year of Casanova's death. They are remarkably charming, written with a
mixture of piquancy and distinction; and I will quote the characteristic
beginning and end of the last letter I was able to find. It begins: 'No,
it is impossible to be sulky with you!' and ends: 'If I become vicious,
it is you, my Mentor, who make me so, and I cast my sins upon you. Even
if I were damned I should still be your most devoted friend, Henriette de
Schnetzmann.' Casanova was twenty-three when he met Henriette; now,
herself an old woman, she writes to him when he is seventy-three, as if
the fifty years that had passed were blotted out in the faithful
affection of her memory. How many more discreet and less changing lovers
have had the quality of constancy in change, to which this life-long
correspondence bears witness? Does it not suggest a view of Casanova not
quite the view of all the world? To me it shows the real man, who perhaps
of all others best understood what Shelley meant when he said:

True love in this differs from gold or clay
That to divide is not to take away.

But, though the letters from women naturally interested me the most, they
were only a certain proportion of the great mass of correspondence which
I turned over. There were letters from Carlo Angiolini, who was
afterwards to bring the manuscript of the Memoirs to Brockhaus; from
Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the Piombi; from the
Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is
some account in the Memoirs; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished man
of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same
volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from
Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, 'bel
homme, ayant de l'esprit, le ton et le gout de la bonne societe', who
came to settle at Gorizia in 1773, while Casanova was there; from the