The Great Lover

...His very name, depending on whom you ask, has become a synonym for the cavalier gallant or for the sex-addicted hellion...

...A provocative booklet, in which he assaulted the Venetian patriciate and claimed he was the bastard son of a Venetian grandee, got him expelled from Venice forever...

...Bragadin was so smitten with Casanova that he unoffi cially adopted him as his son...

...He thought about heading off for Madagascar...

...Choderlos de Laclos would concur—and though his Valmont would appreciate Casanova’s energy and address, he would fi nd him wanting in blackness of soul...

...Despite his prowess in the bedroom, Giovanni is a fatally slow learner...

...The novel sometimes reads like the work of a member of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who happens to have overdeveloped tear ducts, but it is nevertheless an eloquent testimonial to natural sentiment refi ned by civilized earnestness...

...Soon, Casanova approached the verge of suicide, and only a chance encounter with a cheering acquaintance saved him...

...When Casanova visited the convent church to get a glimpse of her, another nun, M.M., propositioned him in a letter...

...He undertook to increase that fortune by hoodwinking the preposterously wealthy and alchemically gullible Marquise d’Urfe, whom he promised to reincarnate in a newborn boy...

...I will not stop to count all those whom he has seduced: but how many has he not ruined utterly...

...The end comes hard for the man who has always relied on the charms of youth to win the pleasures of young fl esh—“cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life...

...So the way is clear for the general reader who wishes to trace this morally slippery term to its source in a particular man’s legendary sexual career...

...One has to assume that he is now a member of the Hellfi re Club in perpetuity, but one can also imagine him in the circle of the contemptible and disgusting rather than among the more malign...

...And so one comes to Casanova, the most famous, and the most notorious, lover of his, or perhaps any other, time...

...As one disabused woman writes, “He can calculate to a nicety how many atrocities a man may allow himself to commit, without compromising himself...

...Although Bellino was appalled by Casanova— he had procured the services of the singer’s two pubescent sisters, and had brutally taken a Greek slave girl while Bellino was watching—she fell in love with him, revealed that her penis was a prosthesis, and so enchanted him that he proposed marriage...

...In the epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), Jean-Jacques Rousseau teaches aristocrats and bourgeois alike how they ought to live and love...

...Don Giovanni would recognize himself in Casanova, but in diminished form...

...Casanova’s memoir, Histoire de ma vie, or History of My Life, was not published in its original form until the 1960s, and although the English translation by Willard R. Trask, which was completed in 1971, is generally acknowledged as masterly, the daunting length and considerable cost (six volumes, well over 2,000 pages) surely put off a good many readers...

...La Charpillon confounded him at every turn...

...Kinks within kinks abound in the memoirs...

...Magazine publishing, a civil service job, and spying for the Inquisition all failed to bring in the cash he needed for his Eurotrash way of life...

...in an elegant apartment for sexual assignations, which M.M.’s other lover, the French ambassador to Venice, watched from a secret chamber...

...and, in order to be cruel and mischievous with impunity, he has selected women to be his victims...

...At 38, in London, he fell for the 16-yearold La Charpillon, who came from an illustrious line of whores: “It was on that fatal day at the beginning of September 1763 that I began to die and ceased to live...

...The account of his getaway is swashbuckling stuff, and the story made him the raconteur of the moment in Paris, where he fl ed and where he made his fortune by starting up a state lottery...

...some of them are amusing, others less so...

...I have never found any occupation more important”— and the sexually unexciting life is not worth living, by Casanova’s lights...

...Then, in 1755, someone must have traduced Casanova, for without being told why, he was arrested and confi ned in the Leads, Venice’s hell-hole prison...

...And if you ask someone who has actually read the History of My Life, he (maybe even she) will likely tell you that Casanova is both gallant and hellion, a charming rapscallion who loved, after his own fashion, many of the women he slept with, and a heartless reprobate who loved only himself...

...A new abridgement in this single Everyman’s Library volume, which has deftly pared away over half the original, makes Casanova more accessible...

...Casanova would meet M.M...

...The marriage was called off when he met his prospective mother-in-law, but he did wind up in bed with mother and daughter together: There are, after all, things you just don’t do and things you just can’t pass up...

...sorrowfully renounce each other when her father, a baron, fi nds the suitor, who possesses all the virtues but noble blood, altogether unfi tting...

...to the villainous, he was insuffi ciently evil to be really interesting...

...The blackguard Vicomte de Valmont is a man who lives in accordance with his nefarious principles, which derive from Machiavelli and underwrite a career of sexual pillage...

...He got over the novice’s jitters soon enough...

