Casanova's Women (48 page)

In mid-March 1764, Casanova abruptly left London for reasons that are still unclear. He had been involved in a financial transaction concerning a forged bill of exchange for 520 guineas, he was deeply in debt, and he had a court case pending against him brought by Marianne de Charpillon. Sophia, into whose heart he had deliberately insinuated himself during his stay in the city, would never see him again; and it is unlikely that he ever wrote to her. She remained at boarding school for another three years before returning to Carlisle House. ‘Short, but very pretty, and full of talent', as an old school friend described her in her teens, she had by then grown far apart from her difficult but talented mother, just as Casanova had hoped that she would. By now London's most famous impresario was even more celebrated than she had been at the time of Casanova's visit to London and yet, at the same time, even more deeply entrenched in debt. In 1765 she had attempted to buy the famous King's Theatre in the Haymarket, the only theatre in London licensed by the Lord Chamberlain to stage Italian opera, and when she had failed to raise the required sum of £14,000 she had calmed her restless spirit by opening a second, smaller assembly room in Soho's Greek Street. In 1771, Teresa
staged her own highly popular but unlicensed opera at Carlisle House, and ran foul of the law. Competitors tried to drive her out of business. Her enemies accused her of running a bawdy house. Her many legal cases against John Fermor dragged on interminably, and expensively, through the Courts of Chancery. Arrested by creditors five or six times a year, Teresa was occasionally allowed out of prison on bail to run the concerts and balls which would help her to pay off the money she owed. Despite her dire situation, she still did her best to look after her children: in 1770, she even sent Giuseppe off on a grand tour of Europe, warning him to live within the modest allowance of one hundred guineas which she had scraped together for him and making him a promise to accept favours from no one.

Teresa finally went bankrupt in 1772, squeezed out of business by competition from the newly opened Pantheon assembly rooms on nearby Oxford Street – a building which was ‘the wonder of the XVIII Century and the British Empire' and ‘the most beautiful edifice in England' according to historian Edward Gibbon. In a humiliating, fixed auction, which she herself was forced to witness, Carlisle House, complete with its precious contents, was sold off to a consortium of her creditors for a fraction of its true worth. Thomas Chippendale, who had supplied her with rococo and chinoiserie furniture, was among the buyers.

Until then Sophia had remained at Soho Square, where she gave concerts herself and ‘enjoyed the protection and the esteem of all the greatest ladies in London'. Since being enrolled at The Nunnery she had grown to despise her mother ‘who mortified her every day, who reduced (her) to tears over nothing'
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and whom she later accused of trying to push her into the arms of a local rake, Lord Piggott. As soon as Teresa went bankrupt Sophia abandoned her and fled into the welcoming arms of the Roman Catholic Church. Charles Butler, one of the most prominent Catholics of the day, gave her a small stipend with which she rented modest rooms for herself near Bedford Row, Bloomsbury. In a bid to distance herself further from her infamous mother, she immediately changed her
name from the all-too-distinctive Miss Cornelys to the anonymous-sounding Miss Williams, an anglicised form of her second Christian name, Wilhelmine. Following her example, Giuseppe, who had by now returned from Italy, changed his surname to Altorf and took a job as tutor to Lord Pomfret's son.

Sophia Williams had no intention of following in her mother's footsteps by going into commerce or becoming a courtesan. Instead, like her brother, she became a paid companion to the nobility who had once frequented her mother's house. For a woman to go into service in this way was an unenviable occupation ‘considered in the light of a degradation' in the opinion of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, but it suited Sophia's nature. The education Teresa had drummed into her from her earliest years now paid off in full measure. Musically gifted, cultured, intelligent and, more importantly, as adept in her own way at ingratiating herself with the aristocracy as her mother had been, Sophia was taken in by Lady Harrington, who had always liked her, and became a companion and governess to her daughters. From the Harringtons' house in Stable Yard, St James's, Sophia eventually passed to Lady Cowper, and later to the Duchess of Newcastle, the Duchess of Beaufort, Lord Newhaven, the Marchioness of Tweeddale and finally to Margaret, the Dowager Lady Spencer.

Through these aristocratic connections, all of which she owed directly to Teresa, Sophia was introduced to George Ill's wife Queen Charlotte and her second daughter, Princess Augusta. Oddly, the governess and the princess had something in common: each had endured a miserable childhood under the rule of a repressive and temperamental mother against whom she had had to struggle for her freedom. An unlikely relationship developed between them – the princess signed her letters to Sophia as being from ‘Your very sincere friend Augusta'
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– and in time she appointed Sophia as her private almoner.

