Free Casanova's Women by Judith Summers Page B

Only Faustina, Francesco and Gaetano were missing: Faustina had died in infancy; Francesco was following a successful career as a painter of battle scenes in France, where he had become a respected member of the Paris Academy; and Gaetano, her youngest – then thirty-two years old – was pursuing a lacklustre career in the church. Financially, Zanetta was comfortably off, and divided her time between a country house just outside the city and a fourth-floor apartment ‘on the great square’ in Dresden.
    Here Casanova took refuge from the social whirl by renting a second-floor apartment where he holed himself up for several weeks to cure himself of a dose of venereal disease. And here, on 29 November 1776, Zanetta Casanova died. According to the parish records she was sixty-seven years and three months old. Widowed with six children at the age of twenty-six, the beautiful shoemaker’s daughter from Venice had achieved many remarkable things during her lifetime, not least a long and successful theatrical career in which she was never out of work. Despite her lack of maternal feeling, she had given birth to a minor artistic and intellectual dynasty: to two successful painters, an actress and a sub-deacon.
    And there was Giacomo.

TWO
Virgins of the Veneto
    The more innocent a girl is, the more ignorant she is of the methods and the aim of seduction
.
Without her realising it, the attraction of pleasure entices her, curiosity mingles with it, and opportunity does the rest. 1
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BETTINA
    SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Bettina Gozzi sat on her bed in the small closet adjacent to her father’s room in their house in Padua, and unpacked the parcel that Signora Casanova, the mother of her brother’s favourite pupil, had sent her from Venice. To her amazement it contained a dozen pairs of fine gloves and five lengths of black
zendale
, the silky mantilla-like shawls with which fashionable ladies covered their shoulders and head. With these magnificent gifts came a message from the actress to the cobbler’s daughter: would Bettina please take better care of Giacomo’s hair from now on, so that he would soon have no need to wear the awful wig that his grandmother had bought him?
    Bettina unfurled one of the
zendale
, threw it over her head, and examined her reflection in a tiny fragment of looking-glass. Had these luxurious presents not sweetened Signora Casanova’s request she might well have felt insulted, for she had been caring for the boy’s hair ever since he had come to live with her family in the late summer of 1734. The signora paid two zecchini a month for Bettina’s parents, Apollonia and Vincenzo Gozzi, to lodge, feedand clothe Giacomo, and although Bettina herself naturally saw none of this money it was her duty to wash and dress him in the mornings and to put him to bed at night. Giacomo had taken to his schoolmaster’s sister on sight without quite knowing why. In time he would discover the reason. As he later wrote, ‘It was she who little by little kindled in my heart the first sparks of a passion which would come to dominate my life.’ 2
    Elizabetta Maria Gozzi, as Bettina had been baptised in 1720, was a pretty and vivacious sixteen-year-old, lighthearted, clever and full of fun. By rights her parents should have adored her, but instead they criticised her constantly. When the youths of Padua threw her admiring glances, for instance, Vincenzo and Apollonia scolded Bettina for standing too long at the window. And while they were immensely proud of their son Antonio for becoming a priest, a teacher and a doctor of civil and canon law, they took no pleasure at all in the fact that Bettina had learned to read and write. In enlightened circles women’s education was a growing issue: in June 1723, Padua’s Academy of the Ricovrati had held a public debate entitled ‘Should Women Be Admitted to the Study of the Sciences and the Noble Arts?’; and it was