Casanova's Women (4 page)

Dwarfing all of these substantial achievements, which Casanova is justly proud of, is a huge manuscript for which he fails to find a publisher. Entitled simply
Histoire de Ma Vie Jusqu'à L'An 1797 – Story of My Life Until the Year 1797
– it is Casanova's autobiography. And it is a masterpiece, all 4,545 pages of it.

Story of My Life
absorbs all of Casanova's pent-up creativity from the day in 1789 he begins writing it as an act of desperation, ‘the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying with grief'. Unable to break out of his Bohemian prison in the same way he once famously broke out of Venice's Leads, he escapes in the only way possible: by time-travelling through his past. It is a past he has carried with him into the future in his phenomenal memory and written down in notebooks and ledgers which, by the time he arrives in Dux, fill a good third of his travelling trunks. Old correspondence, descriptions of places he has visited, images of friends and acquaintances, journeys he has taken, the dates he arrived and departed from cities, what he saw there and where he stayed, his thoughts on life and literature, skirmishes he has been caught up in, gossip he has been told, adventures he has enjoyed, the misdeeds he has committed, the women he has loved – the road-map of his life is all there, an array of colourful fragments.

Working ten to twelve hours a day year in, year out, Casanova pieces these fragments back together, reliving every breathtaking moment of his existence, both good and bad. Committed to telling the truth as he experienced it, he spares nobody, least of all himself.
Story of My Life
is not intended to be a rose-tinted portrait of its
hero and his world but, on the contrary, as accurate and well-rounded a picture of his flawed life and times as he is able to set down. His cast of hundreds includes rogues, aristocrats, bishops, kings, actors, servants, children, shopkeepers, desperate women and outright crooks (among them one of his own brothers). Although they leap off every page they are all overshadowed by one towering presence: Casanova himself. For his razor-sharp pen dissects his own character with the same ruthlessness and psychological insight with which it slices apart that of everyone else.

The result is astounding. Casanova is both hero and villain of the piece, an observer and a participant, at once the circus performer, the audience and the ringmaster who puts himself through the hoops. He speaks of his own love of truth, and at the same time admits to deceit and lying. He praises his virtues, and also brags about his many vices. He boasts of his insufferable pride and intelligence, and yet strips bare his soul to reveal his deepest insecurities. He confesses to being both the architect of his fortune and the man who undermined its foundations, to taking advantage of other people's stupidity, and to letting others get the better of him. He tells of giving away his last penny to help a woman in need, but also of emptying his friends' purses to satisfy his own, transient, selfish whims.

Most revealing of all, Casanova recounts in detail and with great relish and feeling, how he wooed, seduced, loved and parted from some hundreds of women. Descriptions of his love affairs take up a good third of the work.

Angela and Marta. Manon and Donna Lucrezia. Nanetta, Caterina and Marina. Bellino, Bettina and Teresa. Sophia and Lucia. Leonilda and Marcolina. The Charpillon and the Corticelli. Jeanne Camus de Pontcarré de la Rochefoucauld de Lascaris, otherwise known as the Marquise d'Urfé. Henriette. These women will go down in history as among the most important of his conquests. But there are scores and scores of others too numerous to mention in detail, many of them all but obliterated by the dense mist of the past. Madame Dubois. Doña Ignacia. Hedwige. Sara. Esther.
Signora F. Rosalie … Their names – sometimes real, at other times invented – are scattered two-deep across the one hundred and forty-three chapters of Casanova's manuscript. For the most part theirs are not famous names like Voltaire's or Catherine the Great's. But neither are they trophy names inscribed in some roue's little black book.

On the contrary, Casanova's women are unforgettable human beings whose own histories are sometimes as vividly and lovingly recounted as the adventurer's own. Just as Casanova the lover once kissed their dewy skin with breathless abandon, Casanova the writer breathes life into their shadows. He describes what they looked like and where they came from, what they did for a living, if anything, and how much they enjoyed themselves in bed. Where they have grown old Casanova rejuvenates them. When they are dead he resurrects them. Changing nothing in most cases but their identities – discretion remains one of his greatest virtues – Casanova undresses his women on paper just as he once undressed them before taking them to bed, and he exposes their private thoughts and most intimate moments to the public gaze.

