Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  Casanova’s version of events casts little light on the mystery of why Manon married François-Jacques Blondel. The heading to Chapter I, Volume Six of his memoirs, in which he reports the marriage, contains the bald statement Manon Balletti is unfaithful to me – this from the man who had been consistently deceiving her with other women for three years. He goes on to describe how, on Christmas Day 1759, he received a large packet from Manon, along with the following letter from her: ‘Be reasonable, and receive the news that I give you calmly. This packet contains all your letters and your portrait. Send me back my portrait, and if you still have my letters, burn them. I count on your honour. Do not think of me any more. For my part, I will do everything in my power to make myself forget you. Tomorrow, at this time, I will be the wife of M. Blondel, Architect to the King, and a Member of his Academy. You will greatly oblige me if, when you return to Paris, you will pretend not to know me wherever you may meet me.’51

  The news that he had been jilted by Manon was, Casanova wrote, a ‘great grief’ which crushed his soul and sent him into a two-hour trance followed by a jealous fury in which he contemplated going to Paris to murder Blondel ‘who had dared to marry a girl who belonged to me, and who everyone believed to be my wife’.52 Yet, after only a few hours with Esther, to whom he now showed Manon’s love letters (there were then more than 200 of them altogether, of which forty-one now survive) he was already certain that he could begin to forget his fiancée, whom he had already begun to despise and think ‘unworthy of all that I had wanted to do for her’.53 Once again, Casanova could not bear the humiliation of being rejected by a woman. As he later admitted, his pride was hurt more than his heart.

  That Casanova received news of Manon’s imminent marriage on Christmas Day 1759 in Amsterdam is either poetic licence on his part or a genuine mistake made when he wrote his memoirs more than three decades later. Manon’s letters of January and February 1760, which were in his possession, prove that she was not only still in contact with him at that particular time but was also still madly in love with him.

  Between 7 February, when she wrote her last love letter to Casanova, and the end of July, when she married Blondel, something had caused Manon to give up the dream she had been nursing since her seventeenth birthday to unite herself for ever with the love of her life. Perhaps she had finally realised that he did not love her, and never had. But now there was a pressing need for her to marry somebody. By 1760 the Comédie-Italienne, with which her family was so closely associated, was in debt to the tune of some 400,000 livres. They had lost Silvia, their main attraction, in 1758, Antonio had never recovered from the accident which had crippled him a year later, and Mario was in personal financial trouble with a number of his creditors. On 26 March 1760, a bailiff entered the Ballettis’ house to seize the actor’s possessions. Claiming that everything belonged to his daughter, Mario managed to get rid of him, but the threat of losing their home continued to hang over the family.54

  Manon’s future had never been more precarious. The Marquise de Monconseil, among others, had been urging her to make a sensible marriage ever since she had broken off with Clément in the spring of 1757. Three years on, though still relatively young and beautiful, she was a far less marriageable proposition than she had been when the marquise and M. Jonel had attempted to marry her off soon after Silvia’s death. Thanks to Casanova, she had already jilted one suitor and turned her nose up at various others. Added to this, rumours of her long, inconclusive relationship with the adventurer – including the brief period when she was supposed to have been living with him at La Petite Pologne – had not enhanced her marital prospects. Taking all this into consideration, the king’s architect was quite a catch for Manon, despite the large disparity in their ages. From Blondel’s point of view, he was getting the great Silvia’s daughter as his wife, a young beauty who came with a substantial dowry of 24,000 livres.

  If she had not already met Blondel through her parents and their large circle of artistic friends, it is likely that Manon was introduced to him at the beginning of 1760 by his friend, Louis Lambert, whose son and daughter were part of her troupe of amateur actors. Lambert was a signatory on her marriage contract on behalf of the groom, and may even have brokered the match. The marriage contract was drawn up on 20 July, and the couple were married nine days later, at which point Manon moved from her father’s house to Blondel’s home in the rue de la Harpe.

