Casanova's Women (40 page)

They would have come to blows had not Marianne's benefactor – Giacomo Casanova – taken Aunt Julie's arm and gently led her out of the shop. Then he strolled off through the crowd arm-in-arm with his lady friend, Madame Baret, having taught Marianne one of the most valuable lessons of her life: if rich men like you, they give you nice things.

 

This was the first meeting between Casanova and Marianne Geneviève de Boulainvilliers, later known as Marianne de Charpillon. When they met again four years later she thanked him for his generous gesture by becoming his torturer. He wrote of their second meeting in London, ‘It was on that fatal day at the beginning
of September 1763 that I began to die and I ceased to live.' Casanova was thirty-eight years old, wealthy, successful and, he had presumed until then, highly attractive to women. Sixteen-year-old Marianne de Charpillon would show him otherwise. As a lover, she almost destroyed him.

Marianne was born into a family of unscrupulous prostitutes. Catherine Brunner, her grandmother, came from a respectable family in Bern, Switzerland, where her father was a devout pastor. After his death, Catherine and her three younger sisters found themselves short of money, and in order to keep themselves in style they took up a life of easy virtue in the brothels of the town. Though Bern was a relatively small city, thousands of foreigners passed through it and, along with the famous bear-pits, there were plenty of bawdy inns to cater for them, as well as several disreputable bath-houses along the banks of the River Aare. As one French tourist reported, ‘While you are preparing for your bath, the house-girls arrive in succession, each carrying something, one some wine, another some bread, a third the cheese. She who seems to please you most stays with you and, putting no limits on her compliance, gets right into the bath with you.'
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Catherine Brunner became the mistress of a married man named Michel Augspurgher. She took his name and had several children by him, including Marianne's mother Rose, who was born around 1721. Had Catherine played her cards right, she could have married her lover after his wife died, but she appears to have preferred her libertine lifestyle to respectability, and their relationship foundered. So, instead of being recognised as the legitimate daughter of a Swiss burgher, when still a child Rose Augspurgher was exploited by her mother and forced to follow her into what would eventually become a three-generation family business. ‘Scarcely was she able to burble her first words than she was corrupted,' a French police inspector later wrote of Rose's childhood. ‘The cabarets of the Bear, the Star, the Savage and the Golden Key in and around Bern were the temples wherein the premises of this young victim were sacrificed to Venus. Under her
mother's eyes and guidance, she made great progress and had so little choice in the matter that by fourteen years of age she had become the leftovers of the grooms and lackeys of the town.'
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By 1739, the Bern authorities had had more than enough of the Augspurghers' outrageous behaviour. So eager were they for them to leave the city that they gave them a hundred ecus to speed them on their way. Armed with the recipe for a cure-all tonic which she called her
baume de vie
or ‘balm of life' and intermittently sold to make money, Catherine led her motley family troupe to Paris via the Franche-Compté, where it is thought that twenty-five-year-old Rose gave birth to Marianne on 1 November 1746. According to Ange Goudar – adventurer, gambler, writer and a friend of both Casanova and the Augspurghers – the baby's father was the Marquis de Boulainvilliers, a well-known libertine from that area.

