Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. 349 pages in Volume 1. (4,289 total.) Translated by Willard R. Trask. The author’s death in 1797 prevented completion of the work, which was only published in partial, bowdlerized form until the recovery of the original manuscripts allowed for publication in French of the first complete edition in 1960.

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Introduction

If History of My Life (Histoire de ma vie) were a novel, the character of Giacomo Casanova would instantly take his place as one of fictional literature’s most fascinating creations. Having been an actual person, he is arguably more, arguably less than that; more for having lived a life so richly-plotted, so fit for being fictionalized; less because with that life in hand, Casanova did not have to invent so much as did Cervantes in Don Quixote or Fielding in Tom Jones; truth furnished the necessaries to compel interest on its own, for in the faculty of strenuous living, few rival him, and in that of translating memory into prose, even fewer. Though History of My Life runs—in the 1966 National Book Award-winning unexpurgated English translation by Willard R. Trask—to some 12 volumes long (or 4,289 pages), judging from the evidence of Volume 1, this author didn’t need extraneous description or pointless expositions to pad it to such elephantine girth. When he is not traveling and making new acquaintances, Casanova leads us through tautly written episodes of a most extraordinary interest—most involving him either seeking advancement or pursuing a woman, or as the case may be, attempting both simultaneously—and again and again we watch spellbound as he teeters between consummating his ambitions and suffering ruination, with the narration of these escapades often as brisk and nailbiting as any modern thriller.

But a secondary “Casanova” needs addressed before treating of the more interesting one shown in History of My Life. When most hear the name Casanova, they associate it with the idea of a seducer, or in a more negative vein, a womanizer or philanderer. Devotees of History of My Life—so-called Casanovists—will protest that the real Casanova was a lot more than this: a priest, gambler, con man, diplomat, mathematician, playwright, philosopher, science fiction author, and a court personality who met all the illustrious personages of 18th century Europe; and yet, it is not wrong to say that volume 1 of the book shows that if womanizing (or, to speak more properly, a sex addiction) is not the whole of what drives Casanova’s actions, it is a weighty center of gravity that consistently causes trouble for him. Make no mistake, the young man we are shown in volume 1 is a sexual predator. He devises elaborate plots with the end goal of having sex with various women—sometimes consensual, sometimes not, sometimes with girls as young as 11—and he finds suitably attractive prey to hunt in almost every major city he ends up in. At the same time, we are also observing an addict; that is, a person for whom self-control and whether he will be able to exercise it (or, if he cannot, then at least if he can conceal his addiction) is itself a source of tension and drama no matter where our protagonist finds himself. This immensely intelligent and talented man, whatever his charms or his reputation, can be fruitfully understood as a person suffering from defects of personality which bring him as much difficulty as success.

Casanova’s Preface

The preface to the memoirs showcases the author’s sharp wit, intellectual inclinations, and general mindset at the time of writing—1797—though many of the ideas expressed in the preface will seem cryptic until we have a chance to consider them in light of his life experiences. The opening paragraph, for example, runs like this:

I begin by declaring to my reader that, by everything good or bad that I have done throughout my life, I am sure that I have earned merit or incurred guilt, and that hence I must consider myself a free agent.

Why is it important whether Casanova earned his merit or incurred his guilt? And why would he emphasize his status as a “free agent”? The preface alone will not answer these questions.

Casanova dismisses “the Doctrine of the Stoics” concerning human destiny, declares his belief in “an immaterial God” (something similar to a Deistic mindset, perhaps?) and yet insists that he prays to this immaterial God and is thereby given the confidence to act freely according to the dictates of his reason, an outlook well-suited to his life experiences for reasons I will elaborate on, but a basic takeaway I had from these passages is that Casanova believes in a theology which justifies his preferred mode of existence; he says that if God did not want humans to reason, we would not have been given that faculty, and he calls foolish people who believe in a God who values penitence, self-abnegation, or hardship, arguing that if God did not want him to live pleasurably he would not have given him such a capability for pleasure.

