Leda rested her head on Caterina’s shoulder during the short ride, eyes closed, but not sleeping. Occasionally, Caterina saw her finger her pendant, her lips moving in some sort of prayer.
The boat bumped to a stop at a set of old oak mooring poles. It took two gondoliers to hoist Leda out and onto the quay. Then, Caterina and she began their walk to the theater, arm in arm.
“You never finished telling me,” Caterina said, to distract her, “the name of the baby if it is a girl. Carus for a boy, and for a girl—is it Cara?” Caterina smiled. She liked the sound of it. Dear one.
“No,” Leda answered her with a mysterious smile. “Guess again.”
“Caruska?”
Leda collapsed in giggles. “No! That is the ugliest name I ever heard!” Men and women walking by stared at her, not only because she was beautiful, and laughing, but because she was unusually far along in her pregnancy to be out in public.
“Caterina,” Leda said, composing herself. “If the baby is a girl, she will be Caterina.”
Caterina felt a huge rush of joy, and turned to kiss Leda’s cheek. Leda tightened the link of their arms.
They passed the church of San Moisè with its busy façade of carved fruit garlands, putti, and saints. It was excessive but cheerful, which fit Caterina’s mood. They rounded the corner and found a sunny courtyard filled with cats enjoying buckets of scraps that had been lowered down from windows above. Caterina spied the theater at the far end of the courtyard. She and Leda made their way across, and Caterina pulled open its huge entrance doors.
The foyer inside felt deliciously cool, with pink marble columns and a black, white, and pink inlaid geometric floor. Mounted on the gold-coffered ceiling was an enormous painting showing the Muse of Music holding a lyre and floating on a cloud. To Caterina, it made the room seem open to the sky.
The jewel-like foyer reminded her of being inside Teatro San Samuele many years before, with Giacomo. She had not gone back to any theater since. When they were first married, Bastiano used to offer to take her to the opera, but she always refused. She had not allowed herself to be happy with him. Now she vowed to go more often—Filippo’s song had reminded her how much she loved to hear singing, to experience the human voice opening her heart.
Caterina guided Leda noiselessly through a door and into the main chamber of the theater. Inside was all black, except for the single figure of Filippo in the orchestra pit at his harpsichord, tinkering on a tune by lamplight. Strings, flutes, oboes, and horns lay on empty chairs scattered around. On the stage, Caterina could make out the looming silhouette of some stage machinery. And—looking out of place, a simple wooden cradle.
Caterina signaled to Leda she would wait at the back of the theater, and hid herself in the dark behind a thick column. She peeked around and watched Leda walking heavily down toward the pit.
Filippo sprang up from his instrument the moment he saw her. He led her up the short flight of steps onto the stage, and showed her the cradle. He went down on one knee in front of her. Taking both of Leda’s hands in his, he covered them with kisses. Caterina saw him explaining himself, but she could only hear murmuring. It seemed to her that Filippo looked into Leda’s eyes as if they were the very living rays of heaven he had been singing about below her windows.
Finally, Filippo stopped speaking. He bowed his head and waited for Leda’s verdict. Leda placed her hand alongside his cheek and lifted his face to see hers. She was smiling. Filippo, seeing he had been forgiven—that he was loved by his beloved—jumped up, embraced Leda, and consumed her with ardent kisses. At the sight of their passion, Caterina became awkwardly aware she was spying. She slipped out of the theater.
Once outside, her heart swelled with happiness. Leda—reunited with Filippo. She breathed in the joy of it. The baby would have a mother and father who loved her. Or him. But she hoped it was a girl. A girl named Caterina. Whose name said, Caterina Capreta helped me find a safe place in the world.
I have done more good than harm in my life, Caterina told herself now, and perhaps that is all I, or anyone, can ask of themselves. She felt the last, terrible burden of her past lift away.
As she made her way home, she was hardly aware she was smiling. She reached a bridge near Campo San Moisè and a handsome man, about her age, gave her an appreciative glance. She smiled even more, meeting his gaze for a brief, flirtatious moment.
I am not so very old after all. Young enough to still receive second glances. Young enough to enjoy the rest of my life.
