Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  By 1750, the five Augspurgher women – Catherine, two of her sisters, her daughter Rose, and young Marianne – were living together in rooms in Paris’s rue et porte Saint-Honoré. Marianne was now four years old, her grandmother and great-aunts were in their forties or early fifties, and Rose was estimated to be somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty years old, ‘tall, good-looking, brunette, with beautiful slanting eyes, and with the exception of rouge and the white paint which she slathers on the pimples and growths on her face, she would be a tasty enough morsel.’ Their household caused nothing but trouble to the authorities: out of vengeance or professional jealousy they shopped other women to the police for living off immoral earnings; they pretended to be duchesses in order to trick aristocrats out of their money; and they falsely denounced their creditors for being traitors to Louis XV. All in all, the Augspurghers were a bunch of ‘dangerous females’ who spun ‘an abominable web of calumnies and falsehoods’.5 Despite this Rose had a string of devoted admirers, several as crooked as her family, including a Swiss rascal named De Thormann, who offered to take the Augspurghers around the courts of Europe, conning wealthy men out of their fortunes, and Comte Antoine-Louis-Alphonse-Marie de Rostaing, the black sheep of a noble family from the Vendôme.

  Rostaing was a professional gambler and a crook. At the same time as he was seeing Rose he was also involved with Marguerite Brunet, the female pimp who acted as Casanova’s procuress in Paris. Forced to flee France in the late 1750s because of his debts, Rostaing persuaded Rose to accompany him to England. Like a close-knit troupe of gypsies, her grandmother and aunts decamped with her to London where, using the name Descharpillon, they settled in Denmark Street in the crowded parish of St Giles, on the fringes of fashionable Soho. Here Rose underwent a mercury cure for a terrible case of syphilis she had caught from Rostaing. Her health was permanently ruined by it. From now on, the family she had once supported would increasingly have to support her.

  Her daughter Marianne had already begun to blossom into the woman whom Casanova would describe as ‘a beauty in whom it was difficult to find a single fault’.6 The child who had caught his eye in Paris’s Palais Marchand had grown tall and slender, with delicate bone-structure, unusually elongated fingers and tiny feet. Her bright blue eyes appeared bluer because of her great pallor, which was set off by glossy light auburn hair. This beauty proved Marianne’s curse, for now that Rose was too ill to work, the ageing Augspurghers looked to their youngest member to keep them. Like her mother before her, Marianne was to have no choice in the matter. Whether she liked it or not (and at times she clearly found it highly distasteful), she was forced to use her charms to reel in dupes for Catherine’s shady business schemes and Rostaing’s crooked games of cards. From her mid-teens onwards, Marianne’s raison d’être was to be milked by her family as if she were a cash-cow. Unpleasant as this burden was, her affection for them ensured that she never shirked it. As her future lover, the MP and popular hero John Wilkes, would later write of Marianne ‘Her whole life has been sacrificed to others.’

  ‘Not yet on the wide streets’7 when George III came to the throne in 1760, fourteen-year-old, fresh-faced Marianne was nevertheless being touted around the vast metropolis by her Aunt Julie in the hope of attracting a wealthy, generous benefactor. There were plenty to be had. London, with its population of three-quarters of a million people, was a magnet which drew in everyone from wealthy aristocrats to foreign artists, and from diplomats to poor country girls trying to better themselves. Since there was no professional police-force to speak of, the streets were thronged with petty criminals. From the labyrinthine old City in the east to the new, spacious residential districts of Marylebone, Soho and Westminster, pickpockets and cut-throats crowded the pavements, relieving the nobility of their diamond watches and lace handkerchiefs and the poor of their loaves of bread and parcels of laundry. Violent muggings were commonplace, even during the daytime, and anyone who walked around in court dress was liable to be attacked by the rebellious mob.

