The most famous lover of all time spent his twilight years as a librarian in a little- known Czech town. Kate Connolly reports
Macaroni, crayfish, and duck in marmalade sauce was on the menu at a strange little dinner in a dilapidated castle in northern Bohemia last week. The guests were as weirdly diverse as the bill of fare: a Dutch Protestant minister, an aid worker, a taxi driver, a historian and an architect.
But they are united in one thing. They are Casanovistes, aficionados of the world’s most famous lover, and they had come together from all over Europe to pay tribute to Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt, by indulging in his favourite comfort foods on the 200th anniversary of his death.
“We drank his favourite Madeira and finished off the evening with mugs of the frothy hot chocolate and pistachios that Casanova so enjoyed,” says the Reverend Marco Leeflang, who had come from Utrecht. “I searched all over the place for the right period-style marmalade,” he says. He found just what he was looking for in Prague’s Tesco, and produces a sample jar from his briefcase to show me.
Duchcov, also known as Dux, is not the kind of place you’d associate with the Casanova of lore. It sits in the middle of one of the most polluted areas in Europe and bears the scars and slag-heaps of years of brown coal mining.
Even Casanova was a reluctant guest when he arrived at the castle gates in 1785. He was 60 years old and, having left his native Venice as a child, had already traversed Europe by horse and coach, lurching from palace to pawnbroker’s and back. His swashbuckling career of duels, imprisonments, daring escapes, near beheadings, debauchery and several bouts of syphilis was coming to an end.
Broke, almost impotent and acutely aware of his age, Casanova took up the offer of his Freemason friend, Count Waldstein, to become Duchcov’s librarian. Here begins the most unknown and perhaps most the fascinating period of Casanova’s life: the time when the magic stopped and old age set in.
“The Bohemian part of his life has been much-neglected,” says Professor Josef Polisensky, author of Casanova: His World, who has been studying the famous lover since he was 10.
“For the first time, he had a regular income and was able to write, and if it wasn’t for that we might never have known about Casanova at all.” Holed up in the basement library with 12 000 books, Casanova began to take stock of his life, and spent 13 hours a day penning the 12- volume Histoire De Ma Vie, stopping only to take hot-chocolate breaks.
The professor, near blind himself now, is at pains to show that Casanova’s reputation as a lover has been grossly exaggerated, while his greatness as a diarist and philosopher has been downplayed. “He conquered 132 times, but he was sexually capable for 35 years, which, according to my calculation, is only three or four affairs a year. To me that doesn’t add up to being a great lover.”
The insular Bohemians considered this “African-skinned” foreigner with a “wild gaze” to be a curiosity, and rumours of his racy, priapic past abounded. At 1,8m he was tall for the times, too. (His blankets were made extra-large, but he could never sleep lying down in his short bed and had to be propped up on three plump pillows.)
Even as an old man, he must have cut quite a dashing figure, particularly since he enjoyed dressing up as a woman. There was a strong strain of transsexuality about him – he liked his lovers to dress as men, and he bemoaned that he would always be “devoid of a uterus”.
But Duchcov society made fun of his silk waistcoats and stockings, of the brass buckles and the white plume he wore to town balls and his old-fashioned dance-steps. So much so that he once wrote a public letter rebuking the townsfolk and copied it to his host, the count. “You riff-raff, you are all Jacobins. You wrong the count and the count wrongs me by not punishing you.”
Despite Casanova’s track record as a lover, a fear that his “steed would flinch from beginning another race” began to eat at him. Perhaps that’s why he took a vow of celibacy on entering Duchcov, having felt for the preceding 22 years (since his rejection by the celebrated prostitute La Chapillon in London, after which he almost threw himself in the Thames) that his “potency had been diminishing little by little” and that “try as I might, women no longer tended to fall in love with me”.
Nevertheless, there are whispers that he wavered from the path of righteousness. Two years before his death he was accused of impregnating the gatekeeper’s daughter, Dorothea Kleer. “At first, although he knew it wasn’t true, he seemed quite proud that at 71 people thought he was still capable of such a thing,” said Petr Benes, a guide at the castle.
Out of vanity, he let the rumours roll until he realised he was becoming a laughing stock. At which point he marched Kleer to St Barbara’s chapel and said that if she could prove he was the father, he would marry her. She then confessed that the real father was her painter boyfriend, Franz. Kleer and Franz were married soon afterwards.
Rather than more amorous trysts, Casanova found himself embroiled in a mundane battle of wits with his servant, Feldkirchner, whose insolence and constant jibes wore him down.
Unlike in his previous existence, when he would high-tail it out of town as soon as a problem loomed, there was no escape from his provincial prison. Instead he vented his anger through 19 vitriolic letters, written in French in his neat, right- leaning hand. Though they remained undelivered, the letters denounce the servant for not showing respect to “a man who, though not a gentleman by birth, became one through the study of the sciences and literature”.
At other times Casanova complained that the cook had spoilt the polenta, that the stable boy had given him a bad coach or that the count’s hunting dogs howled through the night and prevented him from sleeping.
