Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  Plans to put Manon in a convent alternated with the Marquise de Monconseil’s desire to marry her off to a wealthy Provençal whom the girl had not yet met. ‘Now appreciate this, my dear,’ Manon reported to Casanova, ‘they would send your poor little one in a bundle, through the customs, with my harpsichord and my guitar (for that is part of the bargain) I would arrive or rather I would be unpacked; and this man would be told, here is the wife you have been sent.’ Her humorous tone belied the fear she certainly felt at being out of control of her own destiny. The only thing she wanted, she told Casanova, was to be ‘your little wife, yes, your little wife’.36 Luckily the idea of the convent had been abandoned by November, but pressure was still being put on her to accept the proposed match. Summoned before M. Jonel, who was acting as intermediary, Manon nervously refused the man. Jonel washed his hands of her: she had already jilted one suitor, Clément, and her seemingly inexplicable refusal to accept a second brought the opprobrium of society down on her. It was suggested that she follow in her mother’s footsteps and go on the stage – not at the Comédie-Italienne, where Mario and Antonio worked, but at the French theatre. The situation was becoming so complicated and agonising that Manon even contemplated confiding in the Marquise de Monconseil. Desperate to be permanently united with the man on whom all her hopes depended and whom she already regarded as her partner, she ended her eighteenth letter to him with a plea: ‘always remember that you have a very loving little wife who expects the greatest fidelity from her husband.’37 One can almost hear Casanova grind his teeth as he read this.

  His return to Paris during the first week of January 1759 did not end Manon’s unhappiness, but exacerbated it. Though he had made an absolute fortune by his share-and currency-dealing, and had bought Manon a pair of expensive diamond earrings from Holland, Casanova did not keep his promise to marry her, he did not act wisely to secure their future and he did not even visit her often. Since he was the richest he had ever been – probably the equivalent of a modern-day multi-millionaire – the one-time fugitive intended to enjoy himself and to shine in Parisian society. ‘In less than a week I acquired a good coachman, two good carriages, five horses, a groom, and two good lackeys in half-livery,’38 he boasted of his spending spree. Within days of his return to Paris he was spotted ‘making a magnificent appearance’ at the Comedie-Italienne by an acquaintance from Italy, Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful twenty-year-old daughter of a Venetian mother, Anna Gazini, and British baronet Sir Richard Wynne. ‘He came to greet us and now is with us every day, although his company does not please me and he thinks this does not matter to us,’ Giustiniana wrote of Casanova to her secret lover, his Venetian friend Andrea Memmo, on 8 January. ‘He has a carriage, lackeys, and is attired resplendently He has two beautiful diamond rings, two different snuffboxes of excellent taste, set in gold, and he is bedecked with lace. He has gained admittance, I do not know how, to the best Parisian society. He says he is interested in a lottery in Paris and brags that this gives him a large revenue, although I am told that he is supported by a very rich old lady. He is quite full of himself and is foolishly proud; in brief, he is insupportable except when he speaks of his escape which he recounts admirably.’ Unbearably full of himself Casanova might be, but this did not make him any less attractive to women, and Giustiniana finished off her account of him with a tantalising ‘I talk with him about you very often . . ,’39

  While keeping on his rooms in the rue du Petit-Lion, Casanova also rented grand apartments in the rue Comtesse d’Artois, and a large, elegantly furnished country house, Cracovie en Bel Air, at La Petite Pologne, a hamlet just outside the city limits. With its terraced gardens, baths, cellars, kitchen, and suite of master’s apartments, the hillside property also had stabling for up to twenty horses, and the rent of one hundred louis a year included a cook/housekeeper – Madame Saint-Jean, or ‘The Pearl’ as Casanova referred to her. Taking advantage of The Pearl’s culinary talent and La Petite Pologne’s situation (because it was outside Paris’s customs barrier, one could buy the best quality food and wine free of duty), he used the house to entertain his new friends with an international cuisine for which he soon became famous, and which included pilau ris in cagnoni, macaroni al sughillo and specially-raised chickens with the whitest flesh.

