Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  As an opening gambit this was daring stuff, guaranteed to put off the faint-hearted. But Marianne had pitched her tone perfectly. Although he responded in a similar fashion, declaring that hers was ‘the project of a monster’15 and that he would stay on his guard, Casanova was fascinated by her. Coming from the smiling lips of a sixteen-year-old whose sweet, seemingly transparent expression seemed to indicate delicacy of feeling as well as nobility of birth, her wicked words seemed little more than a tempting challenge, a teasing slap across the wrist with a velvet glove. Casanova would have done better to have taken Marianne more seriously. When she quipped that the only way for a man to resist her was to not see her at all, she spoke nothing less than the truth.

  The following day Lord Pembroke, who had already had his fingers burned by Marianne, warned Casanova that she was ‘a little strumpet who will do everything she can to entrap you’. His words fell on deaf ears. Marianne’s brazen tone, combined with her innocent beauty, had already captivated Casanova who was confident that he would soon enjoy her charms and quickly tire of them. ‘How could I imagine that she would make things difficult for me?’ he wrote with hindsight. ‘Without even flattering myself that I could please her, I knew that I had money, that I wasn’t a miser, and that she would not resist.’16 When he was invited to Denmark Street a few days later to meet her family, he became even more certain of making an early conquest. For, ill and haggard though Rose Augspurgher was – the mercury cure she had taken for venereal disease had ruined her looks – Casanova remembered her from a previous encounter. He had once sold her some jewellery through a Swiss goldsmith in Paris. In return, she had given him two bills of exchange for six thousand francs which had never been honoured, and consequently she still owed him the money. Taking this and everything else into account, Casanova assumed that it was a foregone conclusion that Rose’s daughter would soon become his mistress.

  A relationship with Marianne was always very much a family affair. Seeking safety in numbers on Casanova’s first visit to her home, she surrounded herself with her mother, her aunts and her grandmother. Later that night the party was joined by Ange Goudar, Rostaing and Coumon, and against his better judgement Casanova found himself roped in to several rubbers of whist with them. Even though he lost a small fortune at the card table, he still believed that he had his eyes wide open and was risking nothing as long as he concentrated his thoughts on Marianne. He was underestimating the courtesan, who was as determined as he was to wield the power in their relationship. In her opinion, the Italian was behaving like a classic dupe, and she and her aunts intended to play him for all he was worth.

  A protracted game of pursuit and evasion began. But who was pursuing whom? Without letting Casanova have a say in the matter, Marianne invited herself and the entire company to dine at his house in a few days’ time. On the appointed day she turned up at Pall Mall at nine o’clock in the morning with her aunt, and insisted on speaking to Casanova privately. Coming straight to the point, she admitted that her family’s finances were in chaos, and invited him to invest the sum of a hundred guineas in her aunt’s ‘balm of life’ medicine; in return, he would receive a half-share of any profits, and the capital sum would be refunded to him in six months’ time. One hundred guineas was a substantial amount – the equivalent in modern terms is about £10,000. Taken aback, Casanova said he would think about it, and concluding that this was the sum needed to buy Marianne, he sat down beside her on the sofa and moved in to kiss her in a lighthearted manner. To his astonishment, she turned her head away. Eventually she stood up, smiled, and rejoined her aunt in the next room, leaving Casanova with a clear message: he would get nowhere with her without first showing her the colour of his money.

  When the party came to dine with him that evening, Casanova took Marianne aside and promised to give the one hundred guineas to her aunt at the end of the evening. But when he then tried to kiss her she evaded him again. He would get nothing from her with money or by force, she scolded him; in fact she would only give him what he wanted when he behaved as gently as a lamb when they were alone together. Casanova was angry at being teased like a naughty child, and angrier still when Marianne then behaved towards him in front of the other guests with the kind of freedom that seemed to indicate that they were already lovers.

  After this, Casanova decided to avoid Marianne in future. She did not pursue him. But when three weeks passed and he failed to appear in Denmark Street, Aunt Julie was dispatched to Pall Mall to tell him that Marianne loved him, but that she feared that his love for her was nothing but a caprice. Her niece, she said, ‘only gives herself when she is sure of being loved’. She was at that very moment lying at home in bed with a cold and, Julie assured him, if Casanova came to see her he would not leave unsatisfied. Certain that he was being offered the opportunity to have sex with Marianne, Casanova arrived at Denmark Street fifteen minutes later only to be told that she could not see him because she was upstairs naked in her bath. When he lost his temper, Julie agreed to take him up to her room, adding that if her niece was furious with her she could criticise her all she liked after the event.

  Though Casanova presumed that the two women had plotted the scene together, Marianne’s behaviour showed that she was genuinely shocked when he suddenly appeared at her bedroom doorway. Cowering down in the bathtub, she warned him to get out, and ignored his command for her to spread her limbs so that he could see more of her. Though he promised not to touch her, Casanova then began to masturbate in front of her. Marianne might not have been a virgin, but at sixteen she was scarcely a woman of the world. Horrified by this crude behaviour, she turned her back on him as best she could. When he had satisfied himself – the thing was quickly over – Casanova stormed out of the house, throwing a one-hundred-pound banknote at Julie as he left.

