Casanova's Women (38 page)

The marquise left Aix to join Giuseppe in Lyon, and Casanova despatched Corticelli and her mother to Turin with no remuneration other than a letter of introduction and twenty-five louis. He then travelled on to Geneva where he made several new conquests including two cousins, one of whom, Hedwige, was an intellectual prodigy. Since both Hedwige and her cousin Helena were virgins, Casanova deliberately seduced them together – a tactic that, as he admitted in his memoirs, never failed him in his long career as a libertine: ‘If the friend permits the slightest favour to be stolen from her, in order to stop herself blushing she will be the first to push her friend to grant a greater favour, and if the seducer is skilled the innocent will have gone too far to pull back. Then, the more innocent a young woman is, the more ignorant she is of the ways and aims of seduction. Without her knowing it, the appeal of pleasure entices her, curiosity adds to it, and opportunity does the rest.'
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Ignorance of his aims was also Casanova's best weapon when it came to the Marquise d'Urfé. Intent on keeping her in his thrall, he briefly rejoined her in Lyon where he mystified her with yet more talk of oracles and spirits. Fearing perhaps that if she returned to Paris her relatives would blacken his name, he made his oracle,
which took the form of a pyramid of numbers, predict that she should remain where she was until he sent word for her to meet him in Marseille. After lightening her purse of a further 50,000 francs in travel expenses, Casanova left for Turin to pacify Corticelli, who was by now a loose cannon loaded with dangerous ammunition against him. Catching her with another man, he walked out on her and refused to go back. In retaliation she told her story to the Comtesse de Saint-Giles, a popular society hostess in the city. Days later, Casanova was sent a manuscript containing almost the whole story of his plan to defraud d'Urfé, and in November he was expelled from Turin, probably through Saint-Giles's influence.

He arrived in Marseille in April 1763 with three accomplices: Giacomo Passano, a semi-literate crook whom he had taken on as his ‘secretary'; his youngest brother, Gaetano Casanova, a dishonest priest and failed womaniser whom he had run into in Genoa; and Gaetano's great love, Marcolina. Casanova, who felt little affection for any of his brothers, despised Gaetano for being weak and stupid. So, it seemed, did Marcolina, a respectable girl whom Gaetano had lured away from Venice with false promises that he would marry her. Haughty, bright and tempestuous, Marcolina was so angry with Gaetano for deceiving her that she resorted to physical violence, and it did not take much effort on Casanova's part to seduce her himself – sibling rivalry at its most base. In bed, he found Marcolina voluptuous, accommodating and as insatiable as she was at table and, true to form, he fell in love with her. Soon she, too, was roped in to play a part in the Marquise d'Urfé's regeneration, along with Gaetano, whose status as a cleric – albeit a disgraced one – would hopefully lend some weight to the proceedings, and Passano, who was to play the part of Querilinte, the invented leader of the Rosy Cross.

The marquise had arrived in Marseille an impatient three weeks early, and she was eagerly awaiting Casanova's arrival at the best hostelry in town, the Swiss-run Auberge des XIII Cantons. Their initial conversation consisted of absurdities on her side, and on his
‘nothing but falsehoods which had no trace of either truth or plausibility'.
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Yet again, she was fooled into thinking that she was about to be regenerated as a man. In preparation for meeting Querilinte, she had prepared seven gifts for him, each dedicated to one of the seven planets and each containing seven pounds of precious metal and a seven-carat jewel. Since Casanova had no intention of letting Passano get his hands on these valuables, he persuaded the marquise that they must be placed one by one in a special casket which he himself would look after for safe-keeping.

Now, more than at any other time, Casanova cynically played on the marquise's gullibility. The operation which was about to take place was the culmination of five years' work on his part, and, since it might be his last chance of getting hold of her money, he was determined that nothing should go wrong. But his carefully-laid plans started to unravel during the marquise's first meal with Passano/Querlinte, who was so thrown by her bizarre line of questioning that he was rendered almost speechless. Two days later, he fell gravely ill with a venereal infection, took to his bed and announced to Casanova that he ‘didn't give a f ... for the marquise'. Meanwhile Gaetano acted like an imbecile in public and, in private, ranted against his brother for having stolen Marcolina from him. Insisting that he had won the beauty by the right of the strongest, Casanova threatened to have Gaetano arrested, then changed his mind and blackmailed him into boarding a Paris-bound diligence instead. ‘That was how I got rid of him,'
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he wrote with evident satisfaction in his memoir, unconsciously echoing the same phrase he used to describe how his mother Zanetta had disposed of him on his ninth birthday.

