Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society History's Worst F*ckboys: Casanova About this episode Can you imagine being SO smooth-talking and seductive your surname becomes an actual noun in the dictionary to describe someone who has a reputation for being an expert at in the sack?
Well today we’re going to be talking about a man who was just that…Giacamo Casanova.
But is his legacy as a f*ckboy accurate? Was he really a prolific ladies man? And did he do anything else in his life other than seduce women…and if he did, why do we only remember him for that reason?
Today we’re bringing you a very special Betwixt the Sheets mash-up episode with History Hit’s very own Casanova, Dan Snow (don’t worry, he has humbly confirmed we could call him that).
Kate and Dan will be discussing why there is much more to Casanova than just womanising - he was a scam artist, outlaw, alchemist, spy and church cleric. He wrote satires, fought duels, and escaped from prison more than once. He even set up the French national lottery. Join Kate and Dan for this special collab episode of History Hit in the Sheets to find out all this and more!
Produced by Freddy Chick, Charlotte Long and Mariana Des Forges. Mixed by Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript 6,725 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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2:04 Kate Lister? Hello my lovely Betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am me, you are you, and this is Betwixt the Sheets. Hello everybody, I am so glad that you're joining us today. Not just because it's always fabulous to have you around, but because today, wait for it, this is our three-year anniversary. It's our third birthday, it's Betwixt's third birthday. Happy birthday to us. And it's the leather year. Ha ha, that feels oddly appropriate. I'll leave the anniversary presents up to you. But before we can keep celebrating, I do have to tell you, as I have done for the past three years, that this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should
2:49 Kate Lister? be an adult too. Does that feel safer? I feel safer. Right, birthday buddies, let's do it.
3:00 Kate Lister? Shh, no, I mean it. We don't want the librarians in here. Gosh, what does he do with his time? Count Waldenstein has some 40,000 titles in this library, and there is no coherent pattern to any of this at all. The organisation is terrible.
3:18 Kate Lister? No, stay quiet. Shh, can you hear that? A quill scratching somewhere in the stacks. Somebody's in here, let's go and have a look. Oh, there he is, the librarian, ignoring the library work, and instead, he's writing his 12-volume biography. And what a biography it will be. After all, he may not look it, but this quiet librarian, spending his final years in the middle of nowhere, writing this book, is the one and only, Giacomo Casanova.
3:55 Speaker 04 What do you look for in a man?
3:57 Speaker 05 Oh, money, of course.
3:58 Speaker 04 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
4:01 Speaker 05 I make perfect compliments of whatever my boss needs, by just turning him up and pushing the button.
4:13 Speaker 06 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
4:16 Speaker 07 Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, d'ry.
4:24 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheep, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. By his own reckoning, Casanova had some 116 lovers in his lifetime. That fact, and the fact that he wrote all of this down, means that he has to be mentioned this month. After all, he was a love bombing, gift giving Lothario, but was he a fuckboy too? Well, we have delved back into the archive for this episode with none other than the fabulous Dan Snow. And what would Dan Snow and Casanova for an earful? You can't ask for more than that, can you?
5:05 Speaker 08 Kate Lister, how's it going? You've got the fastest growing podcast in the world. Betwixt is pretty cool. I always love your like sexual advisory stuff at the start. You're like, of course it is. The whole point, listening to it, you muppets.
5:17 Kate Lister? That's my favourite bit is the having to go, right, yeah, it's about sex. We're going to talk about sex. It's like when you get the little bottles of Night Owl and it says, warning, may cause drowsiness.
5:27 Speaker 08 Yeah.
5:27 Kate Lister? But I actually quite enjoy that bit now.
5:29 Speaker 08 It sounds like you're enjoying that bit, for sure, for sure. I mean, Casanova is like a central figure of this story, isn't he? I mean, it's bonkers.
5:36 Kate Lister? There's a lot of things you could say about him, and I'm sure that we will, but you'd have to say that he drank deeply from the cup of life. I think is what you'd have to say about Casanova is he lived several lifetimes over, didn't he? I think that he realises quite early on, you sort of get the sense when you read his memoirs, which is really the only source that we have for Casanova, is these like thousands and thousands, 10,000 words or more memoirs that he wrote when he was in his 60s. And you get a real sense of him sat there, he was a librarian at the time because he'd frittered everything away.
