Casanova's Women (31 page)

In modern times Casanova is sometimes credited for inventing the idea of the French National Lottery, but in his memoirs he makes no such claim for himself. On the contrary, he recounts how at his second meeting with Duverney, which took place the following day, the idea was literally handed to him. At first, he sat for an hour and a half before a roaring fire with Duverney and seven or eight other finance ministers, unable to join in their conversation for the simple reason that he was totally mystified by their complicated technical language; the only time he opened his mouth was to eat. Later, Duverney took him to another room and introduced him to a middle-aged gentleman named Giovanni Antonio Calzabigi, who was working in Paris as Secretary of the Legation of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Duverney handed Casanova a folio notebook belonging to Calzabigi, and declared that it contained Casanova's own secret money-making plan. Glancing down at the title page, Casanova read the word ‘Lottery' followed by a brief outline of how such a scheme would work. Quick to take advantage of the situation, he immediately agreed that this plan was identical to his own. The scheme was Calzabigi's, Duverney said; Casanova had been forestalled. Rather than disillusion him, Casanova played along with the minister's misconception. Though up till now the ministers had been cautious about going ahead with the scheme, the silver-tongued Casanova soon persuaded them to; the king could only profit by financing it, he insisted.

Before long Calzabigi was named administrator of the lottery, and Casanova became its director. Over the next few years he garnered a good share of its profits. The lottery would guarantee him an annual income of 120,000 livres in the future, and gave him immediate access to at least 4,000 francs. As one of its two co-founders, he was granted the right to open six offices selling lottery tickets and paying out prizes. For once Casanova revealed a good head for business. Instead of running all these offices himself, he immediately sold off five of them for 2,000 francs each, and rented luxurious premises in the rue Saint-Denis for the sixth. When the
other ticket-sellers announced that they would pay out the prizes a week after each draw, Casanova printed bills to the effect that any tickets bought from
his
office would be redeemed within twenty-four hours, ensuring that he sold far more tickets than anyone else.

Though the first lottery draw did not take place until April the following year, Casanova was already well on his way to becoming wealthy beyond his dreams. Strutting around Paris in expensive new clothes paid for by de Bernis, or riding up and down the boulevards in his own private carriage, he was besieged by the
haut monde
who, because they accepted him as one of themselves, bought their lottery tickets only from him. Since he looked, talked and behaved like a wealthy aristocrat everyone presumed that he was one, and this allowed him to enjoy unlimited credit with the shopkeepers. ‘Paris was, and still remains, a city where people judge everything by appearances,' he remarked. ‘There is no other country in the world where it is easier to impress people.'
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Between the Ballettis, with their wide artistic and literary connections, and de Bernis, with his access to the court and politicians, Casanova soon gained admittance to the best circles in Paris. He knew everyone worth knowing, including Madame de Pompadour, who promised to help him make his way.

Although he resolved to behave well and avoid bad company, Casanova could not resist the temptation to stray. When Count Edoardo Tiretta, a penniless fellow-adventurer, turned up in Paris in February bearing greetings from their mutual Venetian friend Signora Manzoni, Casanova accompanied him to the house of Angelica Lambertini, a wealthy widow famous for her libertine behaviour (she later insisted on telling Casanova all the details of her sexual encounters with Tiretta, whom she christened the ‘Count of Six Fucks' after the number of times he had made love to her in one night). At Lambertini's, Casanova exposed himself in front of a well-brought-up, sexually innocent young virgin, to whom he gave the name Mademoiselle de la M-re in his memoirs. On 1 March, he took a party which included her, her aunt, Tiretta and Lambertini to the Place de Greve to watch the horrific public
execution of Louis XV's would-be assassin. During the four hours Damiens was being burned with molten lead, tortured with steel pincers, and torn limb from limb by horses, Tiretta sexually molested Mlle de la M-re's aunt.

