Casanova's Women (41 page)

Unaware of the fate that awaited him in Marianne de Charpillon's long, dimpled hands, and with his pockets still overflowing with the Marquise d'Urfé's money, Casanova arrived in London on the afternoon of 13 June 1763 accompanied by his French servant, Clairmont, and Giuseppe Pompeati. After living for four years with the marquise, Giuseppe was to be delivered back to his real mother, Teresa Imer, who needed him to help her run the successful entertainment business she had recently established in Carlisle House, Soho Square. Proudly rejecting the modest accommodation she had rented for him in Soho, Casanova installed himself in a furnished house in Pall Mall, near the court of St James. After only a few weeks of enjoying the capital's many attractions he began to feel bored: what he lacked was a relationship to give meaning to his life. The thousands of readily available London prostitutes would not do. Casanova wanted something more than a brief sexual encounter – a woman he could relate to body and soul. Unsure how to meet one, he conceived the novel idea of advertising for a woman by offering cheap accommodation in return for some female companionship. ‘A small Family or a single Gentleman or Lady, with or without a Servant, may be immediately accommodated with a genteel and elegantly furnished first floor, with all conveniences,' read his advertisement for a tenant in the
Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser
of 5 July 1763, ‘to which belong some peculiar Advantages; it is agreeably situated
in Pall Mall, with boarding if required; it may be entered on immediately, and will be let on very reasonable Terms, as it is no common Lodging House, and more for the sake of Company than Profit. Please to enquire at Mrs Redaw's, Milliner, exactly opposite Mr Deard's Toy Shop in Pall Mall, near the Hay Market, St James's.'
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The notice caused a minor furore among the fashionable
ton
and brought Casanova to the attention of two extraordinary women. One was Marianne de Charpillon, who, as she later told him, burst out laughing when she read it. The other was a refined Portuguese beauty in her early twenties, to whom Casanova gave the name Pauline in his memoirs.

Refined, chaste, modest and well-educated, Pauline was the daughter of an illustrious Portuguese aristocrat, the Marquis X … mo, as Casanova dubbed him (the abbreviation probably stood for Xostimo, a surname pronounced and later written as Cristostomo). On the run from an unwanted arranged marriage, she had fled Lisbon and eloped to England with the man she wished to marry, a low-ranking diplomat named Count Al… . Their elopement was discovered almost as soon as their frigate set sail for England, and a fast craft was dispatched to intercept them. By the time the couple disembarked at Plymouth, each disguised as the other, Portuguese officials were already waiting on the dock to take Pauline back home. Since she had swapped identities and clothes with her fiancé, the officials mistook them for each other, and, believing that the count was Pauline, forced him on to a boat back to Lisbon, taking Pauline's trunk of dresses with them. Left alone in England with nothing but the male breeches and shirt she was wearing, Pauline bought herself a few plain but respectable dresses and tried to survive on a pittance until such time as the count rejoined her in London or sent word for her to return to Portugal. Since she could scarcely afford to rent lodgings or eat, the offer of an ‘elegantly furnished first floor' in smart Pall Mall to be let ‘on very reasonable terms … more for the sake of Company than Profit' was too good an opportunity to pass by. Though she must
have been aware that she risked being molested by her landlord, Pauline saw no alternative but to move in.

Virginal Pauline was just the kind of challenge that Casanova relished. Seducing her was not enough for him: the compliance of a woman who was financially dependent on him would have given him as little satisfaction as seducing a woman who was drunk. After knowing her for only one day, he resolved to do everything within his power to win her away from her absent fiancé. The effort that this would involve only increased Casanova's desire, and he did not for a moment doubt his ability to succeed. ‘I knew,' he wrote, ‘that there was not a woman in the world who could resist the assiduous care and constant attentions of a man who wished to make her fall in love with him.'
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Pauline had staked her reputation on marrying Count A1… . Although she had shared a cabin with him for two weeks on the voyage to England, they had behaved with such strict propriety that they had never even glimpsed each other naked, let alone made love. Yet soon after she moved into Pall Mall, she allowed Casanova, a virtual stranger, to collect, as he described it, the ‘blood-stained sacrifice'
¹²
of her carefully preserved virginity. By the following morning, when he made his third assault on her – the word is his own – he claimed that Pauline had grown as ardent as he was, and that she was longing for more pleasure. Casanova had accomplished what he had set out to do. It was moments like this that he lived for: a perfect physical union such as he had experienced with Henriette, an emotional experience which filled the unbearable void inside himself. The exquisite pain of knowing that his idyll was finite not only added to his pleasure, it was ‘the true foundation' of it.
¹³

