says he is the author of the distich, for there are extraordinary people
in the world. My brother, in short, ought to have composed the distich,
because he says so, and because he confided it to me tete-'a-tete. I had,
it is true, difficulty in believing him; but what is one to do! Either
one must believe, or suppose him capable of telling a lie which could
only be told by a fool; and that is impossible, for all Europe knows that
my brother is not a fool.

Here, as so often in these manuscripts, we seem to see Casanova thinking
on paper. He uses scraps of paper (sometimes the blank page of a letter,
on the other side of which we see the address) as a kind of informal
diary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curious
mind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merely
personal notes among these casual jottings. Often, they are purely
abstract; at times, metaphysical 'jeux d'esprit,' like the sheet of
fourteen 'Different Wagers,' which begins:

I wager that it is not true that a man who weighs a hundred pounds will
weigh more if you kill him. I wager that if there is any difference, he
will weigh less. I wager that diamond powder has not sufficient force to
kill a man.

Side by side with these fanciful excursions into science, come more
serious ones, as in the note on Algebra, which traces its progress since
the year 1494, before which 'it had only arrived at the solution of
problems of the second degree, inclusive.' A scrap of paper tells us that
Casanova 'did not like regular towns.' 'I like,' he says, 'Venice, Rome,
Florence, Milan, Constantinople, Genoa.' Then he becomes abstract and
inquisitive again, and writes two pages, full of curious, out-of-the-way
learning, on the name of Paradise: