February 10, 2014 • 37 mins
Casanova led a life so full of sex and adventure that today we call any particularly charismatic and successful lover by his name. But he was also. smart and witty, traveled and wrote extensively, and had a hand in all kinds of aristocratic intrigue.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. And today we
have something that's been requested by listeners before, uh and
(00:23):
it seems appropriate we're approaching Valentine's Day, talk about this
particular subject, that is Jacomo Casanova. So born in sevent
Giovanni Jacomo Casanova led this life that was just so
overwhelmingly full of sex and adventure that today we just
we call particularly charismatic and successful lovers by his name,
(00:48):
like he's synonymous now with that. But his life was
not just about sex. He was very smart and very witty.
He spoke Italian, French, Latin, and Greek lently, and he
also knew some English, German and Russian. He traveled and
wrote extensively, and he had a hand in all kinds
of aristocratic intrigue and also some crime. He wrote this
(01:13):
twelve volume, three thousand page autobiography that covers almost all
of his life. So in this episode we're not going
to walk step by step through it. His life was
very long and very very rambly, and so that would
be a very long rambly multipart podcast. Instead, we're going
to kind of look at what made him the man
(01:34):
that he was, if not so much the man that
he's remembered as. And just so we are absolutely totally clear,
about a third of Casanova's three thousand page autobiography is
about sex, so is about a third of this episode.
So if you have tender young ears nearby, or if
(01:54):
you yourself might object to this, this is not the
episode for you. A third of this episode, uh maybe
a little blue. We're gonna not be explicit, but it
is there. Right. We are going to start though with
his childhood because it it pretty much sets the template
for what happened later. So just to start off, the
(02:17):
name Casanova actually sort of screams of wealth and extravagance,
but he came from rather poor beginnings. Uh. He was
born on April two of seventy five into a family
of theater people. So the theater in Venice at this
point was enormously popular. But this did not translate into
his parents being at all stable in any kind of
(02:40):
financial or personal sense. Acting meant that they were always
one step away from financial ruin, and on top of that,
female actors were thought of basically as prostitutes or courtisans,
and not so much because being on stage was immodest,
But actresses had this reputation for bestowing sexual favors on
their patrons, as well as on theater managers and other
(03:03):
men in positions of wealth and power. So the whole
profession for ladies had really taken on kind of a
h ill repute. Yeah, so Casanova's mother was an actress
named Zanetta Ferusi, and his paternity is pretty hazy. Her
husband was Gaetano Casanova, and she had a string of
(03:27):
extremely high profile lovers, some of them were royalty, so
all of her children had her husband's last name, but
it's possible that he didn't actually father any of them.
Casanova's grandmother looked after him and all of his siblings
while his parents were away acting. What's interesting for someone
who ends up speaking many languages is that Casanova didn't
(03:49):
talk much before the age of eight, and he had
frequent nosebleeds. He was generally as a child in poor health,
and his family thought he might have some kind of
mental impairment. The apparently improved after seeing a folk healer.
He called her a witch. When he was a young child,
and this sparked an interest in the occult and in magic.
(04:10):
When his mother's husband died of a brain tumor, a
trio of brothers, one of who may have really been
Casanova's biological father, became guardians for him and his siblings,
and they sent Casanova to a boarding school in Padua
for the sake of health of his health because the
air was cleaner there, and although he was nine years old,
(04:31):
he couldn't really right very well when he got to school,
so he was put into a class with younger students.
But as he caught up with his peers, he started
to really excel in reading, in philosophy, and he developed
a knack for language and wit, and he taught himself
Greek from his tutors books, which if you've ever tried
to teach yourself a foreign language just from books, you
will realize that that's quite an accomplishment. Uh. He was
(04:54):
very smart, and his gift for language and writing would
stick with him for his entire life. He also met
his first there. It was his tutor's sister um. She
later survived smallpox and they wound up being friends for
the rest of their lives. He was at her side
when she died in seventeen seventy six. So sweet at
the age of twelve, he entered a university to study law,
(05:15):
and he graduated at sixteen. Just let those numbers settle
for a moment. He also continued to have an interest
in folk medicine, so he took courses in science and
medicine as well while he was studying law. In seventeen forty,
a year before he graduated with his law degree, he
also took minor holy orders. His family wanted him to
(05:36):
become a priest, and this this did not make him
a priest, but it was one of the first steps
that a man would go through to get onto that path,
and this is where Cassanova's m o sort of emerges
for the rest of his life. So he started working
with a parish priest named Father to Cello, and thanks
to Father to Sello's connections and Casanova's charisma, Casanova became
(05:59):
a regular guest at the home of a senator named Malipiero.
So as Casanova spent more and more time under at
Malipiero's influence, he started to dress and act in this
increasingly worldly and flirtatious way, which the people around him
started to frown upon. He also became infatuated with Father
(06:21):
Tousello's niece, Angela, and Angela was interested in Casanova, but
only if he left the church to marry her. Casanova,
on the other hand, as you may suspect from his reputation,
had no intention of marrying. He spent months trying to
woo Angela while the while two of her kind, Nanette
and Marta, chaperoned, so he never swayed Angela from her
(06:43):
convictions of only being with him if he would marry her.
But what wound up happening instead was that he lost
his virginity in an encounter with both Nanette and Marta,
and he described this event as being orchestrated as much
by the him as from as by himself. So the
chaperones ended up yeah in the dalliance with him Yes,
(07:07):
and the three of them continued to have encounters for
a number of years, and he called the pair his
little wives. Nanette eventually married someone else, and Marta eventually
joined a convent, saying her soul would be saved because
she spent the rest of her life repenting for their trysts.
So that's how his love life often went, which is
what we're going to talk about in the next little
(07:29):
chunk of this podcast. Some of his uh his relationships
seemed quite scandalous, even by today's standards. In his own writing, though,
he describes himself as being motivated genuinely by love and
by bringing joy and pleasure to other people. He wrote,
alas for anyone who thinks the pleasure of venus is
(07:51):
worth anything unless it comes from two hearts which love
each other and are in perfect concord. So his aim
was to make a woman feel so loved and adored
that she came to him. His physical encounters were as
much about his partner's pleasures as his own, and as
he got older and had more funds of his own,
(08:12):
he always tried to leave women in a better state
once their relationship had ended, either leaving them with money
or finding a wealthy man for a woman to marry.
