Casanova's Women (20 page)

Marrying a singer was out of the question for Casanova. And now that he had enjoyed Teresa's charms, even associating with her was losing its attraction. Playing for time, he returned her contract by post, warning her to engage a respectable chambermaid as a chaperone and to conduct herself in such a way ‘that I could marry her without blushing', and promising to join her in Naples as soon as he could. Teresa replied poignantly that she would ‘wait for him until such time as he wrote and told her he no longer thought of her'. In another letter, written in early May, she informed him that Castropignano had offered to escort her personally to Naples. The duke was old, she reassured him, but even if he had been young Casanova would have had nothing to fear, for she would always remain faithful to him. If he needed money, she added, he should draw bills of exchange in Bologna on her name, ‘and she would pay them even if it meant her having to sell everything she had'.
³¹

This loving, generous, passionate letter did Teresa no good at all. It is doubtful if Casanova even replied to it. While she went to Naples and threw herself into her career, he returned to Venice and the welcoming arms of his two upper-class ‘wives', as he called them, Nanetta and Marta Savorgnan. It was not so easy for Teresa to forget him: she was pregnant. With no one else to turn to, she confided her predicament to Castropignano who was fast becoming her father-figure and saviour. Unwilling to lose her, the duke arranged for her to give birth in secret, then sent her child – a boy – to a wet-nurse in Sorrento where he was baptised in the name of Cesare Filippo Lanti and looked after and educated until he reached adulthood.

For the next fourteen years Castropignano's generosity to Teresa was boundless. He let her spend his money at a ruinous rate, settled
20,000 ducats on Cesarino, as Cesare was familiarly called, and arranged for both mother and son to be placed under the protection of the Prince della Riccia in the event of his own death. Teresa had accidentally fallen into clover. Her only regret was that her son was brought up believing that she was his sister rather than his mother. Deception was set to be a permanent fixture of her life.

Casanova stopped writing to Teresa soon after she settled in Naples, so she never told him that they had a son. Nevertheless she regarded Cesarino, who grew up bearing an uncanny resemblance to his father, as ‘a sure pledge' of their union, and she remained convinced that she and Casanova would marry if they ever met up again. When they did meet by chance sixteen years later, her position was very different. It was late November 1760, Castropignano had died two years previously, and Teresa was now a self-confident, independent thirty-one-year-old with her own substantial private means. She owned to having ‘fifty thousand
ducati del regno
and the same amount in diamonds';
³²
and she travelled from city to city with a strongbox containing all her precious stones and silver plate plus fifty thousand ducats in securities. During the summer of 1760 she had married Cirillo Palesi, a poor but extremely handsome Roman some ten years her junior who was her delight and her plaything. Though he now had legal rights over her, Teresa sensibly intended to retain control of her money; she neither told him the full extent of her wealth nor informed him of her real relationship with Cesarino. She even lied to him about her age, which she claimed was no more than twenty-four.

As well as her own income, Teresa also received the interest on Cesarino's inheritance from Castropignano. With so much money at her disposal, there could have been scant financial incentive for her to work. However, she continued to perform as a soprano, and in the autumn of 1760 travelled with her husband and fifteen-year-old ‘brother' to Florence, where she was engaged to sing at the Pergola Theatre (the name
Artemisia Lanti
appears in the Pergola's records of the time). One night in November, Teresa glanced into the audience and saw Casanova staring back at her. He was no
longer the impulsive young priest she had known in her youth, but a sophisticated man in his thirties, bewigged, bejewelled and richly dressed in the style of a French aristocrat.

Teresa was so surprised to see Casanova at all, never mind so richly attired, that her eyes never left his during the rest of her aria, and when she walked into the wings she beckoned for him to meet her backstage. Without hesitating for a moment she introduced Casanova to her husband as her ‘father', and the man to whom she owed all her good fortune in life. While Palesi was with them Teresa behaved with strict propriety towards Casanova, and when he left them alone together she would only grant her old lover a single passionate clinch. Her attitude to him was clear-cut: ‘It is all over,' she said of their relationship. This was the perfect cue for Casanova to express his undying love for Teresa. For years he had carried the guilt of not replying to her last letter from Naples, and now that she was rich and in love with someone else he could indulge himself in regrets and pass the responsibility for their continuing separation on to her. ‘I find you bound, and I am free,' he told her. ‘We would never have parted again; you have just rekindled all my old passion; my feelings are unchanged, and I am happy to have been able to convince myself of it; and unhappy not to be able to hope to possess you; I find you not only married but in love. Alas! I have delayed too long.'
³³
His regret increased when he met Teresa's so-called ‘brother', his own son Cesarino whose existence he had been unaware of until this point. Casanova was flabbergasted: the vivacious boy was his mirror-image; nature had ‘never been more indiscreet'.
³⁴

