Casanova's Women (43 page)

Casanova could not believe that he had allowed Marianne to make a fool of him yet again. When she arrived alone at Pall Mall the following day and offered herself to him he turned her away out of anger and pique, a reaction she may well have been gambling on. Though his pride let him believe that her remorse was genuine, his confidence had received a blow it would never recover from. The great seducer felt demoralised, unmanned, and, he was convinced, cured of his addiction to the tease. ‘Such was the state to which Love had brought me in London ... at the age of thirty-eight,' he
wrote of the moment in his memoirs. ‘It was the end of the first act of my life.'
²¹

The dangerous dance that the two of them were locked into was far from over, for by now Marianne was as caught up in its intricate steps as Casanova was. Annoyed that he ignored her when they next encountered each other by chance at the home of M. Malignan, under whose roof they had first met, Marianne invited herself along on an expedition to Richmond Palace which Casanova was organising the next day. Situated in a 2,500-acre park twelve miles outside London, the palace had been built by Henry VII in the sixteenth century, and although the turreted brick buildings were no longer a royal residence, the substantial gardens and several of the apartments were open for visits by special arrangement. As their party toured the park, Marianne clung on to Casanova's arm, undeterred by his flood of insults. Once they reached the maze and were separated from the others she pulled him on to the grass and launched what he described as a full-scale, tender amorous attack on him. After resisting her for a while, his desire got the better of his judgement, and he deluded himself into believing that Marianne was offering herself to him then and there. It was the triumph of self-confidence over experience. For just when Marianne seemed to invite him to ‘gather the laurel of victory ... at that very moment, just as I find myself certain of seizing hold of it, she becomes recalcitrant and turfs me off'.
²²
Infuriated beyond measure, Casanova refused to be placated by her loving promises that she would spend the night with him at his house. This time he wanted immediate satisfaction – or revenge. He held her down, took out a knife, unsheathed it with his teeth and held it to her throat. With remarkable sangfroid, Marianne declared that if he raped her she would remain lying on the grass afterwards and tell everyone in the party what he had done. The ignominy would have been too much for Casanova, who got to his feet and stomped furiously away. To his amazement Marianne followed him and, when they met up with the others, took his arm and behaved as if nothing had happened.

If Marianne's intention was to torture Casanova, as she had so lightly threatened to do when they were first introduced, she was succeeding admirably. At the end of his tether, he vowed never to see her again and sent a note to Rose, threatening to prosecute her if she did not return his two bills of exchange. The Augspurghers must have laughed when they read it; they had no intention of letting the valuable papers leave their hands. Rose wrote back, expressing surprise at the request, and saying that Marianne would return the bills to him in person ‘when you have grown wiser and have learned to respect her'. This effrontery was too much. Armed with two pistols, Casanova made his way to Denmark Street, determined to put an end to the business. But when he saw Marianne's hairdresser enter her house, as he did every Saturday night to put her hair in curl-papers, he decided to wait in the street until the man left.

Casanova hung about impatiently in the cold. Shortly afterwards, he observed Rostaing and Coumon leave the building, but not Marianne's hairdresser. The long minutes turned into hours. The dark street grew even darker. The cold intensified. Still Casanova waited, an angry stalker hovering in the shadows. After what seemed like an age the watch who patrolled the parish every night cried the hour – it was eleven o'clock. Three-quarters of an hour later, a maid opened the Augspurghers' front door and came out into the street. Unable to control himself any longer, Casanova slipped into the hall and opened the parlour door. Inside he saw, ‘as Shakespeare put it, the beast with two backs, stretched out on the couch'.
²³
The woman who had kept him waiting for sex for months was making love with her hairdresser.

Marianne screamed. As her half-naked lover broke away from her, Casanova mercilessly attacked him with his walking stick. Soon every female member of the household came rushing into the parlour, all of them yelling at him to leave the man alone. When the hairdresser ran off, Casanova turned his fury on the pier glass and Dresden tea set he had given Marianne, while she cowered beside the sofa, sheltering from the explosion of sharp glass and china
shards. When Rose still refused to return his bills of exchange, Casanova dashed the chairs to pieces and threatened to attack the women if they did not stop screaming.

