Casanova
Casanova
Modern life abounds with men who aspire to be great lovers
We are constantly told much more than we could ever wish to know about the sexual
adventures of Mick Jagger and Sven-Goran Eriksson.
Yet the ultimate dubious accolade bestowed on
a rampant stud of any age is still "Casanova', a term defined by the
Oxford English Dictionary as............... "a man notorious for seducing women."
Two hundred years after his death, everyone has their own picture of
Casanova perhaps ... Bob Hope's bumbling fumbler in "Casanova's Big Night."
But the real Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was very diferent from the lecher in knee
breeches portrayed in the 24 films and TV dramas that have been made about
his life.
As well as being a serial seducer, Casanova was at various times a priest, soldier,
lawyer, conman and spy And the women to whom he made love, far from being mere passive
conquests, were often as fascinating and complex as the great sexual adventurer himself.
The man who supposedly thought only with his penis was actually a distinguished intellectual
and prolific writer whose passion for literature almost eclipsed his passion for women.
During his lifetime he published more than 35 works of fiction, drama, history and literary criticism; he was an accomplished linguist who spoke fluent Latin, French and Italian as well as his native
Venetian dialect ....his repartee in all of those languages captivated both women and men.
Most intriguingly far from being a ruthless sexual predator who coldly loved 'em and left
em, Casanova was blessed with an instinctive understanding ofthe female psyche which is still
startling in its modernity.
lf all this was n't enough, he also had a career as an entrepreneur
and gambler and if he were alive today he would probably be running a successful hedge fund.
Far from always choosing easy and submissive sexual partners, his lovers were often forceful and
adventurous women.
They included........ a female opera singer who disguised herself as a castrato,
an infamous impresario of Soho's first nightclub, at least two of his own illegitimate daughters,
and a Venetian nun whose libertine attitudes put his own in the shade.
Like most sexual buccaneers, he was unsparingly honest about himself.
Towards the end of his life, isolated and poverty-stricken, he wrote an epic 12-volume
autobiography....... "Histoire de Ma Vie."...... destined to be published posthumously in which he created
an unflinching portrait of his own adventures and misadventures, as well as ofthe amoral,
licentious, class-ridden 18th century in general.
In a work of self-analysis that Freud would have applauded, he confessed all his hopes, his
fears, his failures, his misdeeds and, most famously his love affairs, he held nothing back,
except the real names of some of his women.
Unlike today's kiss-and-tell merchants, he knew the value ofbeing discreet.
The descriptions of his sexual conquests are honest and graphic but never crude.
Seduction was an art to him, and his techniques put the drunken gropings of many of today's seedy
lotharios to shame.
Few could withstand the full force of his magnetic personality when it was
directed at them, and not many wanted to.
Unusually tall, swarthy and handsome, and with a head of glorious curls, Casanova could topple a
virgin's resistance with a single glance....but persistence was key to his success:
"I knew" he wrote, "that there was not a woman in the world
who could resist the assiduous care and constant attentions of a man who wished to make her fall
in love with him."
If a girl did resist, he found she was more likely to give in if he seduced her in
the company of her best friend, because for each small liberty that one allowed him to take, the
other would go a step further.
Generous to a fault, Casanova plied his lovers with money and expensive gifts, whether he could afford it or not...and his generosity did not stop at the bedroom door.
He understood the intricacies of the female orgasm, believed that
the slightest inhibition spoilt love-making, and claimed that a womans sexual pleasure made up
four-fifths ofhis own.
A "new mari' two centuries before the term was coined, he treated women as his equals in bed and out of it, and they adored him for it.
Whether she was a servant girl or a duchess, if he genuinely liked a woman he would do anything for her.
For him, an essential prerequisite of desire was respect.
As capable of true friendship as he was of lifelong enmity; Casanova could hold his own in
company male or female, including that ofVo1taire, Catherine the Great, and Madame de
Pompadour.
