Casanova's Women (23 page)

Parma had suddenly lost its magic. While Henriette waited for a reply to come from France – it would take at least two weeks for the messenger to reach her home and return to Italy – she went with Casanova on an excursion to Milan; their servants followed them in another carriage, bringing with them their trunks and Henriette's cello. Even though he knew he was losing his lover, Casanova continued to lavish money on her and, with a delicacy which pleased him, she continued to accept his generosity. Although they attempted to enjoy themselves a certain sadness invaded their hitherto carefree existence, and sadness was ‘a disease which eventually kills love'.
²³

Casanova's most exquisite, most memorable love affair was drawing to a close. By the time he returned to Parma with Henriette a fortnight later, d'Antoine-Blacas had received an answer from her family: all her conditions had been met, and she was to leave for France in a few days' time. Holding the reins of power until the very end, Henriette asked Casanova to find her a respectable maid and to escort them both across the Alps as far as Geneva, from where she said she would continue her journey alone.

A few days later, the lovers left Parma at dusk in Casanova's English
coupé
, along with Henriette's new maid. After stopping at Turin to engage a manservant for Casanova they drove to the foot of Mount Cenis, where they were to cross from Piedmont to Savoy over the mountain's 2,090-metre-high pass. Since there were no roads across the Alps, Casanova's
coupé
had to be dismantled and loaded on to mules along with their trunks in preparation for the ascent. The Mount Cenis pass was a favourite route with aristocrats on the Grand Tour. Shrouded in clouds even during the summer months (and it was now midwinter), it was dangerous and exciting at the best of times, even for a seasoned traveller, as English aristocrat Horace Walpole had discovered several years earlier when his King Charles spaniel puppy ('the prettiest, fattest, dearest creature!') was carried off by a wolf on the same route. Like Henriette and Casanova, Walpole and his party had been carried up the narrow paths ‘in low armchairs on poles, swathed in beaver bonnets, beaver gloves, beaver stockings, muffs and bearskins … The dexterity and nimbleness of the mountaineers is inconceivable; they run with you down steeps and frozen precipices, where no man, as men are now, could possibly walk. ‘
²⁴
At the top of the pass, Henriette and Casanova, their dismantled carriage, trunks and servants were all transferred from sedan chairs on to sledges for the slow, steep, uncomfortable descent to the village of Lansle-bourg nestling in the snow far below them. Neither Casanova nor Henriette was in the mood to enjoy the thrilling trip. Ahead of them lay a parting that weighed heavily on both of them.

Five days after leaving Parma they finally reached Geneva and checked into the best inn, L'Hôtel à la Balance – The Scales – on the Place de la Bel-Air. The following day Henriette contacted Tronchin, the Genevan representative of a firm of Lyonnais bankers of the same name, requesting a carriage, two reliable male servants and the considerable sum of one thousand louis in cash. Demonstrating just how wealthy and well-connected her family must be, Tronchin himself brought the money to the inn the very next day and assured Henriette that she would have everything else she had asked for within twenty-four hours.

‘Glum and pensive, as one is when the most profound sadness overwhelms the spirit',
²⁵
Henriette and Casanova sat together in a grim silence, which he finally broke by offering to exchange his luxurious English
coupé
for the less comfortable vehicle the banker was due to supply her with. She responded by pushing five rolls of one hundred louis each into Casanova's pockets. The money, he felt, was but ‘a poor consolation for my heart, only too overcome by so cruel a separation'.
²⁶
Nevertheless, and quite out of character, he accepted it. Ever the realist, Henriette offered Casanova no illusory hopes to make their parting easier. On the contrary, she asked him never to make enquiries about her, and furthermore made him promise not to acknowledge her if they should ever meet by chance in the future.

With her maid sitting beside her, and accompanied by two footmen – one sitting at the front of the
coupé
, the other standing at the back – Henriette left Geneva at dawn the next day. She had asked Casanova to remain at the Scales until he received a letter which she would send him from the first post-station she stopped at, Châtillon. Genuinely grief-stricken at her departure, he took to his bed and let sorrow overwhelm him. If he was hoping that Henriette's letter would offer some explanation for her behaviour or tell him where she was headed he was disappointed. When the postillion delivered it the following day, Casanova found that it contained only one word from her:
Farewell
.

