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.
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.