By the time Pauline was summoned back to Portugal three weeks later, the man who had once meant everything to her and whom she was now to marry had been eclipsed in her heart by Casanova, his formidable, determined, more sexually experienced competitor. Assiduous to the end, Casanova accompanied Pauline across the Channel, parting from her at Calais on 11 August and sending
her on to Portugal under the protection of his trustworthy valet Clairmont. It was Clairmont who became the real victim of the affair: it is believed that he was shipwrecked on his return journey on the
Hanover
, an English vessel that sank on 2 December 1763 en route from Lisbon to England.

‘I will never love another woman,' Casanova told his English friend Henry Herbert, Lord Pembroke, three days after parting from Pauline at Calais. The libertine Pembroke was rightly dismissive: Casanova would find another woman within a week, he predicted. In fact it took Casanova three weeks to find Marianne de Charpillon. This time, love would not be a pleasant experience for him. He was due to get a taste of his own medicine. He had deliberately destroyed Pauline's feelings for the man she had loved. Now it was his turn to have a great love ousted from his consciousness by a far less worthy rival.

 

As soon as her lover the Venetian ambassador had left England, Marianne de Charpillon was sent out to reel in another wealthy punter. The Augspurghers were more in need of money than ever, for their London household had become a sizeable one to support. Since 1762 Ange Goudar, the man who had introduced them to Morosini, had become a regular visitor to Denmark Street, where he had teamed up with Rose's lover Rostaing, and a Frenchman named Coumon whose job it was to bring in dupes he met at London's coffee shops so that they could be cheated out of their money at the Augspurghers' card table. The profits of these card games, and Marianne's conquests, were divided up between the gang of eight.

By now, Marianne had learned how to retain some control over her life by promising the men she attracted far more than she actually delivered. She needed them, but she did not want them, and consequently she enjoyed teasing and even punishing, them for wanting her. Her admirers during 1763 included Frederick Calvert, Richard, Earl of Grosvenor, and the Portuguese envoy Senhor de Saa, but it is unlikely that any of them had more luck with her than
Lord Pembroke himself who, one night at Ranelagh, paid Marianne twenty guineas in advance to go for a stroll with him in a shady walkway – a euphemism for having sexual intercourse or at least indulging in heavy petting. As soon as they left the main path, however, Marianne dropped Pembroke's arm and disappeared into the bushes before he had a chance to take the slightest liberty with her.

One night in September 1763, Marianne and her Aunt Julie turned up at the home of a Flemish officer named Malignan, where Casanova happened to be spending the evening. Marianne sized up the new addition to the London scene immediately. With his fashionable Parisian clothes, his showy jewellery, his enamelled snuffbox and diamond watch, the Italian was clearly a man of means and, it followed, a prospective source of income for her. Yet oddly, given his effect on women in the past, she did not find him in the least attractive. Twenty years her senior, Casanova, at thirty-seven, was beginning to show his age, and though he did not yet realise it he soon would.

