No day passed when there wasn’t a quarrel in the house, on account of his coffee, his milk, or a plate of macaroni that he’d asked for. The cook had forgotten his polenta; the head groom had given him a bad coachman … dogs had barked in the night; the Count had invited so may guests that he had to eat at a little side table. A hunting horn had shattered his ears with piercing discords. A priest had bored him in trying to convert him. The Count had not greeted him first, before the rest. The soup had been served him too hot, maliciously. A servant had made him wait for a drink. He had not been presented to an important gentleman … The Count had lent a book without telling him. A groom had not raised his hat in passing. He had spoken German and no one had understood him.
He is angry - they laugh. He shows some of his own Italian poetry - they laugh. He gesticulates in declaiming Italian - they laugh. On entering a room he bows as Marcel the famous dancing master taught him sixty years back - they laugh. At every ball he most gravely dances the minuet - they laugh. He puts on his white plumed hat, his suit of embroidered silk, his black velvet waistcoat, his garters with the strass buckles, his silk stockings - they laugh.
Prince Charles de Ligne, Melanges militaire, litteraires et sentimentaires1
There was no doubt - the Chevalier de Seignalt was getting old. The once-famous galant who had spent his life tearing through Europe making and losing fortunes and having love affairs wherever he went had become a cantankerous old man whose remaining social activities exhausted themselves in warring with the servants. There was precious little else to do. His patron, Count Waldstein, was away most of the time and the Castle of Duchow, in which he had accepted a position, was situated in the furthest reaches of already remote Bohemia.
In this new and last of many incarnations de Seignalt, who was called Neuhaus by his German acquaintances and Casanova by the others, cast himself, only half willingly, as a man of letters, a librarian and a writer. For days on end he would scribble away furiously, writing insulting letters to employees, philosophical and mathematical ones to other correspondents (he believed he had found a formula for squaring the circle and was, as ever, trying to sell his secret), stage plays, an unsuccessful novel and a manuscript that was to see the light of day twenty years after his death, in German and French, the latter in a heavily edited and corrupted version. The title of the twelve-part manuscript was Histoire de ma Vie, jusqu’à l’an 1797. After publication it rapidly reached fame and considerable notoriety and was widely believed to have been written by Stendal. Casanova himself, many thought, was nothing more than a literary construct.
In his Histoire Casanova, who was real enough of course, had created his masterwork, the greatest feat of his career. Writing it was the one way in which he could not only gain the fame and respect that had eluded him during his life, but also immortalize the collection for whose acquisition he was to become so famous: a collection of women all over Europe, women charmed, seduced and conquered by the chevalier.2
The story he recounted bore witness to a driven life that had made him familiar with all European capitals and at home in none. In Venice, his home city, he had been imprisoned in the famous lead chambers, cells that were heated by the sun until many of their inmates lost their mind. He had managed to escape and tried to make his luck elsewhere with nothing but his charisma and wit to count on. In Paris he had organized a lottery and made a great deal of money, lost all of it again on extravagant living and an ill-conceived venture at silk manufacture, won and lost huge sums at gambling tables throughout Europe, advised aristocrats in the secret arts of the cabbala (of which he had little more knowledge than they), at one time extracting fifty pounds of precious metals and jewels from one Mme d’Urfé on behalf of Selenis, the Spirit of the Moon. He tried and failed to repeat his success with setting up a lottery first in London and then, within a year, at the courts of Brunswick, Prussia, Moscow, Warsaw, Dresden and Madrid, leaving behind him a trail of female (and occasionally male) conquests. Now age and penury had confined him to the deepest provinces.
One of the projects undertaken by Casanova in his chilly study while waiting for another cup of cocoa or glass of wine and cursing the tardy servant, has survived in the archives, along with the rest of his papers: it contains notes for and redrafts of the second act of an opera called Don Giovanni. While the extent of Casanova’s involvement in the writing of it is uncertain, it seems likely that he did indeed serve at least as an adviser to the man who was to take the credit for the libretto, Lorenzo da Ponte, whom Casanova had known for many years and who could hardly have wished for a more competent or experienced consultant.