Once they reached Paris, Catherine Augspurgher rented furnished rooms above a cobbler's shop in the rue Pagevin. Her sister Julie was sent out to reel in punters, young Rose was put to work satisfying them, and Catherine fleeced them for all they were worth. Rose's most illustrious lover at this time was the Prince of Lichtenstein who set her up in an apartment and settled an income on her; but when he realised that he was being taken for a ride by her aunts and mother he soon abandoned her. ‘It would be difficult to put a number here to those to whom they have distributed their favours,' stated a police report on the Augspurgher women compiled about ten years after they had settled in Paris. According to gossip, both Rose and her mother Catherine had slept with the same merchant who had made both of them pregnant at the same time. The inevitable consequence of so much promiscuous sex was venereal disease, and at least one of the women's clients was so badly infected by them that he was left ‘in a state of never being able to hope for a recovery'.
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By 1750, the five Augspurgher women – Catherine, two of her sisters, her daughter Rose, and young Marianne – were living together in rooms in Paris's rue et porte Saint-Honoré. Marianne was now four years old, her grandmother and great-aunts were in
their forties or early fifties, and Rose was estimated to be somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty years old, ‘tall, good-looking, brunette, with beautiful slanting eyes, and with the exception of rouge and the white paint which she slathers on the pimples and growths on her face, she would be a tasty enough morsel.' Their household caused nothing but trouble to the authorities: out of vengeance or professional jealousy they shopped other women to the police for living off immoral earnings; they pretended to be duchesses in order to trick aristocrats out of their money; and they falsely denounced their creditors for being traitors to Louis XV. All in all, the Augspurghers were a bunch of ‘dangerous females' who spun ‘an abominable web of calumnies and falsehoods'.
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Despite this Rose had a string of devoted admirers, several as crooked as her family, including a Swiss rascal named De Thormann, who offered to take the Augspurghers around the courts of Europe, conning wealthy men out of their fortunes, and Comte Antoine-Louis-Alphonse-Marie de Rostaing, the black sheep of a noble family from the Vendôme.

Rostaing was a professional gambler and a crook. At the same time as he was seeing Rose he was also involved with Marguerite Brunet, the female pimp who acted as Casanova's procuress in Paris. Forced to flee France in the late 1750s because of his debts, Rostaing persuaded Rose to accompany him to England. Like a close-knit troupe of gypsies, her grandmother and aunts decamped with her to London where, using the name Descharpillon, they settled in Denmark Street in the crowded parish of St Giles, on the fringes of fashionable Soho. Here Rose underwent a mercury cure for a terrible case of syphilis she had caught from Rostaing. Her health was permanently ruined by it. From now on, the family she had once supported would increasingly have to support her.

Her daughter Marianne had already begun to blossom into the woman whom Casanova would describe as ‘a beauty in whom it was difficult to find a single fault'.
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The child who had caught his eye in Paris's Palais Marchand had grown tall and slender, with
delicate bone-structure, unusually elongated fingers and tiny feet. Her bright blue eyes appeared bluer because of her great pallor, which was set off by glossy light auburn hair. This beauty proved Marianne's curse, for now that Rose was too ill to work, the ageing Augspurghers looked to their youngest member to keep them. Like her mother before her, Marianne was to have no choice in the matter. Whether she liked it or not (and at times she clearly found it highly distasteful), she was forced to use her charms to reel in dupes for Catherine's shady business schemes and Rostaing's crooked games of cards. From her mid-teens onwards, Marianne's
raison d'être
was to be milked by her family as if she were a cash-cow. Unpleasant as this burden was, her affection for them ensured that she never shirked it. As her future lover, the MP and popular hero John Wilkes, would later write of Marianne ‘Her whole life has been sacrificed to others.'

‘Not yet on the wide streets'
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when George III came to the throne in 1760, fourteen-year-old, fresh-faced Marianne was nevertheless being touted around the vast metropolis by her Aunt Julie in the hope of attracting a wealthy, generous benefactor. There were plenty to be had. London, with its population of three-quarters of a million people, was a magnet which drew in everyone from wealthy aristocrats to foreign artists, and from diplomats to poor country girls trying to better themselves. Since there was no professional police-force to speak of, the streets were thronged with petty criminals. From the labyrinthine old City in the east to the new, spacious residential districts of Marylebone, Soho and Westminster, pickpockets and cut-throats crowded the pavements, relieving the nobility of their diamond watches and lace handkerchiefs and the poor of their loaves of bread and parcels of laundry. Violent muggings were commonplace, even during the daytime, and anyone who walked around in court dress was liable to be attacked by the rebellious mob.

