by Stendhal
“Vanina Vanini,” 1829 (written in November; first published in Revue de Paris, December 13, 1829)
“Le Juif” (The Jew), 1831 (written in January; first published by Colomb, in 1855)
“San Francesco a Ripa,” 1831 (written in September; first published in Revue des Deux Mondes, July 1853)
“Vittoria Accoramboni,” 1837 (published in Revue des Deux Mondes, March 1837)
“Les Cenci,” 1837 (published in Revue des Deux Mondes, July 1837)
“La Duchesse de Palliano,” 1838 (published in Revue des Deux Mondes, August 1838)
“L’Abbesse de Castro,” 1839 (published in Revue des Deux Mondes, February—March 1839)
“Trop de faveur tue” (Too Much Favor Is Deadly), 1839 (written between April 8 and April 15, 1839; first published in 1912)
“Suora Scolastica,” 1839/1842 (two separate manuscript drafts; first published in 1921)
After Stendhal’s death, his cousin Romain Colomb became his literary executor. Stendhal scholars and readers today are much in Colomb’s debt, and it is gratifying to read Stendhal himself referring to his cousin as “a man of integrity and justice, reasonable, my childhood friend.”21 Colomb oversaw the publication of a number of texts, including a set of stories that he titled Chroniques italiennes in 1855. This volume included five stories: “L’Abbesse de Castro,” “Vittoria Accoramboni,” “Les Cenci,” “La Duchesse de Palliano,” and “Vanina Vanini.” The title Chroniques italiennes and the same set of stories have been often reprinted, but it is important to remember that Stendhal himself did not group them together and did not give them that title. This volume expands on Colomb’s by including other pieces with Italian settings, including some (such as “Le Juif” and “Trop de faveur tue”) that have never been translated. I have included some pieces that are unfinished but nonetheless have a great deal to offer, both in their own qualities as stories and in what they reveal about Stendhal as a writer.
Romain Colomb titled the posthumous collection Chroniques italiennes very deliberately: he named the pieces chroniques, or “chronicles,” rather than récits, or “stories.” Four of the five tales he grouped under that title share a common origin in a set of documents that Stendhal encountered in 1833. At that time, Stendhal held the post of French consul at the little town of Civita Vecchia; he found the place dreary, and he spent much time in Rome. There, he became acquainted with the Caetani family, an illustrious name dating back to the High Middle Ages (the late thirteenth-century pope excoriated by Dante, Boniface VIII, was a Caetani), and in particular he struck up a friendship with Teresa Caetani, Duchess of Sermoneta. He was allowed to examine a set of manuscripts in the family library, most dating from the seventeenth century, and he immediately saw the potential in them for his own work, for basing his own writing on original historical documents. Long before this, in 1816, he had evinced a partiality for such original sources rather than books written by later historians; he referred contemptuously to “the profound stupidity of our so-called historians” and added that he took it as a maxim to read only original documents.22 Now, soon after gaining entrée to the Caetani library, he made the entry in his journal for March 9, 1833, the first reference to what came to be called the Chroniques italiennes:
B. CENCI
The hardest part is arriving at the truth. So much is half-fictional…. Farinaccio, the lawyer who defended the poor girl, left eleven volumes of legal documents regarding the Cenci. This is the best source.23
His versions, then, would be not “history” but something closer to the original documents, and thus closer to the truth.
On the fourteenth of March, he wrote in a mix of French, Italian, and the slightly awkward English he often used in his journals and personal writing: “I see with great pleasure i Tragiciraconti [these tragic tales]. One day I will publish them. It is a distraction, and I am in search of a distraction, being perhaps deeply in love and disturbed by [a particular lady’s] silence.”24
Soon he was doing further research, first into the horrific Cenci story, as he sought out the grave of Beatrice in the church of San Pietro, in Montorio. “I searched in vain for some inscription on the stones near the altar,” he wrote on May 12. “The monks assured me that the body of poor Beatrice is near the altar, but no one knows exactly where.”25 Similar research took place with the other stories as well. He thought that he might bring all the tales together and publish them in a single volume; he wrote a preface for this imaginary volume in April 1833, then another one in May, and then yet another in 1839 (all are included in this collection). And he had a potential title: Historiettes romaines—brief Roman histories or stories.26 (Writing a preface and coming up with a title long before he had a book was not unusual with Stendhal, or with most other writers, probably.) All the prefaces insist on the contrast between Italy and France, and between the more heroic, passionate past and the degraded present.
