10-11-2002

 

 

AS MEMÓRIAS DE CASANOVA

(1725 - 1798)

 

 

Adorei ler as Memórias de Casanova. Nos anos 60, a Livre de Poche editou os primeiros cinco volumes, mas nunca chegou a completar a edição, que se previa ter 12. É uma escrita cheia de humor e delicadeza, mesmo quando o tema é… pornográfico.

(À venda a edição de 1993 nas edições Robert Laffont, com o título Histoire de ma vie, 3 vols.)

 
   

 

 
 

 

A aventura de Casanova com as manas Nanette e Marton

(Tomo I, Cap. IV e IV)

 

Casanova quer conquistar Ângela, sobrinha de um padre cura, e que anda a aprender a bordar em casa de Madame Orio. Aí tem a companhia das encantadoras sobrinhas desta, as duas irmãs Nanette e Marton, de, respectivamente, 16 e 14 anos. Nos dias festivos, Ângela fica a dormir em casa da mestra bordadeira, na cama larga com as suas sobrinhas.

Casanova faz amizade com Madame Orio, dando-lhe a entender que está apaixonado por uma das sobrinhas.

Ângela repudia a corte de Casanova, e não quer nada com ele. Pouco a pouco, este enamora-se das duas sobrinhas e esquece Ângela. Uma noite, Nanette e Marton, fazem-no subir ao quarto delas, sem que a tia disso se aperceba. Casanova prepara-se para ali passar a noite.

 

 

   

   

    Après le petit souper, assis au milieu d'elles, prenant leurs mains, et leurs baisant je leur ai demandé si elles étaient mes véritables amies, et si elles approuvaient la façon indigne dont Angéla m'avait traité. Elles me répondirent d'accord que je leur avait fait verser des larmes. Laissez donc, leur dis-je, que j'ai pour vous la tendresse d'un vrai frère, et partagez-là comme ci vous étiez mes soeurs; donnons-nous-en des gages dans l'innocence de nos coeurs; embrassons-nous,et jurons nous une fidélité éternelle.

    Les premiers baisers que je leur ai donnés ne sortirent ni d'un désir amoureux, ni d'un projet tendant à les séduire, et de leur côté, elles me jurèrent quelques jours après qu'elles ne me les rendirent que pour m'assurer qu'elles partageaient mes honnêtes sentiments de fraternité; mais ces baisers innocents ne tardèrent pas à devenir enflammés, et à susciter en nous trois un incendie, dont nous dûmes être fort surpris, car nous les suspendîmes nous entre-regardant après tous étonnés, et fort sérieux. Les deux soeurs bougèrent sous un prétexte, et je suis resté absorbé dans la réflexion. Ce n'est pas étonnant que le feu de ces baisers avait allumé dans mon âme, et qui serpentait dans tous mes membres m'ait rendu dans l'instant invinciblement amoureux de ces deux filles. Elles étaient toutes les deux plus jolies qu'Angéla, et Nanette par l'esprit, comme Marton par son caractère doux et naïf lui étaient infiniment supérieures: je me suis trouvé fort surpris de ne pas avoir reconnu leur mérite avant ce moment-là. Mais ces filles étaient nobles, et fort honnêtes, le hasard qui les avait mises entre mes mains ne devait pas leur devenir fatal. Je ne pouvais pas croire sans fatuité qu'elles m'aimaient; mais je pouvaient supposer que les baisers avaient fait sur elles le même effet qu'ils avaient fait sur moi. Dans cette supposition j'ai vu avec évidence qu'employant des ruses et des tournures, dont elles ne pouvaient pas connaître la force, il ne me serait pas difficile, dans le courrant de la longue nuit que je devait passer avec elles, de les faire consentir à des complaisances, dont les suites pouvaient devenir très décisives. Cette pensée me fit horreur. Je me suis imposé une loi sévère, et je n'ai pas douter de la force qu'il m'était nécessaire pour l'observer.

    Je les voyais reparaître portant dans leur physionomie le caractère de la sécurité et du contentement, je me suis dans l'instant même donné le même vernis bien déterminé à ne plus m'exposer au feu des baisers.

    Nous passâmes une heure à parler d'Angéla. Je leur ai dit que je me sentais déterminé à ne plus la voir, puisque j'étais convaincu qu'elle ne m'aimait pas. Elle vous aime, me dit la naïve Marton, et j'en suis sûre; mais si vous ne pensez pas à l'épouser, vous ferez fort bien de rompre avec elle tout à fait,  car elle est décidé à ne vous accorder pas un seul baiser tant que vous ne serez pas amoureux: il faut donc la quitter, ou vous disposer à ne la trouver complaisante en rien.

    - Vous raisonner comme un ange; mais comment pouvez-vous être sûre qu'elle m'aime?

    - Très sûre. Dans l'amitié fraternelle que nous nous sommes promis, je peux sincèrement vous le dire. Quand Angéla couche avec nous, elle m'appelle, me couvrant de baisers, son cher abbé.

    Nanette alors, éclatant de rire, lui mais une main sur la bouche; mais cette naïveté me mit tellement en feu, que j'ai eu la plus grande des peines à conserver ma contenance. Marton dit à Nanette qu'il était impossible, ayant beaucoup d'esprit, que j'ignorasse ce que deux filles bonnes amies faisaient quand elles couchaient ensemble.

    - Sans doute, lui ajoutai-je, personne n'ignore ces bagatelles, et je ne crois pas, ma chère Nanette, que vous ayez trouvé dans cette confidence amicale votre soeur trop indiscrète.

    - A présent c'est fait; mais ce sont des choses qu'on ne dit pas. Si Angéla le savait!...

    - Elle serait au désespoir, je le sais bien; mais Marton m'a donné une telle marque d'amitié, que je lui serai reconnaissant jusqu'à la mort. C'en est fait. Je déteste Angéla; je ne lui parlerai plus. C'est une âme fausse; elle vise à mon précipice.

    - Mais elle n'a pas trot, si elle vous aime, de vous désirer pour mari.

    - D'accord, mais employant ce moyen, elle ne pense qu'à ses propres intérêts, et sachant ce que je souffre, elle ne peut procéder ainsi que ne l'aimant pas. En attendant par une fausse imagination monstrueuse elle soulage elle soulage ses désires brutaux sur avec cette charmant Marton qui veut bien lui servir de mari.

    Les éclats de rire de Nanette redoublèrent alors; mais je n'ai pas quitté mon air sérieux, ni changé de style avec Marton faisant les plus pompeux éloges à sa sincérité.

    Ce propos me faisait le plus grand plaisir, j'ai dit à Marton qu'Angéla à son tour devait lui servir de mari, et pour lors elle me dit en riant qu'elle n'était mari que de Nanette, et Nanette du en convenir.

    Mais comment nomme-t-elle son mari, lui dis-je, dans ses transports?

    - Personne n'en sait rien.

    - Vous aimez donc quelqu'un, dis-je à Nanette.

    - C'est vrai mais personne ne saura jamais mon secret.

