Casanova's Women (3 page)

Casanova is no ordinary player in the game of love, but a pastmaster at it. What is his secret? For he must have one. Although he does not keep an exact tally of the women he seduces, he estimates in old age that more than two hundred lovers have passed through his practised hands. The love of women dominates his existence from the moment he comes into the world to his dying days, when his female correspondents flirt with him through their pens.

Where does his almost pathological need to be loved and admired stem from? Casanova's mother does not appear to love
him. She all but ignores him and, when he is only twelve months old, she abandons him to pursue her acting career. After his father dies, she exiles her nine-year-old son to Padua and leaves him with a hideous and cruel hag he does not know. Six months later, neglected and half-starved, he is rescued by his grandmother and sent to live at his schoolmaster's house, where he falls into the sexually curious hands of his first love, Bettina.

By the time Casanova returns to Venice, a precocious fourteen-year-old with a university degree in clerical law and an addiction to gambling, he is, like most youths of his age, at the mercy of his hormones and desperate to lose his virginity. In common with many well-educated young men who lack a private income, he is headed for the priesthood, but in the Serenissima or Serene One, as his native city is known, the temptations of the flesh assail him at every turn. Impressed by his sharp brain, an elderly Venetian senator with a penchant for young women takes Casanova under his wing and teaches him the ways of the world. Senator Alvise Malipiero II instructs the novice priest in the invaluable art of discretion. He lets him bear silent witness to his own torment at the hands of a flirtatious seventeen-year-old minx, and introduces him to the cream of Venetian society. Before long, the young Casanova – extremely tall at just under six feet, with large soulful eyes, dark olive skin and, despite the fact that he has taken the tonsure, a head of glorious curls – becomes the confidant and plaything of some of the most well-connected women in the city.

And so his career as a womaniser begins. Dispensing with formalities, these
nobile donne
allow Casanova to visit their palazzi unannounced, at will; and even to mingle with their unmarried daughters at the gratings of the convents where they are enrolled as
educande
, or schoolgirls. Casanova is in his element being their trusted pet. Understandably he would much rather be made a fuss of by a room full of rich sophisticated beauties than kneel on a cold church floor all day long saying his prayers. As he joins in with their small-talk he discovers what women think and feel about life, literature, love and men. He learns how to talk to women, how
to make them laugh and how to befriend them. He learns to like women as much as they like him.

One night when he is sixteen years old, Casanova discovers the joys of sex in the arms of two sisters: above all he desires one-to-one contact with a woman, but after this first experience he is never averse to increasing the ratio to one-to-two, as long as he is the only man. It proves such a pleasurable purusit that, while he is not bisexual, he will not turn down the very occasional opportunity in the future to experience it with a member of his own sex. Women, however, are his overwhelming interest. They are never mere bodies, but always individuals to him; the idea of taking part in an anonymous orgy does not turn him on. Casanova likes to get to know a woman before he makes love to her. For a woman is like a book to him: good or bad, pretty or ugly, she excites his curiosity, his desire to discover and read. If he is to enjoy sex with her, there must be some emotional or intellectual
frisson
between them. Casanova requires a woman to like him, to desire him, even to love him. And for sex to reach its zenith, he needs to love her with the same intensity.

Addicted not to sex, but rather to making an endless succession of conquests – a trait that, in a non-sexual context, extends to his relationships with all those he wishes to impress – Casanova goes out of his way to court women's affection and friendship, both in bed and out of it. He charms them with his intellect and disarms them with his looks. He gets them to talk about themselves, and listens to them with keen interest. He spoils them with the best food, the best accommodation and extravagant presents. When making a move, he seldom oversteps the mark but instinctively knows when to keep silent and when to flatter, when to retreat and when to pounce. He knows how to manipulate a situation to his own advantage, and very few can resist his persuasive arguments. Taking no for answer is not something he does willingly. If a woman tells him that she will not sleep with him, he can make her see in a few easy steps that she means quite the opposite.