The night watch, whose job it also was to keep the peace in the parish, heard the din and came rushing back to Denmark Street with his stick and lantern. Using the prerogative of the rich, Casanova paid him off with a handful of gold crowns. Meanwhile, taking advantage of the distraction, Marianne fled from the house. This was the fourth time she had suffered from Casanova's violent temper, and she was understandably terrified of what he might do to her. Her disappearance reduced her hardened family to tears. The streets around Denmark Street were dark and treacherous, they wept. Anything might happen to a young woman out alone at midnight. Overcome with remorse, Casanova bribed the maids to go out and find Marianne. He promised the Augspurghers he would pay for the furniture he had broken, and swore that, when she was found, he would beg forgiveness at her feet.

According to her maid, Marianne turned up the following morning in a sedan chair, feverish and in a pitiable state, having taken refuge all night in a shop near Soho Square, a short distance away from Denmark Street. For the next few days Casanova besieged her front door to enquire about her health, only to be told that she was desperately ill. Convinced that he had caused her irreparable harm, he shut himself up at home and neither ate nor slept. On the third day, half crazy with fear and exhaustion, he returned to Denmark Street only to be informed that Marianne was dying.

Determined to commit suicide, he went back to Pall Mall and put his affairs in order, then took his pistols, weighted his pockets with lead balls and headed for the lethal currents of the Thames. On the way, he bumped into Sir Wellbore Ellis Agar, an amiable twenty-eight-year-old acquaintance who, sensing that the foreigner was desperate, dragged him off to an inn for a typical English dinner of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and oysters followed by a few hours of watching naked young whores dance the hornpipe. Afterwards,
Agar insisted that Casanova spend the rest of the evening with him at Ranelagh. Although the adventurer believed that Marianne must be dead by now, the thought of London's pleasure gardens still lured him, and he decided to put off his suicide until the following day.

Marianne was not dead, nor even close to dying. Her spirit was not as easily broken as Dresden china. Having recovered quickly from the shock of Casanova's latest attack on her, she had been wreaking revenge on him by making him suffer. That night she, too, accepted an invitation to go to Ranelagh, in her case with eligible bachelor Lord Grosvenor, the racing-mad owner of a famous horse stud. At the Chelsea Gardens, always one of her favourite haunts in London, Marianne and Grosvenor made their way past the Chinese pavilion to the Rotunda, a huge covered pavilion heated by a vast central brazier which provided essential warmth during cold weather. Here they joined the fashionable crowd in dancing minuets. In the middle of one of the dances, Marianne looked up with smiling eyes, only to see a horrified Casanova staring at her. This time she did not wait for him to attack her, she immediately disappeared into the crowd.

Their chance encounter on the dance floor finally cured Casanova of his desire for Marianne, or so he told himself. But it did not curb his desire for revenge. He went to law and had the older Augspurgher women arrested for refusing to return his bills of exchange. Swearing that she would never grovel to him even to secure their release, Marianne retaliated by seducing the man who had saved Casanova from suicide. Sir Wellbore Agar immediately became her besotted lover, and even paid Casanova 250 guineas to cancel the bills of exchange and secure the release of Marianne's mother and aunts.

‘Cursed be the moment when you came to England to make us all unhappy!' Julie Augspurgher had shouted at Casanova on the night he had caught her niece making love with her hairdresser. Thirsty for revenge, Marianne now brought her own legal complaint against her persecutor: she accused him of having attempted
to disfigure her with a knife. Arrested in the early hours of 27 November 1763 on his way home from a glamorous subscription ball at Carlisle House, Teresa Imer's premises, Casanova found himself dragged in all his finery to a bailiff's premises, then hauled before London's most famous magistrate, Sir John Fielding, brother of Henry Fielding, the novelist and author of
Tom Jones
. A brilliant social reformer and legal brain who had been blinded in a childhood accident and was consequently known as the ‘Blind Beak', Sir John had such a remarkable ear that it was said he could recognise three thousand London criminals by the sound of their voice alone. It was probably his knowledge of Italian that saved Casanova from a long spell in prison. Able to talk fluently to the accused man in his own language, Fielding bound over ‘James Casanova of Pall Mall, Gentleman' to keep the peace ‘especially towards Mary Ann Charpillon and Elizabeth Augbour (sic) Charpillon'. Having ordered Casanova to appear in court in mid-December, Fielding released him on bail.
²⁴

