Old Age and Death The Memoirs Of Jacques Casanova De Seingalt ...

39
PART THE THIRD
DUX
1786-1798
I
THE CASTLE AT DUX
It is uncertain how long Casanova remained at Carlsbad. While there,
however, he met again the Polish nobleman Zawoiski, with whom he had
gambled in Venice in 1746. "As to Zawoiski, I did not tell him the story
until I met him in Carlsbad old and deaf, forty years later." He did not
return to Czaslau, but in September 1785 he was at Teplitz where he found
Count Waldstein whom he accompanied to his castle at Dux.
From this time onward he remained almost constantly at the castle where
he was placed in charge of the Count's library and given a pension of one
thousand florins annually.
Describing his visit to the castle in 1899, Arthur Symons writes: "I had
the sensation of an enormous building: all Bohemian castles are big, but
this one was like a royal palace. Set there in the midst of the town,
after the Bohemian fashion, it opens at the back upon great gardens, as
if it were in the midst of the country. I walked through room after room,
corridor after corridor; everywhere there were pictures, everywhere
portraits of Wallenstein, and battle scenes in which he led on his
troops. The library, which was formed, or at least arranged, by Casanova,
and which remains as he left it, contains some twenty-five thousand
volumes, some of them of considerable value . . . . The library forms
part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing of the castle. The
first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms are arranged, in a