Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  Casanova was perhaps hoping to discourage Teresa, but instead his confession that she had not been the only one perpetrating a deception came as a relief to her. She was glad that Casanova had neither money nor rank because it put them on a more equal footing. She would travel with him anywhere he wished, she swore, and would marry him if he wished to have legal rights over her, although she assured him that the marriage ceremony would make her love him no more than she already did – a surprisingly emancipated attitude. Teresa would also give him a present which, if he loved her, he would not be too proud to accept: the present was to be herself. She was all his, and from now on she would take care of him. ‘Hereafter think only of loving me; but only me,’24 she pleaded.

  Her last words sounded the death knell of their love affair. Although Casanova swore he would marry Teresa in Bologna ‘day after tomorrow, at the latest’ he must already have been looking for a way out of what he could only see as a claustrophobic relationship that would limit his future prospects. In truth he had no intention of getting married, certainly not at this stage in his life. Marriage was ‘the tomb of love’ in his opinion and, as he said of the institution, just months later, ‘I hope never to find myself compelled to contract that tie.’25 But how was he to renege on his promise without dishonouring himself in his own eyes as well as in Teresa’s? The answer was as simple as it was devious: he mislaid his passport.

  In eighteenth-century Europe, as in modern times, passports – quite literally documents which allowed the bearer to ‘pass through a port’ – had to be carried on most long-distance journeys, and travellers lost them at their peril. For identification purposes they contained a detailed description of the bearer. ‘It is commanded to safely and freely let pass: Jacques Cazanua Italian thirty-two years old, five foot ten and a half inches tall or Thereabouts Face long, plain Swarthy. Heavy long nose. Large mouth. Brown, highly intelligent eyes. Who is going to Flanders’ read the passport issued to Casanova by the Due de Gesvres in Paris in 1757.26 Usually issued by government ministers, the military, or the Church or city authorities, such documents were essential when travelling through disputed territories such as central Italy, where the Austrians and Spanish were still battling over their possessions. When he set off from Senigallia with Teresa, Casanova placed his passport safely with his other papers, or so he claimed. Just four hours later, when a non-commissioned officer of the Spanish Army stationed in Pesaro asked to inspect it, he found that it had mysteriously disappeared.

  Casanova was instantly arrested and told that he could go nowhere until he obtained a replacement passport from Rome. Until then, he was to be imprisoned in a Spanish guard house on the edge of Pesaro while Teresa was allowed to walk free. She was distraught at the thought of parting from him. ‘She wanted to stay in Pesaro,’ he later wrote, adding tellingly, ‘but I would not allow it.’27 Instead, he had his trunk untied from their carriage, gave Teresa a generous one hundred sequins and sent her on to Rimini alone.

  Having glimpsed a more secure existence free from deception, Teresa could no longer carry on living as a castrato. The moment she reached Rimini she confided her secret to the impresario who had hired her as ‘Bellino’. The impresario congratulated her on her brave decision. Luckily for her Rimini fell within the ecclesiastical province of Ravenna, where the bar against female singers was no longer in force, so Teresa could legally perform as a woman. She was an immediate success, and not only with the audiences: by the time Casanova turned up ten days later, she already had a new male admirer in tow: an Austrian, Baron Weiss.

  Casanova kept his promise to meet up with Teresa in Rimini, but by his hot-headed behaviour he ensured that he could only stay with her for one night. Although his time in captivity in Pesaro had been boring rather than unpleasant – he had whiled away the long hours playing faro and piquet with the soldiers – he impulsively escaped on a stolen horse before his passport arrived, and turned up in Rimini on the run, disguised as a muleteer. After spending only a few passionate hours with Teresa, he fled at dawn, promising that he would meet up with her again in Bologna in May and marry her then.

