Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  However impressive Saint-Germain was, it was Casanova to whom the Marquise d’Urfé was in thrall. She trusted him implicitly, even with her financial investments: when he was sent to Holland by the French government in October 1758 she handed him 60,000 francs worth of shares she owned in the East India Company of Gothenburg, and asked him to sell them there on her behalf. If this was a test of his honesty, Casanova passed it, for after he had sold the shares for 72,000 francs he sent the marquise a bill of exchange for the entire amount, delighting her so much that she made him a present of all the profits she had made on the deal. However, most of the letter she wrote thanking him was taken up with her spiritual delusions: her Genius had informed her that Casanova would return to Paris with a young boy born of the philosophic union of an immortal with a mortal – the very being into whose body she believed he could transfer her soul and thus regenerate her as a man.

  Fate played into Casanova’s hands when he ran into his old friend and lover from Venice, Teresa Imer. Since their brief affair in the early summer of 1753, the fortunes of the singer and femme fatale who had once captivated both Casanova’s mentor Malipiero and the Margrave of Bayreuth had slipped inexorably downhill. She had returned to Bayreuth from Venice pregnant by Casanova; their daughter, Sophia Wilhelmina Frederica, had been born in the early months of 1754. When the margrave’s court had moved south to Italy later that year, Teresa had left her long-suffering husband, choreographer Angelo Pompeati, and, taking her children with her, had travelled to Paris where she had attempted to make money by singing at private concerts, and later by staging musical evenings in her furnished apartment. Within two years she had been made bankrupt and imprisoned for debt. Bailed out by one of her many admirers, Teresa had fled to Flanders where yet another lover, the powerful Prince Charles of Lorraine, had set her on the road to becoming a theatrical impresario.

  For two seasons, the plays and concerts Teresa had staged in Ghent and Liège had been as artistically successful as her father Giuseppe Imer’s had once been at Venice’s San Samuele theatre. However, financially they had been disastrous for her. Always a perfectionist in her work, Teresa had spent far more on her productions than they had earned – a problem that would dog her throughout her business career and lead to her eventual ruin. Leaving a trail of debts in her wake, she had fled from Flanders to the Dutch Republic, where she now rented dilapidated rooms in a tenement in The Hague and scraped a living by travelling to Rotterdam and Amsterdam and singing at concerts under the assumed name of Madame de Trenti or Tranti. Since they knew that she was in financial trouble, the music impresarios such as M. Van Hagen in Rotterdam refused to pay her any fees. Instead she was allowed to carry a collection plate through the audiences after each performance like some kind of beggar, with her young daughter Sophia trailing after her in the hope of garnering more money by eliciting people’s sympathy.

  At a concert in Amsterdam on New Year’s Day 1759, Teresa noticed Casanova in the audience. He was clearly as shocked to see her as she was to see him, and the sight of their daughter, whose existence he had not known about but who bore an unmistakable likeness to him, left him nonplussed. Although he put a generous amount of money on Teresa’s collection plate Casanova would not acknowledge that he knew her in front of his wealthy companions. Later that night, the desperate and determined soprano sought him out at the inn where he was staying. During the last few years she had lost two of her four children. Scarcely able to feed Sophia, who was now nearly five years old, and too poor to provide for her son, twelve-year-old Giuseppe Pompeati, whom she had left ‘in pawn’ in Rotterdam with some of her creditors, Teresa threw herself on her old friend’s mercy. But when Casanova offered to take their beautiful daughter off her hands she refused to part with her. Instead, she begged him to redeem her son from her creditors, take him to Paris and bring him up for her.

