The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  Why did I gamble when I felt the losses so keenly? What made me gamble was avarice. I loved to spend, and my heart bled when I could not do it with money won at cards.

  And he was good. Over the period covered by his memoirs, his winnings came to more than $11.7 million in modern terms, with his losses running at less than a million. The low boredom threshold he exhibited when trying to hold down a job never affected him at the card table. One marathon session of piquet lasted for forty-two hours without a break.

  But gambling, however addictive he found it, was always a means to an end—and the end, with Casanova, was always a woman. “Love is three quarters curiosity,” he wrote—and his was insatiable: any woman, under any circumstance, was fair game. Tall and skinny with a beaked nose, bulbous eyes, and heavy eyebrows, he was not classically handsome, but it was his unshakable conviction that he—or indeed any man—could seduce any woman if she felt herself the sole object of his undivided attention. “I don’t conquer, I submit,” he explained. Women trusted him and he was an appreciative and considerate lover. He liked to give them pleasure and even practiced safe sex, using a variety of condoms made from sheeps’ intestines and linen or—if all else failed—half a lemon inserted as a kind of improvised diaphragm. His list of conquests is surprisingly modest given his reputation: He slept with perhaps no more than 140 women (a total trounced by Byron, when he lived in Venice, in just two years). On the other hand, it was enough to give him gonorrhea at least eleven times, and when he died in 1798, it was from a bladder complaint probably caused by repeated venereal infections.

  The detail and humor of Casanova’s memoirs make for a compelling read. He relates that he lost his virginity to two sisters and that their lovemaking was punctuated by an impromptu dinner of bread and cheese. Falling for a castrato singer called Bellino, and convinced she was a woman in disguise, he groped her crotch, only to find an unmistakable bulge. Indefatigable as ever, he reasoned this must be a “monstrous clitoris,” and his persistence paid off. “Bellino” was indeed a woman called Teresa, who wore a false phallus to get around the papal ban on women singing in church choirs. Needless to say, she became his mistress. In Venice, he enjoyed a ménage à trois with the French ambassador and a nun. He nearly seduced a beautiful young woman who turned out to be his own daughter by a former lover. A few years later, they met again and this time he deliberately seduced her and slept with her and her mother simultaneously. Untroubled by shame, he also bedded his niece, encouraged a twelve-year-old novice nun to fellate him through a grill, and seduced all five daughters from one family in exchange for rescuing their parents from ruin. But he didn’t get it all his own way. In London a courtesan called Marianne Charpillon refused to go to bed with him and then stole all his money. He was so upset by this that he decided to kill himself by jumping into the Thames, and only stopped when a friend persuaded him to go to a pub and get drunk instead. To get revenge, he trained a parrot to recite: “Miss Charpillon is more of a whore than her mother.” This so enraged Miss Charpillon that she took legal advice on whether she could sue a parrot for libel.

  Casanova had better luck with the Marquise d’Urfé, one of the richest women in Paris, who was impressed by his deep knowledge of the Kabbalah. He convinced her that he could help her be reincarnated and that part of the necessary ritual involved his having sex with her. The Marquise was so physically repulsive he had to fake two of his three orgasms. This wasn’t his usual problem—he was afflicted by premature ejaculation through most of his life—although he claimed he could make love at least six times a night with the help of a special concoction of chocolate and egg white. He also fixed the oyster’s reputation as an aphrodisiac, sometimes eating fifty for breakfast, declaring that the best sauce for an oyster was his lover’s saliva. A special treat was eating live bivalves off a girlfriend’s breasts.