Yet the insecure and frightened child he had once been was never far away
"In the most brilliant gathering if but a single member of it looks me up and down, I am
undone," he revealed "I am overwhelmed with anger, and become stupid"
To understand why one needs look only to the two most important influences on his life: his birthplace, Venice, and his real mother, Zanetta.
Eighteenth-century Venice, like today's Ibiza was the sex-tourism capital of Europe, a year-
round party city invaded every autumn by tens of thousands of foreign tourists who were
attracted by the city's unusually long carnival season, its countless religious and civic festivals,
and its atmosphere of "universal liberty", as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,an English traveller,
once described it.
Rendered anonymous by their carnival masks and cloaks, Venetian women were
legendary beautiful, flirtatious and, above all, available. Only the working classes kept up any
kind of moral standards.
Casanova's working-class mother was born Zanetta Earussi, the daughter of a poor but
respectable Venetian cobbler.
When she eloped with Gaetano Casanova, an actor from a local
theatre, she broke her parents' hearts for though the city' s seven theatres were owned by
noblemen, actors were considered social outcasts, and actresses little better than whores.
The prospect of his beautiful daughter joining their ranks horrified Zanetta's father so much
that he died supposedly of grief within a month of her wedding.
Born into the despised milieu of the theatre on April 2, 1725, Giacomo
Casanova was the first child of this controversial marriage.
Although he would later pass as a proud aristocrat in the capitals of Europe, the
stigma of his humble beginnings never left him, and his relationship with his mother only
exacerbated his feelings of inferiority.
From the start, she paid him little attention.
When he was just 10 months old she left him with his grandmother and followed her husband
to London, where he had been engaged to work with an Italian commedia dell'arte troupe in the
Haymarket.
Here Zanetta fulfilled her parents' worst fears by joining the profession herself and,
it was rumoured, having an affair with the Prince ofWales , the future
George II, who was said to be the father of her second child, Francesco.
Zanetta developed into a talented actress who inspired Italy's most famous playwright, Carlo
Goldoni, to write a play about her.
But her mothering skills were distinctly lacking.
When she returned to Venice, she virtually ignored Giacomo, who in her absence had become a
withdrawn, imbecilic and sickly infant prone to gushing nosebleeds.
When, in 1733, her 36-year-old husband died of a brain tumour he left
his wife with five young children to support and a sixth on the way.
On the night of his ninth birthday Zanetta took Giacomo to Padua,
dumped him at the home of a cruel harridan she had never met before supposedly for the good
of his health and walked out of his life to pursue her acting career at home and, later, in
St Petersburg and Dresden.
"That's how I was got rid of' was how Casanova described this most bitter moment in
his life. His mother's betrayal had a profound effect on his future relationships with Women:
never again would he let one walk out on him; he would always be the one to leave
a relationship first.
Early on, Casanova demonstrated a quick wit, an intense appetite for knowledge, and a perpetually inquisitive mind. He entered the University of Padua at twelve and graduated at seventeen, in 1742, with a degree in law.
The first person to bring him out of his shell was a Paduan schoolteacher, whose pretty
sister first awoke the boy's sexual feelings. Casanova retumed to Venice when he was 14
with a degree in clerical law, a developed intelligence and an addiction to gambling.
From an underweight, unattractive child he had metamorphosed into a gangly
Adonis.
Destined for a high-flown career in the church, he was inducted as a novice priest
and introduced to the most influential people in the city but the pleasures ofVenice assailed
him at every turn, and, as he later admitted, 'cultivating the pleasure of my senses was always
the chief business of my life".
At 16 he lost his virginity on the top floor ofa run-down palazzo
in the arms of two delightfiilly sexually curious sisters.
After that, there was no stopping the young Casanova: his career as a celibate priest was on the slide.
His first searing passion was an older married woman he met on a coach between Naples and Rome.
Despite the fact that her husband was travelling with her, the forthright Donna
Lucrezia took as active a part in the seduction as Casanova did, and was as eager as he was to
take the risk of making love in public gardens.
Their relationship resulted in a daughter, Leonilda, with whom Casanova fell in love in
later life.
