Though the first lottery draw did not take place until April the following year, Casanova was already well on his way to becoming wealthy beyond his dreams. Strutting around Paris in expensive new clothes paid for by de Bernis, or riding up and down the boulevards in his own private carriage, he was besieged by the haut monde who, because they accepted him as one of themselves, bought their lottery tickets only from him. Since he looked, talked and behaved like a wealthy aristocrat everyone presumed that he was one, and this allowed him to enjoy unlimited credit with the shopkeepers. ‘Paris was, and still remains, a city where people judge everything by appearances,’ he remarked. ‘There is no other country in the world where it is easier to impress people.’10 Between the Ballettis, with their wide artistic and literary connections, and de Bernis, with his access to the court and politicians, Casanova soon gained admittance to the best circles in Paris. He knew everyone worth knowing, including Madame de Pompadour, who promised to help him make his way.
Although he resolved to behave well and avoid bad company, Casanova could not resist the temptation to stray. When Count Edoardo Tiretta, a penniless fellow-adventurer, turned up in Paris in February bearing greetings from their mutual Venetian friend Signora Manzoni, Casanova accompanied him to the house of Angelica Lambertini, a wealthy widow famous for her libertine behaviour (she later insisted on telling Casanova all the details of her sexual encounters with Tiretta, whom she christened the ‘Count of Six Fucks’ after the number of times he had made love to her in one night). At Lambertini’s, Casanova exposed himself in front of a well-brought-up, sexually innocent young virgin, to whom he gave the name Mademoiselle de la M-re in his memoirs. On 1 March, he took a party which included her, her aunt, Tiretta and Lambertini to the Place de Greve to watch the horrific public execution of Louis XV’s would-be assassin. During the four hours Damiens was being burned with molten lead, tortured with steel pincers, and torn limb from limb by horses, Tiretta sexually molested Mlle de la M-re’s aunt.
Mlle de la M-re was an heiress and ‘an angel’ whose family had promised her in marriage to a man she had never met. In order to seduce her, Casanova promised to marry her himself – a cynical exercise in getting his own way. Although he swore he would not deflower her, he did so anyway. ‘What does one not promise in such moments?’ he later wrote of this betrayal. ‘But then who is the woman, if she loves well, who charges her lover to keep his promise when love seizes hold of the place which was occupied by reason?’11 By the following evening he had ceased to desire Mlle de la M-re, just as she had predicted he would. Instead, he turned his attention to Manon Balletti: ‘I was in love with this young woman, but Silvia’s daughter, with whom I had enjoyed no pleasure other than dining with the family, weakened this love which no longer left me anything to desire.’12 When Mlle de la M-re’s fiancé turned up, Casanova abandoned her to him and at the same time blamed her for forsaking him. The ‘angel’ had suddenly turned into an inconstant monster, and he wanted revenge.
Instead, he decided to salve his hurt pride by enticing his friends’ young daughter-away from her fiancé Clément. By early April he had begun ‘to spin the perfect love to Manon Balletti, who every day gave me some new sign of the progress that I was making in her heart’. What was he thinking of in trifling with her heart? He knew from the start that courting her was a terrible mistake: ‘The friendship and esteem which I felt for her family kept me from harbouring any idea of seducing her; but falling more in love with her every day, and not thinking of asking for her hand in marriage, I could not conceive what the outcome would be.’13 Manon was a young beauty, as we can see from the portrait of her painted by Nattier that same year, but she was engaged to be married to another man, and even if Casanova had been in a position to marry her himself he had no intention of doing so. His attitude to the institution had not changed since he had wriggled out of his engagement to Teresa Lanti. The very idea of marriage ‘made me shudder’, he admitted. ‘I knew myself too well not to foresee that I would become unhappy in a settled relationship, and consequently make my other half unhappy too.’14 Nevertheless, unable to resist the flattery of being desired by her, he pursued Manon in a series of late-night visits to the house, and in secret love letters that he passed to her via her maid, Madame Obert.
