Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  Sophia Williams had no intention of following in her mother’s footsteps by going into commerce or becoming a courtesan. Instead, like her brother, she became a paid companion to the nobility who had once frequented her mother’s house. For a woman to go into service in this way was an unenviable occupation ‘considered in the light of a degradation’ in the opinion of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but it suited Sophia’s nature. The education Teresa had drummed into her from her earliest years now paid off in full measure. Musically gifted, cultured, intelligent and, more importantly, as adept in her own way at ingratiating herself with the aristocracy as her mother had been, Sophia was taken in by Lady Harrington, who had always liked her, and became a companion and governess to her daughters. From the Harringtons’ house in Stable Yard, St James’s, Sophia eventually passed to Lady Cowper, and later to the Duchess of Newcastle, the Duchess of Beaufort, Lord Newhaven, the Marchioness of Tweeddale and finally to Margaret, the Dowager Lady Spencer.

  Through these aristocratic connections, all of which she owed directly to Teresa, Sophia was introduced to George Ill’s wife Queen Charlotte and her second daughter, Princess Augusta. Oddly, the governess and the princess had something in common: each had endured a miserable childhood under the rule of a repressive and temperamental mother against whom she had had to struggle for her freedom. An unlikely relationship developed between them – the princess signed her letters to Sophia as being from ‘Your very sincere friend Augusta’18 – and in time she appointed Sophia as her private almoner.

  In many ways Sophia was the opposite of both her parents. Where Teresa and Casanova were both brave and adventurous, she was fearful. They lived their lives on a grand scale; she played out hers on a small stage. While they were both sexually promiscuous she died a childless spinster and, almost certainly, a virgin. While they were both unscrupulous, disingenuous, and even dishonest if it was in their interest, she devoted her life to God, to the righteous (perhaps even self-righteous) path, and to selfless good works.

  What she had inherited from her parents was her father’s intellect and her mother’s entrepreneurial spirit. And it was these qualities which helped her to start the Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum in 1806, and the Adult Orphan Institution in Mornington Place, St Pancras, in 1820. Sophia’s fifteen wards in the latter institution became her children – neat, orderly, grateful and well-behaved. All of them had ‘come into the Institution at their own requests and have implicitly followed the regulations laid down for them with the greatest Cheerfulness’, as she noted in her first report to the charity’s trustees. ‘They behave with infinite cordiality and affection to each other and appear fully convinced that, being equally the children of misfortune, it is an indispensable Duty to assist and feel for each other… . The certainty that if the Institution succeeds, and they are deserving of its Protection, they will at all times find an asylum in it endears it to them and makes them delight in lending their assistance in every way that can promote its prosperity.’

  Having no position in life need not be a tragedy, Sophia seemed to be telling the world: if they looked after one another women could survive and even find fulfilment and happiness without marriage, a lover, an income or a family. Sometimes one was even better off without parents. By now she was a bona fide orphan too. Casanova had died in 1798, Teresa a year earlier. Bankruptcy in 1772 had not dented Teresa’s enthusiasm for business. After getting out of prison, she bought a hotel in the south-coast town of Southampton, but the project ran into trouble through no fault of her own. Back in London in 1775 she organised a fabulous Venetian regatta on the River Thames, and soon afterwards wormed her way back into Carlisle House, this time as its manager. To the amazement of fickle society, the seemingly indestructible Mrs Cornelys eclipsed her former success by holding two seasons of sensational ‘Rural Masquerades’. Her imagination, and spending, ran riot over these parties. She transformed her old Soho mansion into an indoor Arcadia by covering the wooden floors in fresh turf and importing banks of hedges and armfuls of exotic, out-of-season flowers. As the newspapers reported in glowing detail, on one occasion Mrs Cornelys created an indoor arbour ‘filled with greenhouse plants and pots of flowers, and in the centre stood an elegant pavilion hung with festoons of silk; on the top (to which the company ascended by a temporary staircase,) was spread a table for a dozen persons, in the middle of which was a fountain of water, and a reservoir, with gold and silver fish swimming about in it’. Upstairs, in the vast Concert Room, ‘lofty pines stood at equal distances along the sides, and branched to each other at the top’ while underneath them a luxurious picnic of crayfish, hot fowls, asparagus and strawberries was laid out on ‘an elegant erection of Gothick-arches’ decorated with coloured lanterns. Meanwhile, at the end of the Concert Room, the orchestra’s dais was surrounded by orange trees and illuminated by ‘a moving spiral pillar of lights, which terminated in a brilliant sun’.19

