History's Worst F*ckboys: Casanova
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Shh! No, I mean it! We don't want the librarians in here. Gosh, what does he do with his time? Count Waldenstein has some 40,000 titles in this library and there is no coherent pattern to any of this at all. The organisation is terrible. No, stay quiet. Shh! Can you hear that? A quill scratching somewhere in the stacks. Somebody's in here. Let's go and have a look.

Oh, there he is, the librarian, ignoring the library work, and instead he's writing his 12-volume biography. And what a biography it will be. After all, he may not look it, but this quiet librarian spending his final years in the middle of nowhere writing this book is the one and only Giacomo Casanova.

Hello and welcome back to Between the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society with me, Kate Lister.

By his own reckoning, Casanova had some 116 lovers in his lifetime. That fact, and the fact that he wrote all of this down, means that he has to be mentioned this month. After all, he was a love-bombing, gift-giving Lothario, but was he a fuckboy too?

Well, we have delved back into the archive for this episode with none other than the fabulous Dan Snow. And what with Dan Snow and cashing over for an earful, you can't ask for more than that, can you? Kate Lister, how's it going? Have you got the fastest growing podcast in the world? Ha ha ha!

The Twigst, it's pretty cool. I always love your sexual advisory stuff at the start. You're like, of course it is. The whole point is to listen to you Muppets. That's my favourite bit, is having to go, right, yeah, it's about sex. We're going to talk about sex. It's like when you get little bottles of Nite Owl and it says, warning, may cause drowsiness. Yeah. But I actually quite enjoy that bit now. It sounds like you enjoy that bit, for sure, for sure. I mean, Casanova is like a central figure of this story, isn't he? I mean, it's bonkers.

There's a lot of things you could say about him, and I'm sure that we will, but you'd have to say that he drank deeply from the cup of life, I think is what you'd have to say about...

about Casanova is he lived several lifetimes over, didn't he? I think that he realises quite early on, you sort of get the sense when you read it, is memoirs, which is really the only source that we have for Casanova, is these thousands and thousands, 10,000 words or more, memoirs that he wrote when he was in his 60s. And you get a real sense of him sat there. He was a librarian at the time because he'd fritted everything away. By the way, can we just briefly, Casanova ended his days as a librarian. I love librarians, but I mean, that is a classic.

It is, isn't it? Because he earned his fortune several times over and then spaffed it up the wall repeatedly because he couldn't stop gambling. He was a terrible, terrible gambler. And everything he did was about chance and opportunistic and he would keep getting in trouble. He'd keep being chucked out of places, which is kind of one of the reasons he was on the run all the time is because he would keep pissing people off and then he'd be exiled.

But I don't think he ever stopped being a chancer. I think he worked out very early on that he was really clever. And he was. He was really, really bright. But I think that he worked out that you can trick people.

You can manipulate people. And I think he liked doing it as well. So he is super smart and he graduates. He's really clever. He hates the law, doesn't he? He hates it. But he graduates super young from university and is still a teenager. He's really young. He's one of those like child prodigies. He graduates from law at about like 17 or something like that. And he was just a voracious reader of books. He would just absorb everything. But then he's stuck because, well, all right, you're very clever and you know a lot of stuff and you're quite good looking by all accounts.

But what are you going to do? You're still the son of an actress and you're penniless. So he tempted to go into the church for a bit.

But wasn't very good at it. He was a bit of a wrong-un, wasn't he? Well, do you know, he was really good at delivering the sermons and people started coming from all over the place to hear him talk. But there was one incident where he got smashed before he was supposed to give the sermon. And then he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do, so he pretended to faint rather than give it away that he was absolutely sozzled. And it just became pretty obvious that he was not going to fit in the church because he kept shagging everyone.