So not really like your standard eighteenth century pickup artists
that we've come to view him as. In many ways
like that he was just seducing and discarding women and
moving on. He was trying to better their lives. A
(08:35):
fascinating concept. Yeah, well, and you know, when we think
about today there's a lot of discussion about like the
sexualization of society and people. A lot of times will
look into past eras and talk about how much more
sexually conservative people were, and this is not necessarily true
of the particular era being discussed. But Casanova was definitely
(08:58):
not like ruining virgins and making them unmarriageable, like I
think that's an idea that people associate with him. And
while there were visions that he had experiences with, he
did not like wreck people and then leave them destitute
in a gutter. He attempted to make their lives better
(09:22):
and to make them happy while they were together. For
the most part, there was also a lot of food
in this a whole lot of food, very very often,
uh in his In his descriptions of the things that
went down in the bedroom, there was also the discussion
of the meal they had beforehand and all the delicious, rich, sumptuous,
(09:44):
aphrodisiac kind of foods that they had before. The food
and the sex go together in Casanova's worlds of food
and maps, uh So. Some of his other most infamous
relationships include a castrado known as Bellino, who turned out
to be a woman named Teresa, and he was quite
(10:05):
conflicted about being in love with a man, but then
when it turned out that she was a woman, he
thought about leaving the church to marry her. They ultimately
did not marry, although they did have a child together.
There's also the extremely infamous affair with two women known
as c C and m N. So he first started
being involved with c C and her father did not
(10:29):
like this at all. He sent Cecy away to a
convent to get her away from Casanova, but by the
time she got there, she was already pregnant. A nun
named MM looked after Cecy after she miscarried this child.
According to his autobiography, CC and MM developed a relationship
with each other, and then Casanova had a relationship with
(10:50):
both of them. This is one of the encounters that
is quite famous today, but there's some discussion about whether
it really happened. It has a whole lot of a
style in common with sort of none pornography that existed
at the time, and while there are theories about the
identity of c C MM has never been conclusively identified.
(11:16):
He also pursued his illegitimate daughter and became engaged to her,
not knowing. It is important to note that it was
his daughter. After he discovered the truth, he claims to
have gone on to have had an affair with both
the daughter and the mother who he fathered the child with,
and there is some historical discussion again about whether this
(11:37):
part actually happened. And then there was Onriette, who is
often thought of as the love of his life. When
you see movies about Casanova and there's the story of
and the one woman who would tame his heart, usually
that is intended to be on Riette, and she was witty, charismatic,
(11:57):
and adventurous. She really seemed like his perfect match. He
described his time with her as the happiest time of
his life. But she ended their relationship after a few months,
and that did not happen that often. Casanova was not
often the person who got left. He was really heartbroken.
She's the person who scratched a message into their bedroom
(12:19):
window that said to see aureate or you will also
forget on Rhett. Unsurprisingly, Casanova fathered a lot of children,
and he contracted some STDs, including both gnaia and syphilis,
and he took the steps that were believed at the
time to cure these diseases and prevent their transmission, and
(12:41):
as condoms improved, he also started to use them in
his sexual adventures. Yes, so we can't paint a one
pcent rosy picture of Casanova's attitudes and behaviors as a lover,
even discounting some of the very scandalous nat sure of
the particular women he had relationships with. Um. Although he
(13:05):
writes a lot about really focusing on genuinely loving somebody,
on on making women feel loved and wanted and beautiful,
and on being an attentive, considerate, and pleasing lover, he
was not always in the good guy slash good lover camp.
For example, at one point he beat a seventeen year
(13:26):
old Cortisan who had tried to swindle him. Ashamed of
what he had done, he actually planned to drown himself
in the Thames, but his friends came to his rescue,
and he got his revenge by buying a parrot and
training it to call her a whore. And then he
sold that parrot, presumably as the most odd way to
(13:46):
disseminate information and insults of all time. Yes, presumably whoever
bought this parrot did not know that it was going
to be calling this woman a whore at odd interval spit.
In his autobiography, Casanova's sexual exploits take up about a
third of the book, and that's more than a hundred
(14:08):
women in total, along with also a few men. You
could read this as only a third of this autobiography
about this man who's known for being a sort of
sex god, is about sex, or you could read it
as an entire third of this autobiography of a person's
whole life is about sex, depending on your point of view.
(14:28):
Most of the time in this autobiography he does try
to conceal the identities of his partners, sort of saying
he didn't really have the right to publish their personal business.
Big exception to this is anytime he was having an
affair with an actress. Actresses were fair game in in
Casanova's mind of who he could gossip about openly in
(14:50):
his autobacks. Didn't really help the uh promiscuous Paul that
fell over that profession. I'm sure no, hey, before we
keep talking about this fascinating tale of romance and intrigue,
do you want to take a moment, So all of
this sex talk that we just talked about before the
break seems kind of at odds with Cassanova's intent to
(15:11):
join the church, which he clearly did intend to do,
especially considering that if he became a priest, he would
be expected to take a vow of chastity. He was
pretty open about the fact that he did indeed intend
to take that vow of chastity, but he also was
pretty upfront about the fact that he intended to break it.
I will say the words, but I will not live
(15:33):
by them. That's kind of his plan. After the death
of his grandmother, he was actually sent to seminary, and
he spent his last nights before leaving quite gamorously, basically thinking,
I'm not sure when the next time I'll get to
break my vow of sell with this sea will happen.
So I'm going to do it now as often as
i can, right. He became an abbot, and later, while
(15:54):
living in Rome as a young man, he became secretary
to a cardinal. At some point after he arrived in Rome,
he was presented to Pope Benedict the fourteenth, and allegedly
his reputation had preceded him. Pope Benedict had heard of
him and his exploits, and they kind of got along.
The church was in a little bit of a different
place than that it is now. Yeah, And Cassanova wound
(16:16):
up leaving Rome and the church the following winter after
a woman that he'd been having an affair with became pregnant,
a pretty big scandal. There was some sort of you know,
not maybe not not to the point maybe of tacit approval,
but tolerant. There was some looking the other way, but
you know, when this woman became pregnant, definitely by Casanova,
(16:37):
that was a big deal. At various points after leaving
the church, Casanova also talked about taking the vow of
celibacy and returning to the life of priesthood. Usually this
was right after some kind of heartbreak or having lost
a bunch of money gambling, or like some other thing
that made him unhappy. He always changed his mind. Uh.
(17:02):
And then we will talk about his his magic life,
his time dabbling in magic, and the occult which happened
after he left the church. So in seventy six, Cassanova
was living in Venice and he was trying to make
a living as a violinist. He really was kind of
a jack of all trades, uh, And he worked in theater.
(17:23):
At various points in his life. He shared a gondola
with Senator Matteo Giovanni Braggadine, and the senator collapsed with
what appeared to be a stroke. Casanova believed the doctors
were actually taking the wrong course of action, so he
took the senator's treatment, uh, into his own hands. Unfortunately,
the senator did recover and he took Casanova under his protection. Yeah,
(17:45):
if the senator had not recovered, Casanova would have been
in deep, deep, deep trouble. That's a pretty brazen step
to take. It was extremely brazen, and once he did recover, though, uh,
he sort of took Casanova under his wing. Casanova convinced
Braggating and his cohorts, who followed a system of Jewish
(18:07):
mysticism called Kabala, that he was a mystic with quite
a bit of power. He spent his time with them,
tankering with Kabbala and the occult, and he wound up
living with Braggating, who gave him a pretty generous allowance.
