This was not Henriette’s only message to him: with the point of a small diamond ring he had given her she had scratched four words into the window-glass of their room: ‘Tu oublieras aussi Henriette.’ - You will forget Henriette too. Although in many ways such a wise judge of Casanova’s character, Henriette was wrong in this one thing. ‘No, I have not forgotten her,’ he wrote some forty years later, ‘and it is balm to my soul every time I remember her.’28
From the post-station at Châtillon, Henriette’s carriage took the road to Lyon. There we, like Casanova, lose sight of her. It seems almost certain that, at Lyons, the English coupé bought in haste by Casanova in Cesena to impress her turned south down the Rhône valley towards the prosperous city of Aix-en-Provence, where Henriette’s family owned a house in town and a pretty country château six to ten kilometres outside the city, near the Croix d’Or crossroads on the Marseille road.
Whatever difficulties she had expected to encounter when she returned to France, Henriette faced them without a backward glance. Though it is unlikely that she ever lived with her husband again, she was certainly accepted back into the bosom of her parental family, and eventually resumed life as a grande dame of Aixoise society. She had got what she had wanted by running away: not passion, but rather independence and peace of mind and, most importantly, freedom from her husband’s tyranny. She never told anyone the details of her Italian adventure. Her love affair with Casanova and her fling with the Hungarian officer belonged to a brief, desperate period of her life that was best kept secret. By her own admission, Henriette was blessed with a natural joie de vivre and possessed the ability to live for the moment. A quiet life was perhaps enough for her.
By the spring of 1763, Casanova was just a memory to thirty-seven-year-old Henriette, one that was unexpectedly revived towards the end of May, when she was staying with members of her family at their country estate on the Marseille road. Shortly after half-past five one afternoon, a French manservant knocked at the château door asking for help. He introduced himself as Clairmont, and said that his master the Chevalier de Seingalt’s carriage had broken down at the end of the drive; they were in need of a cartwright to mend the vehicle and some help in pulling the carriage off the road. Carriage breakdowns were a habitual feature of long-distance travel, particularly in France where, according to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ‘a French postillion has always to alight before he has got three hundred yards out of town’,29 and two servants from Henriette’s château were dispatched to bind up the carriage’s broken shaft. At the same time, an invitation was extended to the travellers to take shelter in the château until the carriage was mended. Henriette put on a hooded cloak and walked with her relatives down the long tree-bordered drive that led to the public road. At the end of the drive she could see a broken Berlin being pulled slowly through the gates by a team of four rather restive horses. In front of it walked a man who appeared at first to be a well-dressed French aristocrat, arm-in-arm with a tall, natural beauty some twenty years his junior whose long dark loose hair streamed out behind her in the wind. As these two figures drew nearer, Henriette became aware that the so-called Chevalier de Seingault was in fact the Venetian she had known in Parma as Giacomo de Farussi.
Henriette shrank back under her hood, while one of her male relatives offered Casanova and the young woman, who everyone at first presumed was his daughter, the hospitality of the house. When she spotted one of the family’s mastiffs chasing a pet spaniel, Henriette seized the opportunity to get away and ran off to rescue it, but she accidentally tripped and fell. Before Casanova could help her up she struggled to her feet unaided and, claiming a sprained ankle, limped back to the house on her brother’s arm and took refuge in her bedroom. She could only wonder what Casanova was doing there. Had he found out where she lived and come there deliberately with the purpose of seeing and perhaps embarrassing her, or was his carriage breakdown directly outside the gates of her house an extraordinary coincidence?
Casanova claimed it was the latter. He was travelling from Marseille to Lyon with Marcolina, a feisty Venetian beauty he had recently stolen from under the nose of his detested youngest brother Gaetano (’a blasphemer and a fool, a barbarian who deserves no pity’ as the adventurer generously described him).30 A league beyond the Croix d’Or, a well-known crossroads near the village of Bouc-Bel-Air, a fastening on the pole of their carriage had accidentally broken, leaving Casanova no alternative but to send his servant Clairmont to approach the nearest house for help. That it turned out to be Henriette’s house was, he insisted, the work of destiny. Fata viam invenient. Once again in their relationship, Fate had shown the way.
