Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Real Casanova

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

Can you imagine being SO smooth-talking and seductive your surname becomes an actual noun in the dictionary to describe someone who has a reputation for being an expert at in the sack?Well today we’...re going to be talking about a man who was just that…Giacamo Casanova.But is his legacy accurate? Was he really a prolific ladies man? And did he do anything else in his life other than seduce women…and if he did, why do we only remember him for that reason? Today we’re bringing you a very special Betwixt the Sheets mash-up episode with History Hit’s very own Casanova, Dan Snow (don’t worry he has humbly confirmed we could call him that).Kate and Dan will be discussing why there is much more to Casanova than just womanising - he was a scam artist, outlaw, alchemist, spy and church cleric. He wrote satires, fought duels, and escaped from prison more than once. He even set up the French national lottery. Join Kate and Dan for this special collab episode of History Hit in the Sheets to find out all this and more!Produced by Freddy Chick, Charlotte Long and Mariana Des Forges. Mixed by Dougal Patmore.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.Email us with your subject ideas at betwixt@historyhit.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.
Starting point is 00:00:25 Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, how are you doing? I hope that you are keeping well and staying fabulous. But it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. What is a fair do's warning, Kate? I will tell you.
Starting point is 00:00:50 A fair do's warning is what I give before every episode, just to make sure that you know exactly what's going on here. This is an adult podcast with adult themes and adults speaking to other adults about adulty things and adulty, We're talking about Casanova today. So there is lots of adults doing adulty things going on. Lots of discussions around sex. I'll probably be swearing quite a lot. And there might be some discussions around venereal diseases as well. I can't quite remember if we got round to that. But if we haven't, then we should have done. And now that I've told you about this,
Starting point is 00:01:21 you can't get mad at us if you continue listening to this because fair dues, you have been warned. Can you imagine being so smooth-talking and so sexy that you're not. name itself becomes a byword for anybody that is an absolute legend in the sack. Oh, she's alright, Cassanova. Hmm. I'm still hoping that Lister might catch on in this way, but I doubt it. But one man whose name did catch on like that is Giacomo Casanova. But is his legacy accurate?
Starting point is 00:02:03 Was he really a committed ladies man? Did he do anything else in his life, apart from shagging his way across Europe? and if he did, why do we only remember him for his bedroom antics? Who was the real Giacomo Cassanova? Today, in the lead-up to Valentine's Day, we are bringing you a very special Betwixt the Sheets episode with history hits very own Cassanova, Dan Snow. Well, he's the closest that we could get, okay?
Starting point is 00:02:31 But don't worry. He is humbly confirmed that we can call him that. We're going to be talking about Casanova's most famous love affairs, which even included a couple of nuns. Some of the people he met in his lifetime from Mozart to Benjamin Franklin to Catherine the Great and of course, sex in the 18th century. I mean, why would you want to talk about anything else?
Starting point is 00:02:53 Enjoy! Who have a girl out there? Five. Five? At work? What I'd like to know is how can you figure out what a girl would like to do? A certain girl, I mean. Well, you might ask her.
Starting point is 00:03:16 First of all, be late. That'll show her you're a busy, important person. But you're not too interested in her. Play hard to get. Kate Lister, how's it going? You've got the fastest growing podcast in the world. The Twix. It's pretty cool.
Starting point is 00:03:36 I always love your sexual advisory stuff at the start. You're like, course, it's the whole point. Listen to you, Muppets. That's my favorite bit is that having to go, right, yeah, it's about sex. We're going to talk about sex. It's like when you get the little bottles of nuts. night hole and it says warning may cause drowsiness. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:53 But I actually quite enjoy that bit now. It sounds like you enjoy that bit, for sure, for sure. I mean, Cassanova is like a central figure of this story, isn't he? I mean, it's bonkers. There's a lot of things you could say about him, and I'm sure that we will, but you'd have to say that he drank deeply from the cup of life, I think is what you'd have to say about Cassanova is he lived several lifetimes over, didn't he?