  In 1755 Casanova’s sexual intrigues, combined with his dabbling in banned Masonic rites and magic, earned him a five-year sentence in Venice’s Piombi prison. He stuck it out for nine months before escaping by breaking through the roof of his cell and walking out of the main gates when they were opened the next morning. Forced to seek exile in France, he came up with his greatest and most lucrative financial scam—inventing the French national lottery. Now in his midthirties, he enjoyed a brief spate of wealth and fame, styling himself the Chevalier de Seingalt (an entirely bogus title). He met—and was disappointed by—Voltaire, arguing with him over religion; he discussed powered flight with Benjamin Franklin and taxation policy with Frederick the Great; and made friends with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s favorite librettist. (It seems likely that Da Ponte’s masterpiece, Don Giovanni, was based at least in some part on Casanova, who may even have contributed to the writing himself.)

  Casanova’s own literary ambitions never quite came together until the very end of his life. He wrote forty-two books, including a history of Venetian government, a history of Poland, and a much-admired translation of Homer’s Iliad into modern Italian. He even produced a five-volume science-fiction novel, Isocameron, which predicted the motor car, the airplane, television, and many other inventions. His plays were performed across Europe but he was never in one place long enough to capitalize on his reputation. Fame, money, and love all had a way of deserting him. He never came close to getting married, although he did, in his late twenties, fall heavily for a young Frenchwoman called Henriette:

  They who believe that a woman is incapable of making a man equally happy all the twenty-four hours of the day have never known an Henriette. The joy which flooded my soul was far greater when I conversed with her during the day than when I held her in my arms at night.

  Henriette was smart and cultured as well as beautiful, and she seemed to sense Casanova was in the grip of a pathology he couldn’t control. She turned the tables on him, and stole away in the night, having scratched a message on his bedroom window with her diamond ring. It said, “You will forget Henriette, too.” She also slipped 500 gold louis into his jacket pocket (worth about $45,000 today): the perfect “thanks, but no thanks” gesture. She had his number: clever, charming, and expensive to run. Casanova was bereft and cheered himself up the only way he knew how: more travel, more women, and more gambling. It would be easy to argue that he squandered his talents and that but for his addiction to sex, he might have ended up, in some way, as one of the great men of his day. Surveying the wreckage at the end of his life, he fantasized about the different course he might have taken:

  If I had married a woman intelligent enough to guide me, to rule me without my feeling that I was ruled, I should have taken good care of my money, I should have had children, and I should not be, as now I am, alone in the world and possessing nothing.

  Anyone familiar with his effervescent memoirs will see this as self-pitying, self-indulgent humbug: Casanova got the life he wanted and the fate he deserved. As he sat in the castle at Dux in Bohemia, hunched over his manuscript in a drafty library, scribbling away for thirteen hours a day, he had come full circle. The nine-year-old boy who had watched his father die and kissed his beautiful mother good-bye was alone once more.

  The chief business of my life has always been to indulge my senses; I never knew anything of greater importance. I felt myself born for the fair sex, and I have been loved by it as often and as much as I could.

  Sex may not have made him happy, but it made him laugh and it made him famous, more famous than almost anyone else of his era.

  In 1765 Casanova was granted an audience with Catherine the Great (1729–96). Both were in their prime: He was forty, she thirty-six. Here were two of the most famous sexual appetites of all time engaged in an animated discussion. What did they talk about? Bringing the Russian calendar into line with the rest of Europe is what. They clearly got on. He said of her that she “thoroughly understood the art of making herself loved. She was not beautiful, but yet she was sure of pleasing by her geniality and her wit.” She said of him that he was “not precisely handsome” but
agreed to see him again and was obviously charmed. Their encounter ended with Casanova’s failure to persuade her either to reform the calendar or to introduce his lottery scheme. He praised her tact and judgment but ended with an arch (and somewhat ironic) aside to the reader, saying that, for all her greatness, “the moralist will always consider her, and rightly, as one of the most notable of dissolute women.”

  Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, wasn’t Russian, wasn’t called Catherine, and hated being referred to as “the Great.” She was a Prussian aristocrat, born Sophie Frederica Auguste, Princess von Anhalt-Zerbst.

