A Venetian Affair (22 page)

He returned from Holland a hero. During his absence, however, Bernis had been removed from power. Casanova went to see him the day he returned to Paris. “You have performed miracles,” his old friend told him. “Now go and be adored.”
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It was that night, when Casanova went to bask in acclaim at the Comédie Italienne, that he saw Mrs. Anna and Giustiniana waving at him. Surprised by the warmth of their greeting, he went over to their box “at once” and promised to visit them the next day at their hotel. The sight of Giustiniana, fully grown and beaming in the lights of the theater, stirred his old yearning. “She looked like a goddess,” he wrote decades later, an old man hunched over his desk in the castle of Dux. “After a sleep of five years my love [awoke] again with an increase in power equal to that which the object before my eyes had gained in the same period.”
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In early January the Wynnes left the Hôtel d’Anjou. Mrs. Anna felt it had become “too noisy and crowded,” and she didn’t like the way the innkeeper tried to meddle in their family affairs, with her indiscreet queries and her unsolicited advice. They moved to the Hôtel de Hollande, just around the corner, in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. Casanova was among the first to visit them in their new lodgings, and he quickly made a habit of stopping by. “He is with us every day even though his company does not please me, and I don’t think these visits are in our interest,” Giustiniana complained to Andrea. “He has a carriage and lackeys and is attired resplendently. He has two beautiful diamond rings, two tasteful pocket watches, snuffboxes set in gold, and always plenty of lace. He has gained admittance, I don’t know how, to the best Parisian society. He says he has a stake in a lottery in Paris and brags that this gives him a large income. . . . He is quite full of himself and stupidly pompous. In a word, he is unbearable. Except when he speaks of his escape, which he recounts admirably.”

Ambassador Erizzo strongly disapproved of these visits— Casanova was a Venetian fugitive, after all. Quite apart from the requirements of his office, the ambassador felt a deep aversion for the man and an even deeper distrust. He warned Mrs. Anna about the corrupting influence Casanova would have on her daughters and sons. She listened to Erizzo, and her old wariness gradually resurfaced, but Casanova was so persistent it was hard to keep him at a distance. The other Venetian in their circle, the poet Farsetti, had a strong dislike for Casanova as well. His feelings for Giustiniana, however, were even stronger, so he took his
merenda
(afternoon meal) every day at the Hôtel de Hollande with the Wynnes, even if it meant he had to sit through Casanova’s performances.

The two men irritated each other to no end. Casanova flirted incessantly and played to the gallery with elaborate accounts of his adventures that kept everyone spellbound—especially the two boys, Richard and William, who stared at him with envy and growing admiration.
¹⁶
Farsetti meanwhile sipped his chocolate and looked on in disapproval. “I think Farsetti is a little in love with me,” Giustiniana confessed to Andrea, begging him not to gossip about it with their friends in Venice. “He grows pale when he sees me, he shakes when we are alone, but he has yet to make me laugh.” Farsetti held her attention by bringing daily assurances that the invitation to the house of Monsieur de La Pouplinière, which he had promised, was imminent. He also brought his “little poems and plays” in the hope of softening Giustiniana’s heart. “But I don’t tell him whether I find them good or bad . . . and if he doesn’t deliver on his promise, I shall treat him harshly.”

A few days later her patience with Farsetti was rewarded. “It is arranged at last,” she wrote to her lover and accomplice. “I am going to La Pouplinière’s this evening with the rest of the family.”

The old
fermier général
was indeed, as Andrea had assured Giustiniana, one of the richest men in Paris, having raked in millions of francs by collecting taxes for the king. He lived in a splendid house on the rue de Richelieu and owned a country estate at Passy, just outside Paris. Chamber music had become his passion, and the exquisite concerts he hosted every Saturday were favorite rendezvous of Parisian society. The playwright Jean-François Marmontel, a frequent guest, later wrote that the house was always filled with the sound of music: “The players lived there. During the day they prepared in beautiful harmony the symphonies they executed in the evening. And the best actors and singers and dancers of the Opera were there to embellish the dinner parties.”
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Now sixty-six years old, semiretired, and still recovering from an illness that had nearly killed him two years earlier, La Pouplinière had lost much of his joie de vivre. Ten years had passed since he had banished his beautiful wife in the wake of the infamous
scandale de la cheminée.
Yet he had never forgotten her, and obviously she had not forgotten him. When he had fallen ill she had returned to Paris to nurse him, even though she herself was already ravaged by cancer. In the end he survived and she did not. A year after her death he still carried the burden of her loss.

