After that the prince showed me a small manuscript, which has been published since, and which he had then just finished. Its subject was the Venetian Casanova. When that famous adventurer was tired of hawking about Europe his projects, his magic secrets, and his striking personality; when, in fact, he felt old age creeping over him and poverty staring him in the face, he applied to the Prince de Ligne. Almost as a matter of course, the latter made him welcome, bestirred himself on his behalf, and got him the post of librarian to his nephew, the Prince de Wallstein. Casanova’s curiously chequered career appealed to the imagination of the old marshal. He also had had many adventures during his existence. He liked the ready and biting wit of the Venetian, his profound and varied learning, and his philosophically-turned and ever fresh comments.
‘Yes,’ said the prince, ‘Casanova was the most diverting individual I have ever met with. It was he who said that a woman is never older than her lover fancies her to be. His inexhaustible recollections, his imagination, which was as vivid as it had been at twenty, his enthusiasm with regard to myself, won my heart. He often read his memoirs to me. They partake of the nature of those of a knight-errant and of the “Wandering Jew”; unfortunately they’ll never see the light.’[58]
His writing-table was littered with verses, the greater part unfinished.
‘You are looking at those sketches,’ he said. ‘It is because I am unable to work like the majority of poets. There are two dictionaries at their disposal, the dictionary of the heart and the rhyming dictionary. When there is no longer anything in the first, or when they can no longer read it, they open the second. When my heart no longer dictates, I leave off writing.’
We spent a little more time in examining several charming portraits of women with whom he had been in love, and a rich collection of letters written by the sovereigns and the most illustrious personages of Europe during half a century.
The hour for returning struck, and we left the delightful retreat which, one day, will become historical. But amidst those brilliant reminiscences of the Vienna Congress, my grateful memory could not omit that day wholly passed in familiar conversation with the Prince de Ligne.
CHAPTER VII
A Court Function—The Empress of Austria—The Troubadours—Amateur Theatricals—The Empress of Russia—The Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg—Tableaux-Vivants—Queen Hortense’s Songs—The Moustaches of the Comte de Wurbna—Songs in Action—The Orphan of the Prisons—Diplomacy and Dancing—A Ball and a Supper at Court.