One evening in November 1763 the splendidly named Sir Wellbore Ellis Agar passed a middle-aged Venetian man on Westminster Bridge who, he thought, looked a little glum. Sir Wellbore knew what the stranger needed: ‘a drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding’. And so he took the 38-year old Casanova to a tavern on Cockspur Street which supplied all these delights of British life. A band of blind musicians was rustled up, so that the orgy would be spared an audience. Casanova found he could only manage the drink; he was fastidious about his food at the best of times, but to his mortification he was too depressed even to enjoy the French dancing girls.
Casanova’s visit to London was disastrous, and his humiliation that night crowned a miserable few months. He was beginning to acknowledge that age was dimming his energies; he was fast running out of money; yet again he had a dose of venereal disease; and his heart had been broken by a merciless Soho-based courtesan named Marie Anne Chaprillon. He had professed love; she had taken his money, frustrated his desires, betrayed and humiliated him. On Westminster Bridge that night he had been — and not for the first time in his life — contemplating suicide. The English baronet saved his life, but not his amour propre; before he left London, however, he cheered himself up by leaving a parrot at the Royal Exchange which he had trained to screech ‘Mademoiselle Chaprillon is more of a whore than even her mother’.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Casanova’s night with Sir Wellbore was the need for blind musicians. Men of their station and inclination frequently did not have much of a sense of modesty when it came to such things and certainly no right to blush. Perhaps they would play better the less they saw. Complete discretion was not a luxury, even for the very rich. As the details of Casanova’s amours make clear, the elaborate rules of gallantry and the public nature of seduction made the serious intent of a man of action perilously close to slipping into opera buffa — a comedic chaos. Seduction and hilarity were not far apart, and in Casanova’s recollections there are plenty of anecdotes involving voyeurism, false identities, fun-loving nuns, breathless escapes, mismatched couples and all the other staples of 18th-century erotica. Many men, and women for that matter, appreciated an audience — if not to the act itself then to the tragi-comic course of seduction, conquest, deceit and betrayal. Whether your affair turned into opera seria or opera buffa, a sense of style was paramount.
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