Like a sapling tree in a hurricane, Manon did not stand a chance of withstanding Casanova’s artful courtship which, being so inexperienced, she immediately took for a profession of undying love. ‘You begin by exaggerating your love greatly to me,’ she replied to one of his letters shortly after she had celebrated her seventeenth birthday at the beginning of April. ‘I believe that it is sincere, it flatters me and I desire nothing else than to see it last for ever.’ However, already exhibiting the lack of self-confidence that would characterise their relationship, she finished off her sentence with a plaintive ‘will it last?’15 If this did not make Casanova feel trapped, then Manon’s ‘always love me well’ at the bottom of the letter must have done so. Her postscript – ‘If you want to make me really happy, you will burn our letters’16 – provided him with his first opportunity to betray her: despite repeated requests from her to destroy the letters she wrote to him during their relationship, Casanova kept them, refused to return them to her when their relationship ended, and even showed them to another woman.
Far from making her happy, Manon’s first experience of falling in love was like a painful, unpredictable illness over which she had no control. One moment she felt feverishly elated, the next she was distraught. She fretted that her family would discover what was going on and that Casanova would be ‘so sure of my tender feelings that you will neglect to take care of my heart’.17 She was right: in the middle of May he suggested that her feelings for him would fizzle out within a month. ‘Is it possible that you think so little of me to believe such a thing of me?’ she replied, confounding his probable escape plan. ‘No, be convinced that I will never change … I believe that I could never stop loving you.’18
Perhaps to prove how committed she was to Casanova, Manon now broke off her engagement to Clément. Since she did not dare to tell her parents her real reason for ending it – that she was in love with their friend and believed he would marry her as soon as he was in a position to do so – Mario and Silvia immediately enlisted their close acquaintance and patroness the Marquise de Monconseil, the wife of Louis XV’s Lieutenant General, to secure her an alternative match. The marquise roped in a bachelor named M. Jonel to help her, but Manon believed she had little to fear in the short term. Casanova was clearly terrified of the implications of her break with Clément. Instead of reassuring her of his love he became highly critical, exacerbating her feelings of insecurity. Rather than blame him for being nasty to her, Manon blamed herself: ‘It is true I believe your love has lessened, I don’t think that’s a crime of yours, no, I have a thousand faults, I know, and the more one knows me the more one discovers them.’19 Her self-abasement made Casanova angry, and they were soon openly quarrelling. ‘To fall out with each other all the time makes me despair,’ she wrote to him at the beginning of June, ‘it makes me desolate, and I don’t want to do it any more. No, no, no!’ She suggested, naively, that each of them should draw up a list of behaviour that they found annoying in the other so that they could avoid aggravating each other in the future. Anyone who broke the treaty could be reprimanded, but only in writing: ‘By this arrangement we will always be happy together … My dear friend, would you like things to be this way?’20
After two months of courtship – which consisted mostly of secret kisses snatched in stolen moments, but no actual sex – there was clearly only one thing that Casanova wanted from his relationship with Manon, and that was for it to end. But it seemed impossible for him to get out of the affair without risking a permanent break with Antonio, Mario and Silvia, friends whom he not only loved and respected but also found extremely useful. It was now his turn to become morose and depressed, moods which Manon was quick to notice. ‘Your sadness to
