Casanovas Homecoming

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Casanova's Homecoming

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Title: Casanova's Homecoming
Author: Arthur Schnitzler
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CASANOVA'S HOMECOMING
BY
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
1922
The Translation of this book was made by EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL
CHAPTER ONE.
Casanova was in his fifty-third year. Though no longer driven by the
lust of adventure that had spurred him in his youth, he was still hunted
athwart the world, hunted now by a restlessness due to the approach of
old age. His yearning for Venice, the city of his birth, grew so intense
that, like a wounded bird slowly circling downwards in its death flight,
he began to move in ever-narrowing circles. Again and again, during
the last ten years of his exile, he had implored the Supreme Council for
leave to return home. Erstwhile, in the drafting of these petitions--a
work in which he was a past master--a defiant, wilful spirit seemed to

have guided his pen; at times even he appeared to take a grim delight in
his forwardness. But of late his requests had been couched in humble,
beseeching words which displayed, ever more plainly, the ache of
homesickness and genuine repentance.
The sins of his earlier years (the most unpardonable to the Venetian
councillors was his free-thinking, not his dissoluteness, or
quarrelsomeness, or rather sportive knavery) were by degrees passing
into oblivion, and so Casanova had a certain amount of confidence that
he would receive a hearing. The history of his marvellous escape from
The Leads of Venice, which he had recounted on innumerable
occasions at the courts of princes, in the palaces of nobles, at the supper
tables of burghers, and in houses of ill fame, was beginning to make
people forget any disrepute which had attached to his name. Moreover,
in letters to Mantua, where he had been staying for two months,
persons of influence had conveyed hope to the adventurer, whose
inward and outward lustre were gradually beginning to fade, that ere
long there would come a favorable turn in his fortunes.
Since his means were now extremely slender, Casanova had decided to
await the expected pardon in the modest but respectable inn where he
had stayed in happier years. To make only passing mention of less
spiritual amusements, with which he could not wholly dispense--he
spent most of his time in writing a polemic against the slanderer
Voltaire, hoping that the publication of this document would serve,
upon his return to Venice, to give him unchallenged position and
prestige in the eyes of all well-disposed citizens.
One morning he went out for a walk beyond the town limits to
excogitate the final touches for some sentences that were to annihilate
the infidel Frenchman. Suddenly he fell prey to a disquiet that almost
amounted to physical distress. He turned over in his mind the life he
had been leading for the last three months. It had grown wearisomely
familiar--the morning walks into the country, the evenings spent in
gambling for petty stakes with the reputed Baron Perotti and the latter's
pock-marked mistress. He thought of the affection lavished upon
himself by his hostess, a woman ardent but no longer young. He

thought of how he had passed his time over the writings of Voltaire and
over the composition of an audacious rejoinder which until that
moment had seemed to him by no means inadequate. Yet now, in the
dulcet atmosphere of a morning in late summer, all these things
appeared stupid and repulsive.
Muttering a curse without really knowing upon whose head he wished
it to