  It was a good thing that Manon had not waited for Casanova to return to Paris. By the end of February 1760 he was in Cologne. By the end of March he was in Stuttgart, from where he fled at the beginning of April to Zurich, and then on to Baden, Lucerne, Fribourg and Berne. By the time of Manon’s marriage that July, Casanova was in Geneva, discussing the merits of the sixteenth-century poet Ariosto with the great Voltaire. Since leaving Esther in Holland he had become entangled with a wide variety of women including Madame Dubois, a respectable French widow who had fallen on hard times and taken a job as his housekeeper. Besides falling deeply in love with Dubois, Casanova slept with countless prostitutes, cavorted with lesbians in the bathhouses of Berne, and was tricked into having sex with a woman he despised and from whom he caught a bad dose of the pox. Put off sex by this experience, he even flirted briefly with the idea of becoming a monk.

  Casanova next visited Paris in the summer of 1761. During his brief stay in the city he was invited to dine at Madame Vanloo’s house, but when he heard that Manon, now Madame Blondel, was to be among the guests he made an excuse and absented himself. As Madame Vanloo reported the following day, Manon had asked her to thank Casanova for his discretion in the matter. By now she was pregnant. Her first child, a boy, was born on 19 November 1761, and died the following day. Her second child, also a boy, was born shortly before Christmas 1764, and baptised Jean-Baptiste Blondel on 24 December. In time he would become a famous architect like his father and great-uncle.

  Casanova never forgave Manon for breaking off with him, and he did not resist the temptation to pass on salacious gossip about the state of her marriage. If Blondel had found his wife a virgin, he told Madame Vanloo, he owed that to no one but Manon herself. And he had heard that Blondel resided alone in the Louvre, he reported, while his wife lived in a house in the rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs. Though they lived separately, they supped together every evening, which was ‘a strange sort of set-up!’ Having failed to find a mistress worthy to be his wife, Blondel ‘was very happy to have found a wife worthy to be his mistress’.55

  As a member of the Academy and Louis XV’s architect, Blondel was indeed granted the use of an apartment in the Louvre, but not until 1767, when he moved there with Manon. In 1770 he began to publish his lecture notes as an architecture course; when he died on 9 January 1774, leaving thirty-three-year-old Manon a widow, this mammoth task was still incomplete. Manon applied to the king to stay on in the apartment with their nine-year-old son, but permission was refused. Granted a pension of 800 livres, she spent the rest of her short life in the kind of artistic milieu in which she had grown up, surrounded by architects, artists and writers. She died in December 1776, aged just thirty-six.

  EIGHT

  The Marquise d’Urfé

  To trick a fool is an exploit worthy of an intelligent man.1

  IN HER MANSION on Paris’s quai des Théatins, overlooking the River Seine and the Palais du Louvre, Jeanne de Lascaris d’Urfé de Larochefoucauld, the fifty-two-year-old Marquise d’Urfé, stands at a table in her private laboratory, engaged in her favourite occupation, which is experimenting with chemicals. Using a key which she keeps on a long gold chain around her neck, she unlocks the wooden casket in front of her and spoons tiny nuggets of the pure platinum it contains into four clear glass vessels of equal size. Next, carefully removing the stoppers from three heavy bottles, she elegantly trickles sulphuric acid into the first vessel of platinum, nitric acid into the second, hydrochloric acid into the third, and into the fourth a mixture of the latter two known as aqua regia.

>   The chemicals bubble and hiss, releasing noxious gases into a room which already reeks of alcohol and sulphur, as well as coal-smoke from the perpetually burning furnace in the corner. These heady fumes do not bother the marquise; on the contrary, they act like smelling salts on her spirits. Jeanne de Lascaris d’Urfé de Larochefoucauld lives for her filtrations, her distillations and her chemical transmutations, in short for her search for the most elusive substance on earth – the fabled philosopher’s stone, that which can prolong life for ever and turn base metal into gold.

