Reconciliation with Marina followed. Shortly after that, Casanova entertained both her and de Bernis in his own casino: impressed by what he had seen of Casanova’s behaviour, the ambassador now wanted to meet him in person. During this bizarre evening, Casanova’s attitude to both his guests ‘was that of a private individual to whom a king accompanied by his mistress was paying the greatest of all honours’. He fed them the choicest wines and best oysters, and treated Marina as if she were no more than a friend. At length the nun turned the conversation to Casanova’s young ‘wife’, de Bernis expressed his desire to meet Caterina, and Casanova found himself agreeing to invite the girl to join them all for dinner in a few days’ time. Although he realised what was happening – that the ambassador was interested in Caterina, and Marina was acting as his procuress in the matter – Casanova felt helpless to stop it. De Bernis had generously shared his mistress with him for months. Now Casanova owed it to him to return the favour. And despite his protective feelings towards Caterina, the idea was not wholly repugnant to him.
Slowly, surely, Caterina was being debauched. Only months ago she had been an innocent virgin. Casanova had seduced her and made her pregnant. Because of him she had been locked up in the convent, where she had nearly lost her life and where Marina had seduced her. Now, Caterina was being groomed by Marina to become another man’s lover, and far from doing anything to stop this happening, Casanova actively participated in the plot. At a dinner he arranged for the four of them he went out of his way to make Caterina shine, even though he despised himself for doing so. At their next meeting, from which the ambassador purposely stayed away, he and Marina showed Caterina books of pornographic engravings, and the three of them indulged in a night of sex. By now Casanova felt well and truly trapped into returning all the favours de Bernis had shown him. He knew that if he attended the two women’s next meeting with the ambassador Caterina would be safe but he himself would appear niggardly, rude and ungrateful. If he stayed away, however, she would be corrupted and, even though he would hold himself responsible, she would fall in his estimation and he would no longer want to marry her.
Perhaps it was for this reason that the marriage-shy adventurer decided to abandon Caterina to her fate. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, but he had more than met his match in the libertine nun who had engineered the plot. Caterina’s mind ‘is now as freethinking as ours’, Marina wrote cheerfully to Casanova after the two women had spent an evening with de Bernis, ‘and she owes it to me. I can boast that I have finished training her for you.’29 Regretful that he had not watched their antics from the secret chamber, she insisted on recounting every lurid detail of the evening when she next saw Casanova. She had misjudged him: instead of arousing him, the tale had the opposite effect of making him fear he would be ‘out of sorts to cut a good figure in bed’; and, as the great lover knew, ‘to cut a poor figure one only needs to fear it’.30
Between 1753 and May 1755, while Christoforo Capretta believed that his daughter was safely out of harm’s way in the convent, she was being debauched by Marina Morosini, Casanova and the French ambassador to Venice. And while de Bernis insisted in his memoirs that Venetians were astonished to find him ‘insensible to the charms of women’,31 he was carrying on with a fifteen-year-old school girl and a nun, as we know from a letter he wrote to his friend the Comtesse des Alleurs, wife of the French ambassador at Constantinople. ‘Your nun has evaded the walls of her convent to take refuge in Padua,’ he wrote on 1 September 1754, ‘which is the most sombre cloister that I know. I have been to see her, and she will come to dine in my house in the fields.32 In speaking of her flirtations, you cast in the most delightful possible manner some stones in my garden; you put to me questions on unfaithfulness which, happily or unhappily for me, can no longer embarrass me. I lead the life of a Carthusian friar and I have all the more merit in that it is quite necessary that I possess some sanctity.’33
Discreet as de Bernis was, it was hard to keep secrets for long in Venice. By the time that the new British ambassador, John Murray, arrived in the Republic in October 1754, rumours were rife that the French resident was having an affair with a patrician-born nun at Santa Maria degli Angeli – a situation that was probably tolerated by the Council of Ten for diplomatic reasons as well as to protect the powerful Morosini family. John Murray, a man who delighted in sexual exhibitionism and was ‘a scandalous fellow in every sense of the word’34 according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was soon boasting to his new friend Giacomo Casanova that he himself had enjoyed Mother Maria Contarina, the French ambassador’s mistress, for the price of a hundred sequins. When an outraged Casanova investigated this claim, the so-called nun turned out to be an impostor, but the news that she was being impersonated by a prostitute drove home to Marina the precarious nature of her situation.
