Giacomo Casanova this crime for lack of evidence, but by this time, he had already fled from Venice. Escaping to Parma, Casanova entered into a three-month affair with a Frenchwoman he named "Henriette", perhaps the deepest love he ever experienced—a woman who combined beauty, intelligence, and culture. In his words, "They who believe that a woman is incapable of making a man equally happy all the twenty-four hours of the day have never known an Henriette. The joy which flooded my soul was far greater when I conversed with her during the day than when I held her in my arms at
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