Casanova's Women (2 page)

Equally at ease in a palace, a merchant's house or a brothel, and most at home between a woman's legs, Casanova successfully straddled the worlds of the high life to which he aspired, and the low life into which he had been born. Steering a course through both, but putting down roots in neither, he followed only one
precept in his life – to go where the wind blew him – and he crisscrossed the continent of Europe as often as the migrating birds. En route he plied a good number of professions, but although he was a polymath with infinite capabilities he had little staying power, so in the end he became master of none. At one time or another he was a priest, a spy, a soldier, a playboy. In Rome he became secretary to a famous cardinal. In Paris he talked his way into becoming a financial adviser to the French government, founded a highly profitable national lottery for them and, on his own account, opened a factory that made hand-painted wallpaper. In the business centre of Amsterdam he dealt in shares as well as cards, and had equal success in both. Addicted to gambling from an early age, he frittered his fortunes away like sand in the wind. He was generous to a fault and fatally extravagant, especially when the money he was spending was not his own.

An historian, philosopher and writer, Casanova published books and pamphlets in Paris, Prague and Dresden, edited a literary journal in Venice, wrote a history of Poland and translated Homer's
Iliad
into his native dialect. Although he had no particular talent for music, he once took a job as a violinist in a theatre, work that he found humiliating but which nevertheless led to his greatest-ever stroke of luck. Somehow able to turn almost any situation, however unpromising, to his own advantage, he was an adventurer whose imprisonment and subsequent escape from the most secure prison in Europe, Venice's I Piombi, earned him fame and admiration as well as notoriety. Strangers of all classes were as captivated by the intriguing, impressive figure he cut as they were enchanted by his magnetic personality and witty conversation; as one female stranger wrote breathlessly after dining with him in Lyon, ‘We hung on his lips.' Although he had an extraordinary gift for intimate friendship, if someone dared to slight him he would become their enemy for life. Unable to fathom his character or to pinpoint his exact position in the world, his acquaintances gossiped about him from Salerno to London, sometimes admiringly, at other times critically. Was Casanova a pauper or a millionaire, a man of principle or a
dishonourable, dishonest rogue? At ease with his own contradictions, he worshipped the truth and yet was happy to be a consummate conman whenever it suited him, claiming that he deceived the foolish only in order to make them wise. He became a Freemason, a Rosicrucian and a freethinker whilst remaining at heart a Christian. Though he derided the superstitions of others, he studied alchemy and the Kabbalah, and led people to believe that he was a mystic and a sage. Countesses asked him to predict their future, and duchesses consulted him on intimate matters of health. Even intelligent men fell for Casanova's clever deceptions and unwittingly enriched his purse; and he easily convinced the credulous that he could turn base metal into gold.

All in all, Casanova reflects from his armchair in Dux Castle, these things are substantial achievements for a cobbler's grandson whose own uneducated mother dismissed him as an imbecile.

But by far Casanova's greatest achievement has been as a womaniser. He has had women in almost every city, town and port on his remarkable 64,000-kilometre journey around Europe, and sometimes on the coach journeys in between. He has slept with actresses and opera singers, housekeepers and shopkeepers, a slave and a serf, lawyers' wives and businessmen's daughters, noble women and fallen women, high-class courtesans and common whores. He has made love to experienced married ladies and he has deflowered countless virgins. He has enjoyed sex with women in their late fifties, and – a particular predilection of his – girls as young as eleven years old.

Ancient taboos have proved an aphrodisiac rather than a barrier to Casanova, who has made love to two nuns, his thirteen-year-old niece and his own grown-up daughter, an encounter that, very probably, led to him siring his own grandson. No sexual or romantic challenge has proved too great for him: once, quarantined in a lazaretto in Ancona, he indulged in heavy petting with a female slave through a hole in a balcony floor, and, on another memorable occasion, with a young schoolgirl through the iron bars of a convent grating.

In his active days Casanova enjoyed a conquest as much as a victory. Relegating the possibility of failure to the realm of impossibilities, he refused to take no for a final answer. If he had the will to woo someone, he would find a way. There was not one woman in the world, he believed, who could resist the attentions of a man determined to make her fall in love with him, and experience taught him that in ninety-nine out of one hundred cases he was right. Scores of women from Amsterdam to Zurich who initially refused to sleep with him later willingly defied their fathers, husbands, lovers or convention in order to throw themselves at his feet.

