Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  Acutely clever about investing her money, the Marquise d’Urfé was gullible to the point of stupidity when it came to alchemy and mysticism, the new-age beliefs of her time. A contemporary memoir, Les Souvenirs de la Marquise de Crêquy, painted her as ‘the most stubborn of alchemists, determined to find the philosopher’s stone … She was a lost woman, my aunt the baroness told us, her mind was in a whirl and all her wealth was blown away on the search.’4 The Landgravine of Hesse described her in slightly more generous terms as ‘a woman of wit, but who believes in communication with sylphs and spirits’ and novelist Jacques Cazotte, author of The Devil in Love, called her ‘the doyenne of the French Medeas’. The drawing-room of her Paris mansion ‘was always choked with quacks and people stampeding after the occult sciences’, Cazotte noted. ‘She had been in communication with the spirits throughout her life. Myself, I portrayed them with a master’s hand, and we found each other as learned as each other, that’s to say, very obscure.’5

  The Enlightenment was an age divided ‘between the two extremes of rationalist doubt and mystic credence, between the most audacious scepticism and the most absurd superstition’.6 As people sought to gain a new scientific understanding of the world, to prolong their lives and make themselves healthier and richer, alchemy, freemasonry and the occult became all the rage in the aristocratic circles of Paris. There was no shortage of pseudo-scientists, magicians and voyantes or mediums ready to milk the rich of their money; and the Marquise d’Urfé’s potpourri of blind beliefs, coupled with her wealth, made her a prime target for them. Charlatans and con-artists of the time included Madame Bontemps, a fashionable fortune-teller and spiritualist consulted by the likes of Madame de Pompadour, the Abbé de Bernis and even Casanova (her name, ‘Madame Good Times’, suggests that she specialised in telling people what they wanted to hear); Jacques Cazotte, who enslaved the Marquise de la Croix with his prophecies of the future; the Count of Cagliostro, a chemist and hypnotist who, in the 1780s, would captivate the court with his séances and promises of miraculous cures; the extraordinary Comte de Saint-Germain; and of course Casanova himself.

  The Marquise d’Urfé was introduced to Casanova in 1757 or 1758 by her nephew Nicolas-François-Julie de la Tour d’Apchier, the Comte de La Tour d’Auvergne, a man as prone to flights of fantasy as she was: in 1751 he had been thrown into the Bastille prison for frequenting witches and participating in ‘parties de diable’, in which he and his aristocratic friends had run through the fields at night in the hope of seeing the devil.7 Suffering from bad sciatica, the suggestible Nicolas declared himself miraculously cured after Casanova, as a prank, painted a mystical pentacle on his thigh using an amalgam of nitre, flowers of sulphur and mercury mixed with his patient’s own urine, and he immediately told his aunt about his new acquaintance. The marquise responded by saying that she had already heard of Casanova and was dying to meet him, that she believed she already knew him, and that he was not the man the whole of Paris believed him to be.

  What was Casanova’s reputation in Paris at the time? In January 1757, at thirty-one years old, he had arrived in the city armed with nothing except his heroic reputation. With the help of de Bernis, he had quickly established himself as one of the founders of the lottery and an adviser to the French government. Through the minister and the Balletti family he soon met everyone in the city worth knowing and, thanks to his brilliant mind, his ability to befriend a wide range of people and his overwhelming need to insinuate himself into their hearts, he was soon welcomed in all the best circles. But there was something else too that made Casanova sought after as a companion: his reputation as a magician and alchemist. Although he claimed that he abhorred being famed for these skills, in reality he was happy to trade on them. Fascinated by medicine since his youth, and well-aware of the power of suggestion, he possessed an intuitive understanding of the human mind and body which had already won him the worship of Senator Bragadin and his friends in Venice, and the gratitude of the Duchess of Chartres, whose disfiguring pimples he had helped cure during his first sojourn in Paris in 1750. At that time Casanova was already rumoured to be ‘connected with fortune-telling and horoscope drawing’, or so the French minister at Cologne wrote to the Due de Choiseul.8 Seven years on, the duchess and her ladies-in-waiting Madame de Boufflers and Madame du Blot continued to consult him on matters of health and prediction.

