Casanova

THE IRRES I STI BL E

Philippe Sollers

Translated and with an introduction by

Armine Kotin Mortimer

Casanova
THE I R R E S I ST I B L E
Casanova
THE I R R E S I ST I B L E

Philippe Sollers

Translated and with an Introduction by

Armine Kotin Mortimer

U N IVE R S I T Y O F I L L I N O I S P R E S S
Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
Originally published as Casanova l’admirable by Éditions Plon, © 1998

Introduction and Translation © 2016 by Armine Kotin Mortimer

All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sollers, Philippe, 1936– author. | Mortimer, Armine Kotin, 1943–
translator.
Title: Casanova the irresistible / Philippe Sollers ; translated and with an
introduction by Armine Kotin Mortimer.
Other titles: Casanova l’admirable. English
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2016] | Translated from
the French. | Includes index.
Identifiers: lccn 2015047409 (print) | lccn 2015051355 (ebook) |
isbn 9780252039980 (hardcover : alk. paper) | isbn 9780252098154
(e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Casanova, Giacomo, 1725–1798. | Adventure and
adventurers—Europe—Biography. | Europe—Biography.
Classification: lcc d285.8.c4 s6613 2016 (print) | lcc d285.8.c4 (ebook) |
ddc 940.2/53092—dc23
lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047409
 Translator’s Introduction
Armine Kotin Mortimer

People think they know Casanova, but they are wrong, Philippe Sollers writes
in the opening of this book. The man has become a myth, a circus animal, a
mechanical lover, a more or less senile or ridiculous marionette. Let’s instead
see what he really wrote about himself, says Sollers.
His 1998 Casanova l’admirable stems from a fresh, idiosyncratic reading of
the thousands of pages of Casanova’s memoirs, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My
Life), written in French between 1789 and 1798 and now published in twelve
volumes. This remarkable work, the chief source of information about Casa-
nova, has been subjected to abridgment and bowdlerizing as well as incom-
plete and inaccurate translations, the objects of Sollers’s critique. He corrects
these depredations by retelling the story and interweaving into it exposition,
observations, analyses, and opinions of his own. His tactic is to seek the “truth,”
and he directs his scorn at those biographical accounts that distort the story
for their own purposes, mostly because of Casanova’s sensational descriptions
of his relations with women. Serious Casanovists have shown that the writer
fictionalizes only a little, and that the inevitable errors such as a memoirist
might make are mostly minor. Sollers wants readers to know the plain realities
of this crafty, cunning, colorful human being: “Let us rather conceive of him
as he is: simple, direct, courageous, cultivated, seductive, funny. A philosopher
in action.”

Giacomo Casanova wrote his memoirs in a castle in Dux (now Duchcov) in

Bohemia during a period of nine years at the end of his life. Their 4,545 manu-
script pages are immensely detailed. Casanova made notes, kept documents,
and wrote out events soon after they happened. He left these accumulating
materials with friends or carried them with him everywhere—and he moved

v
 vi

around constantly, eventually ending up in Dux, where he was employed by

Count Waldstein as a librarian for the last thirteen years of his life. The story
he wrote can be compared to the excellent 1961 biography Casanova by James
Rives Childs (1893–1987), who drew heavily on archival sources. Rives Childs’s
augmented Casanova: A New Perspective, published in 1988, remains the most
authoritative reference.
Casanova was born in Venice to two actors. Raised by a grandmother, he
was launched on his various careers (if they can be so called) in his mid-teens.
Destined at first to the priesthood, he lacked the vocation; lawyering didn’t take,
either. Throughout his life, in the absence of noble birth and secure finances,
he used his wits and his chameleon qualities to fashion himself into whatever
identity was needed. For instance, he sees a patrician collapse in a gondola:
“Giacomo happens to be there, he takes charge, takes him back to his palace,
prevents people from taking bad care of him, turns himself into a doctor,
takes it seriously. Fortune guides him. ‘Now I have become the doctor of one
of the most illustrious members of the Venetian Senate,’” he notes, and he is
rewarded by being adopted. He had no fixed profession, and one might even
say no fixed address. (The title of Ian Kelly’s recent Casanova: Actor, Lover,
Priest, Spy is suggestive.) Though he was “homeless,” Venice remained home
for him, the place to which he yearned to return during his years of wandering.
But he spent very little time there and was in fact exiled from the Most Serene
Republic more than once. No doubt that is why he has usually been called an
“adventurer,” a description that covers all the activities in which Casanova
engaged in the hope of sustaining himself: soldier, theater violinist, magician,
alchemist, mathematician, doctor, matchmaker, assistant to various political
entities, employee of the Inquisition, financier, manufacturer of silk fabrics,
historian, gambler, and more—not to forget librarian at the end. He was curi-
ous about everything and was constantly in motion.
Love was of course Casanova’s chief pleasure in life. Sollers, however, is
among those writers on his subject who object to a common image of the
Story of My Life as the narrative of a repetitive, obsessive series of mechanical
and superficial sex acts. Repetitive, yes, but neither mechanical nor superficial,
nor truly obsessive. The Casanova experiment is scientific, Sollers wants to
show, and as such gains by being repeated, because new insights accumulate
with each event—and also because, in good scientific practice, an experiment
should be repeatable. The actions of his body brought him knowledge about
the nature of the human being; he behaved like a scientist who is curious to
discover whatever he can about the world in which he finds himself. Such is
the persona Sollers presents: a fearless experimenter with his body, even when
it brought him pain instead of pleasure.
 vii

Most important, and Sollers insists on this, Casanova was a writer. Besides
his memoirs, he wrote books, pamphlets, and articles in three languages,
including a multivolume science fiction novel. This focus on the writing may
surprise readers who know that Sollers frequently writes about women and
sexuality. Not just a great lover who took the experiences of his body as his
primary subject, Casanova was a great writer who composed much as a musician
might, as Sollers writes more than once, to achieve an ensemble greater than
the sum of its parts or of its notes: “Casanova is a great composer. In life as in
writing. His intent is to show that his life unfolded as if it were being written.”
A great deal of Sollers’s admiration for this “irresistible” narrative rests on the
fact that this Italian living in German-speaking Bohemia chose to write the
story of his life in French. For Sollers, French is the revolutionary language,
the language of freedom.
People of the eighteenth century enjoyed a freedom that was, Sollers
writes, so concentrated that they seem perpetually in advance of us. “Listen
to Mozart—you will hear it right away. Same fresh air effect when we read
Casanova.” The eighteenth century is alive for Sollers and exemplified by the
key figures he writes about: Mozart, Vivant Denon (founder of the Louvre
Museum), Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Denis Diderot (in a
rarely seen video in which Sollers acts the part of this important Enlightenment
intellectual). So vitally does he feel their qualities, it’s as if those men never
died; so alive are they in his mind that the eighteenth century superimposes
itself on the twenty-first.
As a result, there comes a moment in Sollers’s writing about them when
the eighteenth-century figures appear in his presence and blend with him:
eventually, where Sollers himself is the earlier figure. Casanova the Irresistible
is, it turns out, also about Sollers. It’s a textual strategy of self-identification,
a way of stating his stance, similar to the unique way he has of writing about
himself in his novels from 1983 on. In those novels, Sollers builds an image
of a consistent narrator persona across multiple first-person characters with
common characteristics: an omnipresent speaker, the focal point from which
everything is seen; a writer of keen intelligence; and always a marginalized
social critic—in sum, through all the “Multiple Related Identities,” an image
of the author himself. In Sollers’s view of Casanova, those characteristics of the
autobiographical persona are present in a more subtle, not to say surreptitious,
way.
This somewhat devious (though perfectly clear) substitution is most visible
at the end of Casanova the Irresistible, where we will see “another” Casanova
strolling around Venice on that key date of June 4, 1998, while all around him
celebrations mark the fact that the city’s favorite son has been dead for two
 viii

hundred years. “I wanted to speak about another Casa. The one who on this
very day, in Venice, picks his way among the Japanese tourists near the Doge’s
Palace. No one pays attention to him. Two hundred years after his death, he
seems to be in excellent shape. Hale and hearty as when he was thirty, just
before his arrest.” At this point, Sollers has entirely identified with Casanova;
the superposition, the subtle substitution, are complete. But in style and man-
ner, in artful undercurrents, the reader comes to recognize how the author
has “updated” his subject throughout the essay as well. In the very manner
of writing about Casanova, Sollers seeks to make him present among us as a
model from which we should glean lessons unavailable from the majority of
those who speak and write now.
Sollers has said that he wrote this book to shame society for what it has
repressed or neglected and for its failure to be cognizant of its failings. In it
he affirms a philosophy of life stemming from Casanova’s admirable qualities.
His reasons are thus quite personal as well as social. Casanova comments that
his body and his soul are one: “I have never been able to conceive how a father
can tenderly love his charming daughter without at least once having slept with
her. This conceptual impotence has always convinced me, and still convinces
me all the more strongly today, that my mind and my matter form a single
substance.” Apart from the astonishing affirmation of father-daughter incest,
the importance of this passage lies in the philosophy it expresses: the sameness
of body and soul, or of mind and matter. Sollers proposes in Casanova “un
homme heureux,” a happy man. Here was a man who had fun in life, motivated
throughout by his desire to enjoy himself, simply put; the happiness of his
soul was no different from the happiness of his body. Authors rarely deign to
describe themselves as happy people, but Sollers affirms it for the one he calls
Casa, and more importantly, through him, for himself.

This attitude is typical of Philippe Sollers. He has always maintained his inde-
pendence from any trend, critical fashion, style, or adherence. Born near Bor-
deaux in 1936, Sollers made his brilliant entry onto the Parisian intellectual
scene in 1958–1960 with back-to-back publications and the founding, with oth-
ers, of the journal Tel Quel, destined to become the arbiter of French thought for
the next two decades and the spearhead of what became known in the United
States as “French theory.” A leading exponent of the avant-garde, Sollers wrote
novels reputed as “difficult” and “experimental” during the sixties and seventies
(Drame, translated as Event; Nombres; Lois; the two punctuation-less books H
and Paradis, the last appearing in 1981 and 1986 after serial publication), then
suddenly began writing novels in a “readable” style with the publication in 1983
of the brilliant Femmes, translated by Barbara Bray as Women. He continues
 ix

to publish novels as well as book-length essays and extended interviews on

many topics, in art, literature, music, photography, biography, and social his-
tory. In addition to his tremendous written output, Sollers maintains a striking
media presence as well as a blog and “Interventions” on his website, making
him one of the most widely known authors in France. He lives in Paris with
his wife, Julia Kristeva.
In France, this man, often misunderstood by casual readers, is nevertheless
a touchstone of intellectual life, a person of considerable erudition who has
chosen to express himself via a verbal art unique to him. From his self-defined
stance as a marginalized thinker on humanity’s behalf, he is a gadfly who pricks
the conscience of his country. William Cloonan describes Sollers as a “public
intellectual” considered on a par with Lacan, Barthes, and Foucault. Michel
Braudeau calls Sollers a “remarkable critic, partisan of the Enlightenment and
of happiness, love, and music, egocentric and very generous, the most agile
runner on every sort of track, always the first to arrive.”
“Happiness, love, and music” characterize all of Sollers’s writing, not unlike
Casanova’s. This is especially evident in the novels written since the “turning
point” of 1983, when Gallimard, the publisher Sollers called the “central bank,”
brought out Femmes. That bestseller was followed by fifteen novels, among
them Portrait du joueur, Le Cœur absolu, Le Lys d’or, La Fête à Venise, Le Secret,
Passion fixe, L’Étoile des amants, Une vie divine, Trésor d’amour, Médium, and
the 2015 L’École du mystère. His book-length essays include the autobiographical
Un vrai roman: Mémoires and Portraits de femmes. Many of his books, includ-
ing ones from before 1983, have been released in paperback editions, and a few
of the novels have been translated into English. Among the nonfiction books,
the most recent translation into English is Mysterious Mozart.
 A Note about the Translation

Translating Sollers calls for judicious choices at every turn. To convey Sollers’s
voice in English, a translator might think of herself as channeling him. The task
is to retain the unique qualities of his writing by finding ways to render them
in a language quite foreign to French and without losing nonlexical aspects
such as rhythm, voice, internal rhyme, and other poetic effects of sound and
sense. Rhythmic strategies Sollers uses regularly include lists, comma-spliced
sentences, and deliberate changes of register (levels of speech). His lists follow
a rhetoric of accumulation, and they often achieve striking effects by combin-
ing items that aren’t usually connected. Allusions further enrich the narrative.
Therefore, I believe a translation of Sollers should gently push the reader to
sense that something different is happening in the language, as it does in the
original French. His creative use of the French language is a matter of pride for
him. At the same time, I strive to do what is possible to avoid distressing the
Anglophone ear and eye. The objective is to make English sound like Sollers,
which can be achieved by bending the syntax a little, so there is a degree of
foreignness that nevertheless does not hinder comfortable reading and com-
prehension. Above all, I seek to avoid “flattening” Sollers’s expressive prose.
I have translated all the passages Sollers quotes from Casanova’s memoirs
and other texts. It wasn’t until Willard R. Trask’s translation of History of My
Life was published by Harcourt, Brace, and World in 1966–1971 that the com-
plete, uncensored text of the Histoire de ma vie became available in English
(reissued by the Johns Hopkins University Press in paperback in 1997). For
this major work of French literature, this is the only translation to recom-
mend. However, should the reader compare my versions with Willard Trask’s,
minor discrepancies beyond the differences one might expect from different
translators would appear. That is because Sollers’s quotations are sometimes

xi
 xii

not letter-perfect; he occasionally relies on his excellent memory, resulting in

minor variants. More importantly, to preserve the literary or poetic effects that
Casanova occasionally achieves, perhaps unintentionally (as French was not
his native language), I have bent good English through a looseness of syntax
and lexical choice, resulting in different wording from Trask’s.
On the few occasions when I felt that clarifications were needed, particularly
for words that simply lost too much of their resonance when rendered into
English, I have interpolated a word or two. The footnotes, brief identifications
for the most part, are mine as well.
“Nothing will have prevented me from enjoying myself.”
—CASANOVA

“I was right in all my disdain: since I’m escaping!

I escape! I explain.”
—RIMBAUD
 1
People think they know Casanova. They are wrong.
I open a dictionary, I read:
“CASANOVA DE SEINGALT, Giacomo (1725–1798), an adventurer born in
Venice, famous for his novelesque exploits (particularly his escape from the
Piombi of Venice) and his gallant exploits, which he recounted in his Memoirs.”

Casanova was indeed born in Venice near the beginning of the eighteenth
century, he is inseparable from the great legend of that city, but he died far
from there, at seventy-three, in Dux (now Duchcov), in Bohemia. Why?
The real title of the Memoirs is Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life). It is an
enormous volume loaded with adventures revolving around gambling, travel,
magic, and sex, and very few people know that it was written in French before
being published in German, then retranslated into French in a more “proper”
version than the original. To read what Casanova really wrote, with his pen,
we had to wait until the beginning of the sixties, in the twentieth century. (But
only a few specialists or enthusiasts are interested in that publication.) It isn’t
until 1993 that this essential text, along with a selection of other writings by
the same author, are at last published in French in three volumes anyone can
obtain.
This has to be our point of departure: the original version was deferred, and
“subtitled.” Why?

Yes, why did people decide to forget that Casanova was also a writer? What
can be done to unmask two centuries of injurious censure and repression
alongside this willful ignorance?

Seingalt is an added pseudonym, forged by Casanova himself in 1760 when he

is in Zurich. He calls himself Chevalier de Seingalt, he ennobles his signature. If
one thinks of the meaning of the word seing, “signature,” it’s as if he wanted to
say that his signature is high (alt) and ancient. One can imagine that Stendhal

3
 4

(who called Casanova Novacasa in his Journal) remembered this move when he
chose his pseudonym as a writer. Casanova in French is Maisonneuve, Newhouse
in English. Jack Newhouse. No need to add that we are at the antipodes of that
other Jack, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The century of Casanova is the century of
Voltaire and Mozart (but also Sade). Mozart, Da Ponte, and Casanova met at
Prague, incidentally, for the creation of Don Giovanni in 1787 (Casanova arrived
from Dux). This scene has never really been depicted. Why?

There are two known autograph folios by Casanova, the examination of

which shows that they are the drafts of interchangeable variants for scene 10
in the second act of the opera. The author who made this discovery writes:
“Few nonmythical beings were as much the man of the instant, of the pure
present, as Casanova. And also the man of the catalogue. . . . It is not out of
the question to imagine that in listening to:
Un catalogo gli è che ho fatt’io

sung in this Bohemian autumn of 1787, the old adventurer could believe that
it was time to copy over the list of his own love affairs. Thus Don Giovanni
may well have had a part in bringing us the Story of My Life, which remains,
after all, the immortal catalogo of Giacomo Casanova, though it is far from
being only that.”1

In September 1787, then, Mozart is in Prague at the Three Lions, Lorenzo

Da Ponte at the Hotel Plattensee. The two hotels are so close that the musician
and his librettist can speak to each other from the windows. Casanova arrives.
At the time, he is seeking to publish a long science fiction novel.
But the real science fiction novel is actually the encounter of these three men.
Casanova has known Da Ponte since his stay in Vienna two years earlier, when
he was secretary to the ambassador from Venice (whom he doesn’t like). It’s
easy to imagine that he met Mozart. Note that, not insignificantly, our three
characters are Freemasons.

One evening at the Villa Bertramka, Casanova is in dialogue with Mozart

about his escape from the Leads in Venice. There’s a friendly plot developing,
which ends up locking the composer in his room. He won’t be liberated until
he has written the overture to his opera, already composed in his head but still
not written out.
Do we see all this?

1. Alfred Meissner made this suggestion in 1876 in his book Rococo Bilder.
 5

And do we see how fascinating it is to reflect on the fact that Casanova starts
writing the story of his life during the summer of 1789?

In music, then: Vivaldi and Mozart. In painting, Fragonard, Tiepolo, Guardi.

The cities? Venice, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Lon-
don, Naples, Constantinople, Cologne, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Munich, Zurich,
Geneva, Berne, Basel, Vienna, Paris again, Madrid.
We find ourselves in the great Europe of the Enlightenment, the epoch from
which an obscure force of violence has attempted and still attempts to divert us.
It goes without saying that Venice is the center of this variable geometry.
Everything stems from there, everything returns there, even if Casanova died
in exile in Czechoslovakia. But when he writes, it’s Venice that writes.
In French.

People didn’t want to think of Casanova as a writer (and let’s say it calmly:
one of the great writers of the eighteenth century). They have made him into
a circus animal. They are relentless in drawing a false image of him. Producers
have projected themselves onto him and presented him as a puppet, a mechani-
cal lover, a more or less senile or ridiculous marionette. He haunts people’s
imaginations but makes them anxious. They are happy to recount his “gallant
exploits,” but on condition of depriving their hero of his depth. In short, they
are jealous. They treat him with a diffuse, uptight, paternalistic resentment.
Fellini, in a remarkably stupid comment, went so far as to say that he found
Casanova stupid.
Let us rather conceive of him as he is: simple, direct, courageous, cultivated,
seductive, funny. A philosopher in action.

He enjoyed himself a great deal, he saw human behavior from behind the
scenes, he studied the nervous system of credulity. He sometimes deceived
certain partners, but, as he explained it, it was their will, not his, and someone
else would have tricked them in any case, less well. He doesn’t always portray
himself as a hero; he doesn’t embellish, he describes with precision, he is quick.
He is as amusing to read as Cervantes’s Don Quixote. In short, his Story of My
Life is a masterpiece, the record of a man who affirms his truth.

He had an exceptional body. He followed it, listened to it, spent it, thought
it. That, basically, is what the eternal spirit of bigotry reproaches him with.

In April 1798, at Dux, Casanova falls ill. He stops revising his manuscript. On
May 27, his nephew, Carlo Angiolini, arrives in Dux to take care of his uncle,
who dies on June 4. Angiolini takes the manuscript to Dresden.
 6

In 1820, the Angiolini family sells the manuscript to the publisher Brockhaus
in Leipzig.
From 1822 to 1828, the first edition of the Story of My Life appears in German
translation, “cleaned up.”
From 1826 to 1838, it’s the first French publication, “revised” (the Laforgue
version, the one Stendhal reads in 1826, still available in the Pléiade edition).
In 1945, the manuscript of the Story of My Life narrowly escapes destruction
and is transferred from Leipzig to Wiesbaden. Only in 1960 does the publica-
tion of the original text appear (the Brockhaus-Plon edition), republished in
1993 in three volumes by Bouquins (Robert Laffont).

It is obvious that Casanova has been “forgotten” a lot, even if he has also been
quietly looted. He is forgotten, rearranged, costumed in keeping with Ancien
Régime–type fantasies (as they say). They don’t want him to make History. Life
should not be confused with History, and even less with sexual freedom and
writing. Fortunately, against all these obscurantisms, admirable “Casanovists,”
mostly amateurs, have worked to provide a multitude of verifications. Aside
from a few errors, mostly of dates, everything Casanova writes is true. That is
probably what is most explosive about him. Keep in mind, finally, that the text
itself, Casanova’s hand, has had its full effect for only five years. Just a begin-
ning, then.

I like to picture this clandestine transferal of 1945 in a Europe on fire under

intensive bombardments and destroyed by human madness. At that time, the
death drive is everywhere; an unprecedented savagery seems to have annihi-
lated the very idea of civilization. Thousands of pages of small black handwrit-
ing, piled into cases transported by trucks, recount an unimaginable life.

Fire from the heavens has not succeeded in destroying this writing. Nor
have hypocrisy, censure, pictorial deformations, indifference, malevolence,
and publicity. But what are we to make of it now? Are we free enough to read
it?

Casanova: man with a future.

 2
Jean Laforgue was a professor of French in the nineteenth century.
He is a scrupulous and serious layman of the kind that used to be produced
at the time. He is asked to rewrite Casanova. He does.
He comes upon this sentence about women: “I have always found that the one
I loved smelled good, and the stronger her perspiration, the more intoxicating
it seemed to me.”
Laforgue thinks about it for thirty seconds. No, in the nineteenth century
(no more than today, by the way), a woman does not perspire.
So he corrects this incongruity and writes: “As for women, I have always
found intoxicating the odor of those whom I loved.”
It is better, after all, right?
Laforgue blows his nose.

After smell, taste. Casanova does not hide what he calls his “gross tastes”:
game, red mullet, eel’s liver, crabs, oysters, rotting cheeses, all accompanied by
champagne, burgundies, Graves.
Laforgue (a bit like Leporello) finds this appetite barbaric, exaggerated,
slightly degenerate, and even frankly aristocratic. So he abbreviates and writes,
in a more bourgeois vein, “delicious suppers.”

Now for touch. At one point, Casanova describes himself in action at night,
barefoot so as not to make any noise. Barefoot? Laforgue immediately gets cold
feet and puts “lightweight slippers” on his hero.
These slippers, you understand, are an entire program. The body too raw, too
present, too three-dimensional: that is the danger. Try to imagine the man in
Fragonard’s The Bolt (Le Verrou) wearing slippers: it’s no longer the same paint-
ing. Laforgue is a specialist of the fig leaf (each period has such “restorers”).

But lay prudishness has two visages (that’s one of its charms). For example,
the word “Jesuit” makes it shudder. So when Casanova uses this word ironically,

7
 8

Laforgue piles on the sarcasm. Same thing whenever it’s a question of the monar-
chy. How can one reconcile the fact that Casanova is openly hostile to the Terror
with the fact that his adventures (as tempered by censure) put him in phase with
History? An irritating paradox, that. Laforgue will let the praise for Louis XV
stand (“Louis XV had the most handsome head one can imagine, and he carried
it with as much grace as majesty”); after all, that Louis didn’t have his head cut
off. On the other hand, better to suppress the diatribe against the people of the
French who massacred their nobility, the people who, as Voltaire said, “are the
most abominable of all” and who resemble “a chameleon that takes on all colors
and is susceptible to anything a leader can make it do, good or bad.”

Women perspiring, odors, food, political opinions: it all needs to be kept

under surveillance. If Casanova writes “the low people of Paris,” he’ll be made
to say “the good people.” But obviously it is the details about sexual desire that
are the thorniest. About a woman who has just fallen, Larforgue writes that
Casanova “repairs with a chaste hand the disarray that her fall had caused
in her clothing.” How gallantly these things are spoken! Casanova, however,
is more explicit: he says he went to “quickly pull down her skirts, which had
displayed all of her secret marvels before my eyes.” Not a chaste hand, as you
see, but a prompt glance.

Professor Laforgue “fears marriage like fire.” Is it because he doesn’t want

to shock his mother, his sister, or his wife—or his wife’s numerous women
friends—that he rejects Casanova’s wording: “I fear marriage more than death”?
More abruptly, one mustn’t show two of the main heroines of the Story of My
Life, C. C. and M. M. (the two friends in one of the happiest periods of Casa-
nova’s life in his casino in Venice), in a scene like this: “They began their labors
with a frenzy like that of two tigresses who looked like they wanted to devour
each other” (picture Marcel Proust blushing while reading this sentence). In
any case, it is out of the question to print this: “We were all three of the same
sex in all the trios that we executed.” (Only quite recently, a nice young woman
writing about Casanova wondered what sex might be in question here. One
cannot really explain it to her in writing.)

After an orgy, it seems natural to Laforgue to make Casanova feel “disgust.”

Nothing of the sort; Laforgue is making it up. It is true that in his time the flesh
is supposed to be sad and all books read, that ennui and melancholy, doubt
and despair increasingly overwhelm the mind.

If Casanova writes: “Sure of a complete orgasm at the end of the day, I let
myself go with all my natural gaiety” (that’s how he is), Laforgue corrects him
 9

and has him say: “Sure of being happy. . . .” The word orgasm (jouissance) is
banished. A woman, according to the professor, cannot be represented lying on
her back while “masturbating.” No, she will be “in the act of deluding herself ”
(understand it if you can). That, at least, is how a hand remains chaste. He will,
however, dare to say “onanism” (a medical word) where Casanova forges this
marvelous neologism: “manustupration”—a hand for stupre, debauchery.
You can verify this: a clever woman with a hand for stupre is hardly delud-
ing herself. That’s what Professor Laforgue probably didn’t have a chance to
observe. Too bad.

More censure: it is not decent to speak, as Casanova does, about the “fero-
cious viscera that give this woman convulsions, drive that one crazy, make
another devout.” Casanova loves women; he describes them as he loves them,
without devotion. But Laforgue is already a feminist—he respects women, he
fears them, he is prefiguring legions of prudish professors, especially philoso-
phers, a new clergy that will replace the old. Casanova is the bad boy in the
class. If he speaks of suspect spots on his pants, he is quickly sent to the boys’
room to get that cleaned up. From time to time, moral formulas will be interpo-
lated into his text (they are lacking). These professorial corrections sometimes
reach great heights. Here, for instance, is M. M., of whom Casanova writes that
“this religious woman, a keen thinker, playful and libertine, was admirable in
everything she did.” One day she sends a love letter to her Casanova. Laforgue
version: “I send a thousand kisses that disappear into the air.” Casanova had
actually noted (and it is so much more beautiful): “I kiss the air, thinking you
are there.”
Mere details? Surely not. Love is the science of details.

“My life is my matter, my matter is my life,” says Casanova. Usually literature

and novels serve to imagine the life one did not have, here it’s the opposite:
here is someone who realizes, like a last judgment, that his life has been woven
like a book, an immense novel: “In remembering the pleasures I have had, I
renew them, I enjoy them a second time, and I laugh about the suffering I have
endured and that I no longer feel. Member of the universe, I speak to the air,
and I see myself as giving an account of my management the way a butler does
to his master before disappearing.”

An admirable formula: “Member of the universe, I speak to the air. . . .” The

air listens. The personage called Casanova (who existed and is going to die)
regards himself as a butler with respect to himself. He has faithfully accompa-
nied himself, cared for himself, served himself. As a butler he can disappear
from the great mansion of life. He does not, however, say that the master
 10

disappears. Jacques is not a fatalist. His double is his secretary. The body goes
away, the mind judges. The mind is a narrative.

Such is Casanova. He organizes a party for himself at every moment; nothing

prevents him for long, nothing constrains him, even his illnesses and his fiascos
interest or amuse him; and always, everywhere, without warning, women are
there to join him in his magnetic whirlwinds. He comes, he goes, and especially
he escapes. He is without a doubt the most consummate technician of escape.
(And what is the Story of My Life, written in a distant corner of Bohemia, if
not an immense escape from space and time?)

The women who act in his camp are often, as if by chance, sisters or friends,
if not mother and daughter. Let us rub our eyes and read: “I have never been
able to conceive how a father can tenderly love his charming daughter without
at least once having slept with her. This conceptual impotence has always con-
vinced me, and still convinces me all the more strongly today, that my mind
and my matter form a single substance.”

And the blasphemer insists: “Incest, eternal subject of Greek tragedies, makes
me laugh instead of making me cry.”
Are we dreaming? Is it possible the Commendatore in Don Giovanni is noth-
ing but an incestuous father, furious in his eternal home that the other man,
the devil, has consummated his dream with his daughter? Didn’t Jocasta know,
at bottom, that Oedipus was her son? And as for Oedipus, wasn’t he gropingly
ambiguous and aroused with his daughter Antigone, who was also his half-
sister? Stop, or you will disappear into the eternal fire. You have to hear this
defiance, this formidable declaration of incest proclaimed (and furthermore
practiced and narrated, during a famous night in Naples).

There’s enough here to upset or forever scandalize all societies, whatever

they may be. The question is then the following: how could a society have let
this confession pass? We oughtn’t to read this sort of discourse (and today
no doubt less than ever, given the return to power of the moral order). That
is often the impression one has in traversing the eighteenth century: we find
there human beings as if cut off, detached from humanity, so to speak. Such is
the concentration of their freedom that it appears perpetually ahead of ours.
Listen to Mozart—you will hear it right away. Same fresh air effect when we read
Casanova. If he is right, and if he has proven it, nine-tenths of the ruminations
of humanity collapse. People have therefore decided that he was boasting. But
nothing could be less certain.
 11

“My mind and my matter form a single substance.” Casanova’s adventures and
the polarity they give off no doubt stem from this “substance” that constitutes
him, and which no metaphysics can take into account. Because of this substance
and the hatred of servitude and death that follow from it, doors open, walls pull
apart, enemies disappear, lucky chances multiply, getting out of prison is pos-
sible, games of chance turn out well, suicide is suspended, madness is utilized
and conquered, reason (or at least a certain superior reason) triumphs.

Casanova is a cabalist, he is a magician, but contrary to common sense (even

one that claims to be reasonable), he doesn’t believe in it. He is constantly
making fun of the credulity of the elite of his time. A Cagliostro or a Count
de Saint-Germain makes him laugh.2 His business with the Marquise d’Urfé
(who expects the sexual super-sorcerer Casanova to turn her into a man upon
her rebirth) is one of the most astounding stories ever lived (or at least ever
recounted). A charlatan, Casanova? If you like, when necessary, but a charlatan
who admits it, example without precedent and without sequel, who each time
specifies the true, sexual cause of superstitions. He is like Freud, in the end,
but more comical. Freud is the outcome of a century of repression; Casanova
is the narrative of a century of liberation, which did, after all, produce the only
Revolution people still talk about.

He meets the stars of his time? No problem. Voltaire? You recite Ariosto
to him, make him cry. Rousseau? Lacks charm, doesn’t know how to laugh.
Frederick of Prussia? Jumps from one subject to another, doesn’t listen to your
replies. Catherine of Russia? You travel with her while discussing the calendar.
The Cardinal of Bernis? He is your friend in debauchery in Venice and later a
protector in Paris. The pope? He gives to you, from the start, the same decora-
tion as to Mozart.

Apropos of the pope, Casanova’s position might surprise you. He begins his
Story like this: “The doctrine of the Stoics and of any other sect on the power
of destiny is an illusion of the imagination that holds with atheism. I am not
only a monotheist but a Christian fortified by philosophy, which has never
spoiled anything.”

2. Giuseppe Balsamo, known as Cagliostro (1743–1795), was an occultist and adventurer. The
Count de Saint-Germain (ca. 1696–1784), according to Willard Trask, was an “adventurer extraor-
dinary, whose real origin is unknown.” Casanova maintains that he was an Italian violinist.
 12

Worse, he apparently died while murmuring: “I lived as a philosopher, I die

as a Christian.”

Providence, he also says, has always granted his prayers (particularly at the
time of his escape from the Leads). “Despair kills; prayer makes it disappear,
and when a man has prayed, he feels confident and acts.” Casanova, praying?
What a scene. You can see how badly he has been misunderstood.

An astonishing profession of faith, in any case, for a man who at the same
time flies in the face of his cohorts with this sentence destined to be understood
by those who “as a result of remaining in the fire have become salamanders”
(clearly an alchemical allusion): “Nothing will have prevented me from enjoy-
ing myself.”

Such is the fundamental tone—the positive tone—of the first detailed apol-
ogy of irreversible time.

Casanova is present; we are the ones who have drifted far from him, evidently
into a fatal impasse. One evening in Paris he is at the opera in a box neighbor-
ing Madame de Pompadour’s. High society is making fun of his approximate
French, for example when he says he is not cold at home because he has “felt up”
his windows. They are intrigued, they ask where he’s from: “Venice.” Madame de
Pompadour: “From Venice? Are you really from down there?” And Casanova:
“Venice is not down there, madame; it is up there.” This insolent comment
(which the marquise will remember later, when he has got out of the Leads by
the rooftops) strikes the spectators. That very evening, he is received in Paris
society.
 3
You say “Prague,” and right away the twentieth-century clichés appear:
the city must be dark, medieval, demoniacal, stagnant; the clock of time has
stopped; it’s the city of the Golem and Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, the absurd,
a tenacious plot by the forces of darkness. Even knowing the Berlin Wall has
fallen and the “velvet revolution” has taken place, you first think of the suc-
cessive invasions, German, Russian, and the deep “socialist” sleep cornered
between the police and the army.

Looking for Casanova in Prague therefore seems a joke, a provocation, and

in any case an impossible wager. And yet he is there somewhere, not far. The
narrator comes from New York after once more passing through Venice. It’s
the first time he’s come here. Here? A total surprise, because here in Prague,
it’s still Italy. He wonders if he didn’t get off in Naples by mistake. The colors
are flamboyant, they’re repainting the city, they’re putting it in perspective for
the tourists, its palaces and churches vibrate in the sun, pink, pale green, ochre,
white, yellow. Here the baroque is at home, and therefore the Jesuit Counter-
Reformation (look out, Professor Laforgue is going to delete the word “Jesuit”).

Aside from the hideous and massive monument to the memory of Jan Hus
on the main square (one could happily dynamite it, along with the sinister
statue of Giordano Bruno on the Campo di Fiore in Rome), everything is
clear, magnificently proportioned, joyful, musical. The castle up on the hill?
An enchantment of embedded structures (especially at night). The stairs, the
terraces? A dream of symphonic scores. What is more, red posters practi-
cally everywhere, as if winking at me, announce an imminent performance
of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

The narrator doesn’t speak, he walks, he threads his way, he takes note of the
fact that soon, all around, there will be concerts (Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart again),
he goes back to his hotel, he sleeps a little, he goes out again. Of course he goes

13
 14

to see the Jewish cemetery and its tombs chaotically erected in the silence of
writing and faith, but the pressures of tourist consumerism chase him out in
a hurry. He makes it his business to admire the Loreta (now it’s as if he is in
Florence or Pisa).3 He takes the precaution of having himself photographed
here and there, particularly in front of the Kafka café and the Casanova fast-
food place. It’s all getting a bit mixed up in his head; he gets the impression
that he is himself the location of a strange but luminous and true fusion: he is
looking for Kafkasanova.

Strange? No. Kafka, this seducer in times of distress, signals to him, shows him
the way, which is the reversal in time speaking silently in a secret language of
resurrection and renaissance. Shh! It is probably too soon to say it—it is neces-
sary to remain very cautious, even if the proof is calmly self-evident. And yet,
beware—the thinking that always denies, the thinking of cynicism and despair,
is probably still active, hiding in a corner. Nevertheless, no doubt about it, the
color of innocence is here. “Pentiti! No! Si! Si! No! No!” One circumvents the
Commendatore, one does not repent, one has learned to live in the midst of the
flames, like a salamander. Here for the first time in October 1787 (exactly two
hundred ten years ago) someone was right for all time in singing about liberty,
women, good wine—and the rest. Kafka, still elegantly standing, is a hero of this
liberty, made prisoner by the nineteenth century’s deafness. One has come like a
cabalist to defy the Terror on his behalf. One invites him to tonight’s performance
along with Jacques Casanova. There will be musicians, women singing, the only
humanity saved a priori from the shipwreck, it’s obvious.

The next morning early, the traveler is impatient to take a car and go to
Duchcov, where Casanova lived. Is Duchcov the Dux of the past, where the
former castle of the Waldsteins was, in which Casanova played the part of
librarian for thirteen years? Over there, yes, on the road to Germany, toward
Dresden? That’s it. Does Duchcov by any chance mean something in Czech?
Oh yes, says the driver in English, it’s “the ghost’s village,” the village of the
phantom.
That’s promising.
Dux, “guide” in Latin (with the regrettable significance taken on later by
Il Duce), has thus become a haunted name. As we know, Casanova was an
excellent Latinist. Dux, Lux, those similarities didn’t escape him. Where are
you at this time? In Dux, in a castle, in Bohemia. What address (and what an
address) for writing and ending his days!

3. The Loreta is a large pilgrimage destination in the Hradčany district of Prague.

 15

It’s raining a little. The car is traveling through a strangely deserted coun-
tryside, collectivized and therefore uninhabited. It’s a very beautiful country.
Forests of beech and silver birch; soon little mountains, and everywhere the
golden beauty of autumn (it’s October). On the left all of a sudden, a baroque
monastery, half destroyed (communism oblige), undergoing renovation. The
narrator stops in the rainy wind, he contemplates levitating stone Virgins and
angels among the floating leaves. No one’s about. The silence is complete. They
leave, and soon there comes the first incident in this memorable day.

It’s at a turn in the road. Already from afar, on the right, ancient fortifications
have appeared, dark red. A military city, no doubt, a strategic point, a garrison
center. Yes and no. It’s Terezin, Theresienstadt, the phantom city par excellence.
Terrible site of Nazi barbarism and ruse, site of sordid exploitation of “resettled”
Jewish populations, site of suffering, encampment, triage, blackmail, torture,
murder. Lined up in a large open space are twenty-eight thousand little tomb-
stones with red roses planted next to each one. They look like children’s graves.
In the distance, the main fort. A tall cross standing, with a crown of thorns, and a
Star of David, behind, farther off, near which hundreds of flower bouquets have
accumulated. People must come here from around the world. The narrator gets
out of the car and walks in the field of the dead. He is soon petrified in the face
of—what? The unnamable. We are no longer in normal historical time, which is
calculable, but in another stormy substance that we don’t need to define—what
Claude Lanzmann, referring to the Shoah, calls “the immemorial.”