She surprised herself by thinking tenderly of Bastiano, maybe for the first time in their long marriage. She felt new appreciation for him, thinking of how he had quietly helped her with Leda. He was kind and careful, and loving in his own way. Somewhere in her heart, she knew, she did in fact love him.
She glanced back to see if the handsome man on the bridge was gone. He was. He had reminded her a little of Giacomo. She stopped for a second, and closed her eyes. The early September sun gently warmed her face. She touched her cheek, remembering the sweet echoes of Giacomo’s fingers on her skin. And wondered if somewhere far away, he ever closed his eyes . . . and remembered her too.
HISTORICAL NOTES
This is a work of fiction built on events told by Giacomo Casanova in the third and fourth volumes of The Story of My Life. Casanova began his memoirs around 1791, when he was already well past sixty years old. The memoirs—totaling an incredible 3,600 manuscript pages and never published in his lifetime—were therefore written many years after the events described took place. While he claimed he invented nothing, he must have had to do some fiction writing himself. He adored this project above any other he had ever undertaken, claiming he did it “to laugh at myself.” He happily wrote thirteen hours a day, which passed like thirteen minutes for him. “What pleasure in remembering one’s pleasures!” he wrote in a letter from this period, lamenting only that he had to mask the names in order not to “expose the affairs of others.”
Casanova describes meeting a young girl he calls “Signorina C.C.” in 1753, soon after his return to Venice after several years abroad. (He had been forced to leave his native city already by 1748, for beating an uncooperative prostitute with a broom and slicing off a dead man’s arm and putting it in someone’s bed as a joke.) Casanova is immediately enchanted by “C.C.” as much for her beauty—he describes her as having alabaster skin set off by black hair and large black eyes—as for her whole personality:
What chiefly struck me was a lively and perfectly unspoiled nature brimming over with candor and ingenuousness, a gay and innocent vivacity, simple and noble feelings—in short, a combination of qualities which showed my soul the venerable portrait of virtue, which always had the greatest power to make me the slave of the object in which I believed I saw it.
Caterina’s brother “P.C.” disgusts him, and particularly his attempt to sell his sister to him. Casanova claims he felt sorry for her, but actually never tells us whether he ever paid any money for her company.
The identity of the young girl “C.C.” was uncovered by the Italian scholar Bruno Brunelli Bonetti in 1937. He pieced together the puzzle from a record in the Venetian State Archives that referred to “Sig. Pietr’ Antonio Capretta” (the spelling of the name is variant) and Giacomo Casanova and several bills of exchange. If “P.C.” in the memoirs could be tied to Pier Antonio Capreta, then “C.C.” was his sister, Caterina. When the father’s initials “Ch.C.” perfectly matched up with their father, Christoforo Capreta, Bonetti knew he had the right family.
Later, the French scholar Jacques Marsan found Caterina’s birth and marriage records in Venice. It’s true she was only fourteen years old when Casanova met her, born December 10, 1738. Her large home was somewhere on the present-day Fondamenta della Misericordia in the northern part of the city, but it did not survive. I put her as a girl in my favorite house in Venice, the fifteenth-century Cà Dario in the neighborhood of Dorsoduro. The story’s details about its upper loggia and small, wa
lled garden are drawn from what can still be seen in Campiello Barbaro today.
For Casanova, Caterina was an angel and he never wavers in this view of her. Even as their story becomes complicated and she is banished to the convent, suffers a miscarriage, and discovers his affair with her friend “M.M.,” Casanova quotes letters (whether real or reconstructed, he makes clear there were many letters written between them) that betray no jealousy at all. In fact, she exclaims joy over his new affair:
I am not at all sorry either that you love her or that she loves you, and I pity you so much for being cruelly reduced to making love at a grating [that is, being kept apart by the bars in the visiting parlor] that I would gladly let you take my place. I should make two people happy at one stroke.
According to Casanova, “M.M.” also considers Caterina an “angel incarnate” for not hating her, when M.M. is the reason Casanova no longer loves Caterina. It was this all-too-happy state of affairs that set the wheels turning in my imagination and led to this story telling about Caterina’s hidden feelings and actions. How could she not have been devastated?
