Casanova's Women (13 page)

‘I found Bettina old, ill and dying,' he wrote of the sad occasion in his memoir. ‘She expired before my eyes
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… twenty-four hours after I arrived at her home.'
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It is impossible to feel only friendship for a woman one finds pretty, with whom one can converse, and whom one suspects of being in love. Friendship at its apogee becomes love, and, relieving itself by the same sweet mechanism which love needs to make itself happy, it rejoices to find itself stronger after the tender act
.
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IN A SUN-DRENCHED street in Naples in June 1744, Donna Lucrezia Castelli climbed into a carriage bound for Rome, and took a forward-facing seat opposite her husband and next to her seventeen-year-old sister Angelica. A pretty young woman in her late twenties, she had light chestnut hair, a neat, clean appearance, a vivacious manner and a mind of her own. Lucrezia had moved to the Kingdom of Naples on her marriage ten years previously and, despite the prospect of the long, uncomfortable trip that lay ahead, she was excited at the prospect of returning home to Rome, where Castelli had business to pursue and where Angelica was due to be married in a few months' time.

While the driver secured their luggage to the roof with ropes, the three travellers spread themselves out over the upholstered seats, pleased to have a little extra space. Lucrezia fanned herself energetically, raised the dusty window blind and looked out into the street, hoping that no one else was going to join them. The
vettura
was a small, slow-moving vehicle pulled by a single team of mules,
and the journey north would take six days and entail five overnight stops at rustic coaching inns along the way. If a fourth passenger were to appear they would not only have to share the hot, airless carriage with him or her, but also their meals and their bedrooms too: for a flat fee a
vetturino
made all the sleeping and eating arrangements for his passengers, whoever they were, and in order to make as much profit as he could from the trip he would hire only one room for all of them at each inn, as was customary. Just as Lucrezia was congratulating herself for being lucky, a portly red-faced man with a hefty laugh strolled up to the vehicle, accompanied by a young man and a tall, youthful novice priest. After they had tearfully embraced on the roadside and sworn eternal friendship to each other, it was the priest who climbed up into the carriage and squashed his long limbs into the seat opposite hers.

His arrival put paid to any privacy Lucrezia and her family might have hoped to have enjoyed on the way to Rome. As the carriage lurched off down the long Strada di Toledo, past the rows of busy market stalls, she glanced surreptitiously at the fellow who was now seated next to her husband with his back towards the driver and his knees jammed against hers, and who, like it or not, was to be their constant companion and even their bedfellow from now on. He was a large youth some ten years her junior with a high forehead, tanned skin and a chin softened by a shadow of down. Dark brown curls cascaded from under his cap, and his thin face was imprinted with the hunger of burning ambition. Although he was simply dressed in the clothing of a novice
abate
he clutched an expensive gold and tortoiseshell snuffbox in one hand, and sat as erect as any nobleman. Off to Rome to make his fortune in the Church, one would have guessed, and rightly so. But as he gazed resolutely out of the window, tears of emotion welled up in his big, limpid eyes and Lucrezia was suddenly intrigued by him.

Content to be en route at last, she settled back in the corner of the seat as the
vettura
passed through the city gates and took the road towards Capua. She was totally unaware that she was embarking on a journey that would transform her life. The young
priest sitting opposite her was Giacomo Casanova, and Lucrezia was about to have a liaison with him which would have far-reaching consequences for her. In the future Casanova would not only name her as one of the greatest loves of his life, he would write about their love affair in intimate detail. Had she known that, more than two centuries after her death, scholars would be discussing her licentious sexual behaviour in terms of the social mores of the times, Lucrezia might well have jumped down from the carriage before it left Naples.

Casanova, too, stared out of the window, and contemplated his future with mixed feelings. Since his beloved grandmother had died in March the previous year he had been seized with a restlessness that would never leave him. At nineteen years old he was still at heart the same carefree young man who had romped with abandon in the Savorgnan sisters' bed, but he had known difficult times, too, and was now at a crossroads in his life. Now that the family house in the Calle della Commedia had been sold he no longer had a permanent base in Venice, where his wild behaviour after Marcia's death had landed him in a seminary for two brief weeks, and later in the Republic's Fort of Sant' Andrea, where he had caught his first dose of venereal disease from a lieutenant's wife. On his way to Rome in the suite of Venetian ambassador Andrea de Lezze, Casanova had stopped off in Chioggia, a fishing port where he had caught a second dose of the shameful illness, and when his ship had landed at Ancona, he had been put in quarantine for the plague along with the other passengers. After a brief stay in Rome, Casanova had returned to Venice, and from Venice he had travelled south again, this time to Martirano, to take up the position with the city's new bishop, Bernardo de Bernardis, which his mother had obtained for him through her influence in Dresden.