Casanova’s behaviour also attracted unwelcome attention from Venice’s Council of Ten. What was the reason for his frequent visits to Murano? Whilst they might close their eyes to the ambassador’s liaison with Marina, if Casanova was involved with her it was a different matter. Moreover, why was the upstart actors’ son in cahoots with de Bernis and Murray? In order to prevent spying by foreign powers, any communication between the Venetian patrician classes and the foreign ambassadors living among them was strictly forbidden, and, although Casanova was a commoner by birth, his close relationship with Senator Bragadin cast his friendships with foreigners in a suspicious light. Highly suspicious, too, were Casanova’s dealings with Bragadin. Just why had the middle-aged senator taken him under his wing? Why did he support him financially? What was at the root of Casanova’s power over him and his two male companions, Dandolo and Barbaro? It was rumoured that the three men dabbled in Jewish mysticism with Casanova’s help.
A month after Murray’s arrival in Venice, the Inquisitors ordered one of their spies, a jeweller named Giovanni Battista Manuzzi, to keep track of Casanova’s activities. Between November 1754 and the following July, Manuzzi stalked his quarry through Venice. He questioned Casanova’s old neighbours in the parish of San Samuele and the men who worked at the wine-shops he frequented, he gathered information about his relationship with Senator Bragadin, and he no doubt tailed him on his frequent trips to Murano. Manuzzi even waylaid Casanova himself at an inn, goading him on to boast about his exploits.
Casanova and Marina were unaware that both their situations were about to change, and very much for the worse. For in January 1755 de Bernis was sent to Parma by his government; and from there he was recalled to Paris. Returning to Venice for a brief spell in May to be ordained as a sub-deacon by the patriarch, he finally left Venice for good on the last day of that month. His return to France plunged Marina into despair, bringing on a serious illness, probably depression. She had already lost Caterina, who nowadays slept in her aunt’s chamber at the convent. Now she had lost a man who had genuinely loved her, who had enabled her to fulfil her passionate nature, and whose generosity had bought her a degree of freedom. The Murano casino which had been her refuge for more than two years was sold along with all its contents, and without the ambassador to protect her and buy the gondoliers’ discretion, escaping from the convent was impossible for her. As in the early days of her confinement at the Angeli, Marina was a prisoner in the house of God. Unable to meet her alone any more, Casanova comforted her as best he could through the iron screen in the visiting parlour. Soon she would lose this bittersweet pleasure too.
Just eight weeks after de Bernis left Venice the Inquisitors moved in on Casanova. By now Manuzzi had compiled at least half a dozen reports on him. They painted a picture of a consummate conman, a sponger and an unbeliever ‘who, by his lies and his beautiful words, lives off others’. Money was ‘never lacking to him’. He had been the ruin of Senator Bragadin, from whom he had extricated a great deal of money ‘and made him believe that he can make the Angel of Light appear’. In addition Casanova had travelled widely posing as ‘a man of letters’. He was acquainted with and bel
oved by many patricians, foreigners and the flower of Venice’s youth, whom he bewitched with his clever talk. Casanova was given to mixing with debauched people, Manuzzi claimed, and he led them even deeper into bad ways. He had heard him admit that he cheated at cards and, perhaps worst of all, boast that he was a freethinker who ‘believes nothing in the matter of religion’. In a wine-shop called Al Rinaldo Trionfante Manuzzi had heard Casanova publicly read out a poem which mocked religion: ‘The subject is treated in an astonishing manner for he speaks both directly and indirectly of copulation.’35 In short, he was a reprehensible character: ‘Conversing with and becoming intimate with the said Casanova one sees truly united in him misbelief, imposture, lasciviousness, voluptuousness in a manner to inspire horror.’36 If Manuzzi had found out about Casanova’s relationship with Mother Maria Contarina of the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, this information was not included in the report; since the nun was one of the powerful Morosini clan, the resulting scandal would have been too terrible.