Starting point is 00:04:14 I think that he realizes quite early on, you sort of get this sense when you read in his memoirs, which is really, the only source that we have for Casanova is these like thousands and thousands, 10,000 words on more memoirs that he wrote when he was in his 60s. And you get a real sense for him, sat there, he was a librarian at the time
Starting point is 00:04:31 because he'd fritted everything away. By the way, can we just briefly, Cassanova ends his days as a librarian. I love librarians, but I mean, that is a classic. It is, isn't it? Because he earned his fortune several times over and then spaffed it up the wall repeatedly because he couldn't stop gambling.
Starting point is 00:04:47 He was a terrible, terrible gambler and everything he did was about chance and opportunistic and he would keep getting in trouble, he'd keep being chucked out of places, which is kind of one of the reasons he was on the run all the time is because he would keep pissing people off and then he'd be exiled. But I don't think he ever stopped being a chance.
Starting point is 00:05:06 I think he worked out very early on that he was really clever, and he was. He was really, really bright. But I think that he worked out that you can trick people. You can manipulate people. And I think he liked doing it as well. So he is super smart and he graduates He hates the law, doesn't he hates it? But he graduates super young from university
Starting point is 00:05:26 And is it still a teenager? He's really young. He's one of those like child prodigies He graduates from law at about like 17 Or something like that And he was just a voracious reader of books He would just absorb everything But then he's stuck because well
Starting point is 00:05:40 All right, you're very clever And you know a lot of stuff And you're quite good looking by all accounts But what are you going to do? You're still the son of an actress And you're penniless So he attempted to go into the church for a bit but wasn't very good at it.
Starting point is 00:05:50 He was a bit of a wronging, wasn't he? Well, do you know, he was really good at delivering the sermons, and people started coming from all over the place to hear him talk. But there was one incident where he got smashed before he was supposed to give the sermon, and then he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do, so pretended to faint rather than give it away that he was absolutely sozzled. And it just became pretty obvious that he was not going to fit in the church because he kept shagging everyone.
Starting point is 00:06:16 And he then, he basically finds himself a word. wealthy patron, right? Which is, I mean... He does. It's just a shortcut. It's a life hack, that, isn't it? But then what are you going to do? You're like 18 years old. How are you going to make your money? It's a very, very, very different world. You can't really have an apprenticeship. If you haven't inherited the money, there's only a few options available to you, really. And getting a wealthy patron is definitely one of them. And he does score the jackpot, and it's Senator Bragadin. Kastanova found him when he was having a heart attack or a stroke. And he kind of launched into... It's another example of that. It's another example of that.
Starting point is 00:06:48 them being this brilliant con artist. He launched into this, oh my God, I'm going to help you. I'm the hero. And he picked him up off the street and took him back to his apartments and lay down the bed. And then he made this whole big song and dance about how he'd saved him and his doctors couldn't. So when Bragenden kind of came back round, he was incredibly indebted to Kassanover when he made him his principal air. But it's another example of him bullshitting really, really well. Well, instead of being a healer slash alchemist is something that he would turn to when he was
Starting point is 00:07:17 struggling for a square meal. Yeah, and it was a dangerous game, actually, and it was one that would come around and bite him on the ass, because in Venice at the time, there was sort of their own version of the Inquisition going on, which is sort of the repressive,
Starting point is 00:07:30 religious authorities. We're getting very upset with this sort of magic occult, sacrilegious stuff going on. And Cassanova really liked that. In fact, he's got one story that when he was really little, his grandmother took him to a witch
Starting point is 00:07:41 to heal him of nosebleeds, which is extreme. And he thinks at some point that he is able to, able to perform magic and cabala and mysticism. And at some point, like when his life pretends to be like a spiritualist and a mediumist, but he does kind of play around with this stuff, how much he believed it himself. I'm not quite sure.
