were suppressed, but the only result was that a new class of
gaming-houses came into existence called Casini, which were much worse
in character than the old establishments. Ruined nobles borrowed
enormous sums from usurers, and even from plebeians, sharing the
winnings with the lender when successful, and being entirely at his
mercy if they lost. Some women kept private Casini of their own, to
which they invited
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult._]
men and women; and while they played at Pharaoh, Basset, and Biribissi
within, the gondoliers played Morra at the landing outside.
Venice slept little, and was devoured day and night by the fever of
pleasure. The lighting of the city
[Illustration: THE SALUTE FROM THE RIVA]
was paid for by the proceeds of the lotto, which had been introduced in
1734. Goldoni says that the shops were always open until ten o’clock
[Sidenote: _Goldoni, vol. i. chap. xxxv._]
at night, while a great many did not close till midnight, and some never
shut at all. In Venice, he continues, you would find eatables exposed
for sale at midnight exactly as at midday, and all the eating-houses
were open. It was not the custom to give many dinners or suppers in
Venetian society, but a few such occasions have remained famous, and the
invited guests appear to have behaved with as little restraint as if
they had been in a common eating-house. A certain noble, of the Labia
family, once gave a supper at which he showed all his finest plate, and
the guests could not refrain from admiring the magnificent chiselled
pieces of gold and silver that covered the table. Suddenly, as the
gaiety increased, the master of the house jumped up and began to throw
the plates and dishes through the open windows into the canal,
accompanying this mad proceeding with one of the worst puns ever made in
the Italian
[Sidenote: _Tassini, under ‘Labia.’_]
language, or rather in the Venetian dialect: ‘L’abia o non l’abia, sarò
sempre Labia’--the words mean, ‘Whether I have it or not I shall always
be Labia.’
The conditions of married life in the decadence were such amongst the
nobles that it is best not to inquire too closely as to what went on. In
[Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 303; Mutinelli, Ult. 86._]
a great number of cases husband and wife were like strangers to each
other, and the children were utterly neglected, when there were any.
When divorce becomes common, the family, which is the first of social
institutions, soon ceases to exist, and no country has ever shown
vitality or long endurance where society was not based on the relations
of father, mother, and children to each other. There never was any
divorce law in Italy, but there was, and is, such a thing as the
annullation of marriage. In Venice, between 1782 and 1796, the Council
of Ten registered two hundred and sixty-four applications for
annullation, and the great part of them were admitted.
As generally happens when a form of government is exhausted and is about
to go to pieces, the Venetian
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 71._]
people retained ideas of morality longer than the wealthy burghers or
the worn-out nobility; the wives of the artisans necessarily lived more
at home than their richer sisters, and were generally able to keep their
husbands. The love of pleasure was too universal to admit of excepting a
whole class from its influence, and to the last the working people seem
to have been very prosperous under the old government; but their
amusements were harmless and their pleasures innocent compared with
those of the upper thousands. The women of the people organised their
diversions with a good deal of system, forming groups among themselves,
each of which had a presidentess and a treasuress, who collected the
subscriptions, kept the money in safety, and made out the accounts when,
at intervals, the little fund was drawn upon for excursions and parties
of pleasure, to which men were not invited.
On the morning of one of those appointed days, the women and girls met
at the landing from which they were to start, all dressed very much
alike. Those who belonged to the class of the better artisans wore a
rather dark cotton skirt, a blouse of scarlet cloth, a chintz apron with
a design of large flowers, and lastly, a white linen kerchief called the
‘niziol,’ which was to them what the black ‘cendal’ was to the Venetian
ladies; and from ‘niziol’ the word ‘nizioleto’ was formed, like
‘cendaleto,’ and meant a pretty woman or girl of the people. Of course,
when they met for a day’s pleasure they wore whatever ornaments they
possessed.
The women of the poorest class wore over the dark skirt a very wide
apron which covered it entirely when let down, but which they pulled up
over their heads like a sort of hood when they went out.