Romain Colomb’s classification of the five narratives as chroniques becomes a bit complicated, though, when we consider that one of them, “Vanina Vanini,” was written in 1829, well before Stendhal encountered the Caetani texts. And there is no known source, documentary or otherwise, for this story—so the “chronicle” label fits it rather awkwardly.27
Perhaps the term chronicle should be reserved only for those works explicitly based on one of the documents from the Caetani library. In any case, defining the term is of interest, and doing so has occupied a number of Stendhal scholars. In fact, Stendhal himself used it repeatedly elsewhere: the subtitle of Le Rouge et le noir is Chronique de 1830, and the subtitle of La Chartreuse de Parme is Chronique italienne. A Stendhalian chronicle is historical, but it uses its historical setting primarily as a contrast with the present, a contrast that is frequently made explicit, as the narrator intrudes to point out how no one today would act or feel the way a sixteenth-century Italian did. Thus, it is not quite right to call Stendhal’s chronicles historical fiction. Philippe Berthier suggests that the real object of the Stendhalian chronicle is not the past, though this is its ostensible subject, but the present world of the author and reader; and unlike a historical novelist such as Walter Scott (who was so influential and so widely read all over Europe that comparison with him is inevitable), Stendhal is interested not in period detail or the merely picturesque but rather in “the rhythms of the modern human heart, as it is determined and modified by the biotope in which it is immersed.”28 Thus, the chronicle is only apparently about the past; it actually functions as a critique of the present, and perhaps as an exhortation to the reader of the present to repudiate what Stendhal saw as the deadening weight of modernity.
If the texts are to be chroniques, “chronicles,” rather than récits, “stories,” the implication would seem to be that they are transparent histories, that they tell us “what really happened.” But this aspect, too, is more complicated. Stendhal was in fact working with documents for several of the stories, and in some cases and at some points he does stick closely to the original documents, especially with “Vittoria Accoramboni” and “The Cenci.” But the additions to what was in those documents make all the difference. “Vittoria” opens with a kind of frame, the author presenting himself as a translator and simple conduit of information; he even apologizes for not having embroidered more upon the bare story:
[D]o not expect to find here a spicy style, fast-paced and glittering with fashionable allusions to the latest ways of feeling; above all, do not expect the kind of seductive emotions you find in a George Sand novel. That great writer would have crafted a masterpiece out of the life and the miseries of Vittoria Accoramboni. The sincere and simple tale I present to you here has no advantages beyond those more modest ones of being historical. When by chance you find yourself traveling alone in a coach as night falls, and your thoughts turn to the great art of plumbing the depths of the human heart, you may base your reflections on the circumstances of the story presented here.
The author presents himself as a kind of impr
esario, raising the curtain on an exotic set of creatures he has found for us.
His version of the Cenci story likewise begins with a kind of frame, in this case a very lengthy disquisition on the Don Juan type of character—and in doing so he returns to one of his favorite themes, that real passion was all but dead in modern France and could have been found only in Spain and Italy. But when, after a seven-page preface, he finally turns to the story, he sticks very close to the documents. Indeed, his only significant change is to soften somewhat the reality that the originals portrayed for the modern reader: for example, Francesco Cenci brought whores into bed with his wife, a detail Stendhal omits. Certainly the story is horrific enough as he tells it. The story of this doomed family had been told in a number of different versions, some dating from the sixteenth century, and in fact two different versions were published in France during Stendhal’s lifetime (in 1822 and 1825); the English poet Percy Shelley had encountered the story in Rome around the same time, and he published his dramatic version in 1819.29 The story of Beatrice Cenci was well enough known, so Stendhal’s motivation for retelling it was in part to seek out the truth behind the story, as we have seen. And of course it is a tale of passions operating on the grand scale; Francesco Cenci was a monster who did a great deal of evil, but his dynamism, his sheer power of will, clearly captivated Stendhal, as did the contrast with the innocent daughter driven to parricide by the cruelty of her father.
