The Memoirs of Casanova

Bibliographical and Historical Notes

ARTHUR SYMONS

THE Venetian documents state that in 1754 Gian Battista Manuzzi was set to spy on Casanova, commissioned by the three Inquisitors of State, Andrea Diedo, Zuame Contarini, and Antonio da Mala. It was in November, 1754, that Manuzzi began his espionage of Casanova. His first report is datfed November 11th. He says of Casanova: "Generally it is considered that he is the son of a Comic Actor and of a Comic Actress; thus has been described the aforesaid Casanova, as having a Cabalistic character; that is, of a sorcerer." Also that he is accustomed to "live at other people's expense," and especially on that of Bragadin; lover of debauch, gambler with cards. He found him often in conversation with Zorzi, with Bernado Memmo, and with Antonio Braida, whose primary occupation was to hiss the comedies of Chiari: conversing with others in the cafe of Menegasso in the Merceria. It is stated also that Chiari had his revenge on Casanova in a romance called La Comediante in fortuna, where he caricatured him under the name of M. Venesio.

On July 17th Manuzzi writes:

On Monday the 15th at the Cafe Rinaldo triumfante Casanova read an impious composition in the Venetian dialect. I know nothing more enormous that can be thought or said against religion; the writer considered that those who believed in Jesus Christ were uncertain in their judgments. To deal with Casanova and to frequent with him, one can only find in him an accumulation of impiety, of imposture, of debauch and of sensuality to such an extent that he gave me a sense of horror."

On the 24th he writes to the Inquisitors:

"It is not possible to me in any manner to get Giacomo Casanova to let me make copies of at least one octave of his composition, seeing that when Casanova promised me the other day that he would not deny my request, he meant the contrary; for, he added by way of excuse of having read it to many people, that certain characters were written as if he himself were the writer of them, that the matter was scandalous, as when he had said that it is necessary for one to have his will with women, that the adultery of David gave birth to Solomon; that in this composition were things so stupendous that his very life seemed to him in great peril."

It is signed Gio.: Batta Manuzzi.

The Spy and the Manuscripts

ON July 27th, Manuzzi is ordered: A Missier di arrestare Giacomo Casanova, fermera tutte le carte, e porterle sotto li Piombi. Eight days before he was arrested the spy entered his house and induced him to show him his manuscripts which treated of magic. These were Le Clavicule de Salomon, Zecorben, Picatrix, an Instruction sur les heures plantiraires, and conjurations for evoking the demons. These were returned to him, after having been examined by the secretary of the Inquisitors.

I give an Italian the text of Casanova's arrest (August 21st, 1755) that I copied in the Archives of the Frari in Venice:

"Venute a cognizione del tribunale li molti riflessibile colpe di Giacome Casanova, v; principalmente in disprezzo publico della Santa Religione 55. EE. lo feccro arrestare e passar sotto li Piombli. "Andrea Diedo, INQ.

"Antonio Condalmeri, INQ.

"Antonio Da Mala, INQ.

"Annotazione in margina:

"L'oltra scritto Casanova condennato anni cinque sotto li Piombi."

There I found, with the arrest of Casanova, his imprisonment in the Piombi, the exact date of his escape, the name of the monk who accompanied him, all authenticated by documents contained in the riferti of the Inquisitors of State; there are the bills for the repairs of the roof and walls of the cell from which he escaped; there are the reports of the spies on whose information he was arrested for his too dangerous free-spokenness in the matters of religion and morality. The same archives contain forty-eight letters of Casanova to the Inquisitors of State, dating from 1768 to 1782, among the Riferti di Confident, or reports of secret agents; the earliest asking for permission to return to Venice, the rest giving information in regard to the immoralities of the dty, after his return there; all in the same handwriting as the Memoirs.

