And at times Scarpia had been tempted, not only because he too had felt the same bloodlust, but because he saw in the eyes of these women a pleading to be taken under his protection, preferring to submit to a handsome and well-bred officer if it saved them from the brutish soldiers below. But when the bloodlust ebbed, so too did the temptation. Conscience, honour and self-respect regained their control over his thoughts and actions. Had he raped a woman, Scarpia would have been unable to face his own reflection in a mirror or look Cardinal Ruffo in the eye.
*
Scarpia had never lost his respect for his friend and patron, Cardinal Ruffo. There had been times during the campaign when he had been called to Ruffo’s headquarters to discuss strategy, and there he was struck by the modesty and wisdom of this generalissimo and prince of the Church. Ruffo slept under canvas like his men, and every evening he did the rounds of their bivouacs, talking to his Calabrians in their native dialect, comforting the wounded, reassuring the fearful, listening to their complaints, settling their quarrels, calming their anxieties – not just as their commander but also as their pastor. And later, around the campfire, he would encourage his officers to give their views, and never humiliate those whose opinions were crass and ill-informed.
However, Scarpia never felt he knew what thoughts were to be found in the deepest recesses of the cardinal’s mind. He made a great display of the Catholic religion from the altars he had erected before the gates of a recalcitrant city, preached the duty of each and every man to fight for the Holy Faith, promised eternal happiness for those who should die and absolution for any sins committed in the heat of battle. But was God on their side? Was it prayer and the intercession of the saints that had led to their victory? Or was the success of the sanfedisti due more to the victories of Kray and Suvorov in Lombardy, which had forced Macdonald to withdraw?
One evening, when dining with the cardinal in his tent, Scarpia had asked Ruffo quite what he expected from the intercession of the saints.
Ruffo had looked up, as if surprised by the question. ‘I never expect too much.’
‘It is said by Cardinal Zurlo that San’ Gennaro’s blood liquefied to indicate his support for the republic and the French.’
The cardinal smiled. ‘Poor Gennaro. He must be confused. I ask for one thing and my brother in Christ, Cardinal Zurlo, for another.’
‘Can we count on his help, all the same?’
‘I think so, don’t you? After all, he will surely see that Cardinal Zurlo prayed with a bayonet held to his throat.’
‘Yet the blood liquefied. Can a saint perform a miracle under duress?’
Ruffo smiled again. ‘It is best, I think, not to speculate as to what a saint can or cannot do. We know that they are with Almighty God in Heaven and can intercede on our behalf. We know that miracles occur for nothing is impossible for God. The illiterate lazzaroni know this too, and in their faith there is more wisdom than in the whole of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.’
‘But sometimes, Your Eminence, the most devout men can make bad soldiers.’
‘Certainly.’
‘And scoundrels like Bonaparte make good ones.’
‘The Devil is given his due. Remember the Book of Job. Satan wanders through the world for the ruin of souls, and the Lord leaves him free to test us. But remember, too, the vision of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge. He saw the cross in the sky and heard a voice saying In hoc signo vinces. With this sign you will conquer. We too raise the cross and will conquer.’
‘Yet the crusaders at Hattin went into battle with a relic of the True Cross and they were defeated.’
The cardinal sighed and wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘We see through a glass darkly, my dear Baron. We cannot presume to know the will of God. God is beyond our understanding. We can only defer to the holy wisdom of the Church, listen to our conscience and do as our conscience commands.’
‘But surely many of the Jacobins believe in their cause, while some of our soldiers are only after booty.’
The cardinal’s expression did not change. ‘Of course. There are Jacobins who believe that they are fighting for the good of mankind, but they reject the guidance of the Church and that is the sin of pride. Man is a delicate mechanism, Vitellio. He can easily be set off course. We know from God through revelation the truths about our condition, and distortions of these truths can have grave consequences through many generations to come. It is from God that we know that man is more than an animal; that each one of us is of equal worth; that marriage is sacred, ordained by God, one man to one woman, and then think back to the polygamous pagans or of the Saracens who take four wives or the licentious Anabaptists of Münster. Yes, there may be Jacobins who act in good conscience, but their ideas are like a plague, and those who bring in foreign armies to infect the innocent must be resisted. They must be driven out of Italy just as the Saracens were driven out of Spain.’
