Casanova's Women Read online

  Love is an art, seduction a thrilling, sometimes dangerous sport played by both sexes. Flirtation, subterfuge, refusal, pursuit and final surrender are the basic moves of the game, and the board is anywhere you choose to conduct the affair: a field, a bosky park, a covered carriage or a day-bed in a candlelit room. The absence of any male and female undergarments other than long linen chemises, and the growing fashion for less formal dresses, make success in the sport easy to achieve. As the stiff French manners of Louis XIV’s late reign recede into memory, women have lowered their necklines, sometimes as far as their nipples, and loosened their padded whalebone stays in order to push up their breasts without compressing their waists too much. Fabrics are soft and light; more than ever before they cling to a woman’s curves. Held out from the body by rigid panniers and hoops, the new wider skirts allow a hem to be easily lifted to gain access to the stockinged legs and naked flesh underneath. Men’s knee breeches, whilst hugging the thighs, are baggy in the seat and speedily unbuttoned at the front.

  The game of love has many sets of rules: two for aristocrats, two for their servants, two for country peasants, one of each for men and women. To acknowledge that you have a lover might be acceptable among high society or servants in the capitals of Europe, and in the theatrical profession where actresses like Casanova’s mother regularly favour their admirers, but it is distinctly less so among Europe’s peasant classes, where couples are more likely to marry for love rather than money or position, and respectability is often the only thing of worth that a girl possesses. A nobleman’s daughter who is known to have lost her virginity might still make a marriage with a man of the second rank because she has a dowry. A peasant girl loses her entire value if she is deflowered, and faces an inevitable downward slide into prostitution, destitution and an early death from disease.

  The price of love is high, and in most cases it is women who pay it. Pregnancy is the worst disaster. Childbirth, with its possible consequences of haemorrhaging and septicaemia, is so dangerous that women in France face a one-in-ten chance of dying in the process. Abortion is a mortal sin likely to end in a serious internal infection, yet to have a baby out of wedlock brings disgrace on one’s person, one’s family and one’s offspring, who will forever bear the stigma of illegitimacy. Women of means can get away with having an illegitimate child by taking refuge in a country village or convent for their confinement, and afterwards paying for their baby to be brought up by a foster mother whilst they return to their former lives as if nothing had happened. But if a poor woman brings a bastard into this world her reputation, and her life, are ruined.

  Though contraception is absolutely forbidden by the Church, it is increasingly used, both within marriage and outside it. It is becoming more possible to separate pleasure from procreation, and birth rates across Europe are beginning to fall, dramatically so in France. Women douche with astringents after sex or insert sponges or golden balls into their vaginas to stop themselves from conceiving, but such devices are expensive and hard to come by, and since most seductions take place away from the home and without warning, a douche is unlikely to be to hand at the moment when a woman needs it. Coitus interruptus, a more reliable method of contraception if practised correctly, is beyond a woman’s control. The male contraceptive -la capote anglaise or English overcoat as the French called it – has been around since Egyptian times, fashioned out of linen, but it is rarely used outside the better brothels of Paris or London, where it re-emerged during the reign of King Charles II made out of animal gut. Secured to the penis by a gathered ribbon at one end, its texture is often so thick and uneven that it is bound to cool all but the very hottest ardour. Rather than using them to prevent their lovers from getting pregnant, men usually wear the overcoats, if at all, to preserve themselves from disease.

