Casanova's Women (9 page)

Amused and perhaps flattered by her charge's jealousy, Bettina hatched a dangerous plan to tease him. One morning she turned up in his bedroom bearing a pair of white stockings that she had knitted for him herself, and insisted on helping him to try them on. When she pulled them up Giacomo's legs she suddenly remarked that his thighs were dirty and, without asking his permission, dipped her sponge into a bowl of warm water and began to wash his loins clean. Higher, higher Bettina washed, with a mixture of curiosity and daring, right to the very top of his legs and under his nightshirt. What happened next shocked both of them: Giacomo
had an erection. ‘Seated on my bed Bettina pushed her zeal for cleanliness too far,' he reminisced in his memoirs, ‘and her curiosity aroused such a voluptuous feeling in me that it only stopped when it was impossible for it to become greater. When I had calmed down I felt like a criminal, and I believed I had to ask for her forgiveness. Bettina, who had not expected that at all, thought for a while and then told me in an indulgent tone that the fault was all hers, but that it would never happen again.'
⁴

The sexual pleasure he had experienced had overwhelmed Giacomo. He was in love for the first time in his life. But to his chagrin Bettina kept away from his bedroom from then on. Deciding that this must be because she loved him back, the twelve-year-old suffered paroxysms of remorse at having committed ‘the most heinous of crimes' in front of her. Concluding that the only way to make up for it was to marry her, he wrote her a letter declaring his feelings. One of his first literary works, he considered it ‘a masterpiece, more than enough to make her adore me and give me preference over Candiani'.
⁵
He simply could not understand why Bettina failed to respond to it.

The rivalry between Giacomo and Candiani came to a farcical head one winter's evening when Antonio and Vincenzo were called away overnight. Desperate to talk to Bettina in private, Giacomo asked her meaningfully to come to his room after everyone else had gone to bed. When she failed to turn up he presumed that she had accidentally fallen asleep and, fearful of waking the guard dog which slept in the hall, he crept barefoot downstairs and sat on a step a few paces away from her locked bedroom door, impatiently waiting for her to wake up and let him in. It was snowing, the hall was freezing, and his limbs soon turned to marble. As the hours passed, Giacomo's temper grew as hot as his body grew cold. When, at dawn, he heard the bolt on Bettina's bedroom drawn back, he staggered forward expecting to fall into her welcoming arms at last. However it was not Bettina who came rushing out of the room but his enemy, Candiani. And when the youth saw Giacomo sitting there, he kicked him outside into the snow.

The humiliation and – as Giacomo experienced it – Bettina's betrayal were too much for him. Hungry for revenge, even murder, he attempted to force his way into her bedroom, but she had already bolted the door from the inside. As he kicked at it petulantly the dog began to bark, waking the entire household. Giacomo ran back upstairs before anyone saw him, and as he lay shivering under the covers he thought of ways to avenge himself for having been ‘deceived, humiliated, ill-treated, become an object of contempt to the happy and triumphant Candiani'.
⁶

Bettina too lay awake, terrified in case Giacomo told anyone what she had been up to. Against the Church's teaching, she had dared to explore her sexuality. If her family found out that Candiani had been in her bedroom all night long her parents would beat her and she would be disgraced in her brother's eyes. Even young Giacomo now despised her. A chaste girl was desirable, pure, and respected by everyone. A sexually active girl, on the other hand, was considered untrustworthy, contemptible and on the road to becoming a harlot. In the words of one anonymous contemporary Englishman, any prospective husband who suspected that his intended was not a virgin should ‘discard her with the greatest speed'.
⁷
‘No charm can supply its place,' advised the writer of
A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady
, published in 1740, on the subject of virginity. ‘Without it, beauty is unlovely, wit is mean and wanton, quality contemptible, and good breeding worthless. She who forfeits her chastity, withers by degrees into scorn and contrition.'
⁸
In Catholic countries, where the most revered woman was the Blessed Virgin Mary, virginity had an almost mystical quality. So-called Virgin's Milk, derived from chalky stone from the Bethlehem grotto where the Virgin Mary was said to have breast-fed baby Jesus, was believed to heal wounds, help lactating mothers, and reduce swellings; its properties were considered so extraordinary that, after the Duchess of Urbino smeared Virgin's Milk all over her body, she announced that she had undergone a ‘magical rejuvenation'.
⁹