So he was living it up as a mistake. That's
kind of like when you hear in modern times of
(18:27):
people being convinced that someone is a guru and yeah,
and kind of becoming their patron. He did end up
leaving braggating circle in seventeen forty eight when he realized
the Venetian Inquisition had its eye on him. And while
this relationship with the Senator seemed to have started out
as something of a fraud, Casanova gradually really did genuinely
(18:48):
grow fond of the man. They became actual friends. But
this was not at all the case when it came
to a French aristocrat named Madame Durfey. He built her
out of lots of money by claiming to have magical
powers that were going to help her be reborn as
a man. He in addition to you know, getting money
(19:09):
from her for his living expenses, he got money from
her to pay for all of these things that he
would need to do this magic ritual to ensure her
rebord her rebirth into a male baby's body. This really
went on for seven years until she finally she didn't
entirely wise up. She wised up to Cassanova not being
(19:31):
able to do it. She held onto this idea that
she was going to be reborn into a baby he
was a boy um, but she she cut off contact
with Cassanova after it finally finally became clear to her
that he was not going to be the one to
do it. I have so many questions. It's it's quite
a story. Yeah, like what uh, yeah, I have many questions.
(19:55):
I'll read it. I'll do more research. But somehow that
multi years Windell did not land Casanova in jail. However,
other things did. The first time he went to prison
was when he was eighteen, while he was in seminary.
The reasons are actually a little unclear, but while in
prison he had an affair with the wife of another inmate,
(20:16):
and that is actually how he contracted his first STD.
In seventeen fifty three, as we've sort of referenced, before
he drew the eye of the Venetian inquisition. This might
have been because he had been paying way too much
attention to the inquisitor's mistress. So he wound up being
imprisoned in the upper floors of the Doja's palace, and
(20:37):
this was a prison that was named the LEDs after
its lead roof. From there Casanova actually made a daring escape.
He shaped a bar that he had found in a
pile of garbage into a tool, and then he dug
through the floor and a patron got him moved to
a new cell on the eve of his escape, though,
so he ended up having to start from scratch all
(20:59):
over again. Yeah, it was like Shawshank, That's exactly what
I was thinking, except I for rich guy, got you
moved to a nicer cell. At that point when he
had to start completely over. He formed an alliance with
a monk who was confined to the cell upstairs from
his So Casanova managed to smuggle his tool to the monk,
who used it to dig a tunnel through the floor
(21:20):
down into Casanova's room. On November one, seventeen fifty six,
Casanova climbed up through the hall and the two of
them made their way out through a window that the
monk's cell happens to have out onto the roof of
the palace, and from there they actually went back into
the palace through a skylight, and they hid in a
ballroom and then eventually convinced a watchman that they were
(21:43):
couriers who had been accidentally locked inside overnight, and so
they ended up walking right out the front door. As
he may imagine, two things happened here. One is that
he had to leave Venice because he had just escaped
from prison. The other is he was quite famous from
having made this daring escape from a prison that was
(22:04):
widely regarded to be impenetrable, like you were not supposed
to be able to break out of the leeds. He uh.
He did it, though, and it made quite a name
for himself in doing so. He would not be in
Venice again for almost eighteen years. And before we talk
about some of the extensive travel that he did in
his life, let's have another moment for a word. I'm
(22:25):
a sponsor, and now I'll get back to the very
exciting life of Jacobo Casanova. So, after Casanova broke out
of the leeds, he went to Paris, and Paris was
just one of the places he either visited or lived
in during his life. He traveled about forty thousand miles
during his lifetime, which is an extremely long way to
(22:46):
go when you consider that most of it was in
carriages over uncertain roads. Um he visited Paris, London, Geneva, Barcelona, Rome, Prague, Constantinople, Amsterdam, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Warsaw,
basically every big name city that was existing in that
(23:06):
overall the zone of the world at that time, and
all over he hobnobbed with the rich and the royal,
and some of these places he had to flee after
loving the wrong woman, or breaking the wrong law, or
when he simply ran out of money. He was quite
good at making money or enticing people to give him money,
but he was even better at spending it apparently, and
(23:27):
uh he would also lose it and gamble it away.
He had a gambling problem. He lost a lot of money.
He was a man of many appetites. Yeah, that is
a great way to describe him. In Paris he created
the National Lottery and became its director and salon keeper.
In Leon he was inducted into the Freemasons. And Poland
he had to face a jealous boyfriend in a duel.
(23:50):
Casanova got shot in the hand and he wound up
shooting his opponent in the stomach. While he was in
Geneva he met Voltaire, and in Prague he met Mozart's
libretta's and allegedly collaborated on the libretto for the opera
Don Giovanni. And in St. Petersburg he met the famous
Catherine the Great, met a lot of super rich and
(24:12):
famous and important people. He did like a tour of
history kind of it was unfolding. So when he was
almost sixty years old, Casanova finally had to leave Venice
for good. He had made it back there at various
other points, but this was sort of the last straw.
He had lampooned some extremely prominent people in a satire
(24:32):
that he wrote, and it was time to go. He
became a librarian for a Bohemian count, Joseph Walstein, who
lived in uh Duxov, about sixty miles north of Prague,
and he still traveled from time to time, but not
nearly so far. It was a comfortable life, but pretty miserable.
Casanova's uh you know, para wis and and love life
(24:59):
had been on the lane for a really long time.
This was also pretty much out in the middle of
nowhere compared to Vienna and Prague and all these other
places that he had been living. Um, you don't really
hear a lot about cassing over the librarian, no, but
this is where he wrote most of his more than
forty books, including his autobiography. This one he wrote under
(25:23):
the name Chevalier de Sengelt, which is a pseudonym that
he had coined earlier in his life. He started writing
the autobiography in seventeen eighty nine at the suggestion of
a doctor, because at that point he was so lonely
and so depressed that he was considering suicide. And the
autobiography is written in French, and it abruptly stops mid
(25:43):
sentence in seventeen seventy four. It's unclear whether he just
lost interest. He was almost fifty years old at that
point in the narrative, and his prolific sex life was,
you know, pretty much waning. His adventures it's not so
exciting to write about, or whether he did in fact
write more, but that those pages have somehow become lost. Yeah,
there's a theory that the surviving manuscript was a recopying
(26:06):
of an earlier draft, and that the earlier draft has
been destroyed, and that he just stopped for some reason
at that point in recopying. He wound up dying alone
and poor on June four, at the age of seventy three,
after he contracted a urinary tract infection and that combined
with having prostetitis and the after effects of many STDs
(26:30):
to end his life. He was buried in the graveyard
of a church there, though he was later exhumed and
moved question mark, We do not know where. Yeah, he was.
He had really made a name for himself during his lifetime,
but he was kind of fading into obscurity when he died.
(26:51):
He was not important enough for people to make note
where where his body was moved to at that point. Um.
So we've mentioned this autobiography several times. When Casanova died,
he bequeathed his autobiography to his nephew, and his nephew
sold it to a German publisher, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus twenty
two years later. Version of the autobiography with most of
(27:14):
the most dirty parts cut out, came out in eighteen
twenty one and was immediately banned. The brock House family
kept it for the next one dred and forty years.
The first complete unedited version of it came out in
French in nineteen sixty and an English version came out
in nineteen sixty six, so it took a very long
(27:34):
time to get published in its unedited states, all of
the unexpirgated thing. Yeah, there was also some drama in
in uh. I can't remember if it was World War
one or World War two. In the offices of the
publisher were hit by a bomb and everyone was quite
concerned about where was the Casanova manuscript? In two it
(27:57):
was bought on behalf of the government of France for
nine points six million dollars. Pages of it went on
display to the public for the first time in eleven
and in something that I don't no one really knows
that this was on purpose or just a whoever happenstance.
The paper that it was written on has a watermark
(28:18):
of two hearts touching. I don't know what to do
with that information. Part of me thinks it's so sweet,
and part of me is like, it's pride, just a blob. Uh.
This paint is not only a picture of Casanova, but
also of what life was like in Venice and other
parts of Europe in that part of history. So he
really did create kind of a really important document in
(28:40):
that regard. Historians and researchers have painstakingly gone through it.
They fact checked it, they've crossed referenced it, and the
overall verdict seems to be that there are errors and contradictions,
particularly related to places and dates, and that there are
also some embellishments and untruths, but many of these are
what's to be expected when a person is writing their
entire life story from memory, which we've come up against
(29:02):
before when I've talked about in the podcast. But you know,
facts get a little wiggly sometimes in memory. Uh And
you know he was doing it with the help of
a few letters and mementos, but it was mostly just
plucked from his memory, and on the whole it gives
a very real account of the man and of Europe
at the time and what life was like living throughout Europe. Yeah,
(29:22):
there's a lot of talk about this. Actually, you know,
regardless of how how you feel about the extreme quantity
of of explicitly sexual content in it, that there's a
whole lot more in the book besides that that is
of a lot of historical and literary value, which is
one reason why now this manuscript lives in the National
(29:45):
Library in Paris. And that is the life of Jacobo Casanova.
I rewatched this weekend. I had watched it before, but
I rewatched the BBC slash Masterpiece Theater uh Many series
David Tennant as the young Jacomo Casanova um and as
I was watching it, I was like, there are parts
(30:07):
of this that this gets really right and it kind
of gets the overall flavor of it really pretty right. Uh,
some of it it's completely not right, but it's okay. Well,
there's often in many adaptations one. I mean, just to
make a piece of film or television that is viewable
(30:31):
that is not labeled as pornography, you have to edit
an awful lot out to begin with. It would be
quite easy to make an adaptation of Casanova's autobiography that
was definitely like pornographic would not be a stretch at all.
But then too, I think people just want to cling
to that idea of a sort of romantic element to it,
that no, he was, you know, a ladies man, and
(30:54):
he did get around, but he was there's a there's
a love about the whole thing, you know, I kind
of want to put him to other with And yeah,
there's there's a lot of that seems to be the theme.
And this is the woman who made him settle down,
which that's not not a thing that actually he did
talk about settling down with several women that he never
(31:14):
settled down with any of them. And and there are
a number of Casanova scholars, Number one, they're a number
of Casanova scholars will stop but the number two there
are a lot of them who you know, remark that
he would be kind of chagrined that now he's remembered
mostly for his sex life, because even though that was
(31:35):
a big part of his life, there was so so,
so much more. There's you know, even more other stuff
that we didn't talk about in this episode. Um So,
while he he did make quite the name for himself
as a lover, that was one part of the story.
That's really just the SoundBite version. That is sound bite
version one third of his autobiography and this podcast, do
(31:58):
you also have some listener. This is from Katie and
it's going back to our smallpox episode. This is actually
a topic that a few people have mentioned, but this
this particular email was so uh, I'm just gonna read it. Hi, ladies,
I just wanted to send you a message thanking you
(32:18):
for helping to keep me saying during my husband's deployment.
So thanks to your husband, an to Katie and to Katie,
military spouses are doing a whole other service. Yeah, we
we have love for both. I'm a young wife without
much of you, and I eagerly look forward to all
your episodes and go back to read listen to older
episodes between new ones. I was just listening to the
episode on Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccine, and I
(32:41):
thought i'd send you a message detailing my own experiences
with it. Before my husband's company deployed, all of the
soldiers had to be vaccinated against militarized smallpox, and caring
for my husband's injection site was an extremely complicated task,
lasting a few weeks. We went through an entire box
of rubber gloves, several bottles of bleach, and countless zip
black baggies. In addition to having to wear gloves while
(33:03):
changing the bandage, then bagging up the bandage, and filling
the baggie with bleach, I also had to bleach the
tub after every shower he took, and washed his laundry
separate from everything else. I wasn't allowed to touch him
anywhere near his injection site without gloves, causing plenty of
freak outs during our continuous game of slug bug every
time we were in the car. Luckily, everything with him
(33:25):
went smoothly, but there are plenty of horror stories about
soldiers getting vaccinated and having it spread through their whole
body if they're not careful. Unfortunately, for my husband, this
meant no swimming or going in a body of water
with anyone else in the vicinity during the hot summer months.
Even though this episode aired a while ago, I thought
you amazing hosts would enjoy hearing about modern day struggles
(33:46):
with smallpox vaccination. Thank you again for all the amazing
information and the joy you both bring me with every episode.
You're truly making my first deployment as a military spouse
all the more bearable. Thank you so much, Katie. Yes,
but we got several notes about people in the military
getting vaccinated for smallpox, and there were a few people
(34:07):
who were like, why are they doing this if there's
no more smallpox? And the reason is that because there
are stores of smallpox that exists still and you know,
rumors of you know, such and such. Government has a
hidden cash of it that nobody knows about. There's the
idea that it could be used as a weapon, which
would be devastating if it, you know, made its way
(34:28):
through the military personnel who were trying to deal with that.
So that is why many military personnel are vaccinated for smallpox.
When I read this letter, I was like, really, you
have to do all that, and I went and looked
online and basically, yes, that sounds so crazy to me
and it makes me feel like the most um lacking
(34:49):
housekeeper on the planets, and like bleach the tub. I
don't do that very often, but if I had to
do it every time one of us made well smokes
and we did talk in the episode of one of
the issues with smallpox UH vaccines was that it could
be spread to other people um, which is why they
(35:09):
have to take all those precautions because the objective there
is to vaccinate only the people who need to get
the vaccine and not everyone else around them, but then
everyone else around them also has to take precautions to
make sure that they do not wind up being infected themselves.
So thank you again, Katie, Thank you for being a
military spouse. Thank you to your husband for his service.
(35:33):
I love the letters like this one, so if you
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(36:17):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. And today we
have something that's been requested by listeners before, uh and
(00:23):
it seems appropriate we're approaching Valentine's Day, talk about this
particular subject, that is Jacomo Casanova. So born in sevent
Giovanni Jacomo Casanova led this life that was just so
overwhelmingly full of sex and adventure that today we just
we call particularly charismatic and successful lovers by his name,
(00:48):
like he's synonymous now with that. But his life was
not just about sex. He was very smart and very witty.