For the traveler, Terezin is like a warning: if he speaks of resurrection, of

renaissance, of pleasures, colors, Mozart, that doesn’t in the least signify an
exotic “return” to the eighteenth century. He has not come here to make a
decorative costume drama, thus adding a misreading to all the ones that have
plagued (and continue to plague) Casanova. No, the point is to rise to the level
(if possible, but is it possible?) of the death drive right here. It makes me think of
someone (who happened to be a surrealist poet) who thought Casanova lacked
a “sense of the tragic.” On the contrary. The sense of time, of the instant, the
sensitivity to each situation of time imply an acute perception of the negative.
Stefan Zweig also found Casanova lightweight: “Light as a mayfly, empty like
a soap bubble.” Such superficial comments of a pseudo-profundity are very
widespread and ultimately clerical. Mozart is heart-wrenching and lightweight.
Love, as strong as death, exists to triumph over it.
We just need to be attentive and serious, that’s all.

The trip continues, but it is understood now that it is taking place in a space
other than the space of geographical maps, as if it had crossed an invisible
 16

high-tension line. The driver is silent and indifferent; he has probably passed
by there a hundred times. After Terezin, the city of mute horror, the car is
headed northwest, toward Dux—Duchcov, the phantom village.

Here it is at last, this village. Nothing remarkable, except for the beautiful
baroque castle as we arrive on the square, ochre and white, flanked by a church,
and placed as if inadvertently right in the center of town. We’re here.
It’s deserted. But suddenly, horns, cars driven at top speed, tumbling out of
god knows where. It’s a wedding. The people of the castle have been gone for a
long time, you can get married there. The narrator has stopped being astonished
by anything, he knows today is special, that there will be a certain number of
signs, of omens like this. So it’s a peasant wedding (and it happens that the
narrator has in his suitcase a book by Kafka entitled Wedding Preparations in
the Country). Would the pretty bride, tall and dark haired, agree to have her
picture taken with a French traveler, in front of the castle gate? Her fiancé and
her father see no problem with that? No, not at all. And everyone goes in.

So I’m arriving at Casanova’s for a wedding. Just like that. His castle has
become the city hall, one could have guessed it (but that would very much
astonish Count Waldstein if he were here, and even more the Prince de Ligne).
What’s strange is that right away, Giacomo had a troublesome adventure
here with a young peasant girl from the area who he says constantly came
into his room to serve him. She becomes pregnant, they suspect this bizarre
stranger who never stops writing, he defends himself, the anger of the populace
increases, it’s another Don Giovanni scene. Finally a guilty party denounces
himself (true? false?), the young folks are married, the incident is closed.
Phew, that was close.

The wedding party is waiting for the mayor. I tour the castle. Casa’s apart-
ment, transformed into a museum, is not very big (two rooms), but not bad
at all. The windows look out on the front courtyard and the statues that line
its edges (among others a giant Hercules). It’s here that the librarian, badly
paid (but that’s not what counts now), wrote the Story of My Life at the rate of
twelve or thirteen hours a day (and night). The only piece of furniture worth
remembering is this pink Louis XV armchair near a window, in which he died.

The young red-headed woman who serves as a guide speaks only Czech or
German. A little English after all, but it’s mostly Germans who come to see the
monster’s lair. In any case, she recites the classic banalities. Beautiful castle,
beautiful park, rows of well-maintained sitting rooms, paintings of battles,
 17

portraits, chandeliers, antique furniture (all that must have been reconstituted
after the war). Here we are again in the library of Monsieur le Chevalier de
Seingalt. The guide leans against the books. She seems to be falling, as if sud-
denly ill. No, she is simply engaging a secret mechanism, she pushes. A hidden
door then opens, and there. . . . No! Yes.

A dimly lit room. A wax mannequin dressed in “eighteenth-century” fashion,

with a wig. He is writing, a goose quill pen in his hand, on a desk cluttered with
folders, under a red lamp (real presence). A Musée Grévin staging. There he
is! Casa! The phantom of the castle! From the Ancien Régime! Don’t, above
all, bring in the bride!
The guide is pleased with her effect. A stuffed Casanova in an obscure recess,
should have thought of it. Imagine what follows: in the evening, the castle,
nationalized, closes. No one’s around. Up there in his tiny room, the vampire,
immortalized and in curls, continues his work of social demoralization. These
Czechs have a sort of humor.
Sometimes we almost wish the walls could speak.

A mummified mannequin, fine, but where is the body? Not inside the castle
or the park, in any case, nor in the closed church next door. So? “Over there,
farther away.” Where? In the woods? I come to a lake above which (premoni-
tory signs recur) there rises at that very moment a magnificent rainbow. I have
rarely seen one as beautiful. I am not making anything up, of course—not the
wedding, nor the wax phantom, nor the double rainbow that now serves as my
guide. No more, no more, it’s too much. But finally here is the Santa Barbara
church (also closed), on the façade of which (is it encased in the wall?) one
can read the following plaque:
JAKOB CASANOVA
VENEDIG, 1725
DUX, 1798

Jakob for Giacomo, Venedig for Venice.

Casanova was buried in German.

In the end, German will have been the daily drama for Casa. He speaks Ital-
ian, he is writing nonstop in French, and his busy existence resonates anew in
this language. But at Dux he lives surrounded by domestics who speak only
German and, as Francis Lacassin writes in his preface to the 1993 edition of
Histoire de ma vie, “peasants who speak only dialect—today we would say
Czech.”
 18

So things aren’t going too well. The year is 1791. A librarian, moreover a
superfluous one, who spends his time writing in an incomprehensible language
with a bad reputation (the Revolution), necessarily awakens distrust, jealousy,
hatred among the narrow-minded. The funny thing is that Casanova sees the
distant hand of the “Jacobins” against him in this hatefulness. From the start,
one has the impression that he has to fight on two fronts: the arrogance of the
nobility on one side, popular aggression on the other. Chateaubriand’s witti-
cism comes to mind: “For the Royalists, I loved freedom too much; for the
revolutionaries, I had too much contempt for crime.”

Casa’s persecutors at the castle are the steward Feldkirchner and his accom-
plice (Giacomo even calls him his “minion”), the messenger Wiederholt. Count
Waldstein will later fire them. But it is easy to imagine, from day to day, the
meanness, the contempt, the mockeries that took the graphomaniac librarian
for their object. Casanova takes revenge in his writing by deforming the stew-
ard’s name, but with little satisfaction: “Courage, then, Monsieur Faulkircher.
Reply to these letters. But do at least be so honorable as to send me your replies
in French, or Latin, or Italian, or even Spanish, as I am to send them to you in
German. I pay a translator, pay one yourself and do not be ashamed to publish
your ignorance—you, of all the languages of the universe, I, of German.”

That is the declaration of a southerner who already knows he is in a historical

position of inferiority. This state of affairs is going to last two centuries, it is still
lasting. The French Empire, outcome of the Revolution, actually served only
to prepare English domination, then German (German will replace French
in Russia after Pushkin), then Russian, then American. Greek? Latin? There’s
nothing to be said about them, or less and less. Italian is quickly marginal-
ized, Spanish will wait a long time for its South American recovery, and as for
French, after having been the first language in the world, it yields its place to
English, itself reduced, via the internet, to its basic elements. The North has a
powerful organization, the South (for now, at least) is beaten.

No surprise, therefore, if after his death Casanova quickly appears as a

vaguely ridiculous dinosaur. A different organization of the world, including
the cinema, demands it. Once again, what he wrote doesn’t count; he is auto-
matically turned into a spectacle.

Letter from Casanova to the steward of Dux: “Your scoundrel of a Viderol,

truly an executioner’s valet, having torn my portrait out of one of my books,
 19

scribbled my name on it with the epithet that you taught him and stuck it on
the door of the privy with his feces or yours, for an infamous commerce makes
mixing them easy.”

Every writer is paranoid, granted, but that scene, with its anal coloration, is
nevertheless highly revelatory of a certain climate. It’s no surprise that a little
later the messenger Wiederholt (“Viderol”) beats the librarian with a stick in a
street in the village (the date is December 11, 1791, Casanova is over sixty-five,
he immediately begins judicial proceedings that come to nothing).

So much for the ground floor. But let us reach the floors above and observe
the behavior of the aristocracy toward Casanova. No doubt the best example is
the Prince de Ligne. Ligne is a nobleman of high rank, an important diplomat,
an intellectual who vaunts his libertinage and atheism, and, what is more, an
excellent writer (in French). He knew Casanova well in Bohemia; he admires
him and is envious; he is fascinated by his reading of fragments of the Story
of My Life (which he secretly hopes will never be published). Of course he has
all the prejudices of his class with respect to an individual who has risen from
nothing. His behavior is therefore two-faced.

His letters to Casanova, with a perhaps muted irony, are burning declarations
of love (“I am tenderly attached to you”): “Enjoy yourself, keep busy, my dear
Casanova, let all your reflections about the magic lantern of life be comical. . . .”
“Why would you want your works to be castrated when you have been quite
satisfied not to be so yourself?” “When I meet a fool, I tell myself, what a shame
not to spend my life with the man who terrorizes him!” “A third of this charming
second volume, my dear friend, made me laugh. A third gave me a hard-on, a
third made me think. The first two make you madly lovable, and the last admi-
rable. You win out over Montaigne. That is the highest praise, in my view.” “My
heart tells me loud and soft that it belongs to you; and moreover it is not pure
in this sentiment, for there is pride in loving and being loved by a man like you,
the rearguard of the most famous people who existed in the past. . . .” Etc., etc.

Such praise! Such passion! I’m taking a bet, however: the Prince de Ligne
surely didn’t think his letters to Casanova would be published one day, nor
that Casanova, the new Montaigne (even in disguise), would be more famous
than he. He loved Casanova. Perhaps. But when he writes about him for the
public, the tone changes (and the social prejudice, the lover’s spite, and his
literary jealousy explode).
 20

First a portrait à clef, easy to decipher, in which Casanova appears with

the name Aventuros: “He would be a quite handsome man if he weren’t ugly;
he is tall, built like a Hercules; but an African complexion, lively eyes full of
wit, it is true, but always presaging susceptibility, anxiety, or rancor, give him
a somewhat ferocious air, easier to anger than to amuse. He laughs little but
makes one laugh; he has a way of saying things that hark back to the dull-witted
Harlequin or the Figaro, which makes him very amusing. The only things he
does not know are those that he claims to know: the rules of the dance, of the
French language, of taste, of worldly behavior, and of etiquette.”

Poison barely sweetened with “rejected lover.” Along the way, the calumni-
ous insinuation: “Women and little girls especially are in his head, and it is
impossible for them to leave and go elsewhere. . . . He takes his revenge for all
of that on everything that can be eaten or drunk; no longer able to be a god in
the garden, a satyr in the woods, he is a wolf at the table. . . .”

Casanova as sex maniac, and mainly a pedophile? Embittered by impotence

and reduced to eating? Thank you, dear friend, my reader, my prince!

And also this: “Do not fail to bow to him, because a mere trifle will make
him your enemy. His prodigious imagination, the vivacity characteristic of his
country, his journeys, all the professions he has exercised, his fortitude in the
absence of all his moral and physical goods make of him a rare man, valuable
to meet, even worthy of consideration and of much friendliness by the very
small number of people who are in his good graces.”

A little consideration all the same. Commiserative consideration, to be sure.

You never know. Elsewhere, Ligne specifies that Casanova was the son of an
unknown father and a bad actress from Venice. But here is the essential point:
this adventurer’s memoirs are “dramatic, rapid, comical, philosophical, full of
new, sublime, and inimitable things.” But: “I will do what I can to remember
these Memoirs, the cynicism of which is, among other things, their greatest
strength, but which for this reason will never see the light of day.”

A regret, or a wish? What follows allows one to get some idea. Casanova was
basically ridiculous: “He spoke German, they didn’t understand. He became
angry, they laughed. He showed some of his French poetry, they laughed. He
gesticulated while declaiming his poetry in Italian, they laughed. He bowed on
entering, the way Marcel, the famous dance master, had taught him sixty years
earlier, they laughed. He did the courant step in his minuets at each ball, they
 21

laughed. He put on his white plumes and his drugget of golden silk, his jacket of
black velvet, and his garters with strass buckles on silk stockings, they laughed.”

And who is this “they” who laughed?

The Prince de Ligne is in agreement with the domestics at the Dux castle.
Masters and slaves get along more often than one thinks, you might say.
And it continues: “The mothers in the village are complaining that he wants
to teach all the little girls nonsense. He says they are democrats. . . . He gives
himself indigestion and says they are trying to poison him. He is knocked
down, he says it’s by order of the Jacobins. . . .”

Not only ridiculous, this Casanova, but also unhealthy, and to put it bluntly,
seriously deranged. The proof: “He claimed that each thing he had done was
by order of God, and that was his motto.”

A pathetic madman, this Casanova, who did not want for wit and courage,
although always agitated, disconsolate, moaning. Women? Come, come, at the
very most some little girls.

In the letter to Casanova in which he says that a third of the Story of My Life
had given him a hard-on, Ligne adds: “Like a skillful physician, you convince
me; like a profound metaphysician, you subjugate me; but you disoblige me like
a timid antiphysician, scarcely worthy of your country. Why have you refused
Ismaël, neglected Petrone, and were you much relieved to learn that Bellisse
was a girl?”

You have to read beyond the play on words that amuses the paradoxical but
often strangely frivolous wit of the Prince. The story about Bellisse (Bellino)
concerns a boy whose charm is so compelling that one could be persuaded to
love him, but who turns out to be a girl disguised as a man.

“Antiphysician” is the word for a homosexual at that time. Frederick of Prus-

sia, for example, is a notorious “antiphysician,” which sheds some light on the
highs and the lows of his relationship with Voltaire. Read between Ligne’s lines:
come, dear friend whom I adore, be less timid. It’s a spiritual proposition, to
be sure, but also physical.

It’s an old tune: if Casanova was so interested in women, it’s no doubt because,
without admitting it to himself, he was homosexual. Besides, these stories
about women are dubious, we’d have to get their versions. In any case, what is
 22

a man seeking in his multiple feminine adventures if not the unique image of
his mother? Wasn’t Don Juan basically homosexual and impotent?
People talk a lot about homophobia now, but never about heterophobia. How
strange.

Come now, it’s useless hiding behind those masks. You are pursuing the
Only-One woman through all these Alls. Your catalogue doesn’t fool us: it’s an
alibi, a rampart, an inverted confession. Your relentless insistence on saying
white proves that you mean black. You think you are alert, you are an invert.
You are in fact a woman in search of men. And if that’s not the case, that’s how
it ought to be, etc.

Moreover, a female psychoanalyst confirms this: Casanova was “at the mercy
of female desires” (false: sometimes, not always); “women are his masters, he
is fascinated by the feminine to the point of wanting to be included in it” (not
at all); “he is the plaything of women’s pleasure” (the Fellini marionette ver-
sion). And also: “Imprisoned [sic] by his identification with the all-powerful
maternal and having no sufficient paternal support to detach himself from it”
(Why become a psychoanalyst? To finally be a good father), Casanova thinks
that “if God exists, he is female.”

Not homo enough for one, too enslaved to women for the other; speaking
bizarrely about God for the first (who doesn’t care), transforming God into a
woman for the second. Poor Casanova. They will constantly apply devotional,
worldly, popular, Marxist, psychoanalytical criticism—and he will end up in
commercials for beauty products or in recipes, for sure.

At one point, Ligne advises him to secretly entrust his Story of My Life to
his own publisher, who would pay him income on it until his death: “Say you
have burned your memoirs. Get in your bed. Have a Capuchin monk come,
and let him throw some reams of paper into the fire, saying you are sacrificing
your works to the Virgin Mary.”

In other words, be a hypocrite. But that’s just it, Casanova is not a hypocrite
(even if he will be an agent of the Inquisition in Venice for a time).

The Prince de Ligne is a star of the Congress of Vienna in 1814 along with
Talleyrand and Metternich. The purpose is to redefine Europe after the Napo-
leonic tornado. This prince will die during the congress. I picture him some-
what somnolent during the sessions, asking himself this question: what in fact
has become of Aventuros’s three thousand seven hundred manuscript pages?
 23

Burned by a Capuchin monk, no doubt. Too bad. Or fortunately. A world has

come to an end.

Sequere Deum, follow God: Casanova’s motto. The male, not female, God
(Deum) is not a woman and is only half man, contrary to what many humans
think. What woman wants, God wants? If you want.

If God were a woman, he would have less success with women (to the extent
that men wish to become women for him, as religions prove). A harsher ver-
sion: Casanova denies Oedipus and castration. We note that Oedipus makes
him laugh (scandal), and as for castration, it chiefly concerns the censors of
his narrative.

What does he really say? Very simple, very direct things: “My sanguine tem-
perament made me very sensitive to all sexual pleasures, always joyful and always
eager to go from one enjoyment to another, and ingenious at inventing them.”

The “sanguine” temperament is his youth. But the animal claims to have
studied the question by successively having “the four temperaments”: the pitu-
itary in childhood (implausible childhood), the sanguine, the bilious (he is
tormented, it is true, at age thirty-eight), and finally the melancholic, excellent
for recounting all the rest. (And the “little girls” can go to the devil, then!)

Let’s listen to him: “Cultivating the pleasures of my senses was my principal

business throughout my life; I never had any more important. Feeling myself
born for the sex different from mine, I have always loved it, and I have made
it love me as much as I could. I have also loved good food with a passion, and
passionately, too, all objects able to excite curiosity.”

I am because I feel. I am very curious about differences. I love difference

passionately, and I get it to love me.
Difference loves to be different, but not with just anybody. Otherwise, bore-
dom—to flee from like death.
Death? I detest it, “because it destroys reason” (a sublime formula). “I sense
that I shall die, but I want it to come in spite of myself; my consent would smell
of suicide.”

Casanova almost killed himself in London, at the midpoint of his life. He

knows what he’s talking about. But then too he affirms, as in his miraculous
escape from the Leads, that he followed God. Why not believe him?
 4
“My mother brought me into the world in Venice on the 2nd of April, Easter,
in the year 1725. The night before, she had a strong desire for crayfish. I like
them a lot.”

It’s an old man of seventy-two who writes these lines, probably among the last
he penned. He is answering the silly questions of an amorous correspondent
of twenty-two, Cécile de Roggendorf, whom he will never actually meet. The
handwritten copy of his text, entitled Précis of My Life, was found among the
Dux papers. It’s only a few very dense pages long, and it ends like this: “This
is the only précis of my life that I have written, and one may make whatever
use of it one wishes. ‘Non erubesco evangelium.’ Dated this 17th of November,
1797. Jacques Casanova.”

I’m not blushing about this gospel? In Latin? Signed J.C., like Jesus Christ?
Sir Cabalist, you exaggerate.

That first sentence deserves to be considered one of the most extraordinary

ever written. It’s Easter Day, therefore, implicitly, Resurrection. The gross April
Fool’s–joke Casanova emerges in the midst of a blush of crayfish. He is born
out of a strong desire of his mother’s that occurred the night before his birth,
and he will fulfill it, this desire, until the night before his death.
Ironically, of course.
His mother, Zanetta, an actress, is about to leave for Dresden, a city quite
close to the castle where her son will one day die (or rather disappear as a
body). She communicated something to him, but what?

Let’s read: I like crayfish a lot, or rather women who have or inspire desires
that others could blush about.
In his handwritten manuscript, Casanova writes écrivisse instead of écrevisse.
Which gives: “The night before, she had a strong desire for écrivisse.” Écrivisse,

24
 25

écrivisse: écrit (writing), vice (vice). The excellent crustacean (écrevisse) is not
the only thing evoked here, but also writing “backwards,” the writing of mem-
ory itself. Zanetta, my mother, by having a strong desire for crayfish the night
before my birth, also without realizing it gave birth to a writer. And a cabalist
attentive to words and to letters that change into figures.

However, Casanova does not fall from the sky. Let’s get to Venice near the
beginning of the eighteenth century, it’s time.
Whom shall we take as an intermediary? A singular character, a poet with
a very bad reputation who plays a “paternal” role in Giacomo’s existence:
Baffo.

Zorzi Alvise Baffo (1694–1768) is a patrician, a member of the Great Council,

of noble origin but poor. He is a friend of the Casanova family, a scandalous
libertine poet who writes in Venetian dialect and is known as “the child of the
Adriatic.” Here is his epitaph:
The promptness of his wit
In traversing in many ways
All the facets of his subjects
Excuses to a degree
The extreme lubricity of his poetry.

We could have replaced the word excuses with explains.

To explain the freewheeling life in Venice at the time of Casanova’s birth,

Baffo’s poems are important. Poems—or rather narrative verses: it works just
as well to recount them as to translate them, as long as one doesn’t rub out the
obscenities.

Example: One day he is melancholy, he is out walking, he sees a girl’s pretty

face at a window. He bows, she smiles, he goes right up to her room, she is
alone, he proposes “to fuck her.” She sweetly replies no, that she’s a virgin, but
she could jerk him off if he wants. “She wanted to make me come against her
cunt, and I swear she masturbated as adroitly as any whore.”

That’s just one example out of a hundred. And I’ve chosen one of the more
decent (look out for Professor Laforgue).

Baffo describes Venice as a paradise of gaiety, a center of pleasures devoted

to Venus. An abrupt acceleration occurred, then: “Married women no longer
keep out of sight, and you see them about the city day and night. . . . You can
 26

meet them easily in their beds, and the husband knows nothing about it, or if
he knows, it doesn’t bother him.”

In the past, the cafés were frequented only by whores and madams (those are
Baffo’s words), but today “they are filled with city women, female storekeepers,
noble ladies, and adulteresses who are dying of hunger. . . . In the evening they
go out onto the square with an air, a brio, that makes one want to pinch them.”

The noble ranks are “dressed in the French manner,” and they consume
everything they possess. The casinos are full and the stakes are high: “Money
flows from all sides; the city therefore becomes more beautiful; but vice emp-
ties all the purses.
“Without all these vices, artists would be entirely ignored and would soon
disappear.
“Without ambition, gourmands, and lovers, huge treasures would remain
buried in a corner.
“It is regrettable that there are not more whores in this city; but married
women have made it their task to replace them.”

Let us not forget that Venice is the city of Aretino, Titian’s friend, whose pen
is redoubtable. Baffo carries this tradition forward, worsening it. Very young,
Casanova read all that.

“There are also scores of female virtuosos, singers and dancers, spritely
mounts that it is a pleasure to ride. . . .
“The singers and dancers live the grand life and are now the queens who
trail penises in their wake.
“Those women exert great power over the men; their manner is free, and
they are an honor to their sex.
“They have a charm that attracts; they never wear anything torn and are just
as clean underneath as on the outside.”

Do I need to mention that the musician who is enchanting Venice at that

time is named Antonio Vivaldi? The red priest? And that one can hear freedom
itself breathe in his music?

“What happiness, what joy, to hear a virtuoso sing while you are screwing
her!
“What pleasure can be compared to the pleasure of feeling your beloved
dance under your penis?
 27

“Their conversation is generally full of charm, and the fuckable ones can
defy all comparison.”

The old French word vit, penis, has a certain charm. Sade uses armloads
of it, so to speak. The vit has its own vitality, it vibrates. It remains masculine,
contrary to its modern equivalents. Casanova will call it thunder, steed, principal
agent of humanity, and even, in moments of great demonstrative exaltation,
the Word. As for the liquid that comes out, now increasingly stocked in labo-
ratories under the name sperm, he calls it liqueur, nectar, humid radical. Isn’t
that better?
The word fuck remains employed. But rumor has it that joblessness is aug-
menting in its scope of activity. Slang, though, still uses it.

In any case, we can assess, through Baffo and his student, to what extent
the Venice of tourism has been wiped clean of these turpitudes. A sinister,
commercialized parody of the magnificent disorders of the past remains: the
Carnival. As for the program of the North, it is well known: death in Venice.
 5
The world described by Baffo is the one in which Giacomo Casanova was
conceived. We know that Casa let it be understood that he was the illegitimate
son of a Grimani, patrician of Venice (the theater where his father and mother
performed, San Samuele, belonged to the Grimani family). That would explain
a lot of things: incomprehensible protections, serious troubles, prison, exile, the
return, spy activity, another exile after a pamphlet in which he attacks the entire
Venetian nobility, the wish to become noble (“Chevalier de Seingalt”), etc. His
mother, Zanetta, was beautiful. They say she had an affair in London with the
Prince of Wales, from which was born another son, Francesco, the well-known
battle painter.

The official father, Gaetano, is perhaps also the genetic father. At the time,
pre-DNA, they were rather unconcerned about this matter. And yet it’s true that
an individual who is exceptional necessarily provokes legends of this sort, which
also come from his own imagination. Me, the son of actors? Just a minute. My
family goes back to the fifteenth century, here are my father’s records, because
if he is the one who engendered me, see his work: “In the year 1428, D. Jacobe
Casanova, born in Saragossa, capital of Aragon, illegitimate son of D. Francisco,
abducted D. Anna Palafox from the convent the day after she had taken her vows.”

Not bad, is it, for the start of an opera. By his father, then, Giacomo is Span-
ish, and among his ancestors one even finds a Don Jouan [sic], master of the
sacred palace in Rome, who becomes an assassin and then a sort of corsair with
Christopher Columbus.4 There is also a Marc Anthony, a “poet in the style of
Martial,” and even a Jacques Casanova, a soldier operating in France against
the future Henri IV.

4. Slight confusion: the Don Juan Casanova who was the master of the sacred palace was actu-
ally the father of the Don Juan who sailed with Columbus and died on his return journey in 1493.

28
 29

A hidden patrician? Given this cinema, why not the poet Baffo himself,
who, like a great friend of the family, so strangely accompanies the very young
adventurer’s beginnings?

This is what Casanova says about Baffo: “Mr. Baffo, sublime genius, poet
in the most lubricious of genres, but great and unique, was the reason it was
decided to put me in boarding school in Padua, and to whom as a consequence
I owe my life. He died twenty years later, the last of his ancient patrician family;
but his poems, though dirty, will never let his name die. The State Inquisitors
of Venice, out of a sense of piety, will have contributed to his fame: persecuting
his manuscript works, they made them valuable.”

Am I not right to emphasize “I owe him my life”?

The second paragraph of the Précis of My Life is as follows: “At my baptism, I

was named Giacomo Girolamo. I was imbecilic until age eight and a half. After
a three-month hemorrhage, I was sent to Padua, where, cured of my imbecility,
I devoted myself to my studies, and at sixteen they made me Doctor and gave
me the clothes of a priest to go seek my fortune in Rome.”

Hold on, what’s this business about “imbecility” and “hemorrhage”? In the
Story of My Life, Casanova tells us that his existence “as a thinking person”
began only at eight years and four months: “At the beginning of August 1733,
the organ of my memory developed. . . . I remember nothing of what may have
happened to me before that time.”

Strange amnesia. Here we have a man of Memoirs who admits that his
memory has a black hole of more than eight years (hello, Freud!); who dis-
tinguishes the corporeal from the thinking being, thereby informing us that
he had to construct a confused memory for himself. Here, then, is his first
memory, his awakening, as if he had just landed on an unknown planet, fallen
from another galaxy, absurdly cast into this world: “I was standing in a corner
of the room, leaning toward the wall, supporting my head and keeping my
eyes fixed upon the blood that flowed copiously from my nose to the floor.
Marzia, my grandmother—I was her beloved—came to me, washed my face
with fresh water, and without telling anyone in the house took me in a gondola
to Murano. This is a very populous island a half-hour away from Venice.”

This child’s condition is desperate. They resort to the drastic measures of

the past; they consult the dark science of witches. Here’s one, in fact, sitting on
 30

a pallet surrounded by black cats. Giacomo must finally be born, or reborn.

There has to be a ceremony.

So the old witch takes this bloody child and locks him, dazed, in a trunk.
Then she launches into her big number: laughter, tears, cries, chants, blows
struck on the trunk-coffin. She gets him out, he is bleeding a little less, she
caresses him, undresses him, lays him on a bed, burns drugs, collects the smoke
in a sheet, wraps him in it, and gives him sugared pills with a pleasant taste.
After which she rubs the nape of his neck and his temples with an unguent “with
an agreeable odor.” Then she puts his clothes back on, predicts the decline of
his hemorrhage on the condition that he speak to no one about this, or else his
blood will empty out completely and he will die. Finally, she announces that
a charming woman will visit him the next night, but be careful, total silence.

Little Giacomo goes home and goes to bed, and he sleeps. “But waking a
few hours later, I saw, or thought I saw, coming down the chimney, a dazzling
woman in large panniers, clothed in a superb fabric, wearing on her head a
crown strewn with precious stones that seemed to sparkle with fire. In a majes-
tic and gentle manner, treading slowly, she came and sat on my bed. From her
pocket she took little boxes, which she emptied on my head while murmuring
some words. After a long speech, of which I understood nothing, she kissed
me and left the way she had come. And I went back to sleep.”

One could call this scene the Queen of the Night stunt. On so strange an
eight-year-old child, the effect will be very successful.

Giacomo bleeds less and less, his memory functions, he even learns to read.
In recalling this episode, he only notes that, whether dream, masquerade, or
hallucination, it had healing powers, especially because of the imposed silence
of death: “The remedies for the worst illnesses are not always found in the
pharmacy, and every day a phenomenon shows us our ignorance. There were
never sorcerers in the world; but their power has always existed with respect
to those whom they had the talent to make believe in them.”

Casanova will often play the sorcerer, astonished each time by the human
being’s desire to believe. Common sense is not so common.

For the time being, little Giacomo is dull. He is living apart, no one speaks
to him. They believe he has a “passing” existence. His destiny as a passenger
commences.
 31

After the rebirth with the witch, the discovery of lying.

His father is busy one day with some optical work. Giacomo sees “a large
diamond-cut crystal with facets” that fascinates him because the view of objects
is multiplied through it. He puts it in his pocket. His father wants it; Giacomo
slips it in his brother Francesco’s pocket, who’ll get beaten for this robbery. I
was stupid enough to tell my brother this story later, says Casanova; he has
never forgiven me, and he has seized every occasion for revenge.
Indeed.

Upon which, as if by chance, the father dies. Giacomo coldly notes the facts,
just as, later on, another departure, by his mother, will make his other brother
cry, but not him (what’s tragic about that?). Have people noticed that hyper-
sensitive individuals are not sentimental? And that sentimental individuals
are hardly sensitive? The current opinion claims the opposite. It’s the world in
reverse.

For all that, the hemorrhagic illness is not over. “I looked wild,” says Casa,
“my mouth always open. . . .” Doctors scratch their heads in bewilderment (we
too), but finally they decide he should have a change of air. Baffo insists on
this; he will accompany him to Padua with Zanetta, Giacomo’s mother, and
an abbot from the Grimani family.

They leave in a burchiello, a “little floating house.” Seeing the trees silently
slip by, Giacomo, for whom all this is new, concludes that the trees are mov-
ing. His mother sighs at his stupidity and tells him that it’s the barge that is
moving, not the trees. Giacomo understands, and his thoughts develop right
away: therefore it is possible, he says to his mother, that the sun also doesn’t
move, and that it is we who roll from West to East. The mother cries that he
is stupid, the abbot deplores his imbecility, but Baffo, the lubricious libertine
poet, embraces him with tenderness: “You are right, my child. The sun does
not move; be brave, always reason in consequence, and let them laugh.”

The mother and the abbot on one side (obscurantism). The scandalous poet
on the other (reason). I emphasize the “my child.”
Baffo continues to talk to Giacomo, paying no attention to the two other
accompaniers. He offers him the beginnings of a theory made for his reason,
purely and simply: “That was the first real pleasure I tasted in my life. Without
Mr. Baffo, that moment would have sufficed to debase my intelligence: the cow-
ardice of credulity would have affected it. The stupidity of the two others would
certainly have dulled the sharp edge of a faculty in me, by which I can’t say if
 32

I have gone very far; but I do know that to it alone do I owe all the happiness
I enjoy when I find myself face to face with myself.”

Few people feel that like the earth they are turning around the sun. And very
few have the audacity to think that they find their mothers stupid.

Giacomo Casanova was the idiot of the family. He will be its genius.
 6
“Those to whom age gives increasing subtleness and sweetness, as to a noble
vintage, also relive their amorous experiences in their thoughts.”

Nietzsche may have been thinking of Casanova when he wrote this sentence.
I could cite many others. Nietzsche liked Stendhal, hence Casanova.

Casa often describes his amorous experiences in alchemical terms, with

added flippancy and irony, of course. He is on the point of achieving the Grand
Œuvre, or else he is in too much of a hurry, he fails, he falls ill, he has to start
over with his maneuvers. The war of love (doing, speaking) is like a royal art,
a musical art.

In the end there is only one principle: follow the God.

The God is what appears, shines, sends a signal. Casa, with his desires, is
available. He has intuition, a good eye. If not here, it will be there. Or there.
He moves forward, through thunder and lightning.

Humans have trouble knowing how to deal with God. They can’t do with-
out him, they know he strikes where he wishes in spite of their calculations,
they dream about him, but they embellish him, they charge him with abstract
pronouncements, systems, smother him with relics or useless sacrifices, misun-
derstand him to his face, whereas he is as plain as day. Compare this to Freud’s
astonishment when Charcot whispers in his ear, at the Salpêtrière in Paris, that
with hysterics, it’s always the sex thing that is to blame. No doubt, Freud says
to himself, but why then does he never speak about it publicly? Right.

Take Bettina, for instance, one of the very young Giacomo’s loves. She is
intensely worked up over the thing, but they prefer to think she is crazy or

33
 34

possessed by a demon. They’re always exorcising her, without success; the devil
is really tenacious. Those are tiresome, ridiculous scenes. Young Giacomo,
informed by his readings and his own temperament, feels sorry for her. The
clergy gets involved in the phenomenon, that’s what it’s made for (the clergy
changes with time, but they always play the same part, which consists in speak-
ing against the physical evidence).

Giacomo is destined to the priesthood (he’s poor, social advancement may

come from it). But what does he have in common with this priest who cuts
his hair while he’s sleeping, censures a sermon he is supposed to give because
he quotes Horace; or later on, with that punctilious supervisor obsessed by
nocturnal encounters between boys and the “manustuprations” that follow?
Nothing.

In Padua he lives the free life of the students at the time, the “schoolboys”
in Villon’s sense, gamblers, quarrelers, liars, cheaters, and sometimes even
murderers.5 It is his second initiation, after the one by the witch (the third,
which one would expect to be more serious, was his affiliation with Freema-
sonry in Lyon in 1750, at age twenty-five). What counts above all for him is to
feel, to learn to read “the proud book of experience.” No, he won’t be a priest,
his feelings don’t lead him there. Become a lawyer? No, he has an “invincible
aversion” to the study of laws. We guessed as much: “Lawyering ruins far more
families than it supports, and those who die killed by doctors are much more
numerous than those who recover. The result is that the world would be much
less unhappy without these two clans.”

You would think you are reading Molière, and even Antonin Artaud: “If
there had not been doctors, there would never have been patients.”

Such a declaration would seem insane to a twentieth-century reader, espe-

cially an American. Doesn’t one constantly live in relation to one’s doctor and
one’s lawyer? As for Casanova, he is an outlaw in his own way, with ethics
supported by casuistry. It is possible to cheat if you are dealing with a fool (it
is even a duty). There is something necessary about ruses: “Deceit is a vice,
but an honest ruse is nothing but the mind’s prudence. It is a virtue. It does, I
admit, resemble roguery, but you have to accept that. He who does not know
how to exercise an honest ruse is a fool. This prudence is called cerdaleophron
in Greek. Cerda means fox.”

5. The poet François Villon lived in the fifteenth century and wrote about the rowdy life of
students at the time.
 35

It’s a wink to Ulysses the wise, the man of a thousand tricks (Casanova will
be a translator of the Iliad). In Latin, he would be the man of sollertia (from
the Greek holos and the Latin sollus, altogether; and ars, art). In short, you
have to be armed for the defense: “Everyone in this world tries to handle his
affairs as best he can and to learn weaponry not with the intention of killing
but to prevent being killed.”

Giacomo, after all, felt he had a “medical” vocation. He will mostly be his
own doctor, by resisting, sometimes with weapons in hand, the unconsciously
murderous precipitation of doctors (those, for instance, who want to cut off
his hand after a duel in Poland). Moreover, with his own eyes he had actually
seen the distracted incompetence of a doctor kill his father.

Not priest, not lawyer, not doctor. What, then? Writer, it’s better than all
three at once.

The God one follows is a God of desire. On to the battlefield, then, which
is the bed, and if possible with two girls. Plunging into intermediary states
between sleeping and waking to disarm reproof, here are Marton and Nanette
in bed with him. First one (the other, out of emulation and rivalry, will be
bolder): “Little by little I disenveloped her, little by little she opened up, and
little by little, through continuous and very slow though marvelously natural
movements, she put herself in a position from which she could not have offered
me another without betraying herself. I set about the work. . . .”

One studies situations and occasions, one acts accordingly. A “pretty farm
wife,” in a carriage, is afraid of the storm, and her husband is right nearby?
No problem, one covers her with a coat, one seats her on oneself, the driver
will pretend not to notice anything: “She asks me how I can defy thunder and
lightning with such villainy; I answer that thunder and lightning are in agree-
ment with me.”

God does not like superstition. Proofs, on this matter, may well be
innumerable.
God does not like superstition, but he can very well use it, and even liberti-
nage, to achieve his purpose. That is what the Chevalier de Seingalt, alias the
mysterious Mr. Paralis, will amply experience later on.
 7
Casanova is an excellent raconteur. That is his weapon. His interlocutors
listen, they are surprised, seduced, swept along. You read him, it’s the same.
Several times he mentions the effectiveness of his tales on his listeners; his
escape from the Leads becomes a bravura set piece dispensed throughout
Europe. In the face of adversity, telling the truth the way it happened (not all
of it, obviously, chaste ears must be spared) is a way to prevail. Especially, of
course, if one has a pleasant appearance. One finds allies, one pleases.

For a time, Giacomo plays at being a soldier. They first put him in a fort near
Venice. He escapes one night to beat up an insulter in the city. Impossible to
prove anything: during the day he took the precaution of simulating a sprain
and colic. A woman from Greece has burdened him with the clap? He is careful
not to infect his partners, he recovers, he finds another Greek woman, very
beautiful, with whom he caresses himself through a hole in the floor: “Our
pleasures, although sterile, lasted until dawn.” Once freed, he comes and goes,
he counts on whatever shows up. And something always shows up. “I smell the
odor of woman,” says Don Giovanni, while hypocritical prudes pinch their
noses. The height of insolence finds him even at Our Lady of Loreto, the famous
sanctuary (where Montaigne came to say his prayers): “I took communion in
the very place where the Holy Virgin gave birth to our creator.”
He is eighteen.
But here is Rome and its ecclesiastical corridors. The qualities needed to sur-
vive in this city (otherwise “one has to go to England”) are, according to him, the
following. One has to be “chameleonesque, supple, insinuating, dissimulating,
impenetrable, accommodating, often demeaning, falsely sincere.” One has to
“always pretend to know less than one knows, have only one tone of voice, be
patient, master of one’s physiognomy, cold like ice even if one is burning, etc.”
It’s being Machiavelli and Mazarin, but even more cynical, since the sexual col-
oration is present. “I don’t know if I am bragging or confessing about all these

36
 37

qualities,” says Casanova. “I was an interesting scatterbrain, a quite fine horse of

good breeding, though untrained, or badly trained, which is even worse.”

