The scene: an Italian garden. The players: Giacomo Casanova, the married Lucrezia and a snake who watches from the grass. Casanova and Lucrezia have just made love. Just is the word. Only moments after the lovers have finished, Lucrezia’s husband and her mother arrive. Seconds to spare. Later, Casanova asks Lucrezia what she would have done had they been caught. “Nothing,” she replies. “Don’t you understand that in those divine moments, one is nothing but in love? Can you believe you weren’t possessing me entirely?”
Well, hello, Giacomo! The rascal’s rascal, the roué’s roué, the Signor Loverman of the Venetian lagoon. Not so fast, says Leo Damrosch in Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova. This charming seducer, whose name has become shorthand for a particular sort of insatiable, irresistible rake, wasn’t that charming at all. “His career as a seducer, already notorious in his own time, is often disturbing and sometimes very dark,” Damrosch writes. “It challenges any reader today, and still more it challenges a biographer. Casanova aspired to a life of freedom from restraints — but freedom at whose expense?”