And he then, he basically finds himself a wealthy patron, right? Which is, I mean... He does. It's just a shortcut. It's a life hack though, isn't it? But then what are you going to do? You're like 18 years old. How are you going to make your money? It's a very, very, very different world. You can't really have an apprenticeship. If you haven't inherited the money, there's only a few options available to you, really.

And getting a wealthy patron is definitely one of them. And he does score the jackpot, and it's Senator Braga Dinn. Casanova found him when he was having a heart attack or a stroke, and he kind of launched into... It's another example of him being this brilliant con artist. He launched into this, oh, my God, I'm going to help you, I'm the hero. And he picked him up off the street and took him back to his apartment and laid down on the bed, and then he made this whole big song and dance about how he'd saved him and his doctors couldn't. So when Braga Dinn kind of came back round...

He was incredibly indebted to Casanova and he made him his principal heir. But it's another example of him bullshitting really, really well. Well, instead of being a healer

slash alchemist is something that he would turn to when he was struggling for a square meal. Yeah, and it was a dangerous game, actually, and it was one that would come around and bite him on the ass because in Venice at the time, there was sort of their own version of the Inquisition going on, which is sort of the repressive religious authorities were getting very upset with this sort of magic occult thing

sacrilegious stuff going on and Casanova really liked that in fact he's got one story that when he was really little his grandmother took him to a witch to heal him of nosebleeds which is extreme and he thinks at some point that he is able to perform magic and Kabbalah and mysticism and at some point in his life pretends to be like a spiritualist and a mediumist but he does kind of play around with this stuff how much he believed it himself I'm not quite sure.

Yeah, he does a bit of Philosopher's Stone action, doesn't he? We should talk about sex, because he is also the victim of child abuse. I mean, he had...

His first sexual experiences were under the age that he was young, I mean, wasn't he? He was young. He didn't have full penetrative sex until he was in his teens. But his first sexual experience was with a woman that was older than him, definitely. And he kind of remembers it as like it awoke something in him that he was going to devote the rest of his life to. But today, yeah, we'd say that that's child abuse. And then he...

It's sort of famous sleeping with nuns, but that does fit within the genre of sort of literary nun porn in the 18th century. It was actually a thing. It was a thing. You've got to be careful when you talk about Casanova because it's like, how much of it is true? If the authority that you've got on this is himself, is his memoirs,

how much of it can be corroborated by other source material, you know, or how much of it, if you put different lenses on it and like, it's your mate at school that was bragging about shagging two supermodels. And when you're like, did that happen? And there's certainly a lot in the memoirs that sort of maps onto corroboration.

quite popular genres of porn at the time. And nun porn was quite big. But yeah, famously he had two very turbulent love affairs with two women who lived in a nunnery. We should talk about his... He was imprisoned, you've mentioned this, and his famous escape from prison, because that is a classic. Tell me about that. Right. Okay. So he gets imprisoned because... And this is going back to what you were saying at the beginning about at the time people were aware that he was...

shagging people he shouldn't be shagging and he was getting a reputation and he was like the venetian authorities were gathering information on him about him being a fornicator and a seducer of women and a liar and somebody that stole men's wives away and was generally a rake and a scoundrel but what really did for him was this sort of dabbling in magic that he liked to sort of put about and there was the accusation that he'd said anyone who believes in christianity is weak

And he was arrested on those charges and he was thrown in jail.

in Venice and he stayed there for 15 months and he did manage to escape, which was no mean feat because he was right up in, they were called like the lead cells or something like that because they had lead on the roof. So it's how does he get away? And he manages to find, it's sort of like, I'd say an ice pick, but it's not, but imagine like an ice pick and he manages to sort of make a hole in the ground, but then he's moved to a different cell just as he's about to Andy Dufresne it, right? And

But then he starts talking to a monk who's a bad monk who's in the cell next to him and he manages to get him the ice pick and then he kind of tunnels through to his cell and they pull each other out and then they're like loose in the rafters in the ceiling of the building of the jail.