Casanova and the Inquisitors

THE revised text of Casanova's Memoirs, the only authoritative edition which we have, in twelve volumes (1826-1837), printed by Brockhaus, ends abruptly (as the MS. does) with the year 1774, and not with the year 1797, as the title would lead us to suppose. Casanova is at Trieste, where, on September 12th, he receives his passport for Venice from Marco de Monti, telling him to present himself to the circonspecto Marcantonio Businello, that he may learn the decision the Inquisitors of State have decided on. It is signed by Francesco Grimani. He reaches Venice in twenty-four hours, and is told by Businello, not only that he is free (which he certainly was), but that his pardon was the recompense of his Confutazione della Storia del Governo Veneto d'Amelot de la Houssaye, printed at Amsterdam in 1769. The book is extremely patriotic, extremely and curiously learned, especially in the footnotes, some of which relate to various erotic and erratic matters. He shows an extraordinary knowledge, which the reader of the Memoirs would hardly have expected, knowledge of the bookish kind. In the second volume he gets from Amelot to Voltaire, whom he chiefly occupies himself with in the third. He is very religious in his point of view, and very moral; as in the passage when he attacks French morals ("Donne deboli, Gioventa vena, Costumi erotti"). His Apostille, p. 136 to p. 218, against Voltaire is in French. As the Avertissement de l'Impremeur, has a curious interest in regard to the questions I am concerned with, partly textual, I give it as it is printed: "J'avertis les Lecteurs que j'ai trouvt presque toutes les paroles de ce manuscrit destitutes d'accent, et que je n'ai cru devoir me dispenser de les faire accentuer, avant que les en void a la presse qu'en consideration de l'auteur, qui dans une de ses apostilles soutient, que les accens n'aident en rien l'ouvrage a etre compris par les intelligents, et ne scauroient avoir la force de les faire comprendre a ceux qui sont dans le cas d'en avoir besoin. Il dit que sur d'etre entendu des premiers il se passera d'etre compris des seconds." The Codicillo (pp. 219-282) is in Italian.

The Mysterious Crime

BUSINELLO tells him he was wrong in escaping. Casanova replies that he imagined he had been condemned to remain there to the end of his life; to which Businello answers: "Je ne pouvois pas m'imaginer cela, car a petit faute petite peine." Casanova asks the exact reason of his arrest and the reason of his crime, which he had never divined. Businello looks on him seriously, says nothing, but puts the forefinger of his right hand against his nose, as a sign of silence.

(Continued on page 108)

(Continued, from page 106)

As a matter of fact, the actual reasons for Casanova's arrest are, on the whole, uncertain. I give in order what Casanova says in Histoire de ma Fuite. Laurent, his gaoler, says to him that those who, like himself, were imprisoned in the Piombi, "were all persons of the greatest distinction, and criminals the reason of whose arrest it was impossible for the most curious of men to discover." On p. 109 Laurent says to him "that all Venice ignored my crime, and that consequently all Venice wanted to divine it." He goes on to say that Casanova had made himself the leader of a new religion, and that the Inquisitors of State had only had him imprisoned on the requisition of the Ecclesiastical Inquisition. Others said that Madame Memmo had persuaded the Tribunal by means of Antonio Mocenigo to have him arrested, because he spoilt what is called good religion with ultraliberal reasonings. Others said that Antonio Condalmeri had had him arrested because he had hissed the Comedies of the Abbe Chiari, and because Casanova had sworn to go to Padua and kill him. Casanova says:

"There were many more people beside myself who might have been arrested on the charge of hissing Chiari's Comedies. As for what regards the Abbe, it is true that I said I wanted to go to Padua to kill him; but that the illustrious Jesuit Origo calmed me in insinuating that I had other ways than that of revenging myself for his attack on me in his miserable novel. So as I praised Chiari's Comedies in the cafes, my vengeance might have been perfect."

The Woman in the Case

ALL I can add to this is what Casanova said to Bragadin on July 26th, 1755, after telling him that Messer Grande, in his absence, had examined all his rooms near the Erbaria: "that a man cannot be a criminal without knowing the fact that he is, and that I might have committed a fault against myself, if in escaping I had left in their minds an indication that my reason was some kind of remorse of conscience." There was, of course, a Venetian woman, whom he hated leaving, and who was one of the innocent causes why Casanova had the obstinacy to refuse to leave Venice.