  ‘The malady with which Venus not infrequently repays those who worship at her Shrine’, as Scottish writer James Boswell describes venereal disease, is an embarrassing and potentially life-threatening penalty paid by most players of the game of love. No one wants to own up to syphilis, a plague which has devastated the Old World since the discovery of the New in the late fifteenth century and which is mistakenly believed to be part and parcel of the same affliction as gonorrhoea, a sexually transmitted disease which has been around since medieval times. The English call the illness the ‘French Disease’, Spaniards call it El Morbo Ingles and the French La Maladie Espagnole or even the Mai de Naples. The pox affects the brain if left untreated. It causes pain and ulcers and a putrid discharge that leaves sufferers with ‘scandalously soiled’ clothing and sheets. Newspapers, particularly in England, are full of quack remedies for sufferers, many of which do more harm than good. They include syringes to wash out an infected urethra, the famous Italian Bolus pill, Velno’s Vegetable Syrup, Keyser’s Pills, and Dr Rock’s Royal Patent. People will do anything for a cure. Boswell, a sex addict who suffers from venereal disease on nineteen separate occasions, travels from Italy to London just to get hold of Dr Gilbert Kennedy’s Lisbon Diet Drink, an anti-venereal tonic containing sarsaparilla, liquorice and guaiac wood, an ingredient used by the natives of the Caribbean island of San Domingo to some good effect. But at half a guinea a bottle, the Lisbon Diet Drink is exorbitantly expensive, particularly since the recommended dose is two bottles a day.

  Since the early sixteenth century, the main cure for the pox has been treatment with the liquid metal mercury, administered orally, by injection, as an inhalation or as a topical ointment mixed with animal fat. The high fever and copious saliva that these treatments produce are believed to help the patient sweat out the disease, but they do far worse than that. Mercury poisons the system, causing terrible pain as well as damage to the liver, brain and kidneys. It makes one’s teeth fall out and turns one’s breath foul. Administered by an unskilled physician, a mercury ‘cure’ can easily result in chronic weakness or even death. Wary of bad medical practitioners, in all but his most severe cases of the pox Casanova treats himself by avoiding alcohol, sticking to a rigorous diet and drinking a solution of saltpetre; this cure takes him between six and eight weeks. Though in his youth he finds venereal disease humiliating and degrading, by old age he has grown so used to it that he regards the physical scars it has given him as badges of honour won with pleasure on the battlefields of romance.

  Casanova is no ordinary player in the game of love, but a pastmaster at it. What is his secret? For he must have one. Although he does not keep an exact tally of the women he seduces, he estimates in old age that more than two hundred lovers have passed through his practised hands. The love of women dominates his existence from the moment he comes into the world to his dying days, when his female correspondents flirt with him through their pens.

  Where does his almost pathological need to be loved and admired stem from? Casanova’s mother does not appear to love him. She all but ignores him and, when he is only twelve months old, she abandons him to pursue her acting career. After his father dies, she exiles her nine-year-old son to Padua and leaves him with a hideous and cruel hag he does not know. Six months later, neglected and half-starved, he is rescued by his grandmother and sent to live at his schoolmaster’s house, where he falls into the sexually curious hands of his first love, Bettina.

  By the time Casanova returns to Venice, a precocious fourteen-year-old with a university degree in clerical law and an addiction to gambling, he is, like most youths of his age, at the mercy of his hormones and desperate to lose his virginity. In common with many well-educated young men who lack a private income, he is headed for the priesthood, but in the Serenissima or Serene One, as his native city is known, the temptations of the flesh assail him at every turn. Impressed by his sharp brain, an elderly Venetian senator with a penchant for young women takes Casanova under his wing and teaches him the ways of the world. Senator Alvise Malipiero II instructs the novice priest in the invaluable art of discretion. He lets him bear silent witness to his own torment at the hands of a flirtatious seventeen-y
ear-old minx, and introduces him to the cream of Venetian society. Before long, the young Casanova – extremely tall at just under six feet, with large soulful eyes, dark olive skin and, despite the fact that he has taken the tonsure, a head of glorious curls – becomes the confidant and plaything of some of the most well-connected women in the city.

