Casanova's Women (28 page)

Between November 1753 and May 1755, when de Bernis was recalled to France, the rebellious nun was in the extraordinary position of having two devoted lovers, neither of whom could do enough for her. The French ambassador paid for her
casino
. He watched over her with the care of a doting father, and his money and influence enabled her to escape from the convent as often as she liked. Meanwhile Casanova worshipped her body and understood
her troubled soul. He waited on Marina hand and foot when they were together, taking on the role of her maid when they went to bed by pinning up her hair for her, and he even made the ambassador's chef teach him how to cook her favourite dish. This kind of attentiveness was irresistible. Aware that Marina belonged first and foremost to her other lover, whose identity he soon guessed, Casanova complied with all the ambassador's wishes and, instead of trying to compete with him, was happy to take second place. If he unexpectedly turned up at the convent to see Marina when the ambassador was due to arrive there, he immediately left so that there should be no awkward meeting between them. At de Bernis's request, he took care not to make Marina pregnant. And although he had rented his own
casino
in Venice for her, he willingly accepted the fact that she rarely came there, because the ambassador thought it safer for her to stay on Murano, particularly if he himself was out of town. When Marina confessed that her other lover planned to hide in the secret chamber and spy on them making love on New Year's Eve, Casanova obligingly joined her in putting on a display of sexual fireworks for the ambassador's benefit. ‘I picked her up, she threw her arms around my shoulders so that she weighed less, and having dropped my muff, I seized her by the thighs and she braced herself on the nail,' he wrote of their exploits that night, ‘but after a little walk around the room, fearful of what might follow, I put her down on the carpet, then having sat down and having made her sit on top of me, she had the kindness of finishing the job with her beautiful hand, collecting in the palm the white of the first egg. “Five more to go,” she says to me.'
²⁶
Instead of moving into the bedroom where de Bernis would not be able to spy on them, the couple then made love on the sofa. After this they made love again in front of a mirror, and had mutual oral sex in the ‘straight tree' posture mentioned by sixteenth-century poet Pietro Aretino in his
Sonetti lussuriosi
: ‘I lifted her up to devour her chamber of love which I could not otherwise reach, wishing to put her in a position to devour in turn the weapon which wounded her to death without taking her life.'
²⁷
For this performance Casanova was rewarded by a love-letter from Marina ('I love you to adoration, I kiss the air, thinking that you are there') and, from the ambassador, a gift of one of his own precious snuffboxes. Made of gold, it contained two concealed portraits of Marina, one depicting her dressed as a nun, the other showing her lying naked next to her habit, upon which sat a cupid with a quiver at its feet.

It seemed that there were no lengths to which Marina and Casanova would not go in order to please de Bernis. This included sacrificing Caterina to the ambassador's wishes. Casanova's so-called ‘wife' soon suspected that he was involved with the same Mother Maria Contarina with whom she was now having her own passionate lesbian relationship but, lying through his teeth, he assured her that there was nothing between them but friendship. After that, Caterina kept her suspicions to herself. But when, a few months later, she spotted Marina wearing a medallion of the Annunciation painted by the same artist who had painted the St Catherine ring which Casanova had given her, she drew her own conclusions. Caught lying, but anxious that she should not make trouble between them, Casanova assured Caterina that his feelings for the nun in no way detracted from his passion for her.

He was lying again and she would soon find out in the cruellest of ways. For just after she had guessed the truth about his liaison with the nun, Marina secretly opened the
educanda's
St Catherine ring and discovered Casanova's portrait hidden within it. Possessing no concept of sexual jealousy herself, she conceived the idea of bringing Casanova and Caterina together again. The surprise meeting was to be a gift to both of them, as well as to de Bernis, with whom she planned to spy on the lovers' passionate reunion from within the secret chamber in her
casino
. The evening involved a great deal of planning on her part. First Marina obtained permission from the abbess for Caterina to sleep in her room, so that she could smuggle her out of the convent whenever she wanted to. Next, she herself arranged to meet Casanova at the Murano
casino
at two o'clock in the morning on a night when a carnival masquerade ball
was being held in the public part of the convent parlour for the amusement of the nuns. After watching the festivities with Caterina through the grating (they laughed most of all at the antics of a male masquerader dressed as Pierrot) Marina took the girl aside and, asking her to trust her, dressed her up in a nun's habit and sent her off to the
casino
in a gondola.