This is a perfect example of Casanova being a complete con artist. So they're climbing up the roofs, climbing in the eaves. And the only place they can get to is like this big, great hall that they kind of drop down into. But all the doors are locked. So it's like, well, that's brilliant. We can't get out. But they're so tired, they fall asleep. And then they get woken up the next morning by a guard opening the door. And Casanova leaps into action straight away. And he goes, how dare you? How dare you treat us like this? And what he knew was there'd been a ball there the night before.

So he managed to pass off in that second that they were two guests of the ball that had been locked in there overnight by accident.

The guard was so apologetic and terrified that they'd report him to his superiors. He led them out of the building. That's like mad skills, that, isn't it? Mad skills. The joyful years before, like, you know, official papers. Yeah. It just shows how far confidence can get you, doesn't it? If you just front it out. After he escapes, is that when he goes to France? There's this incredible, the most proper bit. Well, I say that, it's still gambling, but the most kind of,

perhaps the bit of his career that he's not actually breaking multiple laws and customs at the same time.

He goes to France. He goes to Paris. Yeah, and he loves Paris. And he learns the language. And again, he's seducing everybody. Famous courtesans, famous actresses, famous men's wives. But the one thing that he does is he, quote unquote, invents the first lottery. Yeah, like a national lottery. Like a state lottery. Yeah. I mean, he, again, what he does is he manages to convince people that he's invented it. But what he actually did is he nicked the idea from other people that he'd been speaking to.

It wasn't his idea, but he packaged it really well and he was an amazing salesman. So he sold this idea to the Parisian authorities. And obviously, like the lottery is win-win for everyone. All us poor schlubs think, yeah, but I might win it.

And we kind of enjoy that little buzz and the people that win are the company that does it. So he made them a lot of money and he made a lot of money for himself. But yeah, he's still remembered as the inventor of the lottery. He gets a bit of work as a spy at this point. He hangs out with Madame de Pompadour, who's Louis XV's sort of favourite foremost mistress. And Rousseau he's hanging out with. I mean, it's bonkers. If he did hang out with him. Oh, you see, maybe he's just making her laugh.

It might be. I mean, there's some corroborating evidence because when his memoirs were discovered and finally published, there was a lot of his letters and correspondence that was found. And there are letters that have been written to him. So we know that, I mean, unless he was going to the extent of faking letters written to him, like we know that some of this can be corroborated, but you can't help but reading it through and go, oh, you helped Mozart with your music. Did you Casanova? Right. Of course you did. It just sounds very much like, yeah, he goes to another school. You wouldn't know him. It's just got that kind of...

vibe about it but maybe I'm being really horribly wrong maybe it was all true well I don't know if you want it to be true or not it's so bizarre I like the way he basically nicks loads of money off an old French aristocrat by promising he can make him young again and then goes to Britain to flog his lottery scheme to the British government and ends up shagging some Brits

Then he does do this kind of mad European tour. Again, meets Frederick the Great, meets Catherine the Great. Wild. Yep. He's all over the place. And you can look at that as like, isn't that quite exciting that he's always kind of on the move. He lives this very kind of rootless existence, but he also keeps getting thrown out of places. So he has to keep leaving places. When he was in England, he was chugging various quarters and he didn't like it very much because he couldn't speak English all that well and they couldn't speak French.

Which is kind of nice because he had this thing about, like, he didn't just want to have sex. He also wanted witticisms and banter and, you know, all those things. Knock, knock jokes. I don't know. So he didn't like that very much. And he got in trouble with quite a famous courtesan in Britain whose name escapes me. She had a French name. And she wouldn't sleep with him and he got really upset and angry because it was like the first woman that had refused him. And I think he slapped her as well. And he was really upset with himself and he left. I'll be back with Casanova and Dan after this short break.

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It's funny, the pictures of Casanova, I'm being a bit superficial, it doesn't look super attractive. And I just wonder if, like, people's teeth must have been so bad. If you were like a bog standard six and a half out of ten, seven, were you like a ten in the 18th century, do you reckon?

