Casanova's Women (32 page)

Clingy, obsessive, and chronically insecure, Manon was in many ways typical of a young girl experiencing the pangs of first love. However, her behaviour was guaranteed to bore and alienate Casanova, who continued to play her along when he returned from Dunkirk in the latter months of the year. During his absence Silvia's consumption had taken its toll on her – ‘I only wish that her health were as perfect as her heart,' Manon had written to him in September.
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If the actress found out that her trusted friend had been carrying on with her precious young daughter, the news might well destroy her, and Casanova saw no alternative but to continue to renew his promise to marry Manon at some unspecified future date whilst pursuing his ambitions – and his sexual interests – elsewhere.

There was no shortage of beautiful women treading the
grands trottoirs
of Paris. They ranged from common whores with whom one could rent rooms above the shops at the Palais-Royal by the hour, or even by the minute, to young girls fresh in from the countryside whom Casanova met through his female pimp Brunet, and haughty courtesans who disdained to have liaisons with anyone
less than a wealthy financier or aristocrat. The latter group included actress Giacoma Antonia Veronese, known as Camilla, who lived with the Count of Egreville and worked with the Ballettis at the Comédie-Italienne. Camilla had a number of lovers that year including Casanova and the Comte de la Tour d'Auvergne, who introduced the Venetian to his aunt, the Marquise d'Urfé.

It was with good reason that Manon complained that she was feeling marginalised and neglected. Casanova was preoccupied not only with enjoying himself in the arms of other women but also with securing his future through both legitimate and dubious means. He was too busy to see her. He no longer told her that he loved her. In fact, he gave her every proof that he disliked her. And yet he persisted in stringing her along by telling her, from time to time, that he adored her and would marry her one day. ‘Do not keep my heart in perpetual chains,'
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Manon begged him in February 1758. ‘Didn't you promise me yesterday that you would see me today?' she reproached him a few weeks later. ‘Not at all, you go and enjoy yourself elsewhere, you just about remember in the evening that you promised someone (who you say you love) to come and see her and you arrive with an indifferent air.'
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Insecurity made Manon sulky, moody and jealous. By the beginning of April their mutual reproaches had grown increasingly bitter, and Casanova was turning nastier by the day. He openly insulted her, and afterwards showed neither repentance nor any desire to make peace. ‘You have pierced my heart,' she admitted after one terrible quarrel. ‘Have you forgotten my dear Casanova that you used to love me (for I dare not flatter myself any longer that you still do).'
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Her eyes, blinded by love for so long, were now wide open. Even she could see that the abusive relationship was drawing to a close. But when she pleaded time and again for him to return her letters, Casanova consistently refused to do so. ‘Oh God, how angry I am towards you, even more towards myself!' she wrote to him in May. ‘You are the most ungrateful of men. Adieu Mr.'
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The spiralling deterioration of their relationship over the spring and summer of 1758 coincided with a sharp decline in Silvia's health,
and in June, if not before, Manon told her mother of her feelings for their family friend. Her ‘nona', as she referred to her in a letter to Casanova, responded ‘with all the sweetness and kindness imaginable, how I love her, and how she deserves to be loved.'
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Her daughter's happiness was paramount in Silvia's mind. Wishing to see her settled, she was on the point of speaking to the Marquise de Monconseil about allowing Manon to marry Casanova when her daughter's relationship suddenly appeared to be over. ‘Tell me or write to me what you intend to say to Mama to justify your change of heart, which cannot fail to seem strange to her,' a despairing Manon pleaded with Casanova. ‘Farewell, soon you will no longer remember if you ever loved me; as for me, I will remember it for ever!'
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Their differences were set aside at the end of August, for Silvia was fading fast. On 1 September the actress summoned her notary and dictated her will. Terrified of being buried alive ('People will think this puerile, but it is a human weakness that they will pardon me for'), she begged not to be interred until a full two days after her death. Although her possessions were to be divided up between all her children, she left a special financial legacy to Manon, saying that she was doing so because she had spent more on her sons' education than on her daughter's. In reality Silvia was acutely anxious about Manon's future – for who would look out for the girl's interests when she was no longer around to do so?