6:07 Speaker 08 By the way, can we just briefly, Casanova ended his days as a librarian. I love librarians, but I mean, that is a classic.
6:14 Kate Lister? It is, isn't it? Because he earned his fortune several times over and then spaffed it up the wall repeatedly because he couldn't stop gambling. He was a terrible, terrible gambler. And sort of everything he did was about chance and opportunistic and he would keep getting in trouble. He'd keep being chucked out of places, which is kind of one of the reasons he was on the run. All the time is because he would keep pissing people off and then he'd be exiled. But I don't think he ever stopped being a chancer. I think he worked out very early on that he was really clever. And he was, he was really, really bright. But I think that he worked out that you can trick people. You can manipulate people and I think he liked doing it as well.
6:54 Speaker 08 So he is super smart and he graduates.
6:56 Kate Lister? Really clever.
6:57 Speaker 08 He hates the law, doesn't he? He hates it. But he graduates super young from university and is still a teenager.
7:02 Kate Lister? He's really young. He's one of those like child prodigies. He graduates from law at about like seventeen or something like that. And he was just a voracious reader of books. He would just absorb everything. But then he's stuck because well, all right, you're very clever and you know a lot of stuff and you're quite good looking by all accounts. But what are you gonna do? You're still the son of an actress and you're penniless. So he tempted to go into the church for a bit. But wasn't very good at it.
7:25 Speaker 08 He was a bit of a wrong'un, wasn't he?
7:27 Kate Lister? Well, do you know, he was really good at delivering the sermons and people started coming from all over the place to hear him talk. But there was one incident where he got smashed before he was supposed to give the sermon. And then he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do, so he pretended to faint rather than give it away that he was absolutely sauzled. And it just became pretty obvious that he was not gonna fit in the church because he kept shagging everyone.
7:50 Speaker 08 And he then, he basically finds himself a wealthy patron, right? Which is, I mean.
7:55 Kate Lister? He does.
7:56 Speaker 08 It's just a shortcut. It's a life hack though, isn't it?
7:58 Kate Lister? But then what are you gonna do? You're like eighteen years old. How are you gonna make your money? It's a very, very, very different world. You can't really have an apprenticeship. If you haven't inherited the money, there's only a few options available to you, really. And getting a wealthy patron is definitely one of them. And he does score the jackpot and it's Senator Braggadon. Casanova found him when he was having a heart attack or a stroke. And he kind of launched into, and it's another example of him being this brilliant con artist. He launched into this, oh my God, I'm gonna help you, I'm the hero. And he picked him up off the street and took him back to his apartments and laid down the bed. And then he made this whole big song and dance about how he'd saved him. And his doctors couldn't. So when Braggadon kind of came back round, he was incredibly indebted to Casanova when he made him his principal
8:42 Kate Lister? heir. But it's another example of him bullshitting really, really well.
8:45 Speaker 08 Well, he's sort of being a healer slash. Alchemist is something that he would turn to when he was struggling for a square meal.
8:54 Kate Lister? Yeah, and it was a dangerous game, actually, and it was one that would come around and bite him on the arse. Because in Venice at the time, there was sort of their own version of the Inquisition going on, which is sort of the repressive religious authorities were getting very upset with this sort of magic occult, sacrilegious stuff going on. And Casanova really liked that. In fact, he's got one story that when he was really little, his grandmother took him to a witch to heal him of nosebleeds, which is extreme. And he thinks at some points that he is able to perform magic and Kabbalah and mysticism. And at some points, like when his life pretends to be like a spiritualist and a mediumist. But he does kind of play around with this stuff. How much he believed it himself, I'm not quite sure.
9:35 Speaker 08 Yeah, he does a bit of philosopher's stone action, doesn't he?
9:38 Kate Lister? Yes.