Starting point is 00:08:01 Yeah, he does a bit of philosopher's stone action, doesn't it? We should talk about sex because he is also the victim of child abuse. I mean, he had his first sexual experiences were under the age that he was young. I mean, wasn't he? He was young. He didn't have full penetrative sex until he was in his teens. but his first sexual experience was with a woman that was older than him, definitely. And he kind of remembers it as like it awoke something in him
Starting point is 00:08:27 that he was going to devote the rest of his life to. But today, yeah, we'd say that that's child abuse. And then he's sort of famous sleeping in nuns, but that does fit within the genre of sort of literary nun porn in the 18th century was actually a thing. It was a thing. You've got to be careful when you talk about Casano, because it's like how much of it is true. If the authority that you've got on this is himself is his memoirs,
Starting point is 00:08:51 how much of it can be corroborated by other source material, you know, or how much of it, if you put different lenses on it and like, it's your mate at school that was bragging about shagging two supermodels and you're like, did that happen? Did that happen? And there's certainly a lot in the memoirs that sort of maps onto quite popular genres of porn at the time. And non-porn was quite big. But yeah, famously, he had two very turbulent love affairs with two women who lived in a nunnery.
Starting point is 00:09:19 We should talk about his... He was in prison. You've mentioned this. And his famous escape from prison, because that is a classic. Tell me about that. Right. Okay.
Starting point is 00:09:28 So he gets in prisons because... And this is going back to what you were saying at the beginning about at the time people were aware that he was shagging people. He shouldn't be shagging. And he was... Like, the Venetian authorities were gathering information on him about him being a... fornicator and a seducer of women and a liar and somebody that stole men's wives away and was
Starting point is 00:09:51 generally a rake and a scoundrel. But what really did for him was this sort of dabbling in magic that he liked to sort of put about. And there was the accusation that he'd said anyone who believes in Christianity is weak. And he was arrested on those charges and he was thrown in jail in Venice. And he stayed there for 15 months and he did manage to escape, which was no mean feat because he was right up in, they were called like the lead cells or something like because they had lead on the roof. So it's how does he get away? And he manages to find it sort of like, I'd say an ice pick, but it's not. But imagine like an ice pick. And he manages to sort of make a hole in the ground. But then he's moved to a different cell just as he's about to Andy Dufrain
Starting point is 00:10:32 it, right? But then he starts talking to a monk who's a bad monk, who's in the cell next to him. And he manages to get him the ice pick. And then he kind of tunnels through to his cell and they pull each other out and then they're like loosened the rafters in the ceiling of the building of the jail. This is a perfect example of Casanova being a complete con artist. So they're climbing up the roofs, they're climbing in the eaves and the only place they can get to is like this big, great hall that they kind of drop down into, but all the doors are locked. So it's like, well, that's brilliant, we can't get out. But they're so tired, they fall asleep. And then they get woken up the next morning by a guard opening the door. And Casanova leaps into action straight away.
Starting point is 00:11:08 And he goes, how dare you? How dare you treat us like this? And what he knew was there'd been a ball there the night before. So he managed to pass off in that second that they were two guests of the ball that had been locked in there overnight by accident. The guard was so apologetic and terrified that they'd report him to his superiors. He led them out of the building. That's like mad skills, that isn't it? Mad skills. The joyful years before like, you know, official papers and... Yeah. It just shows how far confidence can get you, doesn't it? If you just front it out. After he escapes, is that when he goes to France?
Starting point is 00:11:45 It's incredible, the most proper bit, well, I say that, it's still gambling, but the most kind of perhaps a bit of his career that he's not actually breaking multiple laws and customs at the same time. He goes to France. He goes to Paris. Yeah, and he loves Paris. And he learns the language. And again, he's seducing everybody, famous courtisans, famous actresses, famous actresses, famous men's wives.
Starting point is 00:12:07 But the one thing that he does is he, quote, unquote, invent the first lottery. Yeah, like a national lottery. Like a state lottery. Yeah. I mean, he, again, what he does is he manages to convince people that he's invented it. But what he actually did is he nicked the idea from other people that he'd been speaking to. So it wasn't his idea. But he packaged it really well and he was an amazing salesman.
