Casanova's Women Read Online Free Page B

her parents in style. At the least, he ensures that she is in a position to survive without him. Casanova sees nothing questionable in this pattern of behaviour – in fact, he believes he is acting extremely honourably – and he scoffs at women who accuse the male sex of being perfidious: ‘They would be right if they could prove that when we swear to be true to them we do so with the intention of tricking them. Alas! We love without consulting our reason, and reason has no more to do with it when we cease loving them.’ 4
    Perhaps Casanova ceases loving once too often. For along with professional success and security, he ultimately sacrifices his happiness in order to follow the path of freedom; at least, that was what he believes he has been doing all these years. Few, if any, men of his time travel quite so much or squander so many golden opportunities, many of them handed to him on a plate. Is he searching for something, or running away from himself? Is no woman, no city, no mode of employment ever good enough for the proud adventurer? Or does the actress’s son from Venice secretly feel that, no matter what he does and no matter who loves him, he never quite passes muster? That
he
is never good enough? Although, like Socrates, Casanova believes that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, this is one question he does not choose to ask himself.
    In the end Casanova’s rootless and peripatetic existence extracts a heavy price from him. Careless of the future, he burns his bridges as fast as he crosses them and makes bitter enemies en route as well as loyal friends. In old age he is
persona non grata
as far afield as Madrid, Vienna, his native Venice and his beloved Paris. He has nothing: no spouse, no lover, no legitimate children, no property, no place he can even call home. Everything of material value he once possessed – thediamond rings that graced his fingers, his valuable watches, his jewelled chains, his enamelled snuffboxes, even the relic of a saint given to him by his beloved schoolmaster as a parting gift – is sold off to pay his debts. Casanova even loses his laurels, along with the respect of many of the people whose good opinion he once went out of his way to seek. As one ex-admirer puts it, Casanova becomes a ‘glorious butterfly, transformed into a worm’. 5
    His life-long travels finally come to an end in 1785 at the château of Count Joseph Carl Emmanuel Waldstein, the wealthy seigneur of Dux Castle, Bohemia, and a fellow Freemason and gambler thirty years Casanova’s junior. Here the adventurer remains until his death. Out of kindness and liking for him Waldstein pays the sometime adventurer a modest pension of 1,000 florins to take care of his 40,000-volume library, but Casanova is far from grateful for what is in reality a sinecure. His precious freedom has given way to a life of glorified servitude to which, after more than twelve years, he still finds it nigh impossible to reconcile himself. But however much he hates his situation in Waldstein’s grand baroque palace, and however much he loathes life in Dux, a small provincial town on the road between Prague and Toplitz, Casanova cannot afford to leave and, besides, he has run out of places to go.
    â€˜They say that this Dux is a delightful spot, and I see that it might be for many,’ he scrawls on a scrap of paper on his desk. ‘But not for me. What delights me in my old age is independent of the place I inhabit. When I do not sleep I dream, and when I am tired of dreaming I blacken paper, then I read, and most often reject all that my pen has vomited.’ 6
    Casanova blackens a lot of paper while he is at Dux. To relieve the terrible boredom of being stuck here, he throws himself wholeheartedly into the literary pursuits which have always been one of his main interests. From being a compulsive womaniser, he becomes a compulsive writer: all the power and energy he once