Casanova's Women (45 page)

No amount of flattery could win Wilkes back; the former
femme fatale
who had been Casanova's nemesis in matters of love had at last met her match. Gradually, an intermittent correspondence resumed between them, but their love affair was finished. In Bath the following winter, Wilkes began two lengthy liaisons with other women. Even so, La Charpillon had not entirely lost her fascination. Although he never dined with the occupants of Titchfield Street again, he continued to note down his ex-lover's various changes of addresses: first to number fourteen Winchester Row, near Paddington, and later to number thirty-one Upper Seymour Street, near Portman Square.

From there, Marianne de Charpillon slipped quietly into obscurity. To Casanova she would always remain a vivid and uncomfortable memory. For him, a manipulative tease would for ever be
‘une Charpillon'
.

I have never been able to conceive how a father could tenderly love his charming daughter without having slept with her at least once.
¹

ON 24 JUNE 1820, sixty-six-year-old Sophia Williams, a grey-haired lady with a nose so long and thin that it overshadowed her chin, stood at the threshold of numbers thirty-two and thirty-three Mornington Place, a street of nondescript terraced houses off the Hampstead Road, in the London parish of StPancras. During the next half-hour, fifteen plainly-dressed young women wearing poke bonnets filed past her into the building, pausing only to drop her a small bob-curtsey. Mrs Williams, as Sophia was known despite her spinster status, responded with a thin, humourless twitch of the mouth that belied her turbulent emotions. Within its cage of tightly-laced stays her heart pounded with excitement. Today she was witnessing the culmination of a dream which she had been toiling for years to turn into a reality: the opening of the Adult Orphan Institution, her refuge and school of further education for vulnerable young women, women such as she had once been herself.

Inside the house the new wards, as the girls were termed, were each issued with half a dozen towels, two sheets and two spoons, and sent off to place their possessions in the simple, curtainless dormitories upstairs. Octavia Langhorne, Harriet Williams, Amelia
Kendall, the three Ross sisters, Arabella Batley, Amelia Bennet, Clara Bingham, Mary and Frances Bussell, Eleanor Cambell, Emma Middleton, Eliza Elliott and Alicia Sills – all of them had lost fathers who were middle-class clergymen or military or naval officers; and seven of them had lost their mothers as well. Some had guardians, others were friendless, still others completely destitute. In the absence of private incomes and dowries, all faced an uncertain future in which one of the few respectable options open to them was to obtain a position as a governess or lady's companion, and the dire alternative was to descend to a life on the streets. Mrs Williams's Adult Orphan Institution would equip them for the former occupation, while safeguarding them from the kind of unscrupulous people who might push them into the latter. The formidable Mrs Williams would protect them from exploitation. She would fight the world on their behalf, and equip them to fight for themselves.

This was not the first educational establishment that Mrs Williams had opened. In 1806, under the patronage of George Ill's wife Queen Charlotte, she had founded the Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum, a school which prepared poor local orphans to take up positions as domestic servants. But the Mornington Place school, which she had got off the ground with the help of her friend Princess Augusta, was much closer to her own heart, and quite revolutionary in concept. For during the next few years Mrs Williams's fifteen wards, who ranged in age between fourteen and twenty-one, would receive the kind of well-rounded education that was usually only available to upper-class men. They would learn to ‘be made perfect Mistress ... of the English language and Arithmetic, to write and read French grammatically, to be well grounded in sacred and profane History, Chronology, Ancient and Modern Geography and the use of the Globes, perfect in the rudiments of Drawing and Theory of Music, so as to be capable of teaching others'.
²
In short, Mrs Williams's Adult Orphan Institution was the first academic school of further education for women in England, a training college for governesses and female
schoolteachers which predated the more famous Queen's College in London's Harley Street by twenty-eight years.

