Casanova's Women (16 page)

Castelli died a few years later. The widowed Lucrezia was now more in control of her own destiny than she had ever been. In her thirties, and still as beautiful and youthful as ever, she moved to the countryside outside Naples to live near some friends. This was no place to bring up Leonilda, however, who by the age of ten was a precociously clever, beautiful cherub of a girl. Given the appropriate education and contacts, she might well make an advantageous marriage, but this was not something that her mother felt able to handle by herself.

Money was an issue. While disposing of some of her late husband's assets Lucrezia came in contact with Carlo Caraffa,
the Duke of Maddaloni and head of one of the most powerful and prominent aristocratic families in Naples. The duke had inherited his father's title and vast fortune at the age of fourteen. Now in his early twenties, he lived in his family's imposing sixteenth-century palazzo on the corner of the Strada di Maddaloni and the Strada di Toledo, where he indulged his passion for art, the theatre, opera and forbidden books. Rich, generous, kind and intelligent, Maddaloni was a young man who seemed to have everything; his one great sorrow was that he was impotent, and everyone in the Kingdom of Naples knew about it.

Maddaloni was so enchanted by young Leonilda that he made Lucrezia an offer. In exchange for an annual allowance of 600 ducats, he would adopt the little girl as his nominal ‘mistress'; since he was impotent, this title was for appearance's sake only; a man in his position had to be seen to have a mistress. In reality Maddaloni would bring the girl up as his daughter, have her educated to his own taste, equip her with a fine wardrobe and diamonds, and install her in her own house in Naples. Furthermore, he would settle a large dowry on her, find her a suitable husband and ensure that she was a virgin on her wedding night.

If Lucrezia had any misgivings about handing over her pre-pubescent daughter to this freethinking twenty-one-year-old aristocrat, they did not stop her from doing so. Her duty as a mother almost demanded it of her. Being a widow with limited means she could never offer her daughter the social advantages that Maddaloni could. But was the duke really impotent? The same year that he adopted Leonilda he married Vittoria Guevara, the daughter of the Duke of Bovino and ‘a charming woman who had the talent to make him into a man'.
³⁴
As testament to this, three years later Vittoria bore him a son, leaving all Naples agog.

Under Maddaloni's unconventional tutelage Leonilda grew up into a vivacious young woman who resembled her mother in both looks and spirit. By the age of fifteen ‘she was a beauty; her hair was light chestnut, a colour above suspicion, and her beautiful black eyes listened and questioned at the same time … when she told a
story she spoke with her hands, her elbows, her shoulders and often with her chin. Her tongue was not sufficient for her to be able to express all that she wanted people to understand.'
³⁵
Leonilda's character was as striking as her appearance, an intoxicating mix of sophistication and total innocence. Maddaloni's education had freed her from convention and prejudice, but her knowledge of sexual matters far outstripped her actual experience by a long way. The duke was a father-figure and mentor to her, and no more, but nevertheless there was a sexual element to their relationship: he had decorated one of the rooms in her house with Chinese erotic prints which they often studied together, although the subject-matter aroused neither of them; and, Leonilda was accustomed to receiving him while sitting in bed wearing only a ribbon-trimmed dimity corset, and she unabashedly dressed and undressed in front of him.

Lucrezia could relax in the knowledge that her daughter was living in luxury and had a secure future in front of her. She herself was now lodging as a paying guest with friends in Sant' Agata, a picturesque spot in the hills behind Naples. Life there was not as quiet as it sounded: the town's stunning views of Mount Vesuvius and the gulf made it a popular stopping-off point on the Grand Tour, and Lucrezia's friend, the Marchesa Agnese Galiani, had three young children to liven up the place. It was at Sant' Agata that, one day in January 1761, Lucrezia received startling news from Naples: within the next few days Leonilda was to be married to a man old enough to be her father and then she was to leave with him for Rome. Needed in the city to sign the marriage contract and give her blessing to the match, Lucrezia set off for Naples immediately, arriving there in the evening, and going directly to Leonilda's house, where her daughter excitedly told her about the debonair thirty-five-year-old whom she adored and who had settled a generous dowry of 5,000 ducats on her.

