The Casanova Correction

The myth and the memoirs

Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725. His parents were both actors. He died in 1798 in Bohemia, where he worked as a private librarian at Duchcov. In between he was a violinist, a junior priest, a soldier, a gambler, a spy and the director of a lottery.

He was not handsome in the usual sense. The Prince de Ligne knew him personally and wrote the description that is often quoted: he would be a handsome man if he were not ugly. He was tall, strongly built and dark, with eyes full of fire.

In his sixties a doctor advised him to write as a cure for low spirits. He wrote about 3,700 pages of memoirs in French. The complete, uncensored text was not published until 1960–62. Every English edition before that was censored.

He wrote the memoirs himself, and he is the only witness to most of the love affairs. But the record around them holds up. Venetian state archives confirm that he was imprisoned in the Piombi in 1755 and escaped across the palace roof on the night of 31 October 1756.

Scholars who count through the memoirs find about 122 women across forty years, or about three a year. The numbers alone contradict the legend. These were relationships, not a score.

What to do

Read it for his method, not for his morals

The useful third of the book is what he did in the first twenty minutes after he met someone. The rest is a man defending himself, and you should read it with that in mind.

He wrote Histoire de ma vie in 1789–98 at Duchcov. Since the 1960s, scholars have confirmed many of its people and events and corrected others. His escape from the Piombi is recorded in Venetian state archives, separately from his own account.

Limits of the study: The love affairs themselves cannot be checked. Learn from the behaviour, and treat the results as his own account.

Attention: ask a second question

His biographer Ian Kelly sums up the method in one sentence. At his best, Casanova's only boast was that he, or any man, could win any woman, as long as she was the only object of his complete attention.

That is a claim about where he looked, not about how he looked. Everything else in the memoirs follows from it. He asked questions, he remembered the answers, and he came back to things people had told him days earlier.

He also made himself worth talking to. Kelly notes that he learned languages easily, studied mathematics and literature, and played the violin for money when he was poor. He could keep a table interested in subjects that had nothing to do with wanting something from anyone.

What to do

Ask a second question

Anyone can ask what you do. The skill is the follow-up question on the same subject, before you say a word about yourself. Later you mention the subject again, and that is the part almost nobody does.

Two online chat studies with more than 600 people, and a speed-dating study with 110 people and about a thousand four-minute dates, found the same thing. People who asked more follow-up questions were liked more, and speed daters who asked more questions got more second dates.

Enjoyment: be easy to please

He says it plainly at the start of the memoirs. He wrote that enjoying whatever pleased his senses was the main business of his life, and that he had never found anything more important to do.

He meant it. He ate oysters by the dozen. He arranged private suppers and did not give vague invitations. He described the food, the room and the music with the same attention that he gave to the people.

The best-known example is the oyster game he describes at a supper in Rome in 1771. It was a party trick, and it shows the habit behind it: he turned an evening into an occasion and did not wait for one to happen.

What to do

Be easy to please, and be specific

When you think something pleasant, say it out loud. Invite people to something with a name: this dish, this place, this hour. Do not invite them to a vague drink sometime. Being hard to impress looks like self-protection, not good taste.

His own preface and his suppers record the behaviour. The idea that open enjoyment makes you better company is our own view. We know of no study that shows it, and we prefer to say so than to borrow an unrelated one.

The exit: leave first

In 1749 he met Henriette, a Frenchwoman he called the great love of his life. They had about three months together in Parma. She left, and he did not follow her.

He describes that parting as one of the saddest moments of his life. He wrote it more than forty years later, and the details were still clear. They wrote to each other again in old age. He never saw her again, and he never tried to change that.

This is the pattern worth copying. He was better at endings than almost anyone else in the book. The relationships he ended cleanly are the ones he kept, as friendships, as letters, and as the passages he wrote most tenderly.

What to do

End it yourself, warmly, while it is still good

Leave a conversation at its best moment. Do not wait until you both run out of things to say. You choose the moment the other person will remember, and you avoid the slow fading that makes an evening feel like a failure.

When people look back on an experience, they mostly remember its strongest moment and how it ended. How long it lasted hardly matters.

Limits of the study: The studies used controlled episodes of pain and pleasure in a lab. Applying them to conversations is our own step.

From 1757 he spent years cheating the Marquise d'Urfé, a rich widow in her fifties who was obsessed with the occult. He convinced her that he could make her be reborn as a male child. He took jewels and money from her until she broke with him in 1763. The attention that made him good company was also his tool for a long fraud.

In London in 1763 the method failed completely. He became obsessed with a seventeen-year-old girl known as La Charpillon. He was thirty-eight. He was thoroughly humiliated and came close to killing himself. He wrote that he began to die from the day he met her.

An honest reading has to include both facts. We teach the quality of his attention. We do not hold him up as a man to copy, and the exercises stop where consent stops.