Donna Lucrezia—Lucretia—is probably his first passion. He starts the

ambush in the carriage, continues in the grass where snakes are crawling,
concludes in a garden on a grassy bank: “Standing face to face and serious,
looking only into each other’s eyes, we unlaced, we unbuttoned, our hearts
were palpitating, and our rapid hands hastened to calm our impatience. . . .
Our first combat made the beautiful Lucretia laugh, who admitted that genius,
because it has the right to shine everywhere, was out of place nowhere.”

Casanova uses her first name Lucretia very consciously (it’s the memory of
a rape, it’s one of the most beautiful paintings by the Venetian Titian).
This love for Lucretia did not prevent him from desiring a marquise, who is
the mistress of a cardinal. We are most certainly not in a Protestant country:
“She was pretty and powerful in Rome, but I couldn’t convince myself to crawl.”
He gives it a go on a terrace, but without success. That scene, however, leads
to the pope, Benedict XIV (people tend to forget that he was the dedicatee of
Voltaire’s play Mahomet), “a man of learning, witty, quite amiable.” Casa talks
to him and charms him: “I asked him permission to read all the forbidden
books, and he gave it to me in a benediction, saying he would send it to me
in writing for free; but he forgot.” (We therefore regret to say that we cannot
publish this explosive document here.)

Lucretia has a seventeen-year-old sister, Angélique. One night they sleep

in the same room, it’s an opportunity: “I think I have never undressed more
quickly. I opened the door and fell into Lucretia’s open arms, while she said to
her sister: this is my angel, be quiet and sleep.

“She couldn’t say more, because our mouths glued together were no longer
the organs of speech or the channel of respiration.”

As you will have gathered, the session will continue in the morning with
Angélique, who has only to turn over (she didn’t sleep a wink). And Lucretia
encourages her sister: “The fire of nature made Angélique deaf to any pain;
she felt only the joy of satisfying her ardent desires.”

Lucretia’s imperturbable conclusion: “I brought the light into my sister’s

mind. Instead of complaining, she must approve me now, she must love you,
and as I am about to depart, I leave her to you.”
 38

Such is Casanova’s flowery style. He can also be dry. His narrative is effective
because of the sexual precision and the metaphor that veils the pornography
(though not entirely). The reader is caught in the trap, he has to furnish cer-
tain physiological details himself. One of two things may happen: either he
knows what’s going on (and enjoys himself) or he has only a very vague idea
and is changed into a female reader (“you can tell everything, but not a word
too many”), and is thus kept in suspense. We are at the antipodes of Sade.
Repetition is the law of the genre, but Casanova’s code is never criminal (on
the contrary, it’s the pleasure he procures that interests him). He is doing white
magic, not black magic (death and necrophilia have no part in his life; he is
the opposite of a “Satanist”). At times, you would think it’s the Harlequin col-
lection subverted by the deviation in the description itself. A very subtle art
that counts on the ineluctable persistence of the clichés about love.

For crudeness and violence to “age” well requires genius (Sade’s or Céline’s).
Casanova has an immense picaresque talent, another form of genius. Everything
seems calm, but in the next room, unbeknownst to all, two sisters and a man are
“bringing the light” to each other. What happened? That. The same thing as noth-
ing. And not nothing, naturally, but the essential, as though nothing happened.

All of Casanova could be called Précis of Clandestinity.

“As a consequence of these reflections, I devised for myself a system of reserve

in my conduct as well as my speech, which may have made people think me suit-
able for affairs of some consequence, more than I could imagine myself to be.”

Illusion is necessary, appearances have a right to deceive. A new truth

emerges, always.

Example: this magnificent young castrato with the black eyes, met at Ancona:
Bellino (what a name!). Is it a boy, as he obstinately claims, or isn’t it more likely
a girl? Casa tells us he wants it to be a girl, but arranges to make us doubt his
true desire. This episode about a transvestite to be unmasked is going to last
a fairly long time, and here is where the narrator’s skill as a novelist shines: he
is asking the question of questions, the one that is at the source of all curiosity
(hello again, Freud!), and he defers the answer as much as possible. Here too
the reader, male or female, has to situate him/herself as a function of her/his
own uncertainties: what sex is the other really? And I?

Bellino has two young sisters, Cécile and Marine. They are accompanied by
a devout mother whom Providence rewards all the better now that Giacomo is
 39

looking after them, nocturnal money won by pleasure. That said, it is Bellino
he wants, but not without first being dispassionately assured of his sex. Bellino
promises to satisfy his curiosity but constantly puts off the inspection until
the next day. Some spice on the side: the waiter at the inn is a male prostitute
who offers himself to Casa; he obviously refuses, all the while praising Italian
tolerance on this subject, in comparison to English repression at the time.

Refusals, rejections, reticence excite the libertine—it’s well known—instead

of discouraging him. Everything is always so easy that the obstacle, far from
being dissuasive, works like an aphrodisiac (this will cost Casa dearly later, in
London). The more Bellino keeps his (or her?) distance, the more desire grows.
The Story is onto a sure thing.

Let’s spice up the adventure some more: here is the beautiful Greek woman he
had been groping earlier. Now she is in a boat in the port, the wife of a Turkish
merchant captain (to whom she was sold). Casa makes some purchases with
Bellino, who has no idea that those two know each other: “She throws herself
upon me and, pressing me against her bosom, says to me, here is the instant
of Fortune. No less courageous than she, I sit, adjust myself to her, and in less
than a minute, I do to her what her master hadn’t ever done in five years.”

All that in front of Bellino, of course, while the husband is out for five min-
utes. He would have needed one more minute, says Casanova.

All the same, he is happy. Here is the founding philosophy (unfortunately not
widely shared at all) of the Story of My Life at this time: “Those who say that life
is only a conglomeration of misfortunes mean that life itself is a misfortune. If it
is a misfortune, then death is good fortune. Those people did not write in good
health, their pockets full of money, with contentment in their souls, just after
holding in their arms Céciles or Marines, and being sure of having others later. It
is a race of pessimists who can only have existed between scoundrel philosophers
and roguish or atrabiliar theologians. If pleasure exists, and if one can enjoy it only
when alive, life is therefore good fortune. Aside from that, there are misfortunes;
I am one to know it. But the very existence of these misfortunes proves that the
mass of goodness is the stronger. My happiness is infinite when I find myself in
a darkened room and I see light through a window facing a vast horizon.”

Bellino, that admirable boy so like a pretty girl, still refuses a perquisition. To
his great annoyance, Casanova is transformed into a pesky policeman. Penis
or not penis? Such is the question by which the Story of My Life leads us up the
garden path, with a very conscious orchestration. Most of the time people forget
 40

this art of composition in Casanova. They look for the “erotic” passages, make up
anthologies; they probe his so-called weaknesses or his illnesses; they endow him
with a retroactive unconscious that corresponds to the frustrations he unveils
in us; they take no account of his demonstrations, his gradations; they evacuate
History (with a big H and a little h) from the Story. They act as though the society
he describes is not also the society of all time. As if women, for instance, were not
always more or less detained and confined in the ignorance of their own bodies
(with a few exceptions, always the same ones). After the corset of religion, mar-
riage, chancy reproduction, aren’t they further confined in the requirements of
beauty, of the permanent spectacle, of compulsory genetic control? Obscurantism
changes its clothes, not its purpose: to control.

That is one of the reasons why Casanova, in the general confusion, needs
Providence. He doesn’t hide it, all the while recognizing that his conduct is
at the very least unregulated: “Those who adore Providence independently of
everything can only be of a good sort, although guilty of transgression.”

Even robbers in the time of Horace, for instance. Providence or Fortune,

either word will do. A throw of the dice can abolish chance. What is decisive
is the encounter, including with oneself.

While groping Bellino more or less against his will, Giacomo has felt some-
thing. An indubitable protrusion. A monstrous clitoris? Maybe. He wants to
carry this “incendiary illumination” to the end. Riding in a carriage with the
castrato, he begs him to lift the veil at last (negotiations, digressions, actions
often take place in the movement of a carriage). If Bellino is a man, Casa says
he will let it drop. If he is a girl, nature will take care of the rest. Bellino points
out to him, quite intelligently, that nothing is certain and that he, Giacomo,
could on the contrary come down on the side he seems to reprove so categori-
cally and become a man loving another man.

The situation is exacerbated. He has to be done with it.

Well, to the great disappointment of the Prince de Ligne as well as of X, Y, or

Z, Bellino is actually Teresa. She is wearing a prosthesis, which a great castrato
musician taught her to attach. She shows the thing to Casa, she gives herself to
him, his pleasure is complete (understandable, after such a long preparation).
It is at this point that the old narrator writing in Dux specifies that “the visible
pleasure that I gave always composed four-fifths of mine.” Interesting admission.
 8
So Casanova composes, he is a philosopher whose boudoir is everywhere.
In counterpoint, he is always telling us what negative forces he encounters:
stupidity, fanaticism. Stupidity, he says, is worse than meanness. Meanness can
be punished and corrected, but stupidity stupefies, it takes your breath away.
Such as his cleaning woman, who has just thrown out an entire chapter of his
manuscript because the papers she saw on his table were used, crossed out.
She left the blank paper. He has to start over.

Are people mean because they are stupid or stupid because they are mean?
You could change your mind about it three times a day (after all, his cleaning
woman was maybe meaner than Casa thought).

Besides, writing is inherently diabolical. Someone who writes all day long
is doing magic, that’s for sure. When you add characters that can’t be under-
stood, the inquisition kicks in. Casa is on a boat, a storm rages, a priest on the
bridge exhorts the sailors to pray and to repent their sins. Casa gets a kick out
of contradicting him, saying there is nothing demoniacal about the phenom-
enon. Challenged, the priest calls him an atheist; the crew is superstitious, and
they’re planning to throw the atheist into the sea. Casa has to fight back (he
fights like this from time to time, with lucidity and courage). After which the
priest burns a parchment that Giacomo has bought from a Greek, which can
only be an infernal grimoire. The proof: it curls up in the flames.

“The parchment’s supposed virtue was to make all women fall in love with
the man who had it. I hope the reader will have the goodness to believe that I
gave no credence to any sort of philter and that I had bought the parchment
for a laugh.”

41
 42

You can see that Casanova writes for a future reader freed from all super-
stitions. Does such a reader exist today? I doubt it. Will he exist tomorrow?
Nothing could be less certain. For that to happen, religious limitations would
have to cease, and one cannot perceive their end as of yet (not even among
scientists or convinced rationalists). And just as Proust discovers sadism and
snobbism from top to bottom in the society of his time, so Casa underscores
the persistence of chimerical illusions at all levels of society. Some believe in
the devil, others are seeking the philosopher’s stone. The only difference is in
the more or less modulated use of sexuality. But how bizarre—it’s a sexuality
that doesn’t know its own sexuality.

In Corfu, there is a very wise Turk, Yusuf. He naturally thinks that Islam is
the best religion and that Venetian Catholicism, with its bread and wine, is a
local joke. The Quran is more universal, that much is obvious, and to convince
this lost traveler, Yusuf offers him his fortune and his daughter, on the condi-
tion, of course, that he learn Arabic and become a Muslim. Become rich, why
not, but getting married and changing religion do not enter into our passing
adventurer’s projects.
The veil or the chador, no. The only lubricious note in this episode is a
masturbation session with an accomplice while observing, from their hiding
place, naked young women bathing in the moonlight.

But the veil is also internal. Madame F., for example, obstinately rejects Gia-
como’s desires. Now he’s a bashful lover, a troubadour, a morose Cherubino:
“The lover who does not know how to grab fortune by the hair is lost.”

The more he desires, the more he is punished, classic cycle. He has to pretend
to be sick to get a bit of attention. And it works. Women like to nurse, it’s their
tendency. Madame F. grants him her mouth (and here the clichés abound:
“nectar,” “divinity,” etc.). Casa when frustrated becomes almost tedious. At last
there are some fleeting caresses, fingers that go where they shouldn’t. Then stop:
“My dear friend, we were about to damn ourselves.” We suppose the reader is
familiar with these incidents in the alarmist style.

When he is vulnerable like this, Casa generally succumbs to the venomous

charm of a courtesan. He gets infected by a certain Melulla. It’s almost as if he
looked for microbes to refresh his spirits. It’s done. Well, he won’t be a soldier,
either. Return to Venice—as a violinist.
 9
It’s the great turning point.
After a period of various disturbances with friends as disorderly as he (fright-
ening the bourgeois of Venice at night), luck smiles on him. Its name: Bragadin,
a patrician in his fifties, a bachelor. The occasion: Bragadin has an attack of
apoplexy while getting into a gondola. Giacomo happens to be there, he takes
charge, takes him back to his palace, prevents people from taking bad care of
him, turns himself into a doctor, takes it seriously. Fortune guides him.

“Now I have become the doctor of one of the most illustrious members of
the Venetian Senate.”

A quid pro quo emerges. Bragadin, with his two friends Dandolo and Bar-
baro, is into “abstract sciences,” in other words, a passion for esoterics. And
yet all three are religious, austere, ascetic, very unfriendly to women (that was
a good bet). This young Casanova has risen like an angel, he is surely more
knowledgeable than he seems, perhaps he is being sustained by a supernatural
force. Bragadin asks the question.

“At that moment, in order not to hurt his vanity by saying he was mistaken, I
made use of a bizarre expedient and, in the presence of his two friends, confided
falsely and insanely that I possessed a numerical calculus by which, when I wrote
a question and changed it into numbers, I would receive, also in numbers, a
response that told me everything I needed to know and that no one in the world
could have told me. M. de Bragadin said it was the key of Solomon.”

So there you have it. Casa declares that he received his “numerical calcu-
lus” from a Spanish hermit, but it hardly matters, the others want nothing so
much as to believe him. His new life as an inspired prestidigitator has begun.
His “cabala,” which consists in rapidly transforming letters into numbers and
inventing, almost blindly, a reversion of numbers into words, is actually based

43
 44

on a strenuous exercise of memory. Here we are at the heart of Casanova’s ner-

vous system, in his mental gymnastics, his laboratory of metamorphoses. As
if the incessant skirt-chasing and gambling are preparations for fundamental
psychological activity, for the penetration characterizing a medium.

The Key of Solomon is a book of magic that teaches how to control spirits from
hell and elementals (gnomes, undines, sylphs, salamanders). It was printed in
Hebrew, then Latin; Goethe mentions it in his Faust. Casa has read other books,
to be sure, and they will be seized at his house later on at the time of his arrest.
He is borrowing particularly from Agrippa von Nettesheim.6 But mainly he has
understood that the demand for magic is general and that he has within him
something, an “occult power,” that meets the demand. He has sudden inspira-
tions, inexplicable movements of intuition, he feels a magnetic power (for good
reason). We also understand why, in making “lay” use of his numerical opera-
tions, he will be interested not only in the limited play of his power but also in
its public extension: the lotto, the lottery, all sorts of other schemes. Casa is a
structuralist before the fact. Thus he conceived a very bold international proj-
ect, a “grammatical lottery,” capable of providing a source of both State income
(what State doesn’t need money?) and bank exchanges, but also a sort of “school”
developing democratic aptitudes for writing and reading.

Prophetic Casanova. Don’t we constantly see popular television programs

with numbers, letters, spelling, a wheel of fortune, dictionary questions, frenzies
of culture?

In this, too, the power of writing. Casa is in contact with a genius, a demon
or an angel. His name is Paralis—paradise, lyre, lily—and he appears in the
writing itself. You are written without knowing it, it’s written, it gets written;
spirits express themselves in numbers, but that can be translated into oracles,
even into verses. The patricians can’t believe their eyes and ears. Since every
question, when well formulated, is already an answer, it suffices to organize the
perspective (the pyramid shape isn’t random). Unheard-of truths, unsuspected
by the magician himself, rain down. Casa admits it. He replies just about any-
thing at all, and yet the trick is turned: it’s not at all anything at all.

This Casanova is a living treasure. He becomes Bragadin’s “son,” the Hiero-

phant of the palace, paid, lodged, fed, and laundered. A violin player without
a future, now he is a lord.

6. Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) was a German magician, alchemist, theologian, astrolo-
ger, and occultist.
 45

Giacomo is very conscious of his fraud, but what’s most astonishing is that
he describes it, which no charlatan has ever done and will ever do after him.
He explains it quite naturally: “I made the finest and the noblest decision, the
only natural one: to put myself in a position to never again lack for my needs.”

In other words: I am poor, I have a gift, I exploit it so I can live as I like;

I could have done worse, like many others, and ruined my protectors. Or
rather, more subtly: humanity believes and will always believe in fairy dust,
and the most dangerous charlatans are perhaps those who tell you that it can
free itself from this drug. The dust changes form, the fairy, no. A philosopher
should know that and carry on regardless. Who said the Enlightenment was
optimistic? That would be failing to read Voltaire or propagating Homais’s
falsification of him.7

The patricians are a contradiction—wise and yet credulous? Nothing surpris-

ing about this fact. Everyone (except Casa) will nevertheless be astounded by
this unnatural association: “They all-heavenly, I all-worldly; they very severe
in their mores, I addicted to the greatest libertinage.”

The good life at last.

A portrait of the artist and gambler by himself: “Rich enough, gifted by

nature with an imposing exterior, a determined gambler, a big spender, a great
and always trenchant talker, not at all modest, intrepid, running after pretty
women, supplanting rivals, recognizing as good company only that which
amused me, I could only be hated.”

Objectivity.

“What forced me to gamble was a feeling of avarice; I liked to spend, and

I regretted it when it wasn’t gambling that had supplied the money for my
spending. I felt that money won at the gaming tables had cost me nothing.”

Lucidity, frankness.

“People are astonished that there are devout villains who implore their saints
and who thank them after the success of their villainy. They are wrong. This
sentiment can only be good, because it wages war against atheism.”

7. In Madame Bovary, the pharmacist Homais exemplifies everything Flaubert detested about
the bourgeoisie.
 46

Insolence, humor.

Casa tells us that old Bragadin, in his youth, “was madly extravagant about
women, who were also mad about him.” He also “gambled and lost a lot.” He is
“handsome, smart, facetious, and of the sweetest disposition.” He is therefore the
ideal father for this adoptive son of twenty-one. All the same, this protective father
reasons with “a bizarre mixture of worldly politics and false metaphysics.” Well,
let’s not complain: he loves his Casa, forgives him everything, looks the other
way, pays his gambling debts. The son continues his adventures, his predominant
passion remaining the young debutante. Here’s one right now, Christine, helped,
enlightened, seduced, and then married by her seducer to another. Casa likes
those amicable arrangements. Everyone is happy, the comedy continues.

But Giacomo overdoes it (he’s quick to be bored). For instance, to get revenge
on someone, he cuts off a dead man’s arm and puts it one night in the arms of
the sleeper, who nearly dies of fright. It’s a delicate case, people are murmuring.
Best to go spend some time elsewhere.

“Follow the God” requires a great many detours. Some clowning? Okay.
One time he traffics in a fake relic, the rusted knife with which Saint Peter was
supposed to have cut off the ear of one of the servants of the grand priest. All
he has to do is manufacture a sheath coming from that time period, and the
object works. Another time, a peasant is searching for a treasure buried on his
property. No problem, he’ll find it by a magic trick, all the more because the
peasant has a pretty daughter with a charming name, Javotte. On the pretext
of some purification ritual, he’ll have her take a bath, after which he pulls out
all the stops: a circle on the ground, conjuration of spirits, abracadabra, storm,
lightning, etc. (Lightning actually does strike, and it’s one of the rare moments
when Casanova admits he is afraid.)

This is all idiotic, and it doesn’t measure up to love. Love, therefore, comes
forward. And love, as one might expect, is French, even provençal. Is it a man?
It looks like it. But no, you have again been fooled; here is “an unkempt, laugh-
ing figure,” a woman of wit. Also beautiful, and from an excellent family. What
could she be doing traveling the roads disguised as a professional gambler, in
the company of an old officer?

Inflamed, Giacomo dreams of her, thinking he isn’t dreaming, he is “in love

to the point of perdition.” You will have recognized Henriette, a quite real and
enigmatic person who has fascinated the Casanova specialists.
 47

“What a night! What a woman, this Henriette whom I loved so much! Who
made me so happy!”

A self-censure here. Modesty. No physical details. He is totally submerged,

subjugated. The magician is magified. Casa’s Sequere Deum has just found its
equal in the Virgilian motto of Henriette and her family: Fata viam invenient,
fate guides our life.

Social class differences have a large effect, even more so Henriette’s culture
and intelligence. An aristocrat turned adventurer for a season, she will soon be
returning to her rank and her proprieties. They settle in Parma, where Casa reg-
isters under the name of his mother, Farussi—no more need be said. Henriette
had only men’s clothes; he dresses her luxuriously as a woman and considers
her his wife. At that time, Parma was awaiting the arrival of the bride of the
infante Duke Felipe, Louise-Elisabeth, eldest daughter of Louis XV, known as
Madame de France. The city is full of French and Spanish people. The climate
is one of French intoxication. “Those who believe one woman is not enough
to make a man happy all the twenty-four hours of a day have never known a
Henriette.”

They talk, they laugh, they enjoy themselves. Henriette philosophizes about
the perfection of happiness: “A man cannot be happy unless he recognizes
himself as such, and to recognize himself he must be in a state of calm.” What a
dream: a woman who advocates calm. Order, beauty, luxury, calm, voluptuous-
ness. So Casa exclaims: “Happy the lovers whose wit may replace their senses
when they are in need of rest!” Good counsel for all time, but rarely realized.

This mixture (modesty, gaiety, levity) seems new for Giacomo. It reaches its
culmination one evening when Henriette surprises him by playing the cello like
a virtuoso. A woman on the cello—that was forbidden by the convent, because
of the indecency of the position. This time it is too much. He is overwhelmed
on hearing her, he runs into the garden, he weeps. The love doctor is also the
musician doctor. Too often people forget that amour libre, free love (wonderful
expression), is also the title of a piece of French music.

Henriette has to go home. Giacomo accompanies her as far as Geneva. It’s

a sentimental adieu, with a strangely detached letter in which she asks him
not to attempt to see her again. There is also the famous inscription scratched
into a window with a diamond: “You will also forget Henriette.” No, he won’t
forget, nor will she (she’ll keep an eye on him from afar). Nevertheless, here
 48

he is, well and truly abandoned, hence depression, another venereal disease,
and even a brief attack of devout conversion. The writer in Dux concludes,
in the course of his narrative: “I find that my life has been more happy than
unhappy, and after having thanked God for this, cause of all causes and sover-
eign director of all combinations, though we don’t know how, I congratulate
myself.”

Casanova’s God is the following: one thanks him, and then one congratulates
oneself.

Syphilis is treated with mercury, devoutness with irony.

Henriette was the messenger from France, a character in the manner of The
Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal publishes his novel in 1839, forty-one years
after Casanova’s death). The full visa for France (at last) comes first via Lyon
and Freemasonry: “There is not a single man in the world who is capable of
knowing everything; but every man should aspire to know everything.”

The results of this affiliation can be observed in Casa’s later encounters, even
if many intrigues remain obscure. In the case of the Duchess of Chartres, with
whom he will cabal, there is no doubt. For the time being, we are immersed
in the discovery of the Paris of Louis XV, who “was great in everything and
would have had no defects if flattery had not obliged him to have some.” When
Giacomo writes these lines, he doesn’t mean that he is a monarchist. In reality,
he isn’t anything. His position at the end of his life, disgusted as he is with the
excesses of the Terror, is to wonder if the sometimes enlightened despotism of
a king is not preferable to a popular despotism that chops off heads. The ques-
tion remains open. But for him, in Paris, the moment (he is twenty-five) is that
of the Opera, the offstage maneuvers, the bordellos (for example, the excellent
one in the Hotel du Roule). Louis the so-called Well-Beloved sets the tone with
his Parc-aux-Cerfs (stag parks), which the world’s cinema still likes to fantasize
about. Little girls of thirteen are exchanged, which would make people scream
criminal pedophilia today. Is the young Marie-Louise O’Murphy the famous
model of the Boucher painting? In any case, under the king’s keeping, she will
soon give birth to a bastard.

But Casa’s first stay in Paris seems only marginally significant. The Duchess
of Chartres, libertine and esoteric, consults him and has him treat her (she has
venereal pustules on her face but doesn’t want to follow a course of treatment).
Casa impresses her with his pyramids and his angel, and he manipulates her
 49

adroitly. He says the duchess, interrogating his Oracle, “found truths that I
didn’t know I possessed.”

Fine, but now he has to decamp once again, toward Dresden (experienced
but cold professional prostitutes), then Vienna. “Everything in Vienna was
beautiful, there was a lot of money and a lot of luxury, but a great difficulty
for those devoted to Venus.”

Who is waging war against Venus? A man? No, a woman. Empress Marie-
Therese drives the repressive delirium to the point of creating a special police,
including “chastity commissioners” [sic]. She has prostitutes and adulterous
women deported, and even women unaccompanied in the streets (otherwise
they must have a rosary in their hands to prove they are going to mass). Round-
ups are sent to an unhealthy place, Temesvar, now Timisoara in Romania (of
recent sinister memory). In compensation, gambling becomes more wide-
spread, but it will also be the object of sanctions by the Queen of the Night.

It is in Vienna that Giacomo seriously comes to grips with death for the first
time. He has indigestion, he is very ill, a doctor absolutely wants to bleed him,
he senses that this intervention will be fatal, he refuses. The doctor insists and
is about to prick him by force. Casa has just enough energy to grab one of his
pistols on his night table and shoot the doctor. He gets better by drinking water,
and he notes: “I went to the Opera, and a lot of people wanted to be introduced
to me. They regarded me as a man who had defended himself from death by
shooting off a pistol.”

Sexual repression and death-dealing doctors? The Story of My Life is composing

again. Philosophy is proved by narrative. And the narrative is existence itself.

In the meantime the news arrives: his “disorders” are forgotten, he can return
to Venice. He arrives home: “I was eager to take up my old habits again, but
more methodically and with more reserve. In the room where I slept and
wrote, I had the pleasure of seeing my papers veiled by dust, a sure mark that
for three years, no one had entered there.”

“Dust is my friend,” said Picasso.

We see our adventurer, his heart going a bit fast, open his door, look at his
bed, his desk, his notebooks, and verify, with the tips of his fingers, the dust.
That is what the Spectacle wants to avoid at all costs: the representation of a
young, courageous, free, moving Casanova.
 10
She’s fourteen. Today we know that her name was Caterina Capretta. She is
going by in a carriage near Casa on a road, the carriage tips over, he rushes to
her, helps her up from her spill, and for an instant glimpses under her skirts
“all her secret marvels” (the sentence censured by Professor Laforgue, if you
recall).

She is the famous C. C., who, along with the no less famous M. M. (Marina
Maria Morosini), is going to be one of the stars of this grand opera that is the
Story of My Life.

Let me note in passing that the identity of M. M. was the object of much
impassioned research on the part of Casanovists, and that it was established
only in 1968 (the coincidence of this date enchants me).

M. M. and C. C. are soon going to be together in the convent of XXX. He

chose to write these names with these letters. Let’s cabal a little like him:
M.M.C.C.X.X.X.

Perhaps the Story of My Life will be readable, openly so, only in 2230.
Let us not forget that Stendhal hoped to be read around 1936.

C. C. has a very dubious brother, P. C., who sees right away the profit he can
make from a connoisseur of secret marvels (Giacomo is twenty-eight, he is of
marrying age). So he wants to sell his sister to this suitor. Rather stupidly, for
example, he tries to push her into debauchery. Casa, who is taken for a novice,
is furious and reacts as a defender of innocence. His incipient love for C. C.
becomes “invincible.”

He takes his charming little friend to a garden on an island east of the

Giudecca. They run around in the grass, they have races with little caresses for

50
 51

prizes, nothing serious, she’s a child: “The more I discovered her innocence,
the less could I determine to take possession of her.”

Get married? Why not, after all? But let’s get married in the face of God,
that insatiable voyeur. That will add spice to the scene. They then return to
an inn on the island, it’s the Monday of Pentecost. In bed: “Ecstatic with an
overwhelming admiration, I was devouring everything I could see with fiery
kisses, rushing from one spot to another and unable to stop anywhere, pos-
sessed as I was by the cupidity of being everywhere, regretting that my mouth
had to go less rapidly than my eyes.”

Here Giacomo is throwing ten clichés at us, but they are well-studied clichés,
since they serve to describe him as a voracious animal and predator. (And it
is clear to what extent the classic thesis about a Casanova as nothing but a
plaything of women’s desire is false, although quite motivated to keep itself
alive.)
Let’s be serious. It’s a matter of taking her virginity, a question that shocks
a lot of mothers (even feminist ones) and makes men hesitant or else convul-
sively jealous: “C. C. became my wife like a heroine, as any girl in love should,
because pleasure and the fulfillment of desire make even pain delicious. I spent
two full hours without separating myself from her. Her continual swoons made
me immortal.”

We read that right: no “little death,” but well and truly a sensation of immor-
tality. God is obviously in on the game. A Greek god, no doubt, that would
not be surprising. At the same moment, in Venice, the solemn ceremony was
taking place in which the Doge, on the Bucentaur, departs for the open sea to
wed it (a perilous exercise, the weather mustn’t turn bad).
A little later, however, “Remaining as if dead, we went to sleep.”
And the next morning: “Nothing could have been more indiscreet than my
angel’s eyes. Darkly shadowed to the point where it looked like she had received
blows. The poor child had sustained a combat that had positively made her
into another person.”

Here then is Giacomo, “married” (only before God, thank god). Of course
the novice immediately goes to extremes and wants to get pregnant (she will
be, but not for long). In the continuation of their session, they have together
attained “the accord of this death that is the source of life” (a philosophical
formula). The pimp brother smells a good deal, borrows money from Casa but
ends up in prison for debts. Giacomo, as serious as a pope, asks his protector
Bragadin to intercede for his real marriage. Fortunately, C. C.’s father becomes
 52

angry and sends his fourteen-year-old daughter to wait for a decent age in the
convent of Saint Mary of the Angels.

Casa is interrupted in the midst of his idyll. All for the good, since another
novel is starting, the title of which could be The Angels of Murano. It is one
of the most famous passages in the Story of My Life, which contains at least
twenty excellent novels and a hundred novellas, each one better than the last.

A change of scenery. They no longer see each other, they write clandestine
letters, carried by special bearers. They are in despair, they dream of an abduc-
tion, but it’s difficult. Time takes on another dimension, since surveillance
at the convent “measures time at the weight of gold.” Which doesn’t prevent
certain accommodations: “She reported, in a most amusing style, that the
most beautiful of all the nuns in the convent loved her madly, that twice a day
she gave her lessons in French, and that she had forbidden her to have any
acquaintance with the other women. . . . She said that when they were alone,
she gave her kisses that I would have been right to be jealous of, if she had
been of a different sex.”

The reader knows Diderot and maybe Sade. He has already jumped to conclu-
sions, but he will be wrong. This is the affair in which Casanova shows himself
the most inventive and the most ambiguous. In what is about to happen, we will
never exactly know if he masters the rules of the game or not. Probably both.

It was to be expected. C. C. has a miscarriage (unless it’s actually an abortion).

At the time, in a convent, even one adapted to secular life, this is not a minor
incident. From now on, the only messages Casa receives are the consequences
of his little mistress’s hemorrhage, from his “wife” who still considers him
her “husband.” They send him packages of linens soiled with blood, a strange
present (blood: the theme of his entry into existence). A go-between brings
all that to his home: “I shuddered when this good woman showed me, mixed
in with the blood, a little shapeless mass.”

As a child, Giacomo had himself been this shapeless mass, bloody and stupid.
Since then he has what could be called a body of borders, always very attentive to
its excretions and its fragile envelope. He would not have such pleasure otherwise.
Gambling, libertinage, writing form the apparatus of this unstable porosity.

Giacomo now goes to mass in the chapel of the convent of the Angels, in
order to be seen by his beloved, who nearly died. What he sees, above the altar,
is an Annunciation depicting a Virgin with open arms. Soon his frequenting
 53

the services makes him “the enigma of the entire convent.” The nuns pretend
not to look at anything, but they see everything. They are very curious. In town,
Casa loses weight and is bored, even though he wins at gambling.

Hence the establishment of his casino near Saint Mark’s Square, a studio
in the style of the discreet patricians or the profligates of the time. Baffo has
described for us this type of “petites maisons” (as they used to say in Paris)
where one smells, from the entryway, the scents of lemons, oranges, roses,
violets, and where the walls are blanketed with lascivious paintings. Casanova
in his casino, a play on words: Casinovo.

His turn to be seduced now, literally.

As he is leaving the convent after mass, a nun, in a letter, proposes a ren-
dezvous. He can see her in the parlor of the convent or in a casino in Murano.
She can also go to Venice in the evenings.
M. M., still anonymously, has just arrived on stage. Naturally she is “the
prettiest of the nuns,” the one who is teaching C. C. French. Has the latter been
indiscreet? Giacomo does not want to believe it, and this possible blindness of
his is going to provide all the interest of this narrative, starting now.
He replies to the letter, chooses the parlor for fear of “the snare”: “I am
Venetian and free in all the meanings of this word.”
Casa has been selected solely on the basis of his physical appearance (at least
if C. C. has not spoken, which to us readers seems highly doubtful). He is not
easily astonished, but all the same: “I was very surprised by the great freedom of
these saintly virgins who could so easily violate their enclosure.” If they can lie to
such an extent, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t also lie to him, in accordance
with the unshakable war of the sexes. It is very easy to imagine M. M. confessing
little C. C., especially after the episode of the bloody linens. All this based on
learning the French language. The rest of the novel will confirm this hypothesis.

M. M. shows herself in the parlor. She is beautiful, rather tall, “white inclining
to pale,” “a noble, decided air, reserved and timid at the same time,” “a gentle,
happy physiognomy,” etc. Her hair can’t be seen for the moment (it is chestnut).
She has big blue eyes. C. C. is blonde with very dark eyes.
Her hands are particularly striking, and her forearms, “where no veins were
visible and, instead of muscles, there were hollows.”
She is twenty-two. She is plump.

He returns, she doesn’t come. He is humiliated, baited. He decides to give

it up: “M. M.’s face had left me with an impression that could only be effaced
by the greatest and the most powerful of abstract beings. By time.”
 54

Not to worry, everything is fine, the clandestine correspondence resumes.

At this point in the text there appears a personage whose identity we will soon
know: M. M.’s lover. Then she already has a lover?
“Yes, rich. He will be charmed to see me tender and happy with a lover like
you. It is in his character.”
Far from being discouraged, Giacomo’s ardor increases: “It seems to me
I have never been happier in love.” Poor little C. C.! To have such a faithless
“husband”! But wait, she will be back when the present opera wishes it.

Casa reasons coldly: the human being, as an animal, has three essential
passions, which are nourishment, the instinctive desire for coitus ensuring the
reproduction of the species with a premium of pleasure, and hatred prompt-
ing the destruction of the enemy. The animal is profoundly conservative. Once
endowed with reason, it may indulge in variants. It becomes gluttonous, volup-
tuous, and more intent on cruelty: “We suffer hunger the better to savor ragouts,
we put off the pleasures of love to make it more vigorous, and we suspend our
revenge to make it more murderous.”

Our adventurer is perfecting his education.

The Venetian nuns of the time constitute a famous hotbed of gallantry. A

large number of young women, not at all religious, are there “waiting.” Though
under surveillance, they can slip out at night if they have money and relations.
Wearing a mask is essential. They must return very early in the morning, with
complicit help. The gondoliers know this, and the State Inquisitors also. It’s a
matter of modulating the indecencies, no scandal, no waves. When the papal
nuncio arrives in Venice, for example, three convents are in competition to
provide him with a mistress. There is information in the air; that creates emu-
lation. One takes a nun the way one takes a high-class courtesan or a deluxe
geisha. Diplomats are interested, and that is the case with M. M.’s lover, since
he happens to be the ambassador from France, the Abbé de Bernis.

Bernis is a learned libertine (he appears in Sade’s Juliette). He is also a

minor poet, although an ecclesiastic (or because). He is rather handsome,
his pseudonym is “Belle-Babet.” Voltaire calls him Babet the Flower Maiden.
Voltaire (Memoirs): “It was then poetry’s privilege to govern States. There
was another poet in Paris, a man of breeding, very poor but quite amiable,
in a word the Abbé de Bernis, since then cardinal. He had begun by writing
verses against me, and later had become my friend, which was of no use to
him, but he had become Madame de Pompadour’s friend, and that was more
useful for him.”
 55

Such is M. M.’s lover, who will not be angry if she takes Casanova as a lover.
Bernis will soon be famous in all Europe for the treaty he is going to sign with
Austria, which directly attacks Frederick of Prussia. It is a kind of revenge,
because Frederick, as Voltaire malevolently reminds us, had written this line
of verse: “Avoid Bernis’s abundant sterility.”

Madame de Pompadour, as is well known, will directly intervene in the

signing of the treaty. Her shadow is thus “up there” somewhere in Venice. We
can understand Casanova’s enthusiasm for such a ceiling.

M. M., then, invites Casa to dine in the casino-studio furnished by Bernis

in Murano. This first time, all they do is flirt: “All I could do was continually
swallow her saliva mixed in with mine.”
The next time will be more penetrating. Giacomo is actually somewhat
surprised to see the place full of antireligious and erotic books. Moreover, the
beautiful, ardent nun is philosophical: “I began to love God only after I had
rid myself of the idea that religion had given me of him.”

That disc is worn out now, and I wonder what today’s declaration of a truly
libertine temperament might be. Perhaps this: “I began to love my sexual
pleasure only after I had rid myself of the idea that sentimental or porno-
graphic commercializing had given me of it. It is not easy to escape this new
opium. Positive vice requires a lot of discretion, refinement, taste. Come tomor-
row evening, and we will laugh at the general ugliness, the mafia, money,
the movies, the media, so-called sexuality, artificial insemination, cloning,
euthanasia, Clinton, Monica, Viagra, integrists (bearded or not), sects, and
pseudo-philosophers.”

