text: Italian

text: Republic of Venice

text: Histoire de ma vie

text: pope

text: cardinal

text: Voltaire

text: Goethe

text: Mozart

text: Bohemia

text: Count Waldstein

text: Venice

text: Zanetta Farussi

text: Gaetano Casanova

text: Francesco Giuseppe

text: Giovanni Battista

text: Grand Tour

text: Kingdom of Great Britain

text: Carnival

text: courtesan

text: unguent

text: Padua

text: University of Padua

text: abbé

text: Patriarch of Venice

text: Palazzo Malipiero

text: Grimani

text: Calabria

text: Rome

text: pope

text: Republic of Venice

text: Corfu

text: Constantinople

text: faro

text: San Samuele theater

text: patrician

text: windpipe

text: cabalists

text: Parma

text: grand tour

text: Freemasonry

text: Rosicrucianism

text: Master Mason

text: Lyons

text: Dresden

text: Prague

text: Vienna

text: The Leads

text: Doge's palace

text: Robert-François Damiens

text: Louis XV

text: witness and describe

text: de Bernis

text: Foreign Minister of France

text: lottery

text: Jeanne d'Urfé

text: numerology

text: Rosicrucian

text: alchemist

text: Madame de Pompadour

text: Count de Saint-Germain

text: d'Alembert

text: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

text: philosopher's stone

text: Dunkirk

text: ancien régime

text: Seven Years' War

text: state bonds

text: Amsterdam

text: harem

text: For-l'Évêque

text: Marquise d'Urfé

text: Louis XV

text: Cologne

text: Stuttgart

text: Switzerland

text: Einsiedeln

text: Albrecht von Haller

text: Voltaire

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text: Genoa

text: Florence

text: Rome

text: Naples

text: Modena

text: Turin

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text: Pope Clement XIII

text: Papal Order

text: Éperon d'or

text: England

text: venereal disease

text: Austrian Netherlands

text: Moscow

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text: Frederick the Great

text: Catherine the Great

text: Warsaw

text: Franciszek Ksawery Branicki

text: Breslau

text: Kingdom of Prussia

text: Charles III

text: Iliad

text: Prince Charles de Ligne

text: Voltaire

text: Benjamin Franklin

text: Lorenzo Da Ponte

text: Mozart

text: Da Ponte

text: Don Giovanni

text: von Waldstein

text: chamberlain

text: Castle of Dux

text: Bohemia

text: Czech Republic

text: Prague

text: Lorenzo da Ponte

text: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

text: Don Giovanni

text: Leopold II

text: La clemenza di Tito

text: Republic of Venice

text: Napoleon Bonaparte

text: Duchcov

text: National Library of France

text: sybarites

text: assurance caps

text: William Bolitho

text: Gambling

text: lotteries

text: faro

text: basset

text: piquet

text: biribi

text: primero

text: quinze

text: whist

text: Prince Charles de Ligne

text: Don Juan

text: Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

text: Dresden

text: Lugano

text: Bologna

text: Gorizia

text: Venice

text: Giovanni Gradenigo

text: Giovanni Dolfin

text: Prague

text: Leipzig

text: duplication de l'hexaèdre

text: Histoire de ma vie

text: Brockhaus

text: Wiesbaden

text: Paris

text: Casanova

text: Béla Lugosi

text: The Loves of Casanova

text: Ivan Mozzhukhin

text: Il cavaliere misterioso

text: Riccardo Freda

text: Vittorio Gassman

text: Luigi Comencini

text: Leonard Whiting

text: Fellini's Casanova

text: Federico Fellini

text: Donald Sutherland

text: La Nuit de Varennes

text: Marcello Mastroianni

text: Casanova

text: Richard Chamberlain

text: Le Retour de Casanova

text: Alain Delon

text: Casanova

text: Heath Ledger

text: Sienna Miller

text: Charlie Cox

text: Casanova Variations

text: John Malkovich

text: Zoroastro, Io Casanova

text: Walter Burle Marx

text: Casanova

text: LeVert

text: Casanova

text: The Divine Comedy

text: Air

text: Johan de Meij

text: Pet Shop Boys

text: Fundamental

text: Ralph Benatzky

text: Johann Strauss Jr.

text: Camino Real

text: Tennessee Williams

text: Casanova's Homecoming

text: Dominick Argento

text: Carol Ann Duffy

text: Hayley Carmichael

text: pasticcio

text: Julian Perkins

text: Northern Ballet

text: Ian Kelly

text: Takarazuka Revue

text: Casanova

text: BBC

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text: Frank Finlay

text: Casanova

text: David Tennant

text: Peter O'Toole

text: Horrible Histories

text: Tom Stourton

text: Arthur Schnitzler

text: Elinor Wylie

text: Miklós Szentkuthy

text: Sándor Márai

text: Pierre Kast

text: Rafael Sabatini

text: Casanova

text: Andrew Miller

text: Pascal Lainé

text: Andrei Codrescu

text: Arthur Japin

text: Robert Aickman

text: Manon Balletti

text: Don Juan

text: Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt 1725–1798

categories: Duellists,Giacomo Casanova,18th-century Italian novelists,1798 deaths,18th-century male writers,Italian writers in French,Italian Freemasons,Italian librarians,Italian Roman Catholics,1725 births,Italian escapees,Italian memoirists,18th-century Italian writers

paragraph: Giacomo Casanova

paragraph: Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (, ; 2 April 1725 – 4 June 1798) was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. His autobiography, "Histoire de ma vie" ("Story of My Life"), is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century.

paragraph: As was not uncommon at the time, Casanova, depending on circumstances, used more or less fictitious names, such as baron or count of Farussi (the name of his mother) or (). He often signed his works "Jacques Casanova de Seingalt" after he began writing in French following his second exile from Venice.

paragraph: He has become so famous for his often complicated and elaborate affairs with women that his name is now synonymous with "womanizer". He associated with European royalty, popes, and cardinals, along with luminaries such as Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart. He spent his last years in Bohemia as a librarian in Count Waldstein's household, where he also wrote the story of his life.

paragraph: Section::::Biography.

paragraph: Section::::Biography.:Youth.

paragraph: Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725 to actress Zanetta Farussi, wife of actor and dancer Gaetano Casanova. Giacomo was the first of six children, being followed by Francesco Giuseppe (1727–1803), Giovanni Battista (1730–1795), Faustina Maddalena (1731–1736), Maria Maddalena Antonia Stella (1732–1800), and Gaetano Alvise (1734–1783).

paragraph: At the time of Casanova's birth, the city of Venice thrived as the pleasure capital of Europe, ruled by political and religious conservatives who tolerated social vices and encouraged tourism. It was a required stop on the Grand Tour, traveled by young men coming of age, especially men from the Kingdom of Great Britain. The famed Carnival, gambling houses, and beautiful courtesans were powerful drawing cards. This was the milieu that bred Casanova and made him its most famous and representative citizen.

paragraph: Casanova was cared for by his grandmother Marzia Baldissera while his mother toured about Europe in the theater. His father died when he was eight. As a child, Casanova suffered nosebleeds, and his grandmother sought help from a witch: "Leaving the gondola, we enter a hovel, where we find an old woman sitting on a pallet, with a black cat in her arms and five or six others around her." Though the unguent applied was ineffective, Casanova was fascinated by the incantation. Perhaps to remedy the nosebleeds (a physician blamed the density of Venice's air), Casanova, on his ninth birthday, was sent to a boarding house on the mainland in Padua. For Casanova, the neglect by his parents was a bitter memory. "So they got rid of me," he proclaimed.

paragraph: Conditions at the boarding house were appalling, so he appealed to be placed under the care of Abbé Gozzi, his primary instructor, who tutored him in academic subjects, as well as the violin. Casanova moved in with the priest and his family and lived there through most of his teenage years. In the Gozzi household, Casanova first came into contact with the opposite sex, when Gozzi's younger sister Bettina fondled him at the age of 11. Bettina was "pretty, lighthearted, and a great reader of romances. ... The girl pleased me at once, though I had no idea why. It was she who little by little kindled in my heart the first sparks of a feeling which later became my ruling passion." Although she subsequently married, Casanova maintained a lifelong attachment to Bettina and the Gozzi family.

paragraph: Early on, Casanova demonstrated a quick wit, an intense appetite for knowledge, and a perpetually inquisitive mind. He entered the University of Padua at 12 and graduated at 17, in 1742, with a degree in law ("for which I felt an unconquerable aversion"). His guardian's hope was that he would become an ecclesiastical lawyer. Casanova had also studied moral philosophy, chemistry, and mathematics, and was keenly interested in medicine. ("I should have been allowed to do as I wished and become a physician, in which profession quackery is even more effective than it is in legal practice.") He frequently prescribed his own treatments for himself and friends. While attending the university, Casanova began to gamble and quickly got into debt, causing his recall to Venice by his grandmother, but the gambling habit became firmly established.

paragraph: Back in Venice, Casanova started his clerical law career and was admitted as an" abbé" after being conferred minor orders by the Patriarch of Venice. He shuttled back and forth to Padua to continue his university studies. By now, he had become something of a dandy—tall and dark, his long hair powdered, scented, and elaborately curled. He quickly ingratiated himself with a patron (something he was to do all his life), 76-year-old Venetian senator Alvise Gasparo Malipiero, the owner of Palazzo Malipiero, close to Casanova's home in Venice. Malipiero moved in the best circles and taught young Casanova a great deal about good food and wine, and how to behave in society. However, Casanova was caught dallying with Malipiero's intended object of seduction, actress Teresa Imer, and the senator drove both of them from his house. Casanova's growing curiosity about women led to his first complete sexual experience, with two sisters, Nanetta and Marton Savorgnan, then 14 and 16, who were distant relatives of the Grimanis. Casanova proclaimed that his life avocation was firmly established by this encounter.

paragraph: Section::::Biography.:Early career in Italy and abroad.

paragraph: Scandals tainted Casanova's short church career. After his grandmother's death, Casanova entered a seminary for a short while, but soon his indebtedness landed him in prison for the first time. An attempt by his mother to secure him a position with Bishop Bernardo de Bernardis was rejected by Casanova after a very brief trial of conditions in the bishop's Calabrian see. Instead, he found employment as a scribe with the powerful Cardinal Acquaviva in Rome. On meeting the pope, Casanova boldly asked for a dispensation to read the "forbidden books" and from eating fish (which he claimed inflamed his eyes). He also composed love letters for another cardinal. When Casanova became the scapegoat for a scandal involving a local pair of star-crossed lovers, Cardinal Acquaviva dismissed Casanova, thanking him for his sacrifice, but effectively ending his church career.