His tactics in the game of love can breach the most impenetrable
fortress, and once the walls are down Casanova has full confidence in his ability to please the defeated one who lies physically and emotionally naked at his feet. In bed, he seeks something more than simple sexual satisfaction – a mutual climax that is like death in each other's arms, the kiss that unites two souls. He hints that his penis is large and that his self-control is exceptional, but he also admits to having his insecurities. Able in his youth to perform several times a night with the same lover, and to prolong his performance until she is satisfied, he nevertheless lives in permanent fear of failure. As he admits with disarming candour, ‘I have all my life been dominated by the fear that my steed would flinch from beginning another race.'

Sexually uninhibited himself, Casanova believes that the slightest inhibition spoils enjoyment for both parties. He spontaneously does delicious things to women that they would not dare ask a man to do to them, and he shows them sexual practices that they had no idea existed. The link between clitoral stimulation and the female orgasm is well known in the eighteenth century:
Onania – Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution
, an English sex manual first published in 1710, describes in detail how ‘the necessary and unavoidable Friction of the
Penis
, against the
Clitoris
, in the Act of Coition, causes those excessive Ticklings and transporting Itchings to each Sex, that are not to be describ'd, so well as felt;
¹
and, after being initiated early on into this open secret, Casanova takes pleasure in enlightening the unenlightened among the female sex. In bed he enjoys giving even more than he does receiving, and he claims that his partner's pleasure makes up four-fifths of his own. Since he cannot understand how a woman can enjoy herself with a man if the threat of pregnancy hangs over her – it would certainly put him off sex if he were a woman – he often spares his lovers by practising
coitus interruptus
, and on occasions wears a condom.

Sex and love, if not indivisible for Casanova, are closely linked, and the search for love dominates his life. He himself is shot through by Cupid's arrow almost as often as he plunges one through a woman's heart. Though some of his encounters are
mere passing fancies that gratify his senses for a night or so, others lead to lasting friendships, or change a woman's life for ever, or deeply touch his soul. He enjoys countless lighthearted love affairs, and suffers over a handful of destructive infatuations. He is once so hopelessly besotted by a woman that he secretly eats the split ends of her hair. He experiences true love, ‘the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale.' He knows the delights of living in perfect harmony with a woman who is his soul-mate and his intellectual equal. He tastes the bitterness of unwanted separation before an affair has run its course: ‘The pain seems infinitely greater than the pleasure we have already experienced … We are so unhappy that, in order to stop being so, we wish we had never been happy in the first place.'
²

But after falling in and out of love countless times, Casanova is still no clearer as to what love is. ‘For all that I have read every word that certain self-styled sages have written on the nature of love, and have philosophised endlessly about it myself as I have aged, I will never admit that it is either a trifle or a vanity,' he writes of it. ‘It is a kind of madness over which philosophy has no power at all; a sickness to which man is prone throughout his life and which is incurable if it strikes in old age. Indefinable love! God of nature! Bitterness than which nothing is sweeter, sweetness than which nothing is more bitter! Divine monster which can only be defined by paradoxes!'
³

‘I have loved women even to madness,' he admits in a more prosaic mood. ‘But I have always preferred my freedom to them. Whenever I have been afraid of sacrificing it, only chance has saved me.' The thought of marriage has always been as disagreeable to him as the idea of settling down in one place. However deeply Casanova has loved, however strongly he is attached to a woman, his amorous feelings inevitably give way to claustrophobia and the need to escape. Somehow he manages to find a valid reason why the affair must end: the woman's old fiancé turns up unexpectedly; her father locks her away in a convent; Casanova gets himself
thrown into prison or exiled from the town she is in; the girl is unfaithful to him, or she puts her career before him. Eager to leave with an easy conscience, he sets her up with a more reliable partner. He finds her a husband and, generous to a fault, provides her with a dowry. If no substitute suitor is available he gives his lover his own private carriage as a present so that she can return to her parents in style. At the least, he ensures that she is in a position to survive without him. Casanova sees nothing questionable in this pattern of behaviour – in fact, he believes he is acting extremely honourably – and he scoffs at women who accuse the male sex of being perfidious: ‘They would be right if they could prove that when we swear to be true to them we do so with the intention of tricking them. Alas! We love without consulting our reason, and reason has no more to do with it when we cease loving them.'
⁴