On 20 July Manuzzi was ordered by the Inquisitors to get hold of a copy of Casanova’s blasphemous, pornographic poem. He broke into Casanova’s rooms but could not find it. Instead, he reported that Casanova ‘has many evil books at his place, and at the back of a cupboard, strange objects including a kind of leather apron like those worn by people who call themselves masons in what they call loges’.37 Casanova had indeed been initiated into freemasonry in the French city of Lyon in 1750. On 25 July – ironically the Feast of San Giacomo, his name day – the Inquisitors issued an order to their agent Messer Grande ‘to arrest G. Casanova, to take all his papers and conduct him to I Piombi’ – the notorious prison under the roof of the Doge’s Palace known as The Leads. That evening Messer Grande and his sbirri forced their way into Casanova’s casino looking, so they claimed, for a trunk full of contraband salt. Protective of him as ever, Senator Bragadin advised his adopted son to flee the city immediately, as he had done in 1749, but this time Casanova stubbornly refused to go.
At daybreak the following morning, Messer Grande entered Casanova’s chamber in the Palazzo Bragadin, woke him up and arrested him. While his possessions were rifled through and his books seized, he dressed himself in a smart ruffled shirt, a new coat, a floss-silk cloak and a hat trimmed with lace and a jaunty white feather. Guarded by thirty to forty officers, he was escorted to the constables’ headquarters, and from there conducted by gondola to the Doge’s palace, where he was marched upstairs to the attic cells. Here one of the most restless spirits of the eighteenth century was imprisoned in solitary confinement in a dark, baking hot cell so low that he could not stand upright. The place was bare except for a bucket ‘for the needs of nature’ and a wooden shelf one foot wide fastened four feet above the floor. Rats the size of rabbits scuffled outside the thick iron grating that separated this tiny hell-hole from the garret that led to it, and an instrument of execution was nailed to the wall.
Casanova was never tried. Neither was he told how long he had been condemned for, nor informed of the reason for his arrest. Nevertheless on 21 August 1755 his offence was recorded in the journal of the Secretary of the Inquisitors: it was ‘the grave faults committed by G. Casanova primarily in public outrages against the holy religion’.38
On 12 September it was noted in the Republic’s records that Casanova had been condemned to The Leads for a term of five years. This was a light sentence compared to Marina Maria Morosini’s. She was still imprisoned within the walls of Santa Maria degli Angeli in 1790, at which time she was listed in the records as the convent’s abbess. It is believed that she died there in 1799.
As for Caterina Capretta, she was allowed out of the Murano convent after three years in order to marry a Venetian lawyer named Sebastiano Marsigli. She appears to have born no resentment towards her seducer, for when he returned to Venice from exile in 1774 she renewed her acquaintance with him. Two letters to him bearing the name Caterina Marsigli, written in 1780 and 1781, were found among his papers after his death.
SEVEN
Manon Balletti
I laugh when I hear certain women call men whom they accuse of inconstancy ‘perfidious’. They would be right if they could prove that when we swear to be true to them we have the intention of failing them. Alas! We love without consulting our reason, and reason is no more mixed up in it when we stop loving them.1
MARIA-MADDALENA BALLETTI, known as Manon, was born into a theatrical dynasty in Paris. Her father was a famous actor, her uncle an impresario, her aunt Flaminia a playwright, and her mother was quite simply the most famous actress of her generation and the idol of all France.
Manon’s paternal grandmother, an actress named Giovanna Benozzi, was the same La Fragoletta over whom Casanova’s own father, Gaetano, had run away from his home in Parma back in 1716. Mario, La Fragoletta’s son by actor Francesco Balletti, had followed in his thespian parents’ footsteps, and in 1715 he moved to Paris to join a new company of Commedia dell’ Arte players set up under the patronage of the Regent, Philip of Orléans (Paris’s previous Italian troupe had been expelled in 1697 for staging La Fausse Prude, a play which made fun of Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Maintenon). Successful from its very first performance at the Palais-Royal theatre on 18 May 1716, the new Comédie-Italienne also included Mario’s sister, playwright and actress Elena ‘Flaminia’ Riccoboni and her husband, impresario and actor ‘Lelio’ Riccoboni. From the Palais Royal the players moved to the revamped Hôtel de Bourgogne, where they continued to perform to much acclaim.
