guilty pleasures; Arthur Japin's latest novel portrays the transformation of Casanova's first lover from country girl to courtesan.(In Lucia's Eyes)(Book Review)

Byline: Megan O'grady

To this day, Casanova's name is invoked to describe the most incorrigible of heartbreakers, but in his memoirs, in which he documents 122 conquests, he admits to breaking only two hearts. The first belonged to Lucia, a beautiful young girl he fell in love with when he was seventeen and met again years later under decidedly less pleasant circumstances.

Now the woman who inspired this exceptional admission of remorse is the subject of a new novel: Arthur Japin's dark intrigue In Lucia's Eyes (Knopf). Set in Venice and Amsterdam during the Age of Enlightenment, it begins with the legendary lover in action, dressed for the opera in shiny yellow breeches and plying a mysteriously veiled courtesan with well-oiled compliments. When she dismisses him as a flirt and a cynic, he challenges her to produce a single name who has suffered for having loved him.