The Venetian Glass Nephew by Elinor Wylie

First published: 1925

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Fantasy

Time of work: 1782

Locale: Italy and France

Principal Characters:

• Peter Innocent Bon, an unworldly cardinal
• Virginio, his Venetian glass nephew
• Rosalba (Sappho the Younger) Berni, Virginio’s bride
• Monsieur de Chastelneuf, the Chevalier de Langeist
• Angelo Querini, a philosopher and scholar
• Count Carlo Gozzi, a writer of fairy tales

The Story

The heart of Peter Innocent Bon, cardinal prefect of the Congregation of the Propaganda, was filled with happiness that was almost childlike in its simplicity. After thirty years, he was to see his native Venice once more, for brilliant, vain Pius VI, about to visit its lagoons and golden palaces, had named the aged cardinal a member of his suite. Peter Innocent, in 1782, was in the eighty-first year of his life. A shy, mild man, he seldom appeared in the rich vestments of his office, but went inconspicuously about Rome in the gray-brown garb of the Franciscan Friars Minor, a robe suited to the humility of a follower of St. Francis.

Only one small regret marred Peter Innocent’s pleasure as he viewed again the city of his youth. Pius was traveling in state, and he and many of his suite were accompanied by their nephews. Peter Innocent had no nephews; his brother had fathered only daughters and his sisters were in holy orders. Seeing the satisfaction that other churchmen found in the company of their young kinsmen, he wished that he too might have enjoyed such comfort in his old age. Prayers, fasting, and pilgrimages to holy shrines, however, had given him no nephew of his own, and the thought of parenthood would have been as foreign to the chastity of his mind as to that of his body.

During the Venetian visit, Pius treated Peter Innocent with particular graciousness and asked him to represent the pontiff at the singing of a new cantata at the Incurabili. Listening to the music, the cardinal felt that its subject, the return of Tobias, was appropriate to his own situation.

As he left the Incurabili, a hand touched his shoulder. He turned to find Alvise Luna, the famous glassblower of Murano, at his elbow. Luna, whom the cardinal had known in earlier days, complained that he had fallen upon evil times. Willing to help his old friend and not knowing that the man was under suspicion as a sorcerer, Peter Innocent went with him to his cellar workshop. There he met a masked stranger whom Luna introduced as M. de Chastelneuf, Chevalier de Langeist. Peter Innocent was amazed when the men displayed their miraculous wares, a flying golden griffin, a glass stag that walked, and glass birds that sang. When they asked if they might execute a commission for some bauble he had in mind, Peter Innocent reached a sudden decision. He asked modestly if they could make him a nephew such as he had always desired.

At Luna’s warning glance, Chastelneuf repressed the smile and the ribald comment that rose to his lips. Solemnly he assured the cardinal that such a work of art was difficult but not impossible. If he would return in three days, he could see for himself the result of their labors.

Peter Innocent went to Luna’s cellar three nights later. In a chamber scented with spices and incense, Chastelneuf brought to life a figure of Venetian glass that lay upon a covered bier. The cardinal’s nephew stood revealed as a handsome young man of nineteen or twenty, of complexion so fair as to seem translucent, with yellow hair as fine as spun glass. He was dressed completely in white and wore a strange ring of crystal. Peter Innocent baptized him Virginio.

The cardinal, as much concerned for his nephew’s mind as he was for his person and his soul, decided to send him to Altichieri to study under the noble Angelo Querini, who had been Voltaire’s friend. On his arrival, Virginio met Rosalba Berni, Querini’s lovely ward. Some thought her a descendant of Francesco Berni, the poet; others whispered the name of Cardinal de Bernis. At eighteen, she was a prodigy of learning and a poet known officially as Sappho the Younger. Virginio had never seen anyone so beautiful, and Rosalba was not so engrossed in the classics as to fail to notice how handsome he was. Scholarly Querini, always indulgent toward Rosalba, gave them his blessing when they announced their desire to wed.

Meanwhile, Peter Innocent had gone to consult Count Carlo Gozzi, his longtime friend and a writer of fairy tales, on matters connected with Virginio’s future. He found Chastelneuf closeted with the Count; the chevalier had come to discuss the match between Rosalba and Virginio. He explained the reason for his interest in the girl to Peter Innocent and the Count. Years before he had loved Caterina, Rosalba’s mother, but because of his attachment to another woman, he had callously relinquished his innocent beloved to Cardinal de Bernis, a notorious libertine. The cardinal had loved Caterina faithfully, however, and Rosalba was the daughter of that affectionate union.

