Casanova's Women by Judith Summers

Author:Judith Summers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2006-11-12T22:00:00+00:00

Between 1753 and May 1755, while Christoforo Capretta believed that his daughter was safely out of harm’s way in the convent, she was being debauched by Marina Morosini, Casanova and the French ambassador to Venice. And while de Bernis insisted in his memoirs that Venetians were astonished to find him ‘insensible to the charms of women’,31 he was carrying on with a fifteen-year-old school girl and a nun, as we know from a letter he wrote to his friend the Comtesse des Alleurs, wife of the French ambassador at Constantinople. ‘Your nun has evaded the walls of her convent to take refuge in Padua,’ he wrote on 1 September 1754, ‘which is the most sombre cloister that I know. I have been to see her, and she will come to dine in my house in the fields.32 In speaking of her flirtations, you cast in the most delightful possible manner some stones in my garden; you put to me questions on unfaithfulness which, happily or unhappily for me, can no longer embarrass me. I lead the life of a Carthusian friar and I have all the more merit in that it is quite necessary that I possess some sanctity.’33

Discreet as de Bernis was, it was hard to keep secrets for long in Venice. By the time that the new British ambassador, John Murray, arrived in the Republic in October 1754, rumours were rife that the French resident was having an affair with a patrician-born nun at Santa Maria degli Angeli – a situation that was probably tolerated by the Council of Ten for diplomatic reasons as well as to protect the powerful Morosini family. John Murray, a man who delighted in sexual exhibitionism and was ‘a scandalous fellow in every sense of the word’34 according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was soon boasting to his new friend Giacomo Casanova that he himself had enjoyed Mother Maria Contarina, the French ambassador’s mistress, for the price of a hundred sequins. When an outraged Casanova investigated this claim, the so-called nun turned out to be an impostor, but the news that she was being impersonated by a prostitute drove home to Marina the precarious nature of her situation.

Casanova’s behaviour also attracted unwelcome attention from Venice’s Council of Ten. What was the reason for his frequent visits to Murano? Whilst they might close their eyes to the ambassador’s liaison with Marina, if Casanova was involved with her it was a different matter. Moreover, why was the upstart actors’ son in cahoots with de Bernis and Murray? In order to prevent spying by foreign powers, any communication between the Venetian patrician classes and the foreign ambassadors living among them was strictly forbidden, and, although Casanova was a commoner by birth, his close relationship with Senator Bragadin cast his friendships with foreigners in a suspicious light. Highly suspicious, too, were Casanova’s dealings with Bragadin. Just why had the middle-aged senator taken him under his wing? Why did he support him financially? What was at the root

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