Casanova, writer and rascal.

“Casanova showed that a man can write the most amusing novel without being a literary man and tracing the most perfect image of an age without being an historian, because, in the end, what is important, is never the way we're in, but the effect we've got, is never the morality, but the power” (Stefan Zweig, Three poets of their lives. Stendhal, Casanova, Tolstoi, last page of the part about Casanova).
The Zweig's portraiture outlined the “most living man of the history”, which means less his happy-go-lucky than his tear-away side. No one can compare him for the women he got, the cons he made, and his pride after all this. His memories were just for the old age, when he rotten in the Waldstein count library, and he was thinking burning every pages. His success was posthumous. It was his method to spend his last days without boring himself, and the bear the weight of the bad tricks made everyday by the castle's servants.
Casanova was a swashbuckler; Zweig observes he could never try to spend half of his life writing and reading a book. He spoke six languages, but just to show he was clever. This side is almost embarrassing. When he's unmindful of the morality, we still follow him. He's with us, he's us. But when he's so awfully worldly, he seems like everyone who's trying today to stay in the jet-set circle. He's just doing the non common guy – or perhaps someone who has a big name. His writing is so scientifically calculated, so repetitive, so boring sometimes, that he's just trying to show off his qualities. Qualities that, all in all, are not so interesting. When he tried to philosophize, he's visibly unskilled – he's just trying to seem a philosopher, to have the power to philosophize, to impress the girl he's talking with.
In this case, fortunately he astonished us, and his writing too. He deals all people in the same way; he spoke with Voltaire in the same way he could speak with a locandera. And, most of all, he was trying to spend all his money for her.
Finally, what hit me was his superficiality. He crossed the wave, was not interested to drove in the sea finding the deepest ground (if the Italian literature were not completely ignored, it has been interesting to know what Deleuze could have tell about him). I didn't know, but Casanova didn't want to break young girls' hearts. He was just to sleep with them, to catch every par of their body, to show his masculinity to them. They're married, they discovered is just a scoundrel, it doesn't care. His love is vulgar, simple: just catch the women, just get her, and later, after he “partook” his stuff, go away, leave for another adventure. The only care, is the women pleasure in the moment. But no love, no heart is broken, he passed in their lives without anything else but his body.
Extreme selfish? No, it's important the pleasure of both. Moreover, if I may say: extreme unselfishness. The woman is always all women, and the whole of the woman. His scientific method is the way he could love the woman.