Casanova's Women (37 page)

How much did the marquise know of Casanova's other amorous activities? Without doubt he was discreet about his other women and, with equal discretion, she never questioned him about what he did when they were not together, a quality he considered a great virtue on her part. She would not have been aware of his secret engagement to Manon Balletti, or of his crush on beautiful, twenty-one-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, whom he was intent on seducing.

Happy to flirt with him as she was, Giustiniana was not really interested in Casanova. Although her Venetian mother was trying to marry her off to a wealthy man she detested – France's Farmer General, arts patron Alexandre le Riche de la Pouplinière, she was already pregnant by her secret lover, Venetian nobleman Andrea Memmo, whom she had been forced to leave behind in Venice. Since she knew that Casanova was a friend of Memmo's Giustiniana turned to him for advice about procuring an abortion – a mark both of her desperation and of the confidence the adventurer inspired in women. He discreetly consulted the Marquise d'Urfé who gave him Paracelsus's recipe for an aroph or unguent made of powdered saffron, myrrh and honey, which, she said, smeared on to a cylinder of the appropriate size and inserted into the vagina so
as to sexually excite a woman, would infallibly bring on menstruation. Aware that this advice was ridiculous, it suited Casanova's purpose – to pass it on to the seven-months pregnant Giustiniana. On the spur of the moment he added that the aroph was most effective when mixed with sperm that had not lost its body-heat and administered three or four times a day for five or six days; and because Memmo was not available to administer it, Casanova offered to move into the Hôtel de Bretagne, where Giustiniana was staying with her family, and administer it himself. At first she laughed at him. Several days later, however, she consented, and the aroph was duly administered, with evident sexual satisfaction on both sides, two or three times a night in her chambermaid's garret under the hotel's eaves. But despite repeated applications, it did not bring on a miscarriage.

Rather than abandon Giustiniana to her fate – and fearing perhaps that he would be blamed for her pregnancy – Casanova arranged through his well-connected friend Madame du Rumain both for the Venetian to take refuge during her confinement in a convent outside Paris, and for her proposed marriage to de la Pouplinière to be dropped. He pressed a gift of 200 louis on the pregnant woman, and, at great risk to himself, even helped her to abscond from the Hôtel de Bretagne. The whole Giustiniana affair, which could have led to Casanova's downfall, shows him at his most manipulative, but also at his most generous. He was capable of remarkable friendship and selflessness when he truly liked a woman – though perhaps not great honesty or loyalty towards his old friend Memmo.

The Marquise d'Urfé, in turn, would do anything for Casanova, but she would not lift a finger for her own flesh and blood. When Casanova was imprisoned overnight for debt in August 1759 she personally went to Paris's Fors L'Evêque prison, bailed him out for the sum of 50,000 francs, and then used her influence to ensure that the case was quashed. Yet when her only surviving grandson Achille was effectively orphaned on his father's death two years later, the marquise refused to accept responsibility for him, and he
remained at the d'Urfé château of La Bâtie in the Loire valley with a lawyer acting as his guardian. By now wearing a large magnet around her neck on the Comte de Saint-Germain's advice in the belief that it would draw lightning down on her and thus raise her up to the sun, the marquise thought only of her spiritual regeneration, Giuseppe and her guru Casanova. When he suddenly left Paris for Holland again at the end of September 1759 – his purpose was as much to escape Manon and his mounting debts as to do business for the French government – his departure must have been a blow for her; her relatives, on the other hand, who had by now become highly suspicious of Casanova's power over the marquise, were relieved that he had gone.

As he travelled restlessly through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France over the next few years, the marquise supplied Casanova with letters of introduction; used her influence at court to intrigue on his behalf; bought him expensive diamonds, watches, snuffboxes and lace when he briefly returned to Paris in the summer of 1761 (unfortunately for him they were stolen by his faithless servant Costa); provided him with an elegant apartment in the rue du Bac, which she furnished with ancient tapestries depicting the Great Work; and, most importantly, bank-rolled his travels to the tune of hundreds of thousands of francs. None of this made Casanova grateful. On the contrary, he described her in his memoirs as ‘the miserly Mme d'Urfé, who was obsessed with preaching economy to me'.
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Comic, pathetic, criminal and cruel in equal measure, Casanova's ‘divine operation' to regenerate the Marquise d'Urfé as a man began in January 1762 when they spent three weeks closeted together in the rue du Bac making ‘the necessary preparations'. These began with ‘paying the appropriate devotions to each of the seven planetary geniuses on the days which were consecrated to them':

