Chapter VII: Part 7

In earlier times Venice had set the fashion for the world, and beautifully dressed dolls had been sent by the Venetian women’s tailors as models to Paris. In the eighteenth century Paris sent dolls to Venice. These dolls were exhibited at the fair of the Ascension, near the entrance to the Merceria, and took the place of fashion-plates and dressmakers’ journals. The men wore the cut-away coat, breeches, silk stockings, shoes with buckles, wigs, and three-cornered hats, then common throughout Italy and France; but they had invented a singular fashion of their own, which was that of throwing a light mantle of velvet, satin, or cloth over their hat and wig. It was called the ‘velada,’ and was adorned with embroidery, lace, or a fringe. In the end, it was sometimes made of lace only. As the law did not allow any member of the Great Council to appear in public without his toga, the nobles introduced a fashion which soon became common in all classes; they wore a black or white mask,

and covered themselves entirely with a black silk mantle having a hood, on the top of which they

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Lessico; G. R. Michiel, i. 283._]

placed the three-cornered hat. This garment was nothing, in fact, but a domino. Of course the women soon discovered the advantages of a dress in which they could not only disguise themselves but could even pass for men. The ‘Cendaleto’ remained as the proper dress for going out in the morning, but in the afternoon and evening, at

the theatre, at the ridotti, or in the piazza, the mask and domino became indispensable, and men and women wore precisely the same three-cornered hat.

It was soon noticed, however, that the domino did not tend to improve the public morals, and a decree was issued limiting its use to the period between the first Sunday in October and Advent Sunday, and during Carnival and the festivities which took place at the Ascension.

The women, no doubt, amused themselves in various ways, not excepting that form of diversion in which women have such marked advantages over men; but their chief enjoyment, if not their principal occupation, was gambling. Games of chance were played for very high stakes in the ridotti, which were gaming-clubs, not much better than the ‘hells’ of modern cities. The most celebrated was that connected with the theatre of San Moisè, which the government protected as a useful social institution. A patrician, generally a senator, presided in his toga at the tables, in order to see that there was no cheating. The singular rule of admission was that one must be either noble or masked, and the consequence was that the Venetian ridotti were frequented not only by the Venetians themselves, but by half the gamblers, adventurers, and blacklegs in Europe.

King Frederick IV. of Denmark once visited San Moisè disguised in a domino, and won a large sum of money from a Venetian noble who was

[Sidenote: _Tassini, under ‘Ridotto.’_]

risking the last remains of his fortune. On being told the circumstances, he pretended to stumble, upset the table with all the money on it, and disappeared, leaving the embarrassed gentleman to pick up his gold again, which he did with marvellous alacrity. The number of players at San Moisè was so great that in 1768 the government enlarged the place, using for the purpose the proceeds of property confiscated from the nuns, which terribly scandalised the population and provoked some bitter epigrams. At the ridotto the most illustrious patrician ladies quarrelled for places at the table with ladies of no character at all, and a contemporary observes that in order to pay their gambling debts and continue to

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 54._]

amuse themselves, they were reduced to the last extremity. He adds that they played from the hour of tierce, which is half-way between dawn and noon at all times of the year.

In 1780, when the Republic had but a few years more to live, the two ridotti of San Moisè and San

[Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 303, and ix. II._]

Cassian, which had been protected and superintended by the government, were suppressed, but the only result was that a new class of gaming-houses came into existence called Casini, which were much worse in character than the old establishments. Ruined nobles borrowed enormous sums from usurers, and even from plebeians, sharing the winnings with the lender when successful, and being entirely at his mercy if they lost. Some women kept private Casini of their own, to which they invited

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult._]

men and women; and while they played at Pharaoh, Basset, and Biribissi within, the gondoliers played Morra at the landing outside.

