Casanova's Women (33 page)

Was it any wonder that Manon complained Casanova had no time for her? Unfortunately her litany of justified reproaches was guaranteed to make him want to be with her even less. ‘She could not conceive how I could defer marrying her, if I truly loved her,' he wrote disingenuously. ‘She kept saying that I was deceiving her.'
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Manon was too young to have any perspective on the unpleasant situation: although her fiancé made her increasingly miserable she was still fixated by the idea that her only chance of a happy future lay with him.

Carried away by his seemingly unstoppable success both with women and in business, Casanova continued to spend and womanise with reckless abandon throughout the first half of 1759. His outgoings would have financially crippled the richest aristocrat, not least the cost of maintaining each one of his twenty-strong factory workforce in their own establishment. By now the wallpaper business itself was in dire trouble: the continuing war with England over their American possessions had been ruinous for the French luxury goods business, leaving Casanova with a huge stockpile of unsold chinoiserie panels. He was spending what he did not have, and the tradesmen, who until now had allowed him almost unlimited credit, were at last becoming nervous and demanding to be paid. When, on 23 August, he was suddenly arrested for debt and imprisoned in the city's Fors L'Evêque jail, Manon loyally sent him the valuable diamond earrings he had given her on his return from Holland. Their worth was not enough to secure his freedom, and in the end it was the wealthy Marquise d'Urfé who bailed Casanova out two days later to the tune of 50,000 francs, and carried him off from prison in her gold carriage.

Slightly subdued by this salutary experience, Casanova returned Manon's earrings to her and promised her that he would give up his silk-painting business and its female workforce – a financial necessity, as it happened. But selling the factory was not as simple as he
had anticipated: three days after he sold off his shares in it to a man named Jean Gamier, one of the employees ran off with the liquid assets, and Casanova was faced with a legal suit for the return of Garnier's money. At about the same time, he was presented with a court action over a dubious bill of exchange in which he had been involved. Whether or not he was guilty of this particular crime, he knew that his period of grace was passing and that the time had come for him to leave France for a while. Promising a tearful Manon yet again that he would do his best to earn a great deal of money and then invest it wisely for their future when he returned, Casanova left Paris for a second trip to Holland at the end of September on another financial mission for the French government; despite the legal proceedings against him, France's ministers continued to trust him to negotiate loans on their behalf. Although he led Manon to believe that he would be back before December, Casanova's actions spoke otherwise: before leaving the city he resigned from his position as director of the lottery, gave up his apartments and sold off his carriage and his horses. He arrived in Holland with at least 100,000 francs in his strong box and an equal amount in jewellery.

Convinced that she would see him again in a matter of weeks, Manon was nevertheless distraught at his departure. Her whole world seemed to be collapsing around her. On 13 September her brother Antonio had been seriously injured by a stray bullet during a performance of Veronese's
Camille Magicienne
at the Comédie-Italienne. A fortnight later he was only just well enough to be lifted from his bed so that the sheets could be changed, and although he was starting to take a little soup he would never make a complete recovery. Manon visited him regularly, but at night she took refuge at La Petite Pologne, where Madame Saint-Jean looked after her, preparing nutritious meals to help her regain all the weight she had recently lost. Despite the rumours that were now circulating in Paris about Casanova's financial dealings, Manon's belief in him remained unshaken. Her ‘dear Giacometto' could rest assured that ‘bad talk, postponements, lies, nothing can change my heart, which is all yours, and which has no wish for a change of master.'
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The rest of Paris was less forgiving. Once it was known that Manon was staying at La Petite Pologne, a rumour spread that she was living there with Casanova, who was not in Holland, but rather in hiding. To a young woman who had kept her reputation and perhaps her virginity intact for two and a half years – rather miraculously, given the nature of her secret fiance's sex-drive – this was an outrageous slur on both their characters. Manon was ‘in a rage, an indignation, a misery which cannot be described,' she wrote to Casanova ‘from petite pologne on 23 8bre 1759 for the last time', as she scribbled incandescently at the top. For honour demanded that she immediately leave the country house where she had all too briefly found contentment: ‘I'm dying of misery,' she confessed, ‘I have it on all sides, I can't hold out any longer I have to give into it; my heart aches. They wish to rob me of my honour. Finally everything contributes to make me pitiable, if I did not love you as much as I do I'd go and stick myself in a convent and never come out again. How evil the world is. How unhappy I am.'
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Manon was friendless and inconsolable. If Casanova were to abandon her now it would be the worst thing that could happen to her. She reassured herself that he was incapable of such a betrayal, but his evasive reply to her laments slightly dented her confidence in him. Instead of being sympathetic, her ‘husband' sounded bored by her complaints, and demanded to know the latest political news from Versailles.

