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:—

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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:—

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The composers were not much better off than the playwrights.

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

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.

There was another magistracy which also had to do with the theatres. The ‘Provveditori di Commun’

fixed the price of the libretto of the play. It was Council of Ten, however, that named the hour at which the performance was to begin and end.

The lighting of the theatres was wretched and the boxes were completely dark, which appears to have

given the ladies a considerable sense of security, for I find that in 1756 the noble dame Pisani Grimani, who owned the theatre of San Benedetto, was forbidden by the Inquisitors of State to stand at the door of her box in a costume which might ‘produce grave disorder.’

In 1776 the government made an effort to limit such extreme views of comfort in warm weather, and an edict was issued commanding ladies to wear modest dresses, with domino and hood, at the theatre. The noble ladies Maria Bon Toderini and Elisabetta Labia Priuli were put under arrest in their own houses in the following year for having, in their boxes, thrown back their hoods and allowed them to slip down upon their shoulders.

The musicians’ desks were lighted with candles of Spanish wax, from Segovia in Castile. The stage was illuminated by lamps fed with olive oil. In the dim house there seems to have been a good deal of rough play, and the patricians in the boxes occasionally threw ‘projectiles’—possibly hard sweet-meats are meant—at the people in the pit. The lights were put out as soon as the curtain fell on the last act, and the spectators groped their way out in the dark as they could, helped by the big brass lanterns which the gondoliers brought to the door when they came to wait for their masters.

Plays were not advertised at all. A small bill giving the name of the play and the names of the authors was pasted up in the Piazzetta, and another was to be seen at the Rialto, but that was all. It was the business of the State to provide foreign ambassadors and ministers with boxes, and a vast deal of care was bestowed on this matter, which was full of difficulties; for the boxes were generally the property of private families that did not at all like to give them up. But the government always reserved the right to take any boxes it chose for the use of the Diplomatic Corps. In Venice, the smallest affairs were always conducted according to a prescribed method, and there was a regular rule by which the boxes were distributed. The document has been found by Signor Molmenti in the Archives of the Inquisitors of State, docketed and labelled: ‘Theatres. Foreign Ambassadors. Boxes.’ Here it is:—

When the box was at last drawn and had been accepted by the Minister, the owner of it received a notice in the following form:—

The feelings of the box-owner, dispossessed by this formal nonsense, may be guessed, for the indemnity paid by the ambassadors was very small.

It seems that even the Council anticipated that he would use bad language, for the underling who took him the notice was a Comandator-Portier, and was made to wear a red cap with the arms of the Republic as a badge ‘to protect him against abuse’!

In 1791, when a company formed of nobles undertook to build the Fenice Theatre, using part of the ruins of the old theatre of San Benedetto, they presented to the Doge a memorandum concerning the boxes for the Diplomatic Corps, of which I give an extract for the sake of its monumental absurdity, translating the terms quite literally:—

The memorandum ends with the rather startling statement that the pretensions of the ambassadors, if admitted, would cause the Company to lose eleven thousand ducats.

The Doge, who afterwards showed small alacrity to act when the country was in mortal danger, was apparently much moved on receiving the Company’s petition, and forthwith summoned the Senate to consider the weighty matter; it is true that if he had done anything for the petitioners without appealing to that body, he would have been naturally suspected of being a shareholder.

The Senate decided that, without making any change in the method of drawing boxes, and without prejudice to the existing system in any other theatre, ambassadors should pay owners one hundred and sixty’ ducats for boxes in the first row, and that ministers should pay eighty ducats for those in the second; whereby, said the Senate, which still preserved traditions of business, the owners of the said boxes would be getting four per cent on the money they had invested.

The construction of the famous Fenice lasted twenty months, and the new theatre opened with an opera by Paisiello on a libretto by Alessandro Pepoli.

XII

THE LAST MAGISTRATES

The philosophical reader will naturally ask what elements composed the Great Council of the Venetian Republic at a time when France was on the brink of the Revolution, and all Europe was about to be shaken by the explosion of the first new idea that had dawned on mankind since Christianity. I shall try to answer the question.

There were three classes of men in the Council: first, the ancient aristo-plutocracy which, though with a few

additions to its numbers, and though itself divided into two parties, had on the whole steered the Republic through eleven hundred years of history; secondly, a number of families, mostly of ‘new men,’ though they had sat in the Council four hundred years and more, but who had all been more or less occupied with the legal profession since they had existed; thirdly and lastly, the poor nobles called the ‘Barnabotti,’ from the quarter of San Barnabò, where most of them were lodged at the public expense.

The first category generally held the posts of highest dignity, many of which implied a salary by no means small, but never sufficient to pay for the display which the position required, according to accepted customs. The traditional splendour which the Venetian ambassadors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had inaugurated was dear to the Senate, and had come to be officially required, if not actually prescribed in so many words. These great families had long been accustomed to play the leading parts, and as the business spirit which had made Venice the richest power in Europe died out, their pride was often greater than their sense of responsibility. These and many other causes lowered the standard according to which young Venetians had been brought up during centuries to understand the administration of their country; and the result was that they were not fit to fill the offices to which they were called, and therefore handed over their work to private secretaries, who were generally ambitious and intriguing men. To be a member of the Great Council had now only a social value, like those hereditary coats of arms in which there had once been such deep meaning. Throughout ages the aristocracy of Venice had differed altogether from the nobility of other countries, but as decadence advanced to decay, and decay threatened destruction, the Venetian senator grew more and more like the French marquis of the same period.

In an access of greatness Louis XIV. is reported to have said, ‘L’état c’est moi!’ but the State continued to exist without him. The Venetian nobles might have said with much more truth, and perhaps with more reasonable pride, ‘We nobles are the Republic!’ For when they degenerated into dolls, the Republic soon ceased to exist.

The second category of nobles comprised by far the sanest and most intelligent part of the aristocracy, and it was generally from their ranks that the Quarantie were chosen, as well as the ‘Savi,’ and those magistrates from whom special industry and intelligence were required, or at least hoped.

The Barnabotti had nothing in common with the two other classes, except their vanity of caste, which was so infinitely far removed from pride. As I have said, they owed their name to the parish

which most of them inhabited. Their nobility was more or less recent and doubtful, and almost all had ruined themselves in trying to rival the richer families. The majority of them had nothing but a small pension, paid them by the government, and barely sufficient to lift them out of actual misery. It was especially for them

that the College of Nobles had been founded, in which their sons were educated for nothing, with all the usual imperfections of gratuitous education. Like the ‘New Men’ of the fourteenth century, they felt that an insurmountable barrier separated them from the older and richer classes, and the humiliations to which they were often exposed by the latter kept alive in them the sort of hatred which was felt in other parts of Europe by the agricultural population for the owners of the land. Their poverty and rancorous disposition made them especially the objects of bribery when any party in the Great Council needed the assistance of their votes against another.

The better sort of Venetians were well aware of the evils that were destroying the governing body. In 1774 a member of the Council made a speech on the subject, in which he said that the greatest damage the Republic had suffered had been caused by the action of time; it lay in the already very sensible diminution in the numbers of the Great Council, which was, in fact, the government itself. He pointed out that within one century a large number of patrician families had become