Venice slept little, and was devoured day and night by the fever of pleasure. The lighting of the city

was paid for by the proceeds of the lotto, which had been introduced in 1734. Goldoni says that the shops were always open until ten o’clock

[Sidenote: _Goldoni, vol. i. chap. xxxv._]

at night, while a great many did not close till midnight, and some never shut at all. In Venice, he continues, you would find eatables exposed for sale at midnight exactly as at midday, and all the eating-houses were open. It was not the custom to give many dinners or suppers in Venetian society, but a few such occasions have remained famous, and the invited guests appear to have behaved with as little restraint as if they had been in a common eating-house. A certain noble, of the Labia family, once gave a supper at which he showed all his finest plate, and the guests could not refrain from admiring the magnificent chiselled pieces of gold and silver that covered the table. Suddenly, as the gaiety increased, the master of the house jumped up and began to throw the plates and dishes through the open windows into the canal, accompanying this mad proceeding with one of the worst puns ever made in the Italian

[Sidenote: _Tassini, under ‘Labia.’_]

language, or rather in the Venetian dialect: ‘L’abia o non l’abia, sarò sempre Labia’--the words mean, ‘Whether I have it or not I shall always be Labia.’

The conditions of married life in the decadence were such amongst the nobles that it is best not to inquire too closely as to what went on. In

[Sidenote: _Rom. viii. 303; Mutinelli, Ult. 86._]

a great number of cases husband and wife were like strangers to each other, and the children were utterly neglected, when there were any. When divorce becomes common, the family, which is the first of social institutions, soon ceases to exist, and no country has ever shown vitality or long endurance where society was not based on the relations of father, mother, and children to each other. There never was any divorce law in Italy, but there was, and is, such a thing as the annullation of marriage. In Venice, between 1782 and 1796, the Council of Ten registered two hundred and sixty-four applications for annullation, and the great part of them were admitted.

As generally happens when a form of government is exhausted and is about to go to pieces, the Venetian

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult. 71._]

people retained ideas of morality longer than the wealthy burghers or the worn-out nobility; the wives of the artisans necessarily lived more at home than their richer sisters, and were generally able to keep their husbands. The love of pleasure was too universal to admit of excepting a whole class from its influence, and to the last the working people seem to have been very prosperous under the old government; but their amusements were harmless and their pleasures innocent compared with those of the upper thousands. The women of the people organised their diversions with a good deal of system, forming groups among themselves, each of which had a presidentess and a treasuress, who collected the subscriptions, kept the money in safety, and made out the accounts when, at intervals, the little fund was drawn upon for excursions and parties of pleasure, to which men were not invited.

On the morning of one of those appointed days, the women and girls met at the landing from which they were to start, all dressed very much alike. Those who belonged to the class of the better artisans wore a rather dark cotton skirt, a blouse of scarlet cloth, a chintz apron with a design of large flowers, and lastly, a white linen kerchief called the ‘niziol,’ which was to them what the black ‘cendal’ was to the Venetian ladies; and from ‘niziol’ the word ‘nizioleto’ was formed, like ‘cendaleto,’ and meant a pretty woman or girl of the people. Of course, when they met for a day’s pleasure they wore whatever ornaments they possessed.

The women of the poorest class wore over the dark skirt a very wide apron which covered it entirely when let down, but which they pulled up over their heads like a sort of hood when they went out.

The fathers, husbands, and brothers of the women came with them as far as the boat, but left them then, as the people would have thought it highly

[Sidenote: _Rom. ix. 18._]

improper that decent women should amuse themselves in the company of the other sex. Yet for their protection two elderly men of unexceptionable character went with them, as well as the necessary rowers, and it was a common practice to be rowed about for a time before leaving the city, singing songs together.

The principal diversions of the day were the picnic, which was a solid affair, a dance, generally the country ‘villotta,’ accompanied by the singing of couplets, and the return to Venice in the boat, illuminated with festoons of little coloured lanterns. At the landing they parted, dividing what was left of the provisions, lest anything should be lost, and no doubt each good wife did her best to bring home a few titbits for the men of her household, if only to make them envy her for being a woman. I find no record of what the men did with themselves on picnic days, but it must have been very quiet in the house, and they may have felt that there were compensations even for being left at home.

Another time of gaiety was the evening after a regatta. Then the houses of the winners were decked with garlands of green, and the doors were open to every friend; the silk flag, which was the token of victory, was hung in a conspicuous place for all visitors

[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Nuovi Studi, 318._]

to admire, and when it grew late they all sat down to a plentiful supper, which on those occasions generally consisted principally of several dishes of fish washed down with copious draughts of the island wine. The last homes of Venice, in any real sense, were the homes of the working people.