During the years of his wife’s banishment, La Pouplinière had had a succession of mistresses. When he was finished with them he would either pay them off, take them in, marry them off, or a combination of all three. It was the job of M. de Maisonneuve, who was half secretary, half pimp, to take care of the arrangements. In the meantime, this peculiar mix of promiscuity and generosity had caused the large house at rue de Richelieu to evolve into the strangest ménage, where musicians, mistresses past and present, and members of the family all lived together in a rather poisonous atmosphere.

The doyenne of La Pouplinière’s mistresses was Mme de Saint Aubin, a former singer and musician who ruled over the household “like an old sultana,” as Giustiniana put it. La Pouplinière had long since ceased to love her, but he did not have the strength to send this crafty and rather domineering woman away. She had become an accomplished hostess, having taught herself how to organize a good concert and an elegant dinner, and the old man depended on her to run his crowded house. When she raised hell—which she often did—he simply raised her income.

Mme de Saint Aubin’s major enemies in the house were M. and Mme de Courcelles, La Pouplinière’s brother-in-law and his pretty young wife, who occupied a large apartment in the house with their daughter, Alexandrine. The Courcelles were allied with the Zimmermans—he a retired Swiss Guard, she the former Sophie Mocet, La Pouplinière’s most recent mistress—and had the backing of La Pouplinière’s scheming nephews. M. de Maisonneuve, on the other hand, was in the camp of Mme de Saint Aubin, together with the latest entry in the household, Emmanuel-Jean de La Coste, a seedy-looking former Celestine monk who had escaped from his monastery some years earlier and run off to Holland with a girl and a bag of stolen diamonds. He had returned to France and lived by doing small spying jobs for the government. In Paris he had crossed paths with Casanova and tried to swindle him for a thousand écus worth of lottery tickets. When that had failed, he had managed to worm his way into La Pouplinière’s household and, through flattery and favors, had become his close adviser.

The challenge of seducing a rich old man who stubbornly refused to remarry and over whom so many Parisian women were fighting appealed to Giustiniana’s vanity. She had done her home-work, and she knew she was stepping onto a treacherous stage. But she also knew her strengths—her charm, her vivacity, her youth— and a part of her was eager to test them outside her usual circle of Russian and Venetian friends. “Who knows?” she gamely wrote to Andrea. “In the end, for the sake of doing you a favor, I might succeed in moving him more than all these other women have.”

The long-sought-after invitation also made her deeply apprehensive. This was not entirely a game; it was a scheme that could change her life forever. She knew herself well enough to foresee that once she started, she would probably play her hand to the end. The seduction of Consul Smith had been a similar proposition, but then she had had Andrea to back her up. Now she was alone, on unfamiliar terrain, facing a cast of complete strangers.

She was also three years older—wiser, perhaps, but also a little more oppressed by the sense of time passing quickly by:

Ah, Memmo, tell me where those happy hours have gone?
Where are you, my true heart? . . . When will your head and your
heart be joined to mine? If only you knew how much I love you
and how unhappy I am! Nothing moves in my heart anymore
unless I think of you. I shall soon be twenty-two years old, and
you know what it means for a woman to be twenty-two. . . . Half
my life, or in any case half of the better part of life, has gone by.
How have I lived it? . . . Only you know everything about my
life, and I would be so happy if it could end with you. Farewell,
my Memmo. I shall never be happy if I cannot join you somewhere, somehow. Love me as hard as you can, and remember your
truest and most unhappy friend. Farewell, I embrace you a thousand times.