...Even so, the churchly career did not last long: Casanova joined the Venetian army in 1744, and left that in short order to become a hack violinist with a theater orchestra...

...No serious man will envy Casanova’s life, and women will only shudder...

...The problem is that once sexual pleasures are hard to come by, life becomes unendurably barren...

...He had really lived as a sex tourist and had dressed his philosophizing accordingly...

...Whoredom, Judith Summers tells us, was a thriving industry...

...In London, Vienna, and Madrid he fell afoul of the authorities—shady dealings, sexual malfeasance— and had to leave town...

...When he fi nally got her into bed, she still refused him...

...The ceiling of his cell was so low he could not stand up, and the summer heat and winter cold were torture...

...He invites to dinner the animate memorial statue of the Commendatore, whom he has killed in a brawl and whose daughter he has raped...

...He helped save the life of a Venetian patrician, Matteo Bragadin, who suffered a stroke in his presence, then beguiled the brilliant but credulous man with his professed knowledge of cabbalistic lore and occult practice...

...Her merchant-father would not hear of her marrying an actress’s son, and placed her in a convent...

...Lord Chesterfi eld would think him a rake and an upstart with no hope of being taken for a gentleman...

...As Casanova writes, “Incestuous relations, the eternal subjects of Greek tragedy, instead of making me weep make me laugh...

...At 15 he ended his virginity in the arms of two sisters, Nanetta and Marta, and their threesome became a regular thing...

...How are we to judge Casanova...

...So they got rid of me,” Casanova bitterly recalls, and a lifetime could not efface the pain of this original abandonment...

...BY ALGIS VALIUNAS Everyone knows what the word Casanova means—according to taste, and often depending on one’s sex, either an enviable ladies’ man or a snake-bellied creep—but few are familiar with Giacomo Casanova himself (1725-1798...

...In 1787, on a visit to Prague, he likely met Mozart, and served as Lorenzo Da Ponte’s expert consultant on the libretto of Don Giovanni...

...In the heat of the moment, however, clerical garments came off as readily as a secular pair of trousers, and the odor of sanctity only made it easier to get over on young beauties...

...The Marquise bankrolled Casanova’s extensive travels, but not even her addled generosity could keep him from winding up poor again...

...To the virtuous, then, Casanova was a scoundrel...

...its motto, taken from Rabelais— Fay ce que voudres, Do what you please—was carved on the walls of Medmenham Abbey, a Gothic monastery where club members dressed as monks and threw the lewdest orgies in the civilized world...

...Wild times ensued...

...There is no edifying behavior in Laclos’s world, a sexual mire in which the vicious gambol and drown the innocent...

...One is hesitant to wish for another’s sake that there really is a hell, lest one happen to meet the standards for admission oneself, but surely that is a risk worth taking in the case of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814...

...Rousseau’s head-over-heels young lovers, Saint Preux and Julie d’Etange, Algis Valiunas is a writer in Florida...

...Thirty-eight is terribly young to begin to die...

...No one had ever escaped from the Leads, but Casanova did, after a year-anda-half inside...

...Lord Chesterfi eld (16941773), in his famous letters advising his illegitimate son on the behavior proper to a gentleman, makes the nice distinction between a rake and “a man of pleasure, [who,] though not always so scrupulous as he should be, and as one day he will wish he had been, refi nes at least his pleasures by taste, accompanies them with decency, and enjoys them with dignity...

...His memoirs are the dismal record of wasted gifts and misdirected energies...

...The studied inversion of Rousseauan virtue is the Marquis’s unclean aim, to be achieved by the defi lement and sexual torture of innocents...

...A rare piece of luck changed his life’s course...

...From 1790 to 1797 he worked on his voluminous memoirs, never quite able to fi nish them...

...His books are intended to infl ict moral damage on the reader, to infi ltrate and corrode normality with nightmare fantasies that will not leave the mind...

...Wedded bliss never came off, for he was poor, and living off her earnings would have been a humiliation...

...More often it was his groin that silenced his heart...

...The body count is more closely tallied in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787...

...The youth studied for the priesthood, taking a degree in civil and ecclesiastical law at the University of Padua, and becoming an abate, a novice priest, in 1741...

...He made a point thereafter of leaving women before they could leave him...

...The 18th century was a veritable erotic battleground, where the forces of virtue conducted a brave rearguard action against a legion of free-thinking rakehells and auxiliary squadrons of respectable gentlemen out for a good time...

...Choderlos de Laclos takes the epigraph for his own epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), from Rousseau’s preface to The New Heloise: “I have observed the manners of my times, and I have published these letters...

...At 28 he seduced with a proposal of marriage the virginal 14-year-old C.C...

