Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  Defying expectation, Casanova began a slow recovery. During the entire period of his illness and recuperation he was cared for day and night by a serving woman, who tended him so diligently that she probably saved his life. When he eventually paid her off, she told him that she had been hired by his physician. The physician, however, insisted that he did not know the woman, and nor did the innkeeper’s wife. The mystery remained unsolved until Casanova finally left Aix for Marseille in late April or early May, by which time he believed he was well enough to arrive at Henriette’s château in good health. He had written her a letter before he left the city, warning her of his arrival, and when his carriage reached the gates of her house ‘a league and half before the Croix d’Or’ he ordered the postillion to stop so that he could send it up to the château; aware that his visit might not be welcomed, he had no wish to foist himself on Henriette if she did not wish to receive him. Henriette, however, was not there: the manservant who came down to the gates told Casanova that she had been in Aix for the last six months, and was not expected back in the country for another three weeks.

  Casanova had unwittingly been walking the same streets and attending the same social gatherings as his ‘divine Henriette’ and yet he had not recognised her. He was mortified. Invited up to the house so that he could write to her, he was surprised to see the same servant who had looked after him during his illness. The woman explained that she had worked at the château for the past ten years. When her mistress had heard that Casanova was ill, she had sent her to his inn and told her to enter his room boldly and take care of him as well as if he had been Henriette herself. If anyone were to ask her who she was, Henriette had told her servant to say that the physician had sent her.

  Convinced that Henriette must still love him, and upset that he had not recognised her, Casanova suggested in his letter that he immediately return to Aix. Her reply reached him in Marseille a day later. ‘Nothing, my old friend,’ she wrote, ‘is more romantic than the story of our meeting at my country house six years ago, and our present encounter, twenty-two years3 after our separation in Geneva. We have both aged. Will you believe that, though I still love you, I am nevertheless very content that you did not recognise me? It’s not that I have grown ugly, but putting on flesh has altered my looks.’ She was ‘a widow, happy and comfortably enough off to inform you that if you lack money at the bankers, you will find it in Henriette’s purse’; she had obviously seen or heard enough of Casanova to have noticed his relative poverty and, without wounding his pride, she generously wished to help him in any way she could. However, she was decisive that this was as far as she wanted the relationship to go. Although she was happy that she had perhaps helped to prolong his life by sending ‘a woman whose good heart and fidelity I knew’ to look after him when he was ill, Henriette was adamant that he should not rush back to Aix in case this gave rise to speculation about their relationship. If he were to return some time in the future, however, she assured him that they would be able to see each other ‘although not as old acquaintances’; as in the past, her boundaries were clear. If Casanova wished to maintain a correspondence with her, she promised to do everything within her power to make it flourish. She was curious about his life and promised him, ‘now that you have given me such strong proof of your discretion’, that she would tell him the whole story of her flight to Cesena in 1749.4

  As in the past Henriette maintained control over the relationship. She would always be grateful to Casanova for his impeccable behaviour towards her, but a reunion between them was out of the question. ‘Henriette had grown wise,’ Casanova wrote. ‘The force of temperament had diminished in her as it had in me. She was happy; I was not. If I went back to Aix for her, people would have guessed things that no one should have known; and what would I have done? I could only have become a burden to her.’5

  Casanova’s confidence with women was sliding inexorably downhill. He was to have one last great romantic adventure: in the arms of Leonilda. By 1770 his daughter by Donna Lucrezia was twenty-four years old and had been married for five years to an extremely wealthy man, the Marchese della C, one of the richest men in Salerno. She and her sixty-year-old husband divided their time between an immense palace in the city and a stunning villa in the country. In both homes Leonilda was waited on by vast retinues of servants. A French cook prepared her meals, more than a dozen pages served her at table, and whenever she strolled in the gardens she was followed both by a page who carried the train of her dress, and by a young female companion who walked half a pace behind her.