The fathers, husbands, and brothers of the women came with them as far
as the boat, but left them then, as the people would have thought it
highly
[Sidenote: _Rom. ix. 18._]
improper that decent women should amuse themselves in the company of the
other sex. Yet for their protection two elderly men of unexceptionable
character went with them, as well as the necessary rowers, and it was a
common practice to be rowed about for a time before leaving the city,
singing songs together.
The principal diversions of the day were the picnic, which was a solid
affair, a dance, generally the country ‘villotta,’ accompanied by the
singing of couplets, and the return to Venice in the boat, illuminated
with festoons of little coloured lanterns. At the landing they parted,
dividing what was left of the provisions, lest anything should be lost,
and no doubt each good wife did her best to bring home a few titbits for
the men of her household, if only to make them envy her for being a
woman. I find no record of what the men did with themselves on picnic
days, but it must have been very quiet in the house, and they may have
felt that there were compensations even for being left at home.
Another time of gaiety was the evening after a regatta. Then the houses
of the winners were decked with garlands of green, and the doors were
open to every friend; the silk flag, which was the token of victory, was
hung in a conspicuous place for all visitors
[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Nuovi Studi, 318._]
to admire, and when it grew late they all sat down to a plentiful
supper, which on those occasions generally consisted principally of
several dishes of fish washed down with copious draughts of the island
wine. The last homes of Venice, in any real sense, were the homes of the
working people.
Life in the country did little to bring the members of a noble family
nearer together, but there was a good deal of it, such as it was. At a
time when France set the fashions, which she was before long to impose
on the greater part of Europe, every rich Venetian noble dreamt of
making a little Versailles of his own villa. The residences of the
Marcello, the Corner, the Gradenigo, the Foscarini, and the Pisani, on
the road to Treviso and on the banks of the Brenta, were so many little
courts, in which every element was represented from the sovereign to the
parasite, from the parasite to the buffoon, and the lesser nobles
imitated the greater throughout a scale which descended from the sublime
to the ridiculous. The villas themselves were often decorated by the
greatest artists. In the hall of the Pisani’s country-house at Strà, for
instance, Tiepolo had painted a wonderful picture representing the
reception of Henry III. in Venice.
In going from the city to the villas, people went by water as far as it
was possible, and each family had a sort of light house-boat for this
purpose,
[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Ult. 112, 116._]
called a ‘burchiello,’ and fitted with all possible comfort. The
travellers dined and supped sumptuously on board, and spent most of
their time in playing cards; and when the end of the journey was reached
a long round of pleasures and amusements began, in which the ‘cicisbei’
played an important and, one would think, a terribly fatiguing part.
They were assisted by regular relays of parasites who were invited for a
few days at a time, and who were expected to pay with ready flattery and
story-telling for the hospitality they received.
Eating then played a much larger part in what was called pleasure than
we moderns can well understand. We are ourselves no great improvement
[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Vita Priv._]
on our fathers, in respect of manly virtue, faith in things divine, or
honesty when it does not happen to be the best policy; but as an age of
men we are not greedy of food. The Venetians were. Not only did they
employ French cooks and spend much time in considering what things to
eat, but their dinners were so interminably long, and the courses they
ate were so numerous, that they found it convenient to use three
dining-rooms in succession for the same meal, the first being for the
soup and the beef, the second for the roast meats and vegetables, and
the third for the pudding and dessert.
The Venetians were near their end when they ceased to be men of business
and turned into gamblers and spendthrifts. All this extravagance,
especially in the country, led to financial embarrassment at the end of
the season; and in order to satisfy the creditors who then appeared in
force, it was necessary to rackrent the peasants or to sell property and
produce at ruinous prices. In one of his comedies Goldoni makes a ruined
nobleman say again and again to his steward, ‘Caro vecchio, fè vu’--‘My
dear old man, manage it yourself.’ The expression was so true to life
that not one but a number of nobles complained to the government that
they were being publicly libelled by a playwright.
