Casanova's Women (49 page)

His bedroom, which once seemed as claustrophobic and hateful to him as his cell under The Leads, has suddenly become a place that Casanova never wants to leave. The coffered ceiling with its cobwebs that are never dusted to his liking, the hard-backed
armchair with its faded chintz seat in which he has fidgeted away so many restless hours, the mean little desk from which, jealous of their freedom, he has sent off so many hundreds of letters to travel the roads of Europe - all these things which have caused him endless grief since he arrived at Dux thirteen years ago are suddenly beloved to him. He has even developed a sentimental attachment to the charmless Magda, whose rough hands occasionally straighten the rumpled sheet he is lying under, tucking it tightly under the mattress as if she was a torturer binding him to the rack, with no regard as to the pain she causes him.

But these things are now under threat. There is scarcely a glimmer of hope left in the embers of the tiled stove, and the long-case clock in the corner, the hands of which once moved so inexorably slowly, is ticking away the last minutes of Casanova's life all too fast. All he can do is lie here, isolated in his pain, and wait for Death to claim him.

Even though his nephew-in-law from Dresden has come to look after him, Casanova has never felt so lonely. He aches for the touch of a tender hand, or to experience just one more time the comfort of warm, naked female flesh pressed against his own. But these are things of the distant past. For as far back as he can remember he has slept alone in this narrow bed, his feet warmed by the body heat of his only flesh-and-blood female companion of the last three years - Finette, his young fox terrier bitch who this afternoon keeps vigil on the rug beside him, whining softly for him to play with her, and staring up at him with her moist, black, uncomprehending eyes.

The man who was once surrounded by admirers and adored by so many women, and who in the future will be remembered as the greatest lover in history, is dying alone among strangers, mourned only by a dog.

How did the young fearless Adonis fired by lust and ambition come to this? When did success forsake him? When did old age - ‘sad and weak, deformed, hideous old age'
¹
as he so succinctly described it - catch up with him? Casanova's first intimation of mortality, a more-than-occasional failure to perform between the
sheets, visited him extraordinarily early: in his mid-thirties, soon after the London courtesan Marianne de Charpillon dealt his self-confidence those blows from which it never fully recovered. As if she had put a jinx on him, his luck changed swiftly. Senator Bragadin died, leaving him without a private income. The striking looks he had taken for granted since his youth became raddled by illness and age. His appearance lost its sparkle along with the diamond buttons that he sold to pay off his debts; it grew as faded as the gold embroidery on his once-glorious waistcoats. Despite his height and build, Casanova no longer stood out in a crowd of men as the most handsome among them. Instead, like his rivals, he had sallow skin, receding hair, rotting teeth and painful haemorrhoids.

He tried to ignore the change in his appearance. But he was aware that women did not. ‘I still loved the fair sex,' he wrote of himself at this time, ‘though with much less passion, much greater experience, and less courage for daring enterprises, for, looking more like a father than a lover, I no longer believed I had either rights or justifiable claims.'
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Even the greatest love of his life, Henriette, did not fall into Casanova's arms when he turned up in Aix-en-Provence for a second time in 1768; and he was then only forty-three years old. In her mid-forties herself, Henriette was still living apart from her husband, and had grown prettily, contentedly plump. As was her custom, she spent the winter of 1768/69 in the city, receiving no visitors at home but often going out in company. Sometime in February 1769 she became aware, probably by seeing him at one of the many social gatherings she frequented, that her old lover was in town once more, this time alone. She made no move to contact him. The vicissitudes of life had clearly taken their toll on him, he was not ageing flatteringly, and he had the air of a downtrodden man. Forced for the first time since his early twenties to earn a living by his own abilities, both literary and at the gaming table, Casanova no longer had enough money or self-confidence to sustain his role as a rich nobleman. Instead of being taken in by his cultivated air and extraordinary story-telling skills, the aristocrats he mixed with frequently suspected that he was a lower-class
impostor. He had begun to smell of failure, of an early promise never fulfilled. In his youth he had got away with living on the very edge of legality through sheer force of personality, but over the past five years his dubious friendships and frequent brushes with the authorities had made him
persona non grata
in a host of cities and countries. In March 1764 he had fled London. In July 1766 he had been ordered to leave Poland after wounding General Branicki in a duel. The following January he had been banished from Vienna for illegal gambling, and in November 1767 he had been expelled from France. After spending a year in Spain, Casanova had wound up in a Barcelona prison for eight days after a series of indiscretions that had made him many enemies culminated in an ill-advised love affair with the mistress of the Captain General of Catalonia. Freed on 28 December 1768, he had crossed the border back to France and made his way, via Perpignan and Montpellier, to Aix-en-Provence where he planned to spend the carnival season, and perhaps find work with the local judiciary body or Parlement.

