Casanova discusses the Epicurean school in his first two Italian works, and in French in Histoire de ma fuite des Prisons de la République de Venise (1787) and the Utopian novel Icosameron (1789), as well as two late unpublished works. As he recounts in his Histoire de ma vie, he was suspect on his return to Venice as a young Doctor of Law in 1748 because of his Epicurean philosophy. His search for wisdom through love is inspired by this philosophy as taught by three masters : Epicurus via Diogenes Laertius and Gassendi ; Lucretius's De rerum natura ; and the abbé Batteux's La Morale d' Epicure, which contains French translations of long extracts from Epicurus (a fragment of which is given as an appendix to this article). An analysis of Casanova's various works reveals both his nocturnal 'philosophy' and the corpus of works he refers to and comments on over 30 years, in order to exhort his readers to follow Epicurus's philosophy.