Well, if it’s 1 November, it must be 267 years since Casanova made good his escape from ‘The Leads’ — the prison under the roof of the Doge’s palace in Venice where he’d been shoved for “grave faults … public outrages against the holy religion”, aka shagging.
Casanova was much more than a shagger. He was, variously, a writer, spy, librarian, gambler, wit, violinist… but there is a good reason why he has a reputation as history’s most famous shagger. It’s because he wrote about having lots and lots of sex.
He’d been born to two actors, got a law degree at 17 (also the age at which he started shagging), and didn’t have much money until he helped a Venetian aristocrat, Don Matteo Bragadin, who’d had a stroke. Bragadin basically adopted him, and things took off…
The money meant that young Giacomo could gamble more (without getting into debt), could dress well, and could meet more women. Unfortunately, at least one of them was the wrong woman as far as the authorities were concerned.
No one had ever escaped from The Leads, but Bragadin used his influence to get Casanova permission to take exercise outside his cell. He was still in the attic, but up there he had the good fortune to come across
a piece of polished black marble measuring one by six by three inches, and a straight iron bar as thick as his thumb and eighteen inches long.
That’s from John Masters’ 1969 biography of Casanova, but presumably — given the level of detail — based on Casanova’s own multi-volume Histoire de ma vie. Anyway, using his spit, he sharpened the bar on the marble until he had a useful spike.
When this wasn’t hidden in an armchair, which he’d also been allowed, he used it to make a hole in the floor. Apparently, once he’d got through the wood, he worked his way through marble terrazzo using “vinegar from his salads to soften this”.
After nearly being discovered one day, he reached the ceiling below and found a beam which meant he couldn’t get any further. So he started again a foot further over. By 25 August, he’d made enough progress to set 28th as his escape date.
Then the jailer came in in and said he had good news: Senator Bragadin had arranged for him to be moved to a much nicer cell with two windows. Casanova protested that he didn’t mind what he later described as “rats of a fearful size”, but to no avail.
He was moved to the better cell, but — what with having left an enormous hole in the bottom of the last one — was forced to share it with someone who was clearly spying on him. So he started to communicate (via shared books) with a dodgy priest in the next cell.
Balbi, apparently, had fathered children with three different women, so he and Casanova were clearly kindred spirits. Casanova smuggled the priest his sharpened iron bar in a bible, and they made a new plan.
Jailers came in every day to check Casanova’s walls and floor, but they didn’t check next door. So, the idea was that Balbi would break through the ceiling, crawl through the attic space, and then get through Casanova’s ceiling.
This they did, and — what with them having a big metal spike on them — ‘persuaded’ the spy Soradici to come with them. At this point, it was still about midday on 31 October, and they figured they had plenty of time to get away before they were discovered.
They made a hole on the roof, saw that the moon was up, and decided to wait until it wasn’t. They finally got onto the roof at about 11pm. Casanova crawled along the roof for an hour, but identified no way down. They would have to go through the palace…
He found a window, broke through (cutting his hand), and lowered Balbi 25 feet down on a rope to the floor. Then he looked for something to tie his rope to, and found a 36ft ladder. Manoeuvring this to the window and tying his rope to it would have worked, but would also have left a visible sign of their escape, so he decided to manhandle it into the hole and climb down it. In doing this, he “lost his footing and slipped over the parapet, as far as his chest”.
Eventually, he managed to get into the room, which had
large, barred doors. It was 1.30am. Balbi ranted and raved, but Casanova arranged the rope as a pillow, and went to sleep.
When Balbi woke him up at 5, they found another door, and broke the lock with their trusty spike. Now they were in the palace proper, and went through “a succession of rooms, galleries and chambers, and down four separate flights of stairs”. Eventually, they came to a door they couldn’t open, and — at about 6am — Casanova impulsively opened a window.
They were spotted by a passer-by, who went and told the palace doorkeeper “he must have shut some great personage inside the palace” — because Casanova had changed into the posh clothes he’d been wearing the day he was arrested.
The doorkeeper opened the door, and Casanova did what one must in such circumstances — pretended he had every right to leave the building and fucking legged it.
He got to a jetty, and shouted “To Fusina, at once!” to a gondolier. Once out of sight, with his supposed route to the mainland established for the benefit of any witnesses, he changed his destination to Mestre — also on the mainland, but further north. He got himself to Paris, became a trustee of the state lottery, made a fortune, hung out with Rousseau and Madame de Pompadour, became a spy, dabbled in alchemy, and did a lot more shagging.
Now, obviously, all this sounds preposterous — and I haven’t even mentioned this bit yet:
…but James Rives Child’s 1988 biography of Casanova says
substantiating records were discovered in the Venetian archives
and corroborated by the journal of Giovanni Girolamo Gradenigo, then archbishop of Udine, who described the escape as “prodigious”.
You can read more about Casanova in Smithsonian:
…and in this account of the jailbreak, which concludes — and not unreasonably — that, he was right to say in his 12-volume memoirs:
I can say I have lived.
