Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  Let me give one example out of a hundred, that of the episode which you will find at the beginning of the second volume, when Casanova is posting to Naples on important business. At the inn where he has halted for a brief space, he catches sight of a pretty woman in a neighboring room, in a stranger’s bed (that of a Hungarian captain). No, what makes the matter more absurd is that he does not yet know whether she is pretty or not, for she is hidden under the bedclothes. He has merely heard laughter, a young woman’s laughter, and thereupon his nostrils quiver. He knows nothing about her, whether she is attractive or the reverse, likely to be compliant or not, whether she is a possible conquest at all. Nevertheless he casts aside all his other plans, sends his horses back to the stable, and remains in Parma, merely because this off-chance of a love adventure has turned his head.

  Thus does Casanova act after his kind anywhere and everywhere. By day or by night, in the morning or in the evening, he will commit any folly in the hope of spending an hour with an unknown woman. Where he covets, he grudges no price; where he wishes to conquer, he is heedless of no resistance. Wishing to see a woman once more, a German burgomaster’s lady of whom he does not even know whether she can make him happy, he forces his way, in Cologne, into a company where he has not been invited, where he knows himself to be unwelcome, and has to accept a rating from the host and to endure the derision of the other guests. But what does the rutting stallion care for the blows of the whip that are rained on him? Casanova will cheerfully spend the whole night in a damp cellar, will endure cold and hunger and the company of rats uncomplainingly, for the chance that when dawn comes he will be rewarded by an hour of not over-comfortable amorous dalliance. He will, ever and again, risk sword thrusts, pistol shots, invectives, extortions, disease, humiliations — and for what? Not, as would be comprehensible enough, for an Anadyomene, for the pearl of womanhood, infinitely worthy of a man’s love. He will risk all these things for Mistress Everywoman, for Mistress Anybody, simply because she is a woman, because she is a member of the opposite, the coveted, sex. Every pimp, every souteneur, can plunder this famous seducer; every complaisant husband or easygoing brother can involve him in the most discreditable affairs — provided his senses are stimulated. And when are they not stimulated? When is Casanova’s erotic thirst fully quenched? Semper novarum rerum cupidus, always eager for some new thing, always questing after new prey, his lusts are incessantly aquiver for the unknown. A town without a love adventure is no town for him; the world without women is not a world. Just as his lungs need air, and his muscles need alternation of movement and repose, so does this virile body of his need the recurrent tensions and discharges of amorous embraces. Not for a month, not for a week, scarcely even for a day, can he feel at ease without women. In Casanova’s vernacular, abstinence means, very simply, dullness and boredom.

  Since he has so gargantuan an appetite, and since he satisfies it so persistently, we can hardly be surprised to find that the quality of his feminine provision is not always of the best. So champion a sensualist cannot afford to be fastidious; he cannot be an epicure, and must be content with the role of glutton. Consequently, it is no particular recommendation to a woman that she has been one of Casanova’s innumerable mistresses. She need not have been a Helen of Troy, nor yet a chaste virgin, nor yet remarkably witty or well-bred or attractive, in order to enjoy the privilege of this gentleman’s embraces. Enough for him, generally speaking, that she should be woman, vagina, his polar opposite in matters of sex, formed by nature to enable him to discharge his libido. Beauty, shrewdness, tenderness — no doubt these are agreeable accessories, but altogether subsidiary to the main point, sheer femininity; femininity, incorporated in a perpetually new shape, is all that Casanova desires.

  You must rid yourself of any romanticist or aesthetic notions concerning this extensive Parc aux Cerfs. Casanova’s collection, like that of any professional amorist (inevitably undiscriminating), is of unequal quality, and is anything but a gallery of beauty. You will certainly find there some sweet and tender girls, such as might have been painted by Casanova’s fellow countrymen Guido Reni and Raphael; others might have been limned by Rubens, or sketched by Boucher upon silk fans: but side by side with these you will find English streetwalkers whose hard and impudent faces only the pencil of a Hogarth could have drawn; hideous old witches who might have graced the canvases of Goya; poxy drabs in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec; rough peasant-women and servant-girls such as Breughel might have painted — a medley of beauty and foulness, wit and vulgarity, a chance assembly at a fair, thrown together haphazard without assortment or choice.