    Je me suis alors flatté que Nanette en secret pouvait être la rivale d'Angéla. Mais avec ces jolis propos j'ai perdu l'envie de passer la nuit sans rien faire avec ces deux filles qui étaient faites pour l'amour. Je leur ai dit que j'étais bien heureux d'avoir pour elle que des sentiments d'amitié, car sans cela je me trouverai fort embarrassé à passer la nuit avec elles sans leur des marques de ma tendresse, et d'en recevoir, car, leur dis-je d'un air très froid, vous êtes l'une et l'autre jolies à ravir, et faites pour faire tourner la tête à tout homme que vous mettrez à même de vous connaître à fond. Après avoir parlé ainsi, j'ai fait semblant d'avoir envie de dormir. Ne faites pas de façon, me dit Nanette, mettez-vous au lit: nous irons dormir dans l'autre chambre sur le canapé.

    - Je me croirais, faisant cela, le plus lâche des hommes. Causons: l'envie de dormir me passera. Je suis seulement fâché à cause de vous. C'est vous qui désirez vous coucher; et c'est moi qui irai dans l'autre chambre. Si vous me craignez, enfermez-vous; mais vous auriez tort car je ne vous aime qu'avec les entrailles de frère.

    - Nous ne ferons jamais cela, me dit Nanette, laissez-vous persuader, couchez-vous ici.

    -Habillé, je ne peux pas dormir.

    - Déshabillez-vous. Nous ne vous regarderons pas.

    - Je ne crains pas cela: mais je ne pourrais jamais m'endormir vous voyant obligées à veiller à cause de moi.

    - Nous nous coucherons aussi, me dit Marton, mais sans nous déshabiller.

    - C'est une méfiance qui insulte ma probité. Dites-moi, Nanette, si vous me croyez honnête homme.

    - Oui, certainement.

    - Fort bien. Vous devez m'en convaincre? Vous devez vous coucher toutes les deux à mes côtés tout à fait déshabillées, et compter sur la parole d'honneur que je vous donne que je ne vous toucherai pas. Vous êtes deux, et je suis un: que pouvez-vous craindre? Ne serez vous pas les maîtresses de sortir du lit, si je cesse d'être sage? Bref, si vous ne me promettez pas de me donner cette marque de confiance du moins quand vous me verrez endormi, je n'irai pas me coucher.

    J'ai alors cesser de parler faisant semblant de m'endormir: et elles se parlèrent tout bas; puis Marton me dit d'aller me coucher, et qu'elles en feraient de même  quand elles me verraient endormi. Nanette me le promit aussi, et pour lors je leur ai tourné le dos, et après m'être entièrement déshabillé, je me suis mis au lit, et je leur ai souhaité la bonne nuit. J'ai d'abord fait semblant de dormir, mais un quart d'heure après, je me suis endormi tout de bon. Je ne me suis réveillé que quand elles vinrent se coucher; mais je me suis d'abord tourné pour reprendre mon sommeil, et j'ai commencé à agir que quand je me suis vu le maître de les croire endormies. Si elles ne dormaient pas, il ne tenait qu'à elles d'en faire semblant. Elles m'avaient tourné le dos, et nous étions à l'obscur. J'ai commencé par celle vers laquelle j'étais tourné ne savant pas si c'était Nanette ou Marton. Je l'ai trouvée accroupie, et enveloppée dans sa chemise, mais ne brusquait rien, et n'avançant l'entreprise qu'aux pas les plus petits elle se trouva convaincue que le meilleur parti qu'elle pût prendre était celui de faire semblant de dormir, et de me laisser faire. Peu à peu je l'ai développée, peu à peu elle se déploya, et peu à peu par des mouvements suivis, et très lents, mais merveilleusement bien d'après nature, elle se mit dans une position, dont elle n'aurait pu m'en offrir une autre plus agréable que se trahissant. J'ai entamé l'ouvrage, mais pour le rendre parfait, j'avais besoin qu'elle s'y prêtât de façon à ne plus pouvoir le désavouer, et la nature enfin l'obligea à s'y déterminer. J'avais trouvé la première exempte de doute, et ne pouvant pas douter non plus de la douleur qu'on avait dû endurer j'en fus surpris. En devoir de respecter religieusement un préjugé auquel je devais une jouissance dont je goûtais la douceur pour la première fois de ma vie, j'ai laissé la victime tranquille, et je me suis tourné de l'autre côté pour agir de même avec la soeur qui devait compter sur toute ma reconnaissance.

    Je l'ai trouvé immobile dans la posture qu'on peut avoir quand on est couché sur le dos, dorment profondément, et sans aucune crainte. Avec les plus grands ménagements, et toute l'apparence de crainte de la réveiller j'ai commencé par flatter son âme m'assurant qu'elle était toute neuve comme sa soeur: et je n'ai différé à la traiter de même que jusqu'au moment qu'affectant un mouvement très naturel, et sans lequel il m'aurait été impossible de couronner l'oeuvre, elle m'aida à triompher; mais dans le moment de la crise, elle n'eut pas la force de poursuivre la fiction. Elle se démasqua en me serrant très étroitement entre ses bras, et collant sa bouche sur la mienne. Après le fait, je suis sûre, lui dis-je, que vous êtes Nanette.

    - Oui, et je m'appelle heureuse, comme ma soeur, si vous êtes honnête, et constant.

    - Jusqu'à la mort mes anges, tout ce que nous avons fait fut l'ouvrage de l'amour, et qu'il n'y ait plus question d'Angéla.

    Je l'ai alors prié de se lever pour aller allumer des bougies, et ce fut Marton qui eut cette complaisance. Quand j'ai vu Nanette entre mes bras animée par le feu de l'amour, et Marton et Marton qui tenant une bougie nous regardait, et paraissait nous accuser d'ingratitude de ce que nous ne lui disons rien, tant qu'ayant été la première a se rendre a mes caresses, elle avait encouragé sa soeur à l'imiter, j'ai senti tout mon bonheur.

    Levons nous, leur dis-je, pour nous jurer une amitié éternelle, et pour nous rafraîchir.

    Nous fîmes tous les trois dans un baquet plein d'eau une toilette de mon invention qui nous fit rire, et qui renouvela tous nos désirs; puis dans le costume de l'ange d'or nous mangeâmes le reste de la langue, et vidâmes une autre bouteille. Après nous être dit cent choses, que dans l'ivresse de nos sens il n'est permis d'interpréter qu'à l'amour, nous nous recouchâmes, et nous passâmes dans des débats toujours diversifiés tout le reste de la nuit. Ce fût Nanette qui en fit la clôture. Mme Orio étant allée à la messe j'ai dû les quitter abrégeant tous les propos. Après leur avoir juré que je ne pensais plus à Angéla, je suis allé chez moi m'ensevelir dans le sommeil jusqu'à l'heure de dîner.

    M. de Malipiero me trouva l’air joyeux et les yeux fatigués ; mais, discret, je lui laissai croire tout ce qu’il voulut sans lui rien dire. Le surlendemain je fis une visite à Mme Orio, et comme Angela n’y était pas, je restai à souper, et je me retirai en même temps que M. Rosa. Nanette pendant ma visite trouva le moment de me remettre une lettre et un petit paquet. Le paquet contenait un morceau de cure sur lequel était l’empreinte d’une clef, et le billet me disait de faire faire la clef et de m’en servir pour aller passer les nuits avec elles quand l’en aurais envie. Elle m’informait en outre qu’Angela avait été passer avec elles la nuit du lendemain, et que dans le habitudes où elle étaient elle avait deviné tout ce qui s’était passé ; qu’elles en étaient convenues en lui reprochant qu’elle en avait été la cause ; que là-dessus elle leur avait dit les plus fortes injures, promettant qu’elle ne remettrait plus les pieds chez elle, mais que cela leur était fort égal.

