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 that you could say about the Leads was that it wasn’t the Wells: cells in the cellar of the palace which 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 a superb actor, audacious, self-absorbed, occasionally generous, occasionally evil and a brilliant cold reader—a magician’s term for someone who pretends psychic powers but in reality makes inferences from close observation of the subject. Casanova had no intention of submitting to his fate.

In the door of his cell, there are two holes and an iron collar, the purpose of this setup being to facilitate strangulation of a prisoner. The collar holds the poor devil in place. A wire a 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, his despair seems that it 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 hairdresser for a Count, and who 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 money of the failed investment he had made on a nobleman’s behalf. He soon is freed. Casanova speculates that a guided tour of the instruments of torture worked where imprisonment did not.

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. Among the refuse in the garret, he spots an iron rod and an oblong piece of marble. 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 makes a small hole in the floor and discovers his cell is above the inquisitors’ room. Over the course of 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 planned.

The hour before the hour of his escape, Casanova and his things are moved to a new cell.

His jailor is happy for him because the new cell has more light and a better view and he cares about the welfare of his charges. Then the hole is discovered.

Casanova is stripped and searched, his possessions turned inside out. However, they neglect to examine 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 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 it is not possible for him to use the pointed bar. Giacomo has to find another way. The prisoners, mostly highborn fallen on hard times, lend each other books. In the binding of the books they put secret messages so can keep up a correspondence of sorts. Casanova decides that the best way out is to recruit a fellow prisoner to make a hole in his ceiling, travel down the attic to Casanova’s cell and make a hole there. His cohort is a priest who tried to insist 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 with parmesan cheese swimming in butter 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 without a hitch until a few days before the escape, Casanova gets a new cellmate—a barber who supplemented his living by spying on friends and neighbors. The barber had tried to betray his godfather, a high-placed noble—but that backfired. The spy is a cringing, whining, obsequious, superstitious man incapable of keeping a secret if it would give him the least advantage or recognition.

Casanova, the son of actors, decides to play on barber’s fears and credulity. He persuades the man that he had a vision from God and an angel is 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 must take on the form of a man 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 and then they climb out 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 attached with weaver’s knots for use as a rope. After spending several hours searching the roof for a way off, Casanova decides their only possible exit is climbing through a dormer window 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 empty space and wrenches out the grating. The next problem is only one person can go down while the other one holds the “rope”. The priest volunteers to be the first through the window.

This leaves Casanova alone on the roof. By 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 on his knees in the gutter pushing the ladder before him. On reaching the dormer window, he must angle the ladder in. From where he is, he can only insert the ladder a few feet so he must balance himself in the gutter to achieve the appropriate angle. He succeeds or I would not be telling this story. He climbs down the ladder into a room and, to his companion’s outrage, exhausted mentally and physically, he falls asleep.

Casanova awakes three hours later, dresses in new clothes, walks out the Leads, take gondolier out of city and walks out of the Republic.