The Wild Peacock

The legendary Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova is an old and impoverished man bitterly grumbling over his life at the Duchcov château where he works as a librarian and spends most of his time writing his memoirs. The morose old man declines that he would ever actively seduce women, claiming that he, on the contrary, often fell victim to their seduction. He recollects when he was a thirty-year old prisoner fleeing from the infamous Venetian Lead Chambers. As he escaped through the swamps, he surprisingly found shelter in the house of the commander of the bailiffs that were pursuing him. The beautiful but totally unaware and pregnant commander’s wife treated him and her still young and pretty mother protected him from the soldiers with her own body and then made love to him. Casanova then found many inviting open arms of women all over Europe and across all social strata. His host, Prince Waldstein, takes his protégé Casanova to Prague to attend the performance of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Watching it to the end, however, Casanova outrageously refuses to be the model of the leading part. Returning to Duchcov, he talks about the duel caused by two actresses, which he fought twenty years ago in Warsaw against the Polish marshal Braniczky. The two rivals went to the site of the duel together and they almost became friends on the way. They both fired simultaneously, both were wounded and faced very painful treatment. The Polish king granted a pardon to the two cavaliers. The talkative but tired storyteller falls asleep and his co-travellers leave him in the brougham laid up in the courtyard. Casanova died in Duchov on June 4, 1789 before he managed to complete his memoirs.