It is uncertain how long Casanova remained at Carlsbad. While there,
however, he met again the Polish nobleman Zawoiski, with whom he had
gambled in Venice in 1746. "As to Zawoiski, I did not tell him the story
until I met him in Carlsbad old and deaf, forty years later." He did not
return to Czaslau, but in September 1785 he was at Teplitz where he found
Count Waldstein whom he accompanied to his castle at Dux.
From this time onward he remained almost constantly at the castle where
he was placed in charge of the Count's library and given a pension of one
thousand florins annually.
Describing his visit to the castle in 1899, Arthur Symons writes: "I had
the sensation of an enormous building: all Bohemian castles are big, but
this one was like a royal palace. Set there in the midst of the town,
after the Bohemian fashion, it opens at the back upon great gardens, as
if it were in the midst of the country. I walked through room after room,
corridor after corridor; everywhere there were pictures, everywhere
portraits of Wallenstein, and battle scenes in which he led on his
troops. The library, which was formed, or at least arranged, by Casanova,
and which remains as he left it, contains some twenty-five thousand
volumes, some of them of considerable value . . . . The library forms
part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing of the castle. The
first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms are arranged, in a
decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls with strange patterns.
The second room contains pottery, collected by Casanova's Waldstein on
his Eastern travels. The third room is full of curious mechanical toys,
and cabinets, and carvings in ivory. Finally, we come to the library,
contained in the two innermost rooms. The book shelves are painted white
and reach to the low vaulted ceilings, which are whitewashed. At the end
of a bookcase, in the corner of one of the windows, hangs a fine engraved
portrait of Casanova."
In this elaborate setting, Casanova found the refuge he so sadly needed
for his last years. The evil days of Venice and Vienna, and the problems
and makeshifts of mere existence, were left behind. And for this refuge
he paid the world with his Memoirs.