By mid-June Caterina was enrolled as an educanda in the Murano convent, where she was destined to remain until her marriage five years later and where the beautiful nun Marina Maria Morosini – or Mother Maria Contarina, as she was known within the convent walls – took her under her wing. She discouraged Caterina from befriending the other girls, gave her French lessons twice a day and showered her with passionate kisses of which, Caterina told Casanova, he would have had a right to be jealous if the nun had been a man. The abbess had been instructed not to let Caterina correspond with anyone outside the convent, and she was threatened with excommunication if she attempted to do so. Nevertheless, by bribing a lay-nun by the name of Laura, she managed to exchange letters with the man she now regarded as her husband. With Laura acting as a go-between, Casanova smuggled Caterina some money; and with the unwitting help of her mother, whom he persuaded to believe that he was really a pious man, he managed to send her a miniature portrait of himself concealed in a secret compartment of a ring which bore on its exterior a tiny painting of her namesake, St Catherine.
Caterina had already paid a high price for falling in love with Casanova. First she had lost her precious virginity, then her freedom. Worse was to come. The Bellini Barbarigo Madonna and Child that hung above the altar in the Angeli’s church portrayed a glowing vision of motherhood, but Caterina’s pregnancy would have no such happy outcome. At the end of July she had a miscarriage. Forced to hide it from all the choir-nuns except Marina, who helped her to keep the affair secret, she lay propped up in bed on pillows, bleeding copiously into a large wad of linen napkins which Casanova purchased from a Jewish merchant in Venice’s ghetto, and which Laura smuggled in and out of the convent underneath her own dress. It was possible, even likely, that Caterina would die, and Casanova knew that he would hold himself responsible if she did. Overcome with guilt, he temporarily moved into Laura’s rag-strewn house on Murano in order to be closer to Caterina; and when he saw the number of blood-soaked napkins which the lay-nun pulled out from under her skirt when she came home at night he ‘nearly dropped dead. It was sheer butchery.’20
Eventually Caterina recovered from the ‘illness’ that had mystified the entire convent. By the end of August, when Casanova attended a profession at the Angeli church in order to try to catch a glimpse of her, she looked older and yet more beautiful than ever. She seemed so pleased to see Casanova, even from a distance, that he decided to visit the church on every feast day from then onwards. But the sordid miscarriage, and her internment, had already dulled his romantic feelings towards Caterina. Celibacy was definitely not on his agenda: he ‘had been born to have a mistress and to live happily with her’.21 Unwilling to wait four years to marry the girl whose life he had all but ruined within the space of a fortnight (and he was not finished with her yet), Casanova was already on the lookout for a new relationship.
Marina suspected from the start that Caterina had been sent to the convent because she had a lover. Yet it did not occur to her that he was the same man who had attracted her so strongly in church that she had dared to write to him. When Casanova replied to her anonymous letter he assured her that he was free of ties, and she had no reason to doubt his word. Within days he took up the offer of visiting her in the convent in the company of her close friend the Countess Segura. While the two women chatted through the iron grille in the visiting-parlour, a masked Casanova sat nearby observing the beauty who had propositioned him by letter. By the time he left he was madly in love with Marina, and fully resigned to being unfaithful to Caterina, who, he justified, could only be pleased at a liaison designed ‘to keep me alive, and consequently to preserve me for her’.22
The following afternoon he returned to the convent alone as the nun had instructed him to if he wished to see her again. Claiming that he was a relative, he asked for Mother Maria Contarina in the countess’s name. Suddenly Marina’s courage failed her. After keeping Casanova waiting for an hour, she told her elderly lay-nun to inform him that she was ill the whole day. Instead, the woman told him that she was ‘busy all day’. Marina was devastated, for she guessed that he would take it as an insult. She was right: always sensitive about his humble origins, Casanova could never bear to be slighted by anyone. Furious at having been trifled with by the fickle nun, he returned Marina’s letters to her along with a cold but somewhat restrained note pardoning her folly and at the same time warning her never to repeat it with another man.
