Casanova's Women (39 page)

Brutally honest in his memoirs about many unflattering aspects of his life, Casanova could not bring himself to tell the truth about the end of his relationship with the Marquise d'Urfé. In order to explain it, he took the well-trodden path of many writers of fiction and killed off his heroine prematurely. ‘The first of August was an ill-fated day ... for me,' he wrote of his stay in London in 1763. ‘Among others, I received a letter from Paris, announcing the death of Mme d'Urfé.'
³⁵
The cause of her death was a self-administered but accidental overdose of her own medicine, the universal panacea, he claimed, and all Paris was agog at her will, which bequeathed her fortune to a child she claimed she was carrying, and which also named Casanova as the baby's guardian. Casanova insisted that he was dumbfounded by the news of her death. Well he might have been, for the marquise was very much alive at that time. The letter he received would have informed him only that she now knew the truth about him and was dead
as far as he was concerned
. As he admitted elsewhere in his memoirs, ‘I learned that my good Mme d'Urfé had died, or had become wise, which for me would have had the same result.'
³⁶

Not only was the relationship that had sustained him financially for more than half a decade at an end, but from now on Casanova had to avoid Paris, his favourite city. Due to his own greed he was finished there. When he next visited it, briefly, in 1767, he ran into the Marquis de Lisle, one of the marquise's nephews, who loudly remarked to his friends that the adventurer had stolen a million francs from his aunt. Two days later, Casanova received a letter of cachet ordering him to leave Paris within forty-eight hours and, furthermore, expelling him from France. He did not return to Paris again until 1783, and then only for another brief stay.

The Marquise d'Urfé's last years were spent at one of her many Paris addresses, a house in the rue des Deux-Portes, where she was looked after by a vast retinue of servants and where she eventually brought her one surviving grandson, Achille, to live with her. Her experience with Casanova may have taught her to be less trusting of the living, but she still stubbornly retained her belief in the dead. Among her papers was found a letter she wrote to her husband's ancestor, the writer Honoré d'Urfé, who had died in 1625. Although it is undated, it appears to have been written after the end of her relationship with Casanova. The marquise assured the dead author of
L'Astrée
that she had ‘the pleasure of learning that you are still among the living' and unwittingly revealed not only her ambitions but also the depth of her disappointment and loneliness:

 

‘What would I not do to have the pleasure of seeing you, and of trying to merit your friendship, which is more precious to me than life itself … You know how to scrutinise the depths of hearts. How happy I would be if you found in mine the qualities necessary for entering into the sublime company of sages for which I have sighed for such a long time. You have not ignored all my misfortunes. You know that the attachment and the respect that I have always had for your illustrious blood has caused the greatest part of them, losing in them everything which attached me to life. Come, monsieur, heal all my losses by taking the place of a father (I hope I am allowed to call you by this sweet name), and deign to enlighten someone who would sacrifice everything for the happiness of spending her days near you. Receive me like the prodigal child. Forget all my aberrations, which have only been caused by the desire to learn the true science. You know the critical situation I find myself in today. Deign to honour me with your advice, and do not suffer that she who has the honour of bearing your name should be tricked into mistaking black for white, and that the thing which should lead to supreme happiness by bringing us close to the All-Powerful should prove a fatal stumbling block to virtue. I dare to hope that you will not refuse
me this mercy and that of adopting me as your daughter and regarding me as the most submissive of your slaves. JEANNE, marquise d'Urfé.'
³⁷

 

Casanova, and alchemy, continued to preoccupy the marquise's thoughts. On 5 May 1769, she wrote out a list of questions to her late husband. They were ‘a testimony of the enigmas that Casanova should solve with the help of his pyramids'. She wanted to know what had become of the powder of projection that had once belonged to the d'Urfés, and how she could get hold of it. Were any other members of the d'Urfé family still alive in the world? What did she have to do to understand the Kabbalah? What was the name of her good spirit? Who could put her magic mirror together again?
³⁸

The Marquise d'Urfé died just after midnight on 13 November 1775. Among her papers were found two sealed packets, on which were written: ‘I pray that my executor should set fire to this packet without opening it. I have given my word about this, and I beg him to redeem it. They do not contain papers which relate to me nor to anything of mine.' On 19 December, these packets were opened in the presence of her nephew the Comte de Lastic, and the contents were immediately burned. Her will had been made the previous February. In it, she completely disinherited her daughter Adélaïde, who was still imprisoned in the convent of Conflans after thirteen years, in favour of Adélaïde's son, Achille.

