History of My Life, Volumes 3-4; Volume 34

Front Cover

Award-winning translation of the complete memoirs of Casanova available for the first time in paperback.

Volumes 3 and 4 offer some of the most extraordinary episodes in Casanova's extraordinary life, including his liaison with the nun M. M., and his flight from the State Inquisitor's prison—each in its own way a feat of singular dash and daring.

Because every previous edition of Casanova's Memoirs had been abridged to suppress the author's political and religious views and tame his vivid, often racy, style, the literary world considered it a major event when Willard R. Trask's translation of the complete original text was published in six double volumes between 1966 and 1971. Trask's award-winning translation now appears in paperback for the first time.

 

Contents

Volume
3
page
20
set out from Bologna a happy man The Captain leaves us
38
page
54
page
89
page
107
page
123
My blunders in French my successes my numerous acquaintances
145
page
303
page 19
19
page 35
35
page 54
54
give M M my portrait Her present to me I go to the opera
71
page 109
109
Monsieur de Bernis departs leaving me his rights to the casino
126
page 147
147

run foul of the law in Paris Mademoiselle Vesian
173
page
198
page
220
CHAPTER XIII
235
CHAPTER XIV
251
page
269
CHAPTER XVI
286
NOTES
294
page 166
166
The beautiful patient I cure her Plot hatched to ruin me Inci
182
Under the Leads Earthquake
199
page 220
220
page 258
258
page 282
282
page 303
303
APPENDIX page
355

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About the author (1997)

Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725. His parents, both actors, wanted him to become a priest, but their hopes were dashed when, at sixteen, he was expelled from seminary for immoral misconduct. Probably best-known for his reputation as a womanizer, Casanova was in turn a secretary, a soldier in the Venetian army, a preacher, an alchemist, a gambler, a violinist, a lottery director, and a spy. He translated Homer's Iliad into Italian and collaborated with Da Ponte on the libretto for Mozart's Don Giovanni. He retired in 1785 to the castle of a friend—Count Waldstein of Bohemia—in order to write his memoirs.