onte Cristo_, or any of the
imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been
written in imitation of them. They tell the story of a man who loved
life passionately for its own sake: one to whom woman was, indeed, the
most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
indifferent. The bust which gives us the most lively notion of him shows
us a great, vivid, intellectual face, full of fiery energy and calm
resource, the face of a thinker and a fighter in one. A scholar, an
adventurer, perhaps a Cabalist, a busy stirrer in politics, a gamester,
one 'born for the fairer sex,' as he tells us, and born also to be a
vagabond; this man, who is remembered now for his written account of his
own life, was that rarest kind of autobiographer, one who did not live
to write, but wrote because he had lived, and when he could live no
longer.

And his _Memoirs_ take one all over Europe, giving sidelights, all the
more valuable in being almost accidental, upon many of the affairs and
people most interesting to us during two-thirds of the eighteenth
century. Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice, of Spanish and Italian
parentage, on April 2, 1725; he died at the Chateau of Dux, in Bohemia,
on June 4, 1798. In that lifetime of seventy-three years he travelled,
as his _Memoirs_ show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England,
Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he met
Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert and
Crebillon at Paris, George III. in London, Louis XV. at Fontainebleau,
Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II.
at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by the
Inquisitors of State in the _Piombi_ at Venice, he made, in 1755, the
most famous escape in history. His _Memoirs_, as we have them, break off
abruptly at the moment when he is expecting a safe conduct, and the
permission to return to Venice after twenty years' wanderings. He did
return, as we know from documents in the Venetian archives; he returned
as secret agent of the Inquisitors, and remained in their service from
1774 until 1782. At the end of 1782 he left Venice; and next year we
find him in Paris, where, in 1784, he met Count Waldstein at the
Venetian Ambassador's, and was invited by him to become his librarian at
Dux. He accepted, and for the fourteen remaining years of his life lived
at Dux, where he wrote his _Memoirs