Casanova's Women (36 page)

From now on, the marquise hung on Casanova's every word. She truly believed that he was omnipotent, and that he had the power and knowledge to fulfil her greatest wish by performing an operation which would ‘regenerate' her by transferring her soul into the body of a male infant born of the philosophical union of a mortal with an immortal. She was aware that she might die in the process, she informed him in all seriousness, but she was prepared to risk death in order to be reborn as a man. Casanova, who could barely keep a straight face when she confessed this, would in time make the marquise's ‘regeneration' the basis of a drawn-out con-trick he perpetrated on her, by which he hoped to gain control of her entire fortune. In the short term, he was flattered to be thought the greatest of all Rosicrucians and alchemists and the most powerful of all men by a lady of such high rank; and he was aware that, if he was ever in need of money, she would refuse him nothing.

For the next six years the marquise was Casanova's
‘grand trésorier'
, a source of frequent and extremely generous hand-outs. Her lackeys, horses and the sumptuous golden d'Urfé carriage lined
with red Utrecht velvet were permanently at his disposal and, as soon as he condescended to meet them (if only one at a time), she introduced him to her influential family and friends. They included her brothers, councillor Geoffroy Camus de Pontcarré and Jean-Baptiste de Viarmes, the provost of Paris's special mercantile courts, the ninety-year-old Chevalier d'Arginy, a pomaded, bewigged high-ranking cavalry officer known as Paris's ‘dean of the fops', and Anne Languet, the Comtesse de Gergi who brought with her the legendary Comte de Saint-Germain, a man who fascinated the marquise and Casanova alike, and whose outrageous claims put Casanova's in the shade.

Called ‘Der Wundermann' in Germany and ‘the man who knows everything and never dies' rather ironically by Voltaire, the Comte de Saint-Germain was an international celebrity. No one knew how he obtained his seemingly bottomless purse of money, or where he came from; he was rumoured variously to be the son of a Portuguese Jew, an Alsatian Jew, the illegitimate son of Marie de Neubourg, widow of Charles II of Spain, or a child of Francis II Rákóczy, the Prince of Transylvania. Stockily built, with the refined dark looks of an aristocratic Spaniard, Saint-Germain claimed that he was anything between three hundred and two thousand years old. People believed him because he had an ageless appearance: the Comtesse de Gergi, who befriended him in Paris in the 1750s, insisted that she had met him decades earlier in Venice where her husband had been French ambassador, and that he had looked no different then.

Saint-Germain was a polymath and a savant. There seemed to be nothing that he did not know or could not accomplish. A brilliant linguist, he spoke every modern European language including German, Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French and he also knew Latin, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Sanskrit. He was a virtuoso violinist but said that he had given up music because he had no more to learn on the subject. He was a talented portrait-painter, and was an extremely learned alchemist who claimed, like the Marquise d'Urfé, that he could turn base metal into gold and
transform a handful of small diamonds into a single large flawless stone. His love of jewels was legendary. ‘He wore very fine diamonds in his rings, watch, and snuffbox,' according to the memoirs of Madame de Pompadour's maid, Madame du Hausset. ‘He came, one day, to visit Madame de Pompadour, at a time when the Court was in full splendour, with knee and shoe-buckles of diamonds so fine and brilliant that Madame said she did not believe the King had any equal to them.'
¹⁴
Saint-Germain was sought after and accepted in the most exalted circles in Europe, even more so than Casanova. But although he was constantly invited to dine at people's houses and was happy to join the company at table, he never ate or drank in public, and in private lived on a simple diet consisting almost exclusively of oatmeal. A mine of amusing anecdotes and dazzling knowledge, he often delivered them in a didactic tone which no one seemed to mind for he always appeared to know what he was talking about and spoke to everyone in the same way. As Madame du Hausset wrote, ‘Nobody could find out by what means this man became so rich and so remarkable; but the King would not suffer him to be spoken of with ridicule or contempt.' In fact Saint-Germain became one of Louis XV's close advisers, setting up a laboratory for him and probably working as his spy. ‘If he isn't God himself, a powerful God inspires him,' the Comte de Milly wrote of Saint-Germain.
¹⁵
Women in particular adored him, and he was known to have many lovers as well as female friends to whom he gave advice on dyeing their hair (he was a specialist on the subject of dyes), face paints to beautify their complexions and a secret ‘water of youth' which he told them was very expensive yet gave to them free of charge, claiming that it would preserve their looks for ever.

