These same subjects – music and the opera – continued to occupy me during my convalescence, but less violently. After long and sometimes involuntary brooding I decided to explore the whole matter, and to try to compose an opera of my own, both the words and the music. It was not altogether my first attempt. At Chambéry I had written an operatic tragedy entitled Iphis and Anaxaretes, which I had been sensible enough to throw into the fire. At Lyons I had composed another, entitled The Discovery of the New World; and after reading it to M. Bordes, the Abbé de Mably, the Abbé Trublet and some others, I finally treated it in the same way, although I had already written the music of the prologue and the first act, which David had told me, when I showed it to him, contained passages worthy of Buononcini.
On this occasion, before setting to work I gave myself time to consider my plans. I sketched out an heroic ballet, treating three diffèrent subjects in three separate acts, each in its own style of music. Each subject dealt with the love of a poet, and I called the opera The Gallant Muses. My first act, in the grand manner, was given to Tasso; the second, which was tender in mood, to Ovid; the third, entitled ‘Anacreon’, was intended to breathe a dithyrambic gaiety. As a start, I tried myself out on the first act, and devoted myself to it so wholeheartedly that for the first time in my life I knew the delights of impetuous composition. One evening just as I was going into the opera house, I felt myself so racked and over-mastered by my ideas that I put my money back in my pocket, ran home, and shut myself in my room. When I had pulled all my curtains to cut out the light of day, I threw myself on the bed, and there, entirely abandoning myself to the poetic and musical gadfly, I composed the greater part of my act rapidly, in seven or eight hours. I may say that my love for the Princess of Ferrara – for I was the Tasso at that moment – and my proud and noble feelings when confronting her unjust brothers made my night a hundred times more delicious than if I had spent it in the arms of the princess herself. In the morning only a very small part of what I had composed remained in my head. But that little, almost obliterated by weariness and sleep, nevertheless testified to the vigour of that whole of which it was the remains.
This time I did not carry my work very far, for I was deflected by other matters. Whilst I was growing attached to the Dupin family, Mme de Beuzenval and Mme de Broglie – whom I continued to visit occasionally – had not forgotten me. The Count de Montaigu, a captain in the Guards, had just been made ambassador at Venice, which appointment he owed to Barjac,* to whom he paid assiduous court. His brother, the Chevalier de Montaigu, gentleman-in-waiting to the young Dauphin, was an acquaintance of these two ladies and of the Abbé Alary of the French Academy, whom I sometimes saw. Mme de Broglie knew that the ambassador was looking for a secretary and proposed me. We entered into negotiation. I asked for fifty louis† as salary, which was little enough for a post in which one has to keep up appearances. He offered me a hundred pistoles,† and I was to make the journey at my own expense. The proposal was ridiculous, and we could not come to terms. M. de Francueil, who was trying hard to keep me back, won the day. I stayed, and M. de Montaigu departed, taking with him a secretary named M. Follau, who had been given to him by the Foreign Office. As soon as they reached Venice they quarrelled. Follau saw that he was dealing with a madman, and left him there in the lurch. Then M. de Montaigu, having no one but M. de Binis, a young priest who wrote under the secretary’s instructions and was not capable of taking his place, had recourse to me. His brother, the Chevalier, a clever man, by giving me to understand that there were privileges going with the secretaryship, made me change my mind and accept the thousand francs. I received twenty louis for my journey, and set out.
1743–1744 At Lyons I should have liked to take the Mont-Cénis route, so that I could have visited my poor Mamma on the way. But I went down the Rhône and boarded a ship at Toulon, on account of the war and for the sake of economy, and also in order to get a passport from M. de Mirepoix, who was then Commander in Provence, and to whom I had a letter of introduction. M. de Montaigu could not get on without me, and sent me letter after letter to hurry me on my way. One incident kept me back.