In these stories, along with “The Abbess of Castro” and “The Duchess of Palliano,” the author’s relationship to his material is foregrounded. I am only the translator, he repeats, or I am only a chronicler; he insists on his own absence—even though the opening frames often emphasize his presence. The result is a remarkable, very unusual kind of poetics of narrative, with Stendhal slipping in and out of the roles of reader, translator, chronicler, and editor. This movement creates a dynamism or energy of its own, which helps propel the tales. Pierre Laforgue has called this a “poetics of translation,” arguing that for Stendhal, “fiction can only exist if it is supported by some prior text, a text that his own can graft itself onto… . The representation of reality is first and foremost a matter of translation.”30 Translation in these stories is, however, only distantly like what we call translation; Stendhal tightens, reorganizes, omits, and adds—sometimes adding a very great deal indeed. Translation becomes a kind of pose adopted for various effects and purposes, including one of the oldest artifices of all, the insistence that one is employing no artifice.
Stendhal, most critics would agree, is a writer who places little value on narrative control, tight symmetries, and precise moments of orchestrated closures. On the contrary, he wrote at white heat, rarely revising. As Mérimée put it, “[H]e wrote a great deal and put a lot of work into his books, but rather than correcting his execution he would change his plan” to fit what he had already drafted.31 D. A. Miller argues that Stendhal’s thematic values of freedom and spontaneity led him deliberately to evade narrative closure, to embrace an incomplete or open-ended quality, “a blissful moment of release from the tyranny of narrative control.”32 The best-known instance of closure’s being an issue in Stendhal is in his novel Lucien Leuwen: it is apparently unfinished, but Stendhal seems to have been content to leave it as it was, and many readers over the years have found it perfectly satisfying in its “incomplete” state and have been left inwardly debating exactly what being complete or incomplete has to do with aesthetic satisfaction. Stendhal’s collected fictional works—currently available in the three-volume Pléiade edition edited by Yves Ansel, Philippe Berthier, and Xavier Bourdenet—consist of many unfinished tales and stories. Several of those with Italian settings and themes that fit with the Chroniques italiennes are included in this volume, being of very high interest even if unfinished. These are “The Jew,” “Too Much Favor Is Deadly,” and “Suora Scolastica.”
“The Jew,” which has evidently never been translated before, opens with a personal, diarylike epigraph: “Having nothing to read, I shall write. It is the same kind of pleasure, but the intensity is greater.—The stove is giving me a great deal of trouble. My feet are cold, and my head aches.” Writing, here, is recreation—a substitute for reading and an escape from a dull day and a dismal hotel room. And writing provides a more intense sensation—that idea again. But the tale Stendhal spins is inventive and energetic, and might have made a full-length novel. Filippo Ebreo is a descendant of the rogue character common in the picaresque tradition but several steps higher on the respectability scale than, say, Lazarillo de Tormes or Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Stendhal sketches the man and his story quickly, and the narrative barely pauses for breath as Filippo, ostensibly narrating his life story to a non-Jewish audience, moves from one entrepreneurial escapade to another, his life complicated by first a wife and then a lover; event follows upon event, and although the psychological interest is minimal, it is not unimportant. The story retains an oral quality, the feeling of being spoken rather than carefully written. As such, it stands apart from most of the other tales, relying on no previous text, having no pretense to translation or chronicling. There is of course some echo of Shylock in the gain-obsessed Filippo as well as in his native Venice, and it may be that Stendhal based him on some real person whose identity is now lost. But “The Jew” has the feel of genuine Stendhalian iction, and although there is some casual stereotyping in the conception of the character, there is also something about him that recalls Stendhal’s other novelistic heroes, such as Julien and Fabrizio. Filippo is alive: he acts, he feels strongly, and he has ambition.
