I endured his slights, his brutality, and his ill-treatment with patience, for I thought them the product rather of ill-humour than of dislike. But as soon as I saw that he intended to deprive me of the honour I deserved for my good service, I resolved to resign. The first mark of his ill-will which I received was on the occasion of a dinner which he proposed to give to the Duke of Modena and his family, who were in Venice, and at which, so he informed me, I was not to have a place at table. I replied indignantly, though not angrily, that as I had the honour to dine there every day, if the Duke of Modena required that I should not be present on the occasion of his visit, it was a point of honour for his Excellency and a necessity for me that his request should be refused. ‘What!’ he exclaimed in a rage. ‘My secretary, who is not even a gentleman, claims to dine with a sovereign, when my gentlemen do not!’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, ‘the post with which your Excellency has honoured me confers such nobility on me for so long as I hold it that I take precedence even of your gentlemen, or those who call themselves such, and am admitted where they cannot go. You are not unaware that on the day when you make your public entry I am required by etiquette and immemorial custom to follow you in ceremonial uniform, and that I then have the hpnour of dining with you in the Palazzo di San Marco. I do not see why a man who has the right to eat in public with the Doge and the Venetian senate may not eat in private with the Duke of Modena.’ Although this argument was unanswerable, the ambassador did not give in. But we had no occasion to renew the dispute, for the Duke of Modena did not come to dinner.
From that time he never ceased to slight me, to treat me unjustly and deliberately to deprive me of the small privileges belonging to my post, privileges which he transferred to his dear Vitali; and I am sure that if he had dared to send him to the Senate in my place he would have done so. He generally employed the Abbé de Binis to write his private letters in his study; and he made use of him to write M. de Maurepas an account of the Captain Olivet affair, in which, far from making any mention of me who had concerned myself in it alone, he even deprived me of the credit for the interrogatory of which he sent a copy and which he attributed to Patizel, who had not uttered a word. He wanted to annoy me and please his favourite, but not to get rid of me. He knew that it would not be as easy to find a successor to me as it had been in the case of M. Follau, who had already told the world something about him. He absolutely required a secretary who knew Italian to deal with the answers from the Senate, someone who would write all his dispatches and manage all his affairs without his having to bother about anything, someone with sufficient merit to serve him faithfully and at the same time mean enough to toady to his rascally gentlemen. He wanted therefore to retain me and to humble me by keeping me far from my country and his, and without sufficient money to return; and he would perhaps have succeeded if he had set about it with more moderation. But Vitali, who had other views and wanted to force me into action, got his way. Once I saw that I was wasting my efforts; that the ambassador was treating my services as crimes instead of being grateful for them; that all I could expect from him was insults at home and injustice abroad, and that, considering the general discredit he had brought upon himself, his malice might prejudice me while his favours could not serve me, I made up my mind and asked leave to resign, giving him sufficient time, however, to find a new secretary. Without saying yes or no, he continued his usual behaviour. Seeing that things were going no better and that he was not trying to find my successor, I wrote to his brother and, after setting out my reasons, asked him to obtain my release from his Excellency, adding that whether I got it or not it was impossible for me to stay. I waited for a long time without receiving a reply and began to be seriously embarrassed. But finally the ambassador received a letter from his brother. It must have been very sharp in tone for, although he was subject to very violent fits of temper, I had never seen him in such a state before. After a torrent of horrible abuse, unable to think what more to say, he accused me of having sold his cipher. I burst out laughing, and mockingly asked him whether he thought there was any man in all Venice stupid enough to give a crown for it. This reply made him foam with rage. He made a show of calling his servants to throw me out of the window, as he said. Up to that moment I had been very calm, but when I was threatened anger and indignation ran away with me too. I rushed to the door, and drew the catch that secured it on the inside. ‘No, Count,’ I said, standing solemnly up to him, ‘your people shall not interfere in this affair. It shall be settled between us two, if you please.’ My action and my look instantly calmed him; his whole attitude revealed surprise and alarm. When I saw that he had recovered from his fury I took my leave of him in very few words. Then without waiting for his reply I opened the door, went out, and walked calmly across the ante-room past all his servants, who rose in the usual way, and who I think would rather have taken my part against him than his against me. I did not go up to my room, but immediately descended the stairs and left the palazzo, never to return.