I think that what Casanova has, and I still think that this is true today, self-confidence and self-belief and wit and being funny is one of the most attractive things that you can have. Like you could put someone in front of you that is a solid 10 out of 10, like your absolute dream shag, and it would be amazing for a bit. It'd be like, oh my God, I can't believe I get to play with this. This is incredible. How long would it take before you started going,

Still here. If they had like no personality, if they were actually quite boring to be around, like how long would it take for that novelty to wear off? But he didn't have that. He had wit and charisma in absolute spades. And so he was really confident. And that will get you like so far almost every time.

Listen to this, kids. That's advice for you from the expert. That's advice. Yes. He was expelled from Warsaw when he had a duel. I mean, come on, he's got to have a few duels. And he got shot in the left hand with a candle. They argued over an actress, of course. Of course. By the way, can we just talk about the actress thing? Like, what is it about an actress, like, hence the bishop actress sort of phrases that we use? Like, tell me about 18th century actresses.

Right. So there has been, as long as there, because women weren't always allowed on the stage, of course, like right in Shakespearean times, it was men playing the roles of women. So it was considered very daring when women were finally allowed on the stage. And there has been a very close association between actresses and sex workers, courtesans. They've merged into one another for a really, really long time. And I suspect it's because an actress

an actress has got a certain amount of agency that other women don't have. So, for example, Casanova's mother, she travelled all over Europe. You're not going home to a husband. You have a certain amount of freedom that's built into that. You're on the stage, so you're already being admired. That's definitely a part of it. And if you look at some of the great courtesans throughout history, they start off as actresses. Like Nell Gwynn, one of my favourites, she started off as...

an actress on the stage, and that was how she caught the eye of Charlie Boy, Charles II, and became his mistress. So there's a really close association between the two. Is this unusual? Why has he talked honestly about how he had sex with men as well as women? Is that something, given that sodomy is capital crime, that strikes me as kind of quite honest? He doesn't quite go into the same gory details that he does with women. There's like veiled suggestions. So he would write about one of his famous lovers,

M.M., who was actually a nun, of course she was, but who was also the lover of a really prominent bishop, of course she was, and that they had sex while the husband watched. And it's kind of like, is that true? Or was he in there as well? But there is one incident where he's very, very attracted to a famous singer, a castrato.

And he goes to have sex with him and then kind of realizes at the crucial moment, him is a her and she's been masquerading as a castrato and stuffing her pants with a fake penis. And there is a certain amount of, he seems to be getting off on it a little bit. So he probably wouldn't have written it down in explicit detail because as you said, it's like really, really bad. But he, he,

seemed to have sex with literally everything. He gets back to Venice eventually. I just love the way he just travels looking for opportunities to ingratiate himself with rich people. And then occasionally he just doesn't find it. He's like, oh, Spain was complete. Nothing happened there. So then he keeps going. He's like a shark. He's got to have oxygen over the gills. I find it such an extraordinary way to live.

It would be interesting, like, what would people make of him today from a psychological point of view? Like, there's so much going on there that he never marries and settles down. He doesn't really have a permanent home. Like you said, he's always on the move. It's this very sort of rootless existence. But he seems to really thrive on it.

as well. And like in some places he's, when he was in Paris, he was a millionaire and then he lost it all, which is like an incredible feat. Like how the hell did you do that? You silly sod. And then other places he was just working as a violinist, as a fiddler, because he couldn't do anything else. He certainly fiddled. Anyway. He certainly fiddled. But also I was like,

Now we've got credit cards and sadly people can run up massive. But when you're wandering around Spain looking for a rich person to read their fortune or do some crazy stuff to, other days when he's got nothing left in his wallet, he's like, I am going to go hungry and sleep in a barn tonight. I find that just that pre-modern...

journey in lifestyle? I find it kind of so fascinating, the logistics of it. How does it work? A lot of it's on credit. And a lot of it is like the art of the con artist is to make people think that they can trust you. So he needs to present himself to people. And he kind of gets this reputation. People might know who he is, even if they know him as a rake and a scoundrel. He was definitely famous for his jailbreak. So he's got a kind of a license to sort of turn up at places as a fascinating person.

