I remained in Padua long enough to equip myself for the doctor's degree I meant to take the following year.
After Easter I returned to Venecia, where my misfortune had already been absorbed into the city's perpetual gossip and forgotten. I had not forgotten, however.
Whenever someone hinted that I might preach again, a prickling heat climbed my scalp. I answered, with all the dignity a disgraced abbé can muster, that I would sooner starve than mount another pulpit.
On the eve of Ascension Day M. Manzoni introduced me to a young courtesan, who was nick-named Cavamacchia, after her father's humble trade as a clothes scourer.
Juliette Preati was vexed by this as she wished to be called by her family name, but it was all in vain; Venecia loved it, therefore it would cling to her forever.
She had been introduced to fashionable notice by the Marquis de Sanvitali, a nobleman from Parma, who had given her one hundred thousand ducats for her favours.
Her beauty was then the talk of everybody in Venecia, and it was fashionable to call upon her.
To converse with her, and especially to be admitted into her circle, was considered a great boon.
As she will reappear more than once in my history, I trust my readers will indulge me while I sketch the path that led her to that elevated sofa where I first beheld her.
At a young age, while delivering a newly cleaned coat to the nobleman Marco Muazzo, she was noticed even through her rags.
Muazzo soon visited her father's shop with his friend, the advocate Bastien Uccelli, who was struck by the romantic and cheerful nature of Juliette still more than by her beauty and fine figure.
He installed her in rooms of her own, provided a music master, and added the sort of "protection" that leaves no doubts about its terms.
During the fairs he paraded her through the coffeehouses and promenades of the city, where she drew eyes as naturally as lanterns draw moths, and soon every admirer of the fair sex knew her name.
Six months later, a manager bound for Vienna offered her a contract.
She went.
By then the advocate had ceded her to a wealthy Convenentian who, after lavishing diamonds upon her, left her also.
On stage she sang a role meant for a castrato; beauty carried what her inferior talent could not.
She became a sensation. Admirers swarmed her box, praised her too loudly, and carried the tales of her private triumphs a little too near imperial ears.
The august Empress Maria Theresa was not amused.
One morning Juliette received an order to quit the city.
Count Spada extended his protection and brought her back to Venecia; soon after, she left for an engagement in Padua.
There she conquered the Marquis de Sanvitali; the marchioness finding Juliette seated boldly in her own theatre box, and Juliette having acted disrespectfully to her, she slapped her face.
The affair made a great deal of noise so Juliette gave up the stage altogether.
She came back to Venecia, where, made conspicuous by her banishment from Vienna, she could not fail to make her fortune.
Expulsion from Vienna, for this class of women, had become a title to fashionable favour, and when there was a wish to depreciate a singer or a dancer, it was said of her that she had not been sufficiently prized to be expelled from Vienna.
In the spring the Marquis de Sanvitali reappeared. His first gesture -a gift of one hundred thousand ducats- was offered as restitution for the insult Juliette had received from his wife--
An insult, however, which the courtesan never admitted, she preferred that the price be attributed to her charms rather than to a blow.
She was right; the admission of the blow received would have left a stain upon her charms, and how much more to her taste to allow those charms to be prized at such a high figure!
Manzoni presented me to her in the spring of 1741, declaring that I was a young cleric "with promise."
Juliette received me as one might receive a petitioner.
Reclining upon a sofa, she was surrounded by seven or eight admirers who fanned her vanity with flattery.
When she turned toward me, I felt her gaze pass over my figure with the calm of a merchant appraising cloth.
"I am not sorry to make your acquaintance," she said, flicking open her fan and indicating a chair.
The room glowed under twenty candles, their reflections dancing across mirrors and silk.
Up close, she was beauty perfected by calculation: a complexion too even, lips too vivid, the faintest line of rouge at the border between nature and art.
Her smile was constant—perhaps from pleasure, perhaps from habit.
Her bosom, veiled only by gauze, seemed designed to provoke desire; yet I did not surrender to her charms.
Her hands were large and fleshy.
Though she tried to hide her feet, a stray slipper betrayed them- well-proportioned to her tall frame, a trait displeasing to every man of refined taste, who expects a tall woman to have a small foot.
Altogether I found her beautiful, but when I compared her beauty and the price of one hundred thousand ducats paid for it, I marvelled at my remaining so cold.
I found myself unwilling to spend a single sequin to study her charms.
Before I could finish my private audit, the rhythmic splash of oars struck the canal.
Conversation faltered.
We all rose from our seats, and M. Querini hastened, somewhat blushing, to quit his place on the sofa.
The gondola had delivered its rightful sovereign: the Marquis de Sanvitali.
He entered—a man bronzed by travel, confident in his ruin. He smiled with the serenity of one long forgiven for excess.
Taking a chair just below Juliette's, he forced her to turn toward him, and for the first time I saw her face in full.
I visited Juliette four or five times afterward. Each visit left me less enchanted and more observant.
So, at Malipiero's table one evening, when someone asked my opinion of her, vanity spoke before prudence could intervene.
"She would please only a glutton," I said, "one whose taste has tired of honest flavors. She lacks the grace of nature and the manners of breeding; no wit, no ease- none of those refinements that hold a gentleman's attention after the candles burn low."
The laughter that followed was too hearty to be discreet.
Malipiero leaned close and murmured, "You've just earned an enemy, my boy. By morning she'll know every syllable."
He was right.
When I next called on her, she inspected me through a small glass as though I were a specimen under study.
When she wasn't peering, she half-closed her lids-- the cruelest trick of a woman who knows her eyes are her chief weapon.
They were that dangerous shade of blue that flickers between innocence and calculation, and which often vanishes, after having worked miracles, when the owner reaches the shady side of forty.
Frederick the Great preserved it until his death.
Nature, in her humor, had armed my adversary well.
The story of my insult reached her through the chatterbox Cortantini, who never let discretion spoil a good tale.
Yet when I visited with M. Manzoni soon after, Juliette received us warmly and told him that a wonderful judge of beauty had found flaws in hers, but she took good care not to specify them.
It was plain she was firing indirectly at me. I braced myself for the ostracism I was expecting, but which, however, she kept in abeyance fully for an hour.
Then, as the talk turned to a concert given by Therese Imer, she aimed.
"Tell me," she said lightly, "what does Signor de Malipiero do for little Thérèse?"
"He educates her," I replied.
"That he can," she replied, smiling sweetly. "He's a man of talent. But what, pray, can he do with you?"
I felt the room lean toward her. "Whatever he can," I said.
Her smile sharpened. "They say he finds you rather stupid."
The laughter was unanimous and deserved.
Naturally, she had the laugh on her side.
I, confused, uncomfortable and not knowing what to say, took leave after having cut a very sorry figure.
I resolved never again to darken her door.
The next day at dinner the account of my adventure caused much amusement to the old senator.