Edoardo Tiretta

Part of Giacomo Casanova's set in Paris, he moved to Calcutta in his forties, where he worked as a civil architect, building superintendent and land surveyor.

[2] Having been discovered embezzling money from the mount of piety in his hometown of Treviso, he took refuge in France in order to escape the police, where he found himself nearly destitute.

Tiretta arrived in Paris in 1757 at the age of twenty-five and was introduced to the infamous Giacomo Casanova, who described him thus:[3] In the beginning of March, 1757, I received a letter from my friend Madame Manzoni, which she sent to me by a young man of good appearance, with a frank and high-born air, whom I recognized as a Venetian by his accent.

He shared Casanova's libertine lifestyle, seducing women for money; one of his many lovers nicknamed him "Count Six-Times" based on the number of times they had made love in one night.

[5] However, Tiretta got involved in a scandal and fled to Calcutta, then a prominent East India Company city and capital of the Bengal Presidency.

[6] Diarist William Hickey left the following account of Tiretta: "By birth he was an Italian, but had spent considerable portion of his life in France and Germany ... he had made no great proficiency in the English language ... it being perfectly ridiculous to hear the strange mélange had made when speaking ... a compound of English, French, Portuguese and Hindustani, interlarded with the most uncouth and outré oaths in each language.

[15] The writer Giovanni Comisso wrote about his own ancestry: "Edoardo Tiretta from Treviso, my maternal ancestor, had participated in Casanova's life.