On Saturday 16 September Silvia died in her bed in the rue du Petit-Lion, cradled between Manon's and Casanova's arms. Manon's future preoccupied her until the very end. ‘Ten minutes before she died, she commended her daughter to my care,' Casanova recorded. ‘I promised her truly from my soul that I would make her my wife; but Fate, as one always says, was against it.'
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Two days later the idol of France was buried at her local church, Saint-Sauveur. No one was more devastated than her daughter. Casanova remained with the family for the next three days, but after that his business interests took him away. No date had been set for his marriage to Manon, and it is doubtful if anyone but the two of them even knew about their relationship.

A nightmarish month of legal formalities followed. The house was sealed up so that an inventory could be taken of the contents, and Manon was forced to deal with a steady stream of officials. By the time the seals were removed on 18 October, she was at her wits' end. To make matters worse, Casanova was sent to Holland on financial business by the French government, and did not return until the New Year. While he was away (and busy wooing a fourteen-year-old Dutch heiress named Esther) the grief-stricken Manon wrote him nineteen letters, numbering each one carefully at the top. ‘If you knew how much I've been crying, my dear friend,' she wrote in letter number one. ‘I have not stopped since you left; I'm really frightened that on your return you'll find me so ugly that you will no longer love me.'

Now that her mother was not around Manon was being pressed by her brothers and the Marquise de Monconseil to return to the Saint-Denis convent where she had been educated, or to take temporary refuge in the convent of Bellechasse until her future could be decided. She had little say in the matter, and was close to breaking down: ‘The convent frightens me,' she confided in Casanova, ‘your fickleness makes me tremble, I'm frightened that during your trip you will find objects more loveable than I am, who will make you forget how dear I am to you, and how much you are so to me. All this makes me despair, and I will not live until I receive assurances of the liveliest tenderness from you.'
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Her only hope lay in believing Casanova's promise that, if he made sufficient money during his trip, he would fulfil Silvia's dying wish and marry her on his return. This alone could make Manon ‘the most joyful, the merriest, the happiest of all creatures … You see my dear friend only these castles in Spain distract me from my misery, and whenever I think that they are only castles in Spain, blackness overwhelms me and everything distresses me.'
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Plans to put Manon in a convent alternated with the Marquise de Monconseil's desire to marry her off to a wealthy Provençal whom the girl had not yet met. ‘Now appreciate this, my dear,' Manon reported to Casanova, ‘they would send your poor little one in a
bundle, through the customs, with my harpsichord and my guitar (for that is part of the bargain) I would arrive or rather I would be unpacked; and this man would be told, here is the wife you have been sent.' Her humorous tone belied the fear she certainly felt at being out of control of her own destiny. The only thing she wanted, she told Casanova, was to be ‘your little wife, yes, your little wife'.
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Luckily the idea of the convent had been abandoned by November, but pressure was still being put on her to accept the proposed match. Summoned before M. Jonel, who was acting as intermediary, Manon nervously refused the man. Jonel washed his hands of her: she had already jilted one suitor, Clément, and her seemingly inexplicable refusal to accept a second brought the opprobrium of society down on her. It was suggested that she follow in her mother's footsteps and go on the stage – not at the Comédie-Italienne, where Mario and Antonio worked, but at the French theatre. The situation was becoming so complicated and agonising that Manon even contemplated confiding in the Marquise de Monconseil. Desperate to be permanently united with the man on whom all her hopes depended and whom she already regarded as her partner, she ended her eighteenth letter to him with a plea: ‘always remember that you have a very loving little wife who expects the greatest fidelity from her husband.'
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One can almost hear Casanova grind his teeth as he read this.