night made me very dejected,’ she wrote to him one midnight in early June, after he had picked a fight with Antonio. ‘I imagine the cause of it and that makes things worse. We are not happy, my dear friend, I’m beginning to perceive it.’ Since her brother was growing suspicious about their relationship, she begged her secret suitor to be more circumspect in his behaviour: ‘Don’t say anything to him which could shock him for he is a stronsegosse!21 You have an unbounded vivacity and a quarrel between you two is the most distressing thing that could happen to me. B is sometimes pernickety, I admit, but you are also a bit too scathing on a subject that he himself would find really ridiculous if he bothered to think about it... I quake lest any of these miseries reach Mama’s ear.’22
A pattern of psychological abuse was being established which would grow worse in time. Casanova became increasingly fractious and inconsistent towards Manon, and she reacted by abasing herself more and more. ‘Your letter which I am reading again makes me see all my faults and eclipses those that I imagine you have yourself,’ she wrote to him in July. ‘I alone am to blame my dear friend, will you forgive me? I love only you, and I want always to love you, if I am in a bad mood towards you it’s because I stupidly suppose that you no longer feel towards me the same tender feelings which makes my happiness, and which is the only thing I desire.’23 Nothing Manon did improved their relationship, including indulging in sexual petting with Casanova, though not full sex; that was the only thing she withheld from him. By the end of July, after four months of courtship, Casanova was constantly wrong-footing her, and she still felt tongue-tied in his presence. The idea of being in love with him was proving far more enjoyable than the reality. ‘It seems to me,’ she confessed, ‘that I am more at my ease when I write to you than when I talk to you.’24
Rather than face the consequences of breaking off the liaison, Casanova fed Manon just enough affection to keep her hopes alive. But when de Bernis was created Minister of State for Foreign Affairs at the end of June, and asked him to go to Dunkirk on secret government business (it was to compile a report on French warships), Casanova jumped at the chance, as much to put space between himself and Manon, one suspects, as for the 12,000 francs he would eventually earn from the mission. Manon’s letters pursued him from the very moment he left Paris on 28 August – ‘It already seems as if I haven’t seen you for a month,’ she wrote to him that very day25 – and only his return could make her happy. When she had not heard from him after four days she was in torment. What had become of him? Why had he not written to her? And when was he coming back? she asked. It was impossible that he thought of her as often as she did of him. So little importance did she give her own achievements that, when she sang and played the guitar to great acclaim at a party given by the Marquise de Monconseil on 5 September – the guest of honour was the exiled King of Poland, Stanislas Leszczynski – she did not even mention it in her next letter.
Clingy, obsessive, and chronically insecure, Manon was in many ways typical of a young girl experiencing the pangs of first love. However, her behaviour was guaranteed to bore and alienate Casanova, who continued to play her along when he returned from Dunkirk in the latter months of the year. During his absence Silvia’s consumption had taken its toll on her – ‘I only wish that her health were as perfect as her heart,’ Manon had written to him in September.26 If the actress found out that her trusted friend had been carrying on with her precious young daughter, the news might well destroy her, and Casanova saw no alternative but to continue to renew his promise to marry Manon at some unspecified future date whilst pursuing his ambitions – and his sexual interests – elsewhere.
There was no shortage of beautiful women treading the grands trottoirs of Paris. They ranged from common whores with whom one could rent rooms above the shops at the Palais-Royal by the hour, or even by the minute, to young girls fresh in from the countryside whom Casanova met through his female pimp Brunet, and haughty courtesans who disdained to have liaisons with anyone less than a wealthy financier or aristocrat. The latter group included actress Giacoma Antonia Veronese, known as Camilla, who lived with the Count of Egreville and worked with the Ballettis at the Comédie-Italienne. Camilla had a number of lovers that year including Casanova and the Comte de la Tour d’Auvergne, who introduced the Venetian to his aunt, the Marquise d’Urfé.
