– My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it. It is only necessary to have courage, for strength without self-confidence is useless.
– As for the deceit perpetrated upon women, let it pass, for, when love is in the way, men and women as a general rule dupe each other.
(Casanova knew this better than anyone – his affair with La Charpillon (Marie Anne Auspurgher) was the fascinating, if impossibly bitter, case of deceipt perpetrated by a woman upon a man. The ‘affair’ which was never consummated and which cost Casanova 2,000 guineas culminated in a “journee du dupe“, when Casanova was denied access to La Charpillon under the pretext that she was dying. Unconsolable, he decided to throw himself in the Thames, but was talked out of it by a friend who happened to pass by. Together, they went to Ranelagh Gardens, where Casanova saw his expensive darling dancing, offensively healthy and beautiful.)
Also, to carry on expanding on the phrase by Huysmans that appeared on The LOOK’s Front Page
There is only one reason for literature to exist, to save those who write it from the tedium of living,
here are a couple of extracts from Casanova’s Memoirs that quite potently prove the Frenchman’s point:
– I have written the story of my life,.. but am I wise in throwing it before a public of which I know nothing but evil? No, I am aware it is sheer folly, but I want to be busy, I want to laugh, and why should I deny myself this gratification?… By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them the second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of times now past, and which I no longer feel.
Indeed, for the man who had been to many countries and places and had known (literally, as figuratively, speaking) many people, to find himself as a librarian in an old chateau in Dux must have been frustrating, especially as his health had also begun to deteriorate. With nothing interesting happening around him in the chateau his only resort was his own past, which thought he captured with the well-known ‘my life is my subject, and my subject is my life‘.
[The quotes are from the unabridged English translation of Casanova’s Memoirs (London, 1894)].