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5 Gambling High and Low: Casanova's Story ofMy Life IT SOMETIMES HAPPENS THAT A single life, recreated as autobiography and allowing its vicarious reliving by reader as well as author, brings together within its variegated fabric the full range of the diverse and conflicting characteristics defining an age. As concerns gambling and its role within the culture of the Enlightenment, no one is more representative and no one tells us more about what really was at stake in those wagers than does Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, the Venetian son of an itinerant actor and a shoemaker's daughter who was born in 1725 and lived until two years before the close of the century. The twelve volumes of his Histoire de ma vie, which he wrote in French during the last ten years of his life, stand as a revealing chronicle and acute analysis of the tenor of his time. Speaking of Casanova the gambler, Chantal Thomas makes the claim that "Casanova spent more than half his life playing pharaon."l She does not mean that, if the hours had been counted, Casanova spent anywhere near as much time at the tables as he did seated at his writing desk in the poorly heated library of Count Waldstein's chateau at Dux. What she does mean is that, from his adolescent initiation to gambling at Chiogga after his studies at Padua until well into his late fifties, Casanova relied on gambling in all its forms not only as a source of income but as his entree into the otherwise inaccessible world of the aristocracy-be it French, Italian, Dutch, German, English, Russian, or Spanish. Without gambling, in other words, Casanova could never have become Casanova. If gambling provides the nexus between Casanova the individual and Casanova the chronicler of the larger world, it is because that activity -its ever-present cards, dice, and lotteries-was, for him and for the ancien regime aristocracy of which he willed himself to become a part, the hallmark of refined sociability. Gambling as Casanova practiced it was 86 Chapter 5 a form of polite conviviality as yet untouched either by the moral opprobrium that would be heaped on it by the triumphant bourgeoisie or by the metaphysical aura of a Dostoyevskian encounter with Will and Fate. As Thomas puts it, "Gambling, for Casanova, reveals nothing of any force beyond daily life, no secret perdition, no inhuman fatality. It is rather that life itself exists only in and through gambling" (172). If Casanova, an actor's son, could become the chevalier de Seingalt, it was because his attitude toward names, titles, and identity itself, was that of a gambler shuffling the letters of the alphabet as he would a deck of cards and drawing from them a hand which, for the space of the game, he would call his own. In Volume 8 of the Histoire, Casanova recounts that he explained to the mayor ofAugsburg why his travel document named him the chevalier de Seingalt. "The alphabet belongs to everyone; there is no denying that. I took eight letters, and combined them in such a way as to produce the word Seingalt. The word pleased me, and I adopted it as my surname."2 To the mayor's objection that people must retain the name received from their fathers, Casanova replied that, at some point in the past, all fathers must similarly have drawn their hands from the alphabet's deck. "The name you bear yourself by right of inheritance did not exist from all eternity; it must have been invented by one ofyour ancestors who had not received it from his father, even if your name were Adam" (8: 36). The gambler's ethos presides over Casanova's autobiography from its first to its last page. Casanova chose as its first words, as the first groups of letters his reader would encounter, the Latin epigraph Necquicquam sapit qui sibi non sapit. Adapted from the seventh of Cicero's Epistolae familiares, that phrase might loosely be translated as "one knows nothing if one does not draw pleasure and profit from that knowledge." Bringing together the two senses of the Latin sapere-to please the sense oftaste but also to know in the sense ofpossessing a skill-and coupling them with the reflexive intensifier sibi, this polysemantic pun stands as an Enlightenment motto for the life well lived. It not only alludes to the studied Epicureanism of the century's reorientation of knowledge toward the pursuit...

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