9:38 Speaker 08 We should talk about sex because he is also the victim of child abuse. I mean, he had, his first sexual experiences were under the age, he was young, I mean, wasn't he?
9:48 Kate Lister? He was young. He didn't have full penetrative sex until he was in his teens. But his first sexual experience was with a woman that was older than him, definitely. And he kind of remembers it as like it awoke something in him that he was going to devote the rest of his life to. But today, yeah, we'd say that that's child abuse.
10:08 Speaker 08 And then he, sort of famous sleeping in nuns, but that does fit within the genre of sort of literary nun porn. In the 18th century, it was actually a thing. It was a thing.
10:16 Kate Lister? You've got to be careful when you talk about Casanova because it's like, how much of it is true? If the authority that you've got on this is himself, is his memoirs, how much of it can be corroborated by other source material, you know? Or how much of it, if you put different lenses on it and like it's your mate at school that was bragging about shagging two supermodels? And, and you're like, did that happen? Did that happen? And there's certainly a lot in the memoirs that sort of maps on to quite popular genres of porn at the time. And nun porn was quite big. But yeah, famously, he had two. Very turbulent love affairs with two women who lived in a nunnery. Yeah.
10:55 Speaker 08 We should talk about his, um, he was imprisoned, you've mentioned this and his famous escape from prison, because that is a classic. Tell me about that.
11:02 Kate Lister? Right. Okay. So he gets imprisoned because, um, and this is going back to like what you said in the beginning about at the time people were aware that he was shagging people he shouldn't be shagging and he was getting a reputation and he was like the Venetian authorities were gathering information on him about him being a fornicator and a seducer of women and a liar and somebody that stole men's wives away and was generally a rake and a scoundrel. But what really did for him was this sort of dabbling in magic that he liked to sort of put about. And there was the accusation that he'd said anyone who believes in Christianity is weak. And he was arrested on those charges and he was thrown in jail in Venice and he stayed there for 15 months and he did manage to escape,
11:47 Kate Lister? which was no mean feat because he was right up in, they were called like the lead cells or something like, because they had lead on the roof. So it's how does he get away? And he manages to find it sort of like, I'd say an ice pick, but it's not, but imagine like an ice pick and he manages to sort of make a hole in the ground, but then he's moved to a different cell, just as he's about to Andy Dufresne it, right? But then he starts talking to a monk who's a bad monk, who's in the cell next to him. And he manages to get him the ice pick and then he kind of tunnels through to his cell and they pull each other out and then they're like loosening the rafters in the ceiling of the building of the jail. This is a perfect example of Casanova being a complete con artist. So they're climbing up the roofs, they're climbing in the eaves and the only place they can get to is like this big, great hall
12:31 Kate Lister? that they kind of drop down into, but all the doors are locked. So it's like, well, that's brilliant. We can't get out. But they're so tired, they fall asleep and then they get woken up the next morning by a guard opening the door. And Casanova leaps into action straight away and he goes, how dare you? How dare you treat us like this? And what he knew was there'd been a ball there the night before. So he managed to pass off in that second that they were two guests of the ball that had been locked in there overnight by accident. The guard was so apologetic and terrified that they'd report him to his superiors, he led them out the building. That's like mad skills, that, isn't it?
13:06 Speaker 08 Mad skills for joyful years before, like, you know, official papers and.
13:12 Kate Lister? Yeah, it just shows how far confidence can get you, doesn't it? If you just front it out.
13:18 Speaker 08 After it escapes, is that when he goes to France, has this incredible, the most proper bit? Well, I say that, it's still gambling, but the most kind of perhaps the bit of his career that's, he's not actually breaking multiple laws and customs at the same time.
13:30 Kate Lister? He goes to France, he goes to Paris, yeah, and he loves Paris and he learns the language. And again, he's seducing everybody, famous courtesans, famous actresses, famous men's wives, but the one thing that he does is he quote unquote invents the first lottery.
13:46 Speaker 08 Yeah, like a national lottery.