paragraph: In search of a new profession, Casanova bought a commission to become a military officer for the Republic of Venice. His first step was to look the part:

paragraph: He joined a Venetian regiment at Corfu, his stay being broken by a brief trip to Constantinople, ostensibly to deliver a letter from his former master the Cardinal. He found his advancement too slow and his duty boring, and he managed to lose most of his pay playing faro. Casanova soon abandoned his military career and returned to Venice.

paragraph: At the age of 21, he set out to become a professional gambler, but losing all the money remaining from the sale of his commission, he turned to his old benefactor Alvise Grimani for a job. Casanova thus began his third career, as a violinist in the San Samuele theater, "a menial journeyman of a sublime art in which, if he who excels is admired, the mediocrity is rightly despised. ... My profession was not a noble one, but I did not care. Calling everything prejudice, I soon acquired all the habits of my degraded fellow musicians." He and some of his fellows, "often spent our nights roaming through different quarters of the city, thinking up the most scandalous practical jokes and putting them into execution ... we amused ourselves by untying the gondolas moored before private homes, which then drifted with the current". They also sent midwives and physicians on false calls.

paragraph: Good fortune came to the rescue when Casanova, unhappy with his lot as a musician, saved the life of a Venetian patrician of the Bragadin family, who had a stroke while riding with Casanova in a gondola after a wedding ball. They immediately stopped to have the senator bled. Then, at the senator's palace, a physician bled the senator again and applied an ointment of mercury—an all-purpose but toxic remedy at the time—to the senator's chest. This raised his temperature and induced a massive fever, and Bragadin appeared to be choking on his own swollen windpipe. A priest was called as death seemed to be approaching. However, despite protests from the attending physician, Casanova ordered the removal of the ointment and the washing of the senator's chest with cool water. The senator recovered from his illness with rest and a sensible diet. Because of his youth and his facile recitation of medical knowledge, the senator and his two bachelor friends thought Casanova wise beyond his years, and concluded that he must be in possession of occult knowledge. As they were cabalists themselves, the senator invited Casanova into his household and became a lifelong patron.

paragraph: Casanova stated in his memoirs:

paragraph: For the next three years under the senator's patronage, working nominally as a legal assistant, Casanova led the life of a nobleman, dressing magnificently and, as was natural to him, spending most of his time gambling and engaging in amorous pursuits. His patron was exceedingly tolerant, but he warned Casanova that some day he would pay the price; "I made a joke of his dire Prophecies and went my way." However, not much later, Casanova was forced to leave Venice, due to further scandals. Casanova had dug up a freshly buried corpse to play a practical joke on an enemy and exact revenge, but the victim went into a paralysis, never to recover. And in another scandal, a young girl who had duped him accused him of rape and went to the officials. Casanova was later acquitted of this crime for lack of evidence, but by this time, he had already fled from Venice.

paragraph: Escaping to Parma, Casanova entered into a three-month affair with a Frenchwoman he named "Henriette", perhaps the deepest love he ever experienced—a woman who combined beauty, intelligence, and culture. In his words, "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. Having read a great deal and having natural taste, Henriette judged rightly of everything." She also judged Casanova astutely. As noted Casanovist J. Rives Childs wrote:

paragraph: Section::::Biography.:Grand tour.

paragraph: Crestfallen and despondent, Casanova returned to Venice, and after a good gambling streak, he recovered and set off on a grand tour, reaching Paris in 1750. Along the way, from one town to another, he got into sexual escapades resembling operatic plots. In Lyon, he entered the society of Freemasonry, which appealed to his interest in secret rites and which, for the most part, attracted men of intellect and influence who proved useful in his life, providing valuable contacts and uncensored knowledge. Casanova was also attracted to Rosicrucianism.

paragraph: In Lyons, Casanova become companion and finally took the highest degree of Scottish Rite Master Mason.

paragraph: Regarding his initiation to the Scottish Rite Freemasonry in Lyons, the "Memoirs" said:

paragraph: Casanova stayed in Paris for two years, learned the language, spent much time at the theater, and introduced himself to notables. Soon, however, his numerous liaisons were noted by the Paris police, as they were in nearly every city he visited.

paragraph: In 1752, his brother Francesco and he moved from Paris to Dresden, where his mother and sister Maria Maddalena were living. His new play, "La Moluccheide", now lost, was performed at the Royal Theatre, where his mother often played in lead roles. He then visited Prague and Vienna, where the tighter moral atmosphere of the latter city was not to his liking. He finally returned to Venice in 1753. In Venice, Casanova resumed his escapades, picking up many enemies and gaining the greater attention of the Venetian inquisitors. His police record became a lengthening list of reported blasphemies, seductions, fights, and public controversy. A state spy, Giovanni Manucci, was employed to draw out Casanova's knowledge of cabalism and Freemasonry and to examine his library for forbidden books. Senator Bragadin, in total seriousness this time (being a former inquisitor himself), advised his "son" to leave immediately or face the stiffest consequences.

paragraph: Section::::Biography.:Imprisonment and escape.

paragraph: On 26 July 1755, at age 30, Casanova was arrested for affront to religion and common decency: "The Tribunal, having taken cognizance of the grave faults committed by G. Casanova primarily in public outrages against the holy religion, their Excellencies have caused him to be arrested and imprisoned under the Leads." "The Leads" was a prison of seven cells on the top floor of the east wing of the Doge's palace, reserved for prisoners of higher status as well as certain types of offenders—such as political prisoners, defrocked or libertine priests or monks, and usurers—and named for the lead plates covering the palace roof. The following 12 September, without a trial and without being informed of the reasons for his arrest and of the sentence, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment.

paragraph: He was placed in solitary confinement with clothing, a pallet bed, table, and armchair in "the worst of all the cells", where he suffered greatly from the darkness, summer heat, and "millions of fleas". He was soon housed with a series of cellmates, and after five months and a personal appeal from Count Bragadin, was given warm winter bedding and a monthly stipend for books and better food. During exercise walks he was granted in the prison garret, he found a piece of black marble and an iron bar which he smuggled back to his cell; he hid the bar inside his armchair. When he was temporarily without cellmates, he spent two weeks sharpening the bar into a spike on the stone. Then he began to gouge through the wooden floor underneath his bed, knowing that his cell was directly above the Inquisitor's chamber. Just three days before his intended escape, during a festival when no officials would be in the chamber below, Casanova was moved to a larger, lighter cell with a view, despite his protests that he was perfectly happy where he was. In his new cell, "I sat in my armchair like a man in a stupor; motionless as a statue, I saw that I had wasted all the efforts I had made, and I could not repent of them. I felt that I had nothing to hope for, and the only relief left to me was not to think of the future."

paragraph: Overcoming his inertia, Casanova set upon another escape plan. He solicited the help of the prisoner in the adjacent cell, Father Balbi, a renegade priest. The spike, carried to the new cell inside the armchair, was passed to the priest in a folio Bible carried under a heaping plate of pasta by the hoodwinked jailer. The priest made a hole in his ceiling, climbed across and made a hole in the ceiling of Casanova's cell. To neutralize his new cellmate, who was a spy, Casanova played on his superstitions and terrorized him into silence. When Balbi broke through to Casanova's cell, Casanova lifted himself through the ceiling, leaving behind a note that quoted the 117th Psalm (Vulgate): "I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord".

paragraph: The spy remained behind, too frightened of the consequences if he were caught escaping with the others. Casanova and Balbi pried their way through the lead plates and onto the sloping roof of the Doge's Palace, with a heavy fog swirling. The drop to the nearby canal being too great, Casanova prised open the grate over a dormer window, and broke the window to gain entry. They found a long ladder on the roof, and with the additional use of a bedsheet "rope" that Casanova had prepared, lowered themselves into the room whose floor was 25 feet below. They rested until morning, changed clothes, then broke a small lock on an exit door and passed into a palace corridor, through galleries and chambers, and down stairs, where by convincing the guard they had inadvertently been locked into the palace after an official function, they left through a final door. It was 6:00 in the morning and they escaped by gondola. Eventually, Casanova reached Paris, where he arrived on the same day (5 January 1757) that Robert-François Damiens made an attempt on the life of Louis XV. (Casanova would later witness and describe his execution.)

paragraph: Thirty years later in 1787, Casanova wrote "Story of My Flight", which was very popular and was reprinted in many languages, and he repeated the tale a little later in his memoirs. Casanova's judgment of the exploit is characteristic:

paragraph: Section::::Biography.:Return to Paris.

paragraph: He knew his stay in Paris might be a long one and he proceeded accordingly: "I saw that to accomplish anything I must bring all my physical and moral faculties in play, make the acquaintance of the great and the powerful, exercise strict self-control, and play the chameleon." Casanova had matured, and this time in Paris, though still depending at times on quick thinking and decisive action, he was more calculating and deliberate. His first task was to find a new patron. He reconnected with old friend de Bernis, now the Foreign Minister of France. Casanova was advised by his patron to find a means of raising funds for the state as a way to gain instant favor. Casanova promptly became one of the trustees of the first state lottery, and one of its best ticket salesmen. The enterprise earned him a large fortune quickly. With money in hand, he traveled in high circles and undertook new seductions. He duped many socialites with his occultism, particularly the Marquise Jeanne d'Urfé, using his excellent memory which made him appear to have a sorcerer's power of numerology. In Casanova's view, "deceiving a fool is an exploit worthy of an intelligent man".

paragraph: Casanova claimed to be a Rosicrucian and an alchemist, aptitudes which made him popular with some of the most prominent figures of the era, among them Madame de Pompadour, Count de Saint-Germain, d'Alembert, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So popular was alchemy among the nobles, particularly the search for the "philosopher's stone", that Casanova was highly sought after for his supposed knowledge, and he profited handsomely. He met his match, however, in the Count de Saint-Germain: "This very singular man, born to be the most barefaced of all imposters, declared with impunity, with a casual air, that he was three hundred years old, that he possessed the universal medicine, that he made anything he liked from nature, that he created diamonds."

paragraph: De Bernis decided to send Casanova to Dunkirk on his first spying mission. Casanova was paid well for his quick work and this experience prompted one of his few remarks against the "ancien régime" and the class on which he was dependent. He remarked in hindsight, "All the French ministers are the same. They lavished money which came out of the other people's pockets to enrich their creatures, and they were absolute: The down-trodden people counted for nothing, and, through this, the indebtedness of the State and the confusion of finances were the inevitable results. A Revolution was necessary."

