Old and crippled as he was, Malipiero soon grew obsessed with making Teresa his mistress. Although he was delighted to see her when she arrived with her mother, by the time they left he was always in a rage. He allowed only one other person to be present at their meetings: the novice abate Casanova who, as he recorded in his memoirs, was amazed by Teresa’s flirtatious behaviour: ‘She came to visit him nearly every day, but always accompanied by her mother, an old actress who had retired from the theatre for the good of her soul and who, as one might have expected, had formed a project to unite GOD with the devil. She took her daughter to Mass every day, she demanded that she take confession every Sunday; but in the afternoon she took her up to see the amorous old man, whose anger astonished me when the girl refused to kiss him on the grounds that, having made her devotions in the morning, she could not condescend to offend the same GOD whom she had eaten and might still have in her stomach. What a sight for me then aged fifteen, the only one who the old man allowed to be a silent witness to these scenes! The villainous mother applauded the resistance of her daughter, and dared to lecture the voluptuary, who in his turn dared not refute her maxims which were either too Christian or not at all so, and he had to resist the temptation of hurling anything he could lay his hands on at her. He didn’t know what to say to her. His lust turned to anger; and after they left he calmed himself down by having philosophical talks with me.’18
It seemed inconceivable to Malipiero that Teresa would not allow him to take even the slightest liberty, never mind relinquish her precious virginity to him – that is, if he had the physical ability to claim it. He was wealthy, noble, generous and well-connected, while she came from the kind of milieu where to offer sex to one’s patron was de rigueur. And yet, despite being urged on by her mother, the young soprano resisted Malipiero’s every advance. Though he attempted to bribe her to become his mistress she insisted that her maidenhead was not for sale at any price; and when, out of desperation, he offered to marry her, she turned him down, very properly saying that she did not wish to earn the hatred of his relatives, whose name would have been struck from Venice’s Golden Book of patrician families if the senator had married a commoner; though sexually liberated, Venetian society was still rigidly divided when it came to class and birth. Frustrated beyond endurance, the senator turned to fifteen-year-old Casanova for some distinctly non-clerical advice on how to seduce Teresa:
‘Offer her a huge sum of money, a settlement.’
‘From what she says she wouldn’t commit a mortal sin to become queen of the world.’
‘You’ll either have to rape her or throw her out and ban her from coming here.’
‘I’m not capable of doing the former, and I can’t bring myself to do the latter.’
‘Kill her.’
‘That might happen if I don’t die first.’
‘Your Excellency is to be pitied.’
‘Do you ever go to her place?’
‘No, for I could fall in love with her; and if she behaved towards me as I see her do here, I’d become unhappy.’
‘You are right.’19
Malipiero was eager to nip in the bud any possible relationship between Teresa and Casanova. Since they were thrown together every day, she was an obvious temptation to the youth, and for her part the handsome young novice was a much more enticing prospect than the withered septuagenarian who was forever trying to talk her into bed. They shared a similar family background in the twilight world of the Venetian theatre where their parents’ lives had once been all too intimately intertwined; and given their similarly adventurous spirits, their good looks, their amorous natures and the amount of time they spent together, it was almost inevitable that they would eventually be attracted to one another. The opportunity for them to show their feelings for each other was not to come quite yet, and when it did it had explosive consequences for Casanova. Left alone in the salon with Teresa one afternoon while the senator took a siesta, Casanova began to play a dangerous game with her. ‘Being seated close to one another at a small table,’ he wrote, ‘our backs turned towards the door of the bedroom where we supposed our benefactor was asleep, in the innocent gaiety of our natures we were overcome with the desire to explore the differences between our bodies.’ They were so carried away that they did not notice the furious Malipiero hobble back into the room with the aid of his walking-stick: ‘We were at the most interesting part of our examination when a violent blow from a cane fell on my neck, followed by another, which would have been followed by more if I hadn’t very rapidly escaped from the hail by making for the door.’20 This was the last Malipiero saw of Casanova, whom he banned from his palazzo from then on; but the senator was so much in Teresa’s thrall that he never reproached her about what had happened.