  We shall never know if he intended to keep his promise. For within weeks of her debut as a female performer, Teresa was introduced to fifty-six-year-old Francesco d’Eboli, the Duke of Castropignano and Captain General of the Spanish Army in Naples. Castropignano instantly fell in love with her, and offered her a lucrative contract at the San Carlo theatre in Naples. Built in 1737, the magnificent San Carlo with its blue and gold décor was regarded as one of the most prestigious opera houses in the world, and to be offered a year’s contract there was a fabulous opportunity for any singer. Nevertheless, Teresa hesitated to accept it until she had consulted Casanova by sending him two letters. The first told him of her good luck, and contained the unsigned contract for the San Carlo theatre. The second contained a pledge to serve him all her life. ‘She said that if I wanted to go to Naples with her she would meet up with me wherever I wished,’ he reported, ‘and that if I felt an aversion to returning to Naples I must disregard her good luck, and be certain that she could conceive of no fortune and no happiness other than to do everything within her power to make me content and happy’28 – an impossible task, had she but known it.

  By putting her fate into Casanova’s hands, Teresa reduced him to a state of the ‘greatest irresolution’ in which his genuine feelings for her battled against his own needs and pride. It was a defining moment for him. He neither wanted to lose his latest passion nor to stand in the way of her success, yet he was not prepared to follow her to Naples without having first made his own mark in the world. Like his own mother Zanetta, Teresa was in the theatrical profession, a despised lower-class milieu which Casanova had always tried to distance himself from. And, like Zanetta, Teresa would soon be surrounded by male admirers – in fact, she had already had two in tow, Weiss and the powerful duke. Casanova knew he could never cope with competition from other, richer admirers, nor with the ignominy of living off a woman’s earnings. Then there was his position to think of. During his previous stay in Naples he had made well-connected friends who believed him to be of high social rank. If he were to reappear in the city he had left with such high hopes only months previously as the penniless husband or lover of an actress, ‘a coward living off his wife or his mistress’,29 he would feel disgraced, and rightly so. More than anything else Casanova was ambitious to rise in the world, and an alliance with an actress – one of his own kind – would inevitably lead to his social downfall: ‘Sharing her lot, whether as a husband or lover, I should find myself degraded, humiliated, and forced by my position and profession to grovel. The reflection that in the fairest time of my youth I would have to renounce all hope of the high fortune which it seemed to me I had been born for gave the scales such a strong jolt that my reason silenced my heart.’30

  Marrying a singer was out of the question for Casanova. And now that he had enjoyed Teresa’s charms, even associating with her was losing its attraction. Playing for time, he returned her contract by post, warning her to engage a respectable chambermaid as a chaperone and to conduct herself in such a way ‘that I could marry her without blushing’, and promising to join her in Naples as soon as he could. Teresa replied poignantly that she would ‘wait for him until such time as he wrote and told her he no longer thought of her’. In another letter, written in early May, she informed him that Castropignano had offered to escort her personally to Naples. The duke was old, she reassured him, but even if he had been young Casanova would have had nothing to fear, for she would always remain faithful to him. If he needed money, she added, he should draw bills of exchange in Bologna on her name, ‘and she would pay them even if it meant her having to sell everything she had’.31

  This loving, generous, passionate letter did Teresa no good at all. It is doubtful if Casanova even replied to it. While she went to Naples and threw herself into her career, he returned to Venice and the welcoming arms of his two upper-class ‘wives’,
as he called them, Nanetta and Marta Savorgnan. It was not so easy for Teresa to forget him: she was pregnant. With no one else to turn to, she confided her predicament to Castropignano who was fast becoming her father-figure and saviour. Unwilling to lose her, the duke arranged for her to give birth in secret, then sent her child – a boy – to a wet-nurse in Sorrento where he was baptised in the name of Cesare Filippo Lanti and looked after and educated until he reached adulthood.

  For the next fourteen years Castropignano’s generosity to Teresa was boundless. He let her spend his money at a ruinous rate, settled 20,000 ducats on Cesarino, as Cesare was familiarly called, and arranged for both mother and son to be placed under the protection of the Prince della Riccia in the event of his own death. Teresa had accidentally fallen into clover. Her only regret was that her son was brought up believing that she was his sister rather than his mother. Deception was set to be a permanent fixture of her life.

