Casanova's Women (30 page)

From that night on, and for the next two years, Casanova and the Balletti family were inseparable. With his outgoing personality, sparkling conversation and similar background (despite his airs and graces and his income from Senator Bragadin he had been born into a modest theatrical family just like theirs) he fitted in perfectly with their gregarious and artistic way of life. Silvia and Mario looked on Casanova as another son, and Antonio as a brother, while Manon grew to regard him as a glamorous family friend. From Casanova's point of view, he could not have chosen ‘company more agreeable and more apt to procure me countless advantages and a quantity of brilliant acquaintances in Paris', and at this point in his life his sole purpose was to improve and enjoy himself. He was in awe of fifty-year-old Silvia – that ‘woman of women' as he described her. Age had not made her any less attractive or captivating, and he ‘found her above everything that was said of her ... By unanimous consent Silvia was a woman above her profession.'
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She was not, however, above being flattered by the attentions of her son's handsome young friend. During the next two years the pair became so close that a police report of 1752 cited Casanova as living ‘at the charge of Mile Silvia, of the Italian Comedy'. Another claimed that ‘Mile Silvia lives with Casanova, an Italian, said to be the son of an actress. It is she who keeps him.'
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But although he dined and
supped with Silvia almost every day and became acquainted with all her friends, including the playwright Crebillon who volunteered to become his French teacher, it is highly unlikely that anything improper happened between the actress and the Venetian despite the police inspector's innuendo.

Casanova had left Paris in the autumn of 1752. He returned in the first week of 1757 under totally different circumstances – as a penniless exile and fugitive. Since his arrest on 26 July 1755 he had been imprisoned in The Leads under the eaves of the Doge's Palace. The notorious and terrifying prison – ‘The Hell of living humanity' as Casanova called it
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– took its name from the three-foot-square lead sheets covering the palace's roof. They acted as heat conductors, turning the primitive cells underneath them into ice-houses during Venice's cold winters and into sweat-boxes during the sweltering summer months. Casanova either lay on the dusty floor or at times sat stark naked in an armchair, exhausted by the heat and with the sweat pouring off his body and on to the floor. Fleas ate him alive. The silence of his frequent spells in solitary confinement was unbearable to a man who thrived on company. ‘I discovered that a man shut up by himself, and in a situation where it is impossible for him to do anything, alone in a place of near darkness, where he does not and cannot see anything other than he who brings him something to eat once a day, and where he cannot stand upright, is the unhappiest of mortals,' he wrote. ‘He longs for Hell, if he believes in it, just to have some company. In that place I reached the point of longing for that of an assassin, a lunatic, a man with a foul-smelling disease, a bear. The solitude under The Leads drives men to despair; but to understand it one must have lived through it.'
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No one ever informed him how long he was condemned to stay there; for all he knew it was for the rest of his life. He was allowed no visitors. Never in his life had he felt so alone. But he was not entirely without friends: Senator Bragadin, his adopted father, went down on his knees before the Inquisitors and begged for his son's release, but to no avail. As soon as he was allowed to – on
New Year's Day 1756 – he sent Casanova gifts of a bearskin bag to put his legs in during the cold weather, a dressing gown lined with fox fur, money and books.

Literature and philosophy consoled Casanova to some extent, but he was desperate for freedom and started planning his escape as early as November 1755. Despite the fact that no prisoner had ever escaped from The Leads before, he was convinced that he could succeed; he had to, the alternative was unbearable. When he was allowed out of his tiny airless cell into the garret next door for exercise, he began to amass objects that might be useful to him, including a long iron bolt and a piece of marble, which he used as a whetstone to fashion the bolt into a pike which he hid in the stuffing of his armchair. His initial plan – to break through the floor and lower himself into the room beneath – collapsed when he was moved to a new, superior cell with windows and a view of the Lido. After he left his old cell, the hole under the bed which he had so painstakingly chiselled away was discovered, and from then on Casanova was placed under constant surveillance by his warder, Lorenzo.

