Giacomo of all trades

Spectator, The, Jun 28, 2008 by Wilson, Ben

CASANOVA: ACTOR, SPY, LOVER, PRIEST by Ian Kelly Hodder & Stoughton, £20, pp. 400, ISBN 9780340922149 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

One evening in November 1763 the splendidly named Sir Wellbore Ellis Agar passed a middle-aged Venetian man on Westminster Bridge who, he thought, looked a little glum. Sir Wellbore knew what the stranger needed: 'a drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding'. And so he took the 38-year old Casanova to a tavern on Cockspur Street which supplied all these delights of British life. A band of blind musicians was rustled up, so that the orgy would be spared an audience.

Casanova found he could only manage the drink; he was fastidious about his food at the best of times, but to his mortification he was too depressed even to enjoy the French dancing girls.

Casanova's visit to London was disastrous, and his humiliation that night crowned a miserable few months. He was beginning to acknowledge that age was dimming his energies; he was fast running out of money; yet again he had a dose of venereal disease; and his heart had been broken by a merciless Soho-based courtesan named Marie Anne Chaprillon. He had professed love; she had taken his money, frustrated his desires, betrayed and humiliated him. On Westminster Bridge that night he had been -- and not for the first time in his life -- contemplating suicide.

The English baronet saved his life, but not his amour propre; before he left London, however, he cheered himself up by leaving a parrot at the Royal Exchange which he had trained to screech 'Mademoiselle Chaprillon is more of a whore than even her mother'.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Casanova's night with Sir Wellbore was the need for blind musicians. Men of their station and inclination frequently did not have much of a sense of modesty when it came to such things and certainly no right to blush. Perhaps they would play better the less they saw. Complete discretion was not a luxury, even for the very rich. As the details of Casanova's amours make clear, the elaborate rules of gallantry and the public nature of seduction made the serious intent of a man of action perilously close to slipping into opera buffa -- a comedic chaos. Seduction and hilarity were not far apart, and in Casanova's recollections there are plenty of anecdotes involving voyeurism, false identities, fun-loving nuns, breathless escapes, mismatched couples and all the other staples of 18thcentury erotica. Many men, and women for that matter, appreciated an audience -- if not to the act itself then to the tragi-comic course of seduction, conquest, deceit and betrayal. Whether your affair turned into opera seria or opera buffa, a sense of style was paramount.

Casanova's number of conquests was, if not small, not excessive either. What made him different from his libidinous contemporaries was that sense of style. Born into an acting family, and living among performers all his life, Casanova knew exactly how to play to an audience. The great strength of Ian Kelly's new biography is that he emphasises this aspect of the old roué's character.

Kelly is himself an actor, and he is attuned to the 18th-century habit of mind which cast the world as a stage. Casanova lived his life as an actor. Neither born well nor with any inclination to claim a stake in the humdrum of a professional existence, he made his way on his wits. Kelly also puts Casanova's wanderlust at the heart of the story and as a way of explaining the man himself.

He follows the trail his subject left in his eternal rovings around Europe. 'What was required of me, ' wrote Casanova of his journeys as sometime trainee priest, soldier, violinist, quack, cabbalist adept, lottery promoter, entrepreneur and spy, 'was the skill to play my role and not to compromise myself .... The thing is to dazzle.' After his beloved but unforgiving Venice he felt most at ease (he never felt at home anywhere) in Paris, for this was a city where 'people judge everything by appearances. There is no other [place] in the world where it is easier to impress people.' This is the connection between travel and sex.

Casanova played up to his reputation-- and to the reputation of Venetians as performers and lovers. A stranger on the lookout for sensual enjoyment and a fast buck needs to read the landscape and smell the air. Casanova was able to do this -- to adapt to his surroundings and give people what they wanted and expected; to dazzle indeed, in whatever way best suited the audience or target or victim. This kind of thing does not impress at home. In Venice, Casanova developed a pretty poor reputation, as a chameleon chancer who seduced not only women but senators and impressionable young men with his pranks and enlightened panache.

As such he was considered a dangerous radical by the Inquisitori di Stato, the patricians who oversaw the security of the republic. 'He plays the alchemist with misers, the poet with pretty women, and the politician with important people, ' said one of his fellow Venetians. This, more than his later reputation for sexual danger, put him beyond the pale. Indeed, if he had confined himself to being what we would call 'a Casanova', he might have saved himself some bother.