By now it was two o'clock in the morning. While Marina, who had secretly followed her from the convent, watched with de Bernis from within the secret chamber, a perplexed Caterina stood alone in front of the fire in her nun's habit, with no idea of where she was or what she should expect. Suddenly the door opened and the Pierrot from the convent parlour walked in. The moment he saw her he froze. Caterina instantly realised that he was Casanova, and she understood everything: the man she believed was her ‘husband' really was her female lover's lover. And, even worse, he was clearly displeased to see her. In truth, he was in a state of shock, for he knew that his lies to both women had been exposed. He felt dishonoured, and ‘played with, tricked, trapped, scorned' by both of them. The only way he could understand the situation was to presume that Marina had discovered his duplicity and set out to punish him for it, and he was so overwhelmed with self-pity at the thought of having lost her that he was unable to hide his feelings. To make love to Caterina for form's sake when he was in love with Marina would have made Casanova feel even more contemptible: ‘I was her husband; I was the one who had seduced her. These reflections tore at my soul.'
²⁸
With a maturity way beyond her years, Caterina put on a bravura show in the face of rejection: Marina was her worthy successor, she insisted; she loved both of them, and wished them both well.

Marina's plan to give pleasure to all three of her lovers had backfired badly. The evening had turned into a disaster. After eight tortuous hours of tears, explanations and sorrow, which she and de Bernis observed with growing dismay, Casanova handed his key to the
casino
to Caterina with instructions that she should return it to the nun. Then he left, believing that he would never go back there.

It seemed that the heavens were conspiring to punish Casanova for his lies. Since he had arrived on Murano that afternoon a terrible storm had blown up from the west. Freezing cold in his thin linen Pierrot's costume, and with no cloak to protect him from the wind, he barely made it back across the lagoon to Venice even though his gondola was steered by two strapping men. Drenched to the skin, he took to his bed in the Palazzo Bragadin, his fever and delirium aggravated by shame at having lost face, betrayed Caterina and ruined his chances with Marina. In this he was mistaken. Believing for a short while that their mutual lover had drowned in the storm, the two women were now as distraught as he was. By the time Casanova began to recover a few days later there were already two letters on his bedside, one from each of them. Caterina's explained Marina's good intentions in thrusting them together; and enclosed in Marina's letter to him was the key to her
casino
.

Reconciliation with Marina followed. Shortly after that, Casanova entertained both her and de Bernis in his own
casino
: impressed by what he had seen of Casanova's behaviour, the ambassador now wanted to meet him in person. During this bizarre evening, Casanova's attitude to both his guests ‘was that of a private individual to whom a king accompanied by his mistress was paying the greatest of all honours'. He fed them the choicest wines and best oysters, and treated Marina as if she were no more than a friend. At length the nun turned the conversation to Casanova's young ‘wife', de Bernis expressed his desire to meet Caterina, and Casanova found himself agreeing to invite the girl to join them all for dinner in a few days' time. Although he realised what was happening – that the ambassador was interested in Caterina, and Marina was acting as his procuress in the matter – Casanova felt helpless to stop it. De Bernis had generously shared his mistress with him for months. Now Casanova owed it to him to return the favour. And despite his protective feelings towards Caterina, the idea was not wholly repugnant to him.

Slowly, surely, Caterina was being debauched. Only months ago she had been an innocent virgin. Casanova had seduced her and
made her pregnant. Because of him she had been locked up in the convent, where she had nearly lost her life and where Marina had seduced her. Now, Caterina was being groomed by Marina to become another man's lover, and far from doing anything to stop this happening, Casanova actively participated in the plot. At a dinner he arranged for the four of them he went out of his way to make Caterina shine, even though he despised himself for doing so. At their next meeting, from which the ambassador purposely stayed away, he and Marina showed Caterina books of pornographic engravings, and the three of them indulged in a night of sex. By now Casanova felt well and truly trapped into returning all the favours de Bernis had shown him. He knew that if he attended the two women's next meeting with the ambassador Caterina would be safe but he himself would appear niggardly, rude and ungrateful. If he stayed away, however, she would be corrupted and, even though he would hold himself responsible, she would fall in his estimation and he would no longer want to marry her.

Perhaps it was for this reason that the marriage-shy adventurer decided to abandon Caterina to her fate. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, but he had more than met his match in the libertine nun who had engineered the plot. Caterina's mind ‘is now as freethinking as ours', Marina wrote cheerfully to Casanova after the two women had spent an evening with de Bernis, ‘and she owes it to me. I can boast that I have finished training her for you.'
²⁹
Regretful that he had not watched their antics from the secret chamber, she insisted on recounting every lurid detail of the evening when she next saw Casanova. She had misjudged him: instead of arousing him, the tale had the opposite effect of making him fear he would be ‘out of sorts to cut a good figure in bed'; and, as the great lover knew, ‘to cut a poor figure one only needs to fear it'.
³⁰

 

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 of Casanova's power over him and his two male companions, Dandolo and Barbaro? It was rumoured that the three men dabbled in Jewish mysticism with Casanova's help.