Life in the country did little to bring the members of a noble family nearer together, but there was a good deal of it, such as it was. At a time when France set the fashions, which she was before long to impose on the greater part of Europe, every rich Venetian noble dreamt of making a little Versailles of his own villa. The residences of the Marcello, the Corner, the Gradenigo, the Foscarini, and the Pisani, on the road to Treviso and on the banks of the Brenta, were so many little courts, in which every element was represented from the sovereign to the parasite, from the parasite to the buffoon, and the lesser nobles imitated the greater throughout a scale which descended from the sublime to the ridiculous. The villas themselves were often decorated by the greatest artists. In the hall of the Pisani’s country-house at Strà, for instance, Tiepolo had painted a wonderful picture representing the reception of Henry III. in Venice.

In going from the city to the villas, people went by water as far as it was possible, and each family had a sort of light house-boat for this purpose,

[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Ult. 112, 116._]

called a ‘burchiello,’ and fitted with all possible comfort. The travellers dined and supped sumptuously on board, and spent most of their time in playing cards; and when the end of the journey was reached a long round of pleasures and amusements began, in which the ‘cicisbei’ played an important and, one would think, a terribly fatiguing part. They were assisted by regular relays of parasites who were invited for a few days at a time, and who were expected to pay with ready flattery and story-telling for the hospitality they received.

Eating then played a much larger part in what was called pleasure than we moderns can well understand. We are ourselves no great improvement

[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Vita Priv._]

on our fathers, in respect of manly virtue, faith in things divine, or honesty when it does not happen to be the best policy; but as an age of men we are not greedy of food. The Venetians were. Not only did they employ French cooks and spend much time in considering what things to eat, but their dinners were so interminably long, and the courses they ate were so numerous, that they found it convenient to use three dining-rooms in succession for the same meal, the first being for the soup and the beef, the second for the roast meats and vegetables, and the third for the pudding and dessert.

The Venetians were near their end when they ceased to be men of business and turned into gamblers and spendthrifts. All this extravagance, especially in the country, led to financial embarrassment at the end of the season; and in order to satisfy the creditors who then appeared in force, it was necessary to rackrent the peasants or to sell property and produce at ruinous prices. In one of his comedies Goldoni makes a ruined nobleman say again and again to his steward, ‘Caro vecchio, fè vu’--‘My dear old man, manage it yourself.’ The expression was so true to life that not one but a number of nobles complained to the government that they were being publicly libelled by a playwright.

Everything was in a state of decay already approaching ruin. When the Princess Gonzaga came to Venice

[Sidenote: _Archivio Stor. Ital. fourth series, vol. xvi. p. 180._]

she had such an abominable reputation that no Venetian lady had the courage to present her to the society of the capital. At last, however, the Signora Tron, the wife of a procurator of Saint Mark, offered to do so. She introduced the Princess with these historic words: ‘Ladies, this is the

Princess Gonzaga. She belongs to an illustrious family. As for the rest, I will not answer for her, nor for you, nor for myself.’

She was wise in refusing to answer for herself, at all events, for she was accused of setting a higher price on

[Sidenote: _Horatio Brown, Sketches._]

her box at the theatre than on herself. ‘That is true,’ she answered, ‘for I sometimes give myself for nothing.’

It is comprehensible that where great ladies talked like this, a burgher dame should have put up her

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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.

In her early youth she began several literary works, among which a rather inaccurate translation of some of Shakespeare’s plays has come down to us. She was a literary personage, however, when still young, and the drawing-rooms of the Palazzo Michiel were frequented by all that was most distinguished in Venice, as well as by the best of the foreign element. Giustina, like all women who succeed in gathering intellectual people about them, encouraged the discussion of all sorts of subjects from the broadest point of view. At that time she was slightly inclined towards the new order of ideas, and boasted of being somewhat democratic; but if this was true, it did not prevent her from sincerely lamenting the fall of the Republic a few years later.

On the twelfth of May 1797, after the fatal session which ended the history of Venice, a few nobles gathered at her house to mourn over the sudden end. While they sat together, heavy-hearted and conversing in broken sentences, they heard the rabble in the street below, howling at those whom it called the assassins of Saint Mark. The little group upstairs understood the danger, and after a moment’s silence Giustina called upon them to save the city at least, if they could no longer save the Republic. Her cousin Bernardino Renier was there, and was temporarily charged with seeing to the safety of the city. The only means he could think of for preventing pillage was violence, and he swept the streets with artillery.