  For when his passions run away with him, this pan-erotist has coarse nerves, and his fancy wanders into strange and devious paths. One who is ever at the mercy of his amorous impulses knows no preferences. He pounces on the first comer; fishes in all waters, be they clean or dirty, be they fenced or unfenced. This boundless and reckless eroticism knows nothing of the restrictions imposed by morality or good taste, by station or by age; it knows nothing of above or below, of too early or too late. Many of the objects of Casanova’s passion are so young that in our stricter times his indulgence would certainly have brought down on him the heavy hand of the law; and others are women well advanced in years, including that septuagenarian ruin, the Marchioness of Urfé — assuredly the most preposterous love affair which ever a man has shamelessly recorded for the information of posterity. This most unclassical Walpurgisnacht ranges through all countries and all classes. Delicate girls, in the shuddering thrill of their first shame; distinguished ladies wearing priceless lace and resplendent with jewels; the scum of brothels; randy old women — all join hands in this witches’ dance. The niece replaces the aunt, the daughter the mother, in the still-warm bed; procuresses give Casanova their own daughters, and husbands make it easy for him to possess their wives; soldiers’ wenches and ladies of rank and station enjoy the pleasure of his embraces on the same night. You must not think it possible to depict the love adventures of Casanova after the graceful manner of eighteenth-century pastoral etchings. You must, for once, have the courage to contemplate undiscriminating eroticism in all its crude contradictions, in its unmistakable realism, as the pandemonium of masculine sensuality.

  Such a lust as Casanova’s has no exceptions. It is lured equally by the abstruse and by the everyday; there is no anomaly which does not inflame it, nor any absurdity which can chill it. Lousy beds, dirty linen, offensive odors, comradeship with pimps, the presence of spectators, extortion, the diseases that attend indiscriminate venery, are inconsiderable trifles for this divine bull who, like the second Jupiter, wishes to embrace Europa, to clasp the whole world of woman in his arms, to sate his almost maniacal lust. But in one respect, his passions are scrupulously masculine. Stormy as is the raging torrent of his blood, it never flows outside the natural channel. Casanova’s impulses are exclusively directed towards members of the other sex. He loathes contact with a castrato, and angrily whips a Ganymede out of his path. Despite all his vagaries, he remains constant to the world of women. But within this world his ardor knows no limits.

  That is what gives Casanova his unprecedented power over women, that is what makes him irresistible — the Pan-like power of his rushing impetus, the elemental force of his sexual appetite. The hidden passion in women’s own blood responds to this fierce passion of the male animal, to the tremendous ardor of the opposite sex. They let him take possession of them because he is fully possessed by them; they fall to him because he has fallen to them — and not so much to the one woman in the case, as to the plurality of women, to the universal femininity in the particular woman of the moment, to the opposite pole of his own sex. Intuitively they feel that here at length they have encountered one to whom nothing is more important than woman. He is not like nearly all other men, wearied by affairs and duties; now listless and husbandly, now eager and ardent; his wooing no more than a secondary and occasional matter. He assails them with the torrential might of his nature;
he does not spare, he spends; he does not hesitate, does not pick and choose. In very truth, he gives himself to the uttermost, to the last drop of lust in his body, to the last ducat in his purse; always and unhesitatingly he is ready to sacrifice everything else to a woman because she is a woman, and at the moment can quench his thirst for woman.

  To Casanova, the first and last word of enjoyment, and all enjoyment that lies between, is to see women happy, amazed with delight, rapturous, laughing, carried out of themselves. As long as he has money left, he lavishes presents on the woman of his momentary choice, flatters her vanity with luxurious trifles, loves to deck her out splendidly, loves to wrap her in costly laces before he unclothes her that he may enjoy her nakedness, loves to surprise her with gifts more expensive than she has ever dreamed of, loves to overwhelm her with the tokens of his extravagant passion. He is like one of the gods of Hellas, a bounteous Zeus, showering on his beloved the golden rain of his ardent passion. In this, too, he resembles Zeus, that thereafter he speedily vanishes into the clouds. “I have loved women madly, but I have always preferred freedom even to them.” This increases his attraction, for the stormy phenomena of his appearance and disappearance enshrine him in their memory as something unwonted, which has brought them rapturous delight, so that association with him is never Staled by habit.

