translate the
French literally): 'I beg you to tell my servant what the biscuits are
that I like to eat, dipped in wine, to fortify my stomach. I believe
that they can all be found at Roman's.' Usually, however, these notes,
though often suggested by something closely personal, branch off into
more general considerations; or else begin with general considerations,
and end with a case in point. Thus, for instance, a fragment of three
pages begins: 'A compliment which is only made to gild the pill is a
positive impertinence, and Monsieur Bailli is nothing but a charlatan;
the monarch ought to have spit in his face, but the monarch trembled
with fear.' A manuscript entitled _Essai d'Egoisme_, dated, 'Dux, this
27th June, 1769,' contains, in the midst of various reflections, an
offer to let his _appartement_ in return for enough money to
'tranquillise for six months two Jew creditors at Prague.' Another
manuscript is headed 'Pride and Folly,' and begins with a long series of
antitheses, such as: 'All fools are not proud, and all proud men are
fools. Many fools are happy, all proud men are unhappy.' On the same
sheet follows this instance or application:

Whether it is possible to compose a Latin distich of the greatest
beauty without knowing either the Latin language or prosody. We
must examine the possibility and the impossibility, and afterwards
see who is the man who 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