The moment Lucrezia saw her future son-in-law she gave a cry and sank down on to the nearest sofa. Leonilda's betrothed was not only old enough to be the girl's father, he
was
her father. The
sixteen years since Lucrezia had last seen Giacomo Casanova had treated him kindly, or so it appeared. Then he had been a young ambitious cleric with nothing to his name. Now, he was – or rather he appeared to be – a wealthy aristocrat who passed by the French name of the Chevalier de Seingalt. When he saw Lucrezia he rushed over to greet her as a long-lost friend, but, when she informed him pointedly that he was to marry her daughter, Casanova sank down next to her, and the look on his face showed that he understood everything.

Rather ungallantly, the adventurer left it to a frightened and embarrassed Lucrezia to explain what he called the ‘unpleasant mystery' of his real identity to Leonilda and her protector. The young girl immediately threw herself at her mother's feet and swore that she had never loved Casanova ‘except as a daughter'
³⁶
– exceptionally for the adventurer, their relationship had yet to be consummated. Lucrezia's courageous confession had averted a disaster. Incestuous relationships were known to happen, particularly between siblings – Cardinal Guerin de Tencin, one of the highest figures in the Roman Catholic world, was credited by his enemies with committing incest with his sister, novelist and courtesan Claudine Guerin de Tencin – but to knowingly proceed with an incestuous marriage between a father and a daughter was unthinkable, even to freethinkers such as Maddaloni and Casanova, who knew that there was so much prejudice attached to such a union ‘that one would have to have an entirely depraved mind to trample it underfoot'.
³⁷
Nevertheless, the idea of committing incest with one's young and beautiful daughter was far from repugnant to him, as he would later demonstrate, not only with Leonilda but with another of his illegitimate daughters. As he wrote, shocking us even today, ‘I have never been able to conceive how a father could tenderly love his charming daughter without have slept with her at least once.'
³⁸

By the following morning Maddaloni had come to the conclusion that, to save face, they should all treat Casanova's short betrothal to Leonilda as a joke, and that the adventurer should renew his affair
with Lucrezia instead. The idea soon awoke the pragmatist in Casanova. If he could not marry his daughter, he would marry her mother, and that way he would possess both of them. As they all dined together two days later, he publicly proposed to Lucrezia, or rather he told her he would marry her and take both women to Rome. Instead of eliciting the delighted, grateful response he expected, his proposal met with a suspicious silence. Lucrezia might still love Casanova, but she distrusted his motives, and with good reason.

While her daughter and the duke went to the opera that evening, Lucrezia visited Casanova in his room, where they made love with the ease of old friends. Afterwards they lapsed into silence. ‘Here I am again,' he joked eventually, ‘in the charming country which undid me, to the sound of gunfire and drums, the first time I dared to travel up and down it in the dark.'
³⁹
Lucrezia could not help laughing at this witty reference to the skirmish between the Austrians and Spanish that had reduced their first attempt at love-making to a farce. The passing years had made Casanova even more charming and attractive, but to give up her independence for him was a risk she was unwilling to take for her daughter's sake as much as her own. For where did his newly-found wealth and name come from? And what were his motives in wanting to marry first her daughter, and now herself? When he repeated his proposal of marriage, she told him that her dearest wish was to live with him until her death, but instead of going to Rome with him she would like him to ‘stay in Naples, and leave Leonilda to the duke. We'll frequent society, we'll find her a husband worthy of her, and our happiness will be perfect.'

That Casanova fell at this hurdle was no accident. During his lifetime he proposed marriage to many of his lovers, and wriggled out of it successfully every time. Having escaped from marrying Leonilda because she was his daughter, he proceeded to backtrack as fast as he could from marrying her mother, a woman whom he nevertheless regarded as one of the great loves of his life. He could not possibly settle down in Naples, he told her, adding reproachfully,
‘Your daughter was ready to leave with me.' The subtle nuance of his language was not lost on Lucrezia: ‘Say our daughter. I see that you wish you were not her father. You love her.'