Yet Casanova also tells us that, “I was all my life the victim of my senses; I have delighted in going astray and I have constantly lived in error, with no other consolation than that of knowing I had erred.” His fondness for pleasure extends not merely to sex, but to fine wine, “good sticky salt cod from Newfoundland, high game on the very edge, and cheeses whose perfection is reached when the little creatures which inhabit them become visible.”[note]Being a dry, aged-cheese man myself, I found this detail somewhat endearing.[/note] This, “despite an excellent moral foundation, the inevitable fruit of the divine principles which were rooted in my heart.” Casanova does not err, in other words, because he does not know better; he errs because he cannot help himself. He tells us later:

Having observed that I have all my life acted more from the force of feeling than from my reflections, I have concluded that my conduct has depended more on my character than on my mind, after a long struggle between them in which I have alternately found myself with too little intelligence for my character and too little character for my intelligence.

Casanova conveys here that he suffered from irresistable urges throughout his life, with the effect being that his great intelligence was insufficient to prevent these urges from getting him into trouble; and on the flipside, the trouble those urges got Casanova into had the effect of negating the advantages that would have accrued to him had he been able to control them. This pattern repeats itself throughout Volume 1 of History of My Life: Casanova’s talent and formidable intelligence win him the favor of powerful men, but then his natural tendencies cause him to lose it. As he later observes upon entering the service of a powerful Cardinal in Rome:

This is the whole story of my sudden entrance into a house in which I would have made a great fortune if I had conducted myself in a way in which, being what I was, I could not.

The section of the preface which the horde of modern-day Smart People will most approve of is the part where Casanova’s pronounces on fools—“We avenge intelligence when we deceive a fool,”—and contrasts them with stupid people, “whose stupidity was almost a kind of wit,” and who “are like eyes which, but for a cataract, would be extremely beautiful.”

Youth in Venice and Padua

The first source of difficulty in Casanova’s life is his low birth. He relates a not undistinguished ancestry to the reader: one ancestor was Secretary to King Alphonso of Aragon, another a noteworthy poet, another served as a Colonel in the Spanish army during a war with France. Yet as time goes on, the star of the family Casanova is clearly in decline, and Casanova’s father is obliged to wed his mother in secret because he is a lowly actor and it is felt the girl’s mother would not approve. As a child, Casanova is left in the care of his grandmother Marzia in Venice while both parents travel abroad and act. Until he is eight years old, the young boy suffers from frequent nosebleeds of such severity that doctors who are consulted are in wonderment about how he remains alive.[note]One wonders what condition might have caused this. Hemophilia, perhaps?[/note]. But in his earliest memory he can recall, Casanova remembers being taken by his grandmother across the Vienna Lagoon to Murano, to the shop of an old witch who locks the young boy in a chest, recites spells over him, but warns him “that I will lose all my blood and die if I dare reveal her mysteries to anyone.” Later that night, a dazzlingly beautiful woman comes and visits him while he is sleeping, emptying the contents of some boxes on his head, and muttering incantations. His grandmother solemnly reiterates to Giacomo that he must never tell of what has taken place to anyone.

Where I Acquired the Above-Pictured Set I purchased this set at a going-out-of-business auction held by the (now-defunct) Dust Jacket Books in Cincinnati, Ohio. An abridged version of the book is currently available, though I am a completist, so I find abridgements generally intolerable. For example, I am reading an older translation of another racy 18th century French work, The Perverted Ones by Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, and the translator has seen fit to cut out much of the content about balls and dinner-parties that someone like myself might find some ethnographic interest in. This has had the (surely) unintended effect of making that book more boring.

What to make of this story, the faintest dose of magical-realism in an otherwise realistic memoir? My own surmise is that the episode is suggestive of a recurrent theme in Casanova’s life: the importance of keeping secrets. Such secrets include the shame and ignominy of his parents’ trade (acting), as well perhaps the experience of having had some uncontrollable medical condition which made the young Casanova unpresentable. He later says, after living in Padua for two years, that in a party of Venetian aristocrats, “I attracted the attention of the entire company, who, having seen me almost an imbecile, were astonished to find that I had become more than presentable in the short space of two years.” Casanova elaborates later in the chapter that his disease “had reduced me to such a state that no one knew what to do with me. I was extremely weak, had no appetite, was unable to apply myself to anything, and looked like an idiot.” This former condition humiliated Casanova to such a degree that it almost certainly affected his subsequent ways of behaving towards other people.

