Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  They are made welcome at the courts, where people are amused by them without respecting them. No one troubles to inquire the genuineness of their titles of nobility, any more than to ask for the marriage certificates of the ladies who pass as their wives, or for evidence of the virginity of the girls they may bring along. Whoever can give pleasure, and relieve even for an hour that boredom which is the most deadly of all the sicknesses of a court, is sure to be a welcome guest. They are tolerated, as a man tolerates a courtesan who amuses him and does not rob him too impudently. Sometimes an artist or a swindler will have to put up (as had Mozart) with a kick in the behind from a princely boot; sometimes they find their way from the ballroom to the prison, and even, like Afflisio, the manager of the imperial theater, to the galleys. The cleverest among them feather their nests; become tax collectors, souteneurs, or even, as complaisant husbands of court whores, genuine noblemen and barons. But for the most part they find it wiser not to wait until the roast burns, for their whole charm lies in their novelty and their incognito. If they turn up the corners of the cards too obviously, if they dip their hands too deep into people’s pockets, if they make themselves at home too long in any one court, it may well happen that someone will tear the cloak from their shoulders and disclose the mark of the branding iron or the scar left by the lash. Frequent change of air is necessary to save them from the hangman’s noose. That is why they are continually on the move across Europe, commercial travelers of a peculiar kind, gypsies who pitch their moving tents in palace after palace. Thus it is that throughout the eighteenth century a rotation of the same figures proceeds from Madrid to St. Petersburg, from Amsterdam to Pozsony, from Paris to Naples. At first one is inclined to think it is no more than a lucky chance that, at every gaming table and at all the petty courts one after another, Casanova should encounter the same rogues, Talvis, Afflisio, Schwerin, and Saint-Germain; but the adept knows that such perpetual wanderings denote flight rather than a round of amusements.

  There is a genuine freemasonry among these rogues. When they meet as old acquaintances, one of them will hold the ladder for another, and one of them will vouch for another. They exchange wives, coats, names; and there is only one thing which each of them keeps for himself — his own special profession. Parasites of the courts, these actors, dancers, musicians, adventurers, harlots, and alchemists, form, in conjunction with the Jesuits and the Jews, the only International that as yet exists in the world of the eighteenth century; the nobility is sessile, fixed to this court or to that; and the bourgeoisie is dull, immobile, not yet emancipated. But the rabble rout of freebooters, without flag and without fatherland, moves on freely from one country to another and rubs shoulders with all classes. With their appearance, a new age dawns, and a new method of exploitation. They are not like the robbers of old, who plundered the defenseless, not like the highwaymen who, pistol in hand, robbed the travelers in coaches; their art is a subtler one. For them, a ready wit has replaced the cudgel, and a calculated impudence proves more effective than the bravado of the old-style robber. Their success is the outcome of a knowledge of psychology. These new cutpurses have sworn alliance with cosmopolitanism and good manners. They rob their victims with the aid of marked cards and forged bills of exchange.

  They are of the same race as the bold fellows who sailed to the Indies in the earlier days, who ruffled it as free companions, who would never be content to earn their livelihood in a humdrum civic fashion, but preferred to take big risks on the chance of filling their pockets at one blow. Now the method has changed, and therewith its physiognomy. The new adventurers have not the rough hands, the sodden faces, the coarse manners of those earlier captains; they have rings on their delicately kept fingers, and their heads are adorned with powdered wigs. They use a modish lorgnon, they walk like dancing masters, articulate like actors, mouth wise sayings like philosophers. With imperturbable visage, they cheat at cards; and with a patter of witty conversation, they persuade women to pay them a long price for love potions and spurious jewels.

  Beyond question, there is something attractive about them one and all; their wit and their psychological insight make them interesting; and some of them deserve to be named geniuses. The second half of the eighteenth century was their heroic period, their golden age. Just as earlier, under Louis XV, the French poets formed a brilliant pleiad, and just as later in Germany a brilliant group of creative writers made the name of Weimar ever memorable, so do the figures of these magnificent swindlers and immortal adventurers brilliantly characterize this particular period of European history. Before long they are not content with dipping their hands into princely pockets; their ambition is to spin the roulette board of universal history. Instead of serving, they wish to make others serve them, with the result that the activity of adventurers has set its stamp upon the eighteenth century. John Law, an Irish wanderer, convulses the French currency with his assignats. D’Eon, passing for a man, but one whose sex is as dubious as his reputation, guides international policy. A little round-headed fellow, Baron Neuhof by name, becomes king of Corsica as Theodore I, is later an inmate of debtors’ prisons in various capitals, and dies in London as a pensioner in a debtors’ prison. Cagliostro, a Sicilian peasant lad, who has never learned to read and write properly, has Paris at his feet, and fashions out of the famous necklace a halter which puts an end to monarchy. Trenck (the most tragic figure of them all, seeing that though an adventurer he was not devoid of true nobility) sports a red cap, plays the hero of freedom — and perishes on the guillotine. Saint-Germain has the king of France at his beck and call, and yet we are still puzzled concerning the mystery of his birth. One and all, these adventurers have more power than men born to power; they stimulate the fancy and arouse the attention of the whole world; they deceive the learned, lead women astray, plunder the rich, pull the strings of the political marionettes. Last and not worst among them comes our Giacomo Casanova, the historiographer of the guild, who describes them all when he describes himself, rounding off the story of these never-to-be-forgotten men with a hundred deeds and adventures of his own. Every one of them is more famous than the authors, more influential than the statesmen of their day; for a brief time they are the masters of a world already doomed to perish.

