Casanova's Women (46 page)

Teresa's head was immediately turned by her instant success. Instead of saving for the future, or paying back the money Fermor had laid out on her behalf, she decided after only weeks in business to expand her new enterprise on an extremely grandiose scale. By the spring of 1761 she had engaged a builder, Samuel Norman, to refurbish the entire mansion and, furthermore, to pull down all the outbuildings at the back including the old chapel, and to replace
them with a purpose-built ballroom and dining-room. At thirty feet high, eighty feet long and forty feet wide, the Concert Room, as her ballroom was called, was three-quarters the size of the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall Palace, and had its own banqueting hall underneath it of almost equal dimensions where four hundred guests could be seated at one crescent-shaped table. Both rooms were adorned with pillars and furnished with the latest fashion in silk sofas and armchairs. This was just the start of Teresa's extravagance: she installed octagonal glass doors worth a hundred pounds each in the refurbished main house; commissioned chinoiserie furniture from society carpenter Thomas Chippendale; hung heavy velvet curtains at the huge windows; and adorned the panelled walls with scores of elaborate and expensive rococo candle sconces and burnished mirrors, the largest of which cost her £262 – the equivalent of £25,250 in the modern day.

The effect was fabulous. For the next eleven years the concerts and parties that Teresa held in the sumptuous surroundings of Carlisle House were among the most memorable events in London's packed social calendar. On gala nights Soho Square filled with crowds of onlookers who came to watch the jewel-bedecked aristocracy arrive in a continuous crush of carriages and sedan chairs that lasted from nine in the evening, when the house opened its doors, until well past midnight. The chaos in the square, which included the occasional overturned carriage and smashed window, was so terrible that Teresa soon instituted London's first one-way traffic system: in her frequent newspaper advertisements for her assemblies she ordered all the coachmen to pull up outside Carlisle House only ‘with their horses' heads pointing towards Greek Street'.

Inside the candle-lit mansion guests danced, ate sweetmeats and drank French wine and champagne, or non-alcoholic beverages such as tea, coffee and orgeat, a cold drink made from almonds or barley mixed with orange-flower water. They listened to concerts by London's most celebrated musicians (they included Johann Christian Bach and viola da gamba maestro Carl Abel), danced to a full-scale orchestra, gambled into the early hours, made
assignations and occasionally even consummated them on the premises. Often her patrons did not leave Soho Square until well after dawn. And while they were enjoying themselves on the upper floors of Carlisle House, their hundreds of servants lived it up below stairs.

With Carlisle House, Teresa succeeded in bringing the magic and excitement of the Venetian carnival to the very heart of London. Her house became an essential stop on any out-of-towner's visit to London and the subject of gossip in newspaper columns as far afield as the American colonies. Only a few years previously she had been destitute; now she was a celebrity – London's ‘Mother of Masquerades' and ‘Empress of Magnificent Taste and Pleasure' as the newspapers called her. By 1763 she was hosting twenty-four full-scale balls a year, each for between 400 and 1,000 paying guests, and Carlisle House was taking some £24,000 in revenue – more than £2.5 million in modern terms. As befitted a woman in her position, its proprietor lived in grand style, keeping her own private carriage and six horses and employing upwards of thirty-two servants in the house, including a private secretary. As well as her apartments in Carlisle House she rented a country villa in the Thames-side town of Hammersmith, where she and Sophia went whenever they had the time.

To the outside world, Mrs Cornelys's ‘fairy palace', as Horace Walpole called Carlisle House, appeared to be a phenomenal success. Few people were aware that it was a palace built out of playing cards which could collapse at any time, bringing down Teresa and Sophia with it. Contrary to appearances, by 1763 London's most famous impresario was already deeply in debt, and getting more so with every passing day. She had fallen out with Fermor over the huge cost of building the new ballroom, and the one-time lovers were now engaged in a bitter, costly four-year battle in the Courts of Chancery over both the ownership of the building and the business that was conducted within it. Fermor claimed that Carlisle House was entirely his and that he and Teresa shared a fifty-fifty partnership in the business. Teresa counter-claimed that the building and its profits were wholly hers: she had
paid the builders, therefore in law she owned the house; the thousands of pounds which Fermor had laid out had been given to her as a present; and seeing that they were lovers, this kind of generosity was only to be expected from a rich English gentleman.