In many ways Sophia was the opposite of both her parents. Where Teresa and Casanova were both brave and adventurous, she
was fearful. They lived their lives on a grand scale; she played out hers on a small stage. While they were both sexually promiscuous she died a childless spinster and, almost certainly, a virgin. While they were both unscrupulous, disingenuous, and even dishonest if it was in their interest, she devoted her life to God, to the righteous (perhaps even self-righteous) path, and to selfless good works.

What she had inherited from her parents was her father's intellect and her mother's entrepreneurial spirit. And it was these qualities which helped her to start the Cheltenham Female Orphan Asylum in 1806, and the Adult Orphan Institution in Mornington Place, St Pancras, in 1820. Sophia's fifteen wards in the latter institution became her children – neat, orderly, grateful and well-behaved. All of them had ‘come into the Institution at their own requests and have implicitly followed the regulations laid down for them with the greatest Cheerfulness', as she noted in her first report to the charity's trustees. ‘They behave with infinite cordiality and affection to each other and appear fully convinced that, being equally the children of misfortune, it is an indispensable Duty to assist and feel for each other… . The certainty that if the Institution succeeds, and they are deserving of its Protection, they will at all times find an asylum in it endears it to them and makes them delight in lending their assistance in every way that can promote its prosperity.'

Having no position in life need not be a tragedy, Sophia seemed to be telling the world: if they looked after one another women could survive and even find fulfilment and happiness without marriage, a lover, an income or a family. Sometimes one was even better off without parents. By now she was a bona fide orphan too. Casanova had died in 1798, Teresa a year earlier. Bankruptcy in 1772 had not dented Teresa's enthusiasm for business. After getting out of prison, she bought a hotel in the south-coast town of Southampton, but the project ran into trouble through no fault of her own. Back in London in 1775 she organised a fabulous Venetian regatta on the River Thames, and soon afterwards wormed her way back into Carlisle House, this time as its manager.
To the amazement of fickle society, the seemingly indestructible Mrs Cornelys eclipsed her former success by holding two seasons of sensational ‘Rural Masquerades'. Her imagination, and spending, ran riot over these parties. She transformed her old Soho mansion into an indoor Arcadia by covering the wooden floors in fresh turf and importing banks of hedges and armfuls of exotic, out-of-season flowers. As the newspapers reported in glowing detail, on one occasion Mrs Cornelys created an indoor arbour ‘filled with greenhouse plants and pots of flowers, and in the centre stood an elegant pavilion hung with festoons of silk; on the top (to which the company ascended by a temporary staircase,) was spread a table for a dozen persons, in the middle of which was a fountain of water, and a reservoir, with gold and silver fish swimming about in it'. Upstairs, in the vast Concert Room, ‘lofty pines stood at equal distances along the sides, and branched to each other at the top' while underneath them a luxurious picnic of crayfish, hot fowls, asparagus and strawberries was laid out on ‘an elegant erection of Gothick-arches' decorated with coloured lanterns. Meanwhile, at the end of the Concert Room, the orchestra's dais was surrounded by orange trees and illuminated by ‘a moving spiral pillar of lights, which terminated in a brilliant sun'.
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In the summer of 1776, Teresa was again termed ‘the Mother of Masquerades, Taste and Elegance' by fashionable society. But her brilliant skills were not enough to keep her in business. Eighteen months later she was broke again. She clung on to Carlisle House as if to a life raft, returning there for a brief spell in May 1779, but it was a life raft more liable to sink her than save her. Later that year she was committed to the King's Bench prison by order of her many creditors, who no doubt congratulated themselves that this time the slippery Mrs Cornelys would never get out. They were wrong: on 6 June 1780 the gaol was set on fire during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, and fifty-seven-year-old Teresa escaped along with hundreds of other prisoners; she remained on the run until the end of August, when she was recaptured in Westminster.

