Casanova: a Study in Self Portraiture

Ten instances, in duels, he stood within the very jaws of demise. A ranking of instances he was once in impending hazard of the detention center or the galleys. hundreds of thousands handed into his fingers and out back, and he by no means afflicted to avoid wasting. For the very cause that he gave himself therefore unreservedly to the sport of existence, having fun with to the total each girl, each second, each experience; for that very cause, notwithstanding he used to be to tug out his declining years as a terrible pensioner in an odd land, he attained his maximum aim—an limitless abundance of existence. HOMO EROTICUS Seducer, say you? Nay, i used to be yet there whilst nature, along with her fabulous witchery, begun her paintings. Nor should you dub me fake, For i'm ever grateful in my center. ARTHUR SCHNITZLER: CASANOVA’S go back TO VENICE he's A DILETTANTE, and customarily a second-rate one at that, in the entire arts God has created: he writes lame verses and boring philosophical disquisitions; he can play the mess around passably; and the easiest you could say of his dialog is that it exhibits an encyclopaedic smattering. He may perhaps count number as a professional in all the video games of the Devil’s making, reminiscent of faro, biribi, dicing, dominoes, the arrogance trick, alchemy, and international relations. yet within the paintings of affection Casanova excels all his competitors. the following his manifold abilities, that are fragmentary and botched for the main half, mix with a sophisticated chemistry to make of him the ideal eroticist; during this topic, he's no doubt a genius of first rank. His body is sufficient to exhibit that he used to be designed for the carrier of Cytherea. Nature, parsimonious in general, has been free-handed right here, equipping him liberally with sap, sensuality, power, and a good looks; a guy apt to please women’s hearts, a completely masculine creature, robust and supple as metal, a well-tempered instance of his intercourse, big in mold, and but admirable in shape. you'll make a tremendous mistake have been you to visualize Casanova, the conqueror of ladies, to were of the fragile kind of male attractiveness that is these days trendy. This bell’uomo is not any ephebe; not anything of the kind! he's a stallion of a guy, with the shoulders of the Farnese Hercules, the muscular tissues of a Roman wrestler, the bronzed great thing about a gypsy lad, the impudence and audacity of a condotiere, and the sexual passion of a satyr. His powers of resistance are stupendous. 4 assaults of venereal sickness, doses of poison, a dozen sword thrusts, the negative years handed within the Leads in Venice and in pestilential Spanish jails, moved quickly trips from Sicilian heats to the frosts of Muscovy—none of this stuff impede his phallic strength through a jot. regardless of whilst or the place, the merest spark from a woman’s eyes, the 1st intimation of a woman’s nearness, suffices to set his invincible sexuality aflame. For a hectic zone of a century he's perpetually the Messer Sempre Pronto, the Mr Ever prepared, of the Italian farces, and up until eventually the age of 40 understands purely via rumour of that distressing fiasco which Stendhal, in his treatise De l’amour, thinks very important adequate to debate in a supplementary part.