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Giacomo Girolamo Casanova

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (April 2, 1725 – June 4, 1798) was a Venetian adventurer and author. His main book Historie de ma vie (Story of My Life), part  autobiography and part memoir, is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century.

So famous a womanizer was he that his name remains synonymous with the art of seduction and he is sometimes called "the world's greatest lover".

He enjoyed the company of European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with men such as Voltire, Goethe and Mozart; but if he had not been obliged to spend some years as a librarian in the household of Count Waldstein of Bohemia (where he relieved his boredom by writing the story of his life), he would probably be forgotten today.

Jacques Casanova de Seingalt as he called himself in his memoirs was tall, good looking with bright dark eyes and a beaked nose.  He was, you might say, the Valentino of his day.

He seduced amorous nuns, virgins (some as young as 13), innumerable married women, two sisters at the same time, a castrato (“he” turned out to be a “she”), he traveled with a lesbian companion, he escaped from the dreaded Leads prison in Venice and he displayed great skill in the magic arts.

His passion for women was only an extension of his amazing passion for life, living and people. It didn’t hurt either that he was a prodigy, a polymath, brilliant in almost every subject and fluent in five different languages. He made and lost half a dozen fortunes, lived in every major European city before it was fashionable nor reasonable, hung out with Kings (Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, Louis XV), intellectuals (Voltaire, Rousseau), and artists (Mozart). He also hung out with monks and beggars. He survived the Inquisition, escaped from prison, wrote over 40 books and was banished from three different countries.

His legacy is beyond women — it’s that of living life to it’s most possible limits, disregarding the ideas of “success” or “failure” in favor of simply having experiences and appreciating them. As he said in his memoirs, “Whether you think my actions good or bad, no one can deny, that I truly lived.”

He wrote about sexual experiences with 133 women in his memoirs. He notes that he purposely left out a dozen or so who’s reputation he didn’t want to tarnish (probably very famous women). He stopped his memoirs when he turned 42.

If Casanova was a romantic it was because he had the good fortune to have experienced true love once in his life, even though he knew it was transitory.  The woman in question was Henriette, a beautiful young woman whom he met in his younger days.  Her role switching resembles Casanova’s own and perhaps they were both French spies at one time.  If she too was a romantic, then she understood the limits of romantic love -- after three great months together she left him.  She wanted to marry a husband who would remain constant in his sexual attentions and his finances, just as she knew she herself would not remain constant.  If Casanova was her true love then she knew equally that he could never be constant either.  They were equals.  For such lovers the truest form of love is a fantasy you carry throughout your life for your perfect sexual mate that can only be diminished by staying together.  Such a love is a Romantic notion.

There was a dramatic surge of interest in the 1920s when a ton of books about Casanova appeared and further translations followed, but with all the risqué bits still cut out.  For Casanova this only confirmed that the present was not the revenge of the past upon the present but the revenge of the present upon the past.  Civilization did not progress; it regressed. 

In 1797, word arrived that the Republic of Venice had ceased to exist and Napoleon Bonaparte had seized Casanova’s home city. It was too late to return home. Casanova died on June 4, 1798, at age 73. His last words are said to have been “I have lived as a philosopher and I die as a Christian”

It is said, the grumpy old ghost of Casanova still haunts the library of the Castle of Dux (where he was the librarian to Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein, a chamberlain of the emperor, in the Castle of Dux, Bohemia (Duchcov Castle, Czech Republic)).  The Castle squats in western Bohemia, passing through time like a ship passes through space, the clouds soaring overhead.  The ghost has been at war for many years with the vicious little mediocrities employed at the Castle who barge in from time to time to fling insults at him.  He has rigged a trap over the door into the library and next time, he plans to flatten them with an avalanche of his heaviest German philosophy books. 

Casanova had found that as he got older the criticism intensified as if old men were not allowed to seduce younger women occasionally.  Did this mean a tragic decline into dotage?  No.  He did not have to be turned into a symbol overloaded with unnatural meanings.

Though having had hundreds of lovers, over a dozen marriage proposals, eight illegitimate children, and thousands of friends and acquaintances — many in high places — he died miserable, bitter, and alone.