He spoke Italian, French, Latin, and Greek lently, and he
also knew some English, German and Russian. He traveled and
wrote extensively, and he had a hand in all kinds
of aristocratic intrigue and also some crime. He wrote this
(01:13):
twelve volume, three thousand page autobiography that covers almost all
of his life. So in this episode we're not going
to walk step by step through it. His life was
very long and very very rambly, and so that would
be a very long rambly multipart podcast. Instead, we're going
to kind of look at what made him the man
(01:34):
that he was, if not so much the man that
he's remembered as. And just so we are absolutely totally clear,
about a third of Casanova's three thousand page autobiography is
about sex, so is about a third of this episode.
So if you have tender young ears nearby, or if
(01:54):
you yourself might object to this, this is not the
episode for you. A third of this episode, uh maybe
a little blue. We're gonna not be explicit, but it
is there. Right. We are going to start though with
his childhood because it it pretty much sets the template
for what happened later. So just to start off, the
(02:17):
name Casanova actually sort of screams of wealth and extravagance,
but he came from rather poor beginnings. Uh. He was
born on April two of seventy five into a family
of theater people. So the theater in Venice at this
point was enormously popular. But this did not translate into
his parents being at all stable in any kind of
(02:40):
financial or personal sense. Acting meant that they were always
one step away from financial ruin, and on top of that,
female actors were thought of basically as prostitutes or courtisans,
and not so much because being on stage was immodest,
But actresses had this reputation for bestowing sexual favors on
their patrons, as well as on theater managers and other
(03:03):
men in positions of wealth and power. So the whole
profession for ladies had really taken on kind of a
h ill repute. Yeah, so Casanova's mother was an actress
named Zanetta Ferusi, and his paternity is pretty hazy. Her
husband was Gaetano Casanova, and she had a string of
(03:27):
extremely high profile lovers, some of them were royalty, so
all of her children had her husband's last name, but
it's possible that he didn't actually father any of them.
Casanova's grandmother looked after him and all of his siblings
while his parents were away acting. What's interesting for someone
who ends up speaking many languages is that Casanova didn't
(03:49):
talk much before the age of eight, and he had
frequent nosebleeds. He was generally as a child in poor health,
and his family thought he might have some kind of
mental impairment. The apparently improved after seeing a folk healer.
He called her a witch. When he was a young child,
and this sparked an interest in the occult and in magic.
(04:10):
When his mother's husband died of a brain tumor, a
trio of brothers, one of who may have really been
Casanova's biological father, became guardians for him and his siblings,
and they sent Casanova to a boarding school in Padua
for the sake of health of his health because the
air was cleaner there, and although he was nine years old,
(04:31):
he couldn't really right very well when he got to school,
so he was put into a class with younger students.
But as he caught up with his peers, he started
to really excel in reading, in philosophy, and he developed
a knack for language and wit, and he taught himself
Greek from his tutors books, which if you've ever tried
to teach yourself a foreign language just from books, you
will realize that that's quite an accomplishment. Uh. He was
(04:54):
very smart, and his gift for language and writing would
stick with him for his entire life. He also met
his first there. It was his tutor's sister um. She
later survived smallpox and they wound up being friends for
the rest of their lives. He was at her side
when she died in seventeen seventy six. So sweet at
the age of twelve, he entered a university to study law,
(05:15):
and he graduated at sixteen. Just let those numbers settle
for a moment. He also continued to have an interest
in folk medicine, so he took courses in science and
medicine as well while he was studying law. In seventeen forty,
a year before he graduated with his law degree, he
also took minor holy orders. His family wanted him to
(05:36):
become a priest, and this this did not make him
a priest, but it was one of the first steps
that a man would go through to get onto that path,
and this is where Cassanova's m o sort of emerges
for the rest of his life. So he started working
with a parish priest named Father to Cello, and thanks
to Father to Sello's connections and Casanova's charisma, Casanova became
(05:59):
a regular guest at the home of a senator named Malipiero.
So as Casanova spent more and more time under at
Malipiero's influence, he started to dress and act in this
increasingly worldly and flirtatious way, which the people around him
started to frown upon. He also became infatuated with Father
(06:21):
Tousello's niece, Angela, and Angela was interested in Casanova, but
only if he left the church to marry her. Casanova,
on the other hand, as you may suspect from his reputation,
had no intention of marrying. He spent months trying to
woo Angela while the while two of her kind, Nanette
and Marta, chaperoned, so he never swayed Angela from her
(06:43):
convictions of only being with him if he would marry her.
But what wound up happening instead was that he lost
his virginity in an encounter with both Nanette and Marta,
and he described this event as being orchestrated as much
by the him as from as by himself. So the
chaperones ended up yeah in the dalliance with him Yes,
(07:07):
and the three of them continued to have encounters for
a number of years, and he called the pair his
little wives. Nanette eventually married someone else, and Marta eventually
joined a convent, saying her soul would be saved because
she spent the rest of her life repenting for their trysts.
So that's how his love life often went, which is
what we're going to talk about in the next little
(07:29):
chunk of this podcast. Some of his uh his relationships
seemed quite scandalous, even by today's standards. In his own writing, though,
he describes himself as being motivated genuinely by love and
by bringing joy and pleasure to other people. He wrote,
alas for anyone who thinks the pleasure of venus is
(07:51):
worth anything unless it comes from two hearts which love
each other and are in perfect concord. So his aim
was to make a woman feel so loved and adored
that she came to him. His physical encounters were as
much about his partner's pleasures as his own, and as
he got older and had more funds of his own,
(08:12):
he always tried to leave women in a better state
once their relationship had ended, either leaving them with money
or finding a wealthy man for a woman to marry.
So not really like your standard eighteenth century pickup artists
that we've come to view him as. In many ways
like that he was just seducing and discarding women and
moving on. He was trying to better their lives. A
(08:35):
fascinating concept. Yeah, well, and you know, when we think
about today there's a lot of discussion about like the
sexualization of society and people. A lot of times will
look into past eras and talk about how much more
sexually conservative people were, and this is not necessarily true
of the particular era being discussed. But Casanova was definitely
(08:58):
not like ruining virgins and making them unmarriageable, like I
think that's an idea that people associate with him. And
while there were visions that he had experiences with, he
did not like wreck people and then leave them destitute
in a gutter. He attempted to make their lives better
(09:22):
and to make them happy while they were together. For
the most part, there was also a lot of food
in this a whole lot of food, very very often,
uh in his In his descriptions of the things that
went down in the bedroom, there was also the discussion
of the meal they had beforehand and all the delicious, rich, sumptuous,
(09:44):
aphrodisiac kind of foods that they had before. The food
and the sex go together in Casanova's worlds of food
and maps, uh So. Some of his other most infamous
relationships include a castrado known as Bellino, who turned out
to be a woman named Teresa, and he was quite
(10:05):
conflicted about being in love with a man, but then
when it turned out that she was a woman, he
thought about leaving the church to marry her. They ultimately
did not marry, although they did have a child together.