  Casanova had no illusions that he was a magician. He had been aware of the power of magic since the day his grandmother had taken him to Murano to consult the witch about his nosebleeds, but unlike many of his contemporaries he was a rationalist who did not believe in the supernatural. Witnessing first-hand Bettina Gozzi’s so-called demonic possession and exorcism in his early teens, he had seen through the ritual and rhetoric and come to the healthy conclusion that everyone concerned, including Bettina herself, was simply acting a role. Nevertheless, magic and illusion fascinated him, perhaps because it fascinated others. Over the years he had taught himself the basics of alchemy, studied arithmancy and cryptology, and gained a working knowledge of the Kabbalah. As the Venetian spy Manuzzi had discovered, he had been initiated into the secret society of Freemasons in 1750 when he had joined a masonic lodge in Lyon. Like the Marquise d’Urfé, Casanova had also joined the Order of the Rosy Cross, or Rosicrucians, an occult order which combined, among other movements, Gnosticism, alchemy and Kabbalism.

  As his relationship with Bragadin had shown, Casanova shamelessly used all this knowledge for his own ends and amusement. If the senator and his friends chose to believe his story that an ancient Spanish hermit had taught him how to predict the future, who was he to disillusion them? Not for nothing had one of Manuzzi’s secret reports to the Venetian Inquisitors stated that Casanova ‘cultivates people who are ready to believe anything … He is an exaggerator and by dint of lies and a witty tongue he lives at the expense of this, that and the other.’9

  Refined, convincing, intellectual, with the reputation of being a mystic and a healer and the added bravura of being the only man ever to have escaped from The Leads in the Doge’s Palace, by the time he returned to Paris in January 1757 Casanova’s ability to enchant both men and women was unparalleled. He had no moral scruples about taking in fools or relieving them of their money, and even in old age he was certain ‘that my readers will not condemn me when they see me emptying my friends’ purses to satisfy my whims. They had chimerical plans, and by making them hope for their success I hoped at the same time to cure them of their folly by disillusioning them. I deceived them to make them wise; and I did not believe myself to be guilty, for what prompted me was not avarice. I was merely paying for my pleasures with money which was destined to acquire possessions that nature makes it impossible to obtain ... It was money destined to be spent on follies; I merely diverted its use by making it pay for mine.’10 Like all the best charlatans, he listened carefully to what others told him about themselves, stole glimpses of their private documents, made his own deductions and then fed their own information back to them, pretending that he had discovered it by supernatural means. He was not above donning the white robes of a magician, drawing ‘magic’ symbols on the ground and chanting make-believe spells in order to raise buried treasure from under the earth if he felt there was something in it for him, as he had once done in Cesena in 1748 (this, his first magical operation, had coincided with a terrible thunderstorm, and had been so frightening that Casanova had even terrified himself).

  The Marquise d’Urfé was ‘famed for being learned in all the abstruse sciences’, her nephew La Tour d’Auvergne told Casanova before he introduced them.11 She was also fabulously rich and dying to meet the adventurer, whom she said she could introduce to the best people in Paris. All this made her an irresistible prospect for a man who was determined to make his fortune by any means. Their first meeting took place in the marquise’s riverside mansion, and even before he arrived Casanova seized the reins of power by insisting that no other guests be present that day. In the presenc
e of her nephew, the marquise and Casanova circled each other warily, exchanging polite small-talk while secretly studying one another. It was not until La Tour d’Auvergne left that the marquise opened up the subjects so dear to her heart. Eager to show off her occult knowledge in front of a man she was already convinced was an adept, she boasted with a gracious smile that she already possessed the philosopher’s stone, and was experienced in all the great alchemic operations. Although she demonstrated that she was a skilled chemist she could not stop herself from revealing some of her most foolish fantasies: for example, that both the thirteenth-century monk Roger Bacon and the eighth-century Arabian physician Jabir ibn Hayyan were still alive and in communication with her, and that she frequently received letters from the author and philosopher Benoît de Maillet, who had died some twenty years previously.

