Titans of History

CASANOVA

1725–1798

Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.

Giacomo Casanova

The name of Casanova or, to give his full name, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt, is synonymous with womanizing and wild living. Indeed, in his racy and scandalously frank memoirs, Histoire de ma vie jusqu’à l’an 1787 (The Story of My Life Until 1787), this tall, dark and handsome self-appointed hero presents himself as “the world’s greatest lover,” describing his many conquests, as well as his early life, adventures and travels, in salacious detail. It may therefore come as a surprise to find that the notorious philanderer, who sired many children out of wedlock and was himself, it was rumored, the illegitimate son of a Venetian nobleman, was also a highly cultured man—and that is his real claim to fame. Whether they are mainly fact or boastful fiction, his memoirs are the greatest ever written.

Precociously intelligent, Casanova attended the University of Padua from the age of thirteen, obtained a doctorate in law at the age of sixteen (ironically, perhaps, his studies included moral philosophy), took holy orders, and also considered training as a doctor.

“The idea of settling down,” he wrote, “was always repulsive to me.” The adventurous and talented Casanova was always on the move. He started out working in the church in Venice but was soon expelled under something of a cloud, due to his sexual appetites and dandified appearance. From there he had a short-lived career as a military officer, stationed in Corfu, then as a theater violinist in Venice. He took a variety of jobs before leaving Venice in 1748, under suspicion of attempted rape (though he was later acquitted).

Born into a world of artists, con artists and courtesans, Casanova represented a sparkling conflation of two 18th-century social types—the society fraud and the man of letters. He was one of the fascinating mountebanks and charlatans who entertained, mesmerized and swindled the royal courts of the age, claiming variously to be noblemen, necromancers, alchemists (who could turn base metals into gold), Kabbalists, magi and hierophants. The first of them was the so-called Comte de Saint-Germain (1710–84), who claimed to be 2000 years old and able to remember the Crucifixion (his valet claimed to remember it too); Louis XV gave him 10,000 livres. The ultimate was Count Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–95), born Giuseppe Balsamo in Sicily, who made a fortune in courts across Europe claiming, among other feats, that he could convert urine into gold and offer eternal life. His seductive wife, born Lorenza in Sicily, accompanied him as Serafina, Princess di Santa Croce. After a rock-star-style tour of Europe, Count Cagliostro was finally embroiled in the Diamond Necklace Affair that so damaged Queen Marie-Antoinette, and he died in 1795 in an Italian prison.

But it was also a very literary age, when the fame of witty letter-writers, such as Casanova, spread throughout Europe. The greatest letter-writer of the era (along with Voltaire) was the genuine high aristocrat Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne (1735–1814), Belgian grandee, Austrian field marshal and international courtier, wit and socialite, who managed to be friends simultaneously with Emperor Joseph II, Catherine the Great of Russia, and King Frederick the Great. His hilarious letters were copied from court to court, and he finally died at the Congress of Vienna.

Passing himself off as the noble Chevalier de Seingalt, Casanova earned his living as the inventor of the Paris lottery, an agricultural adviser to the kings of Spain, an alchemist and a Kabbalist. He was repeatedly arrested for his debts and in 1755 for witchcraft and freemasonry—and then imprisoned for fifteen months in Venice’s Piombi Prison, known as the Leads, from which it was supposedly impossible to escape. Escape he did, however, across the rooftops, stopping for a recuperative coffee in St. Mark’s Square before disappearing in a gondola.

He traveled widely, through Italy, Austria, Spain, England, Turkey and Russia, meeting Catherine the Great, George III of England and Pope Benedict XII, not to mention Rousseau and Voltaire. Most of his income came from the grandees who admired his intelligence and wit, or—in the case of the women—sought and often received his attentions. Never married, he was engaged frequently. His lovers included courtesans, peasants, heiresses, sisters, countesses and many nuns, sometimes together. In 1776, overcome by debt, he became a secret agent for the Venetian Tribunal of Inquisitors, using the name Antonio Pratiloni and snitching on heretics to the Catholic Church while living with a local seamstress.

Tales of derring-do and romantic trysts litter the memoirs, which are the main source of information about his checkered life. Heavily censored in earlier editions, they were not published in their full unexpurgated twelve-volume form until 1960; they paint a portrait of a lovable trans-European rogue and seducer. He wrote them as an old man looking back on an adventurous life, working as the librarian to the Bohemian Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein. Casanova was never one for letting the facts stand in the way of a good tale. Some of his dates simply do not fit: people are in the wrong places and die at the wrong times, and the pseudonyms he gives his various conquests make it impossible to be certain who was who. Unreliable, self-indulgent and shameless, the memoirs are nevertheless a literary classic, a real picture of an entire epoch.

“I have lived as a philosopher,” declared Casanova on his deathbed, “and died as a Christian.” It was rather less straightforward, and rather more interesting, than that.