Casanova's Women (8 page)

Zanetta and Giovanni settled happily in Dresden. The city on the banks of the River Elbe was then in its golden age, and housed what her eldest son later described as ‘the most brilliant court in all of Europe'.
¹⁴
An explosion of baroque architecture had taken place since the dawn of the eighteenth century and, stylistically if not in size, Dresden now rivalled Vienna in magnificence. Here, among Balthasar Permoser's flamboyant sculptures and Matthaus Pöppelmann's elegant buildings, Zanetta made her permanent home, which she would only ever leave to follow the court to Warsaw, or to seek temporary refuge in Prague during the Seven Years War.

She never returned to Venice, not even when her seventy-three-year-old mother fell gravely ill in the first weeks of 1743. Marcia Farussi died on 18 March, having been cared for during her illness by Giacomo and the other grandchildren whom she had looked after so devotedly for so many years. Even then, Zanetta did not visit her bereaved children, the youngest of whom, Gaetano, was still only nine. Instead, a month after her mother's death she wrote to her priest and protector, Alvise Grimani, asking him to sell off the family house in the Calle della Commedia on her behalf, along with all its contents. With the money the sale raised, Grimani was to settle the children separately in respectable boarding houses in the city. Seventeen-year-old Giacomo was outraged by the thought of losing his home. ‘When I learned that I would no longer have a house at the end of the year, and that all the furniture was to be sold, I no longer stinted myself in my needs,' he later wrote. His anger boiled over into open rebellion: ‘I had already sold some linen, tapestries and porcelain; I now made it my business to sell the mirrors and the beds. I knew that people would disapprove, but this was my father's inheritance, upon which my mother had no claim; I regarded myself as the master of the house. As for my brothers, we could discuss it later.'
¹⁵

Casanova's fury towards his mother is evident in every word. If she had a favourite among her children it was clearly not he. Other women would later fall at his feet, but Zanetta had never shown him much affection. Perhaps she now sensed her eldest son's anger or felt guilty for her lack of maternal feeling, for from the safe distance of Dresden she used her influence to procure him a good position in the Church. Bernardo de Bernardis, a Calabrian by birth, was a Minimite monk she had met in the city. He had ‘great qualities [that] made me think of you every time he honoured me with a visit,' she wrote flatteringly to Giacomo a few months after his grandmother's death. ‘I told him, a year ago, that I had a son who was headed for the priesthood, whom I hadn't the means to keep. He replied that my son would become his if I could get the queen to appoint him to a bishopric in his own country.'
¹⁶
What Bernardo wanted was the bishopric of the town of Martirano, near Naples, where the Polish monarch's daughter was married to the king. ‘Trusting in GOD,' Zanetta's letter continued melodramatically, ‘I threw myself at Her Majesty's feet, and I found favour. She wrote to her daughter, and she had him elected by Our Lord the Pope to the bishopric of Martirano. True to his word, he will take you with him the middle of next year… He will set you on the road to the highest dignities of the Church. Imagine my comfort when I see you in twenty or thirty years from now a bishop at the least.'
¹⁷

This behind-the-scenes manoeuvring was as near as Zanetta ever got to expressing love for Giacomo, whom she did not see again until 1752 when he was twenty-seven years old and came to visit her in Dresden with his brother Francesco. By then Zanetta had lost her looks, a tragedy for an actress used to playing romantic roles. ‘She is around forty years old,' a German critic wrote of her in 1750. ‘Her body is stout, tall, her face looks aged in spite of the theatrical perspective. She would have portrayed a villainous woman, a real demon of a woman, more accurately than a lover. She takes the role of Rosaura; for a young romantic lead her voice is too husky.'
¹⁸
Aware that she was no longer in her prime, Zanetta
had already tried her hand at writing for the theatre: on 6 November 1748 her
Le Contese di Mestre e Malghera per il Trono
, an operatic parody, had been staged at Warsaw.