It was with good reason that Manon complained that she was feeling marginalised and neglected. Casanova was preoccupied not only with enjoying himself in the arms of other women but also with securing his future through both legitimate and dubious means. He was too busy to see her. He no longer told her that he loved her. In fact, he gave her every proof that he disliked her. And yet he persisted in stringing her along by telling her, from time to time, that he adored her and would marry her one day. ‘Do not keep my heart in perpetual chains,’27 Manon begged him in February 1758. ‘Didn’t you promise me yesterday that you would see me today?’ she reproached him a few weeks later. ‘Not at all, you go and enjoy yourself elsewhere, you just about remember in the evening that you promised someone (who you say you love) to come and see her and you arrive with an indifferent air.’28
Insecurity made Manon sulky, moody and jealous. By the beginning of April their mutual reproaches had grown increasingly bitter, and Casanova was turning nastier by the day. He openly insulted her, and afterwards showed neither repentance nor any desire to make peace. ‘You have pierced my heart,’ she admitted after one terrible quarrel. ‘Have you forgotten my dear Casanova that you used to love me (for I dare not flatter myself any longer that you still do).’29 Her eyes, blinded by love for so long, were now wide open. Even she could see that the abusive relationship was drawing to a close. But when she pleaded time and again for him to return her letters, Casanova consistently refused to do so. ‘Oh God, how angry I am towards you, even more towards myself!’ she wrote to him in May. ‘You are the most ungrateful of men. Adieu Mr.’30
The spiralling deterioration of their relationship over the spring and summer of 1758 coincided with a sharp decline in Silvia’s health, and in June, if not before, Manon told her mother of her feelings for their family friend. Her ‘nona’, as she referred to her in a letter to Casanova, responded ‘with all the sweetness and kindness imaginable, how I love her, and how she deserves to be loved.’31 Her daughter’s happiness was paramount in Silvia’s mind. Wishing to see her settled, she was on the point of speaking to the Marquise de Monconseil about allowing Manon to marry Casanova when her daughter’s relationship suddenly appeared to be over. ‘Tell me or write to me what you intend to say to Mama to justify your change of heart, which cannot fail to seem strange to her,’ a despairing Manon pleaded with Casanova. ‘Farewell, soon you will no longer remember if you ever loved me; as for me, I will remember it for ever!’32
Their differences were set aside at the end of August, for Silvia was fading fast. On 1 September the actress summoned her notary and dictated her will. Terrified of being buried alive (’People will think this puerile, but it is a human weakness that they will pardon me for’), she begged not to be interred until a full two days after her death. Although her possessions were to be divided up between all her children, she left a special financial legacy to Manon, saying that she was doing so because she had spent more on her sons’ education than on her daughter’s. In reality Silvia was acutely anxious about Manon’s future – for who would look out for the girl’s interests when she was no longer around to do so?
On Saturday 16 September Silvia died in her bed in the rue du Petit-Lion, cradled between Manon’s and Casanova’s arms. Manon’s future preoccupied her until the very end. ‘Ten minutes before she died, she commended her daughter to my care,’ Casanova recorded. ‘I promised her truly from my soul that I would make her my wife; but Fate, as one always says, was against it.’33 Two days later the idol of France was buried at her local church, Saint-Sauveur. No one was more devastated than her daughter. Casanova remained with the family for the next three days, but after that his
business interests took him away. No date had been set for his marriage to Manon, and it is doubtful if anyone but the two of them even knew about their relationship.
A nightmarish month of legal formalities followed. The house was sealed up so that an inventory could be taken of the contents, and Manon was forced to deal with a steady stream of officials. By the time the seals were removed on 18 October, she was at her wits’ end. To make matters worse, Casanova was sent to Holland on financial business by the French government, and did not return until the New Year. While he was away (and busy wooing a fourteen-year-old Dutch heiress named Esther) the grief-stricken Manon wrote him nineteen letters, numbering each one carefully at the top. ‘If you knew how much I’ve been crying, my dear friend,’ she wrote in letter number one. ‘I have not stopped since you left; I’m really frightened that on your return you’ll find me so ugly that you will no longer love me.’
Now that her mother was not around Manon was being pressed by her brothers and the Marquise de Monconseil to return to the Saint-Denis convent where she had been educated, or to take temporary refuge in the convent of Bellechasse until her future could be decided. She had little say in the matter, and was close to breaking down: ‘The convent frightens me,’ she confided in Casanova, ‘your fickleness makes me tremble, I’m frightened that during your trip you will find objects more loveable than I am, who will make you forget how dear I am to you, and how much you are so to me. All this makes me despair, and I will not live until I receive assurances of the liveliest tenderness from you.’34 Her only hope lay in believing Casanova’s promise that, if he made sufficient money during his trip, he would fulfil Silvia’s dying wish and marry her on his return. This alone could make Manon ‘the most joyful, the merriest, the happiest of all creatures … You see my dear friend only these castles in Spain distract me from my misery, and whenever I think that they are only castles in Spain, blackness overwhelms me and everything distresses me.’35
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