‘Alas! I am very sure my passion will subside so long as I am living with you; but I answer for nothing if you are not there. She is charming, and her mind captivates me even more than her beauty.'
⁴⁰

Lucrezia now knew for certain that Casanova could never be trusted with Leonilda. From that moment on, she entertained no more thoughts about marrying him. Still, she had no objection to making the most of their remaining time together. Not averse to sleeping three in a bed – that is, if Casanova's tale of seducing her sister Angelica at Tivoli is true – Lucrezia allowed her daughter to climb naked under the bedcovers with them that night, as if she was trying to prove, to herself as much as to Casanova, that her own powers of attraction were as strong as ever. For Casanova, who with good reason counted himself ‘the happiest of mortals' to have both beauties in bed with him, the moment was so exciting that he lost his usual exceptional self-control. Forced to withdraw before he ejaculated, he left Lucrezia unsatisfied. ‘Moved to pity, Leonilda helps her mother's soul on its flight with one hand, and with the other she puts a white handkerchief under her gushing father,' he later wrote with such attention to detail that we are convinced that the event actually took place.
⁴¹
Leonilda then demanded that Casanova look at her while he kissed her mother. This three-sided, doubly incestuous combat continued until late in the night and resumed at dawn, and although Casanova stopped short of having coitus with his daughter, in the end nothing else was forbidden. Incest was only an abhorrent crime, it seemed, if it entailed actual penetration.

Two days later, Casanova left Naples. Generosity towards the women he loved was always one of his greatest virtues, and he insisted that Leonilda should keep the dowry of five thousand ducats he had promised her – only now he was giving it to her as a father. Well satisfied by the outcome, Lucrezia returned to
Sant'Agata. To her surprise, Casanova was already waiting for her there. His carriage had overturned on a nearby road, an almost too convenient excuse (and this was not the only time in his life he would use it), and her friend the Marchese had offered to put him up overnight. Since Lucrezia had no wish to become the centre of gossip in the small community where she now lived, when Casanova asked if he could sleep with her she told him that it was out of the question. Although he pleaded that he would marry her in the locality that instant, she called his bluff by repeating that if he really loved her he had only to buy an estate in the Kingdom of Naples and she would live with him there without asking him to commit to marriage. That was the end of the matter. Casanova would regret it in his old age, but at the time there seemed no alternative. As he put it himself, ‘I should have lived happily with this charming woman, but I abhorred the idea of settling down anywhere. I would have been able to buy an estate at Naples which would have made me rich, but it would have meant adopting a prudent course of conduct which was absolutely opposed to my nature.'
⁴²

 

Imprudence was certainly one of Casanova's greatest faults. One of his finest character traits, however, was his sense of discretion, a trait that had been cultivated in him by his first mentor, Senator Malipiero. It created many problems for him when he was writing his memoirs. As he wrote to his friend J. F. Opiz in 1791, ‘What afflicts me is the duty I am under to conceal the names as I have no right to publish the affairs of others.'
⁴³
Although he had few scruples about naming his social acquaintances, the rogues he had encountered and the actresses he had slept with (women in the theatre were seldom bashful about their love affairs), he took pains to disguise the identities of private individuals, particularly women, who might be embarrassed or even harmed by his disclosures. Sometimes, as in the case of Nanetta and Marta, the Savorgnan sisters, Casanova used only Christian names. Elsewhere he wrote down a woman's initials, or identified her by mysterious initials that did not belong to her: one finds in his memoirs a
Signora F, a Mile X.C.V., a Mme …, and even a Mme X.

In the case of Donna Lucrezia, however, Casanova gave her and her family false names. Never dreaming that scholars would comb through the archives of Rome centuries after his death, in search of their real identities, he did not look far for inspiration but instead adapted their real names. Cecilia Monti, Lucrezia's mother, was identified in the early 1960s by the academic J. Rives Childs as Cecilia d'Antoni, who, like her namesake in
Story of My Life
, lived in Rome's Minerva district in the 1740s. In 1745 Cecilia d'Antoni had a fifteen-year-old son and two daughters, as had Casanova's Cecilia Monti. Her elder daughter was named Anna Maria, and the younger was named Lucrezia.