“Dearest of Friends, I reply at once to your good letter of the 28th February which I received Sunday . . . .  I thank you for your kindness which makes you say that you love me and that when you have money you will send me some . . . but that at the moment you are dry as a salamander.  I do not know what sort of animal that is.  But as for me I am certainly dry of money and I am consumed with the hope of having some . . . .  I see that you were amused at the Carnival and that you were four times at the masked ball, where there were two hundred women, and that you danced minuets and quadrilles to the great astonishment of the ambassador Foscarini who told everyone that you were sixty years old, although in reality you have not yet reached your sixtieth year.  You might well laugh at that and say that he must be blind to have such an idea.

“I see that you assisted, with your brother, at a grand dinner at the Ambassador’s . . . .

“You say that you have read my letters to your brother and that he salutes me.  Make him my best compliments and thank him.  You ask me to advise you whether, if he should happen to return to Venice with you, he could lodge with you in your house.  Tell him yes, because the chickens are always in the loft and make no dirt; and, as for the dogs, one watches to see that they do not make dirt.  The furniture of the apartment is already in place; it lacks only a wardrobe and the little bed which you bought for your nephew and the mirror; as for the rest, everything is as you left it. . . .”

It is possible that, at the “grand dinner,” Casanova was presented to Count Waldstein, without whose kindness to Casanova the Memoirs probably would never have been written.  The Lord of Dux, Joseph Charles Emmanuel Waldstein-Wartenberg, Chamberlain to Her Imperial Majesty, descendant of the great Wallenstein, was the elder of the eleven children of Emmanuel Philibert, Count Waldstein, and Maria Theresa, Princess Liechtenstein.  Very egotistic and willful in his youth, careless of his affairs, and an imprudent gambler, at thirty years of age he had not yet settled down.  His mother was disconsolated that her son could not separate himself from occupations “so little suited to his spirit and his birth:” 

On the 13th March 1784, Count Lamberg wrote Casanova:  “I know M. le C. de Waldstein through having heard him praised by judges worthy of appreciating the transcendent qualities of more than one kind peculiar to the Count.  I congratulate you on having such a Maecenas, and I congratulate him in his turn on having chosen such a man as yourself.”  Which last remark certainly foreshadows the library at Dux.

Later, on the lath March, 1785, Zaguri wrote:  “In two months at the latest, all will be settled.  I am very happy.”  Referring further, it is conjectured, to Casanova’s hopes of placing himself with the Count.

IV

Letters from Francesca