"I have never been able to conceive how a father could tendedy love his charming
daughter without having slept with her at least once," he wrote, shocking his readers perhaps
even more now than in his own day.
Although Donna Lucrezia did her best to keep them apart, Casanova and Leonilda eventually consummated their relationship, a liaison that almost certainly resulted in the adventurer fathering his own grandson.
Back in Venice, Casanova started his clerical law career and was admitted as an abbé after being conferred minor orders by the Patriarch of Venice.
He shuttled back and forth to Padua to continue his university studies.
By now, he had become something of a dandy—tall and dark, his long hair powdered, scented, and elaborately curled.
He quickly ingratiated himself with a patron (something he was to do all his life), 76-year-old Venetian senator ................Alvise Gasparo Malipiero................ the owner of Palazzo Malipiero, close to Casanova's home in Venice.
Malipiero moved in the best circles and taught young Casanova a great deal about good food and wine, and how to behave in society.
When Casanova was caught dallying with Malipiero's intended object of seduction, actress Teresa Imer, however, the senator drove both of them from his house.
Captivated by his personality and, most of all, by his apparent knowledge of the cabbala -
something that Casanova used to impress the credulous throughout his life,
Bragadin provided him with an income, a private gondola and an apartment in his palazzo.
Transformed overnight from a penniless musician into a nobleman's son, Casanova
entered a long stretch as a well-heeled playboy.
While roaming aimlessly through Italy in autumn 1749, he met the woman who would
dominate his heart from then on.
That "Hennette", as he called her a refined French aristocrat on the run from her cruel in-laws happened to be in bed with a man she scarcely knew when Casanova first saw her did not matter a jot to him; he was rarely judgmental about women's behaviour, sexual or otherwise.
After living in bliss with her in Parma for three months, he declared that he had
never been so happy perhaps because Henriette asked nothing of him except a pledge of no
commitment, a quality that made her the ideal romantic partner for a mari with an
aversion to being tied down.
"Those who believe that a woman is not enough to make a man equally happy all the
twenty-four hours ofa day have never known an Henriette," he wrote, expressing a capacity for
deep, companionable love something he longed for, despite his aversion to marriage
"The joy which flooded my soul was much greater when I conversed with her during the
day than when I held her in my arms at night."
Henriette eventually saw through Casanova's pretences, yet appreciated his worth.
Although he treated her like a goddess, she eventually left him without a backward glance.
Back in Venice, he threw himself into a thrilling sacrilegious affair with a nun.
Determined to defy her holy vows by experiencing sexual pleasure in all its forms, M M, as Casanova called her in his memoirs, propositioned him by letter after spotting him in church, then seduced him in
a private apartment owned by her existing lover, the French ambassador to Venice.
Here they conducted a long, passionate affair which included putting on three-in-a-bed
sexual displays for the voyeuristic Frenchman the third party being Casanova's 15-year-old
former girlfiiend, with whom M M enjoyed a lesbian relationship.
His affair with M M led to Casanova's arrest by the authorities in Venice for unspecified
"grave faults committed primarily in public outrages against the holy religion.
After 15 months locked up in "the Leads", the notorious cells under the lead roof of the Doge's palace, he escaped and fled to Paris.
Along the way, from one town to another, he got into sexual escapades resembling operatic plots.
In Lyon, he entered the society of Freemasonry, which appealed to his interest in secret rites and which, for the most part, attracted men of intellect and influence who proved useful in his life, providing valuable contacts and uncensored knowledge.
Many famous 18th Century men were Masons including Mozart and George Washington. Casanova was also attracted to Rosicrucianism.
Casanova captivated the whole of`Paris with tales of his adventures.
Within a week of arriving in the city he was also rich beyond his dreams, having talked his way into the directorship of the French national lottery an institution he is often credited with inventing although he 'nicely admitted to having latched onto someone else's idea.
He also carried on an underhand three-year relationship with Manon,
daughter of his best friends, the celebrated actors ..... Silvia and Mario Balletti.