  Sex was readily available on the streets. Prostitutes, whores and bawds were everywhere – it was estimated that as many as 30,000 them worked in the Marylebone district alone. They sold themselves in the backrooms of taverns, solicited on almost every corner, and had their names and addresses listed in well-circulated publications such as Harris’s List ofCovent Garden Ladies, a pamphlet freely available under the porticos of Covent Garden market – another favoured haunt for prostitutes. Designed primarily for out-of-towners, Harris’s List gave the women’s names and addresses along with their histories, their natures, titillating sexual details and even their faults. Miss Hamon of York Street had entered the business after having been ‘debauched by a Scotch gentleman in the army’. Miss L-of Castle Street, though uneducated, was a ‘lovely fountain of Transport… Her yielding limbs though beautiful when together are still more ravishing when separated.’ The predominant passion of Miss R-ad of Queen Anne Street ‘seems for horses, hounds and the delights of the field. No one is more emulous than our heroine to be in at the death.’ Miss W-ll-ms of Upper Newman Street had ‘a peculiar art in raising them that fall and bringing the dead to life. Two pounds Two shillings is the price of admission to enter her un-furnished parlour, which we are convinced is at a moment’s notice ready for the reception of any gentleman.’ Miss Godf-y, a lively twenty-two-year-old ‘very fond of dancing’, who resided in the same street, was ‘a kind of boatswain in her way and when she speaks every word is uttered in a thundering and vociferous tone … extraordinary good companion for an officer in the army as she might save him the trouble of giving word of command.’8

  The Augspurghers did not intend Marianne to become a common prostitute but instead a high-class courtesan who could command a good price for her favours. Some of the best places to attract a rich man were London’s pleasure gardens – Chelsea’s Ranelagh House, the Marylebone Gardens and the New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall – which were the only venues in the vast metropolis where Londoners socialised regardless of wealth and rank. Relatively cheap to get into – entrance fees ranged from a shilling to half a crown – the gardens were one of the city’s main leisure attractions. With their heated dancing pavilions, lantern-lit walls, mock classical ruins and tree-bordered paths they formed the perfect backdrop for young beauties to make an impression on gentlemen, and provided endless opportunities for making assignations – and even, in the dark shadows behind the trees and shrubs, for consummating them.

  It was at Vauxhall Gardens in the summer of 1762 that Marianne de Charpillon was spotted by Francesco Lorenzo Morosini, the new Venetian ambassador to the Court of St James, and former ambassador to France. In her mid-teens, perfectly-formed, stunningly beautiful and no doubt with the highly-prized commodity of her virginity still intact, Mademoiselle de Charpillon appeared to be just what Morosini was looking for to amuse him during his one-year sojourn in London. Using the adventurer Ange Goudar as his intermediary, he paid a formal visit to Marianne’s home, then summoned Goudar to his official residence in Soho Square and set out his conditions in a written document – a common practice at the time, not dissimilar to modern-day prenuptial contracts. In it, Morosini proposed renting a small furnished house where Marianne was to live and receive no one but himself, in return for which he would pay her fifty guineas a month. To this agreement, which had to be signed by Marianne’s mother, Goudar added his own coda: when the ambassador left England at the end of his posting, he himself was to enjoy Marianne’s charms for one night. (Months after Morosini left England, Goudar complained that Marianne had laughed in his face when he demanded his recompense, and that he had yet to enjoy the promised night in her arms. Goudar threatened to have Rose arrested for breaking the terms of their agreement.)

  Within days an appropriate house was rented, and Marianne was moved into it and handed over to the Venetian, a man more than thirty years her senior. The liaison could not have been a great success, for when he left London the following spring Mor
osini did not even say goodbye to her properly – it appears that she avoided him. On his way back to Venice via Lyon, he happened to cross paths with Casanova, who was at the time en route to London, and he entrusted him with a rather ambiguous note addressed to Marianne, which simply said that ‘The Procurator Morosini is annoyed to have left without having been able to take his last leave of Mile Charpillon.’9 Casanova had no idea that the ambassador’s Mile Charpillon was the same Mile de Boulainvilliers for whom he had impulsively purchased a pair of shoe buckles in the Palais Marchand four years earlier. When he asked Morosini where in London this Mile Charpillon resided, the man replied that he had no idea, indicating a remarkable degree of indifference to her. It was left to Casanova to find her or not – it was an unimportant commission, Morosini insisted.

