Casanova's Women (24 page)

Perhaps Henriette was hurt that the lover who had once adored her to distraction had conversed with her for so long without even responding to the timbre of her voice. Alternatively, she may have presumed he was respecting her position by giving no sign that he knew her. After delicately quizzing Marcolina about the nature of her relationship with her companion, Henriette wrote out a note for him, sealed it, gave it to her and made her promise not to hand it to him before they reached Avignon. She wanted Casanova to know that she, at least, had recognised him, but she clearly had no desire for a potentially embarrassing reunion under her family's roof.

In Avignon, Marcolina gave this letter to Casanova along with a message from Henriette that, if he were to return to Aix at some future time, either alone or with a companion, he would be welcome to call on her. Casanova opened the letter with a pounding heart. At the top was written in Italian: ‘To the most honourable man I have met in the world'. The rest of the sheet was blank except for the signature.
Henriette
. The knowledge that he had been in the company of the woman whom he still regarded as
the love of his life and yet had failed to recognise her plunged Casanova into a state of numb shock.

 

To his knowledge, Casanova never again came face to face with Henriette, though six years later he would turn up in her life one last time, as we shall see presently. Discreet until the end, he did not reveal her true identity in his memoirs, and consequently it has intrigued generations of his readers. The facts we know about his greatest love are so few that they can be written down on half a sheet of paper. They are these: Henriette came from Aix-en-Provence where she or her family had a house in the city and a country house situated at the end of an alley of trees either a league or a league and a half north of the Croix d'Or crossroads on the Aix-Marseille road. She was of noble birth. Her family was wealthy and well-connected. She had been educated to a very high standard in a French convent. Like her mother before her, Henriette played the cello, an unusual instrument for women to take up at the time. D'Antoine-Blacas was related by marriage to her husband's family. In the autumn of 1749 she left her husband under threatening circumstances and travelled by boat to Italy where, on one occasion, she signed herself into an inn under the name Anne d'Arci. In February 1750, Henriette returned to Provence via Geneva, where she stopped to collect a substantial amount of money from the Tronchin bankers. Once she was back home, Henriette either lived alone or under the protection of her family – probably her father or brothers, one of whom Casanova refers to in his memoirs as a ‘chevalier' or knight.

By her own admission, Henriette committed three follies in her life, the last of which was absconding from her travelling companion in Rome. Her first folly was presumably her marriage to a man who treated her badly; the second may have been an extramarital affair; her third running away with the Hungarian officer. A possible scenario is that Henriette was mistreated by her husband, was unfaithful to him and ran away to Italy, probably with her lover and wearing his clothes. When their relationship turned sour, she realised the impossibility of surviving indefinitely on her wits and
sought reconciliation with her family. Thereafter Henriette lived separately from her husband, wintering in Aix and spending the summers at the family château near the Croix d'Or with her parents and/or her siblings.

There have been three main contenders for Henriette's chateau, and three possible candidates for the woman herself. Charles Samaran, author of an authoritative early twentieth-century biography of the adventurer, believed that Henriette's house was a château at Luynes, three and a half kilometres from the Croix d'Or, and that Henriette herself was Jeanne-Marie d'Albert de St Hippolyte, the owner's niece, who at the time of Casanova's affair with Henriette was married to Jean-Baptiste Laurent Boyer de Fonscolombe, a lawyer in Aix's parliament. According to the contemporary Casanovist Helmut Watzlawick,
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Henriette was Marie-Anne d'Albertas, the spinster daughter of a well-connected Marseille businessman whose family owned the Pavilion d'Albertas, a pretty hunting lodge close to the Croix d'Or and the village of Bouc-Bel-Air, and whose family motto was
Fata Viam Invenient
– an expression which Casanova uses several times when describing his affair with Henriette.