The identity of Caterina’s rival “M.M.” has proved a more complicated puzzle. The initials coincide with quite a few noblewomen in convents on Murano during this period: no less than eight at Santa Maria degli Angeli alone. The strongest candidate was proposed by the French scholar Pierre Gruet in 1975. Marina Maria Morosini would have been twenty-two years old in 1753, just as Casanova reports. Even more, Casanova wrote a friend saying he planned to refer to his lover Marina in the memoirs as “Mathilde” because the name has the same number of syllables and vowels; the friend wrote back and suggested he simply use “M.M.” Marina Maria Morosini became the abbess at Santa Maria degli Angeli sometime in the period 1773–1799.
That Marina was poisoned by Caterina is probably a fiction. However, it is consistent with what Casanova tells us about the end of his affair with Marina. He records that in January of 1755 she “fell ill and her life was in danger.” When he saw her at the convent on February 2, “her face displayed the signs of approaching death.” She suffered fever and delirium and—just as bad—“her confessor was hastening her death by his boring sermons.” Unexpectedly, by the end of March she had recovered. But by this time, Casanova admits that “my passion for M.M. was declining.” Soon after, Casanova moved on to Tonina, the daughter of a conversa at the convent with whom he had stayed during Marina’s illness.
Around the time of his affairs with C.C. and M.M., Casanova caught the unwelcome eye of the State Inquisitors in Venice, a governmental body set up in 1539 to tighten security in the Republic. The spy Giovanni Battista Manuzzi was set after him. The reports are full of juicy accusations: that Casanova cheated at cards, bewitched people to get money out of them, and that nothing could be more “monstrous” than his thoughts and talk on the subject of religion. He was arrested on July 26, 1755, and put in the Leads. He made his famed escape on October 31, 1756. He was eventually pardoned and allowed to return to Venice on September 14, 1774.
Caterina’s brother Pier Antonio was imprisoned again in Venice in 1764 and 1767, on charges of swindling. He fled at some point to Szeged, Hungary, and there assumed a new name, Antonio Atterpach. He was arrested yet again in 1779 on similar types of charges—falsifying letters of exchange—and in the course of the arrest, was stabbed seventeen times. He was escorted to Pisa (the Grand Duchy of Tuscany at this time was ruled by the House of Habsburg-Lorraine) and sentenced to prison or forced labor. This is the last historical record of him.
Leda Strozzi, Zulietta Pasini, Giorgio Contarini, and Stefano Cavallini are all fictional characters. However, Giorgio was inspired by the portrayal of Peter III in the memoirs of Catherine the Great of Russia during this period. She describes the seventeen-year-old Grand Duke as being “very childish.” He spent a lot of time in “pursuits unbelievable for one his age, such as playing with dolls.” My story’s details about how a non-noblewoman such as Zulietta could marry into the noble class in Venice are based on historical facts. Membership in the noble class—the only class allowed to rule in the Venetian Republic—had been essentially closed since the year 1297. Only rarely were new members added, and the government remained an aristocratic oligarchy until it fell to Napoleon five hundred years later.
The letter Casanova sends Caterina smeared with his semen is based on Andrea di Robilant’s account of such sticky tokens of love sent by the nobleman Andrea Memmo to Giustiniana Wynne in Venice in the 1750s. The details about Caterina’s miscarriage come from Casanova’s own story, supplemented by surgeon and man-midwife medical books of the period. (A “man midwife” was the term used to distinguish such practitioners from the “ignorant women” who attended births.) Sadly, the story about the peasant woman whose child was born rotted like paper is true. It was recorded by Guillaume Manquest de la Motte in Paris in the year 1746.
Caterina married the lawyer Sebastiano Marsigli on February 5, 1757 (M.V.). She was widowed sometime in 1783. There is no record of any children.
A fragment found among Casanova’s many papers indicates that he did see Caterina again sometime after 1774. He wrote he was saddened to find her “a widow, and unhappy.” He was forced to leave Venice in 1783—in trouble again—and this time he never returned. After several years spent wandering, he took a job as librarian to Count Joseph Charles de Waldstein at his castle in Bohemia.