Starting point is 00:12:29 So he sold this idea to the Parisian authorities. And obviously, like, the lottery is win-win for everyone in it. All those poor schlubs think, yeah, but I might win it. And we kind of enjoy that little buzz and the people that win. another company that does it. So he made them a lot of money and he made a lot of money for himself. But yeah, he's still remembered
Starting point is 00:12:48 as the inventor of the lottery. It gets a bit of work as a spy at this point. He hangs out of Madame de Pompadour who's Louis the 15th sort of favorite foremost mistress and Rousseau he's hanging out with. I mean, it's bonkers. If he did hang out with him. Oh, you see, maybe he's just making a lot.
Starting point is 00:13:04 He might be. I mean, there's some cooperating evidence because when his memoirs were discovered and finally published, there was a lot of his letters and correspondence that was found. And there are letters that have been written. to him.
Starting point is 00:13:14 So we know that, I mean, unless he was going to the extent of faking letters written to him, like we know that some of this can be corroborated. But you can't help but reading it through and go, oh, you helped Mozart with your music. Did you cast him over? Right. Of course you did. It just sounds very much like, yeah, he goes to another school. You wouldn't know him.
Starting point is 00:13:30 It's just got that kind of vibe about it. But maybe I'm being really horribly wrong. Maybe it was all true. Well, yeah, you don't know if you want it to be true or not. It's so bizarre. I like the way he basically nicks loads of money off an old French aristocrat. by promising he can make him young again. And then goes to Britain to flog his lottery scheme to the British government
Starting point is 00:13:50 and ends up shagging some Brits. Then he does do this kind of mad European tour. Again, meets Frederick the Great, meets Catherine the Great, wild. Yep, he's all over the place. And you can look at that as like, isn't that quite exciting, that he's always kind of on the move, he lives his very kind of rootless existence. But he also keeps getting thrown out of places.
Starting point is 00:14:10 So he has to keep leaving places. When he was in England, he was shagging various quarters, and he didn't like it very much because he couldn't speak English all that well and they couldn't speak French, which is kind of nice because he had this thing about, like, he didn't just want to have sex. He also wanted witticisms and banter and, you know, all those things, knock-knock jokes, I don't know. So he didn't like that very much. And he got in trouble with quite a famous courtesan in Britain whose name escapes me. She had a French name. And she wouldn't sleep with him and he got really upset and angry because it's like the first woman that had refused him. I think he slapped her as well and he was really upset with himself and he left. I'll be back with Dan and Casanova after this short break. It's funny, the pictures of Casanova, I'm being a bit superficial.
Starting point is 00:15:23 It doesn't look super attractive and I just wonder if people's teeth must have been so bad. If you were like a bog standard six and a half out of ten, seven, were you like a ten in the 18th century, do you reckon? I think that what Casanova has, and I still think that this is true today,
Starting point is 00:15:40 self-confidence and self-belief and wit and being funny is one of the most attractive things that you can have. Like you could put someone in front of you that is a solid 10 out of 10, like your absolute dream shag. And it would be amazing for a bit. It'd be like, oh my God, I can't believe I get to play with this. This is incredible. How long would it take before you started going, you still here? If they had like no personality, if they were actually quite boring to be around. Like how long would it take for that novelty to wear off?
Starting point is 00:16:09 But he didn't have that. He had wit and charisma in absolute spades. And so he was really confident, and that will get you, like, so far almost every time. Listen to this, kids. That's advice for you from the expert. That's advice. Yes. He was expelled from Warsaw when he had a jewel.
Starting point is 00:16:27 I mean, come on, he's got to have a few jewels, and he got shot in the left hand with a colonel. They argued over an actress, of course. Of course. By the way, can we just talk about the actress thing? Like, what is it about an actual? Hence the bishop actresses of the phrases that we used. Tell me about 18th century actresses.
Starting point is 00:16:42 Right, so there has been, as long as there, because women weren't always allowed on the stage, of course. Right in Shakespearean times, it was men playing the roles of women. So it was considered very daring when women were finally allowed on the stage. And there has been a very close association between actresses and sex workers, courtesans. They've merged into one of them for a really, really long time. And I suspect it's because an actress has got a certain amount of agency that other women don't have. So, for example, Cassanova's mother, she travelled all over Europe. You're not going home to a husband, that you have a certain amount of freedom that's built into that, that you're on
Starting point is 00:17:17 the stage, so you're already being admired. That's definitely a part of it. And if you look at someone like the great courtesans throughout history, they start off as actresses. Like Nell Gwynn, one of my favorites. She started off as an actress on the stage, and that was how she caught the eye of Charlie Boy, Charles II, and became his mistress. So there's a really close association between the two. Is this unusual a moment? He talks honestly about how he had sex with men as well as women. Is that something, given that Sodomir's capital crime,
Starting point is 00:17:45 that strikes me as kind of quite honest? He doesn't quite go into the same gory details that he does with women. There's like veiled suggestions. So he would write about one of his famous lovers, M. who was actually a nun, of course she was. But he was also the lover of a really prominent bishop, of course she was, and that they had sex while the husband was. and it's kind of like, is that true?
Starting point is 00:18:07 Or was he in there as well? But there is one incident where he's very, very attracted to a famous singer, a castrato, and he goes to have sex with him and then kind of realizes at the crucial moment, him as a her, and she's been masquerading as a castrato and stuffing her pants with a fake penis. And there is a certain amount of, he seems to be getting off on it a little bit. So he probably wouldn't have written it down as explicit detail. because, as you said, it's like really, really bad.
Starting point is 00:18:39 But he seemed to have sex with literally everything. He gets back to Venice eventually. I just love the way he just travels looking for opportunities to ingratiate himself with rich people. And then occasionally he just doesn't find it. He's like, oh, well, Spain was complete. Nothing happened there. So then he keeps going.
Starting point is 00:18:57 He's like a shark. He's got to have oxygen over the gills. I find it such an extraordinary way to live. It would be interesting, like, what would people make of him today from, like, a psychological point of view. There's so much going on there that he never marries and settles down. He doesn't really have a permanent home.
Starting point is 00:19:14 Like he said, he's always on the move. It's this very sort of rootless existence. But he seems to really thrive on it as well. And like in some places he's, when he was in Paris, he was a millionaire and then he lost it all, which is like an incredible feat. Like how the hell did you do that? He's silly sod. And then other places he was just working as a violinist as a fiddler because he couldn't
Starting point is 00:19:35 do anything else. He certainly fiddled. He certainly fiddled. But also, I was like, you know, now we've got credit cars and sadly people can run up like massive. But like when you're wandering around Spain looking for a rich person to read their fortune or do some crazy stuff to, other days when he's got nothing left in his wallet, he's like, oh-oh, like I'm going to go hungry and sleep in a barn tonight. Like I find that just that pre-modern journeying lifestyle, I find it kind of so fast. Like the logistics of it, how did it work? A lot of it's on credit and a lot of it is like the art.
Starting point is 00:20:06 of the con artist is to make people think that they can trust you. So he needs to present himself to people. And he kind of gets this reputation. People might know who he is, even if they know him as a rake and a scoundrel. He was definitely famous for his jail break. So he's got a kind of a license to sort of turn up at places as a fascinating person. He just gets to a village, goes, where's the big house?
Starting point is 00:20:24 Kind of. Bang on the door. Hey, everyone, it's your lucky day. Castanova is in town. I'm here. It's really weird. It's the thought of, like, be-list celebrities turning up at your house going,
Starting point is 00:20:35 Hi, I'm here. It's mad, isn't it? But he sort of had this reputation, so he knew where to go, and he knew the right people. There's a certain sense that he kind of just things happen to him. At least in the memoirs, that's how he remembers it. Like, he doesn't seem to be able to just go out to the shops for a pint of milk without bumping into an actress or a Corsican or... Or Benjamin Franklin.
