Read Online What Casanova Told Me by Susan Swan - Free Book Online

husband. There is little point trying to tell Father I am not reassured by this advice.
    So I was thinking, as I massaged his head, that I forgive Father for wanting me to do and be things I do not wish to do and be. And perhaps it was the tenderness in my face that the gondolier misinterpreted. As for my betrothed, I feel only boredom. Each night, he comes to dinner and grumbles on about the lace industry in Burano, or the glass furnaces in Murano—both are sadly in decline, he claims. And despite his own lack of cleanliness, Francis has taken up Father’s practice of searching for bodily wastes in the streets as proof of Venetian sloth and depravity. Father had thought we might be married in Venice if his trade mission prospered. But yesterday Francis announced he will not be married in a Papist soap bubble—he means the Basilica of San Marco—because he found human excrement in the vestry.
    My parent and I made our way up from the landing to the little Convent of the Capuchins near SanRedentore. The Abbess was waiting for us at the door, dressed in a white robe that left the tops of her round shoulders as naked as those of the French actresses we saw one night in Paris. Perhaps Father, too, was thinking of those daring thespians because I caught him gazing admiringly at the curve of her neck as she let us into an elegant hall.
    Aside from a tall grilled wall rising up like the bars of a cage at the end of the room we could have been in a count’s banqueting hall in Paris. On one side of the barrier, dozens of young novices in pretty white dresses smiled and dipped like goldfish in a water bowl. On the other, young male visitors stood gossiping with them through the holes in the grille, designed for that purpose.
    The Abbess, who spoke a pretty French, explained that young girls enter her convent to receive an education because Venetian schools are very poor, and Venetian girls among the most untutored in Europe. Most of the novices, she told us, will marry the young men visiting them there that afternoon.
    Although I envied the novices their small bodies and flirtatious ways that so easily elicited the suitors’ attention, they appeared trapped in their pretty cage, and their suitors were a weedy, pale-faced lot, less imposing even than Francis who, like Father, at least looks ruddy from farm work. Our arrival disrupted the flirting, and a few of the suitors turned to listen as Father described the simple wedding ceremony he has planned for Francis and myself. He told the Abbess he wanted a minister of our own denomination and that the ceremony should be done before war is declared.
    “You think there will be a war in Venice?” the Abbess said, smiling at the notion.
    Father brought out a little box of powders he’d bought at a local apothecary shop. He took some up his nostrils.
    “I pray I am wrong, Mother,” he said. “But I believe Napoleon will avenge the Verona uprising against his army. He is encouraged by the weakness of Venice. Already, your Senate has given in to his request to punish Venetians who resist the French.” The Abbess sat very still, as if she didn’t believe a word Father said, and then she broke into a tinkly, sly laugh.
    “You Americans are a deadly serious race,” she said. “A month from now when your daughter is married, you and I will laugh at your foreboding.”
    Our discussion over, the Abbess took us down a long hall and into another grilled room and then another until we found ourselves in a library. She produced a journal and quill-pen and proceeded to make notes about the cost of posting the banns while Father waited fretfully, twirling the curls on his bob wig between his fingers. I guessed that he was brooding about the fate of his mission.
    I resolved not to worry about politics that afternoon and wandered over to enjoy the view from the library window. It overlooked a pretty hedged courtyard, and I was startled to see Monsieur Casanova sunning himself there in his body