Each historical moment has its transgressions. A libertine nun would hardly
be imaginable in our time (but you never know). In the eighteenth century,
on the contrary, the time of the glory of Catholicism, therefore of the Enlight-
enment (everything hinges on understanding this therefore), this apparent
contradiction could flourish unabated. Soon M. M. will propose to Casanova
to let her prelate-ambassador, hidden in an invisible closet, see him in action
with her. He is to play his natural part. They are both excellent actors. To the
point that at one moment Giacomo bleeds. They later learn that the future
Cardinal de Bernis was very pleased to have had, for his private viewing, this
pornographic live cinema.

The program that follows will not be long in coming. C. C., the little fourteen-
year-old marvel, has well and truly been “initiated into the Sapphic mysteries”
 56

(the very ones that will obsess the narrator of In Search of Lost Time). M. M. has
also introduced her to “great metaphysics,” and she has become a freethinker. As
for M. M., she doesn’t hesitate now to come to Venice in the evening and to show
herself, masked, with Casa at the Opera and in the gaming rooms. Moreover, they
are in the midst of Carnival, the tempo speeds up: “I spent two hours playing
all the little banks, running from one to the other, winning, losing, and acting
the fool in all the freedom of my body and my soul, sure of being recognized by
nobody, enjoying the present and scorning future time and all those who play
at maintaining their reason in the sad employ of predicting it.”

One could hardly be less protestant. Giacomo plays the fool, disguised as
Pierrot, but he is going to get a lesson in libertinage.
In principle, he has a rendezvous with M. M. at night. But C. C., dressed
like a nun, is there in her place. Pierrot is petrified. He cries a little. Bernis and
M. M., hidden voyeurs, are, of course, watching the scene. C. C. reasons with
him, explains that none of it is serious, that they both love him, and that this
joke is in reality a surprise gift. They thought to bring him pleasure, that’s all.
She’s cleverly preparing him for the following scenes.

Casa is no longer astonished. He lets things develop, reconciles with M. M.,

who invites herself to dine with him along with an unhidden Bernis. Anyway,
why not a supper for four, M. M., C. C., Bernis, and Casanova? Rendezvous
set, Bernis cancels at the last moment. Finally we are allowed to see the main
tableau: Casa and his two mistresses: “I compliment them on their mutual
attraction and see that they are charmed not to find themselves required to
blush about it.”

Together, they leaf through some erotic engravings, notably The School of
Women.8 Then action: “They began their labors with a frenzy like that of two
tigresses who looked like they wanted to devour each other.” (Remember the
intervention of Professor Laforgue’s scissors in this text.)

“All three of us intoxicated by pleasure, transported by continual furors,

we brought to waste everything visible and palpable that nature had given us,
vying to devour what we saw, and finding ourselves all three transformed into
the same sex in all the trios that we executed. A half-hour before dawn, we
separated, exhausted, weary, fatigued, sated, and humiliated to have to admit
it, though not disgusted.”

8. L’Académie des dames, written in French and published in Venice in 1690, was a book of
erotic writings by Nicolas Chorier.
 57

At that moment, who is controlling the game? M. M., to satisfy Bernis’s

desires? Bernis, to amuse himself? C. C., who can expect a social promotion
from Bernis? Casanova, who no doubt has the same expectation? The atten-
tive reader notices that, during the “frenzied” session, each of the two women
asks Giacomo not to “spare” her, which means they each have taken the risk of
becoming pregnant. Casa as a stallion at Bernis’s back? All of that, all of that.
With this quartet, over whom the image of Madame de Pompadour hovers,
we are truly in the heart of existence as a secret diplomacy.

Of course M. M. has told Bernis everything, and he also wants to enjoy

a trio with the two angels. Casa doesn’t like the idea, but, he says, they have
reasoned well, I owe them something, I am obliged to “swallow the pill” [sic].
Bernis obtains his mimetic session, and there will be another one in which
the M. M.–Casa couple will be on one side and the C. C.–Bernis on the other
(Bernis does not like to be seen in action). Bernis’s money circulates, the more
or less simulated swoons of the two girls also, as well as the “humid radical” of
the two men. There are preservatives (condoms), but they could be mistaken.
Is either one pregnant? It doesn’t seem so. Phew, the roulette was close.

It’s a good bet that this whole show began with C. C.’s miscarriage in the
convent. M. M. finds out, makes her talk, seduces her, sets up an active com-
petition with Casa, increases Bernis’s curiosity and his gifts, consciously or
unconsciously hopes to find herself pregnant like C. C. at the start of the plot,
whereas C. C., who hasn’t given up on a new attempt with Giacomo, no doubt
dreams of taking M. M.’s place with the ambassador.
Are the two men the dupes of this show? Not really. Nor are the girls. What
remains the most certain is the pleasure taken, and that is major.
It’s impossible to go further. The ending comes by itself: Bernis has to leave
for his new functions in Versailles, C. C. will marry a man outside the network,
the pretty and intrepid M. M. will disappear.

A carnival? Yes, but also a battle of powers.

As for Casa, who suspects nothing, a thunderbolt is about to land on his

head.
 11
Casanova has crossed an invisible line. A patrician nun (M. M., of the
powerful Morosini family), a foreign ambassador who is furthermore an
ecclesiastic, those are dangerous liaisons that concern State security. Who
is this amateur, this former violin player, son of actors, meddling in our
affairs? What does he know, exactly? What did he learn? Bragadin protects
him, granted, but he’s an old madman, victim of a charlatan, gambler, and
libertine without scruples. What more can we say about this troublemaker?
Atheist, there. A very good motive for indictment. The Most Serene Republic
knows how to defend itself.

Casanova has already noticed that a certain Manuzzi, a spy of the Inquisition,
is hanging around. One day, he asks him to lend him his magic books. The
storm is approaching, Bragadin in vain warns his adoptive son, advises him
to flee, nothing doing, Casa doesn’t consider himself guilty, he stays. Destiny
knows how to guide us? Follow the God? The cabalistic pyramids? The angel
Paralis? Silence.

On July 25, 1755 (he has just turned thirty), he is arrested by order of the
Tribunal: “My secretary was open; all my papers were on the table where I
wrote. . . .”

They immediately seize everything that is written or printed. Both The Key
of Solomon and The Porter of the Carthusians (an obscene book), as well as
Ariosto, Horace, Plutarch.9
No explanation, no judgment. Directly to the Leads (i Piombi).
Today we know that Casa was already condemned to five years in prison for
atheism. He was informed of nothing.

9. The anonymous Histoire de Dom Bougre, Portier des Chartreux is an erotic French novel
from 1741.

58
 59

His life seems broken, but it’s the opposite. His imprisonment, his interior
revolt, his escape will be like a redoubling of adventure and freedom for him.
The ways of Providence are impenetrable. The proof: God is protecting his
favorite atheist.

They lock him under the Leads from the end of July 1755 to November 1, 1756.
More than fifteen months. Five seasons in hell. It’s a very hard physical and moral
ordeal. He begins, he says, by “making water in large quantity.” That detail shocked
the women readers in Prague on the first publication of the story of his escape,
but that’s how he is, Giacomo; he has a body, a particular one, he observes it, he
examines it. Same thing for the locations, with a keen sense of detail. Orientation,
dimensions, more or less resistant materials, nothing escapes him. And in the
long preparation for his escape, he will show himself to be an excellent worker.

He is surrounded by rats, eaten by fleas. At first, locked in without food and

water, he remains standing for eight hours in a row without moving, leaning
against a small window. The roof is lead, hence extreme heat in summer and
glacial cold in winter. To stand his ground—probably, but how? By thinking.
First observation: “I believe most men die without having thought.”

Everything he recounts is exact. We have the jailer’s record of his food. He

says he can’t stand up straight; he is one meter eighty-seven. A handsome man
with a very dark complexion—“African,” says Ligne; “my dear Brownie,” M. M.
called him.

“I realized that a man imprisoned all alone and rendered incapable of occupy-
ing himself alone in a mostly dark place, where he sees and can only see once a
day the one who brings him food and where he cannot walk upright, is the most
unfortunate of mortals. To see himself in company, he desires hell, if he believes
in it. In that place I came to desire the company of an assassin, of a madman, of a
stinking sick man, of a bear. Solitude under the Leads is despairing; but to know
that, you have to have had the experience of it. If the prisoner is a writer, let them
give him a writing desk and paper, and his misfortune diminishes by nine-tenths.”

He asks to read. They give him The Mystical City of God by Sister Mary of Jesus
of Agreda (that will teach him to make boum-boum with nuns) and the work
of a Jesuit about the Sacred Heart.10 It’s an instance of humor as heavy-handed

10. Sister María de Jesús de Ágreda (1602–1666) was a Franciscan nun and author known for
reports of bilocation between Spain and New Mexico and West Texas in the seventeenth century.
Her life of the Virgin Mary was published in 1722.
 60

as proposing, later, that a Gulag prisoner meditate on Materialism and Empirio-

Criticism by Lenin. And if Casanova were put in prison today, the black humor
would be to want to reeducate him by making him study the complete works of
Pierre Bourdieu in depth, for example.11

“I read everything that the extravagance and heated imagination of an

extremely devout, melancholy Spanish virgin, shut up in a convent and hav-
ing ignorant directors and flatterers, could engender. All these chimerical and
monstrous visions were decorated with the name of ‘revelations.’ In love with
the Holy Virgin, her very intimate friend, she had received the order from
God himself to write the life of his divine mother. The information that she
required and that no one could have read anywhere had been furnished by the
Holy Ghost.”

The heat rises: “The sweat that filtered out of my epidermis streamed onto
the floor to the right and the left of my armchair, in which I sat completely
naked.”

The fleas, the permanent sweating, hemorrhoids, fever, and, on top of that,
debilitating mystical readings—why not, while they’re at it, a collection of
sermons by the Dalai Lama?
He asks them to sweep his cell, which is buried in dust: “I took advantage of
those eight or ten minutes to walk around violently; the rats, terrified, didn’t
dare show themselves.”

Still no word from the Inquisitors, and for a reason: total arbitrariness. “The
guilty person is a machine who does not need to be involved to cooperate in
the matter; he is a nail who needs only the stroke of a hammer to enter the
floor.” (The Moscow trials will take a step forward: the accused will cooperate
with their accusers by declaring themselves guilty.)

One day his cell trembles, a rafter sways. It’s an earthquake, actually the one
in Lisbon on November 1, 1755 (hello, Voltaire!). For a moment, Casa thinks
that the Doge’s Palace could collapse. He would be free among the rubble. It is
as a consequence of this vision that his single thought now becomes to escape
(he will do so exactly one year later).

“I have always thought that when a man gets it into his head to accomplish
any sort of project, and if he thinks only about that, he must succeed in spite of

11. Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and the author of Distinction (1979).
 61

all the difficulties. This man will become grand vizier, he will become pope, he
will upend a monarchy provided he starts early. But a man who has arrived at
the age scorned by Fortune no longer succeeds at anything, and without help
one cannot hope for anything. It’s a matter of counting on her and at the same
time of defying her reversals. But that is a most difficult political calculation.”

Fortune? Here she is, she appears in the shape of a bolt. A Fragonard libertine
is going to use a bolt to escape from prison—it’s surrealistic. He finds the thing
in a pile of debris in a corner of the hovel where he is let in for a brief walk. He
grabs it, starts to sharpen it, he works relentlessly (“the hollow of my hand had
become a huge wound”), little by little he transforms it into a stiletto or small
spear. He is already seeing where to dig in the floor. The exit must be there,
somewhere, in the defects of the wood.

From time to time they bring in cellmates, of whom he sketches savory and
cruel portraits. He has to control them, make them keep silent, sometimes
terrorize them. In fact, he has to pray because prayer turns away doubt and
despair and gives strength. An atheist who prays? He dares say so. He is putting
all the chances on his side.
But in the end, let’s dig that floor. On August 23, by persistence, Casa arrives
above the room of the Inquisitors. The way is open. But on the 25th, he is sud-
denly moved to another dungeon. They don’t send him to the Wells, fortunately
(that would have been the end), but rather higher up, even with a view onto
the Lido. They think they are doing him a favor. He has to start all over.

If he cannot get out through the floor, it will be through the ceiling. The
jailer, who has found the hole in the old cell, is afraid that Casanova will accuse
him of incompetence, also because he has used him, without his knowledge,
to fabricate a little lamp from salad oil and tinder. “Who helped you make all
that?” “You.” The scoundrel is afraid, that’s perfect. The regimen is suppler.
Perhaps a distant complicity, in the Council, has pleaded for a relative soften-
ing? They aren’t judging Casanova, they aren’t assassinating him, they aren’t
condemning him, like countless other poor wretches, to rot away down below
up to his waist in water, in an interminable agony. The ceiling, the ceiling,
there’s the exit.

The magic of writing and of books, always. Casa has a neighbor (Father
Balbi, a monk), a prisoner too, but then religion imposes. This Balbi reads. He
is willing to exchange books with the atheist next door. In the books, one can
hide messages, even entire letters. Still, one needs something to write with: “I
had let the nail of my little finger on my right hand grow in order to clean my
 62

ears, I cut it in a point, and I used it for a pen, and instead of ink I used the
juice of blackberries.”

He has to be cautious with this Father Balbi. He lays a trap in the correspon-
dence. It’s okay. So he can speak to him about the bolt, the “stiletto,” requesting
his complicity to dig a hole in the floor of his cell (through which he can pull
Casa) as well as his ceiling, which opens onto the roof (and from there, good
luck).

But how to pass the bolt to him? Good god, well of course, it’s in a folio
Bible, which includes the Vulgate and the Septuagint. The bolt in the binding
of the Bible lent to Father Balbi, impeccable. But the bolt sticks out a bit on
both sides. Idea: make a dish of macaroni for the next-door neighbor and have
the guard take it all, the macaroni preventing him from seeing the bolt sticking
out from the binding of the Bible.
The Bible, a bolt, a dish of macaroni: what freedom hinges on, you could
say.
So Father Balbi gets to work, floor and ceiling for him, ceiling for Casa. To
hide his work, the monk has asked for some pious illustrations to cover his walls.
The prison has become a kind of church where an odd sort of mass is being
prepared. A cell companion, a former spy, having been put in with Casa, he has
to terrify him with metaphysical speeches. Fortunately, he is as superstitious
as the devil. A traitor, but trembling with fear. That’s what he needs.
If he is not good, an angel will come and punish him, and besides, the Holy
Virgin can appear from one minute to the next.

And that works: “On October 16, at six in the afternoon, in the moment
where I was passing time by translating a Horatian ode” (Casanova’s dandyism)
“I heard steps above my dungeon and three little taps of a fist. . . .”
That is the agreed-upon signal with the burrowing monk.
Everything was decided upon in writing. He had to learn to write “the dark
way” for that, as well. See if you can write a translation of Horace using the
nail of your little finger on your right hand, with blackberry juice, in the dark.
Until now, Casa hasn’t spoken about cabalas or pyramids. It’s time. For
his prognostication, in answer to his own question, he has to choose a book.
Which one? Ariosto, whom he adores. He asks what will be the date of his
deliverance—in which canto of the Orlando Furioso is it indicated, in which
stanza, in which line.
Letters, numbers, calculation. Result: canto IX, stanza 7, line 1:
“Tra il fin d’Ottobre, e il capo di Novembre.”
 63

In other words: “Between the end of October and the beginning of November.”
That can only be the night from the 31st to the 1st. That is indeed the moment
when Casanova, replicating Dante, will exit the Leads to see the stars. God is
signaling to him in poetry or music (Venice is also the Orlando Furioso by
Vivaldi, which must be heard as sung by that sublime M. M. who is Marilyn
Horne).
We understand that it is really a matter of convoking a maximum of rescu-
ing magnetism: “I am recounting this because it is true and extraordinary, and
because if I hadn’t paid attention to it, I might not have escaped.”

The great night has come. Father Balbi pulls Casanova through the ceiling
of his cell. The roof above is open. It is eight o’clock in the evening. Giacomo
goes out, he sees the moon. Too much light. The strollers in Saint Mark’s
Square would see them. Better to act at midnight, but to do what? Complete
uncertainty.

Casa has prepared his rope. Sheets, towels, mattress, everything was used.
The most important are the knots. At weaver’s knots he is an expert: “In vast
enterprises there are elements that determine everything, and regarding which
the leader who deserves to succeed is the one who relies on nobody.”12

The monk Balbi is suddenly full of objections. Everything suggests he is

right. Escaping seems impossible, except by breaking one’s bones down below.
“He was not desperate enough,” Casa notes, “to defy death.”
They keep vigil. Giacomo takes advantage of this to write a very insolent
letter to the Inquisitors, which, in a master stroke, ends with a verse from the
117th Psalm in the Bible: “I shall not die, I shall live, and I shall sing the praises
of the Lord.”

And he takes pains to specify: “Written one hour before midnight, without
a light.”

But the hardest part remains—a performance of high acrobatics. That, says
Casa, is the moment when he has to be “audacious without imprudence.” He
crawls, studies the more or less rotting edge of the roof, sees a dormer win-
dow below from which he may be able to detach the grille with his bolt “with

12. “Weaver’s knot” is another name for a sheet bend, a kind of knot capable of hitching together
ropes of different dimensions.
 64

pyramidal facets.” He lets himself down with his rope, manages to open the
window, sends Father Balbi before him, maneuvers somehow with a ladder,
is seized by a cramp at the decisive moment, waits for it to go away, calculates
everything as a function of the art of levers and balances, nearly falls ten times,
and finally comes out into a sort of attic where he falls asleep, exhausted.

Casanova specialists have verified all of this, which reads like a miracle of
non-Euclidian geometry. You have to believe that the Great Architect, at that
precise moment, had his eyes more or less shut.

After breaking down several doors, the two accomplices arrive in the
Archives of the Palace, then in the Chancellery of the Duke, “the heart of
the State,” the offices where they keep the laws, decrees, ordinances. Are we
dreaming? No, it’s still God having fun. Nevertheless, soon they will have to
make a hole in the wall, going through which Casa painfully cuts his legs. He
is covered with blood. From there to the royal staircase, the “Giants’ Staircase”
(which everyone knows about from postcards).13 But the large doors are locked
and impassable. They will have to wait till morning and once again put them-
selves in God’s hands. While his companion laments, Casa opens the bag he
has taken care to keep with him and undertakes to simply change his clothes,
to make his entrance: “My appearance was that of a man who, after having
been to a ball, had been to a place of debauchery where they had messed up
his hair. The bandages visible at my knees were the thing that spoiled all the
elegance of my personage.”

Now to tempt the Devil: “Thus decked out, my fine hat with Spanish lace of
gold and white plumes on my head, I opened a window.”

In the courtyard of the Palace, “loungers” who happen to be there see him
and think that someone was shut in by mistake the night before. They go get
the guard, who opens the door. Casa has his stiletto-bolt and is ready to cut
the guard’s throat if he resists. But the guard is petrified. The two escapees go
rapidly out and then to a gondola, neither slowly nor at a run. Father Balbi
would like to go to a church, but Casa knows that they have to leave the terri-
tory of the Republic immediately.

They embark, are soon floating on the Giudecca: “I then looked at the whole
beautiful canal behind me and, seeing not a single boat, admiring the most

13. The Scala dei Giganti was so called because of two giant statues at the top, of Mars and
Neptune.
 65

beautiful day one can wish for, the first rays of a superb sun rising above the
horizon, the two young barcaroles who rowed with powerful strokes, and
reflecting at the same time on the terrible night I had just spent, on the place
where I had been during the preceding day, and on all the combinations that
had been favorable to me, the feeling that rises toward merciful god seized my
soul, animating the wellsprings of my gratitude, moving me with an extraor-
dinary power, and so much so that my tears suddenly opened the broadest
pathway to relieve my heart, which excessive joy had smothered. I sobbed, I
cried like a child being taken to school by force.”

The monk Balbi tries to calm him down, but he’s so inept at it (“this monk
was stupid, and his meanness came from his stupidity”) that he provokes a
convulsive laugh from Casa, to the point that he believes him mad.

Is it really the same Casanova who, much later, shortly before his death, in
the Précis of My Life, will say that the State Inquisitors put him under the Leads
for “just and wise” reasons? Is it the same one who, after his return to Venice,
will for a time be the “confidant,” which is to say the paid spy, for these same
Inquisitors? We have his denunciation reports; they are staggering.

In 1775: “The excesses of luxury and the women’s lack of restraint, their
complete freedom to dispose of themselves in contradiction to indispensable
family duties, such are the causes of the increasing extension, every day, of
corruption. . . .”

In 1780: “Women of ill repute and young prostitutes, in the loges on the
fourth floor of the San Cassiano Theater, commit the offenses that the govern-
ment suffers but does not wish to expose to the gaze of others. . . .”

In 1781: “The works of Voltaire, impious productions. . . . The horrible Ode

to Priapus by Piron. . . . By Rousseau, the Emile, which includes numerous
impieties, and La Nouvelle Héloïse, which proves that man is not endowed
with free will. . . . Thérèse philosophe, Les Bijoux indiscrets. . . . The poem by the
impious Lucretius . . . Machiavelli, Aretino, and many others. . . . The impious
books by the heresiarchs and the falsifiers of atheism, Spinoza and Porphyrus,
are found in all the good libraries. . . . Many books of wild libertinage seem to
have been written, with their voluptuous and lubricious narratives, to reawaken
slumbering, languishing depravities. . . . By misfortune, a book is never so well
read as when it is declared infamous because a principle has been implemented,
and a proscription often makes the lawless author a fortune. . . .”
 66

1781 again: “In San Moisè, at the end of the Pescheria, near where one goes
from the Grand Canal to the calle del Ridotto, there is a place called the Acad-
emy of Painters. Drawing students assemble there to make sketches, in diverse
poses, of a naked man or a naked woman, depending on the evenings. This
Monday evening, it is a woman who will show herself, exposed to be sketched
by several students.
“At this academy of the naked woman, they admit young drawing students
aged barely twelve or thirteen. In addition, many curious amateurs, who are
neither painters nor drawing students, participate in this spectacle. This cer-
emony will start at one at night and will last until three.”

Yes indeed, these “reports” are well and truly signed Giacomo Casanova,
ex-escapee from the Leads, notorious libertine for all time. He needed money?
Granted. He was ready to do anything to get himself recognized in Venice?
Maybe. He never recounts anything important? Obviously. Furthermore, these
ruses will not be of much use to him, since he will again be in exile, as of 1782,
because of an extremely virulent pamphlet written against all the polite soci-
ety of the city. Whence his wanderings, once more, and the end in Bohemia.
Whence, in fact, a writing that he had perhaps never envisaged before, the
writing of the Story of My Life, begun in 1789—his triumph.

Complex and obscure, Casa. He is not a saint (but who knows?), he is not a
martyr (although . . .). His temporary job as a spy may have appeared to him
as a masterpiece of black humor. A pleasure of this sort is perceptible in Sade
when he plays at being an exalted revolutionary in the Section des Piques dur-
ing the Revolution. The author of La Philosophie dans le boudoir as eulogist of
Marat—you pinch yourself. Casanova as a denouncer of impious books—you
scratch your head. We could, however, risk a quite simple hypothesis: neither
the one nor the other had anything to expect, as they knew, whether in sub-
stance or in form, from any regime or any society whatsoever. They are traitors
to the first person plural. They never say we. It’s I in depth and once and for
all.

At one point in his Story of My Life, Casa speaks of those “Venetians of times
past, as mysterious in gallantry as in politics.” He is one of those.
 12
So here’s Casa rambling, wandering, determined to cut the throat of any
individual who tries to hinder his flight. He has taken the longest route to the
border, knowing they would be looking for him along the shortest routes. He’s
walking, walking. He sees a house, an obscure impulse tells him to go there.
It’s the home of the local police chief—might as well enter the lion’s den: “I
went straight there, and the truth is I know I didn’t go of my own will. If it is
true that we all possess a beneficent invisible existence that pushes us toward
our happiness, as it happened to Socrates, though rarely, I have to believe that
what drove me there was this existence. I do think that I have never in my life
taken a bolder step.”

God is still having fun. In the courtyard a child is playing. A pregnant woman
appears and, in spite of his wild appearance, takes him for the hierarchical
superior of her policeman husband, who has left, she says, for three days in
search of two prisoners who have escaped from the Leads in Venice. But you
are covered in blood, dear sir? Yes, I hurt myself hunting in the mountains.
Come in, come in, my mother will look after you, we’ll give you something to
eat. He goes in, he is served like a prince, he goes to sleep, he wakes up cured,
dresses, and leaves the way he came, perfectly naturally. The most incredible
thing is that the policeman’s wife took him for the godfather of her future child.
A “beneficent invisible existence”? Absolutely. We live, we have a destiny,
we die, and the invisible existence is there, as it was, as it will be, even lacking
someone to sense it. We are saved from birth, or even without being born,
which in the end is of little importance. To be born is really a matter of luck:
“I know no other grace than to be born. An impartial mind finds it complete”
(Lautréamont).14

14. Isidore Ducasse, pseudonym Lautréamont (1846–1870), the author of Les Chants de Mal-
doror, was an important poet of great influence on surrealists and modern poetry.

67
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He walks. He sends for money from Venice, from Bragadin. At one point
he’s on a donkey. Onward, onward. Here he is in Munich, Augsburg, and finally
Strasbourg. The goal is obviously Paris, the capital of Fortune, the blind god-
dess. He makes it there in a carriage on the morning of January 5, 1757, two
months after having taken French leave. This popular expression for “escape”
says it all.

He stays with his friends the Ballettis, Italian actors. They treat him like a
hero. Silvia, the wife of Balletti, is Marivaux’s famous actress. There is a daugh-
ter, Manon, seventeen (Casa says fifteen), who loves him sincerely while hoping
he will marry her. Vain expectation, we need hardly say, but it prompts the
most beautiful love letters Casa ever received. Letters he preserved in Dux and
that Manon wrote to him in secret, usually around midnight, in a spontaneous
and fresh French. She calls him her lover, her husband, her friend. They never
made love together.

The first person Casa wants to see is of course Bernis, who has just been
named Minister of State, having his entrée into the secret Council of Foreign
Affairs. He goes to Versailles, but it is not an ordinary day: Damiens has just
attempted to assassinate the king. One thrust of the knife but much ado, and
soon for the regicide a fearsome torture.

“At that time the French believed they loved their king, and all their expres-
sions showed it; today we have succeeded in knowing them a little better. But
basically the French are still the same. It is the nature of this nation to always
be in a state of violence. Nothing is true there, everything is appearance. It is a
vessel that only asks to move and looks for the wind, and the wind that blows
is always good. And a ship is on the heraldic arms of the city.”

Casa has decided to be serious and to put his “system of reserve” into prac-
tice. To be sure, he is still being supported from afar by Bragadin, but it is not
enough. He has one card to play right away—the narrative of his escape. Ber-
nis welcomes him kindly, gives him money, has him recount his adventures,
and orders him to write them down so he can show them to the Marquise de
Pompadour. He recommends him to Choiseul and to the comptroller general
M. de Boulogne, and pretends he’s a financier. “Find something for the royal
coffers.”

Aplomb, coldness, audacity, improvisation—using his intuition, Casanova

has turned himself into a specialist in mathematical calculus to establish a
lottery. From the cabala and the pyramids to the chancy management of the
 69

fortune of a nation, there is only one step. His plan, reread today, teems with
errors? It’s of no importance. He’s in cahoots with an Italian, Calzabigi, who has
a peculiar brother who writes in bed, sick. The lottery is to take as its model the
insurance companies, which are beginning to be very rich throughout Europe.
There are millions on the horizon, and Casa is playing with the Royal Treasury.
(“The lottery shall be royal or it shall be nothing.”) The manuscripts of the Story
of My Life are strewn with numbers. From sequins, we go on to louis, to ducats,
to écus. Today, Casa would be a virtuoso of the euro, somewhere behind the
scenes. His reputation is still good, the marquise has read the narrative of his
escape and found it good. The lottery is inaugurated, and Giacomo opens its
bureaus; he is rich.

Life is a lottery, a permanent wheel, the world itself is nothing but a game
based on nothingness. Casanova is convinced of it, but instead of succumbing
to melancholy or depression, like others, he goes to the gaming table, he bets,
he accepts gains and losses. He follows his god, which is his desire. In contra-
diction to the conventional image people cloak him in, the sexual activity he
submits to is not of the order of an obsession but of a wager. He always plays
the same card, but in constantly changing situations. God doesn’t ask him for
sacrifices but for a lot of attention and determination. The abyss between him
and Pascal is imperceptible. No beyond for Casa, a different way of being there.

A Venetian called Tiretta arrives in Paris; he is twenty-five, he is on the

run. Casa receives him, presents him to his acquaintances, and soon Tiretta
is famous for his “organic” exploits. La Lambertini, an Italian woman who
uses him, calls him “Count of Six-Times.” This is an eminent member whose
performances Casa follows with amusement. It is a wider, longer, and more
limited version of himself. Casa uses it for a distraction, which allows him one
evening to seduce the pretty niece of a fat woman during a card game. She is
seventeen, just out of the convent. Only thing is, she’s curious. Here Giacomo
is playing the part of instructor.

They are in a corner of the living room. She comes to talk with him by
the fire. She wants to know what the expression “Count of Six-Times” refers
to, etc. Casa shows her what part of the man’s body is involved. She takes
offense, but wants to know more. Here the lesson speeds up and ends in a
handkerchief. The student, who is neither stupid nor innocent, feigns indig-
nation, but not much. “You have taken me on a voyage in less than an hour
that I did not think it possible to complete until after marriage. You have
made me as knowledgeable as possible about a matter on which I have never
dared focus my mind.”
 70

So Giacomo has only masturbated in front of her. Today, if all he did was
ejaculate on the cocktail dress of this young girl who wants to learn, he would
perhaps be accused of sexual harassment, with an analysis of his “bodily fluid”
(as the American media so elegantly put it) to prove his guilt in DNA terms.
Large amounts of money would be involved, the lawyers and the newspapers
would grab hold of the story. Scandal in Paris: an associate of the Minister of
Foreign Affairs is convicted of fluid aggression against a defenseless adolescent
girl. His fate would be sealed. Bill Casanova would be forbidden from doing
harm. His victim would rake in a few million dollars in book sales by recount-
ing the sordid details of this adventure.

Casanova engaged in an odious action? No doubt, but wait: the niece has
written to him immediately to ask him to marry her, to avoid being sold to a
rich merchant. “I don’t know if I love you; but I do know that I must prefer you
to anyone else for the love of myself.” Her aunt, she says, “is pious, taken with
gambling, rich, miserly, and unjust.” She wants to dispose of her niece the way
families do at the time: in a convent or married, nothing in between. Marry
me, says the young girl to Casa, and you will have this much. Harshness of the
female condition, of which Casanova is the first and the most precise exposer,
whatever one may think. If only for that reason, the Story of My Life is an
extraordinary document: nuns, unfaithful wives, sold-off daughters, prostitutes,
courtesans, crazy old women, low-class women, marquises, bourgeois women,
countesses, virgins, or housewives, it really is Mozart’s catalogue, but aggravated
by an acute sociological gaze. No generalizations: concrete narrations. A flood
of details that has more to say than a thousand and three academic volumes.

The fat hypocritical aunt will soon be treated as she deserves. It is the day
of Damiens’s execution by drawing and quartering. Casa has reserved some
windows for his little company. There is a crowd for the spectacle: “At Damiens’s
torture, I had to look away when I heard him screaming, with only half of his
body left. But the Lambertini woman and Madame XXX did not look away, and
it was not out of the cruelty of their hearts. They told me, and I had to pretend
to believe them, that they loved Louis XV so much that they could not feel
the slightest pity for such a monster. Nevertheless, it is true that Tiretta kept
Madame XXX so singularly occupied during the entire time of the execution
that it is possible it was only because of him that she never dared to move or
turn her head.”

The public dismemberment of Damiens lasted four hours. Madame XXX,

the fat devout aunt, having alleged some lame, after-the-fact pretexts, adopts
Tiretta and becomes the most satisfied of women. As for Casa, he will perfect
 71

the niece’s education, clandestinely and at night. He claims, and why not believe
him, that she doesn’t have any complaints.
Casanova as professor: his bad reputation, the jealous tensions he unleashes
among men, the dissimulated affection women grant him (even when they say
the opposite), the whole legend, in the end, comes from that, assuredly. Pro-
fessor of physical evidence and of History. The torture of Damiens prefigures
the industrial-strength beheadings during the Terror. The French pretended
to love their king. But: “And yet it was the same population that massacred the
entire royal family, all the aristocracy of France, and all those who gave the
nation the fine character for which it is esteemed, loved, and even taken as a
model for all the others. A chameleon that takes on all the colors, susceptible
to everything a leader can make it do, good or bad.”

These lines date from before Napoleon; they are prophetic. They no doubt
also explain a profound element of the “French malaise” and its permanent
“civil war” character. Frenchmen, yet another effort if you wish to once again
become the envied model for Europe and the world. A Venetian in exile wrote
this in French two centuries ago. A message in a bottle for an impossible task?
Not so sure.

Employed by Bernis for “secret orders” (for instance, the examination of

French warships in Dunkirk), Casa had the time to evaluate the bad state of
the administration at the time. Disorder everywhere, useless expenditure as
plain as day, the State is indebted, the population fooled. “A revolution was
necessary.” But the rest is not brilliant: “Poor people dying of hunger and of
misery, or about to be massacred by all of Europe for the enrichment of those
who have deceived them.”

Louis XVI was “virtuous” but “misinformed.” In a recently discovered and

published text, Casanova writes: “The monarchy of France had to perish under
a weak king and incapable ministers, with the exception of Vergennes, who
couldn’t do anything alone. The entire nation mocked a government whose
flanks were exposed on all sides. Secrecy of State had been lost at a time when
they should have covered everything with the thickest veil, for it was a matter
of hiding from the entire nation that affairs were in such disarray that they
should fear bankruptcy. It is true that they should fear it, but it was the min-
isters’ duty to bring to bear resources that could not have been unavailable,
since they were not unavailable in much more difficult times.”

And then there are the more or less occult, or even occultist, plots. Casanova
knows what he is talking about (his animosity toward Cagliostro is well known).
 72

He is especially very violent against the Duke d’Orléans, “Philippe-Egalité.”

“One can consider this prince one of the principal causes of the Revolution.”
Equality? “Nothing is more unequal than equality,” Casa affirms. Fraternity
isn’t his strength, either. What remains is liberty, for which he needs no lessons
from anyone.
 13
Young Manon Balletti loves Casa with all her heart, and he likes her a lot.
That doesn’t change anything about the nature of our seeker of adventures, who
doesn’t hesitate, in the magnetic Paris of the time, to have recourse to those
“mercenary beauties who blossomed on the broad sidewalks and prompted
commentary.” And as usual there are also the actresses, singers, dancers: “Very
free, they enjoyed their rights and gave themselves either to love or to money,
and sometimes to the one and the other at the same time. . . . I had made my
way with them all quite easily. . . .”

The body outpaces sentiment.

Camilla is an actress and a dancer at the Comédie Italienne. For her second-
best lover she has the Count de La Tour d’Auvergne, who for his part keeps
a little mistress. Evenings are brilliant. Casa is there. He returns home with
the count and his young mistress, goes to fondle her a little, is mistaken in his
groping, caresses the count, who jokes about it. They laugh. Thereupon, as one
might expect, the two men become friends, fight a little duel over a money
matter, are reconciled, spend time together. La Tour d’Auvergne is sick; he has
sciatica? No, Casa tells him, it’s just a “humid wind” that I’m going to cure you
of right away by applying “Solomon’s talisman” and pronouncing on it “five
words.” The count and Camilla think it’s a joke, and Casa himself jokes about
it internally, but joking aside, let’s be serious. He orders saltpeter, sulfur blue,
mercury, and a brush. Forces the patient to give him some of his urine. Mixes
it all up (“amalgamates it”). Forbids grins and grimaces. Traces a five-point
star on La Tour d’Auvergne’s thigh while pronouncing pretend magic formu-
las in an incomprehensible language (“I didn’t understand what I was saying
myself ”). Isn’t all this comedy comical? Staged by Molière, surely. But done
with an imperturbable gravity, in reality? A few days later, says Casa, when he

73
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is no longer thinking about this farce, La Tour d’Auvergne comes to see him:
he is cured.

There has never been an esoteric charlatan who writes his memoirs to recount
his deceptions and the credulity of his dupes; and yet, Casanova, a true Enlight-
enment man, is that man. Unconcerned about “the black tide of occultism” (as
Freud says one day to Jung, whom he makes promise, to combat occultism, never
to renounce the theory of sexuality), Casa dives in and swims with ease in the
sea of illusions. Sex he knows about, he trains just about every day. Therefore he
can judge the occult market at first glance. And god knows that in the eighteenth
century it is booming, just like in our time. There are all sorts, of course, but very
cultivated, very intelligent people who also meddle in “abstract sciences.” The
Count de La Tour d’Auvergne, who believes in nothing, wants Casa to meet his
aunt, “known as knowledgeable in all the abstract sciences, a great chemist, a
woman of wit, very rich, sole mistress of her fortune.” Casa doesn’t accept right
away, he doesn’t want to appear like a music hall magician; it’s an elementary
cleverness that can only strengthen the bait.

The Marquise d’Urfé has a famous name. She is still beautiful, although old,
and nothing connected with chemistry, alchemy, or magic is foreign to her. She
receives Casanova, who right away perceives the extent of the problem. He is
a long way from the little cabala games with pyramids, question and answer,
numerical genius with absolute knowledge (though that game could still serve
in the future). Here, in the capital from which one day the transformation of
the historical calendar will emerge, they get to the bottom of things. Grand
Œuvre, philosopher’s stone, first-class library, fully functioning laboratory,
Casa makes a tour of the house, and we with him, as if he is entering a sci-
ence fiction film. The marquise had been the mistress of the Regent, who was
well-known as a maniac of alchemy, to the point that, as Saint-Simon tells it,
he wanted to meet the devil in person. Let us not forget that in the secondary
parts of all these matters it is also very much a question of poison.

Shoulder shrugs on this subject are in no way convincing, on the contrary.

By their reflex refusal of it all, they could very well participate in the augmen-
tation of the phenomenon. Believing or not believing in it is not the problem.
In any case, you have to see how it functions.

It is obvious that the Marquise d’Urfé is crazy, and Casa does not hide his
immediate diagnostic from us. But as with Bragadin, he sees the opportunity
of the situation, he has no desire to work or to be serious, he improvises his
character as needed. He is well-read, intuitive, he knows how to speak and to
 75

be silent, and especially to connect, displace, surmise, insinuate, quickly look

at a document or a manuscript over a shoulder, pretend to know more than
he does, guess right. He is a cryptographer, he goes straight to the cipher.

“From the library we went to the laboratory, which positively astounded

me. She showed me a substance she had been burning for fifteen years and
needed to burn for four or five more. It was a powder of projection, which
would perform the transmutation of all metals into gold in a minute. . . .”