It took five or six days for the misunderstanding to be cleared up and for the two would-be intriguers at last to meet face to face in the convent visiting-room, alone and with only the iron communication grille separating them. After fifteen speechless minutes, and with little time left for preliminaries, Casanova explained that he was a man in easy circumstances: his life in Venice consisted of theatre, society and gambling; and the nun should know that he loved spending money on the woman he adored. For her part, Marina admitted to the stranger – whose name she still did not know – that she already had a lover who gave her money, who was absolutely her master, and from whom she kept no secrets, not even this new liaison. They arranged to meet at Marina’s casino two days later, and she gave Casanova the key to it. Promising him that her lover would not be present when they met, she reassured him that the man would nevertheless be delighted for her.
Casanova had never been so directly propositioned before, let alone by a nun, and he was intoxicated as much by the danger of the situation as by Marina’s manner and beauty. By the time he left the visiting-room he had all but forgotten Caterina as well as every other woman he had ever professed to love. ‘It was as if I had never been happy in love,’ he wrote, ‘and I was about to be so for the first time.’ The idea of having illicit sex with the beautiful, sexually-experienced Bride of Christ excited him so much that he could neither eat nor sleep until he next saw her: ‘The affair involved a vestal. I was to taste a forbidden fruit. I was to trespass on the rights of an omnipotent husband, seizing from his divine seraglio the most beautiful of all his sultanas.’23 Any fantasy he had of taking her in her nun’s habit would have to wait, for when he turned up at the candle-lit casino two days later Marina, who had arrived there earlier, was dressed in elegant secular clothes. Contrary to what she had promised the stranger, her lover was present, but hidden in the secret chamber, from where he watched their every move. By prior arrangement with de Bernis, Marina allowed her new admirer to kiss her and even to uncover her breasts, but she would let him go no further. As a seductive technique, her ‘charming refusals’ worked magic on Casanova, particularly since they came in the form of ‘arguments given in words as amorous as they were energetic and reinforced every moment by loving kisses which melted my soul’.24 The couple spent the entire night kissing passionately, and eventually fell asleep half-clothed on a day-bed in front of the fire.
When he next visited the Murano convent Casanova suspected that he was being followed by a spy, so by mutual agreement he and Marina decided that their second private meeting should take place at his own casino in Venice. As with his offer to take Henriette to Parma in his private carriage, there was a drawback to Casanova’s plan: although he was still being financed by Bragadin, his income was not sufficient for him to own a casino. Eager to impress Marina, he rushed out and rented the most expensive one he could find – an elegant five-roomed apartment a hundred paces from the San Moise theatre, close to the Piazza San Marco. Formerly the property of Robert d’Arcy, the fourth Earl of Holderness and the English ambassador in Venice until 1746, it contained an octagonal room with mirrored walls, floor and ceiling, a salon decorated with painted Chinese tiles depicting erotic scenes, and a boudoir with a bathtub and English-style water-closet – rare novelties in Venice, where plumbing, if it existed at all, was distinctly primitive. Designed to preserve the anonymity of the lovers who met there, the rooms were served by a kitchen hidden behind a revolving dumb-waiter which discreetly blocked off the servants’ view of the dining-room. Since he was anxious n
ot to be found wanting in any respect when the nun visited him, Casanova first spent a night there alone and made the servants prepare him a test dinner for two with no expense spared. Always a generous host with a perfectionist’s eye for detail, he pronounced the game, truffles, sturgeon and oysters served to him on Meissen dishes faultless, as was the champagne and the fine Burgundy wine. However, he reproached the cook for having forgotten to put out a platter of hardboiled eggs, anchovies, and prepared vinegars for making a salad, and insisted on having bitter oranges to flavour the punch in future as well as all the fresh fruit and ices the man could find. In response, the world-weary cook, who had no doubt seen it all before, rolled his eyes with a contrite air.