  Casanova stopped writing to Teresa soon after she settled in Naples, so she never told him that they had a son. Nevertheless she regarded Cesarino, who grew up bearing an uncanny resemblance to his father, as ‘a sure pledge’ of their union, and she remained convinced that she and Casanova would marry if they ever met up again. When they did meet by chance sixteen years later, her position was very different. It was late November 1760, Castropignano had died two years previously, and Teresa was now a self-confident, independent thirty-one-year-old with her own substantial private means. She owned to having ‘fifty thousand ducati del regno and the same amount in diamonds’;32 and she travelled from city to city with a strongbox containing all her precious stones and silver plate plus fifty thousand ducats in securities. During the summer of 1760 she had married Cirillo Palesi, a poor but extremely handsome Roman some ten years her junior who was her delight and her plaything. Though he now had legal rights over her, Teresa sensibly intended to retain control of her money; she neither told him the full extent of her wealth nor informed him of her real relationship with Cesarino. She even lied to him about her age, which she claimed was no more than twenty-four.

  As well as her own income, Teresa also received the interest on Cesarino’s inheritance from Castropignano. With so much money at her disposal, there could have been scant financial incentive for her to work. However, she continued to perform as a soprano, and in the autumn of 1760 travelled with her husband and fifteen-year-old ‘brother’ to Florence, where she was engaged to sing at the Pergola Theatre (the name Artemisia Lanti appears in the Pergola’s records of the time). One night in November, Teresa glanced into the audience and saw Casanova staring back at her. He was no longer the impulsive young priest she had known in her youth, but a sophisticated man in his thirties, bewigged, bejewelled and richly dressed in the style of a French aristocrat.

  Teresa was so surprised to see Casanova at all, never mind so richly attired, that her eyes never left his during the rest of her aria, and when she walked into the wings she beckoned for him to meet her backstage. Without hesitating for a moment she introduced Casanova to her husband as her ‘father’, and the man to whom she owed all her good fortune in life. While Palesi was with them Teresa behaved with strict propriety towards Casanova, and when he left them alone together she would only grant her old lover a single passionate clinch. Her attitude to him was clear-cut: ‘It is all over,’ she said of their relationship. This was the perfect cue for Casanova to express his undying love for Teresa. For years he had carried the guilt of not replying to her last letter from Naples, and now that she was rich and in love with someone else he could indulge himself in regrets and pass the responsibility for their continuing separation on to her. ‘I find you bound, and I am free,’ he told her. ‘We would never have parted again; you have just rekindled all my old passion; my feelings are unchanged, and I am happy to have been able to convince myself of it; and unhappy not to be able to hope to possess you; I find you not only married but in love. Alas! I have delayed too long.’33 His regret increased when he met Teresa’s so-called ‘brother’, his own son Cesarino whose existence he had been unaware of until this point. Casanova was flabbergasted: the vivacious boy was his mirror-image; nature had ‘never been more indiscreet’.34

  The day that Casanova spent with Teresa and their son was, he later wrote, ‘one of the happiest of my whole life’.35 It gave him a taste of the domestic felicity he might perhaps have enjoyed had his nature been different. But his restless spirit would never change. When he ran into Teresa again two years later in Milan, he was disturbed to discover that she was free again. Her honeymoon period with Palesi had ended, and with it their marriage. In an arrangement similar to modern-day alimony payments Teresa, as the wealthier partner, had paid her husband off with a handsome annuity which allowed him to live independently of her.

  Despite the years that had passed Teresa still nursed a small hope that she and Casanova might even at this late stage resume their love affair and marry. Or perhaps she was just playing a trick on him when she told him that there was nothing to stop them staying together for the rest of their lives. Nothing, she might well have added, except Casanova’s nature. Now that he could finally have Teresa, he no longer wanted her, except for casual sex.

  ‘I went home in love with her,’ the serial seducer wrote after they had spent the night together, ‘but my passion found too many diversions to last long.’