There's also the extremely infamous affair with two women known
as c C and m N. So he first started
being involved with c C and her father did not
(10:29):
like this at all. He sent Cecy away to a
convent to get her away from Casanova, but by the
time she got there, she was already pregnant. A nun
named MM looked after Cecy after she miscarried this child.
According to his autobiography, CC and MM developed a relationship
with each other, and then Casanova had a relationship with
(10:50):
both of them. This is one of the encounters that
is quite famous today, but there's some discussion about whether
it really happened. It has a whole lot of a
style in common with sort of none pornography that existed
at the time, and while there are theories about the
identity of c C MM has never been conclusively identified.
(11:16):
He also pursued his illegitimate daughter and became engaged to her,
not knowing. It is important to note that it was
his daughter. After he discovered the truth, he claims to
have gone on to have had an affair with both
the daughter and the mother who he fathered the child with,
and there is some historical discussion again about whether this
(11:37):
part actually happened. And then there was Onriette, who is
often thought of as the love of his life. When
you see movies about Casanova and there's the story of
and the one woman who would tame his heart, usually
that is intended to be on Riette, and she was witty, charismatic,
(11:57):
and adventurous. She really seemed like his perfect match. He
described his time with her as the happiest time of
his life. But she ended their relationship after a few months,
and that did not happen that often. Casanova was not
often the person who got left. He was really heartbroken.
She's the person who scratched a message into their bedroom
(12:19):
window that said to see aureate or you will also
forget on Rhett. Unsurprisingly, Casanova fathered a lot of children,
and he contracted some STDs, including both gnaia and syphilis,
and he took the steps that were believed at the
time to cure these diseases and prevent their transmission, and
(12:41):
as condoms improved, he also started to use them in
his sexual adventures. Yes, so we can't paint a one
pcent rosy picture of Casanova's attitudes and behaviors as a lover,
even discounting some of the very scandalous nat sure of
the particular women he had relationships with. Um. Although he
(13:05):
writes a lot about really focusing on genuinely loving somebody,
on on making women feel loved and wanted and beautiful,
and on being an attentive, considerate, and pleasing lover, he
was not always in the good guy slash good lover camp.
For example, at one point he beat a seventeen year
(13:26):
old Cortisan who had tried to swindle him. Ashamed of
what he had done, he actually planned to drown himself
in the Thames, but his friends came to his rescue,
and he got his revenge by buying a parrot and
training it to call her a whore. And then he
sold that parrot, presumably as the most odd way to
(13:46):
disseminate information and insults of all time. Yes, presumably whoever
bought this parrot did not know that it was going
to be calling this woman a whore at odd interval spit.
In his autobiography, Casanova's sexual exploits take up about a
third of the book, and that's more than a hundred
(14:08):
women in total, along with also a few men. You
could read this as only a third of this autobiography
about this man who's known for being a sort of
sex god, is about sex, or you could read it
as an entire third of this autobiography of a person's
whole life is about sex, depending on your point of view.
(14:28):
Most of the time in this autobiography he does try
to conceal the identities of his partners, sort of saying
he didn't really have the right to publish their personal business.
Big exception to this is anytime he was having an
affair with an actress. Actresses were fair game in in
Casanova's mind of who he could gossip about openly in
(14:50):
his autobacks. Didn't really help the uh promiscuous Paul that
fell over that profession. I'm sure no, hey, before we
keep talking about this fascinating tale of romance and intrigue,
do you want to take a moment, So all of
this sex talk that we just talked about before the
break seems kind of at odds with Cassanova's intent to
(15:11):
join the church, which he clearly did intend to do,
especially considering that if he became a priest, he would
be expected to take a vow of chastity. He was
pretty open about the fact that he did indeed intend
to take that vow of chastity, but he also was
pretty upfront about the fact that he intended to break it.
I will say the words, but I will not live
(15:33):
by them. That's kind of his plan. After the death
of his grandmother, he was actually sent to seminary, and
he spent his last nights before leaving quite gamorously, basically thinking,
I'm not sure when the next time I'll get to
break my vow of sell with this sea will happen.
So I'm going to do it now as often as
i can, right. He became an abbot, and later, while
(15:54):
living in Rome as a young man, he became secretary
to a cardinal. At some point after he arrived in Rome,
he was presented to Pope Benedict the fourteenth, and allegedly
his reputation had preceded him. Pope Benedict had heard of
him and his exploits, and they kind of got along.
The church was in a little bit of a different
place than that it is now. Yeah, And Cassanova wound
(16:16):
up leaving Rome and the church the following winter after
a woman that he'd been having an affair with became pregnant,
a pretty big scandal. There was some sort of you know,
not maybe not not to the point maybe of tacit approval,
but tolerant. There was some looking the other way, but
you know, when this woman became pregnant, definitely by Casanova,
(16:37):
that was a big deal. At various points after leaving
the church, Casanova also talked about taking the vow of
celibacy and returning to the life of priesthood. Usually this
was right after some kind of heartbreak or having lost
a bunch of money gambling, or like some other thing
that made him unhappy. He always changed his mind. Uh.
(17:02):
And then we will talk about his his magic life,
his time dabbling in magic, and the occult which happened
after he left the church. So in seventy six, Cassanova
was living in Venice and he was trying to make
a living as a violinist. He really was kind of
a jack of all trades, uh, And he worked in theater.
(17:23):
At various points in his life. He shared a gondola
with Senator Matteo Giovanni Braggadine, and the senator collapsed with
what appeared to be a stroke. Casanova believed the doctors
were actually taking the wrong course of action, so he
took the senator's treatment, uh, into his own hands. Unfortunately,
the senator did recover and he took Casanova under his protection. Yeah,
(17:45):
if the senator had not recovered, Casanova would have been
in deep, deep, deep trouble. That's a pretty brazen step
to take. It was extremely brazen, and once he did recover, though, uh,
he sort of took Casanova under his wing. Casanova convinced
Braggating and his cohorts, who followed a system of Jewish
(18:07):
mysticism called Kabala, that he was a mystic with quite
a bit of power. He spent his time with them,
tankering with Kabbala and the occult, and he wound up
living with Braggating, who gave him a pretty generous allowance.