"All Venice expected me to be given a means of living suitable to my capacity, and necessary to my subsistence; but all Venice was deceived, except myself. A kind of employment, that I might have obtained by the favour of a tribunal, the influence of it being unlimited, might have had the air of a recompense, and that might have been too much. I am supposed to have a certain talent and that I know in what way to use it; nor, I must say, did this ever displease me; but all the terrific labours I gave myself for the space of nine years were, so to speak, cast to the winds. Either, I said to myself, I was not made for Venice, or Venice was not made for me. In this ambiguity a very disagreeable affair came to rescue me from the state I was in, and I made use of it."

Here he certainly refers to the Nè amor, nè donne, Ovvero la Stalla Ripulita (Venezia, 1727), which, on account of its satire, shamefully enough expressed, against Gian Carlo Grimani and other Patricians, drove him into a second, indeed a final, exile from Venice. In his Pricis de ma Vie, dated October 17th, 1797, he says: "I got into a horrid mess with the Venetian Patricians in 1782. At the beginning of 1783 I on my own will left my ungrateful country and betook myself to Vienna." And it is this same man, but in a bitterer spirit, who wrote in the book on Amelot (1797), that, as I have said, caused his pardon at the hands cf the Venetian Inquisitors: "Adoratore della mia patria, mi senso pronto a difenderla, con l'effusione di tutto il mio sangue, da chiunque fosse assalita."

On p. 262 he says:

"Whenever I am seized by the desire of writing the story of all that has happened to me in the course of twenty-eight years, that I have spent in wandering over the whole of Europe, up to that moment when it pleased the Inquisitors of State to give me the permission to return to Venice in an honourable fashion, I shall begin it at this point, and my readers will find it written with the same style, for there is no writer who has more than one."

"If," he says later, "I actually write my story, it is possible that it will not be printed till after my death, for, being determined to tell the truth, I shall have often enough to maltreat myself, and that won't amuse me."

There is a curious significance in those sentences, which show that he had not begun to write his Memoirs. Again there is something sinister in his statement of what he intends to do. "Either my story will never see the light of day, or it will be an actual Confession. It may make readers blush, for it will be a mirror, in which from time to time they will see themselves.

I shall not give to my story the name of Confessions, for since an extravagant man (Jean Jacques Rousseau) has so sullied the nameof them, I cannot possibly endure it: but it shall be a Confession, if ever there was one."

One realises here the writer's hesitation; he is not yet quite certain how to begin his Confessions. Yet in those pages, at any rate, one sees his mind, his thoughts, occupied with this wonderful newly-invented idea. Certainly I think that the success of the book I have referred to decided him to set himself to the prodigious task of narrating, mostly for his own pleasure, such adventures as no adventurer ever recorded. For this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live to write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no longer.

The Escape from Prison

HISTOIRE de ma Fuite des Prisotis de la République de Venise, qu'on appelle les Plombs, is the only authentic confession that Casanova ever printed in his lifetime; that is to say, of the most famous escape in history. I have before me a textual re-impression of the original edition, printed at Bordeaux in 1884, where style, orthography, punctuation, are all given with an unusual exactitude. And those 278 pages give one, in their vigorous but at times incorrect and often somewhat Italian French, on the whole a more vivid, vital, actual and definite idea of the man himself than one gets from the Brockhaus edition of the Memoirs; for Jean Laforgue's corrections, alterations, suppressions from the original MSS. of Casanova that he had to copy, are incalculable in the damage they give to the vivacity of the whole narrative. It must, therefore, be realised that the Memoirs, as we have them, are only a kind of pale tracing of the vivid colours of the original.