Before he had arrived there Casanova had imagined Martirano as a prosperous city with a sparkling social and intellectual life, the kind of place where he could build a glittering future for himself. He could not have been more mistaken. To his horror Calabria had turned out to be a poverty-stricken region, Martirano a charmless
city, and the bishop's house so dilapidated and sparsely furnished that there was not even a clean mattress for him to sleep on. It had taken Casanova only hours to work out that Bishop Bernardis was a simple man and no match for him intellectually, and for him to dismiss the local aristocracy as an uneducated bunch of provincials. To make matters worse, all the women and girls he had seen in Martirano had been ugly. Accustomed as he was to the female beauties of Venice and the Republic's glittering social life, Casanova had had no intention of building his future, or even spending a matter of months, exiled in some rural backwater ‘without a good library, a social circle, an equal, a literary connection'.
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After spending all of sixty hours in Martirano he had obtained Bernardis's permission to leave, and had travelled to Naples where, by leading others to believe that he had an aristocratic lineage, he had made valuable and influential connections. The Neapolitan friends who had just seen him off had no idea that he was the son of two actors. They had made Casanova feel loved and appreciated, and he was leaving them with regret to return to Rome where, armed with letters of introduction to two of the most powerful men in the Vatican – Father Antonio Giorgi, the Procurator General of the Augustinian order, and Cardinal Acquaviva, the Protector of Spain – he was determined to build the brilliant career in the Church that he had been educated to pursue.

What would he find to do in Rome, and how would he acquire the kind of well-paid, interesting position he so wanted? Casanova silently ruminated on these questions as the
vettura
rumbled along the stones of the most famous of all Roman roads, the Via Appia, which cut through the countryside like a knife blade pointing towards Rome. In ancient times, travellers had looked out of their chariots on to lines of crucified prisoners. Now they saw flat fertile wheat fields, and grape-vines strung between poplar trees. Respecting his quiet mood, Casanova's fellow-passengers chatted amongst themselves, Lucrezia talking to her sister in the Roman dialect, and to her husband in Neapolitan. At dusk the
vettura
stopped at Capua where they were to spend the night – a far from enticing
prospect, for Italian inns were notoriously uncomfortable and primitive. Even if there was a welcoming fire in the dining-room the bedrooms were more often than not cold and damp, for there was seldom any glass in the windows and only simple wooden shutters to keep out the rain. As for the sleeping arrangements, the beds were mostly simple cots consisting of rough-hewn wooden bases covered with straw-filled mattresses, and they were set close together with no thought for the privacy of the occupants, many of whom were strangers to one another. ‘Often times they can find neither beds nor provisions when the company is too numerous,' remarked Englishman Thomas Nugent of Italian inns in his 1749 book
The Grand Tour
, he recommended that travellers take with them their own ‘light quilt, a pillow, a coverlet and two very fine bedcloths', if not an entire bed.
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That night the travellers' room contained two large beds. Propriety required that Lucrezia and her sister should sleep together in one of them. ‘So, I shall have the honour of sleeping with the signor
abate,'
Castelli said jovially to their taciturn companion. ‘I leave it to you, signor,' the young priest replied coldly, which made Lucrezia smile. He retired early and went straight to sleep, a polite gesture which allowed the two women a degree of seclusion in which to prepare themselves for bed, and by the time they awoke the following morning, he had discreetly gone out for a walk. When he returned, the barber who had come to the room to shave Castelli offered to do the same to Casanova's downy chin, but to everyone's amazement the young priest flew off the handle and told the barber in no uncertain terms that he had no need of a shave. A beard was an unclean thing, the disgruntled barber muttered. Back in the coach, Lucrezia's husband tried to calm down their fellow-passenger by remarking that barbers were an insolent lot, and, as Casanova later recorded, she joined in.

 

‘The question is,' said the beauty, ‘if a beard is, or is not, an unclean thing.'