November came and went, but Casanova did not return from Holland, where he was preoccupied with renewing his courtship of the teenage heiress, Esther. Back in Paris, Manon could not sleep. Her reputation was in tatters, but even after so many years of let-downs and disappointment she still hung on her supposed fiance's every word. His letters had the power to turn her mood from depression to elation to guilt in an instant. When jealousy caused her to write a cold letter to him and he wrote back accusing her of doubting his love, she was overwhelmed by contrition. ‘I am ready to make all the reparations you wish,' she wrote to him in the middle of December. ‘Melancholy was the author of my
letter, and not me at all.'
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Casanova was clearly manipulating her from a distance, but Manon did not seem to realise it. She lived only for the moment when ‘my dear Casa, my dear jiacomo (sic), lover, husband, friend, whatever pleases you'
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returned to Paris and made an honest woman of her, as he had been promising to do for years.

The end of 1759 saw no let-up to Manon's suffering. A rumour reached Casanova that she had married an adviser at court – or so he wrote to her, perhaps in an attempt to end their relationship, for by now he was deeply in love with Esther, whose future fortune would be considerable and whose intelligence and charm were, he declared ‘designed to make me forget a thousand Manons'.
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Quick to disabuse him, Manon replied on 20 December that she loved only him. Three months had been too long without him, and she begged him to return in January. Life in the rue du Petit-Lion was unbearably miserable. Antonio was still seriously ill, and she was being shunned by good society. At Christmas very few visitors came to see her, and the only present she received was an almanac. During the final days of the month Manon felt more isolated than ever. ‘You speak to me of your solitude, my dear friend,' she wrote to Casanova on 3 January 1760, ‘but mine has got to the point that I scarcely paid any visits on New Year's Day.' Sadness emanated from every line of her letter, yet by now Manon knew better than to complain: ‘As for me, my very dear husband, I'm keeping well enough since the New Year, I only lack one thing which is really essential to me, and that's my very dear friend whom I love one hundred times more tenderly than I know how to say … Farewell, my dear friend, I kiss you with all my soul and love you with all my heart.'
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Manon's one remaining pleasure lay in receiving Casanova's letters, letters which, despite his passionate feelings for Esther, were as loving that January as they had ever been. Enchanted by them, Manon reassured him on 20 January that her heart was uniquely his: ‘Farewell my most lovable husband,' she wrote, ‘always be like your last letter and you will be madly loved by
nena, nenotola Ballettina. Farewell, my being, my heart, my heart, my heart.'
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All her hope rested on Casanova's expected return at the end of that month, and in order to distract herself in the meantime she decided to stage a series of plays at home with a cast of amateur actors cobbled together out of her few remaining friends, who included the son and daughter of Louis Lambert, the chief of the Bureau de Poste; although Manon had not been allowed to go on the stage professionally, the theatre still ran in her blood.

Casanova did not return at the end of January as he had promised. Instead, at the beginning of February, Manon received a melancholy letter from him informing her that, as his business dealings in Holland had been unsuccessful, he was leaving for Germany and would not be back in Paris for at least another two months. She attempted to sound stoical when she replied on 7 February, filling her letter with comical tales about her rehearsals, but she was unable to hide her deep disappointment, and began her letter with a resigned ‘So my dear husband it is at last decided that I am going to spend a very long time without seeing you.' By now Casanova had been away for more than three months, and she was ‘beginning to grow furiously weary' with his long absence. She had no idea how long it would be until they were together.