Four years later the company was joined by a Toulouse-born actress named Rosa-Giovanna Benozzi, whose own family of itinerant Italian players appears from its surname to have been related to La Fragoletta’s. She and Mario fell in love, and were married on 15 June 1720. During the next decade Rosa-Giovanna – now known simply as Silvia after one of the parts she played – became the most outstanding actress in Paris and a revered figure in society. Though no beauty, she appeared to be one by sheer force of personality. In her portrait by Nattier, which depicts her as Thalia, the muse of comedy whose image appeared on the stage curtains of the Comédie-Italienne, Silvia’s eyes sparkle with amusement and kindness, and an almost impish smile plays across her lips. Affable, witty, modest, unpretentious and equally charming towards everyone from her fellow thespians to the aristocratic courtiers who fawned on her, Silvia brought all these good qualities to the stage, as well as an innate emotional intelligence. Her acting was so skilful that it always appeared totally natural. Inspired by her talent, Pierre Marivaux wrote plays especially for her.
Apart from being a marvellous actress (’the best in the kingdom’ according to Frederick the Great) Silvia was intelligent and deeply pious. A portrait of the Virgin hung in her bedroom, and her personal library of some two hundred books included moral texts, volumes on the English theatre and the works of Molière and Corneille. Unlike most actresses of her day, her morals were impeccable. Famously faithful to Mario, she was also a devoted mother to their three sons – Antonio, Luigi and Guglielmo – and their only daughter, Manon, who was born in April 1740, when Silvia was in her late thirties.
Toi que les Grâces ont formée,
Sois sure aimable Silvia,
Que tu seras toujours aimée
Tant que le bon goût durera.
(You who the Graces have made
Be certain, kind Silvia,
That you will always be loved
As long as good taste endures.)
read a poem about Silvia published in Le Mercure de France. Her teetotaller husband was equally lauded in the Parisian press for his good character and talent:
Mario, que chacun renomme
Pour un acteur ingénieux,
Le rôle que tu fais le mieux,
C’est le rôle d’un galant homme.2
(Mario, whom everyone admires
As an ingenious actor,
The rob you play the best
Is that of a courteous man.)
Suc
cess earned the B allettis the respect of their peers, the adoration of their audiences and an extremely interesting circle of artistic friends. Their daughter grew up in a cultured home filled with books and musical instruments and frequented by all the greatestpainters, actors and writers of the day. The print-hung walls of the dining-room in their house in the rue du Petit-Lion – a building which the family shared with the director of Paris’s Opéra-Comique, Charles-Simon Favart, and his wife, writer and light-opera -star Marie Favart – echoed with the lively talk and laughter of guests at mealtimes. Marivaux was a frequent visitor, as was Louis XV’s painter Carle Vanloo, whose portrait of Silvia hung in the salon. However, although they entertained constantly and employed a cook, a general servant and a maid, money was always in short supply in the Balletti household; and when Mario died in 1762 he left fifty-four unpaid creditors.
Unusually for an actress’s daughter, Manon received a first-class education at the convent of the Ursulines de Saint-Denis, to the north of Paris. At home she was taught how to play the guitar and the harpsichord by a famous music master and composer, Charles-François Clément, and how to act and sing by her uncle Lelio and aunt Flaminia, and above all by her mother, who from the moment of Manon’s birth regarded her as the most important person in her life. The fourth floor of the house was lined with wardrobes stuffed with theatrical costumes, lengths of material, fans and other props which Manon could use to put on plays of her own, and in her mother’s bedroom – a delightful refuge boasting wicker armchairs, floral cushions and a four-poster bed – Silvia taught the girl ‘everything necessary in the way of talents, graces, good behaviour and savoir-vivre’.3 Although she herself was embraced by the highest echelons of Parisian society, most actresses still lived on the very edge of respectability, or beyond it, and Silvia did not encourage her precious daughter to follow her on to the stage.
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