In a breathtaking dialogue, Casa and the marquise have a duel of wits:

knowledge, allusions, hidden meanings. She wants to pronounce the “inef-
fable names” better? Perhaps, but does she know the theory of the planetary
hours? Not enough. Casa suddenly tells her she has a Genius and that he must
learn his name. “You know that I have a Genius?” says the marquise. “You must
have it if it is true that you have the powder of projection.” “I have it.” “Give
me the oath of the order.” “I don’t dare, and you know why.”

Well played. The Rosicrucian oath is indeed difficult to concretize between

a man and a woman, especially if they are seeing each other for the first time.
The marquise immediately recognizes this, and the matter is settled: “When
we find this oath announced in the Holy Scripture, she tells me, it is masked.
He swore, says the Holy Book, while placing his hand on his thigh. But it is not
the thigh.15 Therefore one never finds a man swearing an oath to a woman in
this way, because the woman does not have a Word.”

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. You can see
that Casanova doesn’t mince words in his totally personal interpretation of
Scripture. Besides, the marquise would very much like to be endowed with
a Word—that is to say, be reborn in a masculine body. She senses that Casa-
nova is the man she needs for this vast operation, for this difficult and very
singular cloning. For her, Giacomo is a mutant, a superior sorcerer who, to
avoid being hampered or arrested in his temporal passage, is hidden under a
borrowed identity (for example, under the cloak of the current lottery). “These
extravagances came from the revelations that her Genius made to her during
the night and that her exalted fancy made her consider real. Explaining this to
me one day with the greatest possible sincerity, she said that her Genius had
convinced her that, as she was a woman, I could not make her obtain intimate

15. Genesis 24:1–9. The King James Bible has the hand placed under the thigh; the suggestion
is that it is placed on the male genitals, hence the impossibility for a woman to swear an oath in
this manner.
 76

colloquy with the Geniuses, but that I could, by means of an operation that I
must know, make her soul pass into the body of a male infant born from the
philosophical coupling of an immortal man with a mortal woman, or of a
mortal man with a female being of divine nature.”

Transmutation, transmigration, rebirth with a change of sex, we see, do we

not, that this goes to the heart of the constant fantasies of mortals? The annoy-
ing thing, though, is that one has to die. But the Marquise d’Urfé is ready to
“abandon her old carcass” by using a special poison, known only to Paracelsus
(who wasn’t capable of using it, for that matter). Here Casa is flabbergasted,
he is silent for a long time, looks out the window. She thinks he is weeping: “I
let her think it, I sighed, I took my sword and I left. Her carriage, which was
at my disposition every day, was in front of her door, ready for my orders.”

To be continued, then. Casanova makes a point of noting that he abused

the Marquise d’Urfé: “Every time I remember it, I feel pained and ashamed,
and I am now doing penance for it by obliging myself, as I am, to tell the truth
in writing my Memoirs.” The day he made her believe in his personal com-
munication with the Geniuses, he departed, “carrying with me her soul, her
heart, her wit, and all that remained of her common sense.” It is important to
note that, while very rich, she is also very miserly, but that she is ready to give
everything she has to become a man. It was, says Casa, impossible to disabuse
her: “If like a truly honorable man I had told her that all her ideas were absurd,
she would not have believed me, therefore I made the decision to let myself go.
I could only please myself, continuing to let myself be considered the greatest
of all the Rosicrucians and the most powerful of all men. . . . I could clearly see
that if need be, she could not have refused me anything, and although I had
not formed any plan to seize her wealth in whole or in part, I nevertheless did
not feel I had the strength to renounce this power.”

A classic pro domo argument with Casa. The society in which he finds him-
self makes no place for sons of actors like him. He has nothing to hope for,
except on his own merit—merit very rarely rewarded and always at the mercy
of aristocratic arbitrariness. Well, that’s how it is, and he is not going to wait
to be reborn in two or three centuries. It’s now or never. Unlike most human
beings, he does not dream of being a different man or woman. He is seeking
neither resurrection nor immortality. A very rare quality—he knows what his
sex is, and he has no desire to change. He’s in a hurry.

Casa also met the great sorcerers of his time. The Count de Saint-Germain
would dine with the Marquise d’Urfé. Dine is saying too much, he doesn’t eat,
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he talks: “No one could talk better than he could. He claimed to be prodigious
in everything, he wanted to cause astonishment, and positively he did aston-
ish. He had a decisive manner that nevertheless was not unpleasant because
he was knowledgeable and spoke all languages well, a great musician, a great
chemist, a pleasant face, a master at making all women his friends, because
while he gave them makeup products, he beautified their skin, he flattered
them not by making them younger, because that, he said, was impossible, but
by keeping and preserving them in the state he found them in, by means of a
water that cost him a lot but which he gave them as a present. This very singu-
lar man, born to be the most brazen of impostors, said without impunity and
as a matter of course that he was three hundred years old, that he possessed
universal medicine, that he did anything he wished to nature, that he melted
diamonds and made a large one out of ten or twelve little ones without their
weight diminishing and with the most beautiful clarity. Mere bagatelles for
him. In spite of his boasts, his disparities, and his obvious lies, I didn’t have the
strength to find him insolent, but I also didn’t find him respectable. I found
him astonishing in spite of myself, for he did astonish me.”

We don’t have the Count de Saint-Germain’s memoirs, nor those of Caglio-

stro, but we have Casanova’s. In his Soliloquy of a Thinker, a little book published
in Prague in 1786, Casa makes fun of Cagliostro; it could pass for a warning
addressed to the French monarchy, which is about to be pulled down by the
queen’s necklace. In it, he portrays the typical impostor, whose credit “is based
only on the fact that people have only a precarious and abstract knowledge
of all those extraordinary things he promises. . . . What men believe the most
strongly is what they know the least.”

Casanova promises nothing, commits to little. They endow him with a

power? Fine, let them. He is more interested in his life than in humanity’s.
No doubt it is an error on his part, unless his greater error is knowing how
to recount what deserves to be told and, through all the lies, to make it true.
Astonished, for him, is a very strong word. In passing, you will have noticed
his lucidity, before Freud, about the ineradicable feminine desire for a penis
(or the desire for a child, which comes to the same thing), as well as about the
omnipotence of the proclaimed miracle of beauty products. To be a woman
requires reparation, it’s a fact. And Casa is a repairer, a transitory one, to be
sure, but of the first rank. So the marquise is crazy? No doubt, but she is “sub-
lime.” She would have preferred to be a man? Yes, and so? As for the Count de
Saint-Germain (“I have never in my life known a cleverer and more seductive
impostor”), Casa will soon meet him again in Amsterdam on a secret mis-
sion. A lot of money is involved, and History is shaped by it without our being
 78

able to tease out its threads, most of the time. Here’s Saint-Germain settled
in Chambord by Louis XV, in the same dwelling that the king had given the
Maréchal de Saxe for his lifetime. He even has his laboratory in the Trianon.
The clandestine utilization of impostors has the advantage of not requiring that
they be reported to anyone, neither government nor police. If needed, one can
disavow, but the last thing one does is have them arrested; one assists in their
escape. There are bank transfers, no one’s the wiser. Later, sometimes much
later, ghostly black holes appear in the accounts. They go up in smoke, papers
burn, memories are erased, witnesses have disappeared. A rolling philosopher’s
stone gathers much moss of silver and gold. Nothing new under the money
sun while people are talking here and there about this and that.
 14
Casa the financier is in Holland. Numbers occupy him, speculation solicits
him. Venice is far away, and who would recognize this lovely Lucie of the past
turned old and ugly, in an Amsterdam brothel? On the other hand, Teresa Imer
reappears.16 She is a singer; she is accompanied by her children, including a
little girl of six, Sophia. She looks a lot like Giacomo: she’s his daughter.

Adventures are not in fashion in the North. Esther, young and very bour-
geoise, is charming, but she wants to learn the cabala instead of penetrating
the true mysteries of her composition. They go out, they go to a concert, they
return, they talk. More and more it is a question of money, of love less and
less. Casa is getting old. “I left after giving my daughter a watch.”

Teresa does not leave him her daughter, but she does entrust her twelve-year-
old son to him. The Marquise d’Urfé will think him a gift from the heavens
to assist in her secret program. She calls him Count d’Aranda, puts him in a
high-class boarding school.

“I let her believe that the little d’Aranda belonged to the Great Order, that
he was born as a result of an operation that was unknown to the world, that I
was only his temporary holder, and that he was to die without ceasing to live.
That all came from her brain, and the best thing I could do was to agree with
it. But she maintained that she knew nothing without the revelations of her
Genius, who spoke to her only at night.”

Madame d’Urfé’s nights are agitated, but only psychically. The physical did
not convince her. She is not the only one of this sort, and psychoanalysis does
not yet exist (and we may well wonder if it would be efficacious in this case).

16. Teresa Imer, known as Teresa Cornelys (1723–1797), was a soprano opera singer and impre-
sario who hosted fashionable gatherings at Carlisle House in Soho Square.

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Casa is rich, hence the old-man behavior: he is making gifts, to Silvia Balletti,
to Manon, his heartfelt lover who will soon give up and get married in the most
conventional manner. What does one do when rich? Take a residence in the
country, and here we are in Warsaw-in-Open-Air at La Petite Pologne in the
environs of Paris. The cook is called The Pearl: “My style of life made La Petite
Pologne famous. People were talking about the fine cuisine there. I kept rice-fed
chickens in a dark chamber; they were white as snow and of an exquisite flavor.
I added to the excellence of French cuisine the most seductive of everything
that the remainder of the cuisines of Europe had for the connoisseurs. . . . I
matched choice company to delicate suppers in which my guests saw that my
pleasure depended on the pleasure I procured for them. Women of distinction
and gallantry came to walk in my gardens in the morning, accompanied by
inexpert young men who did not dare to speak and whom I pretended not to
see. I gave them fresh eggs and butter. . . . After that, quantities of maraschino
from Zadar, etc.”

Please note: people will soon open scores of Casanova restaurants pretty
much everywhere in the world. I even saw a fast-food restaurant with this name
in Prague. There will be books for sale in the supermarkets, recommended by
magazines, bearing the title: The Cooking of Casanova. Casanova is becoming
a brand name. To such an extent that he opens a factory making printed silk
cloth, with twelve female workers who end up in his bed, of course, hoping to
make their fortunes. Women in general speak more and more about placing
themselves. It is easy to understand them. There is even a somber matter of a
failed abortion, recounted in detail, in which Giacomo assists a Mademoiselle
XCV, Giustiniana Wynne, an Englishwoman whom he calls “Miss,” with the
intention of seducing her. A midwife will bring charges against him; to free
himself, he is obliged to have his relations intervene. The wife of a shopkeeper
amuses him for a time (“we spent three hours in delicious follies”), but here
too money is in play: “The life I was leading was the life of a happy man, but I
wasn’t happy.” He speaks of the homosexuality of the Duke d’Elbeuf, without
admitting everything, since among his papers in Dux were found the follow-
ing unused notes: “My love for the minion of the Duke d’Elbeuf.” “Pederasty
with Bazin and his sisters; pederasty with X in Dunkirk.” Which shows that
he is not the mechanical heterosexual he has been made out to be, and that is
precisely why it is interesting that he is what he is in full knowledge of himself.
Scandalous, exceptional Casa.

Business, in the end, goes sour (you would think he does it intentionally).
Giacomo is arrested for unpaid bills of exchange—once again, he has to pull
 81

strings behind the scenes. “My imprisonment, though of only a few hours,
made me disgusted with Paris and inspired in me an invincible hatred for all
trials, a hatred I still possess.”
Money and power are no doubt desirable, but they are disenchanting. Casa’s
philosophical tone is far from the Sequere Deum at this time: “Everything is
mixed, and we are the authors of events in which we are not complicit. There-
fore, everything of the greatest importance in the world that happens to us is
just what must happen to us. We are nothing but thinking atoms that go where
the wind blows them.”
 15
Germany is not a success for Casa. To be sure, there is a certain Madame
X in Cologne who is worthy of the beauties of the Olympus by Ariosto, but
joining her requires ruses worthy of the Sioux: letting himself be locked in a
church crouching in a confessional, then waiting in a staircase that leads from
the sacristy to her apartment in a corner filled with rats where he has to remain
for five hours. Furthermore, he mustn’t wake the husband who is sleeping next
door. He gets his recompense, but dearly paid. In Stuttgart he constantly loses
at the gambling tables. No good. Let’s try Switzerland.

In Zurich, a stock-taking: “A perfect peace is the greatest good of all.”

“With this thought in mind I go to bed, and very pleasant dreams bring me
happiness, in peaceful solitude, in abundance, and in tranquility. It seemed
to me that, in a beautiful country setting of which I was the master, I enjoyed
a freedom one seeks in vain in society. I was dreaming, but while dreaming
I said to myself that I wasn’t dreaming. Waking suddenly at daybreak, I am
undeceived. I’m angry and, determined to realize my dream, I get up, dress,
and go out, not caring where I was headed.”

The tone here is almost Rousseauistic. It’s not too surprising to see Giacomo
come upon a church and a tranquil monk who shows him a superb library.
Perhaps the true life is there, after all. Become a monk? Get married? The
troubled libertine has to protect himself on the right and on the left. These
questions return from time to time in the Story of My Life. “At my age,” thinks
Casanova later, “my independence is a kind of slavery.”

“If I had married a woman clever enough to give me direction, to make me

submit without my being able to notice my subjection, I would have looked
after my fortune, I would have had children, and I would not be alone in the
world, as I am, with nothing to my name.”

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The fact is he does have children, but they are entrusted to others. This is the
old librarian in Dux who is speaking, and who continues: “Since I am happy
with my memories, I would be crazy to create useless regrets for myself.” True,
he is alone and has nothing, except his pen.

Just as each time he has doubts about himself, Casa will get sick, but this
time it’s an organized revenge by a woman, a veritable assault. He calls this
character “la F.” She pulls him in, it’s dark, he thinks he’s working on another
woman, and the next day she writes him: “You should know, Monsieur, that
for ten years I have had a slight indisposition from which I have never been
able to be cured. You did enough last night to have contracted it; I advise
you to take remedies immediately. I am warning you about it so you will not
communicate it to your mistress, who could, in her ignorance, give it to her
husband and to others, which would make her unhappy, and I would regret it
as she has never done me any hurt or harm.”

In vain does Casa reply to this exquisite woman straight out of Laclos that
she infected not him but his valet, it’s still a bitter pill. These sorts of diseases,
he says, are the scars one obtains in combat. He gets well, of course (no AIDS
yet), and he does not become a monk. As for marriage, it might have been
with the Dubois woman, whom he calls “my good wife” or “my governess.”
But just as he does from time to time, with true generosity he will marry
her to another man, but not without fabricating for her, at her request, a son
along the way.

Switzerland is a masked country: Calvin on one side, the baths at La Matte

on the other.17 In that house of true debauchery, two lesbian servant girls offer
Casa and the Dubois woman a spectacle: “They began by doing together the
same things they saw me doing with la Dubois. La Dubois watched, very sur-
prised at the frenzy with which the servant I had taken played the part of the
man with the other one. I also was a bit astonished, in spite of the frenzies that
M. M. and C. C. had presented to my eyes six years before this time, nothing
more beautiful than which could be imagined. . . . I turn around, and the
girl, seeing me curious, puts before my eyes a clitoris, monstrous and rigid.
. . . It looked like a fat finger without a fingernail, but it was bendable. The
wench, who desired my beautiful governess, told her it was erect enough to
put into her, if she agreed to allow her to. And that would not have pleased
me.”

17. La Matte was a section of Berne, on the Aar River.

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Another time, perhaps. For the time being, a bit of hypocrisy: “The copulation
of these two young women, although comical, nevertheless excited the greatest
sexual pleasure in us.” Why “comical”? What reader is Casa humoring here?

But Switzerland means especially Geneva, which is to say the Temple of

Reform and Reason. Stage right, the pastors; Casa has fun making them blush
by reproaching them for believing, like Calvin, that the pope is the Antichrist
of the Apocalypse. Stage left, the scientist Haller and of course Voltaire.18

For the pastors, Casa will amuse himself by giving a lesson in concrete meta-
physics to a young woman of genius, a theologian, Hedwig. With Voltaire, he
will deliver a demonstration of poetry. Offstage, it will be a nonstop orgy. The
painting of this situation could be entitled: “Venice Seizes Geneva, Thanks to
One Man.” Or “Rome, under the Mask of Libertinage, Conquers Protestant-
ism.” Or “The Secrets of the Counter-Reformation.” This old war is actually
much more current than people think.

At Lausanne, Casa chances to reflect on Beauty and Form (his reference is

Plato’s Phaedrus): “Nothing extant has ever exerted as strong a power upon
me as a beautiful female form, even that of a child.”

He thinks of Raphaël, of Nattier’s portraits. What is beauty? “You know

nothing about it, you know it by heart.” Great painters are rare. “The painter
who is not made so by God does it by force.”
Sex is like art: if it’s forced, it’s a bad painting; and if it’s prevented, there is
no painting at all.

Casa arrives, then, in Geneva. He stays at the Les Balances Inn. His heart is
throbbing because he is occupying the room he was in with Henriette during
their last night. He goes to a window, he sees the inscription scratched with a
diamond on the glass: “You will also forget Henriette.” He simply comments:
“The hair on my head stood on end.” His hairs don’t often stand on end. But
okay, no superstitions, let’s go see Voltaire.

Monsieur de Voltaire does not have a good reputation here. His caustic
mood irritates the Swiss. The actors he employs are unhappy—he reproaches
them for pronouncing badly, for not laughing properly, for pretending to cry.
In short, he is “insolent, brutal, unbearable.” The wise Haller tells Casa that

18. Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777) was a Swiss anatomist, physiologist, naturalist, and poet,
often referred to as “the father of modern physiology.”
 85

Voltaire is greater from a distance than up close. And since Voltaire praises
Haller in front of Casanova, Giacomo points out to him that the great scientist
is not as kind to him. “Ah,” says Voltaire, “it’s possible we are both wrong.”

Voltaire at home always finds the right words, has the laughers on his side
and a bevy of admirers at his command. People visit from all over, they write
to him from the whole of Europe. Casa introduces himself as Voltaire has
finished dinner and tells him he has been “his student for twenty years.” Very
good, says Voltaire, continue for another twenty years, and don’t forget to send
me my wages.

After that, they dialogue (and Casa is a marvelous writer of dialogues). The
discussion is mainly a literary one. Giacomo unsheathes his favorite weapon,
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. He wants to prove to Voltaire (and to us, hypothetical
readers from a distant future) that the greatest writer of his time is not at the
level of the elevated models of the past in poetry: Homer, Dante. The author of
the Oedipus (Voltaire) doesn’t like The Divine Comedy or Shakespeare. That’s
a mistake. Poetry, my dear Master, is not conventional tragedy, versification,
or witticisms; it’s first of all passion, enthusiasm, love, in short, a very physical
matter. The proof? Listen to the twenty-third canto of the Orlando, I’ll recite
it, and by the end I am truly weeping. Let me also remind you, for what it is
worth, since we are in Geneva, that Pope Leo X once decided to excommunicate
any individual who did not like Ariosto.

Casa, in sum, has the pretension of broadening Voltaire’s taste, an attitude

that is not just “patriotic.” He insists on this panegyric of inspiration and fire,
it’s easy to understand why. The fact is that he is ahead of his time, as nearly
always.

The other discussion with the philosopher who is going to become official
is of a political nature (Rousseau is out of this race; Casa and Madame d’Urfé
went to see him, he seemed embarrassed, gloomy). The tone turns harsher.
Should the government of Venice be criticized? No, Casa replies, to our great
surprise (and I have to say he has a point). Voltaire: can one free humanity from
superstition, that “ferocious beast” that devours it? Casanova: you will never
succeed in destroying it, it is inevitable and perhaps necessary, that is what is
taught by philosophy proved in the boudoir. Voltaire says that a people without
superstition would be philosophical. Yes, says Casa, but that would mean they
would no longer obey (understood: that everyone would have become lucid in
the sexual dimension). Popular sovereignty, which seems just and desirable, is
perhaps only a demagogic illusion perpetrated by bad philosophers and thus
 86

a further deception by the clerisy. Your first passion, says Casa to Voltaire, is
love of humanity. This passion blinds you. (In reality, Voltaire is much more
pessimistic, and here Casa is attacking later “Voltairianism.”) Be careful not
to become a Don Quixote in reverse—reason absolutized could be another
instance of folly. You say that the government of the Most Serene Republic is
despotism? Fine, but I, Casa, “had exaggerated.” The freedom Venice allows is
what is most bearable under an aristocratic authority.

This shows the distance covered by Casa since he has been traveling across
Europe (France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland). He is on his guard and
informed as well by the continuing events, that is, by the victory of moral Rous-
seauism and regressive prudishness. He is the one, the escapee from prison,
condemned for atheism, who warns the two centuries to come. The realization
of desires has reasons that reason has to learn to recognize. Ariosto allowed
me to escape, but are you sure you are not being locked in by not knowing
Ariosto? This is what Casa says between the lines to the author of The Maid,
an enjoyable work, no doubt, but certainly not at the level of the Odyssey or
Hamlet. Casanova’s point of view is all the more interesting in that he is not a
fanatic of Joan of Arc, as one might expect. Okay, fine, I’ll be content to prove
to Voltaire that I can recite the totality of Horace’s works. The Prince de Ligne
notes that no one knows the classics better than Casanova. And we can say
that after having appeared old-fashioned (or outmoded), he is suddenly, today,
and for that very reason, avant-garde.

Poetry, orgy. The one should not be separated from the other. Evenings in
Geneva, with a local accomplice (a voyeuristic bon vivant agent), Casa shuts
himself in with three pretty girls, one of whom is called Helena. They use
prophylactics, of course, for fear of pregnancy. Voltaire in his chateau is a great
man, he is “sarcastic, cynical, caustic,” and his bourgeois niece and mistress,
Madame Denis, is very sweet, but for a young man like Casanova, the nights
would lack for poetry. One is better off in a converted brothel with three
nymphs. No poetry without orgy. And likewise, no successful orgy without
poetry (otherwise one falls below the level of prose, and everything becomes
realistic, which is to say miserable). The art of orgasm is an ars poetica, and
vice versa. Audacity, taste, fire, table, food, wine, a bed, and a sense of rhythm.

Which is why the superficial discourse about “Casanova and pleasure” or

“the libertinage of the eighteenth century,” in movies and magazines as well as
among writers or mediocre academics (whom you wouldn’t want for partners
in an orgy, just look at their behavior), misses the boat so badly. Such language
 87

serves only to highlight today’s sexual poverty and its nostalgia for a “golden
age,” when this same language would have cut a sorry figure. People write bad,
sinister novels, they circle the interior castle without entering its mansions.
There is a clerisy of eroticism now as heavy and ridiculous as the clerisy of
censorship. An entire body of bad literature flourishes in this controlled mar-
ket of dupes whose purpose is to make people believe that everyone has a gift
for sexuality, as for painting and music. That’s called clouding the issue, and
in this case the issue is called Casanova, or Laclos, or Sade. Men and women
set themselves up in their fantasy sex shops, which are generally narrow and
prescribed by all-pervasive beliefs. Thus there are merchants and functionar-
ies (not to mention policemen) who sincerely believe that Casanova is a sex
author (as they say). An atmosphere whose clouds are lacking issues, a leaden
sheen of ignorance and stupidity.

Out of his escape from the Leads, Casanova made the gold of his prose. He
can be what he wants to be: seducer, masturbator, screwer, flirt, penetrator,
climaxer, but with him everything seems natural, normal. We are the ones who
make a big deal about it. We are the ones who separate, fix, label, limit, hinder.
We are the ones who pretend to like Casanova while detesting him, the way
kitsch photography envies painting.

What good are libertines in times of distress? They are like departed poets, of
whom not a single one remains, as far as we know, bearing the Dionysian fire
in the sacred night. But let’s be serious. From now on, the question is resolutely
clandestine, or it is nothing. One could, if need be, for the sake of peace, let
people believe one is ribald, obsessed, perverse—such is society’s demand. Let
us rather close the shutters and the doors and return to the art of composition.
 16
The Enlightenment is Bach, Mozart, Sade, Casa, all at the same time. These
people have forever, a never-ending duration. They repeat themselves, they
fugue, they vary, they accumulate, they skip, they are in what Heidegger calls,
in a magnificent formula, “the inexhaustible beyond of every effort.” Like rivers,
like nature, instantly. They throw money or genius out the window, “bodily
fluid,” too. Have they seen the Word become weary? Humans, yes, never they.
Nothing is less fussy, ruminating, economical. One gets the impression that at
least fifteen earlier centuries suddenly wanted to unburden themselves. What is
happening is an orgasm of Time, which is logically manifested by the triumph
of individuation, the influence of an intense plural minority.

Nietzsche saw this in the French way of celebrating at the time: a splendid
sunrise for nothing, the return and even the transcendence of the Greek miracle.
Party, brothel, intrigue, wit, love, humor, incessant displacement, rapidity,
courage, lightness, the deep seriousness of enjoyment and experience. People
wanted to punish this overflow—it’s done. It was aristocratic and popular, that
is to say, actually, feminine. What they’re usually selling today under the name
of woman would have bored Mozart’s contemporaries to death or made them
die laughing.

When Casa tells us he “sealed with his blood” a last coitus (how horrible, says
the woman beside me), or that he spent five hours making love (how horrible,
how horrible), he is maybe joking a little; he’s piling it on, just a bit. The bed
as the theater of operations? Enough to unleash cyclones of resentment. “Let’s
go to bed,” Casa says to his female partners, who generally are just waiting
for that (how horrible). The next day, money and departure. Jewels, sequins,
louis, ducats, florins, guineas, euros—feel how they flow. The world is a rou-
lette of words, of money, of music, closer to the crackling of computers than
to the coffers of the bourgeois or petty bourgeois. There is no reason at all to
follow the different apocalyptic propagandas: the twenty-first century will be

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Enlightened, or it won’t be. In view of human history as a whole, we can expect

an immense irony. Also love. It is not a matter of derision or debasement but
of being worthy of the novel.

Casa is having fun with life, which is having fun with him. In Chambéry
he meets a nun who resembles M. M. and whose first name is the same. So
now in his narrative there are an M. M. 1 and an M. M. 2. Casa gives M. M. 2
M. M. 1’s portrait. You can see that the equation gets complicated.

M. M. 2 is resolutely lesbian. She flatters Giacomo in these terms: “I love you

so much that I am sorry you are not a woman.” Nevertheless, she tries out a
few prophylactics on him, things are advancing. This time it’s twelve hours in
a row in bed, understandable for an M. M. squared. Later on Casa will return
to Chambéry, sees his second nun at the grille of her convent, and notes that
she is getting along just fine with a young girl of twelve who lets him touch her
through the enclosure before curiously examining his Word and taking com-
munion with it: “Out of a feeling of gratitude, I glued my lips to the delicious
mouth that had sucked the quintessence of my soul and my heart.”

Here a police report would speak of fellatio. A contemporary writer would

write: “She sucked my cock” or “She gave me a blow job.” No connection.

(In Washington, interrogated by the Grand Jury, an intern admits to having

had “sexual relations of a certain type” with the president of the United States
of America. Apparently she gives the details. Consequently, I am going to send
her the Story of My Life, as well as this book.)

Casanova, like a good composer, is gradually discovering the power of the

fugue. Just as he has granted himself two M. M.s, there will also be two Teresas.
Teresa 2 is none other than Bellino, encountered fifteen years later in Florence.
Literarily speaking, this is the Human Comedy or the In Search of Lost Time
effect: the device of recurring characters masters duration through writing.19
And in this case, the surprise is of stature. Recall that Teresa 1 has a six-year-old
daughter by Casa, Sophia. But Teresa 2 (ex-Bellino), who is married, appears
with a fifteen-year-old son, Cesarino. He looks terribly like his father, Giacomo
Casanova himself. This son is a musician, he plays the harpsichord; he is being
raised in Naples. It’s a cheerful dinner for all, and “there you have one of the
happiest days of my life,” notes this peculiar bachelor, already the genitor of

19. Balzac’s Human Comedy employed the device of reusing characters in different novels;
Proust employed a similar strategy in his novel In Search of Lost Time.
 90

three children, at least (counting the one he has just made with la Dubois). On
this point it seems to me that researchers still have a lot of work to do: what has
become of the genetic descendants of Casanova? Where are they now? Whom
did they engender, then and up to the present?

In fact, it would be difficult to be more surrealistic than Casa. This philo-

sophical libertine, masked patriarch, is now in Avignon in quest of Laure de
Sade: “An Italian who has read, heard, and enjoyed Petrarch must be curious to
see the place where this great man fell in love with Laure de Sade.” Whereupon
he quotes this line from Petrarch, which he finds one of the most beautiful ever
written: “Morte bella parea nel suo viso, on her face death appeared beautiful.”

Let us imagine (it’s chronologically possible) a young man of twenty, also

in pilgrimage to this site: the Marquis de Sade. The two visitors greet each
other and pass by. In prison, Sade recounts that he saw Laure, his ancestor,
in a dream, coming to console him for his misfortunes. Casa and Sade never
speak of each other, but they could very well have met in Paris or elsewhere.
In any case they are present here and now in writing, side by side in the sun,
on my table.

“On her face death appeared beautiful.” A beautiful woman is also taking
part in this excursion, but she thinks to make herself interesting by putting on
a sad face (in reality, as someone murmurs, she is an “infatuated whore”). Casa
addresses her with this compliment: “Madame, gaiety is the lot of the blessed,
and sadness is the horrid image of those spirits who are condemned to eternal
suffering. Be therefore cheerful, and earn thus the right to be beautiful.”

Another formula, from Casa to a young friend: “Be joyful, sadness kills me.”

Outcasts are sad. Secretly they want to kill you, sometimes killing themselves
as well. They are morose maniacs of the will to will: better to want nothing
than to not want anything.
Giacomo is rarely “nil” in love—in a state of fiasco, as Stendhal will say,
who was often troubled by his physique and the effects of crystallization in
love. However, “at thirty-eight I started to notice that I was often subject to
this fatal misfortune.” A Viagra pill, Casa? Tigra+Men? No thanks, I still have
a few chapters to write.
 17
The pope returns, too, but this time with a different name. Clement XIII
instead of Benedict XIV. Casa goes to see him, is decorated by him with the
Order of the Golden Spur (Mozart also obtains this recognition), a less and
less significant decoration but one that he is very proud of. The pope assures
the Chevalier de Seingalt of his “singular affection” and listens benevolently
to his wish to be allowed to return to Venice. It is in fact a moment of self-
examination. Go back? Get married? With the little Mariuccia, for example?
Oh no, here is another conquest, Leonilda, about whom he will learn, a little
later, in Naples, that she is his daughter. Well, the children are coming out of
the woodwork! Time is passing, there were three, here’s another. A female,
with whom incest was consummated without their realizing it.

Leonilda is the daughter of Lucretia, whom we have already met. Casa’s desire
for the mother reignites, we are treated to an inevitable scene. It begins with
this sublime recitative from the mother to the daughter: “He is your father.
Give him a kiss, and if he has been your lover, forget your crime.”

Here are the three of them immersed “in the sweetness of a laughing silence.”
(Now a Mozart aria, taken from Cosi fan tutte, for example.)
A still desirable former mistress and her daughter, who is also mine, whom
I’ve just made my mistress? To bed.
Leonilda watches curiously while her parents make love: “‘So that’s how you
did it,’ she said to me, ‘when you conceived me eighteen years ago?’”
No, not exactly like that. The fact is that to “spare” Lucretia, Giacomo has
just pulled out: “Leonilda, moved to pity, with one hand helps the passage of
her mother’s little soul, and with the other puts a white handkerchief on her
father, who was distilling.”

Clever of him to come up with that word distilling.

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It is not over. Lucretia, probably piqued by this detour, wants Casa to start
over and begs him to go right to the end (to the “blood”) to make “another
Leonilda.”
Enough, enough. Let’s rest.

In Rome once more, Casa takes part in “the most infernal debauchery,”
which, as he says, allows him to “become more amply acquainted with myself.”
He has to keep his sword in his hand so as not to be sodomized. His distaste for
this practice shows up on this occasion (nobody’s perfect). When he speaks of
pederasty, we have to understand reciprocal or mutual masturbation. Certain
devotees think there must be much more of that sort to uncover. But one can
suppose that the other sort, in its incessant parade, must bother them. The
scenes with two women, on the other hand, are very frequent, and if it were
absolutely necessary to catalogue Casa’s tastes, one would describe him not as
“lesbian” but as very much liked by lesbians. It’s a nuance, but it carries weight.
Of course one must emphasize the periodic return of excitement provoked
by disguises, a very common practice at the time (Mozart, again). Thus for a
castrato: “You went to them, prestige had its effects, and you had to fall in love
with them or be the most negative of all Germans.”

Homosexuality is “inversion.” Not a negative judgment, but a lucid glance

into the bedrooms of the Roman clergy (and not into the Vatican cellars).
Castratos, as is well known, were for a long time the messengers of the papal
music of the spheres. Today the luminous return of baroque music bathes us
in its aura.
Let’s summarize: pretty girls dressed like men, or castratos as dazzling as
pretty girls. Add to that the “young novice” between twelve and eighteen, and
you have the essential cast of Casa’s opera. I was forgetting the nun, henceforth
a musty character, and the beautiful woman per se, so to speak.

Lacan said one is heterosexual when one loves women, whether one is a man
or a woman. Many women, from this point of view, are not heterosexual, and
neither are many men who think they are. On this point Casanova broadly
clarifies the issue. He is a hero of knowledge. He knew it, moreover, or he would
not have taken the trouble to be complete and precise to such an extent. In
the history of metaphysics, he is the first to treat his body like an experiment.
Metaphysics is very surprised—it was used to looking elsewhere.

One of Casanova’s ruses is to speak of the madness of the Marquise d’Urfé

without telling us what he is doing during all the time he is locked in with
her, feeding her wild imagination. Everything—cabala, pyramids, cult of the
 93

planetary Geniuses—takes a lot of time, and as he doesn’t believe in them for

a minute, we could suppose that he is bored. To be sure, he is earning a living,
since gambling doesn’t cover his expenses. But in my view, he is above all in
training—his moments of simulated seriousness, his exercises of memory and
recitation, his particular asceticism. Under cover of alchemy, he is thus pursu-
ing his own personal alchemy. The writer that he is, that he will be, owes a lot
to this discipline.

Madame d’Urfé is getting impatient. How is that operation that is supposed

to make her be reborn and change sex coming along? Ah, says Casa, bad luck,
the head of the Rosicrucians is in prison right now, in the hands of the Inqui-
sition. I have to go to Augsburg to the Congress that is supposed to be held
there, but for that I’ll need some letters of credit, some gifts to distribute, I don’t
know, watches, snuff boxes, to “seduce the profane.” Passing through Paris, he
is driving with the marquise in the Bois de Boulogne. A little earlier he had
claimed that the Count de Saint-Germain was supposed to be in the area, and
she didn’t believe him. Well, surprise, there he is as they round a corner. He
slips away. Madame d’Urfé checks with Choiseul: oh yes, Saint-Germain spent
the entire night in the minister’s office, they are using him as a spy in London.
There is thus a correspondence between a total madwoman who dialogues with
Anael, the Genius of Venus, and the summit of power. Sex, money, politics,
espionage, crystal balls: does anyone dare to say that times have changed?

Germany, a negative country for Casa. But let’s be fair: “I was in a state of
crisis; it was a time when my fatal genius was waxing crescendo, from stupidity
to stupidity.”
“I was gambling every day and, betting on my word but losing, the difficulty
of having to pay the next day brought me increasing sorrows.”

Self-punishment comes fast: a severe case of syphilis, a fast, baths, mercury

massages, an operation, a hemorrhage. From Munich to Augsburg, a Way of
the Cross for Jacques Casanova. But soon he is off again like the devil: “Scarcely
had my health been restored that, forgetting all my past misfortune, I began
to amuse myself again.”

He meets Lamberg, who will remain one of his most faithful friends (we have
his letters).20 An orgy at an inn with a woman from Strasbourg, and things are
going better and better, since he is able to accomplish the “Magnum Opus.”

20. Count Maximilian Lamberg (1729–1792) was an Enlightenment freethinker and a faithful
friend to Casanova.
 94

In Augsburg, a burgomaster asks him why he has two names, Casanova and
Seingalt. According to this good official, one of the two names must be real, the
other fake. Not at all, replies Casanova, the two are just as real as I am speak-
ing to you: “The alphabet is everyone’s property; that is incontestable. I took
eight letters and combined them to produce Seingalt. The word thus formed
pleased me, and I adopted it for my appellative. . . .”

After all, what Voltaire did was no different. The Casanovists tells us that in
renaming himself, Casa was thinking of the name of the erudite Dane Snetlage,
to whom he addresses his famous letter about the French language in 1797.
Seingalt is supposed to be an anagram of Snetlage. But I prefer my reading:
Seing, sign, signature; alt, from the Latin altus, high. I am of high and noble
signature as others are of high birth. I was born also, or rather, from the alpha-
bet by a free act of my desire and my will. I cabalized myself, my dear official.

But after all, says the fellow, logically, your name can only be your father’s,
right? To which Casa replies: “I believe you are mistaken, because the name
you yourself bear by right of inheritance has not existed for all eternity. It must
have been fabricated by one of your ancestors who did not receive it from his
father, even if you are called Adam.”

But after all, after all, says the policeman, you agree that there are laws against
fake names? “Yes, against fake names; but I repeat that nothing is more real
than my name. Yours, which I respect without knowing it, cannot be more real
than mine; for it is possible that you are not the son of the one you believe to
be your father.”

The burgomaster smiles, perhaps he has good reason to. In reality, he is flab-
bergasted by the Chevalier de Seingalt’s aplomb. (Chevalier: caballus, cabal, and
also chivalry of the Middle Ages.) Here Casa is telling us many things at once.
First, that he no doubt has a different and higher birth than one believes. Then,
that it’s of no importance, since genetics proves nothing and permits nothing a
priori. Further, that a writer (in the very special sense he gives to this word) lies
entirely within the name he gives himself, even if it is identical to the genitor’s
name. To write is to cut into the biological or genealogical chain, an exorbitant,
and for that reason highly suspected, act of liberty. French counts among its
writers, not by chance, an impressive number of those who renamed themselves:
Molière, Voltaire, Céline, Lautréamont, Nerval, Stendhal, among others.

Where do we come from? From our capacity to name. The rest is a mixture:
illusion, Babelization, magma, traffic, nocturnal feminine lies, chance, laboratory
 95

calculation, or back alleys of the clinic, risky cloning, identity card, fingerprint,
obsessing about an existence delivered by others, quarreling about an inheri-
tance, police verification, racial religion, forced tattooing, number filed, possible
roundup, probable camp, inevitable mass graves, moonlit cemetery, scattered
ashes, fable of a community. The only Knight of his Order, the Wiseman of Writ-
ing (like the man responsible for war in Venice), Seingalt is also called Casanova,
who sometimes, let us not forget, has his mail addressed in the name of Monsieur
Paralis. Your social security number, sir? Your diplomas? Your place of employ-
ment? Your wife? Your children? Your employer? Your religion? Your ethnic
background? Your DNA? Okay, fine, disperse, you are giving me a headache.