The third château in the area, and the third candidate for Henriette, were discovered by the Casanova scholar Jean-Louis André in the 1990s, and they remain far and away the most likely candidates.
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At the Croix d'Or crossroads, just before the Pavilion d'Albertas, the Marseille – Aix road splits into two. The old Route Royale heads directly north towards Aix, while the road branching off to the right follows the path of an ancient track through the villages of Bouc-Bel-Air and Gardanne to Luynes, where it rejoins the main road. Three kilometres north of the hilltop village of Gardanne lies the Domaine de Valabre, a large estate upon which is built a sixteenth-century hunting lodge known as the Pavillon de Valabre or the Pavillon des Quatre Tours, and a pretty two-storey seventeenth-century château, restored in the Italianate style in 1733 and set at the end of an avenue bordered with oak trees.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, the Château de
Valabre was an agricultural college; since 1967 it has been the headquarters of the Centre Interrégional de Formation de la Sécurité Civile. Until the 1880s, however, it was a private home and the property of the de Gueidans (or de Gueydans, as the name was sometimes spelled), an ancient family whose links with French royalty went back to the eleventh century when Baron Guy de Gueydan participated in the First Crusade. By the early eighteenth century, the baron's descendants, led by Aix resident Pierre de Gueidan and his son Gaspard, had become one of the most prominent families in Provence. For sixty years Pierre held the post of president of the local Chambre de Comptes. From 1714 onwards his son Gaspard was Aix's most distinguished magistrate and advocate general; and in 1740 King Louis XV nominated him president of the local parliament, a post he retained until 1766.

Gaspard and his wife, Agélique de Simiane, owned a large house in Aix's grand Cours Mirabeau, and in the summer months they retreated to the village of Gardanne, where his father Pierre had in 1683 acquired the ancient Valabre estate. Together Gaspard and Agélique produced at least six children: there were four sons – Joseph, Pierre, Etienne and Timoléon, three of whom became Chevaliers de Malte (Knights of the Maltese Cross) – and two daughters: Anne-Thérèse-Adélaïde born on 14 December 1725; and her younger sister Catherine-Polyxène-Julie, who was born in 1734. Gaspard was justly proud of his beautiful wife and daughters, who appear to have been as musically talented as he was himself. In 1730 he commissioned a portrait of his wife (as ‘Flora') by the fashionable artist Nicolas de Largillière, and five years later he had himself portrayed by Hyacinthe Rigaud playing the bagpipes. This was followed by a painting of his daughters, whose joint portrait
Adélaïde de Gueidan and her sister Polyxène on the harpsichord
now hangs with those of their parents in Aix's Musée Granet.

Originally attributed to Largillière but now to the Aixoise artist Claude Arnulphy, this is a gorgeous portrait of two innocent, well-brought-up young girls with pink cheeks and powdered hair. Both are dressed in elaborate embroidered gowns that show off their
status as the daughters of a wealthy, highly-respected member of society. Catherine-Polyxène is seated at a harpsichord, her hands hovering above the keys while her older sister Adélaïde stands on the left, clutching a rolled-up scroll, presumably of music. What instrument does she play? In the foreground leans what appears to the modern eye to be a violoncello but is in fact a viola da gamba. If Adélaïde is the one who plays this instrument, her talent cannot be illustrated in the picture. For the viola da gamba had to be held between the knees, and to paint a young virgin in such an unladylike pose was unthinkable.

The six-stringed viola da gamba (the name literally means ‘leg viol') was a precursor of the violoncello, and it is almost certainly the instrument played by Casanova's Henriette: for while the violoncello usually took only a supporting role in orchestras in the early eighteenth century, the viola da gamba was regarded as the solo virtuoso instrument. Louis XIV loved its sound so much that he employed two rival viola da gamba players at his court: the prodigious Marin Marais, who composed around 650 works, and Antoine Forqueray, a bizarre, violent man who seldom wrote any of his compositions down. After Forqueray's death his son Jean-Baptiste, a famous player in his own right, collected about thirty of his father's works together and published them in a volume,
Pièces de Viole, avec la Basse Continuë
, which came off the Paris presses in 1747. Since the viola da gamba was losing popularity at the time, Jean-Baptiste dedicated the book to his most illustrious pupil in the hope that she might do something to revive the instrument's popularity. The dedication on the frontispiece reads, ‘A Madame Henriette de France'.

Forqueray's Madame Henriette was none other than Anne-Henriette de Bourbon, one of Louis XV's eight daughters (another of whom was named Adélaïde) and the twin sister of Louise-Elizabeth, whose arrival in Parma to join her husband, the Infante Filippo, coincided with Casanova and Henriette's visit to the city. Around the same age as Casanova's Henriette, and justly proud of her talent on the bass viol, the sophisticated Madame Henriette de
France unabashedly had herself painted several times (by the Parisian court painter Jean-Marc Nattier) with the instrument clearly placed between her legs.