‘And we may recruit brigands to do the work of God?’
‘Two thieves were crucified with Jesus. One good, one bad. The Lord will know which is which.’
‘Does the end justify the means?’
‘Cum finis est licitus, etiam media sunt licita? No, not at all. St Augustine taught quite clearly that nothing wrong can be done for the sake of a good end and St Thomas confirmed it. Ea, quae secundum se mala, nullo fine bene fieri possunt. But St Augustine also taught that war can be just and, if the aim of the war is just, and no evil means are deliberate or intended, then there is no sin. St Bernard reached the same conclusion when he approved the crusades. We are not fighting the Jacobins for their property or for revenge. We are fighting to defend our Church and our king. Evil may be done, but it is incidental. It is not the intended means, let alone the end.’
*
We are not fighting the Jacobins for their property or for revenge. These words of the cardinal had sounded in Scarpia’s ears when, staying with his brother in Naples, he had received the deeds to estates confiscated from republicans in Basilicata. Were these not just as much booty as the jewels and plate pillaged by his troops? And as he heard of the sentences of death handed down on some of Naples’s most distinguished men of letters – Cirillo and Pagnano, de Filippis and Fiorentino – and then women like the foolish Eleonora Pimentel and the impetuous Luisa Sanfelice, and the sixteen-year-old son of the Marchese Genzano, he asked himself was this not revenge?
Scarpia could calm his conscience with the thought that it was not he nor even Ruffo who was taking revenge, but King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina who dismissed all appeals for mercy. Scarpia’s own family was not unaffected by the purge of republicans because, while his brother Domenico had remained loyal to the king, and had been held as a hostage by the republicans in the Castel Nuovo, his brother-in-law Leonardo Partinico and his sister Angelina, who had supported the republic, were arrested and imprisoned, and only released as a favour to Scarpia.
Scarpia was made welcome in the homes of both his brother and sister: he was a hero in Domenico’s household, and the Partinicos realised that they owed him their liberty, perhaps even their lives. However, being with these two happy families made Scarpia miss his own; talking to his nephews and nieces made him yearn to embrace and fondle his own children, whom he had not seen for well over a year. He was now a rich and respected figure in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies – approved of by Acton, favoured by the king and queen – but he was conscious he took little joy in the fruits of his triumph with no woman to share them.
There were a number on offer – Bourbonist salonnières eager to reward their hero, or frightened former republicans ready to barter their bodies for his patronage and protection. If he wanted a mistress, he could take his pick from among some of the most beautiful women in Naples; and if he wanted a new wife, an annulment of his marriage to Paola could surely be arranged, leaving him free to marry the daughter of a leading Neapolitan family – his sister had a number of candidates in mind. But Scarpia did not want a new wife nor a mistress. Bored,
despondent, feeling old, though not yet forty, Scarpia remembered the relative contentment he had felt alone in his father’s library and returned to Palermo.
Fourteen
1
General Jacques Macdonald, after leaving the Parthenopean Republic to its fate, led his army north – first to Rome where he picked up what reinforcements could be spared, then on over the Apennines to Florence and through Tuscany towards Milan. He was stopped at the River Trebia just short of Piacenza by a combined force of Russians and Austrians under the Russian General Suvorov. The French outnumbered the allies, but were defeated. Macdonald fled with the rump of his army to Genoa. Around five thousand of the allies were killed and nine thousand French – among them Major General Gaston de Jouve, the lover of Paola di Marcisano.
When the news of Jouve’s death reached Rome, Paola consulted her friends Graziella di Pozzo and Domenica Attavanti as to whether or not she should go into mourning. If Jouve had been her husband, the etiquette was clear: withdrawal from society for six weeks and, when the widow reappeared, a year dressed in black. But Jouve had not been her husband. The marchesa argued that certainly Paola should not seem unaffected by the death of a patriotic hero, but that the whole ritual of mourning smacked of popish superstition. Graziella agreed and suggested a compromise – a day or two of retirement – perhaps even a week – during which time her seamstress could make some dresses in subdued colours: she had seen some bales of fine grey silk that would match the mien of a bereaved lover.