paragraph: As the Seven Years' War began, Casanova was again called to help increase the state treasury. He was entrusted with a mission of selling state bonds in Amsterdam, Holland being the financial center of Europe at the time. He succeeded in selling the bonds at only an 8% discount, and the following year was rich enough to found a silk manufactory with his earnings. The French government even offered him a title and a pension if he would become a French citizen and work on behalf of the finance ministry, but he declined, perhaps because it would frustrate his "Wanderlust". Casanova had reached his peak of fortune, but could not sustain it. He ran the business poorly, borrowed heavily trying to save it, and spent much of his wealth on constant liaisons with his female workers who were his "harem".

paragraph: For his debts, Casanova was imprisoned again, this time at For-l'Évêque, but was liberated four days afterwards, upon the insistence of the Marquise d'Urfé. Unfortunately, though he was released, his patron de Bernis was dismissed by Louis XV at that time and Casanova's enemies closed in on him. He sold the rest of his belongings and secured another mission to Holland to distance himself from his troubles.

paragraph: Section::::Biography.:On the run.

paragraph: This time, however, his mission failed and he fled to Cologne, then Stuttgart in the spring of 1760, where he lost the rest of his fortune. He was yet again arrested for his debts, but managed to escape to Switzerland. Weary of his wanton life, Casanova visited the monastery of Einsiedeln and considered the simple, scholarly life of a monk. He returned to his hotel to think on the decision, only to encounter a new object of desire, and reverting to his old instincts, all thoughts of a monk's life were quickly forgotten. Moving on, he visited Albrecht von Haller and Voltaire, and arrived in Marseille, then Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, Modena, and Turin, moving from one sexual romp to another.

paragraph: In 1760, Casanova started styling himself the Chevalier de Seingalt, a name he would increasingly use for the rest of his life. On occasion, he would also call himself Count de Farussi (using his mother's maiden name) and when Pope Clement XIII presented Casanova with the Papal Order of the Éperon d'or, he had an impressive cross and ribbon to display on his chest.

paragraph: Back in Paris, he set about one of his most outrageous schemes—convincing his old dupe the Marquise d'Urfé that he could turn her into a young man through occult means. The plan did not yield Casanova the big payoff he had hoped for, and the Marquise d'Urfé finally lost faith in him.

paragraph: Casanova traveled to England in 1763, hoping to sell his idea of a state lottery to English officials. He wrote of the English, "the people have a special character, common to the whole nation, which makes them think they are superior to everyone else. It is a belief shared by all nations, each thinking itself the best. And they are all right." Through his connections, he worked his way up to an audience with King George III, using most of the valuables he had stolen from the Marquise d'Urfé. While working the political angles, he also spent much time in the bedroom, as was his habit. As a means to find females for his pleasure, not being able to speak English, he put an advertisement in the newspaper to let an apartment to the "right" person. He interviewed many young women, choosing one "Mistress Pauline" who suited him well. Soon, he established himself in her apartment and seduced her. These and other liaisons, however, left him weak with venereal disease and he left England broke and ill.

paragraph: He went on to the Austrian Netherlands, recovered, and then for the next three years, traveled all over Europe, covering about 4,500 miles by coach over rough roads, and going as far as Moscow and Saint Petersburg (the average daily coach trip being about 30 miles). Again, his principal goal was to sell his lottery scheme to other governments and repeat the great success he had with the French government, but a meeting with Frederick the Great bore no fruit and in the surrounding German lands, the same result. Not lacking either connections or confidence, Casanova went to Russia and met with Catherine the Great, but she flatly turned down the lottery idea.

paragraph: In 1766, he was expelled from Warsaw following a pistol duel with Colonel Franciszek Ksawery Branicki over an Italian actress, a lady friend of theirs. Both duelists were wounded, Casanova on the left hand. The hand recovered on its own, after Casanova refused the recommendation of doctors that it be amputated. From Warsaw, he traveled to Breslau in the Kingdom of Prussia, then to Dresden, where he contracted yet another venereal infection. He returned to Paris for several months in 1767 and hit the gambling salons, only to be expelled from France by order of Louis XV himself, primarily for Casanova's scam involving the Marquise d'Urfé. Now known across Europe for his reckless behavior, Casanova would have difficulty overcoming his notoriety and gaining any fortune, so he headed for Spain, where he was not as well known. He tried his usual approach, leaning on well-placed contacts (often Freemasons), wining and dining with nobles of influence, and finally arranging an audience with the local monarch, in this case Charles III. When no doors opened for him, however, he could only roam across Spain, with little to show for it. In Barcelona, he escaped assassination and landed in jail for 6 weeks. His Spanish adventure a failure, he returned to France briefly, then to Italy.

paragraph: Section::::Biography.:Return to Venice.

paragraph: In Rome, Casanova had to prepare a way for his return to Venice. While waiting for supporters to gain him legal entry into Venice, Casanova began his modern Tuscan-Italian translation of the "Iliad", his "History of the Troubles in Poland", and a comic play. To ingratiate himself with the Venetian authorities, Casanova did some commercial spying for them. After months without a recall, however, he wrote a letter of appeal directly to the Inquisitors. At last, he received his long-sought permission and burst into tears upon reading "We, Inquisitors of State, for reasons known to us, give Giacomo Casanova a free safe-conduct ... empowering him to come, go, stop, and return, hold communication wheresoever he pleases without let or hindrance. So is our will." Casanova was permitted to return to Venice in September 1774 after 18 years of exile.

paragraph: At first, his return to Venice was a cordial one and he was a celebrity. Even the Inquisitors wanted to hear how he had escaped from their prison. Of his three bachelor patrons, however, only Dandolo was still alive and Casanova was invited back to live with him. He received a small stipend from Dandolo and hoped to live from his writings, but that was not enough. He reluctantly became a spy again for Venice, paid by piece work, reporting on religion, morals, and commerce, most of it based on gossip and rumor he picked up from social contacts. He was disappointed. No financial opportunities of interest came about and few doors opened for him in society as in the past.

paragraph: At age 49, the years of reckless living and the thousands of miles of travel had taken their toll. Casanova's smallpox scars, sunken cheeks, and hook nose became all the more noticeable. His easygoing manner was now more guarded. Prince Charles de Ligne, a friend (and uncle of his future employer), described him around 1784:

paragraph: Venice had changed for him. Casanova now had little money for gambling, few willing females worth pursuing, and few acquaintances to enliven his dull days. He heard of the death of his mother and, more paining, visited the deathbed of Bettina Gozzi, who had first introduced him to sex and who died in his arms. His "Iliad" was published in three volumes, but to limited subscribers and yielding little money. He got into a published dispute with Voltaire over religion. When he asked, "Suppose that you succeed in destroying superstition. With what will you replace it?" Voltaire shot back, "I like that. When I deliver humanity from a ferocious beast which devours it, can I be asked what I shall put in its place." From Casanova's point of view, if Voltaire had "been a proper philosopher, he would have kept silent on that subject ... the people need to live in ignorance for the general peace of the nation".

paragraph: In 1779, Casanova found Francesca, an uneducated seamstress, who became his live-in lover and housekeeper, and who loved him devotedly. Later that year, the Inquisitors put him on the payroll and sent him to investigate commerce between the papal states and Venice. Other publishing and theater ventures failed, primarily from lack of capital. In a downward spiral, Casanova was expelled again from Venice in 1783, after writing a vicious satire poking fun at Venetian nobility. In it, he made his only public statement that Grimani was his true father.

paragraph: Forced to resume his travels again, Casanova arrived in Paris, and in November 1783 met Benjamin Franklin while attending a presentation on aeronautics and the future of balloon transport. For a while, Casanova served as secretary and pamphleteer to Sebastian Foscarini, Venetian ambassador in Vienna. He also became acquainted with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, who noted about Casanova, "This singular man never liked to be in the wrong." Notes by Casanova indicate that he may have made suggestions to Da Ponte concerning the libretto for Mozart's "Don Giovanni".

paragraph: Section::::Biography.:Final years in Bohemia.

paragraph: In 1785, after Foscarini died, Casanova began searching for another position. A few months later, he became the librarian to Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein, a chamberlain of the emperor, in the Castle of Dux, Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic). The Count—himself a Freemason, cabalist, and frequent traveler—had taken to Casanova when they had met a year earlier at Foscarini's residence. Although the job offered security and good pay, Casanova describes his last years as boring and frustrating, though it was the most productive time for writing. His health had deteriorated dramatically, and he found life among peasants to be less than stimulating. He was only able to make occasional visits to Vienna and Dresden for relief. Although Casanova got on well with the Count, his employer was a much younger man with his own eccentricities. The Count often ignored him at meals and failed to introduce him to important visiting guests. Moreover, Casanova, the testy outsider, was thoroughly disliked by most of the other inhabitants of the Castle of Dux. Casanova's only friends seemed to be his fox terriers. In despair, Casanova considered suicide, but instead decided that he must live on to record his memoirs, which he did until his death.

paragraph: He visited Prague, the capital city and principal cultural center of Bohemia, on many occasions. In October 1787, he met Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni", in Prague at the time of the opera's first production and likely met the composer, as well, at the same time. There is reason to believe that he was also in Prague in 1791 for the coronation of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II as king of Bohemia, an event that included the first production of Mozart's opera "La clemenza di Tito". Casanova is known to have drafted dialogue suitable for a Don Juan drama at the time of his visit to Prague in 1787, but none of his verses were ever incorporated into Mozart's opera. His reaction to seeing licentious behavior similar to his own held up to moral scrutiny as it is in Mozart's opera is not recorded.

paragraph: In 1797, word arrived that the Republic of Venice had ceased to exist and that Napoleon Bonaparte had seized Casanova's home city. It was too late to return home. Casanova died on 4 June 1798 at the age of 73. His last words are said to have been "I have lived as a philosopher and I die as a Christian". Casanova was buried at Dux (nowadays Duchcov in the Czech Republic), but the exact place of his grave was forgotten over the years, and remains unknown today.

paragraph: Section::::Memoirs.

paragraph: The isolation and boredom of Casanova's last years enabled him to focus without distractions on his "Histoire de ma vie", without which his fame would have been considerably diminished, if not blotted out entirely. He began to think about writing his memoirs around 1780 and began in earnest by 1789, as "the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying of grief". The first draft was completed by July 1792, and he spent the next six years revising it. He puts a happy face on his days of loneliness, writing in his work, "I can find no pleasanter pastime than to converse with myself about my own affairs and to provide a most worthy subject for laughter to my well-bred audience." His memoirs were still being compiled at the time of his death, his account having reached only the summer of 1774. A letter by him in 1792 states that he was reconsidering his decision to publish them, believing that his story was despicable and he would make enemies by writing the truth about his affairs. But he decided to proceed, using initials instead of actual names and toning down the strongest passages. He wrote in French instead of Italian because "the French language is more widely known than mine".