All this would take place a year in the future. In the meantime, there were plenty of women other than Teresa to distract the sexually charged novice priest from his prayers and studies, for the famous beauties of Venice, with their penchant for the game of love, were to be found in every corner of the city and, as in the future, women took to him at first sight. ‘So many fine acquaintances with women of the world, as they are called, gave me the desire to please by the way I presented myself and the elegance of my dress,’21 Casanova later admitted. By the tail-end of 1741, he had grown obsessed with his appearance. He swaggered around the city in his clerical garb with his face lightly powdered, and his thin gangly body plastered with jasmine-scented pomade. Even though the top of his head had been shaved by Tosello when he took the tonsure, the famous curls once so lovingly tended by Bettina Gozzi had grown thick and long again, contravening an ancient ecumenical edict often cited by his worried priest that Clericus qui nutrit comam anathema - a cleric who grows his hair shall be anathema. Afraid that his self-love was out of control, the ever-anxious Marcia let Tosello into his bedroom early one morning while Casanova lay sleeping, and allowed him to cut off all his front curls. When her grandson woke up he was furious, particularly when Francesco, his younger brother, laughed at him (’He was jealous of me all his life,’ he wrote of Francesco, ‘nevertheless combining envy with fondness, I’m not sure how.’) Casanova plotted revenge on Tosello, but calmed down somewhat when Malipiero sent him a fashionable hairdresser who restyled his cropped hair and made him look even more handsome than before.
The proof of this came when, appealing to Casanova’s vanity, Malipiero suggested that he should write and deliver the panegyric at the church of San Samuele on 26 December; in the senator’s capacity as president of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, a charitable organisation of laymen, the sermon lay in his gift. Casanova had never thought of becoming a preacher before, but suddenly he had full confidence in his own ability to write and deliver a sermon that would astonish everyone. The occasion restored an uneasy peace between the priest and his novice, for Casanova’s first sermon was indeed brilliant. The church received fifty gold sequins in offerings from the impressed patrician audience who had been invited to hear it, Marcia wept with joy, and Casanova’s considerable ego was further inflated not only by the praise that was heaped upon him but also by the number of love-letters that the female congregants slipped into the offerings bag along with their coins.
He did not bother to reply to any of them, for by now Casanova was in love for a second time. While rehearsing his sermon at Tosello’s house he had met a young girl, Angela Cattarina Tosello, who would exercise an irresistible attraction over him for the next year.
ANGELA AND LUCIA
Angela Cattarina Tosello was the daughter of the priest’s brother, painter Iseppo Tosello. Two months younger than Casanova, she was an honest, beautiful girl who had heard the dramatic story of his haircut from her uncle’s lips, and, when Casanova came to the house, insisted on hearing it again from his. Casanova soon became as obsessed with Angela as Senator Malipiero was with Teresa Imer. In order to have a valid excuse to see her, he announced his intention of becoming a full-time preacher and roped in her u
ncle to help him. On his frequent visits to the Tosello household, ostensibly to discuss the subject of writing sermons, Casanova wooed Angela with all the charm he could muster. But whilst she was happy to encourage him to love her, and even promised to marry him if he gave up the Church, she proved a perfect dragon of virtue. None of Casanova’s emotive arguments had the slightest effect on her. Angela was adamant that she was going to save her virginity, and all her other sexual favours, for her marriage bed.
By the following summer Casanova was still pestering Angela like a wasp hovering around a sealed honey pot. It was no use. ‘Her meanness in granting me favours irritated me; and my love had already become a torment,’ he wrote. ‘With my strong instinct I needed a girl more like Bettina, one who enjoyed appeasing the flame of love without snuffing it out.’ He began to lose weight out of sheer sexual frustration. Angela was, he claimed, ‘drying me up. The pathetic, plaintive speeches I made to her over the embroidery frame at which she worked with two sisters, friends of hers, had more effect on them than they did on her heart, which was too enslaved by the maxim that was poisoning me. If I had not only had eyes for her I would have realised that the two sisters were more attractive than she was; but she had made me stubborn.’22 Convinced that he would lose interest if she gave in to him, Angela clung on to her principles in the face of Casanova’s emotional blackmail. When she insisted that her self-enforced abstinence was as difficult for her as it was for him, he grew even more annoyed with her, and turned his attentions to a country bumpkin, whose downfall he unwittingly caused.
