deceived by them, but should have said
much more if you had been in full leisure to read novels. The story
deserves the pen of my dear Smollett.
⁵

By the time the Wynnes finally arrived in London, long preceded by this unflattering introduction, Holderness was in the thick of his political maneuvers aimed at endearing himself with the Bute camp. Clearly he did not want his guardianship to get in the way of his more important pursuits. Since leaving Venice the Wynnes had acquired a reputation as something of a traveling circus, and the recent gossip coming from Paris about Giustiniana’s adventures there had done nothing to improve their reputation. While Holderness felt compelled to sponsor their presentation to Court, if only to honor Richard Wynne’s memory, it was important to him that it be done judiciously. The last thing he wanted was for his Venetian charges to be running around London out of control.

Initially, the Wynne children took Holderness’s orders in stride. After all, their momentary seclusion gave them a little extra time to prepare for their appearance in the best houses of London. Giustiniana looked forward to reading “new English books in order to take my bearings in my country and not appear too much the foreigner.” The picaresque tales of Lady Montagu’s “dear” Tobias Smollett were probably a little old-fashioned for her. But after the dryness of the French
philosophes,
she was eager to immerse herself in the English novels she had heard so much about. Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson had already produced their great works the previous decade. Now Laurence Sterne was the new author everyone in London was talking about—he had published the first two volumes of
Tristram Shandy
only a few months before the Wynnes arrived.

However, reading books was not enough to keep the family quietly occupied. After just a few weeks of Holderness’s strict regime, a grumpy mood took over the household. “We’re all bored in the extreme with London since we cannot go out or see anyone,” Giustiniana complained. “We cannot even go to the park. . . . His lordship keeps us in perpetual servitude.”

Holderness did make one concession: the Wynnes were allowed to visit the Venetian ambassador and his wife, over on Soho Square. This privilege hardly enlivened their social life. Count and Countess Colombo were a “charming couple,” but they were not much fun. The Countess was “always amiable [but] practically always ill . . . and always alone.” Giustiniana went to the embassy mostly to collect her mail and talk about Andrea with the ambassador, who, like other diplomats before him, was so titillated by their story that he offered to become their secret go-between.

The Wynnes were also allowed to receive a select list of visitors at home, but Giustiniana found the guests who crowded their small drawing room even duller than the ambassador and his wife. They were either old acquaintances of her mother’s from their previous trip to London or part of the steady trickle of nondescript Wynne relations who came over out of curiosity about their Italian cousins. None of them earned an individual mention in Giustiniana’s letters. “I do not enjoy myself with these people,” she complained. “We are always onstage. And everyone stares at us and talks as if we were the most beautiful women in the whole kingdom.”

The mood in London was very different from the one in Paris. England was winning the war; the Wynnes arrived in town as His Majesty’s soldiers were taking Quebec and routing the French in Canada. Confidence was high, and a growing sense of predestination gave a purpose to the conflict that the French increasingly seemed to lack. Newspapers and periodicals led the patriotic fanfare:

Come on ye brave Britons, let no one complain
Britannia, Britannia, once more rules the main.
⁶

It was turning out to be “the glorious fifty-nine,” to use the expression in vogue that season.

After three long years, however, a feeling of lassitude was taking hold of the country, even as dispatches continued to bring good news from the battlefields. Whereas Parisians went from deep gloom to wild celebration depending on the latest war bulletin, the British seemed far more subdued in their reactions. “You must not imagine that victories are received here with loud cheers,” Giustiniana explained to Andrea, who was eager to learn all he could about the war. “At the most, a few burning candles appear on the windowsills. . . . One hardly talks about the war. . . . There is more interest in it in Venice than here, where it truly matters. Maybe the English talk about it between themselves. Maybe they’re just tired.”

Admittedly, Giustiniana was catching only glimpses of London, but the little she saw was uninspiring. The ladies did not dress well. Their hairstyles were out of fashion. Conversations rarely went beyond polite formalities. There was no exciting intellectual dispute to follow—nothing like Rousseau and d’Alembert battling each other’s ideas in the press or the polemics surrounding the publication of a new volume of the
Encyclopédie.
Indeed, aside from lengthy reports on the war and rousing calls to victory, the periodicals seemed mostly preoccupied with such mundane topics as the latest development of the ribbon loom or the newest method of collecting taxes. There were few public festivities and no
bals
masqués
whatsoever, the Anglican bishops having recently managed to have them outlawed.

It is not surprising that Giustiniana thought the most interesting figure parading through this gray landscape was the flamboyant Kitty Fisher, courtesan extraordinaire, who had managed to set herself up quite extravagantly: “She lives in the greatest possible splendor, spends twelve thousand pounds a year, and she is the first of her social class to employ liveried servants—she even has liveried chaise porters. There are prints of her everywhere. She is small and I don’t find her beautiful, but the English do and that is what matters.”

The notorious rivalry between Kitty Fisher and Lady Coventry, the former Mary Gunning, was a favorite source of social chitchat. “The other day they ran into each other in the park,” Giustiniana wrote to Andrea, trying to entertain him with some local color, “and Lady Coventry asked Kitty the name of the dressmaker who had made her dress. [Kitty Fisher] answered she had better ask Lord Coventry as he had given her that dress as a gift. Lady Coventry called her an impertinent woman; the other one answered that her marrying a nutty lord had put enough social difference between them that she would have to withstand the insult. But she was going to marry one herself just to be able to answer back to her.”

Giustiniana had arrived in London in early autumn determined to charm her way into the best houses of London. By November her enthusiasm was already flagging. There was so little going on in her life that she had to spice her letters to Andrea with secondhand anecdotes. As she waited for Lady Holderness to return from the country and rescue her, a feeling of futility took hold of her. She became more introspective. Her life was so unsettled now, so uncertain; that she missed Andrea was one of the few certainties. She felt the emptiness every day. Brief trips to pick up his letters at the Venetian Embassy were her only joy. But each one of those journeys also brought more confusion. “You are still more precious to me than anything else in the world, and you always will be,” she wrote tenderly. “. . . But I am so unsure about everything. And do you know why this is? Because I still love you horribly.”

The prospect of another round of husband hunting was suddenly very dispiriting. During those long, rainy autumn days, she wondered for the first time whether a husband was necessary at all. How “convenient” could a marriage of convenience really be? Could she not find a better way to live? Perhaps it had to do with her character, she mused, perhaps with the way she had lived her life so far—but it occurred to her that she had come to value her independence more than the security that might come with a good marriage. Surely an income of her own, even a small one, would give her the freedom she needed to shape her life. “You want me to find a duke or an earl,” she complained to Andrea. “. . . I believe I want none of that. . . . A husband is a nasty thing.”

Holed up in Holderness’s guest house, Giustiniana explored alternatives to marriage. One solution was to invest the small inheritance she had received from her father—fifteen hundred pounds—in order to generate an income she could live on instead of using that sum as a dowry. She admitted that such an arrangement might force her to live more modestly than was her taste: “I hate mediocrity . . . and I am not virtuous enough to live well in a lesser rank.” But at least she would no longer feel hostage to the imperative of a “good” marriage. There was no doubt in her mind that her future would feel less uncertain. In that sense, she would certainly “improve her condition.”

She pictured Andrea raising his eyebrows as he read her letter in the privacy of his room at Ca’ Memmo. His protestations, she warned him, were not going to stop her: “You will scold me, of course, but I have already written to Paris to gather information. I understand that interest rates are much higher there. I will live here for the time being, and I shall have my seat at Court if I choose to wait long enough. And if I get bored I’ll move back to France, unless of course you should ask me to rush back to Venice.”