paragraph: The memoirs open with:

paragraph: Casanova wrote about the purpose of his book:

paragraph: He also advises his readers that they "will not find all my adventures. I have left out those which would have offended the people who played a part in them, for they would cut a sorry figure in them. Even so, there are those who will sometimes think me too indiscreet; I am sorry for it." And in the final chapter, the text abruptly breaks off with hints at adventures unrecorded: "Three years later I saw her in Padua, where I resumed my acquaintance with her daughter on far more tender terms."

paragraph: In their original publication, the memoirs were divided into twelve volumes, and the unabridged English translation by Willard R. Trask runs to more than 3,500 pages. Though his chronology is at times confusing and inaccurate, and many of his tales exaggerated, much of his narrative and many details are corroborated by contemporary writings. He has a good ear for dialogue and writes at length about all classes of society. Casanova, for the most part, is candid about his faults, intentions, and motivations, and shares his successes and failures with good humor. The confession is largely devoid of repentance or remorse. He celebrates the senses with his readers, especially regarding music, food, and women. "I have always liked highly seasoned food. ... As for women, I have always found that the one I was in love with smelled good, and the more copious her sweat the sweeter I found it." He mentions over 120 adventures with women and girls, with several veiled references to male lovers as well. He describes his duels and conflicts with scoundrels and officials, his entrapments and his escapes, his schemes and plots, his anguish and his sighs of pleasure. He demonstrates convincingly, "I can say "vixi" ('I have lived')."

paragraph: The manuscript of Casanova's memoirs was held by his relatives until it was sold to F. A. Brockhaus publishers, and first published in heavily abridged versions in German around 1822, then in French. During World War II, the manuscript survived the allied bombing of Leipzig. The memoirs were heavily pirated through the ages and have been translated into some twenty languages. But not until 1960 was the entire text published in its original language of French. In 2010 the manuscript was acquired by the National Library of France, which has started digitizing it.

paragraph: Section::::Relationships.

paragraph: For Casanova, as well as his contemporary sybarites of the upper class, love and sex tended to be casual and not endowed with the seriousness characteristic of the Romanticism of the 19th century. Flirtations, bedroom games, and short-term liaisons were common among nobles who married for social connections rather than love.

paragraph: Although multi-faceted and complex, Casanova's personality, as he described it, was dominated by his sensual urges: "Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I never found any occupation more important. Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite of mine, I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it." He noted that he sometimes used "assurance caps" to prevent impregnating his mistresses.

paragraph: Casanova's ideal liaison had elements beyond sex, including complicated plots, heroes and villains, and gallant outcomes. In a pattern he often repeated, he would discover an attractive woman in trouble with a brutish or jealous lover (Act I); he would ameliorate her difficulty (Act II); she would show her gratitude; he would seduce her; a short exciting affair would ensue (Act III); feeling a loss of ardor or boredom setting in, he would plead his unworthiness and arrange for her marriage or pairing with a worthy man, then exit the scene (Act IV). As William Bolitho points out in "Twelve Against the Gods", the secret of Casanova's success with women "had nothing more esoteric in it than [offering] what every woman who respects herself must demand: all that he had, all that he was, with (to set off the lack of legality) the dazzling attraction of the lump sum over what is more regularly doled out in a lifetime of installments."

paragraph: Casanova advises, "There is no honest woman with an uncorrupted heart whom a man is not sure of conquering by dint of gratitude. It is one of the surest and shortest means." Alcohol and violence, for him, were not proper tools of seduction. Instead, attentiveness and small favors should be employed to soften a woman's heart, but "a man who makes known his love by words is a fool". Verbal communication is essential—"without speech, the pleasure of love is diminished by at least two-thirds"—but words of love must be implied, not boldly proclaimed.

paragraph: Despite detailing what was clearly an abduction and gang rape ("It was during one Carnival, midnight had struck, we were eight, all masked, roving through the city ..."), Casanova convinced himself that the victim was willing. By his own account, mutual consent was important, but he avoided easy conquests or overly difficult situations as not suitable for his purposes.

paragraph: Casanova valued intelligence in a woman: "After all, a beautiful woman without a mind of her own leaves her lover with no resource after he had physically enjoyed her charms." His attitude towards educated women, however, was an unfavorable one: "In a woman learning is out of place; it compromises the essential qualities of her sex ... no scientific discoveries have been made by women ... (which) requires a vigor which the female sex cannot have. But in simple reasoning and in delicacy of feeling we must yield to women."

paragraph: Casanova writes that he stopped short of intercourse with a 13-year-old named Helene: "little Helene, whom I enjoyed, while leaving her intact." In 1765, when he was forty, he purchased a twelve-year-old girl in St. Petersburg as a sexual slave. In the memoirs he described the Russian girl as emphatically prepubescent: "Her breasts had still not finished budding. She was in her thirteenth year. She had nowhere the definitive mark of puberty." (III, 196–7; X, 116–17). In 1774, when he was almost fifty, Casanova encountered in Trieste a former lover, the actress Irene, now accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter. "A few days later she came, with her daughter, who pleased me ("qui me plut") and who did not reject my caresses. One fine day, she met with Baron Pittoni, who loved little girls as much as I did ("aimant autant que moi les petites filles"), and took a liking to Irene’s girl, and asked the mother to do him the same honor some time that she had done to me. I encouraged her to receive the offer, and the baron fell in love. This was lucky for Irene." (XII, 238).

paragraph: Section::::Gambling.

paragraph: Gambling was a common recreation in the social and political circles in which Casanova moved. In his memoirs, Casanova discusses many forms of 18th-century gambling—including lotteries, faro, basset, piquet, biribi, primero, quinze, and whist—and the passion for it among the nobility and the high clergy. Cheats (known as "correctors of fortune") were somewhat more tolerated than today in public casinos and in private games for invited players, and seldom caused affront. Most gamblers were on guard against cheaters and their tricks. Scams of all sorts were common, and Casanova was amused by them.

paragraph: Casanova gambled throughout his adult life, winning and losing large sums. He was tutored by professionals, and he was "instructed in those wise maxims without which games of chance ruin those who participate in them". He was not above occasionally cheating and at times even teamed with professional gamblers for his own profit. Casanova claims that he was "relaxed and smiling when I lost, and I won without covetousness". However, when outrageously duped himself, he could act violently, sometimes calling for a duel. Casanova admits that he was not disciplined enough to be a professional gambler: "I had neither prudence enough to leave off when fortune was adverse, nor sufficient control over myself when I had won." Nor did he like being considered as a professional gambler: "Nothing could ever be adduced by professional gamblers that I was of their infernal clique." Although Casanova at times used gambling tactically and shrewdly—for making quick money, for flirting, making connections, acting gallantly, or proving himself a gentleman among his social superiors—his practice also could be compulsive and reckless, especially during the euphoria of a new sexual affair. "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."

paragraph: Section::::Fame and influence.

paragraph: Casanova was recognized by his contemporaries as an extraordinary person, a man of far-ranging intellect and curiosity.Casanova has been recognized by posterity as one of the foremost chroniclers of his age. He was a true adventurer, traveling across Europe from end to end in search of fortune, seeking out the most prominent people of his time to help his cause. He was a servant of the establishment and equally decadent as his times, but also a participant in secret societies and a seeker of answers beyond the conventional. He was religious, a devout Catholic, and believed in prayer: "Despair kills; prayer dissipates it; and after praying man trusts and acts." Along with prayer he also believed in free will and reason, but clearly did not subscribe to the notion that pleasure-seeking would keep him from heaven.

paragraph: He was, by vocation and avocation, a lawyer, clergyman, military officer, violinist, con man, pimp, gourmand, dancer, businessman, diplomat, spy, politician, medic, mathematician, social philosopher, cabalist, playwright, and writer. He wrote over twenty works, including plays and essays, and many letters. His novel "Icosameron" is an early work of science fiction.

paragraph: Born of actors, he had a passion for the theater and for an improvised, theatrical life. But with all his talents, he frequently succumbed to the quest for pleasure and sex, often avoiding sustained work and established plans, and got himself into trouble when prudent action would have served him better. His true occupation was living largely on his quick wits, steely nerves, luck, social charm, and the money given to him in gratitude and by trickery.

paragraph: Prince Charles de Ligne, who understood Casanova well, and who knew most of the prominent individuals of the age, thought Casanova the most interesting man he had ever met: "there is nothing in the world of which he is not capable." Rounding out the portrait, the Prince also stated:

paragraph: "Casanova", like "Don Juan", is a long established term in the English language. According to "Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary", 11th ed., the noun "Casanova" means "Lover; "esp": a man who is a promiscuous and unscrupulous lover". The first usage of the term in written English was around 1852. References in culture to Casanova are numerous—in books, films, theater, and music.

paragraph: Section::::Works.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1752 – "Zoroastro: Tragedia tradotta dal Francese, da rappresentarsi nel Regio Elettoral Teatro di Dresda, dalla compagnia de' comici italiani in attuale servizio di Sua Maestà nel carnevale dell'anno MDCCLII". Dresden.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1753 – "La Moluccheide, o Sia i gemelli rivali". Dresden.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1769 – "Confutazione della" Storia del Governo Veneto "d'Amelot de la Houssaie". Lugano.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1772 – "Lana caprina: Epistola di un licantropo". Bologna.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1774 – "Istoria delle turbolenze della Polonia". Gorizia.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1775–78 – "Dell'Iliade di Omero tradotta in ottava rima". Venice.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1779 – "Scrutinio del libro" Eloges de M. de Voltaire par différents auteurs. Venice.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1780 – "Opuscoli miscellanei" (containing "Duello a Varsavia" and "Lettere della nobil donna Silvia Belegno alla nobil donzella Laura Gussoni"). Venice.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1780–81 – "Le messager de Thalie". Venice.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1782 – "Di aneddoti viniziani militari ed amorosi del secolo decimoquarto sotto i dogadi di Giovanni Gradenigo e di Giovanni Dolfin". Venice.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1783 – "Né amori né donne, ovvero La stalla ripulita". Venice.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1786 – "Soliloque d'un penseur". Prague.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1787 – "Icosaméron, ou Histoire d'Édouard et d'Élisabeth qui passèrent quatre-vingts un ans chez les Mégamicres, habitants aborigènes du Protocosme dans l'intérieur de nôtre globe". Prague.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1788 – "Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la République de Venise qu'on appelle les Plombs". Leipzig.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1790 – "Solution du probléme deliaque". Dresden.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1790 – "Corollaire à la duplication de l'hexaèdre". Dresden.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1790 – "Démonstration géometrique de la duplication du cube". Dresden.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1797 – "A Léonard Snetlage, docteur en droit de l'Université de Goettingue, Jacques Casanova, docteur en droit de l'Universitè de Padou". Dresden.