In 1756, due to the start of what would become known as the Seven Years War, the Italian Theatre in Dresden closed and Zanetta was temporarily pensioned off with an income of 400 thalers. When the city came under fire, she fled to the safety of Prague with many of her compatriots. Short of money (she did not always receive her pension during the war), she appealed to Giacomo for financial aid. Always generous by nature, he sent her what he could spare. Zanetta may not have been much of a mother to him, but, as he told an acquaintance at the time, ‘I do not forget my duty as a good son.'
¹⁹

Whilst most of her colleagues made their ways back to Italy at the close of hostilities, Zanetta returned to Dresden, the city she now thought of as home. Unexpectedly, it was at this later stage in her life that she at last began to enjoy something of a domestic life. Around 1751, her nineteen-year-old daughter Maria had joined her in Dresden. Breaking the promise she had made to her dying husband, Zanetta had allowed the girl to join her on the stage, and in February 1752 the two Casanova women acted together in
Zoroastre
, a French play written by Cahusac and translated into Italian by Giacomo, presumably at Zanetta's instigation (it was his first theatrical work). Maria later married musician Peter August, the court harpsichordist in Dresden, and gave birth to a daughter, Marianne.

Then, in the autumn of 1764, Zanetta's third son Giovanni, who had been living with her intermittently since her arrival in Saxony, returned to Dresden from Rome, where he had been studying painting for five years under the artist Anton Raphael Mengs. He brought with him a Roman wife, Teresa Roland. Giovanni was appointed director of Dresden's Academy of Fine Art that year, and the couple's first son, Carolus Xaverius, was born in Dresden in 1765.

When Giacomo visited Dresden for a second time in 1766,
Zanetta's family was more complete than it had been since she had first left Venice. Only Faustina, Francesco and Gaetano were missing: Faustina had died in infancy; Francesco was following a successful career as a painter of battle scenes in France, where he had become a respected member of the Paris Academy; and Gaetano, her youngest – then thirty-two years old – was pursuing a lacklustre career in the church. Financially, Zanetta was comfortably off, and divided her time between a country house just outside the city and a fourth-floor apartment ‘on the great square' in Dresden.

Here Casanova took refuge from the social whirl by renting a second-floor apartment where he holed himself up for several weeks to cure himself of a dose of venereal disease. And here, on 29 November 1776, Zanetta Casanova died. According to the parish records she was sixty-seven years and three months old. Widowed with six children at the age of twenty-six, the beautiful shoemaker's daughter from Venice had achieved many remarkable things during her lifetime, not least a long and successful theatrical career in which she was never out of work. Despite her lack of maternal feeling, she had given birth to a minor artistic and intellectual dynasty: to two successful painters, an actress and a sub-deacon.

And there was Giacomo.

The more innocent a girl is, the more ignorant she is of the methods and the aim of seduction
.
Without her realising it, the attraction of pleasure entices her, curiosity mingles with it, and opportunity does the rest.
¹

 

 

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Bettina Gozzi sat on her bed in the small closet adjacent to her father's room in their house in Padua, and unpacked the parcel that Signora Casanova, the mother of her brother's favourite pupil, had sent her from Venice. To her amazement it contained a dozen pairs of fine gloves and five lengths of black
zendale
, the silky mantilla-like shawls with which fashionable ladies covered their shoulders and head. With these magnificent gifts came a message from the actress to the cobbler's daughter: would Bettina please take better care of Giacomo's hair from now on, so that he would soon have no need to wear the awful wig that his grandmother had bought him?

Bettina unfurled one of the
zendale
, threw it over her head, and examined her reflection in a tiny fragment of looking-glass. Had these luxurious presents not sweetened Signora Casanova's request she might well have felt insulted, for she had been caring for the boy's hair ever since he had come to live with her family in the late summer of 1734. The signora paid two zecchini a month for Bettina's parents, Apollonia and Vincenzo Gozzi, to lodge, feed
and clothe Giacomo, and although Bettina herself naturally saw none of this money it was her duty to wash and dress him in the mornings and to put him to bed at night. Giacomo had taken to his schoolmaster's sister on sight without quite knowing why. In time he would discover the reason. As he later wrote, ‘It was she who little by little kindled in my heart the first sparks of a passion which would come to dominate my life.'
²

Elizabetta Maria Gozzi, as Bettina had been baptised in 1720, was a pretty and vivacious sixteen-year-old, lighthearted, clever and full of fun. By rights her parents should have adored her, but instead they criticised her constantly. When the youths of Padua threw her admiring glances, for instance, Vincenzo and Apollonia scolded Bettina for standing too long at the window. And while they were immensely proud of their son Antonio for becoming a priest, a teacher and a doctor of civil and canon law, they took no pleasure at all in the fact that Bettina had learned to read and write. In enlightened circles women's education was a growing issue: in June 1723, Padua's Academy of the Ricovrati had held a public debate entitled ‘Should Women Be Admitted to the Study of the Sciences and the Noble Arts?'; and it was rumoured that in 1732 a female professor of philosophy and physics had been appointed at the University of Bologna. But even among the Italian nobility women's education was usually limited to the odd foreign language, sewing, singing, and the art of polite conversation. In peasant homes like the Gozzis', having a literate daughter was something to be feared rather than welcomed.