‘It is one of the superstitions of the human spirit to have
imagined that virginity could be a virtue,'
¹⁰
the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire wrote at the time Bettina was growing up. However, like female education, this idea was very far from being embraced by Padua's working classes. By daybreak, Bettina's anxiety had sent her into a series of terrifying convulsions which made her whole body arch, and her anxious mother stood by her bed with the servants, attempting to hold her down. When Bettina discovered that an incriminating note Candiani had written to her was missing from one of her pockets (Giacomo had stolen it out of jealousy) her convulsions grew even worse. Professional help was summoned: a midwife who diagnosed hysteria, a condition believed to emanate from the womb; a physician who prescribed a regime of rest and cold baths. Apollonia blamed their old maid, who she believed had cast a spell on her daughter. When Vincenzo and Antonio returned home from their trip, the young priest assembled his religious paraphernalia and attempted to exorcise any devils that might be possessing Bettina, but as he approached her his sister stopped breathing.

Over the next twelve days Bettina stayed in bed, at times lucid, at times delirious, fitfully arching her body and clenching her teeth and hands so tightly that no one could separate them. Two more priests tried to exorcise the devil it was believed had infiltrated her body. The first, Father Prospero da Bolvolenta, a Capuchin monk and the most famous exorcist in Padua, decided to argue theology with her, but when she reasoned better than he did he resorted to beating her with his crucifix. The second, Father Mancia, was a handsome young Dominican with a saintly bearing who was reputed never to have failed in exorcising possessed young women. However, although he sprinkled Bettina with holy water and sat quietly with her for hours on end, he too was unable to force the devil from her soul.

Giacomo watched these bizarre proceedings with a detachment that was exceptional in a boy of his age. In adulthood he would describe his feelings at the time in his polemical work
Confutazione della Storia del Governo Veneto d'Amelot de la Houssaie
. ‘I was dying
at the least to ask a lot of questions,' he wrote of Bettina's possession, ‘but, being so young, I did not have the right to open my mouth; and then my indiscreet questions might have made people suspect me of incredulity, and I could even have been declared an atheist.' In retrospect the possessed girl's behaviour appeared sexual in nature: ‘I observed in Elizabetta a great passion for men when the demons tormented her; and I noted that when the demons attacked her throat she indulged in lewdness and indecent contortions.'
¹¹

Giacomo was secretly convinced that Bettina was putting on an act to draw attention away from her night with Candiani. Perversely, this made her go up in his estimation: since she had the wit to fake a possession in order to escape the consequences of her actions, he felt he could no longer despise her. Bettina had turned herself into one of the heroines of the chapbooks she devoured with such relish: ‘This girl seemed more astonishing to me than those who had been presented as marvels in the novels I had read,'
¹²
Casanova wrote.

As everyone realised a few days later, Bettina really was ill, and dangerously so. For the past twelve days – almost the entire period of her so-called possession – smallpox, the virulent and disfiguring disease which had claimed the life of Giacomo's sister Faustina a few years earlier, had been incubating in her body. Now it broke out in a terrible rash. While Candiani and his fellow-pupils were immediately exiled to a neighbour's house, Giacomo was allowed to remain at home with Apollonia and the patient; presumably he was thought to be immune to the disease, perhaps because he had contracted a mild form of it during his childhood. At Bettina's bedside he developed a life-long passion for medicine, and noted her symptoms with a physician's clinical detachment. Her lovely face, her torso, her legs, her throat, her mouth, even her scalp were soon covered in huge red blisters. Her eyes closed, her body and face all but disappeared under the rash, she smelled of a foul sweat and the only movement Giacomo could discern was the painful rise and fall of her chest.