It was the custom of the patrician classes to leave Venice in the hot summer months when the sewage-polluted canals smelled to high heaven and the mosquitoes were at their most vicious, and to take refuge in their country villas on the cooler mainland, where they enjoyed an idyllic rural lifestyle. Boating parties, afternoon trottatas in carriages around the shady countryside, and balls, picnics and dinners galore were all conducted with the kind of lighthearted informality that would have been unacceptable in town.
One of Malipiero’s female friends, the Countess of Montereale, owned a large estate at Pasiano in Friuli, where she spent every summer along with her daughter and a large retinue of guests. In September 1740 she invited Casanova to join her there for a few weeks, and she allotted him a bedroom on the ground floor of the villa, next to that occupied by her caretaker’s daughter, who was to wait on him. The girl, Lucia, was fourteen years old, an innocent uneducated country lass with an all-too-trusting and generous nature. Childish almost to the point of being simple-minded, as her parents’ only child she was ‘their darling, the consolation of their old age’. She was obedient, devout and healthy, these good people told Casanova; in fact, her only fault was that she was ‘too young’ – a subtle warning to their employers’ teenage houseguest to respect her honour. They had good reason to warn him off, because physically Lucia was as mature as many seventeen-year-olds. Her skin was fashionably but naturally pale, her eyes were smoulderingly dark, her breasts were ‘two rocks made to shipwreck the most experienced of pilots’23 and she wore her long black hair pinned up in an untidy style that was uniquely hers. So unconscious was Lucia of the power of her beauty that she walked about in a state of semi-undress: Casanova’s first view of her was when she appeared barefooted in his bedroom early one morning clad only in a skimpy chemise. Far from being embarrassed by the situation, Lucia looked at the young priest as serenely as if he had been an old friend, unaware that her appearance had put him into a state of violent sexual excitement and wiped all thoughts of Angela, Teresa and even Bettina from his mind.
Casanova found it inconceivable that any well-brought-up young girl, ‘virtuous and not at all stupid’,24 could behave as freely as Lucia did and still be strait-laced enough to repulse him. He was certainly not the first man to take an interest in her: the countess’s elderly husband had made so many advances towards her that Lucia now ran away whenever she saw him approaching. By contrast with this archetypal lewd old man who was fond of making rude jokes at her expense, the young abate was somehow safe, ‘well-behaved, and what’s more a priest’, as Lucia put it when, determined to find out whether or not she would be open to his advances, Casanova managed to entice her under his bedcovers on the second morning of his stay in Pasiano. Her uninhibited response to him, he concluded, was entirely innocent in nature. ‘Her naivety, her vivacity, her curiosity, her frequent blushes when she guilelessly said things that made me laugh, everything convinced me that she was an angel incarnate who could not fail to fall victim to the first libertine who should take her in hand. I was certain that it would not be me.’25 It was self-esteem rather than disinterested respect for Lucia that made Casanova determined not even to attempt to lose his own innocence with her; for he did not wish to be shown up in front of his wealthy friends as the kind of man who would betray Lucia’s parents’ confidence.
What did Lucia think of the young priest who asked her into his bed every morning, chatted with her for three hours without so much as holding her hand, and then disappeared off to spend his days entertaining her parents’ wealthy employers with his witty repartee? Did she suspect that during their time together he was torturing himself with desire or that, night after night, he resorted to what he called ‘the schoolboys’ remedy’ and masturbated with her image in his mind? When, at the end of twelve days, Casanova warned Lucia to stay away from him in future for her own good, she made a fatal error very common among women who were new to the game of love: she mistook his lust for love. She was in love with him too, she declared, but instead of making her miserable, as it did him, love made her happy. Could it be that Casanova was not born to love women? Begging him to think of some plan, and touchingly telling him to ‘Trust in Lucia’, the caretaker’s daughter fell into his arms.