Henriette had also written Casanova a longer letter which he
received the following day from d'Antoine-Blacas. He copied it out word for word in his memoirs: ‘It is I, my only friend, who had to abandon you. Do not make your sorrow greater by thinking of mine. Let us imagine that we have had a pleasant dream, and let us not complain of our fate, for never was so pleasant a dream so long. Let us congratulate ourselves on having had three whole months of perfect happiness; there are few mortals who can say as much. So let us never forget each other, and let us often recall our love in our minds in order to renew it in our souls, which, though parted, will enjoy it even more intensely. Do not enquire about me, and if chance brings you to find out, be it as if you did not know. You should know, my dear friend, that I have put my affairs in such good order that for the rest of my days I shall be as happy as I can be without you. I do not know who you are; but I know that nobody in the world knows you better than I do. I will have no more lovers in all my life to come; but I hope that you will not think of doing the same. I wish you to love again, and even to find another Henriette. Farewell.'
²⁷

This was not Henriette's only message to him: with the point of a small diamond ring he had given her she had scratched four words into the window-glass of their room:
‘Tu oublieras aussi Henriette.' -
You will forget Henriette too. Although in many ways such a wise judge of Casanova's character, Henriette was wrong in this one thing. ‘No, I have not forgotten her,' he wrote some forty years later, ‘and it is balm to my soul every time I remember her.'
²⁸

 

From the post-station at Châtillon, Henriette's carriage took the road to Lyon. There we, like Casanova, lose sight of her. It seems almost certain that, at Lyons, the English
coupé
bought in haste by Casanova in Cesena to impress her turned south down the Rhône valley towards the prosperous city of Aix-en-Provence, where Henriette's family owned a house in town and a pretty country château six to ten kilometres outside the city, near the Croix d'Or crossroads on the Marseille road.

Whatever difficulties she had expected to encounter when she
returned to France, Henriette faced them without a backward glance. Though it is unlikely that she ever lived with her husband again, she was certainly accepted back into the bosom of her parental family, and eventually resumed life as a
grande dame
of Aixoise society. She had got what she had wanted by running away: not passion, but rather independence and peace of mind and, most importantly, freedom from her husband's tyranny. She never told anyone the details of her Italian adventure. Her love affair with Casanova and her fling with the Hungarian officer belonged to a brief, desperate period of her life that was best kept secret. By her own admission, Henriette was blessed with a natural
joie de vivre
and possessed the ability to live for the moment. A quiet life was perhaps enough for her.

By the spring of 1763, Casanova was just a memory to thirty-seven-year-old Henriette, one that was unexpectedly revived towards the end of May, when she was staying with members of her family at their country estate on the Marseille road. Shortly after half-past five one afternoon, a French manservant knocked at the château door asking for help. He introduced himself as Clairmont, and said that his master the Chevalier de Seingalt's carriage had broken down at the end of the drive; they were in need of a cartwright to mend the vehicle and some help in pulling the carriage off the road. Carriage breakdowns were a habitual feature of long-distance travel, particularly in France where, according to Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
, ‘a French postillion has always to alight before he has got three hundred yards out of town',
²⁹
and two servants from Henriette's château were dispatched to bind up the carriage's broken shaft. At the same time, an invitation was extended to the travellers to take shelter in the château until the carriage was mended. Henriette put on a hooded cloak and walked with her relatives down the long tree-bordered drive that led to the public road. At the end of the drive she could see a broken Berlin being pulled slowly through the gates by a team of four rather restive horses. In front of it walked a man who appeared at first to be a well-dressed French aristocrat, arm-in-arm with a tall, natural
beauty some twenty years his junior whose long dark loose hair streamed out behind her in the wind. As these two figures drew nearer, Henriette became aware that the so-called Chevalier de Seingault was in fact the Venetian she had known in Parma as Giacomo de Farussi.