paragraph: BULLET::::- 1822–29 – First edition of the "Histoire de ma vie", in an adapted German translation in 12 volumes, as "Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de Seingalt, oder sein Leben, wie er es zu Dux in Böhmen niederschrieb". The first full edition of the original French manuscript was not published until 1960, by Brockhaus (Wiesbaden) and Plon (Paris).

paragraph: Section::::In popular culture.

paragraph: Section::::In popular culture.:Film.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (1918), a Hungarian film featuring Béla Lugosi

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Loves of Casanova", or "Casanova", a 1927 French film starring Ivan Mozzhukhin

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Il cavaliere misterioso" ("The Mysterious Rider"), a 1948 film by Riccardo Freda, in which Casanova is played by Vittorio Gassman in his debut as a lead actor

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Poslední růže od Casanovy" ("The Last Rose from Casanova"), a 1966 Czech film featuring Felix le Breux as aging Casanova during his stay at Duchcov

paragraph: BULLET::::- "", a 1969 feature film by Luigi Comencini, starring Leonard Whiting

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Fellini's Casanova", a 1976 feature film by Federico Fellini, starring Donald Sutherland

paragraph: BULLET::::- "La Nuit de Varennes" (1982), a film featuring Marcello Mastroianni

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (1987), a television movie, starring Richard Chamberlain

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Le Retour de Casanova" (1992), a French comedy starring Alain Delon

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (2005), a feature film featuring Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller and Charlie Cox

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova Variations" (2014), a feature film starring John Malkovich

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Zoroastro, Io Casanova" (2017) an Italian film featuring Galatea Ranzi

paragraph: Section::::In popular culture.:Music.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova Fantasy Variations for Three Celli" (1985), a piece for cello trio by Walter Burle Marx

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova", (1986), song by Russian rock group "Nautilus Pompilius". Music by Vyacheslav Butusov, text by Ilya Kormil'tsev.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (1987) song by R&B group LeVert. The song reached number 1 on the R&B chart as well as reaching number 5 on the pop chart.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (1996), an album by the UK chamber pop band The Divine Comedy, inspired by Casanova

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova 70" (1997), a single by French electronic duo Air

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (2000), a piece for cello and winds by Johan de Meij

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova in Hell" (2006), a song by the UK group Pet Shop Boys, from their album "Fundamental"

paragraph: Section::::In popular culture.:Performance works.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (1928), an operetta by Ralph Benatzky, based on music by Johann Strauss Jr.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Camino Real" (1953), a play by Tennessee Williams, in which an aging Casanova appears in a dream sequence

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova's Homecoming" (1985), an opera by Dominick Argento

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (2007), a play by Carol Ann Duffy and Told by an Idiot theatre company, starring Hayley Carmichael as a female Casanova

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (2008), a musical by Philip Godfrey, first performed at the Greenwich Playhouse, London

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (2016), a "pasticcio" opera by Julian Perkins and Stephen Pettitt, first performed in the "Baroque Unwrapped" series at Kings Place, London

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (2017), a ballet by Northern Ballet choreographed by Kenneth Tindall based on the biography by Ian Kelly.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (2019), a musical performed by Takarazuka Revue and starring Rio Asumi as Casanova.

paragraph: Section::::In popular culture.:Television.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova", a 1971 BBC Television serial, written by Dennis Potter and starring Frank Finlay

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova", a 2005 BBC Television serial featuring David Tennant as young Casanova and Peter O'Toole as the older Casanova

paragraph: BULLET::::- In 2017, an episode of "Horrible Histories" called "Ridiculous Romantics" featured Tom Stourton, portraying Casanova.

paragraph: Section::::In popular culture.:Written works.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanovas Heimfahrt" ("Casanova's Homecoming") (1918) by Arthur Schnitzler

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Venetian Glass Nephew" (1925) by Elinor Wylie, in which Casanova appears as a major character under the transparent pseudonym "Chevalier de Chastelneuf"

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Széljegyzetek Casanovához" ("Marginalia on Casanova") (1939) by Miklós Szentkuthy

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Vendégjáték Bolzanóban" ("Conversations in Bolzano" or "Casanova in Bolzano") (1940), a novel by Sándor Márai

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Le Bonheur ou le Pouvoir" (1980), by Pierre Kast

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Fortunes of Casanova and Other Stories" (1994), by Rafael Sabatini, includes nine stories (originally published 1914–1921) based on incidents in Casanova's memoirs

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova" (1998), a novel by Andrew Miller

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova, Dernier Amour" (2000), by Pascal Lainé

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Casanova in Bohemia" (2002), a novel about Casanova's last years at Dux, Bohemia, by Andrei Codrescu

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Een Schitterend Gebrek" (English title "In Lucia's Eyes"), a 2003 Dutch novel by Arthur Japin, in which Casanova's youthful amour Lucia is viewed as the love of his life

paragraph: BULLET::::- "A Disciple of Plato", a short story by English writer Robert Aickman, first printed in the 2015 posthumous collection "The Strangers and Other Writings", in which the main character—throughout described as "the philosopher"—is revealed in the last lines to be Casanova.

paragraph: Section::::See also.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Manon Balletti

paragraph: BULLET::::- Don Juan

paragraph: Section::::External links.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt 1725–1798 Ebook

alias:
Casanova
Kazanova
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova di Seingalt
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt
Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt
ג'אקומו קאזאנובה
Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
Jacques Casanova
Dzhiakomo Kasanova
Джакомо Казанова
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova De Seingalt

description: Venecian adventurer and writer

enwikiquote_title: Giacomo Casanova

wikidata_label: Giacomo Casanova

wikipedia_title: Giacomo Casanova


text:
Cheapside
The King's School, Grantham
Ernest Hardy
Jesus College, Oxford
Roman Catholicism
Cardinal Manning
priesthood
St Mary's College, Oscott
Birmingham
Scots College
Duchess Sforza Cesarini
Venice
Isola di San Michele
A.J.A. Symons
Maundy Gregory
Charles Masson Fox
Parson's Pleasure
Robert Hugh Benson
Greek love
ephebe
Hadrian the Seventh
Saint George
King Arthur
Hadrian IV
Hadrian VI
Chatto & Windus
Messina earthquake
Aristophanes
Plato
Symposium
Harry Pirie-Gordon
Odysseus
Wilhelm von Gloeden
Guglielmo Plüschow
Duchess Sforza Cesarini
Genzano di Roma
The Yellow Book
Holywell
Charles Sidney Beauclerk
A. J. A. Symons
autobiographical fictions
Henry Harland
Ronald Firbank
Graham Greene
Alexander Theroux
Ulysses
James Joyce
Hadrian the Seventh
Lord Northcliffe
Benson, R. H.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Johnson, Pamela Hansford
Norwich, John Julius
Symons, A.J.A.
Weeks, Donald

categories: 20th-century English novelists,Converts to Roman Catholicism,Alumni of St Mary's College, Oscott,19th-century English painters,Victorian pederasty,Impostors,English male novelists,English short story writers,English historical novelists,LGBT novelists,1860 births,English male short story writers,English Roman Catholics,English photographers,Gay artists,English historians,Translators of Omar Khayyám,Gay writers,English Roman Catholic writers,19th-century English novelists,1913 deaths,People from Venice,English male painters,Burials at Isola di San Michele,LGBT writers from England,20th-century English painters

paragraph: Frederick Rolfe

paragraph: Frederick William Rolfe (surname pronounced ), better known as Baron Corvo, and also calling himself Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, (22 July 1860 – 25 October 1913), was an English writer, artist, photographer and eccentric.

paragraph: Section::::Life.

paragraph: Rolfe was born in Cheapside, London, the son of a piano manufacturer. He left school at the age of fourteen and became a teacher. He taught briefly at The King's School, Grantham, where the then headmaster, Ernest Hardy, later principal of Jesus College, Oxford, became a lifelong friend.

paragraph: He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1886 and was confirmed by Cardinal Manning. With his conversion came a strongly-felt vocation to the priesthood, which persisted throughout his life despite being constantly frustrated and never realised. In 1887 he was sponsored to train at St Mary's College, Oscott near Birmingham and in 1889 was a student at the Scots College in Rome, but was thrown out by both due to his inability to concentrate on priestly studies and his erratic behaviour.

paragraph: At this stage he entered the circle of the Duchess Sforza Cesarini, who, he claimed, adopted him as a grandson and gave him the use of the title of "Baron Corvo". This became his best-known pseudonym; he also called himself "Frank English", "Frederick Austin" and "A. Crab Maid", among others. More often he abbreviated his own name to "Fr. Rolfe" (an ambiguous usage, suggesting he was the priest he had hoped to become).

paragraph: Rolfe spent most of his life as a freelance writer, mainly in England but eventually in Venice. He lived in the era before the welfare state, and relied on benefactors for support. But he had an argumentative nature and had a tendency to fall out spectacularly with most of the people who tried to help him and offer him room and board. Eventually, out of money and out of luck, he died in Venice from a stroke on 25 October 1913. He was buried on the Isola di San Michele, Venice.

paragraph: Rolfe's life provided the basis for "The Quest for Corvo" by A.J.A. Symons, an "experiment in biography" regarded as a minor classic in the field. This same work reveals that Rolfe had an unlikely enthusiast in the person of Maundy Gregory.

paragraph: Section::::Homosexuality.

paragraph: Rolfe was entirely comfortable with his homosexuality and associated and corresponded with a number of other homosexual Englishmen. Early in his life he wrote a fair amount of idealistic but mawkish poetry about boy martyrs and the like. These and his Toto stories contain pederastic elements, but the young male pupils he was teaching at the time unanimously recalled in later life that there had never been any hint of impropriety in his relations with them. As he himself matured, Rolfe's settled sexual preference was for late adolescents. Towards the end of his life he made his only explicit reference to his specific sexual age preference, in one of the Venice letters to Charles Masson Fox, in which he declared: "My preference was for the 16, 17, 18 and large." Grant Richards, in his "Memories of a Misspent Youth" (1932), recalls "Frederick Baron Corvo" at Parson's Pleasure in Oxford – where scholars could bathe naked – "surveying the yellow flesh tints of youth with unbecoming satisfaction".

