Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  ‘I shall look at them with pleasure; but I beg you to tell me in which way you believe you have offended me, for you look guilty.’

  ‘I! I’ve certainly not behaved wrongly towards you!’

  ‘You speak to me without looking at me. Are you ashamed to have such beautiful eyes? And now, you’re blushing. So what crime have you committed?’

  ‘You’re embarrassing her,’ her mother says to me. ‘Answer him that you’ve committed no crime, but that it’s out of respect and modesty that you don’t stare at the people to whom you are talking.’

  She says nothing.

  After a short silence the company rose, and the little one, after dropping a curtsey, went to fetch her drawings and came to me.

  ‘Mademoiselle, I don’t want to look at anything until you look at me.’

  ‘Go on,’ says her mother, look at Monsieur.’

  ‘Oh, now I recognise you,’ I say to her. ‘And you, do you remember having seen me before?’

  ‘Even though it was six years ago, I recognised you the moment you came in.’

  ‘How could you have recognised me if you did not look at me? If you only knew, my angel, what unforgivable rudeness it is not to look at the person to whom you are talking! Who could have taught you such a bad lesson?’

  The little one then looked at her mother, who went over to the window. When I saw that I had avenged myself enough, and that the English people had understood everything, I began to examine her drawings, congratulating her on her talent, and complimenting her mother for having procured for her such a good education.6

  In Sophia’s face Casanova ‘saw a beautiful soul, and I secretly pitied her for having to live under the domination of her mother, who was a fool’.7 His caring attitude belied his own secret intentions towards his daughter, which were scarcely honourable: as he admitted in his memoirs, one of his main motives in coming to London was ‘to get my daughter out of her mother’s hands’.8 In part this was because Casanova believed that Teresa was bringing Sophia up badly; and in part it was for dubious and extremely selfish reasons. Casanova wanted his daughter for himself.

  The idea of adult men having sex with young children, so shocking to us in the present day, was so common, particularly between the daughters of the poor and wealthy men, as to be almost unremarkable during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the romantic idea of childhood innocence existed, the concept of childhood as being a state different from adulthood was scarcely recognised at the time. In France, although the average age of marriage grew higher during the eighteenth century (settling at about twenty-eight years for men and twenty-six years for women) there were nevertheless no provisions in law regulating having sex with children until the 1830s. In Britain the age of consent – that is, the age at which a child could legally consent to having sex – was just ten years old throughout the eighteenth century; in 1763 Sophia was only nine.

  By his own admission Casanova had a strong predilection for pubescent and even pre-pubescent girls. When he was nineteen he had slept with Teresa/Bellino’s adopted sisters, Marina and Cecilia, virgins aged eleven and thirteen respectively. Four years later he had been forced to leave Venice after beating and attempting to deflower a young virgin on the island of Giudecca. In 1747, when he was twenty-two, he had stealthily taken advantage of fourteen-year-old Genoveffa, the daughter of a peasant in the city of Cesena. Caterina Capretta, also aged fourteen, had been just half Casanova’s age when he seduced her in 1753. The following year Casanova had seduced fifteen-year-old Tonina, the daughter of his Murano landlady, as well as Tonina’s pre-pubescent sister Barberina, whom he described as ‘not yet a grown girl; the roses of her burgeoning breasts had not yet budded’.9 More young girls had followed: thirteen-year-old Sara, whom thirty-five-year-old Casanova deflowered in Berne in 1760; and Marianne Corticelli who ‘was thirteen years of age, and looked only ten’ when he slept with her that same year.

  In the future there would be more young girls. After leaving London in the spring of 1764, Casanova would persuade an anonymous French eleven-year-old to perform fellatio on him through the iron grating separating them in the visiting-room of a French convent. In Moscow he would deflower Zaire, a twelve-year-old virgin Russian serf whom he purchased as a personal slave from her parents for a hundred roubles; although she cowered in a corner ‘like a rabbit scared that the dogs it saw would devour it’10 when he negotiated to buy her, the thirty-nine-year-old adventurer soon convinced himself that she was in love with him.

