atique, de la rapidite, du comique, de
la philosophie, des choses neuves, sublimes, inimitables meme') until the
year 1820, when a certain Carlo Angiolini brought to the publishing house
of Brockhaus, in Leipzig, a manuscript entitled Histoire de ma vie jusqu
a l'an 1797, in the handwriting of Casanova. This manuscript, which I
have examined at Leipzig, is written on foolscap paper, rather rough and
yellow; it is written on both sides of the page, and in sheets or quires;
here and there the paging shows that some pages have been omitted, and in
their place are smaller sheets of thinner and whiter paper, all in
Casanova's handsome, unmistakable handwriting. The manuscript is done up
in twelve bundles, corresponding with the twelve volumes of the original
edition; and only in one place is there a gap. The fourth and fifth
chapters of the twelfth volume are missing, as the editor of the original
edition points out, adding: 'It is not probable that these two chapters
have been withdrawn from the manuscript of Casanova by a strange hand;
everything leads us to believe that the author himself suppressed them,
in the intention, no doubt, of re-writing them, but without having found
time to do so.' The manuscript ends abruptly with the year 1774, and not
with the year 1797, as the title would lead us to suppose.

This manuscript, in its original state, has never been printed. Herr
Brockhaus, on obtaining possession of the manuscript, had it translated
into German by Wilhelm Schutz, but with many omissions and alterations,
and published this translation, volume by volume, from 1822 to 1828,
under the title, 'Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de
Seingalt.' While the German edition was in course of publication, Herr
Brockhaus employed a certain Jean Laforgue, a professor of the French
language at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript, correcting
Casanova's vigorous, but at times incorrect, and often somewhat Italian,
French according to his own notions of elegant writing, suppressing
passages which seemed too free-spoken from the point of view of morals
and of politics, and altering the names of some of the persons referred
to, or replacing those names by initials. This revised text was published
in twelve volumes, the first two in 1826, the third and fourth in 1828,
the fifth to the eighth in 1832, and the ninth to the twelfth in 1837;
the first four bearing the imprint of Brockhaus at Leipzig and Ponthieu
et Ci