  Needing something to do with all his spare money – aside from what he had made in Holland, he was now getting a huge income from the lottery and, as Giustiniana Wynne had heard, was also being supported by an elderly widow, the Marquise d’Urfe – Casanova opened a factory which produced hand-painted, Chinese-style silk panels similar to those currently being imported from Peking, but at a fraction of the cost of the imports. Housed in the Temple district, his factory employed some twenty young women aged between eighteen and twenty-five. When he took Manon to visit it she ‘quaked when she saw me the owner of this seraglio’40 – and she had good reason to do so. The beautiful all-female workforce were modest and ‘of good reputation’ until, one by one, their employer seduced them. Since he could never be bothered to bargain for women’s favours and had plenty of money at the time, Casanova acceded to all their demands and set up each of them in turn in a separate furnished house. When, one by one, he lost interest in his workers, he generously continued to support them.

  There was no end to Casanova’s womanising at this time, and on occasions he derived vicarious pleasure from carrying it out right under Manon’s nose, for example when he invited both her and Giustiniana Wynne – or Mile XCV as he discreetly called her in his memoirs – to the same dinner party.

  Soon afterwards, Casanova began a passionate affair with seventeen-year-old Madame Baret, a shopkeeper’s wife, whom he believed he loved more than he had ever loved any woman – a frequently repeated phrase in his memoirs. While Madame Baret’s lanky, unappreciative husband fussed over his stock of pantaloons and waistcoats, Casanova took the beautiful young bride to bed, or out on shopping trips to the Palais Marchand. When Madame Baret was taken ill, he offered her a week’s stay at his country house in La Petite Pologne so that she could recuperate. While her grateful husband was taking care of their shop, Casanova spent eight days of ecstasy exploring Madame Baret’s perfectly proportioned body and attempting to straighten her curled, golden pubic hair. She received his attentions ‘with the greatest calmness, and did not give herself up to the empire of Venus until she felt she felt every element of her charming self in tumult’.41

  Was it any wonder that Manon complained Casanova had no time for her? Unfortunately her litany of justified reproaches was guaranteed to make him want to be with her even less. ‘She could not conceive how I could defer marrying her, if I truly loved her,’ he wrote disingenuously. ‘She kept saying that I was deceiving her.’42 Manon was too young to have any perspective on the unpleasant situation: although her fiancé made her increasingly miserable she was still fixated by the idea that her only chance of a happy future lay with him.

  Carried away by his seemingly unstoppable success both with women and in business, Casanova continued to spend and womanise with reckless abandon throughout the first half of 1759. His outgoings would have financially crippled the richest aristocrat, not least the cost of maintaining each one of his twenty-strong factory workforce in their own establishment. By now the wallpaper business itself was in dire trouble: the continuing war with England over their American possessions had been ruinous for the French luxury goods business, leaving Casanova with a huge stockpile of unsold chinoiserie panels. He was spending what he did not have, and the tradesmen, who until now had allowed him almost unlimited credit, were at last becoming nervous and demanding to be paid. When, on 23 August, he was suddenly arrested for debt and imprisoned in the city’s Fors L’Evêque jail, Manon loyally sent him the valuable diamond earrings he had given her on his return from Holland. Their worth was not enough to secure his freedom, and in the end it was the wealthy Marquise d’Urfé who bailed Casanova out two days later to the tune of 50,000 francs, and carried him off from
prison in her gold carriage.