  Widely travelled and highly intelligent, the Marchese della C appeared to outsiders to be a conventional man and a good Christian. In private he was a freethinker and a Freemason, but in the traditional moral climate of Salerno these things were best kept to himself. His general good health was marred by gout so painful that it made it impossible for him to walk and prevented him from making love properly to his beautiful young wife. Having remained a bachelor until the age of fifty-five, he had no children, which was his greatest sorrow. On his death his fortune would pass to one of the ten or so dislikeable nephews who hung around his palace like carrion crows, waiting for him to die. As Lucrezia, who had come to Salerno to live with her daughter, remarked to Casanova when he turned up in the city in 1770, ‘if among the nobility of this city she could have found a man capable of pleasing her, the Marchese would have made a friend of him, and if it came to it he would not even have been sorry to see her become pregnant.’ Leonilda’s husband would never be absolutely sure that a child she bore was not his, because ‘when he is feeling well he comes to sleep with her, and from what my daughter has told me, he can flatter himself that he has done what he has effectively not done. But there is no longer any expectation that his fondness will have positive results.’

  In 1761 in Naples, Lucrezia had stood protectively between father and daughter. Nine years on in Salerno, all she could do was to stand by helplessly while Casanova and Leonilda renewed and finally consummated their incestuous love affair. When, six months later, Casanova received a letter informing him that his daughter was pregnant, he shuddered at the thought of it. Three months after that, Leonilda gave birth to a boy who was almost certainly her half-brother as well as her son, and Casanova’s son and grandson.

  With this love affair Casanova’s days as a great seducer were effectively over. By his mid-forties the once-irresistible lover had to talk hard to persuade a woman into bed. It scarcely seemed worth the effort. ‘I had begun to find the pleasure of love-making less intense, less seductive than I imagined it to be beforehand,’ he confessed, ‘and my sexual prowess had already been diminishing little by little for eight years’ - that is, since his late thirties. Women had once begged for his caresses. Now, if he was lucky, they tolerated them - an unbearable situation for a man who had always prided himself on giving pleasure even more than taking it. Discouraged by their indifference and his own financial circumstances from pursuing the kind of woman he could truly love, Casanova was reduced to paying for sex, or snatching his pleasures wherever he could. In Russia and Poland he bought small girls’ virginities off their poverty-stricken parents. Wanting an easy life, he opted for the services of prostitutes. Anything else was too much trouble: when he tried to grope his landlady’s nineteen-year-old niece in Spa, the girl punched him in the nose.

  But relief sex was not enough for Casanova, who was bored by the mechanical emptiness of it. An ‘intolerable void’ occupied his heart. Ironically, the pathological seducer wanted the act of love for, without love, both sex and life were meaningless to him. So he persuaded himself he was in love again: with Doña Ignacia, a devoutly religious boot-maker’s daughter in Madrid, who stopped going to confession so that she could sleep with him without telling her priest; with Sophia’s old schoolfriend Betty, with whom he had a brief fling in Siena; with Leah, a Jewess in Ancona; and with Charlotte, a pregnant young girl whom he befriended and selflessly, chastely looked after until she died in chi
ldbirth. Her death shattered him. Confronted so brutally by mortality, Casanova realised that he was now a different being from the man of his youth. Then he had been a happy, carefree hedonist with the prospect of a glorious future in front of him. Now he was ‘forced to admit to myself that I had wasted all my time, which meant that I had wasted my life’.6 He was forty-seven years old, ‘the age scorned by Fortune’ as he described it, and still had another twenty-six years ahead of him.

  His love affair with love was not completely over. Having negotiated his pardon by the Venetian authorities, in 1774 the prodigal son returned to Venice, the ‘beloved mother’ of its citizens, where a last chance awaited him. Desperate for money as well as approval, he threw himself wholeheartedly into his literary career, translated the Iliad, wrote a three-volume history of Poland and published a literary journal. At the same time he became a secret agent of the Republic’s Inquisitors. As poacher-turned-gamekeeper, he compiled at least fifty reports under the pseudonym Antonio Pratolini, including one which suggested burning impious and licentious books. And he did something else that would have been anathema to him in the past: he settled down with a woman.

  For three years Casanova rented a house in Venice’s Barbara delle Tole and shared it with a simple seamstress by the name of Francesca Buschini, her mother and her brother. He kept them all, bought Francesca fine dresses, and introduced her to the delights of the theatre and opera - grand gestures which cost him little but which enslaved her heart. Although she was a far cry from the upper-class beauties who had captivated him in his youth, she seemed to give Casanova something he had never experienced before except fleetingly: a sense of security.