paragraph: Those of whom it is either speculated or surmised that they had sexual relations with Rolfe – Aubrey Thurstans, Sholto Osborne Gordon Douglas, John 'Markoleone', Ermenegildo Vianello and the other Venetian gondoliers – were all sexually mature young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one (with the exception of Douglas, who was considerably older). The idealised young men in his fiction were of a similar age.

paragraph: In 1904, soon after his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, the convert Robert Hugh Benson formed a chaste but passionate friendship with Rolfe. For two years this relationship involved letters "not only weekly, but at times daily, and of an intimate character, exhaustingly charged with emotion." There was a falling out in 1906, and Benson satirised Rolfe in his novel "The Sentimentalists". Rolfe returned the favor a few years later, putting a caricature of Benson named "Bobugo Bonsen" in a book named "Nicholas Crabbe". Their letters were subsequently destroyed, probably by Benson's brother.

paragraph: Rolfe sought to characterise the relationships in his fiction as examples of 'Greek love' between an older man and an ephebe, and thus endow them with the sanction of the ancient Hellenic tradition familiar to all Edwardians with a classical education.

paragraph: Section::::Work.

paragraph: Section::::Work.:Principal works of fiction.

paragraph: Rolfe's most important and enduring works are the stories and novels in which he himself is the thinly-disguised protagonist:

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Stories Toto Told Me" (1898), a collection of six stories, later expanded to thirty-two and republished as "In His Own Image" (1901), in which ‘Don Friderico’ and his teenage acolytes embark on long walking tours in the Italian countryside, even as far from Rome as the eastern coast of Italy. The youths’ leader, the sixteen-year-old Toto, recounts tales of saints behaving like pagan gods. The stories are richly Catholic and unashamedly superstitious, and the saints who figure in them are hedonistic, vengeful and (though not licentious) entirely comfortable with nudity, diametrically opposite to any Protestant ideal of sainthood.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Hadrian the Seventh" (1904), with an original and compelling plot, is Rolfe's most famous novel. Rolfe portrays himself as an Englishman with a quintessentially English name, 'George Arthur Rose,' (after Saint George, King Arthur, and England's national flower) who, having originally been rejected for the priesthood, finds himself the object of a spectacular and highly improbable change of mind on the part of the church hierarchy, who elect him to the papacy. Rose takes the name Hadrian VII and embarks upon a programme of ecclesiastical and geopolitical reform; the only English pope was Hadrian IV, and the last non-Italian pope had been Hadrian VI. More self-indulgently, he takes the opportunity to review his past life and to reward or punish his friends and acquaintances according to what he believes to be their just deserts. "Hadrian" is thus essentially an exercise in wish-fulfilment.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Nicholas Crabbe" (written 1900–1904, published 1958) tells the story of Rolfe's first attempts to achieve publication, with starring roles for Henry Harland, John Lane and Grant Richards. In this novel Rolfe has given himself a new fictional name, 'Nicholas Crabbe,' and its plot is a blow-by-blow chronicle of events, reproducing many of the publishers' letters and Rolfe's replies to them. "Nicholas Crabbe" is an undistinguished novel, but it is rich in autobiographical detail.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole" (written 1910–1913, thought lost, found in Chatto & Windus's safe, published 1934) is set in Venice and reintroduces the reader to 'Nicholas Crabbe.' It has three interlocking plots: Crabbe’s efforts to get his books published, in the face of obstacles placed in their way by his friends and agents in England, and his consequent economic difficulties; his rescue of a sixteen-year-old girl from the Messina earthquake and employment of her as his assistant and gondolier, dressed in male garments to avoid scandal; and the transcendent beauty of Venice itself and the role it plays in the lives of its votaries. Extracts from the novel’s beautiful descriptions of Venice appear regularly in guidebooks and modern anthologies. Unlike Rolfe’s other novels, this one ends happily, with a lucrative book contract and a declaration of love. "The desire and pursuit of the whole" is the definition of love, according to Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium.

paragraph: In 1912, the year before his death, Rolfe began to write another autobiographical novel, "The Freeing of the Soul, or The Seven Degrees" (written 1912–1913, published 1995), of which only a few pages have survived. Set in the fifth century, the novel was to have as its protagonist a middle-aged Byzantine bishop named Septimius, preoccupied with the likelihood of another of the barbarian attacks which had been terrifying his Venetian flock. The novel was a departure for Rolfe, as his four previous autobiographical works had been set in his own time.

paragraph: Section::::Work.:Other writings.

paragraph: Rolfe wrote four other novels: "Don Tarquinio" (1905), "Don Renato" (1909), "The Weird of the Wanderer" (1912), and "Hubert’s Arthur" (published posthumously in 1935). Both "The Weird" and "Hubert’s Arthur" were collaborations with Harry Pirie-Gordon. These works differ from the autobiographical novels in two respects: they are set in previous centuries, and the principal protagonist in each is not Rolfe’s "alter ego", although there is a strong degree of identification. (In "The Weird of the Wanderer" the hero, Nicholas Crabbe, becomes a time traveller and discovers that he is Odysseus.)

paragraph: Rolfe also wrote shorter fiction, published in contemporary periodicals and collected after his death in "Three Tales of Venice" (1950), "Amico di Sandro" (1951), "The Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda" (1957) and "The Armed Hands" (1974). He also published an entertaining but unreliable work of history, "Chronicles of the House of Borgia" (1901), translations of "The Rubáiyát of 'Umar Khaiyám" (1903) and "The Songs of Meleager" (published posthumously in 1937), and a little poetry, later gathered into one volume, "Collected Poems" (1974).

paragraph: Section::::Work.:Letters.

paragraph: Rolfe was an enthusiastic letter writer. John Holden recalled that "Corvo was one of those men who never speak a word if they can write it. We lived in the same house, a very little one, yet he would always communicate with me by note if I was not in the same room with him. He had dozens of letter books. He seized upon every opportunity for writing a letter, and every letter, whether to a publisher or to a cobbler, was written with the same care." About a thousand of his letters have survived, and several sequences of them have been published in limited editions. The letters reveal a lively, intelligent and absorbent mind, but because of Rolfe’s paranoiac tendencies they are often disputatious and recriminatory. Among the commentators who rated Rolfe’s letters more highly than his fiction was W H Auden, who wrote that Rolfe "had every right to be proud of his verbal claws … A large vocabulary is essential to the invective style, and Rolfe by study and constant practice became one of the great masters of vituperation." The letters have yet to be collected into a single scholarly edition.

paragraph: Section::::Photography and painting.

paragraph: Section::::Photography and painting.:Photography.

paragraph: Rolfe took an interest in photography throughout his life, but never achieved any more than basic competence. While he began to experiment with photography when he was a schoolmaster, it was his time in Rome in 1889–90 that introduced him to the work of the 'Arcadian' photographers Wilhelm von Gloeden and Guglielmo Plüschow. His seminary, the Scots College, was quite close to Plüschow's studio in via Sardegna, just off the via Veneto, and when Rolfe was expelled from the College and came under the benevolent patronage of the Duchess Sforza Cesarini, he began his own photographic efforts in imitation of von Gloeden and Plüschow. His models were the local "ragazzi" from the streets of Genzano di Roma, a town dominated by the Duchess's "palazzo". These youths were later to become the principal characters in Rolfe's Toto stories, published first in "The Yellow Book" in 1895–96 and later collected in "Stories Toto Told Me" in 1898 and "In His Own Image" in 1901.

paragraph: Rolfe continued to indulge his interest in photography in Christchurch in 1890–91, upon his return from Rome, and experimented with colour and underwater pictures. He began to lose interest, however, and really only took photography up again when he returned to Italy in 1908. His photographic career has been fully documented in Donald Rosenthal's book "The Photographs of Frederick Rolfe Baron Corvo 1860–1913", which was published in 2008.

paragraph: Section::::Photography and painting.:Painting.

paragraph: Rolfe never lost his conviction that he had been called to the Catholic priesthood. When he worked in his late teens and early twenties as a schoolmaster, and later when he tried his hand at painting and photography, he saw these as stop-gap occupations, means of earning an income until the Church authorities came to their senses and agreed with his own firm view that he had a priestly vocation.

paragraph: It was for this reason that Rolfe never undertook any formal training in either painting or photography. His paintings and designs, including several for the covers of his own books, were bold and surprisingly accomplished amateur efforts. He executed some of the most impressive of them when he was living in Christchurch in 1890 and 1891, including a small but striking oil painting of St Michael.

paragraph: From 1895 to 1899 he lived in Holywell in North Wales, where he painted some fourteen processional banners, commissioned by the parish priest there, Fr Charles Sidney Beauclerk. Rolfe painted the figures of the saints and John Holden assisted with the lettering on the borders. Only five of the banners have survived, and may still be seen in the Holywell Well Museum; they are colourful representations, in a naive style, of Saints Winefride, George, Ignatius, Gregory the Great and Augustine of Canterbury.

paragraph: Rolfe produced no further paintings after he became a full-time writer.

paragraph: Section::::Posthumous literary reputation.

paragraph: Rolfe's early books were politely reviewed but none of them was enough of a success to secure an income for its author, whose posthumous reputation began to dim. Within a very few years, however, coteries of readers began to discover a common interest in his work, and a resilient literary cult began to form. In 1934 A. J. A. Symons published "The Quest for Corvo", one of the century's iconic biographies, and this brought Rolfe's life and work to the attention of a wider public. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a further surge of interest in him which became known as "the Corvo revival", including a successful adaptation of "Hadrian" for the London stage. Two biographies of Rolfe appeared in the 1970s. These led to his inclusion in all the major works of reference and engendered a stream of academic theses on him. Although his books have remained in print, no substantial monograph has ever appeared in English on his work. With the growing academic interest in the history of literary modernism and acknowledgement of the central importance of life writing in its genesis, the true importance of Rolfe’s autobiographical fictions has come into focus. His influence has been discerned in novels written by Henry Harland, Ronald Firbank, Graham Greene, and Alexander Theroux, and in his coinage of neologisms and use of the Ulysses story there is some perhaps coincidental prefiguring of the work of James Joyce.

paragraph: Section::::Bibliography.

paragraph: Rolfe's works include:

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Tarcissus the Boy Martyr of Rome in the Diocletian Persecution" [c.1880]

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Stories Toto Told Me" (John Lane: The Bodley Head, London, 1898)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Attack on St Winefrede's Well" (Hochheimer, Holywell, 1898; only two copies extant)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "In His Own Image" (John Lane: The Bodley Head, London, 1901. 2nd Impression 1924)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Chronicles of the House of Borgia" (Grant Richards, London: E. P. Dutton, New York, 1901)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Nicholas Crabbe" (1903-4, posthumously published 1958, a limited edition of 215 numbered copies in slipcase were to have been issued with the trade edition but industrial action and other factors meant the trade edition ended up with precedence)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Hadrian the Seventh" (Chatto & Windus, London, 1904)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Don Tarquinio" (Chatto & Windus, London, 1905)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Don Renato" (1907-8, printed 1909 but not published, posthumously published Chatto & Windus, London, 1963, a limited edition of 200 numbered copies in slipcase were issued at the same time as the trade edition)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Hubert's Arthur" (1909–11, posthumously published 1935)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Weird of the Wanderer" (1912)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole" (1909, published Cassell, London, 1934)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Bull against the Enemy of the Anglican race" (Privately printed, London, 1929) (an attack on Lord Northcliffe)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Three Tales of Venice" (The Corvine Press, 1950)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Letters to Grant Richards" (The Peacocks Press, 1952)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda" (Nicholas Vane, London, 1957)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "A Letter from Baron Corvo to John Lane" (The Peacocks Press, 1958)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Letters to C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon" (Nicholas Vane, London, 1959)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "A Letter to Father Beauclerk" (The Tragara Press, Edinburgh, 1960)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Letters to Leonard Moore" (Nicholas Vane, London, 1960)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Letters of Baron Corvo to Kenneth Grahame" (The Peacocks Press, 1962)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Letters to R. M. Dawkins" (Nicholas Vane, London, 1962)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Architecture of Aberdeen" (Privately Printed, Detroit, 1963)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Without Prejudice. One Hundred Letters From Frederick William Rolfe to John Lane" (Privately printed for Allen Lane, London, 1963)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "A Letter to Claud" (University of Iowa School of Journalism, Iowa City, 1964)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Venice Letters A Selection" (Cecil Woolf, London, 1966 [actually 1967])

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Armed Hands" (Cecil Woolf, London, 1974)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Collected Poems" (Cecil Woolf, London, 1974)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The Venice Letters" (Cecil Woolf, London, 1974)

paragraph: Section::::Further reading.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Benkovitz, Miriam. "Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo". Putnam, New York, 1977. SBN: 399-12009-2.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Benson, R. H., "The Sentimentalists" (1906), where the central figure is closely modelled on Rolfe (who in turn pillories the novel as "The Sensiblist" in "The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole")

paragraph: BULLET::::- Bradshaw, David. "Rolfe, Frederick William" in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (consulted online).

paragraph: BULLET::::- Connell, Brendan. "The Translation of Father Torturo". Prime Books, 2005. Dedicated to Rolfe, this book is a clear homage to Hadrian the Seventh.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Miernik, Mirosław Aleksander. "Rolfe, Rose, Corvo, Crabbe: The Literary Images of Frederick Rolfe". Peter Lang Verlag, 2015.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Johnson, Pamela Hansford. "The Unspeakable Skipton". Macmillan, 1959; Penguin Books (No.1529) 1961. Rolfe's life as source for the characterisation of Daniel Skipton.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Norwich, John Julius. "Paradise of Cities: Venice and its Nineteenth Century Visitors". Penguin, 2004.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Reade, Brian (ed.). "Sexual Heretics; Male Homosexuality in English literature from 1850–1900 – an anthology". London, Routledge, Keegan and Paul, 1970.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Rosenthal, Donald, "The Photographs of Frederick Rolfe Baron Corvo 1860–1913", Asphodel Editions, 2008.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Scoble, Robert. "The Corvo Cult: The History of An Obsession", Strange Attractor, London, 2014;

paragraph: BULLET::::- Scoble, Robert. "Raven: The Turbulent World of Baron Corvo", Strange Attractor, London, 2013,

paragraph: BULLET::::- Symons, A.J.A. "The Quest for Corvo". Cassell, London, 1934.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Weeks, Donald. "Corvo". Michael Joseph, London, 1971.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Woolf, Cecil. "A Bibliography of Frederick Rolfe Baron Corvo" The Soho Bibliographies, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1972 (Second Edition)

paragraph: BULLET::::- Woolf, Cecil and Sewell, Brocard (eds). "New Quests for Corvo". Icon books, London, 1965.

paragraph: Section::::External links.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Archival material at

alias:
Fr. Austin
Baron Corvo Rolfe
Frederick William Rolfe
Baron Corvo
A. Crab Maid
Fr. Rolfe
Frank English
Frederick Austin
Prospero

description: British writer, photographer and historian

enwikiquote_title: Frederick Rolfe

wikidata_label: Frederick Rolfe

wikipedia_title: Frederick Rolfe


text: romantic poet

text: New York Evening Post

text: log cabin

text: Cummington

text: Massachusetts

text: state legislator

text: Mayflower

text: John Alden

text: The Courtship of Miles Standish

text: Charity Bryant

text: Rachel Hope Cleves

text: Weybridge, Vermont

text: William Cullen Bryant Homestead

text: Williams College

text: Worthington

text: Bridgewater

text: Plainfield

text: To a Waterfowl

text: Alexander Pope

text: The Embargo

text: Thomas Jefferson

text: Thanatopsis

text: North American Review

text: Edward Tyrrel Channing

text: To a Waterfowl

text: Harvard University

text: Phi Beta Kappa Society

text: Washington Irving

text: Great Barrington, Massachusetts

text: New-York Evening Post

text: William Coleman

text: organized labor

text: Thomas Jefferson and his party

text: Jackson

text: Free Soil Party

text: Republican Party

text: John Frémont

text: Abraham Lincoln

text: Cooper Union

text: Cooper Union speech

text: American Academy of Arts and Sciences

text: Picturesque America

text: United States

text: Canada

text: Homer

text: Iliad

text: The Odyssey

text: homeopathy

text: Unitarian Church

text: Central Park

text: Giuseppe Mazzini

text: Roslyn Cemetery

text: Thomas Holley Chivers

text: Edgar Allan Poe

text: The Poetic Principle

text: Mary Mapes Dodge

text: Thomas Cole

text: Volterra

text: Charles Lyell

text: Bryant Park

text: public high school

text: Central Park

text: Metropolitan Museum of Art

text: New York Medical College

text: Hudson River School

text: Thomas Cole

text: Walt Whitman

text: Martin Luther King, Jr.

text: Give Us the Ballot

text: Bryant

text: Williams College

text: Columbia, Maryland

text: Cleveland, Ohio

text: Long Island City, New York

text: Cullen, Saskatchewan

text: Bryant, Saskatchewan

text: Google Books

text: Bryant's edition of the Odyssey

text: William Cullen Bryant Homestead

categories: New York Post people,Hall of Fame for Great Americans inductees,Williams College alumni,People from Cummington, Massachusetts,Poets from Massachusetts,1794 births,American male poets,New York (state) Free Soilers,Poets from New York (state),19th-century American male writers,Classical liberals,New York (state) Republicans,American Unitarians,Romantic poets,American people of English descent,Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,People from Roslyn, New York,19th-century American poets,1878 deaths

paragraph: William Cullen Bryant

paragraph: William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the "New York Evening Post".

paragraph: Section::::Youth and education.

paragraph: Bryant was born on November 3, 1794, in a log cabin near Cummington, Massachusetts; the home of his birth is today marked with a plaque. He was the second son of Peter Bryant (b. Aug. 12, 1767, d. Mar. 20, 1820), a doctor and later a state legislator, and Sarah Snell (b. Dec. 4, 1768, d. May 6, 1847). The genealogy of his mother traces back to passengers on the "Mayflower": John Alden (b. 1599, d. 1687), his wife Priscilla Mullins and her parents William and Alice Mullins. The story of the romance between John and Priscilla is the subject of a famous narrative poem by Longfellow "The Courtship of Miles Standish".

paragraph: He was also the nephew of Charity Bryant, a Vermont seamstress who is the subject of Rachel Hope Cleves's 2014 book "Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America". William Cullen Bryant described their relationship: "If I were permitted to draw the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and to me interesting, story of two maiden ladies who dwell in this valley. I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for more than forty years." Charity and Sylvia Drake are buried together at Weybridge Hill Cemetery, Weybridge, Vermont.

paragraph: Bryant and his family moved to a new home when he was two years old. The William Cullen Bryant Homestead, his boyhood home, is now a museum. After just one year at Williams College (he entered with sophomore standing), he hoped to transfer to Yale, but a talk with his father led to the realization that family finances would not support it. His father counseled a legal career as his best available choice, and the disappointed poet began to study law in Worthington and Bridgewater in Massachusetts. He was admitted to the bar in 1815 and began practicing law in nearby Plainfield, walking the seven miles from Cummington every day. On one of these walks, in December 1815, he noticed a single bird flying on the horizon; the sight moved him enough to write "To a Waterfowl".

paragraph: Bryant developed an interest in poetry early in life. Under his father's tutelage, he emulated Alexander Pope and other Neo-Classic British poets. "The Embargo", a savage attack on President Thomas Jefferson published in 1808, reflected Dr. Bryant's Federalist political views. The first edition quickly sold out—partly because of publicity attached to the poet's young age. A second, expanded edition included Bryant's translation of classical verse. During his collegiate studies and his reading for the law, he wrote little poetry, but encounters with the Graveyard Poets and then Wordsworth regenerated his passion for "the witchery of song."

paragraph: Section::::Poetry.

paragraph: "Thanatopsis" is Bryant's most famous poem, which Bryant may have been working on as early as 1811. In 1817 his father took some pages of verse from his son's desk, and at the invitation of Willard Phillips, an editor of the "North American Review" who had previously been tutored in the classics by Dr. Bryant, he submitted them along with his own work. The editor of the "Review," Edward Tyrrel Channing, read the poem to his assistant, Richard Henry Dana, who immediately exclaimed, "That was never written on this side of the water!" Someone at the "North American" joined two of the son's discrete fragments, gave the result the Greek-derived title "Thanatopsis" ("meditation on death"), mistakenly attributed it to the father, and published it. After clarification of the authorship, the son's poems began appearing with some regularity in the "Review". "To a Waterfowl", published in 1821, was the most popular.

