Casanova: Prison Breaker, Lottery Founder, Spy, and Fake Alchemist

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The name Casanova now means a promiscuous lover, but Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was also a law graduate at 17, a cleric, a violinist, a spy, and a founder of the French state lottery. Born in Venice in 1725, he learned early that people want to believe in secret knowledge. When a senator named Bragadin suffered a stroke in a gondola, Casanova overruled the doctor, had a mercury ointment washed off, and then passed himself off as an oracle. The senator became his patron for life.

That same nerve carried him out of the Leads, the prison under the roof of the Doge's Palace, and into Paris in January 1757, where he sold the treasury on a lottery and posed as an alchemist under the title Chevalier de Seingalt. This episode follows his long con on the Marquise d'Urfe, his years wandering more than 4,000 miles between royal courts, the one woman who saw through him, and the lonely librarian's job in Bohemia where he wrote his 12-volume memoir, Histoire de ma vie.

As a boy he was taken to a witch on the island of Murano for his nosebleeds. The cure failed, but her ritual taught him the power of theater.
Arrested without trial in 1755, he smuggled an iron spike to a priest in the next cell inside the spine of a Bible, with a heaped plate of pasta on top to distract the jailer.
His lottery asked bettors to pick up to five numbers from 1 to 90, and he took a percentage of ticket sales as a director.
Henriette, the lover he praised above all others, left him first and slipped a large sum of money into his pocket as she went.
He wrote up to 13 hours a day at Dux Castle to keep from going mad, and died in 1798 after learning that Napoleon had ended the Republic of Venice.

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