Despite this, using a sharpened fingernail as a pen and mulberry juice as ink, Casanova started a secret correspondence with a Venetian noble-born monk, Marin Balbi, who occupied the next cell and with whom he exchanged messages hidden inside the bindings of books. By this means, he persuaded Balbi not only that he had a failsafe escape plan but also to do most of the preliminary work for him by breaking through the ceiling above the wall of their adjoining cells. Casanova smuggled the priest his pike hidden in the parchment binding of a large folio Bible that he had asked Lorenzo to buy for him, and he even made the unwitting warder carry the book through to Balbi's cell, with a large dish of hot buttery macaroni balanced on top of it.

On the last night of October 1756, Balbi at last broke through the ceiling. Casanova immediately ripped up every bit of material he could find – sheets, napkins, even his mattress cover – and knotted them together into a rope almost two hundred feet long.
Bundling his clothes and lace handkerchiefs into his coat, he squeezed through the hole Balbi had made into the loft above, and hacked a hole through the boards that lined the lead-plated roof. After peeling back one of the three-foot lead squares Casanova put his head out into a bright moonlit night. Anxious of being spotted by Venice's
sbirri
, he waited until the moon set after midnight, then scrambled across the dizzyingly high and precariously sloping roof with his possessions tied around his neck and Balbi in his wake. Missing death by inches when he slipped over the guttering and hung suspended by his arms while the rest of his body dangled in space high above the palace courtyard, Casanova heaved himself back on to the roof, prised off a window-grating on a lower floor, and re-entered the deserted building. Over the next few hours he and the priest, who was complaining bitterly because there was no real escape plan, gradually forced their way through a series of locked doors and worked their way down to the magnificent Stairway of the Giants, just above ground level, only to find that the gates at the top of it were locked and they were trapped inside the building. While Balbi ranted against him, a scratched and bleeding Casanova calmly changed into the faded summer clothes and feather-trimmed hat that he had been wearing on the day of his arrest, bandaged the cuts and scratches he had suffered with his old handkerchiefs, and trusted in destiny to rescue him as it had done so many times in his life.
Fata viam invenient
. Alerted by some idlers in the courtyard, who glimpsed his rather quixotic figure peering out of a window, a lone caretaker came up to see what was going on. The moment he unlocked the gates, Casanova pushed past him and, followed by Balbi, walked swiftly down the ceremonial stairs, through the palace's fifteenth-century royal gateway and out towards the Molo, or wharf, where they jumped into the first gondola they saw.

After one year, three months and five days of torturous and at times terrifying imprisonment Casanova was free. Via Munich, Augsburg and Strasbourg, by boat, on foot and eventually by hitching a lift in a carriage, he made his way to France, and arrived triumphantly in the
French capital on the freezing cold morning of Wednesday 5 January 1757. During his first stay in Paris, between June 1750 and the autumn of 1752, his single-minded goal had been the pursuit of pleasure. Now he was returning under markedly different circumstances, as a penniless thirty-one-year-old with an urgent need to make his fortune. His first stop in the city was the Ballettis' house in the rue du Petit-Lion. Since news of his dramatic escape had already reached the family they had been expecting him to turn up in Paris sooner or later, and he was received with open arms. ‘Joy filled the house as soon as my arrival was known,' he wrote. This was as near to a home-coming as the rootless Casanova would ever get. He found the Balletti family much as he had left it four and a half years earlier, with one notable exception: Manon, who had been just twelve years old when he had last seen her, was now a ravishingly pretty sixteen-year-old, engaged to be married to Clément, a man five years Casanova's senior.