So he was living it up as a mistake. That's
kind of like when you hear in modern times of
(18:27):
people being convinced that someone is a guru and yeah,
and kind of becoming their patron. He did end up
leaving braggating circle in seventeen forty eight when he realized
the Venetian Inquisition had its eye on him. And while
this relationship with the Senator seemed to have started out
as something of a fraud, Casanova gradually really did genuinely
(18:48):
grow fond of the man. They became actual friends. But
this was not at all the case when it came
to a French aristocrat named Madame Durfey. He built her
out of lots of money by claiming to have magical
powers that were going to help her be reborn as
a man. He in addition to you know, getting money
(19:09):
from her for his living expenses, he got money from
her to pay for all of these things that he
would need to do this magic ritual to ensure her
rebord her rebirth into a male baby's body. This really
went on for seven years until she finally she didn't
entirely wise up. She wised up to Cassanova not being
(19:31):
able to do it. She held onto this idea that
she was going to be reborn into a baby he
was a boy um, but she she cut off contact
with Cassanova after it finally finally became clear to her
that he was not going to be the one to
do it. I have so many questions. It's it's quite
a story. Yeah, like what uh, yeah, I have many questions.
(19:55):
I'll read it. I'll do more research. But somehow that
multi years Windell did not land Casanova in jail. However,
other things did. The first time he went to prison
was when he was eighteen, while he was in seminary.
The reasons are actually a little unclear, but while in
prison he had an affair with the wife of another inmate,
(20:16):
and that is actually how he contracted his first STD.
In seventeen fifty three, as we've sort of referenced, before
he drew the eye of the Venetian inquisition. This might
have been because he had been paying way too much
attention to the inquisitor's mistress. So he wound up being
imprisoned in the upper floors of the Doja's palace, and
(20:37):
this was a prison that was named the LEDs after
its lead roof. From there Casanova actually made a daring escape.
He shaped a bar that he had found in a
pile of garbage into a tool, and then he dug
through the floor and a patron got him moved to
a new cell on the eve of his escape, though,
so he ended up having to start from scratch all
(20:59):
over again. Yeah, it was like Shawshank, That's exactly what
I was thinking, except I for rich guy, got you
moved to a nicer cell. At that point when he
had to start completely over. He formed an alliance with
a monk who was confined to the cell upstairs from
his So Casanova managed to smuggle his tool to the monk,
who used it to dig a tunnel through the floor
(21:20):
down into Casanova's room. On November one, seventeen fifty six,
Casanova climbed up through the hall and the two of
them made their way out through a window that the
monk's cell happens to have out onto the roof of
the palace, and from there they actually went back into
the palace through a skylight, and they hid in a
ballroom and then eventually convinced a watchman that they were
(21:43):
couriers who had been accidentally locked inside overnight, and so
they ended up walking right out the front door. As
he may imagine, two things happened here. One is that
he had to leave Venice because he had just escaped
from prison. The other is he was quite famous from
having made this daring escape from a prison that was
(22:04):
widely regarded to be impenetrable, like you were not supposed
to be able to break out of the leeds. He uh.
He did it, though, and it made quite a name
for himself in doing so. He would not be in
Venice again for almost eighteen years. And before we talk
about some of the extensive travel that he did in
his life, let's have another moment for a word. I'm
(22:25):
a sponsor, and now I'll get back to the very
exciting life of Jacobo Casanova. So, after Casanova broke out
of the leeds, he went to Paris, and Paris was
just one of the places he either visited or lived
in during his life. He traveled about forty thousand miles
during his lifetime, which is an extremely long way to
(22:46):
go when you consider that most of it was in
carriages over uncertain roads. Um he visited Paris, London, Geneva, Barcelona, Rome, Prague, Constantinople, Amsterdam, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Warsaw,
basically every big name city that was existing in that
(23:06):
overall the zone of the world at that time, and
all over he hobnobbed with the rich and the royal,
and some of these places he had to flee after
loving the wrong woman, or breaking the wrong law, or
when he simply ran out of money. He was quite
good at making money or enticing people to give him money,
but he was even better at spending it apparently, and
(23:27):
uh he would also lose it and gamble it away.
He had a gambling problem. He lost a lot of money.
He was a man of many appetites. Yeah, that is
a great way to describe him. In Paris he created
the National Lottery and became its director and salon keeper.
In Leon he was inducted into the Freemasons. And Poland
he had to face a jealous boyfriend in a duel.
(23:50):
Casanova got shot in the hand and he wound up
shooting his opponent in the stomach. While he was in
Geneva he met Voltaire, and in Prague he met Mozart's
libretta's and allegedly collaborated on the libretto for the opera
Don Giovanni. And in St. Petersburg he met the famous
Catherine the Great, met a lot of super rich and
(24:12):
famous and important people. He did like a tour of
history kind of it was unfolding. So when he was
almost sixty years old, Casanova finally had to leave Venice
for good. He had made it back there at various
other points, but this was sort of the last straw.
He had lampooned some extremely prominent people in a satire
(24:32):
that he wrote, and it was time to go. He
became a librarian for a Bohemian count, Joseph Walstein, who
lived in uh Duxov, about sixty miles north of Prague,
and he still traveled from time to time, but not
nearly so far. It was a comfortable life, but pretty miserable.
Casanova's uh you know, para wis and and love life
(24:59):
had been on the lane for a really long time.
This was also pretty much out in the middle of
nowhere compared to Vienna and Prague and all these other
places that he had been living. Um, you don't really
hear a lot about cassing over the librarian, no, but
this is where he wrote most of his more than
forty books, including his autobiography. This one he wrote under
(25:23):
the name Chevalier de Sengelt, which is a pseudonym that
he had coined earlier in his life. He started writing
the autobiography in seventeen eighty nine at the suggestion of
a doctor, because at that point he was so lonely
and so depressed that he was considering suicide. And the
autobiography is written in French, and it abruptly stops mid
(25:43):
sentence in seventeen seventy four. It's unclear whether he just
lost interest. He was almost fifty years old at that
point in the narrative, and his prolific sex life was,
you know, pretty much waning. His adventures it's not so
exciting to write about, or whether he did in fact
write more, but that those pages have somehow become lost. Yeah,
there's a theory that the surviving manuscript was a recopying
(26:06):
of an earlier draft, and that the earlier draft has
been destroyed, and that he just stopped for some reason
at that point in recopying. He wound up dying alone
and poor on June four, at the age of seventy three,
after he contracted a urinary tract infection and that combined
with having prostetitis and the after effects of many STDs
(26:30):
to end his life. He was buried in the graveyard
of a church there, though he was later exhumed and
moved question mark, We do not know where. Yeah, he was.
He had really made a name for himself during his lifetime,
but he was kind of fading into obscurity when he died.
(26:51):
He was not important enough for people to make note
where where his body was moved to at that point. Um.
So we've mentioned this autobiography several times. When Casanova died,
he bequeathed his autobiography to his nephew, and his nephew
sold it to a German publisher, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus twenty
two years later. Version of the autobiography with most of
(27:14):
the most dirty parts cut out, came out in eighteen
twenty one and was immediately banned. The brock House family
kept it for the next one dred and forty years.
The first complete unedited version of it came out in
French in nineteen sixty and an English version came out
in nineteen sixty six, so it took a very long
(27:34):
time to get published in its unedited states, all of
the unexpirgated thing. Yeah, there was also some drama in
in uh. I can't remember if it was World War
one or World War two. In the offices of the
publisher were hit by a bomb and everyone was quite
concerned about where was the Casanova manuscript? In two it
(27:57):
was bought on behalf of the government of France for
nine points six million dollars. Pages of it went on
display to the public for the first time in eleven
and in something that I don't no one really knows
that this was on purpose or just a whoever happenstance.