 Quelques jours après la fortune nous délivra d’Angela ; son père, ayant été appelé à Vicence pour une couple d’années afin d’y peindre à fresco des appartements, l’emmena avec lui. Je me trouvai par son absence tranquille possesseur de ces deux charmantes filles, avec lesquelles je passai au moins deux nuits par semaine, n’introduisant facilement chez elles au moyen de la clef, que j’avais eu soin de faire faire.  

 

in Histoire de ma vie, volume 1 chapitre V         

     

 

   After our supper, which was delicious, I sat between them, holding their hands, which I pressed to my lips, asking them whether they were truly my friends, and whether they approved of Angela's conduct towards me. They both answered that it had made them shed many tears. "Then let me," I said, "have for you the tender feelings of a brother, and share those feelings yourselves as if you were my sisters; let us exchange, in all innocence, proofs of our mutual affection, and swear to each other an eternal fidelity."

   The first kiss I gave them was prompted by entirely harmless motives, and they returned the kiss, as they assured me a few days afterwards only to prove to me that they reciprocated my brotherly feelings; but those innocent kisses, as we repeated them, very soon became ardent ones, and kindled a flame which certainly took us by surprise, for we stopped, as by common consent, after a short time, looking at each other very much astonished and rather serious. They both left me without affectation, and I remained alone with my thoughts. Indeed, it was natural that the burning kisses I had given and received should have sent through me the fire of passion, and that I should suddenly have fallen madly in love with the two amiable sisters. Both were handsomer than Angela, and they were superior to her-- Nanette by her charming wit, Marton by her sweet and simple nature; I could not understand how I had been so long in rendering them the justice they deserved, but they were the innocent daughters of a noble family, and the lucky chance which had thrown them in my way ought not to prove a calamity for them. I was not vain enough to suppose that they loved me, but I could well enough admit that my kisses had influenced them in the same manner that their kisses had influenced me, and, believing this to be the case, it was evident that, with a little cunning on my part, and of sly practices of which they were ignorant, I could easily, during the long night I was going to spend with them, obtain favours, the consequences of which might be very positive. The very thought made me shudder, and I firmly resolved to respect their virtue, never dreaming that circumstances might prove too strong for me.

   When they returned, I read upon their countenances perfect security and satisfaction, and I quickly put on the same appearance, with a full determination not to expose myself again to the danger of their kisses.

For one hour we spoke of Angela, and I expressed my determination never to see her again, as I had every proof that she did not care for me. "She loves you," said the artless Marton; "I know she does, but if you do not mean to marry her, you will do well to give up all intercourse with her, for she is quite determined not to grant you even a kiss as long as you are not her acknowledged suitor. You must therefore either give up the acquaintance altogether, or make up your mind that she will refuse you everything."

   "You argue very well, but how do you know that she loves me?"

   "I am quite sure of it, and as you have promised to be our brother, I can tell you why I have that conviction. When Angela is in bed with me, she embraces me lovingly and calls me her dear abbe."

   The words were scarcely spoken when Nanette, laughing heartily, placed her hand on her sister's lips, but the innocent confession had such an effect upon me that I could hardly control myself.

   Marton told Nanette that I could not possibly be ignorant of what takes place between young girls sleeping together.

"There is no doubt," I said, "that everybody knows those trifles, and I do not think, dear Nanette, that you ought to reproach your sister with indiscretion for her friendly confidence."

   "It cannot be helped now, but such things ought not to be mentioned. If Angela knew it!"

   "She would be vexed, of course; but Marton has given me a mark of her friendship which I never can forget. But it is all over; I hate Angela, and I do not mean to speak to her any more! she is false, and she wishes my ruin."

   "Yet, loving you, is she wrong to think of having you for her husband?"

   "Granted that she is not; but she thinks only of her own self, for she knows what I suffer, and her conduct would be very different if she loved me. In the mean time, thanks to her imagination, she finds the means of satisfying her senses with the charming Marton who kindly performs the part of her husband."

   Nanette laughed louder, but I kept very serious, and I went on talking to her sister, and praising her sincerity. I said that very likely, and to reciprocate her kindness, Angela must likewise have been her husband, but she answered, with a smile, that Angela played husband only to Nanette, and Nanette could not deny it.

   "But," said I, "what name did Nanette, in her rapture, give to her husband?"

   "Nobody knows."

   "Do you love anyone, Nanette?"

   "I do; but my secret is my own."

   This reserve gave me the suspicion that I had something to do with her secret, and that Nanette was the rival of Angela. Such a delightful conversation caused me to lose the wish of passing an idle night with two girls so well made for love.

   "It is very lucky," I exclaimed, "that I have for you only feelings of friendship; otherwise it would be very hard to pass the night without giving way to the temptation of bestowing upon you proofs of my affection, for you are both so lovely, so bewitching, that you would turn the brains of any man."

   As I went on talking, I pretended to be somewhat sleepy; Nanette being the first to notice it, said,

   "Go to bed without any ceremony, we will lie down on the sofa in the adjoining room."

   "I would be a very poor-spirited fellow indeed, if I agreed to this; let us talk; my sleepiness will soon pass off, but I am anxious about you. Go to bed yourselves, my charming friends, and I will go into the next room. If you are afraid of me, lock the door, but you would do me an injustice, for I feel only a brother's yearnings towards you."
   "We cannot accept such an arrangement," said Nanette, "but let me persuade you; take this bed."
   "I cannot sleep with my clothes on."
   "Undress yourself; we will not look at you."
   "I have no fear of it, but how could I find the heart to sleep, while on my account you are compelled to sit up?"
   "Well," said Marton, "we can lie down, too, without undressing."
   "If you shew me such distrust, you will offend me. Tell me, Nanette, do you think I am an honest man?"
   "Most certainly."
   "Well, then, give me a proof of your good opinion; lie down near me in the bed, undressed, and rely on my word of honour that I will not even lay a finger upon you. Besides, you are two against one, what can you fear? Will you not be free to get out of the bed in case I should not keep quiet? In short, unless you consent to give me this mark of your confidence in me, at least when I have fallen asleep, I cannot go to bed."
   I said no more, and pretended to be very sleepy. They exchanged a few words, whispering to each other, and Marton told me to go to bed, that they would follow me as soon as I was asleep. Nanette made me the same promise, I turned my back to them, undressed myself quickly, and wishing them good night, I went to bed. I immediately pretended to fall asleep, but soon I dozed in good earnest, and only woke when they came to bed. Then, turning round as if I wished to resume my slumbers, I remained very quiet until I could suppose them fast asleep; at all events, if they did not sleep, they were at liberty to pretend to do so. Their backs were towards me, and the light was out; therefore I could only act at random, and I paid my first compliments to the one who was lying on my right, not knowing whether she was Nanette or Marton. I find her bent in two, and wrapped up in the only garment she had kept on. Taking my time, and sparing her modesty, I compel her by degrees to acknowledge her defeat, and convince her that it is better to feign sleep and to let me proceed.  Her natural instincts soon working in concert with mine, I reach the goal; and my efforts, crowned with the most complete success, leave me not the shadow of a doubt that I have gathered those first-fruits to which our prejudice makes us attach so great an importance. Enraptured at having enjoyed my manhood completely and for the first time, I quietly leave my beauty in order to do homage to the other sister. I find her motionless, lying on her back like a person wrapped in profound and undisturbed slumber. Carefully managing my advance, as if I were afraid of waking her up, I begin by gently gratifying her senses, and I ascertain the delightful fact that, like her sister, she is still in possession of her maidenhood. As soon as a natural movement proves to me that love accepts the offering, I take my measures to consummate the sacrifice. At that moment, giving way suddenly to the violence of her feelings, and tired of her assumed dissimulation, she warmly locks me in her arms at the very instant of the voluptuous crisis, smothers me with kisses, shares my raptures, and love blends our souls in the most ecstatic enjoyment.