  In the summer of 1776, Teresa was again termed ‘the Mother of Masquerades, Taste and Elegance’ by fashionable society. But her brilliant skills were not enough to keep her in business. Eighteen months later she was broke again. She clung on to Carlisle House as if to a life raft, returning there for a brief spell in May 1779, but it was a life raft more liable to sink her than save her. Later that year she was committed to the King’s Bench prison by order of her many creditors, who no doubt congratulated themselves that this time the slippery Mrs Cornelys would never get out. They were wrong: on 6 June 1780 the gaol was set on fire during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, and fifty-seven-year-old Teresa escaped along with hundreds of other prisoners; she remained on the run until the end of August, when she was recaptured in Westminster.

  Carlisle House was finally sold by auction five years later. Nothing more was heard of its former owner until May 1792, when a letter appeared in The Times informing the public that she had remarried and was now the widow of a certain Mr Frederick Smith. A few years later Mrs Smith briefly took over The Grove, an old country villa in the village of Knightsbridge, near Hyde Park, which had extensive gardens and came with a flock of goats and asses. Determined to get back into the business she loved, Teresa tended the beasts, sold their milk, and, with the small profit she made, filled the house with books and musical instruments in order to open it to the public as a venue for female archery and country breakfasts. This ambitious plan collapsed when she fell into debt yet again. Injured by the bailiffs who came to arrest her, she was hauled off to prison, bleeding at the breast.

  This was one blow Teresa would never recover from. ‘Reduced to abject misery and want’ and in agony from breast cancer, she lay dying in a series of terrible prison cells, first in the notoriously frightening Newgate Prison and later in the Fleet. Here she received a rare condescending visit from her daughter. Devoutly religious as Sophia was, she offered Teresa no words of comfort. On the contrary, she told her that she believed she was not her daughter, or Casanova’s, but the illegitimate child of Prince Charles of Lorraine and ‘a lady of quality’. When she had got this off her chest, Sophia left the gaol, never to return there. She sent her mother a meagre weekly income, but it was not enough to pay even for a proper bed or good food. When Teresa died on 19 August 1797 Sophia refused to pay for the funeral, priggishly informing the authorities that a pauper’s burial was ‘good enough for a woman who had led such an improper life’.

  Haughty, bitter and cruel towards her mother, to the outside world Sophia was self-effacing and concerned only with doing good. Although her childhood had scarred her indelibly, she came to believe that ‘every affliction has been a blessing in the end … Were my life to (start) over again there is not one single circumstance or event however bitter it has been that I would wish not to have occurred.’ That she was in many ways the opposite of both her parents – religious, upright and chaste – was certainly no accident, and to the end of her life she was haunted by the fear of following in her mother’s profligate footsteps. As
she wrote in her will, ‘It will be my endeavour as long as life is spared not to owe any money.’20

  Sophia died suddenly on 25 June 1823 at the Mayfair home of the Dowager Countess Sidney, three days after presenting her latest report on the Adult Orphan Institution to its benefactors. ‘Most sincerely do I lament the loss of that excellent good Mrs Williams,’ Princess Augusta wrote to her friend Lady Harcourt a fortnight later. ‘Her worth was great. She was humble and yet persevering in doing good.’21 Not everyone thought so well of her: in the eyes of writer John Taylor, who had known Sophia in her youth, she was ‘an artful hypocrite … totally devoid of sensibility’ who, while pretending to care for others, had looked out only for herself.22