We can also see the dramatic effect Casanova’s parents’ acting careers have on him in a brief episode in Naples where Casanova meets a distant relative of his, Don Antonio Casanova, with whom he bonds over their shared genealogy, and makes other fruitful connections there. Everything seems to be going swimmingly for Casanova in Naples. He tells us, “If my destiny had let me remain in Naples, I should have made my fortune there; but I believed I ought to go to Rome, though I had no settled plan.” His plans are then decided, however, by a curious circumstance:

I quickly made up my mind to leave when I found that my acquaintances were determined to procure me the honor of kissing the Queen’s hand. It was obvious that in answering the questions she would put to me, I should have to tell her that I had just left Martorano and give her an account [of a destitute religious institution there.] Then too, Her Majesty knew my mother, there was nothing to stop her from revealing her position in Dresden; Don Antonio would be scandalized and my genealogy made ridiculous. I knew the inevitable and unhappy results of the prejudices then current; I should have come a complete cropper. I left while it was still time.

Even as late as the age of 18, Casanova cannot allow the secret of his mother’s trade to get out. His genealogy would be “made ridiculous,” which demonstrates that a non-ridiculous genealogy was a significant part of Casanova’s social capital, the affect which he presented to the world. The dimunition of his genealogy would result in severe damage to his ability to navigate this social world built on hereditary connections.[note]It is habitual for modern readers to talk about “the past” as though it is a different world whose social dynamics have vanished. This is not true. It is still the case that presenting a positive affect to the world, minimizing the ignominy and embarrassing elements of one’s past, and associating oneself with individuals or status symbols which carry prestige, are important factors for achieving material success in the world. We are hardly so removed from the circumstances which force Casanova, at this point in the story, to leave Naples in a hurry.[/note]

Another early sequence exemplifies Casanova’s need to keep secrets: His father, who experimented with optics late in life, has a beautiful round crystal in his workshop, which young Giacomo steals. When his father finds his crystal gone, he summons Giacomo and his brother Francesco and asks who took the crystal. Both boys deny having stolen the crystal, but while the father searches the room for the crystal, Giacomo drops the crystal into his brother’s pocket, framing him for the crime. When the father finds the crystal on Francesco, he beats the boy. Casanova relates that, “Three or four years later I was stupid enough to boast to my brother that I had played this trick on him. He has never forgiven me and has taken every opportunity to revenge himself.” Six weeks later, Casanova’s father dies from a sudden abcess in the brain. We are told rather graphically how “the apostem discharged through his ear one minute after he died; it left him after killing him, as if it found nothing further to do in him.”

On his deathbed, Casanova’s father secures the promise of the Grimani, a family of Venetian noblemen, to become the patrons of his destitute family. It is through this patronage that Casanova becomes connected to Signor Grimani and a Signor Baffo. While keeping straight all of the personages mentioned in History of My Life can be something of a chore, it is helpful to think of Grimani as a humorless rich man, and Baffo as a philosopher, statesman, and poet, and the only one of this group that Casanova genuinely seems to respect. Baffo it is who arranges to have young Giacomo sent to Padua, where he will receive an education, and Baffo is also the only one of a group also including Signor Grimani and Casanova’s mother to defend him from mockery when he claims the sun does not move, but rather Earth does. Casanova tells the reader:

This was the first real pleasure I enjoyed in my life. [Which suggests his previous experiences in life were very far from joyful. -Abe] But for Signor Baffo, that moment would have been enough to corrupt my intelligence: the baseness of credulity would have taken root in it. [The italicized text are margin notes Casanova added to his manuscript.] The stupidity of the two others would certainly have blunted the edge of a faculty by which I do not know if I have progressed very far; but I do know that to it alone I owe all the happiness I enjoy when I commune with myself in solitude.

