The Casanova Correction

The myth and the memoirs

Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725 to two actors and died in 1798 in Bohemia, working as a private librarian at Duchcov. In between he was a violinist, an abbé, a soldier, a gambler, a spy and a lottery director.

He was not conventionally handsome. The Prince de Ligne, who knew him personally, wrote the often-quoted portrait: he would be a handsome man if he were not ugly — tall, strongly built, dark-complexioned, with eyes full of fire.

In his sixties, on a physician's advice against melancholy, he wrote roughly 3,700 pages of memoir in French. The complete, unexpurgated text was not published until 1960–62; every English edition before that was censored.

The memoirs are self-reported, and he is the only witness to most of the affairs. But the surrounding record holds up: Venetian state archives confirm his 1755 imprisonment in the Piombi and his escape across the palace roof on the night of 31 October 1756.

By his own count there were about 122 women across four decades — roughly three a year. The arithmetic alone contradicts the legend: these were affairs, not a tally.

The move

Read it as method, not as morality

The useful third of this book is what he did in the first twenty minutes of meeting someone. The rest is a man justifying himself, and it is worth reading with that in mind.

Histoire de ma vie, written 1789–98 at Duchcov. Scholarship since the 1960s has verified many of its people and events and corrected others; the Piombi escape is documented in Venetian state archives independently of him.

Limits — The affairs themselves are unverifiable. Treat the behaviour as instructive and the outcomes as his own account.

Attention: the second question

Casanova's biographer Ian Kelly puts the method in a single sentence: at his height, his only boast was that he — or any man — could win any woman, provided she was the sole object of his undivided attention.

That is a claim about where his eyes were, not about how he looked. Everything else in the memoirs follows from it: he asked, he remembered, and he came back to what someone had told him days earlier.

He also made himself worth talking to. Kelly notes he picked up languages easily, worked at mathematics and literature, and played the violin professionally when he was broke — he could hold a table on subjects that had nothing to do with wanting anything.

The move

Ask the second question

Anyone can ask what you do. The move is the follow-up on the same subject, before you say a word about yourself — and then the callback to it later, which is the part almost nobody does.

Across two online-chat studies of 600+ people and a speed-dating study of 110 people over 2,000+ conversations, people who asked more follow-up questions were better liked, and speed daters who asked more questions were more likely to be granted a second date.

Delight: being easy to please

The memoirs open with him saying it plainly: cultivating whatever gave pleasure to his senses was, he wrote, the chief business of his life — he had never found any occupation more important.

It was not a pose. He ate oysters by the dozen, staged private suppers rather than issuing vague invitations, and described the food, the room and the music with the same attention he gave the company.

The famous version is the oyster game he describes at a supper in Rome in 1771 — a party trick, and a good illustration of the underlying habit: he turned an evening into an occasion instead of waiting for one to happen.

The move

Be easy to delight, and specific about it

Say the pleasant thing out loud instead of thinking it, and invite people to something named — this dish, this place, this hour — rather than to a vague drink sometime. Being hard to impress reads as defence, not taste.

The behaviour is documented in his own preface and suppers. That visible enjoyment makes you better company is our reading — we know of no study that establishes it, and we would rather say so than borrow an unrelated one.

The exit: leaving first

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

He wrote that parting as one of the saddest passages of his life — around 1795, more than forty years later, still with the detail intact. They corresponded again in old age. He never saw her again, and never tried to reverse it.

That is the pattern worth taking: he was better at endings than almost anyone in the book, and the relationships he ended cleanly are the ones he kept — as friendships, as correspondence, as the passages he wrote with most tenderness.

The move

End it yourself, warmly, while it is still good

Leave a conversation on its best beat rather than at its natural exhaustion. You are choosing which moment the other person keeps — and removing the slow deflation that makes an evening feel like it failed.

Retrospective judgements of an experience are dominated by its most intense moment and by how it ended; total duration barely registers.

Limits — Established with controlled pain and pleasure episodes in the laboratory. Applying it to the shape of a conversation is our extension.

From 1757 he spent years defrauding the Marquise d'Urfé, an elderly woman obsessed with the occult, by convincing her he could have her reborn as a male child. He took jewels and money until she broke with him in 1763. The attention that made him good company was also the instrument of a long con.

And in London in 1763 the method failed completely. He became obsessed with a girl of sixteen known as La Charpillon — he was thirty-eight — was comprehensively humiliated, and came close to killing himself over it. He wrote that from the day he met her, he began to die.

Both belong in any honest reading. We teach the quality of his attention. We do not teach him as a man, and the exercises stop where consent does.