Casanova and Marcolina would have made an extraordinary impression on Henriette’s family – just how extraordinary we can gauge from a description of them written by a young Frenchwoman, Marie de Nairne, who met them by chance just three days later. ‘This stunning traveller arrived in a Berlin at the Hôtel du Parc in Lyon towards five o’clock in the evening,’ Mademoiselle de Nairne wrote to her fiancé Baron Michel de Ramsay in a letter of 28 May 1763. ‘He immediately created a hullabaloo because he was not given the room he claimed he had booked in advance. His servant, like himself, had the same threatening manner … But at table, once the hors d’oeuvre had been served, he was in charming humour, expounding enthusiastically upon a thousand different subjects. We hung on his lips … He was tall, with a dark complexion, richly dressed with heavy jewelled rings on his fingers. His foreign accent was highly comical.31 A very attractive young woman, dark and with dazzling teeth, and the same foreign accent, who had arrived with him in the coach, laughed ceaselessly at the stories related for our amusement ... It was M. de Casanova, a Venetian nobleman.’32
Casanova’s behaviour outside her house showed Henriette that either he had not recognised her beneath her hood or, as in the past, he was behaving like the consummate gentleman. She was curious to talk to him, but reluctant to reveal who she was if he had not already guessed. When she learned that her brothers had invited him to stay for supper she sent down a message inviting the entire company to join her in her room before they ate, but she made sure to arrange herself in a dark alcove. ‘She was lying in a big bed at the back of an alcove made even darker by crimson taffeta curtains,’ Casanova wrote of going up to her bedroom. ‘She was not wearing a cap; but it was impossible to see her to the point where one could not make out whether she was ugly or pretty, young or of a certain age. I told her that I was in despair at having been to blame for her misfortune, and she answered me in Venetian Italian that it would amount to nothing.’33 Henriette would not show her face in the light but she was not above giving Casanova a hint as to who she was. Though she had never been to Venice, she explained, she had often talked with Venetians. Delightedly, Casanova introduced her to Marcolina who, since she spoke no French, was thrilled to have someone to talk to in her native language. From then on, Henriette did nothing but talk in the Venetian dialect to her guests. The only personal detail that she deliberately let slip about herself was that she was a widow – a term used to denote both bereavement and separation at a time when divorce was virtually unknown in France.
Since their carriage would not be ready until the following day, the travellers were invited to spend the night at the château. It was Marcolina, not Casanova, who shared Henriette’s bed, and, according to the salacious description the young girl gave him the following day, the two women committed ‘all the follies that you know that two women who love each other do when they sleep together ... I saw all of her this morning, and we kissed each other all over.’34 Henriette had lost neither her youthful beauty nor her libertine attitude to sex. Marcolina had pleased her, and the proof of it lay in a beautiful jewelled ring that Henriette presented her with the following morning. This valuable gift (Casanova estimated its worth as 200 French louis) may have obliquely been intended for the man who had once behaved with such generosity towards her.
Perhaps Henriette was hurt tha
t the lover who had once adored her to distraction had conversed with her for so long without even responding to the timbre of her voice. Alternatively, she may have presumed he was respecting her position by giving no sign that he knew her. After delicately quizzing Marcolina about the nature of her relationship with her companion, Henriette wrote out a note for him, sealed it, gave it to her and made her promise not to hand it to him before they reached Avignon. She wanted Casanova to know that she, at least, had recognised him, but she clearly had no desire for a potentially embarrassing reunion under her family’s roof.
In Avignon, Marcolina gave this letter to Casanova along with a message from Henriette that, if he were to return to Aix at some future time, either alone or with a companion, he would be welcome to call on her. Casanova opened the letter with a pounding heart. At the top was written in Italian: ‘To the most honourable man I have met in the world’. The rest of the sheet was blank except for the signature. Henriette. The knowledge that he had been in the company of the woman whom he still regarded as the love of his life and yet had failed to recognise her plunged Casanova into a state of numb shock.