This passage demonstrates one of the most appealing aspects of the early part of Casanova’s memoir: It functions as a bildungsroman and the sort of declaration of intellectual independence that can hardly fail to move any of us moderns who value the intellectual life and, like Casanova, finds themselves in occasional contention with the tribe of fools. (I myself have an anecdote much like this one;[note]When I was in the third grade, I got into a fight with the teacher and my classmates over the question of which state in the United States is the largest. My teacher, pointing to the large map on the wall, asked the class which was the largest. A chorus rang out, “TEXAS!” Then I said, “No, it’s Alaska.” And they insisted, and the teacher insisted, no, the map clearly shows that Texas is the largest. But my father had recently gone to be part of a medical practice in Barrow, Alaska, and he had told me that if you superimposed Alaska over the continental United States, it would occupy half of the land area. My teacher and classmates would hear nothing of it, and I was sent to the principal’s office; I’ve been a hard-headed contrarian ever since.[/note] I’m sure many people do.)

It is in Padua that Casanova’s experience of life goes from merely abject to depraved. He is put up in a boarding house with a Slavonian woman. (“So they got rid of me,” he writes.) He is poorly fed and kept under her tyrannical rule with three other boys, in rooms infested with rats and fleas. “Thus did I begin to learn what is is to be unhappy and to bear misfortune patiently,” he says, adding rather humorously, “My soul profited from the competition between my afflictions.” When his instructor at school, a Doctor Gozzi, becomes aware of the conditions at the Slavonian woman’s house, he arranges to have Casanova move in to his own house. The danger seems to be passed, until one night the Doctor’s daughter, Bettina, is helping the boy put on his stockings. He is twelve, she fifteen. She performs some manner of sex act on the younger boy which isn’t made clear.[note]Casanova always characterizes his sex acts in euphemisms, presumably as a concession to the modesty of his readers.[/note] After this, Casanova becomes involved in a love triangle between himself, Bettina, and an older boy. Bettina, meanwhile, falls ill from a fever, though Casanova thinks she is faking it to conceal her sexual sins. He watches as Doctor Gozzi and his family despair over Bettina, thinking her possessed by a demon, summoning exorcists to try to cure her. Only Casanova suspects the truth, but having had a first sexual experience with the girl, he is driven to manipulate the situation to his own advantage.

This leads to an extraordinary exchange in which Bettina tells Casanova at some length that she is innocent, she loved him, but she was merely trying to fend off advances from the overly aggressive older boy. But the young Casanova has seen too much; he is wise to Bettina’s manipulations, and responds brilliantly:

“Come now, my dear Bettina!” I said, “your whole story has touched me; but how can you expect me to believe that your convulsions and your wild ravings are natural, to say nothing of the demoniac symptoms you exhibited only too appropriately during the exorcisms, although you very sensibly admit that on this point you have doubts?”

Bettina is taken aback by this response; the last thing she expected was for this twelve-year-old kid to fail to be her co-conspirator, and instead use his position to blackmail her. The manipulator becomes the manipulated, and this is a common pattern we see in Casanova’s interactions with women: he finds women who are themselves engaged in some manner of sneaky behavior, and then he patiently devises ways to entrap them in their own web of deceit. Part of the lurid thrill of these episodes is wondering what brilliant trump card, what pièce de résistance, will crown his next triumph. In moments such as these, when all the cold stratagems and careful planning pay off, Casanova comes off in these memoirs like the Sherlock Holmes of predatory sexual behavior; you can disapprove of what he does, but you cannot deny how artfully he goes about it. Two further points may be made in Casanova’s defense: the first is that he would never have had the opportunity of staging such reversals had the 18th century society of the time not already been prone to illicit sexual affairs. (On at least a couple of occasions, Casanova gets himself into trouble by trying to steal away a woman who is already engaged in an illicit affair with an older, more powerful man.) The second defense one may mount on his behalf is that there are moments in the novel—with Bettina, with the servant-girl Lucia, and later with the younger girl in Rome, Barbaruccia—where Casanova pointedly shows the reader his decision to decline to pursue the girl; though this defense fails of itself, for the very fact that Casanova finds it notable when he declines to pursue a beautiful woman suggests that this is a significant departure from his modus operandi, which is to be pursuing (in Volume 1) up to three different women at once, moving on to the next one once the trail of the previous goes cold.