Angela is a prissy virgin and stubbornly intends to remain so until the day she is married. Nanetta and Marta are disobedient sisters with a healthy sexual curiosity. Bellino forsakes her sex in order to make a living. Marina is a nun with a libido that far outstrips her religious conviction. Bettina's attempts to express her sexuality are destined to end in disaster, and Lucia's naive belief that men actually mean what they say leads to her downfall. Manon is a clinging vine, Donna Lucrezia a sexually liberated wife who is lucky to have the most understanding husband in the world. Teresa is the female impresario of an exclusive and successful night club, and an appalling mother whose daughter excites Casanova even though he happens to be her father. Marianne de Charpillon will all but destroy the adventurer, and Marianna Corticelli will make the mistake of retaliating when he tries to double-cross her. Jeanne Camus de Pontcarre de la Rochefoucauld de Lascaris, the Marquise d'Urfé, is as credulous as her name is long. Henriette is refined,
beautiful, daring and clever. She is the love of Casanova's life, and the woman who describes him – after she leaves him – as ‘the most honourable man I have ever met'.

In the future Casanova's biographers will accept his version of his relationships with these women. But in any love affair there are at least two versions of the truth. What do Casanova's women really think of the great seducer? How is he different from the other men they encounter? And what effect does meeting him have on their lives? Read between the lines of
Story of My Life
, or search deep in the archives, and it is possible to hear some of their voices, voices which have been silent until now. They speak of a man who undoubtedly loves women but who plucks virginities as lightheartedly as if they are wildflowers in the field, regardless of the consequences. A man whose behaviour often passes the loose boundaries of eighteenth-century sexual decorum. A man who preys on the vulnerable, who uses coercion and emotional blackmail to get what he wants. A man of forty who manages to convince himself that a twelve-year-old Russian virgin whom he buys off her peasant parents for a hundred roubles is passionately in love with him. A man who treats women with the utmost respect – unless he does not deem them worthy of it. A man who claims to abhor violence towards women yet on occasions resorts to it. A man who will fake an orgasm rather than lose face. A man who promises women the world, yet consistently flees after failing to deliver, leaving behind him a mountain of broken pledges, a lake brimming with despair. A seducer who, if he was operating today, might well be in prison for breach of promise, incest, fraud, paedophilia, grievous bodily harm and rape.

Each of Casanova's women is entirely different from the others. Each experiences another side of his character, and only a few of them ever meet. What they have in common is that they are all seduced in one way or another by Giacomo Casanova, and it is upon their naked backs that he will build his reputation as the greatest womaniser who has ever lived.

There are certain situations in life to which I have never been able to adapt myself. In the most brilliant company, if but a single member of it looks me up and down, I fall apart; I become bad-tempered and foolish. It is a weakness
.
¹

ON THE EVENING of Friday 2 April 1734; Giacomo Casanova followed his mother Zanetta out of the family's tall, narrow house on Venice's Calle della Commedia, past the back of the theatre where she worked, across the large
campo
where he often played with his brothers and sisters and into the network of quays and passages that led towards the Piazza San Marco. In front of them strode a porter carrying a small travelling trunk on his shoulder. In it were all Giacomo's clothes and possessions. That day the boy had celebrated his ninth birthday, and now his childhood was to end for ever.

As always, Venice looked magical at night. The inky canals danced with golden reflections, white mist swirled under the
bridges, and the doorways of the grand palazzi were guarded by blazing orange flambeaux. Here and there shutters were thrown open up above, and music and laughter drifted from the lighted windows. Although the Lent Carnival had officially ended a few weeks earlier, the party atmosphere in Venice always continued for a good six months of the year, and revellers wearing white masks and black tricorn hats still swarmed through the streets, sweeping past the child in their full-length cloaks and lending a sinister air to the fairy-tale scene. Some glided silently, like ghosts stalking the living. Others stood in the shadows of doorways, locked in embraces with other masked figures, their curved papier-mache noses clashing like buffalo horns. Yet others lurched along arm-in-arm with groups of friends, smelling strongly of drink and singing and laughing as if they did not have a single care.