 

After these preparations, I would go to a place which would be made known to me by the inspiration of the geniuses, and take a virgin, the daughter of an adept, and impregnate her with a male
child by a method which was only known to the brothers of the Rosy Cross. This boy would be born alive, but with only a sensitive soul.
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Mme d'Urfé must receive him into her arms at the instant he came into the world, and keep him with her in her bed for seven days. At the end of seven days, she would die, with her mouth glued to that of the child who, by this means, would receive her intelligent soul.

After this permutation, it would fall to me to care for the infant with the mastery that was known to me, and as soon as the child had attained its third year, Mme d'Urfé would become conscious again, and then I would begin to initiate her into a perfect knowledge of the Great Doctrine.

The operation must take place on the day of a full moon in April, May or June. Above all, Mme d'Urfé must make a will in due form leaving everything she had to the child, whose guardian I was to be until his thirteenth year.
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In short, Casanova's plan consisted almost entirely of quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo spiced up with a smattering of Aristotelian philosophy and large dollops of thinly-disguised self-interest on his part. His intention was not merely to pander to the marquise's whims but to seize hold of her entire fortune, and during his travels he acquired a motley collection of accomplices to help him do so. They included Giuseppe Bono, a corrupt banker and silk merchant resident in Lyon; Giacomo Passano, a Genoese adventurer, actor and painter of erotic miniatures whom he met in Livorno; and Marianna Corticelli, a talented young Bolognese dancer he picked up in Florence.

La Corticelli, Casanova's
petite friponne de Bologne
or ‘little Bolognese rogue' as his friend Count Trana called her, was scarcely more than a child when he first encountered her in November 1760. Yet she was already heading down the short road that led from dancing to prostitution. In the city to perform alongside Casanova's old love, Teresa Lanti, at the Teatro della Pergola, Corticelli was accompanied by her brother and her mother, Laura
Gigli, a woman so poor that she could not afford enough bedcovers for her children and was consequently willing to exploit them at the first opportunity. Pushy, cocksure and full of spirit, ‘the little madcap', as Casanova described Corticelli, won his interest as much by her sense of humour as by the fact that ‘she was thirteen years old, and only looked ten'. But even though he had obviously not lost his fondness for very young girls, the young dancer did not inspire any great passion in Casanova; her main attraction was that she made him laugh. For her part, she seems to have tolerated their sexual relationship without enjoying it: in bed with him she was humorous, compliant and yet passionless. Casanova had his uses, the greatest of them being as a provider of food, wine, a brazier to heat the freezing cold inn room where she slept naked under thin sheets beside her brother, and hard cash, with which she immediately bought herself a warm fur cloak. Rich enough to make people bow to his every whim, Casanova also intervened on Corticelli's behalf with the impresario at the Pergola, who had pledged to give her a pas-de-deux to dance in the second opera, but had not honoured the contract.

Sought by the Florentine authorities because of his involvement in some shady business deal in the city, Casanova carried Corticelli off towards Bologna without telling her mother; when Laura caught up with the fugitives she complained that his behaviour was beyond a joke. In Bologna, the family's home and a city well known for its prostitutes, Corticelli acted as Casanova's pimp, procuring him girls of her own age who provided him with such delicious pleasures that he still remembered them wistfully in his old age. He left Bologna seven days later, promising Corticelli that he would visit her in Prague, where she was engaged to dance for a year, and then take her to Paris with him.