“Too Much Favor Is Deadly” and “Suora Scolastica” are set within convents, as is “The Abbess of Castro,” and Stendhal’s frequent use of such a setting is worth some exploration. He does not eroticize the convent as Diderot had done in La Réligieuse (1760, published in 1796); there is no leering in Stendhal. The repeated convent setting perhaps reveals something about his own obsession with freedom: convents, or at least these convents, are places of confinement and denial of life. The incarcerated females—not young women who follow the call to a religious vocation but instead aristocratic young women whose families have forced them into convents—are Stendhalian heroes themselves, intelligent, sensitive, and impelled by overwhelming passions, and their deaths or near deaths are apotheoses that lift them up into the realm of the tragic. Yvon Houssais notes how the convent becomes a kind of tomb, a “space within an interior space, within the town yet fundamentally alien to it, like a kind of monster.”33 Stendhal’s convents are historically based and presented in precise topographical detail, yet there is something mythical, even archetypal about them, reminiscent of the classical labyrinth or the underworld. The convent thus becomes a quintessential landscape for Stendhal, a place where the line between inside and outside is most firmly drawn. As such, it is the place that best represents the prison of interiority versus the freedom of the exterior, the freedom to be found in action. It is an exceptionally charged space, the nexus wherein passion and the self can bloom into their fullness. In Stendhal’s view, it is human institutions—here, convents, but, more generally, all social institutions that chain down the self and the passions—that provide the necessary friction to spark the full dynamism of the passions.34 “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” said Rousseau,35 and though Stendhal was by no means a straightforward Rousseau enthusiast, the sentiment is the same in both writers—even if the solutions each suggests are entirely different. For Stendhal, as we have seen, passion and freedom are the greatest goods in life. Speaking of “The Abbess of Castro,” Michal Peled Ginsburg notes that it is the confinement itself that makes the character of Hélène desirable: “Passion in Stendhal defines itself in opposition to tyranny, and tyranny is tyranny because it attempts to put limitations on passion; every passion is the passion for liberty, for escaping a prison.”36
The fascination with the charged atmosphere of a half-historical, half-imaginary convent only grew with Sten
dhal in his later years. In fact, he was in the process of working on a second version of “Suora Scolastica” on the day of his death. He had been in ill health for some time, and had obtained leave from his consular post in Civita Vecchia to go to Geneva to see a specialist; from there he went on to Paris. On March 22, 1842, after composing some passages in “Suora Scolastica,” he went out for dinner but collapsed on the sidewalk in front of his building. His cousin Romain Colomb was nearby and took him to his own home, where Stendhal died early the next morning. That convent imagery accompanied him literally to the end of his life.
Italo Calvino writes that Stendhal is always asserting “the existential tension that arises from measuring one’s own individuality (and one’s own limitations) against the individuality and limitations of one’s surroundings.”37 These Italian convents were, for him, the preeminent, almost poetically perfect example of the confinements and limitations to which the hero is subjected—and which forge the hero and the heroic. And the poetics of enclosure and confinement were of course deeply involved for him with his Italy, the land where real passion could still be found. This Italy became the ideal laboratory in which he could best conduct his fictional-historical experiments.
Mariella Di Maio draws an intriguing parallel between convent confinement and writing itself for Stendhal, suggesting that writing, like the convent cell, both confines the self and, paradoxically, gives it the place it needs to fully blossom.38 Indeed, Stendhal himself spoke of writing as a “silk prison” of sorts in Memoirs of an Egotist: “Have you ever seen, gentle reader, a silkworm that has eaten enough mulberry leaf? The comparison isn’t very dignified, but it is so apposite! This ugly beast doesn’t want to eat any more, it needs to climb up and spin its silk prison. Such is the animal known as a ‘writer.’”39 The incomplete nature of some of the tales, such as “Too Much Favor Is Deadly” and “Suora Scolastica,” may be disappointing to the reader at first, but there is somehow an appropriateness about this aspect, too. Even his finished work exemplifies the style discontinu—fragmentary, disdaining transitions, written down rapidly with little revision. Mérimée described Stendhal’s method: “He wrote a great deal and worked a great deal on his books, but instead of correcting the execution, he would change the plan. If he eliminated the faults of a first draft, it was only in order to commit new ones, for I do not believe he ever tried to correct his style: there are so few cross outs in his manuscripts that one can say they always remained first drafts.”40 The kind of correctness so valued by traditionalists of his era was, to him, simply another kind of confinement. The staccato style and the headlong rush of the drafting process somehow accord perfectly with tales that never achieve closure or conclusion. Is the incomplete tale by its very nature a declaration of freedom on the part of the writer?