Mlle de la M-re was an heiress and ‘an angel' whose family had promised her in marriage to a man she had never met. In order to seduce her, Casanova promised to marry her himself – a cynical exercise in getting his own way. Although he swore he would not deflower her, he did so anyway. ‘What does one not promise in such moments?' he later wrote of this betrayal. ‘But then who is the woman, if she loves well, who charges her lover to keep his promise when love seizes hold of the place which was occupied by reason?'
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By the following evening he had ceased to desire Mlle de la M-re, just as she had predicted he would. Instead, he turned his attention to Manon Balletti: ‘I was in love with this young woman, but Silvia's daughter, with whom I had enjoyed no pleasure other than dining with the family, weakened this love which no longer left me anything to desire.'
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When Mlle de la M-re's fiancé turned up, Casanova abandoned her to him and at the same time blamed her for forsaking him. The ‘angel' had suddenly turned into an inconstant monster, and he wanted revenge.

Instead, he decided to salve his hurt pride by enticing his friends' young daughter-away from her fiancé Clément. By early April he had begun ‘to spin the perfect love to Manon Balletti, who every day gave me some new sign of the progress that I was making in her heart'. What was he thinking of in trifling with her heart? He knew from the start that courting her was a terrible mistake: ‘The friendship and esteem which I felt for her family kept me from harbouring any idea of seducing her; but falling more in love with her every day, and not thinking of asking for her hand in marriage, I could not conceive what the outcome would be.'
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Manon was a young beauty, as we can see from the portrait of her painted by Nattier that same year, but she was engaged to be married to another man, and even if Casanova had been in a position to marry her himself he had no intention of doing so. His attitude to the
institution had not changed since he had wriggled out of his engagement to Teresa Lanti. The very idea of marriage ‘made me shudder', he admitted. ‘I knew myself too well not to foresee that I would become unhappy in a settled relationship, and consequently make my other half unhappy too.'
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Nevertheless, unable to resist the flattery of being desired by her, he pursued Manon in a series of late-night visits to the house, and in secret love letters that he passed to her via her maid, Madame Obert.

Like a sapling tree in a hurricane, Manon did not stand a chance of withstanding Casanova's artful courtship which, being so inexperienced, she immediately took for a profession of undying love. ‘You begin by exaggerating your love greatly to me,' she replied to one of his letters shortly after she had celebrated her seventeenth birthday at the beginning of April. ‘I believe that it is sincere, it flatters me and I desire nothing else than to see it last for ever.' However, already exhibiting the lack of self-confidence that would characterise their relationship, she finished off her sentence with a plaintive ‘will it last?'
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If this did not make Casanova feel trapped, then Manon's ‘always love me well' at the bottom of the letter must have done so. Her postscript – ‘If you want to make me really happy, you will burn our letters'
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– provided him with his first opportunity to betray her: despite repeated requests from her to destroy the letters she wrote to him during their relationship, Casanova kept them, refused to return them to her when their relationship ended, and even showed them to another woman.