Starting point is 00:20:57 Or Benjamin Franklin. Here he meets. Yeah, extraordinary. They talk about aeronautics and balloon transport together in Paris. They do. And he's spying. He seems to have a little nice, towards the end of his life, he gets that nice little stipend from the Venetians. He so does a bit of spying.
Starting point is 00:21:10 I guess he's flogging his roller decks. He's flogging his little back book and his contacts to provide a bit of intelligence, the state security services. I think he would be a brilliant spy, apart for the fact that he wrote it all down in a memoir, which was definitely a bit of a giveaway. One of the things that he was really good at was reading people. And so the way that he seduced,
Starting point is 00:21:30 and I think that he still continues to seduce people, actually, because we're still drawn to him. was still like, who was this person, this enigmatic person, is that he kind of presents himself as this very exciting person who does stuff that you couldn't possibly do. I think that's quite magnetic, isn't it? The reality of it would be very different. And his last year, as we said at beginning, he was a librarian, amazingly. He got very depressed. He was having a not particularly good time. That's the period in which he claims of Mozart helped him with a few bits and bobs. As you do. But then wrote this unbelievable memorabilms.
Starting point is 00:22:05 That's surely your dream, because I've talked to you many times in this podcast, and you're saying the big problem is people don't write down the things we do, like, sexually, and we don't write honest memoirs, right? We all write boring, unbelievably, because we don't offend people, and we don't want to get caught out for telling little porcupines, but he is one of those rare people that does just write this incredible memoir. And it is an incredible, as a historical document, it's so valuable. And it wasn't published unedited to begin with.
Starting point is 00:22:31 It took a while to get the full gory details out there. But again, even that, as valuable as that is, you've got to always be thinking, is this unscensored, though? Because there's a real sense that he knows he's writing it for an audience. He knows and that he's really enjoying reminiscing. One of my favorite quotes from his memoirs is, I wrote my life to laugh at myself and so far I've succeeded. So he's like having a really good time remembering this stuff. But it's how accurate was it? If we could find the people he's writing about and go,
Starting point is 00:23:05 well, Katanoa seems to think that you had an amazing time. Is that what you remember? I'm not so sure if those things would marry up, but it's still such a valuable document. I like his line where he just says, I can say I have lived. And I think is probably true. Although it's not whitewash things,
Starting point is 00:23:24 there was at least one, but several rape allegations. And then he slept with his daughter. What's going with that? It's really complex because, like, if I tell you this story about this, you invented the lottery and he's funny and he's charismatic and he chagged his daughter. It's like, whoa, go back one. What?
Starting point is 00:23:39 So we're kind of left with this like, wow, okay. If it's true, if it's true, we don't know if there's corroborating evidence, but he had an affair with a woman called Lucrezia. And then years later, he met her daughter, who was called Leonilda. And he almost had sex with her. And then it found out that that's actually his daughter. He almost had sex with her. And then there's a weird description about he has sex with Lucrezia while Leonilda's in the room, but he doesn't have sex with her then.
Starting point is 00:24:09 But that's weird. Like we're in weird territory already. And then he has this thing about later on when he met her when she's like 25, she was unhappily married because she couldn't get pregnant. So as a favour, as a fatherly favour, he has sex with her to get her pregnant. And it's kind of just like Cassanova. Like I want to be on your side, but it's like, what are you doing? And it's, again, you've got to, like, I'd say look at it in the context of the time, but no one was chagging their daughters, even at the time.
Starting point is 00:24:39 But what it might be is playing to incest porn, which was bizarrely common. Like the Marquis de Sard writes about it all the time. And when you look at erotica into the 19th century, there's a weird amount of incest. And by the way, incest porn is still incredibly popular today on Porn Hub. It's not fathers and daughters. It tends to be stepmother and stepson, that kind of thing. So what he might be doing is bullshitting and trying to create weird sexual fantasies.