Henriette shrank back under her hood, while one of her male relatives offered Casanova and the young woman, who everyone at first presumed was his daughter, the hospitality of the house. When she spotted one of the family's mastiffs chasing a pet spaniel, Henriette seized the opportunity to get away and ran off to rescue it, but she accidentally tripped and fell. Before Casanova could help her up she struggled to her feet unaided and, claiming a sprained ankle, limped back to the house on her brother's arm and took refuge in her bedroom. She could only wonder what Casanova was doing there. Had he found out where she lived and come there deliberately with the purpose of seeing and perhaps embarrassing her, or was his carriage breakdown directly outside the gates of her house an extraordinary coincidence?

Casanova claimed it was the latter. He was travelling from Marseille to Lyon with Marcolina, a feisty Venetian beauty he had recently stolen from under the nose of his detested youngest brother Gaetano ('a blasphemer and a fool, a barbarian who deserves no pity' as the adventurer generously described him).
³⁰
A league beyond the Croix d'Or, a well-known crossroads near the village of Bouc-Bel-Air, a fastening on the pole of their carriage had accidentally broken, leaving Casanova no alternative but to send his servant Clairmont to approach the nearest house for help. That it turned out to be Henriette's house was, he insisted, the work of destiny.
Fata viam invenient
. Once again in their relationship, Fate had shown the way.

Casanova and Marcolina would have made an extraordinary impression on Henriette's family – just how extraordinary we can gauge from a description of them written by a young Frenchwoman, Marie de Nairne, who met them by chance just three days later. ‘This stunning traveller arrived in a Berlin at the Hôtel du
Parc in Lyon towards five o'clock in the evening,' Mademoiselle de Nairne wrote to her fiancé Baron Michel de Ramsay in a letter of 28 May 1763. ‘He immediately created a hullabaloo because he was not given the room he claimed he had booked in advance. His servant, like himself, had the same threatening manner … But at table, once the hors d'oeuvre had been served, he was in charming humour, expounding enthusiastically upon a thousand different subjects. We hung on his lips … He was tall, with a dark complexion, richly dressed with heavy jewelled rings on his fingers. His foreign accent was highly comical.
³¹
A very attractive young woman, dark and with dazzling teeth, and the same foreign accent, who had arrived with him in the coach, laughed ceaselessly at the stories related for our amusement ... It was M. de Casanova, a Venetian nobleman.'
³²

Casanova's behaviour outside her house showed Henriette that either he had not recognised her beneath her hood or, as in the past, he was behaving like the consummate gentleman. She was curious to talk to him, but reluctant to reveal who she was if he had not already guessed. When she learned that her brothers had invited him to stay for supper she sent down a message inviting the entire company to join her in her room before they ate, but she made sure to arrange herself in a dark alcove. ‘She was lying in a big bed at the back of an alcove made even darker by crimson taffeta curtains,' Casanova wrote of going up to her bedroom. ‘She was not wearing a cap; but it was impossible to see her to the point where one could not make out whether she was ugly or pretty, young or of a certain age. I told her that I was in despair at having been to blame for her misfortune, and she answered me in Venetian Italian that it would amount to nothing.'
³³
Henriette would not show her face in the light but she was not above giving Casanova a hint as to who she was. Though she had never been to Venice, she explained, she had often talked with Venetians. Delightedly, Casanova introduced her to Marcolina who, since she spoke no French, was thrilled to have someone to talk to in her native language. From then on, Henriette did nothing but talk in the Venetian dialect to her guests. The only
personal detail that she deliberately let slip about herself was that she was a widow – a term used to denote both bereavement and separation at a time when divorce was virtually unknown in France.

Since their carriage would not be ready until the following day, the travellers were invited to spend the night at the château. It was Marcolina, not Casanova, who shared Henriette's bed, and, according to the salacious description the young girl gave him the following day, the two women committed ‘all the follies that you know that two women who love each other do when they sleep together ... I saw all of her this morning, and we kissed each other all over.'
³⁴
Henriette had lost neither her youthful beauty nor her libertine attitude to sex. Marcolina had pleased her, and the proof of it lay in a beautiful jewelled ring that Henriette presented her with the following morning. This valuable gift (Casanova estimated its worth as 200 French louis) may have obliquely been intended for the man who had once behaved with such generosity towards her.