Casanova's Women Read Online Free Page A

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 aremere 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
    â€˜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 himselfthrown 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