Produced by David Widger THE MEMOIRS OF JACQUES CASANOVA de SEINGALT 1725-1798 THE RARE UNABRIDGED LONDON EDITION OF 1894 TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR MACHEN TO WHICH HAS BEEN ADDED THE CHAPTERS DISCOVERED BY ARTHUR SYMONS. [Transcriber’s Note: These memoires were not written for children, they may outrage readers also offended by Chaucer, La Fontaine, Rabelais and The Old Testament. D.W.] ENLARGE TO FULL SIZE CONTENTS CASANOVA AT DUX TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE AUTHOR’S PREFACE THE MEMOIRS OF JACQUES CASANOVA VENETIAN YEARS EPISODE 1 -- CHILDHOOD CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII EPISODE 2 -- CLERIC IN NAPLES CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII EPISODE 3 -- MILITARY CAREER CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV EPISODE 4 -- RETURN TO VENICE CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX EPISODE 5 -- MILAN AND MANTUA CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII CASANOVA AT DUX An Unpublished Chapter of History, By Arthur Symons I The Memoirs of Casanova, though they have enjoyed the popularity of a bad reputation, have never had justice done to them by serious students of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr. Havelock Ellis, has realised that ‘there are few more delightful books in the world,’ and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova, published in Affirmations, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety. But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in his relation to human problems. And yet these Memoirs are perhaps the most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they are more entertaining than Gil Blas, or Monte Cristo, or any of the imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester, one ‘born for the fairer sex,’ as he tells us, and born also to be a vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live to write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no longer.