  Casanova readily agreed to do so. He already had a hidden agenda: to pass the boy off as the half-immortal being whom the Marquise d’Urfé had predicted he would bring back to Paris with him. The suggestible marquise needed little encouragement. As soon as Casanova arrived in Paris with Giuseppe, she snatched the child from under his nose, took him home, made him sleep in her bed and, for the next four years, insisted on bringing him up at her own expense. Three years older than her son Jean had been when he died, Giuseppe Pompeati – or the Count of Aranda as he quickly reinvented himself in order to impress his rich foster mother – was an intelligent if rather lazy youth who gave new purpose and meaning to the marquise’s life. Since Agnès’s death in the summer of 1756 and her estrangement from Adélaïde she had had no one but herself to think of. Now she again had a child who depended on her. While her own daughter and son-in-law were all but starving in their dismal lodgings on the far side of the city, the marquise plied Giuseppe with gifts of clothes and jewels, bought him a pony and enrolled him at Viard’s, the best boarding school in Paris. ‘A prince could not have been better lodged, better treated, better dressed or better respected by the entire household,’ Casanova reported after visiting him there.18 M. Viard taught Giuseppe all that a young French aristocrat was supposed to know about the world, and his pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, whose job it was to look after the boy, instructed him in the facts of life just as Bettina Gozzi had instructed Casanova during his schooldays.

  Giuseppe had lived a hard hand-to-mouth existence with his critical and demanding birth-mother. Thanks to the Marquise d’Urfé his life in Paris was an earthly paradise. But while he gloried in his new identity as the adored and indulged protégé of Paris’s richest widow, the marquise’s relations with her daughter and son-in-law deteriorated sharply. Still unable to access Adélaïde’s property, the couple brought a legal action against the marquise, claiming that she was withholding large sums of money from them. The loss of two children of her own, coupled with years of living in terrible poverty, took its toll on Adélaïde, who now fell ill. Suffering, perhaps, from postpartum depression, she believed that her late second son had been born with claws on his toes instead of nails.19 Pregnant for a third time in 1759, she grew so deranged that her husband applied for permission to separate from her – reluctantly, the Marquis de Châtelet insisted, since he still loved his wife dearly. The couple’s third child, Achille-François-Félicien, was born with a withered right arm at the ancient d’Urfé château of La Bâtie le Forez on 3 November 1759. The following year his desperate parents were ordered to surrender all their remaining property to their thirty-three creditors, who included a lemonade-maker, a master tailor, water carriers, butchers, horse riders, wood-sellers and even chair-men. Since they had nothing to live on, Louis XV granted the du Châtelets a generous pension of 10,000 livres. But the marquis died on 6 May 1761, and the half-deranged Adélaïde was extradited to the convent at Conflans for the rest of her life.

  After his triumphant return from Holland at the start of 1759 Casanova had gone out of his way to flatter and court the Marquise d’Urfé in a fashion more suited to a lover than a platonic friend. When he rented his country villa at La Petite Pologne she was his very first visitor, and he encouraged her to believe that he had arranged the entire house with her happiness in mind. He had his portrait painted on a medallion with the intention of giving it to her (she never received it, though, for he kept it and had it made into a snuffbox which he eventually gave to Teresa Lanti when he ran into her in Florence in November 1760). When the marquise expressed a desire to meet the enlightenment philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova accompanied her to the château in Montmorency where he was then staying, and they both came away with the same impression – that the famous philosopher was entirely undistinguished and rather rude.

  How much did the marquise know of Casanova’s other amorous activities? Without doubt he was discreet about his other women and, with equal discretion, she never questioned him about what he did when they were not together, a quality he considered a great virtue on her part. She would not have been aware of
his secret engagement to Manon Balletti, or of his crush on beautiful, twenty-one-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, whom he was intent on seducing.

  Happy to flirt with him as she was, Giustiniana was not really interested in Casanova. Although her Venetian mother was trying to marry her off to a wealthy man she detested – France’s Farmer General, arts patron Alexandre le Riche de la Pouplinière, she was already pregnant by her secret lover, Venetian nobleman Andrea Memmo, whom she had been forced to leave behind in Venice. Since she knew that Casanova was a friend of Memmo’s Giustiniana turned to him for advice about procuring an abortion – a mark both of her desperation and of the confidence the adventurer inspired in women. He discreetly consulted the Marquise d’Urfé who gave him Paracelsus’s recipe for an aroph or unguent made of powdered saffron, myrrh and honey, which, she said, smeared on to a cylinder of the appropriate size and inserted into the vagina so as to sexually excite a woman, would infallibly bring on menstruation. Aware that this advice was ridiculous, it suited Casanova’s purpose – to pass it on to the seven-months pregnant Giustiniana. On the spur of the moment he added that the aroph was most effective when mixed with sperm that had not lost its body-heat and administered three or four times a day for five or six days; and because Memmo was not available to administer it, Casanova offered to move into the Hôtel de Bretagne, where Giustiniana was staying with her family, and administer it himself. At first she laughed at him. Several days later, however, she consented, and the aroph was duly administered, with evident sexual satisfaction on both sides, two or three times a night in her chambermaid’s garret under the hotel’s eaves. But despite repeated applications, it did not bring on a miscarriage.