Mindful of Marina’s safety, it was de Bernis himself, masked and disguised as a gondolier, who conducted her from Murano to Venice’s Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo where she had arranged to meet Casanova behind the famous equestrian statue of the fifteenth-century warrior Bartolomeo Colleoni. The ambassador had disguised her as a masked male masquerader in black satin breeches teamed with a pink velvet coat and matching waistcoat embroidered with gold thread. Marina’s hair was arranged in a masculine plait that hung all the way down her back to her knees, her shoe buckles were set with brilliants, her fingers were covered in valuable rings, and the neck of her ruffled shirt was pinned with a heart-shaped diamond brooch. In addition, de Bernis had filled Marina’s pockets with all the accessories appropriate for a wealthy young nobleman: opera glasses, scented handkerchiefs, a case of toothpicks, a snuffbox and even a pair of fine English flintlock pistols, presumably so that she could protect herself from Casanova in an emergency. Casanova was overcome by her lover’s generosity in presenting Marina to him in this way. Assuring the nun that, although she was not his first love, she would surely be his last, he wined and dined her before making love to her for seven hours, pausing only to engage in the odd fifteen minutes of intimate conversation. Since Marina demonstrated no sexual novelties to him (her experience was limited to one man), Casanova took it upon himself to enlighten her in the mysteries of the female orgasm and, he later hinted, to oral sex: she was ‘astonished to find herself capable of so much pleasure, for I had shown her many things which she had believed were fictions. I did to her what she did not believe she was allowed to ask me to do to her, and I taught her that the slightest embarrassment spoils the greatest of pleasures.’25
Between November 1753 and May 1755, when de Bernis was recalled to France, the rebellious nun was in the extraordinary position of having two devoted lovers, neither of whom could do enough for her. The French ambassador paid for her casino. He watched over her with the care of a doting father, and his money and influence enabled her to escape from the convent as often as she liked. Meanwhile Casanova worshipped her body and understood her troubled soul. He waited on Marina hand and foot when they were together, taking on the role of her maid when they went to bed by pinning up her hair for her, and he even made the ambassador’s chef teach him how to cook her favourite dish. This kind of attentiveness was irresistible. Aware that Marina belonged first and foremost to her other lover, whose identity he soon guessed, Casanova complied with all the ambassador’s wishes and, instead of trying to compete with him, was happy to take second place. If he unexpectedly turned up at the convent to see Marina when the ambassador was due to arrive there, he immediately left so that there should be no awkward meeting between them. At de Bernis’s request, he took care not to make Marina pregnant. And although he had rented his own casino in Venice for her, he willingly accepted the fact that she rarely came there, because the ambassador thought it safer for her to stay on Murano, particularly if he himself was out of town. When Marina confessed that her other lover planned to hide in the secret chamber and spy on them making love on New Year’s Eve, Casanova obligingly joined her in putting on a display of sexual fireworks for the ambassador’s benefit. ‘I picked her up, she threw her arms around my shoulders so that she weighed less, and having dropped my muff, I seized her by the thighs and she braced herself on the nail,’ he wrote of their exploits that night, ‘but after a little walk around the room, fearful of what might follow, I put her down on the carpet, then having sat down and having made her sit on top of me, she had the kindness of finishing the job with her beautiful hand, collecting in the palm the white of the first egg. “Five more to go,” she says to me.’26 Instead of moving into the bedroom where de Bernis would not be able to spy on them, the couple then made love on the sofa. After this they made love again in front of a mirror, and had mutual oral sex in the ‘straight tree’ posture mentioned by sixteenth-century poet Pietro Aretino in his Sonetti lussuriosi: ‘I lifted her up to devour her chamber of love which I could not otherwise reach, wishing to put her in a position to devour in turn the weapon which wounded her to death without taking her life.’27 For this performance Casanova was rewarded by a love-letter from Marina (’I love you to adoration, I kiss the air, thinking that you are there’) and, from the ambassador, a gift of one of his own precious snuffboxes. Made of gold, it contained two concealed portraits of Marina, one depicting her dressed as a nun, the other showing her lying naked next to her habit, upon which sat a cupid with a quiver at its feet.
