The social and financial hardships ended abruptly on 21 April 1746. Casanova was on his way home, after playing the violin at a wedding reception, when he found a letter a middle-aged man had just dropped. Politely he returned the letter to its owner, the 56-year-old senator Matteo Giovanni Bragadin, who offered him a lift home. During the journey on the senator’s gondola, though, Bragadin suffered a mild stroke. Casanova took the senator to his palazzo, called a surgeon and refused to leave his side.