  Angry contempt and vengeful fury were aspects of Casanova’s personality that the women he truly loved rarely saw. Slightly embarrassed, perhaps, by what he had stooped to, he avoided Marianne at the Vauxhall Gardens later that week. To his astonishment, she came up to him and flirted as lightheartedly as if the ugly scene in her bedroom had never taken place. Casanova, who had been drinking quite heavily, was captivated by her again and suggested that they take a stroll in one of the darker walkways. Marianne cleverly side-stepped the issue: she wished to be fully his, she said with seeming sincerity, but in the daylight and only after he had called on her every day like a true friend of the family.

  Marianne was establishing a pattern which would continue throughout their relationship: she ran away when Casanova pursued her, and ran after him whenever he rejected her. Ordered by her family to cultivate Casanova for his money, she preserved her dignity by becoming a tease of the first order, a past-mistress in the seductive arts of flirtation and titillation. With hindsight, Casanova would see how foolishly he behaved in allowing himself to be manipulated by her, but at the time he was too much in her thrall to help himself. He could think no further than that he wanted the tricky, elusive sixteen-year-old and that he was determined not only to have her but to conquer her heart just as he had conquered Pauline’s. Used to having women of all classes fall at his feet, he simply could not tolerate the fact that a mere courtesan whose family owed him a great deal of money would consistently reject him. So far he had spent more than one hundred guineas on Marianne and had not received so much as a single kiss in return. Instead of turning him off her, the challenge only added to his determination to succeed with her. He would not be humiliated. Fooled by her constant promises that she would be his entirely if only he would behave in the right way towards her, he tried time and again to please her. But for once the great lover seemed to have lost his touch. Nothing he did was right – or rather, no matter what he did, Marianne somehow managed to wrong-foot him.

  With Ange Goudar acting as intermediary, Casanova offered Rose another one hundred guineas for a single night with her daughter; but he refused to pay the money in advance. Marianne was indignant. Appearing at
his lodgings in tears early the next morning in tears, she berated Casanova for trying to buy her from her mother; it was an insupportable insult. If he wanted her he should not bargain for her, but rather woo her. He was handling the intrigue atrociously, treating her at first like a prostitute ‘and yesterday as if I was an animal without a will of my own, a base slave of my mother’s’. The phrase had the ring of bitter truth. If Casanova had dealt directly with her, she said, Marianne would have made him happy without the one hundred guineas. Her only condition would have been ‘that you would have paid court to me for just two weeks, coming to my home without ever asking the least compliance from me, we should have laughed, you would have become part of the family, we should have attended promenades and plays together, and at last, having made me madly in love with you, you would have had me in your arms as you would have deserved to have me, not out of compliance, but out of love.’ Casanova should try conquering her heart ‘like a reasonable lover, and not like a brute’.17

  As Marianne intended, her reprimands chastised and enslaved Casanova. During the next fortnight he visited Denmark Street every day without so much as trying to kiss her; he arranged outings to the theatre and day trips to the countryside; and he gave her expensive presents, for which she thanked him by letters written in charmingly misspelled French. She did not, she said in one of them, understand why he believed it was her fault that he was filled with bile towards her when she was ‘as innocent as a new-born babe’ and when she wished only to put him ‘in such a sweet and passionate state that your blood will turn into a real clarified syrup, that would surely happen if you follow my advice.’18 Tantalising promises like these ensured that Casanova remained well and truly hooked despite his lack of progress with her. Later, he estimated that this period of their courtship alone cost him a hefty four hundred guineas.

  His eventual reward was a night spent with Marianne on a mattress on the floor of the family’s front parlour, a distinctly unromantic setting. It was an appalling experience for both of them. First Casanova undressed and got into bed. Then Marianne took off everything but her linen shift and, to his chagrin, blew out the candles before slipping into bed beside him. As soon as she lay down, he tried to clasp her in his arms, only to find her as rigid as a corpse. ‘Curled up in her long shift, her arms crossed and her head buried in her breast, she lets me say whatever I want, and never answers me at all. When I run out of words, I make up my mind to act, she remains motionless in the same position, and she defies me to do it. I take this game to be a joke, but in the end I am convinced that it is not. I realise that I’ve been tricked, taken for a fool, the most despicable of men, just as the girl is the most abominable of trollops.’19 It would have been far easier for Marianne to have let Casanova make love to her, but she continued to resist him. After a futile struggle to unfurl her rigid body, his anger turned into a violent rage. Grabbing hold of her as if she were an inanimate bundle, Casanova tore open the back of her shift from top to bottom and attempted to rape her. Marianne suffered his prolonged attack in silence, never calling out for help and only uncurling once, when she suspected, rightly, that he was trying to penetrate her anally. At the end of three terrible hours, Casanova’s hands were around Marianne’s throat. Realising that he was about to kill her, he suddenly let go of her, dressed and slammed out of the house, leaving her feverish, badly bruised and covered in scratches.