  She left few possessions – some books, a watch chain, a writing desk given to her by Queen Charlotte, an ink stand, a turquoise ring, a seal with a sphinx on it, and a silver teapot which she bequeathed to her faithful servant Catherine Troy. Her real legacy was the Adult Orphan Institution, the first academic school for the female sex in England, still going strong in the twenty-first century as the Princess Helena College, an independent school for girls in Hertfordshire. A huge portrait of its founder, donated by Princess Augusta, still hangs in the hall. Dressed in a white Regency-style frock and a turban-like head-dress, Sophia is playing the harp in a pair of open-toed sandals. In her face one can just make out the shadow of her father’s features: the dark hair, the arched eyebrows, the long nose and the slightly receding chin. However, there is nothing of her father’s or mother’s visceral joie de vivre in her pose or her expression. As she stares up at the single shaft of sunlight breaking through the stormy sky above her, Casanova’s daughter looks resigned to her fate, careworn, lonely, and more than a little sad.

  ELEVEN

  4 June 1798

  SHADES OF NIGHT are closing in around Casanova. A blanket of darkness has settled around him in his bedroom in Dux Castle, not unlike the thick fog that he remembers once hung over Venice. From time to time the shape of a face looms up at him through the mist, the features hazy and unclear even at close quarters. He is aware of people tiptoeing across the creaking parquet floor, but he cannot see them. They mutter about him as if he is already dead and shuffle around his bed as if not to disturb him. But Casanova, who faces an eternity of peace, has grown frightened of silence, an absence of sound into which one could so easily slip away. He wants to be disturbed, to hear the off-key scratchy sound of violins playing outside the cafés in the Piazza San Marco, or the merry laughter of a crowd of gossiping women, or even Magda the maid’s guttural voice, for at least that would be a sign that he is still alive. But Casanova cannot tell anyone this. He for whom words were formerly weapons of seduction and manipulation, the vehicles with which he manoeuvred himself so easily in and out of the finest salons in the world, is now too feeble even to ask for a chamber pot when he needs one. It is all he can do to keep breathing.

  His bedroom, which once seemed as claustrophobic and hateful to him as his cell under The Leads, has suddenly become a place that Casanova never wants to leave. The coffered ceiling with its cobwebs that are never dusted to his liking, the hard-backed armchair with its faded chintz seat in which he has fidgeted away so many restless hours, the mean little desk from which, jealous of their freedom, he has sent off so many hundreds of letters to travel the roads of Europe - all these things which have caused him endless grief since he arrived at Dux thirteen years ago are suddenly beloved to him. He has even developed a sentimental attachment to the charmless Magda, whose rough hands occasionally straighten the rumpled sheet he is lying under, tucking it tightly under the mattress as if she was a torturer binding him to the rack, with no regard as to the pain she causes him.

  But these things are now under threat. There is scarcely a glimmer of hope left in the embers of the tiled stove, and the long-case clock in the corner, the hands of which once moved so inexorably slowly, is ticking away the last minutes of Casanova’s life all too fast. All he can do is lie here, isolated in his pain, and wait for Death to claim him.

  Even though his nephew-in-law from Dresden has come to look after him, Casanova has never felt so lonely. He aches for the touch of a tender hand, or to experience just one more time the comfort of warm, naked female flesh pressed against his own. But these are things of the distant past. For as far back as he can remember he has slept alone in this narrow bed, his feet warmed by the body heat of his only flesh-and-blood female companion of the last three years - Finette, his young fox terrier bitch who this afternoon keeps vigil on the rug beside him, whining softly for him to play with her, and staring up at him with her moist, black, uncomprehending eyes.

  The man who was once surrounded by admirers and adored by so many women, and who in the future will be remembered as the greatest lover in history, is dying alone among strangers, mourned only by a dog.