When Marianne recognised the Chevalier de Seingalt (Casanova had adopted the French title in 1759 and used it in England), as the man who had given her a pair of buckles in Paris's Palais Marchand four years earlier, she took advantage of this stroke of luck to recall the story. Raising the hem of her dress, a seductive gesture in itself, she showed him that not only did she remember the occasion, she was still wearing the very same buckles on her shoes. Going even further, she reminded him that ‘encouraged by my aunt, you did me the honour of kissing me'. The feeling that their meeting was fated was compounded when Marianne told Casanova her name, and like a magician, he produced from his portfolio the letter addressed to her from Morosini. By passing on the note from her ex-lover, Casanova made Marianne aware that he knew her position. Without a trace of embarrassment, she flirtatiously chided him for not having sought her out and delivered it sooner, and she invited him to dine with her family the following day. When he refused because Lord Pembroke was due to dine with him in Pall
Mall, Marianne invited herself and her aunt along, indicating that she was not only available but actively pursuing a relationship with him. She teased Casanova about his infamous newspaper notice advertising for a lodger, and said she had felt like applying for the position herself, because she ‘wanted to punish the audacious author of such a notice ... by making you fall in love with me, and afterwards making you suffer the torments of Hell by the way I treated you. Ah! How I should have laughed!'
¹⁴

As an opening gambit this was daring stuff, guaranteed to put off the faint-hearted. But Marianne had pitched her tone perfectly. Although he responded in a similar fashion, declaring that hers was ‘the project of a monster'
¹⁵
and that he would stay on his guard, Casanova was fascinated by her. Coming from the smiling lips of a sixteen-year-old whose sweet, seemingly transparent expression seemed to indicate delicacy of feeling as well as nobility of birth, her wicked words seemed little more than a tempting challenge, a teasing slap across the wrist with a velvet glove. Casanova would have done better to have taken Marianne more seriously. When she quipped that the only way for a man to resist her was to not see her at all, she spoke nothing less than the truth.

The following day Lord Pembroke, who had already had his fingers burned by Marianne, warned Casanova that she was ‘a little strumpet who will do everything she can to entrap you'. His words fell on deaf ears. Marianne's brazen tone, combined with her innocent beauty, had already captivated Casanova who was confident that he would soon enjoy her charms and quickly tire of them. ‘How could I imagine that she would make things difficult for me?' he wrote with hindsight. ‘Without even flattering myself that I could please her, I knew that I had money, that I wasn't a miser, and that she would not resist.'
¹⁶
When he was invited to Denmark Street a few days later to meet her family, he became even more certain of making an early conquest. For, ill and haggard though Rose Augspurgher was – the mercury cure she had taken for venereal disease had ruined her looks – Casanova remembered her from a previous encounter. He had once sold her some
jewellery through a Swiss goldsmith in Paris. In return, she had given him two bills of exchange for six thousand francs which had never been honoured, and consequently she still owed him the money. Taking this and everything else into account, Casanova assumed that it was a foregone conclusion that Rose's daughter would soon become his mistress.

A relationship with Marianne was always very much a family affair. Seeking safety in numbers on Casanova's first visit to her home, she surrounded herself with her mother, her aunts and her grandmother. Later that night the party was joined by Ange Goudar, Rostaing and Coumon, and against his better judgement Casanova found himself roped in to several rubbers of whist with them. Even though he lost a small fortune at the card table, he still believed that he had his eyes wide open and was risking nothing as long as he concentrated his thoughts on Marianne. He was underestimating the courtesan, who was as determined as he was to wield the power in their relationship. In her opinion, the Italian was behaving like a classic dupe, and she and her aunts intended to play him for all he was worth.

A protracted game of pursuit and evasion began. But who was pursuing whom? Without letting Casanova have a say in the matter, Marianne invited herself and the entire company to dine at his house in a few days' time. On the appointed day she turned up at Pall Mall at nine o'clock in the morning with her aunt, and insisted on speaking to Casanova privately. Coming straight to the point, she admitted that her family's finances were in chaos, and invited him to invest the sum of a hundred guineas in her aunt's ‘balm of life' medicine; in return, he would receive a half-share of any profits, and the capital sum would be refunded to him in six months' time. One hundred guineas was a substantial amount – the equivalent in modern terms is about £10,000. Taken aback, Casanova said he would think about it, and concluding that this was the sum needed to buy Marianne, he sat down beside her on the sofa and moved in to kiss her in a lighthearted manner. To his astonishment, she turned her head away. Eventually she stood up,
smiled, and rejoined her aunt in the next room, leaving Casanova with a clear message: he would get nowhere with her without first showing her the colour of his money.