Casanova's Women (26 page)

According to one well-informed Venetian gossip, Marina had not been forced to become a nun by her family but, after spending her
childhood at the Angeli as a boarder, she had embraced the conventual life of her own free will. The real enigma was the sudden caprice that had made such a wealthy and cultivated young beauty decide to take the veil. If she had indeed entered the cloister on a whim, Marina had plenty of time to repent of her irrevocable decision. During the four years since her profession the religious life had become anathema to her, and her island convent now seemed more like a prison than a place of refuge. Venice was so close that she could see it in the distance and almost hear its music, yet its multitudinous attractions could have been one hundred miles away. With her questioning mind and her strong sexual drive, Marina yearned for what took place in the city: family life, the theatre, gambling, witty conversation, love affairs and intrigues. Instead, she was marooned on Murano with petty rules, a religion she no longer believed in, and the island's smoke-belching glass industry with all ‘the Furnaces and Calcinations, the Transubstantiations, the Liquefactions that are incident to this Art'.
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There was only one way that many young Venetian nuns could bear their restricted lives inside the convent, and that was to rebel by escaping now and then, often in carnival costume, and having secret lives outside it. When she had entered Santa Maria degli Angeli Marina had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but since then she had deliberately and defiantly broken each one time and again. For in the autumn of 1752, at the age of twenty-one, she had taken a lover. The Abbé François Joachim Pierre de Bernis was handsome, witty, sweet-natured, thoughtful and loveable; and, as the new French ambassador to Venice, he was also a man of power and means. The youngest son of an impoverished noble family, he had been educated at St Sulpice in Paris where he had taken the tonsure in his youth in preparation for an ecclesiastical career. In his mid-twenties he had worked under Cardinal de Fleury, tutor and later Prime Minister to Louis XV and one of the guiding lights of the French Church. Fleury had strongly disapproved of his young abbé, and had warned him that he would receive no appointment from him as long as he lived. De Bernis
is said to have replied, ‘Very well, Your Grace, I shall wait' – which is exactly what he did. For the next few years, he lived in Paris as well as he could on his limited means, and whiled away his time by writing light poetry and essays. Elected into the French Academy in 1744 at the age of twenty-nine (Cardinal de Fleury had died two years earlier), he was befriended by Voltaire, who, because of de Bernis's florid literary style, nicknamed him ‘Babet la Bouquetière' after a famous Parnasse flower-seller. Since a farce entitled
Les Amours de Babet la Bouquetière
was staged in Paris in 1772, by which time de Bernis was a famous cardinal in Rome, he had clearly had a reputation as a ladies' man in his youth.
¹⁰
He certainly became a favourite of the future Madame de Pompadour, who received him at her husband's home, the Château d'Etoiles, and, after she became Louis XV's official mistress, secured de Bernis a modest annual pension of 1,500 livres and a grace-and-favour apartment in the Palais du Louvre.

Through Pompadour's influence, thirty-seven-year-old de Bernis was appointed ambassador to Venice in 1752. Although he was sent there that October ‘as into a cul-de-sac of little interest', as he admitted in his memoirs, he was determined to make his mark in the Republic: ‘I had been announced in Venice as an agreeable man and a younger son without resources. People expected gallantry and a very ordinary style of living. I balked this public expectation on both points.'
¹¹
His new home was a grand palazzo near the Madonna dell'Orto church, decorated with blue and green damask silk and filled with gold ornaments. It had a charming summer house in the garden, painted white and covered with brightly-coloured wooden carvings of flora and fauna, and the main building contained a billiard table at which he played during the long evenings. Seven footmen, two secretaries and a plethora of domestic servants waited on him, and his kitchen was presided over by a wonderful French chef, du Rosier, whom he had probably brought from Paris with him. Keeping this large retinue under control required the imposition of strict discipline: ‘I wished my household to be regulated like that of a Carthusian establishment,' de Bernis
wrote, ‘I required that silence and order should reign there; that my retinue should be polite and respectful towards all citizens, and that libertinism should be banished.'
¹²

