The Project Gutenberg EBook of Casanova's Homecoming, by Arthur Schnitzler

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Title: Casanova's Homecoming

Author: Arthur Schnitzler

Release Date: November, 2005 [EBook #9310]
Posting Date: August 4, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CASANOVA'S HOMECOMING

By Arthur Schnitzler

1922

The Translation of this book was made by EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL

CHAPTER ONE.

Casanova was in his fifty-third year. Though no longer driven by the
lust of adventure that had spurred him in his youth, he was still hunted
athwart the world, hunted now by a restlessness due to the approach of
old age. His yearning for Venice, the city of his birth, grew so intense
that, like a wounded bird slowly circling downwards in its death flight,
he began to move in ever-narrowing circles. Again and again, during the
last ten years of his exile, he had implored the Supreme Council for
leave to return home. Erstwhile, in the drafting of these petitions--a
work in which he was a past master--a defiant, wilful spirit seemed to
have guided his pen; at times even he appeared to take a grim delight in
his forwardness. But of late his requests had been couched in humble,
beseeching words which displayed, ever more plainly, the ache of
homesickness and genuine repentance.

The sins of his earlier years (the most unpardonable to the Venetian
councillors was his free-thinking, not his dissoluteness, or
quarrelsomeness, or rather sportive knavery) were by degrees passing
into oblivion, and so Casanova had a certain amount of confidence that
he would receive a hearing. The history of his marvellous escape from
The Leads of Venice, which he had recounted on innumerable occasions at
the courts of princes, in the palaces of nobles, at the supper tables of
burghers, and in houses of ill fame, was beginning to make people forget
any disrepute which had attached to his name. Moreover, in letters to
Mantua, where he had been staying for two months, persons of influence
had conveyed hope to the adventurer, whose in