It was the time of the plague at Messina. The English fleet, which had anchored there, inspected the felucca on which I was. On arriving at Genoa, therefore, after a long and tiresome voyage, we were subjected to a quarantine of twenty-one days. The passengers were given the choice of spending that period on board or in the lazaretto, in which we were warned that we should find nothing but the bare walls, for they had not yet had time to furnish it. Everyone else chose the felucca. But the unbearable heat, the confined space, the impossibility of taking exercise, and the vermin made me prefer the lazaretto at all costs. I was led into a large two-storied building, absolutely bare, in which I found neither window nor table nor bed nor chair, not even a stool to sit on, nor a bundle of hay on which to lie. They brought me my cloak, my travelling bag, and my two trunks; the great doors with their huge locks were shut upon me, and I was left at liberty to walk as I would from room to room and up and down stairs; and everywhere I found the same bare solitude.
All this did not make me sorry that I had chosen the lazaretto rather than the felucca. Like another Robinson Crusoe I started making arrangements for my twenty-one days, as if it were for my whole life. First I had the amusement of catching the fleas I had picked up in the felucca. When by a change of clothing and linen I had finally got rid of these, I went on to furnish the room which I had chosen for myself. I made myself a good mattress out of my waistcoats and shirts, some sheets from several napkins which I sewed together, a blanket out of my dressing-gown, and a pillow from rolling up my cloak. I made myself a chair out of one trunk laid flat, and a table from the other set on end. I took out some paper and an inkstand. I arranged the dozen books I had with me as a library. In short, I so managed things that except in the matter of curtains and windows I was almost as comfortable in that absolutely bare lazaretto as at my tennis court in the Rue Verdelet. My meals were served with grand ceremony. Two grenadiers with fixed bayonets acted as the escort; the staircase was my dining-room, the bottom stair served me as a seat; and when my dinner was served, they rang a bell as they retired, as a signal for me to sit down to table. Between my meals, when I was not reading or writing or attending to my furnishings, I used to walk in the Protestant cemetery, which served me as a courtyard, or climb a lantern which overlooked the port, and from which I could see the ships sail in and out. I spent fourteen days like this, and should have spent the whole twenty-one without a boring moment if M. de Jonville, the French ambassador, to whom I managed to send a letter, soaked in vinegar, perfumed and half burnt, had not got my period reduced by a week. I went to spend those days with him, and I was more comfortable, I admit, under his roof than lodging in the lazaretto. He was extremely kind to me; and Dupont, his secretary, was a good fellow. He took me to several houses, both at Genoa and in the country, where the company was quite amusing. I formed an acquaintance with him, and we started a correspondence which we kept up for quite a long time. Then I pleasantly pursued my way across Lombardy. I saw Milan, Verona, Brescia, and Padua, and finally reached Venice, where the ambassador was impatiently awaiting me.
I found piles of dispatches, both from the Court and from other embassies. He had not been able to read those that were in code, though he had all the necessary code books. Never having worked in an office of any sort, and never in my life having seen a ministerial cipher, I was first afraid that I might be at a loss. But I found that nothing could be simpler, and in under a week I had deciphered them all. They certainly were not worth the trouble; for not only is the Venetian embassy always fairly idle, but the ambassador was not the sort of man whom anyone would have entrusted with even the most trifling negotiations. He had been in a great fix until I arrived, for he could neither dictate nor write a legible hand. I was very useful to him, which he realized; and he treated me well. But he had another motive for doing so. After the retirement of his predecesso
r, M. de Froulay, who had gone out of his mind, M. Le Blond, the French Consul, had taken charge of the embassy business, and this he continued to manage, now that M. de Montaigu had arrived, until such time as he should have instructed the newcomer in the duties. Although he was himself incapable, M. de Montaigu could not bear anyone else to do his work, took a dislike to the consul, and, as soon as I arrived, deprived him of his functions as secretary to the embassy in order to give them to me. The title and the functions going together, he told me to assume the former as well, and so long as I remained with him he never sent anyone else in a secretarial capacity either to the Senate or to its Foreign Officer. And really it was quite natural that he should have preferred to have his own man as secretary to the embassy, rather than a consul or a clerk nominated by the Court.
