A Venetian Affair (29 page)

The five-day visit to the country turned out to be even more dreadful than Giustiniana had anticipated: “I was bored to death. Imagine a crowd of pompous councillors and self-important English barristers. The horror!” The food was lousy and the company unspeakably dull. She was forced to escape to the garden so many times that she caught her first English cold.

In late November Lady Holderness finally came to town, to the immense relief of the three Wynne sisters. She immediately invited them over to take a good look at the young Venetian girls her busy husband had entrusted to her care. There followed a more formal invitation to her first “assembly” of the season.

Lady Holderness was an attractive woman of about forty, with a pleasant manner and a warm smile. Giustiniana was touched “by her ladyship’s goodness.” She found her “still beautiful and very charming”—the sort of woman only “a truly fickle man or else a husband could ever tire of.” There was an advantage, she explained to Andrea, to being shown in society by such a fine lady: “I hear there is great impatience to see Bettina; and we are expected to make a charming impression.” They had waited around the house for too long, but there was some compensation in hearing that “the country is curious in the extreme to see us, including the princesses, who have been asking about us.”

There was a good deal of wishful thinking in all this. London society was terribly stuffy and exclusive—far more than Paris society—and it was not about to swing its doors wide open to the Wynne girls. True, there was some curiosity about them, especially Giustiniana. “There is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be handsomer than my Lady Coventry,” Horace Walpole wrote to a friend with anticipation. But it was the sort of curiosity reserved for the amusing and the vaguely exotic. Even Walpole was mindful that a different young beauty threatened Lady Coventry at the end of every summer “and they are always addled by winter.”
⁷

A year had passed since Lady Montagu had sent her acidulous missive to her daughter, Lady Bute, whose influence in society was rising in tandem with that of her husband in politics. Now it was Lady Bute’s turn to regale her mother with unflattering reports on the Wynnes in action. And Lady Montagu, sitting in her rented
palazzo
in Venice, made it sound as if she could not wait for the next installment of her favorite saga: “I am very much diverted with the adventures of the Three Graces lately arrived in London. . . . I am heartily sorry their mother has not learning enough to write memoirs.”
⁸

Giustiniana’s initial burst of excitement at the prospect of going out in the world soon exhausted itself as she attended a string of “boring dinners” and “unbearable assemblies.” She spared Andrea the details of these tedious evenings for fear of “passing my distaste on to you.” With one partial exception: her evening at the home of Lady Northumberland, the most celebrated London hostess. Thanks to Lady Holderness, the Wynne sisters had received the coveted invitation. This time Giustiniana was suitably impressed by the grandeur of the scene. “The house is very large, magnificent, richly lit up and one can see the most beautiful paintings,” she conceded. But she went on to describe herself wandering among a tired and aimless crowd. There were at least a thousand people at Northumberland House that night: “Some of them played cards out of sheer duty, others ambled distractedly, and everyone was bored. I was certainly in that number. . . . What was the use of hearing people say how pretty we were or clap their hands at a curtsey only less clumsy than those one ordinarily sees here?”

The only episode worth mentioning at all occurred in the picture gallery, where she suddenly came face to face with a celebrated Titian painting depicting an illustrious Venetian family.
¹⁹
It produced something of a shock. The contrast between the vague familiarity of the scene on the large canvas and those unfriendly surroundings unleashed a rush of nostalgia for the world she had left behind. Still, even a very good painting was not enough to fill an evening. “By misfortune I was unable to have a carriage until midnight.”