  For the heroic age of the adventurers lasted no more than thirty or forty years! Then the stage on which they played was destroyed by the most finished of their type, by the most brilliant genius of them all, by the arch-adventurer, Napoleon. The characteristic of genius is that it does in real earnest that which talent does only as play-acting; that it is not content with make-believe, but demands the whole world as a stage for creative activities. When Bonaparte, the impoverished little Corsican, calls himself Napoleon, this is not that he may, like Casanova-Seingalt, or like Balsamo-Cagliostro, hide his bourgeois origin behind a mask of nobility; he is putting forward a masterful claim to superiority, is seizing triumph as his right, instead of endeavoring to snatch it by craft. With Napoleon, adventurer of genius among a crowd of adventurers who had merely talent, the adventurer comes out of the anteroom of princes to seat himself on the imperial throne; and sets for a brief hour the most splendid of all crowns, the crown of Europe, upon his head.

  TRAINING AND TALENTS

  He is said to be a man of letters, but to have an intelligence rich in cabals; it is reported that he has been in England and in France, has gained inexcusable advantages at the cost of knights and ladies, for it has ever been his way to live at others’ expense, and to get the better of the credulous. If we examine the aforesaid Casanova, we see in him unbelief, fraud, unchastity, and voluptuousness, assembled in an alarming way.

  SECRET REPORT OF THE VENETIAN INQUISITION, 1775

  Casanova never denies having been an adventurer. On the contrary, he is proud of having been the flat-catcher rather than the flat, the shearer rather than the shorn, in a world where, as the old adage says, people want to be fooled. One thing, however, he strongly objects to. You must not confound him wi
th commonplace knaves, jailbirds and brethren of the halter, who pick pockets in a rough and commonplace fashion, instead of elegantly charming money out of the hands of the stupid. In the memoirs, he is always careful to shake the dust from his cloak when he has had to acknowledge meeting (and, in truth, making common cause) with the cardsharpers Afflisio or Talvis — for although, as rogues, they have to meet on the same plane, they come from different worlds. He, Casanova, is from an upper world, a cultured world; they come from below from nowhere. Casanova thus resembles the sometime student Schiller’s sententious robber-captain, Karl Moor, who despises his confederates Spiegelberg and Schufterle because they have a positive liking for their rough and bloody trade, to which he has taken from a misguided enthusiasm, in order to revenge himself for the baseness of the world. In the same way Casanova always energetically dissociates himself from the mob of common rogues, in whose figures the splendid, the distinguished profession of adventurer forfeits its splendor and its distinction. No, verily, our friend Giacomo would have us regard as noble that which the ordinary cit looks on as dishonorable, and the stickler for propriety as revolting. He finds a philosophical justification for the adventurer’s career. Far from being an unsavory business it is, for him, a fine art. According to him, for the philosopher here below there is no other moral duty than to amuse himself to the top of his bent at the cost of the blockheads, to dupe the vain, cheat the simple, relieve misers of their superfluous wealth, make cuckolds of the husbands — in a word, play the part of envoy of divine justice and punish all the follies of this world. Thus, for him, fraud is not merely a fine art, but a supreme moral duty; and, as a worthy outlaw, he practices it with an excellent conscience and incomparable self-satisfaction.

  If we are to believe Casanova, he did not become an adventurer simply because he was short of money and had inherited a slothful disposition, but from temperament, fired by genius. Having had a talent for acting handed down to him by his father and his mother, he made the whole world into his stage, of which Europe was the center. For him, as for Til Eulenspiegel of old, to deceive his fellows, to make fools of them, came by nature, and he could not live except in a carnival atmosphere of dominoes and jesting. Again and again, a hundred times over, he had a chance of entering some respectable occupation, of settling down in a warm and well-lined nest; no temptation of this kind could induce him to make himself at home in a respectable occupation. If you were to offer him millions, high office and a dignified position, he would not accept them; he wished always to remain in his own element. He has good reason, therefore, for the pride with which he distinguishes himself from other adventurers. He is urged on to his madcap exploits, not by desperation, but by sheer delight in what he is doing. Furthermore, it is true enough that he did not originate like Cagliostro from a foul country hovel, or like Count Saint-Germain from utterly unknown beginnings which we may assume to have been equally malodorous. Messer Casanova was certainly born in lawful wedlock, and from a family in tolerably good repute. His mother, nicknamed “La Buranella,” was a famous cantatrice, who was acclaimed in all the opera houses of Europe, and ultimately secured a permanent appointment at the court theater in Dresden. His brother Giambattista’s name is mentioned in every history of art as a noted pupil of Raphael Mengs, who was still regarded as a great artist at the close of the eighteenth century. This youngest Casanova’s battle canvases can be seen in the leading galleries. The second son, Francisco, was likewise a painter of considerable renown. Giacomo’s other relatives pursued dignified avocations, that of lawyer, priest, and the like.