   Guessing her to be Nanette, I whisper her name.

   "Yes, I am Nanette," she answers; "and I declare myself happy, as well as my sister, if you prove yourself true and faithful."

   "Until death, my beloved ones, and as everything we have done is the work of love, do not let us ever mention the name of Angela."

   After this, I begged that she would give us a light; but Marton, always kind and obliging, got out of bed leaving us alone. When I saw Nanette in my arms, beaming with love, and Marton near the bed, holding a candle, with her eyes reproaching us with ingratitude because we did not speak to her, who, by accepting my first caresses, had encouraged her sister to follow her example, I realized all my happiness.

   "Let us get up, my darlings," said I, "and swear to each other eternal affection."

   When we had risen we performed, all three together, ablutions which made them laugh a good deal, and which gave a new impetus to the ardour of our feelings. Sitting up in the simple costume of nature, we ate the remains of our supper, exchanging those thousand trifling words which love alone can understand, and we again retired to our bed, where we spent a most delightful night giving each other mutual and oft-repeated proofs of our passionate ardour. Nanette was the recipient of my last bounties, for Madame Orio having left the house to go to church, I had to hasten my departure, after assuring the two lovely sisters that they had effectually extinguished whatever flame might still have flickered in my heart for Angela. I went home and slept soundly until dinner-time.

   M. de Malipiero passed a remark upon my cheerful looks and the dark circles around my eyes, but I kept my own counsel, and I allowed him to think whatever he pleased. On the following day I paid a visit to Madame Orio, and Angela not being of the party, I remained to supper and retired with M. Rosa. During the evening Nanette contrived to give me a letter and a small parcel. The parcel contained a small lump of wax with the stamp of a key, and the letter told me to have a key made, and to use it to enter the house whenever I wished to spend the night with them. She informed me at the same time that Angela had slept with them the night following our adventures, and that, thanks to their mutual and usual practices, she had guessed the real state of things, that they had not denied it, adding that it was all her fault, and that Angela, after abusing them most vehemently, had sworn never again to darken their doors; but they did not care a jot.
   A few days afterwards our good fortune delivered us from Angela; she was taken to Vicenza by her father, who had removed there for a couple of years, having been engaged to paint frescoes in some houses in that city. Thanks to her absence, I found myself undisturbed possessor of the two charming sisters, with whom I spent at least two nights every week, finding no difficulty in entering the house with the key which I had speedily procured.
 

 

 Pode encontrar o texto integral das Memórias aqui

 The Memoirs, in english, here

 

25-6-2008

 

Casanova: philosopher, gambler, lover, priest

 

Frances Wilson

 

Frances Wilson reviews Casanova: Philosopher, Gambler, Lover, Priest by Ian Kelly

What is Casanova's biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story, just as no one setting out to describe his extraordinarily restless life could have read, travelled or written more than Casanova, or thought more about the business of living than he did, or lived as bravely or as excessively.

The Histoire, which Casanova wrote at the end of his days when he was working as a librarian at Dux Castle in Bohemia, details with such wit, candour and style his peripatetic years as a priest, con-man, cabbalist, violinist, soldier, alchemist, prisoner, fugitive, gambler, intellectual, writer and lover, while inadvertently giving such a vivid picture of mid-18th-century Europe, that not only is there little for anyone to add but due to its sheer bulk - over 3,800 pages, making up 12 volumes - the beleaguered biographer must rather choose what to take away in order to make his own version a reasonable length.

Casanova has baffled and thwarted many of those writers who, while trying to describe and evaluate his experiences, have succeeded only in repeating in edited form the events as he tells them, but in Ian Kelly he has at last found his Boswell. Himself an actor, Kelly is immediately alert to the theatricality of his subject.

Born the illegitimate son of a Venetian actress in a city where it was mandatory to be masked from October to Ash Wednesday, Casanova lived a life shaped by the slipperiness of the masquerade and the playfulness of the theatre. It is as a player of parts on the great European stage that he describes himself in his Histoire.

Accordingly, Kelly shapes his biography around not chapters but dramatic acts and scenes, with refreshing intermezzi where he pauses to discourse, in true Enlightenment fashion, not only on Casanova's involvement in the Cabbala, the 'fusion of Gnosticism, Egyptian mathematics, neo-Platonism, Judaic mysticism and personal revelation' by which he was so mysteriously intrigued; but also on his means of travel (important in terms of sex-on-the-road), his love of food (equal and analogous to his love of women), and his attitude to women (most appreciated when they smelt of cheese).

To focus on the women. Between the age of 16, when he lost his virginity, and his late forties, when he lost his potency, Casanova slept with around 130 of them, which works out at an average of four a year. This may or may not seem a great deal for a man who never married or stayed in one place for too long, but Kelly argues that Casanova deserves his place in history not because of the quantity of bodies he enjoyed but because of the guilt-free quality of the enjoyment as he describes it in his memoirs. The Histoire 'posited firmly, for the first time in the Western canon, the idea that an understanding of sex - with all its irrationality and destructive potential - is key to an understanding of the self'.

Behind the masks, Casanova's 'self' emerges as a complex affair. His first sexual encounter was with a pair of sisters whom he enjoyed simultaneously; much later he would enjoy his own daughter in the same bed as her mother. While he was uncharacteristically cagey about his genuine homosexual encounters, he was particularly drawn to women who dressed as men - at one point embarking on a dizzying affair with a girl disguised as a castrato disguised as a girl.

The manner of Casanova's affairs suggest that he was busy avoiding pain as much as pursuing pleasure; he behaved, as Wordsworth would say, 'more like a man /Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved'. He would become emotionally attached and then sharply detach himself: his need to leave was as strong as his need to love. What is striking is how repetitive his affairs were, as though he were performing the same scene again and again. At one point, years after a liaison with a nun he calls by the pseudonym MM, he meets another nun and he calls her MM too.

An unexpected pleasure is the book's focus on food. Casanova loved eating; 'sex is like eating and eating is like sex', he wrote, and Kelly speculates that he may be the originator of the reputation of oysters as an aphrodisiac. He was born into the 'last great age of Venetian cooking', he liked his macaroni sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and during his final years, while he mouldered away in Dux Castle, 'A day did not go by', a friend observed, 'that he did not have a quarrel, over his coffee, over his milk, his plate of macaroni on which he insisted…'

Kelly's narrative loses its momentum only once, in his disappointingly flat account of Casanova's spectacular escape over the leads of the Doge's palace, where he was imprisoned for 'a question of religion'. But because this particular scene was Casanova's party piece - even his enemies admitted that he told the story brilliantly - and the crowning achievement of his life, perhaps it is best that the biographer does not steal the show.

