Casanova's Women (25 page)

If Jean-Gaspard was indeed illegitimate, who then was his real father? In December 1746, Provence had been invaded and occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces. They remained in the area of La Palud until the following year. Born in February 1749, Jean-Gaspard could possibly have been the child of a Hungarian officer who had remained in the area – the same officer, perhaps, with whom Casanova's Henriette absconded by sea to Civitavecchia later that year.

Gaspard de Gueidan was a methodical man who kept detailed accounts of his day-to-day expenses. His records show that Adélaïde returned to Aix from La Palud in March 1749, just weeks after giving birth to Jean-Gaspard. She remained in the city until the following October, without her husband or any of her children. Then, for the three months commencing on 11 November, when Gaspard mentions the expenses of a journey in his ledger, Adélaïde appears to have been missing from the city. On 18 December her father notes down a payment made to ‘the coach driver who carried the trunk to Cannes'.
⁴²
Thereafter, several crucial pages of the ledger are missing.

Gaspard's housekeeping records further indicate that Adélaïde returned to Aix on or just before 14 February 1750, St Valentine's Day. The period when she was away – November 1749 to February 1750 – corresponds exactly with the dates of Casanova's love affair with Henriette. Wherever Adélaïde was during this period, we know from a letter written by her brother-in-law that she was not with her husband at La Palud. Nor would she be again. From then
on, she resided in Aix, without her husband or her children. The reason remains a mystery, for although Gaspard de Gueidan preserved the letters of his other children, Adelaide's are missing, either lost or deliberately destroyed.

The jigsaw pieces of Adélaïde de Gueidan's history – her skill on the viola da gamba, her abortive marriage, her suspected illegitimate son, her absence from Aix over the winter of 1749/1750 – fit together to create an almost perfect image of Casanova's ‘divine Henriette', a woman who withheld her real identity from Casanova for many years. Only one piece of the jigsaw does not fit. When he wrote about her in his memoirs, Casanova claimed that Henriette was still alive, content with her life and in contact with him. But Adélaïde de Gueidan had died at La Palud on 2 December 1786, some two years before he started work on
Histoire de Ma Vie
in 1789.

More than two and a half centuries after her love affair with Casanova, Henriette, the most romantic of all his women, still remains as she always wanted to be – an enigma, as intriguing to us now as she was to Casanova on the day he first fell in love with her.

Nothing is more certain than that a devout girl, when she does the work of the flesh with her lover, experiences a hundred times more pleasure than one without prejudices.
¹

IT IS FIVE O'CLOCK on the morning on 1 November 1753. An icy mist hangs over the black Venetian lagoon. The terns, ducks and gulls that live in the marshes have not yet awakened the day with their cries, but there is life already within the glass factories on the island of Murano, where the furnace fires which have been kept burning all night cast their demonic red glow into the sky. At the mouth of the Canale degli Angeli a light flickers behind the barred window of an ancient convent. Inside, a twenty-two-year-old woman sits shivering at a desk in an unheated bedchamber, writing a letter to a man she has never met.

Sunk in thought, M.M. twists a lock of long golden hair around fingers so blue with cold that her skin appears to be translucent. She knows virtually nothing about the intended recipient of her letter, not even his name. All she knows is that he is a tall, darkly tanned nobleman, with an imposing physique, a head of raven curls tied neatly with a ribbon at the nape of his neck, and large soulful eyes that smoulder with passion. Since August, he has put in an appearance at the convent's church on every feast day – the Transfiguration of the Lord, the Day of the Assumption, the Birth of Virgin Mary – as if he is the Holy Spirit made flesh, and today
being All Saints' Day, M.M. is hoping that he will turn up again. Although he has never once looked in her direction, something about this man intrigues and excites her. She is overwhelmed with the desire to make contact with him, even to touch him. As delicately as she can under the circumstances, but in terms that will leave little room for doubt, she is going to suggest to him that they become lovers.

Discreetly using the French language, which she believes he understands, M.M. sketches out in her letter the possible trajectory of a liaison between them. If he wishes, the recipient can first come to visit her with one of her friends, to whom he should not tell his name even if, once he has seen her, he decides that he does not want the matter to proceed. Alternatively, M.M. will send him the address of a private casino on Murano ‘where you will find her alone at the first hour of the night, on the day you indicate to her; you can stay and sup with her, or you can leave after a quarter of an hour in the event that you have business'. If he prefers to offer her dinner in Venice, he should ‘Tell her the day, the hour of the night, and the place where she should surrender herself, and you will see her leave a gondola masked, provided you are on the quay alone, without a servant, masked, and holding a candle.' Impatient to know his answer, M.M. ends by begging the stranger to give his reply to the same serving-woman who delivers this letter to him, and who will be waiting for him an hour before midday tomorrow in the church of San Canziano, near the Rialto bridge.

M.M. puts down her pen and reads through what she has written. Then, with a burning feeling inside her chest, she clutches at the heavy crucifix that hangs like a stone around her neck. What will the man think of her for propositioning him so brazenly? What if she has misjudged his character? What if he finds out who she is and publicly shames her? For she is suggesting the unthinkable to him: that the two of them commit a crime against God, by making a cuckold of the most Holy of husbands – Lord Jesus Christ.

M.M. is a nun.

She hesitates for a moment, then dips her pen in the silver-topped
inkpot once more and scrawls a final mitigating sentence at the bottom of the page. ‘Consider,' she writes, ‘that if I had not assumed you to be good and honourable, I should never have resolved to take a step that might make you form a dreadful opinion of me.'
²
After blotting these words dry, she folds the unsigned letter into a small rectangle, melts some bronze-coloured wax in the flame of her candle and firmly fastens the paper shut with her seal, which bears the imprint of a running knot. Before she can change her mind and tear the letter up she rings for her serving-woman and hands it to her with a large tip, instructing her exactly to whom, and when, the thing should be delivered.

A bell tolls, summoning M.M. to Prime. Terrified by what she has done, and yet at the same time exhilarated, she hides her tousled hair under a modest head-dress, slips a plain habit over her lace-trimmed shift, and rushes to the chapel in time to join her sisters for morning prayers.

 

In the autumn of 1753 M.M., the most enigmatic of all Casanova's lovers, was a twenty-two-year-old
monacha da coro
, or choir-nun, in the Augustinian convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli on the Venetian island of Murano. She was ‘an absolute beauty, tall, with a complexion so white that it verged on pallor, a noble and decisive demeanour that was at the same time shy and reserved, large blue eyes; a sweet and smiling face, beautiful lips moist with dew, which allowed a glimpse of two superb rows of teeth'.
³
Like her glorious knee-length hair, which instead of cutting off as nuns were supposed to she kept hidden under her head-dress, her arched eyebrows were of the lightest chestnut colour. Her hands and forearms – the only parts of her flesh visible to the world apart from her face and throat – were plump, dimpled and as flawlessly white as the purest Carrara marble.

Who was this beautiful, libidinous nun? For obvious reasons, Casanova was very much concerned to disguise her identity, and in his manuscript he originally gave her the name
Mathilde.
⁴
When he wrote to his friend the Prince de Ligne about the problem of what
to call her, he received the advice to
‘Faites imprinter M.M'
.
⁵
This must have appealed to Casanova's sense of discretion, for he returned to his manuscript, scored out the original name and replaced it with the two initials. In reality M.M. was almost certainly a young woman named Marina Maria Morosini. Like many Venetian choir-nuns, she came from a patrician family. Her father, Domenico Morosini, was descended from a long line of notable Venetians that included several doges, a sixteenth-century historian, and the seventeenth commander-in-chief of the Republic's vast navy, said to be one of the greatest captains of his time (Francesco Morosini besieged Athens' Acropolis in 1687 and bombarded the Parthenon, almost destroying it in the process).