  Despite his violent attack on their youngest member, the Denmark Street coterie still had no intention of letting Casanova slip away. The following morning, Rose threatened to bring legal proceedings against him. The day after that she wrote again, this time saying that Marianne had admitted that she might have been at fault in the matter too. Next, Marianne was made to write to Casanova, promising to explain her actions if he would receive her. Leaving nothing to chance, the meddling Goudar was dispatched to Pall Mall to inform Casanova that Marianne’s resistance had been Rose’s idea, and to show him a rapist’s armchair, a device which automatically clasped the arms and legs of any woman who sat down in it, forcing their lower back forward and their legs apart. The chair, Goudar said, could be Casanova’s for the sum of one hundred guineas; and if he could get Marianne to sit in it, his business would be accomplished in seconds. Casanova balked at the idea. He was aware that the crime of rape carried the death penalty in England, although prosecutions were rare; and he would have derived no satisfaction from obtaining a woman in this way.

  Eventually Marianne turned up at his lodgings and, acting the contrite tease to perfection, put out her face for Casanova to kiss (he refused), then lifted her dress to show him where her body was still scarred by the livid bruises and scratches he had inflicted on her. The erotic effect of small glimpses of bruised, naked flesh was too much for Casanova: although he had made up his mind to have nothing more to do with Marianne, he lacked the strength of mind to turn her away. Determined to gain control of the situation, the following day he went to see Rose and offered to establish her daughter in a house of her own on the same terms on which she had lived with the Procurator Morosini, that is for fifty guineas a month. Rose agreed, with the proviso that he pay her an extra one hundred guineas the instant Marianne left Denmark Street.

  Now that she was finally to be his, Casanova did not waste another moment. Through Goudar he quickly rented a house at Chelsea, produced a written contract which was signed by both women and, giving Marianne no time to prepare herself, ordered her to throw her possessions into a trunk and leave Denmark Street with him immediately. As their carriage rumbled off down Soho’s narrow streets, into spacious Mayfair and out into what was still countryside on the edge of Hyde Park, the victorious Casanova anticipated the pleasures he imagined lay ahead. What was Marianne feeling? She was being taken away from her beloved family by a man for whom she felt absolutely no desire. A man whose behaviour in the past had revolted her. A man who had recently beaten her black and blue. Although his attack on her had not been entirely unprovoked, she feared Casanova’s temper and what he might do to her. Once again she was in a position where she must sacrifice herself on her family’s behalf.

  When they arrived in Chelsea, Marianne put on a brave face, explored the house that Casanova had rented for her and declared herself delighted with it. They took a walk, chatted in a light-hearted manner and dined together in high spirits. But the moment they went to bed, her resolve to do what she was being paid to do faltered. Though she allowed Casanova to kiss and embrace her, she simply could not bring herself to let him make love to her. Using the excuse that her period had started, she cleverly overcame his objections and put him to sleep ‘with caresses’. The following morning she awoke to find him in the process of unlacing her corset to check if she was indeed menstruating. She was not. Infuriated, Casanova tried to rape her for a second time, but Marianne successfully fought him off. As she scrambled out from under the covers and began to throw on her clothes, her ‘impertinent mockery’, as he described it, provoked him to hit her across the face and kick her off the bed. With blood streaming from her nose, Marianne screamed and stamped her feet until the caretaker came rushing upstairs. Advised that he would be risking arrest if he forced her to remain in the house, Casanova lay in bed fuming while Marianne washed her bloodied face and finished dressing. The caretaker called a sedan chair, Marianne left, and a stupefied, bewildered Casanova returned to Pall Mall and shut himself up in his rooms.

  Through Goudar, Rose sent a message to her daughter’s attacker that, if he did not immediately return her trunk of clothes to Soho and relinquish all claims on the Augspurgher family, Marianne would accuse him of rape or perhaps even pederasty, a crime which also carried the death penalty. Rather than face ruin, Casanova capitulated, specifying only one condition: that Marianne receive her trunk from him in person. As he later reflected, he was acting like ‘the greatest of fools’ by insisting on seeing her. The mere sight of her swollen, bandaged face and tearful blue eyes made him so repentant that he put aside his grievances and
once again became a slavish visitor to Denmark Street, where he sat in contrite silence watching his injured victim weep over her needlework.

  Casanova had never before encountered such resistance in a woman. The challenge to win her heart was becoming an obsession. During the following weeks he sent her more expensive presents, including an elaborate pier glass and a Dresden tea service for twelve. When he described himself in a note to her as ‘the most cowardly of all men’20 Marianne appeared to forgive him, and invited him to sup with her in her bedroom, where, she said, she would show him unmistakable tokens of her gratitude.

  Up in her bedroom that night, before they undressed, Casanova gave Marianne the two unpaid bills of exchange for six thousand francs which he had received from Rose years back in Paris; as soon as Marianne became his mistress, he told her, he would endorse them to her order. Marianne must have been amazed by his foolishness in handing them over before their affair was consummated. As if they were what she had wanted from him all along, she locked them safely in her jewellery case, then immediately burst into tears and refused to have sex with him. If she had ever had any intention of satisfying Casanova, the time had long since passed.