I give here certain variants in the first text and the corrected one in the Memoirs:

"J'ai entendue sonner vingt et une heure, et j'ai commencé à m'inquiéter un peu de ce que personne, ne venoit pas voir si je voulois manger, de ce qu'on ne me portoit pas un lit, une chaise, et au moins du pain, et de l'eau. Je n'avois pas d'appetit, mais il me sembloit qu'on ne devoit pas le savoir: jamais de ma vie je n'avois eu la bouche si amere: je me tenois cependant pour sur que vers la fin du jour quelqu'on parortroit: mais lorsque j'ai entendu sonner le vingt-quatre hueres je suis devenu comme un forcene, heurlant, frappant des pieds, pestant, et accompagnant de hauts cris tout le vain tapage que mon etrange situation m'excitoit a faire."

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This is Laforgue's text:

"Au son de i'horloge, qui sonne vingt et une heure, je commengai a me reveiller, et j'iprouvai quelque inquietude de ne voir paraitre personne pour m'apporter a manger, et les effects et meubles dont j'vais besoin pour me coucher. Il me semblait qu'au moins on aurait du m'apporter une chaise, du pain et de l'eau. Je n'avais point d'appetit, mais devaiton le savoir? et de ma vig je n'avais eu la bouche aussi sèche et aussi amere. Je me tenais cependant pour stir qu'avant la fin du jour quelqu'on paraîtrait; mais lorsque j'entendis sonner le vingt-quatrième heure, je devins furieux, heurtant, frappant des pieds, pestant et accompagnant de hauts cris tout le vain tapage que mon etrange situation m'excitoit à faire."

Again, for "lorsque tout nu," one reads "Dans l'etat de la nature:" for "L'amour de la Patrie devient un vrai phantome devant l'csprit d'un homme en prison," "L'amour de la patrie même, le plus sacre de tous, peut-il prevaloir dans le coeur de 1'homme qu'elle opprime!" Finally, for "J'aurais voulu me voir suivi par le beau trou que j'avois fait avec tant de peine, mais e'etait impossible: mon corps alloit, mais mon ame restait la," read: "J'aurais bien voulu pouvoir emporter mon beau trou, objet de tant de pienes et d'espoir perdus. Je puis dire qu'en sortant de cet horrible lieu de douleur, mon ame y resta toute entière."

The Leipzig Manuscript

I MUST now quote from my Casanova at Dux. First that in September, 1899, I was shown at Leipzig the manuscript Histoire de ma Vie jusqu'à Van 1797, in his handwriting. The manuscript I examined is written on foolscap paper, rather rough and yellow; it is written on both sides of the page, and in sheets or quires; here and there the paging shows that some pages have been omitted, and in their place are smaller sheets of thinner and whiter paper, all in Casanova's handsome unmistakable handwriting. The manuscript is done up in twelve bundles, corresponding with the twelve volumes of the original edition; and in only one place is there a gap. The fourth and fifth chapters are missing, as the editor of the original edition points out, adding: "It is not probable that these two chapters have been withdrawn from the manuscript of Casanova by a strange hand; everything leads us to believe that the author himself suppressed them, with the intention, no doubt, of re-writing them, but without having found time to do so." And, as I have said, the manuscript ends, with the year 1774.

Then comes my most important discovery at Dux: that is to say, a manuscript entitled Extrait du Chapitre 4 et 5. It is written on paper similar to that on which the Memoirs are written; the pages are numbered 104-148; and though it is described as Extract, it seems to contain, at all events, the greater part of the missing chapters in Vol. XII. It is curious that this very important document, which supplies the one missing link in the Memoirs, should never have been discovered by any of the few people who have had the opportunity of looking over the Dux manuscripts. I am inclined to explain it by the fact that the case in which I found this manuscript contains some papers not relating to Casanova.

Now, these various questions resolve themselves into these. First, that the MS. I examined at Leipzig is entirely in Casanova's handwriting; then, that the two missing chapters I discovered at Dux do actually find their place in the MSS. from which they had been removed; again, that those I found prove to a certainty that only Casanova himself removed them; that they prove also that no one would ever have dared to destroy or suppress one page of this manuscript, considering how invaluable is the entire book as we possess it, and how priceless the manuscript was to those who possessed it after his death: therefore, might it not be legitimate to believe that the book as we have it comes to a natural end?