Ian Kelly has taken on a tremendous challenge and produced a great blast of a book, packed with energy and information, marinated in sympathy and understanding, and rippling with enthusiasm right down to the final footnote.

 

 

 

 

July 6, 2008

Casanova: Actor, Spy, Lover, Priest by Ian Kelly

 

 James McConnachie

 

Casanova by Ian Kelly

 

Those two most notorious rakes and lovers, the fictional Don Giovanni and the electrifyingly historical Giacomo Casanova, are easy to confuse. With good reason: as the author of this lively new biography observes, Casanova actually had a box at the premiere of Mozart's opera, in 1787, and he may even have helped write the libretto.

Casanova recorded sexual skirmishes with some 130 women, and “a handful, as it were”, as Kelly puts it, of men. Among the women were novices and nuns, mothers, sisters and daughters (including his own), matriarchs and ingenues, aristocrats and prostitutes, women dressed as soldiers and women masquerading as operatic castrati. Among the men were a handsome young seminarian for whose sake Casanova got kicked out of the seminary, and a Turkish man of letters with whom Casanova charmingly confessed he “had to submit to his taking turnabout. It would have been impolite to refuse”.

Don Giovanni, of course, catalogued 1,003 conquests in Spain alone. But if Casanova can't compete on numbers, his life was easily as colourful as that of his fictional counterpart. His witty ripostes, his duels, his dialogues with philosophers and queens and, above all, his daring escape from prison in Venice (he peeled back the roof leads, climbed into the Doge's palace, summoned a watchman to open the gate, walked across the Piazzetta and took a gondola to freedom) were the very stuff of society gossip.

In Ian Kelly's hands, the story makes for a thrilling read - and is somewhat more manageable than the 4,000 folio pages of Casanova's original memoirs. Kelly's subtitle is Actor, Spy, Lover, Priest, but he is no more interested in religion or diplomacy than was his subject. The young Venetian saw the church as a vaulting-horse for his ambition and a passport to travel, but church and Casanova soon realised they weren't suited. As for spying, we hear only rumblings of the era's political rivalries, and Casanova's man-on-the-make role in them.

The love affairs, rather than politics, are Kelly's consuming interest. Few have loved as widely, or written about it as vividly and honestly, as Casanova. Kelly, oddly, is a little more circumspect. He recounts Casanova's first sexual experience (in bed, in 1741, with two sisters) in full, but otherwise avoids pornographic detail.

When Casanova meets Anna Maria d'Antoni Vallati in the gorgeously classical gardens of the Villa Aldobrandini, Kelly tells us how statues of “naked gods and monsters grappled with mountain streams and each other”, but doesn't indulge overmuch in the real-life grappling. “We unlaced, we unbuttoned, our hearts throbbed, our hands hurried to calm their impatience,” Kelly quotes - and that's about it. When, many years later, Casanova makes love to his own adult daughter by that same Anna Maria, the page is alive with blushing triplets of full stops.

Kelly is an actor as well as a biographer, and he plays up Casanova the self-dramatist. (He even divides his book into acts and scenes rather than chapters, with intermezzi covering key themes. It's cleverly done, but maybe labours the point.) Casanova was both an actress's son and a Venetian, a habitual masquerader from what was then the most theatrical city in Europe. He spent much of his career pursuing - or, on occasion, fleeing - actress-prostitutes across the Continent. “The thing,” he wrote, “is to dazzle.”

Kelly evokes the 18th-century demi-monde captivatingly. It is a world of condoms closed by ribbons in green or scarlet silk, oysters and Oeil de Perdrix champagne, coffee and malvasia wine, and financial and sexual bills of exchange. Kelly is less successful in getting to his subject's heart, perhaps because Casanova really was the quintessential actor. His affairs and intrigues seem to have motivations no deeper than to make himself famous, rich and, above all, beloved. Casanova's candour and wit were clearly beguiling. He was hard to resist but equally hard to fall in love with - and remains so. Kelly does rescue Casanova's previous reputation as an “erotic fantasist, con-artist and serial dissembler”, as he puts it, and cross-references other sources to prove that he really didn't make it all up. What Kelly can't do is make his hero seem any less of a chancer.

Casanova funded his louche lifestyle by gambling, living off his patrons and conquests, and by launching France's first state lottery - a speculation from which he made one of Europe's fastest fortunes. He lost it almost as quickly. Casanova also made kabbalistic predictions for credulous aristocrats, presenting himself as a Freemason-meets-sorcerer. Kelly believes this brings “an unexpected spiritual dimension to this most fleshly of men” but Casanova himself admitted how cynically he exploited his clients.

When he attempted to impregnate the wealthy and aged Marquise d'Urfe (by deflowering a virgin in her presence and ejaculating inside her three times, stimulated by a naked gyrating dancer, who happened to be his mistress), his esoteric justifications were as fake as his second and third orgasms. Even when Casanova was compassionate he had an eye out for sexual opportunity. He was asked to perform an abortion for a friend in need. To the alchemical prescription of saffron and myrrh applied to the mouth of the womb, Casanova added his own extra ingredient and method of delivery.

The sheer exuberance and excess of Casanova's life is at times overwhelming. Chapters burst with the names of salons and theatres, cities and capitals, lovers and rivals. Our hero has hardly extricated himself from one financial embarrassment when he is implicated in an erotic one. His life reads like a classic 18th-century novel. This is hardly surprising. Casanova may have lived life as an actor, but he recounted it as a true writer.

Casanova's memoirs are the swan song of the libertine 18th century. He died in June 1798, surrounded not by lovers but by books, and his own voluminous memoirs. “He did not go down shouting his disdain for morality, like Don Giovanni,” Kelly writes, “he went with a wry smile and a knowing joke as the curtain fell.”

A year earlier, Napoleon had brought an end to the long debauch of the Venetian republic and its even longer decline. The whole culture of transcontinental philandering would soon die, too, in a welter of cannon smoke and Romantic ideals. Europe was about to become what Casanova could never manage to be: serious.

  

 

 

The Man Who Loved Women

 

Toni Bentley

  

CASANOVA

Actor Lover Priest Spy

By Ian Kelly

Illustrated. 403 pp. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. $28.95

 

Oh, the noble task of the righteous to resurrect the debauched! To roll those in the gutter (the right­eous, of course, put them there, while Oscar Wilde put us all there) up to Calvary is indeed a Sisyphean ordeal, one in which the depraved, on principle, rarely cooperate, dead or alive. So just when I was feeling pretty good about the incredible, extraordinary, brilliant, charming, sexy, insanely energetic Giacomo Casanova, we find out, in Ian Kelly’s entertaining and highly readable new biography, that he knowingly slept with his own daughter in the grotto of her husband’s garden. He repeated the exploit “only two or three more times” before leaving her pregnant with a much-wanted heir for her impotent husband, the Marchese de C. Years later Casanova met his 21-year-old grandson — and, most likely, son — and praised the young man’s wisdom. Is this too much for you? Well, there’s more.