13:48 Kate Lister? Like a state lottery, yeah. I mean, he, again, what he does is he manages to convince people that he's invented it. But what he actually did is he nicked the idea from other people that he'd been speaking to. It wasn't his idea, but he packaged it really well and he was an amazing salesman. So he sold this idea to the Parisian authorities and obviously like the lottery is, is win, win for everyone in it is all those poor schlubs think, yeah, but I might win it. And we kind of enjoy that little buzz and the people that win are the company that does it. So he made them a lot of money and he made a lot of money for himself. But yeah, he's still remembered as the inventor of the lottery.
14:25 Speaker 08 He gets a bit of work as a spy at this point. He hangs out with Madame de Pompadour, who's Louis the 15th's sort of favourite foremost mistress and, and Rousseau he's hanging out with. I mean, it's bonkers.
14:35 Kate Lister? If he did hang out with him.
14:36 Speaker 08 Oh, you see, maybe he's just making it up.
14:39 Kate Lister? He might be. I mean, there's some corroborating evidence because when his memoirs were discovered and finally published, there was a lot of his letters and correspondence that was found. And there are letters that have been written to him. So we know that, I mean, unless he was going to the extent of faking letters written to him, like, we know that some of this can be corroborated, but you can't help but reading it through and go, oh, you helped Mozart with your music, did you, Casanova? Right, of course you did. It just sounds very much like, yeah, he goes to another school, you wouldn't know him. It's just got that kind of vibe about it, but maybe I'm being really horribly wrong. Maybe it was all true.
15:12 Speaker 08 Well, I don't know if you want it to be true or not, it's so bizarre. I like the way he basically nicks loads of money off an old French aristocrat by promising he can make him younger.
15:21 Speaker 08 And then goes to Britain to flog his lottery scheme to the British government and ends up shagging some Brits. Then he does do this kind of mad European tour, again meets Frederick the Great, meets Catherine the Great, wild.
15:33 Kate Lister? Yep, he's all over the place. And you can look at that as like, isn't that quite exciting that he's always kind of on the move, he lives his very kind of rootless existence, but he also keeps getting thrown out of places. So he has to keep leaving places. When he was in England, he was shagging various courtesans and he didn't like it very much because he couldn't speak English all that well and they couldn't speak French, which is kind of nice because he had this thing about like, he didn't just want to have sex, he also wanted witticisms and banter and, you know, all those things, knock, knock jokes, I don't know. So he didn't like that very much. And he got in trouble with quite a famous courtesan in Britain, whose name escapes me, she had a French name. And she wouldn't sleep with him and he got really upset and angry because it was like the first woman that had refused
16:17 Kate Lister? him. And I think he slapped her as well. And he was really upset with himself and he left.
16:27 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Casanova and Dan after this short break.
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19:30 Speaker 08 It's funny, the pictures of Casanova, I'm being a bit sophisticated, it doesn't look super attractive and I just wonder if, like, people's teeth must have been so bad. If you were like, a bog standard, six and a half out of 10, seven, were you like a 10 in the 18th century, do you reckon?
19:42 Kate Lister? Um, I think that what Casanova has, and I still think that this is true today, self-confidence and self-belief and wit and being funny is one of the most attractive things that you can have. Like, you could put someone in front of you that is a solid 10 out of 10, like your absolute dream shag, and it would be amazing for a bit. It'd be like, oh my god, I can't believe I get to play with this, this is incredible. How long would it take before you started going, still here? Like, if they had like no personality, if they were actually quite boring to be around, like, how long would it take for that novelty to wear off? But he didn't have that, he had wit and charisma in absolute spades. And so he was really confident, and that will get you, like, so far almost every time.
20:27 Speaker 08 Listen to this, kids, that's advice for you from the expert.
20:31 Kate Lister? That's advice, yes.
20:33 Speaker 08 He was expelled from Warsaw when he had a duel, I mean, come on, he's got to have a few duels, and he got shot in the left hand with a colonel, they've argued over an actress, of course.
20:42 Kate Lister? Of course.
20:43 Speaker 08 By the way, can we just talk about the actress thing? Like, what is it about an actress, like, hence the bishop actress sort of phrases that we use. Like, tell me about 18th century actresses.
