This collection of essays picking up different themes from Casanova's History of my life seems to have grown out of a documentary Jaubert made for Arte in 1998, and it comes together into a kind of book-length introduction to what he obviously sees as one of the towering works of 18th century French literature, a "great and terrible novel". Because as far as Jaubert is concerned, this unfinished 4000-page epic is better seen as a highly-sophisticated work of autofiction than as the frank, confessional memoir it seems to be. After all, Casanova starts his story by claiming descent from Don Juan and Donna Anna, no less, and he goes on to shape his life as a series of incidents from picaresque novels.

There is the intriguing question of Casanova's relationship to Mozart's Don Giovanni: he certainly knew Mozart and Da Ponte (and they were all Freemasons), he was probably at the 1787 premiere in Prague, and there's a tantalising page in his papers that looks like a draft of text for the the Act II quintet, as well as numerous incidents in his Life that have parallels to the Don. It's tempting to think that he might have been a silent collaborator in the libretto, but it's just as likely that it was seeing the opera that prompted him to start writing his memoirs at last in summer 1789. Moreover, whilst the Don ends up being dragged down into Hell to the sound of trombones, Casanova's career ended rather more prosaically with him becoming a librarian. He's clearly a rococo figure with a grin on his face, where the Don is thoroughly baroque (albeit behind several layers of Mozartian irony).

Jaubert also rather unexpectedly claims Casanova as a feminist. This isn't quite as crazy as it sounds: he did once write a pamphlet arguing against an inane medical theory about the weakness of the female intellect — according to his observations women were every bit as clever as men, simply held back by excessively restricted lives and poor education. And it does seem to be true that his many sexual adventures had more to do with mutual pleasure than with adding names to Leporello's notebook, and that he had a fairly good track record for seeing his former girlfriends properly provided for when relationships came to an end. Women usually seemed to be pleased to see him if they happened to meet again a decade or two later — even if these reunions more often than not turned into piquant realisations that the charming young woman he has been trying to seduce must be yet another daughter he didn't know he had.

One thing I hadn't quite realised was that the Venetian-born Casanova, sitting in a castle library in darkest Bohemia, chose to write in French, a language he had only learnt properly as an adult. Jaubert credits him with initiating the change that allowed the passé composé, previously confined to the spoken language, to be used in literary French, something that gives his memoirs an unexpectedly modern feel compared to other texts of the time. Of course, no-one apart from a few editors and translators actually noticed that until the first unexpurgated editions started to come out in the 1960s, so he didn't quite revolutionise French literature overnight. ( )

Comment parler de "l’Histoire de ma vie" dans laquelle tout est déjà dit?

Bien essayé, mais… Malgré une grande tendresse qu’on devine pour son héros et un appréciable attachement aux sources, reste une impression de profil d’une oeuvre dont on a peine à se défaire ( )