To his knowledge, Casanova never again came face to face with Henriette, though six years later he would turn up in her life one last time, as we shall see presently. Discreet until the end, he did not reveal her true identity in his memoirs, and consequently it has intrigued generations of his readers. The facts we know about his greatest love are so few that they can be written down on half a sheet of paper. They are these: Henriette came from Aix-en-Provence where she or her family had a house in the city and a country house situated at the end of an alley of trees either a league or a league and a half north of the Croix d’Or crossroads on the Aix-Marseille road. She was of noble birth. Her family was wealthy and well-connected. She had been educated to a very high standard in a French convent. Like her mother before her, Henriette played the cello, an unusual instrument for women to take up at the time. D’Antoine-Blacas was related by marriage to her husband’s family. In the autumn of 1749 she left her husband under threatening circumstances and travelled by boat to Italy where, on one occasion, she signed herself into an inn under the name Anne d’Arci. In February 1750, Henriette returned to Provence via Geneva, where she stopped to collect a substantial amount of money from the Tronchin bankers. Once she was back home, Henriette either lived alone or under the protection of her family – probably her father or brothers, one of whom Casanova refers to in his memoirs as a ‘chevalier’ or knight.
By her own admission, Henriette committed three follies in her life, the last of which was absconding from her travelling companion in Rome. Her first folly was presumably her marriage to a man who treated her badly; the second may have been an extramarital affair; her third running away with the Hungarian officer. A possible scenario is that Henriette was mistreated by her husband, was unfaithful to him and ran away to Italy, probably with her lover and wearing his clothes. When their relationship turned sour, she realised the impossibility of surviving indefinitely on her wits and sought reconciliation with her family. Thereafter Henriette lived separately from her husband, wintering in Aix and spending the summers at the family château near the Croix d’Or with her parents and/or her siblings.
There have been three main contenders for Henriette’s chateau, and three possible candidates for the woman herself. Charles Samaran, author of an authoritative early twentieth-century biography of the adventurer, believed that Henriette’s house was a château at Luynes, three and a half kilometres from the Croix d’Or, and that Henriette herself was Jeanne-Marie d’Albert de St Hippolyte, the owner’s niece, who at the time of Casanova’s affair with Henriette was married to Jean-Baptiste Laurent Boyer de Fonscolombe, a lawyer in Aix’s parliament. According to the contemporary Casanovist Helmut Watzlawick,35 Henriette was Marie-Anne d’Albertas, the spinster daughter of a well-connected Marseille businessman whose family owned the Pavilion d’Albertas, a pretty hunting lodge close to the Croix d’Or and the village of Bouc-Bel-Air, and whose family motto was Fata Viam Invenient – an expression which Casanova uses several times when describing his affair with Henriette.
The third château in the area, and the third candidate for Henriette, were discovered by the Casanova scholar Jean-Louis André in the 1990s, and they remain far and away the most likely candidates.36 At the Croix d’Or crossroads, just before the Pavilion d’Albertas, the Marseille – Aix road splits into two. The old Route Royale heads directly north towards Aix, while the road branching off to the right follows the path of an ancient track through the villages of Bouc-Bel-Air and Gardanne to Luynes, where it rejoins the main road. Three kilometres north of the hilltop village of Gardanne lies the Domaine de Valabre, a large estate upon which is built a sixteenth-century hunting lodge known as the Pavillon de Valabre or the Pavillon des Quatre Tours, and a pretty two-storey seventeenth-century château, restored in the Italianate style in 1733 and set at the end of an avenue bordered with oak trees.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, the Château de Valabre was an agricultural college; since 1967 it has been the headquarters of the Centre Interrégional de Formation de la Sécurité Civile. Until the 1880s, however, it was a private home and the property of the de Gueidans (or de Gueydans, as the name was sometimes spelled), an ancient family whose links with French royalty went back to the eleventh century when Baron Guy de Gueydan participated in the First Crusade. By the early eighteenth century, the baron’s descendants, led by Aix resident Pierre de Gueidan and his son Gaspard, had become one of the most prominent families in Provence. For sixty years Pierre held the post of president of the local Chambre de Comptes. From 1714 onwards his son Gaspard was Aix’s most distinguished magistrate and advocate general; and in 1740 King Louis XV nominated him president of the local parliament, a post he retained until 1766.