After a year in Prague, Corticelli received a letter from Casanova asking her and her mother to meet up with him in Metz. There, in February, he informed them of his plan to involve Corticelli in the Marquise d'Urfé's regeneration operation by passing her off as a virgin countess descended from the Lascaris family, with whom the
d'Urfés had intermarried during the sixteenth century. After a few weeks spent coaching his protégée in her new role, and with Laura reluctantly posing as a servant, Casanova conducted mother and daughter to Pontcarré, thirty kilometres east of Paris, where he had arranged to meet the Marquise d'Urfé at one of her many homes. The Château de Pontcarré was an ancient fortress with turreted corners, surrounded by a moat teeming with vicious gnats. Warned to expect their arrival, the marquise had the drawbridges lowered and stood under the gateway surrounded by her household ‘like an army general ready to surrender the place to us with all the honours of war'.
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Surrender was unnecessary – Casanova had already conquered her. She greeted her long-lost ‘relative' the Countess of Lascaris with effusive tenderness, ran through their genealogy to explain just how they were related, and had a bed made up for her in her own room. Corticelli behaved as if to the manner born, chattering away graciously in French to her hostess and captivating Giuseppe Pompeati, now known as the Count of Aranda, whom the marquise had brought to Pontcarré with her. Since it was immediately apparent that Corticelli had fallen for the youth, Casanova decided to get rid of him.

On the fourteenth day of the April moon, the first stage of the marquise's regeneration went ahead as planned. Casanova, the charlatan orchestrating it, went to bed and ordered the marquise to bring Corticelli to his room. Having undressed the so-called virgin countess, anointed her with perfumes and draped her in a magnificent veil, the marquise watched while Casanova ‘deflowered' her and supposedly impregnated her with the male child into whose body her own soul was eventually to be transferred. But when, on the last day of the moon, Casanova consulted his numerical oracle, it declared – for safety's sake – that the countess had not become pregnant after all because Aranda had been watching the secret ceremony from behind a screen. The oracle went on to predict that the ceremony could be repeated successfully outside France during the full moon in May, but only if Aranda was sent at least one hundred leagues away from Paris for a
year, accompanied by a tutor, a manservant and all the appropriate appurtenances. Since she was determined that nothing should stand in the way of her regeneration, the marquise immediately sent Aranda to stay with one of her relatives in Lyon.

Never able to support a rival in the bedroom, Casanova had used his oracle to separate his godson from Corticelli. She was furious. From now on she decided to look after her own interests. As, accompanied by a retinue of liveried servants and retainers, they made their way towards Aix-la-Chapelle, where the mystical operation was to be repeated, the strained relationship between them grew worse. Outwardly, Corticelli continued to behave like a countess, charming everyone she met including Teresa Imer's old lover the Margrave of Bayreuth and his daughter the Duchess of Württemberg. Towards Casanova, however, she was hostile and difficult, and at a ball in Aix she deliberately embarrassed him by dancing more like the showgirl she was than the aristocrat she was pretending to be. The marquise noticed nothing amiss: following the ball she gave Corticelli a casket containing diamond earrings, a jewelled watch and a ring set with a fifteen-carat rose diamond. Together these were worth in the region of 60,000 francs – a vast amount to a penniless theatrical family. Afraid that the dancer and her mother would abscond with the jewels before the second operation, Casanova confiscated everything. Incandescent with rage, Corticelli, who now claimed she was already pregnant by one of her admirers in Prague, threatened to tell all to the marquise and expose Casanova's criminal intentions. Casanova threatened to keep the jewels himself – which in fact he did; having dared to stand up to him, Corticelli would never see her valuable diamonds again. Furthermore he immediately convinced the Marquise d'Urfé that her relative the Countess Lascaris had been bewitched by a black spirit and had gone mad; nothing she said was to be believed any more. Consequently, when Corticelli carried out her threat to denounce him, the marquise merely laughed at her.

Since Corticelli had become such an unreliable accomplice, Casanova decided to postpone the regeneration operation until a
replacement for her could be found. He advised the marquise that they must write for guidance to a spirit named Selenis who lived on the moon. In an elaborate hoax ceremony conducted in a house outside Aix, the marquise and Casanova bathed naked together by moonlight in a large bath filled with perfumed water, then burned aromatic herbs and recited mystical prayers. Spouting meaningless words which she devoutly repeated after him, Casanova burned her letter to Selenis in a juniper-scented flame. Ten minutes later, an answering letter appeared as if by magic on the surface of the water (Casanova had written it out earlier in silver ink on green glazed paper, and had smuggled it into the bath). The spirit informed the disappointed marquise that her regeneration would finally take place in Marseille the following spring, with the aid of a being named Querilinte, one of the three leaders of the Rosy Cross and yet another of Casanova's inventions.