Everything was in a state of decay already approaching ruin. When the
Princess Gonzaga came to Venice
[Sidenote: _Archivio Stor. Ital. fourth series, vol. xvi. p. 180._]
she had such an abominable reputation that no Venetian lady had the
courage to present her to the society of the capital. At last, however,
the Signora Tron, the wife of a procurator of Saint Mark, offered to do
so. She introduced the Princess with these historic words: ‘Ladies,
this is the
[Illustration: RIO DELLA TORESELA]
Princess Gonzaga. She belongs to an illustrious family. As for the
rest, I will not answer for her, nor for you, nor for myself.’
She was wise in refusing to answer for herself, at all events, for she
was accused of setting a higher price on
[Sidenote: _Horatio Brown, Sketches._]
her box at the theatre than on herself. ‘That is true,’ she answered,
‘for I sometimes give myself for nothing.’
It is comprehensible that where great ladies talked like this, a burgher
dame should have put up her
[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 82._]
daughter’s honour at a lottery, for which the tickets were sold at a
sequin, about fifteen shillings, each.
The decadence was turning into final degeneration, and everything morbid
was hailed with enthusiasm.
[Sidenote: _Carrer, Annali, 34._]
Two lovers committed suicide, for instance, and immediately
handkerchiefs were sold everywhere adorned with a death’s head in one
corner, and embroidered in the middle with the lovers’ initials
surrounded with stains of the colour of blood.
The average Venetian lady was at once ignorant and witty, yet here and
there one succeeded in cultivating her mind by reading and intercourse
with the famous foreigners who spent much time in Venice at the end of
the eighteenth century. Giustina Renier Michiel was undoubtedly the most
remarkable and admirable Venetian woman of her times. She was born in
1755, the daughter of Andrea Renier, afterwards Doge, and the niece of
Marco Foscarini. At the age of three she was sent to a convent of
Capuchin nuns at Treviso; at nine she was brought back to Venice and
placed in a fashionable boarding-school kept by a Frenchwoman, where
she learned French badly, and Italian not at all. But the girl was a
born bookworm, and even in her school succeeded in reading a vast number
of books, and in filling her girlish imagination with a vast store of
ideals. She naturally hated complication and prejudice, and aspired to
be simple and just. Like many women of independent mind, she could not
help associating dress with moral qualities and defects; and when she
was old enough to please herself, she always wore a long straight
garment of woollen or white linen, according to the season, and adorned
her beautiful hair with a crown of roses. Such a costume might surprise
us nowadays, but she loved flowers, and deemed that to wear them brought
her nearer to nature. If she was obliged to wear fashionable clothes for
some public occasion, she spoke of them as a disguise, and hastened to
‘take off her mask and domino,’ as she expressed it, as soon as she
reached home. ‘Molière may say that a Countess is certainly something,’
she wrote in French to a friend; ‘he should have written that a Countess
is very little, or a Count either!’ She often used to say: ‘I should
like to know why every one does not try to please me, since it would
take so little to succeed!’ One of her hobbies was not to give trouble,
and she pushed this admirable virtue so far that one day, when her frock
caught fire, she would not call any one, but rolled herself on the
carpet till the flames were extinguished.
She had a great admiration for the Cavalier Giustiniani, the same who
faced Bonaparte so bravely a few years later, but she did not marry him.
She is said to have been very beautiful, but short, a fact which
disturbed her unnecessarily, to judge by a note found in one of the
commonplace books in which she copied passages from her reading and
wrote out her own reflections. ‘A monarch who was rather famous in the
last century,’ she wrote with child-like simplicity, ‘forbade his
soldiers to marry short women; on the other hand, he rewarded them if
they married gigantic women. Can it be because people fear that short
women will turn out more mischievous than tall ones?’
At the age of twenty she was married to Marcantonio Michiel, and a few
months later she accompanied him to Rome, where her father, Andrea
Renier, was ambassador. She made a profound impression on Roman society,
and soon went by the name of ‘Venerina Veneziana,’ the little Venetian
Venus. In Rome she met the genial poet Monti, then very young, and
recommended to the Venetian ambassador by Cardinal Braschi. To fill her
idle hours, the industrious little lady studied engraving on wood.
Not long after her return from Rome her paternal uncle was elected Doge.