  FIVE

  Henriette

  There is a happiness which is perfect and real as long as it lasts; it is transient, but its end does not negate its past existence and prevent he who has experienced it from remembering it.1

  HE MET HER at an inn in Cesena in the late autumn of 1749. She was in bed with another man at the time. At first all that Casanova could see of her was a shape huddled beneath the sheets. He presumed that whoever she was, she was hiding herself out of modesty or embarrassment, but when at long last she stuck her head out from under the covers she did not seem at all ashamed of her predicament. In fact, the opposite was true. Her face was as fresh and sunny as a spring morning, and although she was wearing a man’s shirt and her tousled hair was cut in a male style, her bewitching smile left Casanova in no doubt that she was all woman.

  This was Casanova’s first glimpse of Henriette, the greatest love of his life. She was everything he could possibly desire in a woman – courageous, intelligent, witty, beautiful and sexually liberated while at the same time being extremely cultivated and refined. She was also, most importantly, a grand aristocrat, and literally in a different class to the other women he had known. If a woman such as Henriette loved him, Casanova must be worth loving. Through loving her, the needy child rejected by his mother at last began to value himself.

  Henriette asked nothing of Casanova except a pledge of no commitment. This alone made her the ideal romantic partner for a man with an aversion to being tied down. But there was much more to their relationship than that. Casanova admired Henriette. He was in awe of her. She alone out of all his women was his soul-mate. Just being in her company gave him a feeling of contentment he had never experienced before. ‘Those who believe that a woman is not enough to make a man equally happy all the twenty-four hours of a day have never known an Henriette,’ he wrote of her. ‘The joy which flooded my soul was much greater when I conversed with her during the day than when I held her in my arms at night.’2

  At the time they met, Casanova was ready to fall in love again. Twenty-four years old and wandering aimlessly through Italy with a surprising amount of money in his pockets, he was almost unrecognisable as the penniless novice priest who had fallen in love with fifteen-year-old Teresa Lanti four years previously. Just before parting from Teresa in Rimini he had abandoned his ecclesiastic garb and with it all thought of making a career in the Church. Donning an officer’s uniform, he had returned to Venice, entered the service of the Republic as an ensign, and sailed for Corfu as adjunct to Giacomo da Riva, the governor of the Venetian galley slaves there. After several months working for da Riva, Casanov
a had made his way to Constantinople, where good fortune and happiness had continued to evade him. By January 1746, he was back in Venice, unemployed and rootless. The family house on the Calle della Commedia had been given up long ago, his sister Maria had moved to Dresden to join their mother, and his brother Francesco was temporarily imprisoned in the fortress of Sant’Andrea, where he was whiling away his time by painting battle scenes, an occupation at which he later earned a good living. As for the Savorgnan sisters, Nanetta had left Venice with her new husband, Marta was locked away in a convent on the island of Murano, and Signora Orio, their all-too-trusting aunt, had married an admirer and closed up her huge palazzo.

  Casanova was homeless and penniless. Desperate for money, he managed with the help of nobleman Michele Grimani, his family’s erstwhile patron, to get a job as a violinist at the San Samuele theatre, which Grimani owned and where his parents had once been employed; though Casanova could not have cared less about music, Dr Gozzi had taught him a rudimentary knowledge of the violin during his schooldays, and he now put it to use. To work as a humble fiddler was the ultimate humiliation for a brilliant university graduate who had been given every opportunity to better himself and of whom great things had been universally expected. Ashamed of the level he had sunk to, Casanova avoided his old acquaintances, particularly those among the nobility, and his self-esteem, which was always so important to him, spiralled downhill along with his behaviour. In the company of a group of fellow-musicians and a dissipated young member of the patrician Balbi family, he frequented Venice’s least salubrious taverns after the performances, then roamed drunkenly through the city committing crimes of vandalism and playing malicious practical jokes. The gang set gondolas loose on the canals, rang alarm bells in the church towers and broke into houses in the early hours of the morning, terrifying the occupants. Sexual predators who thought of nothing but their own immediate needs, they snatched whores away from their clients in the brothels, made them submit to brutal sex acts and then left without paying them.