After the marchesa had left, but with Graziella still with her, Paola practised that mien in front of the mirror and rigidly retained it even as Graziella shook with laughter. The marchesa would have strongly disapproved of such levity around the death of a patriot, but Graziella had known for some time that Paola had grown bored of her brigadier and had been delighted to see him depart with Macdonald. She had not wished him dead, and as she sat alone in the Villa Larunda in semi-mourning, she thought back fondly of her farouche Frenchman with his hairy torso and scratchy whiskers; of his jolly good nature and the loud laugh that always accompanied his own jokes. After the mercurial Scarpia, who at one moment had played the debonair adventurer and then had become maudlin and philosophical – a Werther overcome by Weltschmerz – Jouve had been easy to live with: Paola could understand Josephine taking a hussar as a lover while Bonaparte was campaigning in Italy.
Jouve had also been right for the time – the time being the new era of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the overthrow of a medieval theocracy and the rebirth of the civitas of antiquity in which the ancestors of the Marcisanos (if that thousand-year-old rumour was to be believed) had played a prominent role. Jouve had been a warrior; in one of the tableaux vivants in which Paola had appeared, lightly draped, as the nymph Larunda, the major general had also taken part attired as Mars with a thick leather breastplate moulded to his hirsute torso, metal slats over his woollen tunic and a helmet with a horsehair mane – all borrowed from the costumier at the Argentina theatre. Ludovico had appeared in a toga, and so too the young artists from the Villa Medici and their Italian friends such as Mario Cavaradossi, and, of course, presiding over them all, the Consul of the Roman Republic, Cesare Angelotti.
There had been something exhilarating about the republican festivities. Perhaps some of the symbolic changes had verged on the ridiculous: the bronze statue of St Michael the Archangel on top of the Castel Sant’Angelo, renamed ‘The Genius of Liberty’, dressed in a tricolour cape and a republican bonnet. But Paola had seen with what joy young Roman girls danced around the Liberty trees in flimsy costumes and, as the warm air caressed their bodies, had chosen handsome young men with whom to celebrate their liberation. At a reception given by the Principessa di Santa Croce, a sour abate had said that throughout history sexual licence had been a driving force of political revolution. Was her affair part of that phenomenon? Why, then, had she gone off Jouve? Was it because he laughed so loudly at his own jokes, or had she turned against the French because they were plundering her city?
All the festivities and celebrations could not hide the comprehensive looting of Rome by the army of occupation. Ludovico excused it by the right of conquest. ‘After all, Rome is filled with statues taken from Greece and obelisks from Egypt.’ And when she had complained to Jouve, he had said: ‘You must understand, my little cabbage, that, as our great General Bonaparte once said, an army marches on its stomach, and France has a large army with a prodigious appetite and it is many months since our soldiers have been paid.’
Though the French soldiers might not have been paid, their senior officers, among them Jouve, seemed to have plentiful resources; so too the leading republicans such as Cesare Angelotti, who suddenly found the money to buy the confiscated palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta on the via Dondotti for the knock-down price of 5,200 scudi. It became quite clear to Paola that Angelotti’s concept of fraternity extended no further than members of his immediate family whom he enriched through the buying and selling of confiscated properties; and that his idea of liberty was also relative because he exercised his powers as consul in an arbitrary fashion. ‘Be careful,’ said a pamphlet lodged with Pasquino. ‘Don’t let Angelotti hear you, because when he’s in a rage, he’s a real beast.’
The Marchesa Attavanti, Angelotti’s sister, defended her brother, saying that he deserved some reward for what he had suffered for the republican cause. And: ‘It’s all very well for those who have property already to criticise those who have had to acquire it.’ Paola made no response, but felt this was an unsatisfactory excuse for Angelotti’s venality. Others took the same view. Angelotti was pilloried in the republican broadsheets and attacked when he rode out in his luxurious carriage. He was finally forced to resign as consul and was only spared prosecution for corruption by claiming immunity as a member of the Senate.