Banished it was, to the island of Murano where de Bernis was introduced to Marina in the visiting-parlour of Santa Maria degli Angeli. The intermediary may well have been a scheming friend sympathetic to Marina's plight, or perhaps an unwitting member of her family; although Venice's patricians were forbidden by law from conversing with foreigners, Marina's relative Francesco Morosini had served as the Venetian ambassador in Paris between 1748 and 1751 and would almost certainly have met de Bernis there. With all the finesse that his nation was renowned for in matters of intrigue, de Bernis courted Marina through the iron grating of the communication window. Clever, generous and witty ('Seriousness never excluded jesting on the minister's side, who in this way possessed to perfection the French spirit', Casanova wrote of him)
¹³
he quickly won over the sexually and intellectually frustrated nun. He was not the first French ambassador to fall under the spell of one of Murano's enclosed women: the Marquis de Froulay, one of his predecessors, had conducted a very indiscreet affair with Maria da Riva, a patrician-born nun from the convent of San Giacomo. The Council of Ten had eventually transferred Maria to a convent in Ferrara, from where she had later absconded with a colonel whom she subsequently married, scandalising society and causing de Froulay to go mad with grief.

As one eighteenth-century observer noted with some sympathy, Venice's reluctant nuns had a reputation for being ‘cheerful libertines … If they fail to keep up an enforced vow of chastity it is no fault of theirs, but of the parents who pushed them into the cloister and of the people who thought of such a dreary vow to begin with … Nuns from the large convents are forever going masked to the play or out to meet their lovers on the Piazza. All they have to do is get round the sister-portress, who never says no to those with noble families or powerful friends and admirers.'
¹⁴
The Burgundian President Charles de Brosses was also aware of the nuns' libidinous
reputation: were he to be sent to Venice for a long stay, he remarked, his mind would immediately turn to its
religieuses
.

Seducing a nun was a sacrilegious crime theoretically punishable by perpetual banishment from the Republic, or even death. The inherent dangers made the pleasure even sweeter for de Bernis. Generous, protective and above all discreet, he proved to be Marina's perfect comrade in her rebellion against her religious vows. With the help of his influence and money, with which she bribed the convent's gardener and the lay-nun who looked after her, she was soon escaping from the convent at night through a door in her bedchamber which led on to a side canal. From there she was spirited off in one of the ambassador's five gondolas to a nearby private house or
casino
which de Bernis had rented for her and to which he gave her a key. In this sumptuously furnished apartment he introduced the bride of Christ to sex (to which she soon became addicted), pink champagne and French food served on silver hotplates and Sèvres porcelain. He also passed on to her the enlightened ideas he had imbibed from Voltaire. A small library of books and erotic engravings at the
casino
provided Marina with ‘all that the wisest philosophers have written against religion, and all that the most voluptuous pens have written on the subject which is the sole aim of love'.
¹⁵

By reading these books and through philosophical discussions with her lover, the fallen Murano ‘Angel' soon lost her remaining religious faith. Her new enlightened perspective made her even more defiant against her religious wardens. When her confessor warned her to stop reading the French moralist Pierre Charron's book,
La Sagesse
, she refused on the grounds that her conscience was untroubled by it; and when the Bishop of Torcello, under whose diocese the Angeli fell, took the matter up with her, she retorted that a confessor's job was to absolve her, not to advise her. Since Marina was unsatisfied by the bishop's ruling that she be left to her own conscience in future, de Bernis wrote to Rome on her behalf and procured a brief from the Pope authorising the nun to confess in future to whomsoever she wished.

There seemed no end to the delight Marina took in rebelling against the Church. During Venice's long carnival season, when everyone went about disguised in cloaks and masks, she allowed de Bernis to take her to the opera and to gamble at the public ridotto. Through him, she acquired a wardrobe of fine secular clothes, and he showered her with diamonds and money which she kept locked up in her desk at the
casino
, a place which soon became her refuge and where she delighted in playing house, making up the day-bed in front of the fire herself and even dressing the salad at table. Everything she could possibly need was thoughtfully provided for her there including a personal maid. There was even a pretty box filled with hand-made condoms to ensure that her lover would not make her pregnant. De Bernis did everything within his power to make Marina happy – and that included facilitating her desire to take a second lover when the stranger she saw in the Angeli's church took her fancy. The idea actually appealed to the ambassador's voyeuristic streak. The
casino
contained a secret chamber that could only be entered through the false back of a cupboard, and twenty holes bored through its walls looked directly into the main chamber. With Marina's consent, de Bernis planned to spy on her and the handsome churchgoer who had caught her fancy. Sexual exhibitionism was about to be added to the list of her crimes against God.