This made my position a tolerably pleasant one, and prevented his gentlemen, who were Italians, as were his pages and the majority of his people, from disputing my precedence in the house. I successfully wielded the authority which went with my position, to maintain his rights of protection, that is to say the inviolability of his quarters against attempts which were frequently made to violate them. But on the other hand I did not allow thieves to seek sanctuary there, although advantages might have accrued to me thereby, of which his Excellency would not have declined his share
He even presumed to claim a part of the secretary’s fees, which are called the chancellery dues. Although we were at war, there was no lack of applications for passports, for each of which a sequin was paid to the secretary who drew it up and countersigned it. All my predecessors had collected this sequin from Frenchmen and foreigners alike. I considered the practice inequitable and, although not a Frenchman myself, abolished it in the case of the French. But I exacted my fee so rigorously from everyone else, that when the Marquis Scotti, the brother of the Queen of Spain’s favourite, sent a messenger to demand a passport without giving him my sequin I sent the man back to ask for it, a boldness which that vindictive Italian did not forget. As soon as the news got round that I had reformed the passport tax, my only applicants were crowds of pretended Frenchmen who claimed in abominable jargons to be either from Provence, Picardy, or Burgundy. As I have a fairly good ear I was not easily fooled, and I doubt whether a single Italian cheated me out of my sequin, or a single Frenchman paid it. I was stupid enough to tell M. de Montaigu, who knew nothing about anything, what I had done. The word sequin made him prick up his ears. He did not comment on my abolition of the fee for Frenchmen, but demanded that I should account to him for the others, promising me equivalent advantages in return. Indignant at this meanness, rather than actuated by self-interest, I proudly rejected his proposal. He persisted, and I grew warm. ‘No, sir,’ I said to him with some spirit, ‘let your Excellency keep what is yours and leave me what is mine. I will never hand you over a sou.’ Seeing that he would gain nothing by this means he tried another, and had the effrontery to say that since I drew the profits of the chancellery I ought to pay its expenses. I did not want to wrangle on this subject; and from that time I paid out of my own pocket for the ink, paper, wax candles, and ribbon, and even the seal, which I ordered to be repaired without his ever reimbursing me a farthing. This did not prevent me from giving a small part of the revenue from passports to the Abbé de Binis, a good fellow, who had never thought of making any claim to it. He was obliging to me, I acted honestly by him, and we always got along very well together.
When I began my duties I found them less difficult than I had feared they might be, for an inexperienced man working under an equally inexperienced ambassador, who, moreover, out of ignorance and obstinacy, seemed deliberately to thwart anything that common sense and a little intelligence showed me might be useful in his interest and the King’s. The most sensible thing he did was to ally himself with the Marquis de Mari, the Spanish ambassador, a skilful and subtle man, who could have led him by the nose if he had wished, but who, seeing the common interests of the two kingdoms, generally gave him good advice. But M. de Montaigu always spoilt things by adding some idea of his own when carrying dé Mari’s plans out. The one thing they had to do in common was to see that the Venetians maintained their neutrality, which they continually protested they were faithfully doing, whilst all the time openly providing the Austrian troops with munitions and even with recruits, who posed as deserters. M. de Montaigu, I believe, wanted to curry favour with the Republic and therefore, despite my remonstrances, never failed to make me state, in all his dispatches, that Venice would never violate her neutrality. The poor man’s stubborn stupidity caused me to write nonsense and commit absurdities at every turn. I was obliged to be his agent in his follies, since he would have it so. But sometimes they made my duties unbearable, sometimes even almost too difficult to perform. He absolutely insisted, for instance, that the greater part of his dispatches to the King and the minister should be in cipher, though neither contained anything whatever that required such a precaution. I protested that between Friday, when dispatches arrived from Court, and Saturday, when ours were sent off, there was not enough time to do all that ciphering and also to attend to the heavy correspondence which I had to have ready for the same courier. He found an excellent solution for this dilemma, which was to write his replies on Thursdays to the dispatches that would arrive the next day. Despite everything that I could say about the impracticability and the absurdity of his idea, he thought it so ingenious that I had to give in. So, all the time I was with him I would keep note of some odd words he might utter at random during the week and of a little trivial news which I would pick up here and there. Then, armed with this scanty material, I would invariably bring him on a Thursday morning a rough draft of the dispatch which was to go out on the Saturday, with certain additions or corrections which I would hurriedly make by the light of the dispatches that arrived on Friday, to which ours were supposed to be a reply. He had another peculiar habit, which made his correspondence unimaginably absurd. This was to send back each item of news to its source instead of passing it on. He reported Court news to M. Amelot, news from Paris to M. de Maurepas, from Sweden to M. d’Havrincourt, from Petersburg to M. de La Chetardie; and sometimes he would send each one of them back news which he had received from them, and which I clothed in slightly different language. But as of all the dispatches I brought him to sign he only ran through those to the Court and merely signed those to the other ambassadors unread, I was a little freer to revise these latter in my own way, and I at least interchanged the information in them. But it was impossible for me to give a reasonable turn to the essential dispatches; and I was lucky if he did not decide to interlard them impromptu with a few lines from his own head, which obliged me to go back and hurriedly transcribe the whole document complete with his fresh piece of nonsense which had to receive the honour of the cipher, without which he would not have signed it. Countless times I was tempted, out of regard for his reputation, to cipher something different from what he had said; but I felt that nothing could justify such a breach of faith, and let him rave on at his peril, glad only that I could speak my mind to him, and do my duty by him, both at my own risk.
