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Giacomo
Casanova
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Giacomo
Casanova began writing his
memoirs in approximately 1791, in
the relative isolation of the
Castle of Dux in Bohemia, where
he served as the librarian for
Josef Karl Emmanuel, Count
Waldstein.
The
genesis of The Story of My Life
may be attributed to a pervasive
dissatisfaction Casanova felt
with his appointment in a remote
corner of Europe. His despair at
his inability to return to his
native city of Venice also played
a role in the construction of his
memoirs. It was, Casanova writes,
"the sole remedy I believed I
possessed to avoid going mad or
dying of sorrow."
Casanova
was born in Venice in 1725.
Venice at that time was an
independent state (Italy would
not unite until 1870) and was
characterized by a decline in her
earlier reputation as a
formidable
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naval presence. Many attribute to
this decline the subsequent "libertinism"
of the city. Casanova's parents were
actors, and the young Casanova was
frequently left in the care of his
grandmother after his father died and his
mother had to fend for herself as an
actress.
Casanova
was sent to Padua at the age of nine
(1734) to recover from a life-threatening
blood ailment. He studied there, and
obtained his doctorate at the age of
sixteen. Following his departure from
Padua, Casanova entered the seminary of
St. Cyprian but was expelled. Although he
spent some time in the service of a Roman
Catholic cardinal, Casanova was expelled
from Rome after unsubstantiated claims
that he corrupted an underage girl. By
1745 he had abandoned his ecclesiastical
career and joined the Italian military. As
an officer, Casanova travelled to Corfu
and Constantinople. By early 1746, he
returned to Venice and began a short
career as a violinist at the San Samuele
theater.
In
1748-49, Casanova left Venice for a time
and travelled to Milan, Parma, Geneva,
Prague, and Vienna. He became a Freemason
in Lyon in 1750 and travelled to Paris,
where he met the dramatist Crebillon, who
taught him French. Returning to Venice in
1753, Casanova became involved with a nun,
a certain "Madame Murano."
In
1755, after suffering ruinous gambling
losses and participating in various
illegitimate dealings, Casanova was
denounced by the Venetian State
Inquisitors and imprisoned beneath the
lead roofs of the Venetian Ducal Palace,
in a prison commonly known as "the Leads."
Casanova executed a spectacular escape
from the prison in 1756 (later published
as The Story of My Escape, Leipzig: 1787)
and made his way to Paris. It was in Paris
that he gave himself the title "Chevalier
de Seingalt."
In
1760, dogged by financial troubles,
Casanova left Paris and travelled to
Switzerland, where he met Voltaire. He
continued to travel throughout the
continent, and in 1764 went to Berlin,
where Frederick II offered him a post,
which he declined. On a visit to the
Baltic city of Riga, Casanova met
Catherine of Russia and subsequently moved
to Warsaw, from which he was forced to
flee, following a scandal-ridden duel with
a Polish aristocrat.
Casanova's
reputation preceded him as he travelled
throughout the continent, and he was
forced in 1767 to seek refuge in Spain.
Casanova was permitted to return to
Venetian territory between 1774 and 1782,
but he spent his final years in the
service of Count Waldstein, in Bohemia,
where he died in 1798.
THE
STORY OF MY LIFE by Giacomo Casanova
INTRODUCTION
"I
should like to be the younger brother to
all humanity."
In
a signal encounter with the famous French
philosopher and writer Voltaire, Casanova
explains that "I amuse myself by studying
people as I travel . . . it is fun to
study the world while passing through it."
Indeed, Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt,
traveller, adventurer, musician, lover,
escaped convict, and avid reader, brings
to his monumental The Story of My Life
(Histoire de ma vie) an explicit
relish—and aptitude—for intimate
observations on human nature, customs,
gastronomy, science, literature,
economics, and religion.
These
selections serve not only as a catalogue
of erotic exploits, for which Casanova's
memoir has gained its notoriety, but also
as a gazetteer of important
Enlightenment-era locales. Casanova, under
various circumstances, travels from
decadent Venice (where he was born in
1725) to trendy Paris, artistically rich
and morally puritanical Vienna, and
wealthy, plague-ridden Constantinople.
Indeed, Casanova's identity as a Venetian
provides an interesting counterpoint to
his encounters and digressions with
various personalities. His travels
underscore the richness and diversity of
Italian and Continental identity in the
eighteenth century.
Throughout
his adventures, Casanova is never less
than an observant, personable guide. The
deftly written sketches of those he
encounters—including Catherine the
Great of Russia, Pope Clement XIII,
Voltaire, and the French dramatist
Crebillon—show his formidable
intelligence and curiosity. His
descriptions of a host of
others—including lower dignitaries,
actresses and actors, inn-keepers, spies,
and commoners—reveal his wit and his
desire to unveil the broad scope of the
eighteenth-century Continental world.
Indeed,
what inevitably charms the reader in
Casanova's wide-ranging memoirs is the
author's natural intelligence and his
disinclination to suffer fools gladly.
Nonetheless, this intelligence does not
prevent Casanova from falling into
numerous scrapes, resulting more than once
in his being imprisoned or exiled. In such
instances, Casanova does not spare
himself, acerbically commenting on his own
poor judgment, and frequently linking his
troubles to his susceptibility to "the
allurements of all forms of sensual
delight." The cultivation of such
pleasures, Casanova tells us, "was my
principle concern throughout my life."
Still, he notes that "I do not know
whether it was by my intellect that I have
come so far in life, I do know that it is
to it alone that I owe all the happiness I
enjoy when I am face to face with myself."
Much
of the pleasure Casanova experiences in
the later, more subdued portion of his
life is derived from remembering his
colorful exploits, and threading them
together in The Story of My Life. "In
recalling the pleasures I enjoyed, I
relived them," he writes in his 1797
Preface. Certainly, Casanova shows a
striking ability to reconstruct events and
impressions from his "follies of youth."
While the authenticity of some events
included in his memoirs is questionable,
one suspects that Casanova's accounts are
largely true, and that any deviations that
occur are for the sake of literary
considerations. Casanova may well have
shunned writing a memoir that might "weary
the mind . . . without interesting the
heart."
There
is something for every reader in The Story
of My Life. As Edmund Wilson notes in an
essay on Casanova, "Has any novelist or
poet ever rendered better than Casanova
the passing glory of the personal
life—the gaiety, the spontaneity, the
generosity of youth; the ups and downs of
middle age when our character begins to
get us and we are forced to come to terms
with it; the dreadful blanks of later
years, when what is gone is gone." Wilson
notes, too, the "brilliant variety of
characters," and calls Casanova's memoirs
"one of the most remarkable presentations
in literature of one man's individual
life."
The
Story of My Life succeeds, then, as an
exploration of eighteenth-century culture,
and as a candid account of personal
triumph and folly. Formally, it offers a
compelling example of the personal memoir
where the intimate, public, and historical
are woven together into a vibrant
tapestry. The rich ensemble of characters,
major and minor, who populate Casanova's
memoirs continue, even in the twenty-first
century, to fascinate with their
paradoxicality. Casanova consorts with
nuns who have other lovers, women who
masquerade as men, and great intellects
who show narrow-minded provincialism.
Casanova's own awareness of the diversity
he shows us, combined with his skill as a
storyteller, make The Story of My Life an
unforgettable encounter with the
possibilities the human condition
presents.
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