  We see, then, that our Casanova did not come from the gutter, but sprang from the same artistic and variegated stratum of the burgher class as Mozart and Beethoven. Like them, he had had the advantage of an excellent general education. Having the gift of tongues he was able, amid all the scrapes of his youth and despite his premature amorous escapades, to learn Latin, Greek, French, and Hebrew, with a little Spanish and English thrown in — although for thirty years the German language remained outside his ken. He excelled in mathematics no less than in philosophy. He was a competent theologian, preaching his first sermon in a Venetian church when he was not yet sixteen years old. As a violinist, he earned his daily bread for a whole year in the San Samuele theater. When he was eighteen, so runs the tale, he became doctor of laws in the University of Padua — though down to the present day the Casanovists are still disputing whether the degree was genuine or spurious. This much is certain, that he must have had many advantages of a university education, for he was well informed in chemistry, medicine, history, philosophy, literature, and, above all, in the more lucrative (because more perplexing) sciences of astrology and alchemy. In addition, the handsome, nimble young fellow early became skilled in all the less intellectual arts that were then proper to a gentleman, such as dancing, fencing, riding, and card playing. If we add to these acquirements that he had an amazingly good memory, so that in all his life he never forgot a face, and never failed in the ability to recall anything he had heard, read, uttered, or seen, we have the picture of a man with quite exceptional endowments: almost a savant, almost a poet, almost a philosopher, almost a gentleman.

  But this “almost” was for Casanova the heel of Achilles. He was almost everything: a poet and yet not wholly one, a thief and yet not a professional one. He strove hard to qualify for the highest intellectual rank, and strove hard to qualify for the galleys; yet he never succeeded in attaining perfection. As universal dilettante, indeed, he was perfect, knowing an incredible amount of all the arts and all the sciences; but he lacked one thing, and this lack made it impossible for him to become truly productive. He lacked will, resolution, patience. Let him study the books of some specialty for a year, and you will find no better jurist, no more brilliant historian. He might become a professor of any science, so quickly and accurately does his brain work. But he has no taste for thoroughness. A confirmed gamester, he finds serious application impossible; intoxicated with the wine of life, he revolts against commonplace perseverance. He never wants to be anything, for he is content to seem to be everything. The semblance suffices him, since it deceives his fellows, to cheat whom is an inexhaustible delight. Experience has taught him that a little learning is enough. In any domain, no matter what, where he has the first elements of knowledge, a splendid assistant springs to his aid — his stupendous impudence, his unchallengeable self-confidence, his swell-mobsman’s courage. Whatever Casanova undertakes, he never admits that he is a novice in the enterprise. He promptly assumes the manners of an expert, plays the swindler or cardsharper to perfection, and can almost always extricate himself from a tangle. In Paris, Cardinal de Bernis asks him whether he knows anything about lotteries. He is as ignorant of them as a babe unborn, but it need hardly be said that he answers glibly in the affirmative, appears before a committee, and, with his unrivalled gift of the gab, unrolls financial schemes as if he had been a bank manager for the last twenty years. He is in Valencia when the text of an Italian opera is missing. Casanova sits down and writes one offhand. Beyond a doubt if he had been asked to write the music as well as the libretto, he would have sharked up something out of the old operas. In Russia, he presents himself to Catherine the Great as a reformer of the calendar and a learned astronomer. In Courland, a no less ready-made expert, he inspects the mines. Playing the chemist, he recommends to the republic of Venice a new method of dyeing silk. In Spain, he poses as a land reformer and a colonizer. He drafts for Emperor Joseph II an elaborate scheme to prevent usury. He writes comedies for the duke of Waldstein; constructs the tree of Diana and similar specimens of alchemist hocus-pocus for the Marchioness of Urfé; and he opens Madame de Rumain’s treasure chest with the key of Solomon. He buys shares for the French government. In Augsburg, he presents himself as Portuguese ambassador; in France, he is by turns a manufacturer and the pimp who keeps the royal “deer park” supplied; in Bologna, he writes a pamphlet on medicine; in Trieste, he pens a history of Poland and translates th
e Iliad into ottava rima. He has the talent for doing anything in the world without making himself look ridiculous. If we glance through the list of his posthumous writings, we fancy that they must be those of a universal philosopher, of an encyclopedist, of a new Leibnitz. Here is a long novel, side by side with the opera Odysseus and Circe, an attempt at doubling the cube, a political dialogue with Robespierre. If you had asked him to give a proof of the existence of God or to write a hymn in praise of chastity, he would not have hesitated for a moment.