Yet Casanova was seldom satisfied with winning a woman's body. What he wanted, far more than sexual satisfaction, was to win her heart. And more often than not, he claimed that prize as well.

 

Casanova was born into an age of intrigue and gallantry, an age when love is the prerogative of the rich, and sex one of the few pleasures available even to the poor. The Church preaches abstinence outside marriage, but few people take any notice of its sermons, even the priests and bishops, many of whom lack religious vocation and have only embarked upon a clerical career at the behest of their families. Since enlightened minds see sex as a natural, pleasurable act which leads only to happiness, male philandering is acceptable and male chastity is almost non-existent: as the Methodist preacher John Wesley writes, ‘How few can lay claim to it at all?'

Love is a widely available commodity, and attitudes to sex are liberal. Pornographic engravings are on display for all to see in the windows of London's print-shops and female armies made up of thousands of whores patrol almost every European city. They range from desperate streetwalkers who will pull up their skirts in a doorway, on a bridge or behind a tree for only a few pennies to well-bred prostitutes who demand courtship and high fees. In the Swiss city of Berne, ladies of pleasure step naked into the spa baths with their clients. In London, where there are more than one hundred brothels within the vicinity of Drury Lane alone, publications
such as
Kitty's Atlantis
, the
Whoremonger's Guide
and the
Covent Garden Magazine or Amorous Repository
list the women's names and whereabouts, along with their prices and sexual specialities. Paris has its own such publication: the
Almanack des Adresses des Demoiselles
.

Rich men who want more than relief sex – or sex with less risk of disease – can look for a lover among the better class of courtesan, or the virgin daughters of the working classes, or among their servants, or even among their peers. In the second half of the eighteenth century every woman seems open to their approaches, from high-born duchesses to the wenches who wait on them. For to have a lover is considered a status symbol in sophisticated European circles where marriage is usually little more than a business arrangement forged by one's family, and where only the female servants of the rich, who build up their own dowries from their wages, have the freedom to choose their own spouses. As Lord Chesterfield advises his son, ‘
Un arrangement
, which is, in plain English, a gallantry, is at Paris as necessary a part of a woman of fashion's establishment as her house.' No king is a king without at least one official mistress, and no prince or duke can hold up his head in public if he does not have a beautiful courtesan in tow. Even the Russian empresses take lovers, Catherine the Great at least twelve of them.

Love is an art, seduction a thrilling, sometimes dangerous sport played by both sexes. Flirtation, subterfuge, refusal, pursuit and final surrender are the basic moves of the game, and the board is anywhere you choose to conduct the affair: a field, a bosky park, a covered carriage or a day-bed in a candlelit room. The absence of any male and female undergarments other than long linen chemises, and the growing fashion for less formal dresses, make success in the sport easy to achieve. As the stiff French manners of Louis XIV's late reign recede into memory, women have lowered their necklines, sometimes as far as their nipples, and loosened their padded whalebone stays in order to push up their breasts without compressing their waists too much. Fabrics are soft and light; more
than ever before they cling to a woman's curves. Held out from the body by rigid panniers and hoops, the new wider skirts allow a hem to be easily lifted to gain access to the stockinged legs and naked flesh underneath. Men's knee breeches, whilst hugging the thighs, are baggy in the seat and speedily unbuttoned at the front.

The game of love has many sets of rules: two for aristocrats, two for their servants, two for country peasants, one of each for men and women. To acknowledge that you have a lover might be acceptable among high society or servants in the capitals of Europe, and in the theatrical profession where actresses like Casanova's mother regularly favour their admirers, but it is distinctly less so among Europe's peasant classes, where couples are more likely to marry for love rather than money or position, and respectability is often the only thing of worth that a girl possesses. A nobleman's daughter who is known to have lost her virginity might still make a marriage with a man of the second rank because she has a dowry. A peasant girl loses her entire value if she is deflowered, and faces an inevitable downward slide into prostitution, destitution and an early death from disease.