Writing was the only thing that cheered him. He would retreat to his room and remember the women he had loved and his adventures with them. He recalled his adoration for Adriana Foscarini in Corfu in 1745, and how he swallowed phials of her hair ground to a powder, such was the strength of his passion.
He remembered how on his entrance to Vienna in 1747, Empress Maria Theresa set up a chastity commission to curb sexual licentiousness.
Casanova revelled in the celebration of his copulations in elegant salons, in gondolas, in carriages, on couches and in cow-sheds. He even gloried in his lovers’ body odour and post-coital farts. What is most remarkable is the understanding he had for his women, both in bed and out. Contrary to popular belief, most of the time he didn’t just dine and dash.
“The older I grew, the more what attracted me to women was intelligence,” he wrote in Volume 11. He told his last “pen lover”, the 22-year-old Cecile von Roggendorf, that he believed true love to be unrelated to carnal pleasure.
His empathy with women even stretched so far as a knowledge of pre-menstrual tension, unheard of in the 18th century: “When their uterus is active, women are agitated, irritable, and deserving of pity,” he wrote.
But the most important woman in his life, and the one he had constantly tried to impress, always remained inaccessible. His beautiful mother Zanetta Casanova – an actress in the days when they often performed in bed as well as on stage – abandoned him at birth. When she did see him she would humiliate him, telling him that the colour of his wig didn’t match his eyebrows.
In Duchcov he returned again and again to his painful days as a latchkey kid, remembering her total lack of interest and the joy he felt when he made her laugh. He learned the art of conversation just to win her attention. He even adopted a slavish penchant for her passion – crayfish – a craving she developed in the last few days of her pregnancy with him.
There are obvious Oedipal undertones in his obsession and in the quiet jealousy he expresses towards her lovers, including the future George II, who probably fathered Casanova’s half-brother, Francesco.
A Czech psychologist has suggested that this deep longing for acceptance had a huge influence on his attitude towards women in adult life. Indeed, in the introduction to his memoirs, Casanova confesses: “Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite to mine, I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.”
His later years were not all misery. He entertained Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and the young Ludwig van Beethoven.
He also drew up a blueprint for a soap factory, and devised a “grammatical” lottery for the city of Prague that aimed to teach the player French. He anticipated science fiction with his utopian adventure tale, Icosameron, and wrote treatises on the Enlightenment, atheism and the education of young women. And when Wolfgang Mozart was in Prague composing Don Giovanni, Casanova assisted Lorenzo da Ponte by scribbling a few lines for the libretto inspired by his own amorous experiences.
And, unable to contain his wanderlust, he often travelled overnight in his dressing- gown from Duchcov to Leipzig, Prague and Dresden, taking his huge pillows, two pineapples and two pheasants with him. At the border between Bohemia and Saxony he was once strip-searched by customs officials looking for a painting of the Madonna by Antonio Correggio, stolen from Dresden’s art gallery.
An ambitious social-climber, Casanova had a lifelong obsession with being accepted by the aristocracy. In his last days he lived out that fantasy on the northern Bohemian scene, where he was the star player. He made constant trips to the spa-town of Teplice, 6km from Duchcov, which attracted high society mainly from the north of Europe. He spent much of the spring and summer months visiting his friend Elise von der Recke.
Today Teplice is a rather sad roadside stop on the infamous highway E55, which attracts sex tourists lured by cheap Czech prostitutes.
Casanovistes are in constant dispute over the cause of his death. Some say it was throat cancer, others cancer of the prostate, while others suggest it was the effects of venereal disease.
His last letter was to Von der Recke, who sent him soup, red wine and a Bible just before he died. “If I recover I’ll be all yours,” he wrote. “But what would you do with me?” He died in a rose-patterned chair, which is still on display at the castle, with his nephew at his side.
Since the late 1980s, the Italians, who sent him into exile at the age of 57, have requested the return of Casanova’s remains to Venice. But just as Casanova enjoyed sowing seeds of confusion in life, so it is in death.
In the Eighties, Reverend Marco Leeflang hired a clairvoyant to locate his hero’s grave in the castle grounds. “The clairvoyant contacted Casanova, who said: `My bones aren’t important but there’s a leather case full of documents buried at my side.’ “
The communist authorities gave permission to dig a specific depth and width for a set amount of time at a site next to a Soviet army monument.
“The mayor stood there with his ruler and stop-watch,” says Leeflang, “but all we found was the tooth of a cow and Milada the clairvoyant burst into tears. Nevertheless, Casanova would have appreciated the spectacle.”
He would also no doubt have laughed long and hard at last week’s dinner. For, before the dinner, the Bishop of Bohemia said Mass in his memory at the castle’s derelict chapel – the surest sign yet that the man who was thrown out of a seminary as a teenager for deflowering two nuns is in line for absolution as well as rehabilitation.
“We thought the bishop would reel back in horror when we asked him,” says Leeflang. “But I suspect that maybe he’s just never got round to reading the memoirs.”