For a while Giustina cherished the vain hope that Bonaparte would help Venice to rise from her ashes. That fact explains why she was willing to receive in her house the handsome, fair-haired Marina Benzon, who danced round the tree of liberty in the Square of Saint Mark’s with the ‘Carmagnola’ on her head, on the day that saw the Venetian flag replaced by the Phrygian cap of liberty. It explains, too, why Giustina was in

[Sidenote: _1809._]

the square ten years later, when Napoleon came to Venice a second time. It was a singular meeting enough.

When the Emperor was passing his troops in review in the square, Bernardino Renier pointed out his cousin Giustina, who was in the crowd looking on, and Napoleon at once sent two officers to bring her to him. The story is that the Emperor planted himself before her with his arms crossed and his legs apart.

‘What are you celebrated for?’ he asked roughly.

‘I, sire? Celebrated?’ cried the lady.

‘Yes, you. But to what do you owe your celebrity?’

‘To friendship, no doubt, which attributes to me an importance I do not possess.’

‘What have you written?’ demanded the Emperor.

‘Little things not worth mentioning,’ answered Giustina.

‘Verse or prose?’

‘In prose, sire. I never was able to write a verse in my life.’

‘Ah, then you improvise, you improvise, do you?’

‘I wish I could, sire! for I should have an excellent opportunity to-day of covering myself with glory!’

‘Come, what have you written?’ asked the Emperor impatiently.

‘A few translations.’

‘Translations?’

‘Of tragedies,’ answered Giustina.

‘The tragedies of Racine, I suppose?’

‘I beg your majesty’s pardon, I have translated from the English.’

The eye-witnesses of this meeting say that when the Emperor received this answer he turned on his heel and left the high-born lady standing there.

The final state of Giustina’s mind was somewhat contradictory, for her frankly democratic dreams had faded away, yet there remained an unlimited indulgence for the most contradictory opinions which were sometimes expressed in her presence, together with the greatest indignation against those who judged Venice by modern standards, whether they were Venetians or foreigners. She seemed to make it her duty to prevent anything from disturbing the ghost of the defunct Republic.

When Chateaubriand made his first visit to Venice

[Sidenote: _1806._]

he had the bad taste to write an article in the _Mercure de France_, from which I translate a few extracts:--

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.’

XI

THE LAST CARNIVALS--THE LAST FAIRS THE LAST FEASTS

No people ever combined business with pleasure so advantageously as the Venetians, and few governments have understood as well as theirs how to make use of amusement in managing the people; indeed, the method was so convenient that at last the Signory preferred it to all others, and took most pains to promote the public gaiety just when the Republic was on the verge of dissolution. There is something unnatural

[Sidenote: _Rom. ix. 213._]

in the contrast between the outward life and the inward death of Venice in those last years; something that reminds one of the strangest tales ever told by Hoffmann or Edgar Poe.

Never dull, even at the last, all Venice went mad with delight at the feast of the Ascension, when the great fair was held. It will be remembered that Pope

[Sidenote: _1177._]

Alexander III., on the occasion of his visit to Venice, issued a brief granting numerous indulgences to all persons who would pray in the basilica of Saint Mark between the hour of Vespers on the eve of Ascension Day and Vespers on the day itself; and the brief concluded by invoking the malediction of heaven on any one who should oppose this practice or destroy the document itself.

With their usual keen eye for business, the Venetians saw at once that while their souls were profiting by the much-needed indulgence, their pockets could be conveniently filled without vitiating that state of grace which is especially necessary during such religious exercises. Many strangers from the mainland would visit the city on the anniversary, and by holding out a rational and sufficient inducement they could be made to come again, in greater numbers, year after year. Nothing was so sure to attract a rich class of pilgrims as a great annual fair, and to make their coming absolutely certain it was only necessary to suspend the duties on imported wares during eight days.

