Baffo accompanied Giacomo and his mom to Padua. On the journey, the boy observed that the bushes appeared to “stroll” because the boat sailed alongside. From this phenomenon, he deduced that “the solar doesn’t transfer both, and it’s we who roll from West to East.” His mom mocked his “silliness,” however Baffo, Casanova later boasted, was amazed: an untutored nine-year-old had intuited a idea of which the Vatican took a dim view, heliocentricity. “All the time draw the logical conclusions of your reasoning,” he stated, “and let the others snigger.”
Casanova’s mind was central to his sense of price, and he believed that it might have been stunted “by the cowardice of credulity” had Baffo not risen to his protection. The emphasis is his, and it stresses a horror that generates the drama in his life and work: of the credulity of fools; of his personal as “an ideal dupe” of ladies; and of blind religion in authority, divine or temporal, enforced by the concern of perdition. Enlightenment Deism formed Casanova’s philosophy—and helped to rationalize his predations. “Mad are those that assume the Supreme Being might ever benefit from the sorrow, ache and abstinence they provide as much as Him in sacrifice,” he wrote. “He by no means gave us something aside from the aim of creating us pleased.” However “Histoire” incorporates the germ of a contemporary nervousness: that no bond we maintain sacred is dependable.
In the midst of thirty-five hundred pages, “Histoire” has its longueurs. However the first chapter is a marvel of psychological financial system. All of the seeds of the narrator’s character are planted there. Kids of detached moms develop as much as doubt their very own existence; they’ll by no means slake their voracity for love and approval. The charmless little boy turns into a flamboyant showboater. He dodges abandonment by escaping from attachments. At any time when he feels suffocated, he seeks a brand new local weather.
Giacomo’s keep in Padua was amongst his longer sojourns in a single place. His grandmother rescued him from a vermin-ridden boarding home the place his landlady had starved him, and lodged him with a younger priest, Antonio Gozzi, whom he would later recall gratefully. Gozzi tutored him in Latin and nurtured his love of examine, getting ready him to earn a legislation diploma. The clergyman additionally occurred to have a sister, Bettina, a magnificence in her early teenagers. Bettina took cost of the boy’s toilette. She gave him a sponge bathtub each morning—and his first erections.
Bettina’s trysts with an older swain infected Giacomo’s jealousy, we’re instructed in “Histoire,” and he or she salted the wound with capricious teasing. One in all her schemes concerned dressing him as a lady so they may attend a ball collectively. Androgyny all the time titillated Casanova; just a few years later, in Ancona, he fell deliriously in love with “Bellino,” a younger soprano of unsure gender. In contrast to Venice, the Papal States barred ladies from their phases, so the aspiring divo—a poor man’s daughter—was passing as a castrato with the assistance of a prosthetic penis.
In 1742, at sixteen, Casanova defended his thesis at Padua’s historical college, having discovered extra about vice from his classmates than he had about legislation from his professors. He returned to Venice with a doctorate but in addition with a penchant for delinquency. Ultimately, Zanetta, who was performing in Warsaw, known as in a favor. She organized for her wayward son to turn out to be the non-public secretary of a Franciscan monk who had, by means of her machinations with the Queen of Poland, been appointed to a bishopric in Calabria.
Casanova gaily set off for southern Italy, anticipating to dwell effectively there. As a substitute, he discovered himself in a squalid backwater amongst “animals.” After three days within the bishop’s service, he decamped for Rome. Stopping in Naples, he met an aristocrat who was additionally named Casanova and satisfied him that they have been associated. His namesake endowed him with a pricey wardrobe.
“Histoire” doesn’t draw back from the truth that the creator’s liaisons with older males have been usually transactional. Rome, he dryly notes, “obliges the entire human race to show pederast, however gained’t admit it.” But considered one of his most memorable seductions occurred there. His lover was a married girl, Donna Lucrezia Castelli, and their clandestine fornication, a few of it alfresco, produced a toddler. Casanova wouldn’t uncover the existence of his putative daughter Leonilda for some eighteen years, at which level he fucked her mom whereas she shared their mattress. A decade later, he knocked Leonilda up as a favor, he claimed, to her impotent husband. Incest, he suggests, is a consummate delight: “I’ve by no means been capable of conceive how a father can tenderly love his charming daughter with out at the least as soon as having slept along with her.”