In the opera da Ponte, or perhaps Casanova himself, gives the role of archivist and bookkeeper to another figure, Leporello, the manservant, who describes in his ‘catalogue aria’ the extent of his master’s expertise in the art of womanizing:
| Madamina, il catalogo è questo | Little Madam, the catalogue is right here |
| Delle belle che amò il padron mio; | Of the beauties my patron has loved; |
| Un catalogo egli è che ho fatt’io. | A catalogue of my own devising. |
| Osservate, leggete con me. | Come here, read it with me. |
| In Italia seicento e quaranta, | In Italy six hundred and forty, |
| In Almagna duecento e trentuna, | In Germany two hundred and thirty-one, |
| Cento in Francia, in Turchia novantuna, | A hundred in France, ninety-one in Turkey, |
| Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre! | But in Spain there are a thousand and three! |
‘Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre!’ Every collector needs his Leporello to exhort posterity ‘Osservate, leggete con me’, ‘Observe, read with me’, witness this accomplishment. A ‘leporello’ is not just the name of a comical manservant, but also of an accordion-folded book, popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for pictorial works such as costume and landscape prints, the ideal record keeper and faithful companion.
Without his catalogue, every major collector has to fear the dispersal of his collection and his own descent into obscurity. A catalogue is not an appendage to a large collection, it is its apogee. While paintings, books, gold snuffboxes and other precious things might eventually pass back into the world through necessity, greed or ignorance, and carry with them no visible record of their previous ownership (unless, of course, collectors honour the Chinese custom of putting collectors’ stamps on items of calligraphy and other graphic work), a catalogue will in one way guarantee the survival of the collection as ensemble, as organism and as personality. Wherever it stands, in a library or in a second-hand bookshop, given pride of place on a shelf or buried under a pile of cheap thrillers, it will always go on proclaiming, with the delicate voice of its carefully set print on cream wove paper, mille e tre, mille e tre!
Lacking such a travel companion as Leporello to recount his exploits, the ageing Casanova had to assume the role of the talkative subordinate for himself. He had good reason, though, to insist on immortalizing his achievements. He had assembled a collection that was remarkable because of its sheer size, entertainment value, and because of the sacrifices he had made for it. Unfortunately, however, it was highly ephemeral and without due documentation nothing would remain of it.
Casanova’s travelling itinerary, the precondition for these conquests, is in itself worthy of the attentions of a Leporello. It is all the more remarkable if one takes into account the travelling conditions of the time. Stagecoaches travelled about thirty to forty miles per day, arduous, bone-rattling ten-hour journeys throught dust or mud, stifling heat or chilly winds, passengers thrown together with five other travellers in the cabin, another two or three on the roof, and in the basket at the back ‘chickens, eggs, vegetables and wealthy peasants’.3 Travelling was never easy and always expensive, including nights in coaching inns, bribes to coachmen, food, wine and other expenses. Needless to say, the Chevalier de Seignalt managed to squeeze in (probably literally) a few furtive encounters en route.
Whatever Casanova’s role in creating the most classical account of Don Giovanni, the two figures have often been afterwards conflated or confused and they are used almost interchangeably to describe a compulsive womanizer. In them both, the ecstatic moment of possession, which so many collectors seek, is to be taken literally, though the traffic also goes both ways: ‘I have twenty thousand records and that means that twenty thousand women can’t betray me,’ a distinguished, and at the time of talking slightly inebriated, collector once told me.4 Casanova attempted to marry conquest with safety from betrayal by casting himself in the role of the betrayer; others seek to do the same by choosing to invest their feelings in objects instead of people.
The dialectic of conquest and possession, both words endowed with great erotic charge, typifies every collector’s response to his or her objects. The art critic Brian Sewell told me about two American collectors of old master drawings. One of them would travel to London, choose one or more drawings at a Bond Street gallery and have them wrapped in brown paper for transport back to New York. His chauffeur-driven car would wait for him in front of the gallery. When he died, all the drawings he had purchased in London were found, still in their brown-paper wrappings. The enjoyment was purely in the possession, in the fact that they were his. He no longer needed to look at them. The second collector would make the same journey from Manhattan to London, go to Bond Street, be courted by the dealers, buy drawings and have them packed in brown-paper wrappings. ‘You should have seen the orgiastic sweat on his forehead as he raped that paper as soon as he had climbed into his limousine,’ Sewell added.