  Unaware of the fate that awaited him in Marianne de Charpillon’s long, dimpled hands, and with his pockets still overflowing with the Marquise d’Urfé’s money, Casanova arrived in London on the afternoon of 13 June 1763 accompanied by his French servant, Clairmont, and Giuseppe Pompeati. After living for four years with the marquise, Giuseppe was to be delivered back to his real mother, Teresa Imer, who needed him to help her run the successful entertainment business she had recently established in Carlisle House, Soho Square. Proudly rejecting the modest accommodation she had rented for him in Soho, Casanova installed himself in a furnished house in Pall Mall, near the court of St James. After only a few weeks of enjoying the capital’s many attractions he began to feel bored: what he lacked was a relationship to give meaning to his life. The thousands of readily available London prostitutes would not do. Casanova wanted something more than a brief sexual encounter – a woman he could relate to body and soul. Unsure how to meet one, he conceived the novel idea of advertising for a woman by offering cheap accommodation in return for some female companionship. ‘A small Family or a single Gentleman or Lady, with or without a Servant, may be immediately accommodated with a genteel and elegantly furnished first floor, with all conveniences,’ read his advertisement for a tenant in the Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser of 5 July 1763, ‘to which belong some peculiar Advantages; it is agreeably situated in Pall Mall, with boarding if required; it may be entered on immediately, and will be let on very reasonable Terms, as it is no common Lodging House, and more for the sake of Company than Profit. Please to enquire at Mrs Redaw’s, Milliner, exactly opposite Mr Deard’s Toy Shop in Pall Mall, near the Hay Market, St James’s.’10

  The notice caused a minor furore among the fashionable ton and brought Casanova to the attention of two extraordinary women. One was Marianne de Charpillon, who, as she later told him, burst out laughing when she read it. The other was a refined Portuguese beauty in her early twenties, to whom Casanova gave the name Pauline in his memoirs.

  Refined, chaste, modest and well-educated, Pauline was the daughter of an illustrious Portuguese aristocrat, the Marquis X … mo, as Casanova dubbed him (the abbreviation probably stood for Xostimo, a surname pronounced and later written as Cristostomo). On the run from an unwanted arranged marriage, she had fled Lisbon and eloped to England with the man she wished to marry, a low-ranking diplomat named Count Al… . Their elopement was discovered almost as soon as their frigate set sail for England, and a fast craft was dispatched to intercept them. By the time the couple disembarked at Plymouth, each disguised as the other, Portuguese officials were already waiting on the dock to take Pauline back home. Since she had swapped identities and clothes with her fiancé, the officials mistook them for each other, and, believing that the count was Pauline, forced him on to a boat back to Lisbon, taking Pauline’s trunk of dresses with them. Left alone in England with nothing but the male breeches and shirt she was wearing, Pauline bought herself a few plain but respectable dresses and tried to survive on a pittance until such time as the count rejoined her in London or sent word for her to return to Portugal. Since she could scarcely afford to rent lodgings or eat, the offer of an ‘elegantly furnished first floor’ in smart Pall Mall to be let ‘on very reasonable terms … more for the sake of Company than Profit’ was too good an opportunity to pass by. Though she must have been aware that she risked being molested by her landlord, Pauline saw no alternative but to move in.

  Virginal Pauline was just the kind of challenge that Casanova relished. Seducing her was not enough for him: the compliance of a woman who was financially dependent on him would have given him as little satisfaction as seducing a woman who was drunk. After knowing her for only one day, he resolved to do everything within his power to win her away from her absent fiancé. The effort that this would involve only increased Casanova’s desire, and he did not for a moment doubt his ability to succeed. ‘I knew,’ he wrote, ‘that there was not a woman in the world who could resist the assiduous care and constant attentions of a man who wished to make her fall in love with him.’11

  Pauline had staked her reputation on marrying Count A1… . Although she had shared a cabin with him for two weeks on the voyage to England, they had behaved with such strict propriety that they had never even glimpsed each other naked, let alone made love. Yet soon after she moved into Pall Mall, she allowed Casanova, a virtual stranger, to collect, as he described it, the ‘blood-stained sacrifice’12 of her carefully preserved virginity. By the following morning, when he made his third assault on her – the word is his own – he claimed that Pauline had grown as ardent as he was, and that she was longing for more pleasure. Casanova had accomplished what he had set out to do. It was moments like this that he lived for: a perfect physical union such as he had experienced with Henriette, an emotional experience which filled the unbearable void inside himself. The exquisite pain of knowing that his idyll was finite not only added to his pleasure, it was ‘the true foundation’ of it.13

  By the time Pauline was summoned back to Portugal three weeks later, the man who had once meant everything to her and whom she was now to marry had been eclipsed in her heart by Casanova, his formidable, determined, more sexually experienced competitor. Assiduous to the end, Casanova accompanied Pauline across the Channel, parting from her at Calais on 11 August and sending her on to Portugal under the protection of his trustworthy valet Clairmont. It was Clairmont who became the real victim of the affair: it is believed that he was shipwrecked on his return journey on the Hanover, an English vessel that sank on 2 December 1763 en route from Lisbon to England.