After the mother’s death, de Bernis had been summoned to Rome. Rosalba, already famous for her beauty and learning, had become the spoiled darling of French scholars and philosophers. After Voltaire’s death, Querini had become her guardian.

As Chastelneuf finished his story, Rosalba and Virginio appeared, having driven from Altichieri in the chevalier’s carriage. Seeing their happiness and youthful high spirits, Peter Innocent and his friends decided that the wedding should take place at once.

The marriage of Virginio and Rosalba, however, did not end as happily as one of Count Gozzi’s fairy tales. Chastelneuf had seen to it that Virginio could play the part of a tender and devoted husband, but there had been no provision for the contingencies of daily association with a hoyden such as Rosalba had suddenly become. He splintered too easily; sometimes, after a hearty embrace, Rosalba found particles of glass in her palms. Games like hide-and-seek and blind-man’s-buff, in which she sportively delighted, were impossible for him. Privately, she and Virginio were unhappy, and, realizing their unhappiness, Peter Innocent, Querini, Chastelneuf, and Count Gozzi were wretched as well.

At last, after Rosalba had tried to end her misery by leaping into a bonfire, Chastelneuf made a desperate suggestion. If she were willing to endure the agony of fire, she could be changed into a woman of the finest Sevres porcelain. Rosalba agreed for Virginio’s sake and because of her own love. Through winter snows, she and Chastelneuf and Peter Innocent traveled to the ancient town of Sevres, in France. While Peter Innocent, in an inn at Versailles, read aloud from the life of St. Francis, she and Chastelneuf went to the abandoned Dubois factory, and there she was transformed into a proper bride for a Venetian glass lover.

So Virginio and Rosalba returned to Venice in the twilight of a dimming century to live happily in a delicate, beautiful world of porcelain and Murano glass. There Pietro Longhi painted them in his old age. With fragile grace, the lovers look out from the miniature he made, and reflected in the mirrors that surround them are the faces of Peter Innocent Bon, Angelo Querini, and Count Carlo Gozzi. M. de Chastelneuf is not in the antique miniature; it is believed that he had retired to Bohemia.

Critical Evaluation:

Elinor Wylie came to fiction writing late in her career. In her poetry, her famous intensity had been controlled though spectacular, but in her novels it took on a feverish and artificial quality. She did not have to strain to write well, for her feeling for style was instinctive, but she was obsessed with the need to create ornate pictures out of words. She became part of the group of “Exquisites” of the 1920’s which included Joseph Hergesheimer, James Branch Cabell, and Carl Van Vechten. The shadow behind THE VENETIAN GLASS NEPHEW, however, is the Oscar Wilde of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY. Both novels deal with artificially created beauty and both convey, beneath their baroque surfaces, a moral lesson.

THE VENETIAN GLASS NEPHEW is the most completely realized of Wylie’s novels, reflecting the qualities of her poetic imagination and style. A subtle fable of life and art, it marches with minuet grace and precision along its fantastic course. Virginio, the man of glass, and Rosalba, his flesh-and-blood bride, are more than figures in a romance which seems on the surface as slight and fragile as its spun-glass hero. Under the brittle brilliance of this novel, there is a darkly personal note of mocking irony and almost silent grief. What might have been a slight work of artifice becomes, through its underlying meaning, a work of limited but authentic art. M. de Chastelneuf, idealist, cynic, and charlatan, is the famous Casanova under thin disguise.

A decadent eroticism (especially in the character of Chastelneuf) pervades the book. The question raised by Gozzi stands at the center of the novel: Can this artificial youth be “better than human”? Chastelneuf, who stage-manages the entire drama, cannot be concerned with ordinary moral questions. He is insistent upon carrying human passion and curiosity to the limits of possibility. Yet, it appears, at last his heart is touched by the plight of Virginio, composed of magic and glass, and Rosalba, that “burning and spiritual child of love.”

Wylie’s novels seem to invert Hemingway’s aphorism: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration,” but there are in THE VENETIAN GLASS NEPHEW a gaiety and erudition that give the book a lovely, amused formality that the reader cannot easily resist. The tale poses a contest between Christian art and pagan nature, and in this conflict, there can be only one result: nature must yield. Venice is the appropriately artificial setting for the story, and the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, the inevitable setting for this moral romance of “exquisite monsters” and alchemists and brittle lovers.