It seemed that there were no lengths to which Marina and Casanova would not go in order to please de Bernis. This included sacrificing Caterina to the ambassador’s wishes. Casanova’s so-called ‘wife’ soon suspected that he was involved with the same Mother Maria Contarina with whom she was now having her own passionate lesbian relationship but, lying through his teeth, he assured her that there was nothing between them but friendship. After that, Caterina kept her suspicions to herself. But when, a few months later, she spotted Marina wearing a medallion of the Annunciation painted by the same artist who had painted the St Catherine ring which Casanova had given her, she drew her own conclusions. Caught lying, but anxious that she should not make trouble between them, Casanova assured Caterina that his feelings for the nun in no way detracted from his passion for her.
He was lying again and she would soon find out in the cruellest of ways. For just after she had guessed the truth about his liaison with the nun, Marina secretly opened the educanda’s St Catherine ring and discovered Casanova’s portrait hidden within it. Possessing no concept of sexual jealousy herself, she conceived the idea of bringing Casanova and Caterina together again. The surprise meeting was to be a gift to both of them, as well as to de Bernis, with whom she planned to spy on the lovers’ passionate reunion from within the secret chamber in her casino. The evening involved a great deal of planning on her part. First Marina obtained permission from the abbess for Caterina to sleep in her room, so that she could smuggle her out of the convent whenever she wanted to. Next, she herself arranged to meet Casanova at the Murano casino at two o’clock in the morning on a night when a carnival masquerade ball was being held in the public part of the convent parlour for the amusement of the nuns. After watching the festivities with Caterina through the grating (they laughed most of all at the antics of a male masquerader dressed as Pierrot) Marina took the girl aside and, asking her to trust her, dressed her up in a nun’s habit and sent her off to the casino in a gondola.
By now it was two o’clock in the morning. While Marina, who had secretly followed her from the convent, watched with de Bernis from within the secret chamber, a perplexed Caterina stood alone in front of the fire in her nun’s habit, with no idea of where she was or what she should expect. Suddenly the door opened and the Pierrot from the convent parlour walked in. The moment he saw her he froze. Caterina instantly realised that he was Casanova, and she understood everything: the man she believed was her ‘husband’ really was her female lover’s lover. And, even worse, he was clearly displeased to see her. In truth, he was in a state of shock, for he knew that his lies to both women had been exposed. He felt dishonoured, and ‘played with, tricked, trapped, scorned’ by both of them. The only way he could understand the situation was to presume that Marina had
discovered his duplicity and set out to punish him for it, and he was so overwhelmed with self-pity at the thought of having lost her that he was unable to hide his feelings. To make love to Caterina for form’s sake when he was in love with Marina would have made Casanova feel even more contemptible: ‘I was her husband; I was the one who had seduced her. These reflections tore at my soul.’28 With a maturity way beyond her years, Caterina put on a bravura show in the face of rejection: Marina was her worthy successor, she insisted; she loved both of them, and wished them both well.
Marina’s plan to give pleasure to all three of her lovers had backfired badly. The evening had turned into a disaster. After eight tortuous hours of tears, explanations and sorrow, which she and de Bernis observed with growing dismay, Casanova handed his key to the casino to Caterina with instructions that she should return it to the nun. Then he left, believing that he would never go back there.
It seemed that the heavens were conspiring to punish Casanova for his lies. Since he had arrived on Murano that afternoon a terrible storm had blown up from the west. Freezing cold in his thin linen Pierrot’s costume, and with no cloak to protect him from the wind, he barely made it back across the lagoon to Venice even though his gondola was steered by two strapping men. Drenched to the skin, he took to his bed in the Palazzo Bragadin, his fever and delirium aggravated by shame at having lost face, betrayed Caterina and ruined his chances with Marina. In this he was mistaken. Believing for a short while that their mutual lover had drowned in the storm, the two women were now as distraught as he was. By the time Casanova began to recover a few days later there were already two letters on his bedside, one from each of them. Caterina’s explained Marina’s good intentions in thrusting them together; and enclosed in Marina’s letter to him was the key to her casino.
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