Paola was also dismayed by the regular executions by firing squad of both common criminals and political offenders. As the material conditions of the Roman poor deteriorated and the people went hungry, there were more protests and more executions – of those who stole bread or hoarded it, of thieves, bandits, deserters but also dissenters: two clerics were shot in November 1798 for replacing a Liberty tree in their village with a cross. However, the execution that tested Paola’s new loyalties the most was that of Gennaro Valentino, the young commander of the Roman militia during the Neapolitan occupation who, after receiving a safe conduct, had been shot by the French. Why had Championnet reneged upon his officers’ promise? Jouve had been evasive. The general himself had never given his word. Junior officers had exceeded their authority. Valentino might have worn the uniform of a Neapolitan officer, but he was a Bourbonist fanatic at the head of a force of sbirri, arresting and imprisoning patriots whom he would have executed had he had the chance.
Paola asked the Marchesa Attavanti at a reception if this was true. Cesare Angelotti, standing with his back to Paola, overheard her question and turned to answer her. ‘We had to make an example.’
‘Because he kept order?’
‘Precisely. Because he was young and able and handsome and admired by too many people.’
‘And honourable,’ said Paola.
‘And honourable,’ said Angelotti with an ironic bow and condescending smile. ‘It is precisely the lackeys of the despots who are appealing who must be crushed.’
Paola had seen the force of Angelotti’s reasoning perhaps more clearly than he did himself. The limpid idealism of a Valentino showed up the hypocrisy of the corrupt patriots and rapacious French. The execution had been dishonourable and cruel. It had cast doubts in her mind on the benevolence of the republic, and tarnished in retrospect all those ceremonies and celebrations in which she had taken part. She now began to regret her appearance as the nymph Larunda at republican pageants and blushed to think of Ludovico in a toga. At the time, it had seemed like a dressing-up party but now, decidedly, the party was over, and it was time for the costumes to be put away.
2
After the week agreed upon with her friends, Paola came out of her mourning and reappeared in society wearing a pale grey silk dress. Many commiserated with her loss of Jouve, and she displayed to perfection the well-practised manner of a bereaved lover. She was surprised to find that the defeat at Trebia seemed to have had little effect on her republican friends, who surely had as much to mourn as she did. How could the republic survive without its French protectors? Yet Angelotti, Cavaradossi and the Attavantis all behaved as if nothing had changed: the march of history could not be reversed.
Both the frenzied celebrations and vindictive executions continued even as the allies marched on Rome. In August 1799, two Florentines – a father and his son – were shot for carrying arms, together with a priest who had urged his congregation to rise against the French. In September, on the anniversary of the founding of the French Republic, with the allied armies coming ever closer to Rome, there were horse races, fireworks, a military parade and a grand ball at the Apollo theatre. At a gala dinner at the French Embassy, the French commander, General Garnier, promised the Roman republicans to defend their city to the last drop of his blood; a week later, he reached agreement with the allies for its surrender.
The terms were lenient: neither side wished to see the orgy of vengeance that had followed the fall of the Parthenopean Republic. There was to be no triumphal entry into the city. The Neapolitan army entered silently from the south, the British from the west, the Austrians and Russians from the north. A contingent was sent at once to protect the Jewish ghetto. Those Roman republicans who chose to do so could leave with the French and those who remained would be protected. The French troops retained their arms, and were escorted by British marines down the dusty road to the port of Civitavecchia from where ships of the British navy would take them to France.
Who should now govern the liberated city? The legitimate ruler was the Pope, but there was no Pope. At the end of August 1799, the aged and ailing Pius VI, having been taken as a prisoner to France, had died upon reaching the city of Valence. Before being bundled out of the holy city, Pope Pius VI had ruled that the next conclave should be held where a majority of cardinals were to be found at the time of his death. This had been Venice, then controlled by the Austrians, and in November the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church assembled in the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio in Venice to elect a new Pope. The conclave dragged on for months and, while awaiting the outcome of the election, the allies appointed as interim governor of Rome the Neapolitan General Naselli. The fleur-de-lis banner of the Bourbon King of Naples was raised over the Castel Sant’Angelo.
Scarpia Page 29