Passano may have been out of action, but that did not prevent him from issuing threats from his bed when he discovered that Casanova had kept the precious gifts which the marquise had intended for him. He demanded a thousand louis to keep quiet, and when Casanova called his bluff he wrote the marquise an eight-page letter telling her everything. This was the second time that she had heard the truth from one of Casanova's accomplices. But, as in
the case of Corticelli, Casanova took the precaution of blackening Querilinte's character in the marquise's eyes, again with the help of his oracle. Passano's letter, which the marquise gave to Casanova to read, may well have planted suspicions in her mind, but she was so eager for the operation to go ahead that she brushed them aside, saying that the letter was gibberish: she did not understand it, and moreover ‘she did not choose to understand it'.
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Casanova used the reprieve to get rid of Passano, whom he forced to leave for Lyon even though he was so ill he could scarcely stand up.

Left only with the compliant and adoring Marcolina to help him, Casanova fixed a date for the second regeneration ceremony. This time he was to impregnate the fifty-seven-year-old marquise while Marcolina, in the guise of an undine, or elemental spirit, conjured up out of nowhere, danced about naked in the background. Her purpose was as much to arouse Casanova as to impress the marquise, for the great lover doubted his own ability to perform to order with the older woman: ‘I might find myself incapable. At the age of
thirty-eight
I was beginning to see I was often subject to that fatal misfortune.'
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The marquise was as nervous of the encounter as he was himself, though for different reasons. It is likely that Casanova had become her lover when they first met in 1758, but during the five years since they had often been apart, and she was perhaps now more conscious of the difference in their ages. Beautiful as she was, she was by no means young any more, and when she prepared for her part as the spirit Seramis, she sought to disguise her age by wearing an exquisite gold and silver dress, a pale lace mantle over her exposed bosom and too much rouge on her cheeks. Awed by the sudden appearance of the silent undine (since Marcolina spoke only Italian, Casanova had thought it best if she pretended to be a mute), she let the spirit undress and bathe her before Casanova – or rather Paralisee Galtinarde, as he had named himself for the occasion – made love to her three times, urged on by Marcolina who cavorted lewdly in the nude behind the marquise's back. Casanova's fears of impotence were almost realised. Though the marquise, ‘tender, amorous, clean, and not
at all disgusting', did not displease him, by ‘the second assault' he himself was tiring: ‘I get in the lists, I work for half an hour, groaning in a sweat, and tiring out Seramis without being able to come to a conclusion and feeling ashamed to cheat her; she wiped my brow of the sweat mixed with pomade and powder which dripped from my hair; the undine, by giving me the most provocative caresses preserved what the old body I was obliged to touch was destroying, and nature disavowed the effectiveness of the means I was employing to reach the finishing line. Towards the end of the hour I finally determined to finish having counterfeited all the usual signs which appear at that sweet moment.'

This, the first faked male orgasm in literature and a description as cruel as it is hilarious, was later followed by another: ‘I decided to cheat for a second time by an agony accompanied by convulsions which ended in motionlessness, the necessary outcome of an agitation which Seramis, as she told me afterwards, found unexampled.'
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The marquise was convinced that she was pregnant with the male half-mortal into whom her soul would one day be transferred. To believe otherwise would have meant acknowledging Casanova's immense betrayal over the course of some five years. However, Passano's letter, coupled with the story that the Countess Lascaris/Marianna Corticelli had told her in the past, planted doubts in her mind which would not go away. And now that the operation was over, Casanova was almost too sure of himself. In Lyon a fortnight later (he had sent the marquise on before him, and trailed behind with Marcolina in his own carriage, which, as we have seen, broke down outside Henriette's house on the way) he pressed the marquise into making legal arrangements for her confinement. These included drawing up a will in his favour and making provision for herself to be looked after financially, presumably by him, once her soul was transferred into the body of the infant she believed she was carrying.