Far from making her happy, Manon's first experience of falling in love was like a painful, unpredictable illness over which she had no control. One moment she felt feverishly elated, the next she was distraught. She fretted that her family would discover what was going on and that Casanova would be ‘so sure of my tender feelings that you will neglect to take care of my heart'.
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She was right: in the middle of May he suggested that her feelings for him would fizzle out within a month. ‘Is it possible that you think so little of me to believe such a thing of me?' she replied, confounding his
probable escape plan. ‘No, be convinced that I will never change … I believe that I could never stop loving you.'
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Perhaps to prove how committed she was to Casanova, Manon now broke off her engagement to Clément. Since she did not dare to tell her parents her real reason for ending it – that she was in love with their friend and believed he would marry her as soon as he was in a position to do so – Mario and Silvia immediately enlisted their close acquaintance and patroness the Marquise de Monconseil, the wife of Louis XV's Lieutenant General, to secure her an alternative match. The marquise roped in a bachelor named M. Jonel to help her, but Manon believed she had little to fear in the short term. Casanova was clearly terrified of the implications of her break with Clément. Instead of reassuring her of his love he became highly critical, exacerbating her feelings of insecurity. Rather than blame him for being nasty to her, Manon blamed herself: ‘It is true I believe your love has lessened, I don't think that's a crime of yours, no, I have a thousand faults, I know, and the more one knows me the more one discovers them.'
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Her self-abasement made Casanova angry, and they were soon openly quarrelling. ‘To fall out with each other all the time makes me despair,' she wrote to him at the beginning of June, ‘it makes me desolate, and I don't want to do it any more. No, no, no!' She suggested, naively, that each of them should draw up a list of behaviour that they found annoying in the other so that they could avoid aggravating each other in the future. Anyone who broke the treaty could be reprimanded, but only in writing: ‘By this arrangement we will always be happy together … My dear friend, would you like things to be this way?'
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After two months of courtship – which consisted mostly of secret kisses snatched in stolen moments, but no actual sex – there was clearly only one thing that Casanova wanted from his relationship with Manon, and that was for it to end. But it seemed impossible for him to get out of the affair without risking a permanent break with Antonio, Mario and Silvia, friends whom he not only loved and respected but also found extremely useful. It was now his turn to become morose and depressed, moods which Manon was quick
to notice. ‘Your sadness tonight made me very dejected,' she wrote to him one midnight in early June, after he had picked a fight with Antonio. ‘I imagine the cause of it and that makes things worse. We are not happy, my dear friend, I'm beginning to perceive it.' Since her brother was growing suspicious about their relationship, she begged her secret suitor to be more circumspect in his behaviour: ‘Don't say anything to him which could shock him for he is a stronsegosse!
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You have an unbounded vivacity and a quarrel between you two is the most distressing thing that could happen to me. B is sometimes pernickety, I admit, but you are also a bit too scathing on a subject that he himself would find really ridiculous if he bothered to think about it... I quake lest any of these miseries reach Mama's ear.'
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A pattern of psychological abuse was being established which would grow worse in time. Casanova became increasingly fractious and inconsistent towards Manon, and she reacted by abasing herself more and more. ‘Your letter which I am reading again makes me see all my faults and eclipses those that I imagine you have yourself,' she wrote to him in July. ‘I alone am to blame my dear friend, will you forgive me? I love only you, and I want always to love you, if I am in a bad mood towards you it's because I stupidly suppose that you no longer feel towards me the same tender feelings which makes my happiness, and which is the only thing I desire.'
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Nothing Manon did improved their relationship, including indulging in sexual petting with Casanova, though not full sex; that was the only thing she withheld from him. By the end of July, after four months of courtship, Casanova was constantly wrong-footing her, and she still felt tongue-tied in his presence. The idea of being in love with him was proving far more enjoyable than the reality. ‘It seems to me,' she confessed, ‘that I am more at my ease when I write to you than when I talk to you.'
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Rather than face the consequences of breaking off the liaison, Casanova fed Manon just enough affection to keep her hopes alive. But when de Bernis was created Minister of State for Foreign Affairs at the end of June, and asked him to go to Dunkirk on
secret government business (it was to compile a report on French warships), Casanova jumped at the chance, as much to put space between himself and Manon, one suspects, as for the 12,000 francs he would eventually earn from the mission. Manon's letters pursued him from the very moment he left Paris on 28 August – ‘It already seems as if I haven't seen you for a month,' she wrote to him that very day
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– and only his return could make her happy. When she had not heard from him after four days she was in torment. What had become of him? Why had he not written to her? And when was he coming back? she asked. It was impossible that he thought of her as often as she did of him. So little importance did she give her own achievements that, when she sang and played the guitar to great acclaim at a party given by the Marquise de Monconseil on 5 September – the guest of honour was the exiled King of Poland, Stanislas Leszczynski – she did not even mention it in her next letter.