 

When twenty-eight-year-old Giacomo Casanova left the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli after hearing mass on All Saints' Day, an elderly lay-nun from the convent walked past him and dropped Marina's letter at his feet. Intrigued, Casanova picked it up and, as his gondolier steered him back towards Venice, he broke open the wax seal and read the contents with a mixture of curiosity and amazement. Back at the Palazzo Bragadin, where he was then living as the senator's adopted son, he shut himself up in his apartments while he made up his mind what to do. Although the letter was a work of daring madness on the part of its anonymous author, Casanova nevertheless found a dignity in it that made him respect
her. From its tone he concluded that the nun who had written it must be young, pretty and well versed in the art of intrigue – in short, a delectable prospect. But two things made him hesitate: first, the letter might have been written to entrap him; second, he already had a lover among Murano's ‘Angels'. In fact, he had two.

The first was Marta Savorgnan, one of the two sisters with whom he had lost his virginity so many years ago. The second was fourteen-year-old Caterina Capretta (C.C. as he called her in his memoir) who, because of her suspected liaison with him, had been sent to the Angeli the previous June as a boarder.

Casanova had met Caterina at the end of May 1753, just days after returning to Venice from Paris, where he had spent two hedonistic years at Senator Bragadin's expense. Since parting from Henriette he had become a sophisticated socialite and a skilful womaniser. Life in Paris had polished any remaining rough corners off his education and manners. His French, the language of the European aristocracy, had been all but perfected thanks to a year's worth of private lessons given him by the then-famous satirical playwright Crebillon; he had learned the minuet under the well-known dancing instructor Marcel; and, thanks to his friendship with the renowned family of actor Antonio Balletti, whom he had met in Milan, he had insinuated himself into the highest echelons of Parisian artistic society.

Caterina was introduced to Casanova by her older brother Pietro, a ne'er-do-well who was trying to persuade the young adventurer to honour three dubious bills of exchange in return for a share in his business, which was importing beef cattle into Venice from Styria and Hungary. While his father was out of town, Pietro deliberately threw his innocent fourteen-year-old sister together with his sophisticated acquaintance under compromising circumstances, hoping that an intrigue between them would put pressure on Casanova to give him money. Pietro's plan backfired when Casanova fell in love with Caterina. Tall, slim and raven-haired, the girl was a well-protected virgin who knew nothing of the ways of the world. She had never mixed in company before, or
even left her parents' house unless it was on her mother's arm. What impressed Casanova most about her was her fresh candid mind, her unspoiled nature and her youthful exuberance – all so different from the studied airs and graces of Parisian women. Allowed by her brother to visit the San Biagio garden on the island of Giudecca with her admirer, Caterina raced around ‘like a young greyhound… she runs until she is out of breath, and then laughs at the astonishment which keeps me motionless and staring at her.'
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Convinced that if he himself did not fall for the bait, Pietro would use Caterina to attract a less scrupulous man, Casanova felt well and truly trapped. He ‘could proceed with C.C. neither as an honest man nor as a libertine. I could not delude myself that I might have her as a wife, and I thought that I would kill anyone who dared to persuade me to seduce her.'
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These noble sentiments lasted a matter of days – just long enough for Caterina and her mother to grow to trust Casanova, and for him to link up again with his old friend Teresa Imer. The flirtatious young singer who had captivated Senator Malipiero in her youth was now married to a choreographer named Angelo Pompeati, and living with him and their children in the Prussian outpost of Bayreuth. Here she had become an opera star and the adored lover of two important men: the Marquis de Montpernis, the French impresario of Bayreuth's beautiful opera house; and the ruling Margrave himself, Friedrich von Hohenzollern, the brother-in-law of Frederick the Great. Back in Venice in the spring of 1753 to visit her parents, Teresa was at a loose end. Years earlier, Casanova had ruined his relationship with Senator Malipiero by being caught petting with her in his palazzo. Older but no wiser, the two of them now consummated the affair that had been brewing since then. It was a lighthearted fling for both of them: Teresa was soon to return to her husband and lovers in Bayreuth; and Casanova had Caterina's virginity on his mind.