The day that Casanova spent with Teresa and their son was, he later wrote, ‘one of the happiest of my whole life'.
³⁵
It gave him a taste of the domestic felicity he might perhaps have enjoyed had his nature been different. But his restless spirit would never change. When he ran into Teresa again two years later in Milan, he was disturbed to discover that she was free again. Her honeymoon period with Palesi had ended, and with it their marriage. In an arrangement similar to modern-day alimony payments Teresa, as
the wealthier partner, had paid her husband off with a handsome annuity which allowed him to live independently of her.

Despite the years that had passed Teresa still nursed a small hope that she and Casanova might even at this late stage resume their love affair and marry. Or perhaps she was just playing a trick on him when she told him that there was nothing to stop them staying together for the rest of their lives. Nothing, she might well have added, except Casanova's nature. Now that he could finally have Teresa, he no longer wanted her, except for casual sex.

‘I went home in love with her,' the serial seducer wrote after they had spent the night together, ‘but my passion found too many diversions to last long.'

There is a happiness which is perfect and real as long as it lasts; it is transient, but its end does not negate its past existence and prevent he who has experienced it from remembering it.
¹

HE MET HER at an inn in Cesena in the late autumn of 1749. She was in bed with another man at the time. At first all that Casanova could see of her was a shape huddled beneath the sheets. He presumed that whoever she was, she was hiding herself out of modesty or embarrassment, but when at long last she stuck her head out from under the covers she did not seem at all ashamed of her predicament. In fact, the opposite was true. Her face was as fresh and sunny as a spring morning, and although she was wearing a man's shirt and her tousled hair was cut in a male style, her bewitching smile left Casanova in no doubt that she was all woman.

This was Casanova's first glimpse of Henriette, the greatest love of his life. She was everything he could possibly desire in a woman – courageous, intelligent, witty, beautiful and sexually liberated while at the same time being extremely cultivated and refined. She was also, most importantly, a grand aristocrat, and literally in a different class to the other women he had known. If a woman such as Henriette loved him, Casanova must be worth loving. Through loving her, the needy child rejected by his mother at last began to value himself.

Henriette asked nothing of Casanova except a pledge of no
commitment. This alone made her the ideal romantic partner for a man with an aversion to being tied down. But there was much more to their relationship than that. Casanova admired Henriette. He was in awe of her. She alone out of all his women was his soul-mate. Just being in her company gave him a feeling of contentment he had never experienced before. ‘Those who believe that a woman is not enough to make a man equally happy all the twenty-four hours of a day have never known an Henriette,' he wrote of her. ‘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.'
²

At the time they met, Casanova was ready to fall in love again. Twenty-four years old and wandering aimlessly through Italy with a surprising amount of money in his pockets, he was almost unrecognisable as the penniless novice priest who had fallen in love with fifteen-year-old Teresa Lanti four years previously. Just before parting from Teresa in Rimini he had abandoned his ecclesiastic garb and with it all thought of making a career in the Church. Donning an officer's uniform, he had returned to Venice, entered the service of the Republic as an ensign, and sailed for Corfu as adjunct to Giacomo da Riva, the governor of the Venetian galley slaves there. After several months working for da Riva, Casanova had made his way to Constantinople, where good fortune and happiness had continued to evade him. By January 1746, he was back in Venice, unemployed and rootless. The family house on the Calle della Commedia had been given up long ago, his sister Maria had moved to Dresden to join their mother, and his brother Francesco was temporarily imprisoned in the fortress of Sant'Andrea, where he was whiling away his time by painting battle scenes, an occupation at which he later earned a good living. As for the Savorgnan sisters, Nanetta had left Venice with her new husband, Marta was locked away in a convent on the island of Murano, and Signora Orio, their all-too-trusting aunt, had married an admirer and closed up her huge palazzo.