Plotted on a map of Europe, Casanova’s advances and retreats resemble Napoleon’s. In the midst of his travels, Damrosch writes, he lined forty thousand miles. At twenty, he was again in Venice from Corfu, having served within the Venetian Military. With none glamorous prospects, he performed the violin at weddings and on the theatre the place his mother and father met. Shortly thereafter, although, he was pressured to flee La Serenissima after an alleged rape, not for the final time. He ended up in Paris, the place he acquired a manservant and patronized a well-known brothel. An Italian buddy invited him to the opera in Fontainebleau. Mme. de Pompadour, he claims, took be aware of him from her field, and he amused her with some off-color wit in his stilted French. One in all many erotic discoveries from this chapter of his “apprenticeship” was a teen-age magnificence from a household of prostitutes, Marie-Louise O’Murphy. They didn’t go all the way in which, however Casanova commissioned a miniature of her, which supposedly impressed “Resting Woman,” the well-known nude portrait by François Boucher. It captivated the King of France, who added Marie-Louise to his harem.
After numerous adventures in Prague and Vienna, Casanova returned to Venice in 1753, residing in luxurious because the “adopted son” of an aged senator and cavorting with a ravishing nun, M.M., who was herself a licentious prodigy. The Inquisition was conserving tabs on his playing; on the pornographic poetry he wrote; on his rumored “satan worship”; and maybe, Damrosch suggests, on his entanglement with a international diplomat, the illustrious Abbé de Bernis, his future enabler on the French courtroom, with whom he shared M.M.’s favors.
In July, 1755, with out being knowledgeable of the fees in opposition to him, Casanova was clapped right into a rat-infested cell within the Ducal Palace—an notorious attic jail whose metal-plated roof gave it its title, the Leads. Nobody had ever escaped it, however he resolved to. He improvised a chisel and used his mattress to cover the progress of his excavations. However then he was moved to a distinct cell. Because the months handed, his prospects for launch appeared to develop dimmer. A fellow-inmate, a monk incarcerated for corrupting virgins, joined forces with him. They bored holes of their ceilings, and, after they had breached the roof, they climbed onto its fog-slicked slope. Casanova almost plunged to his demise after managing to smash a window, however they gained entry to a collection of workplaces. A watchman who found them the following day assumed that they have been misplaced revellers. (Casanova had the foresight, he tells us, to have introduced a change of garments: “my elegant coat,” a lace chemise, a plumed Spanish hat.) They exited the palace by the use of its grand staircase and employed a gondola that rowed them to freedom on the mainland.
Le Chevalier dined out on this story throughout Europe and ultimately revealed it as an illustrated chronicle that made him a star. W. G. Sebald is among the many writers who’ve solid him as a foe of censorship and despotism. He himself, nonetheless, casually instructed an admirer of Voltaire’s that “the Republic of Venice acted justly.” After his banishment ended, eighteen years later, he volunteered as an informer for the Inquisition, plying his base commerce below a pseudonym.
The escaped prisoner made a beeline for the Metropolis of Mild, the place, in 1757, he scored his nice coup with the French lottery and located himself with a fortune to dissipate. (Gastronomy was considered one of his costly passions.) Months later, he met the credulous marquise, and exploited her obsession with the occult. When she lastly bought sensible to his rip-off, she had him run out of France. He later tried his luck within the London of George III however, unable to talk English, he didn’t have a lot. He got here to grief with an adventuress, and, in 1764, needed to flee England to keep away from a possible demise sentence for forgery.
Subsequent up was Germany, the place he didn’t impress Boswell or the Prussian king. His courtship of the empress Catherine proved equally unavailing. In Poland, King Stanisław tipped him 2 hundred ducats for reciting Horace—considered one of Casanova’s favourite celebration methods—although he subsequently ordered him to depart Warsaw. (His misdeeds in Paris had caught up with him.) Florence expelled him on suspicion of dishonest at playing cards. He was run out of Vienna and Madrid.
Two of his siblings have been established in Dresden, the place their mom, the nice Buranella, was an idol in retirement. She and Giacomo had been estranged for many years, but he claims that she was overjoyed to see him. (He says nothing of his personal emotions about seeing her.) She died in 1776, a yr after Michele Grimani, and a yr earlier than Casanova revisited Gozzi, his previous tutor, who was now an archpriest in Padua. The ruined Bettina was residing along with her brother; marriage to a “depressing wretch” had left her “poor and sad.” She died a day after Giacomo’s arrival, as he sat by her bedside.
Age isn’t sort to those that dwell by their charms. At sixty, Casanova was pressured by destitution to just accept a modest sinecure because the librarian of a fortress in Bohemia, owned by a noble admirer who was hardly ever in residence. He had misplaced his tooth, and his devoted steed now not reared at his command. “Luck,” he wrote, had “turn out to be a stranger” to him. The servants, irritated by his pretensions, tormented him. So did a lifetime of venereal infections, which was most likely what did him in.