Like a lover a collector will jealously guard his possessions, and like a lover he will talk and think about them in erotic, narcissistic terms: the object of desire. It is beautiful because it can be touched, for love without touch is a poor substitute. It is, as Paul Valéry wrote about art itself, ‘the substitution of sensation for hypothesis, of marvellous presence for prodigious memory; it is an infinite library as well as an immense museum: Venus transformed into a document’.5 The retreat into this narcissistic universe, the more graceful aspect of what may also be called an autistic streak, makes the collector, like a lover, believe that the world and the desired are there just for him: ‘The passion for an object leads to its being construed as God’s special handiwork: the collector of porcelain eggs will imagine that God never made a more beautiful or rarer form, and that He created it purely for the delight of porcelain egg collectors …’6 Enter Mr Utz.
That collecting is to a large degree erotically driven has caused the French historian Jacques Attali to call every collector a Don Juan7 and collecting has received a fair share of attention from psychoanalysts.8 It is all the more remarkable that another passionate collector and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, had hardly anything to say on the subject. Despite or perhaps because of the fact that he was himself victim to this passion, he was uncharacteristically silent about it and its psychological significance. His last house, though, at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, London, is eloquent in its own right, filled as it is not only with books, but also, and especially, with antiquities, which populate cabinets and cases, mantelpieces and tables, including his desk. ‘The core of paranoia,’ he had written in 1908, ‘is the detachment of the libido from objects. A reverse course is taken by the collector who directs his surplus libido on to an inanimate object: a love of things.’9 Things are famously less fickle in their love than people:
When an old maid keeps a dog or an old bachelor collects snuffboxes, the former is finding a substitute for her need for a companion in marriage and the latter for his need for – a multitude of conquests. Every collector is a substitute for a Don Juan Tenerio, and so too is the mountaineer, the sportsman, and such people. These are erotic equivalents.10
The parallel with the pet dog has not eluded other writers. ‘For the collector,’ Maurice Rheims writes, ‘the object is a sort of docile dog which receives caresses and returns them in its own way; or rather, reflects them like a mirror constructed in such a way as to throw back images not of the real but of the desirable.’11 Dogs, much like hat-pins or toy cars, do not run off because their affection is exhausted. It is quite safe to invest one’s love in them. Loved in the way their owners want to be, and indulged with as they themselves want to indulge, they are both object and fulfilment of desire.
In protecting the possession of these erotic equivalents, jealous collectors can go to extraordinary lengths. An unnamed European collector who prided himself on possessing the only copy of a work immediately flew to New York when he found another copy in the catalogue of a book dealer there. He bought the copy for a considerable sum, took it to a commissioner for oaths and burned it in front of him in order to have his act verified. Then he returned home satisfied and safe in the knowledge that he was once again the owner of the only known copy of his treasured book.
In Greek legend, King Tantalos was cursed with never being able to reach the delicious fruit hanging on branches just in front of him that would retract as soon as he reached out to them. Collectors suffer the reverse curse. They reach the objects of their longing only to find that those objects are nothing but symbols of what they craved for, that it was the longing itself, and the ecstatic moment of acquisition, that fooled them – for a moment only – into believing that in this object lay the key to satisfying their hunger. The enchantment wears off as soon as we touch what we desired. It is just not confirmed collectors who suffer this fate. This is what sends us all into shops, trying to buy contentment, beauty, completeness, only to find that, once the intoxication of the moment is gone, we need another dose of it, that it is the elation of the moment that makes us happy, not the addition to our wardrobe. Like beautiful princesses turning into old hags, a coach and horses being transformed into a pumpkin with toads in harness, and a proud castle imploding into a muddy hovel, we find that our desires alight for a while on objects only to take flight when we finally believe we have caught up with them. What we hold in our hands crumbles, while our longing, temporarily assuming the shape of this thing or that, remains dancing in front of us, enticingly, maddeningly. Like Casanova we are left chasing after it, trying to satisfy immaterial passions with matter, with moments of fulfilment, proving like him that we still can conquer, that it is not too late, while Leporello stands by, bemusedly reciting the catalogue of our follies.