Beschreibung:

CASANOVA DE SEINGALT, Giacomo (1725-1798). Autograph letter signed ('Giacomo Casanova' and 'M. Casanova'), written in the third person to the Abbot [Eusebio] de la Lena, in Italian and French, Teplitz, [c.1795], one page, square 4to.
CASANOVA DE SEINGALT, Giacomo (1725-1798). Autograph letter signed ('Giacomo Casanova' and 'M. Casanova'), written in the third person to the Abbot [Eusebio] de la Lena, in Italian and French, Teplitz, [c.1795], one page, square 4to. Casanova apologises to one of his closest friends, the bibliophile Eusebio de la Lena, for not making his way to the Collegio Teresiano to thank him for a favour. He requests two letters be forwarded to him at Count Carl de Waldstein's castle of Dux (in Bohemia, now in Duchov in the Czech Republic) where Casanova had held the post of librarian since 1785. The Count, a descendant of Count Wallenstein, the hero of the Thirty Years War, first met Casanova at the Venetian embassy in Paris in 1783; captivated by his conversation he later secured his company by offering him employment. Casanova remained at Dux until his death, composing his memoirs there, in which he wrote [to his friend Master Faulkircher] 'you began to rack your brains in vain to understand what need Count Waldstein had of a librarian, at a salary of a thousand florins a year ... you advised him to get rid of me'. During the first two years, with the Count continually absent, Casanova 'took my meals alone in my room, and paid for them myself', but was later obliged to 'accept the Count's offer to eat in the servants' hall', having been cheated out of 4,000 florins by a bookseller named Hilscher ( The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt , Navarre Society Ltd, 1922, II, p.476.) The bibliophile and man of letters, Eusebio de la Lena (b.1747) belonged to a prominent Lucchese family, and lived in both Venice and Vienna. Not published in Pompeo Molmenti's Carteggi Casanoviani (1916), which contains three letters from Casanova in Dux to the Abbot, dated 1791 and 1796.