CASANOVA’S ESCAPE FROM THE LEADS

No one had ever escaped from the Leads—so-called because the prison was on top of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, which was roofed in lead tiles. This roofing made the cells into ovens in the summer and freezers in the winter. The only good thing you could say about the Leads was that it wasn’t the Wells: cells in the palace’s cellar that always had two feet of water in them and were infested with giant sea rats.

Casanova does not know why he is arrested and imprisoned in the Leads or the length of his sentence. He explains: “When this tribunal proceeds against a delinquent, it is already sure that he is such; so why has it a need to talk to him? And when it has condemned him, what need is there to give him the bad news of his sentence? His consent is not necessary; it is better to let him hope.”

There is much to admire and despise in the person of Giacomo Casanova. He was audacious, self-absorbed, occasionally generous, occasionally evil, a superb actor, and a brilliant cold reader—a magician’s term for someone who pretends to have psychic powers but, in reality, makes inferences from close observation of the subject. Giacomo is not the type to submit easily to this fate.

To make the point of the helplessness of the prisoners, in the door of Casanova’s cell, there are two holes and an iron collar, the purpose of this setup being to facilitate the strangulation of a prisoner. The collar holds the poor devil in place. A wire is threaded through the holes, and the executioner on the other side of the door tightens it.

Days, weeks, months pass. The cell is perpetually dim, airless, and harbors a vast multitude of fleas. Casanova is not allowed to bathe or shave. At first, it seems his despair might kill him. Despair is, for better or worse, a very slow killer.

Cellmates come and go. One is a wigmaker who had served as a Count’s hairdresser and fell in love with the Count’s daughter, newly arrived from the convent. She returned his affection too ardently and became pregnant. The Leads is the Count’s revenge. Another is a moneylender who refused to return the money lost in a failed investment he had made on a nobleman’s behalf. He only remains for a few days. A guided tour of the instruments of torture succeeds in persuading him where imprisonment had failed.

Once a day, while the floor of the cell is swept and the fleas are scattered, Casanova is allowed into the garret next to the cell. He spots an iron rod and an oblong piece of marble among the refuse in the garret. He manages to smuggle both into his cell. For weeks, using the marble as a whetstone, Casanova works fashioning a point on the end of the bar. He then makes a small hole in the floor and discovers his cell is above the inquisitors’ meeting room. Over several months, he enlarges the hole, secreting the bits of wood plaster in his chamber pot. He intends to make a rope out of his clothes and bedclothes. He has the day and the hour of his escape planned. 

The hour before that hour, the jailor informs Casanova that he and his things are to be moved to a new cell.

His jailor is happy for him because the new cell has more light and a better view. The jailor truly cares about the welfare of his charges. In the course of the move, the guards discover the hole. 

Casanova is stripped searched, his possessions turned inside out, and every square inch of the floor, walls, and ceiling of the cell are examined. The guards, however, neglect to look under the seat of a cushioned chair where the iron bar is secreted. The jailor threatens Casanova, who in turn threatens the jailor, saying he will claim he received the tools to make the hole from him. Casanova confesses to not feeling a scintilla of guilt for threatening the jailor, a simple, good-natured family man who treats the prisoners with kindness and honesty and who will probably lose his life when Casanova escapes.

Casanova’s cell is now checked daily for any signs of excavation, so he can’t use the sharpened iron bar. Giacomo has to find another way. The prisoners, mostly highborn fallen on hard times, lend each other books. In binding the books, they put secret messages to keep up a correspondence of sorts. After long and painful consideration, Casanova decides that the only way to escape is to recruit a fellow prisoner to make a hole in his ceiling, then travel down the attic until he is over Casanova’s cell and make a hole there. He chooses as his cohort a priest whose crime was insisting that his three illegitimate children from three indigent virgin girls entrusted to his care be treated as legitimate—an example to my modern way of thinking of a bad man imprisoned for attempting to do the right thing.

Casanova transfers the bar by cooking a huge dish of macaroni and parmesan cheese in butter swimming up to the rim, putting the bar in a huge bible from which it extended an inch on either side, putting the dish on the bible and giving both to the jailor, admonishing him to be careful not to spill the cheese and butter on the expensive bible as he carries it to his friend.

The work goes on every night without a hitch until a few days before the escape. Casanova gets another cellmate—a barber who supplemented his living by spying on friends and neighbors. The barber had accused his godfather, a high-placed noble, of plotting against the Venetian State. That backfired. The spy is a cringing, whining, obsequious, superstitious man incapable of keeping a secret if it would give him the slightest advantage or recognition.

Casanova, the son of actors, decides to play on the barber’s fears and credulity. He persuades the man that he had a vision from God that an angel was going to come in through the ceiling, but first, the angel has to make a hole. When the spy hears the priest hacking away above him, he naturally asks why the angel has to work at making a hole. Casanova claims that the angel, of course, must take on the form of a man with the limitations of corporeality to visit them.

The angel arrives through the ceiling. The spy/barber is obliged to cut the beards of Casanova and the angel, which he does without question. Casanova and the angel climb out of the hole in the ceiling. It is a holiday, so the barber/spy has nobody to inform.

They hack their way to the leaden roof. Now the problem is how to get off the roof. They crawl to the ridge. They have dozens of feet of clothes tied together with weaver’s knots for use as a rope. After several hours crawling over the roof, Casanova concludes their only possible exit is by climbing through a dormer window a few feet below the gutter using the makeshift rope. He slides down towards the window until his feet find the gutter, and then, at an awkward angle, stretches out over a sixty-foot drop and wrenches out the grating. The next problem is that only one person can go down while the other holds the “rope.” The priest volunteers to be the first through the window.

The priest succeeds. This leaves Casanova alone on the roof. Sliding along the lead plates, he searches the roof again and discovers a ladder. Still sliding, he pushes the ladder towards the dormer window. The ladder slips, but the gutter prevents it from falling off the roof. Casanova also slips, and the gutter does him the same favor. He must now crawl with his knees in the gutter, pushing the ladder in front of him. On reaching the dormer window, Casanova must angle the ladder in. From where he is, he can only insert the ladder a few feet, so he needs to stand and balance himself in the gutter to achieve the appropriate angle to finish inserting the ladder. Starting by leaning over a sixty-foot drop, he climbs through the window and down the ladder into a room. To his companion’s outrage, exhausted mentally and physically, he falls asleep.

Casanova awakes three hours later, puts on new clothes, walks out of the Leads, takes a gondola beyond the city’s limits, and walks out of the Republic and into freedom.