The Marquise d'Urfé was among Saint-Germain's devotees; she even commissioned a portrait of him. He became a frequent visitor to her Paris hôtel, and despite the unspoken rivalry between them he was one of the few guests whom Casanova was happy to dine with there. The two adventurers had plenty in common, not least the habit of encouraging their admirers to swallow their tall stories.
‘Sometimes I amuse myself, not by
making
people believe, but by
letting
them believe, that I have lived in the most remote periods,' Saint-Germain is reported to have said to Madame de Pompadour when she laughed at one of his more outlandish claims.
¹⁶
By his own admission, Casanova worked in exactly the same way.

Despite his suspicions about the Comte de Saint-Germain, Casanova was almost indulgent towards him when he met him at the Marquise d'Urfé's home: ‘This man, instead of eating, talked from the beginning to the end of dinner, and I listened to him with the greatest attention, for nobody spoke as well as he did. He made himself out to be a prodigy in everything, he wished to amaze, and he really did amaze … This very singular man, born to be the most brazen of impostors, said with impunity, as if by the by, that he was three hundred years old, that he possessed the universal panacea, that he could do whatever he pleased with nature, that he melted diamonds, and that he could make one large one of the finest water out often or twelve small ones without diminishing the weight. For him these things were trifles. Despite his pretentious boasts, his eccentricities, and his obvious lies, I could not bring myself to find him insolent, but neither could I consider him respectable; I found him astonishing despite myself, for he amazed me.'
¹⁷

 

However impressive Saint-Germain was, it was Casanova to whom the Marquise d'Urfé was in thrall. She trusted him implicitly, even with her financial investments: when he was sent to Holland by the French government in October 1758 she handed him 60,000 francs worth of shares she owned in the East India Company of Gothenburg, and asked him to sell them there on her behalf. If this was a test of his honesty, Casanova passed it, for after he had sold the shares for 72,000 francs he sent the marquise a bill of exchange for the entire amount, delighting her so much that she made him a present of all the profits she had made on the deal. However, most of the letter she wrote thanking him was taken up with her spiritual delusions: her Genius had informed her that Casanova would return to Paris with a young boy born of the philosophic union of an
immortal with a mortal – the very being into whose body she believed he could transfer her soul and thus regenerate her as a man.

Fate played into Casanova's hands when he ran into his old friend and lover from Venice, Teresa Imer. Since their brief affair in the early summer of 1753, the fortunes of the singer and
femme fatale
who had once captivated both Casanova's mentor Malipiero and the Margrave of Bayreuth had slipped inexorably downhill. She had returned to Bayreuth from Venice pregnant by Casanova; their daughter, Sophia Wilhelmina Frederica, had been born in the early months of 1754. When the margrave's court had moved south to Italy later that year, Teresa had left her long-suffering husband, choreographer Angelo Pompeati, and, taking her children with her, had travelled to Paris where she had attempted to make money by singing at private concerts, and later by staging musical evenings in her furnished apartment. Within two years she had been made bankrupt and imprisoned for debt. Bailed out by one of her many admirers, Teresa had fled to Flanders where yet another lover, the powerful Prince Charles of Lorraine, had set her on the road to becoming a theatrical impresario.

For two seasons, the plays and concerts Teresa had staged in Ghent and Liège had been as artistically successful as her father Giuseppe Imer's had once been at Venice's San Samuele theatre. However, financially they had been disastrous for her. Always a perfectionist in her work, Teresa had spent far more on her productions than they had earned – a problem that would dog her throughout her business career and lead to her eventual ruin. Leaving a trail of debts in her wake, she had fled from Flanders to the Dutch Republic, where she now rented dilapidated rooms in a tenement in The Hague and scraped a living by travelling to Rotterdam and Amsterdam and singing at concerts under the assumed name of Madame de Trenti or Tranti. Since they knew that she was in financial trouble, the music impresarios such as M. Van Hagen in Rotterdam refused to pay her any fees. Instead she was allowed to carry a collection plate through the audiences after each performance like some kind of beggar, with her young
daughter Sophia trailing after her in the hope of garnering more money by eliciting people's sympathy.

At a concert in Amsterdam on New Year's Day 1759, Teresa noticed Casanova in the audience. He was clearly as shocked to see her as she was to see him, and the sight of their daughter, whose existence he had not known about but who bore an unmistakable likeness to him, left him nonplussed. Although he put a generous amount of money on Teresa's collection plate Casanova would not acknowledge that he knew her in front of his wealthy companions. Later that night, the desperate and determined soprano sought him out at the inn where he was staying. During the last few years she had lost two of her four children. Scarcely able to feed Sophia, who was now nearly five years old, and too poor to provide for her son, twelve-year-old Giuseppe Pompeati, whom she had left ‘in pawn' in Rotterdam with some of her creditors, Teresa threw herself on her old friend's mercy. But when Casanova offered to take their beautiful daughter off her hands she refused to part with her. Instead, she begged him to redeem her son from her creditors, take him to Paris and bring him up for her.

Casanova readily agreed to do so. He already had a hidden agenda: to pass the boy off as the half-immortal being whom the Marquise d'Urfé had predicted he would bring back to Paris with him. The suggestible marquise needed little encouragement. As soon as Casanova arrived in Paris with Giuseppe, she snatched the child from under his nose, took him home, made him sleep in her bed and, for the next four years, insisted on bringing him up at her own expense. Three years older than her son Jean had been when he died, Giuseppe Pompeati – or the Count of Aranda as he quickly reinvented himself in order to impress his rich foster mother – was an intelligent if rather lazy youth who gave new purpose and meaning to the marquise's life. Since Agnès's death in the summer of 1756 and her estrangement from Adélaïde she had had no one but herself to think of. Now she again had a child who depended on her. While her own daughter and son-in-law were all but starving in their dismal lodgings on the far side of the city, the
marquise plied Giuseppe with gifts of clothes and jewels, bought him a pony and enrolled him at Viard's, the best boarding school in Paris. ‘A prince could not have been better lodged, better treated, better dressed or better respected by the entire household,' Casanova reported after visiting him there.
¹⁸
M. Viard taught Giuseppe all that a young French aristocrat was supposed to know about the world, and his pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, whose job it was to look after the boy, instructed him in the facts of life just as Bettina Gozzi had instructed Casanova during his schooldays.

Giuseppe had lived a hard hand-to-mouth existence with his critical and demanding birth-mother. Thanks to the Marquise d'Urfé his life in Paris was an earthly paradise. But while he gloried in his new identity as the adored and indulged protégé of Paris's richest widow, the marquise's relations with her daughter and son-in-law deteriorated sharply. Still unable to access Adélaïde's property, the couple brought a legal action against the marquise, claiming that she was withholding large sums of money from them. The loss of two children of her own, coupled with years of living in terrible poverty, took its toll on Adélaïde, who now fell ill. Suffering, perhaps, from postpartum depression, she believed that her late second son had been born with claws on his toes instead of nails.
¹⁹
Pregnant for a third time in 1759, she grew so deranged that her husband applied for permission to separate from her – reluctantly, the Marquis de Châtelet insisted, since he still loved his wife dearly. The couple's third child, Achille-François-Félicien, was born with a withered right arm at the ancient d'Urfé château of La Bâtie le Forez on 3 November 1759. The following year his desperate parents were ordered to surrender all their remaining property to their thirty-three creditors, who included a lemonade-maker, a master tailor, water carriers, butchers, horse riders, wood-sellers and even chair-men. Since they had nothing to live on, Louis XV granted the du Châtelets a generous pension of 10,000 livres. But the marquis died on 6 May 1761, and the half-deranged Adélaïde was extradited to the convent at Conflans for the rest of her life.

After his triumphant return from Holland at the start of 1759 Casanova had gone out of his way to flatter and court the Marquise d'Urfé in a fashion more suited to a lover than a platonic friend. When he rented his country villa at La Petite Pologne she was his very first visitor, and he encouraged her to believe that he had arranged the entire house with her happiness in mind. He had his portrait painted on a medallion with the intention of giving it to her (she never received it, though, for he kept it and had it made into a snuffbox which he eventually gave to Teresa Lanti when he ran into her in Florence in November 1760). When the marquise expressed a desire to meet the enlightenment philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova accompanied her to the château in Montmorency where he was then staying, and they both came away with the same impression – that the famous philosopher was entirely undistinguished and rather rude.