According to Casanova's memoirs, the libertine's philandering began when he was seventeen and his first love betrayed him. Casanova had been determined he would marry the serving girl, Lucia, but she mysteriously disappeared. Years later, he met her again, hideously disfigured and working as a prostitute in an Amsterdam brothel. In his captivating new novel, Arthur Japin has transformed this male tale of disillusion and cynicism into a woman's story of adventure, sacrifice, resilience and, ultimately, real love.
In his version, Lucia contracts small pox. Fleeing from the humiliation of being rejected by the man she loves because of her disfigurement, the serving girl finds employment with a female scholar and embarks on a journey of enlightenment, which will eventually lead her to become the most sophisticated courtesan in Amsterdam. Here, as the veiled, enigmatic prostitute, Galath‚e de Pompignac, she begins a second affair with Casanova, who is unaware of her true identity.
With his exceptional ability to build a living reality from the bare bones of historical fact, Arthur Japin takes the reader on an entrancing journey from the canals of Venice to those of Amsterdam, painting a glorious portrait of the eighteenth century with all its contradictions of head and heart, reason and instinct, wit and sensuality. The eventual moral, that it is more important to give love than to possess it, emerges from this perfectly plotted novel as beautifully as Lucia from her veil.