‘Yes it is,' said the advocate, ‘for it is an excretion.'

‘That may be so,' I told him, ‘but one doesn't regard it as such; does one call hair an excretion, which on the contrary is nourished, and admired for its length and beauty?'

‘In that case,' the lady resumed, ‘the barber is a fool.'

‘But aside from that,' I asked her, ‘do I have a beard?'

‘I believe so.'

‘In that case I'll start to get myself shaved at Rome. This is the first time I've been accused of needing it.'

‘My dear wife,' said the advocate, ‘you should have held your tongue, for it could be that the abate was going to Rome to become a Capuchin.'
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This sally made me laugh, but I did not want him to have the last word. I told him that he had guessed right; but that the desire to become a Capuchin had left me the moment I had seen his wife. Laughing too, he answered that his wife was mad about Capuchins, so I should not abandon my vocation.
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The ice was broken and the flirtatious tone of Lucrezia's relationship with Casanova was set. For the next five days the four travellers would enjoy an easy companionship in the cramped, hot carriage and at the inns where, as in the town of Garigliano that evening, their ‘amusing conversation compensated for a poor supper'.
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Lucrezia could not help but be flattered by the amount of attention the young
abate
paid her, for he carried himself with the air of a wealthy nobleman and talked with a self-confidence and breadth of knowledge that were truly astounding in one so young. His past friendships with the elite of Venice's women, coupled with his sexual experiences with the Savorgnan sisters, had given Casanova a veneer of sophistication, an ability to flatter and flirt and an ebullient self-confidence which went way beyond his years. ‘It is not beauty, but something better that I had, but I can't quite define it,' he wrote of himself at this period of his life. ‘I felt that I was capable of anything.'
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Previously Casanova had kept away from married women out of fear that he would feel jealous of their husbands. This time, he
could not avoid one. Cooped up with Lucrezia in the close physical proximity of the tiny
vettura
, and even sharing a bedroom with her, he became ever more captivated by her. Her very ordinariness seemed to excite him. Though she appeared to be both respectable and happily married, he nevertheless sensed that she desired him, and her husband's presence gave the potential intrigue an added piquancy.

Unknown to him, Casanova had awoken Lucrezia's dormant sexual feelings. Sexual passion and romantic love seldom entered into the equation between a husband and a wife, at least on the woman's side, at a time when most middle-and upper-class marriages were arranged by one's parents for financial or dynastic reasons. However, Lucrezia willingly did her duty towards Castelli, who was a jovial, hard-working, plain-speaking fellow in his forties, a nice man, and in many ways a typical Neapolitan. As an advocate he was well respected in his native kingdom, where years of rule by different nations had resulted in a complex legal system that was a mishmash of Roman, Byzantine, Swabian, Angevin, Aragonese and Spanish laws. The resulting muddled legislation was a perfect medium for roguery and corruption to fester in, and since there was no shortage of rogues in Naples, Castelli, like other Neapolitan lawyers, could not afford to rest on his laurels. Built on the flat plain at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, his city was neither as smart nor as relaxed as Rome, Lucrezia's birthplace, but it was one of the largest cities in Europe and it teemed with life day and night. The cafes were always packed, the long crowded
strode
echoed with the clatter of thousands of small brisk carriage horses, and the huge port was one of the busiest in the Mediterranean. ‘Naples proclaims herself from the first as gay, free and alive,' wrote Goethe, who visited the Campagna Felice, or Happy Country, as the kingdom was called, in February 1787. ‘The Neapolitan firmly believes that he lives in Paradise and takes a very dismal view of Northern countries.'
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From the sweet perfume of its fragrant tomatoes and the salty stench of its fish market, to its multicoloured flora and the azure blue of its gulf, Naples sang with smells and colours. Great
wealth, in the shape of marble-clad palazzi, existed side by side with terrible slums, and the streets teemed with ne'er-do-wells, bandits and beggars who flocked into the city from the surrounding towns and hills. ‘The most abominable, the most disgusting vermin that have ever crawled on the earth,' Charles de Brosses called them. ‘These people have no habitation; they live in the streets, do no work, and are kept from starving by alms given them by the convents. Every morning they cover the steps and the ground of the Monte Oliveto, which they make impassable; they form a truly sickening sight.'
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