His grandmother had belonged very much to the
ancien régime
, but Achille de Châtelet, who had just turned sixteen when he inherited the vast family fortune, grew up to be distinctly modern and egalitarian in his outlook. His wastrel parents had personified some of the most decadent aspects of the French aristocracy. By contrast, Achille joined the army, put his name to Anglo-American political philosopher Thomas Paine's call for royalty to be abolished, and fought and was gravely wounded during the 1789 Revolution. Arrested in 1793 because of his Girondine friendships, Achille wrote an impassioned letter to the Convention: ‘Representative
Citizens, when the king was powerful, I dared to have it posted up that royalty should be abolished, and when he offered me favours, I rejected them with disdain. At the beginning of the war, I shed my blood for my country. After thirteen months of suffering, and with my wound still open, I demanded to take up my army post again, and I did not ask to retire until I saw through experience that I was too crippled to be able to carry out my duties and that my wound was deteriorating in the most dangerous way. After this conduct, I am rather surprised to find myself arrested by the surveillance committee of the town of Aire, whose motives are impossible for me to divine. I have perhaps a right to claim favours from the republican government. I ask for none, only for justice. So I beg you to make me acquainted with the reasons for my detention, to punish me promptly if I am guilty, and, if I am not, to allow me to be taken home, to Auteuil, to receive medical assistance, of which I have the greatest and most pressing need.
Salut et fraternité
. A. Duchastellet.'
³⁹

Achille died before his trial, on 10 or 11 April 1794, amid rumours that he was poisoned. ‘This century was not worthy of him,' wrote one of his fellow-prisoners. ‘His lights, his talents and his virtues would have honoured the finest days of Athens and Rome.'
⁴⁰

Such praise could not have been heaped on Marianna Corticelli, whom Casanova also killed off prematurely in his memoirs, claiming that she died in 1763 during a cure for venereal disease that he himself had paid for. This was a lie. After falling out with him over the marquise's gift to her of a casket of jewels – the value of which could have changed her life for the better – the giggling, reckless Bolognese dancer Casanova had seduced when she was just thirteen years old lived on for years. She danced her way through the theatres of Paris, Berne, Venice and Turin, and became embroiled in a series of abusive relationships with a succession of violent men who stole from her, took advantage of her, and promised her money but gave her none. A brute named Masson de Pressigny, with whom Corticelli lived in Paris in 1767, gagged her and beat her up so badly
that she had a miscarriage When she went to law to prevent him from harming her any further, Pressigny counter-claimed that he had paid off her huge debts, that she had run off with other men, and that she had been debauched before she met him.
⁴¹

Corticelli had no cushion of wealth to stop her from hitting rock bottom. A life of poverty, violence, prostitution and its inevitable consequences – frequent pregnancies and venereal diseases – took its toll on her. Her death in Turin on 14 December 1773 earned a mere postscript in a letter to Casanova from his friend, the Comte de Perouse. ‘P.-S. Corticelli, whom you knew long ago, died here yesterday of a high fever after only a few days of illness, she was engaged as third dancer at the Grand Theatre. Be calm, for she edified everyone. In her convulsions she made her last nude appearance in front of her confessor, for before she died she walked about completely naked in her room.'
⁴²

At the time of her death Marianna Corticelli was twenty-six years old. She had been a prostitute for half her life.