  Rather than abandon Giustiniana to her fate – and fearing perhaps that he would be blamed for her pregnancy – Casanova arranged through his well-connected friend Madame du Rumain both for the Venetian to take refuge during her confinement in a convent outside Paris, and for her proposed marriage to de la Pouplinière to be dropped. He pressed a gift of 200 louis on the pregnant woman, and, at great risk to himself, even helped her to abscond from the Hôtel de Bretagne. The whole Giustiniana affair, which could have led to Casanova’s downfall, shows him at his most manipulative, but also at his most generous. He was capable of remarkable friendship and selflessness when he truly liked a woman – though perhaps not great honesty or loyalty towards his old friend Memmo.

  The Marquise d’Urfé, in turn, would do anything for Casanova, but she would not lift a finger for her own flesh and blood. When Casanova was imprisoned overnight for debt in August 1759 she personally went to Paris’s Fors L’Evêque prison, bailed him out for the sum of 50,000 francs, and then used her influence to ensure that the case was quashed. Yet when her only surviving grandson Achille was effectively orphaned on his father’s death two years later, the marquise refused to accept responsibility for him, and he remained at the d’Urfé château of La Bâtie in the Loire valley with a lawyer acting as his guardian. By now wearing a large magnet around her neck on the Comte de Saint-Germain’s advice in the belief that it would draw lightning down on her and thus raise her up to the sun, the marquise thought only of her spiritual regeneration, Giuseppe and her guru Casanova. When he suddenly left Paris for Holland again at the end of September 1759 – his purpose was as much to escape Manon and his mounting debts as to do business for the French government – his departure must have been a blow for her; her relatives, on the other hand, who had by now become highly suspicious of Casanova’s power over the marquise, were relieved that he had gone.

  As he travelled restlessly through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France over the next few years, the marquise supplied Casanova with letters of introduction; used her influence at court to intrigue on his behalf; bought him expensive diamonds, watches, snuffboxes and lace when he briefly returned to Paris in the summer of 1761 (unfortunately for him they were stolen by his faithless servant Costa); provided him with an elegant apartment in the rue du Bac, which she furnished with ancient tapestries depicting the Great Work; and, most importantly, bank-rolled his travels to the tune of hundreds of thousands of francs. None of this made Casanova grateful. On the contrary, he described her in his memoirs as ‘the miserly Mme d’Urfé, who was obsessed with preaching economy to me’.20

  Comic, pathetic, criminal and cruel in equal measure, Casanova’s ‘divine operation’ to regenerate the Marquise d’Urfé as a man began in January 1762 when they spent three weeks closeted together in the rue du Bac making ‘the necessary preparations’. These began with ‘paying the appropriate devotions to each of the seven planetary geniuses on the days which were consecrated to them’:

  After these preparations, I would go to a place which would be made known to me by the inspiration of the geniuses, and take a virgin, the daughter of an adept, and impregnate her with a male child by a method which was only known to the brothers of the Rosy Cross. This boy would be born alive, but with only a sensitive soul.21 Mme d’Urfé must receive him into her arms at the instant he came into the world, and keep him with her in her bed for seven days. At the end of seven days, she would die, with her mouth glued to that of the child who, by this means, would receive her intelligent soul.

  After this permutation, it would fall to me to care for the infant with the mastery that was known to me, and as soon as the child had attained its third year, Mme d’Urfé would become conscious again, and then I would begin to initiate her into a perfect knowledge of the Great Doctrine.

