Sources

Everything on this site traces to these materials.

The manuscript

• Histoire de ma vie jusqu’à l’an 1797, manuscript, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 28604 (“Fonds Casanova”) — acquired February 2010; digitized on Gallica. Roughly 3,700 pages, written 1789–1798.

The scholarly editions

• Histoire de ma vie, ed. J. Rives Childs, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1958–1960, 3 vols. — the first Pléiade edition.
• Histoire de ma vie, ed. Gérard Lahouati and Marie-Françoise Luna, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 2015, 3 vols. — the current scholarly standard; its chronology and notes underlie this site’s dates.
• Histoire de ma vie, F.A. Brockhaus / Plon, Wiesbaden–Paris, 1960–1962, 12 vols. — the first edition printed from the manuscript.

The public-domain English text quoted here

• The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725–1798, translated by Arthur Machen, 1894 (Project Gutenberg ebooks 2951, 2960, 2965, among others). Caveat: Machen translated the expurgated Laforgue text, not the manuscript; quotations on this site are verbatim Machen.

The 19th-century editions (for the record)

• German translation by Wilhelm von Schütz, Brockhaus, Leipzig, 1822–1828 — first publication, bowdlerized.
• French edition ed. Jean Laforgue, 1826–1837, 12 vols. — the bowdlerization that ruled for 120 years.

Archives and institutions

• Archivio di Stato di Venezia — the Inquisitori di Stato records corroborating the arrest and escape.
• Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Fonds Casanova” — manuscript and documentation.
• Wikimedia Commons — public-domain images used on this site, each with provenance in provenance.json.

For further reading

• The Pléiade edition (2015) is the place to start for the complete French text with full scholarly notes.
• J. Rives Childs, Casanoviana: An Annotated World Bibliography of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt — the bibliographic backbone of modern Casanova studies.

Source notes

• This page is itself the source list; every factual claim elsewhere on the site traces to one of the materials above, as noted per page.