Perhaps Casanova ceases loving once too often. For along with professional success and security, he ultimately sacrifices his happiness in order to follow the path of freedom; at least, that was what he believes he has been doing all these years. Few, if any, men of his time travel quite so much or squander so many golden opportunities, many of them handed to him on a plate. Is he searching for something, or running away from himself? Is no woman, no city, no mode of employment ever good enough for the proud adventurer? Or does the actress's son from Venice secretly feel that, no matter what he does and no matter who loves him, he never quite passes muster? That
he
is never good enough? Although, like Socrates, Casanova believes that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living', this is one question he does not choose to ask himself.

In the end Casanova's rootless and peripatetic existence extracts a heavy price from him. Careless of the future, he burns his bridges as fast as he crosses them and makes bitter enemies en route as well as loyal friends. In old age he is
persona non grata
as far afield as Madrid, Vienna, his native Venice and his beloved Paris. He has nothing: no spouse, no lover, no legitimate children, no property, no place he can even call home. Everything of material value he once possessed – the
diamond rings that graced his fingers, his valuable watches, his jewelled chains, his enamelled snuffboxes, even the relic of a saint given to him by his beloved schoolmaster as a parting gift – is sold off to pay his debts. Casanova even loses his laurels, along with the respect of many of the people whose good opinion he once went out of his way to seek. As one ex-admirer puts it, Casanova becomes a ‘glorious butterfly, transformed into a worm'.
⁵

His life-long travels finally come to an end in 1785 at the château of Count Joseph Carl Emmanuel Waldstein, the wealthy seigneur of Dux Castle, Bohemia, and a fellow Freemason and gambler thirty years Casanova's junior. Here the adventurer remains until his death. Out of kindness and liking for him Waldstein pays the sometime adventurer a modest pension of 1,000 florins to take care of his 40,000-volume library, but Casanova is far from grateful for what is in reality a sinecure. His precious freedom has given way to a life of glorified servitude to which, after more than twelve years, he still finds it nigh impossible to reconcile himself. But however much he hates his situation in Waldstein's grand baroque palace, and however much he loathes life in Dux, a small provincial town on the road between Prague and Toplitz, Casanova cannot afford to leave and, besides, he has run out of places to go.

‘They say that this Dux is a delightful spot, and I see that it might be for many,' he scrawls on a scrap of paper on his desk. ‘But not for me. What delights me in my old age is independent of the place I inhabit. When I do not sleep I dream, and when I am tired of dreaming I blacken paper, then I read, and most often reject all that my pen has vomited.'
⁶

Casanova blackens a lot of paper while he is at Dux. To relieve the terrible boredom of being stuck here, he throws himself wholeheartedly into the literary pursuits which have always been one of his main interests. From being a compulsive womaniser, he becomes a compulsive writer: all the power and energy he once expended in sexual congress now concentrates itself into his pen. He maintains a lively correspondence with past friends and literary acquaintances. He writes and publishes numerous full-length
books and pamphlets:
Icosameron
, a philosophical five-volume romance;
Soliloque d'un penseur
, a polemical tract against his fellow-adventurers;
Histoire de ma Fuite
, the true story of his escape from prison; and
A Leonard Snetlage
, a criticism of the vocabulary that has infiltrated the French language since the Revolution destroyed the country he once loved so much. Casanova also publishes various works on mathematics and algebra, and it is rumoured that he collaborates with his friend, Lorenzo da Ponte, on the libretto of Mozart's opera
Don Giovanni
.