Misogyny and Rape

Even if one finds Casanova’s love schemes charming, there are times when his behavior veers into what most modern readers would find appalling.[note]Though it is a mark of the degree to which sexual mores have changed that many of the encounters 18th century readers would have considered appalling, most liberal-minded readers of today would find unobjectionable.[/note] Take, for example, Casanova’s affair with the Countess Gozzi during his stay at Pasiano. Casanova has initially returned both to fulfill a promise to an acquaintance, and to renew his relationship with a servant girl, Lucia, who lived in the house, who he is saddened to find ran off in the interval with another man. Meanwhile, this Countess had recently been married to a Count Daniele. As he socializes at the dinner table in the garden, Casanova’s eyes are drawn to the bride and her sister, whom the bride’s husband very conspicuously has eyes for. Casanova flirts with the Countess over the next couple days, and at the end of the week she takes him into her confidence and tells him her despair at her husband’s attraction to her sister. Casanova hatches a plot with her for her to pretend to be in love with him and not her husband, so as to make her husband jealous and thereby want to be with her. “To persuade her to this course,” our dastardly narrator tells us, “I told her that it was difficult and that only a woman of great intelligence could play so false a role. She assured me that she would play it to perfection; but she played it so badly that everyone saw the plot was of my own devising.”

But Casanova doesn’t particularly care if the scheme works, because the plan is merely a ruse for him to stay in close proximity with the Countess and wait for his moment. His opportunity comes when he and the Countess go off in a separate carriage from the rest of their party. Casanova tells the coachman to take them on a separate path where storm clouds are gathering. The Countess wants to head the other way, indicates that the thunder terrifies her, but Casanova reassures her that the storm will pass in half an hour. Then this happens:

The rain comes down. I take off my cloak to use it to cover us both in front; and, heralded by an enormous flash, the lightning strikes a hundred paces ahead. The horses rear, and the poor lady is seized by spasmodic convulsions. She throws herself on me and clasps me in her arms. I bend forward to pick up the cloak, which had fallen to our feet, and, as I pick it up, I raise her skirts with it. Just as she is trying to pull them down again, there is another flash of lightning, and her terror deprives her of the power to move. Wanting to put the cloak over her again, I draw her toward me; she literally falls on me, and I quickly put her astride me. Since her position could not be more propitious, I lose no time, I adjust myself to it in an instance by pretending to settle my watch in the belt of my breeches. Realizing that if she did not stop me at once, she could no longer defend herself, she makes an effort, but I tell her that if she does not pretend to have fainted, the postilion will turn and see everything. So saying, I leave her to call me an impious monster to her heart’s content, I clasp her by the buttocks, and carry off the most complete victory that ever a skillful swordsman won.

This is a rape—certainly by any modern definition. He lifts her skirt, she tries to stop him. She “makes an effort” to defend herself, but Casanova tells her that if she resists him, she will be ruined. She protests and calls him an impious monster. He pronounces victory in such debonair terms that it seems as if he expects a goodly portion of his male audience to approve; he asks her to kiss him, and she tells him, “No, because you are an atheist and Hell awaits you.” After they get out of the coach, the coachman laughs, and when Casanova asks why he is laughing, the coachman replies, “You know why.” This, in brief strokes, is a depiction of a rape and of the rape culture—to employ a term that has lately become prominent—which enables it.

There are more subtle indications, however, that Casanova’s traditional image as an ideal lover and friend to women is much overrated. While Casanova is imprisoned on an island fort outside Venice after being caught flirting with Signor Grimani’s mistress, he meets a Count Bonafede, a military man with an illustrious past and a ravishing wife who Casanova immediately begins to pursue. (“Her smiling look seemed to be saying, ‘In a year or two you will see in me all that you now only imagine.'”) Months later, when Casanova has been released from the fortress and can roam freely in Venice, he goes to visit the Countess and complete his attempts to seduce her. But what he sees upon entering the house takes him by total surprise.

