• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Histoire de ma vie by Giacomo Casanova Histoire de ma vie. Les mémoires de Casanova ne sont pas seulement, comme on le croit trop souvent, le catalogue de ses conquêtes, fussent-elles évoquées avec verve. Leur auteur, certes, est un aventurier, mais c’est également un homme cultivé et brillant qui parle latin et a fait paraître d’autres livres, et puis surtout un véritable Européen qui parcourt tout le continent de Venise à Moscou, de Paris à Naples ou de Londres à Constantinople, toujours guidé par ses désirs et ses plaisirs, le goût du jeu, de l’opéra et de la danse. Casanova a soixante-quatre ans lorsqu’il entreprend de rédiger ses mémoires en 1789 et si le récit de ses succès féminins lui permet de les revivre et d’en éprouver une seconde fois la jouissance, il y retrouve aussi la douceur d’un passé que la Révolution vient d’abolir. Quant à nous, ce que nous découvrons dans l’évocation enjouée de ses conquêtes mais aussi de ses aventures et mésaventures, de ses démêlés avec les autorités et de ses rencontres avec les grands, c’est toute la séduction d’un témoignage vivant sur une certaine Europe où les élites parlaient français. Histoire de ma Vie. Histoire de ma vie ( History of my life ) is Casanova’s wonderful autobiography. Running to almost one and a quarter million words, and written in French (the language of the educated European classes) it is twice the length of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and covers his life to the year 1774, when it stops abruptly. He began writing his autobiography sometime around 1789 when he was in his mid-sixties, apparently to cheer himself up during a period of illness, and was still writing it when he died. It is a record not just of his love life but of what he ate, what he read, how he dressed, how he travelled, of his gambling, his business and financial dealings, of medical treatments, of the theatre, of the Church, the political, religious, intellectual and cultural preoccupations of the time, and of moral attitudes and codes of behaviour. Altogether it gives the reader an unparalleled insight into the life of eighteenth-century Europe. Casanova was also an accomplished writer and a tremendous storyteller who loved to entertain his audience. Histoire de ma vie , even in translation, is a joy to read. He wrote this monumental work during his time as a librarian in Dux castle, in Bohemia, where he lived from 1787 until his death in 1798. Effectively in exile from Venice for a second time, aging, homeless, unemployed, not in the best of health and resentful at the failure of the literary world to take this overreaching son of an actress seriously, Casanova was offered the position of librarian by Count Joseph Charles de Waldstein. Despite getting him out of a hole, Dux was generally an unhappy final resting place for this great adventurer, his pleasure-seeking days behind him. He wasn’t particularly respected by those he worked and lived alongside and his cantankerous disposition didn’t help. It was because of this, as well as his determination to achieve recognition as a serious man of letters, that he threw himself into writing. Arthur Symons notes: Casanova tells us in his Memoirs that, during his later years at Dux, he had only been able to ‘hinder black melancholy from devouring his poor existence, or sending him out of his mind,’ by writing ten or twelve hours a day. (‘Casanova at Dux: An Unpublished Chapter of History) And the Venetian’s output was prodigious: In his declining years, his writing alarmed not just the illiterate servants at Dux but his friends. He left, at his death in 1798, 1,703 letters, fifty drafts of dialogues, 150 memos, sixty-seven printed items, 390 poems as well as nearly five hundred pages of uncategorised writings; more than three thousand manuscript pages of various works in progress, in addition to his memoirs that ran to nearly four thousand folio pages, and existed, once, in multiple hand-copied versions. (Ian Kelly, ‘Casanova: Actor, Spy, Lover, Priest’) Casanova died 4 th June, 1798, his autobiography beside him. Carlo Angiolini, Casanova’s nephew-in-law, organised his burial and it was he who now inherited the many volumes of loose manuscript that comprised Histoire de ma vie . More than 20 years later, in January 1821, they were bought by the German publisher F A Brockhaus and now this forgotten Venetian adventurer began to fall under the gaze of a wide European public. It was, of course, the womaniser, not the serious man of letters, that caught the attention. Over the next several generations numerous abridged, censored, ‘improved’, pirated, and poorly translated versions came on to the market. Some were little more than approximations of the original. The Busoni pirate edition (1833-1837) included completely fictitious additional material. The successful Laforgue version (1826-1838), based upon the original