Memoirs of Jacques Casanova (1929 PDF)

- Life of adventure → Casanova recounts travels across Europe, encounters with nobles, clergy, and artists, and his constant pursuit of pleasure.  

- Romantic escapades → His affairs with women are central, but they are also windows into social customs and gender roles of the 18th century.  

- Historical backdrop → The memoirs capture the atmosphere of Enlightenment Europe — Venice, Paris, Vienna, and beyond.  

- Philosophy and wit → Casanova reflects on freedom, morality, and the art of living, often with irony and self‑awareness.  

- Boyd’s translation → Condenses the sprawling original into a readable narrative, balancing scandal with literary value.  

 Excerpt :

Giacomo Casanova, who liked to be known as Jacques Casanova the Seingait, was born in Venice, on April 2, 1725, and died at the Chateau of Dux in Bohemia, on June 4, 1798. The last fourteen years of his life were spent as Count Waldstein’s librarian at Dux, and it was in that retreat that he wrote the Memoirs which were to make him famous, in spite of himself, for he seems to have written chiefly to beguile his premature old age rather than with any thought of posterity. 

The curious and complicated his¬ tory of the manuscript shows this. There are references to it in the letters and memoirs of his contemporaries, notably the Prince de Ligne, who has left a vivid picture of the author, but its publication was as haphazard and adventurous as the life of the author himself.

 In 1820 a certain Carlo Angiolini, who was the son-inlaw of Casanova’s younger sister, brought a manuscript entitled, “The Story of My Life to the Year 1797,” to the firm of Brockhaus in Leipzig. 

The work was in twelve volumes and ended abruptly with the year 1774Nobody seems to know how it came into AngiolinPs possession, nor what happened to the concluding portion. 

Even the manuscript as left by Casanova has never been printed. It was first translated from the original faulty French into German and was published, with many omissions and alterations, from 1822 to 1828. At the same time, Herr Brochaus had the French text revised by French professor.