Two letters from Caterina—or more accurately, cryptic notes—also survive among Casanova’s papers. The handwriting is shaky; she is an aging woman by this time. She refers to books he is sending to her, though she does not name them. They seem to have shared some sort of long-lasting interest in reading together. The note mentions payment of a few lire for the items.
In the end, we can never know what was in Caterina’s heart. But Casanova believed that she continued to love him. He claimed that she only got married after his escape from prison and subsequent exile—“when there was no longer any hope that I would ever be seen again in Venice.”
Giacomo Casanova died in Bohemia in 1798.
The date of Caterina Capreta’s death is unknown.
The convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli was suppressed by Napoleon in 1810 and destroyed in 1832. As late as 1919, the little door in the garden wall through which the nuns escaped was still there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some years ago, walking with a friend, Linda Fisher, in Mount Auburn Cemetery, I shared an idea I had: to write a novel about Giacomo Casanova and his young lover, Caterina Capreta. I wanted to tell her story.
I’m busy with work and family, I explained, shrugging. I’ll probably never write it. To which Linda gently challenged, Why not? Those words stuck. Soon after, I started to write.
Patricia Fortini Brown, John Butman, Celia Latz, Chiara Peacock, Emily Rubin, and Monika Schmitter read and encouraged my early efforts. Mille grazie, as they say in Italy, to the amazing women in the Concord Writers’ Group, who read several more: Jeannine Calabria, Sue Curtin, Becky Sue Epstein, Katharine Esty, Fran Grigsby, Maile Hulihan, Elisabeth Townsend, and Marti Thomas Webster. I can hardly thank enough Judy Sternlight, my incomparably skilled, tactful, and positive-minded editor. Sitting on a high rock with Judy in Central Park, with her dog Ruby by our side, talking over the final scene, is a memory I will hold on to forever: the fusion of our imaginations, dreaming of the eighteenth century, sunlight at our backs.
My agent, Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein, believed in this story, and I am immensely grateful for her help in leading me to my editor at Kensington Publishing, Alicia Condon. From our first phone call, I knew the book had found its right home.
Thank you to my family: my parents, Sumner and Phyllis Myers; my husband, Michael; daughter, Ginevra; dog, Lyra; and cats, Shura and Clementine. These people and animals make me feel special, loved, and supported in my dreams each day.
Please read on for an excerpt from
Barbara Lynn-Davis’s next fascinating
work of histo
rical fiction . . .
RAPHAEL’S MUSE
Rome, 1514
“By Christ’s body, can’t you move any faster? I’m starving over here!”
Margherita reached into a basket of fresh, crusty bread, clasping her fingers around a darkly baked loaf. She was hungry herself—the bakery would be closing soon for the midday meal, but customers were still clamoring inside the small shop.
“That’s the smallest one,” the stooped old man grumbled. “I want a bigger one.”
Margherita put back the loaf and grabbed a larger one. She pulled the fabric of her cotton chemise over her breasts as she reached; otherwise the men always peered in as she worked.
“Ecco, Signor.” She smiled at the old man. She was alone working today, her father tending the wood-fired oven located off the back courtyard, unaware what Margherita experienced most days in the bakery, selling.
The old man counted his coins. “How many more for you, sweet bitch?” he asked. Margherita froze.
“That’s enough,” Margherita heard a younger man say, saw him step beside the old man, and nudge him gently away. This younger man was in his mid-twenties, and hardly the sort to play the hero. Margherita noticed his large, sensitive eyes, his fair skin, his long neck. He had a slight moustache and chestnut-colored hair to his shoulders. He struck her as a dreamer.
“Prego, Signor,” she asked him, feeling the color rise in her cheeks, immensely grateful for his intervention but not wanting to acknowledge any further what had happened.
The young man stood staring at her face. Margherita was used to that, to be honest. Men’s eyes simply went to her, unable to resist. Her long, dark hair, which she always kept tied up in the shop, her almond-shaped, gypsy-dark eyes. She didn’t see her beauty as a gift, but a nuisance, attracting unsought-after and often rude attention. Having no status—a baker’s daughter, with the baker himself not usually present—she was fruit all too ripe for picking.
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