To Marianne's chagrin, her case against Casanova was eventually adjourned from December until the following April, by which time he had fled England, partly to avoid standing trial, and partly because of his involvement in trying to cash an illegal bill of exchange. Over the New Year period in London he continued to persecute Marianne, this time through the mouth of a parrot which he taught to say
‘Miss Charpillon is more of a whore than her mother'
. He dispatched his black servant, Jarba, to the Royal Exchange in the City with instructions not to sell the parrot for less than fifty guineas, a sum he was certain that no man would be prepared to pay for it. Day after day, Jarba stood in the Exchange with the talkative parrot. Its repetitive cry, followed by its cackling laugh, attracted a large, amused audience but no buyers, and it was not long before news of the insult filtered down to Denmark Street, as Casanova had hoped it would. The older Augspurgher women were horrified by the scandal but, rather than give Casanova the satisfaction of thinking that he had upset her, Marianne let him know through Goudar that she found the incident extremely
amusing. It is doubtful that she did. Marianne valued herself highly, and the last thing she would have wanted was to become a public laughing stock. When the parrot was eventually purchased, it was by her admirer Lord Grosvenor, who no doubt bought it to spare her further embarrassment.

 

The parrot's right to free speech would certainly have been championed by Marianne's future lover, John Wilkes, the famous dissident Member of Parliament and rake. In the spring of 1763 Wilkes had published an attack on the king's speech at the opening of parliament in his irreverent opposition newspaper, the
North Briton
, and he had subsequently been incarcerated in the Tower of London for publishing ‘a false, scandalous, and seditious libel'. By claiming the privilege of his position as Member of Parliament for Aylesbury, Wilkes prevented the case coming to trial and at the same time turned himself into a national champion of liberty.

On 19 January 1764, while Casanova's parrot was singing Marianne's praises at the Royal Exchange, Wilkes was expelled from the House of Commons. After fleeing to Paris, he was convicted in absentia on two further counts of seditious, obscene and impious libel and declared an outlaw, a move which made him more popular than ever with freedom-lovers on both sides of the Atlantic. Wilkes's warning to Parliament, ‘Do not underestimate the sons of liberty', was taken up by an American revolutionary group who thereafter called themselves the Sons of Liberty: their members included John Hancock and John Adams, and such was Wilkes's standing with them that the men asserted that ‘the fate of Wilkes and America must stand or fall together'.

By the time he returned to England from France in the early months of 1768, Wilkes had become a popular hero and the Establishment loathed him more than ever. Determined to be a thorn in their side, he immediately stood as Member of Parliament for Middlesex, and won a clear majority. Instead of being allowed to take up his seat, Wilkes was thrown into the King's Bench, a prison usually reserved for debtors. The election was annulled, and the
vote was held again – and then again. Each time Wilkes won a clear majority. When the poll was held for a fourth time with the same result, the government declared their lackey Henry Lawes Luttrell to be the victor even though he had polled fewer votes. Fifteen thousand Wilkes supporters gathered outside the walls of the King's Bench on 10 May to demonstrate on behalf of their imprisoned hero. Troops fired on them, killing seven people and sparking violent protests throughout London.

Three weeks later, Wilkes was sentenced to a further twenty-two months. Protests about his continued imprisonment, co-ordinated by a group of radicals calling themselves the Bill of Rights Society, continued until his release two years later. On 27 February 1770, several months before he was due to be freed, these culminated in a near-riot outside Carlisle House, Soho Square, where a huge masquerade ball was being attended by every aristocrat and government member of any importance, including George Ill's newly-appointed prime minister, Lord North. Later that year Wilkes was finally released from prison, allowed to take up his seat in the Commons and, at the same time, appointed a sheriff of the City of London. In order to be close to the centre of power, he moved into lodgings in Prince's Court, Great George Street, Westminster with Polly, his daughter from a short-lived marriage.