  And so his career as a womaniser begins. Dispensing with formalities, these nobile donne allow Casanova to visit their palazzi unannounced, at will; and even to mingle with their unmarried daughters at the gratings of the convents where they are enrolled as educande, or schoolgirls. Casanova is in his element being their trusted pet. Understandably he would much rather be made a fuss of by a room full of rich sophisticated beauties than kneel on a cold church floor all day long saying his prayers. As he joins in with their small-talk he discovers what women think and feel about life, literature, love and men. He learns how to talk to women, how to make them laugh and how to befriend them. He learns to like women as much as they like him.

  One night when he is sixteen years old, Casanova discovers the joys of sex in the arms of two sisters: above all he desires one-to-one contact with a woman, but after this first experience he is never averse to increasing the ratio to one-to-two, as long as he is the only man. It proves such a pleasurable purusit that, while he is not bisexual, he will not turn down the very occasional opportunity in the future to experience it with a member of his own sex. Women, however, are his overwhelming interest. They are never mere bodies, but always individuals to him; the idea of taking part in an anonymous orgy does not turn him on. Casanova likes to get to know a woman before he makes love to her. For a woman is like a book to him: good or bad, pretty or ugly, she excites his curiosity, his desire to discover and read. If he is to enjoy sex with her, there must be some emotional or intellectual frisson between them. Casanova requires a woman to like him, to desire him, even to love him. And for sex to reach its zenith, he needs to love her with the same intensity.

  Addicted not to sex, but rather to making an endless succession of conquests – a trait that, in a non-sexual context, extends to his relationships with all those he wishes to impress – Casanova goes out of his way to court women’s affection and friendship, both in bed and out of it. He charms them with his intellect and disarms them with his looks. He gets them to talk about themselves, and listens to them with keen interest. He spoils them with the best food, the best accommodation and extravagant presents. When making a move, he seldom oversteps the mark but instinctively knows when to keep silent and when to flatter, when to retreat and when to pounce. He knows how to manipulate a situation to his own advantage, and very few can resist his persuasive arguments. Taking no for answer is not something he does willingly. If a woman tells him that she will not sleep with him, he can make her see in a few easy steps that she means quite the opposite.

  His tactics in the game of love can breach the most impenetrable fortress, and once the walls are down Casanova has full confidence in his ability to please the defeated one who lies physically and emotionally naked at his feet. In bed, he seeks something more than simple sexual satisfaction – a mutual climax that is like death in each other’s arms, the kiss that unites two souls. He hints that his penis is large and that his self-control is exceptional, but he also admits to having his insecurities. Able in his youth to perform several times a night with the same lover, and to prolong his performance until she is satisfied, he nevertheless lives in permanent fear of failure. As he admits with disarming candour, ‘I have all my life been dominated by the fear that my steed would flinch from beginning another race.’

  Sexually uninhibited himself, Casanova believes that the slightest inhibition spoils enjoyment for both parties. He spontaneously does delicious things to women that they would not dare ask a man to do to them, and he shows them sexual practices that they had no idea existed. The link between clitoral stimulation and the female orgasm is well known in the eighteenth century: Onania – Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, an English sex manual first published in 1710, describes in detail how ‘the necessary and unavoidable Friction of the Penis, against the Clitoris, in the Act of Coition, causes those excessive Ticklings and transporting Itchings to each Sex, that are not to be describ’d, so well as felt;1 and, after being initiated early on into this open secret, Casanova takes pleasure in enlightening the unenlightened among the female sex. In bed he enjoys giving even more than he does receiving, and he claims that his partner’s pleasure makes up four-fifths of his own. Since he cannot understand how a woman can enjoy herself with a man if the threat of pregnancy hangs over her – it would certainly put him off sex if he were a woman – he often spares his lovers by practising coitus interruptus, and on occasions wears a condom.