Going to see an angel, I believed that I should enter a corner of Paradise, and I find myself in a drawing room in which there was nothing but three or four rotting wooden chairs and an old, dirty table. It was almost impossible to see, for the blinds were closed. . . . Even so, I could see that the lady who was receiving me was wrapped in a dress which was all tatters and that her shift was dirty.
. . .
Her wretched dishabille making her look almost ugly, I find that I no longer feel guilty of anything. I am astonished at the impression she had produced on me in the fortress, and she seems almost glad that I had been surprised into an act which, far from having offended her, must have been flattering to her. Reading all my emotions in my face, she displayed in hers not anger but a mortification which roused my pity. If she had been able, or had dared, to philosophize, she would have had the right to despise me as a man whom she had attracted only by her fine cloths, or by the idea of her rank or her wealth which had led him to form.

As soon as Casanova realizes that the Countess has no money and that her fine dress was a rental, he is appalled. Her worth as a person sinks to absolutely nothing, just like that. In response to her descriptions of her hardships, he responds with empty platitudes: “I ended with the stupid commonplace which is always used to console a girl oppressed by poverty, even if she is respectable. I predicted that every imaginable happiness would come to her from the irresistible power of her charms.” He gives her a small kiss and promises to visit, but never does. Reflecting upon this incident, Casanova uses the following dubious metaphor to tell readers what he values in a woman:

Woman is like a book which, be it good or bad, must begin to please with its title page; if that is not interesting, it does not rouse a desire to read, and that desire is equal in force to the interest the title page inspires.

In other words, if a woman is neither wealthy nor beautiful, Casanova has no interest in her.

Young Adulthood in Venice, Naples, and Rome

We should not, however, allow Casanova’s significant flaws to entirely occlude our view of his virtues, which were evidently substantial. One particular talent the adult Casanova has is insinuating himself into the favor of a wealthy benefactors using his wit, and then making sure to use his connection to one powerful benefactor as a bridge unto the next.[note]Had he been alive today, we can be certain that Casanova would be a consummate pro at “networking”.[/note] Signor Grimani, being an altogether too serious fellow, could hardly have been the ideal Venetian patrician for a young Casanova, freshly returned from the university in Padua, to want to attach himself to. Instead, he makes the acquaintance of an aging lothario of a man, Senator Malipiero, flattered him on their first encounter by suggesting that he eats to slow in his dotage. “I told him that he need only invite to his table those who naturally ate twice as much as other people.” The old man complains that his mistress, Teresa Imer, refuses to marry him. From this conversation, we get flashes of young Casanova’s morbid wit:

“She says she would not commit a mortal sin to become queen of the world.”
“You must violate her or send her packing, banish her from your house.”
“I am incapable of the first, and I cannot make up my mind to the second.”
“Kill her.”
“That is what it will come to, if I do not die first.”
“Your Excellency is to be pitied.”

Casanova is an expert in all the methods needed to thrive in the conversations: wit, flattery, and imagination. (Though one wonders if he comes to these encounters pre-armed with these jokes.) Whenever he goes to a dinner, he tells us (without getting into specifics) that he becomes the center of attention. It is difficult to tell to what extent Casanova may be exaggerating his conversational prowess; given that he gets to author his own story here, he is free to make himself seem as witty as time allows, whereas in actual life, a person who may be able to craft the perfect rejoinder only five minutes later than it was needed is at a distinct disadvantage. It is possible that Casanova was the toast of any gathering of social equals that included him, though his narration gives some reason for us to wonder whether this is true.

One reason that strikes me is that Casanova does not seem to be a man with true friendships. This may seem like an odd claim to make about someone whose list of acquaintances fills an entire index in volume 12 of my edition, but none of the male acquaintances of Casanova can really be counted as true confidantes. Certainly there are his protectors and surrogate father figures such as Signor Malipiero and (later in Rome) Cardinal Aquaviva. There are also men whose families he associates himself with, such as the husbands of the Countesses Bonafede and Gozzi, but in these cases those men are not friends so much as rivals and unwitting dupes; Casanova devotes little time to detailing any intimate conversations he might have had with these men.