  Every one of these women feels that Casanova would be impossible as a husband, as a faithful Céladon; but as a lover, as a god of a passing night, they will never forget him. Though he forsakes them one and all, none of them would have had him different from what he was. Casanova, therefore, need only be himself, faithful to the unfaithfulness of his passion, and he will win every woman. A man such as this has no need to wear false colors, to pretend to be other than he is; he need not devise lyrical arts of seduction. Casanova need merely let his frank passion run its course, and this does the wooing for him. It is vain, therefore, for timid youths to devour the sixteen volumes of his Ars Amandi, in the hope of learning the master’s secret. The craft of seduction can be no more learned from books than the writing of poetry. There is nothing to be learned from Casanova; there is no peculiar Casanova-trick, no Casanova-technique of conquest and taming. His only secret is the straightforwardness of his desire, the elemental onslaught of his passionate nature.

  I said just now “straightforward,” but I might just as well have said “upright” or “honest” — astonishing words to apply to Casanova. No matter; though at the gaming table he has no scruple about using marked cards, and though in any other field than love he is the most accomplished of cheats, where love is concerned we must admit that he shows a straightforward honesty of his own kind. Casanova’s relationship to women is truly honorable, because purely passionate, purely sensual. It may seem deplorable, but it is true that insincerity in love makes its first appearance with the intermingling of higher feelings. The body, stupid worthy fellow that he is, does not lie; he never intensifies his appetites beyond the naturally attainable. Not until intellect and sentiment come to play their part in the game, not until their soaring pinions are at work, does passion become exaggerated, and therefore false, introducing fancied eternities into our earthly relations. It is easy, therefore, for Casanova, who never prates of transcending the realm of the bodily, to keep his promises; for, supplied from the well-stored magazine of his sensuality, he exchanges pleasure for pleasure, the bodily for the bodily, and never runs into debt in the spiritual sphere.

  That is why the women who have passed the night with Casanova do not feel that they have been cheated of platonic expectations. For the very reason that he has never demanded from them any other raptures than the orgasms of the flesh, for the very reason that he has never made any pretense of an eternity of sentiment, there will be no subsequent phase of disillusionment. You have every right, if you wish, to describe such eroticism as love of the baser sort, as purely sexual, unspiritual, and animal; but you must not dispute its straightforwardness, its honesty. Surely this braggart with his frank desire for possession, deals more honestly, deals better, with women than do the romanticist enthusiasts, the “great lovers,” like (to give one example) the sensual-supersensual wooer Faust, who, in his extravagance, swears by sun and moon and stars, calls God and the universe to witness the nobility of his feelings for Gretchen, in order (as Mephistopheles has long foreseen) to end these high flights in a thoroughly Casanovese fashion, and, in the most earthly manner possible, to rob the poor fourteen-year-old girl of the treasure of her virginity. The path of a Goethe or a Byron is strewn with feminine wreckage. Men of a higher, a more cosmic nature, lift their companions to such sublime levels that the poor women, while unable to adapt themselves permanently to this stellar atmosphere, are unable, thereafter, to readapt themselves satisfactorily to their earthly habitat. Casanova’s flash of earthly passion, on the other hand, does very little harm to their souls. He is not responsible for any shipwrecks, for any outbreaks of despair. He has made a great many women happy, but has made no women hysterical. From the episode of sensual adventure, they return undamaged to everyday life, to their husbands, or to other lovers, as the case may be. Not one of them commits suicide, or falls into a decline. Their internal equilibrium has never been disturbed, for Casanova’s unambiguous and radically healthy passion has never touched the mainspring of their destiny. He has blown across them like a tropical hurricane, and after he has passed they will bloom in a more ardent sensuality. He has made them glow without singeing them; has conquered them without destroying them; has seduced them without corrupting them. Precisely because his erotic assault has been confined to the resistant tissues of the epidermis, and has never reached the vulnerable depths of the soul, his conquests never lead to catastrophes. Consequently, there is nothing demonic about Casanova as a lover; he never brings tragedy into a woman’s life. In the drama of love, the world’s stage knows no more brilliant an episodist than he, but he is nothing more than an episodist.