Sex was readily available on the streets. Prostitutes, whores and bawds were everywhere – it was estimated that as many as 30,000 them worked in the Marylebone district alone. They sold themselves
in the backrooms of taverns, solicited on almost every corner, and had their names and addresses listed in well-circulated publications such as
Harris's List ofCovent Garden Ladies
, a pamphlet freely available under the porticos of Covent Garden market – another favoured haunt for prostitutes. Designed primarily for out-of-towners,
Harris's List
gave the women's names and addresses along with their histories, their natures, titillating sexual details and even their faults. Miss Hamon of York Street had entered the business after having been ‘debauched by a Scotch gentleman in the army'. Miss L-of Castle Street, though uneducated, was a ‘lovely fountain of Transport… Her yielding limbs though beautiful when together are still more ravishing when separated.' The predominant passion of Miss R-ad of Queen Anne Street ‘seems for horses, hounds and the delights of the field. No one is more emulous than our heroine to be in at the death.' Miss W-ll-ms of Upper Newman Street had ‘a peculiar art in raising them that fall and bringing the dead to life. Two pounds Two shillings is the price of admission to enter her un-furnished parlour, which we are convinced is at a moment's notice ready for the reception of any gentleman.' Miss Godf-y, a lively twenty-two-year-old ‘very fond of dancing', who resided in the same street, was ‘a kind of boatswain in her way and when she speaks every word is uttered in a thundering and vociferous tone … extraordinary good companion for an officer in the army as she might save him the trouble of giving word of command.'
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The Augspurghers did not intend Marianne to become a common prostitute but instead a high-class courtesan who could command a good price for her favours. Some of the best places to attract a rich man were London's pleasure gardens – Chelsea's Ranelagh House, the Marylebone Gardens and the New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall – which were the only venues in the vast metropolis where Londoners socialised regardless of wealth and rank. Relatively cheap to get into – entrance fees ranged from a shilling to half a crown – the gardens were one of the city's main leisure attractions. With their heated dancing pavilions, lantern-lit
walls, mock classical ruins and tree-bordered paths they formed the perfect backdrop for young beauties to make an impression on gentlemen, and provided endless opportunities for making assignations – and even, in the dark shadows behind the trees and shrubs, for consummating them.

It was at Vauxhall Gardens in the summer of 1762 that Marianne de Charpillon was spotted by Francesco Lorenzo Morosini, the new Venetian ambassador to the Court of St James, and former ambassador to France. In her mid-teens, perfectly-formed, stunningly beautiful and no doubt with the highly-prized commodity of her virginity still intact, Mademoiselle de Charpillon appeared to be just what Morosini was looking for to amuse him during his one-year sojourn in London. Using the adventurer Ange Goudar as his intermediary, he paid a formal visit to Marianne's home, then summoned Goudar to his official residence in Soho Square and set out his conditions in a written document – a common practice at the time, not dissimilar to modern-day prenuptial contracts. In it, Morosini proposed renting a small furnished house where Marianne was to live and receive no one but himself, in return for which he would pay her fifty guineas a month. To this agreement, which had to be signed by Marianne's mother, Goudar added his own coda: when the ambassador left England at the end of his posting, he himself was to enjoy Marianne's charms for one night. (Months after Morosini left England, Goudar complained that Marianne had laughed in his face when he demanded his recompense, and that he had yet to enjoy the promised night in her arms. Goudar threatened to have Rose arrested for breaking the terms of their agreement.)

Within days an appropriate house was rented, and Marianne was moved into it and handed over to the Venetian, a man more than thirty years her senior. The liaison could not have been a great success, for when he left London the following spring Morosini did not even say goodbye to her properly – it appears that she avoided him. On his way back to Venice via Lyon, he happened to cross paths with Casanova, who was at the time en route to London, and
he entrusted him with a rather ambiguous note addressed to Marianne, which simply said that ‘The Procurator Morosini is annoyed to have left without having been able to take his last leave of Mile Charpillon.'
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Casanova had no idea that the ambassador's Mile Charpillon was the same Mile de Boulainvilliers for whom he had impulsively purchased a pair of shoe buckles in the Palais Marchand four years earlier. When he asked Morosini where in London this Mile Charpillon resided, the man replied that he had no idea, indicating a remarkable degree of indifference to her. It was left to Casanova to find her or not – it was an unimportant commission, Morosini insisted.