20:50 Kate Lister? Right, so there has been, as long as there, because women weren't always allowed on the stage, of course. Like, right in Shakespearean times, it was men playing the roles of women. So it was considered very daring when women were finally allowed on the stage. And there has been a very close association between actresses and sex workers, courtesans, like, they've merged into one another for a really, really long time. And I suspect it's because an actress has got a certain amount of agency that other women don't have. So, for example, Casanova's mother, she travelled all over Europe, you're not going home to a husband, you have a certain amount of freedom that's built into that, that you're on the stage, so you're already being admired, that's definitely a part of it. And if you look at some of
21:31 Kate Lister? like, the great courtesans throughout history, they start off as actresses. Like, Nell Gwynne, one of my favourites, she started off as an actress on the stage, and that was how she caught the eye of Charlie Boy, Charles the Second, and became his mistress. So there's a really close association between the two.
21:47 Speaker 08 Is this unusual, and whilst he talks honestly about how he had sex with men as well as women, is that something... Given that Sodomy is capital crime, that strikes me as kind of quite honest.
21:57 Kate Lister? He doesn't quite go into the same gory details that he does with women. There's like veiled suggestions. So he would write about one of his famous lovers, M M, who was actually a nun, of course she was, but he was also the lover of a really prominent bishop, of course she was, and that they had sex while the husband watched. And it's kind of like, is that true? Or like, was he in there as well? But there is one incident where he's very, very attracted to a famous singer, a castrato, and he goes to have sex with him and then kind of realises at the crucial moment, him is a her and she's been masquerading as a castrato and stuffing her pants with a fake penis. And there is a certain amount of, he seems to be getting off on it a little bit.
22:41 Kate Lister? So he probably wouldn't have written it down as explicit detail because, as you said, it's like really, really bad. But he seemed to have sex with literally everything.
22:52 Speaker 08 Gets back to Venice eventually. I just love the way he just travels looking for opportunities to ingratiate himself with rich people. And then occasionally he just doesn't find it. He's like, oh, Spain was completely, like, nothing happened there. So then he keeps going. He's like a shark. He's got to have oxygen over the gills. I find it such an extraordinary way to live.
23:11 Kate Lister? It'd be interesting, like, what would people make of him today from a psychological point of view? Like, there's so much going on there that he'd never marries and settles down. He doesn't really have a permanent home. Like you said, he's always on the move. It's this very sort of rootless existence, but he seems to really thrive on it as well. And like in some places, he's, when he was in Paris, he was a millionaire and then he lost it all, which is like an incredible feat. Like, how the hell did you do that? He's silly sod. And then other places, he was just working as a violinist, as a fiddler, because he couldn't do anything else.
23:45 Speaker 08 He certainly fiddled. Anyway.
23:47 Kate Lister? Certainly fiddled.
23:48 Speaker 08 But also, I was like, you know, now we've got credit cards and sadly people can run up like massive. But like, when you're wandering around Spain, looking for a rich person to read their fortune or do some crazy stuff to. Are there days when he's got nothing left in his wallet? He's like, oh, like, I am going to go hungry and sleep in a barn tonight. Like, I find that just that. Pre-modern journeying lifestyle. I find it kind of so fascinating, the logistics of it. How did it work?
24:11 Kate Lister? A lot of it's on credit and a lot of it is like the art of the con artist is to make people think that they can trust you. So he needs to present himself to people and he kind of gets this reputation. People might know who he is, even if they know him as a rake and a scoundrel. He was definitely famous for his jailbreak. So he's got a kind of a licence to sort of turn up at places as a fascinating person.
24:32 Speaker 08 He just gets to a village, goes, where's the big house?
24:34 Kate Lister? Kind of.
24:34 Speaker 08 Bang on the door. Hey, everyone, it's your lucky day. Casanova is in town.
24:38 Kate Lister? I'm here. It was like, it's really weird. It's the thought of like B-list celebrities turning up at your house going, hi, I'm here.
24:46 Speaker 08 That's mad, isn't it?
