On the 30th September, she wrote:  “You will read to-day, if you please, a weary letter; for your silence, Monsieur, has given me humors.  A promise is a debt, and in your last letter you promised to write me at least a dozen pages.  I have every right to call you a bad debtor; I could summon you before a court of justice; but all these acts of vengeance would not repair the loss which I have endured through my hope and my fruitless waiting . . . .  It is your punishment to read this trivial page; but although my head is empty, my heart is not so, and it holds for you a very living friendship.”

In March 1797, this Henriette went to Lausanne and in May from there to her father’s home at Mecklenburg.

IV

Correspondence with Jean-Ferdinand Opiz

On the 27th July 1792, Casanova wrote M. Opiz that he had finished the twelfth volume of his Memoirs, with his age at forty-seven years 1772.  “Our late friend, the worthy Count Max Josef Lamberg,” he added, “could not bear the idea of my burning my Memoirs, and expecting to survive me, had persuaded me to send him the first four volumes.  But now there is no longer any questions that his good soul has left his organs.  Three weeks ago I wept for his death, all the more so as he would still be living if he had listened to me.  I am, perhaps, the only one who knows the truth.  He who slew him was the surgeon Feuchter at Cremsir, who applied thirty-six mercurial plasters on a gland in his left groin which was swollen but not by the pox, as I am sure by the description he gave me of the cause of the swelling.  The mercury mounted to his esophagus and, being able to swallow neither solids nor fluids, he died the 23rd June of positive famine . . . .  The interest of the bungling surgeon is to say that he died of the pox.  This is not true, I beg, you to give the lie to anyone you hear saying it.  I have before my eyes four hundred and sixty of his letters over which I weep and which I will burn.  I have asked Count Leopold to burn mine, which he had saved, and I hope that he will please me by doing it.  I have survived all my true friends.  ’Tempus abire mihi est’ Horace says to me.

“Returning to my Memoirs . . .  I am a detestable man; but I do not care about having it known, and I do not aspire to the honor of the detestation of posterity.  My work is full of excellent moral instructions.  But to what good, if the charming descriptions of my offences excite the readers more to action than to repentance?  Furthermore, knowing readers would divine the names of all the women and of the men which I have masked, whose transgressions are unknown to the world, my indiscretion would injure them, they would cry out against my perfidy, even though every word of my history were true . . . .  Tell me yourself whether or not I should burn my work?  I am curious to have your advice.”