While diminished, Casanova's ability to seduce both men and women with his personality and intellect had not entirely deserted him. In Aix he was befriended by the Marquis d'Eguilles, the president or presiding judge of the Parlement, and his brother the Marquis d'Argens, a philosopher and writer who since 1744 had been Director of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Through their connections Casanova was invited to numerous balls and assemblies at which he always looked out in vain for Henriette. Although he occasionally heard her real name mentioned, he did not enquire after her ‘for fear of suggesting that I knew the lady'; his loose tongue may have got him into trouble in Spain, but when it came to Henriette Casanova remained as discreet as ever. Convinced that she must be at her country château near the Croix d'Or, Casanova planned to call on her when he eventually left the city.

Before he could do so, events took an unexpected turn. After dining at the Marquis d'Argens' country house one night Casanova drove back to the city in an open carriage, in a strong wind and without an overcoat. By the time he reached Aix he was chilled to
the bone, but instead of going to bed he went out with an acquaintance and spent two hours attempting to deflower a fourteen-year-old virgin whose hymen had so far defied all other attempts made on it. Casanova was too old for such shenanigans, and the following morning he came down with a severe and dangerous case of pleurisy. Plagued by a terrible cough, he began to spit up blood - a sign of possible consumption - and a few days later slipped into a torpor. Eight days after taking to his bed he was at death's door, and a priest was summoned to hear his confession and administer the last rites.

Defying expectation, Casanova began a slow recovery. During the entire period of his illness and recuperation he was cared for day and night by a serving woman, who tended him so diligently that she probably saved his life. When he eventually paid her off, she told him that she had been hired by his physician. The physician, however, insisted that he did not know the woman, and nor did the innkeeper's wife. The mystery remained unsolved until Casanova finally left Aix for Marseille in late April or early May, by which time he believed he was well enough to arrive at Henriette's château in good health. He had written her a letter before he left the city, warning her of his arrival, and when his carriage reached the gates of her house ‘a league and half before the Croix d'Or' he ordered the postillion to stop so that he could send it up to the château; aware that his visit might not be welcomed, he had no wish to foist himself on Henriette if she did not wish to receive him. Henriette, however, was not there: the manservant who came down to the gates told Casanova that she had been in Aix for the last six months, and was not expected back in the country for another three weeks.

Casanova had unwittingly been walking the same streets and attending the same social gatherings as his ‘divine Henriette' and yet he had not recognised her. He was mortified. Invited up to the house so that he could write to her, he was surprised to see the same servant who had looked after him during his illness. The woman explained that she had worked at the château for the past
ten years. When her mistress had heard that Casanova was ill, she had sent her to his inn and told her to enter his room boldly and take care of him as well as if he had been Henriette herself. If anyone were to ask her who she was, Henriette had told her servant to say that the physician had sent her.

Convinced that Henriette must still love him, and upset that he had not recognised her, Casanova suggested in his letter that he immediately return to Aix. Her reply reached him in Marseille a day later. ‘Nothing, my old friend,' she wrote, ‘is more romantic than the story of our meeting at my country house six years ago, and our present encounter, twenty-two years
³
after our separation in Geneva. We have both aged. Will you believe that, though I still love you, I am nevertheless very content that you did not recognise me? It's not that I have grown ugly, but putting on flesh has altered my looks.' She was ‘a widow, happy and comfortably enough off to inform you that if you lack money at the bankers, you will find it in Henriette's purse'; she had obviously seen or heard enough of Casanova to have noticed his relative poverty and, without wounding his pride, she generously wished to help him in any way she could. However, she was decisive that this was as far as she wanted the relationship to go. Although she was happy that she had perhaps helped to prolong his life by sending ‘a woman whose good heart and fidelity I knew' to look after him when he was ill, Henriette was adamant that he should not rush back to Aix in case this gave rise to speculation about their relationship. If he were to return some time in the future, however, she assured him that they would be able to see each other ‘although not as old acquaintances'; as in the past, her boundaries were clear. If Casanova wished to maintain a correspondence with her, she promised to do everything within her power to make it flourish. She was curious about his life and promised him, ‘now that you have given me such strong proof of your discretion', that she would tell him the whole story of her flight to Cesena in 1749.
⁴