Manon
Manon Balletti was a beautiful, well- protected 16-year-old, engaged to be married to
her music teacher, when 31-year-old Casanova turned up in the French capital.
Manon did not stand a chance of withstanding Casanova's artful courtship.
Her clinging manner brought out the very worst in him, and her painful love letters to him, 40 of
which survive, reveal the depth ofhis cruelty to her.
For Manon, the idea of being in love with the world' s greatest lover proved far more enjoyable than the reality
"It seems to me," she let slip in one letter, "that I am more at my ease when I write to you than when I talkto you."
"Love is a great poet, its subject matter is inexhaustible; but if the end at which it aims
never arrives, it collapses like dough at the baker's," Casanova wrote.
When Manon refused to surrender her virginity he soon lost interest in her.
Nevertheless, out of cowardice he strung her along for years while he cavorted with
a host of other Parisian beauties.
He duped many socialites with his occultism, particularly the 52 year old widow... the Marquise Jeanne d'Urfé'.
Using his excellent memory Casanova fooled the rich widow into thinking that he had a sorcerer's power of numerology.
Obsessed with alchemy and convinced that her younger lover not only possessed the secret of the philosopher's stone but also that he could make her immortal, the fabulously wealthy marquise kept Casanova in money and diamond buckles for years.
Casanova claimed to be a Rosicrucian and an alchemist, aptitudes which made him popular with some of the most prominent figures of the era, among them Madame de Pompadour, Count de Saint-Germain, d'Alembert and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
So popular was alchemy among the nobles, particularly the search for the "philosopher's stone", that Casanova was highly sought after for his supposed knowledge, and he profited handsomely.
He met his match, however, in the Count de Saint-Germain:
"This very singular man, born to be the most barefaced of all imposters, declared with impunity, and with a casual air, that he was three hundred years old, that he possessed the universal medicine, that he made anything he liked from nature and that he created diamonds."
Count Saint Germain
Casanova moved on to Dresden in 1752 and encountered his mother. He wrote a well-received play" La Moluccheide,"now lost.
He then visited Prague, and Vienna, where the tighter moral atmosphere was not to his liking. He finally returned to Venice in 1753.
In Venice, Casanova resumed his wicked escapades, picking up many enemies, and gaining the greater attention of the Venetian inquisitors.
His police record became a lengthening list of reported blasphemies, seductions, fights, and public controversy.
A state spy, Giovanni Manucci, was employed to draw out Casanova's knowledge of cabalism and Freemasonry, and to examine his library for forbidden books. Senator Bragadin, in total seriousness this time , advised his "son" to leave immediately or face the stiffest consequences.
After years of travelling across Europe and many adventures, Casanova became weary of
his wanton life, Casanova visited the monastery of Einsiedeln and considered the simple, scholarly life of a monk.
He returned to his hotel to think on the decision only to encounter a new object of desire, and reverting to his old instincts, all thoughts of a monk's life were quickly forgotten.
Moving on, he visited Albrecht von Haller and Voltaire, and arrived in Marseille, then Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, Modena, and Turin, moving from one sexual romp to another.
Back in Paris, he set about one of his most outrageous schemes convincing his old dupe the Marquise d'Urfé that he could turn her into a young man through occult means.
The plan did not yield Casanova the big payoff he had hoped for, and the Marquise d'Urfé finally lost faith in him.
Casanova traveled to England in 1763, hoping to sell his idea of a state lottery to English officials.
He wrote of the English,
"the people have a special character, common to the whole nation, which makes them think they are superior to everyone else.
It is a belief shared by all nations, each thinking itself the best. And they are all right."
Through his connections, he worked his way up to an audience with King George III, using most of the valuables he had stolen from the Marquise d'Urfé.
While working the political angles, he also spent much time in the bedroom, as was his habit.
As a means to find females for his pleasure, not being able to speak English, he put an advertisement in the newspaper to let an apartment to the "right" person. He interviewed many young women, choosing one "Mistress Pauline" who suited him well.
Soon, he established himself in her apartment and seduced her. These and other liaisons, however, left him weak with venereal disease and he left England broke and ill.
