Between the 13th February and the 6th December 1796, Casanova engaged in a correspondence with Mlle. Henriette de Schuckmann who was visiting at Bayreuth.  This Henriette (unfortunately not the Henriette of the Memoirs whose “forty letters” to Casanova apparently have not been located), had visited the library at Dux in the summer of 1786.  “I was with the Chamberlain Freiberg, and I was greatly moved, as much by your conversation as by your kindness which provided me with a beautiful edition of Metastasio, elegantly bound in red morocco.”  Finding herself at Bayreuth in an enforced idleness and wishing a stimulant, wishing also to borrow some books, she wrote Casanova, under the auspices of Count Koenig, a mutual friend, the 13th February 1796, recalling herself to his memory.  Casanova responded to her overtures and five of her letters were preserved at Dux.  On the 28th May Henriette wrote: 

“But certainly, my good friend, your letters have given me the greatest pleasure, and it is with a rising satisfaction that I pore over all you say to me.  I love, I esteem, I cherish, your frankness . . . .  I understand you perfectly and I love to distraction the lively and energetic manner with which you express yourself.”

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