One day Giacomo would be one of these happy-go-lucky, pleasure-seeking adults. For the present, he lived in a frightening world over which he had no control. A few months previously he had seen his father collapse in agony from what the doctors could only diagnose as an abscess in his head. Two physicians had administered medicines which had sent thirty-six-year-old Gaetano Casanova into agonising convulsions, and his horrible screams had torn through the neighbourhood. The powerful authoritarian figure who had only recently threatened to beat Giacomo for stealing a prism from his optics workshop on the ground floor of the house had suddenly been reduced to a bedridden invalid upstairs. Realising that he was dying, he had summoned the entire family to his bedside, along with Zuane, Alvise and Michele Grimani, the three patrician brothers who were his family's patrons. Between convulsions, Gaetano had blessed all of his children and made the noblemen promise to protect them after his death. Then he had made his wife Zanetta swear that she would never allow any of them to go on the stage as they had both done.

After a week of intense suffering, Gaetano Casanova had died on 18 December 1733. Two months later his widow had given birth to yet another child. Zanetta already had three sons – eight-year-old
Giacomo, six-year-old Francesco and three-year-old Giovanni – and two daughters – two-year-old Faustina and one-year-old Maria-Maddalena – so now there were six little fatherless Casanova children, and since Giacomo was the eldest no one, not even his beloved grandmother Marcia, paid much attention to him any more. Everything around Giacomo had changed, and not for the better as far as he was concerned. His mother now headed the household, and it was she who suddenly decided that he should be sent away from Venice to school. Giacomo had always suspected that she did not like him very much, for she never seemed pleased by anything he did, often ignored him and rarely spoke to him except in an impatient tone. Now here was the proof, if proof were needed, that Zanetta favoured his younger brothers and sisters over him: out of the six children, he alone was being exiled from Venice. His grandmother told him that it was for his own good, but how could this be true?

As his mother strode ahead of him down the busy Salizzada San Moisé, a beautiful but determined figure swathed in a black cloak with a black lace
zendale
draped over her head, Giacomo struggled to keep up with her so as not to anger her any more than he must already have done. But there was little point: his fate was sealed; he was doomed. Giving up, he trailed slowly after her into the wide open plain of the Piazza San Marco, Venice's pulsing heart. Lit by scores of flambeaux, the huge square was as bright and crowded at night as it was at midday. Grand patrician gentlemen in embroidered coats and wigs, drunken English milords clutching wine-bottles in their hands, merchants from the East, Jewish businessmen from the ghetto – the cosmopolitan crowd that assembled here every night, as if in a vast ballroom, all turned to look at the beautiful actress, even the masked women milling around the open-air haberdashery stalls or sitting at tables in the crowded cafés underneath the colonnades, where fiddlers strode among them, playing scratchy tunes on their violins.

Walking fearlessly past the towering campanile that loomed over the far end of the square, Zanetta Casanova turned into the
Piazzetta and walked purposefully over to the waterfront, where the porter was waiting for them with Giacomo's trunk. Here she shooed Giacomo aboard a houseboat built in the form of a large gondola. This
burchielh
would sail overnight across the lagoon and down the Brenta Canal to Padua, she explained in a strained voice, and Padua was the city where he was to live from now on. Inside, the vessel was like a small but sumptuous house. There were chairs and even sofas, and drapes of heavy brocade, and mirrors made of Murano glass suspended between the large windows. Two people Giacomo knew were already on board: Alvise Grimani, the priest who had presided over his father's deathbed; and his late father's friend, poet Giorgio Baffo, the man who had advised Zanetta to send Giacomo away.