24:47 Kate Lister? But he sort of had this reputation. So he knew where to go and he knew the right people. There's a certain sense that he kind of just, things happen to him. At least in the memoirs, that's how he remembers it. Like, he doesn't seem to be able to just go out to the shops for a pint of milk without bumping into an actress or a courtesan or...
25:05 Speaker 08 Or Benjamin Franklin.
25:06 Kate Lister? Or Benjamin Franklin.
25:08 Speaker 08 Here he meets. Yeah, extraordinary. They talk about aeronautics and balloon transport together.
25:12 Kate Lister? They do.
25:13 Speaker 08 And he's spying. He seems to have a little nice, towards the end of his life, he gets that nice little sty pen from the Venetians. He does a bit of spying. I guess he's flogging his Rolodex, he's flogging his little back book and his contacts to provide a bit of intelligence to the state security services.
25:27 Kate Lister? I think he would be a brilliant spy, apart from the fact that he wrote it all down in a memoir, which was definitely a bit of a giveaway. One of the things that he was really good at was reading people. And so the way that he seduced, and I think that he still continues to seduce people, actually, because we're still drawn to him. We're still like, who was this person, this enigmatic person, is that he kind of presents himself as this very exciting person who does stuff that you couldn't possibly do. And I think that's quite magnetic, isn't it? The reality of it would be very different.
25:59 Speaker 08 And his last years, as we said at the beginning, he was a librarian, amazingly. He got very depressed. He was having a not particularly good time. That's the period in which he claimed to have Mozart, helps him with a few bits and bobs.
26:11 Kate Lister? As you do.
26:12 Speaker 08 But then wrote this unbelievable memoir. That's surely your dream, because I've talked to you many times on this podcast and you're saying the big problem is people don't write down the things we do, like sexually, and we don't write honest memoirs, right? We all write boring, unbelievably, because we don't offend people. We don't want to get caught out for telling little pork pies. But he is one of those rare people that does just write this incredible memoir.
26:33 Kate Lister? And it is incredible. As a historical document, it's so valuable. And it wasn't published unedited to begin with. It took a while to get the full gory details out there. But again, even that, as valuable as that is, you've got to always be thinking, is this uncensored though? Or because there's a real sense that he knows he's writing it for an audience. He knows and that he's really enjoying reminiscing. One of my favourite quotes from his memoirs is, "I wrote my life to laugh at myself and so far I've succeeded." So he's like having a really good time remembering this stuff. But it's, how accurate was it? If we could find the people he's writing about and go, "Well, Catherine, I was saying that you had an amazing time. Is that what you remember?"
27:18 Kate Lister? I'm not so sure if those things would marry up, but it's still such a valuable document.
27:24 Speaker 08 I like his line where he just says, "I can say I have lived." And I think is probably true, but though let's not whitewash things, there was at least one, but several rape allegations. And then he slept with his daughter. What's going on with that?
27:38 Kate Lister? It's really complex because like, if I tell you this story about this guy who invented the lottery and he's funny and he's charismatic and he chugged his daughter. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, go back one, what? So we're kind of left with this like, wow, okay. If it's true, if it's true, we don't know if there's corroborating evidence, but he, he had an affair with a woman called Lucrezia. And then years later, he met her daughter who was called. Leonilda, and he almost had sex with her and then it found out that that's actually his daughter. He almost had sex with her. And then there's a weird description about he has sex with Lucretia while Leonilda's in the room, but he doesn't have sex with her then. But that's weird. Like, we're in weird territory already. And then he has
28:21 Kate Lister? this thing about later on, when he met her and she's like 25, she was unhappily married because she couldn't get pregnant. So as a favour, as a fatherly favour, he has sex with her to get her pregnant. And it's kind of just like Catherine over, like, I, I wanna be on your side, but it's, what are you doing? And it's, again, you've got to, like, I'd say, look at it in the context of the time, but no one was chugging their daughters at the time, even at the time. But what it might be is playing to incest porn, which was bizarrely common, like the Marquis de Sade writes about it all the time. And when you look at erotica into the 19th century, there's a weird amount of incest. And by the way, incest porn is still incredibly popular today on Pornhub. It's not fathers
29:06 Kate Lister? and daughters, it tends to be stepmother and stepson, that kind of thing. So what he might be doing is bullshitting and trying to create weird sexual fantasies. Not that that makes this okay, but that's what he might be doing.