 

This flagrant incest happened only a few years after Casanova, unknowingly, almost married this daughter. Upon being apprised of his involvement in her parentage, he gave her a 5,000-ducat dowry to marry someone else (the marchese) and settled instead for having her be a participatory witness to a repetition of the act of her own procreation between himself and Donna Lucrezia, her mother. This story is so transgressive that Kelly has chosen to doubt it, and declines to quote the amazing, tender, disturbing details of “the moment which leads Lucrezia to the death of love,” wherein their daughter “sends her mother’s little soul on its flight.” By questioning the story’s veracity — he takes most others at face value — Kelly not only attempts to clean up Casanova’s behavior, but swiftly avoids the profound implications of the intriguing, and troubling, vein of incest that runs throughout his subject’s life. Kelly gives us Casanova lite. But it’s still a marvelous story.

There is risk involved, however, even in just reading about Casanova from your armchair: you are left, inevitably, with the feeling, if you’re a man (I’m guessing here), that you are lazy beyond measure in all things and have missed out entirely on the meaning of woman, which is the meaning of life; and if you are a woman (not guessing here), well, you simply missed out on the greatest lover you will never have and thus also the meaning of life.

While Kelly, a British actor and writer, and the author of biographies of the English dandy Beau Brummell and the French chef Antonin Carême, is clearly no prude and loves his subject, he does make a few meager attempts — witness his subtitle for “Casanova” and its telling order: “Actor Lover Priest Spy” — to hitch his wagon to the resurrection idea of Casanova’s being not only misunderstood as a lover but oh so much more. He was a linguist, writer, poet, librettist, philosopher, notary, translator, lawyer, military officer, duelist, gourmand, healer, mathematician, bibliophile, government informer, theater manager, pimp, violinist, matchmaker, cabalist, wit. Whew! All this and the perpetual skirt-chasing, a pursuit Casanova lifted to a high art. Did they simply have more time in the 18th century, or just no TV?

But does one really have to be more, or other, than one’s hard-earned infamy? Seriously. The “he’s more than you think” conceit, while true on one level — Casanova ­really was quite the intellectual, though subject to constant distraction — remains a capitulation to propriety (or puritanical publishing). Besides, it is worth noting one significant thing about this magnificent man: aside from his voluminous memoirs, which are a uniquely intimate self-portrait and an equally enthralling portrait of 18th-­century Europe, and his indisputable success as a lover, he was not particularly successful — consider his frequent imprisonments and perpetual state of debt — at any of his other numerous professions. He was a con man, a rogue, a thief, a charlatan, an opportunist, a bon vivant — and a lifelong Roman Catholic.

And while we’re setting the record straight, Casanova was no Don Juan, either. The two are constantly, incorrectly, conflated. Casanova was real and was Venetian, he adored women, and he bedded, according to his own testimony, a paltry 122, give or take a few depending on how you count orgies, and a handful of men. Don Juan is a mythical figure, was Spanish, did not, by all accounts, love women in the least, and had, according to Mozart’s catalog aria, 2,065 conquests — all female. Women were indeed merely notches on Don Juan’s bedpost, while Casanova’s lovers simply held on to his. But Casanova does appear to have had, perhaps, maybe, sort of, a hand, more like a fingerprint, in the libretto of Mozart’s opera. He was definitely in a box in the theater for the premiere of “Don Giovanni” in Prague on Oct. 29, 1787. But then Casanova managed to be just about everywhere, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, during the Age of Enlightenment.

Born in the Republic of Venice in 1725, Casanova was the first child of Zanetta Farussi, an actress known as La Buranella, and her actor-dancer husband, Gaetano Casanova, though Casanova insisted that his real father was the Venetian patrician Michele Grimani. The theatrical aspect of Casanova’s life, which Kelly rather overplays — every chapter is titled as the scene of an act in a comedy — had begun. A sickly child, little Giacomo was brought up by his grandmother; Zanetta was a popular comedienne, with a very busy love life and several other children. On his ninth birthday Giacomo was shipped off to Padua for an education and left in a lice-infested hostel. Casanova retained a lifelong bitterness toward his mother, writing that she “got rid of me.” Hello, Dr. Freud.

In Padua, a girl named Bettina, a few years older than young Giacomo, introduced into the boy’s heart “the first sparks of a feeling which later became my ruling passion.” He was 10 years old at the time, though he didn’t lose his virginity proper until two sisters, Nanetta and Marta, ages 16 and 15, conspired to lure the eager 16-year-old into their bed for a kissing game. He told them there was no risk in his sleeping naked with them, as “you are two and I am one.” Apparently, one could handle two quite well. Casanova the rapacious lover, and gambler, won the Preakness in his first race out and never looked back.

Casanova’s lovers — Donna Lucrezia, Donna Ignazia, Teresa Imer, Teresa Lanti (who posed as the castrato known as Bellino), C. C., M. M. (two M. M.’s, actually, both nuns), Esther, Hedwig and her cousin Helen, Marguerite Astrodi and her sister Rosalie, Baroness de Roll and Pauline, to name but a few — populate his story like sweet angel fairies, co-conspirators, teachers and often intellectual equals, and one senses that wit and tenderness arrived in equal doses with the passion. He was constantly helping women to get married (to someone else), to evade an abusive husband or father, or just to bide their time calmly in a convent — all before, after or during his affairs with them.

There were lavish dinners, lavish dinners in convents, three-ways, four-ways, the passing of oysters from mouth to mouth, the blowing up of English sheep-gut condoms (which tied with a pink bow) and verses written in the condoms’ honor. Despite Casanova’s enthusiasm for these reusable devices — “so precious,” he wrote with piquant wit, “to a nun who wants to sacrifice herself to love” — he left at least eight children in his wake and suffered as many as 11 bouts of venereal disease.

The tales he tells are fantastic. What one might call, aro­matically speaking, “The Curried Abortion” is one of my favorites: Giustiniana Wynne, “a beautiful half-­English, half-Venetian adventuress,” in Kelly’s words, was pregnant with her lover Andrea Memmo’s child when her mother arranged for her to marry a rich old man. The timing was terrible. She needed an abortion, both illegal and dangerous, so she wrote to Memmo’s friend Casanova to ask for help. “I am putting my life, my reputation, my whole being in your hands,” she pleaded. “You are now my guardian angel.”

Casanova consulted his alchemical and cabalistic books and found a recipe for an abortifacient that called for saffron mixed with myrrh, applied with a “cylinder . . . three or four times a day for a week.” Ever sympathetic to a damsel in distress, he told a giggling Giustiniana that the remedy also required fresh semen and generously offered his own “cylinder” for the delicate operation. The potion didn’t work, so feel free to try this one at home.

And then there was “Henriette,” the woman history has deemed to have been his great love — for even Casanova must have had one, n’est-ce pas? To have had many “great” loves is socially incorrect and offends those with merely one or less. An older, married, aristocratic Frenchwoman, Henriette was on the run from her horrid husband and father-in-law and attired as a soldier when the 24-year-old Casanova first met her. He was especially charmed by women en travesti.

