but now everyone laughs.  Old Casanova treads the grave measures of the minuet; they applauded his dancing once, but now everyone laughs.  Young Casanova was always dressed in the height of the fashion; but the age of powder, wigs, velvets, and silks has departed, and old Casanova’s attempts at elegance ("Strass” diamonds have replaced the genuine stones with him) are likewise greeted with laughter.  No wonder the old adventurer denounces the whole house of Jacobins and canaille; the world, he feels, is permanently out of joint for him; everything is cross, and everyone is in a conspiracy to drive the iron into his soul.

At last these persecutions, real or imaginary, drive him away from Dux; he considers his genius bids him go, and, as before, he obeys.  Casanova has but little pleasure or profit out of this his last journey; he has to dance attendance in ante-chambers; no one will give him any office, whether as tutor, librarian, or chamberlain.  In one quarter only is he well received—­namely, by the famous Duke of Weimar; but in a few days he becomes madly jealous of the duke’s more famous proteges, Goethe and Wieland, and goes off declaiming against them and German literature generally—­with which literature he was wholly unacquainted.  From Weimar to Berlin; where there are Jews to whom he has introductions.  Casanova thinks them ignorant, superstitious, and knavish; but they lend him money, and he gives bills on Count Wallenstein, which are paid.  In six weeks the wanderer returns to Dux, and is welcomed with open arms; his journeys are over at last.

But not his troubles.  A week after his return there are strawberries at dessert; everyone is served before himself, and when the plate comes round to him it is empty.  Worse still:  his portrait is missing from his room, and is discovered ’salement placarde a la porte des lieux d’aisance’!

Five more years of life remained to him.  They were passed in such petty mortifications as we have narrated, in grieving over his ’afreuse vieillesse’, and in laments over the conquest of his native land Venice, once so splendid and powerful.  His appetite began to fail, and with it failed his last source of pleasure, so death came to him somewhat as a release.  He received the sacraments with devotion, exclaimed,—­

“Grand Dieu, et vous tous temoins de ma mort, j’ai vecu en philosophe, et je meurs en Chretien,” and so died.

It was a quiet ending to a wonderfully brilliant and entirely useless career.  It has been suggested that if the age in which Casanova lived had been less corrupt, he himself might have used his all but universal talents to some advantage, but to our mind Casanova would always have remained Casanova.  He came of a family of adventurers, and the reader of his Memoirs will remark how he continually ruined his prospects by his ineradicable love for disreputable company.  His “Bohemianism” was in his blood, and in his old age he regrets—­not his past follies, but his inability to commit folly any longer.  Now and again we are inclined to pronounce Casanova to be an amiable man; and if to his generosity and good nature he had added some elementary knowledge of the distinction between right and wrong, he might certainly have laid some claim to the character.  The Prince de Ligne draws the following portrait of him under the name of Aventuros: