In an elaborate and very carefully prepared volume, entitled J. J. Rousseau à Venise, 1743-1744, written by M. Victor Ceresole, and published in Geneva and in Paris in 1885, the writer proves very conclusively that Rousseau did not remain so long in Venice as Rousseau declared he did in the Confessions; and he points out, upon contemporaneous documentary evidence, that Rousseau occupied the tall thin house in the Canareggio Quarter, which is to-day on the Fondamenta delle Penitente, and bears the number 968. It is the warehouse of a firm of wood merchants, who have removed the grand staircase and have utilized a greater part of the aristocratic old mansion, which was once the home of a powerful Venetian family, and later of the Spanish Ambassadors, as a storehouse for their merchandise, imported from the mountains of Cadore, the land of Titian, and retailed by the innkeepers
GOLDONI’S STATUE
of the present at seventy cents an armful. Rousseau lived long enough in Venice to have added to his own innate power of invention some of the Venetian love of exaggeration; and if, in his Confessions, he increased the length of his stay here by at least one-third, it is not easy to say how much of what he said he did here is fiction or fact.
Upon the Ramo dei Fuseri side of the Hotel Victoria and upon the little bridge of the same name is a tablet bearing the following inscription: “Goethe wohnte hier 28 Sep.-14 Oct. MDCCLXXXVI.” Notwithstanding the bad reputation for veracity which the Venetian tablets generally have achieved for themselves, and despite the extraordinarily free and phonetic translation of a distinguished American artist from Hartford, Connecticut, to the effect that Goethe “weren’t here,” it seems from his own confessions that Goethe was here, on this identical spot, and at that particular period of his existence, for he wrote: “I am comfortably housed in ‘The Queen of England’ [so named in honor of the consort of George III.], not far from St. Mark’s Square, and this is the greatest advantage of my quarters. My windows look out on a small canal between high houses; directly under me is an arched bridge, and opposite a densely populated alley. So live I, and so shall I for some time remain, until my packet is ready for Germany, and until I have had a surfeit of the pictures of the city. The loneliness I have sighed for with such passionate longing I now enjoy. I know perhaps only one man in Venice, and I am not likely to meet him in some time.”
How much Goethe did for Venice, and for the Hotel of the English Queen, Goethe himself probably never knew. But ever since Goethe expressed, in print, his romantic love for the place, German brides have been coming here on their wedding-trips, and have been trying to see Venice as Goethe saw it, and have been quoting Goethe to their husbands-of-a-day-or-two, and have been pretending an enthusiasm for Venice which they do not always feel, simply because, somehow, this is considered, on Goethe’s account, the proper thing for German brides to do.
The biographers of Samuel Rogers have printed only fragmentary portions of the Diary and Letters written during his visit to Italy in 1814, and very few of his personal experiences here have been preserved. We learn that Venice greatly delighted him, and that he was particularly fond of loitering about the Square of St. Mark. No doubt he was wont to break his fast at the Restaurant Quadri, and very likely he was accustomed to break the fast of the doves who loitered there too.
Byron spent the winter of 1816-’17 in Venice. On the 17th of November, 1816, he wrote to Moore: “I have fallen in love, which, next to falling into the canal (which would be of no use, as I can swim), is the best, or the worst, thing I could do. I have got some extremely good apartments in the house of a Merchant of Venice, who is a good deal occupied with business, and has a wife in her twenty-second year.” He spoke more than once of these lodgings, but he gave no hint as to where they were, and he asked Murray to address him Poste Restante. Moore, however, says that for many months he continued to occupy the same rooms “in an extremely narrow street, called the Spezzeria, at the house of a linen-draper.”
The Spezzeria is not a street, but a district of the town, near the Rialto Quarter. It was devoted, in Byron’s day, to the dealers in spices. His Merchant of Venice, therefore, should have been a vender of drugs, sugars, coffees, spices, wax-candles and the like, in wholesale. But, alas for the romance of it all! tradition, in Venice, says that he was a plain, commonplace baker who lived, in good enough style, not in the Spezzeria, but in the Frezzeria, the Street of the Makers of Arrows.