  Slightly subdued by this salutary experience, Casanova returned Manon’s earrings to her and promised her that he would give up his silk-painting business and its female workforce – a financial necessity, as it happened. But selling the factory was not as simple as he had anticipated: three days after he sold off his shares in it to a man named Jean Gamier, one of the employees ran off with the liquid assets, and Casanova was faced with a legal suit for the return of Garnier’s money. At about the same time, he was presented with a court action over a dubious bill of exchange in which he had been involved. Whether or not he was guilty of this particular crime, he knew that his period of grace was passing and that the time had come for him to leave France for a while. Promising a tearful Manon yet again that he would do his best to earn a great deal of money and then invest it wisely for their future when he returned, Casanova left Paris for a second trip to Holland at the end of September on another financial mission for the French government; despite the legal proceedings against him, France’s ministers continued to trust him to negotiate loans on their behalf. Although he led Manon to believe that he would be back before December, Casanova’s actions spoke otherwise: before leaving the city he resigned from his position as director of the lottery, gave up his apartments and sold off his carriage and his horses. He arrived in Holland with at least 100,000 francs in his strong box and an equal amount in jewellery.

  Convinced that she would see him again in a matter of weeks, Manon was nevertheless distraught at his departure. Her whole world seemed to be collapsing around her. On 13 September her brother Antonio had been seriously injured by a stray bullet during a performance of Veronese’s Camille Magicienne at the Comédie-Italienne. A fortnight later he was only just well enough to be lifted from his bed so that the sheets could be changed, and although he was starting to take a little soup he would never make a complete recovery. Manon visited him regularly, but at night she took refuge at La Petite Pologne, where Madame Saint-Jean looked after her, preparing nutritious meals to help her regain all the weight she had recently lost. Despite the rumours that were now circulating in Paris about Casanova’s financial dealings, Manon’s belief in him remained unshaken. Her ‘dear Giacometto’ could rest assured that ‘bad talk, postponements, lies, nothing can change my heart, which is all yours, and which has no wish for a change of master.’43

  The rest of Paris was less forgiving. Once it was known that Manon was staying at La Petite Pologne, a rumour spread that she was living there with Casanova, who was not in Holland, but rather in hiding. To a young woman who had kept her reputation and perhaps her virginity intact for two and a half years – rather miraculously, given the nature of her secret fiance’s sex-drive – this was an outrageous slur on both their characters. Manon was ‘in a rage, an indignation, a misery which cannot be described,’ she wrote to Casanova ‘from petite pologne on 23 8bre 1759 for the last time’, as she scribbled incandescently at the top. For honour demanded that she immediately leave the country house where she had all too briefly found contentment: ‘I’m dying of misery,’ she confessed, ‘I have it on all sides, I can’t hold out any longer I have to give into it; my heart aches. They wish to rob me of my honour. Finally everything contributes to make me pitiable, if I did not love you as much as I do I’d go and stick myself in a convent and never come out again. How evil the world is. How unhappy I am.’44 Manon was friendless and inconsolable. If Casanova were to abandon her now it would be the worst thing that could happen to her. She reassured herself that he was incapable of such a betrayal, but his evasive reply to her laments slightly dented her confidence in him. Instead of being sympathetic, her ‘husband’ sounded bored by her complaints, and demanded to know the latest political news from Versailles.

  November came and went, but Casanova did not return from Holland, where he was preoccupied with renewing his courtship of the teenage heiress, Esther. Back in Paris, Manon could not sleep. Her reputation was in tatters, but even after so many years of let-downs and disappointment she still hung on her supposed fiance’s every word. His letters had the power to turn her mood from depression to elation to guilt in an instant. When jealousy caused her to write a cold letter to him and he wrote back accusing her of doubting his love, she was overwhelmed by contrition. ‘I am ready to make all the reparations you wish,’ she wrote to him in the middle of December. ‘Melancholy was the author of my letter, and not me at all.’45 Casanova was clearly manipulating her from a distance, but Manon did not seem to realise it. She lived only for the moment when ‘my dear Casa, my dear jiacomo (sic), lover, husband, friend, whatever pleases you’46 returned to Paris and made an honest woman of her, as he had been promising to do for years.