Since Mrs Williams's own childhood had been blighted by a mother who had thrust her opinions on her, she was determined not to mould her charges' minds against their will. Her aim was ‘not to give talents, but to cultivate them; not to combat bad habits, but to encourage and confirm good ones; not to correct erroneous ideas but to instil just ones'.
³
False pride was to be avoided at all costs: as respectable girls who had fallen on hard times, those under her care must know their place in the world and yet be proud of it; for, as Mrs Williams later reported with heartfelt feeling to the wealthy subscribers who supported her school, ‘nothing is below the Dignity of a Gentlewoman but doing wrong'.
⁴

For all her prim and proper appearance, wrong-doing was something that Mrs Williams knew all about, though not through any action of her own. As a child she had known poverty, destitution and what it was like to live on the wrong side of the law. Later she had experienced temptation, abuse and the bad influence of those who would exploit her. Like her charges, Mrs Williams had experienced first-hand all the indignities and fears of being a young woman alone in the world. Only by putting her faith in God had she survived what she described in her last will and testament as a life of ‘wonderful affliction'; and, almost certainly, survived it a virgin, in stark contrast to her promiscuous parents.

Now, through the Adult Orphan Institution, Mrs Williams would help other young women to resist evil as she had done. Showing the same entrepreneurial spirit that her despised mother had once possessed, she had worked tirelessly for years to enlist the hundreds of subscribers who were to support the Institution, and as chief governess, honorary secretary and sub-treasurer, she now had complete control of running it. Until her death four years later, the Adult Orphan Institution would be Mrs Williams's world, and one she would rule like the most benign of tyrants. When the last of her new charges had entered its portals that morning, she closed the front door and fastened it with a heavy
chain, cutting off her wards, and herself, from the bad influences of the outside world.

Sophia Wilhelmina Frederica Pompeati, later known as Sophia Cornelys and Sophia Williams, was the daughter of Giacomo Casanova and his childhood friend, Teresa Imer. After meeting Casanova at Senator Malipiero's palazzo in Venice, Teresa had become a famous opera singer, an impresario, a high-class courtesan and an adventuress every bit as unscrupulous and daring as he was. Their brief flirtation, which had cost Casanova his relationship with the senator, had eventually been consummated in June 1753, and Sophia was the result of it. Born the following winter in Bayreuth, where Teresa was then living with her husband, Venetian choreographer Angelo Pompeati, and their two other children, Giuseppe and Wilhelmina, Casanova's daughter had been named after Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie von Hohenzollern, the Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth and the wife of Teresa's lover, the Margrave.

By the time Sophia was four her mother had left Bayreuth, and her husband, and dragged her through France, Flanders and the Dutch Republic. During their travels the little girl had seen the death of her sister Wilhelmina, and observed her mother on the arms of countless lovers, some important, others not; they included Alexandre le Riche de la Poupliniere, Louis XV's Farmer General and the one-time suitor of the pregnant Giustiniana Wynne, and Prince Charles of Lorraine, the Regent of the Austrian Netherlands. Sophia had lived through Teresa's riches-to-rags decline in Paris, and her subsequent arrest and imprisonment for debt. She had witnessed her quarrels with scores of creditors, men and women from whom Teresa was forced to flee time and again. During the first weeks of 1759, Sophia's brother Giuseppe was taken away from the Dutch Republic to Paris by Casanova, a man who, during his brief stay in The Hague, devoured her own half-naked body with kisses and who, so her mother told her, was her real father. Nine months later, thirty-five-year-old Teresa dragged Sophia
across the Channel to London in order to join yet another man, an independently wealthy English clergyman named John Fermor, who had fallen in love with Teresa after hearing her sing at a concert in Rotterdam and who had promised to help her reestablish her singing career in England.

In London mother and daughter had at first lived together in an uneasy, claustrophobic alliance. Teresa was totally dependent on Fermor. She knew no Englishman except her lover, and neither she nor her daughter spoke the English language. Almost as soon as they arrived in the sprawling metropolis, Teresa and Fermor began to squabble over money; besotted as he was by the sophisticated singer, the married father-of-two and school rector had not thought through the reality of keeping his extravagant foreign mistress and her child. As he had promised Teresa in the Dutch Republic, he arranged a debut concert for her at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, but her singing career did not take off as they had both hoped that it would.