Giustiniana began to turn down invitations, something she had rarely done before, whether in London, Paris, or Venice. “I go out very little in public so as to preserve the applause for my sisters,” she joked. As she had predicted, the “applause” was going mostly to Bettina, now the most admired of the three sisters. Lady Montagu, hardly a fan of the Wynnes, had conceded even before they had left Venice that Bettina was likely to blossom into a paragon of Hanoverian beauty. She was tall, she said, “and as red and white as any German alive. If she has sense enough to follow good instructions she will be irresistible.”
⁹

Occasionally, Giustiniana attended a
conversazione
—a rather large assembly where there was, in fact, very little conversation. As many as a hundred ladies would gather in one of the better houses of London, with the odd gentleman in attendance, invariably “old or blind or loud.” Giustiniana was freer to move around than she had been in other more formal occasions, but even these events she found tedious and suffocating. Few ladies were interested in speaking to her, and those who deigned to address her were not particularly friendly. “One ends up speaking only to people one knows, and the people one knows tend to spend their time at the gambling tables like almost everyone else.” Giustiniana felt more and more alienated: “One is made to feel so isolated in this grand society. What a life!” She was especially disappointed by the lack of warmth and solidarity between women: “You cannot imagine the degree to which [they] are malicious. Friendship does not exist among them. . . . I could never become a friend of any of them, and so I treat everyone well and pay many compliments.”

In her letters she went out of her way to make her London life sound dreary and wasteful: “I don’t go to the park so as not to die of cold . . . I read . . . I eat . . . I sleep a lot.” There was no point in fretting about what dress to wear at Court, she groused, because Holderness confirmed that there were still no seats available for them. The damp London weather did not help raise her spirits: she spent half her time in bed nursing head colds that never seemed to end: “I am so congested I cannot stand it anymore. . . . This damned climate is damaging my health. . . . It is more unpredictable than Giustiniana herself.” But there was no use blaming the rain, she added wistfully. The ennui that was sapping her energy “has more to do with my nature than with the climate.”

In fact, Giustiniana was not being entirely truthful when she depicted herself as a depressed stay-at-home who spent her time curled up in bed, writing to her long-lost lover in Venice and pining for his replies. She had met, through the Holdernesses, a handsome young man who came calling on her at Dean Street and found, to her own surprise, that his pleasing manner and his sensitive nature were beginning to warm her heart.

Giustiniana’s new admirer was Baron Dodo Knyphausen, a brilliant Prussian diplomat who was thirty years old—the same age as Andrea.
²⁰
George Townshend drew a couple of sketches of him that are now at the National Gallery; in them he appears as a smartly dressed young man with thin legs, a pointed nose, a broad forehead, and strands of curly hair combed straight back.

Knyphausen had been in London little more than a year but had immediately been very much at the center of things, with easy access to the highest reaches of government as well as the most elegant houses in London. Frederick the Great held him in very high regard: he had named him Prussian ambassador to Paris when he was only twenty-four. In France, Knyphausen had demonstrated his considerable skills in the complicated diplomatic game that had preceded the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, and his dispatches had been instrumental in paving the way for the alliance between Prussia and Great Britain. When war broke out, Frederick saw him as the ideal man to nurture the relationship with the British ally. The baron arrived in London as Frederick’s special envoy in 1758 and developed a close working relationship with William Pitt, the principal advocate of the war. By the time he met the Wynnes, he had already negotiated three contracts for British war subsidies to Prussia.

Giustiniana was flattered by the visits of such a coveted young man. “All the ladies want him,” she assured Andrea when she told him about Knyphausen. “He is the only fashionable man in England.” It was not just the sudden gratification of male attention that drew her to him. She was intrigued by this thoughtful, introspective man with whom she could carry on a conversation that ranged beyond the niceties of social chitchat. As the weeks passed she caught herself thinking about him more and more; waiting for him to appear and brighten up the day. He too reminded her of Andrea, though in a deeper way than had the frivolous Count de Lanoy in Brussels at the end of the summer: “I find myself busy thinking about a man who not only resembles you physically but also has a similar character. . . . That is why I find him so special and why I like him so. . . . Will you forgive me this new friendship? Oh, if only you knew how much he is worthy of it.”

Giustiniana grappled with these new feelings without quite knowing what to make of them. This was very different from willfully seducing an old man; different, too, from flirting gaily behind a Carnival mask. There was no room for coquetry here. Part of her wanted to give in to the new stirrings she felt inside her, yet after all that she had been through in Venice, and then in Paris, she was wary of more emotional strain. She was also confused: “I don’t even know if what I feel for him is love or respect. . . . I tremble at the idea of giving myself over to a passion. I fear passion. I try to convince myself that I should always preserve the will of reason. I already worry about the future, and I am fragile and I am anxious.”