...The opera singer Bellino, whom Casanova met at 19, was apparently a castrato, but Casanova was sure there was, in fact, a beautiful woman disguised here, for he felt deep stirrings of love toward this creature...

...To the reader, these youngsters’ amorous sport is a disturbing blend of innocence and corruption, like a butterscotch sundae dusted with cocaine...

...In the name of taste, decency, and dignity, Chesterfi eld suggests the young man, who happened to be courting his future wife at the time, contract sexual liaisons with two Parisian beauties at once, the fi rst for “an attachment,” the other for “mere gallantry...

...And the Marquis de Sade would deem him rather too much of a sentimentalist, who said his own pleasure derived largely from the pleasure he gave, when in fact the richest pleasures come from the pain one infl icts...

...He was learning the sexual humiliation that comes with age...

...His tastes were not aberrant, by the standards of the time: The legal age of consent in England was 10...

...She teased him, took his money, and turned her back...

...Doing a pair of sisters in the same bed can become addictive, though Summers is reluctant to believe Casanova’s tale of another such escapade, with Donna Lucrezia and Donna Angelica...

...Balked longing ravaged him...

...Instead, he accepted a sinecure as librarian in the castle of a Bohemian count and fellow Freemason...

...A comic pursuit followed and nearly ended when Casanova’s groping hand discovered a distressingly masculine appendage where he had expected paydirt...

...A Grand Tour of Europe fed his innate cosmopolitanism, and some literary work got done: An Italian translation of an opera libretto and a parody of Racine made it to the Dresden stage...

...The caressing lover turned rampaging brute: He beat her mercilessly, put a knife to her throat, tried to rape her...

...But fi rst, context must be taken into account, for the culture wars over sexual mores were underway long before the 1960s...

...In London and Paris, publications such as the Whoremonger’s Guide and the Almanack des Adresses des Demoiselles informed the consumer where to fi nd prostitutes, what they will do for you, and how much they charge...

...Casanova’s mother, a beautiful Venetian actress widowed when her son was nine, Summers writes, made it hard for Casanova to love another or himself, leaving him to the care of strangers while she hit the theatrical road...

...It is true enough, however, that Casanova impregnated Lucrezia in 1744, and that 17 years later he became engaged, quite unwittingly, to his own daughter, Leonilda...

...Charm goes a long way, but even Casanova ran short of it in the end...

...To imagine the response of the literary fi gures of his own century might be a way in...

...He is said to have declared on his deathbed, “I have lived as a philosopher and die as a Christian...

...Of the roughly 130 women he recorded sleeping with, 22 were not women at all but girls between 11 and 15, and another 29 were between 16 and 20...

...In England, Summers goes on, the Hellfi re Club indulged the diabolical sportiveness of bold aristocrats with no fear of damnation...

...Rousseau would fi nd him a sinister rogue who embodied the worst of vain social ambition and sexual license...

...As Giovanni’s servant Leporello sings in his catalogue aria, his master has had 640 women in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, and 1,003 in Spain...

...And Judith Summers’s Casanova’s Women, which recapitulates several of the more signifi cant entanglements, and provides salient facts where the memoir is sketchy, provides an excellent summary and commentary...

...And there is much that Summers doesn’t tell...

...Dreams of making it big overrode true love, suggesting that love might not have been so true after all: “The refl ection that now, at the fairest time of my youth, I was about to renounce all hope of the high fortune for which I considered that I was born gave the scales such a push that my reason silenced my heart...

...He caught her making love with her hairdresser...

...For all his talent and winsomeness, Casanova was a moral mediocrity, whose vitality ran out when his looks were gone, and whose relentless pleasureseeking ended in despondency...

...The pleasure to be had with women—and young girls and even, on rare occasions, other men— was his animating passion, which amounted to a consuming fever...

...Under the sage tutelage of the middle-aged friend of her father’s whom Julie marries (Monsieur de Wolmar), the impetuous hearts get over their lacerating youthful passion, recover their purity, and learn the true ends of an estimable marriage: Lessons in home economics, child-rearing, and the prudent rationing of pleasure furnish sterling moral exemplars for the preservation and perpetuation of what is best in the social order...

...The Bohemian backwater of Dux did not suit him, but when he got over being suicidal he managed to do a lot of writing...

...but for Casanova it was pure joyous sweetness...

...Hoping to make a literary splash, he began an Italian translation of the Iliad and a history of Poland, but the printer cut both projects short in 1778 when Casanova could not pay his fees...

...In 1798 a genito-urinary infection, exacerbated by repeated bouts of venereal disease over the years, cut him down...

...When the stone guest grips his hand and threatens him with damnation, Giovanni refuses to repent, and is hauled off to hell...