He was not a very estimable personage, and as he had married a dancer
whom the people refused to accept as the Dogess, his niece Giustina did
the honours of the ducal palace when occasion required.
In her early youth she began several literary works, among which a
rather inaccurate translation of some of Shakespeare’s plays has come
down to us. She was a literary personage, however, when still young, and
the drawing-rooms of the Palazzo Michiel were frequented by all that was
most distinguished in Venice, as well as by the best of the foreign
element. Giustina, like all women who succeed in gathering intellectual
people about them, encouraged the discussion of all sorts of subjects
from the broadest point of view. At that time she was slightly inclined
towards the new order of ideas, and boasted of being somewhat
democratic; but if this was true, it did not prevent her from sincerely
lamenting the fall of the Republic a few years later.
On the twelfth of May 1797, after the fatal session which ended the
history of Venice, a few nobles gathered at her house to mourn over the
sudden end. While they sat together, heavy-hearted and conversing in
broken sentences, they heard the rabble in the street below, howling at
those whom it called the assassins of Saint Mark. The little group
upstairs understood the danger, and after a moment’s silence Giustina
called upon them to save the city at least, if they could no longer save
the Republic. Her cousin Bernardino Renier was there, and was
temporarily charged with seeing to the safety of the city. The only
means he could think of for preventing pillage was violence, and he
swept the streets with artillery.
For a while Giustina cherished the vain hope that Bonaparte would help
Venice to rise from her ashes. That fact explains why she was willing to
receive in her house the handsome, fair-haired Marina Benzon, who
danced round the tree of liberty in the Square of Saint Mark’s with the
‘Carmagnola’ on her head, on the day that saw the Venetian flag replaced
by the Phrygian cap of liberty. It explains, too, why Giustina was in
[Sidenote: _1809._]
the square ten years later, when Napoleon came to Venice a second time.
It was a singular meeting enough.
When the Emperor was passing his troops in review in the square,
Bernardino Renier pointed out his cousin Giustina, who was in the crowd
looking on, and Napoleon at once sent two officers to bring her to him.
The story is that the Emperor planted himself before her with his arms
crossed and his legs apart.
‘What are you celebrated for?’ he asked roughly.
‘I, sire? Celebrated?’ cried the lady.
‘Yes, you. But to what do you owe your celebrity?’
‘To friendship, no doubt, which attributes to me an importance I do not
possess.’
‘What have you written?’ demanded the Emperor.
‘Little things not worth mentioning,’ answered Giustina.
‘Verse or prose?’
‘In prose, sire. I never was able to write a verse in my life.’
‘Ah, then you improvise, you improvise, do you?’
‘I wish I could, sire! for I should have an excellent opportunity to-day
of covering myself with glory!’
‘Come, what have you written?’ asked the Emperor impatiently.
‘A few translations.’
[Illustration: A NARROW STREET, NEAR THE ACADEMY]
‘Translations?’
‘Of tragedies,’ answered Giustina.
‘The tragedies of Racine, I suppose?’
‘I beg your majesty’s pardon, I have translated from the English.’
The eye-witnesses of this meeting say that when the Emperor received
this answer he turned on his heel and left the high-born lady standing
there.
The final state of Giustina’s mind was somewhat contradictory, for her
frankly democratic dreams had faded away, yet there remained an
unlimited indulgence for the most contradictory opinions which were
sometimes expressed in her presence, together with the greatest
indignation against those who judged Venice by modern standards, whether
they were Venetians or foreigners. She seemed to make it her duty to
prevent anything from disturbing the ghost of the defunct Republic.