His return to Paris during the first week of January 1759 did not end Manon's unhappiness, but exacerbated it. Though he had made an absolute fortune by his share-and currency-dealing, and had bought Manon a pair of expensive diamond earrings from Holland, Casanova did not keep his promise to marry her, he did not act wisely to secure their future and he did not even visit her often. Since he was the richest he had ever been – probably the equivalent of a modern-day multi-millionaire – the one-time fugitive intended to enjoy himself and to shine in Parisian society. ‘In less than a week I acquired a good coachman, two good carriages, five horses, a groom, and two good lackeys in half-livery,'
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he boasted of his spending spree. Within days of his
return to Paris he was spotted ‘making a magnificent appearance' at the Comedie-Italienne by an acquaintance from Italy, Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful twenty-year-old daughter of a Venetian mother, Anna Gazini, and British baronet Sir Richard Wynne. ‘He came to greet us and now is with us every day, although his company does not please me and he thinks this does not matter to us,' Giustiniana wrote of Casanova to her secret lover, his Venetian friend Andrea Memmo, on 8 January. ‘He has a carriage, lackeys, and is attired resplendently He has two beautiful diamond rings, two different snuffboxes of excellent taste, set in gold, and he is bedecked with lace. He has gained admittance, I do not know how, to the best Parisian society. He says he is interested in a lottery in Paris and brags that this gives him a large revenue, although I am told that he is supported by a very rich old lady. He is quite full of himself and is foolishly proud; in brief, he is insupportable except when he speaks of his escape which he recounts admirably.' Unbearably full of himself Casanova might be, but this did not make him any less attractive to women, and Giustiniana finished off her account of him with a tantalising ‘I talk with him about you very often . . ,'
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While keeping on his rooms in the rue du Petit-Lion, Casanova also rented grand apartments in the rue Comtesse d'Artois, and a large, elegantly furnished country house, Cracovie en Bel Air, at La Petite Pologne, a hamlet just outside the city limits. With its terraced gardens, baths, cellars, kitchen, and suite of master's apartments, the hillside property also had stabling for up to twenty horses, and the rent of one hundred louis a year included a cook/housekeeper – Madame Saint-Jean, or ‘The Pearl' as Casanova referred to her. Taking advantage of The Pearl's culinary talent and La Petite Pologne's situation (because it was outside Paris's customs barrier, one could buy the best quality food and wine free of duty), he used the house to entertain his new friends with an international cuisine for which he soon became famous, and which included
pilau ris in cagnoni, macaroni al sughillo
and specially-raised chickens with the whitest flesh.

Needing something to do with all his spare money – aside from what he had made in Holland, he was now getting a huge income from the lottery and, as Giustiniana Wynne had heard, was also being supported by an elderly widow, the Marquise d'Urfe – Casanova opened a factory which produced hand-painted, Chinese-style silk panels similar to those currently being imported from Peking, but at a fraction of the cost of the imports. Housed in the Temple district, his factory employed some twenty young women aged between eighteen and twenty-five. When he took Manon to visit it she ‘quaked when she saw me the owner of this seraglio'
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– and she had good reason to do so. The beautiful all-female workforce were modest and ‘of good reputation' until, one by one, their employer seduced them. Since he could never be bothered to bargain for women's favours and had plenty of money at the time, Casanova acceded to all their demands and set up each of them in turn in a separate furnished house. When, one by one, he lost interest in his workers, he generously continued to support them.

There was no end to Casanova's womanising at this time, and on occasions he derived vicarious pleasure from carrying it out right under Manon's nose, for example when he invited both her and Giustiniana Wynne – or Mile XCV as he discreetly called her in his memoirs – to the same dinner party.

Soon afterwards, Casanova began a passionate affair with seventeen-year-old Madame Baret, a shopkeeper's wife, whom he believed he loved more than he had ever loved any woman – a frequently repeated phrase in his memoirs. While Madame Baret's lanky, unappreciative husband fussed over his stock of pantaloons and waistcoats, Casanova took the beautiful young bride to bed, or out on shopping trips to the Palais Marchand. When Madame Baret was taken ill, he offered her a week's stay at his country house in La Petite Pologne so that she could recuperate. While her grateful husband was taking care of their shop, Casanova spent eight days of ecstasy exploring Madame Baret's perfectly proportioned body and attempting to straighten her curled, golden pubic hair. She received
his attentions ‘with the greatest calmness, and did not give herself up to the empire of Venus until she felt she felt every element of her charming self in tumult'.
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