She was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. Or maybe not. This was in 18th-century London, so it was probably more of a pub.
Either way, the fact might now be lost to history had her customers one day in 1761 not included Giacomo Casanova.
The young Venetian was being shown around London by Ange Goudar, a French adventurer and writer he later described as a “man of wit, a pimp, a gambling thief, a police spy, a false witness, a deceitful, bold and ugly person”.
Goudar had already introduced him to “the most famous courtesans in London, and especially the illustrious Kitty Fischer, who was then starting to go out of fashion”.
Ché sara, Sara – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish beauty who turned Casanova’s head
What’s with the name? – Frank McNally on O’Doul, O’Day, and other nominal oddities of Irish America
Far away, so close – Fionnuala Ward on measuring distance
The Derry man who influenced George Washington and Alexander Hamilton - Brian Maye on Hercules Mulligan
But as Casanova recalled many years later in his memoir, The Story of My Life, it was a humble barmaid who made the deepest impression:
“He also introduced me in a brewery, where we drank a strong beer, preferable to wine, to a servant girl, aged sixteen and a true prodigy of beauty. She was Irish and Catholic and was called Sarah.”
Unfortunately for Casanova, Sara (as she spelled her name) was not available to him, romantically or otherwise:
“I wanted to conquer or acquire her, but Goudar had designs on her and actually carried her off the following year. He ended up marrying her, and it was this same Sarah Goudar who shone in Naples, Florence, Venice and elsewhere, and whom we shall meet again four or five years later, still with her husband.”
As for the husband, by then in his early 50s, Goudar may have been motivated less by romance than by his young wife’s potential to help him rise in the world.
He had enjoyed some success as a writer, doubling as a French spy on his travels. But he was a heavy and bad gambler.
Despite concerted attempts, he had also failed to establish himself among the public intellectuals of Paris, always a crowded field.
According to Casanova, Goudar’s ambition now was to install the lovely Sara as a mistress of King Louis XV, perhaps even deposing Madame de Pompadour from the top job.
When that plan was abandoned, the couple went to Italy where, under Goudar’s instruction, Sarah instead became a lover to Ferdinand, King of Naples and the Two Sicilies.
The arrangement allowed them to live comfortably and run a casino there, until the queen found out about the affair and had them run out of town, with only a small pension.
It was a few years later, in Lucca, that Casanova again met Goudar and “la belle Irlandaise Sarah, ex servant dans une taverne à bière de Londres”.
Invited to dinner, the great seducer claimed to be “petrified” at the thought of meeting her again.
He was then “stupefied” by the “metamorphosis” she had undergone.
She was now dressed with the greatest elegance, spoke perfect Italian, and combined her obvious intellect with “ravishing beauty”.
The world, meanwhile, was beating a path to her door. In less than 15 minutes, Casanova watched her greet “five or six ladies of the first rank, and ten or twelve dukes, princes, marquesses, along with visitors from every nation”.
He credited much of her transformation to Goudar but also noted that in his social climbing project, the Frenchman had converted from Protestantism.
Contrastingly, for her part “in this comedy”, Sara “had been born Catholic and never ceased to be”.
Casanova’s reflections about her also took on a radical tone, however: “What I find absurd is that the entire aristocracy, the court itself, went to Sarah’s place, and that this beautiful Irishwoman went nowhere, because she wasn’t invited. There is the parasitism of the nobility.”
As he had noticed, Sara Goudar was more than just a pretty face. She went on to publish several books on the cultural life of Italy, drawn from letters to aristocratic friends, and an anthology of her writings in 1777.
She may have contributed to her husband’s work too.
But who was this beautiful Irishwoman with whom Casanova was so smitten with unrequited desire?
Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find anything about her life before that barmaid job in London, not even her maiden name.
Most of what is written by or about her is in French or Italian (including Casanova’s own accounts above, which I may have translated badly).
We have only his word – although he was very insistent about it – that she was Irish at all. On the cover of her collection Oeuvres Mêlées (Mixed Works), she is described as “Madame Sara Goudar, Angloise”.
She and her husband travelled widely in Italy, spending time in Rome, Florence, and Venice as well as Lucca, from which he was also expelled.
By 1783, they were in Paris, where Sara ran a brothel and casino, while he worked for the foreign ministry and police.
But the French Revolution does not appear to have benefitted them much.
Goudar is said to have left his wife in 1790 and died in near poverty a year later.
Little is known about Sara after that, except that she was still alive “until at least 1794″.
