than I’ In one letter, sent from Paris in 1759, she writes:  ’Never believe me, but when I tell you that I love you, and that I shall love you always:  In another letter, ill-spelt, as her letters often are, she writes:  ’Be assured that evil tongues, vapours, calumny, nothing can change my heart, which is yours entirely, and has no will to change its master.’  Now, it seems to me that these letters must be from Manon Baletti, and that they are the letters referred to in the sixth volume of the Memoirs.  We read there (page 60) how on Christmas Day, 1759, Casanova receives a letter from Manon in Paris, announcing her marriage with ’M.  Blondel, architect to the King, and member of his Academy’; she returns him his letters, and begs him to return hers, or burn them.  Instead of doing so he allows Esther to read them, intending to burn them afterwards.  Esther begs to be allowed to keep the letters, promising to ’preserve them religiously all her life.’  ‘These letters,’ he says, ’numbered more than two hundred, and the shortest were of four pages:  Certainly there are not two hundred of them at Dux, but it seems to me highly probable that Casanova made a final selection from Manon’s letters, and that it is these which I have found.

But, however this may be, I was fortunate enough to find the set of letters which I was most anxious to find the letters from Henriette, whose loss every writer on Casanova has lamented.  Henriette, it will be remembered, makes her first appearance at Cesena, in the year 1748; after their meeting at Geneva, she reappears, romantically ‘a propos’, twenty-two years later, at Aix in Provence; and she writes to Casanova proposing ‘un commerce epistolaire’, asking him what he has done since his escape from prison, and promising to do her best to tell him all that has happened to her during the long interval.  After quoting her letter, he adds:  ’I replied to her, accepting the correspondence that she offered me, and telling her briefly all my vicissitudes.  She related to me in turn, in some forty letters, all the history of her life.  If she dies before me, I shall add these letters to these Memoirs; but to-day she is still alive, and always happy, though now old.’  It has never been known what became of these letters, and why they were not added to the Memoirs.  I have found a great quantity of them, some signed with her married name in full, ‘Henriette de Schnetzmann,’ and I am inclined to think that she survived Casanova, for one of the letters is dated Bayreuth, 1798, the year of Casanova’s death.  They are remarkably charming, written with a mixture of piquancy and distinction; and I will quote the characteristic beginning and end of the last letter I was able to find.  It begins:  ’No, it is impossible to be sulky with you!’ and ends:  ’If I become vicious, it is you, my Mentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you.  Even if I were damned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette de Schnetzmann.’