The Gozzis were a joyless couple. Born into a peasant family, Bettina's mother Apollonia had had a hard life. The Greek sun god after whom she had been named seldom shone on her. The tragic loss of ten out of the twelve children she had borne had taken its toll, and a life of repeated pregnancies, poverty and suffering had turned her sour and old before her time. Her husband Vincenzo was bad-tempered, taciturn and chronically indecisive, particularly on an empty stomach; Apollonia often remarked that he would never have married her had someone not given him a hearty
breakfast on their wedding day. Bent over the wooden lasts in his workshop for hours on end, a hammer in one hand and a mouthful of iron nails clamped between his teeth, the cobbler rarely spoke, even to his wife, unless he was drunk. Alcohol was his only form of relaxation. On Holy Days he disappeared into a tavern with his friends, and when he lurched home at midnight, wailing sentimental songs in a loud, off-tune voice and with his knees buckling under him, he became violent and aggressive, particularly if his wife and daughter attempted to quieten him down.

Such was life in the Gozzi household. Being blessed with a contented nature and a devout, educated brother to whom she was devoted, Bettina made the best of things. Her main pleasure was reading novels which she bought from the pedlars who passed through the city en route from the print-shops of Venice to Spain, Germany and Russia, or on their way south from Leipzig to Rome. During Padua's regular fairs, Bettina would stand for hours in the piazza listening to these chapmen declaim the stories they sold. Back home, she would lose herself in printed tales of noble bandits, sea-faring adventures and romances, chapbooks of which her strictly religious brother disapproved.

If before she received Zanetta Casanova's gifts Bettina had sometimes rushed Giacomo's morning ablutions, she now redoubled her efforts to look after him. Every morning she went upstairs to the large room he shared with her brother, sat on the big bed where teacher and pupil slept side by side, and carefully combed the boy's hair before he got up. Then, as she washed his face, chest and torso she tickled and kissed him tenderly, just like the older sister she felt she was to him. Soon Giacomo's short curls grew so long and luxuriant that he was able to put away his silly wig for good.

The winter descended on Padua in a blanket of icy mist, and 1736 slipped into 1737. When Giacomo had first moved into the Gozzis' house he had been a half-starved nine-year-old. Three years on, his concave chest was swelling, his childish skin growing swarthier and the lightest dusting of down was casting a shadow
over his prominent upper lip. Giacomo was approaching adolescence. His sexual desire was awakening, and it was Bettina who was rousing it. Instead of looking dully at her as she washed him in the mornings he often shied away in embarrassment from her sisterly caresses. Why, she asked knowingly, did he not return her tickles and kisses? Did he have to be so timid with her?

The following autumn Antonio Gozzi took on three new pupils from the nearby district of Feltre. Vincenzo put them up in a downstairs bedroom of the house, while Giacomo, who continued to be the priest's favourite pupil, continued to share his teacher's big bed in the best room upstairs as he had done since he had moved into the house. Now for the first time there were boys of Bettina's age around, among them Candiani, a robust and good-looking fifteen-year-old country lad. Soon Bettina and Candiani's colluding glances and secretive smiles gave Giacomo his first taste of jealousy, an emotion which always brought out the very worst in him – insecurity, vengefulness and anger. He had already lost his mother and grandmother to his brothers and sisters, and now he was losing Bettina to ‘an ignorant, coarse, witless, uneducated farmer's son, unable to match me in anything, whose sole advantage over me was in having reached the age of puberty'.
³
Furious that Bettina could consider him second-best to a stupid yokel, Giacomo pushed her away when she came to dress him. When she gently suggested that he was jealous of Candiani, he retorted that he thought the farmer's son as worthy of her as she was of him.