He just gets to a village, goes, where's the big house? Kind of. Bang on the door. Hey, everyone, it's your lucky day. Casanova is in town. I'm here. It's really weird. It's the thought of like B-list celebrities turning up at your house going, hi.

I'm here. It's mad, isn't it? But he sort of had this reputation, so he knew where to go and he knew the right people. There's a certain sense that he kind of just, things happen to him. At least in the memoirs, that's how he remembers it. Like, he doesn't seem to be able to just go out to the shops for a pint of milk without bumping into an actress or a courtesan or... Or Benjamin Franklin.

Or Benjamin Franklin. Here he meets. Yeah, extraordinary. They talk about aeronautics and balloon transport together. They do. And he's spying. He seems to have a little nice, towards the end of his life, he gets that nice little stipend from the Venetians. He does a bit of spying. I guess he's flogging his Rolodex. He's flogging his little back book and his contacts to provide a bit of intelligence to the state security services.

I think he would be a brilliant spy, apart from the fact that he wrote it all down in a memoir, which was definitely a bit of a giveaway. One of the things that he was really good at was reading people. And so the way that he seduced, and I think that he still continues to seduce people, actually, because we're still drawn to him. We're still like, who was this person, this enigmatic person? He kind of presents himself as this very exciting person who does stuff that you couldn't possibly do.

And I think that's quite magnetic, isn't it? The reality of it would be very different. And his last years, as we said at the beginning, he was a librarian, amazingly. He got very depressed. He was having a not particularly good time. That's the period in which he claims he met Mozart, helped him with a few bits and bobs. Yeah.

As you do. But then wrote this unbelievable memoir. That's surely your dream, because I've talked to you many times on this podcast, and you're saying the big problem is people don't write down the things we do, like sexually, and we don't write honest memoirs, right? We all write boring, unbelievably, because we don't want to offend people. We don't want to...

get caught out for telling little porcupines, but he is one of those rare people that does just write this incredible memoir. And it is an incredible... As a historical document, it's so valuable. And it wasn't published unedited to begin with. It took a while to get the full gory details out there. But again, even that, as valuable as that is, you've got to always be thinking...

Is this uncensored, though? Because there's a real sense that he knows he's writing it for an audience. He knows. And that he's really enjoying reminiscing.

One of my favourite quotes from his memoirs is, I wrote my life to laugh at myself and so far I've succeeded. So he's like having a really good time remembering this stuff. But it's how accurate was it? If we could find the people he's writing about and go, well, Casanova seems to think that you had an amazing time. Is that what you remember? I'm not so sure if those things would marry up, but it's still such a valuable document. I like his line where he just says, I can say I have lived.

And I think it's probably true. Although, let's not whitewash things. There was at least one, but several rape allegations. And then he slept with his daughter. What's going on with that? It's really complex because, like, if I tell you this story about this guy who invented the lottery and he's funny and he's charismatic and he chagged his daughter. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, go back one. What? What?

So we're kind of left with this like, wow, OK, if it's true, if it's true, we don't know if there's corroborating evidence. But he had an affair with a woman called Lucrezia. And then years later, he met her daughter, who is called Leonilda. And he almost had sex with her. And then it found out that that's actually his daughter. He almost had sex with her.

And then there's a weird description about he has sex with Lucrezia while Leonel is in the room, but he doesn't have sex with her then. But that's weird. Like we're in weird territory already. And then he has this thing about later on when he met her and she's like 25, she was unhappily married because she couldn't get pregnant. So as a favor, as a fatherly favor, he has sex with her to get her pregnant. And it's kind of just like Casanova, like I want to be on your side, but it's...