“Her intelligence enslaved me,” he wrote, even “more than her beauty.” He claimed that their three months together were the happiest of his life. “They who believe that a woman is incapable of making a man equally happy all the 24 hours of the day,” he wrote, “have never known an Henriette.” How joyously we all might recall affairs that ceased at three months! Perhaps Casanova’s sense of timing in this respect, as in others, is a mark of his wisdom as a lover: he took the best and left before the worst.

After they parted company, he found the words “Tu oublieras aussi Henriette” (“You will also forget Henriette”) scratched on the window of their room with the diamond ring he had given her. It was still there decades later. “No, I have not forgotten her,” Casanova wrote as an old man, “and it is balm to my soul every time I remember.”

Several years after Henriette, things began heating up for the young man when, in the spring of 1755, Contessa Lorenza Maddalena Bonafede, draped only in her name, ran through the Campo San Pietro screaming Casanova’s name. He had not even slept with her, just borrowed money. A few months later, the Venetian Inquisition, which had had spies watching him for several years already, sent “nearly 40 men” to arrest Casanova in his rooms, accusing him of “a question of religion.” His dabblings with cabalism, women above his station (as the son of an actress), gambling and endless con games made him a person of constant suspicion. He was sentenced to five years in prison without a trial.

Incarcerated in the upper level of the Doge’s Palace, he began his famous escape, after nine months of imprisonment, by digging a hole under his bed at night, toward Tintoretto’s “Paradiso,” below, with an iron spike he had smuggled into his room, honed to a point and hidden in his chair. Only days before his planned escape, he was moved to a new cell and the hole was discovered.

Housed in a different part of the prison, he joined forces with a renegade monk and smuggled the spike to his clerical friend in the spine of a huge Bible, camouflaged under an enormous plate of gnocchi “swimming in butter” — an optical diversion, for the prison busboy, from the spike, which protruded one inch on either end of the Bible. If commedia dell’arte had not already been invented, the buttered gnocchi, alone, would have done it. The monk dug through his ceiling and broke through to Casanova’s cell; the two climbed onto the roof of the Doge’s Palace under a full moon. They scrambled across the roof and back down into the building through a skylight. Many ladders and bedsheet ropes later, they found themselves free but locked in with the Tintoretto. (Prison escape just isn’t the cultural experience it used to be.) Disguised, they made their way out of the building at dawn in full view and grabbed the nearest gondola for a speedy getaway. They parted company, and Casanova, exhausted, ended up having a good long sleep at the house of the local police chief, who was out looking for the escaped prisoners. Casanova was not allowed to return to Venice for almost 18 years, and when he did he wept.

He began his multiyear sojourn back and forth across Europe — St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, London and every town in between — traveling by the end of this life close to 40,000 miles and meeting with such notables as Frederick the Great, Mme. de Pompadour, Rousseau, Voltaire, two popes, Benjamin Franklin and Catherine the Great. He tried to sell each of them something.

During his time in Paris, Casanova served as the director of the French lottery and became a millionaire virtually overnight. For years he was a close adviser to the Marquise d’Urfé, one of the richest women in France. Her faith in him finally dissipated when his last attempt to help her reincarnate failed. He told her that the complex ritual required that she give birth to herself, impregnated by him with three consecutive orgasms. Despite the naked dancing girl he had arranged as décor for the ceremony, he admitted to faking two of the orgasms, and the 63-year-old marquise did not succeed in giving birth to anyone, least of all herself. Casanova fled France in disrepute. He was never to be rich again.

“I knew that aged 38,” he wrote, “I had begun to die.” He began calling himself the “Chevalier de Seingalt” for no apparent reason, and in fact he lived for 35 more years. The last 14 were spent as the librarian, at the Castle of Dux in Bohemia, for a fellow caba­list, Count Josef Karl Emmanuel von Waldstein. It proved to be the only steady job he ever had, and he hated it. But it was here, with little to do, that he began his memoirs to amuse himself. He died in 1798, sitting in his armchair with thousands of pages of his memories about him. His grave is lost — though his armchair remains.

In Kelly’s telling, Casanova’s story rushes by like a Nas­car travelogue of an 18th-century libertine, written in sprightly, though not particularly insightful, prose. “His apparent sexual compulsion may be explained then less by appetite and opportunity,” Kelly writes in one of his brief attempts to dig below Casanova’s surface, “as by a damaged or hungering psyche that found balm only in companionable sensuality.” Lydia Flem’s 1997 book “Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women,” is far more provocative on Casanova’s fascinating psychology and offers many more quotations of a self-revealing nature from the man himself. (Everyman’s Library has an excellent abridged version of the memoirs, published last year.) Prince Charles Joseph de Ligne, Casanova’s great companion during his last years, read some early drafts of his friend’s writings, Kelly says, and reported that “he could not read a single chapter without envy, amusement, astonishment or an erection.”

At his death, aside from his already published works — which included a five-volume science fiction novel, a history of Poland, a translation of the “Iliad” and a treatise challenging Voltaire — he left, according to Kelly, “1,703 letters, 50 drafts of dialogues, 150 memos, 67 printed items, 390 ­poems as well as nearly 500 pages of uncategorized writings; more than 3,000 manuscript pages of various works in progress, in addition to his memoirs, that ran to nearly 4,000 folio pages, and existed, once, in multiple hand-­copied versions.” His memoirs were not published accurately, in their entirety, until almost two centuries after his death — starting in 1960 in French (their original language), and in 1966 in English. One feels the force of the sheer energy of this man — as did perhaps his lovers — catapulting him through history and onto our doorstep. I, for one, will invite him in.

Casanova’s story is a moving testament, easily overlooked while one is in the thrall of his oversize tale, to the sheer power of the written word. We know of him now only because he wrote it all down; there is precious little corroboration, and none, as Charlie Rich crooned, for the love that goes on behind closed doors. We think it is about the women, but it is really about how Casanova wrote about the women and how he loved them, quite a different thing. “The pleasure I gave,” he said, “made up four-fifths of mine.” Thus, he has attained an immortality even he could hardly have imagined. His name is now a descriptor. He would have been so delighted. Casanova will forever be the arche­type of the boy-man whose overwhelming ardor for women and passionate pursuit of sexual connection symbolize every man’s eternal, always thwarted, attempt to go home.

Toni Bentley’s most recent book is “The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir.” She is the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim fellowship.

 

 

 

 

Saturday, 5 March 2005

 

Casanova: the lover seduced by his own romance

The priapic legend he created for himself, dramatised in a new television series, obscures the Italian libertine's talents as a scientist and philosopher

By John Walsh
 

Giacomo Casanova crammed several lives into his 74 years. His travels and adventures, imprisonments and escapes, would furnish the plots of several Puritanian thrillers. Far from being the lounge-lizard and boudoir seducer of legend, he made love to women in between doing a dozen other things. He was a multi-tasker par excellence, a self-inspired Renaissance man, a restless existentialist who tried on a score of identities, from soldier and spy to gambler and utopian thinker. At his death he left a total of 8,000 pages of manuscripts (among them was an essay proposing reform of the Gregorian calendar).

