QI The Book of the Dead

Extra-curricular activities were also on offer. The priest’s teenage sister, Bettina, seduced him, inflaming his ardour one morning by washing his thighs, using the flimsy excuse that she wanted him to try on a new pair of white stockings. As Casanova recalled, she ‘struck the first sparks of a passion that was to become the dominant one in my heart’. The eleven-year-old Giacomo quickly lost control (‘the sweet pleasure her curiosity caused in me did not cease until it could increase no more’) and then tormented himself, wondering if, after this terrible crime, he should offer to marry her. But Bettina had already turned her attention elsewhere, to older boys – teaching Giacomo another, less enjoyable lesson: after love comes melancholy.
    For the next four decades, Casanova devoted himself to the pursuit of pleasure and a lavish lifestyle. His working life, by contrast, was chaotic. He graduated from Padua University as a lawyer but felt an ‘unconquerable aversion’ to the legal profession. Instead, hetook holy orders. This started well. He landed a job working for a powerful cardinal in Rome, where he met the Pope and persuaded him to allow him access to ‘forbidden books’ and grant him special dispensation to eat meat on ‘fish only’ days (on the grounds that fish ‘inflamed’ his eyes). After being caught in a three-in-a-bed romp with two sisters and then arrested for gambling debts, he left the Church in a hurry, though a distinctly ecclesiastical flavour lingers on in the records of his romantic encounters (he ‘approaches the altar frieze’, ‘performs the gentle sacrifice’ and on one occasion ‘reaches the porch of the temple, without gaining free entrance to the sanctuary’). Casanova’s next temping job was as an officer in the Venetian army. Initially attracted by the smart uniforms, he almost immediately got bored with the repetitiveness of military life, so he had a stab at being a theatre violinist, followed by trying his hand as secretary to a Venetian senator. And so it went on. Casanova’s charm and intelligence would get him work, after which he would be distracted by women, rack up huge gambling debts and be forced to flee from his creditors. His story reads like half a dozen airport thrillers with the pages shuffled and put back together in the wrong order. He was a diplomat, mathematician, spy, alchemist, Freemason, card sharp, magician, entrepreneur, faith healer, actor, playwright, duellist, lawyer, physician and, finally, librarian. Fluent in Italian, French, Latin and Greek, with a smattering of German, English and Russian, he travelled some 40,000 miles and negotiated his way in twenty-seven different currencies. Work, for Casanova, was only ever about status: he would do anything for anyone, in any country, as long as it allowed him freedom and the semblance of wealth and influence. Throughout his life, most of his ‘income’ came from gifts. When he needed serious money, he gambled:

    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 over £11 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 unshakeable 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 practised 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 Dutch cap. His list of conquests is surprisingly modest given his reputation: he slept with perhaps no more than 140 women (a total trounced by