It's like, what are you doing? And it's again, you've got to like, I'd say look at it in the context of the time, but no one was chugging their daughters at the time, even at the time. But what it might be is playing to incest porn, which was bizarrely common. Like the Marquis de Sade writes about it all the time. And when you look at erotica into the 19th century, there's a weird amount of incest.

And by the way, incest porn is still incredibly popular today on Pornhub. It's not fathers and daughters. It tends to be stepmother and stepson, that kind of thing. So what he might be doing is bullshitting and trying to create weird sexual fantasies. Not that that makes this OK, but that's what he might be doing. I guess I struggle with his life to think how unusual was it?

other lives like this but that we just don't know about is it the fact this one's chronicled it's fascinating isn't it and if they hadn't found those manuscripts if they hadn't been published we might never know that this man yeah they had a really interesting life didn't they they survived the bombing of Leipzig they were suppressed for years it's only quite recently that they've all come out

out really yeah and we're still like discovering little things like who his famous lovers were and because he like anonymizes some of them in the memoirs is like mm and cc and all these things and

I think that he was unusual, even for the time. And I think that he knew that he was unusual. And he had to have been unusual because no one would have given a shit about him otherwise. You can't be turning up at the court of Catherine the Great and going, hello, I'm casting over the completely normal because no one cares. He had this huge appetite for adventure. And I think that he just said yes a lot. You know, like most of us have that kind of like, I'm not really sure I should be doing it. I don't think he had that. He just steered into the skid his entire life.

He steered into the sky. Yes, he did. Well, Casanova felt like the obvious point where our two podcasts would intersect. Because I love the 18th century and you love the history of, well, things that go on between the sheets. Although I don't think Casanova was between the sheets for that long. I think it was... It was anywhere he could try it, up against walls, in castles, boats, walls.

But he must have done it betwixt the sheets a few times. I mean, you'd think so, wouldn't you? Yeah. Some of their relations went off a bit longer. I think they would have had time for a bit of sleep occasionally. But you know, he only actually slept with about 120 people. I think that's quite an important thing. I think that's quite interesting as well. It made me think that it's not a kind of eye-watering figure, I don't think. It's not, is it? No. I might be giving away too much about myself, but when I read that, I was like, what?

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I sometimes wonder whether he includes, is that like a class thing? Does he not include like a quick roll in the hay with like somebody he considers, are those people like named people that he considers important? So I think that was interesting. Also though, I wonder how like Catherine the Great had love affairs and gained a reputation as like a serial shagger. In fact, she seems to have been someone who enjoyed a consecutive series of reciprocal loving relationships.

And I wonder if in those days, maybe that was an astonishing number of people to have slept with. It's fascinating. I mean, it's still quite a big number. But when you think of someone like, I think, Gene Simmons brags that he slept with over 10,000 people. Yeah, it was a mad weekend, I'm telling you. That's kind of that sort of number. And I think that's quite an important point. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of dodgy stuff about Casanova, but you'd have to say that

He does fall in love a lot. There is like a lot of casual sex, but he does seem to have genuine relationships with a lot of people. But I have also wondered, were these just the named people? What about like the faceless poor people that you had sex with? But yeah. Yeah, that's the thing I find interesting about him. But yeah, it's fascinating.

Well, listen, Kate, thanks very much for coming on my podcast. I'm surprised you have time these days. You're so important to come on my podcast. I really appreciate that. Well, you know, just I'll try and remember you from when I was done. It's been so lovely to talk to you. Thank you.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Dan for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com.

Coming up, we're going to delve into what it meant to be beautiful and ugly in the past. This podcast was edited by Freddie Chick, Charlotte Long, Mariana Deforges, and mixed by Dougal Patmore. Join me again betwixt the sheets for History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

Right.

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