  Her alchemy laboratory is the marquise’s refuge from the world. Being a clever woman with interests that rise far above every day matters, she would far rather spend her mornings here among her grinding bowls, her burning mirrors, her blowpipes, her phials of salts and her caskets of silver, phosphorus and mercury than suffering under her hairdresser’s curling tongs or making small-talk with sycophantic courtiers whose interests never go further than the paste buckles on their shoes. Luckily she can afford to do exactly what she likes in life. A widow with no children – well, none living that she cares to acknowledge – a position of unrivalled grandeur and a fortune so great she could not spend the half of it if she tried, the marquise has both the means and the time to indulge her every whim. Instead of being ruled by fashion like lesser mortals, she is guided by an invisible spiritual being she refers to as her ‘Genius’, whose every word she listens to slavishly, and in whom she puts her entire faith.

  That is, until Giacomo Casanova walks into her life.

  Jeanne Camus de Pontcarré was the daughter of Pierre-Nicolas Camus de Pontecarré, first president of the Rouen parliament, and his second wife Marie-Françoise de Bragelonne, who died giving birth to her in 1705. Brought up by a succession of stepmothers, Jeanne grew up into an intelligent beauty who was soon noticed at court by Philippe II, the Duc d’Orléans and Regent of France during the minority of Louis XV. By the time she was eighteen, Jeanne was known as Philippe’s most beautiful mistress, but her lover appears to have valued her as much for her mind as for anything else, for, as she was never tardy in reminding her acquaintances, he nicknamed her Egérie, after the Roman goddess Egeria, the trusted adviser of King Numa Pompilius.

  In September 1724, nine months after Philippe’s death, nineteen-year-old Jeanne was married to Louis-Christophe de la Rochefoucauld de Lascaris, Marquis de Langeac, colonel of the regiment of Roche-Guyon and the last remaining descendant, through his mother’s line, of the d’Urfés, one of France’s most illustrious families. Louis’s ancestors included the famous Claude d’Urfé, representative of France at the Council of Trent and the trusted guardian of Henri II and Catherine de Medici’s children, and his two literary sons: the improbably-named Anne, who was a poet; and the more famous Honoré, the author of L’Astrée, an internationally-popular pastoral novel.

  Immensely proud of the d’Urfé heritage, Jeanne, along with her husband Louis, set about re-establishing the family name. Over the next nine years she bore him two daughters and a son: Adélaïde-Marie-Thérèse, born in 1727; Agnès-Marie, born in 1732; and Jean-Antoine-François, born in 1733. There was to be no happy family life for them. In January 1734 Louis died of smallpox while on active duty near Milan, leaving twenty-eight-year-old Jeanne one of France’s wealthiest widows. For she had inherited the entire d’Urfé fortune including extremely profitable shares and investments, properties in and around Paris, and country estates that brought in an annual income of some 80,000 livres. With no financial need to remarry – she spent less than 30,000 livres a year, much of it on augmenting Claude d’Urfé’s famous library of ancient books and manuscripts which she had inherited along with her husband’s fortune – Jeanne concentrated on astutely investing her money and raising her three children alone.

  They brought her little joy. Jean, her only son, died at the age of nine, and her elder daughter Adélaïde grew up to be troublesome and extravagant. By the tail-end of 1753, Adélaïde, aged twenty-six, was still unmarried and deeply in debt. Worried about her losing her money, Jeanne took the drastic measure of applying to Louis XV to have her daughter’s Paris mansion and country château sealed up to protect them from being seized by her creditors, and she requested that Adélaïde herself be forcibly enclosed in the convent of Sainte-Marie in Saint-Denis.2 Locked up in a convent cell, forbidden to communicate with her friends or to use the income from her farms to pay off her debts, Adélaïde railed against her mother who, in return, claimed that her daughter was out of control and disinherited her. When Adélaïde was offered the chance to leave the convent on condition that she marry straight away, she declared that she would accept the first suitor who came along to get away from Jeanne, even if he were the devil himself.

  Though no devil, sixty-year-old widower Alexis-Jean, the Marquis du Châtelet-Fresnières, whom Adélaïde married on 7 May 1754, was nevertheless a highly unsuitable husband, because he was just as improvident as she, and by the following September creditors were snapping at the heels of them both. In dire straits, the poverty-stricken Marquis and Marquise du Châtelet-Fresnières, daughter and son-in-law of Paris’s richest widow, were forced to flee from one lowly lodging house to another in the remotest, least fashionable arrondissements of the city while Jeanne lived in luxury near the Louvre. Their first son, born in April 1755, died when he was seven months old; their second, born in August 1756, died the following January. By 1765 the bereaved couple’s debts totalled more than a million livres.