I went straight to M. Le Blond, to tell him what had happened. He was not greatly surprised, for he knew the man. He kept me to dinner, and the dinner, though impromptu, was splendid. Every Frenchman of consequence in all Venice was there; there was not a soul at the ambassador’s. The consul told my tale to the company; and when he had done all exclaimed with one voice, which was not in His Excellency’s favour. He had not settled my account, he had not given me a sou and, reduced to the few louis I had on me for my sole resource, I was in difficulties about my return journey. All purses were opened to me. I borrowed twenty sequins from M. Le Blond, and an equal sum from M. de Saint-Cyr, with whom next after him I was on the closest terms. I thanked all the rest, and until I left stayed with the chancellor of the consulate in order to prove to the public that the French nation was no accomplice in her ambassador’s crimes. Furious at seeing me feted in my misfortune, and himself, ambassador though he was, neglected, M. de Montaigu completely lost his head and behaved like a madman. He so far forgot himself indeed as to present a written request to the Senate for my arrest. The Abbé de Binis warned me of this, and I decided to stay another fortnight instead of leaving two days later as I had intended. My conduct had been witnessed and approved; I was universally respected. The Senate did not even condescend to reply to his extraordinary request, and sent me a message by the consul that I could stay in Venice as long as I liked, and need not trouble myself about the actions of a madman. I continued to see my friends, and went to take leave of the Spanish ambassador, who received me very kindly, and of the Count Fino-chietti, the Neapolitan minister, whom I did not find at home. But I wrote to him, and he sent me the most courteous possible reply. Finally I departed, leaving behind me, despite my difficulties, no debts other than the loans I have just mentioned and about fifty crowns owed to a merchant called Morandi, which Carrio undertook to settle for me, and for which I have never repaid him, although we have often met since then. As for. those two loans, I paid them off punctually as soon as I was able.
Let us not leave Venice without a word about the famous amusements of that city, or at least about the very small part I took in them during my stay. It is clear from the course of my youth how little I pursued the pleasures of that age, or at least those which are called such. I did not change my tastes in Venice; but my duties, which would anyhow have prevented that, gave the simple pleasures I allowed myself a greater relish. The first and most charming of these was the company of men of distinction, M. Le Blond, M. de Saint-Cyr, Carrio, Altuna, and a charming Friulian gentleman whose name, I am sorry to say, escapes me, but whom I never remember without emotion; of all the men I have met in my life, he was the one whose heart was most like my own. We were intimate also with two or three Englishmen, who were witty and well educated and as passionately fond of music as ourselves. All these gentlemen had their wives, or women friends, or mistresses; and these latter were nearly all women of parts at whose houses there was singing and dancing. There was some gambling too, but ve
ry little; our lively tastes, our talents, and the theatre made this seem a poor amusement. Gambling is the resource only of the bored. I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from Nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion which it inspires in all those born to understand it. When I listened to the barcarolles I decided that I had never heard singing till then; and soon I was so crazy for the opera that I grew tired of always chattering, eating, and playing in the boxes when all I wanted was to listen, and often stole away from company to some other part of the theatre, where I would shut myself alone in my own box and, despite the length of the performance, give myself up to the pleasure of enjoying it, undisturbed, to the very end. One day, at the Teatro di San Crisostomo, I fell asleep, and far more soundly than if I had been in bed. The loud and brilliant arias did not wake me. But who could describe the delicious sensation produced in me by the delicate harmony and angelic singing of that song which finally did! What an awakening, what bliss, what ecstasy when I opened my ears and my eyes together! My first thought was that I was in paradise. This ravishing piece, which I still remember and shall never forget so long as I live, began like this:
Conservami la bella
Che si m’ accende il cor.*
I decided to get the music, and did so. I kept it for a long time, but on paper it was not the same as in my memory. The notes were the same, but it was not the same thing. That divine aria can be performed nowhere but in my head, as indeed it was on the day when it awoke me.