  Almost three centuries after her death her name is still synonymous with wanton lust. Her notoriety is based on having had “legions” of lovers, combined with the entirely apocryphal story that she died while attempting to mate with a horse. In fact, her death was one of the least remarkable things to happen to her: She collapsed from a stroke while on the lavatory and died some hours afterward in bed. What she left behind her was a powerful, modernized Russian empire that made other European states nervous. Most of the rumors concerning her death were probably spread by her enemies, of which the post-Revolutionary French were the most prominent. Tales of sexual excess were the standard way of disparaging a powerful woman: The rumors about Queen Marie Antoinette’s sex life were even worse.

  To get to the truth about Catherine we need to start with her very odd and unsatisfactory marriage to her cousin, the Grand Duke Peter of Holstein-Gottorp (1728–62), heir to the Russian throne. Badly disfigured by smallpox and physically quite weak, Peter preferred playing soldiers to managing affairs of state. His absorption in these games was total and he would change uniform up to twenty times a day while having mock battles with his valets, guards, and a selection of companion dwarfs. Catherine was expected to join in and often had to stand on guard as a sentry in the doorway between their two rooms when she was his fiancée. Peter had several other lovers, one of whom Catherine described as being as “discreet as a cannonball.” After their wedding in 1745 they moved into the Oranienbaum Palace on the Gulf of Finland, near St. Petersburg. Catherine realized the marriage was doomed from the start, writing in her journal that he was “unlovable” and telling herself “if you love him you will be the most wretched creature on earth.” Fortunately, the marriage wasn’t consummated for several years, and by the time it was, Catherine had already started on her own sequence of dashing lovers, beginning with a handsome chamberlain called Sergei Saltyov and a suave Polish nobleman, Stanislaw Poniatowski, whom she visited disguised as a man (Catherine later made him king of Poland). She insisted that her first son, Paul, was the result of her affair with Saltyov, though he was both physically and emotionally very like the Grand Duke Peter, a weak-willed bully who shared the older man’s love of dressing up. In an effort to stop his becoming an effeminate laughingstock like her husband, Catherine arranged for a young widow to instruct him in the art of love when he was fourteen.

  In 1762, on the death of his mother, Grand Duke Peter became Emperor Peter III. He was a German, born in Kiel, and he hated Russians. At his mother’s funeral he disgraced himself by deliberately walking slowly so that the cortège drew ahead and then sprinting after it so that the elderly courtiers were left gasping for breath. Six months later, a group of Russian nobleman deposed him in a coup d’état, provoked by both his incompetence and his support for Prussia’s land claims in Poland. The feeble-minded Peter seemed quite happy to retire to his country palace with his mistress, and despite her own lack of Russian blood, Catherine was proclaimed Catherine II, Empress of All the Russias. She’d been careful not to implicate herself directly in the coup but she ordered that the victorious army be given free drinks in St. Petersburg, paying the bill herself. It came to more than 100,000 rubles (around $30 million today). Three days later, a young officer called Alexei Orlov assassinated Grand Duke Peter.

  Orlov was the third of four brothers, the second of whom, Grigory, had been Catherine’s paramour since 1759 and was one of the leaders of the military coup. Historians generally exonerate Catherine from her husband’s murder, but she rewarded all four Orlovs by creating them counts, and Grigory got a palace in St. Petersburg as well. He had obvious attractions as a lover. He was a powerfully built guardsman who had been wounded several times on the battlefield and enjoyed bear hunting, cockfighting, and boxing. Catherine almost married him, but though they stayed friends, she decided he wasn’t up to the politics and she’d have more freedom as the dowager empress. In the meantime, she continued to enjoy the services of younger, physically impressive men. Perhaps the most important of these was General Grigori Potemkin, who remained a confidant and ally even after their love affair was over. They wrote to each other several times a day even when they were in the same building—she called him her “lion of the jungle,” “golden tiger,” “wolf,” and her “Cossack.” He called her “Sovereign Lady,” and occasionally “Little Mother” (Matrushka). After their affair, it was rumored that he acted as her bedroom adviser, choosing young men she would find suitably attractive and interesting. Catherine was sexually active until the end of her life: One of her last lovers was Prince Platon Zubov. He was only twenty-two, more than forty years her junior. She was devoted to him, referring to him as her “baby,” and telling everyone he was “the greatest genius Russia has ever known.” Under her patronage, he amassed great wealth and eventually succeeded Potemkin as governor general of New Russia, the newly conquered lands in what is now southern Ukraine.