On December 31, 1761, Casa disembarks in Paris, where the Marquise d’Urfé
lodges him in a very fine apartment on the rue du Bac. They get down to serious
business. Soon the marquise will be called Seramis, and Casa Galtinarde (taking
off from Seingalt). The Story of My Life is also a fairy tale written by Casanova the
Enchanter, an epic novel with evildoing demons and unexpected allies, sorcer-
ers or protective divinities. Song of Roland, furious Roland, prurient Giacomo.
But one may say that any well-considered life includes the Good Guys and the
Bad Guys, the faithful ones, the felons, the honest ones, the con men, the trai-
tors. Casa keeps his position always on the boundary between the marvelous
and the real, the fantastic and the verifiable. Superior reason is a navigation by
sight between madness and reason. Too much in one direction and it’s a swerve
toward chimeras. Too much in the other and it’s boredom. Casa antes, “cuts,” bets,
reenters the game, constantly tries his luck. His success is a matter of intuition.

Without cracking a smile, Casa tells the marquise that the cult of the
Geniuses of the Seven Planets will reveal the place where he can find a virgin,
daughter of an adept, whom he is to impregnate with a boy “by means of a
method known only to the Rosicrucian brothers.” There’s nothing like stories
of impregnation to control the feminine imagination: “The son was to be born
alive but with only a sensory soul. Madame d’Urfé was to receive him in her
arms at the instant he came into the world and keep him with her for seven
days in her own bed. At the end of those seven days, she would die with her
mouth pressed against the child’s, who would thereby receive her intelligent
soul. After this permutation, it was going to be my task to care for the child
with the magisterium known to me; and as soon as the child attained his third
year, Madame d’Urfé was to recognize herself in him, and then I was to begin
to initiate her in the perfect knowledge of the great science.”

This kind of permutation and regeneration really takes us well beyond the
Astrée, the pastoral novel by the genius of the family, Honoré d’Urfé. So this is
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also a literary victory for Casa. One detail shouldn’t be neglected: the marquise
is to make a will to designate as unique heir this child for whom Giacomo will
be the guardian until the age of thirteen. “This sublime madwoman found this
divine operation completely obvious, and she burned with impatience to see
the virgin who was to be her chosen vessel.”

Casanova’s magic flute is going to repair the great divine injustice of Christi-
anity, which engendered a son in the Virgin Mary. Why not a daughter? That’s
the whole problem. The solution: be reborn as a boy, somewhere between
Scientology and the Solar Temple, with the help of the Rosicrucians.

Having staged this scenario to gain time (and he’ll change it along the way),
he has this wonderful comment: “I saw that I needed a female miscreant whom
I would have to indoctrinate.”
This will be the Corticelli woman.
He knew her back in Florence: “She was thirteen and looked only ten; she
was shapely, white, cheerful, funny, but I don’t know how or why I fell in love
with her.”

Time has passed. Lolita Corticelli will play a major role in Casanova’s opera.
She accepts, there is money to be won. With a wave of a magic wand, she
becomes the Countess de Lascaris, a descendant of the famous family that
reigned in Constantinople. It’s far away, difficult to verify, exactly what is
needed.

The marquise receives the little gang in her chateau at Pontcarré. She mar-
vels at the “virgin Lascaris” (she can’t hear the lascar, “scoundrel,” in Lascaris),
undresses her, perfumes her, puts a veil on her, and is present at the organic
operation performed by Casa that is supposed to make her be reborn. Nothing
“sexual” in all that, of course, but the game is quite clever. Where do children
come from? From the primal scene. Obscenity is erased, curiosity satisfied,
pleasure taken in secret.

Obviously the operation is a failure. La Corticelli will attempt to blackmail

Casa the charlatan, who is obliged to make out that she is crazy and perhaps
“pregnant with a gnome,” as in Rosemary’s Baby. Everything la Corticelli will
say to denounce Giacomo will only prove the extent to which she is possessed
by the adversaries of the redemptive mission. Never mind, says Casa, we’ll try
it again in Aix-la-Chapelle. For the moment, the cabala is formal: you, mar-
quise, you must write to the moon, which is to say the Genius Selenis. “This
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madness, which should have brought her back to reason, filled her with joy.
She was in a state of inspired enthusiasm, and I was convinced at that point
that even if I had wanted to prove to her the nullity of her hopes, I would have
been wasting my breath. At best she would have judged that an enemy genius
had infected me and that I had ceased to be a perfect Rosicrucian. But I was
far from undertaking a cure that would have been so disadvantageous to me
without being of use to her. To begin with, her fantasy made her happy, and
there is no doubt that returning to the truth would have made her unhappy.”

It is extraordinary that Casanova uses the word cure here. It is as if he is say-

ing that Madame d’Urfé is definitely unanalyzable, or better yet, that something
in a woman will forever remain outside any reason. All the religions know that,
sects, too, like Society in its Spectacle. We can also see that he has decided to
write a sort of Don Quixote in reverse: Sancho could be a philosopher who
keeps the Knight Errant happy by sharing his illusions. He would propose
giants in the form of windmills, and other such stories. The implicit lesson of
this reversal goes far indeed.

The Chevalier de Seingalt isn’t errant. To be sure, his actions are irregular;
he justifies them. He doesn’t specify the nature of his physical relations with
Madame d’Urfé, but it’s as plain as day. Later on, he will actually give himself
away by saying to Marcolina, his assistant in another scenario in which he is
to make love with the marquise, that this time it is more difficult. This time: he
has committed to making a male child with her, and she is seventy (in reality
fifty-eight). Beautiful but old. What a job. For the time being, he is going to
take her to bathe with aromatic herbs and conjurations, outside the city. He
gets into the tub with her, hiding in his hand a letter “written in a circle and
in silver characters on shiny green paper.” The letter is revealed in the water,
it’s prodigious, the Genius of the Moon is answering in person and makes an
appointment with the pilgrims for the following spring.
 18
Let no day pass without gambling, without loving.
Nor without meditation.
Look at him, this old hermit in Dux, still youthful in his restlessness, sit-
ting down at his table to write. From morning to evening he writes, and again
at night. Outside it’s winter, it’s snowing. Or the heat of summer invades the
castle. Little by little, scenes arise and stand out in his narrative. How was that
duel to the death one evening, at cards, at a time when he was so exhausted he
thought he would fall off his chair? Oh yes, an idiotic comment was enough
to destabilize the adversary upon his return from the restroom: “My trick
worked because it wasn’t planned and it couldn’t be predicted. An army general
is no different; a ruse in battle must arise in the captain’s head as a result of
circumstance, of chance, and of the habit of grasping at once the relations of
opposition between men and things.”

The repartee, the thrust, the witticism, the presence of mind. You lunge, you
riposte, touché. It’s lightning. He is reminded of this comment by Frederick
the Great of Prussia: “We write to escape boredom and madness. No doubt
the last line belongs to death, but it must be forced to ratify all the rest.”

He dreams, sometimes. In his sleep, he sees a mass of light, “completely filled

with eyes, ears, feet, hands, noses, mouths, genitals of the one and the other
sex, and other bodies whose shapes were unknown to me. . . . The harmony
emerging from this phenomenon gave me great pleasure. . . .”
Casa is full of joy, understandably—he sees God and starts to converse with
him. God tells him splendid things, like: “I lie upon human reason like a per-
fectly spherical ivory globe that cannot roll on the plane on which it is pushed
because the surface lacks cleanliness and evenness.” Also: “If I believed myself, I
would not be infinite.” And also: “The examination of my attributes engendered
incredulity, and pride allied with ignorance sustained and still sustains it.”

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From time to time, God tells the sleeper to turn over, and he continues
his revelations. Thus we learn that he couldn’t care less about atheism, no
more than he cares about superstitions and human passions. Be just, he tells
Casa, and that will suffice. For the rest, “since good philosophy pertains to
only one out of a hundred thousand, it follows that moral evil in the world
is a hundred thousand times greater than good.” And physical harm? “There
is no physical harm. It is a matter of the nature of the universe. Everything
that appears bad is good. Turn the other direction.” God, as you can see, is
very much at ease, not in the least preoccupied by the present: “Matter being
infinite like me, it is impossible for me to define it, because, matter not having
had a principle, its principle must remain unknown to me. I am the eternal
spiritual principle.”
“But you are in space?”
“No, because I am not matter, and in my quality as a real immaterial spirit
I have no desire to find myself in the void.”
“Then we can’t say that you are everywhere?”
“Everywhere except in the void.”

God even adds a few aphorisms: “I am concerned equally with everything

that exists because of the particular demands of each being.”

Or: “Without the religions that humans invented, the plague of superstition
would never have existed, and ignorance would never have been the principal
lot of the human genus.”

And this, finally, which like the other formulas should seem very wise: “Truth
exists on its own, it is independent, but to no avail; for it becomes error as soon
as one communicates it.”

This last observation could be word for word that of a neighbor in Prague
who will put in his appearance later: Franz Kafka.

Back to Switzerland with the “young female theologian” Hedwig. “This beau-
tiful blonde,” says Casa, “set me afire with the charms of her wit.” Questions are
asked, she replies. She asks for more and more difficult questions. For example:
What would have happened if Jesus had consummated the work of the flesh
with the Samaritan woman? In other words, of what nature would the fruit of
their union have been?
Here Casa picks his way. Hedwig becomes a little flustered. She’ll get a “show
and tell” session. “Jesus was not susceptible of an erection,” she is told in private.
 100

What is it, asks the young theologian. Casa presses the demonstration: here is
the Word, creator of men, and what comes out of it is the “humid radical,” etc.

We know our serpent’s methods. Here the interest is in the composition, once
again. Casanova takes advantage of this episode to graft onto his narration the
subjects that really interest him and his conviction that God is “incomprehen-
sible.” People take him for an atheist, but they are wrong. Nothing that concerns
God is foreign to him, taking his experience into account. The young theologian
will prove particularly gifted. To lead her not to sin but to knowledge, Casa
takes care to attack her not alone but with her cousin Helena. He delivers in
passing one of the laws he has discovered during his “long libertine career
. . . a few hundred women”: “What has constantly served me the best was the
care I took not to attack novices—those whose moral principles or prejudices
were an obstacle to success—except in the company of another woman. . . .
The weaknesses of the one cause the fall of the other.” Three trumps, therefore:
the draw of pleasure, curiosity, opportunity.

All three of them go to bed, “all the while philosophizing about shame.” Two
deflowerings, the organ “crowned with a skullcap for insurance.” Hedwig is an
“avid physicist,” interested in everything. Helena is more reticent, but also more
abandoned in the act: “Having begun again, and knowing my nature, fooling
them at will, I showered them with happiness during several hours, passing
five or six times from the one to the other before exhausting my strength and
reaching the paroxysm of orgasm.”

It is possible that if you have lived like that, God would end up appearing
in your dreams. Casanova could be a kind of Copernicus or Galileo, of a new
type—an eventuality that has not been adequately noticed, in my opinion.

However, we mustn’t think that everything always happens with this som-
nambulistic facility. In Turin, we find a Spanish countess whom Casa rubs the
wrong way. She will take revenge.
She invites him and requests that he try out an amusing sneezing powder
with her. A powder that makes one bleed. She takes some herself, they bleed a
bit together. A funny game.
The next morning, a Capuchin monk asks to see him and, betraying a confes-
sion, tells him to go to a certain address. Now we find ourselves with a witch
who has the previous evening’s blood mixed in a bottle. Giacomo pays her and
asks: “‘What would you have done with this blood?’
“‘I would have inducted you.’
 101

“‘What do you mean by inducted? How? I don’t understand.’

“‘You shall see.’
“I was terrified; but the scene changed in an instant. The witch opens a case
about a cubit long, and I see a wax statue lying on its back, completely naked; I
can read my name and, though badly done, I recognize my features and see my
cross draped on the neck of the idol. The simulacrum resembled a monstrous
Priapus in the parts that characterize that god. At this too comical vision I am
seized with hysterical laughter and fall into an armchair until I can catch my
breath.”

Casa is not superstitious. But “in spite of all the gold this infamy cost me, I
was not unhappy to have known about it and to have taken the advice of the
good Capuchin, who sincerely thought I was done for. He must have learned
about the business in confession with the very person who had brought the
blood to the witch. Those are miracles that auricular confession in the Catholic
religion very often brings about.”

He says nothing to the countess, of course. On the contrary—the next day

he showers her with gifts. After all, she could have had him assassinated much
more readily.
 19
We should never forget that while writing, Casanova thought his Story
would never be published. Aside from his Irish doctor who recommended
this therapy, everyone more or less dissuaded him from writing his memoirs.
It’s not done. From time to time he glances at the papers piled on his table,
rereads, revises a chapter, deletes pages, crosses out names, gets discouraged,
thinks it would be better to throw everything in the fire. But no, he continues,
Sequere Deum, the god is at the end of his quill.

He doesn’t take it easy. His adventures are often miserable, especially the
deflowerings paid for by the families. His cyclical illnesses are becoming tedious
in the end. One often has the impression, which is justified, that he doesn’t
know where he is going. His route leads nowhere other than to the table where
we see him writing. So what is his pursuit? What is his goal? The pains he is
taking to tell all result in a mystery. And yet we read him as if he had conveyed
a manuscript to us under the seal of secrecy. For a long time now, we have
been able to dispense with most of the pseudo-books that are published like
products in the global publishing market. Why waste any time where nothing
is happening? In contrast, Casa has only to take us to a carnival in Milan, to
a ball where he dances contra dances to exhaustion, to a new love where “five
hours pass like five minutes,” to a dinner where once again disguises change
the rules of the game, for us to follow him with curiosity and joy. Will little
Clementina, with all her reading, yield after lengthy gallantries? No? It’s not
important, the comedy turns away, retreats, starts over: “Fovet et favet (he
cherishes and is favorable) was my favorite motto, and thanks to my good
nature it still is, and will always be until my death.”

Casanova’s brother, a priest, has run off with a girl, Marcolina. Casa soon
takes her over. In Genoa, surrounded by Rosalie, Annette, and especially his
“niece,” he is living a happy life. One senses that he likes to write sentences like:
“My niece, having become my mistress, set me on fire.” In the meantime, the

102
 103

Marquise d’Urfé, changed into Seramis, is waiting for him in Marseille: “Preoc-
cupied by libertinage and in love with the life I was leading, I took advantage
of the folly of a woman who, had she not been deceived by me, would have
wanted to be by another.”

Always the same excuse. Some praise, all the same: “In spite of her folly,
Madame d’Urfé did good.”

The “oracles” are decisive: Casa is to “inoculate” Madame d’Urfé after they
have both been purified in the bath. Giacomo’s concern is to not find himself
“unable” in the coming action. An undine? Here’s a role for Marcoline. Besides,
it rhymes. “The reader will understand,” says Casa, “provided he is a magician.”

Passano, a rival who attempts to take his place, betrays the inoculator.21 But
he too will be made out as possessed. The proof: he has syphilis.

Metal must be offered to the seven planets. Cases are prepared for this pur-
pose, but they contain only lead instead of precious metals. They are thrown
into the sea. Marcolina the undine is perfect. She presents Seramis with a note
specifying: “I am mute, but I am not deaf. I have emerged from the Rhone to
bathe you. The hour has commenced.” The orders of Oromasis, king of the
Salamanders, are executed. Madame d’Urfé is more and more excited. Casa:
“I could not pity this woman, for she made me laugh too much.” Under the
name of Galtinarde, he is preparing to be both the husband and the father of
Seramis. “I consummate the marriage with Seramis while admiring Marcolina’s
beautiful parts, which I had never seen so well.”

The annoying thing is that the inoculation operation, to be credible, has to

be repeated three times: “Encouraged by the Undine, I undertake the second
siege, which was supposed to be the strongest, because the hour had sixty-five
minutes. I enter the fray, I work for half an hour, sweating, scolding, and wear-
ing out Seramis without reaching the outcome and ashamed to be cheating her.
She was wiping from my forehead the sweat that came from my hair mixed with
pomade and powder. The Undine, by caressing me most vigorously, preserved
what the ancient body I was obliged to touch destroyed. . . .”

Take your pick: this scene is either comical or pathetic. In the end, Casa
pretends to come, which requires more inventive simulation for a man than

21. Giacomo Passano was an actor and rival adventurer who denounced Casanova to Madame
d’Urfé.
 104

for a woman. Men in general are scarcely aware of such faking in their female
partners. Women are more suspicious, but one can fool them all the same
(“Even Marcolina was fooled”).
A prisoner of his own stage directions, Casa now has to accomplish a third
coitus, dedicated to Mercury. Marcolina gives it her all like a true Genius of
the Rivers, which very much astonishes Madame d’Urfé-Seramis: “She asked
the beautiful creature to lavish her treasures on me, and at that point Marco-
lina displayed all the doctrines of the Venetian school. At once she became
lesbian, whereupon, seeing I was alive, she encouraged me to satisfy Mercury.
But here once again I am not lacking for thunder, but without the power to
make it burst forth. . . . I made up my mind to cheat her a second time by an
agony accompanied by convulsions, which ended in immobility, the necessary
consequence of an agitation that Seramis, as she told me afterward, considered
without example.”

Ought we to translate, in modern language, that Casa had a hard-on but

couldn’t ejaculate? Probably not. In any case, we can admire his professional
conscience as well as his feminine gift for ecstatic acting. These days such a job
would be advantageously replaced by an artificial insemination at the corner
clinic. No Oromasis, no Mercury, no Undine, and no “thunder.” Masturbation
in a closet, sperm, and inoculation with a syringe. It is true that the medical
profession would disadvise the experiment for the Marquise d’Urfé, whom
Casa ages excessively in his Story, saying she is seventy whereas she is only
fifty-eight. Science has given hope even to women in their sixties. And after
all, we can always imagine there are crazy gynecologists.

In short, it’s complicated. Cloning less so, and its application is well under
way. Perhaps the Count de Saint-Germain or Casanova, right now, are hidden
laboratory scientists, masked geneticists. Exceedingly rich American women,
passionately interested in occult research, come and consult them for purposes
of “regeneration” or immortality. Everything is possible in this expanding gal-
axy, we’re just at the beginning of the human comedy.
Madame d’Urfé asks the oracle if the operation went perfectly. Casa pulls
himself together: “I responded that the Word of the Sun was in her soul and
that she would give birth to herself with her sex changed at the beginning of
February.”

For the time being, he sends her to her bed, where she is not supposed
to move for one hundred seven hours. He is in a hurry to get together with
Marcolina, who has become very enamored of him and lets him experience
a night comparable to the times in Parma with Henriette and with M. M. in
 105

Murano. (In Casa’s classification, this is the highest rating.) “I remained in bed
for fourteen hours, of which four were devoted to love.”
The “Venetian school” has its charm.

Marcolina has just gained a magnificent necklace and six hundred louis.
She doesn’t want to leave her Chevalier de Seingalt. He: No, no, you’ll find a
husband. She: No, take me away with you, I am your loving woman; “I would
love you like my soul, I would never be jealous, I would look after you like my
child.”
Now there’s a declaration of love.
Madame d’Urfé is also very happy. “Marry me,” she says to Casa, who gets
out of it by pointing out that when she becomes a man, his son, she would be
declared a bastard. Let us keep our wits about us and go back to questioning
the oracle. Questions, replies, new questions, new replies; what a job.

The attentive reader of the Story of My Life, already alerted by the M. M.–C. C.
episode, now observes a very distinct expansion of the motif of the lesbian dur-
ing the course of the narration. You cannot help but think of Proust’s obses-
sion, in his analysis of time. Marcolina, for instance, makes no bones about
admitting she has had such inclinations since age seven, and that in ten years
she has had three or four hundred woman friends. In Aix, she is pursued by
a countess (which is not surprising, since “Provençal women almost all tend
toward such inclinations, and it makes them all the more lovable”). Casa is
jealous, a little, not too much. Albertine, I mean Marcolina, calmly tells him
the next morning: “We did all the crazy things you know women do when they
sleep together.”22

Why not, in fact. But since the “student of Sappho” has won a ring, she is
quickly pardoned by her knight. Only thing is, there’s a bolt from the blue:
Marcolina gives him a letter from the nocturnal countess; there is only one
signature: Henriette. Here you say to yourself that Casa is laying it on a bit thick.
No, he only wants to say (and Proust’s Search will say exactly the same) that the
world of humanity is an immense orgy, a generalized incestuous exchange that
time is in charge of proving. One cannot, however, imagine Proust’s narrator
in the situation Casanova describes between Marcolina and Irene: “I spent
almost the whole night backing up the frenzy of these two bacchantes, who
left only when they saw me reduced to nothing and giving no further sign of
resurrection.”

22. Albertine is the probably lesbian mistress of the hero of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the
object of his intense, obsessive jealousy.
 106

In the morning he finds them asleep, “wound around each other like two
eels.” These flowers of evil provoke no feeling of culpability in him, not the
slightest suggestion of “damned women.” Why, then, the later sulfurous, fatal
shadows in Baudelaire, Proust, and all of literature? Why this legend of the
centuries? The real question is whether we can read Casanova without hiding,
or, worse, by pretending that we find everything he tells banal. There is one
last solution, which one could call final: not to read anything at all, and no
doubt it is toward that that the nihilism of the end of the twentieth century
is heading. Which only goes to show that obscurantism can look forward to
happy days. Unless we decide at last to understand this profound observation
by the Chevalier de Seingalt: “I was pleased to learn that to put reason on the
road to truth, one has to begin by deceiving it. Darkness must have preceded
light.”
 20
Casanova is in London. From the start, he admires the order and cleanliness
of the English; he goes to see his daughter Sophia, who is now ten; he looks
unsuccessfully for women to seduce; reduced to prostitutes, he sends away ten
who don’t please him. A bad sign.

What to do? He puts up a sign outside his apartment to say that above his
there is another apartment for rent at a cheap price, “to a young lady who is
single and free, who speaks English and French, and who will receive no visits
either in the daytime or at night.”

That’s turning the street into a gambling table. And it works: here’s Pauline.
She has escaped from Portugal after the assassination of the king, which is
attributed to the Jesuits. Suddenly Casa seems very up to date on the secret
intrigues troubling the Catholic monarchies. Pauline tells her story, tumbles
into his arms, and it’s happiness: “A never-ending train of orgasms, to the point
that we could no longer desire.” Once again, the comparison with Henriette is
imperative. But the storm is approaching; it will be as sudden as it is terrible.

Casanova often said there were three acts in the comedy of his life. The first,
from his birth until London. The second, from London to his definitive exile
from Venice in 1783. The third, from that exile to Dux, where, he says, “prob-
ably I’ll die.”

“It was on that fatal day at the beginning of September in 1763 that I began
to die and that I finished living. I was thirty-eight. . . .”

The thunderbolt has a name: la Charpillon.

107
 108

“She was a beauty that it was difficult to find fault with. Her hair was a light
chestnut, her eyes blue, her skin of the purest white. . . . Her bosom was small
but perfect, her hands plump but slender and a little longer than ordinary
ones; her feet were adorable and her stride sure and noble. Her sweet, open
physiognomy pointed to a soul distinguished by the delicacy of its sentiments
and that appearance of nobility that ordinarily depends on birth. On those
two points only, it had pleased Nature to lie about her face. It would have been
better for Nature to be truthful only about her face and to lie about all the rest.
This girl had premeditated the intention of making me unhappy even before
having come to know me; and she told me so.”

She is seventeen. Apparently she is for sale.

The first question we ask (taking into account the misfortunes that are to
follow) is the following: how can a professional like Casanova let himself be
dragged into such a ridiculous and destructive business? How can this phoenix
of the libido get himself plucked like a pigeon?

But that’s just it: the best players are sometimes also the weakest. They are
subject to what one might call the virtuoso’s vertigo. Of course Casanova could
have avoided telling the story of his gravest defeat “in the middle of the course
of life” (he says himself, with a nod to Dante’s Divine Comedy). If he did tell it,
it’s because this failure on his part led him to suicide, from which he escaped
only by chance. Suicide is the negation of his vision of the world. Therefore it
is a problem of knowledge. It’s as if he imposed this trial upon himself in order
to see more clearly.

For some time now, Casa has been slowing down. One senses that he doesn’t
care as much for adventure, that his heart isn’t in it, and especially his body. Is
it the result of his move to the North? Not only. Quite simply, he is getting old;
no longer does he obtain “suffrage on sight,” as he will write more and more
often. He thinks of himself as free of charge or within the limits of ordinary
negotiations. But with la Charpillon, he encounters a huge unseen difficulty.
Those who are familiar with hysterical intrigue will have no trouble making
sense of it, but for Giacomo the combination of systematic arousal and rejec-
tion, in a context of cynical exploitation, is a new, unforeseen strategy. At least
as applied to him. The Charpillon woman basically resembles him, hence the
virulence of the transfer—a gnawing identification that also excites, like every-
thing that slips away with constancy and malignancy, therefore with character.
La Charpillon never discourages Casa, on the contrary. As in poker, she raises
the stakes each time. And like a good player, she plays to win, not to lose.
 109

Giacomo is used to shared idylls (even if they require financial arrangements)

or remunerated satisfactions. He’s become accustomed to the idea of being
desirable. Most of the time he forces the issue a little, the reply comes, all is
well. But with la Charpillon, in England, at his age (the age for being settled),
the terrain and the times have changed. The man becomes an experimental
marionette. In fact, it was from this episode about la Charpillon that Pierre
Louÿs drew his narrative The Woman and the Puppet.23 (The number of writ-
ers that Casanova will have inspired, as if he had written nothing himself, is
strange. Thus Apollinaire’s sketch Casanova, a Parodic Comedy, which shows
the lack of seriousness of the information about Casanova that has constantly
been his lot.)24

Casanova has fallen upon a strictly matriarchal organization. A grandmother,

a mother, two aunts, female servants, and the lure that supports the whole: a
pretty, gifted girl of seventeen. She is negotiable, but as expensive as possible.
This is the Augspurgher family, with a specialist for an ancestor, née Brun-
ner. A police report from the time describes this clan as “dangerous females;
an abominable tissue of slander and lies.” Casa will also end up speaking of
a “bunch of females.” They are assisted in their work by three male players,
panders including the famous Goudar, the author of The Chinese Spy, a book
Casa collaborated on in the form of letters.25
Charpillon: a predestined name. One hears within it harpie (harpy), charpie
(cottony filaments), pillage (pillage), haillons (rags), papillon (butterfly). An
entire program. Charpiller ought to be a French verb. In any case, Casa is going
to be majorly charpillé. She’s a coquette? Yes, but in addition sincere. With her,
the true is a mere moment of the false.

Giacomo is turned on. He proceeds as usual, frontally, but la Charpillon

disengages. Once. Twice: “I stopped pressuring her when she told me I would
never obtain anything from her by money or by violence; but that from her
friendship I might hope for all if she were to see me become as gentle as a lamb
in private with her.”

Be a lamb, you will be my lion. Proud and generous, to be sure. The lion in
question takes umbrage, finds this summons beneath him, decides to forget this
bad business, and takes some preserves to his daughter. However, the “lamb”

23. Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel La Femme et le pantin is said to be based on this episode in
Casanova’s memoirs.
24. Casanova is a libretto in three acts written by Apollinaire in 1918, the year of his death.
25. Ange Goudar (1708–1791) was an adventurer, journalist, noted con man, and agent of the
French government.
 110

proposal is not without effect: it’s the temptation of masochism, which, for a
hardened libertine, can add spice because of its very incongruity.
Especially when they prod him. One of the aunts comes to protest that they
never see him, that la Charpillon is complaining about it, and that she is in
bed with a bad cold. Moved, our half-lion makes his call and, as if by chance,
discovers his belle naked in her bathtub. He tries to have a go, without success.
He is furious, but she prods him again and they dine together; he drinks too
much, nothing works. He is in chains. She now has an “irresistible ascendancy”
over him.

Let’s not forget the context. Casa doesn’t understand English; the laws of
the country escape him; the secret mission he is engaged in (about which he
doesn’t speak) mustn’t be going very well; at this moment he has no strong
physical satisfactions. La Charpillon, the grandmother, the mother, the aunts,
the servants, and the panders have gathered all that (including the “age thirty-
eight”). The pigeon-lamb can also imagine that the poor delicious girl is being
manipulated by her entourage. He decides to bring things out in the open.
Goudar has just set a snare for him: the purchase of an armchair that would
automatically imprison the object of his desire (hence rape and judicial pur-
suit). Giacomo is not yet that crazy. He therefore proposes, through Goudar,
a hundred guineas to the mother of la Charpillon to spend a night with her
daughter. He thinks he’s settling matters. He’s falling in.

La Charpillon gets haughty, as if it were an insult. You don’t understand a

thing, she says to Casa, now more and more a quarter-lion. I love you, but you
have to make me love you more, deserve me, press your suit, come see me with
my family, at least for two weeks. Then, a hundred guineas, okay. If you have
been a good lamb. To tighten the noose, while talking love, she cries. She is
magnificent, sentimental, true, overwhelming like a new Héloïse (not counting
the matter of the money).

Heroic in his auto-criticism, Casa says: “This language seduced me.” He’s
headlong into bad literature, which is endless, as he ought to know. The famous
novel of the time is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. A simu-
lacrum of virtue inspired by vice acts on Giacomo like a magnet. He finds this
whole setup a bit complicated, but nevertheless he goes. With presents, needless
to say.

After two weeks, the anticipated night of love arrives. But then—he’s dumb-
struck: “Scarcely do I feel she is lying down than I approach to press her in my
 111

arms, but I find she is worse than dressed. Curled up in her long nightshirt, her
arms crossed and her head buried in her chest, she hears me say everything
I want to and never answers. When I’m tired of saying and determine to get
to doing, she remains immobile in the same posture and defies me. I thought
this playacting was a joke; but I remain convinced in the end that it was not.
I realize that I am deceived. I am stupid, I am the most despicable of all men,
and the girl the most abominable of whores.”

Here the lamb is enraged, recovers his tiger’s claws, and begins to seek his
reward through violence. He tears the back of la Charpillon’s nightshirt, bru-
talizes her, but in vain. “I determined I was going to finish, but I found myself
destitute of strength, and having with one of my hands seized her neck, I felt
myself powerfully tempted to strangle her.”

It’s no longer the new Héloïse, it’s Joan of Arc raped by one of her torturers:
“Cruel night, distressing night, in which I spoke to the monster in all manner of
tones: gentleness, anger, reason, remonstrances, threats, rage, despair, prayers,
tears, meanness, and atrocious insults. For three long hours she resisted, with-
out ever answering and without ever opening up, except one single time to
prevent me from an act that in a certain sense would have avenged me.”

No question—la Charpillon is right. We approve of her, we even applaud

her. That guy is a cretin, a macho, a pig. His lamb-conversion is a long time
coming, but his exasperation and his dazed distraction are promising. And
the fact is, it’s not over.

The “bunch of females” is holding a grand consultation. La Charpillon visits

Casanova at his place. She makes him feel ashamed. She shows him her bruises.
She tells him she accepted this transaction only at her mother’s insistence. She
offers to be his if he supports her completely in a house rented at his expense.
She weeps, she speaks divinely, she is more and more pretty and true. Once
again the lamb is seduced. He rents a house in Chelsea, they move in together.
They go to bed, she is sweet to him, but, bad luck, that night she has her period.
Casa calms down, waits for morning, and checks anyway, while she’s asleep:
she was lying. Hence, another scene of violence. La Charpillon takes a blow
to the nose, she “bleeds profusely.”

If you remember Casa’s strangely hemorrhagic beginnings in life, all this

business with blood is really too much. An essayist in a hurry would simply
write castration here and go look at something else. The lamb-conversion of the
 112

masculine element is inscribed in the order of Technique; no one would think

to complain if he needs to avoid brutalities of this kind, multiple convulsions,
rapes, even organized massacres. But Casanova’s subtlety is great indeed: he is
exploring this red and black continent. At his own expense, to be sure, but with
a redoubtable lucidity—because in the end, everyone is cheating everyone in
this affair, each with a self-interested lie: “What comes after a lengthy contempt
for oneself is a despair that leads to suicide.”

The plot thickens. Goudar, the “Chinese spy,” warns Casa that the matriarchal
syndicate, having recovered its lure bleeding from the nose, is considering hit-
ting him with a slanderous accusation—probably pederasty, a fancy punishable
by death at that time in England.

Made to feel guilty, Casa attacks once again. He brings gifts to the victim of
his brutality, he entrusts her with bills of exchange. One more time he attempts
sex and falls flat. Then it’s la Charpillon who returns to see him; he is aggravated,
doesn’t know what to do with himself, rages.

And it starts again. The “young monster” is really very strong, and Giacomo
very stupid. Is he still able to forget this hell and find distraction, if only for a
minute, with a known prostitute? Not even: “She was charming, but she spoke
only English. Accustomed to loving with all my senses, yet doing without my
hearing, I was unable to yield to love.”

(Casa’s sphere of erotic action is limited to French, Italian, and Spanish.

That’s already a handicap for the coming times. A large part of the “Charpillon
effect” comes from the fact that she speaks French. Today a virtual Giacomo
would have to learn Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese quite young.)

However, Casanova wants to recuperate his bills of exchange. La Charpil-

lon sends a reply to come get them at her house. During a dinner in company
when he is not expecting her, she comes in, provocative, winsome, sits beside
him, treats him ironically. Each time Casa sees her, he is again overcome with
desire. It’s idiotic, but that’s how it is. They go into a garden, walk into a laby-
rinth, and there she throws him to the ground and “attacks like a lover.” He
softens immediately (or rather the opposite), but it’s out of the question to go
all the way. Another scene of violence. He takes out a knife and threatens to
slash her throat if she doesn’t give in. “Go right ahead,” says she, “and I will
tell everyone what happened.” A woman raped, what a scandal. She emerges
from this altercation in all casualness, “as if nothing had happened.” Casa is
in awe: “Her physiognomy had a prestige that I could not resist.”
 113

Love is a sickness, as we know, or rather as we don’t know enough. On this,

Casanova has undertaken an exhaustive study. (Once again, we think of the
narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, whose true sexual organ is actu-
ally jealousy.) But Casanova collaborates with his pathology, he shows himself
engaged in it, you would think he wants to exhaust its power. Thus we arrive
at the ultimate explosion before the risk of depression, with an admirable
description of maniacal possession. One evening he goes to la Charpillon’s
residence when she is not expecting him and surprises her making love with a
young wigmaker on a couch. He beats the wigmaker, breaks the furniture with
his cane, staves in the upholstery, breaks the chairs. The feminine syndicate
screams, la Charpillon escapes into the night. The police intervene. Everyone
is terrorized, and they accuse the madman, total hysteria. Casa of course sinks
immediately into repentance: “But how could I be an idiot of such a high
degree? It’s because I needed to be.”

I needed to be: it was inevitable but also necessary, to learn something more
about human illusions and myself.

The Charpillon woman has disappeared, alone on the London streets at

night. Poor little thing, what’s going to happen to her? The lion becomes a
lamb again. They learn she has returned in the morning, feverish, shocked,
and stressed all the more because it was her “critical time” (her period; the
wigmaker wasn’t put off). The matriarchal syndicate amplifies the news: inter-
rupting the critical time of a pretty young girl, how horrible. La Charpillon is
very sick, she is suffering, she has convulsions, she is delirious, no doubt she
is going to die. Only the action of a monster can have caused this distressed
menstruation. And in her agony she names him, keeps on crying: “My torturer!
Seingalt! He’s trying to kill me!”

All these shenanigans (which are of course fake) are much more effective
than an old-fashioned rite of sorcery. Casa feels like a criminal. The affair with
the wigmaker was just a youthful fling (and Casanova is old), he was wrong to
explode, it’s his fault that an angel is going to leave this earth. And here is a min-
ister of religion who replaces the doctor. “Pentiti! Pentiti! Repent! Scoundrel!”
Casa returns home, he stops eating, he has the chills, he vomits.
He says he is going crazy, and we readily believe him. He was the ideal guinea
pig for this type of experimentation. He paces his room in a frenzy, talking to
himself. That’s it, la Charpillon is breathing her last, he feels “an icy hand press
his heart.” The Commendatore is not there, but it’s as if he were. La Charpillon
is an innocent, a saint, and he, Casa, an assassin who must be punished. He
himself will pronounce the sentence (death) and execute it (suicide).
 114

Okay, that’s it, he no longer deserves to live. He has journeyed to the end
of his stupidity, his blindness, his bad tendencies. The public agrees. They vote
with raised hands or lowered thumbs: death. The condemned man approves.

He writes letters, he bequeaths all his possessions to Bragadin in Venice.

He takes his pistols and, motivated not “by anger or love, but by the coldest
reason,” decides to go drown himself in the Thames at the Tower of London.
For this he buys lead, with which he fills his pockets.
Lead? Like the prison of the Leads?

“The reader may believe me, that all those who have killed themselves were
only preventing madness, which would have taken hold of their reason if they
had not proceeded to execution, and that consequently all those who went
mad could have avoided this misfortune only by killing themselves. I came to
that decision only when deferring for a single day would have made me lose
my reason. Here is the corollary: A man should never kill himself, because it
could happen that the cause of his sorrow may cease before madness arrives.
Which means that those whose souls are strong enough never to despair of
anything are happy. My soul was not strong enough, I had lost all hope, and I
was wisely going to kill myself. I owe my salvation only to chance.”

An astonishing profession of faith, which makes death, contemplated cold,

a disastrous remedy for madness.
But one can also summarize Casanova’s position by this formula: rather
death than lamb. Which doesn’t lack for panache.

Chance? Yes, but mainly destiny. On Westminster Bridge, where he is going

to drown himself, Casa encounters Chevalier Egard, “an amiable Englishman,
young and rich, who was enjoying life by caressing his passions.”26 Chevalier
Egard! God is guarding!
The other man, upon seeing how Casa looks, immediately understands that
something grave is happening. He sticks by his side, takes him to a tavern,
and forces him to amuse himself. Giacomo puts off his suicide for a few hours
without renouncing it. He can’t eat, except for oysters and a Bordeaux wine, a
Graves. The girls Egard has picked up leave him indifferent, even when an orgy
begins. “The pleasures of love are the effect, not the cause, of gaiety.” The two
chevaliers, Egard dragging Seingalt, continue their tour. They come to a place
where people are dancing. And there, waltzing, is the Charpillon woman.

26. The man Casanova calls “le chevalier Egard” was Sir Wellbore Ellis Agar (1735–1805),
according to a note by Willard Trask.
 115

Casa has an epileptic fit. “A revolution took place in less than an hour
throughout my entire person, it caused me to fear the consequences, for I was
trembling from head to foot, and a very strong palpitation gave me to doubt
that I would be able to stand should I dare to get up. The ending of the strange
paroxysm appalled me, it seemed to me it would have to be fatal.”