  When the marquise turned her back for a moment, Casanova secretly stole a look at one of her notebooks, where he found a drawing of the same mystical pentacle he had painted on her nephew’s thigh, surrounded by the names of the Planetary Geniuses, spirits assigned to the planets by the Kabbalah. A few minutes later, when the marquise asked him to write down the words he had spoken when he had drawn the pentacle, he cannily copied out the same names. Convinced that he had divined them by mystical means, the marquise immediately fell under Casanova’s spell. At nine o’clock that evening, when her nephew returned to the house, his aunt and friend were still deep in conversation. Jeanne believed that she had at last found a soul-mate in the intellectually impressive and handsome younger man, and she was reluctant to let go of him.

  Casanova was eager to comply. Though, as yet, he had no specific plan to take advantage of the gullible marquise, he was happy to enjoy what was a rather malicious joke at her expense. From then he dined alone with her every day, for she sacrificed her other friends in order to enjoy his company, and she spent so many private hours with him that her servants presumed that he was her husband. Were they lovers? Casanova hinted as much. At the time he was conducting his secret liaison with Manon Balletti, sleeping with Parisian prostitutes and his female workforce, and pursuing countless other women, but this did not rule out his having an affair with the marquise in order to ingratiate himself further with her.

  Despite being twenty years his senior, the marquise was still a beautiful woman. More important than any sexual attraction she might have felt for Casanova, she considered him her kindred spirit, the one person who truly shared her spiritual beliefs. She discussed her search for the philosopher’s stone with him. They conducted alchemic experiments together. A fluent Latin speaker, Casanova helped her to translate ancient Latin texts she could not understand. Unwilling to recognise that he might have an ulterior motive in befriending her, the marquise convinced herself that Casanova was ‘a genuine adept under the mask of a man of no consequence’,12 an independently wealthy young man who had only taken his position with the French Military Lottery in order to disguise his real identity as a magician.

  The marquise was deceiving herself, and Casanova did his best to encourage her. A few weeks after they first met he consolidated his hold over her by successfully decoding a manuscript she had given him. It purported to contain Paracelsus’s formula for the philosopher’s stone, written out in a secret code to which she believed only she held the key. Casanova worked out the code by using simple cryptography, but instead of telling her so ‘the fancy took me to tell her that a Genius had revealed it to me’. Little did the Marquise know that Paralis, this invisible genius, was a being he had invented years back to impress Senator Bragadin and his friends. ‘It was this false confidence which put Madame d’Urfé under my control,’ he admitted. ‘That day I made myself the arbiter of her soul.’ He had successfully hijacked ‘her heart, her mind, and all that remained of her common sense’,13 and for the next six years he would shamelessly abuse his power over her.

  From now on, the marquise hung on Casanova’s every word. She truly believed that he was omnipotent, and that he had the power and knowledge to fulfil her greatest wish by performing an operation which would ‘regenerate’ her by transferring her soul into the body of a male infant born of the philosophical union of a mortal with an immortal. She was aware that she might die in the process, she informed him in all seriousness, but she was prepared to risk death in order to be reborn as a man. Casanova, who could barely keep a straight face when she confessed this, would in time make the marquise’s ‘regeneration’ the basis of a drawn-out con-trick he perpetrated on her, by which he hoped to gain control of her entire fortune. In the short term, he was flattered to be thought the greatest of all Rosicrucians and alchemists and the most powerful of all men by a lady of such high rank; and he was aware that, if he was ever in need of money, she would refuse him nothing.

  For the next six years the marquise was Casanova’s ‘grand trésorier’, a source of frequent and extremely generous hand-outs. Her lackeys, horses and the sumptuous golden d’Urfé carriage lined with red Utrecht velvet were permanently at his disposal and, as soon as he condescended to meet them (if only one at a time), she introduced him to her influential family and friends. They included her brothers, councillor Geoffroy Camus de Pontcarré and Jean-Baptiste de Viarmes, the provost of Paris’s special mercantile courts, the ninety-year-old Chevalier d’Arginy, a pomaded, bewigged high-ranking cavalry officer known as Paris’s ‘dean of the fops’, and Anne Languet, the Comtesse de Gergi who brought with her the legendary Comte de Saint-Germain, a man who fascinated the marquise and Casanova alike, and whose outrageous claims put Casanova’s in the shade.

