Frederick II of Prussia had received him warmly in Potsdam, though they hadn’t struck a deal. Now he was back on the road, hustling other crowned heads. Having earned a fortune as a result, he led a princely life for a while, but lost much of it investing in a silk factory that went bankrupt. He even charmed his way into the French court, posing as a financier, and sold Louis XV on the concept of a national lottery. He translated the Iliad into Italian he published a utopian novel he grappled with problems in classical geometry he traded bons mots with Voltaire. When his ardor flagged, the nymph’s task was to rekindle it.Ĭasanova had a sideline, of course, which has earned him eponymous immortality most of us, I’d venture to say, have met “a real Casanova.” But his conquests in the boudoir, not to mention those in carriages, in bathhouses, or behind park shrubbery, have eclipsed his accomplishments while fully dressed. A casket of jewels was involved, along with a comely young accomplice posing as a naked water nymph. How would this work? Casanova’s mystically enabled sperm would impregnate her with a male fetus endowed with her soul. Many of them were gulls at a card table, though he had recently convinced an elderly marquise, a widow with a vast fortune and an obsession with the occult, that he could arrange for her rebirth as her own son. Giacomo Casanova, whose surname means “new house,” practiced many trades-violinist, gambler, spy, Kabbalist, soldier, man of letters-but his main line of work, he later admitted, was deceiving fools. The “blockhead” had also been travelling around Europe, although not on a patrician’s leisurely inspection of art and ruins. This voluble personage of thirty-nine, unusually tall, with a dark complexion and affected manners, was an Italian who “wanted to shine as a great philosopher,” Boswell wrote, “and accordingly doubted of his own existence and everything else.
In a Berlin tavern, he encountered a certain Neuhaus. The following year, he embarked on a Grand Tour. In 1763, the young James Boswell finished his “London Journal,” one of the frankest accounts of high and low life in the eighteenth century. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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