Casanova was homeless and penniless. Desperate for money, he managed with the help of nobleman Michele Grimani, his family's erstwhile patron, to get a job as a violinist at the San Samuele
theatre, which Grimani owned and where his parents had once been employed; though Casanova could not have cared less about music, Dr Gozzi had taught him a rudimentary knowledge of the violin during his schooldays, and he now put it to use. To work as a humble fiddler was the ultimate humiliation for a brilliant university graduate who had been given every opportunity to better himself and of whom great things had been universally expected. Ashamed of the level he had sunk to, Casanova avoided his old acquaintances, particularly those among the nobility, and his self-esteem, which was always so important to him, spiralled downhill along with his behaviour. In the company of a group of fellow-musicians and a dissipated young member of the patrician Balbi family, he frequented Venice's least salubrious taverns after the performances, then roamed drunkenly through the city committing crimes of vandalism and playing malicious practical jokes. The gang set gondolas loose on the canals, rang alarm bells in the church towers and broke into houses in the early hours of the morning, terrifying the occupants. Sexual predators who thought of nothing but their own immediate needs, they snatched whores away from their clients in the brothels, made them submit to brutal sex acts and then left without paying them.

These misdeeds and crimes culminated in a premeditated gangrape during the February 1746 carnival. While several members of the gang kidnapped a weaver and stranded him on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, opposite San Marco, the others abducted his pretty young wife to an inn in the Rialto district. Here they took her to a private upstairs room, plied her with wine and then took turns raping her. When Casanova wrote about the affair years later, he was still convinced that the woman had enjoyed ‘her happy fate'
³
as he described the ordeal of being forced to have sex with seven drunk men (the one gang member who refused to take part was Francesco Casanova, who had been freed from imprisonment only to be led into bad ways by his older brother). The city authorities offered a large reward for anyone who denounced the rapists, but since the ring-leader was a nobleman no one did.

Casanova knew that he was going to the dogs. However, he trusted in a stoic Latin maxim taught to him by his erstwhile mentor Senator Malipiero that
Fata viam invenient
– Fate will find the way – and counted on the goddess Fortune to rescue him. Miraculously, she did. Just before dawn on the morning of 21 April 1746 he was on his way home from playing the fiddle at a smart wedding when he saw a middle-aged senator drop a letter as he was getting into his gondola. When Casanova handed the letter back to him, the senator, wealthy fifty-six-year-old bachelor Matteo Giovanni Bragadin, offered him a lift home. During the short journey the senator suffered from what appears to have been a stroke. Casanova quick-wittedly summoned a surgeon, took Bragadin back to his palazzo, stationed himself at his bedside and refused to leave until he had recovered. His own childhood experiences at the hands of Venice's doctors, coupled with the vigil he had kept at Bettina Gozzi's sickbed, had given Casanova a healthy disrespect for the medical profession, and when he observed that the mercury poultice which the physicians had applied to Bragadin's chest was making him worse rather than better he took it upon himself to scrape off the poisonous ointment. From then on, he treated the senator himself.

Once Bragadin was back on his feet he regarded the young fiddler as his saviour and his oracle. He and his two male companions, Marco Dandolo and Marco Barbaro, with whom he shared his family's ancient palazzo, secretly dabbled in the occult arts – a practice regarded as heretical at the time. With just a little encouragement from Casanova all three were soon led to believe that their young friend had supernatural gifts, knew all about alchemy and possessed the key to the Kabbalah, an ancient system of thought and knowledge based in Jewish mysticism. Sensing that he was on to a good thing, Casanova was reluctant to disillusion the three men. To do so seemed almost unkind – or so he persuaded himself – for ‘with me at their command they saw themselves possessed of the philosopher's stone, the universal medicine, communication with the elemental spirits, and all the celestial
intelligences and the secrets of all the governments of Europe'.
⁴
Although he knew he was being dishonest he enjoyed the public notoriety that the trio's hero worship soon brought him. When Bragadin offered to adopt him as his son – to provide him with a servant, an apartment in the palazzo, his own private gondola and a moderate income of ten gold sequins a month – and told him to think of no career in future other than that of enjoying himself, Casanova lacked the moral strength to turn down what was, by any standards, a remarkable and unprecedented stroke of good fortune for a young man without status or means of his own.