All women, respectable or not, are for sale. When a man has the time, he buys them with his attention, and when he is in a hurry as I am he makes use of gifts and gold.
¹

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD Marianne de Boulainvilliers stood beside her aunt in a jewellery shop in Paris's Palais Marchand, and gazed with longing at a pair of shoe-buckles in one of the display cabinets. Set with small pieces of
strass
, glass tinted and cut to resemble precious stones, the buckles were not the most expensive ones in the shop, but they were pretty and colourful and sparkly, and Marianne coveted them.

The shopkeeper broke off her conversation with Marianne's Aunt Julie, opened the cabinet, took the buckles out and handed them to the girl with a smile. They cost only three louis, she simpered, and are a bargain at the price. Marianne gazed wistfully down at them, knowing full well that Julie would never buy them for her. Other people in Paris were veritably dripping with wealth – there were two in the shop now, a grown-up lady with a trilling laugh and her gentleman companion, a dark giant bristling with diamonds and lace – but her own family lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Along with the great number of gentlemen callers who knocked at their front door there came a never-ending stream of
creditors demanding payment. If there were ever louis to spare in their all-woman household they were spent on meals and wine, or on paying off nosy police inspectors, or on pretty clothes for Marianne's mother Rose, so that she could go out and earn money for all of them.

Marianne turned over the buckles with her surprisingly long, slender fingers, then looked up wistfully into her aunt's disapproving face. A petite child with a mass of chestnut hair, delicate bone-structure and startlingly blue eyes set in a pale china-doll face, she had a sweet, open countenance that gave her an almost noble air. If she owned these buckles she would be really happy, she muttered. But it was no good – with a movement as rough as her voice, Aunt Julie snatched them away from her, banged them down on the counter and pulled Marianne towards the shop door. ‘I'll give you a better price – just two louis!' the shopkeeper called after them. Aunt Julie ignored her.

As she was hauled past the smart lady and gentleman, Marianne stopped and dropped a low curtsey as she had been taught to do. To her surprise, the lady bent down and kissed her, told her that she was as pretty as an angel and asked her name. The child was Mademoiselle Marianne de Boulainvilliers, her niece, Aunt Julie answered before she had a chance to speak. The giant gentleman looked down on her admiringly, then smiled at her aunt and said, ‘Are you so cruel that you would refuse such a pretty niece these buckles, which she insists would make her happy?' And then he said, ‘Will you allow me to make her a present of them?' And before Aunt Julie could say anything he plucked the buckles off the counter and pressed them back into Marianne's hands.

The astonished girl looked up at her aunt beseechingly. After a hesitation which seemed to last for ever, Julie told her in a gentle voice that yes, she could accept the present and that she should give the kind gentleman a kiss. The shopkeeper beamed. ‘Those buckles only cost three louis,' she told Marianne's benefactor. ‘What?' Aunt Julie said, her face suddenly clouding with anger. ‘But you just told me I could have them for two!'

As the two women began to haggle furiously over the price of the buckles, the bottom dropped out of Marianne's world. For a brief moment the beautiful trinkets had been hers; now Aunt Julie was making a scene about the price and it seemed they were already slipping out of her grasp. She tightened her grip on them. ‘Put them down, Marianne,' Aunt Julie said in a tone of voice that could not be disobeyed. She would not allow the kind man to be taken advantage in this way, she said. If he really wanted to spend three louis on her niece, why didn't he give the money directly to her, and they would go to another shop where they could buy buckles twice as pretty as these for the same price?

After she finished speaking there was a moment of awkward silence. Then the gentleman smiled with amusement and slowly put some coins on the counter: first one louis, then a second, then a third. Before Aunt Julie could object again, the shopkeeper snatched them up and pushed the buckles back towards Marianne. The bargain had already been struck, she said, the money was hers and the buckles belonged to the girl. But Aunt Julie was not in a mood to let this go. As insults flew through the air as thick and fast as mud splattering behind carriage wheels, a crowd of curious onlookers gathered outside the door. The shopkeeper was a cheat! Aunt Julie yelled. And she was a bawd! the shopkeeper shouted back.