He went on to Belgium, recovered, and then for the next three years, traveled all over Europe, covering about 4,500 miles by coach over rough roads, and going as far as Moscow (the average daily coach trip being about 30 miles in a day).
Again, his principal goal was to sell his lottery scheme to other governments and repeat the great success he had with the French government. But a meeting with Frederick the Great bore no fruit and in the surrounding German lands, the same result.
Not lacking either connections or confidence, Casanova went to Russia and met with Catherine the Great but she flatly turned down the lottery idea.
At age 49, the years of reckless living and the thousands of miles of travel had taken its toll. Casanova's smallpox scars, sunken cheeks, and hook nose became all the more noticeable.
His easygoing manner was now more guarded. Prince Charles de Ligne, a friend described him around 1784
" He would be a good-looking man if he were not ugly; he is tall and built like Hercules, but of an African tint; eyes full of life and fire, but touchy, wary, rancorous—and this gives him a ferocious air. It is easier to put him in a rage than to make him gay.
He laughs little, but makes other laugh. He has a manner of saying things which reminds me of Harlequin or Figaro, and which makes them sound witty."
Venice had changed for him. Casanova now had little money for gambling, few willing females worth pursuing, and few acquaintances to enliven his dull days. He heard of the death of his mother and more paining, he went to the bedside of Bettina Gozzi, who had first introduced him to sex, and she died in his arms.
His "Iliad" was published in three volumes, but to limited subscribers and yielding little money.
In a downward spiral, Casanova was expelled again from Venice in 1783, after writing a vicious satire poking fun at Venetian nobility. In it he made his only public statement that Grimani was his true father.
Forced to resume his travels again, Casanova arrived in Paris, and in November 1783 and met Benjamin Franklin while attending a presentation on aeronautics and the future of balloon transport.
For a while, Casanova served as secretary and pamphleteer to Sebastian Foscarini, Venetian ambassador in Vienna. He also became acquainted with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, who noted about Casanova,
"This singular man never liked to be in the wrong."
In 1785, Casanova began searching for another position.
A few months later, he became the librarian to ....Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein,.... a chamberlain of the Emperor, in the Castle of Dux, Bohemia.
The Count—himself a Freemason, cabalist, and frequent traveler—had taken to Casanova when they had met a year earlier at Foscarini's residence.
Although the job offered security and good pay, Casanova describes his last years as boring and frustrating, even though it was the most productive time for writing.
His health had deteriorated dramatically and he found life among peasants to be less than stimulating.
He was only able to make occasional visits to Vienna and Dresden for relief.
Although Casanova got on well with the Count, his employer was a much younger man with his own eccentricities.
The Count often ignored him at meals and failed to introduce him to important visiting guests. Moreover, Casanova, the testy outsider, was thoroughly disliked by most of the other inhabitants of the Castle of Dux. Casanova's only friends seemed to be his fox terriers.
In despair, Casanova considered suicide, but instead decided that he must live on to record his memoirs, which he did until his death.
The isolation and boredom of Casanova's last years enabled him to focus without distractions on his "Histoire de ma Vie", without which his fame would have been considerably diminished, if not blotted out entirely.
He began to think about writing his memoirs around 1780 and began in earnest by 1789, as "the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying of grief".
The first draft was completed by July 1792, and he spent the next six years revising it.
He puts a happy face on his days of loneliness, writing in his work, "I can find no pleasanter pastime than to converse with myself about my own affairs and to provide a most worthy subject for laughter to my well-bred audience."
His recollections only go up to the summer of 1774.
His memoirs were still being compiled at the time of his death.
A letter by him in 1792 states that he was reconsidering his decision to publish them believing his story was despicable and he would make enemies by writing the truth about his affairs.
But he decided to proceed and to use initials instead of actual names, and to tone down its strongest passages.
He wrote in French instead of Italian because "the French language is more widely known than mine".