Teresa was by now posing as a widow and calling herself Mrs Cornelys (a name she had adopted from one of her many Dutch lovers, a man named Cornelis de Rijgerbos). Undaunted by her dire situation and past failures, she decided to reinvent herself as a music impresario, a career she had plied in Paris and Flanders with disastrous financial consequences. Though several concert rooms already existed in London – most notably the Great Room in Soho's Frith Street – they were lacklustre venues which did not attract the aristocracy in any great number. What the city lacked, Teresa realised, was an exclusive set of assembly rooms where the nobility and gentry could listen to high-class Continental music and, more importantly, socialise and gamble just as they had done in her father's theatre in Venice. Teresa hoped to make concert-going as popular an activity for the English nobility as was attending an opera at the famous King's Theatre in the Haymarket, where Zanetta Casanova had made her debut in 1726, and she herself had performed on a trip to London twenty years later.

All the odds were against the enterprise becoming a success. Teresa was an Italian Roman Catholic, which put her beyond the
pale in the eyes of the staunchly Protestant Hanoverian monarchy. Moreover she was a woman, with few legal rights, no status and absolutely no money of her own. Nevertheless she manipulated the doubtful Fermor into bankrolling her business and signing all the contracts on her behalf; and, using him as an intermediary, she took a lease on premises in the well-situated London parish of St Anne's, Soho. Built in the 1680s for Edward Howard, the second Earl of Carlisle, after whom it had been named, Carlisle House was a double-fronted four-storey mansion on the east side of fashionable Soho Square. Since the Howards had moved out of the building in 1753 it had been rented to the Neapolitan envoy, and later used as a tapestry factory and furniture warehouse. Now in need of renovation, Carlisle House was nevertheless a beautiful structure large enough to host assemblies in, and it came with substantial outbuildings which included a disused Roman Catholic chapel where Teresa could stage her concerts.

Exhibiting a natural flair for interior design, Teresa moved into Carlisle House with Sophia and, with Fermor's money, quickly transformed it into a fitting backdrop against which the aristocracy could display their jewels and finely honed wit. With the help of several fashionable society women whom she had somehow befriended – most notably the scandalous yet highly popular Miss Elizabeth Chudleigh, lady-in-waiting to Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales – the singer drew up a list of wealthy aristocrats who would be invited to subscribe to a private concert club which was to be known as The Society in Soho-square. The exclusive nature of the membership list, the high price of the society's subscription tickets, the novelty of the venture and Teresa's extraordinary powers of self-promotion ensured that Carlisle House became a success even before it opened. Thanks to Miss Chudleigh, the founder members even included a royal prince – Edward Augustus, the Duke of York, who would remain one of Teresa's staunchest supporters until his death in 1767.

Teresa's first concert meeting, which took place on 27 November 1760, was a sensation. Bored by life at the somewhat dull
Hanoverian court which inhabited St James's Palace, the English aristocracy had an inexhaustible appetite for novelty and were hungry for enjoyment, something that Carlisle House provided in good measure. Never before had a London concert been given with such style, or in such a glamorous semi-public setting. Never before had music attracted such a glittering audience. And with her charming continental manners, her sophisticated savoir-faire and her innate Venetian zest for life, the ‘singular Mrs Cornelys', as Teresa was thereafter talked about by the fashionable
ton
, proved a huge hit as a hostess.

During the next decade almost every member of the royal family would frequent her Carlisle House assemblies, concerts and masquerade balls, with the exception of King George III and his queen. As well as the Duke of York and Miss Chudleigh and her friends, Teresa would number among her patrons the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Portland, the Duchess of Northumberland, the Countess of Harrington, the Earl of Carlisle, Lady Spencer, Sir Horace Walpole, novelist Fanny Burney, the Duchess of Bolton, the Earls of Huntingdon, Sandwich, Falmouth and Chomondley, and most of the British government including Lords Palmerston, Boling-broke and North. Anyone who was anyone, as well as anyone who aspired to be someone, wanted to join The Society in Soho-square and was prepared to pay heavily for the privilege: from half-a-guinea for a single afternoon concert ticket to five guineas for a ticket to a gala masquerade ball. Those who did not make it on to the list of eligible members attempted to gatecrash the front door or scrambled to buy stolen or counterfeited tickets on the black market, where they changed hands for as much as fifty guineas each.