It took Giustiniana less than a month to ensnare La Pouplinière. These are the accounts she gave Andrea of her success:

Paris, January
22

Mon cher frère, . . . I went to La Pouplinière’s on Monday. . . . There was quite
a crowd, and the master of the house was very sweet with us. The
concert he gave was in our honor, and I must say it was the best
orchestra in the world. I have never heard a better cello or a better
oboe. The
hautbois des forêts
and the clarinets—wind instruments that are not much used in our parts—are admirable. I
praised with honesty, I hope I praised with grace. I looked at him
with great composure, and I never spoke excessively, though I
could have spoken more. He in turn praised the precision with
which I judged what I heard and what I saw; I am told he never
pays this kind of compliment. With great courtesy he invited us to
the regular Saturday concert. What do you say of my beginning?
But enough of this. . . . It is too early to justify your hopes. . . .
Farsetti came to see us on Tuesday and stayed all day. He brought
me a book of French ariettas. . . . I spent a good deal of time learning
a few of them well: if I want to please the old man, I will have to
have him ask me to hum a few French songs.

Paris, January
29

Mon cher frère,

. . . Saturday I went to the great concert at La Pouplinière’s
and there were lots of people. He was rude to everyone but very
sweet with me and invited me for dinner on Wednesday. Let
me handle this, but you must be patient. . . . Would you believe
how many compliments I received at La Pouplinière’s on Saturday? Two ladies sent the ambassador of Naples here to tell
me a thousand things. . . . I will wait for you here: we shall
live together whatever way we may. Do you have the courage for
that? . . . Come laugh with me about all these crazy people. . . .
And don’t stop loving me, my heart.

Paris, February
12

Mon cher frère,

Listen: I have many things to tell you. I see my luck approaching; but since your insistence has brought me to where I am, I
want your advice to count. My dearest friend, my heart and my
soul are always with you. . . . I stayed home until Wednesday,
when I had dinner at La Pouplinière’s. There I noticed that my
innocent e forts had touched his heart because his attentions
toward me were considerable. . . . Friday he paid us a visit, a
favor he never bestows, and Saturday we went out to Passy with a
huge crowd. It is a large house, beautiful and full of those comforts that are so scarce in Italy and that you are so fond of. It is
divided into small apartments, with a splendid
salon.
We walked
in the garden, which is even more beautiful than the house but not
very green. We left Passy, and we had lunch at his house in Paris
around one o’clock. So many attentions! . . . In short: he told me
he did not want me to go to London under any circumstances,
saying he would die at the thought that I should leave him; he
asked me to stay in his house, provided I was willing to live with
his sister-in-law here in Paris, and promised he would make me
happy. You can imagine how little I liked his proposition; but we
must see where it leads. . . . One must raise the stakes and then be
willing to take half. So I mentioned a few problems, but I did not
say no. . . . He is an extremely generous man. . . . What I fear,
though, is his passion for arranging marriages. He has a nephew
who looks like a
chaise
porter. . . . I’d rather marry the old man.
What do you think? Would I be fulfilling your project with
honor? Enough: you can trust me. . . . The next day his secretary
came to see me, and after lengthy preambles he said he was sure
his master wouldoffer me a life annuity of between eight and ten
thousand francs and his house to live in if I stayed in Paris. You
can imagine my surprise! And my answer! I pretended I did not
believe the proposition came from his master, whose sensitive way
of thinking I went on to praise, even though I knew perfectly well
that it did. I pointed out to him in the most delicate manner that
perhaps he did not realize the kind of person I was or my station in
life, and at that I let the matter drop, though I did mention, in
passing, that if I wished to marry the way an honest girl like
myself should, I hoped that good and noble proposals would not
be lacking in my father’s country. We’ll see what e fect these
words will have. . . . Meanwhile, I’m rather happy with myself,
and I hope you are as well. . . . I hope I’m being clear despite the
rush with which I’m writing you; but since you know my heart I’m
sure you understand me perfectly. . . . Farewell, love me. All the
handsome men I see are not worth your little finger.