Methodology
The rules this site holds itself to — so you can check our work.
The honesty rules
- Verbatim quotations only. Every quotation is checked character-for-character against its source. The English quotes come from Arthur Machen’s 1894 public-domain translation (itself made from the expurgated Laforgue text) — labeled as such, never presented as Casanova’s own French.
- Certainty labels. The timeline marks each entry documented (archives or multiple sources), memoirs (Casanova’s account only), or disputed. Disputed anecdotes — the Grimani paternity hint, the Mozart legend, the reported last words — are flagged where they appear and collected on Myths.
- No invented facts. Dates, names, and sums come from the scholarly editions (Pléiade 2015) and the BnF’s “Fonds Casanova” documentation. Where the record is silent, the site says so.
- Portrait honesty. Real images are public-domain works with verified provenance (see below). Casanova’s authentic portraiture is limited to essentially one lifetime image — Johann Berka’s 1788 engraving — and the site says so plainly. No AI-generated image on this site shows a real person’s face; generated art is abstract Venetian atmosphere, labeled “AI-generated dramatization art — not a historical depiction.”
- No paraphrase as quotation. Summaries are summaries; quotes are quotes.
How the site was built
provenance.json
What the site does not do
It does not invent a public biography for the Vizlings character (see Meet the character), does not present the mockup stream as live (see Stream), and does not display any owner-supplied character art — none was available for this character, and the roster records that honestly.
Source notes
- The Pléiade Histoire de ma vie (2015, ed. Gérard Lahouati and Marie-Françoise Luna) is the primary authority for dates and the reliability assessments summarized here.