If threatening never to see her again had been a tactic designed to seduce her it could not have been more successful. From now on, Lucia spent the early hours of every morning, the late evening hours, and often all night, in bed with Casanova, and she swore that she would love him for ever. Angela had refused him everything; too generous for her own good, Lucia refused him nothing. Although their sexual relationship stopped short of actual penetration – or so Casanova later insisted – by the time he left Pasiano at the end of the month, her virginity, if it still existed, was a nebulous technicality.
His feelings for Lucia lasted until the moment he returned to Venice and saw Angela again. Intent on obtaining the clearly unobtainable – a trait that would continue throughout Casanova’s adult life – he visited the recalcitrant virgin every day at the embroidery school where she was now studying, but she still resisted him. Instructed by her uncle the priest not to spend so much time at the school, Casanova enlisted her fellow-students and close friends, Nanetta and Marta Savorgnan, to help him towards his goal.
NANETTA AND MARTA
The noble-born Savorgnan sisters were in every way delightful girls. Nanetta, the older at sixteen, was clever, quick-thinking, adventurous, literate and well-read. Her sister Marta, who was just one year younger, was quieter and perhaps less intelligent, but she had a gentle, artless nature which made her happy to follow her sister’s lead. Both girls, whilst entirely inexperienced, were bursting with sexual curiosity. They simply could not understand why their good friend Angela persisted in repelling her gorgeous admirer, particularly when she had already confessed to them that she liked him; when she stayed overnight with them and shared their large bed, she even made Marta play the part of her ‘dear abate’ in their kissing games.
The patrician Savorgnans had long-established links to the Farussi family: Tribune Savorgnan had been Zanetta’s godfather,26 and the actress and her husband had rented their house on the Calle della Commedia from one of his relatives. By the time when Casanova met Nanetta and Marta their mother was dead, and the girls were living in a large but dilapidated palazzo with their aunt, Caterina Orio, a noble lady who had fallen on hard times. Dependent on a small p
ension from her brother, the secretary of Venice’s ruling Council of Ten, Signora Orio coveted one of the grants handed out to needy windows by the charitable Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament (the recipients’ names were selected by lot twice a year) but she lacked an influential person to put her name forward for the draw.
When Casanova asked Nanetta and Marta to intervene with Angela on his behalf, the sisters threw themselves into the task with the gusto of professional matchmakers. Compared to their fun-loving, mischievous natures, prim Angela soon seemed rather dull. As Nanetta’s first letter to Casanova made clear (she smuggled it to him at the embroidery school), the intrigue was to be delightfully complicated and risky and involve all sorts of subterfuge, and she was to organise everything. Since there was nothing in the world that she was not prepared to do for Angela, she wrote, she had devised a plan that would benefit all of them. Casanova’s first task was to get into their aunt’s good books by recommending to Senator Malipiero that her name be entered into the lottery for a grant from the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, of which he was president.
‘Last Sunday Angela told her that you enjoy this gentleman’s affection,’ Nanetta wrote, ‘and that the best means of gaining his support would be by committing you to ask him for it. She foolishly told her that you’re in love with me, that you only go to the embroidery school so that you can speak to me, and that consequently I would be able to engage your interest on her behalf. My aunt answered that since you were a priest there was nothing to fear, and that I could write and invite you to her house; but I refused. The lawyer Rosa, who’s my aunt’s soul-mate, said that I was in the right, and that it wasn’t proper for me to write to you; but that she herself must ask you to come and see her on an important matter. He said that if it was true that you liked me you wouldn’t fail to turn up, and he persuaded her to write you the note that you’ll find when you get home. If you want to find Angela at our house, don’t come until the day after tomorrow, Sunday. If you can obtain the favour that my aunt desires from Signor Malipiero you’ll become the pet of our house. Forgive me if I treat you badly when you come, for I told them that I didn’t like you. You’d do well to flirt with my aunt, even though she’s sixty years old. Signor Rosa will not be jealous, and you’ll endear yourself to everyone here. I’ll arrange things so that you can speak to Angela alone. I’ll do everything to convince you of my friendship. Farewell.’27
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