  Called ‘Der Wundermann’ in Germany and ‘the man who knows everything and never dies’ rather ironically by Voltaire, the Comte de Saint-Germain was an international celebrity. No one knew how he obtained his seemingly bottomless purse of money, or where he came from; he was rumoured variously to be the son of a Portuguese Jew, an Alsatian Jew, the illegitimate son of Marie de Neubourg, widow of Charles II of Spain, or a child of Francis II Rákóczy, the Prince of Transylvania. Stockily built, with the refined dark looks of an aristocratic Spaniard, Saint-Germain claimed that he was anything between three hundred and two thousand years old. People believed him because he had an ageless appearance: the Comtesse de Gergi, who befriended him in Paris in the 1750s, insisted that she had met him decades earlier in Venice where her husband had been French ambassador, and that he had looked no different then.

  Saint-Germain was a polymath and a savant. There seemed to be nothing that he did not know or could not accomplish. A brilliant linguist, he spoke every modern European language including German, Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French and he also knew Latin, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Sanskrit. He was a virtuoso violinist but said that he had given up music because he had no more to learn on the subject. He was a talented portrait-painter, and was an extremely learned alchemist who claimed, like the Marquise d’Urfé, that he could turn base metal into gold and transform a handful of small diamonds into a single large flawless stone. His love of jewels was legendary. ‘He wore very fine diamonds in his rings, watch, and snuffbox,’ according to the memoirs of Madame de Pompadour’s maid, Madame du Hausset. ‘He came, one day, to visit Madame de Pompadour, at a time when the Court was in full splendour, with knee and shoe-buckles of diamonds so fine and brilliant that Madame said she did not believe the King had any equal to them.’14 Saint-Germain was sought after and accepted in the most exalted circles in Europe, even more so than Casanova. But although he was constantly invited to dine at people’s houses and was happy to join the company at table, he never ate or drank in public, and in private lived on a simple diet consisting almost exclusively of oatmeal. A mine of amusing anecdotes and dazzling knowledge, he often delivered them in a didactic tone which no one seemed to mind for he always appeared to know what he was talking about and spoke to everyone in the same way. As Madame du Hausset wrote, ‘Nobody could find out by what means this man became so rich and so remarkable; but the King would not suff
er him to be spoken of with ridicule or contempt.’ In fact Saint-Germain became one of Louis XV’s close advisers, setting up a laboratory for him and probably working as his spy. ‘If he isn’t God himself, a powerful God inspires him,’ the Comte de Milly wrote of Saint-Germain.15 Women in particular adored him, and he was known to have many lovers as well as female friends to whom he gave advice on dyeing their hair (he was a specialist on the subject of dyes), face paints to beautify their complexions and a secret ‘water of youth’ which he told them was very expensive yet gave to them free of charge, claiming that it would preserve their looks for ever.

  The Marquise d’Urfé was among Saint-Germain’s devotees; she even commissioned a portrait of him. He became a frequent visitor to her Paris hôtel, and despite the unspoken rivalry between them he was one of the few guests whom Casanova was happy to dine with there. The two adventurers had plenty in common, not least the habit of encouraging their admirers to swallow their tall stories. ‘Sometimes I amuse myself, not by making people believe, but by letting them believe, that I have lived in the most remote periods,’ Saint-Germain is reported to have said to Madame de Pompadour when she laughed at one of his more outlandish claims.16 By his own admission, Casanova worked in exactly the same way.

  Despite his suspicions about the Comte de Saint-Germain, Casanova was almost indulgent towards him when he met him at the Marquise d’Urfé’s home: ‘This man, instead of eating, talked from the beginning to the end of dinner, and I listened to him with the greatest attention, for nobody spoke as well as he did. He made himself out to be a prodigy in everything, he wished to amaze, and he really did amaze … This very singular man, born to be the most brazen of impostors, said with impunity, as if by the by, that he was three hundred years old, that he possessed the universal panacea, that he could do whatever he pleased with nature, that he melted diamonds, and that he could make one large one of the finest water out often or twelve small ones without diminishing the weight. For him these things were trifles. Despite his pretentious boasts, his eccentricities, and his obvious lies, I could not bring myself to find him insolent, but neither could I consider him respectable; I found him astonishing despite myself, for he amazed me.’17