One kind of music, in my opinion greatly superior to the operatic, is that of the scuole. The scuole are charitable institutions founded for the education of young women without means, who subsequently receive dowries from the State either at marriage or for the cloister. Amongst the talents cultivated in these young girls music holds pride of place. Every Sunday, in the church of each of these four scuole, motets are sung during vespers, for full choir and orchestra, composed and conducted by the greatest masters in Italy and sung in the grilled galleries by these girls, the oldest of whom is under twenty. I cannot conceive of anything so pleasurable or so moving as that music: the artistic riches, the exquisite taste of the singing, the beauty of the voices, the delicacy of execution, everything about those delightful concerts combines to produce an impression which is certainly not a fashionable one, but against which I doubt whether any man’s heart is proof. Never did Carrio or I miss those vespers in the Mendicanti, and we were not the only ones. The church was always full of music-lovers; even singers from the opera came here to have a real lesson in tasteful singing from these excellent models. What distressed me were the accursed grilles, which only let the sound through but concealed those angels of beauty – for the singing was worthy of angels – from my sight. I could talk of nothing else. One day when I spoke of them at M. Le Blond’s, he replied: ‘If you are so curious to see these young girls, it is quite easy to satisfy you. I am one of the directors of the institution, and I will take you to tea with them.’ I gave him no peace until he kept his word. As we entered the room where sat these beauties I had so desired, I felt such an amorous trembling as I had never known. M. Le Blond introduced me to one of these famous singers after another, whose names and voices were all I knew of them. ‘Come, Sophie’… She was hideous. ‘Come, Cattina’… She had only one eye. ‘Come, Bettina’… She was disfigured by smallpox. Scarcely one of them was without some notable defect. My tormentor laughed at my cruel surprise. Two or three, however, seemed passable to me; they only sang in the chorus. I was in despair. We teased them at tea, and they became quite lively. Plainness does not preclude the graces, and these I found they possessed. ‘No one can sing like that without a soul,’ I said to myself. ‘They have souls.’ In the end my way of looking at them so changed that when I left I was almost in love with every one of those plain creatures. I hardly dared attend their vespers again, but I had reason to feel that the worst was over. I continued to find their singing delightful, and their voices lent such imaginary charm to their faces that so long as they were singing I persisted in finding them beautiful, notwithstanding the evidence of my eyes.
Music in Italy costs so little that there is no reason for anyone with a taste for it to go without. I hired a clavichord, and for half a crown I had four or five performers in my room, with whom I practised once a week the pieces that had pleased me best at the Opera. I also made them try over some orchestral parts of my ‘Gallant Muses’. Either because they pleased him, or out of a desire to flatter me, the ballet master of San Crisostomo asked me for two of them, which I had the pleasure of hearing played by that admirable orchestra, and which were danced by a pretty, charming little girl called Bettina, who was kept by one of our friends, a Spaniard called Fagoaga, and at whose house we quite often spent the evening.
But, speaking of women, Venice is not the sort of town in which a man abstains from them. Have you no confession to make under this head, someone may ask. Yes, I have something to tell, certainly, and I will proceed to this confession with the same frankness as I have shown all along.
I have always had a disgust for prostitutes, and at Venice I had no other women within my reach, the majority of houses in the city being closed to me on account of my position. M. Le Blond’s daughters were very charming, but difficult to approach; and I had too much respect for their father and mother even to think of desiring them.
I should have felt more attracted to a young person named Mlle de Catineo, the daughter of the King of Prussia’s agent; but Carrio was in love with her – there was even some talk of marriage. He was well-off and I had nothing; he had a salary of a hundred louts, and I had only as many pistoles; and not only did I not want to enter into competition with a friend, but I knew that nowhere, and certainly not in Venice, can one start playing the gallant with a purse as empty as that. I had not given up my pernicious habit of satisfying my needs in another way, and I was too busy seriously to feel the temptations of the climate. So I lived for more than a year as chastely as I had in Paris, and I departed after eighteen months having only approached the opposite sex on two occasions, as a result of special opportunities which I will mention.
The first was provided for me by that honest gentleman Vitali, some time after the formal apology which I had been obliged to demand of him. There was some talk at table about the amusements of Venice, during which the gentlemen reproached me for my indifference to the most delectable of all, and after praising the graceful manners of Venetian courtesans declared that they had no equals in the world. Domenico then said that I must meet the most charming of them all, offered to introduce me to her, and swore that she would please me. I burst out laughing at this obliging proposal; and Count Peati, an elderly and venerable man, remarked with more frankness than one would have expected from an Italian, that he thought me too sensible to let myself be taken to visit women by an enemy. I had indeed neither the intention nor the desire. Nevertheless, through one of those inconsistencies that I find it difficult myself to understand, I finally let them drag me off, against my inclinations, my feelings, my reason, and my will as well, out of sheer weakness, being ashamed to show my distrust for them and, as they say in that country, per non parer troppo coglione* The padoana to whose house we went was very good-looking, even beautiful, but her beauty was not of the kind that pleased me. Domenico left me with her. I sent for sorbctti, asked her to sing, and at the end of half an hour put a ducat on the table and prepared to go. But she was so strangely scrupulous that she would not accept money that she had not earned, and I so strangely stupid as to give in to her scruple. I returned to the palace so certain that I had caught the pox that the first thing I did on my return was to send for the surgeon and ask for some medicines. Nothing can equal the uneasiness I felt for a whole three weeks, without any real discomfort or any obvious symptom to justify it. I could not imagine that anyone could leave the embraces of a padoana unscathed. The surgeon himsel
f had the greatest imaginable trouble in reassuring me. He only succeeded, in the end, by persuading me that I was so peculiarly made that I could not easily catch an infection; and though I have perhaps exposed myself less to that danger than any other man, the fact that I have never experienced an attack of that nature is a proof to me that the surgeon was right. This belief, however, has never made me rash; and if I have indeed received this advantage from Nature, I can say that I have never abused it.