  Though not illegal, there was nevertheless a transgressive element to his relationships with young girls, as Casanova became increasingly aware as he grew older. In 1771, in the town of Frascati where he had once been consumed by his passion for Donna Lucrezia, an erstwhile lover of his named Mariuccia lifted the covers on a bed where Giacomina, her own nine-year-old daughter by Casanova, and Guglielmina, the thirteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of his brother Giovanni, were sleeping. Each little girl had a hand curved over ‘the signs of their puberty which were beginning to show. The middle finger, even more curved, was held motionless over the little piece of small, rounded, almost imperceptible flesh.’11 With trembling hands, Casanova quickly replaced the covers, horrified by the betrayal of spying on the girls at such an intimate moment. It was, he later wrote, ‘the only moment in my life when I knew for certain the real calibre of my soul, and I was satisfied by it.’ Nevertheless, he was so sexually aroused by the sight of them that he immediately had sex with Mariuccia and found himself unable to get the two children out of his mind. After a few days of flirtation and exchanges of kisses, he seduced his niece and, in the same bed and at the same time, all but deflowered his nine-year-old daughter. He was forty-six years old at the time.

  When he had first encountered Sophia, his daughter by Teresa Imer, in the Dutch Republic, Casanova had showered her with kisses, ‘charmed to be the man to whom this little creature owed her existence’. He noted rather pruriently that the four-year-old had only been wearing the lightest of shifts at the time. Three and a half years later in London, he began to desire his small daughter with a complete disregard for the taboo of incest – a taboo which, though condemned by the Church, was not made a criminal offence in England until as late as 1908. Yet during his first two months in London, Casanova rarely saw Sophia. Teresa stood between them, and she was in such deep financial trouble that she seldom left Carlisle House. The mansion had become her prison, and the threat of arrest and bankruptcy stalked her every day, especially during the summer season when the aristocracy left London and her business was forced to close, cutting off her only source of income. That July, Teresa was forced to pawn her crockery and cutlery in order to stave off her creditors, and from Mondays through to Saturdays she did not dare to leave the sanctuary of her home in case she was arrested.

  One weekday in mid-August, however, a canny bailiff slipped through Carlisle House’s open front door, which he was legally entitled to do. Once inside the house, he arrested Teresa for having failed to redeem one particular bill of exchange for 200 guineas. As he carted her off to his own house to await either release on bail or transfer to one of the city’s notorious debtors’ prisons, Teresa wrote in desperation to Casanova, begging him to ‘Prevent my ruin and that of my innocent family’12 by bailing her out of trouble before her other creditors got wind of the situation.

  Teresa entrusted the letter to Giuseppe and instructed him to deliver it by hand to Casanova’s Pall Mall lodgings. But the son she had pinned her hopes on to help her to turn her business around proved as unenthusiastic a messenger as he had been a worker. Exchanging his former decadent lifestyle for that of an unpaid clerk in his mother’s business appalled him. Teresa had presumed that Casanova had prepared Giuseppe for the working life ahead of him, but the boy seemed to have learned nothing in Paris other than the effete manners of a French aristocrat. He spoke no English, was hopeless at mathematics and geography and was by nature lazy, spoiled and reluctant to work.
Though six years his junior, Sophia was far brighter and better educated – but then, as Teresa told Casanova in no uncertain terms on the day he arrived from Paris, it was she who had brought her up. Instead of being a help to Teresa, Giuseppe was just another burden, one she would need to re-form in her own mould if he was ever to be of any use to anyone, even himself.