When Chateaubriand made his first visit to Venice
[Sidenote: _1806._]
he had the bad taste to write an article in the _Mercure de France_,
from which I translate a few extracts:--
TRIESTE, July thirtieth, 1806.--In Venice there had just been
published a new translation of the _Génie du Christianisme_. This
Venice, unless I am mistaken, would please you as little as it
pleases me. It is a city against nature; one cannot take a step
without being obliged to get into a boat, or else one is driven to
go round by narrow passages more like corridors than streets! The
Square of St. Mark alone is by its general effect worthy of its
reputation. The architecture of Venice, which is almost altogether
Palladio’s, is too capricious and too varied; it is as if two or
three palaces were built one upon the other. And the famous
gondolas, all black, look like boats that carry coffins; I took the
first one I saw for a corpse on the way to burial. The sky is not
our sky beyond the Apennines. Rome and Naples, my dear friend, and
a bit of Florence, there you have all Italy. There is, however, one
remarkable thing in Venice, and that is the number of convents
built on the islands and reefs round the city, just as other
maritime cities are surrounded with forts which defend them; the
effect of these religious monuments seen at night over a calm sea
is picturesque and touching. There are a few pictures left by Paolo
Veronese, Titian....
Giustina was filled with indignation on reading these lines, which were
signed by an author whose sentimentalism had found an echo in her heart.
A lady who admired Foscolo’s _Jacopo Ortis_ would naturally be pleased
with the _Génie du Christianisme_. The attack on her beloved native city
seemed all the more unkind for that, and she hastened to reply in a long
letter written in French, which she published in Pisa in the _Giornale
dei Letterati_. She answered Chateaubriand categorically, concluding
with the following words:--
I know that you have promised to return here; come then, but come
in a mood less sad, in a spirit less weary, with feelings less
cold.... I do not flatter myself that you will exclaim with that
Neapolitan poet that Venice was built by the gods, but I hope at
least that you will find here something more interesting than the
convents on the islands and the translation of your works.
Giustina had been in her grave eighteen years when Chateaubriand
returned to Venice, with a spirit indeed less weary, and allowed
himself to grow enthusiastic, and wrote a beautiful description of the
city in his _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_.
At one time Napoleon ordered a species of inquiry to be made on the
following and similar questions:--What are the prejudices of the
Venetians? What are their political opinions? What are their dominant
tastes? The well-known and learned writers, Filiasi and Morelli, were
commissioned to answer these inquiries, but they refused on the ground
that such questions admitted no answer. Giustina’s interest and ambition
were roused at once, and during several weeks she worked hard at a book
on moral statistics which has never been published, but which, no doubt,
suggested to her the excellent work she afterwards produced on the
origin of Venetian feasts, a book which I have often quoted in these
pages. She worked at this with enthusiasm, bent on evoking in the minds
of future generations the memory of beautiful and touching ceremonies
long disused when the Republic fell. In that age which loved epithets
and classic parallels, the lady who had been nicknamed in Rome the
little Venetian Venus was now called the Venetian Antigone. Indeed, she
made it her business to defend Venice and Venetian history too. But as
she grew old her enthusiasm got the better of her, and she wrote such
terrible answers to people who made small mistakes that she could not
always get her articles printed. In particular, the tragedian Niccolini
published in 1827 a tragedy upon the story of Antonio Foscarini, in
which he held up the court that condemned and executed that innocent
man to execration, but by methods not honestly historical. Giustina was
now over seventy years of age, but she wrote such a furious article on
Niccolini’s play that no one dared to publish it.
She was fond of Englishmen, and called them the Swallows, because they
came back to Venice at regular intervals, and she used to say that
England seemed to her the sister of the ancient Republic of Venice. She
had known the Duke of Gloucester when he was a mere child, and when he
returned to Venice in 1816 his first visit was for her. I translate the
note she wrote in answer to his message announcing his visit:--
A message from H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester, delivered at the
theatre last night, and saying that he wished to honour the Michiel
with his presence, has filled her with lively exaltation. She much
desired to see him again. If H.R.H. had not become the great Prince
he is in virtue of his birth; if he were still that amiable little
boy whom she so often embraced, she would have let him know by this
time that she desired to embrace him affectionately. And indeed she
might have said so now, since the difference of ages is always the
same. Then he was a child and she was young and pretty; now he is
young and charming and she is a little old woman, and also somewhat
deaf. There might therefore still be the purest innocence in the
sweetest embrace. But setting aside this jesting, which is indeed
too familiar, H.R.H. will please to accept in advance the thanks of
Giustina Renier Michiel for the honour which he intends to do her
this evening, and she is impatiently awaiting that desired moment.