  The operation must take place on the day of a full moon in April, May or June. Above all, Mme d’Urfé must make a will in due form leaving everything she had to the child, whose guardian I was to be until his thirteenth year.22

  In short, Casanova’s plan consisted almost entirely of quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo spiced up with a smattering of Aristotelian philosophy and large dollops of thinly-disguised self-interest on his part. His intention was not merely to pander to the marquise’s whims but to seize hold of her entire fortune, and during his travels he acquired a motley collection of accomplices to help him do so. They included Giuseppe Bono, a corrupt banker and silk merchant resident in Lyon; Giacomo Passano, a Genoese adventurer, actor and painter of erotic miniatures whom he met in Livorno; and Marianna Corticelli, a talented young Bolognese dancer he picked up in Florence.

  La Corticelli, Casanova’s petite friponne de Bologne or ‘little Bolognese rogue’ as his friend Count Trana called her, was scarcely more than a child when he first encountered her in November 1760. Yet she was already heading down the short road that led from dancing to prostitution. In the city to perform alongside Casanova’s old love, Teresa Lanti, at the Teatro della Pergola, Corticelli was accompanied by her brother and her mother, Laura Gigli, a woman so poor that she could not afford enough bedcovers for her children and was consequently willing to exploit them at the first opportunity. Pushy, cocksure and full of spirit, ‘the little madcap’, as Casanova described Corticelli, won his interest as much by her sense of humour as by the fact that ‘she was thirteen years old, and only looked ten’. But even though he had obviously not lost his fondness for very young girls, the young dancer did not inspire any great passion in Casanova; her main attraction was that she made him laugh. For her part, she seems to have tolerated their sexual relationship without enjoying it: in bed with him she was humorous, compliant and yet passionless. Casanova had his uses, the greatest of them being as a provider of food, wine, a brazier to heat the freezing cold inn room where she slept naked under thin sheets beside her brother, and hard cash, with which she immediately bought herself a warm fur cloak. Rich enough to make people bow to his every whim, Casanova also intervened on Corticelli’s behalf with the impresario at the Pergola, who had pledged to give her a pas-de-deux to dance in the second opera, but had not honoured the contract.

  Sought by the Florentine authorities because of his involvement in some shady business deal in the city, Casanova carried Corticelli off towards Bologna without telling her mother
; when Laura caught up with the fugitives she complained that his behaviour was beyond a joke. In Bologna, the family’s home and a city well known for its prostitutes, Corticelli acted as Casanova’s pimp, procuring him girls of her own age who provided him with such delicious pleasures that he still remembered them wistfully in his old age. He left Bologna seven days later, promising Corticelli that he would visit her in Prague, where she was engaged to dance for a year, and then take her to Paris with him.

  After a year in Prague, Corticelli received a letter from Casanova asking her and her mother to meet up with him in Metz. There, in February, he informed them of his plan to involve Corticelli in the Marquise d’Urfé’s regeneration operation by passing her off as a virgin countess descended from the Lascaris family, with whom the d’Urfés had intermarried during the sixteenth century. After a few weeks spent coaching his protégée in her new role, and with Laura reluctantly posing as a servant, Casanova conducted mother and daughter to Pontcarré, thirty kilometres east of Paris, where he had arranged to meet the Marquise d’Urfé at one of her many homes. The Château de Pontcarré was an ancient fortress with turreted corners, surrounded by a moat teeming with vicious gnats. Warned to expect their arrival, the marquise had the drawbridges lowered and stood under the gateway surrounded by her household ‘like an army general ready to surrender the place to us with all the honours of war’.23 Surrender was unnecessary – Casanova had already conquered her. She greeted her long-lost ‘relative’ the Countess of Lascaris with effusive tenderness, ran through their genealogy to explain just how they were related, and had a bed made up for her in her own room. Corticelli behaved as if to the manner born, chattering away graciously in French to her hostess and captivating Giuseppe Pompeati, now known as the Count of Aranda, whom the marquise had brought to Pontcarré with her. Since it was immediately apparent that Corticelli had fallen for the youth, Casanova decided to get rid of him.