Giacomo Casanova Casanova soon abandoned his military career and returned to Venice. At the age of 21, he set out to become a professional gambler, but losing all the money remaining from the sale of his commission, he turned to his old benefactor Alvise Grimani for a job. Casanova thus began his third career, as a violinist in the San Samuele theater, "a menial journeyman of a sublime art in which, if he who excels is admired, the mediocrity is rightly despised. ... My profession was not a noble one, but I did not care. Calling everything prejudice, I soon acquired all
Giacomo Casanova was in her thirteenth year. She had nowhere the definitive mark of puberty." (III, 196–7; X, 116–17). In 1774, when he was almost fifty, Casanova encountered in Trieste a former lover, the actress Irene, now accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter. "A few days later she came, with her daughter, who pleased me ("qui me plut") and who did not reject my caresses. One fine day, she met with Baron Pittoni, who loved little girls as much as I did ("aimant autant que moi les petites filles"), and took a liking to Irene’s girl, and asked the mother to do him