Trieste, July thirtieth, 1806.—In Venice there had just been published a new translation of the Génie du Christianisme. This Venice, unless I am mistaken, would please you as little as it pleases me. It is a city against nature; one cannot take a step without being obliged to get into a boat, or else one is driven to go round by narrow passages more like corridors than streets! The Square of St. Mark alone is by its general effect worthy of its reputation. The architecture of Venice, which is almost altogether Palladio’s, is too capricious and too varied; it is as if two or three palaces were built one upon the other. And the famous gondolas, all black, look like boats that carry coffins; I took the first one I saw for a corpse on the way to burial. The sky is not our sky beyond the Apennines. Rome and Naples, my dear friend, and a bit of Florence, there you have all Italy. There is, however, one remarkable thing in Venice, and that is the number of convents built on the islands and reefs round the city, just as other maritime cities are surrounded with forts which defend them; the effect of these religious monuments seen at night over a calm sea is picturesque and touching. There are a few pictures left by Paolo Veronese, Titian....
Giustina was filled with indignation on reading these lines, which were signed by an author whose sentimentalism had found an echo in her heart. A lady who admired Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis would naturally be pleased with the Génie du Christianisme. The attack on her beloved native city seemed all the more unkind for that, and she hastened to reply in a long letter written in French, which she published in Pisa in the Giornale dei Letterati. She answered Chateaubriand categorically, concluding with the following words:—
I know that you have promised to return here; come then, but come in a mood less sad, in a spirit less weary, with feelings less cold.... I do not flatter myself that you will exclaim with that Neapolitan poet that Venice was built by the gods, but I hope at least that you will find here something more interesting than the convents on the islands and the translation of your works.
Giustina had been in her grave eighteen years when Chateaubriand returned to Venice, with a spirit indeed less weary, and allowed himself to grow enthusiastic, and wrote a beautiful description of the city in his Mémoires d’Outre Tombe.
At one time Napoleon ordered a species of inquiry to be made on the following and similar questions:—What are the prejudices of the Venetians? What are their political opinions? What are their dominant tastes? The well-known and learned writers, Filiasi and Morelli, were commissioned to answer these inquiries, but they refused on the ground that such questions admitted no answer. Giustina’s interest and ambition were roused at once, and during several weeks she worked hard at a book on moral statistics which has never been published, but which, no doubt, suggested to her the excellent work she afterwards produced on the origin of Venetian feasts, a book which I have often quoted in these pages. She worked at this with enthusiasm, bent on evoking in the minds of future generations the memory of beautiful and touching ceremonies long disused when the Republic fell. In that age which loved epithets and classic parallels, the lady who had been nicknamed in Rome the little Venetian Venus was now called the Venetian Antigone. Indeed, she made it her business to defend Venice and Venetian history too. But as she grew old her enthusiasm got the better of her, and she wrote such terrible answers to people who made small mistakes that she could not always get her articles printed. In particular, the tragedian Niccolini published in 1827 a tragedy upon the story of Antonio Foscarini, in which he held up the court that condemned and executed that innocent man to execration, but by methods not honestly historical. Giustina was now over seventy years of age, but she wrote such a furious article on Niccolini’s play that no one dared to publish it.
She was fond of Englishmen, and called them the Swallows, because they came back to Venice at regular intervals, and she used to say that England seemed to her the sister of the ancient Republic of Venice. She had known the Duke of Gloucester when he was a mere child, and when he returned to Venice in 1816 his first visit was for her. I translate the note she wrote in answer to his message announcing his visit:—
A message from H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester, delivered at the theatre last night, and saying that he wished to honour the Michiel with his presence, has filled her with lively exaltation. She much desired to see him again. If H.R.H. had not become the great Prince he is in virtue of his birth; if he were still that amiable little boy whom she so often embraced, she would have let him know by this time that she desired to embrace him affectionately. And indeed she might have said so now, since the difference of ages is always the same. Then he was a child and she was young and pretty; now he is young and charming and she is a little old woman, and also somewhat deaf. There might therefore still be the purest innocence in the sweetest embrace. But setting aside this jesting, which is indeed too familiar, H.R.H. will please to accept in advance the thanks of Giustina Renier Michiel for the honour which he intends to do her this evening, and she is impatiently awaiting that desired moment.
Though Giustina had begun life by giving signs of being emancipated, she behaved with the greatest devotion to her daughter and her grandchildren. ‘I have hardly any company but that of children,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘I think very highly of their patience, since there is between me and them the same distance of age which exists between them and me. I find I have nothing in common with them but the taste for “anguria,” and this is a good argument for the truth of what I say.’
Her most intimate friend was Isabella Teodochi Albrizzi. This lady was born in Greece, and was a passionate worshipper of the beautiful; her taste in all matters seems to have been more delicate than Giustina’s and her character was much more gay and forgetful. Giustina lived in the past, Isabella in the present. Everything about Giustina was Venetian, the mantilla she wore on her head, the furniture she had in her house, the refreshments she offered her friends; to the very last everything connected with her belonged to the eighteenth century. With Isabella Albrizzi nothing, on the contrary, was Venetian, nothing was durable; at one moment the French taste ordered her furniture, her bibelots, and her books, and provided her with subjects of conversation; at another, everything about her was English. ‘When you left the Michiel’s drawing-room you had learned to love Venice,’ says her biographer; ‘when you left Madame Albrizzi’s drawing-room you had learned to love Madame Albrizzi.’
They died nearly at the same time. Giustina breathed her last at the age of seventy-seven on April sixth, 1832, surrounded by her grandchildren and her friends. Andrea Maffei wrote that the death of Giustina Michiel was indeed a public loss. ‘To the excellence of her mind she united in a high degree the beauty of her character, and I know of no writer who more dearly loved his country than she.’