  The end of 1759 saw no let-up to Manon’s suffering. A rumour reached Casanova that she had married an adviser at court – or so he wrote to her, perhaps in an attempt to end their relationship, for by now he was deeply in love with Esther, whose future fortune would be considerable and whose intelligence and charm were, he declared ‘designed to make me forget a thousand Manons’.47 Quick to disabuse him, Manon replied on 20 December that she loved only him. Three months had been too long without him, and she begged him to return in January. Life in the rue du Petit-Lion was unbearably miserable. Antonio was still seriously ill, and she was being shunned by good society. At Christmas very few visitors came to see her, and the only present she received was an almanac. During the final days of the month Manon felt more isolated than ever. ‘You speak to me of your solitude, my dear friend,’ she wrote to Casanova on 3 January 1760, ‘but mine has got to the point that I scarcely paid any visits on New Year’s Day.’ Sadness emanated from every line of her letter, yet by now Manon knew better than to complain: ‘As for me, my very dear husband, I’m keeping well enough since the New Year, I only lack one thing which is really essential to me, and that’s my very dear friend whom I love one hundred times more tenderly than I know how to say … Farewell, my dear friend, I kiss you with all my soul and love you with all my heart.’48

  Manon’s one remaining pleasure lay in receiving Casanova’s letters, letters which, despite his passionate feelings for Esther, were as loving that January as they had ever been. Enchanted by them, Manon reassured him on 20 January that her heart was uniquely his: ‘Farewell my most lovable husband,’ she wrote, ‘always be like your last letter and you will be madly loved by nena, nenotola Ballettina. Farewell, my being, my heart, my heart, my heart.’49 All her hope rested on Casanova’s expected return at the end of that month, and in order to distract herself in the meantime she decided to stage a series of plays at home with a cast of amateur actors cobbled together out of her few remaining friends, who included the son and daughter of Louis Lambert, the chief of the Bureau de Poste; although Manon had not been allowed to go on the stage professionally, the theatre still ran in her blood.

  Casanova did not return at the end of January as he had promised. Instead, at the beginning of February, Manon received a melancholy letter from him informing her that, as his business dealings in Holland had been unsuccessful, he was leaving for Germany and would not be back in Paris for at least another two months. She attempted to sound stoical when she replied on 7 February, filling her letter with comical tales about her rehearsals, but she was unable to hide her deep disappointment, and began her letter with a resigned ‘So my dear husband it is at last decided that I am going to spend a very long time without seeing you.’ By now Casanova had been away for more than three months, and she was ‘beginning to grow furiously weary’ with his long absence. She had no idea how long it would be until they were together.

  In fact, Manon would never see Casanova again. But all the broken promises in the world could not make her stop adoring her beloved Giacometti. ‘You remember very well that I love you, don’t you?’ she wrote at the end of her letter. ‘Well never forget it my dear friend. Farewell. I kiss you with all my heart and think of you all the time, even when I am studying my roles. 3 kisses for
jiacomo.’50

  On 29 July 1760, five months and three weeks after writing this loving letter to Casanova, Manon Balletti married François-Jacques Blondel, one of the most influential architects of his day. Like his uncle François Blondel, who had become director of Paris’s Academy of Architecture in 1672, François-Jacques was passionate about providing would-be architects with a broad and thorough education. In 173 7 he had published an important folio on pleasure palaces and interior design, De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance et de la Décoration des Edifices en General; in 1740 he had opened his own private school of architecture, L’Ecole des Arts, which was to influence a whole generation of French architects; and between 1752 and 1757 he had published a seminal two-volume work on building design and interior decoration, L’Architecture française, one of the first written documents on French architectural theory. Appointed architect to Louis XV in 1755, five years later Blondel was at the very top of his profession, with commissions in Metz and Strasbourg as well as Paris. He had money, status, and a house in the city’s rue de la Harpe where he gave well-attended lectures on architecture. But despite his professional success, Blondel was by no means an ideal husband for Manon. At fifty-five years old to her twenty, he was a widower old enough to be her father. He had grown-up sons from his first marriage, one of whom, Georges-François, was an architect and a professor himself, and may already have been married with children of his own.