Memoirs of Casanova — Volume 01: Childhood eBook

Giacomo Casanova
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 255 pages of information about Memoirs of Casanova — Volume 01.

Memoirs of Casanova — Volume 01: Childhood eBook

Giacomo Casanova
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 255 pages of information about Memoirs of Casanova — Volume 01.
Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now, herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as if the fifty years that had passed were blotted out in the faithful affection of her memory.  How many more discreet and less changing lovers have had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-long correspondence bears witness?  Does it not suggest a view of Casanova not quite the view of all the world?  To me it shows the real man, who perhaps of all others best understood what Shelley meant when he said: 

     True love in this differs from gold or clay
     That to divide is not to take away.

But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most, they were only a certain proportion of the great mass of correspondence which I turned over.  There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was afterwards to bring the manuscript of the Memoirs to Brockhaus; from Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the Piombi; from the Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is some account in the Memoirs; from the Marquis Mosca, ’a distinguished man of letters whom I was anxious to see,’ Casanova tells us in the same volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, ’bel homme, ayant de l’esprit, le ton et le gout de la bonne societe’, who came to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from the Procurator Morosini, whom he speaks of in the Memoirs as his ‘protector,’ and as one of those through whom he obtained permission to return to Venice.  His other ‘protector,’ the ‘avogador’ Zaguri, had, says Casanova, ’since the affair of the Marquis Albergati, carried on a most interesting correspondence with me’; and in fact I found a bundle of no less than a hundred and thirty-eight letters from him, dating from 1784 to 1798.  Another bundle contains one hundred and seventy-two letters from Count Lamberg.  In the Memoirs Casanova says, referring to his visit to Augsburg at the end of 1761: 

I used to spend my evenings in a very agreeable manner at the house of Count Max de Lamberg, who resided at the court of the Prince-Bishop with the title of Grand Marshal.  What particularly attached me to Count Lamberg was his literary talent.  A first-rate scholar, learned to a degree, he has published several much esteemed works.  I carried on an exchange of letters with him which ended only with his death four years ago in 1792.

Casanova tells us that, at his second visit to Augsburg in the early part of 1767, he ‘supped with Count Lamberg two or three times a week,’ during the four months he was there.  It is with this year that the letters I have found begin:  they end with the year of his death, 1792.  In his ‘Memorial d’un Mondain’ Lamberg refers to Casanova as ’a man known in literature, a man of profound knowledge.’  In the first edition of 1774, he laments that ‘a man such as M. de S. Galt’

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Memoirs of Casanova — Volume 01: Childhood from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.