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June 27, 2022 Issue

Why Casanova Continues to Seduce Us

He fought for liberties, undaunted by his persecutors--and took
liberties, unconcerned for his victims. Can we make sense of the
Enlightenment libertine?

By Judith Thurman

June 20, 2022

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A masked face reading the pages coming out of a corset.
Casanova prided himself on being a man of letters; his memoirs
represent his ultimate seduction--of the reading public.Illustration
by Anna and Elena Balbusso

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In 1763, the young James Boswell finished his "London Journal," one
of the frankest accounts of high and low life in the eighteenth
century. The following year, he embarked on a Grand Tour. In a Berlin
tavern, he encountered a certain Neuhaus. This voluble personage of
thirty-nine, unusually tall, with a dark complexion and affected
manners, was an Italian who "wanted to shine as a great philosopher,"
Boswell wrote, "and accordingly doubted of his own existence and
everything else. I thought him a blockhead."

The "blockhead" had also been travelling around Europe, although not
on a patrician's leisurely inspection of art and ruins. Giacomo
Casanova, whose surname means "new house," practiced many
trades--violinist, gambler, spy, Kabbalist, soldier, man of
letters--but his main line of work, he later admitted, was deceiving
fools. Many of them were gulls at a card table, though he had
recently convinced an elderly marquise, a widow with a vast fortune
and an obsession with the occult, that he could arrange for her
rebirth as her own son. How would this work? Casanova's mystically
enabled sperm would impregnate her with a male fetus endowed with her
soul. A casket of jewels was involved, along with a comely young
accomplice posing as a naked water nymph. When his ardor flagged, the
nymph's task was to rekindle it.

Published in the print edition of the June 27, 2022, issue, with the
headline "In Flagrante."

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[thurman-ju]
Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987 and
became a staff writer in 2000. Her new essay collection, "A
Left-Handed Woman," will be published in December.
More:BooksBiographiesEnlightenmentCasanovaItaliansItalyLovers

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