Giacomo Casanova At age 49, the years of reckless living and the thousands of miles of travel had taken their toll. Casanova's smallpox scars, sunken cheeks, and hook nose became all the more noticeable. His easygoing manner was now more guarded. Prince Charles de Ligne, a friend (and uncle of his future employer), described him around 1784: Venice had changed for him. Casanova now had little money for gambling, few willing females worth pursuing, and few acquaintances to enliven his dull days. He heard of the death of his mother and, more paining, visited the deathbed of Bettina Gozzi, who had first
Giacomo Casanova essential qualities of her sex ... no scientific discoveries have been made by women ... (which) requires a vigor which the female sex cannot have. But in simple reasoning and in delicacy of feeling we must yield to women." Casanova writes that he stopped short of intercourse with a 13 year old named Helene: "little Helene, whom I enjoyed, while leaving her intact." In 1765, when he was forty, he purchased a twelve-year-old girl in St. Petersburg as a sexual slave. In the memoirs he described the Russian girl as emphatically prepubescent: "Her breasts had still not finished budding. She