  But over the summer of 1782 an act of self-sabotage on his part ended this domestic idyll, just as similar acts had brought to a close so many of his previous relationships with women. This time a humiliating row involving nobleman Carlo Grimani, the son of his old protector Michele, prompted Casanova to write Ne’ Amori, Ne’ Donne, a spiteful satirical pamphlet which suggested that Carlo was a bastard and that he himself was Michele Grimani’s natural son. Its publication caused a furore and an outrage. Casanova took temporary refuge in Trieste, hoping that the disapprobation levelled against him would soon die down. It did not. Advised by his friend the Procurator Lorenzo Morosini to leave the Republic as soon as possible, he found himself reluctant to resume his peripatetic existence. The former drifter was feeling his age. ‘I am fifty-eight,’ he wrote to Morosini from Trieste that September. ‘I cannot go on foot; winter approaches; and if I think of becoming an adventurer again I start to laugh when looking at myself in the mirror.’7

  He had no choice but to go. On 17 January 1783 he returned to Venice just long enough to pick up a few possessions, then left for Vienna. Back in the Serenissima briefly that June to bid a proper farewell to Francesca, Casanova was too scared of being arrested to set foot on land, so he kissed her goodbye in a boat. Then he set off on the long downhill road into permanent exile. Though she would never see him again, Francesca’s letters to her Carissimo and Amatissimo - her dearest and most beloved - Giacomo followed him along his route, reflecting his travels and changing moods, and giving him news of her own life in Venice. She was glad to hear that he was taking the waters in Spa, but sorry to hear that he was not sleeping enough. She took pleasure that he had enjoyed himself with a group of women, and laughed to think that he was contemplating going up in an air balloon. He had written to her that ‘a man without money is the image of death, that he is a very wretched animal’,8 and she regretted that he would not be coming back to Venice for the Feast of the Ascension. How sad she was to hear that his haemorrhoids had kept him in bed! She was sorry that he was still short of money, and she thanked him for the small sums he sent her. She hoped she would never hear him say again ‘that you are disgusted with everything and no longer in love with life’.9 She and her family had nothing to live on. Venice was ruinously expensive and she could find no work.

  In June 1784, Casanova heard from a friend that Francesca had been seen out enjoying herself at a casino, and wrote breaking off with her. In a heartfelt reply, she pleaded her innocence and confessed that, four months earlier and desperate for money, her mother had sold off all his books. Casanova was so furious that eighteen months passed before Francesca heard from him again. By then his long journey into exile had ended at Dux Castle, where Count Waldstein had offered him the post of librarian.

  Touchy, full of rancour, quick to be roused to anger and slow to forgive any slights against him, he prowled the vast library of 40,000 volumes like a beast in captivity. The feeling that he was trapped - that he had trapped himself - added to his frustrations, sexual and otherwise. ‘Women and young girls preoccupy his thoughts,’ wrote his good friend, Waldstein’s uncle the Prince de Ligne, ‘but that’s as far as they can go nowadays. That distresses him, it rouses him to anger towards the fair sex, towards himself, towards the heavens, Nature and the year 1742. He takes his revenge for that on everything that it drinkable and edible; no longer able to be a god in the gardens or a satyr in the forests, he’s a wolf at the table.’10

