The volume opens with Casanova amused at the plight of the Marquis de Prie and company, whom he left coveting his cash-box. Arriving in Grenoble, he quickly secures a lodging through an officer named Valenglard, who arranges rooms with a door-keeper whose cooking is so good that the rent is effectively free. The narrator’s attention is immediately drawn to a modestly dressed brunette at a concert, setting the stage for a series of social encounters that hinge on money, manners, and misreading.

Lodging and the Door-Keeper’s Bargain

The arrangement with the door-keeper is a small but revealing transaction. Casanova takes three rooms and orders supper for two, warning that he is “dainty, liked good things, and did not care for the cost.” The door-keeper counters that if Casanova is not pleased, he will pay nothing. This barter—lodging in exchange for the chance to show off cooking—reflects a world where hospitality is a calculated performance. The door-keeper’s wife and three charming daughters bow profoundly on the ground floor, a detail that hints at the household’s readiness to please. Casanova’s first move is to attend a concert, but he refuses introductions, preferring to survey the women before deciding whom to know. The excerpt shows a narrator who treats social life as a series of strategic choices, from rooms to romantic targets.

The Marquis of Grimaldi’s Confession

In Avignon, Casanova meets the Marquis of Grimaldi, a Genoese nobleman who greets him by name and immediately shares a failed seduction attempt. The marquis describes approaching a beautiful but sad woman at supper, offering her a hundred louis, and being refused with “an air of disdain.” He is baffled: “knowing, as I do, that she has no money, her manner astonished me.” Casanova then reveals his own parallel failure, and the two laugh together at their “bad fortune.” This scene is notable for its frankness: the marquis volunteers his story without prompting, and Casanova reciprocates. The conversation treats the woman’s refusal as a puzzle to be solved, not a moral boundary. The marquis bets she will still eat supper—and wins—prompting Casanova to conclude she is “playing a part.” The episode underscores how the memoir treats romantic pursuit as a game of reading signs, where money is a tool and resistance a move.

The Comte de Bussi’s Impudent Courtship

At supper, a Comte de Bussi sits next to the same woman and begins “to make love to his fair neighbour forthwith,” teasing her in a thousand ways while she remains “as dumb as a statue.” Casanova and Grimaldi watch with amusement, struggling to keep their countenances. The young count is described as “good-natured, a wit, and inclined to broad jokes,” but his manner “bordered on the impudent.” He does all the talking and laughing, apparently unaware that she might be laughing at him. The scene is a comic contrast to the earlier, more gentlemanly approaches: where the marquis offered money discreetly and was refused, Bussi simply assumes his charm will win the day. Casanova’s narration stays detached, observing the social theater without intervening. The woman’s silence becomes a weapon, and the men’s reactions—bafflement, amusement, persistence—reveal the assumptions they bring to the encounter.

Readers should attend to the recurring pattern of failed or ambiguous transactions—money, lodging, seduction—that structure Casanova’s narrative. The excerpts offer no resolution to the woman’s story, and the volume’s title promises a departure from Switzerland that has already occurred by the opening. The memoir’s interest lies less in outcomes than in the play of appearances and the narrator’s cool, often amused, dissection of social rituals.