manuscript, was heavily censored and rewritten by Jean Laforgue, a French teacher employed by Brockhaus to edit the text prior to publishing: If any one person was responsible for defaming Casanova, it was Laforgue, a revolutionary sympathizer, atheist and fundamentalist bigot. He didn’t just correct Casanova’s French but removed passages he disapproved of, softened Casanova’s conservative political stance and toned down what he regarded as obscenity while spicing up passages that he thought dull. (David Coward, ‘Man of the World’, Times Literary Supplement) All editions produced after 1838, until 1960, were based upon these unreliable versions rather than the original manuscripts which were kept hidden by Brockhaus to prevent further pirating. This included the 1894 Arthur Machen translation which for a long time remained the standard English version (although later re-edited and revised, notably by Arthur Symons, who recognised the problematic nature of the Laforgue edition upon which the Machen translation was based). In the second world war, the originals very narrowly escaped being destroyed by the allied bombing of Leipzig, where Brockhaus was based. Between 1960 and 1962, an unabridged version that was faithful to the original was finally released, and this became the basis for the main translations that followed, including William Trask’s English version which was completed in 1971. In 2010, the manuscripts were bought by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and made available online. The errors contained in these various editions, compounded by deliberate falsification, predictably undermined faith in the veracity of Casanova’s memoirs and the reputation of the man himself. Inevitably, those who found his attitudes and behaviour morally reprehensible would be more likely to view these inconsistencies as evidence of his fundamental unreliability and draw the conclusion that he was a fantasist or a self-serving propagandist (or both). Nor did the fact that his autobiography sold well mean that people took his adventures too seriously. In every age, there has been a market for scandal and a rollicking good story, true or false. Indeed, the boundaries between fact and fiction in the public arena can become notoriously ill-defined. Take the example of Sherlock Holmes. A 2011 poll with a sample size of 1,000 uncovered that 21% of people believed he was a real, historical figure. By a similar process, but in reverse, Casanova has become fictionalised, an archetype of the amoral playboy, and has been represented as such on film throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There has always been some serious interest in Casanova, however, and this scholarship, particularly since the 1960s, has confirmed the veracity of much of what he wrote. This is not to say that inaccuracies don’t exist. Writing largely from memory, to entertain himself as well as others, it would be incredible otherwise. Moreover, although Casanova was a historian (he wrote an important work entitled ‘The history of the Polish troubles’) Histoire de ma vie was as much shaped by his literary and philosophical interests as it was an attempt to provide an historically accurate account of his life. French literary historian Marie-Francoise Luna has demonstrated that Casanova modelled his autobiography on a sixteenth- century epic poem by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto called ‘The Frenzy of Orlando’. It has also been convincingly argued by Casanovists such as Jean-Christophe Igalens, Ivo Cerman and Frederico di Trocchio that Histoire de ma vie is, in fact, a philosophical work. Casanova had a particular interest in moral philosophy (how people ought to act and how they do act) and saw himself as a philosopher. He was keenly aware of the currents of thought and disputes that engaged Enlightenment thinkers and was an active participant in the debates that took place – (the broader intellectual context of the Enlightenment, and Casanova’s own beliefs in relation to it, will be the basis for several future articles). Through Histoire de ma vie, Casanova uses his own life and experience as a way of exploring philosophical ideas, notably Libertinism. This subjective empiricism approach was not uncommon. It was, for example, central to much of the experimental method of the early eighteenth- century philosopher George Berkeley. Ivo Cerman comments: ‘He [Casanova] investigated human nature in order to discover the limits of human capacities to act morally…[ Histoire de ma vie ] was supposed to be a true record of his own past actions, which should have shown Casanova what kind of person he really was’. Cerman goes on to suggest that Casanova may have been inspired by one of the greatest of French philosophes , Denis Diderot, who suggested that for a person to know themselves they needed to write a history of their life (‘ histoire de sa vie ’).

Load more

  7

Copy Link