The affair had become all-consuming for Andrea as well. “My love, you govern my every action,” he confessed to her. “I do not think, I do not feel, I do not see anything but my Giustiniana. Everything else is meaningless to me…. I simply cannot hide my love for you from others anymore.” He still made the usual rounds—a family errand, a trip to the printer Pasquali on behalf of the consul, a lunch at Ca’ Tiepolo, and in the evening a visit to the theater. But his life outside the secret world he shared with Giustiniana no longer seemed very stimulating or even much fun. After the death of his uncle Andrea the year before, Ca’ Memmo had received fewer visitors and had ceased to be the scintillating intellectual haven of years past. At this time, too, Andrea’s mother, obsessed about Casanova’s influence on her three boys, finally had her way and convinced the inquisitors to have him arrested.* The heated, late-night conversations at the crowded malvasìe on the latest book from Paris or the new play by Goldoni had lost their most entertaining participant.
Andrea’s personal project for establishing a French theater in Venice was going nowhere, and Giustiniana worried that she might be the main cause of his lack of progress: “Are you not working on it because of me? Dear Memmo, please don’t give up. If only you knew how much I care about your affairs when your honor is at stake. Especially this project, which, given its scale, the detailed manner in which you planned it, and the excellence with which you carried out every phase, was meant to establish your reputation. And to think that my feelings for you—true as they are—might have caused you so much damage. I am mortified.” Andrea admitted that he had made little progress and “all the people involved” in the project were furious with him. “They say I have been taking them for a ride all along. The talk of the town is that the theater project has fallen through because of my excessive passion for you. By God, I couldn’t care less. I only wish to tell you that I love you, my heart.” Sweetly, he added that he would now start working on it again “because it will feel I will be doing something for you. [After I received your letter] I dashed off to the lawyers to get them started again. They weren’t in the office, but I shall find them soon enough.” In the end, despite fitful efforts, the project never got off the ground.
Andrea kept up with his mentor Carlo Lodoli, the Franciscan monk who continued to hold sway among the more open-minded members of the Venetian nobility. Now that he was no longer Lodoli’s student, Andrea saw him less often, but he was anxious that Giustiniana should also benefit from the mind that had influenced him so profoundly. He encouraged his old teacher to visit her as much as possible and draw her into his circle of followers. Giustiniana always welcomed these visits, starved as she was of new books and new ideas in the restricted intellectual environment her mother fostered at home. Most of all she delighted in the chance to spend time with a person who knew the man she loved so well. When Lodoli came to visit, it was as if he brought Andrea with him—at least in spirit. “He just left,” Giustiniana reported to her lover. “He kept me company for a long time, and we spoke very freely. I appreciated our conversation today immensely—more than usual. He is the most useful man to society…. But beyond that, he talked a lot about you and he praised you for the virtues men should want to be praised for—the goodness of your soul and the truthfulness of your spirit.”
For several years Consul Smith’s library had been a second home for Andrea. He continued to visit the consul regularly during his secret affair with Giustiniana, helping him catalogue his art and book collections. Nearly two years had gone by since the two lovers first met in that house. As Andrea worked, he luxuriated in tender memories of those earlier days, when they had been falling in love among the beautiful pictures and the rare books. “Everything there [reminds] me of you…. Oh God, Giustiniana, my idol, do you remember our happiness there?”
In reality, Andrea stopped at the consul’s more out of a sense of duty and gratitude than for pleasure. The old man could be demanding. “When he starts talking after his evening tea, he never stops,” Andrea reported with a sense of fatigue. “He generally asks me to stay on even while he has himself undressed.” These man-to-man ramblings often touched on the Wynnes, and on several occasions Andrea could not help but notice with amusement the vaguely lustful tone Smith had begun to use when he talked about Giustiniana.
Inevitably, as Andrea and Giustiniana’s lives became more entwined and inextricable, so the hopelessness of their situation gradually sank in, bringing with it more tension and crises. Andrea filled his letters with declarations of love and devotion, but he never offered much to look forward to—there was no long-term plan that, however vague, might allow Giustiniana to dream about a future together. Instead, he made offhand remarks about how much simpler it would be if she were married to someone else or, better still, if she were a young widow “so that we wouldn’t have to take all these precautions and I could show the world how much I adore you.”
Giustiniana was having a harder time than Andrea. Her letters, always more impulsive and emotional than his, grew wilder as she swung between bliss and despair. Venice could seem such a hostile place—a watery labyrinth of mirrors and shadows and whispers. She could not get a grip on Andrea’s life or, as a consequence, on her own. The more time passed, the more she felt she was losing her way. Again and again she was overcome by waves of jealousy that brought her to breaking point.
Caterina (Cattina) Barbarigo was a great beauty and a notorious femme fatale. She held court in a casino that was much in vogue among progressive patricians and viewed with suspicion by the inquisitors. Though older than Andrea—she was married and the mother of two beautiful daughters—she liked surrounding herself with promising young men. He, in turn, was delighted to be drawn into her circle of friends—even at the cost of hurting Giustiniana’s feelings. “All day you’ve been at Cattina Barbarigo’s, haven’t you?” she asked accusingly. “Enough, I shan’t complain about it. But why have I not seen you? Why have I not received a line from you? Now that I think of it, it is perhaps better not to have received a note from you because you probably would have written late at night, in haste, and maybe only out of a sense of duty. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will write to me with greater ease.” But there was no letter on the following day, or the next, or the one after that. On the fourth day of silence her anxiety turned into rage:
You should be ashamed of yourself, Memmo. Could one possibly behave worse toward a lover one claims to be desperately in love with? I write to you on Saturday, and you don’t answer because you are at Barbarigo’s house. Sunday I never see you even though I spend the entire day at my window. And no letter—even though you know very well that on Mondays I go out and you should want to find out what the plan is in order to see me. Or perhaps you did write to me but your friend could not deliver? Do you suppose I will believe that you could not find another way of getting a letter to me, considering I had been two days without any news about you? … My mother has been ill for many days, and we could have been seeing each other with fewer precautions. But no—Memmo is having fun elsewhere. He does not even think about Giustiniana except when a compelling urge forces him to. What must I think? I hear from all sides about your new games and your oh-so-beloved old friendships.
Naturally, Andrea pleaded complete innocence: “For heaven’s sake, don’t be so mean. What rendezvous are you talking about? What have I done to merit such scorn? My dear sweet one, you must quiet down. Trust me or else you’ll kill me.” He explained, rather obliquely, that tactical considerations and nothing else occasionally forced him to be silent for a few days or to interrupt the flow of letters. But she should never forget that if he sometimes made himself scarce, it was for her sake and certainly not because he was chasing young ladies around: “You know I love you, and for that very reason, instead of complaining about your perpetual diffidence, I only worry about your position. I would have written to you every day to tell you what I was up to, but you know how afraid I am about writing to you—your mother is capable of all sorts of beastliness. All I care about is making sure the members of your household and our enemies and the crowd of people that follow every step we take do not