EXCURSUS to ADVENTURES WITH HEDVIGE AND HELÈNE AT GENEVA.
Jacques Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt, Knight of the Golden Spur, and one of the most remarkable figures in history and letters, was born on April 2nd, 1725. To-day, nearly two hundred years afterwards, his Memoirs are more vivid and readable than anything penned by our contemporary writers.
“He who opens these wonderful pages,” says the English translator in his preface, “is as one who sits in a theatre and looks across the gloom, not on a stage-play, but on another and a vanished world. The curtain draws up, and suddenly a hundred and fifty years are rolled away, and in bright light stands out before us the whole life of the past; the gay dresses, the polished wit, the careless morals, and all the revel and dancing of those merry years before the mighty deluge of the Revolution.
“The palaces and marble stairs of old Venice are no longer desolate, but thronged with scarlet-robed senators, prisoners with the doom of the Ten upon their heads cross the Bridge of Sighs, at dead of night the nun slips out of the convent gate to the dark canal where a gondola is waiting, we assist at the parties fines of cardinals, and we see the bank made at faro.
“Venice gives place to the assembly rooms of Mrs. Cornely and the fast taverns of the London of 1760; we pass from Versailles to the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg in the days of Catherine, from the policy of the Great Frederick to the lewd mirth of strolling-players, and the presence-chamber of the Vatican is succeeded by an intrigue in a garret.
“It is indeed a new experience to read this history of a man who, refraining from nothing, has concealed nothing; of one who stood in the courts of Louis the Magnificent for Madame de Pompadour and the nobles of the ancien régime, and had an affair with an adventuress of Denmark Street, Soho; who was bound over to keep the peace by Fielding, and knew Cagliostro.
“The friend of popes and kings and noblemen, and of all the male and female ruffians and vagabonds of Europe, abbé, soldier, charlatan, gamester, financier, diplomatist, viveur, philosopher, virtuoso, ‘chemist, fiddler, and buffoon’, each of these, and all of these, was Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt, Knight of the Golden Spur.”
The English translation of Casanova’s Memoirs, from which the foregoing is taken, is a valuable work. To-day the twelve volume set, of which 1,000 copies were privately printed in 1894, commands anything from thirty to forty-five pounds in the sale-room or book-seller’s shop. We have been told that the printer of this English version was prosecuted, and all copies of the work confiscated by the police, who were ordered to burn them. Further, we are told that the copies we buy and read to-day are the copies burned by the police.
If this be so, all honour to the police, for the destruction of any scholarly rendering of these Memoirs can only be described as an act of vandalism. Because Casanova is not for the multitude, does it follow he is not for the few? Translated into the English tongue, Casanova’s Memoirs must be “privately printed” by reason of his plain speech in the matter of amorous intrigue, yet, were every erotic word and scene expunged, the work would still be of fascinating interest and inestimable value to the student of history. There exists a bowdlerised and abridged edition of these Memoirs; we have never seen, and we never wish to see, this work. A study of life, without a leavening of human nature, is worse than useless.