This I did all the time with an honesty, a zeal, and a courage which deserved a better reward from him than in the end I obtained. It was time for me to be what Heaven had intended me to be when endowing me with a happy nature; what the education I had received from the best of women and that which I had given to myself had made me: and that for once I was. I was thrown on my own resources, without friends, advice, or experience, in a foreign land, and in foreign service, surrounded by a pack of rascals who, for their own interest and through fear of being shown up by a good example, urged me to do as they did. But far from imitating them, I served France well, though I owed her nothing, and served her ambassador better, as was my duty, in so far as things depended on me. By remaining irreproachable in a position fully exposed to view, I deserved and won the esteem of the Republic and of all the ambassadors with whom we were in correspondence. I
also won the affection of all the French residents in Venice, including even the consul, whom I was regretfully supplanting in duties which I knew were rightfully his, and which gave me more embarrassment than pleasure.
Being completely under the control of the Marquis de Mari, who did not trouble about the details of his duties, M. de Montaigu so neglected his that, but for me, the French in Venice would not have been aware that their nation was represented by an ambassador. They became disgusted with him indeed, since he always dismissed them without a hearing when they needed his protection; and none of them appeared any more among his suite or at his table, to which he never invited them. I frequently did the things he should have done on my own responsibility, and rendered such Frenchmen as applied to him or to me every service in my power. In any other country I should have done more; but as I was in too humble a position to see anyone in authority I was often forced to turn to the consul; and he, being established in the country and having his family there, was obliged to observe precautions which prevented his acting as he would have liked. Sometimes, however, when I saw him weakening and afraid to speak, I ventured to take dangerous steps, which often succeeded. One incident I remember, and the memory of it still makes me laugh. It would hardly be suspected that Parisian theatre-goers are indebted to me for Coralline and her sister Camille; but it is indeed a fact. Their father, Veronese, had made a contract for himself and his children with the Italian company. But after receiving two thousand francs for travelling expenses, instead of setting out he had quietly appeared at the Teatro di San Luca* in Venice, where Coralline, child though she was, was drawing a crowd. The Duc de Gesvres, as lord chamberlain, wrote to the ambassador to claim both father and daughter. M. de Montaigu handed me the letter, but all his instructions were, ‘Look into that.’ I went to M. Le Blond, and begged him to speak to the patrician who owned the Teatro di San Luca – he was I think one of the Giustiniani – and persuade him to dismiss Veronese, since he was under contract to the King. Le Blond did not much care for the job and did it badly. Giustiniani made some silly excuse, and Veronese was not dismissed. I was annoyed. It was carnival time. I took a domino and a mask, and set out for the Palazzo Giustiniani. Everyone who saw my gondola arrive with the ambassador’s livery was impressed; Venice had never witnessed such a thing. I entered and had myself announced as una siora maschera.† But once inside I took off my mask and gave my name. The senator turned pale, and stood dumbfounded. ‘Sir,’ I said to him in the Venetian dialect, ‘I. am sorry to trouble your Excellency by my visit; but you have at your Teatro di San Luca a man named Veronese, who is under contract to the King. He has been claimed from you, but without success. I have come to ask for him in His Majesty’s name.’ My short speech was effective. The moment I had gone, my man hurried to give an account of the incident to the State Inquisitors, who gave him a severe dressing-down. Veronese was dismissed that very day, and I sent him a message that if he did not set out within a week I would have him arrested. He set out.