The first Ascension Fair was held in the year 1180, when Orio Mastropiero was Doge, and it was a vast financial and popular success. Merchants of all the nations of the earth spread out their merchandise for sale in booths and tents, and under every sort of improvised shelter. For more than a week the Square of Saint Mark’s was a vast bazaar of little shops, following the most irregular and winding lanes, just wide enough for two persons. Every merchant, foreign or Venetian, was free to set up his booth as he pleased and where he pleased, and there were thousands of them, in each of which at least one person had to sleep at night. The effect of it all must have been vastly picturesque, as many things were when effect was never thought of.

The annual fair was held in this same way for about five hundred years, during which time it did not occur to any of the Signory that the contrast between the amazing irregularity of the bazaar and the solemn symmetry of the surrounding architecture was disagreeable.

[Sidenote: _1678._]

Then in the Barocco age came artificial taste and set things to rights, and the Senate issued a decree ordering that the shops should be set up in straight lines, and by squares, like Chicago; and it seems to me that about that time the Ascension Fair turned itself into the first Universal Industrial Exhibition. From that time there was a commission established to which all exhibitors were required to send a detailed list of their merchandise. There were no prizes and no medals, yet I have no doubt but that the result was much the same, and that certain houses of merchant-manufacturers made their reputations and their fortunes on the strength of the impression they created at the Venetian Fair.

It was destined to be still more like a modern exhibition. In 1776 the Signory commissioned an architect to put up a vast oval building of wood, like a double portico, looking both inwards and outwards, and almost filling the Square of Saint Mark’s. It was very practically arranged, for to those who sold the more valuable objects shops were assigned on the inside of the oval, where they were better protected, and the shops on the outside, facing the porticoes of the Procuratie, were filled with the more ordinary wares, which would naturally attract more buyers from the lower classes.

On this occasion painters and sculptors exhibited their work, and Canova, who was then but nineteen years old, is said to have shown one of

[Sidenote: _G. R. Michiel, vol. i. 279._]

his earliest groups. But we learn without surprise that the products offered for sale by Venetians

[Sidenote: _Marble Group, Daedalus and Icarus, Accademia, Room XVII._]

were of inferior quality, and that there was a bad contrast between the showy architectural shops and the poor wares they contained. The end was at hand, and Venetian manufacture was dead.

But the people cared not for that, and were as gay and happy over the Fair as their ancestors had been hundreds of years ago. It mattered nothing to them; if the wares were poor, the charlatans who cried them up were wittier than ever. There was one in particular, a certain Doctor Buonafede Vitali of Parma, who employed four celebrated actors, one of whom was Rubini, famous in Goldoni’s companies; they were dressed in the four Italian theatrical masks, and by their clever improvisations and witty sallies they advertised the doctor’s miracles, and amused the clients that waited to be cured by him.

There were professional jesters, too, who joked on their own account, and there was usually somewhere a black African buffoon-contortionist; and there were long-legged tumblers, called ‘guaghe,’ absurdly dressed as women, who kept the crowd laughing, and while the people looked on they chewed the pods of carobs, which were sold off trays with nuts and other things by the Armenians who moved about in the throng. In the motley multitude nobles and magistrates

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult._]

and foreign ambassadors elbowed each other, and great ladies and light ladies, all effectually disguised under the ‘tabarro,’ the ‘bauta,’ and the mask, which were allowed in public during the Fair.

The Espousal of the Sea was the great ceremony of the week, and the one which most directly recalled the visit of Alexander III. It was last performed by the last Doge in 1796, the six-hundred-and-eighteenth time, I believe, since its institution, and all the ancient ceremonial was carefully followed.

On the eve of the Ascension, the Bucentaur was hauled out of the Arsenal and anchored off the Piazzetta

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Lessico._]

in full view of the delighted population. It was no longer the ‘Busus aureus,’ built by the Senate in 1311, and towed by a small boat from Murano, called the ‘peota.’ In four hundred years new ones had been constructed several times, and the last

Bucentaur was built in 1728. It was about one hundred and fifteen feet over all, with twenty-two feet beam, and was twenty-six feet deep from upper poop-deck to keel. In length and beam it had therefore about the dimensions of a fair-sized schooner yacht, but it was vastly higher out of water, and was flat-bottomed, so as to draw very little. The consequence was that even in smooth water it might have been laid over by a squall, and it was never used except in absolutely fine weather. It was rowed by one hundred and seventy-eight free artisans from the Arsenal, who swung forty-two oars, each of which, however, according to the model now preserved, consisted of three, linked and swung together in one rowlock. The rowers occupied what we should call the main deck, and the upper deck was fitted up