The Casanova of legend would have heartily endorsed the reflection of Tennyson's Ulysses: "I am become a name,for always roaming with a hungry heart". Since 1828, when his epic History of My Life was published, he has become a name for a hungry heart indeed. Call him up on an internet search engine, and the screen will bulge at the edges with two and a quarter million Casanovas: hotels in Rome, candle-lit restaurants in Santa Barbara, drag clubs, wrestling gyms, Venetian mask shops. There's even a punk band called Ugly Casanova and an online advice site called Dr Casanova's Seduction Clinic. It is sobering to think how dull the world of romance would be, had the legendary erotic hero been born an Englishman. "Jack Newhouse" just doesn't have the same ring...

English readers had to wait until 1966 to read of his exploits in the six-volume translation by W R Trask. But it didn't stop them referring offhandedly over the previous 140 years to his reputation as (depending your perspective) either "the world's greatest lover" or the epitome of the heartless seducer, sexual braggart and card-carrying cad. Popular collective memory suggests that he did little more in his 73 years than roam the drawing rooms of 18th-century Europe in a powdered wig, preening and pshawing, swiving and rogering, parting duchesses from their foundation garments and chambermaids from their drawstring blouses.

The movies about his life - there have been 14 since 1918 - have gone for the quantity of seductions rather then the quality of his thoughts. In 1976, Federico Fellini made a long, slow, elegiac film about Casanova's declining years without even opening his memoirs (he reportedly thought them "an unreadable bore"). Dennis Potter's 1971 BBC drama Casanova, a little predictably pitched Frank Finlay into a maelstrom of lubricious fingering and unlacing, and was, equally predictably, accused of gross indecency by Mrs Mary Whitehouse.

Now the BBC is to have another nibble at the cherry when BBC3's Casanova kicks off a three-part series on BBC3 on 13 March. From the outset, it presents our hero (played by the scrawny David Tennant) as a lovable rapscallion forever legging it through streets and squares, over balconies and canal bridges, chased by irate husbands and threatened by grandees jealous of his quicksilver wit and debonair way with the laydeez. Tennant addresses the camera with Jack-the-lad confessions and assurances in the style of Michael Caine in Alfie and Albert Finney in Tom Jones; in a bold stroke, the producers and the screenwriter Russell T Davies have peopled the palazzi of Venice with a collection of egregious English public schoolboys and streetwise yobs on the make. Despite this - and the odd bizarre excursion into Derek Jarman punk excess - the series stays close to the available facts; indeed it's at pains to debunk the long-standing myths. As the servant girl Edith tells the rheumy-eyed older Casanova (played by Peter O'Toole), "That's all your reputation is - filth!".

It's a tragic irony that, after a life so vigorously mouvementé, he should wind up at 60, toothless and alone, employed as a librarian in the Count of Waldstein's castle in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). He had written many books, essays, political tracts and even magazines, but none had made his name. It was an Irish doctor, James Columb O'Reilly, who suggested the obvious course of action: "For several months, you must give up gloomy studies which tire the brain and [you must give up] sex; for the time being, you must be lazy and, as a kind of relief, you might review the happy days spent in Venice and other parts of the world". Good advice, for his life was extraordinary from very early on.

He was born in Venice in 1725, his parents both actors who mostly left the boy in the care of his maternal grandmother while they went on tour. Young Giacomo was, by his own confession, a dim child living in "a nearly vegetative state" until he was eight years old. Then he woke up. (The TV version attributes his awakening to the attentions of yet another handy chambermaid.) At nine, he went to Padua to be educated and proved outstandingly precocious. He went to Padua University to read law at 13 and graduated (a "doctor of civil and canon law") at 17. From there he attended St Cyprian's seminary with a view to taking holy orders, but was expelled for "scandalous behaviour". His interest in girls having started with the servant classes, by 15 he was entwined with several women; among them the Savorgnan sisters, Marta and Nanetta. He served for a time in the army, learned to play the violin, worked for a lawyer, became secretary to the Bishop of Calabria but left on discovering how poverty-stricken the actual region was. Distracted in Naples by a torrid affair with one Donna Lucrezia, he fetched up in Rome in the service of Cardinal Acquaviva, the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See. He was still only 19.

All too typically, he was sacked a year later for being implicated in an elopement; the girl was his French teacher's daughter. There was a scandal, and his reputation was ruined. Back in Venice, he fell in love with a beautiful castrato called Bellino, refusing to believe he could be a man, and planned to marry him/her (the TV drama keeps you guessing for just slightly too long). Eventually, though, he could not face the strain and social stigma of being married to a theatre person. Having parents who were on stage had been bad enough.

Around his 21st birthday, when he could find employment only in playing the violin in a Venice theatre, something strange happened. A cloak of mysticism and secrecy settled around the well-travelled, seen-it-all youth. In April he met a Venetian grandee called Matteo Bragadin whose entourage of friends had a counter-Enlightenment fascination for the occult. When Casanova treated Bragadin after he had a stroke, using the rudimentary shreds of learning he had picked up in his teens, the friends concluded he must have mystical powers. He became Bragadin's unofficial adopted son and plunged into a life of unbridled hedonism.

Giacomo first contracted venereal disease in his teens and was no stranger to syphilis and gonorrhea as he cut a swath through the demi-mondaines of La Serenissima. It is from these years (1746-49) that his reputation most derives. Yet the image he was, in later life, keen to present to the world is not that of a boudoir swordsman, but a sincere and compassionate lover. He never quite got over meeting the love of his life, Henriette, in Cesena. She was young, clever, mysterious, heartless and French, and he clearly adored her. They travelled together to Parma and Geneva, and when she left him (after only seven months) to return to her family, he was devastated and he never found his perfect match again. In the autobiography he compared being in love to having an incurable illness.

Their parting marked a watershed in his career. From 1750, his life became a succession of travels through Europe, diplomatic work, espionage, imprisonment, writing and constant self-dramatisation. He moved through Paris, Dresden, Prague, Vienna. He began to translate plays, then write original dramas himself. In France he was investigated by the State Inquisition as much for his contacts with the Venetian government as for his involvement with occult activities. (By this time he had become a Freemason and been inducted into the kabbala). At last he was arrested in 1755, accused of being "a magician" and incarcerated in the Doge's Palace. With typical insouciance, he managed to escape with the help of a priest and headed for Paris where news of his daring only gilded his reputation. But there were, as usual, other strings to his bow. He was part of a consortium which founded the French state lottery, and became a millionaire. He invested in a workshop for manufacturing printed silk but saw its profits undermined by fraud, for which he himself was blamed. A new patron, the Marquise d'Urf, believing his magic powers could help her reincarnate as a man, bankrolled him for years, as he travelled all over the continent, keeping one step ahead of his creditors.

The figure that emerges from his own memoirs is an interesting blend of sophisticated homme d'affaires and romantic dupe. "Above all, he wishes to be seen as a gentleman," says Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, his biographer, "after being born to two actors, which was not a respectable occupation. He is absolutely determined to have money. And while he's clearly not awfully nice, in fact he's quite ruthless, he's keen to stress his kindness ... The book is a marvellous picture of 18th century life in Europe. He visits England and is appalled to see that English people pee in the streets and shit in the public parks."

Far from a smug Lothario, he was a man doomed to be dissatisfied by life, even as he tried to explore every corner of it. In Histoire de Ma Vie, he wrote, "I saw that everything in the world that is famous and beautiful, if we rely on the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it up close".