  Sex and love, if not indivisible for Casanova, are closely linked, and the search for love dominates his life. He himself is shot through by Cupid’s arrow almost as often as he plunges one through a woman’s heart. Though some of his encounters are mere passing fancies that gratify his senses for a night or so, others lead to lasting friendships, or change a woman’s life for ever, or deeply touch his soul. He enjoys countless lighthearted love affairs, and suffers over a handful of destructive infatuations. He is once so hopelessly besotted by a woman that he secretly eats the split ends of her hair. He experiences true love, ‘the love that sometimes arises after sensual pleasure: if it does, it is immortal; the other kind inevitably goes stale.’ He knows the delights of living in perfect harmony with a woman who is his soul-mate and his intellectual equal. He tastes the bitterness of unwanted separation before an affair has run its course: ‘The pain seems infinitely greater than the pleasure we have already experienced … We are so unhappy that, in order to stop being so, we wish we had never been happy in the first place.’2

  But after falling in and out of love countless times, Casanova is still no clearer as to what love is. ‘For all that I have read every word that certain self-styled sages have written on the nature of love, and have philosophised endlessly about it myself as I have aged, I will never admit that it is either a trifle or a vanity,’ he writes of it. ‘It is a kind of madness over which philosophy has no power at all; a sickness to which man is prone throughout his life and which is incurable if it strikes in old age. Indefinable love! God of nature! Bitterness than which nothing is sweeter, sweetness than which nothing is more bitter! Divine monster which can only be defined by paradoxes!’3

  ‘I have loved women even to madness,’ he admits in a more prosaic mood. ‘But I have always preferred my freedom to them. Whenever I have been afraid of sacrificing it, only chance has saved me.’ The thought of marriage has always been as disagreeable to him as the idea of settling down in one place. However deeply Casanova has loved, however strongly he is attached to a woman, his amorous feelings inevitably give way to claustrophobia and the need to escape. Somehow he manages to find a valid reason why the affair must end: the woman’s old fiancé turns up unexpectedly; her father locks her away in a convent; Casanova gets himself thrown into prison or exiled from the town she is in; the girl is unfaithful to him, or she puts her career before him. Eager to leave with an easy conscience, he sets her up with a more reliable partner. He finds her a husband and, generous to a fault, provides her with a dowry. If no substitute suitor is available he gives his lover his own private carriage as a present so that she can return to her parents in style. At the least, he ensures that she is in a position to survive without him. Casanova sees nothing questionable in this pattern of behaviour – in fact, he believes he is acting extremely honourably – and he scoffs at women who accuse the male sex of being perfidious: ‘They would be right if they could prove that when we swear to be true to them we do so with the intention of tricking them. Alas! We love without consulting our reason, and reason has no more to do with it when we cease loving them.’4

  Perhaps Casanova ceases loving once too often. For along with professional success and security, he ultimately sacrifices his happiness in orde
r to follow the path of freedom; at least, that was what he believes he has been doing all these years. Few, if any, men of his time travel quite so much or squander so many golden opportunities, many of them handed to him on a plate. Is he searching for something, or running away from himself? Is no woman, no city, no mode of employment ever good enough for the proud adventurer? Or does the actress’s son from Venice secretly feel that, no matter what he does and no matter who loves him, he never quite passes muster? That he is never good enough? Although, like Socrates, Casanova believes that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, this is one question he does not choose to ask himself.

  In the end Casanova’s rootless and peripatetic existence extracts a heavy price from him. Careless of the future, he burns his bridges as fast as he crosses them and makes bitter enemies en route as well as loyal friends. In old age he is persona non grata as far afield as Madrid, Vienna, his native Venice and his beloved Paris. He has nothing: no spouse, no lover, no legitimate children, no property, no place he can even call home. Everything of material value he once possessed – the diamond rings that graced his fingers, his valuable watches, his jewelled chains, his enamelled snuffboxes, even the relic of a saint given to him by his beloved schoolmaster as a parting gift – is sold off to pay his debts. Casanova even loses his laurels, along with the respect of many of the people whose good opinion he once went out of his way to seek. As one ex-admirer puts it, Casanova becomes a ‘glorious butterfly, transformed into a worm’.5