[Sidenote: _G. R. Michiel, Origini, i. 197._]

as one long cabin or saloon, taking the whole length of the vessel, but rising by a step at the after end, and having a small window at the stern from which the Doge threw out the ring in the course of the ceremony. His throne was further raised by two steps. Over the cabin were spread enormous draperies of crimson velvet, ornamented with gold fringe, gold lace, and gold tassels. In the stern, within the cabin, was figured a marine Victory with appropriate trophies, and two carved babies, of the rotund and well-creased breed dear to the eighteenth century, supported a huge shell as a canopy over the throne. The fair Giustina Michiel’s description of the decorations makes one’s blood run cold. Prudence and Strength stood sentinels at the Doge’s elbows. In the ceiling of the saloon Apollo smiled upon the nine Muses, pleased to consider the Bucentaur as his temple; the Virtues were inappropriately present, too, and with more reason the Arts, or Occupations, of Shipbuilding, Fishing, Hunting, and the like. The saloon had no less than forty-eight windows, from which the numerous party of ambassadors, magistrates, and distinguished strangers who accompanied the Doge could see all that went on. Lastly, the vessel’s figurehead was a colossal wooden statue of Justice, ‘protecting goddess of every well-regulated government,’ says the lady Giustina, and therefore as inappropriate there as the Virtues themselves.

At the hour of tierce, which was somewhere near eight o’clock in the morning at Ascension, all the bells began to ring, except, I think, that solemn one that tolled while condemned men were being led to death; and excepting, too, that one of lighter tone, the ‘Bankrupt’s Bell,’ which was rung every day for half an hour about noon, during which time debtors might walk abroad and sun themselves without being arrested.

Then the Doge came from his palace preceded by his squires, and the silver trumpets, and the standards, and the bearer of the ducal sword, and the

[Sidenote: _Carrer, Annali._]

Missier Grande, who was nothing more nor less than the head constable of Venice; and after his Serenity came the High Chancellor, the Pope’s Nuncio, the ambassadors, and the principal magistrates. When all were on board the Bucentaur, a salute of artillery gave the signal of departure, and the huge oars began to swing and dip; and after the big barge came the smaller one of the ‘Doge’ of the fishermen, the Niccolotti, the little ‘peota’ of the Murano glass-blowers, and the barges and boats of the Signory, and all the gondolas of Venice, richly draped for that one day. So all moved slowly out; and when they passed the statue of the Virgin before the Arsenal all the people sang, and sent up prayers and invocations with suppliant gestures ‘to the Great Mother of Victories,’ and the sailors cheered and yelled. Then they went on to Saint Helen’s island.

There the Patriarch was waiting with his flat boat, and the monks of Saint Helen served him a collation of chestnuts and red wine, which, at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, was cruelly ungastronomic; and the Patriarch gave his sailors bread and fresh broad beans in the shell.

The Patriarch sent acolytes to the Doge with a nosegay of Damascus roses; and his flat boat having been taken in tow by the Bucentaur, and another boat in which a choir sang the hymns composed for the occasion, they all moved out towards the open sea.

Then, in profound silence, the Doge opened the little stern window behind his throne, and the Patriarch,

[Sidenote: _Horatio Brown, Venice._]

who had come on board, poured holy water into the sea and prayed, saying, ‘Lord, vouchsafe calm and quiet weather to all them that journey by sea’; after which prayer the Patriarch handed the ring to the Doge, who dropped

[Sidenote: _Carrer, Annali._]

it into the sea just where the holy water had been poured, saying, ‘We espouse thee, O Sea, in token of perpetual sovereignty.’

The guns of the fortresses thundered out a salute, and all the thousands of spectators cheered for Saint Mark, and all the young men waved flags; then the whole company began to throw flowers, freshly cut, from boat to boat, and the Patriarch presented great silver dishes full of flowers to the Doge; and all went ashore at San Nicola on the Lido to hear the pontifical high mass, after which every man went home to his own house.