Born on 11 September 1731, Marina had been sent to Santa Maria degli Angeli days before her eighth birthday when, like many of her contemporaries, she was enrolled as an
educanda
, or temporary boarder. There, behind the convent's high walls and locked gates, she was schooled in subjects thought appropriate for a young woman of her class and, at the same time, kept out of harm's way – that is, away from the temptations of Venice and the sexual advances of predatory young men. When the noble-born
educande
grew up some were married off and left to live in their husbands' palazzi. Others remained in the cloister for the rest of their lives. Due to the Republic's rigid caste system, marriage to a man of a similar or higher social status was considered essential in Venetian society. However, this kind of union required the payment of an extremely large dowry by a girl's father. To avoid bankrupting himself, a nobleman would pour a large proportion of his resources into securing a prestigious marriage for his oldest or prettiest daughter, and rather than let her younger sisters marry beneath them he would exile them to one of the Republic's fifty convents where, for a much smaller dowry, they could respectably become the eternal spiritual brides of Jesus Christ. In this way the patrician families of Venice sacrificed their children to economics and tradition: while their younger sons were forced to remain bachelors in order not to split
up the family inheritance, their younger daughters were buried alive within convent walls.

In common with her older sister. Marina was destined to spend her life as an ‘Angel of Murano', as the nuns in the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli were known. Being pushed into taking religious vows was a dreadful experience for a young woman who had no religious calling, though girls did not always realise the full consequences of what they were doing until the ceremony of profession had concluded. ‘When she first appeared, she looked pale, and more dead than alive,' wrote Dr Charles Burney after witnessing the profession of a beautiful young Roman noblewoman, an event he called a human sacrifice. ‘She made a most profound reverence to the cardinal who was seated on the steps of the altar in his mitre and all his rich vestments, ready to receive her. She threw herself upon her knees at the foot of the altar, and remained in that posture for some time … She said, that she begged to be admitted into that convent as a sister of the order of St Ursula: Have you well, said the cardinal, considered of what you ask? She answered, cheerfully, that she had; and was well informed of all she was about to do … At the altar she changed countenance several times, first pale, then red, and seemed to pant, and to be in danger of either bursting into tears, or fainting; but she recovered before the ceremony was ended, and at the convent door assumed an air of great cheerfulness; talked to several of her friends and acquaintance, and seemed to give up the world very heroically.'
⁶

In a furious work which she bluntly entitled
Inferno monacale
– The Nun's Hell – the seventeenth-century Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti, who had been a victim of enforced profession herself, described the ceremony from a novice's point of view as like being ‘a witness at her own funeral'.
⁷
Becoming a nun was tantamount to dying. At the convent gates a novice gave up her hair, her worldly possessions, her personal relationships, her desires, her sexuality and whatever freedoms, however limited, she had hitherto enjoyed. The rest of her life would be ruled by a monotonous timetable of prayers, sermons, meals and devotion overseen by
an abbess and the local bishop. She would never know the love of a man, never have a child, never go to the theatre or dance in the streets during carnival, never choose for herself which book to read, never even walk down the street on her father's arm. When her relatives came to visit her she would communicate with them through a heavy iron grating in a public visiting-parlour. Even in church she would be separated from the secular congregants by a locked iron communication window.

‘Hope and love keep us in this pleasant prison' read the sixteenth-century inscription above the main entrance to the church of Le Vergini, the convent to which some of the most celebrated Venetian families sent their daughters. But there was little hope for those forced to endure the ‘eternal imprisonment' of the convent, even though the older nuns, who had been through the experience themselves and were often relatives of the young novitiates, went out of their way to make the girls' day-to-day existence as pleasant as possible. Upper-class choir-nuns were waited on by
converse
, lay-nuns who only took simple vows and were, in reality, serving-women who went back to their own houses and children at night. Some convent rules – such as those forbidding personal relationships – were simply made to be broken: abbesses frequently turned a blind eye to nuns wearing their own clothes under their habits, keeping valuable personal items in their rooms or forming close, even loving friendships with the young
educande
, as Marina did. Older choir-nuns, ‘instead of enjoining them to adopt a rigorous silence,' assured their younger sisters ‘that they can make as much noise as they like'.
⁸
Convent visiting-rooms often resembled social salons, with family members and secret masked admirers gathering there with their dogs and children to watch a puppet show or exchange gossip and news with the nuns. But even when Venice's carnival celebrations invaded the quiet of the cloister, the nuns remained locked behind their iron grating, forced to be passive spectators to a way of life in which they were forbidden to participate.