The Project Gutenberg EBook of Spanish Passions: Old Age and Death
by Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

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Title: Spanish Passions: Old Age and Death
The Memoirs Of Jacques Casanova De Seingalt 1725-1798

Author: Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

Release Date: October 31, 2006 [EBook #2980]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD AGE AND DEATH ***

Produced by David Widger

MEMOIRS OF JACQUES CASANOVA de SEINGALT 1725-1798

SPANISH PASSIONS, Volume 6e--OLD AGE AND DEATH

THE MEMOIRS OF JACQUES CASANOVA DE SEINGALT THE RARE UNABRIDGED LONDON
EDITION OF 1894 TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR MACHEN TO WHICH HAS BEEN ADDED THE
CHAPTERS DISCOVERED BY ARTHUR SYMONS.

OLD AGE AND DEATH OF CASANOVA

APPENDIX AND SUPPLEMENT

Whether the author died before the work was complete, whether the
concluding volumes were destroyed by himself or his literary executors,
or whether the MS. fell into bad hands, seems a matter of uncertainty,
and the materials available towards a continuation of the Memoirs are
extremely fragmentary. We know, however, that Casanova at last succeeded
in obtaining his pardon from the authorities of the Republic, and he
returned to Venice, where he exercised the honourable office of secret
agent of the State Inquisitors--in plain language, he became a spy. It
seems that the Knight of the Golden Spur made a rather indifferent
"agent;" not surely, as a French writer suggests, because the dirty work
was too dirty for his fingers, but probably because he was getting old
and stupid and out-of-date, and failed to keep in touch with new forms of
turpitude. He left Venice again and paid a visit to Vienna, saw beloved
Paris once more, and there met Count Wallenstein, or Waldstein. The
conversation turned on magic and the occult sciences, in, which Casanova
was an adept, as the reader of the Memoirs will remember, and the count
took a fancy to the charlatan. In short Casanova became librarian at the
count's Castle of Dux, near Teplitz, and there he spent the fourteen
remaining years of his life.

As the Prince de Ligne (from whose Memoirs we learn these particulars)
remarks, Casanova's lif