Oddly, considering its huge turnover, Carlisle House was not making any profits. The reason was clear to anyone who worked there: Teresa's talent was only for arranging events; she had no head at all for the machinations of business, and knew nothing of the relationship between profit and loss. If the tickets to one of her balls netted her 1,000 guineas she would spend far more than that arranging the event. Furthermore, she was completely ignorant of bookkeeping, seldom paid her servants or suppliers on time, and had a disingenuously careless attitude to money, which she continued to borrow in large amounts, even from the hapless Fermor, and seldom paid back. With no one keeping a close watch on her finances, people stole from or cheated Teresa whenever they had the opportunity. Carlisle House veritably leaked money. Any coins or notes taken in at the front office immediately disappeared out the back door.

Three years after arriving in London, Teresa's daughter Sophia appeared to be living a far more settled life than she had ever done before. Her home was a smart London mansion rather than a crumbling Dutch tenement, she never lacked for food, and she was receiving the best education that her mother's money could buy. Yet, despite all this, nine-year-old Sophia's life was as insecure as it had ever been. Though her mother seemed to be wealthy there were still bailiffs in the wings waiting to confiscate the furniture at a moment's notice or to cart Teresa off to a debtors' gaol if she dared to step outside Carlisle House other than on Sundays, the one day of the week when English debtors were free to walk the streets without fear of arrest. Every rap of the shiny brass door-knocker was a potential threat to their settled existence. Every meeting between Teresa and her one-time lover ended in another bitter argument or expensive legal writ. Anxiety gnawed at Sophia's heart, like a mouse slowly nibbling away at a piece of cheese. One day there would be nothing left.

Teresa was far too preoccupied with her business affairs to notice her daughter's unhappiness, let alone understand it. Hounded by the prospect of destitution, she had since her youth pursued her various careers – singer, concert impresario, courtesan – with a gusto that left little time for the niceties of motherhood, an activity for which she never had much aptitude. Like most parents of the day, she believed that her task was to provide financially for her children and to equip them for the life they must eventually lead; the concept of caring for their emotional well-being did not enter her head. When Casanova had run into Teresa in The Hague in 1759 he had been shocked by what he interpreted as the oppressive manner with which she dealt with her children. Under her bad guidance, he had shouted at her in front of Sophia and Giuseppe; they were growing up false, deceitful and overly obsequious. If Teresa ‘had brought them up to be actors, she had succeeded, but for polite society they were little monsters in the making'.
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His criticism had reduced Teresa to tears.

At the time Casanova had presumed that Teresa was grooming their daughter to be a high-class courtesan so that she could keep her in her old age, in the same way that Rose Augspurgher, and later Marianne de Charpillon, kept their family. This was untrue. Unlike the Augspurgher women, who lived close by Carlisle House, Teresa had no intention of exploiting her precious daughter for her own gain. On the contrary, she was determined to use her unexpected success in London to turn Sophia into a respectable, cultured young lady who might, perhaps, make a good marriage – and if that meant sacrificing the child's present happiness for her future good, so be it. Miss Cornelys, as the staff of Carlisle House were instructed to call Sophia, was force-fed a thorough education by a steady succession of tutors. By the age of nine she could already speak and write fluently in Italian, French and English (a language which her mother had yet to master properly), she was knowledgeable in History and Geography, and she could draw skilfully and talk with precocious intelligence on any number of subjects. Musically, Sophia was even more talented than her
mother: her singing voice was as cool and clear as silver, she could play the guitar and the harp, and she danced superbly.