The price of love is high, and in most cases it is women who pay it. Pregnancy is the worst disaster. Childbirth, with its possible consequences of haemorrhaging and septicaemia, is so dangerous that women in France face a one-in-ten chance of dying in the process. Abortion is a mortal sin likely to end in a serious internal infection, yet to have a baby out of wedlock brings disgrace on one's person, one's family and one's offspring, who will forever bear the stigma of illegitimacy. Women of means can get away with having an illegitimate child by taking refuge in a country village or convent for their confinement, and afterwards paying for their baby to be brought up by a foster mother whilst they return to their former lives as if nothing had happened. But if a poor woman brings a bastard into this world her reputation, and her life, are ruined.

Though contraception is absolutely forbidden by the Church, it is increasingly used, both within marriage and outside it. It is becoming more possible to separate pleasure from procreation,
and birth rates across Europe are beginning to fall, dramatically so in France. Women douche with astringents after sex or insert sponges or golden balls into their vaginas to stop themselves from conceiving, but such devices are expensive and hard to come by, and since most seductions take place away from the home and without warning, a douche is unlikely to be to hand at the moment when a woman needs it.
Coitus interruptus
, a more reliable method of contraception if practised correctly, is beyond a woman's control. The male contraceptive -
la capote anglaise
or English overcoat as the French called it – has been around since Egyptian times, fashioned out of linen, but it is rarely used outside the better brothels of Paris or London, where it re-emerged during the reign of King Charles II made out of animal gut. Secured to the penis by a gathered ribbon at one end, its texture is often so thick and uneven that it is bound to cool all but the very hottest ardour. Rather than using them to prevent their lovers from getting pregnant, men usually wear the overcoats, if at all, to preserve themselves from disease.

‘The malady with which Venus not infrequently repays those who worship at her Shrine', as Scottish writer James Boswell describes venereal disease, is an embarrassing and potentially life-threatening penalty paid by most players of the game of love. No one wants to own up to syphilis, a plague which has devastated the Old World since the discovery of the New in the late fifteenth century and which is mistakenly believed to be part and parcel of the same affliction as gonorrhoea, a sexually transmitted disease which has been around since medieval times. The English call the illness the ‘French Disease', Spaniards call it
El Morbo Ingles
and the French
La Maladie Espagnole
or even the
Mai de Naples
. The pox affects the brain if left untreated. It causes pain and ulcers and a putrid discharge that leaves sufferers with ‘scandalously soiled' clothing and sheets. Newspapers, particularly in England, are full of quack remedies for sufferers, many of which do more harm than good. They include syringes to wash out an infected urethra, the famous Italian Bolus pill, Velno's Vegetable Syrup, Keyser's Pills,
and Dr Rock's Royal Patent. People will do anything for a cure. Boswell, a sex addict who suffers from venereal disease on nineteen separate occasions, travels from Italy to London just to get hold of Dr Gilbert Kennedy's Lisbon Diet Drink, an anti-venereal tonic containing sarsaparilla, liquorice and guaiac wood, an ingredient used by the natives of the Caribbean island of San Domingo to some good effect. But at half a guinea a bottle, the Lisbon Diet Drink is exorbitantly expensive, particularly since the recommended dose is two bottles a day.

Since the early sixteenth century, the main cure for the pox has been treatment with the liquid metal mercury, administered orally, by injection, as an inhalation or as a topical ointment mixed with animal fat. The high fever and copious saliva that these treatments produce are believed to help the patient sweat out the disease, but they do far worse than that. Mercury poisons the system, causing terrible pain as well as damage to the liver, brain and kidneys. It makes one's teeth fall out and turns one's breath foul. Administered by an unskilled physician, a mercury ‘cure' can easily result in chronic weakness or even death. Wary of bad medical practitioners, in all but his most severe cases of the pox Casanova treats himself by avoiding alcohol, sticking to a rigorous diet and drinking a solution of saltpetre; this cure takes him between six and eight weeks. Though in his youth he finds venereal disease humiliating and degrading, by old age he has grown so used to it that he regards the physical scars it has given him as badges of honour won with pleasure on the battlefields of romance.