That was the ceremony at which the Venetians assisted in 1796, little guessing that they saw it for the last time. A few months later a vandal mob

[Sidenote: _Rom. x. 305; Mutinelli, Lessico and Ult._]

beached the Bucentaur on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and stripped it of all its ornaments, to burn them and get the gold. The hull was then armed with four heavy old guns, and was turned into a sort of floating battery and sailors’ prison at the entrance of the harbour. On her stern was painted her new name ‘Idra,’ the Hydra, and there she rotted for years. A few fragments of the old vessel are now preserved in the Arsenal. More than two hundred men worked at reducing the Bucentaur and the two big carved boats of the Signory to the democratic standard of beauty.

The last pilot of the Bucentaur was Andrea Chiribini, who, like all his predecessors, called himself ‘admiral,’ and was a ruffian not worth the rope with

[Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Ult.; Bembo, Ben. 265._]

which he should have been hanged when he was young. He was one of the worst types in the Venetian revolution; and after living all his life on the bounty of the Signory, he was the first to help in breaking up the Bucentaur, and in sacking the Arsenal. In order to reward him for these noble acts of patriotism, and in the absence of appropriate funds, he was given a magnificent carved jewel of oriental chalcedony from the treasure of Saint Mark. The talisman did not bring the fellow luck. After wandering about for nearly thirty years, living more or less dishonestly by his wits,

he presented himself one day in 1826 at one of the asylums for the poor, where he spent a day; but when towards evening he was requested to put on the dress of the establishment, he flew into such a terrible rage that he had fever all night, and had to be watched. On the following morning he shook the dust from his feet and departed, declaring that a gentleman like himself could not live among such brigands. During two years the workmen of the Arsenal subscribed to give him a pittance; at the end of that time, feeling that his days were numbered, he consented to enter the little hospice of Saint Ursula, which a pious person of the fourteenth century had founded for the perpetual support of three poor old men.

It is said that the last Carnival of Venice was the gayest in all her history, and fully realised the condition of things described by Goldoni some years earlier in his comedy _La Mascherata_. I translate the couplet into prose:--

Here the wife and there the husband,
Each one does as best he likes;
Each one hastens to some party,
Some to gamble, some to dance.
Provided every one in Carnival
May do exactly as he chooses,
It would not seem a serious matter
Even to go raving mad.

A good many different traditional and legendary feasts amused the Venetians in old times, but the only one that has survived to our own day is

[Sidenote: _G. R. Michiel, iii. 389._]

the Festa del Redentore, the feast of the Redeemer, which was instituted as a thanksgiving after the cessation of the plague in 1576, and is kept even now both as a civil and religious holiday. The serenades, illuminations, and feasts in the island of the Giudecca certainly delight the Venetian populace of to-day as much as in the times when the old flag of Saint Mark floated over everything, and the little movable kitchens on wheels were adorned with the symbols of the Evangelist prettily outlined with flowers on a ground of green leaves.

The central point of all amusement in Carnival was the theatre, for the Venetians always had a passion for spectacles, and, at a time when the worst possible taste debased the stage throughout Italy, the reform which has since raised the Italian theatre so high began in Venice with Goldoni’s comedies. Properly speaking, there was no dramatic art in Italy before him. As I have explained in speaking of the sixteenth century, the Hose Club founded the first theatre, but most of the performances were what we still call mummeries, in which more or less symbolic personages said anything witty or profound that occurred to them, or talked nonsense in the absence of inspiration. Pantaloon was the national mask of Venice, and was always supposed to be a doctor who became involved in the most astonishing adventures. Valaresso, a man of taste in those days, produced a play that ended with a battle supposed to be fought behind the scenes. In his satire the poet makes the prompter appear upon the stage carrying a little lamp. ‘Ladies and

[Sidenote: _Aureli, Vita del Pergolesi._]

gentlemen,’ he says, ‘I see that you are expecting some one to bring you news of the battle; but it is of no use to wait, for every one is dead.’ Thereupon he blows out his lamp, and goes off to bed.

In his memoirs Goldoni explains the rules then followed by dramatic authors. He had occasion to

[Sidenote: _Goldoni, i. xxviii._]

learn them himself when he read his first piece, _Amalasunta_, to Count Prata, director of one of the large theatres in Milan.