On assembly nights, and afternoons when her mother's patrons called at Carlisle House, Sophia was summoned downstairs from the nursery to show off her precocious abilities, to be praised, doted on, cuddled and kissed by the powdered, perfumed and bewigged nobility; and on Sundays she was allowed to dine with her mother and her private guests. The rest of her time was spent studying at an academy of art, or up in her room at Carlisle House where she was isolated from other children. Materially, Teresa made sure that she had everything that a child could need. What Sophia lacked was the companionship of her peers, the freedom to express herself, and her mother's understanding. She tried her best to please Teresa, but it was a struggle. One minute her volatile and over-stressed mother was laughing and cuddling her; the next she was shouting at her angrily for some wrong she had done.

Given her precarious financial situation, it was perhaps understandable if Teresa was inconsistent, bad-tempered and preoccupied with business. Her losses were getting out of hand, so much so that over the winter of 1762/63 she decided that she could no longer cope with running Carlisle House alone. She needed a trustworthy man to help her – and who would be more trustworthy than her own son? She immediately wrote to Casanova in Paris, asking him to return Giuseppe to her, for at sixteen the boy was now old enough to take an active part in her business affairs. Hopefully his presence would leave Teresa free to do what she did best, which was to deal with the creative side of running her concerts and balls.

 

Since the arrival of Teresa's letter in the spring of 1763 coincided with the Marquise d'Urfe's failed ‘regeneration' operation, and the wealthy widow was on the point of losing faith in Casanova, it suited him at that moment both to leave France and get rid of his charge at one and the same time. But Giuseppe, who had been living as d'Urfe's adopted son for more than four years, had no desire whatsoever to leave his life of luxury or to see his real mother
again, and in the end he had to be tricked into leaving France. When he and Casanova arrived in London on 13 June 1763, accompanied by Casanova's servant Clairmont, they made straight for Soho Square, where Casanova left his companions in the carriage and entered Carlisle House alone. Though he could not fail to be impressed by the magnificence of Teresa's premises, his pride was wounded when he was kept waiting in the entrance hall by one of her lackeys, only to be given a message that she was in a meeting with her lawyer and far too busy to see him just then. Led by another of her servants to the Soho lodgings she had rented for them, Casanova was further insulted when Giuseppe was given the best room and he was shown to what appeared to be valet's quarters. His landlady's eulogy on how successful and famous Mrs Cornelys had become in London and how marvellous her daughter was made him feel even more resentful of Teresa. The scene was set for a fight between the erstwhile lovers, and Sophia would be their battleground.

Casanova's presence in London had already caused trouble in Soho Square. For when Sophia had heard that the party had arrived from Paris, she had made the mistake of asking her mother if Casanova was well before enquiring about Giuseppe. Teresa had flown off the handle: the ties of blood and good manners decreed that Sophia should have asked about her brother's health first, she shouted. As punishment for this apparent display of bad manners, the girl was forced to stay at home that night instead of accompanying Teresa to visit the travellers. Casanova was not to see his daughter until the following Sunday, when Teresa invited him to join her for dinner at Carlisle House.

There was little pleasure for Sophia in this occasion either. Instructed by her mother to ignore the man she had once been told was her father, she negotiated the rocky ground between obedience and following her own natural inclination, which was to be friendly towards him. During the meal both adults shamelessly manipulated their daughter in order to score points off each other in front of Teresa's four other guests, and as her parents traded
veiled insults over her head Sophia was left with the feeling that she could do nothing right. When at last her mother instructed her to ‘say something to M. de Seingalt', she was too tongue-tied to do so. She eventually summoned the courage to ask Casanova if he would like to look at her drawings, as he reported:

 

‘I shall look at them with pleasure; but I beg you to tell me in which way you believe you have offended me, for you look guilty.'

‘I! I've certainly not behaved wrongly towards you!'

‘You speak to me without looking at me. Are you ashamed to have such beautiful eyes? And now, you're blushing. So what crime have you committed?'

‘You're embarrassing her,' her mother says to me. ‘Answer him that you've committed no crime, but that it's out of respect and modesty that you don't stare at the people to whom you are talking.'