As in the past Henriette maintained control over the relationship. She would always be grateful to Casanova for his impeccable
behaviour towards her, but a reunion between them was out of the question. ‘Henriette had grown wise,' Casanova wrote. ‘The force of temperament had diminished in her as it had in me. She was happy; I was not. If I went back to Aix for her, people would have guessed things that no one should have known; and what would I have done? I could only have become a burden to her.'
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Casanova's confidence with women was sliding inexorably downhill. He was to have one last great romantic adventure: in the arms of Leonilda. By 1770 his daughter by Donna Lucrezia was twenty-four years old and had been married for five years to an extremely wealthy man, the Marchese della C, one of the richest men in Salerno. She and her sixty-year-old husband divided their time between an immense palace in the city and a stunning villa in the country. In both homes Leonilda was waited on by vast retinues of servants. A French cook prepared her meals, more than a dozen pages served her at table, and whenever she strolled in the gardens she was followed both by a page who carried the train of her dress, and by a young female companion who walked half a pace behind her.

Widely travelled and highly intelligent, the Marchese della C appeared to outsiders to be a conventional man and a good Christian. In private he was a freethinker and a Freemason, but in the traditional moral climate of Salerno these things were best kept to himself. His general good health was marred by gout so painful that it made it impossible for him to walk and prevented him from making love properly to his beautiful young wife. Having remained a bachelor until the age of fifty-five, he had no children, which was his greatest sorrow. On his death his fortune would pass to one of the ten or so dislikeable nephews who hung around his palace like carrion crows, waiting for him to die. As Lucrezia, who had come to Salerno to live with her daughter, remarked to Casanova when he turned up in the city in 1770, ‘if among the nobility of this city she could have found a man capable of pleasing her, the Marchese would have made a friend of him, and if it came to it he would not even have been sorry to see her become
pregnant.' Leonilda's husband would never be absolutely sure that a child she bore was not his, because ‘when he is feeling well he comes to sleep with her, and from what my daughter has told me, he can flatter himself that he has done what he has effectively not done. But there is no longer any expectation that his fondness will have positive results.'

In 1761 in Naples, Lucrezia had stood protectively between father and daughter. Nine years on in Salerno, all she could do was to stand by helplessly while Casanova and Leonilda renewed and finally consummated their incestuous love affair. When, six months later, Casanova received a letter informing him that his daughter was pregnant, he shuddered at the thought of it. Three months after that, Leonilda gave birth to a boy who was almost certainly her half-brother as well as her son, and Casanova's son and grandson.

With this love affair Casanova's days as a great seducer were effectively over. By his mid-forties the once-irresistible lover had to talk hard to persuade a woman into bed. It scarcely seemed worth the effort. ‘I had begun to find the pleasure of love-making less intense, less seductive than I imagined it to be beforehand,' he confessed, ‘and my sexual prowess had already been diminishing little by little for eight years' - that is, since his late thirties. Women had once begged for his caresses. Now, if he was lucky, they tolerated them - an unbearable situation for a man who had always prided himself on giving pleasure even more than taking it. Discouraged by their indifference and his own financial circumstances from pursuing the kind of woman he could truly love, Casanova was reduced to paying for sex, or snatching his pleasures wherever he could. In Russia and Poland he bought small girls' virginities off their poverty-stricken parents. Wanting an easy life, he opted for the services of prostitutes. Anything else was too much trouble: when he tried to grope his landlady's nineteen-year-old niece in Spa, the girl punched him in the nose.