Gaspard and his wife, Agélique de Simiane, owned a large house in Aix’s grand Cours Mirabeau, and in the summer months they retreated to the village of Gardanne, where his father Pierre had in 1683 acquired the ancient Valabre estate. Together Gaspard and Agélique produced at least six children: there were four sons – Joseph, Pierre, Etienne and Timoléon, three of whom became Chevaliers de Malte (Knights of the Maltese Cross) – and two daughters: Anne-Thérèse-Adélaïde born on 14 December 1725; and her younger sister Catherine-Polyxène-Julie, who was born in 1734. Gaspard was justly proud of his beautiful wife and daughters, who appear to have been as musically talented as he was himself. In 1730 he commissioned a portrait of his wife (as ‘Flora’) by the fashionable artist Nicolas de Largillière, and five years later he had himself portrayed by Hyacinthe Rigaud playing the bagpipes. This was followed by a painting of his daughters, whose joint portrait Adélaïde de Gueidan and her sister Polyxène on the harpsichord now hangs with those of their parents in Aix’s Musée Granet.
Originally attributed to Largillière but now to the Aixoise artist Claude Arnulphy, this is a gorgeous portrait of two innocent, well-brought-up young girls with pink cheeks and powdered hair. Both are dressed in elaborate embroidered gowns that show off their status as the daughters of a wealthy, highly-respected member of society. Catherine-Polyxène is seated at a harpsichord, her hands hovering above the keys while her older sister Adélaïde stands on the left, clutching a rolled-up scroll, presumably of music. What instrument does she play? In the foreground leans what appears to the modern eye to be a violoncello but is in fact a viola da gamba. If Adélaïde is the one who plays this instrument, her talent cannot be illustrated in the picture. For the viola da gamba had to be held between the knees, and to paint a young virgin in such an unladylike pose was unthinkable.
The six-stringed viola da gamba (the name literally means ‘leg viol’) was a precursor of the violoncello, and it is almost certainly the instrument played by Casanova’s Henriette: for while the violoncello usually took only a supporting role in orchestras in the early eighteenth century, the viola da gamba was regarded as the solo virtuoso instrument. Lou
is XIV loved its sound so much that he employed two rival viola da gamba players at his court: the prodigious Marin Marais, who composed around 650 works, and Antoine Forqueray, a bizarre, violent man who seldom wrote any of his compositions down. After Forqueray’s death his son Jean-Baptiste, a famous player in his own right, collected about thirty of his father’s works together and published them in a volume, Pièces de Viole, avec la Basse Continuë, which came off the Paris presses in 1747. Since the viola da gamba was losing popularity at the time, Jean-Baptiste dedicated the book to his most illustrious pupil in the hope that she might do something to revive the instrument’s popularity. The dedication on the frontispiece reads, ‘A Madame Henriette de France’.
Forqueray’s Madame Henriette was none other than Anne-Henriette de Bourbon, one of Louis XV’s eight daughters (another of whom was named Adélaïde) and the twin sister of Louise-Elizabeth, whose arrival in Parma to join her husband, the Infante Filippo, coincided with Casanova and Henriette’s visit to the city. Around the same age as Casanova’s Henriette, and justly proud of her talent on the bass viol, the sophisticated Madame Henriette de France unabashedly had herself painted several times (by the Parisian court painter Jean-Marc Nattier) with the instrument clearly placed between her legs.
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