When he does have some sort of conversation with them, Casanova often portrays the conversation in indirect speech, as if to suggest he is playing some infernal joke on the person he is talking to. In fact, the only male companion whose relationship with Casanova can be said to evolve in any significant way is the Frate Steffano, a comic character who accompanies Casanova on his journey from Venice to Rome, serving as a sort of demented Sancho Panza. This clownish Capuchin swears by “Saint Francis” constantly, yet has no problem starting fights with co-religionists and robbing people blind. He is perhaps an example of the type of stupid person whom Casanova tells us he finds so beautiful.

Yet if Casanova is skilled at cultivating new acquaintances, he also has a tendency to destroy those relationships he has. In Venice, Senator Malipiero catches him flirting with his mistress Teresa Imer, and so the decision is made to send him to a seminary. At the seminary, however, he is caught in the same bed with another boy and gets himself thrown out of the seminary. He is cut off financially by the Signor Grimani, his official patron, and he proceeds to sell off the furniture that belongs to the old man before being thrown out of the lodgings Grimani had set up for him. This causes Grimani to have him imprisoned in the fortress and eventually told to establish himself somewhere other than Venice. This precipitates his journey to Naples and then Rome. Casanova’s ability to adapt to new circumstances and make new starts for himself after coming in a close brush with total ruin is admirable, until one considers how another person may not have lived so dangerously in the first place. This dubious manner of living nonetheless makes for some utterly thrilling reading. His time in Rome, to take another example of his high-wire dances with social death, ends with an episode of genuine suspense, with the result that Casanova finds himself forced to leave this city as well.

The dramatic event that forced Casanova into exile involves a French teacher, one Signor Delaqua, his daughter Barbaruccia, and a “handsome young man” who is her lover as well as a fellow pupil of Signor Delaqua along with Casanova. The man exchanges increasingly desperate love letters with the French teacher’s daughter, which he shows to Casanova, much to the latter’s annoyance. (He’s too busy with his own love schemes to get embroiled in this other fellow’s!) The letters are standard I’ll-kill-myself-if-you-won’t-have-me love fare, and Casanova thinks to brush him off by casually telling him to run off and marry the girl, advice the two lovers take all too seriously, for even as Barbaruccia takes her father’s dictates to break off the relationship seriously, it turns out she is pregnant with the young man’s child. He is arrested as the two attempt to leave the city together unseen, and the sobbing Barbaruccia shows up sobbing at Casanova’s apartment, a fugitive from the law. In the pulse-pounding scene that follows, Casanova tries to smuggle the girl to Cardinal Aquaviva’s chamber, where she can throw herself at the Cardinal’s mercy.

But though Casanova successfully rescues the young girl (at least in his telling), his actions have put a cloud over him. Cardinal Aquaviva now tells Casanova he must leave Rome, though secretly, so no one knows where he is going. (This is the Catholic Church, after all, where impropriety is met not with a clean termination, but rather with a soft landing inflicting the offender on some other place where nobody knows about their transgressions.) The cardinal tells him,

“Consider what country you wish to go to; I have friends everywhere; I will give you such recommendations as I am certain will procure you employment.”

But, Casanova says unexpectedly, “the word which despair and resentment brought to my lips was ‘Constantinople’.” “I am obliged to you,” the cardinal jokes, “for not choosing Ispahan [ed. note: in Persia], for I should have been at a loss.”

When a person has been tossed this way and that by his fortunes, to return now to a theme sounded in Casanova’s preface, it is no wonder that he will adopt a point of view that holds there to be no such thing as destiny. While many of Casanova’s great chances at success go to waste, there is some dignity to be retained in telling oneself that the power to shape one’s fate is always in one’s own hands. Even as an old man in the 1790s, as the world was passing Casanova by and he was working as a librarian in a secluded castle in Bohemia, he still evidently believed he might win some immortality for himself by composing these gargantuan memoirs. Judging by Volume 1 of History of My Life, he appears to have succeeded.

Stay tuned for the next installment in this 12-part series on Casanova’s History of My Life!