‘Beautiful’

Observer

‘Sparkling’

The Times

‘Razor-sharp’

Spectator

‘Elegant’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Exquisite’

Daily Telegraph

About the Author

Andrew Miller’s first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy. It has been followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like a Bird, Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2011, The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, The Slowworm’s Song and The Land in Winter, which won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025.

Andrew Miller’s novels have been published in translation in twenty countries. Born in Bristol in 1960, he currently lives in Somerset.

Also by Andrew Miller

Ingenious Pain

Oxygen

The Optimists

One Morning Like a Bird

Pure

The Crossing

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

The Slowworm’s Song

The Land in Winter

CASANOVA

Andrew Miller

www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

Copyright © 1998 by Andrew Miller

First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Sceptre

An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette Livre UK Company

The right of Andrew Miller to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 848 94796 2

Book ISBN 978 0 34068 210 4

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

An Hachette Livre UK Company

338 Euston Road

London NWl 3BH

www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

For PW and DK

No’vel. A small tale, generally of love.

From Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary

Part One

The door opened: light washed in from the corridor. The figure of a servant unlatched the shutters, folding them back and standing there, rubbing his hands together, looking out over the snow-dusted roofs of Dux. Behind him, the old man in the chair with the dog at his feet stopped his sobbing, his babble, and sniffed at the daylight.

‘You have a visitor, mein Herr,’ said the servant, turning from the window and regarding the old man as though he were looking at a figure in one of Count Waldstein’s great tapestries which hung in the draughty halls below, a man of thread, so lank and worn one would not have been amazed to see the back of the chair through his chest.

‘A visitor?’

‘A “lady”, mein Herr. Eine sehr schöne.’

Bolder now, for the count was away and Feldkirchner, the major-domo, called the old man a freak, a relict – and cruder names than that – the servant winked, kissed the air and slipped out of the room while the old man, fighting off blankets and gravity, pursued him to the door, fists waving like the horns of a furious snail.

‘Pot-washer! Jacobin! Your master will hear of this, you hedge-creeper! . . . And what about a fire, eh? You want me to freeze to death? A pox in your nose!’

But his rage was pointless. He was shouting in Italian, or more precisely in Venetian, and these barbarians did not understand him. For the thousandth time he resolved to learn a selection of the most obscene epithets in German or Czech, the sort of language that went straight through a man’s liver like a good Toledo blade. Then perhaps he would have some respect, though of course it was too late for such revolutions, for miracles.

He shook his head and tottered to the window. Smoke crept from a dozen chimneys, and the snow, which had stopped during the night, had begun to fall again, covering the delicate writing of birds’ feet on the windowsill and spiralling down into the market square, where against the bodies of the geese the flakes appeared grey. There was a splash of red down there too, where something had been bled.

Today, it seemed, was market day, a feast day too perhaps, for the puppeteers were there with their puppets made of bones and wire, and their old mule that carried them faithfully from Olmutz to Hubertusburg. There was a time when, leaning on a cane, he had liked to go down to see them, for there was something very diverting in their shows. In his honour – he had always been treated kindly by such people – they had performed a marionette version of the commedia dell’arte with Dottore and Brighella and Arlecchino and, of course, Captain Spavento, who could not wear a shirt because the hairs on his chest bristled so with indignation. It had made him laugh, but it had made him cry also, idiotic old men’s tears thick as amber which he could not stop.

And this was where he must end his days! This Bohemian boneyard, tangling place of the winds – though it was true that on certain days in spring and summer a breeze sprang out of the south-west and for half a day he could taste that other world of flowered balconies, of colonnades in purple shadow, of afternoons so long one could live an entire life in them wrapped in the arms of some beauty, breathing her hair, her breath in warm tresses on his chest . . .

No. It did no good to think of women now, though occasionally he still dreamt of them and when he woke there was a bump in the sheets where a little blood had found its way to his jargonelle. Better the nights when sleep was a mere excision of consciousness, a rehearsal for the death he was no longer hiding from. Dreams, which had once consoled him, now only taunted him.

On the table, among the rubbish there, he discovered the remains of a hard-boiled egg. He examined it and broke off a piece of the gelid white, slipping half into his own mouth and feeding the rest to his fox-terrier bitch, Finette, fondling her ears and slowly, stiffly, bending to kiss the clipped velvet of her skull.

‘Did that house-lizard not say we have a visitor?’

The animal gazed at him, not stupidly but as if filled with intelligent regret that she could not reply to him other than with sniffs and tail-wags and affectionate growls. The old man shrugged. He was not expecting anyone but people still came, visitors, whose names he did not recognise, could not remember, welcome because they sometimes brought presents – wine, mascarpone cheese, even crayfish which he adored and which the cook made into a soup for him. Then they sat politely, listening to his stories and nodding their heads, prompting him to be indiscreet, though who there was left to be indiscreet about, who of all those he had known still alive to blush, he could not imagine.