Die so as to become.27 Giacomo is suddenly cured: “What a prodigious

change! Feeling myself becoming calm, I fixed my vision with pleasure upon
the rays of light, which made me feel ashamed; but this feeling of shame assured
me that I was cured. Such contentment! Immersed in error, I could realize it
only after having emerged. One sees nothing in darkness. I was so astonished
at my new condition that, not seeing Egard, I began to think that I would not
see him again. This young man, I said to myself, is my Genius, who took Egard’s
appearance to return me to my senses. . . . Men easily go mad. I always had a
seed of superstition in my soul, which I certainly do not boast about.”

This was Giacomo Casanova’s second escape from the leads. There are prisons
in concrete space, but also psychological prisons. It is very difficult to possess
the truth, and freedom, in a soul and a body.28

Casa is cheerful, recovered, it’s time to get even. He has the mother and the
aunts of la Charpillon arrested for misappropriation of his bills of exchange.
The feminine syndicate counterattacks by having Casa arrested on the pretext
that he wants to disfigure la Charpillon. He spends a few hours in Newgate
Prison among the criminals and the death row inmates. His witnesses are more
trustworthy than those of his adversaries. The pleasure of revenge is going to
be a pleasantry: a joke.
He buys a parrot and teaches it to repeat the following sentence: “Miss
Charpillon is more of a whore than her mother.” The bird is exhibited for sale
at the London Stock Exchange. It’s a fantastic success. Enough said.

A moral about how little credibility one can lend to “testimonies”: “The ease
with which one finds false witnesses in London is something quite scandalous.
One day I saw a sign in a window on which one could read, in capital letters,
the word witness, nothing else. That meant that the person living in the apart-
ment worked as a witness.”

27. The expression “Stirb und Werde,” from the final lines of Goethe’s poem “Selige Sehnsucht,”
comes from Masonic initiation rites or practices. It is the notion of a second birth upon initiation
into Freemasonry.
28. Sollers is quoting a poem from the Illuminations by Rimbaud.
 21
After these labyrinthine disasters and this second escape, more perilous than
the one from Venice, it’s understandable that Casa would need some relaxation.
Just in time, here come five girls and their mother, the Hanoverians. At last he
can rest in the shade of young girls in flower:

“I felt that I loved them not like a lover but like a father, and the thought that
I was sleeping with them raised no obstacle to my sentiment because I have
never been able to conceive how a father can tenderly love his charming daugh-
ter without having at least once slept with her. This conceptual impotence has
always convinced me, and still convinces me all the more strongly today, that my
mind and my matter form a single substance. Gabrielle would tell me, speaking
to me with her eyes, that she loved me, and I was sure she wasn’t deceiving me.
Is it comprehensible that she wouldn’t have felt this way if she had had what is
commonly called virtue? For me, too, it’s an incomprehensible idea.”

If you want to be loved by a woman, make her your daughter. If you have a
daughter, make her into a woman, at least once. Many fathers are unable to truly
become the fathers of their daughters; they are hampered by their difficulties
with their own mothers. A daughter can also be cut off from her father by her
mother, a frequent case (and it was probably la Charpillon’s case).
Isn’t this perfectly luminous? No? Too bad. Casanova will insist more and
more on this point that seems “incomprehensible” (like God himself), and that
is the reason why he chooses his vocabulary, maliciously: “conceive,” “concep-
tual impotence,” he knows what he’s talking about, and how. True love, love that
“conceives,” is the daughter’s for her father. In the last instance, a daughter has
children only by her father. And a mother always has a father, successful or not.

“My mind and my matter form a single substance”: it’s hard to surpass that
as a complete philosophy. And what proves it is the philosophical novel that life

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becomes on the basis of these principles. Casa’s first “escape” is physiological

(his initial imbecility for eight years, his periodic hemorrhages). The second
is physical (his loss of liberty in the Leads). The third is psychical (rejection,
the temptation of suicide). The fourth and last will be pneumatic (the writing
in high doses of the Story of My Life, moreover unfinished).
It’s a striking demonstration, and one can understand that it should be
unbearable to conceive of, except as a legend. Matriarchal religion works to
deny this phenomenon with all its strength (and we have entered a new techni-
cal phase of matriarchy). What has been called patriarchy, for its part, is only the
violent refusal of the father-daughter relationship, which is to say the necessity
for human beings to exchange women among themselves, to avoid endogamy.
Society, unbeknownst to it, is dominated by this law of masculine homosexual-
ity. When such a tangle seems the looser, it’s only because it’s tightening in the
shadows. Casanova does white magic, let’s not forget it. He disentangles.

“If I had been rich, these Hanoverians would have detained me in their irons
till the end of my life.” Happily he is not rich. The adventure continues.

Casa’s satisfaction as a lover-father is short lived. As he is also frequenting

“bad company,” he is once again infected with syphilis just as he is obliged to
flee London because of an unpaid debt. Here he is in Dunkirk in bad shape,
with a “frightening visage.” From there he goes to Tournai, where, as always
by chance, he encounters the Count de Saint-Germain, who is “working” in
the area.

This gives him the opportunity to learn what’s new with Madame d’Urfé, the
Marquise Seramis, absent from the narrative. “She poisoned herself by taking
too strong a dose of the universal medicine,” Saint-Germain coldly tells him.
“She thought she was pregnant.”
Amen.

Saint-Germain offers to cure Casa (pills). (But after all, perhaps Casanova
is also the Count de Saint-Germain?) He refuses (prudent). Thereupon the
alchemist shows him certain of his results: “He let me see his archeus, which he
called Atoeter. It was a white liqueur in a little vial identical to several others he
had there. They were stoppered with wax. Telling me that it was the universal
spirit of nature, and that the proof was that this spirit would instantly leave the
vial if one made the tiniest little hole in the wax with a pin, I begged him to
let me see it. He gave me a vial and a pin, saying I could do it myself. I pierced
the wax, and in an instant I saw that the vial was empty.”
 118

Casa is astonished, but he asks Saint-Germain what use he makes of this

substance. The other man replies that he cannot tell him. After which he trans-
forms a twelve-sou coin into a gold coin. Casa is sure it’s a sleight-of-hand trick
(make the first coin disappear, substitute another). But he only remarks that
Saint-Germain did not alert him to the transmutation to come: “He replied
that those who felt they could doubt his science were not worthy of speaking
to him. This was his characteristic way of speaking. That was the last time I
saw that famous imposter, who died six or seven years ago.” (So Casa is writing
these lines in 1790 or 1791.)

Time, the universal spirit of nature, evaporates. Another marquise, an unfor-

gettable one, has just died also: Madame de Pompadour, April 15, 1764.

Best make a serious effort to cure himself. This particular syphilis lasts a
month. Bed, boredom. Casa arises cured but very thin.
 22
It’s clear that the Casanova we’re dealing with now is transmuted.

He’s traveling.

We find him in Brunswick in the famous library where Leibniz and Less-
ing found matter for reflection: “I spent eight days, never leaving the library
except to go to my room, and never leaving my room except to return there.
. . . I would have needed the support of only quite minor circumstances to be
a true sage in the world, for virtue always held more charm for me than vice.”
(Speaking thus is Mr. Librarian of Count Waldstein’s chateau in Dux, today
called Duchcov.)

In Berlin he sees Calzabigi, his former accomplice in launching the Paris

lottery; he has to try to make him acceptable to Frederick of Prussia. Frederick
receives Casa at Sans-Souci; begins by deciding that the Chevalier de Seingalt
is a “hydraulic architect” because of one of his comments on the water features
in his garden compared to the ones in Versailles; constantly jumps from one
subject to another; and ends up looking his interlocutor up and down and
pronouncing: “You are a very good-looking man.”
Thank you.

Nothing to obtain from Berlin, let’s leave for Saint Petersburg. In Russia, Casa
buys a peasant girl (it’s not proper) to serve as his servant. He calls her Zaire.
She will be very jealous, she will even come close to killing him by throwing
a bottle at his head. One evening he succumbs to the charms of a young Rus-
sian officer “as pretty as a girl.” He suffers attacks of very painful hemorrhoids.
He hears confirmation of Voltaire’s fame practically everywhere. He finally
sees Czarina Catherine II in her summer garden, where there stand statues
each more ridiculous than the last. He speaks to her as a scientist about the

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Gregorian calendar, which she ought to adopt for her Empire. What exactly
does he sell to her? We don’t know. In any case, he prefers her to Frederick of
Prussia.
Nothing to report. Casa is bored. He falls back on documentary style. A
few metaphysical digressions about sudden death and its consequences in the
beyond, but that’s about it. The only light in the eastern cold: a French actress,
la Valville, who performed only once in Regnard’s Les Folies amoureuses. She’s
been shelved, she wants to leave, she needs a passport. Casa fixes it up for
her and leaves with her in a dormeuse (a vehicle in which they are as if in a
bed). The French women? They are convenient: “They have neither passion
nor temperament, and as a result they do not love. They are accommodating
and have only a single project, always the same. Skilled at breaking up, they
hook up with the same facility and always with a laugh. This is not the result
of thoughtlessness; it is a true system. If it’s not the best, it’s at least the most
convenient.”

Casa may have invented this voyage. But he wanted to say that the French
women are henceforth especially concerned to be kept: melancholy notation
by a traveler, lucid prophecy.

Admirable, secret Casanova. You think he is lost among his anecdotes and
then, all of a sudden, on the sly, he slips in a face card, he grafts onto or injects
into his narrative a message or a document of the highest importance.

In the time of the narrative, he is in Augsburg, in May 1767. In the time of

the narration, he is in Dux on the 1st of January 1798—six months before his
passing. In the narration, he is seventy-three; in the narrative, forty-two.

In 1767 he needs money. So he writes to Prince Charles de Courland, who is

in Venice, to ask him to send about a hundred ducats. “To prompt him to send
them immediately, I sent him a fail-proof procedure to make the philosopher’s
stone.”
That’s how he says it, in the most natural way, in this philosophical (i.e.,
alchemical) novel.

This Prince de Courland is not just anybody. Adventurer, thief, he’s a match
for the famous Cartouche, according to the police. He has a thousand tricks
in his bag, including this one: “The Prince de Courland had learned from an
Italian named Cazenove the secret of a composition of ink that disappeared on
the paper such that one would not imagine that there had ever been writing
on it.”
 121

Invisible writing: that’s Casa, all right.

We are reading Historical and Authentic Memoirs about the Bastille, published
in 1789. It includes the alchemical letter sent by Casa to Courland. Here’s why:
“As my letter, which contained such an enormous secret, was not in code, I
urged him to burn it, assuring him that I had a copy with me; but he didn’t do
it, he kept my letter, and they took it from him in Paris with his other papers
when they put him in the Bastille.”

This letter should never have seen the light of day. But in 1789, twenty years
after Courland’s arrest, “the people of Paris, roused by the Duke d’Orléans”
(interesting detail), dismantle the Bastille, seize the archive, and publish Casa’s
letter, “along with other interesting items” later translated into German and
English: “The ignorant people who exist in this country where I am now liv-
ing (Bohemia), who quite logically are all my enemies, since the donkey never
could be friends with the horse, exulted when they read this charge against me.
. . . The Bohemian animals who reproached me thus were astonished when I
replied that my letter brought me immortal honor and that, if they were not
asses, they should admire it.”

The horse? Of course—we understand: the chevalier, the cabal.

And here, with very neat handwriting, Casa copies his letter.
It’s a classic alchemical text for making gold. Casa is a child of the sun
and not of lead, which is Saturn. It’s surprising that the alchemists, with their
transmutation pretensions, these philosophers “with broad, studious brows”
(as Rimbaud will say in his sonnet on the Vowels), died poor. The fact that
they were subject to surveillance, pursued, and often executed in secret is an
element of the answer. That all this is imposture and smoke, Casa never stops
saying so, except when the “asses” applaud. The fact remains that Courland
is a thief, whom Casa addresses in these terms: “The operation requires my
presence as concerns the construction of the furnace and the extreme diligence
of its execution, for the slightest error would make it fail. . . . The only request
I have of you is to wait until we are together to do this operation. Unable to
work alone, you cannot trust anybody; for even if the operation should succeed,
the person who would help you would steal your secret. . . . I did the tree of
projection with the Marquise de Pontcarré d’Urfé. . . . My fortune would now
be of the highest degree, as concerns wealth, if I had been able to trust a prince
who is master of a currency. This good fortune comes to me only today. . . .”

Technical indications follow that are supposed to result in the fabrication of

true-false gold currency. “State Secret,” fine, if this business is not a charlatan’s
 122

joke. But Casa is not telling (whereas he willingly does the rest of the time).
Furthermore, he’s contradicting himself: so he was the one who “worked” in
Madame d’Urfé’s laboratory? Doing what, exactly?

In addition to control of the work, Casa asks Courland to give him “the mat-
ter it pleases Your Highness to grant me, striking it with the die I will provide
you. Do remember, Monsignor, that it must be a State Secret. You, Prince, must
understand the force of this phrase.”

Courland died in 1801 in Prussia, in straitened circumstances. He was seen

often before, in Poland and in Russia. The only question is the following:
although an imposing group of accusations were brought against him at the
time, why was he freed on April 24, 1768, with a bond of fifty thousand francs
deposited by the Bishop of Vilna? Wasn’t Casa’s letter damning? And why,
instead of treating it like a bizarre parenthesis, did the Chevalier de Seingalt
carefully copy it into the Story of My Life, a manuscript he couldn’t even think
would be published one day? Defiance? Seriousness? Nose-thumbing at the
“asses”? All of the above?

Casa is headed to Paris. He passes through Spa, stops, admires his landlord’s
niece, who has a pretty first name that ought to be popular again, Merci. She
sleeps near his room. He tries his luck, wants to touch her, and gets a fist in
the nose. Frankly, he is getting old. He bleeds.

In Paris he is homesick, lost, hardly recognizes anything: “Paris seemed like

a new world. Madame d’Urfé was dead, my old acquaintances had changed
homes and fortunes. I saw rich people who had become poor, the poor rich; I
found brand-new ladies of the night, those whom I had known having gone to
perform in the provinces, where everything that comes from Paris is celebrated
and praised to the skies. . . .”

In point of fact, Madame d’Urfé is not yet dead, but she no longer exists for
him. There is still Madame du Rumain, whose voice he once restored. There
is an innocent death: Charlotte, a seventeen-year-old, during a failed child-
birth that Casa had nothing to do with. It’s the first time we see him affected,
disinterested, and dispensing his time out of charity. And then, “up there” in
Venice, Bragadin dies, the faithful among the faithful. He has left a thousand
écus to his adoptive son, but it’s sad. Casa gradually gets used to the idea that
he is of a certain age. His tranquility is short-lived; a lettre de cachet orders him
to leave the territory. “For such is our desire,” kings would say back then.
 123

He goes through Orléans, Poitiers, Angoulême, he heads toward Spain.

“I arrived in Bordeaux, where I spent a week. After Paris, it is the foremost
city in all of France.” Stendhal will remember this sentence.

He is in Pamplona; he gets to Madrid.

Right away he is struck by the language. It contains a lot of a’s. Like Casanova.
“One of the most beautiful languages in the universe—sonorous, energetic,
majestic.” It’s not as good as Italian, but almost.
He now calls himself Jaime (Spanish for Jacques). It’s the Inquisition on one
side, women on the other (nothing new under the sun, only the color of the
Inquisition has changed): “The women are very pretty, burning with desires,
and quite ready to lend a hand in any ploy whose purpose is to fool all those
who surround them in order to spy on their thoughts.”

In Madrid, the envoy of the Venetian ambassador is very friendly with Casa
(later on, he will try to have him assassinated). It’s a small world: he is the son of
Manuzzi, the spy who had Giacomo incarcerated in the Leads by denouncing
him to the Inquisitors. He “swings left”; in other words, he occupies the role of
“antiphysical mistress” of the ambassador (unless it’s the other way around). A
slippery terrain, difficult maneuvers, all the more since superstition and denun-
ciations by false piety are everywhere: “The Spanish are edified by everything that
demonstrates that in whatever they may do, they never lose sight of religion. No
courtesan, finding herself with her lover and yielding to desire, determines to
engage in the act without first covering the crucifix with her handkerchief and
turning toward the wall any paintings that represent saints. Anyone who might
laugh at this, any man who would call this ceremony absurd and superstitious,
would pass for an atheist, and the courtesan would go denounce him.”

All well and good, but nothing prevents libertinage. Casa takes the plunge,
that is, into the fandango: “I can’t even describe it. Each man danced face to face
with his woman, taking only three steps, striking the castanets held between
the fingers, and accompanying the music with the most lascivious attitudes.
The man’s postures visibly indicated the act of felicitous love, the woman’s the
consent, the rapture, the ecstasy of pleasure. I thought any woman who had
danced the fandango with a man had nothing left to refuse him. The pleasure
I had in watching it made me cry out. . . .”

Don Jaime Casanova discovers bohemians. He learns fast: “So well did I
learn the style of this dance in three days that even the Spanish admitted that
there was no one in Madrid who could claim to dance better than I.”
 124

The rest ensues. Casa goes into a church (the Soledad), sees a beautiful
woman, follows her (she lives on the street called del Desengaño, “of delusion”);
he goes up, introduces himself, and, as a foreign chevalier who knows no one,
invites the beautiful woman to go to the ball. The family is obliged to accept.
Could he possibly be taken for a sucker? Let’s see what happens.
Casanova’s amused. The beautiful woman is called Ignazia, and of course,
next to her bed, she has a portrait of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, “young, beautiful
physiognomy inspiring physical love.” A discreet homage to the Jesuits in the
appropriate insolent manner. He starts his approach with the usual circum-
locutions: seducing the innocent cousins, funny transvestite disguises, games
in the manner of Goya in his luminous period. The corrida takes place in the
bedroom. For him, it’s a matter of passes, changes of tone, dances with forward
and backward motions: “Nothing is more true than this: a devout girl, when
she engages in the acts of the flesh with her lover, feels a hundred times more
pleasure than one who lacks this prejudice. This truth is too well anchored in
nature for me to feel it necessary to demonstrate it to my reader.”

On the contrary, do demonstrate it for us, really. And tell us if the struggle
against devoutness doesn’t have, as a hidden cause, the desire to prevent women
from climaxing too much? The libertine finds himself in a strange position.
On the one hand, the need to destroy all repressive superstition; but on the
other, the impossibility of consenting to the flattening of desire. There are two
forms of puritanism: the clerical and the anticlerical; the ignorant and the fake
scientific; the religious and the technical; the prudish and the pornographic.
What is it that makes the difference between a fake God and orgasm, between
eroticism and sexual misery? Taste, representation.

It’s not by chance that Casa inserts here digressions about dance and paint-
ing. For example, there is a very beautiful painting of the Virgin with Child
in a church in Madrid. The virgin’s open bosom excites sensuality. The devout
stream in and leave lots of money in this church. One day, there is hardly any-
body. Intrigued, Casa goes in and observes that the new chaplain has painted
a scarf on the Virgin’s breast (“Hide this breast, I dare not see it”).29 The priest
is thirty; he is categorical: “Let all beautiful paintings perish if together they
can cause the slightest mortal sin.”

In Venice, Casa tells him, you would have been immediately incarcerated
in the Leads for this crime (and it is a crime). “I couldn’t say mass,” the young
priest replies, “that beautiful breast troubled my fancy.”

29. “Hide this breast, I dare not see it” is a line from Molière’s famous play Tartuffe (1664–1669).
 125

QED. What functioned in the priest’s head was well and truly a porn photo,
not a painting by Raphaël or Titian. Henceforth we live in a society where a
porn photo does not hinder other merchandise in the least. In New York,
you can go straight from an ascetic Lutheran church to a sex shop. Where is
the problem with that? The fact is, there isn’t any. Bucco-genital relations are
perhaps not “sexual.” And a young woman today can engage in multiple fel-
lations, all the while simply continuing to knit and read romance novels. Like
the society she lives in, she is a devout person for our time, that’s all.

Ignazia is afraid of dying in a state of mortal sin while sleeping. That tends to
affect the imagination. One day she is forced to choose between her confessor
and Casa. Her confessor refuses absolution? It’ll be Casa. Not too neurotic, it
seems; she didn’t need psychoanalysis.

The parodic inverse of the irreducible devout woman is the andromaniac.

Example? The Duchess of Villadarias: “She would grab hold of the man who
aroused her instinct, and he had to satisfy her. That had happened several times
in public gatherings, whence those present had to flee.”

Is the uterus an “absolute animal, unreasonable, uncontrollable . . . a fero-

cious viscus”? “Tota mulier in utero,” as the theologians used to say? Is that
what explains female saints and Messalinas? No more than that the existence
of male saints or of obsessed men can be said to derive from the automatic
nature of the penis, a phallus with eclipses. Casanova wrote and published dur-
ing his lifetime an odd little pamphlet on the matter, Lana Caprina: Epistola
di un licantropo (Splitting Hairs: Letter of a Lycanthrope) (in Italian). In the
Story of My Life he wonders, apparently seriously, if he would have liked to be a
woman. His reply is categorical: no, because of the risk of becoming pregnant.
But yes, if it’s just a matter of living again: “Tiresias, who had been a woman,
pronounced a true but laughable sentence, because it seems the two pleasures
had been put on a scale.”

Tiresias gave women the advantage in pleasure, but one can’t put men and
women on the same scale on this matter. Why is this evidence so little recog-
nized? A calculation mania.

In Madrid, Casa had a stay in the Buen Retiro prison, a place infested with
fleas, bedbugs, and lice. He spent his nights on a bench, fearing once again
that he would go mad. Fortunately, he can count on the encyclopedia party
(Aranda, Campomanes): the expulsion of the Jesuits is under way. The Inqui-
sition, “whose masterwork consists in keeping Christians ignorant,” is on the
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defensive. But the king of Spain, Charles III, is devout. Similarly, in the past,
“Louis XIV chatted with his confessors too much.” In short, Casa gets out, visits
Toledo, Aranjuez; reads “Cervantes’s masterpiece . . . superb novel.” He reflects
on Fortune. A blind goddess? Not at all: “It appeared that she wished to exercise
an absolute dominion over me only to convince me that she reasons and that
she is the master of all. To convince me of it, she employed striking methods
entirely aimed at making me act by force, and to make me understand that my
will, far from declaring me free, was only an instrument she used to do with
me what she wished.”

Casa hesitates. Everything is predetermined, but man is free. Fortune (God,

Providence, Fatality, Destiny, Necessity, etc.) exists, all-powerful—and yet it
doesn’t. Sometimes he has a violent flu, fever, syphilis, a fistula; sometimes an
unheard-of happiness. In spite of all, he insists on having us know that he is
being led by a reasoning force. Freedom and truth (“the only god that I adore”)
are perhaps not a matter of will. There is a reasoning about me that does not
come from me, there is grace and disgrace. Sum, quia sentio. I am, because I
feel. If I were to be reborn, says Casa, I would like it to be with my memory,
otherwise I would no longer be me. So he is attached to himself. Reading him,
so are we. He chooses his eternal return, gives himself the courage and the
proof. To be “the instrument” of Fortune, what music could be more beautiful?
You only have to know how to notate it, it’s a gift. Alchemy, let us recall, is “the
art of music.”
 23
Casa was indiscreet about the morals of Manuzzi and the Venetian ambas-
sador. He gets a slap on the wrist. He has to leave with all haste. Killers pursue
him. He evades them. After Saragossa, here he is in Valencia.

The Lola de Valence, for him, is called Nina.30 She is the mistress of the general
captain of Barcelona (which will cost our libertine traveler dearly). He does a
few orgies with her. Nina is terrible: “Before me I saw a woman beautiful like
an angel, atrocious like a devil, a horrible whore born to punish all those who
to their misfortune would fall in love with her. I had known others of that ilk,
but never an equal.”

She has him come to Barcelona, arouses her official lover’s jealousy, which
for Casa will result in another assassination attempt. In the end he is arrested,
taken to the “Tower,” prison again.

He asks for paper and ink and in forty days writes his refutation of Amelot
de la Houssaye’s Histoire du gouvernement de Venise (History of the Government
of Venice). At this point his goal is clear: regain the favor of the government
of the Most Serene Republic and return “up there,” the only livable place here
below.

Farewell, Spain. He passes through Perpignan, Béziers, Montpellier; arrives

in Aix-en-Provence, where the Marquis d’Argens lives. Sexual confession: he
feels that his “prodigious time is past.” He falls ill, violent pleurisy, coughing
blood. An unknown woman takes care of him, sent to look after him by the
faithful Henriette. He has probably seen Henriette without recognizing her, in
Aix. She apparently has put on weight. She still doesn’t care to see him again.
Later, perhaps, for a tranquil conversation.

30. Lola de Valence is an 1862 painting of a Spanish dancer by Manet.

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“These are the fine moments of my life. These happy encounters, unpre-
dictable, unexpected, altogether fortuitous, due to chance, and all the more
precious.”

Another confession: “The more I advanced in age, the more what bound
me to women was their wit. It was becoming the vehicle that my dulled senses
needed to set themselves in motion.”

He encounters Balsamo (Cagliostro) disguised as a pilgrim and accompanied

by his wife. He takes note of the man’s virtuoso gift for imitating handwrit-
ing. Fatigued, he very nearly gets into a sentimental novel with Miss Betty,
an English woman. He could also write that sort of literature. But Fortune is
keeping watch, she decides differently.
 24
Casanova has returned to Italy, it’s the return of Ulysses—to his country, but
not yet to his city. The air speaks to him, the language bathes him, his body
slowly redeploys. Don Juan is more comfortable as Don Giovanni, we’ll see
that later. Though a man of his age, Don Giacomo is nevertheless not at the
end of his happiness, far from it. He feels he should go to the South, his South:
Naples, Sorrento. An odor di femina? A gaze, rather: “This girl had eyes of such
a brilliant black that it would have been impossible for her to prevent them
from making those who gazed upon them fall in love, or to prevent them from
saying more than they were saying, even in spite of herself.”

Her name is Callimena. Casa decides that her name means “furious beauty”
in Greek (which can be maintained, etymologically), and even “beautiful
moon” (why not). He gets excited. This beauty is fourteen, looks eighteen,
the ideal young debutante. She plays the harpsichord. She resists a bit, not
for long: “This pairing in Sorrento was the last true happiness I have tasted in
my life. . . . That day Callimena gratified my ardor, after having fought herself
for two days in a row. The third day, at five in the morning, in the presence of
Apollo, who rose from the horizon, sitting one beside the other on the grass,
we abandoned ourselves to our desires. Callimena did not sacrifice herself to
interest or to gratitude, for I had given her mere bagatelles, but rather to love,
and I could not doubt it. She gave herself to me and was angry with herself for
having delayed so long in making this gift to me. Before noon we had changed
altars three times, and we spent the afternoon going everywhere, walking, and
stopping at once whenever the slightest spark made itself felt to give rise to the
desire to extinguish it.”

In this passage, we have an example of Casanova’s flowery style when his

intentions are solemn. Apollo, the third day, five in the morning, three changes
of “altars,” no doubt about it, it’s a magic ritual. Free, hence rare. Casa had

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somewhat lost the habit of receiving gifts. The girl’s name is Greek. Not for
nothing is Apollo mentioned; the scene is an Eden, Giacomo’s taking a slice of
the terrestrial paradise. One thinks of old Poussin’s fresh and fabulous painting
Apollo in Love with Daphne. Casa is about to saddle himself with a translation
of the Iliad. Ariosto, Homer—serious allies! But who could fail to grasp that
now he is sure to have his own Odyssey? While Fortune, with its favorable or
hostile winds, determines navigation on the earth, among mortals, the hero of
endurance with the “thousand ruses” dreams of returning home, to Ithaca, to
Venice. The gods have him in their sights. In the Odyssey, Athena protects her
“great-hearted” Ulysses, but Apollo does not disdain to lend a hand to Casa,
in the grass, with his little musician with the dark eyes who finds herself in
tune with him. In tune: it’s unexplainable, that’s the way it is, let’s enjoy a happy
moment in nature.

Quickly, because the game soon languishes and the keeper of the bank is
anything but stable. There is still a duel to fight. Naples is, after all, a favorable
spot. Casa has a look at the muddy courtyard of the chateau at Dux and writes:
“The city of Naples was the temple of my fortune one out of every four times I
stayed there. If at present I went there, I would die of hunger. Fortune scorns
old age.”

The actor’s old age, surely, but not the old age of the one holding the pen.
Apollo will crown him in time.

One traveler, among others (like Vivant Denon), is also very happy in Naples:
the Marquis de Sade, in 1776 (by then, Casa has returned to Venice). Open that
masterpiece called Juliette, and you will be convinced of it. Sade is a volcano,
Casanova a garden. Sade cheerfully massacres the human race, Casanova civi-
lizes it. The night is also a sun. Both darkness and light are at the antipodes
of obscurantist grayness. Of course, the fact that night is also a sun is a Nietz-
schean formula. This extreme reasoning will always shock the ambient clerisy.

I won’t waste my time talking about the amateurs who want to contrast
Naples and Venice (Against Venice: you can picture Casa’s smile).31 All the
sensations are welcome, from the strongest to the most nuanced. All the ports.

(I remember a lunch with François Mitterrand in 1988. He has just been

reelected president of the Republic, he is discovering Venice late in life, he

31. Régis Debray, Against Venice, trans. John Howe (London: Pushkin Press, 2002). As the
author of a Dictionnaire amoureux de Venise, Sollers, like Casanova, can only “smile.”
 131

is tired of the Hexagon day in, day out. After indicating his curiosity about
“the fearsome Monsieur Sollers” (laughter), he tells me almost immediately
that he is reading Casanova (I should have asked him in which edition). Sit-
ting beside me on a couch, he taps me paternally on the thigh and murmurs:
“Watch out for your health, okay?” (I get the impression he is going to hand
me some condoms.) Turning up his nose, Octavio Paz, who is also present,
begins, somewhat harshly: “Lack of depth, of a sense of the tragic, etc.” Mit-
terrand interrupts, aggravated: “You think so? This sense of the moment, this
frenzy for life? Do you really think so? What do you think, Monsieur Sollers?”
I agree with the president, since he’s saying the obvious. The fact is, he is sick;
everything bores him; he has no desire to continue his ridiculous and futile
interviews with Marguerite Duras; he is like an insect attracted to the Venetian
light; his more or less secret daughter Mazarine, the Antigone of his old age,
must be about fourteen at that time.)

Casa took Naples early one morning in Sorrento.

But Salerno is an opera in the nighttime.

Lucretia, his former lover, and Leonilda, his daughter, are there. Leonilda
was sixteen when she saw her father “distilling”; today she is twenty-five; she
is a “perfect beauty”; she has become a marquise by marrying Monsieur de la
C . . ., age seventy, rich but suffering from gout: “A nobleman of seventy who
could boast of having seen the light was a rare phenomenon thirty years ago
in the Sicilian kingdom.”

In other words, the marquis is a Freemason. He and Casanova embrace:

“While sitting beside him, beginning again these renewals of our divine alli-
ance, we embraced, and the two women present, quite astonished, could not
understand how this recognition could be taking place. Donna Leonilda was
delighted to see that her husband was an old acquaintance of mine, she tells
him that and kisses him, and the good old gentleman nearly dies laughing.
Only Donna Lucretia suspects the truth. Her daughter doesn’t understand a
thing and saves her curiosity for another time.”

Casa and the marquis are Brothers by “divine” alliance, which joins with a
human alliance. Casanova deprives himself of nothing.

The Marquis de la C . . . (Giacomo is having fun) is an enlightened man who

has traveled a lot and lived. His only reason for marrying was to have an heir.
Though ill, he can still take the needed action with his wife (Leonilda), but
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without being sure of the results of his action. He loves his wife, a “freethinker”
like him, but in the greatest secrecy: “In Salerno, everyone lacked wit, and so
he lived with his wife and his mother-in-law like a good Christian, adopting
all the prejudices of his compatriots.”

Would the “liberated” reader of today guess what comes next? It’s not certain.

There will be a lot of talk about a “bill of exchange due in nine months,” which
Leonilda will be responsible for paying. Casa is thus the “gold-stallion” who
must fertilize his own daughter, for which, moreover, he will be remunerated.
One can wish for Leonilda and the marquis “a fine son in nine months’ time.”

We have to read closely to understand—nothing is said the way I have just

said it. This section in the Story of My Life is treated with extreme artful-
ness. Casa does not write: “I made my daughter a baby to serve as heir to
the marquis.” He can suppose, at the outset, that the marquis does not know
that Leonilda is his daughter, whereas he knows it perfectly well (and will
singularly surprise Casa when he so specifies after the fact, while still giving
him money).
Appearances are respected. The procedures will take place in a country
home. The marquis will “visit” his wife during the night. But the “negotiation”
has already taken place.

Giacomo, Lucretia, and Leonilda are in a grotto. They recall the night they
spent together nine years earlier. Lucretia discreetly leaves her daughter alone
with her father, recommending that they should not “commit the crime.” “These
words, followed by her departure, brought an effect quite the opposite of the
precept she gave us. Determined not to consummate the so-called crime, we
verged so close upon it that an almost involuntary movement forced us to
consummate it so completely that we could not have done more had we acted
in consequence of an intention premeditated with all the freedom of reason.
We remained still, gazing at each other, without changing our posture, both
of us serious and silent, prey to reflections, and astonished to feel, as we said
to each other later, neither guilty nor victims of remorse. We readjusted our
clothing, and my daughter, sitting next to me, called me her husband while I
called her my wife. With sweet kisses we confirmed what we had just done, and
had an angel come just then to tell us we had monstrously outraged nature, it
would have made us laugh. Absorbed as we were in this quite decent tender-
ness, Donna Lucretia was edified to see us so calm.”
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The rest is mere circumstance, including the way Anastasia, one of Leonilda’s
servants whom Casa had fondled before, “intercepts” the father-gold-stallion
and tries to redirect the bill of exchange for her own profit.

In the end, everyone is happy with the most innocent crime in the world.
Casa obtains five thousand ducats, they celebrate before his departure, tears
flow.
Picture a young marquis later on telling one of his mistresses: “I am the son
of the daughter of my father, who was actually Casanova.”
The son of the daughter of my father: that strangely resembles the theological
formula “Virgin mother, daughter of your son” (as Dante condensed it at the
beginning of his Paradise). We have entered the heart of the incestuous rose.
Awkward silence.

Don Giacomo is now marching to Rome. We arrive at the home of the Duch-
ess de Fiano, very strong personality, ugly, unfortunately not rich. “Having
very little wit, she had decided to be gaily slanderous so people would think
she had a lot.”

Her husband is impotent, babilano. Stendhal took up the word (babilan in

French) to describe this impediment.

But the big news in Rome concerns the suppression of the Jesuits. Yielding
to pressures from the crown, Clement XIV (Ganganelli) has decided to dis-
solve the Society. Casa needs library work at that time; he is very well received
by the Jesuits at the Vatican: “The Jesuits were always the most polite among
the secular orders of our religion, and I would even dare to say the only polite
ones. But during the crisis in which they found themselves at that time, their
politeness was exaggerated to the extent that they seemed to be crawling.”

This does not prevent Casanova from roundly accusing the Jesuits of tak-
ing revenge on Clement XIV by poisoning him: “That was the last proof they
gave, after their death, of their attempts at power.” In this connection let me
note that, as if by chance, Don Giacomo is always more or less working in the
wings as concerns the Jesuits. An old story, one that, starting in the middle
of the eighteenth century, particularly occupies France, Portugal, Spain, Italy.
The Jesuits’ plot, the Masonic plot? No smoke without fire, even if there is a
lot more smoke than fire. This is the context in which the Cardinal de Bernis
logically makes his reappearance.
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Bernis has remained in touch with M. M. (still a nun in Venice). He has a

“mistress of tranquility,” Principessa de Santa Croce, “young, pretty, cheer-
ful, lively, curious, laughing, always talking, asking questions and lacking the
patience to hear the answer to the end.”

“In this young woman I saw a true plaything made for the amusement of
the mind and the heart of a voluptuous and well-behaved man who had heavy
matters on his shoulders and who needed distraction.”

Bernis sees the princess three times a day. They are both Casa’s accomplices
in Rome.

Was it to amuse his friends? Don Giacomo is quickly implicated in a new

intrigue in a convent, or rather a home for poor young girls. There he falls in
love with Armellina, who “has a pale appearance and a sadness that seemed
to be the result of a quantity of desires that she had to suppress.”

An understanding with the mother superior; furnishing of winter clothes,

coffee, sugar. Self-interested charity participates in the siege, while the “ancient
bigots” take offense. On the program is the liberation of the girls, and Bernis
and the princess are only too happy to contribute to it. Why is it that this chapter
seems repetitive, almost boring? Armellina is a good example of the power
of education, and Casa has no inclination to be a “martyr of virtue.” And yet
that’s the case. To be sure, he has recourse to his old technique: suppers with
a friend of Armellina’s, oysters, champagne, pseudo-innocent games, traves-
ties, dressing up, re–dressing up, it’s delicious, it’s idiotic, but one can still take
some slight pleasure in gulping down an oyster on a breast: “When she saw me
fixing my eyes on hers, as if stupefied, she asked me if I had had great pleasure
in imitating a child at the breast.”

Old child, young breast. A virgin whose child is a little gaga. Casa admits his
fantasy: he is a son suckling the breast of a mother who is his daughter. Okay.
But in that case, he is taking his time going further. Blind man’s bluff, fleeting
touches, caresses, badinage, froth, nothing serious. Casa is reinventing the
wheel, but the fact is, these girls are thinking of marriage. You can understand
them, after all; what’s the use of the rest. They need to get settled. Casa isn’t the
right case, and young men are already on the prowl. Best of luck to all, goodbye.

Don Giacomo returns to the lap of the “family.” Here, for instance, is another
of his supposed daughters, Giacomina. (In the meantime, bravo to Leonilda,
who has indeed had a son.) Giacomina, daughter of Mariuccia, is more beautiful
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than Sophia, who has remained in London. Time, for sure, is contracting. And
as if that weren’t enough, Giacomo’s brother Zanetto (his mother’s name in the
masculine) arrives with his daughter, Guglielmina. It’s fatal: at the word niece,
Casa catches fire: “Upon hearing this, I told myself I would make love to this
niece, and what I found amusing and extraordinary is that I found myself set
on this little love affair out of a spirit of revenge. I leave it to physicians more
knowledgeable than I to interpret phenomena of this sort.”

Our response may be a Freudian smile, but Casa is actually making a discov-
ery. All sexuality may be nothing more than a familial derivation or “revenge.”
Families, you excite me. Some claim the opposite, but they are lying. The inces-
tuous lover reigns over the whole matter, including one who is seen as standing
the farthest from the respect due to families. The pedophile, for instance, is
a passionate familialist (too much so). Families, I hate you, because I adore
you. One who is indifferent to the family (the Holy Family) would be a sort of
god. Sexual solicitation, wherever it stems from and whatever its nature (and
especially its obsessive repression), is an invitation to the familial, to the great
biological promiscuity.