29:19 Speaker 08 I guess, like, I struggle with his life to think, like, how unusual was it? Other, other lives like this, but that we just
29:29 Kate Lister? Which you don't know about.
29:30 Speaker 08 Is it the fact this one's chronicled?
29:32 Kate Lister? It's fascinating, isn't it? And if they hadn't found those manuscripts, if they hadn't been published, we might never know that this man.
29:39 Speaker 08 Yeah, they had a really interesting life, didn't they? They survived the bombing of Leipzig. They were suppressed for years. It's only quite recently that they've all come out, really.
29:45 Kate Lister? Yeah, and we're still, like, discovering little things, like who his famous lovers were and, because he, like, anonymizes some of them in the memoirs, like MM and CC and all these things. I think that he was unusual, even for the time. And I think that he knew that he was unusual. And he had to have been unusual because no one would have given a shit about him otherwise. You can't be turning up at the court of Catherine the Great and going, hello, I'm Catherine the Completely Normal, because no one cares. He had this huge appetite for adventure and I think that he just said yes a lot. You know, like, most of us have that kind of like, I'm not really sure I should be doing. I don't think he had that. He just stared into the skid his entire life.
30:23 Speaker 08 Stared into the skid. Yes, he did. Well, Cassino, I felt like the obvious point where our two podcasts would intersect. Because I love the 18th century and you love the history of, well, things that go on betwixt the sheets. Although I don't think Cassino was betwixt the sheets for that long. I think it was. You know.
30:41 Kate Lister? It was anywhere he could try it, up against walls, in castles, boats, anywhere. But he must have done it betwixt the sheets a few times.
30:48 Speaker 08 I mean, you'd think so, wouldn't you? Yeah. Some of the relations were a bit longer. I think they would have had time to have a bit of sleep occasionally.
30:55 Kate Lister? But, you know, he only actually slept with about 120 people. I think that's quite an important thing.
31:00 Speaker 08 I think that's quite interesting as well. It made me think that, it's not a kind of eye-watering figure, I don't think.
31:05 Kate Lister? It's not, is it?
31:06 Speaker 08 No.
31:07 Kate Lister? Yeah, I might be giving away too much about myself, but when I read that, I was like, what?
31:10 Speaker 08 Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I sometimes wonder whether he includes, is that like a class thing? Does he not include like a quick like roll in the hay with like somebody he considers? Are those people like named people that he considers important? So I think that was interesting. Also, though, I wonder how Catherine the Great had love affairs and gained a reputation as like a serial shagger. Well, in fact, she seems to have been someone who enjoyed a consecutive series of reciprocal loving relationships. And I wonder if in those days, maybe that was a astonishing number of people to have slept with. It's fascinating.
31:43 Kate Lister? I mean, it's still quite a big number, but when you think of someone like, I think Gene Simmons brags that he slept with over 10,000 people.
31:50 Speaker 08 What?
31:50 Kate Lister? Yeah. It was a mad weekend, I'm telling you. That's kind of that sort of number. And I think that's quite an important point. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of dodgy stuff about Cassino, but you'd have to say that he does fall in love a lot, that there is like a lot of casual sex, but he does seem to have genuine relationships with a lot of people. But I have also wondered, were these just the named people? What about like the faceless, poor people that you had sex with? But yeah.
32:16 Speaker 08 Yeah, that's the thing I find interesting about him. But yeah, it's fascinating. Well, listen, Kate, thanks very much for coming on my, I'm surprised you have time these days. You're so important to come on my podcast. I really appreciate that.
32:27 Kate Lister? Well, you know, just I'll try and remember you from when I was dad. It's been so lovely to talk to you. Thank you.
32:41 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Dan for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . Coming up, we're going to delve into what it meant to be beautiful and ugly in the past. This podcast was edited by Freddy Chick, Charlotte Long, Mariana De Forjes and mixed by Dougal Patmore. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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