QI The Book of the Dead

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 £30,000 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 fantasised 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 draughty 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 goodbye 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 andher 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 introduce his lottery scheme. He praised her tact and judgement 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 afterwards in bed. What she left behind her was a powerful, modernised Russian empire that made other European states nervous. Most of the rumours 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 rumours 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