As she ventured out cautiously on this new journey, she realized she wanted to have Andrea by her side. She would describe her feelings to him. She would take him along step by step. “Do not reproach me for this new folly,” she pleaded. “For heaven’s sake, be indulgent and charitable in the face of a weakness that in the beginning came about because of you.”

Soon Knyphausen was stopping by the Wynnes’ “every evening at the hour of the
conversazione.
” He showed Giustiniana “a thousand concerns, a thousand attentions,” but he was careful not to raise suspicions in the house by expressing “too evident a preference” for her. His assiduity kept her enthralled, to the point that she once forgot to post her weekly letter to Andrea. “I know my Memmo will forgive me,” she wrote apologetically the following week, “for an involuntary sin. The mail day was taken up with my new Memmo, whom I believe I love with a good heart and who gives me no reason to complain or wish for anything better. . . . If what keeps me so occupied is but a passing fancy, I would to heaven that all my previous ones had been grounded in such respectable foundations. Each day I find this man to be worthier of my esteem. I have for him the same kind of respect I have felt only for you in all my life.”

Soon Giustiniana and Knyphausen were also seeing each other “in secret, one, two, three times a week.” They talked for hours, confiding in each other, testing each other, stretching the bounds of their new friendship. They were drawn together by the ease, the subdued joy they felt in each other’s company, more than by physical attraction. “Respect and compassion are what our friendship is built upon,” she told Andrea.

Knyphausen had only recently recovered from his own painful love affair. For many years he had been secretly in love with a young and beautiful lady whose reputation had been sullied by “a thousand weaknesses”—most especially a severe gambling addiction. A young baronet had then come along and offered his hand, and she had accepted without telling him about her debts. Though not rich, Knyphausen had stepped in to pay them and thus save her reputation. He had also paid for the wedding, as the baronet had not yet come into his inheritance, and kept his grief to himself. “He wept, he was in great despair, but he no longer saw this woman.”

Giustiniana felt that Knyphausen was a kindred spirit. He was curious about her life without being censorious. He showed understanding, he was sensitive, and above all, he listened. And she was grateful to have someone she could count on to talk to without fear of exposure. At last she had found a refuge in the frosty landscape of London society. Knyphausen gave her comfort and made her smile. She told him what she could about her life in Venice, her great journey across Europe, her adventures in Paris. Andrea loomed large over their long conversations. He had been the love of her life, she told Knyphausen. Now, she reassured him, he was a very close friend—her
cher ami.

They continued their clandestine meetings. The only other person who was certain of their relationship was Andrea himself, the silent partner who, for all we can guess, seems to have been more curious than jealous. “Nobody knows anything about my involvement,” Giustiniana assured him. “. . . There is barely a suspicion in my own house.” She and Knyphausen had no compelling reason to behave so secretively. Neither was married, neither was officially involved with anyone else. Yet for all their intimacy they still circled around each other with a lingering hesitancy, still unsure of themselves as much as each other. Secrecy, one feels, suited both of them.

Giustiniana reverted quite naturally to some of her old Venetian ways in order to deceive her mother and meet Knyphausen on the sly. She told Andrea about her frequent escapades so she could, in a sense, share the thrill with her old accomplice. She boasted, for example, of the time she wangled an invitation to lunch at some friends’ house a couple of miles outside London. As soon as she arrived at the house she promptly took leave of her hosts, explaining that pressing business called her back to town. But instead of going home to Dean Street, she went directly to see Knyphausen, who lived just a few streets away: “He was busy with a government minister, from whom he took his leave. He put on a coat and left the house on foot. I followed him from a distance until we reached a little house he had at his disposal, and we walked in. We lunched, and a bottle of champagne put us in such an intimate mood that we shared our secrets and commiserated with each other until we were both crying. What a happy state it would have been if that mutual trust, that familiarity, had lasted longer! But he doesn’t trust me entirely, nor do I trust him.”