  Recognizing the utter lack of spirituality in Casanova’s love adventures, we cannot fail to ask ourselves whether this libido which is purely physical, which is inflamed by the mere rustling of a woman’s petticoat, is entitled to the name of love. Certainly not in a sense which would put Casanova, homo eroticus vel eroticissimus, in the same category with Werther or Saint-Prieux, the immortal lovers. The sense of spiritual exuberance aroused by the sight of the beloved, a feeling akin to piety, which makes the lover regard his beloved as of one nature with the universe and with God, this ecstatic expansion of the soul under the influence of Eros, remains unknown to Casanova from the first day to the last. Nothing that he has ever written, no letter, no verses, betrays the existence in him of any amatory sentiments beyond those directly related to physical possession; and it is doubtful whether we can ascribe to him the faculty of true passion. For this “amour passion,” as Stendhal terms it, is, by its invariable uniqueness, incompatible with any such diurnal ordinariness; it is necessarily of rare occurrence, the outcome of a prolonged storing of the sensibilities, which are at length, like a lightning flash, discharged on the beloved object. There is no such thrift about Casanova. He squanders his ardors too often, relieves his tensions too frequently, to be capable of such high intensities of discharge. His passion, flowing away at the purely erotic level, knows nothing of the ecstasy of uniqueness. We need have no anxiety, therefore, when he seems reduced to despair because Henriette or the beautiful Portuguese lady has left him. We know that he will not blow out his brains; nor are we surprised to find him, a day or two later, amusing himself in the first convenient brothel. If the nun C. C. is unable to come over from Murano, and the lay-sister M. M. arrives in her place, Casanova is speedily consoled. After all, one woman is as good as another! It soon becomes plain to us that, as an arch-erotist, Casanova was never really in love with any one of the innumerable women he possessed. He was in love with the plurality, with the incessant variations, with the multiplicity of love adventures.

  He himself made a dangerous admis
sion when he said: “Already I realized obscurely that love is nothing beyond a more or less lively curiosity.” That is all. He is curious. He wants to repeat his experiences again and again, and always with a different woman. It is not the individual that stimulates him, but the variation, the new and ever new combination upon Eros’s inexhaustible chessboard. His taking and leaving is as simple and natural a function as inspiration and expiration. That is why Casanova, as an artist, was never able to make any one of his thousand women a really lifelike figure to us. His descriptions of them arouse a suspicion that he never troubled to look his mistress lovingly in the face, but was content to regard her in “certo punto.” What rouses him, what “inflames” him, is always the same. A true southerner, he is interested in the grossly sensual, in “country matters,” in a woman’s most obviously sexual characteristics. Again and again, till we grow weary of the iteration, he describes “alabaster breasts,” “divine hemispheres,” “the figure of a Juno”; and again and again he refers to the chance disclosure of “more intimate charms”; all the things that a lad in his salad days gets excited about in a servant wench. Thus, of the countless Henriettes, Irenes, Babettes, Mariuccias, Ermelines, Marcolinas, Ignazias, Lucies, Esthers, Saras, and Claras (one might almost write every name that has been given to a woman), little remains beyond a flesh-colored jelly of voluptuous feminine bodies, a bacchantic medley of figures, functions, and enthusiasms — reminding us of the musings of a man who wakes in the morning with a sore head, and finds it difficult to recall where and with what boon companions he got drunk overnight. Of all the women he describes, not a single one moves before us vividly in the body, to say nothing of the soul. He has enjoyed them only skin-deep, has known them exclusively in the flesh.