  When the youth left Casanova’s lodgings empty-handed, Teresa appealed to Sophia as her last hope: only she had the power to persuade Casanova to help her. Weighed down by this huge responsibility, and accompanied by her mother’s portly friend Madame Raucour, Sophia hurried to the Pall Mall house, forced her way into Casanova’s room where he was then dining with his lodger Pauline and threw herself tearfully at his feet. Was her emotion genuine or was Sophia merely acting the part of a distraught child? Her mother had schooled her in how to alter her emotions at will in order to manipulate people into doing what she wanted them to. And the moment Casanova promised to provide the bail money, Sophia not only cheered up but, egged on by her father, spent the rest of the evening criticising Teresa, probably because she sensed that this was what her ‘dear Papa’, as she now called him, wanted to hear. Although her mother had once told her that Casanova was her father, the child confessed, Teresa now insisted that she was the daughter of a man called the Marquis de Montpernis, the one-time impresario of Bayreuth’s opera house and another of Teresa’s past lovers. Sophia was aware that she looked the image of Casanova – the Duchess of Harrington who had seen them together at a Carlisle House ball had mischievously and repeatedly pointed the likeness out to all and sundry – but when she now bluntly asked Casanova if he was her father he denied it. At the same time, he treated Sophia in what appeared to her to be a fatherly manner, sitting her on his knee and giving her the kind of warm hugs and kisses her mother did not. He praised Sophia’s beauty and talents, and he seemed delighted when she called him her father.

  Casanova’s genuine fatherly feelings towards Sophia were complicated by two things: his dislike of Teresa, and his predilection for young girls. The compulsive seducer was deliberately stirring up trouble between Sophia and her mother to make sure that their daughter loved him more. And now that he had rescued her from the bailiff s clutches and Teresa was in Casanova’s debt, honour demanded that she comply with his wishes – to be allowed to spend more time with Sophia. After being released from the bailiffs house on his surety, the impresario gratefully took Sophia to dine at Pall Mall, and even left her there to spend the night in Pauline’s rooms at the top of the house. Casanova promised his daughter that he would come upstairs the next morning and have breakfast with her and Pauline ‘on condition that she waited for me in bed, for I wanted to see if she was as pretty in bed as she was when dressed’. The following morning he deliberately went upstairs early so that he would find the child undressed. ‘Sophia, all smiles, hid under the covers when she saw me appear,’ he wrote, ‘but as soon as I’d thrown myself down on the bed next to her, and begun to tickle her, she put out her little face, which I covered in kisses.’ The kisses did not stop there: he ‘took advantages of a father’s rights to see exactly how she was formed all over, and to applaud everything she had, which was as yet very immature. She was very small, but ravishingly built.’ Casanova knew exactly what he was doing. Furthermore he knew that it was wrong: ‘Pauline watched me give her all these caresses without suspecting a shadow of evil, but she was mistaken. If she had not been there the charming Sophia would in one way or another have extinguished the flame that her little charms had kindled in her papa.’13

  During the rest of the summer Sophia became deeply depressed and stopped eating. Her weight dropped away. By the beginning of autumn she was skeletally thin and had developed a high fever. With no one else in London to call on, the distraught Teresa once again turned to Casanova for help. Summoned to Carlisle House, he found Sophia in bed ‘looking at me with eyes that said she was dying of grief. Her mother was in despair for she loved her madly; I thought that she was going to batter my skull in when I told her in the presence of the invalid that if the girl died it would be she who had killed her. At that the little one cried “No, no!” and threw her arms around her mother’s neck and pacified her; but before I left I took her aside and told her that Sophia was dying because she made her too afraid of her and ruled over her with an unbearable tyranny.’14

  Yet again, Casanova was driving a wedge between Sophia and Teresa. He had come to London with the express intention of separating them, and he now succeeded by suggesting that their daughter be sent away to boarding school. As soon as she was well enough, Sophia was duly enrolled at a Roman Catholic boarding school in Hammersmith which had been recommended to Teresa by the Duchess of Harrington. Since Teresa still had no money, Casanova paid the first year’s fees of one hundred guineas in advance. Though a sizeable sum, it was much less than the 300 guineas he lost at a London gaming table a few days later.