Casanova had not reckoned with Passano's persistence. Lying ill in bed in Lyon, he decided that Casanova had poisoned him. By
now he had become the adventurer's implacable enemy, intent on exposing him as ‘the greatest scoundrel on earth ... a sorcerer, a falsifier, thief, spy, coin-clipper, traitor, card sharp, slanderer, an issuer of false letters of exchange, a forger of handwriting, and in short the most despicable of all men',
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as he told the local banker Bono. Roping in Gaetano to testify against his own brother, Passano attempted to bring Casanova to court, and only dropped the case when Casanova threatened to counter-sue him. Eventually Casanova blackmailed his brother into leaving Lyon for Paris, and Passano settled out of court for the sum of 100 louis, a mere tenth of the amount he had originally demanded.

It seemed that Casanova was going to get away with his deception after all. In his memoirs he claimed that, back in Paris at the very end of May, he and the marquise were on the best of terms, laughing together at her doctor's amazement that a woman of her age could be pregnant. Yet by 10 June he had abruptly left France for England, taking Giuseppe Pompeati, now known as the Count of Aranda, with him. He had been summoned to return Giuseppe to his mother, Teresa Imer, who was by now a successful impresario living in London and wanted her son back – but was that the only reason why Casanova left in such a hurry? Had he perhaps got wind that the marquise was suspicious of him and that Passano was not only on his tail but already in the marquise's pay? During the first week of June Passano wrote to Teresa Imer in London warning her against the adventurer, soliciting information about him and promising her in return ‘a detailed account of his character'. He had heard that she and Casanova were married, he said, and he wanted to know whether this was true and to find out what she knew of him. Teresa's reply, written on 28 June, very likely with Casanova sitting beside her in her London mansion, Carlisle House, Soho Square, assured Passano that Casanova was not her husband but a dear family friend whom she had known all her life, and that she knew ‘nothing of him other than honour and integrity, and towards me (as I do not doubt towards everybody) the actions of an honest man'.
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Teresa's letter reached Passano in Lyons on 7 July. Copying it out on thinner paper – the original being too heavy, and therefore too costly, for him to send on – he forwarded it to ‘my adorable patroness' as he now addressed the Marquise d'Urfé. Throughout his letter he referred to Teresa as a strumpet, and to the dark-skinned Casanova as Goulenoire – a misspelling of Gueulenoire, meaning Blackface – calling him a thief, a liar and a debauched rogue given to ridiculing others. ‘I forgot to tell you that Goulenoire wrote to M. Bono that he is never coming back,' he added as a postscript, ‘and that he will pay for the calash and his debts with a bill of exchange.'
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Passano had indeed been to see the banker Bono that very day to show him Teresa's letter, for the banker immediately wrote to Casanova: ‘It is true, and I hold it certain that the marquise is not at all pleased with you.'
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Casanova could scarcely have been surprised at this news. He had lied to, cheated and stolen from the marquise for years. He had humiliated her in her own eyes as well as the eyes of the world, and he had now taken back the one tangible thing he had given her: her beloved Count of Aranda. Sadly, instead of coming to her senses, the marquise fell straight into Passano's slippery hands. She sent him an antidote to cure him of the poison that he believed was still afflicting him; she let him make purchases on her behalf; and she trusted him to pursue her grievances against Casanova. Rather than bewitching her as Casanova had done, Passano was fawning, pathetic and overobsequious. ‘I wish to have the honour of kissing your hand before I die,' he wrote to her on 11 July. ‘My adorable patroness, you can make me happy; but maybe my crimes are so great that they make you disposed to hate me rather than do me a service ... I am guilty but innocently. Chastise me by depriving me of your amiable self. I deserve it. Goulenoire, in one of his letters to M. Bono, calls me a monster. He is not right to give me such an epithet. You, madame, who find yourself deceived by a deceived wretch, have more reason to call me a monster. Oh well, I deserve to die, and your murderer has been my executioner. I will leave this world, and I will leave it
with all the resignation and happiness of having in part contributed to your not being sacrificed by this monster who calls me a monster ... I have always found you generous, do not abandon me at the moment where I am either going to die or return home. Here and elsewhere I will do everything I can to show you marks of my repentance and devotion, my divine patroness …'
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