To add a few more details. On April 8th, 1791, Casanova writes to Carlo Grimani, saying, "I have written the story of my life." He goes on to say that the MSS. will remain in the possession of Waldstein, who, he supposes, will print them after his death; supposing also that they would be printed in six or seven volumes in octavo. They were, as we know, printed in twelve volumes.

On January 17th, 1792, Waldstein writes to Casanova: "The story of yout life will certainly give me pleasure, but I do not know how to have it brought to me, as there are no conveyances that come from Prague unless they come from Vienna." On August 1st, 1797, Cecilia Roggendorff writes: "You say in one of your letters that before you die you will bequeath to me the fifteen volumes of your Memoirs." In answer to this he sent her a copy of his Precis de ma Vie, dated September 17th, 1792, the original of which is in Dux.

Casanova's Versatility

ON turning over the pages of his Memoirs I found that in Vol. II he says "I wrote this in 4797," that is, in the year before he died. Was he then only re-writing it? Evidently this is a bit inserted. In Vol. VIII he speaks of "four years ago, in 1792," that is, he was probably inserting it.

Like Baudelaire, I am obliged to quote myself again, in regard to Casanova's life in Dux. The copious manuscripts there, as I wrote, show us how persistently he was at work on a singular variety of subjects, in addition to the Memoirs and to the various books which he published during those years. I must explain here, in parenthesis, that the only books he published during these years are:

1. Histoire de ma fuite des Prisons de la RSpublique de Venise (1787).

2. Icosameron, a curious book, printed in the same year, but, I am certain, written by him in Venice, purporting to be "translated from English," but really an original work of his, a book in five big volumes.

3. A. Leonard Snetlage, Docteur en Droit de l'Université de Goettingen; Jacques Casanova, Docteur en Droit de VUniversitS de Padoue, 1797.

One sees him in Dux jotting down everything that comes into his head, for his own amusement, and certainly without any thought of publication; engaging in learned controversies, writing treatises on abstruse mathematical problems, composing comedies to be acted before Count Waldstein's neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages, indeed with more patience than success, writing dialogues in which God and himself are the speakers, keeping up correspondence with distinguished men and with delightful women. His mental activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious as the activity which he had expended in living a multiform and incalculable life. As in life everything living had interested him, so in his retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him; and he welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he had welcomed adventures. Passion has intellectualised itself, and remains not less passionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with everyone; and it is only after having spent seven years in keeping up miscellaneous learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions, that he turns to look back over his own past life, and to live it over again in memory, as he writes down the narrative of what has interested him most in it.

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End of the Memoirs

IT seems to me certain that there are many reasons for our believing that Casanova actually, and deliberately, ended his Memoirs in 1774. To take one more instance in proof of my statements: in Vol. X Casanova refers to a letter (which he quotes) that he had written on the question of an infallible method for making "the philosopher's stone." He says on page 405: "I have under my eyes the exact copy of the original written at Augsburg in the month of May, 1767, and we are to-day in the first of the year 1798." As he died on the 4th of June in that year, it seems to me certainly a most natural conclusion to arrive at: that he spent his last years in comparative leisure, apart from the casual work he was generally occupied with; and that, at his leisure, he turned over the old pages of his manuscript (not only removing two chapters, as I have said, which shows how intensely he was preoccupied with his one great work, his Confessions) , but in inserting pages, or even sentences. And supposing one does believe, as I believe, that he did end his Memoirs deliberately, at the very moment when he was expecting a safeconduct and the permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings; and considering how he aged, year after year, and must have got, in any case, curiously tired of having to go on and on, what can one more reasonably imagine than this: that he had come to a point in his Confessions when the somewhat shady side of his existence as a secret agent seemed to him, certainly, unadvisable to relate in detail, or not at all?