‘It seems to me,’ said the Count, ‘that you have studied tolerably
well the _Poetics_ of Aristotle and the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace,
and that you have written your composition according to the true
principles of tragedy. Then you did not know that a musical drama
is an imperfect work, subject to rules and traditions which have no
common sense, it is true, but which must be followed to the very
letter. If you had been in France you might have thought more of
pleasing the public, but here you must please actors and actresses,
you must satisfy the composer of the music, you must consult the
scene-painter; everything has its rules, and it would be a crime of
_lèse majesté_ against the art of playwriting to dare to break them
or not to submit to them. Listen to me,’ he continued, ‘I am going
to point out to you some rules which are unchangeable, and which
you do not know. Each of the three principal characters in the
drama must sing five airs--two in the first act, two in the second
act, and one in the third. The second actress and the second “man”
soprano can only have three, and the third parts must be satisfied
with one, or two at the most. The author of the words must provide
the musician with the different shades which form the chiaroscuro
of the music, taking good care that two pathetic airs shall not
follow each other. It is also necessary to separate with the same
care showy airs, airs of action, of undefined character, minuets,
and rondeaux. One must be especially careful to give no airs of
affection or movement nor showy airs nor rondeaux to the second
parts. These poor people must be contented with what is assigned to
them, for they are not allowed to make a good figure.’

Count Prata would have said more, but Goldoni stopped him, for he had heard quite enough. He went home in that state of mind which some young authors have known, and obtained a sort of morbid satisfaction from burning his manuscript.

‘As I was poking the pieces of my manuscript together to complete
the burning,’ he says, ‘it occurred to me that in no case had any
disappointment made me sacrifice my supper. I called the waiter,
and told him to lay the cloth and bring me something to eat at
once.... I ate well, drank better, went to bed and slept with the
most perfect tranquillity.’

Goldoni was of the strong, to whom is the race.

[Sidenote: _Portrait of Goldoni, P. Longhi; Museo Civico, Room IX._]

From the ashes of his Amalasunta rose comedies that reformed the Italian stage.

The composers were not much better off than the playwrights.

‘The modern master,’ says Marcello, ‘must make his manager give him
a large orchestra of violins, hautboys, horns,

[Sidenote: _Teatro alla moda, Benedetto Marcello, quoted by
Molmenti in Nuovi Studi._]

and so forth, saving him rather the expense of the double basses,
as he need not use these except for giving the chords at the
beginning. The Symphony is to consist of a French time, or
_prestissimo_ of semiquavers in major, which as usual must be
succeeded by a _piano_ of the same key in minor, closing finally in
a minuet, gavotte, or jig, again in the major, thus avoiding
fugues, _legature_, themes, etc., etc., as old things outside of
the modern fashion. He will endeavour to give the best airs to the
prima donna, and if he has to shorten the opera he will not allow
the suppression of airs or roundels.’

The same master observes wittily that the authors of the words to accompany this sort of music generally excused themselves from reading the works of older writers, on the ground that the latter had not been able to read their successors, but had, nevertheless, done very well. When the playwright or musician had succeeded in pleasing the actors, the actresses, the manager, the scene-painter, and all the rest of the company, he still had to please the Council of Ten, not to mention the Inquisitors of State and the Inquisitors of the Holy Office, for they all had something to say in the censorship of the theatre.

The infamous Jacopo Casanova, who amongst a number of ignoble occupations acted as a confidant or spy to the Council of Ten, called attention

[Sidenote: _Molmenti, Nuovi Studi, 300._]

in 1776 to a piece called _Coriolanus_, which was being given in the theatre of San Benedetto. It appears to have been a sort of pantomime, which presented on the stage a starving population, a cruel nobility, the unjust condemnation of Coriolanus, the tears of Virgilia and Volumnia, everything, in short, which, according to the scrupulous Casanova, could pervert the Venetian people; and the Inquisitors accordingly suppressed the piece.

Sometimes these gentlemen shut up the provincial theatres altogether for a time with a view to stopping the advance of modern ideas. Here is an edict relating to these measures of prudence, signed by the Doge one year before the fall of the Republic. The first paragraph is in Latin, the rest is in Italian.