On the ninth day of Bettina's sickness, Apollonia called the priest and watched as her only daughter received absolution. On the tenth and eleventh days it was feared that she might die at any moment. ‘All her rotting pustules had turned black and suppurating, poisoning the air,' Giacomo noted. ‘No one could bear it except myself, who was desolate at the poor creature's state. It was in this appalling condition that she inspired in me all the tenderness which I showed towards her after her recovery.'
¹³
When, on the thirteenth day, Bettina's pustules began to itch violently, Giacomo repeatedly warned her not to scratch them, telling her that if she did she would become so ugly that no one would ever love her again. ‘I defy all the physicians in the universe to find a more effective deterrent than this against itching for a girl who knows that she has been beautiful and who realises the risk she runs of becoming ugly if she scratches herself,' he later wrote.
¹⁴

Bettina was kept in bed until Easter, and although the red marks left by her blisters did not fade for a year, thanks to Casanova she miraculously escaped the terrible scarring and pitting which was the usual legacy of smallpox. Giacomo's steadfast support – and the few pox marks on his own face, which he contracted despite his relative immunity – earned him more than her gratitude. From now on, despite the difference in their ages, Bettina loved him ‘without feigning, and I loved her without ever seizing a flower which destiny, aided by prejudice, had reserved for her marriage bed'
¹⁵
- that is supposing that Candiani had not already seized it.

Casanova's feelings for Bettina gave him his first taste of the joys and pains of the romantic life. She made him feel loved but, at the same time, put him through agonies of jealousy. She showed him the importance of persisting when one was rejected, and also gave him his first glimpse of women's wiles. Still having what he termed a kind of virginity himself, Casanova learned through her to love, honour and revere virgins – so much so that in the future he would want to deflower as many as he could.

In the spring of 1739 Casanova was fourteen years old. Although he had outgrown his teacher's schoolroom, he still continued to lodge with the Gozzi family in Padua, where he was now enrolled at the city's ancient university studying for a degree in ecclesiastical law; a career in the Church was often pursued by the impecunious younger sons of the aristocracy, and it was one of the few respectable options open to a boy such as Casanova who, thanks to his mother, had by now been educated far beyond his working-class roots. The Bo' or Boeuf, as Padua University was nicknamed after a nearby inn, had once had a reputation for high standards, but it was now a rather ailing institution. ‘Today when universities have declined it is the case of this one still more than others,' Charles de Brosses, writer, philosopher and President of the Parliament of Dijon, wrote of it that year. ‘The students, [once] so impressive in number and strength, are now few, and most of the time the professors lecture to empty benches.'
¹⁶
Instead of studying, the Bo's students ran wild in the town, gambling, brawling and generally disturbing the peace. They seduced the virgin daughters of respectable families, frequented prostitutes and kept the town awake with their late-night antics. Protected by a bevy of historic privileges, they rarely suffered any consequences for their actions, even when they broke the law, for if the
sbirri
, as the local constables were called, dared to intervene when they caused trouble the students hunted them down and threatened them with pistols.

Casanova experienced his first taste of freedom among these students and soon fell in with a bad crowd, most of them older and from wealthier backgrounds. In order not to lose face he spent money he did not have and joined in many of their japes, including gambling and frequenting brothels; but his continuing relationship with Bettina, which had by now reached the petting stage, made him stop short of having sex with a prostitute. Even though his lodgings were still being paid for by his mother, his extra-curricular activities soon caused him to run up so many debts that he had to sell off all his possessions in order to clear them; and when he ran
out of things to sell, he wrote to his grandmother, asking her for more money. Instead of bailing him out of trouble Marcia arrived unannounced in Padua to see for herself what was going on, just as she had years earlier when Giacomo had appealed for her help from Signora Mida's house. This time the only person her grandson needed rescuing from was himself. Shocked that he had run into debt at such a young age, she immediately pulled him out of the university and took him back to Venice with her. Time would show that, in the long term, he learned nothing from this lesson. For as his beloved teacher Dr Gozzi bade an emotional farewell to the boy he had nurtured for the last five and a half years, he handed Casanova his most treasured possession: the relic of a saint which hung on a chain around his neck. When he was writing his memoirs Casanova admitted that he would still possess the relic ‘had it not been set in gold. The miracle it performed was to get me out of trouble in a time of urgent need.' Ironically, he had eventually sold it to pay off more debts.