The memoirs open with:
I begin by declaring to my reader that, by everything good or bad that I have done throughout my life, I am sure that I have earned merit or incurred guilt, and that hence I must consider myself a free agent. ... Despite an excellent moral foundation, the inevitable fruit of the divine principles which were rooted in my heart, I was all my life the victim of my senses.
I have delighted in going astray and I have constantly lived in error, with no other consolation than that of knowing I have erred.
My follies are the follies of youth. You will see that I laugh at them, and if you are kind you will laugh at them with me.
Uncut, the memoirs ran to twelve volumes, and the abridged American translation runs to nearly 1200 pages.
Though his chronology is at times confusing and inaccurate, and many of his tales exaggerated, much of his narrative and many details are corroborated by contemporary writings.
The confession is largely devoid of repentance or remorse.
He mentions over 120 adventures with women and girls, with several veiled references to male lovers as well.
He describes his duels and conflicts with scoundrels and officials, his entrapments and his escapes, his schemes and plots, his anguish and his sighs of pleasure. He demonstrates convincingly, "I can say vixi ('I have lived')."
The memoirs were heavily pirated through the ages and have been translated into some twenty languages.
But not until 1960 was the entire text published in its original language of French. In 2010 the manuscript was acquired by the National Library of France, which has started digitizing it.
For Casanova, as well as his contemporary sybarites of the upper class, love and sex tended to be casual and not endowed with the seriousness characteristic of the Romanticism of the 19th century.
Flirtations, bedroom games, and short-term liaisons were common among nobles who married for social connections rather than love. For Casanova, it was an open field of sexual opportunities.
Gambling was a common recreation in the social and political circles in which Casanova moved. In his memoirs, Casanova discusses many forms of 18th century gambling—including lotteries, faro, basset, piquet, biribi, primero, quinze, and whist—and the passion for it among the nobility and the high clergy.
Cheaters (known as "correctors of fortune") were somewhat more tolerated than today in public casinos and in private games for invited players, and seldom caused affront. Most gamblers were on guard against cheaters and their tricks. Scams of all sorts were common, and Casanova was amused by them.
Although best known for his prowess in seduction for more than two hundred years since his death, Casanova was also recognized by his contemporaries as an extraordinary person, a man of far-ranging intellect and curiosity.
Casanova was one of the foremost chroniclers of his age. He was a true adventurer, traveling across Europe from end to end in search of fortune, seeking out the most prominent people of his time to help his cause.
He was a servant of the establishment and equally decadent as his times, but also a participant in secret societies and a seeker of answers beyond the conventional.
He was, by vocation and avocation, a lawyer, clergyman, military officer, violinist, con man, pimp, gourmand, dancer, businessman, diplomat, spy, politician, mathematician, social philosopher, cabalist, playwright, and writer. He wrote over twenty works, including plays and essays, and many letters. His novel................ Icosameron................ is an early work of science fiction.
Prince Charles de Ligne, who understood Casanova well, and who knew most of the prominent individuals of the age, thought Casanova the most interesting man he had ever met: "there is nothing in the world of which he is not capable."
Rounding out the portrait, the Prince also stated:
"The only things about which he knows nothing are those which he believes himself to be expert: the rules of the dance, the French language, good taste, the way of the world, savoir vivre.
It is only his comedies which are not funny, only his philosophical works which lack philosophy—all the rest are filled with it; there is always something weighty, new, piquant, profound.
He is a well of knowledge, but he quotes Homer and Horace ad nauseam.
His wit and his sallies are like Attic salt. He is sensitive and generous, but displease him in the slightest and he is unpleasant, vindictive, and detestable.
He believes in nothing except what is most incredible, being superstitious about everything. He loves and lusts after everything. ... He is proud because he is nothing. ... Never tell him you have heard the story he is going to tell you. ... Never omit to greet him in passing, for the merest trifle will make him your enemy."
In 1797 Casanova heard the news that the Republic of Venice had ceased to exist and Napoleon Bonaparte had seized Casanova's home city.
It was too late to return home. Casanova died on June 4, 1798 at age 73.
His last words are said to have been.................
"I have lived as a philosopher and I die as a Christian". 
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