  Half-philosopher, half-court jester, Casanova fulfilled his obligations to Waldstein by cataloguing his books and entertaining his visitors with witty, and erudite conversation. But the light had gone out of him. Although he made others laugh, he was slow to laugh himself. He retained the ability to befriend men and charm women when he wanted to, and even the desire to help them when they were in need, but now he preferred his relationships to be conducted by letter only. He entered into a correspondence with a woman named Henriette de Schuckmann, who had met him whilst visiting Waldstein’s library ten years earlier and who wrote to him in 1796 that ‘I understand you perfectly and I love to distraction the lively and energetic manner with which you express yourself’. The following year he received a surprise letter from twenty-two-year-old Countess Cecile de Roggendorff, whose father he had once known and whose older brother Ernst sometimes stayed at Dux as Waldstein’s guest. Orphaned seven years earlier at the age of fourteen, convent-educated Cecile had since suffered numerous humiliations and persecutions at the hands of her unscrupulous family. Badly scarred by a childhood attack of smallpox, and with no income of her own, she turned to Casanova for advice in desperation after her fiancé was killed at the Battle of Bassano in September 1796. Casanova’s reply, and the practical help he subsequently gave her, soon seduced the vulnerable young woman and also steadied her on her rocky path. The septuagenarian became her confidant and her mentor, the one person she could totally trust. He sent her sound advice, and wrote a short, amusing précis of his life for her. They flirted with each other on paper, safe in the knowledge that her scarred face and his age would never matter because they were never going to meet. With Casanova’s help and influence, Cecile secured a respectable paid position at the court of the Duke of Courlande, and in 1801 she married a count and had four children of her own. Without Casanova’s disinterested friendship, she might well have ended her days in a poor-house or a brothel.

  Even from his sickbed, Casanova continued his long correspondence with a dear female friend, Elisa von der Recke, to whom he wrote delightful poetry, and who, from her own sickbed in nearby Toplitz, sent him wine, crawfish soup far superior to the mess concocted by the castle’s cook, and inspiring notes. They both knew that he was dying, for it was a fact that Casanova faced as unflinchingly as he had faced the other vicissitudes of his life. ‘I swear that the idea of being separated from you cuts me to the quick,’ Elisa wrote to him, ‘but the noble courage with which you approach the sombre gates of death elevates my soul.’11

  Casanova believed that death was ‘a monster which drives an attentive spectator from the great theatre before the end of a play which infinitely interests him. This alone is reason enough to hate it.’12 The great unfinished drama of his own life had been abandoned in a corner of the library, its highs and lows inscribed on piles of dusty manuscript pages bundled up with ribbon
and string. Writing it was a mammoth task - so overwhelming, in fact, that he never got beyond the year 1774, where his story abruptly ended with the middle-aged adventurer anticipating a tryst with a twelve-year-old girl. Although he was unable to face setting down the final, sad humiliating act - his life at Dux - the pleasure which he experienced whilst recalling the rest is evident on every one of the thousands of pages. He was unabashed about having written so much about himself: ‘Worthy or unworthy, my life is my subject, my subject is my life. Having lived it without ever believing that I would want to write about it one day, it may be interesting in a way it would not have been if I had lived it with the intention of writing about it in old age and, what is more, publishing it.’13

  In fact Casanova intended from the start that the work would eventually be published, and with that in mind he deliberately wrote in French, the lingua franca of Europe’s educated classes, rather than in his native Venetian dialect or in Italian, a language which in the eighteenth century was spoken and read by few educated people outside Italy. Encouraged by the Prince de Ligne - who advised him to ‘Put everything in print, believe me, in detail, year by year’ and to ‘Poke fun at your pleasures, if you want: but do not veil them’14 - he held little back except a few names, and the details of his divine Henriette’s story. Since false modesty was never one of his vices, Casanova believed that his memoirs would make him famous one day. But even in his wildest imaginings he could never have conceived just how famous, and for what reason.

  For Casanova’s name has echoed down the centuries and around the world as a synonym for a serial seducer of women. Nowadays he is remembered not as a great writer or philosopher but as the greatest lover who has ever lived. Since it was first printed in 1822 - in a much edited and expurgated German translation - his long memoir has spawned a veritable academic and publishing industry. many scores of editions of it have been published, and it has been translated into at least twenty languages. By the dawn of the twenty-first century Casanova has featured as the hero of more than forty novels and has been the subject of twenty-five biographies. Scholars have written thousands of books, theses and articles about particular aspects of his life, including his correspondence, his methods of travelling around Europe, his knowledge of medicine, and his use of the Kabbalah. By 2006 twenty-four films and TV series have been made about Casanova in which he has been reincarnated by some of the most famous film actors of the twentieth century, including Donald Sutherland, Richard Chamberlain, Tony Curtis, Peter O’Toole, Marcello Mastroianni, Dracula star Vincent Price and, most recently, Heath Ledger. Casanova has inspired at least one ballet,15 two operas16 and a trio of musical scores, including a symphony for violencello and wind orchestra.17