The paper that it was written on has a watermark
(28:18):
of two hearts touching. I don't know what to do
with that information. Part of me thinks it's so sweet,
and part of me is like, it's pride, just a blob. Uh.
This paint is not only a picture of Casanova, but
also of what life was like in Venice and other
parts of Europe in that part of history. So he
really did create kind of a really important document in
(28:40):
that regard. Historians and researchers have painstakingly gone through it.
They fact checked it, they've crossed referenced it, and the
overall verdict seems to be that there are errors and contradictions,
particularly related to places and dates, and that there are
also some embellishments and untruths, but many of these are
what's to be expected when a person is writing their
entire life story from memory, which we've come up against
(29:02):
before when I've talked about in the podcast. But you know,
facts get a little wiggly sometimes in memory. Uh And
you know he was doing it with the help of
a few letters and mementos, but it was mostly just
plucked from his memory, and on the whole it gives
a very real account of the man and of Europe
at the time and what life was like living throughout Europe. Yeah,
(29:22):
there's a lot of talk about this. Actually, you know,
regardless of how how you feel about the extreme quantity
of of explicitly sexual content in it, that there's a
whole lot more in the book besides that that is
of a lot of historical and literary value, which is
one reason why now this manuscript lives in the National
(29:45):
Library in Paris. And that is the life of Jacobo Casanova.
I rewatched this weekend. I had watched it before, but
I rewatched the BBC slash Masterpiece Theater uh Many series
David Tennant as the young Jacomo Casanova um and as
I was watching it, I was like, there are parts
(30:07):
of this that this gets really right and it kind
of gets the overall flavor of it really pretty right. Uh,
some of it it's completely not right, but it's okay. Well,
there's often in many adaptations one. I mean, just to
make a piece of film or television that is viewable
(30:31):
that is not labeled as pornography, you have to edit
an awful lot out to begin with. It would be
quite easy to make an adaptation of Casanova's autobiography that
was definitely like pornographic would not be a stretch at all.
But then too, I think people just want to cling
to that idea of a sort of romantic element to it,
that no, he was, you know, a ladies man, and
(30:54):
he did get around, but he was there's a there's
a love about the whole thing, you know, I kind
of want to put him to other with And yeah,
there's there's a lot of that seems to be the theme.
And this is the woman who made him settle down,
which that's not not a thing that actually he did
talk about settling down with several women that he never
(31:14):
settled down with any of them. And and there are
a number of Casanova scholars, Number one, they're a number
of Casanova scholars will stop but the number two there
are a lot of them who you know, remark that
he would be kind of chagrined that now he's remembered
mostly for his sex life, because even though that was
(31:35):
a big part of his life, there was so so,
so much more. There's you know, even more other stuff
that we didn't talk about in this episode. Um So,
while he he did make quite the name for himself
as a lover, that was one part of the story.
That's really just the SoundBite version. That is sound bite
version one third of his autobiography and this podcast, do
(31:58):
you also have some listener. This is from Katie and
it's going back to our smallpox episode. This is actually
a topic that a few people have mentioned, but this
this particular email was so uh, I'm just gonna read it. Hi, ladies,
I just wanted to send you a message thanking you
(32:18):
for helping to keep me saying during my husband's deployment.
So thanks to your husband, an to Katie and to Katie,
military spouses are doing a whole other service. Yeah, we
we have love for both. I'm a young wife without
much of you, and I eagerly look forward to all
your episodes and go back to read listen to older
episodes between new ones. I was just listening to the
episode on Edward Jenner and the smallpox vaccine, and I
(32:41):
thought i'd send you a message detailing my own experiences
with it. Before my husband's company deployed, all of the
soldiers had to be vaccinated against militarized smallpox, and caring
for my husband's injection site was an extremely complicated task,
lasting a few weeks. We went through an entire box
of rubber gloves, several bottles of bleach, and countless zip
black baggies. In addition to having to wear gloves while
(33:03):
changing the bandage, then bagging up the bandage, and filling
the baggie with bleach, I also had to bleach the
tub after every shower he took, and washed his laundry
separate from everything else. I wasn't allowed to touch him
anywhere near his injection site without gloves, causing plenty of
freak outs during our continuous game of slug bug every
time we were in the car. Luckily, everything with him
(33:25):
went smoothly, but there are plenty of horror stories about
soldiers getting vaccinated and having it spread through their whole
body if they're not careful. Unfortunately, for my husband, this
meant no swimming or going in a body of water
with anyone else in the vicinity during the hot summer months.
Even though this episode aired a while ago, I thought
you amazing hosts would enjoy hearing about modern day struggles
(33:46):
with smallpox vaccination. Thank you again for all the amazing
information and the joy you both bring me with every episode.
You're truly making my first deployment as a military spouse
all the more bearable. Thank you so much, Katie. Yes,
but we got several notes about people in the military
getting vaccinated for smallpox, and there were a few people
(34:07):
who were like, why are they doing this if there's
no more smallpox? And the reason is that because there
are stores of smallpox that exists still and you know,
rumors of you know, such and such. Government has a
hidden cash of it that nobody knows about. There's the
idea that it could be used as a weapon, which
would be devastating if it, you know, made its way
(34:28):
through the military personnel who were trying to deal with that.
So that is why many military personnel are vaccinated for smallpox.
When I read this letter, I was like, really, you
have to do all that, and I went and looked
online and basically, yes, that sounds so crazy to me
and it makes me feel like the most um lacking
(34:49):
housekeeper on the planets, and like bleach the tub. I
don't do that very often, but if I had to
do it every time one of us made well smokes
and we did talk in the episode of one of
the issues with smallpox UH vaccines was that it could
be spread to other people um, which is why they
(35:09):
have to take all those precautions because the objective there
is to vaccinate only the people who need to get
the vaccine and not everyone else around them, but then
everyone else around them also has to take precautions to
make sure that they do not wind up being infected themselves.
So thank you again, Katie, Thank you for being a
military spouse. Thank you to your husband for his service.
(35:33):
I love the letters like this one, so if you
would like to write to us, you can. We're at
History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook
at Facebook dot com. Slash missed in History, Our Twitter
is missed in History, and our tumbler is missed in
History dot tumbler dot com. Our Pinterest, which is newly expanded,
(35:55):
is it pinterest dot com, slash missed in history And
if you would like to learn more about something that
Castanover made a little use of in his lifetime, you
can come to our website. Put the word condom in
the search bar. You will find how Condoms Work, which
I wrote. If you want a different take on that
particular subject, you can put in use a condom and
(36:17):
you will find another article that I wrote called ten
completely wrong ways to use a condom. You can do
all that in a whole lot more at our website,
which is how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Because it has stuff
works dot com. Netflix streams TV shows and movies directly
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