  What Zubov, Potemkin, and many of Catherine’s other partners shared was their capacity to engage her intellectually. She liked her boys beefy, but wit was much more important. Arriving in St. Petersburg as a teenager, she had been horrified by the ignorance and lack of education she found in royal circles: Almost half the courtiers were illiterate. In 1774 she was thrilled when the French philosopher Denis Diderot visited the city, feeding her mind with long discussions about science, art, and politics. He was equally delighted, describing her as having “the soul of Caesar with all the seductions of Cleopatra.”

  Catherine’s active sex life was just one facet of her passionate and energetic personality. She could stay awake for twenty-four hours, working late into the night on state papers; she could ride a horse as well as most men; and she was both highly intelligent and creative, writing plays and corresponding with the great philosophers of the age of Enlightenment, such as Voltaire and d’Alembert, and incorporating their ideas into her Nakaz, or “Instruction” of 1767. Designed as a template for an enlightened monarchy, it anticipated many of the themes of the American constitution by twenty years. All men were equal before the law and the death penalty and torture were discouraged.

  The same progressive attitude and openness to new ideas informed her personal life. As a strong, intelligent woman she was far ahead of her time in the ultraconservative backwater of Russian politics. In that chauvinistic world, a mere woman could not succeed on merit alone. Her enemies would destroy her reputation in any way they could, even if it meant claiming that she was so debauched that no man could fully satisfy her inhuman appetites.

  If Catherine the Great sought out sex because she enjoyed it, Cora Pearl (1835–86) turned her sexual expertise into a business. One of the great Parisian courtesans of the 1860s (known collectively as les Grandes Horizontales), she called her succession of male friends “a golden chain.” They weren’t merely wealthy, they were prominent members of high society: Prince Wilhelm, heir to the Dutch throne; Prince Achille Murat, grandson of the king of Naples; the Duke of Rivoli; the Duke of Morny, half brother of the emperor Napoleon III; and the emperor’s cousin “Plon-Plon,” better known as Prince Napoleon. Showered with gifts from these wealthy lovers, Cora was able to buy two houses in Paris, keep sixty horses, and amass a collection of jewelry worth more than a million francs.

  This darling of the French nobility was actually English, formerly Eliza Crouch of Plymouth. Daughter of the cellist and conductor Frederick Nicholls
Crouch and Lydia Pearson, singer, when Eliza was ten her father deserted the family and emigrated to the United States, where he reputedly fathered another twenty offspring. Eliza never saw him again. Lydia remarried and moved to Guernsey, and Eliza was sent to a convent school in Boulogne, afterward returning to London to live with her grandmother. She was just nineteen when a man in the street accosted her, gave her gin, and took advantage of her. Too ashamed to go home, and completely distrustful of men, she began to earn her living as a prostitute. She befriended Robert Bignel, owner of the Argyle Dancing Rooms, where she plied her trade. He took her to France on holiday as his mistress, but she refused to return to England, throwing her passport on the fire so that he had no choice but to leave her behind. Adopting the name Cora Pearl (because she liked the sound of it), she set about acquiring a circle of wealthy admirers. There was no better place for that than Paris during the Second Empire. The city was the center of the civilized world, a nonstop succession of balls and parties where, as Alexandre Dumas fils described it, “Women were luxuries for public consumption like hounds, horses and carriages.”