Starting point is 00:25:07 Not that that makes this okay, but that's what he might be doing. I guess, like, I struggle with his life to think, like, how unusual was it? Other lives like this, but that we just... Which I don't know about. Is it the fact this one's chronicled? It's fascinating, isn't it?
Starting point is 00:25:24 And if they hadn't found those manuscripts, if they hadn't been published, we might never know that this man... Yeah, they had a really... really interesting life, didn't they? They survived the bombing of Leipzig. They were suppressed for years. It's only quite recently that they've all come out, really. Yeah, and we're still, like, discovering little things, like, who his famous lovers were, and because he, like, anonymizes some of them in the memoirs, like, M.M. and CC, and all these things. I think that he was unusual,
Starting point is 00:25:48 even for the time, and I think that he knew that he was unusual. And he had to have been unusual because no one would have given a shit about him otherwise. You can't be turning up at the court of Catherine the Great and going, hello, I'm casting over the completely normal, because no one cares. He had this huge appetite for adventure and I think that he just said yes a lot. You know, like most of us have that kind of like, I'm not really sure I should be doing. I don't think he had that. He just steered into the skid his entire life. Steered into the skit. Yes, he did. Well, Kastanova felt like the obvious point where our two podcasts would intersect. Because I love the 18th century and you love the history of, well,
Starting point is 00:26:26 things that gone betwixt the sheets. I don't think Kassanova was puttips the sheets for that long. I think it was, you know. It was anywhere he could try it up against walls in castles, boats, anywhere. But he must have done it betwixt the sheets a few times. I mean, you think so, wouldn't you? Yeah. Some of the relationships were off a bit longer. I think they would have had time for a bit of sleep occasionally.
Starting point is 00:26:46 But, you know, he only actually slept with about 120 people. I think that's quite an important thing. I think that's quite interesting as well. It made me think that it's not a kind of eye-watering figure, I don't think. It's not, is it? No. You know, I might be giving away too much about myself. But when I read that, I was like, what?
Starting point is 00:27:01 Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I sometimes wonder whether he includes, is that like a class thing? Does he not include like a quick, like roll in the hay with like somebody he considers are those people like named people that he considers importance? I think that was interesting. Also though, I wonder how like Catherine the Great had love affairs and gained her reputation as like a serial shaggar. Well, in fact, she seems to have been someone who enjoyed a consecutive series of reciprocal
Starting point is 00:27:27 loving relationships. And I wonder if in those days Maybe that was an astonishing number of people who have slept with it, it's fascinating I mean, it's still quite a big number But when you think of someone like, I think Gene Simmons brags that he slept with over 10,000 people
Starting point is 00:27:40 Yeah, it was a mad weekend, I'm telling you. That's kind of that sort of number And I think that's quite an important point. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of dodgy stuff about Cassano but you'd have to say that He does fall in love a lot That there is like a lot of casual sex but he does seem to have genuine relationships for a lot of people.
Starting point is 00:28:00 But I have also wondered, were these just the named people? What about like the faceless poor people that you had sex with? But yeah. Yeah, that's the thing I find interesting about him. But yeah, it's fascinating. Well, listen, Kate, thanks very much for coming on my... I'm surprised you have time these days. You're so important to come on my podcast.
Starting point is 00:28:17 I really appreciate that. Well, you know, just I'll try and remember you from when I was done. It's been so lovely to talk to you. Thank you. Well, that's it. Thank you so much for listening to this special episode, all about the real Cassanova. And if you like what you've heard, please give us a follow so we can keep you up to date on all the exciting episodes coming your way, everything from the history of wedding dresses and dyslexia to food and shame. So please drop us a review if you like the show.
Starting point is 00:28:47 And if you really like what you've been listening to, you can now email us at Betwixt at HistoryHit.com. Email us, your suggestions, your ideas, your feedback, anything you like, really, we enjoy reading them. That email address again, betwixt at historyhit.com. Thank you again for listening to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.

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