In fact, Manon would never see Casanova again. But all the broken promises in the world could not make her stop adoring her beloved Giacometti. ‘You remember very well that I love you, don't you?' she wrote at the end of her letter. ‘Well never forget it my dear friend. Farewell. I kiss you with all my heart and think of you all the time, even when I am studying my roles. 3 kisses for jiacomo.'
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On 29 July 1760, five months and three weeks after writing this loving letter to Casanova, Manon Balletti married François-Jacques Blondel, one of the most influential architects of his day. Like his uncle François Blondel, who had become director of Paris's
Academy of Architecture in 1672, François-Jacques was passionate about providing would-be architects with a broad and thorough education. In 173 7 he had published an important folio on pleasure palaces and interior design,
De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance et de la Décoration des Edifices en General;
in 1740 he had opened his own private school of architecture, L'Ecole des Arts, which was to influence a whole generation of French architects; and between 1752 and 1757 he had published a seminal two-volume work on building design and interior decoration,
L'Architecture française
, one of the first written documents on French architectural theory. Appointed architect to Louis XV in 1755, five years later Blondel was at the very top of his profession, with commissions in Metz and Strasbourg as well as Paris. He had money, status, and a house in the city's rue de la Harpe where he gave well-attended lectures on architecture. But despite his professional success, Blondel was by no means an ideal husband for Manon. At fifty-five years old to her twenty, he was a widower old enough to be her father. He had grown-up sons from his first marriage, one of whom, Georges-François, was an architect and a professor himself, and may already have been married with children of his own.

Casanova's version of events casts little light on the mystery of why Manon married François-Jacques Blondel. The heading to Chapter I, Volume Six of his memoirs, in which he reports the marriage, contains the bald statement
Manon Balletti is unfaithful to me
– this from the man who had been consistently deceiving her with other women for three years. He goes on to describe how, on Christmas Day 1759, he received a large packet from Manon, along with the following letter from her: ‘Be reasonable, and receive the news that I give you calmly. This packet contains all your letters and your portrait. Send me back my portrait, and if you still have my letters, burn them. I count on your honour. Do not think of me any more. For my part, I will do everything in my power to make myself forget you. Tomorrow, at this time, I will be the wife of M. Blondel, Architect to the King, and a Member of his Academy. You
will greatly oblige me if, when you return to Paris, you will pretend not to know me wherever you may meet me.'
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The news that he had been jilted by Manon was, Casanova wrote, a ‘great grief' which crushed his soul and sent him into a two-hour trance followed by a jealous fury in which he contemplated going to Paris to murder Blondel ‘who had dared to marry a girl who belonged to me, and who everyone believed to be my wife'.
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Yet, after only a few hours with Esther, to whom he now showed Manon's love letters (there were then more than 200 of them altogether, of which forty-one now survive) he was already certain that he could begin to forget his fiancée, whom he had already begun to despise and think ‘unworthy of all that I had wanted to do for her'.
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Once again, Casanova could not bear the humiliation of being rejected by a woman. As he later admitted, his pride was hurt more than his heart.

That Casanova received news of Manon's imminent marriage on Christmas Day 1759 in Amsterdam is either poetic licence on his part or a genuine mistake made when he wrote his memoirs more than three decades later. Manon's letters of January and February 1760, which were in his possession, prove that she was not only still in contact with him at that particular time but was also still madly in love with him.

Between 7 February, when she wrote her last love letter to Casanova, and the end of July, when she married Blondel, something had caused Manon to give up the dream she had been nursing since her seventeenth birthday to unite herself for ever with the love of her life. Perhaps she had finally realised that he did not love her, and never had. But now there was a pressing need for her to marry somebody. By 1760 the Comédie-Italienne, with which her family was so closely associated, was in debt to the tune of some 400,000 livres. They had lost Silvia, their main attraction, in 1758, Antonio had never recovered from the accident which had crippled him a year later, and Mario was in personal financial trouble with a number of his creditors. On 26 March 1760, a bailiff entered the Ballettis' house to seize the actor's possessions.
Claiming that everything belonged to his daughter, Mario managed to get rid of him, but the threat of losing their home continued to hang over the family.
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