So we find Casa between his niece and his daughter (ages thirteen and nine).
They are taking drawing lessons: copies of the Belvedere Apollo, Antinous,
Hercules, Titian’s Venus (“reclining, her hand at the very spot where I had seen
the hands of these two little girls”).
For he has seen them, in the bed where they are sleeping: “I see two inno-
cent girls who, each with an arm extended across her belly, held their hands a
little curved upon the marks of their puberty, which were beginning to show.
Their middle fingers, a little more curved, were maintained immobile upon a
small piece of round, almost imperceptible flesh. It was the only moment of
my life in which I had proof of the true temper of my soul, and I was satisfied
to know it. I felt a delicious horror. This new feeling forced me to cover up the
two nudities; my hands trembled.”

Mariuccia, who had pulled down the covers, lacks “a mind to comprehend
the grandeur of this moment.” “Those girls might have died of pain if they had
awakened at the instant I contemplated their beautiful positions. An invincible
ignorance only could have kept them from death, and I could not suppose
them possessed of it.”

So no betrayal. No assault on modesty, on the “security” of sleep or of anoth-

er’s autoeroticism. On the other hand, awake in the bed, they quickly get into
“kisses galore.” Casa does make love to Guglielmina in front of Giacomina,
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who asks him, says he, to do the same for her (not recommended, taking her
age into account). As for Guglielmina, Casa speaks of her in these terms: “I
wanted to thank my brother for having created this jewel for the consolation
of my soul.”

A surrealistic conclusion: there is a lottery, they all decide to play. Little

Giacomina simply says “27.” Casa plays all the combinations of 27. He wins,
and keeps his promise: he takes Mariuccia, Guglielmina, and Giacomina to
Rome for Holy Week (they come from Frascati).

Even better: he was to compose an ode on the Redemption. Inspiration, lack-

ing until then, appears, prompting him. He recites his ode on Holy Thursday.
He cries and makes all the academicians cry. Bernis whispers to him: “What
a clown you are!” Casa, surprised at this remark, tells him no, it was real. The
cardinal contemplates him for a moment, pensive.

Another possible conclusion: “Vice is not synonymous with crime, for one
can be full of vice without being a criminal. Such was I my whole life, and I
dare to say even that I was often virtuous in the actuality of vice.”
In other words (a scandalous proposition), the happiness of vice can be
reinforced by the happiness of virtue.
 25
“When I left Venice in the year 1783, God should have made me go to Rome,
Naples, Sicily, or Parma, and in all likelihood my old age would have been
happy. . . . Today, in my seventy-third year of life, I need only to live in peace
and far from any person who can imagine having rights on my moral freedom,
for a species of tyranny must necessarily accompany such an imagination.”

In Casa’s case, God is Bohemian. It is a God who knows what he is doing

by confining this adventurer in a library near Prague. He has to force him to
write his memoirs. God is Time. Predicting what it is preparing is impossible.

So Giacomo feels old at forty-six. It seems to him that he should plan a “fine
retirement.” He says he is dedicated “entirely to study.” In Florence, his transla-
tion of the Iliad takes him one to two hours a day. He reads, he writes. But his
reputation follows him, and he is driven out of Florence: “The grand-duke only
pretended to love literature. . . . This prince never read, and he preferred bad
prose to the most beautiful poetry. What he loved was women and money.”

A portrait of everyman.
In Bologna, on the contrary, “everyone has a feeling for literature . . . and
although the Inquisition exists, one can easily fool it.”
This is where Casa has his pamphlet Lana Caprina published. The horrible Nina
is in the neighborhood, pretending to be pregnant by her Spanish lover. Infant
trafficking, dead infant, the archbishop is angry, but Casa is not at all a player in this
sort of con game (on the contrary). A courtesan has a pretty name: Viscioletta. All
the same, Casa is morose. Only “cruel experience,” says he, provides instruction.
Advice is of no use: “Man is an animal who can only be indoctrinated by cruel
experience. The effect of this law is that the world will always exist in disorder
and ignorance, because the wise constitute at the very most the hundredth part.”

The hundredth part? Clearly Casanova is an optimist.

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 26
Libraries multiply on Casanova’s route. Here in Pesaro, Count Mosca’s (hello,
Stendhal!). In bibliothèque (library) there is Bible, and the biblical encounter
is about to take place, in fact.

From time to time, Casa reminds us that he has a sort of Genius who speaks
to him with a secret voice. A “daimon” like Socrates’s. This voice speaks more
to dissuade than to recommend. Abstain, rather than do this or that. But for
once, just as he plans to return as quickly as possible to Trieste to be nearer to
Venice, the voice tells him to go to Ancona. Why Ancona? There is no reason.
Never mind, he leaves for Ancona.

Along the way, the driver asks him to give a ride in his carriage to a Jew who
also wants to go to Ancona. Casa at first refuses, he doesn’t want anyone in his
vehicle, and “least of all a Jew.” But (it’s the voice) he changes his mind.

“The next day, in the carriage, this Jew, who had a rather fine appearance,
asked me why I didn’t like Jews.
“‘Because,’ I said to him, ‘your religion requires you to be our enemies. You
believe you have a duty to deceive us. You do not look upon us as your broth-
ers. You push usury to excess when, needing money, we borrow from you. You
hate us, in short.’”
The Jew tells him he’s mistaken, that he has only to come with him and he
will observe that Jews pray for Christians, too, beginning with the pope: “At
that I couldn’t suppress a great burst of laughter because it was true, but I said
to him that what should pray for God should be the heart and not the mouth,
and I threatened to throw him out of the carriage if he didn’t agree that the
Jews would certainly not pray God for Christians if they were sovereign in the
countries where they lived, and he was then surprised to hear me cite, in the
Hebraic language, passages from the Old Testament in which they were ordered

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to seize all the occasions to do all possible harm to all the non-Jews whom they
cursed in their prayers. This poor man didn’t open his mouth again.”

You understand that this is the beginning of a friendship.

Casanova speaking “the Hebraic language”? That’s the least of it for a cabalist.
Is he prejudiced? He pretends to be.
Curious, Casa invites him to dinner. But the other man, of course, has his
own food: “This superstitious man drank water, because, as he said, he was
not sure that the wine was pure. After dinner, in the carriage, he told me that
if I would come stay at his home and be content to eat only those foods not
forbidden by God, he would have me eat more delicately and more voluptuously
and more cheaply than at the inn, alone in a fine room facing the sea.
“‘Do you host Christians, then?’ I said to him.
“‘Never, but this time, so as to disabuse you, I am willing to make an
exception.’”

I repeat: Casanova is a great composer. In life as in writing. His intent is to

show that his life unfolded as if it were being written. The “detour” via Ancona
has a deep significance: “I stay with the Jew, then, finding it most singular. Had
I not been comfortable there, I would have left on the second day. His wife and
children were eagerly waiting for him to celebrate the Sabbath. On this day
dedicated to the Lord, all servile activity is forbidden, I note with pleasure an
air of celebration in the facial expressions, in the clothing, and in the cleanliness
of the entire house. They welcome me as they would a brother, and I respond
to the best of my abilities. . . .”

An astonishing passage in the history of European literature, especially for a

man of the Enlightenment. Casa calls his host Mardoqué, and no doubt he means
Mordecai, the biblical personality from the Book of Esther. One can expect him
to have an interesting daughter. Here she is, she is eighteen. Casa calls her Lia.

He had already had an adventure with another Leah, also Jewish, in Turin.
A difficult negotiation, with a deferred purchase of a vehicle, horseback rides,
and finally a ring serving as irresistible argument—a horse-trader adventure
he has no cause to be proud of. But here in Ancona, the tone changes. Casa
is living in this house with pleasure. He even goes to the synagogue. Soon he
is deploying his nets around this new Leah, who comes to his room bringing
chocolate. But she doesn’t go along, insolently defying him. It’s as if Giacomo
has at last encountered someone, and that astonishes him (usually he is in a
great hurry).
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Leah accepts a little song and dance from our libertine. He brings out his
collection of erotic engravings, particularly “a woman lying on her back, totally
naked, masturbating.” (You will recall that Professor Laforgue, in his rewriting,
brandishes his scissors here and transforms “masturbating” into “in the act
of deluding herself.”) But instead of the panic and blushing he expects, Casa
hears Leah tell him that “all girls do that before their marriage.” She agrees to
look at all the pornographic images (pornographic and quite beautiful) by
Aretino, but he is not to make any obscene move, and above all not to exhibit
the organic consequence of his excitation. He has to keep “the drawing in his
hand.” Wonderful humor here by Casanova: “She didn’t want to see anything
living.”

In short, Leah is giving him a lesson in self-control: “She philosophized

about that much more knowledgeably than Hedwig did.” Leah, the young
Jewess, surpasses the “young theologian” from Geneva. A bright light is cast
on the carnal superiority of the unexpurgated Bible, of the synagogue over the
Protestant church, of the original, in short, over the pasteurized version. Leah
knows all about it. We thought so.

One night, Casa gets up and discovers Leah with a young lover. He watches
them through the keyhole; they have no idea. She is executing all of Aretino’s
positions with him, she’s doing hands-on exercises, including the most difficult
ones (the “straight tree,” for instance, in which, like a real “lesbian,” she imposes
a complete fellation on her partner). Our libertine is flabbergasted.

The next day, he thinks he has the upper hand, tries to blackmail her. Either
she yields or he will denounce her. She coldly replies that she believes him
incapable of such an evil act. He insists, and she is even more precise: “I don’t
like you.”

Stung to the quick, our professional decides to ignore her. Good tactic. She
then explains to him that her young Christian lover is a “libertine rogue” with
whom she is in love, but who doesn’t love her and whom she pays. Now she
tells him, Casa, that she loves him. He sticks to his refusal (each his turn). The
more she attempts to excite him, the more he wants to humiliate her with his
indifference.

Finally she comes to his bed one night and violates him (“I was a fool, she
knew much more about human nature than I”). The fact is, she asks him to de-
virginize her (as they say). What strikes Casa then is her “extreme sweetness”:
 141

“On Leah’s beautiful face I saw the extraordinary symptom of a delicious pain,
and I felt in her first ecstasy her entire person trembling with the excessive
pleasure that inundated her. . . . I continued to hold Leah inseparable from me
until three hours after midnight, and I stimulated all her gratitude by having
her collect my melting soul in the hollow of her beautiful hand.”

The weather is bad for traveling. Fine, he is going to stay another month.
But what does Mordecai think of his curious lodger?

“I have always thought that this Jew knew that his daughter was not refusing
me her favors. Jews are not difficult on this topic, because knowing that a son
we might give to a woman from their race would be Jewish, they think that
by letting us do it they’re getting the better of us. . . . We slept together all the
nights, even those during which Jewish law excommunicates a woman who
lets herself be loved.”

Casanova knowledgeable about Leviticus, chapter XV: we can expect any-

thing coming from him, but all the same.

That is the last love story, or more exactly the last benediction, that the Che-
valier de Seingalt recounts in the Story of My Life. The introduction of this new
tone comes as no surprise. The Knight of the High-Sign is writing his swan
song.
 27
At Trieste, Casa hopes to be in transit: he is awaiting his pardon from the
Venetian Inquisitors, for whom he is soon going to work. He writes his History
of the Troubles in Poland. In retrospect, he compliments himself on having dis-
cerned the troubles he is present at, from a distance, at the end of the century.
Poland, France, Venice have collapsed. Another phase of Time is on the march.
The consul of Venice in Trieste treats him well and is already entrusting him
with some delicate matters concerning Austria. That said, life in Trieste drags
on (but it will also drag for him in Venice, which is wallowing in decadence).

He reencounters an actress, Irene, whom he “loved in Milan, neglected in

Genoa.” She organizes clandestine gaming sessions at her home. She cheats,
she “has a card up her sleeve,” in short, she “makes a killing.” Casa realizes it,
warns her of the danger she risks if she continues. Luckily for her, she has a
charming little girl of nine whom she has taught to caress the gentlemen. Casa
takes advantage of it (not good), and so especially does a certain Baron Pittoni,
who will be Irene’s protector. Don Giacomo will see Irene later: “Three years
afterward, I saw her in Padua, where I made much tenderer acquaintance with
her daughter.”

The end.
The manuscript stops there.
The last word of the Story of My Life is tendre. Casanova couldn’t or didn’t
want to continue his narrative. He is about to be fifty, and perhaps he felt that
it was enough.

And also, great news has come. The State Inquisitors have just sent him his
safe-conduct to return at last to Venice. The witness of this event is the consul,
Marco de’ Monti, who sees Casanova open the document: “He read it, he reread

142
 143

it, he kissed it many times, and after a short time of silence and concentration,
he burst into a torrent of sobs.”

In the Précis of My Life, Casa writes: “Tired of running around Europe, I

determined to solicit my pardon with the Venetian State Inquisitors. For this
reason, I went and settled in Trieste, where two years later I obtained it. It
was the 14th of September, 1774. My entrance into Venice after nineteen years
allowed me to delight in the finest moment of my life.”

Casanova does not recount this finest moment of his life in the Story of My
Life. It’s his stroke of genius. We are obliged to assess our capacity to imagine
it (or not). The rest is silence.
 28
One would have to write another book now; it would include sketches for
fifty novels.
What happened between 1774 and 1785, the date when Casa takes up his job
as librarian at Dux, and 1789, the year he starts his Story of My Life?
A thousand things. (Here I am following the chronology established by
Francis Lacassin, Casanova after the Memoirs, in the third volume of the
Histoire de ma vie published by Editions Robert Laffont, in the “Bouquins”
collection.)

It is the chronicle of a disappointment.

Literary efforts? They don’t work.
Love? In Venice he is living with a seamstress, Francesca Buschini, whose
touching letters we have, written in Venetian dialect. After Casa’s further exile,
she will live more and more in retirement, writing to Casa even in Bohemia: “I
hope you are cheerful and that you chase away melancholy.” “I wish you much
amusement for my sake too.”
Secret missions in Trieste, in Ancona? The role of “confidant,” i.e., cop? Not
interesting, the game is getting stale.
Casa founds a monthly magazine that he writes all by himself. He even
becomes a theater impresario, with a weekly, The Messenger of Thalia.
He is the secretary of a dubious Genoese diplomat. It will go bad for reasons
of money. Casa realizes there is nothing serious for him in Venice. Be resigned
or make a stink? A stink.
He writes a pamphlet that pits him against the entire nomenklatura: Neither
Love nor Women, or The New Augean Stables. The stables drive him out. Tak-
ing himself for Hercules, Casa has overestimated his strength—but the time
of chivalry is past.

144
 145

Here he is again in exile, in 1783, in Trieste. He writes to Morosini: “I am

fifty-eight; I cannot leave on foot; winter comes suddenly. And when I think
of becoming an adventurer again, I look in the mirror and laugh.”32

Casa goes a bit overboard. He announces the destruction of Venice by an

earthquake. His only satisfaction is in provoking an incipient panic.
On June 16, 1783, he sneaks into his city, settles his affairs; it’s the last time
he sees the Republic.

Is there a patron somewhere? Casa is on the road: Trento, Innsbruck, Augs-

burg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle. Nothing.
And then The Hague, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels. Nothing. Nobody
wants anything to do with his lottery or his other mathematical projects.
In Paris he stays with his brother Francesco, the painter, who has an official
residence in the Louvre. Casanova in the Louvre: what a novel that would be,
narrated by him.
All his projects are unrealizable: the creation of a gazette, an expedition to
Madagascar, digging a canal from Narbonne to Bayonne. What an imagination,
dear sir. Calm down.
What exactly is he doing in Fontainebleau for a week? A mystery.
On November 23, 1783, on the other hand, we know that he attends a session
of the Academy of Sciences devoted to a report about the recent ascent in the
Montgolfier balloon. Giacomo Casanova is sitting next to Benjamin Franklin
and Condorcet, he listens to their conversation. But do they really know who
he is? No.

In spite of the protection of Prince Kaunitz in Vienna, Casa wanders for

sixty-two days between Dresden, Berlin, Brno, and Prague. Nothing, no work
in the offing, unemployment.
He meets Da Ponte in Vienna and enters service with Foscarini, the ambas-
sador of Venice, “to write his dispatches.” A little secret diplomacy, he must be
quite good at that. It’s at Foscarini’s dinner table that he meets Count Waldstein,
a Freemason like him, who finds him attractive, notably for his occultist erudi-
tion. The Dux chateau looms on the horizon (1784).

Still in 1784, we are happy to learn, he has spent the Carnival very joyfully
“in the company of two ladies.” In May, somehow or other, he is taking the
thermal cure in Baden.

32. Morosini was procurator of Saint Mark’s.

 146

He writes documented essays about the commercial litigation between Hol-

land and the Most Serene Republic of Venice. But in April 1785, he speaks to
his friend Max Lamberg about his fantastic novel The Icosameron, two-thirds
of which he has already written in Italian (he is going to rewrite it in French).
What a strange guy.
On the same date, Casa’s last good card disappears: Foscarini dies, no more
“dispatches.” Don Giacomo thinks about becoming a monk in the convent of
Einsiedeln in Switzerland. Gambling or the monastery: a consistent philosophy.
Last effort in Berlin: nothing.
In September 1785, in the spa town of Töplitz (Teplice), he accepts Count
Waldstein’s proposal: responsibility for forty thousand books and manuscripts
as librarian in the chateau at Dux (which he will look after distractedly, for
good reason, as he spends between nine and thirteen hours a day writing the
Story of My Life).

In October 1787, a horseback rider joins Mozart and Da Ponte at night in

Prague. It’s Casanova. The world premiere of Don Giovanni will be soon, under
the direction of the composer. Such a surrealistic event cannot be measured;
it is sung.

Tired of recounting his exploit orally, Casa publishes the Story of My Escape
from the Prisons of the Republic of Venice, Known as the Leads, in 1788. It is the
germ of the memoirs, but he still has some illusions: he thinks his big fantastic
but rather boring novel The Icosameron will be a success. It’s a disaster. Wald-
stein, in an elegant move, buys up all his manuscripts.

1789 is the decisive year. Casa is sick; his Irish doctor O’Reilly suggests that he
write the story of his life to chase away his gloomy thoughts. Strangely enough,
that is the moment Casa chooses to declare that he has solved a mathemati-
cal problem posed since antiquity, the duplication of the cube: “to construct
a cube whose volume doubles a given cube.” He writes three studies on this
subject and publishes them in Dresden. But the true cube, the philosophical
stone that occupies him now, is the Story of My Life. It turns out the solution
for him was neither the fantastic novel nor “severe mathematics.” A totally dif-
ferent dimension is revealed to him: his life recopied, which has always been
written between the lines, as a cryptogram.

On March 2, 1791, in spite of his troubles with the steward and the servants
in the chateau (who must think he is crazy), we know from a letter that he
believes he has written two-thirds of his manuscript. Simultaneously, he does
 147

a lot of metaphysics. What’s more, a Letter to Robespierre not found among his
papers came to one hundred twenty pages. It’s his purloined letter: where is it?

Count Waldstein has disappeared. In reality, he is on a secret mission in Paris

for the purpose of rescuing Louis XVI and his family. It’s a problem of horses.
Having failed, he goes on to London, returns to Dux, and fires the steward
who was persecuting Casa (who sees a “Jacobin plot” in the servile hostility
displayed toward him).

1794: hard at work revising his Story of My Life, he nevertheless writes a

funeral oration in Latin for the death of his three-year-old cat Mélanpyge. 33
Coup de théâtre: on September 11, 1795, at age seventy, he escapes from the
chateau at Dux, goes through Tübingen (where one can picture him meeting
Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling), visits Goethe at Weimar (apparently without
much success), and finds himself in Berlin, broke. Waldstein brings him home
at the end of December, but this episode remains no doubt the most mysterious
of his existence.

The last text published by Casanova during his lifetime is the Letter to Leon-
hard Snetlage, recently republished by Éditions Allia under a strange but beau-
tiful title borrowed from Casa’s dedication to Count Waldstein: Ma voisine, la
postérité . . . (My Neighbor, Posterity . . . ). It’s a reflection on the vocabulary
in use after the French Revolution.
For instance, Equality: “In spite of the misery oppressing them, the people
must be joking about it everywhere, all the time. They must be very curious
about the signification of this word, as they see before their eyes at every
moment nothing but inequalities.”
For Casa, “nothing is more unequal than equality.” He has his reasons, he
speaks from the heart of the matter.
Same sarcasm about Jacobin. But in this case he has a precise motive: his
name is Jacques (that’s why it is striking to see his grave marker in Duchcov,
where he is inscribed in German under the name Jakob).

On November 27, 1797, he asks Count Waldstein’s permission to spend a

month in Venice, “next spring.” Venice has just fallen under Bonaparte; he has
received some letters, he wants to go see the situation for himself (in the end,
the earthquake he prophesied has happened).

33. Mélanpyge was actually a dog; the correct spelling of its name was Mélampyge.
 148

On November 17, he writes the Précis of My Life for his young correspondent
Cécile de Roggendorf.

Finally, 1798: Casa has bladder troubles, interrupts the revisions of the Story
of My Life.
April 12: the last letter to Cécile.
In May, very sick.
On May 27, Carlo Angiolini, his nephew, arrives from Dresden to look after
him. Angiolini will leave with the manuscript, which his son will sell to the
German publisher Brockhaus in 1821, for two hundred thalers.
On June 4, Casa dies, at seventy-three. His posthumous life begins.

Death in an armchair. Pink. It’s there today in his rooms in the chateau at
Duchcov. Behind the back of the chair they have engraved a little commemora-
tive plaque in brass. I touched this armchair.

U, cycles, divine vibrations of viridian seas;

Peace of pastures sown with beasts, wrinkles
Stamped on studious brows as if by alchemy.

Or:

“I am the scholar of the dark armchair. Rain and branches hurl themselves
at the casement of my library.”

Casanova gets up from the somber armchair where he is writing to go die

in a pink armchair. That is life, backwards.

I have just quoted the sonnet of the Vowels and a sentence from the Illumina-
34
tions by Rimbaud. Another writer, who lived for a long time in Trieste, where
he was working on a monumental Ulysses, wrote about one of his amorous
adventures in that city with a pretty young Jewess, Amalia, to whom he was
giving English lessons. He called his narrative Giacomo Joyce. A photograph
from this period shows James Joyce, dressed as an Irish dandy, playing the
guitar. Joyce rarely did anything haphazardly. The last words of this story are
“Love me, love my umbrella.” I’m not translating this sentence, which stands,
so to speak, on its own.

34. The lines from Rimbaud’s famous poem “Vowels” are from a translation by Wyatt Mason;
the sentence from the Illuminations is from a translation by Eric Edelman.
 29
An Italian essayist evoking the end of Casa’s life entitled his book The Twilight
of Casanova.
This recalls Nietzsche’s title The Twilight of the Idols.
If Casanova is an idol, he is indeed going toward his definitive night. So
much the better. For two centuries, the propaganda of stupid fascination, of
derision, and especially of resentment has persisted in falsifying his memory,
which is to say: what he wrote.
Above all, they don’t want him to have written his life himself, nor that it
should be magnificently readable.

I wanted to speak about another Casa. The one who on this very day, in Venice,
picks his way among the Japanese tourists near the Doge’s Palace. No one pays
attention to him. Two hundred years after his death, he seems to be in excellent
shape. Hale and hearty as when he was thirty, just before his arrest. He is the one
who, under a different name, welcomes under the Leads this afternoon a team
from French television, which has gone looking for him all the way to Czecho-
slovakia. He is the one whom the security people from the Palace prevent from
climbing onto the roof to indicate the exact location of his escape. He is the one,
also, who speaks in my place for a filmed interview in his cell (as for me, I have
a bad fever this day, June 4, 1998, even though the weather is beautiful).

Casa walks past the mediocre spectacles organized pretty much everywhere to
commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of his death (really). He glances
distractedly (as is his habit) at the beauty products he supposedly sponsors, the
restaurants or cafés that have taken his name, the movie posters announcing yet
another film about him, the magazines where he is used to promote such and
such an actor or actress. He scarcely pauses by the large ridiculous statue erected
in Saint Mark’s Square—his, apparently. During the Carnival, sophisticated haute
couture models paraded around it for the photographers.
The Spectacle, right?

149
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All that is totally without interest, but these clichés are a mask. No one will
go check on what is going to happen this evening in the casino he has rented
in Murano, in Torcello, or better yet, on that little island that no one knows
the name of, in the lagoon, out to sea.

He takes a boat. He takes with him two Japanese women, or two German
women, or three Italian women, depending on the days. Sometimes it’s a Span-
ish woman, an English woman, a Greek woman, and, why not, a French woman.
American, rarely. Norwegian, Swedish, Russian? Whatever. An African? But
of course! An Arab, an Israeli? With pleasure. A Chinese woman? No argu-
ment. But there are also the Argentinians, the Mexicans, the Brazilians, the
Panamanians, the Venezuelans, the Chileans, the Uruguayans, the Paraguayans,
and, suddenly, the Australians. It is easy to imagine Casa operating in all the
great cities of the world, and even in the villages. He is the perfect counterter-
rorist. He is sighted in New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, London, Madrid,
Barcelona, Tehran, Tokyo, Melbourne, Prague (of course), Shanghai, Beijing,
Jerusalem, Moscow. They say he is in the neighborhood of Barcelona or Naples
right now. He takes a running start, he leaps over two or four centuries, he
has escaped dangers, he is always wanted, but his powder of projection makes
him different and unrecognizable when he wishes. No fingerprints, no record
of his DNA. He doesn’t do dope, he’s not on drugs, doesn’t frequent the mob,
has a clean record. The policemen trailing him drop it after a time and invent
whatever for their superiors. Right away they have other things to do.

Yes, Casa has escaped.

What should have been written is The Dawn of Casanova. But hush, the time
has not yet arrived. We are even at the point of facing a repressive impact—so
what, we’ve seen it before, it’s cyclical.
Casa had himself cloned? Of course. From time to time, with the greatest
secrecy, they meet. No recordings, no notes, each has his passport, goodbye.
People have tried to infiltrate them, what a joke. The best agents get sent back,
the latest one, for example. She wanted to continue from Washington to Venice,
the FBI was covering her, but there was no trace of Casa to be seen, in spite of
the publicity.

The evening of June 4, 1998, in a quiet corner of Venice, I opened a notebook

and wrote this title: Casanova l’admirable. I had the Story of My Life with me
and notes taken for years. The rest followed. Perhaps it is not a bad idea to
publish this, at the end of the twentieth century, in French, in Paris.
 Index

Anael, an archangel, 93 Betty, Miss, 128

Anastasia, lover of Casanova, 133 Boucher, François, 48
Ancien Régime, 6, 17 Boulogne, Jean de, 68
Angélique, lover of Casanova, 37 Bourdieu, Pierre, 60
Angiolini, Carlo, 5, 148 Bragadin, 43, 44, 46, 51, 68, 74, 114, 122
Annette, lover of Casanova, 102 Braudeau, Michel, ix
Anthony, Marc, a poet, 28 Brockhaus Verlag, 6, 148
Antigone, 10 Bruno, Giordano, 13
Apollinaire, 109
Apollo, 129, 130 C., Monsieur de la, 131
Aranda, Count d’, 79 C. C. See Capretta, Caterina
Aretino, Pietro, 65, 140 Cagliostro, 11, 71, 77, 128
Argens, Marquis d’, 127 Callimena, lover of Casanova, 129–30
Ariosto, Ludovico, 11, 58, 82, 86, 130; Calvin, John, 83, 84
Orlando Furioso, 62–63, 85 Calzabigi, Ranieri de, 69, 119
Armellina, lover of Casanova, 134 Camilla, lover of Casanova, 73
Artaud, Antonin, 34 Capretta, Caterina (“C. C.”), 8, 50–57, 83,
Athena, 130 105
Cartouche (Louis Dominique
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 13, 88 Garthausen), outlaw, 120
Baffo, Zorzi Alvise, 25–27, 29, 31 Casanova, Francesco, Casanova’s brother,
Balbi, Father, 61–64 28, 31, 145
Balletti, Manon, 68, 73, 80 Casanova, Giacomo (Giacomo Casanova
Balletti, Silvia, 68, 80 de Seingalt): arrested for atheism, 58;
Balzac, Honoré de, 89n begins his memoirs, 5; converses with
Barbaro, 43 God, 98–99; imprisoned, 59–60; motto
Barthes, Roland, ix of, 23, 33, 46, 81; prison escape by,
Baudelaire, Charles, 106 61–65; syphilis, 48, 117–18, 126
Bazin, 80 —Writings: History of the Troubles
Bellino. See Teresa in Poland, 142; The Icosameron, 4,
Benedict XIV, 37, 91 146; Lana Caprina, 125, 137; Letter
Bernis, François-Joachim de Pierre, Abbé to Leonhard Snetlage, 147; Letter to
de, 11, 53–57, 68, 71, 133–34, 136 Robespierre, 147; Neither Love nor
Bettina, lover of Casanova, 33 Woman, 144; Précis of My Life, 65, 143,

151
 152

148; Soliloquy of a Thinker, 77; Story Egard, Chevalier (Wellbore Ellis Agar),
of My Escape from the Prisons of the 114–15
Republic of Venice, 146; translation of Elbeuf, the Duke d’, 80
the Iliad, 35, 137. See also Story of My
Life, The F., Madame, lover of Casanova, 42
Casanova, Guglielmina, Casanova’s niece, Farussi, Zanetta, Casanova’s mother,
135–36 24–25, 28, 31, 47
Casanova, Jacobe, 28 Feldkirchner, steward, 18
Casanova, Jacques, ancestor of Casanova, Felipe, Duke, 47
28 Fellini, Federico, 5, 22
Casanova, Juan, 28 Fiano, Duchess de, 133
Casanova, Zanetto, Casanova’s brother, Flaubert, Gustave, 45n
135 Foscarini, Sebastiano, 145, 146
Catherine II, Czarina, 119 Foucault, Michel, ix
Cécile, lover of Casanova, 38 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, vii, 5, 61; Le
Céline, 38, 94 Verrou (The Bolt), 7
Cervantes, Miguel de, 5; Don Quixote, 5, Franklin, Benjamin, 145
97, 126 Frederick II, of Prussia, 11, 21, 55, 98,
Cesarino, Casanova’s son, 89 119–20
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 33 Freemasonry, 4, 34, 48, 115n, 131, 145
Charles III, of Spain, 126 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 29, 33, 38, 74, 77,
Charpillon, La, 107–16 135
Chartres, Duchess de, 48
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 18 Gabrielle, lover of Casanova, 116
Childs, James Rives, vi Galileo, 100
Choiseul, Étienne François, Duc de, 68, Giacomina, supposed daughter of
93 Casanova, 134, 135–36
Chorier, Nicolas, 56n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 44, 115n,
Clement XIII, 91 147
Clement XIV, 133 Goudar, Ange, 109, 110, 112
Clementina, 102 Grimani, Gaetano, 28
Clinton, Bill, 55, 89 Guardi, Francesco Lazzaro, 5
Cloonan, William, ix
Columbus, Christopher, 28 Haller, Albrecht von, 84–85
Condorcet, Marie Jean, Marquis de, 145 Hedwig, 84, 99–100, 140
Copernicus, Nikolaus, 100 Hegel, G. W. F., 147
Corticelli, Lolita, 96 Heidegger, Martin, 88
Courland, Prince Charles de, 120–22 Helena, lover of Casanova, 100
Henri IV, 28
Dalai Lama, 60 Henriette, lover of Casanova, 46–48, 84,
Damiens, Robert-François, 68–71 104, 105, 107, 127
Dandolo, 43 Hercules, 16, 20, 135, 144
Dante, 63, 85, 133; Divine Comedy, 85, 108 Historical and Authentic Memoirs about
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 4, 145, 146 the Bastille, 121
Denis, Madame, 86 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 147
Denon, Vivant, vii, 130 Homer, 35, 85; Iliad, 130, 137; Odyssey, 86,
Diderot, Denis, vii, 52 130
Don Juan, 22 Horace, 34, 58, 62, 86
Dubois, lover of Casanova, 83, 90 Horne, Marilyn, 63
Duras, Marguerite, 131 Houssaye, Amelot de la, 127
 153

Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 124 M. M. See Morosini, Marina Maria

Ignazia, lover of Casanova, 124–25 M. M. #2, 89
Imer, Teresa, 79, 89 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 36, 65
Irene, lover of Casanova, 105, 142 Manet, Édouard, 127n
Manuzzi, 58, 123, 127
Javotte, lover of Casanova, 46 Marat, Jean-Paul, 66
Jesus, 24 Marcolina, lover of Casanova, 97,
Joan of Arc, 86, 111 102–5
Jocasta, 10 Mardoqué, 139
Joyce, James, 148 María de Jesús de Ágreda, Sister, 59
Jung, Carl, 74 Marie-Therese, Empress of Austria, 49
Marine, lover of Casanova, 38
Kafka, Franz, 13–14, 16, 99 Mariuccia, 91, 134, 135, 136
Kaunitz, Prince, 145 Martial, 28
Kelly, Ian, vi Marton, lover of Casanova, 35
Kristeva, Julia, ix Marzia, Casanova’s grandmother, 29
Mazarin, Cardinal, 36
Lacan, Jacques, ix, 92 Mazarine, daughter of François
Lacassin, Francis, 17, 144 Mitterand, 131
Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 83, 87 Melulla, lover of Casanova, 42
Laffont, Robert, 6 Metternich, Prince Klemens von, 22
Laforgue, Jean, 6–9, 13, 25, 50, 56, 140 Mitterand, François, 130–31
Lamberg, Count Maximilian, 93, 146 Molière, 34, 73, 94; Tartuffe, 124n
Lambertini, La, 69–70 Montaigne, Michel de, 19, 36
Lanzmann, Claude, 15 Monti, Marco de’, 142
Lascaris, Countess de. See Corticelli, Morosini, Marina Maria (“M. M.”), 8, 9,
Lolita 50, 53–58, 83, 104, 105, 134, 145
La Tour d’Auvergne, Count, 73–74 Mosca, Count, 138
Lautréamont, 67, 94 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, vii, ix, 4, 5,
Leah, lover of Casanova, 139–41 10, 11, 15, 70, 88, 91, 92, 146; Cosi fan
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 119 tutte, 91; Don Giovanni, 4, 13, 16, 146
Lenin, Vladimir, 60 Musée Grévin, 17
Leo X, 85
Leonilda, Casanova’s daughter, 91, 131–32, Nanette, lover of Casanova, 35
134 Napoleon Bonaparte, 22, 71, 147
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 119 Nattier, Jean-Marc, 84
Lewinsky, Monica, 55, 89 Nerval, Gérard de, 94
Lia, lover of Casanova, 139 Nettesheim, Agrippa von, 44
Ligne, Prince de, 16, 19–22, 40, 86 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 88; Twilight of
Louis XV, 8, 47, 48, 70, 78 the Idols, 149
Louis XVI, 71, 147 Nina, lover of Casanova, 127, 137
Louise-Elisabeth, Madame de France,
47 Oedipus, 10, 23
Louvre Museum, vii O’Murphy, Marie-Louise, 48
Louÿs, Pierre, 109 O’Reilly, Casanova’s doctor, 146
Lucie, lover of Casanova, 79 Orléans, Philippe, the Duke d’, 72, 121
Lucretia, lover of Casanova, 37, 91, 92,
131–32 Palafox, Anna, 28
Lucretius, 65 Paracelsus, 76
 154

Paralis, Casanova’s demon or angel, 35, Stendhal, 3, 33, 50, 90, 94, 123, 133, 138;
44, 58, 94 Charterhouse of Parma, 48
Passano, Giacomo, 103 Story of My Life, The: artfulness in, viii,
Pauline, lover of Casanova, 107 132; described, 3, 5–6, 50, 52, 95, 141,
Paz, Octavio, 131 142; lesbian motif in, 105; and Monica
Petrarch, 90 Lewinsky, 89; and Prince de Ligne,
Picasso, Pablo, 49 19–22; numbers in, 69; philosophy of,
Piron, Alexis, 65 39, 49, 82; and Sollers, v–vi; writing of,
Pittoni, Baron, 142 66, 117, 144, 146–48
Plato, Phaedrus, 84
Plutarch, 58 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 22
Pompadour, Madame de, 12, 54–55, 68, Tel Quel, viii
118 Teresa (alias Bellino), lover of Casanova,
Porphyrus, 65 21, 38–40, 89
Poussin, Nicolas, 130 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, 5
Proust, Marcel, 8, 42, 106; In Search of Tiresias, 125
Lost Time, 56, 89, 105, 113 Tiretta, 69–70
Pushkin, Alexander, 18 Titian, 37, 125, 135
Trask, Willard R., xi–xii, 11n, 114n
Raphaël, 84, 125
Regnard, Jean-François, Les Folies Ulysses, 35, 129, 130
amoureuses, 120 Urfé, Honoré d’, 95
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 110 Urfé, Marquise de Pontcarré d’, 11, 74–79,
Rimbaud, 1, 115n, 121, 148 85, 92–93, 95, 103–5, 117, 121–22
Roggendorf, Cécile de, 24, 148
Rosalie, lover of Casanova, 102 Valville, la, lover of Casanova, 120
Rosemary’s Baby, 96 Venus, 25, 49, 93
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 11, 65, 85 Vergennes, Charles Gravier, comte de, 71
Rumain, Madame du, 122 Villadarias, Duchess of, 125
Villon, François, 34
Sade, Laure de, 90 Viscioletta, courtesan, 137
Sade, Marquis de, 4, 27, 38, 52, 66, 87, 88, Vivaldi, Antonio, 5, 13, 26; Orlando
90; Juliette, 54, 130 Furioso, 63
Saint-Germain, Count de, 11, 76–78, 93, Voltaire, 4, 8, 11, 21, 45, 54, 55, 60, 65,
104, 117–18 84–86, 94, 119; Mahomet, 37; The Maid,
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de, 86; Oedipus, 85
74
Santa Croce, Principessa de, 134 Waldstein, Count, vi, 14, 16, 18, 119, 145,
Saxe, Maréchal de, 78 146, 147
Schelling, Felix, 147 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, vii
Shakespeare, William, 85; Hamlet, 86 Wiederholt, messenger, 18, 19
Snetlage, Leonhard Wilhelm, 94 Wynne, Giustiniana, 80
Socrates, 67, 138
Solomon, 73 Yusuf, 42
Sophia, Casanova’s daughter, 79, 89, 107,
135 Zaire, lover of Casanova, 119
Spinoza, 65 Zweig, Stefan, 15
PHILIPPE SOLLERS is a biographer, novelist, editor, critic,
and cofounder of the journal Tel Quel. His works include Mysterious
Mozart and Women.

ARMINE KOTIN MORTIMER is a professor emerita of

French at the University of Illinois, Urbana. She is the author of
Writing Realism: Representations in French Literature and For Love
or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism.
The University of Illinois Press
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