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Memoirs of Casanova — Volume 01: Childhood By: Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) |
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THE RARE UNABRIDGED LONDON EDITION OF 1894 TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR MACHEN TO
WHICH HAS BEEN ADDED THE CHAPTERS DISCOVERED BY ARTHUR SYMONS.
[Etext Editors Note: These memoires were not written for children
and may outrage readers offended by Chaucer, La Fontaine, Rabelais
and The Old Testament. D.W.] MEMOIRS OF JACQUES CASANOVA de SEINGALT 1725 1798 VENETIAN YEARS, Volume 1a CHILDHOOD CONTENTS: CASANOVA AT DUX
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
CASANOVA AT DUX An Unpublished Chapter of History, By Arthur Symons
I The Memoirs of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a bad
reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students of
literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr.
Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books in
the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova, published
in Affirmations, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety. But this
essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to take
Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in his
relation to human problems. And yet these Memoirs are perhaps the most
valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth
century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one
of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they are
more entertaining than Gil Blas, or Monte Cristo, or any of the imaginary
travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in
imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved life
passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most
important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows
us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm
resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an
adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester,
one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a
vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his
own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live to
write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no longer. And his Memoirs take one all over Europe, giving sidelights, all the more
valuable in being almost accidental, upon many of the affairs and people
most interesting to us during two thirds of the eighteenth century.
Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice, of Spanish and Italian parentage, on
April 2, 1725; he died at the Chateau of Dux, in Bohemia, on June 4,
1798. In that lifetime of seventy three years he travelled, as his
Memoirs show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England,
Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he met
Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert and
Crebillon at Paris, George III. in London, Louis XV. at Fontainebleau,
Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II.
at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans Souci. Imprisoned by the
Inquisitors of State in the Piombi at Venice, he made, in 1755, the most
famous escape in history. His Memoirs, as we have them, break off
abruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and the
permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings. He did
return, as we know from documents in the Venetian archives; he returned
as secret agent of the Inquisitors, and remained in their service from
1774 until 1782. At the end of 1782 he left Venice; and next year we find
him in Paris, where, in 1784, he met Count Waldstein at the Venetian
Ambassador's, and was invited by him to become his librarian at Dux. He
accepted, and for the fourteen remaining years of his life lived at Dux,
where he wrote his Memoirs. Casanova died in 1798, but nothing was heard of the Memoirs (which the
Prince de Ligne, in his own Memoirs, tells us that Casanova had read to
him, and in which he found 'du dyamatique, de la rapidite, du comique, de
la philosophie, des choses neuves, sublimes, inimitables meme') until the
year 1820, when a certain Carlo Angiolini brought to the publishing house
of Brockhaus, in Leipzig, a manuscript entitled Histoire de ma vie jusqu
a l'an 1797, in the handwriting of Casanova... Continue reading book >>
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