Diary: Peter Brooks, What is a libertine?

Dom Juan’s valet Sganarelle (Claude Brassuer) in Marcel Bluwall’s 1965 adaptation of Molière's Dom Juan for French television, with Michel Piccoli (Photo by Norbert Perrau\INA via Getty Images)

Giacomo Casanova counted sex with some 129 women over a period of thirty-nine years. Not quite up to Don Giovanni’s numbers given in his valet Leporello’s famous catalogue, in Mozart’s opera, with its punchline: “Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre” (But in Spain there are already a thousand and three). Both Don Juan and Casanova have entered history as seducers, the former a mythical Spaniard, the latter real, though clearly devoted to making himself something of a legend in the 3,700 manuscript pages of his memoirs, the Histoire de ma vie. He wrote in French, the language that would give his legend the widest circulation, and was published only after his death, in a reliable version only in our own time. Leo Damrosch titles his new biography of Casanova Adventurer, and Casanova was fully that, also a cardsharp, con man, sometime necromancer, utopian schemer, medical quack, who traveled all over Europe while most at home in his native Venice, though he spent a time imprisoned in the Leads of the Doge’s Palace, from which he escaped in his most sensational adventure (he wrote a book about it).