Carlisle House was finally sold by auction five years later.
Nothing more was heard of its former owner until May 1792, when a letter appeared in
The Times
informing the public that she had remarried and was now the widow of a certain Mr Frederick Smith. A few years later Mrs Smith briefly took over The Grove, an old country villa in the village of Knightsbridge, near Hyde Park, which had extensive gardens and came with a flock of goats and asses. Determined to get back into the business she loved, Teresa tended the beasts, sold their milk, and, with the small profit she made, filled the house with books and musical instruments in order to open it to the public as a venue for female archery and country breakfasts. This ambitious plan collapsed when she fell into debt yet again. Injured by the bailiffs who came to arrest her, she was hauled off to prison, bleeding at the breast.

This was one blow Teresa would never recover from. ‘Reduced to abject misery and want' and in agony from breast cancer, she lay dying in a series of terrible prison cells, first in the notoriously frightening Newgate Prison and later in the Fleet. Here she received a rare condescending visit from her daughter. Devoutly religious as Sophia was, she offered Teresa no words of comfort. On the contrary, she told her that she believed she was not her daughter, or Casanova's, but the illegitimate child of Prince Charles of Lorraine and ‘a lady of quality'. When she had got this off her chest, Sophia left the gaol, never to return there. She sent her mother a meagre weekly income, but it was not enough to pay even for a proper bed or good food. When Teresa died on 19 August 1797 Sophia refused to pay for the funeral, priggishly informing the authorities that a pauper's burial was ‘good enough for a woman who had led such an improper life'.

Haughty, bitter and cruel towards her mother, to the outside world Sophia was self-effacing and concerned only with doing good. Although her childhood had scarred her indelibly, she came to believe that ‘every affliction has been a blessing in the end … Were my life to (start) over again there is not one single circumstance or event however bitter it has been that I would wish not to have occurred.' That she was in many ways the opposite of both
her parents – religious, upright and chaste – was certainly no accident, and to the end of her life she was haunted by the fear of following in her mother's profligate footsteps. As she wrote in her will, ‘It will be my endeavour as long as life is spared not to owe any money.'
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Sophia died suddenly on 25 June 1823 at the Mayfair home of the Dowager Countess Sidney, three days after presenting her latest report on the Adult Orphan Institution to its benefactors. ‘Most sincerely do I lament the loss of that excellent good Mrs Williams,' Princess Augusta wrote to her friend Lady Harcourt a fortnight later. ‘Her worth was great. She was humble and yet persevering in doing good.'
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Not everyone thought so well of her: in the eyes of writer John Taylor, who had known Sophia in her youth, she was ‘an artful hypocrite … totally devoid of sensibility' who, while pretending to care for others, had looked out only for herself.
²²

She left few possessions – some books, a watch chain, a writing desk given to her by Queen Charlotte, an ink stand, a turquoise ring, a seal with a sphinx on it, and a silver teapot which she bequeathed to her faithful servant Catherine Troy. Her real legacy was the Adult Orphan Institution, the first academic school for the female sex in England, still going strong in the twenty-first century as the Princess Helena College, an independent school for girls in Hertfordshire. A huge portrait of its founder, donated by Princess Augusta, still hangs in the hall. Dressed in a white Regency-style frock and a turban-like head-dress, Sophia is playing the harp in a pair of open-toed sandals. In her face one can just make out the shadow of her father's features: the dark hair, the arched eyebrows, the long nose and the slightly receding chin. However, there is nothing of her father's or mother's visceral
joie de vivre
in her pose or her expression. As she stares up at the single shaft of sunlight breaking through the stormy sky above her, Casanova's daughter looks resigned to her fate, careworn, lonely, and more than a little sad.

SHADES OF NIGHT are closing in around Casanova. A blanket of darkness has settled around him in his bedroom in Dux Castle, not unlike the thick fog that he remembers once hung over Venice. From time to time the shape of a face looms up at him through the mist, the features hazy and unclear even at close quarters. He is aware of people tiptoeing across the creaking parquet floor, but he cannot see them. They mutter about him as if he is already dead and shuffle around his bed as if not to disturb him. But Casanova, who faces an eternity of peace, has grown frightened of silence, an absence of sound into which one could so easily slip away. He wants to be disturbed, to hear the off-key scratchy sound of violins playing outside the cafés in the Piazza San Marco, or the merry laughter of a crowd of gossiping women, or even Magda the maid's guttural voice, for at least that would be a sign that he is still alive. But Casanova cannot tell anyone this. He for whom words were formerly weapons of seduction and manipulation, the vehicles with which he manoeuvred himself so easily in and out of the finest salons in the world, is now too feeble even to ask for a chamber pot when he needs one. It is all he can do to keep breathing.