As Casanova exploded back into Manon's life, triumphant at having been the first man ever to achieve the impossible and break out of Europe's most notoriously secure prison, he eclipsed everyone around her including her fiancé. For no one could have seemed a more exciting and romantic figure than Casanova at this point in his life. Whatever Manon's feelings for Clément, he did not stand a chance compared to the unshaven, travel-soiled and exceedingly attractive fugitive who proceeded to captivate the entire family – and before long the whole of Paris – with colourful tales of his unwarrantable arrest, his fifteen months of cruel imprisonment and his daring escape. That Casanova visited Versailles on his first day in Paris, just after a disgruntled and disturbed ex-soldier named Robert-François Damiens made an attempt on Louis XV's life, and brought news of the event back to the rue du Petit-Lion that evening, must have made him appear even more of a heroic and dashing figure in Manon's eyes. Before nightfall not only she but all of Paris was in turmoil, for the populace believed that the king had been assassinated when in fact he had only been slightly wounded and soon made a full recovery. Despite this, for the next few weeks
fashionable Parisians dressed only in elegant black as a conspicuous display of grief over the assassination attempt.

As for Manon, she was lost. For the first time in her life she was in love, and the object of her affection happened to be one of the most dangerously seductive men in history. Keeping her feelings to herself at first, she observed Casanova with a mixture of amazement, awe and blind adoration, and tried to persuade herself that she felt nothing but friendship towards him, for what interest could this glamorous friend of the family possibly take in a young girl such as she? ‘If you only knew how hard I tried to vanquish the fondness that I felt towards you – when I began to perceive it – now I can say to you for better or for worse I did not succeed,' she later confessed in a rambling letter. ‘I enjoyed myself more with you than with anyone else, but I told myself, he's merry, he's intelligent, this isn't surprising, but in the end, I was uneasy when a day passed without you coming to the house; I was sad, dreamy, and I would find that I when I dreamt I thought only of you … What should I do, I asked myself; on the point of marrying a man to whom I have been promised. To whom I have promised myself -1 go and take a liking for a man I probably will not see for much longer, who does not love me – for at that time I believed in good faith that you did not love me – what will become of me, how imprudent I am, stupid; to love someone who is indifferent towards me, such a thing makes one miserable; but then sometimes I thought that perhaps you might love me but that you dared not show any signs of your love because circumstances did not permit you to.'
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Casanova knew women well enough to be able to tell that his friend's sister hero-worshipped him, and he was not shy about flirting with her or paying her compliments, though always in a safely avuncular manner and in her parents' presence. For a few weeks he believed that his intimate relationship with her family was an insurmountable barrier which prevented him from even thinking of pursuing Manon – rather conveniently as it happened, because for once falling in love was not on his immediate agenda. What overwhelmingly concerned Casanova at that moment was his future. In
the past he had wasted almost every opportunity that had come his way, but he could no longer afford to do so. ‘I saw that in order to make anything of myself,' he wrote, ‘I needed to put in play all my physical and moral faculties, to become acquainted with the great and the powerful, to be the master of my own intelligence, and to play the chameleon to all those whom I saw it was in my interest to please.'
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Although he was able to live modestly on the small sum that Bragadin continued to send him, modesty was not enough for Casanova. He wanted to be wealthy.

With this in mind, on his second afternoon in Paris he called on François Joachim Pierre de Bernis who, very conveniently for Casanova, had been nominated Minister of State just four days earlier, on 2 January. De Bernis had heard of his friend's arrest and subsequent escape from The Leads through their erstwhile lover-in-common Marina Morosini who, two years after the ambassador had left Venice, continued to correspond with him from the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli; with no hope left of seeing either of the two men on whom she had once depended, and with no religious faith to sustain her, the nun's life had become a burden to her. Pressing one hundred louis into Casanova's hand, de Bernis signalled that he would be his patron from now on and advised him to try to make his fortune in finance. Two years into seven years of war with Britain and Saxony, the French royal coffers were already depleted, and the First Intendant of the École Militaire Royale, Joseph de Pâris-Duverney, was at that moment trying to find a way to raise twenty million livres to fund his military school. Since his recall from Venice, de Bernis had become a powerful, trusted politician with access to all the top government ministers, and even to the king, and he was still an intimate friend of Madame de Pompadour's. A simple recommendation from him was enough to secure Casanova an immediate audience with Duverney. Although Casanova knew absolutely nothing about making money – all he was good for was spending it – he persuaded Duverney to believe that he had a failsafe secret scheme for raising millions, and this proved enough to secure him a second meeting the following day.