The impressions left upon my mind after this night's reading were painful. I expected some disturbance of the peace through the malice of that woman, who had now become irreconcilably antagonistic.{263} Meeting Sacchi next morning on the Piazza di San Marco, I asked him whether he had noticed the strange conduct of Mme. Ricci on the previous evening. He said that he had certainly been aware of something wrong, but that he could not ascribe it to any cause. Then I communicated my suspicion. "The actress," said I, "means to persuade Signor Gratarol that he is being satirised under the character of Don Adone." "What is her object?" exclaimed Sacchi. "That I will tell you briefly," I replied: "she wants to gain credit with her new friend, to inflict an injury on your troupe, and to cause me annoyance by stirring up a quarrel between me and the gentleman in question." "It is not impossible," said Sacchi, "that she is planning something of the kind. But what are your reasons for thinking so?" "If you had only been attentive to her mutterings and attitudinisings last evening, when the part of Don Adone was being read, you would not put that question," I answered. "I ask you, therefore, as a friend, to withdraw my play until the next season. Lent will soon arrive. The Ricci will go to Paris, and Signor Gratarol to Naples. You can make use of the Droghe d'Amore later on, when its appearance will cause no scandal." After some persuasion, he promised to fulfil my wishes; and next morning he told me that the play had been suspended.
Here the affair would have rested if Signor Gratarol, poisoned by his mistress's report, had not{264} taken a step fatal for his own tranquillity. She returned, as I had imagined, from the reading of my play, and told him that he was going to be exposed upon the stage in the person of Don Adone. He set all his influence at work to prevent the public exhibition of the comedy. The result was that, four days afterwards, Sacchi came to me in great confusion and told me that Signor Francesco Agazi, censor of plays for the Magistrato sopra alla Bestemmia, had sent for the Droghe d'Amore. A new revision was necessitated by certain complaints which had been brought against the rôle of Don Adone.
"So then," said I, "you have given the manuscript to Signor Agazi?" "No," he answered; "I was afraid that I might lose it altogether. I told that gentleman that I had lent it to a certain lady.[60] He smiled and said that when she had done with it he expected to have it in his hands again. In fact, not wishing to be proved a liar in this matter, I took the play to the lady I have mentioned, related the whole story about Gratarol and Ricci, and recommended myself to her protection." Sacchi could{265} not have taken any step more calculated to give importance to this incident. I said as much to him upon the spot; predicted that the lady, who was known to have a grudge against Signor Gratarol, would do her best to circulate the scandal; assured him that the whole town would blaze with rumour, that I should be discredited, and that he might find himself in a very awkward position. "The tribunals of the State," I added, "are not to be trifled with by any of your circumventions."
Signor Gratarol had made a great mistake. Instead of listening to the gossip of an actress, and then setting the machinery of the State in motion by private appeals to persons of importance, he ought to have come at once to me. I should have assured him of the simple truth, and the Droghe d'Amore would have appeared without doing any dishonour to either of us.
His manœuvring had the effect of putting all Venice upon the qui vive, and placing an instrument of retaliation against him in the hands of powerful enemies. The noble lady, Caterina Dolfin Tron, to whom Sacchi took my comedy, read it through, and read it to her friends, and passed it about among a clique of high-born gentlemen and ladies. None of them found any mark of personal satire in the piece. All of them condemned Gratarol for his self-consciousness, and accused him of seeking to deprive the public of a rational diversion, while moving heaven{266} and earth to reverse the decision of the censors of the State.
In two days the town buzzed of nothing but my wretched drama, Gratarol, and me. It was rumoured that I had composed a sanguinary satire. Not only Gratarol, but a crowd of gentlemen and ladies were to be brought upon the scene. A whole theatre, with its pit, boxes, stage, and purlieus could not have contained the multitude of my alleged victims. Everybody knew their exact names and titles. Neighbours laid their heads together, quarrelled, denied, maintained, argued, whispered in each other's ears, waxed hot and angry, told impossible anecdotes, contradicted their own words, and, what was most amusing, everybody drew his information from an infallible source.
One thing they held for certain—that I had made Gratarol the protagonist of my satire. That became a fixed idea, which it only wanted his own imprudence to turn into a fact.
Knowing pretty well where the real point of the mischief lay, I determined to act, if possible, upon the better feelings of Mme. Dolfin Tron.[61] I had enjoyed the privilege of her acquaintance for many{267} years. But my unsociable and unfashionable habits made me negligent of those attentions which are expected from a man of quality. I did not pay her the customary visits; and when we met, she was in the habit of playfully saluting me with the title of Bear. My brother Gasparo, on the contrary, saw her every day, and she bestowed on him the tender epithet of Father. Such being our respective relations, I thought it best to apply to him.
I asked my brother, then, to do all he could to induce this powerful lady to oppose the production of my comedy for at least the present season. Through the machinations of Signora Ricci, against my will, and much to my discredit, the piece was going to create a public scandal, with serious injury to a gentleman whom I had not meant to satirise. My brother, muttering a curse on meddlesome women in general and actresses in particular, undertook the office. He did not succeed. Mme. Tron replied that I was making far too much fuss about nothing, and that my comedy had passed beyond my control. It had become the property of a capocomico, and was at the present moment under the inspection of the State.{268}
Not many days elapsed before I was summoned to the presence of Francesco Agazi, the censor, as I have before observed, for the Signori sopra la Bestemmia.[62] I found him clothed in his magisterial robes, and he began as follows: "You gave a comedy, entitled Le Droghe d'Amore, to the company of Sacchi. I perused it and licensed it for the theatre at S. Salvatore. The comedy has been passed, and must appear. You have no control over it. Pray take no steps to obstruct its exhibition. The magistracy which I serve does not err in judgment." I could not refrain from commenting upon Signor Gratarol's action in this matter, and protesting that I had never meant to satirise the man. He bade me take no heed of persons like Gratarol, whose heads were turned by outlandish fashions. "I made some retrenchments," he added, "in the twelfth scene of the last act of your comedy. They amount, I think, to about ten or twelve verses. These lines expressed sentiments such as are usually maintained by men of Gratarol's sort. You meant them to be understood ironically. But our Venetians will not take them so. What strikes their ear, they retain in its material and literal sense. And they learn much which is mischievous, unknown to them before.—May I parenthetically observe that certain gentlemen want to give orders where they have no right to speak?{269}—I repeat to you that the magistracy which I serve does not err; and I repeat the decree which has been passed." Having spoken these words, Signor Agazi bowed, and left me for his business.