Since Casanova's Henriette and her mother both played the cello or, more likely, the viola da gamba, it is possible that they had acquired Forqueray's book of music; alternatively, Casanova may have bought Henriette a copy of the book when he purchased an instrument for her in Parma. If Henriette was looking for a heroine whose name she might adopt during her flight from home – or if Casanova was searching for a pseudonym for her when he wrote his memoirs – surely Madame Henriette, a royal princess who shared a passion for the same musical instrument and whose sister bore the name Adélaïde, would have been she?

Could Adélaïde de Gueidan have been Casanova's Henriette?

The Château de Valabre, the de Gueidan family's country house, is in the right location near the Croix d'Or crossroads. An inventory of 1734 described the upstairs layout of the buildings as ‘a mass of rooms and dark alcoves'
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which ties in perfectly with Casanova's description of Henriette's bedroom. Born on 14 December 1725, making her eight months younger than Casanova, Adélaïde de Gueidan grew up both at this château and in Aix, where, like Henriette, she was educated at a convent. It appears from her joint portrait with her sister that one of the skills she acquired was playing the viola da gamba. In January 1745, just weeks after her nineteenth birthday, she was married to twenty-nine-year-old Pierre-Louis de Demandolx, the Marquis de Meireste and a moderately well-off nobleman from La Palud in the Alpes de Haute Provence. Interestingly, one of the witnesses to the marriage was the same d'Antoine-Blacas who later recognised Casanova's Henriette in Parma and claimed that he was related to her husband's family. D'Antoine-Blacas, as it turns out, was indeed related by marriage to the Demandolxes of La Palud.
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After her marriage Adélaïde, now the Marquise de Meireste, moved to La Palud to join her husband. It must have been something of a shock for her. Though her in-laws were in her own
father's words ‘a distinguished, even illustrious family,'
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she was far away from her loving parents, in a remote mountainous region where life was far more primitive than it had been in sophisticated Aix. With no relative of her own to protect her, Adélaïde was now at the mercy of her husband and his family. She must have missed her father as much as he obviously missed her. From a distance, Gaspard did what he could to ingratiate himself with his daughter's in-laws by using his influence to secure a place for one of her brothers-in-law in the marines, but for Adélaïde this was not the same as having her father near her, and when he was taken ill she wrote begging him to visit her in the mountains for the good of his health. ‘I know very well that a few doses of the air in La Palud, and above all an embrace from my precious would do me more good than a drink of liquid gold,' Gaspard wrote back to her. ‘I am too far away to apply these panaceas. But whatever wishes I have in this regard I can no longer think of them effectively. The next month will decide it. I do not very much like to delude myself with pandering ideas only to have the displeasure of having them taken away ... As for me, my darling daughter, I can make no better use of the remaining paper than to protest that it's for ever, and without either end or limit, that I am yours.'
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Between 1746 and 1749 Adélaïde gave birth to three children at La Palud: a daughter, Angélique-Anne-Louise, born in October 1746; a son, César-Amable, born in November 1747; and another boy, born in February 1749. Blessed in haste by his paternal grandmother, this third child was not officially baptised until July 1752, when he received two names from his maternal family – Jean, the name of Adélaïde's uncle, and Gaspard, that of her father.

Why was there such a long delay in baptising Jean-Gaspard? And why did the otherwise loving Gaspard de Gueidan, a doting grandfather to Angélique and César, take such a dislike to this grandson? His negative feelings towards little Jean-Gaspard were so out of character that they prompted a letter from his friend Canon Dulard, who simply could not understand his attitude. ‘I do not know why you are so prejudiced against that child,' Dulard wrote
to de Gueidan on 29 December 1758. ‘As for I, who have seen him with totally disinterested eyes, to whom your own feelings had even given an unfavourable impression before the examination, I swear to you, Monsieur, that he pleased me in all respects, and I persist in saying that he is fit to see the light. For the future, if on your side you persist in not valuing him as highly as I do, you can exercise the right that paternity gives you over this boy whom you treat as illegitimate, but I will not hide from you that my heart will bleed over it.'
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