  ‘I will never love another woman,’ Casanova told his English friend Henry Herbert, Lord Pembroke, three days after parting from Pauline at Calais. The libertine Pembroke was rightly dismissive: Casanova would find another woman within a week, he predicted. In fact it took Casanova three weeks to find Marianne de Charpillon. This time, love would not be a pleasant experience for him. He was due to get a taste of his own medicine. He had deliberately destroyed Pauline’s feelings for the man she had loved. Now it was his turn to have a great love ousted from his consciousness by a far less worthy rival.

  As soon as her lover the Venetian ambassador had left England, Marianne de Charpillon was sent out to reel in another wealthy punter. The Augspurghers were more in need of money than ever, for their London household had become a sizeable one to support. Since 1762 Ange Goudar, the man who had introduced them to Morosini, had become a regular visitor to Denmark Street, where he had teamed up with Rose’s lover Rostaing, and a Frenchman named Coumon whose job it was to bring in dupes he met at London’s coffee shops so that they could be cheated out of their money at the Augspurghers’ card table. The profits of these card games, and Marianne’s conquests, were divided up between the gang of eight.

  By now, Marianne had learned how to retain some control over her life by promising the men she attracted far more than she actually delivered. She needed them, but she did not want them, and consequently she enjoyed teasing and even punishing, them for wanting her. Her admirers during 1763 included Frederick Calvert, Richard, Earl of Grosvenor, and the Portuguese envoy Senhor de Saa, but it is unlikely that any of them had more lu
ck with her than Lord Pembroke himself who, one night at Ranelagh, paid Marianne twenty guineas in advance to go for a stroll with him in a shady walkway – a euphemism for having sexual intercourse or at least indulging in heavy petting. As soon as they left the main path, however, Marianne dropped Pembroke’s arm and disappeared into the bushes before he had a chance to take the slightest liberty with her.

  One night in September 1763, Marianne and her Aunt Julie turned up at the home of a Flemish officer named Malignan, where Casanova happened to be spending the evening. Marianne sized up the new addition to the London scene immediately. With his fashionable Parisian clothes, his showy jewellery, his enamelled snuffbox and diamond watch, the Italian was clearly a man of means and, it followed, a prospective source of income for her. Yet oddly, given his effect on women in the past, she did not find him in the least attractive. Twenty years her senior, Casanova, at thirty-seven, was beginning to show his age, and though he did not yet realise it he soon would.

  When Marianne recognised the Chevalier de Seingalt (Casanova had adopted the French title in 1759 and used it in England), as the man who had given her a pair of buckles in Paris’s Palais Marchand four years earlier, she took advantage of this stroke of luck to recall the story. Raising the hem of her dress, a seductive gesture in itself, she showed him that not only did she remember the occasion, she was still wearing the very same buckles on her shoes. Going even further, she reminded him that ‘encouraged by my aunt, you did me the honour of kissing me’. The feeling that their meeting was fated was compounded when Marianne told Casanova her name, and like a magician, he produced from his portfolio the letter addressed to her from Morosini. By passing on the note from her ex-lover, Casanova made Marianne aware that he knew her position. Without a trace of embarrassment, she flirtatiously chided him for not having sought her out and delivered it sooner, and she invited him to dine with her family the following day. When he refused because Lord Pembroke was due to dine with him in Pall Mall, Marianne invited herself and her aunt along, indicating that she was not only available but actively pursuing a relationship with him. She teased Casanova about his infamous newspaper notice advertising for a lodger, and said she had felt like applying for the position herself, because she ‘wanted to punish the audacious author of such a notice ... by making you fall in love with me, and afterwards making you suffer the torments of Hell by the way I treated you. Ah! How I should have laughed!’14