good-night, Teresina behaving exactly like her sisters. He made them
promise that they would soon come with their father and mother to visit
him in Venice. When they had gone, he spoke with less restraint, but
continued to avoid any unsuitable innuendo or display of vanity. His
audience might have imagined themselves listening to the story of a
Parsifal rather than to that of a Casanova, the dangerous seducer and
half-savage adventurer.

He told them of the fair Unknown who had travelled with him for weeks
disguised as a man in officer's uniform, and one morning had suddenly
disappeared from his side; of the daughter of the gentleman cobbler in
Madrid who, in the intervals between their embraces, had studiously
endeavored to make a good Catholic of him; of Lia, the lovely Jewess of
Turin, who had a better seat on horseback than any princess; of Manon
Balletti, sweet and innocent, the only woman he had almost married; of
the singer whom he had hissed in Warsaw because of her bad performance,
whereupon he had had to fight a duel with her lover, General Branitzky,
and had been compelled to flee the city; of the wicked woman Charpillon,
who had made such an abject fool of him in London; of the night when he
crossed the lagoons to Murano on the way to his adored nun, the night
when he nearly lost his life in a storm; of Croce the gamester, who,
after losing a fortune at Spa, had taken a tearful farewell of Casanova
upon the high-road, and had set off on his way to St. Petersburg, just
as he was, wearing silk stockings and a coat of apple-green satin, and
carrying nothing but a walking cane.

He told of actresses, singers, dressmakers, countesses, dancers,
chambermaids; of gamblers, officers, princes, envoys, financiers,
musicians, and adventurers. So carried away was he by the rediscovered
charm of his own past, so completely did the triumph of these splendid