  Run by the Roman Catholic Institute of Mary, an order of teaching nuns dating back to the seventeenth century, the Nunnery, as the school was locally known, was under the direction of a worldly, aristocratic sixty-year-old Mother Superior. Being there improved Sophia’s life immeasurably. At last she was far away from the emotional pressures of Carlisle House, and in a secure environment where she was surrounded by girls of her own age. Casanova visited her there all the time. If the truth were known he did not come to see Sophia but her beautiful schoolfriends, whom he described as ‘angels incarnate’. Dressed in a uniform consisting of ‘brief dresses with an English whalebone corset that exposed all their breasts’15 the young girls – all of whom were under thirteen years of age – sent him into ecstasies and distracted him from his tortuous relationship with Marianne de Charpillon. At one point his visits to the Nunnery became quite obsessive: even though the journey from Pall Mall to Hammersmith took an hour and a quarter he undertook it almost every day, bringing with him baskets of sweetmeats and trinkets to give away as presents. ‘I brought joy to Sophia’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘and at the same time to all her schoolfriends, with whom she shared everything. But the pleasure that I felt surpassed theirs … Her ladyship was extremely courteous to me, and my daughter, who openly called me her dear papa, made me more convinced every day that I had just cause to be called so. In less than three weeks I congratulated myself on having forgotten La Charpillon, and on having replaced her by innocent affections, despite the fact that one of Sophia’s schoolfriends pleased me a little too much for me to find myself completely exempt from amorous desires.’16

  In mid-March 1764, Casanova abruptly left London for reasons that are still unclear. He had been involved in a financial transaction concerning a forged bill of exchange for 520 guineas, he was deeply in debt, and he had a court case pending against him brought by Marianne de Charpillon. Sophia, into whose heart he had deliberately insinuated himself during his stay in the city, would never see him again; and it is unlikely that he ever wrote to her. She remained at boarding school for another three years before returning to Carlisle House. ‘Short, but very pretty, and full of talent’, as an old school friend described her in her teens, she had by then grown far apart from her difficult but talented mother, just as Casanova had hoped that she would. By now London’s most famous impresario was even more celebrated than she had been at the time of Casanova’s visit to London and yet, at the same time, even more deeply entrenched in debt. In 1765 she had attempted to buy the famous King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, the only theatre in London licensed by the Lord Chamberlain to stage Italian opera, and when she had failed to raise the required sum of £14,000 she had calmed her restless spirit by opening a second, smaller assembly room in Soho’s Greek Street. In 1771, Teresa staged her own highly popular but unlicensed opera at Carlisle House, and ran foul of the law. Competitors tried to drive her out of business. Her enemies accused her of running a bawdy house. Her many legal cases against John Fermor dragged on interminably, and expensively, through the Courts of Chancery. Arrested by c
reditors five or six times a year, Teresa was occasionally allowed out of prison on bail to run the concerts and balls which would help her to pay off the money she owed. Despite her dire situation, she still did her best to look after her children: in 1770, she even sent Giuseppe off on a grand tour of Europe, warning him to live within the modest allowance of one hundred guineas which she had scraped together for him and making him a promise to accept favours from no one.

  Teresa finally went bankrupt in 1772, squeezed out of business by competition from the newly opened Pantheon assembly rooms on nearby Oxford Street – a building which was ‘the wonder of the XVIII Century and the British Empire’ and ‘the most beautiful edifice in England’ according to historian Edward Gibbon. In a humiliating, fixed auction, which she herself was forced to witness, Carlisle House, complete with its precious contents, was sold off to a consortium of her creditors for a fraction of its true worth. Thomas Chippendale, who had supplied her with rococo and chinoiserie furniture, was among the buyers.

  Until then Sophia had remained at Soho Square, where she gave concerts herself and ‘enjoyed the protection and the esteem of all the greatest ladies in London’. Since being enrolled at The Nunnery she had grown to despise her mother ‘who mortified her every day, who reduced (her) to tears over nothing’17 and whom she later accused of trying to push her into the arms of a local rake, Lord Piggott. As soon as Teresa went bankrupt Sophia abandoned her and fled into the welcoming arms of the Roman Catholic Church. Charles Butler, one of the most prominent Catholics of the day, gave her a small stipend with which she rented modest rooms for herself near Bedford Row, Bloomsbury. In a bid to distance herself further from her infamous mother, she immediately changed her name from the all-too-distinctive Miss Cornelys to the anonymous-sounding Miss Williams, an anglicised form of her second Christian name, Wilhelmine. Following her example, Giuseppe, who had by now returned from Italy, changed his surname to Altorf and took a job as tutor to Lord Pomfret’s son.