paragraph: On January 11, 1821, Bryant, still striving to build a legal career, married Frances Fairchild. Soon after, having received an invitation to address the Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa Society at the school's August commencement, Bryant spent months working on "The Ages", a panorama in verse of the history of civilization, culminating in the establishment of the United States. As it would in all collections he subsequently issued, "The Ages" led the volume, also entitled "Poems", which he arranged to publish on the same trip to Cambridge. For that book, he added sets of lines at the beginning and end of "Thanatopsis" that changed the poem. His career as a poet was now established, though recognition as America's leading poet waited until 1832, when an expanded "Poems" was published in the U.S. and, with the assistance of Washington Irving, in Britain.

paragraph: His poetry has been described as being "of a thoughtful, meditative character, and makes but slight appeal to the mass of readers."

paragraph: Section::::Editorial career.

paragraph: From 1816 to 1825, Bryant depended on his law practice in Great Barrington, Massachusetts to sustain his family financially, but the strain of dealing with unsophisticated neighbors and juridical pettifoggery pushed him to trade his unrewarding profession for New York City and the promise of a literary career. With the encouragement of a distinguished and well-connected literary family, the Sedgwicks, he quickly gained a foothold in New York City's vibrant cultural life. His first employment, in 1825, was as editor of the "New-York Review", which within the next year merged with the "United States Review and Literary Gazette". But in the throes of the failing struggle to raise subscriptions, he accepted part-time duties with the "New-York Evening Post" under William Coleman; then, partly because of Coleman's ill health, traceable to the consequences of a duel and then a stroke, Bryant's responsibilities expanded rapidly. From assistant editor he rose to editor-in-chief and co-owner of the newspaper that had been founded by Alexander Hamilton. Over the next half century, the "Post" would become the most respected paper in the city and, from the election of Andrew Jackson, the major platform in the Northeast for the Democratic Party and subsequently of the Free Soil and Republican Parties. In the process, the "Evening-Post" also became the pillar of a substantial fortune. Despite his Federalist beginnings, Bryant had shifted to being one of the most liberal voices of the century. An early supporter of organized labor, with his 1836 editorials asserting the right of workmen to strike, Bryant also defended of religious minorities and immigrants, and promoted the abolition of slavery. He "threw himself into the foreground of the battle for human rights" and did not cease speaking out against the corrupting influence of certain bankers in spite of their efforts to break down the paper. According to newspaper historian Frank Luther Mott, Bryant was "a great liberal seldom done justice by modern writers".

paragraph: Ironically, the boy who first tasted fame for his diatribe against Thomas Jefferson and his party became one of the key supporters in the Northeast of that same party under Jackson. Bryant's views, always progressive though not quite populist, in course led him to join the Free Soilers, and when the Free Soil Party became a core of the new Republican Party in 1856, Bryant vigorously campaigned for John Frémont. That exertion enhanced his standing in party councils, and in 1860, he was one of the prime Eastern exponents of Abraham Lincoln, whom he introduced at Cooper Union. (That "Cooper Union speech" lifted Lincoln to the nomination, and then the presidency.)

paragraph: Although literary historians have neglected his fiction, Bryant's stories over the seven-year period from his time with the "Review" to the publication of "Tales of Glauber Spa" in 1832 show a variety of strategies, making him the most inventive of practitioners of the genre during this early stage of its evolution. He was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.

paragraph: Bryant edited the very successful "Picturesque America", which was published between 1872 and 1874. This two-volume set was lavishly illustrated and described scenic places in the United States and Canada.

paragraph: Section::::Later years.

paragraph: In his last decade, Bryant shifted from writing his own poetry to a blank verse translation of Homer's works. He assiduously worked on the "Iliad" and "The Odyssey" from 1871 to 1874. He is also remembered as one of the principal authorities on homeopathy and as a hymnist for the Unitarian Church, both legacies of his father's enormous influence on him.

paragraph: Bryant died in 1878 of complications from an accidental fall suffered after participating in a Central Park ceremony to honor Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. He is buried at Roslyn Cemetery in Roslyn, Long Island, New York.

paragraph: Section::::Critical response.

paragraph: Poet and literary critic Thomas Holley Chivers said that the "only thing [Bryant] ever wrote that may be called "Poetry" is 'Thanatopsis', which he stole "line for line" from the Spanish. The fact is, that he never did anything but steal—as nothing he ever wrote is original." Contemporary critic Edgar Allan Poe, on the other hand, praised Bryant and specifically the poem "June" in his essay "The Poetic Principle":

paragraph: The rhythmical flow, here, is even voluptuous—nothing could be more melodious. The poem has always affected me in a remarkable manner. The intense melancholy which seems to well up, perforce, to the surface of all the poet's cheerful sayings about his grave, we find thrilling us to the soul—while there is the truest poetic elevation in the thrill. The impression left is one of a pleasurable sadness.

paragraph: Editor and children's writer Mary Mapes Dodge wrote that Bryant's poems "have wrought vast and far-reaching good in the world." She predicted, "You will admire more and more, as you grow older, the noble poems of this great and good man."

paragraph: Bryant's poetry is tender and graceful, pervaded by a contemplative melancholy, and a love of solitude and the silence of the woods. Though he was brought up to admire Pope, and in his early youth imitated him, he was one of the first American poets to throw off his influence. Bryant had an interest in science and in geology especially. Thomas Cole was a friend and both, at different times, considered the "geological structure" of Volterra in Italy. He met Charles Lyell in England in 1845. He had a high sense of duty, was a prominent and patriotic citizen, and enjoyed the esteem and even the reverence of his fellow-countrymen.

paragraph: Section::::Legacy.

paragraph: In 1884, New York City's Reservoir Square, at the intersection of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, was renamed Bryant Park in his honor. The city later named a public high school in Long Island City, Queens in his honor.

paragraph: A park in East York, a suburb of Toronto, Canada, bears the name of Cullen Bryant Park as well.

paragraph: Although he is now thought of as a New Englander, Bryant, for most of his lifetime, was thoroughly a New Yorker—and a very dedicated one at that. He was a major force behind the idea that became Central Park, as well as a leading proponent of creating the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was one of a group of founders of New York Medical College. He had close affinities with the Hudson River School of art and was an intimate friend of Thomas Cole. He defended immigrants and, at some financial risk to himself, championed the rights of workers to form labor unions.

paragraph: As a writer, Bryant was an early advocate of American literary nationalism, and his own poetry focusing on nature as a metaphor for truth established a central pattern in the American literary tradition.

paragraph: Some however, argue that a reassessment is long overdue. It finds great merit in a couple of short stories Bryant wrote while trying to build interest in periodicals he edited. More importantly, it perceives a poet of great technical sophistication who was a progenitor of Walt Whitman, to whom he was a mentor.

paragraph: Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted Bryant in his speech "Give Us the Ballot", when he said, "there is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying: 'Truth crushed to earth will rise again.

paragraph: The Seattle neighborhood Bryant is named after him.

paragraph: Bryant House at Williams College is named for him.

paragraph: Bryant Woods, one of the four original villages in Columbia, Maryland, is also named after him.

paragraph: William Cullen Bryant Elementary School in Cleveland, Ohio is also named in his honor.

paragraph: William Cullen Bryant High School in Long Island City, New York is also named in his honor.William Cullen Bryant Elementary School in Great Barrington Massachusetts is also named in his honor.

paragraph: Section::::See also.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Cullen, Saskatchewan and Bryant, Saskatchewan

paragraph: Section::::References.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "William Cullen Bryant: An American Voice" by Frank Gado ()

paragraph: BULLET::::- "William Cullen Bryant" by Charles H. Brown ()

paragraph: Section::::Further reading.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Muller, Gilbert H. "William Cullen Bryant: Author of America". New York: State University of New York Press, 2008.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Symington, Andrew James. "William Cullen Bryant: a biographical sketch : with selections from his poems and other writings". New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880. Google Books.

paragraph: Section::::External links.

paragraph: Works

paragraph: BULLET::::- Selected Poems and Songs by William Cullen Bryant

paragraph: BULLET::::- Bryant's edition of the Odyssey

paragraph: BULLET::::- "THE SKELETON'S CAVE" by William Cullen Bryant; taken from "Tales of Glauber Spa" (1832)

paragraph: Other

paragraph: BULLET::::- Essay on William Cullen Bryant by Wynn Yarborough

paragraph: BULLET::::- Mr. Lincoln and Friends: William Cullen Bryant

paragraph: BULLET::::- William Cullen Bryant Homestead in Cummington, Mass.

paragraph: BULLET::::- "Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide - An Ongoing Project" by Paul P. Reuben

description: American romantic poet and journalist

enwikiquote_title: William Cullen Bryant

wikidata_label: William Cullen Bryant

wikipedia_title: William Cullen Bryant


text: Ōoka Tadayuki

text: Iwatsuki Domain

text: Musashi Province

text: Inaba clan

text: Inaba Masami

text: Meiji government

text: abolition of the han system

text: viscount

text: kazoku

text: Inaba Hisamichi

text: Usuki Domain

text: Bungo Province

text: Papinot, Edmond

categories: Fudai daimyo,1848 births,Kazoku,Inaba clan,1902 deaths

paragraph: Inaba Masayoshi

paragraph: Section::::Biography.

paragraph: Inaba Masayoshi was the younger son of Ōoka Tadayuki, the daimyō of Iwatsuki Domain, Musashi Province. He was adopted into the Inaba clan as heir to Inaba Masami, the 4th Inaba daimyō of Tateyama Domain. On his Inaba Masami’s retirement from public life in 1864, he succeeded to the head of the Tateyama Inaba clan and the position of daimyō of Tateyama. His immediate task was to reconcile the Domain with the new Meiji government. In 1869, he was confirmed as Domain governor, and upon the abolition of the han system in 1871, governor of the short-lived Tateyama Prefecture. He was subsequently made a viscount ("shishaku") under the "kazoku" peerage system.

paragraph: Inaba Masayoshi had no heir, adopted and the fourth son of Inaba Hisamichi, the last daimyō of Usuki Domain in Bungo Province to carry on the Inaba name.

paragraph: Section::::References.

paragraph: BULLET::::- Papinot, Edmond. (1906) "Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie du japon." Tokyo: Librarie Sansaisha...Click link for digitized 1906 "Nobiliaire du japon" (2003)

paragraph: BULLET::::- "The content of much of this article was derived from that of the corresponding article on Japanese Wikipedia."

description: Japanese noble

wikidata_label: Inaba Masayoshi

wikipedia_title: Inaba Masayoshi