TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

A series of adventures wilder and more fantastic than the wildest of
romances, written down with the exactitude of a business diary; a view of
men and cities from Naples to Berlin, from Madrid and London to
Constantinople and St. Petersburg; the 'vie intime' of the eighteenth
century depicted by a man, who to-day sat with cardinals and saluted
crowned heads, and to morrow lurked in dens of profligacy and crime; a
book of confessions penned without reticence and without penitence; a
record of forty years of "occult" charlatanism; a collection of tales of
successful imposture, of 'bonnes fortunes', of marvellous escapes, of
transcendent audacity, told with the humour of Smollett and the delicate
wit of Voltaire. Who is there interested in men and letters, and in the
life of the past, who would not cry, "Where can such a book as this be
found?"

Yet the above catalogue is but a brief outline, a bare and meagre
summary, of the book known as "THE MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA"; a work
absolutely unique in literature. He who opens these wonderful pages is as
one who sits in a theatre and looks across the gloom, not on a
stage-play, but on another and a vanished world. The curtain draws up,
and suddenly a hundred and fifty years are rolled away, and in bright
light stands out before us the whole life of the past; the gay dresses,
the polished wit, the careless morals, and all the revel and dancing of
those merry years before the mighty deluge of the Revolution. The palaces
and marble stairs of old Venice are no longer desolate, but thronged with