FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY STING LIKE A WASP

”Destined for a high-flown career in the church, he was inducted as a novice priest and introduced to the most influential people in the city, but the pleasures of Venice assailed him at every turn, and, as he later admitted, “cultivating the pleasure of my senses was always the chief business of my life”. At 16 he lost his virginity on the top floor of a run-down palazzo in the arms of two delightfully disobedient, sexually curious sisters. After that, there was no stopping the young Casanova: his career as a celibate priest was on the slide.”

There is no denying that Giacomo Casanova’s  reputation as one of the more notorious rake’s the world has ever known,is well earned. Popular culture has tended to cement the womanizer myth by neglecting Casanova’s considerable intellectual and literary qualities ; a European man of letters who had translated the Iliad, written poems and operas and essays and engaged in scientific discussions. His autobiography, ”Memoirs” or  History of My Life  is a great of Western literature, written in a brisk and lively, even sparkling, Italianate French. Casanova was a greedily sensual man, but one whose  passion for literature almost eclipsed his passion for women.

During his lifetime he published more than thirty-five works of fiction, drama, history and literary criticism; he was an accomplished linguist who spoke fluent Latin, French and Italian as well as his native Venetian dialect: his repartee in all of those languages captivated both women and men. He was a cunning cupid, but one with an engaging interest in brilliant and beautiful women. Far ahead of his times, Casanova believed that the women he loved had the same right to sexual enjoyment, public accomplishment and respect for their intelligence as he enjoyed himself.

His life was hardly banal. It could be said he was a jack-of-many trades, but a grandmaster of but one.  Ranging everywhere from Venice and Rome to London, St. Petersburg, Paris and Madrid, Casanova seems consciously to have tried to embrace as much as possible in the way of what his French near-contemporary, the writer Bernard de Fontenelle, called ”the plurality of worlds.” Nothing, apparently, was beyond his ingenuity or resistant to his all-devouring attentiveness. He discussed Italian poetry with Voltaire, became a mining inspector in Poland, smuggled industrial secrets out of England, played the violin in a theater orchestra, proposed a wholesale reform of the Russian calendar to the Empress Catherine; he worked as a spy, an impresario, a stockbroker and an abortionist, opened a factory in Paris for printing silks, wrote a science fantasy novel of a thousand pages and produced a mathematical treatise entitled ”Corollary to the Duplication of the Hexahedron.”

His mother, Zanetta, an actress of low born station, had a few good qualities, but mothering did not make it to the short list. She basically abandoned him at a young age to pursue her career;  Casanova carried a vulnerable  bitterness of this that was unshakeable, an unfathomable. His mother’s betrayal had a profound effect on his future relationships with women: never again would he willingly let one walk out on him; he would always be the one to leave a relationship first, could not make a commitment, and had a deep seated aversion to being tied down.

The story of Casanova’s sufferings is a fantastic record of folly and deceit; doubly bizarre because he had fallen in love and embarked on an episode with Marianne Charpillon, with so few illusions. He knew the family and had had an opportunity of observing at least one of their associates, the Frenchman Ange Goudar, whom he describes as a pimp and a cardshark, a police spy and a perjured witness.  Considering his wide experience of life, and the knowledge it had brought him of adventurers and tricksters; he was acquainted, he once declared, with every vagrant adventurer on earth. Casanova, in a more lucid, less impassioned frame of mind, might very well have come off scot free. But he did not allow for his love interest in England, Marianne Charpillon, and her natural talents; her knack for both exploiting his passions and discovering his weakest points. She possessed a wasp like grip of plunging her sting into some unprotected nerve center, then half resuscitating her almost paralyzed victim only to expose him to fresh cruelties.

”At 17, Marianne de Charpillon was the youngest member of an unscrupulous three-generation family of Swiss prostitutes. She captivated Casanova from the moment they met, when she flirtatiously threatened to make him suffer if he fell in love with her. He should have taken her at her word, but the challenge of winning her heart immediately hooked him. For the next few months she in turn teased, abused and tormented him as no woman had done before. She promised him everything but delivered nothing, even when he spent the night in her bed. Casanova had never been so consistently rejected, and he was thoroughly bewildered by the experience. Reduced to a state of self-loathing and misery, he resorted to violence and even contemplated suicide. In the end he took his revenge on Marianne by teaching a parrot to say, “Miss Charpillon is more of a whore than h

other”, and putting it on sale in London’s Royal Exchange.” ( Judith Summers )

Why was Casanova the victim she chose? That is a question we cannot fully answer. He had money; he was uncommonly generous; he could afford, and was prepared to pay her price. La Charpillon was not an innocent girl; she had already been kept by the Venetian envoy and, no doubt, by several other men. She had much to gain and little to lose, if she granted Casanova what she sought, while the course of action she preferred to pursue  involved her in many real dangers. Admitted to her bed but refused her embraces, her suitor grew violent. On one occasion he bruised her severely and tore the chemise that she was wearing ”right down to the small of her back”. Nothing could shkae her infernal obstinacy.

”Cruel night, desolating night, during which I appealed to the monster in every tone I could command; gentleness, anger, reason, remonstrances, threats, rage, despair, petitions, tears, ignominy and appalling insults. For three whole hours she resisted me; and, all that time she never breathed a word…” Finally, bewildered, stupefied, his brain on fire, Casanova dressed in the dark and wandered home. Soon he felt that he must be going mad: ”I think the natural outcome of a long period of self contempt  is a state of despair that leads to suicide”. A professed libertine, he had been untrue to his creed, to the duty that he owed himself. He had shown irresolution, ridiculous timidity: ”That morning in a timid voice I asked her if she meant to spend the night with me…” he had allowed his senses to inflame his heart, and his heart to rule his head.

Meanwhile, Goudar, the expert pimp, was hurrying busily to and fro. He professed to sympathize with Casanova’s misfortunes, and at one point suggested that his friend should overcome Charpillon’s resistance by persuading her to sit down in a specially contrived chair, an ingenious piece of mechanism that would thereupon imprison her limbs and leave her at her lover’s mercy.

Such a chair he thoughtfully offered to purchase. Casanova refused. Incest, and prepubescent girls, were always particular temptations to him, ones he indulged whenever the opportunity arose. In modern times he would certainly be branded a paedophile. But rape, he knew was a hanging crime in England, and he still hoped that persuasion might succeed. There he was wrong. La Charpillon’s numerous triumphs seemed merely to increase her malice.

Arriving unexpectedly at the house in Denmark Street, he found his idol and a handsome young barber’s assistant stretched out on a sofa and enjoyably, ”making the beast with two backs”; the expressive phrase Casanova had borrowed from Shakespeare. He then set to, and thrashed his rival, broke every chair in the sitting room, and demolished a looking glass and a valuable porcelain service, both his own presents. La Charpillon escaped into the street , and next day he heard that she was seriously ill.