My other adventure, although with a woman also, was of a very different kind, both in its origin and its consequences. I have mentioned that Captain Olivet gave me a dinner on board, and that I took the Spanish secretary with me. I expected a salute of cannon. The crew received us drawn up in line, but not a spot of powder was burnt, which greatly vexed me on account of Carrio who, I could see, was rather hurt. Certainly merchant vessels are in the habit of giving a salute of cannon to people of considerably less importance than ourselves. Besides, I felt that I had earned some mark of consideration from the captain. I could not disguise my feelings, for I always find that impossible; and although the dinner was very good and Olivet did the honours most admirably, I sat down in a bad humour, ate little, and spoke even less.
At the first toast I expected a volley at least. Nothing. Carrio, who could read my mind, laughed to see me sulking like a child. A third of the way through dinner I saw a gondola approaching. ‘Good lord, sir,’ said the captain. ‘Look out for yourself. Here is the enemy.’ I asked him what he meant, and he replied with a joke. The gondola lay-to, and I saw a dazzling young person step out, very coquettishly dressed, and extremely skittish. In three bounds she was in the stateroom and before I had noticed a place being laid for her I found her sitting beside me. She was as charming as she was lively, a brunette of twenty at the most. She only spoke Italian, and her accent alone would have been enough to turn my head. As she ate and chattered, she looked at me, stared a moment, and exclaimed: ‘Holy Virgin! Oh, my dear Brémond, what an age since I have seen you!’ Whereat she threw herself into my arms, put her lips to mine, and squeezed me till I almost stifled. Her large, black, Oriental eyes darted fiery sparks into my heart; and though my surprise rather set me back at first, passion so quickly overcame me that, in spite of the spectators, the lady herself had to restrain me. For I was intoxicated or, rather, delirious. When she saw me as excited as she wished she grew more moderate in her caresses, but no less skittish, and then she vouchsafed to explain the true, or pretended, reason for all this forwardness. She told us that I was the living image of M. de Brémond, the Director of Customs for Tuscany, that she had been madly in love with that gentleman, and was so still; that she had left him because she was a fool; that she would take me in his place; that she intended to love me because she had a fancy to; that, for the same reason, I must love her for so long as she had a fancy; and that when she left me I must bear it as patiently as her dear Brémond had done. No sooner said than done. She took possession of me as if I were hers, giving me her gloves, her fan, her cinda* and her head-dress to hold. She ordered me about, to do this and that, and I obeyed. She told me to go and send back her gondola because she wished to use mine, and I went. She told me to leave my place and to ask Carrio to take it, because she had something to say to him, and I did so. They talked together for a long time in whispers, and I made no objection. When she called me I came back. ‘Listen, Gianetto,’ she said to me. ‘I do not want to be loved in the French fashion. Indeed, it would be of no use. The moment you are bored, go. But do not stop half-way, I warn you.’ After dinner we went to see the glass works at Murano. She bought a lot of little trinkets, and made no ceremony about leaving us to pay for them. But everywhere the tips she left were much larger than our actual spendings. From the carelessness with which she threw her money about, and made us throw ours, it was plain that it had no value for her. When she asked for payment I think that it was more out of vanity than greed; she felt her self-respect increased by the price men put on her favours. In the evening we took her back to her rooms. While we talked I saw two pistols on her dressing-table. ‘Ah,’ I said, picking one up, ‘here is a vanity box of a new manufacture. May I ask what it is used for? For I know that you have other arms which fire better than these.’ After a few light remarks in the same tone, she told us with a naïve pride which made her still more charming: ‘When I confer favours on men I do not love, I make them pay for the boredom they cause me. Nothing could be fairer. For though I endure their caresses I do not care to endure their insults, and I shall not miss the first man who treats me with disrespect.’