He had the whim to put on a good coat. There were still one or two that the moths and the damp had not destroyed. And those papers which gave his room the look of a deranged stationer’s office, it was time he tidied them away; the servants would never do it. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and, gratified to have had these thoughts, modest flights of the mind which reminded him that he was still – however tenuously – a citizen of the world, he immediately picked up the papers nearest to him, shuffled them and squinted at the heading on the uppermost.

‘THE DUPLICATION OF THE HEXAHEDR ON DEMONSTRATED GEOMETRICALLY TO ALL THE UNIVERSITIES AND ALL THE ACADEMIES OF EUROPE.’

Beneath this, in place of the promised monograph, there was a list of his possessions that had gone missing since he had come to this den of magpies to take up the position of castle librarian; and below that, a dozen pages explaining how, with a judicious blend of grifting and arithmetic, one might be sure of winning the state lottery in Rome or Geneva or anywhere – not that he himself ever had much luck with them.

He gathered the papers in his arms like laundry, but rather than stuffing them into one of the drawers or kicking them under the bed – supposing there were any room left there – he carried them to the hearth and dropped them in among the chill of the ashes. Then, striking a spark into the lint of his tinderbox and touching a match to the embers, he ignited them.

WOOMPF!

How hungrily they took the fire! Blue and orange lips swallowing the ink, the pulp, the fine looped hand, the sentiments (‘Unico Mio Vero Amico . . .’); the French, the Italian, the black and the red wax. He watched it a moment, half afraid, then went for more fuel: love letters, Latin treatises, appeals for money, for an audience, for a position. Bills of every description, a disproportionate number from tailors and wine merchants. All on to the pyre, blazing up the chimney into the iron skies of Bohemia. He searched in the cupboards, in chests stamped with the Waldstein arms, in the pockets of suits he had not worn in months, in years. Finette, her plum-coloured eyes brilliant with lights, followed him about, intrigued by this new activity. Soon, the room was almost warm and still he uncovered new material to burn. A manuscript entitled ‘Delle Passioni’. A creased and yellowed copy of a Gothenburg gazette. An old passport into Catalonia – ‘bon pour quinze jours’ – 1768. Remember Nina Bergonza whose mother was also her sister?

Why had he not done this years ago? He felt like those balloonists who threw out bags of sand to send their air boats, their little air gondolas, soaring again. He had himself once planned to fly over the Alps to Trieste and thence to Venice. The thought of drifting in through a sea mist over the Golfo di Venezia and dropping rose petals or dog turds on the inhabitants had quite intoxicated him for a month, but the winds had all been northerlies and everyone had stolen from everyone else and the scheme had failed, as so many others had.

Into the flames he thrust a dozen pages of poetry and the first chapter, the only chapter, of his great History of the Republic. Letters from Henriette, letters from Manon Baletti. A libretto intended for the composer of Don Giovanni, never delivered. Cryptograms, memoirs, dream diaries. Laundry lists. Recipes for stuffed peppers, for jellied pig’s feet. There was no end to it! His life had turned to paper and now he was turning the paper into air, into silky black ashes. Then just as it seemed there could be no more left to burn other than an old newspaper or a limp, elegant banknote from a currency as defunct as the king or emperor printed upon its sides, he found, wedged into the toes of his riding boots – the boots a gift from the nymphomaniac Duchess of Chartres for curing her of her acne – yet another parcel of letters, seven or eight of them, held together with a rust-coloured garter, and these too he was on the point of incinerating when some thrill of unease made him pause and bring the letters up to his nose, that trusty organ, one of the few that had not yet betrayed him. He sniffed, flared the wings of his nostrils and detected, through the overlaying scent of aged and supple leather, a perfume of summer jessamine, so faint, so frail, that at the second sniff – sniff? – the second passionate inhalation, it was gone, like a face in a tobacco cloud.

He tugged the top letter from the grip of the garter, opened it, turned it, his eyes travelling down over the deliberate and girlish hand to the signature at the bottom. A single ‘M’, tall as a thimble.

Monsieur, you will be glad to know that your parrot was recovered from the roof of a brewer’s house in Southwark and that the man made a present of it to his wife, a very large and jolly woman as I understand . . .

He squeezed the parchment in his fist, crushed it. Memory, like athousand-petal bloom, unfolded. Marie Charpillon, her mother, her aunts, her grandmother (poor woman! May God forgive him!) blew into his brain like luminous pollen, complete, perfectly there, as if he had seen them only an hour before instead of more than thirty years ago. With them came Jarba and the great man-shadow and Goudar. And London, that bruised honeycomb of a town, that voracious city that had chewed him up and spat out his bones. Ah! Such shocks of recollection, how dangerous they were, tugging at the frayed lacing of the heart . . .

Finette whimpered. On frequencies denied to men she heard the footfall of the dead, smelling their spoor of cobweb and grave-dust. For several moments her master had the appearance, the awful stillness, of one of the mummified bodies at the Capuchin church in Palermo. Then he stirred again, shuddered and went to the fireplace, but when his visitor arrived, coming in silently and unannounced, he was still posed irresolutely in the snow-light, the letters seized in his hand.

‘Signor Casanova?’

Something in her voice, as if a finger had lightly brushed the hairs at the back of his neck. Slowly, he turned to her.