  Meanwhile, a month before Adélaïde’s marriage, Jeanne’s younger daughter Agnès had married Paul Edouard Colbert, the Comte de Creuilly and Due d’Estouteville. Sadly Agnès, who was said to be one of the most beautiful women in Paris, died two years later on 1 July 1756, leaving no children. Jeanne had now lost a husband, a son, a daughter and two grandchildren, and her one remaining offspring brought her nothing but grief. That she began to put so much faith in alchemy, mysticism and the supernatural is perhaps understandable given these circumstances. Her scientific experiments, some of which lasted for years, filled her otherwise empty life, and the hope of making new discoveries, coupled with the existence of a spiritual world in which it was possible to communicate with the dead, was perhaps more bearable to her than reality.

  The forerunner of modern-day chemistry, alchemy had its roots in a short text known as The Emerald Tablet of Hermes, thought to date back to the ancient Egyptian era and studied by intellectuals as diverse as the thirteenth-century English monk Roger Bacon, the sixteenth-century Swiss-German doctor Philippus Paracelsus, and even Sir Isaac Newton. Newton’s translation of the Tablet, found among his papers, included the most important tenet of alchemic philosophy: ‘That wch is below is like that wch is above & that wch is above is like yt wch is below.’ Everything in nature, alchemists believed, ripened towards purity and perfection, even metals, which ranged from the impure tin and iron to the purest form, gold. Given the right catalyst – a secret substance known as the philosopher’s stone – people could speed this natural process up, transmuting base metals into gold at will and producing a universal panacea or ‘elixir of life’ which kept people from ageing and indefinitely prolonged existence.

  The marquise had taken an interest in alchemy ever since her affair with the regent, a liberal man who had been a disciple of the science himself. By the 1750s she had studied all the ancient books and texts on the subject in the d’Urfé library – they included Paracelsus’s encrypted formula for the philosopher’s stone and original manuscripts by the thirteenth-century Catalan mystic theologian Raymond Lully, also known as ‘Doctor Illuminatus’. Although she approached her experiments with the dedication of a true scientist, she elevated her results to the realms of fantasy. In her laboratory she had ‘a substance that she had kept on the fire for fifteen years, and which still needed four or five more’, which she believed to be ‘a powder of projection which could transform all metals into gold in one minute’ – a process that alchemists described as the opus alchemicum or Great W
ork, and the highest goal in alchemy. Jeanne also experimented with Plantina del Pinto or platinum, a substance given to her in 1743 by the English chemist Charles Wood, who had discovered it two years earlier in Peru. By mixing silver, mercury and nitric acid the marquise created a silver dendrite known as a ‘tree of Diana’, and she claimed to be able to make one ‘that would be a true tree of the sun, which would produce golden fruits that one could harvest’.3

  ‘The philosopher’s stone may be an inlet into another sort of knowledge that will allow us to have intercourse with good spirits,’ wrote the seventeenth-century Irish-born pioneering chemist Robert Boyle, author of The Sceptical Chymist. The marquise certainly believed so. Over the years she had constructed a personal Hermetic occult philosophy which encompassed elements of alchemy, magic, the planetary hours, Gnosticism and arithmancy, a method of prediction which she based on Paracelsus’s system of seven magic squares. She applied herself to the Kabbalah, an ancient form of Jewish mysticism that also studied by Christians, and she joined the Rosicrucians or Order of the Rosy Cross, a secret metaphysical organisation usually only open to men which was dedicated to understanding the principles of the universe. The marquise would have loved to have been a man; and one of her most bizarre fantasies was to believe that she could be ‘regenerated’ or reborn as one with the help of her spiritual guide or ‘Genius’. Her other great folly was to believe that it was possible for humans to converse with undines, sylphs, gnomes and salamanders, the spirits which the Kabbalah assigned to the four elements of water, air, earth and fire. Jeanne would have given all her worldly possessions to accomplish these two aims. And thanks to Casanova, she nearly did.