  How did the young fearless Adonis fired by lust and ambition come to this? When did success forsake him? When did old age - ‘sad and weak, deformed, hideous old age’1 as he so succinctly described it - catch up with him? Casanova’s first intimation of mortality, a more-than-occasional failure to perform between the sheets, visited him extraordinarily early: in his mid-thirties, soon after the London courtesan Marianne de Charpillon dealt his self-confidence those blows from which it never fully recovered. As if she had put a jinx on him, his luck changed swiftly. Senator Bragadin died, leaving him without a private income. The striking looks he had taken for granted since his youth became raddled by illness and age. His appearance lost its sparkle along with the diamond buttons that he sold to pay off his debts; it grew as faded as the gold embroidery on his once-glorious waistcoats. Despite his height and build, Casanova no longer stood out in a crowd of men as the most handsome among them. Instead, like his rivals, he had sallow skin, receding hair, rotting teeth and painful haemorrhoids.

  He tried to ignore the change in his appearance. But he was aware that women did not. ‘I still loved the fair sex,’ he wrote of himself at this time, ‘though with much less passion, much greater experience, and less courage for daring enterprises, for, looking more like a father than a lover, I no longer believed I had either rights or justifiable claims.’2 Even the greatest love of his life, Henriette, did not fall into Casanova’s arms when he turned up in Aix-en-Provence for a second time in 1768; and he was then only forty-three years old. In her mid-forties herself, Henriette was still living apart from her husband, and had grown prettily, contentedly plump. As was her custom, she spent the winter of 1768/69 in the city, receiving no visitors at home but often going out in company. Sometime in February 1769 she became aware, probably by seeing him at one of the many social gatherings she frequented, that her old lover was in town once more, this time alone. She made no move to contact him. The vicissitudes of life had clearly taken their toll on him, he was not ageing flatteringly, and he had the air of a downtrodden man. Forced for the first time since his early twenties to earn a living by his own abilities, both literary and at the gaming table, Casanova no longer had enough money or self-confidence to sustain his role as a rich nobleman. Instead of being taken in by his cultivated air and extraordinary story-telling skills, the aristocrats he mixed with frequently suspected that he was a lower-class impostor. He had begun to smell of failure, of an early promise never fulfilled. In his youth he had got away with living on the very edge of legality through sheer force of personality, but over the past five years his dubious friendships and frequent brushes with the authorities had made him persona non grata in a host of cities and countries. In March 1764 he had fled London. In July 1766 he had been ordered to leave Poland after wounding General Branicki in a duel. The following January he had been banished from Vienna for illegal gambling, and in November 1767 he had been expelled from France. After spending a year in Spain, Casanova had wound up in a Barcelona prison for eight days after a series of indiscretions that had made him many enemies culminated in an ill-advised love affair with the mistress of the Captain General
of Catalonia. Freed on 28 December 1768, he had crossed the border back to France and made his way, via Perpignan and Montpellier, to Aix-en-Provence where he planned to spend the carnival season, and perhaps find work with the local judiciary body or Parlement.

  While diminished, Casanova’s ability to seduce both men and women with his personality and intellect had not entirely deserted him. In Aix he was befriended by the Marquis d’Eguilles, the president or presiding judge of the Parlement, and his brother the Marquis d’Argens, a philosopher and writer who since 1744 had been Director of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Through their connections Casanova was invited to numerous balls and assemblies at which he always looked out in vain for Henriette. Although he occasionally heard her real name mentioned, he did not enquire after her ‘for fear of suggesting that I knew the lady’; his loose tongue may have got him into trouble in Spain, but when it came to Henriette Casanova remained as discreet as ever. Convinced that she must be at her country château near the Croix d’Or, Casanova planned to call on her when he eventually left the city.

  Before he could do so, events took an unexpected turn. After dining at the Marquis d’Argens’ country house one night Casanova drove back to the city in an open carriage, in a strong wind and without an overcoat. By the time he reached Aix he was chilled to the bone, but instead of going to bed he went out with an acquaintance and spent two hours attempting to deflower a fourteen-year-old virgin whose hymen had so far defied all other attempts made on it. Casanova was too old for such shenanigans, and the following morning he came down with a severe and dangerous case of pleurisy. Plagued by a terrible cough, he began to spit up blood - a sign of possible consumption - and a few days later slipped into a torpor. Eight days after taking to his bed he was at death’s door, and a priest was summoned to hear his confession and administer the last rites.