Giacomo Casanova et Cecille von Roggendorff : lettres de sa dernière correspondante

This essay attempts to analyze the exchange between Giacomo Casanova and Cecilia von Roggendorff, during the two years before Casanova’s death in Dux, Bohemia (4 June 1798). Such correspondence represents the step-by-step evolution of a teacher-pupil relationship into a father-daughter one, with the old libertine getting increasingly worried about her. Our analysis follows such mutual exchange through everyday matters such as Casanova’s illness and Cecilia’s melancholy, the former’s attempt to place her into the court as the duke Pierre de Curlande’s maid of honor. By means of a letter-by-letter account, some light is shed on the interlocutors and Casanova’s narration in his Histoire de ma vie, which omits his last years spent in Dux.