by Stendhal
Stendhal wrote constantly, it seems, yet no one fits less the notion of the professional writer. “Literary life, such as it is in the 1840s,” he wrote, “is a wretched business. It reveals the most contemptible instincts of our nature and those most productive of minor unhappiness.”41 He intuitively resisted becoming a professional writer and the fawning and earnest networking it would entail, relying instead on inspiration and luck: “I pick up at random what destiny places in my path. This phrase has been my source of pride for ten years,” he writes in the Memoirs.42 He often expressed a distrust for the novel as it was—sentimental, stereotypical, flattening out difference and uniqueness into a vulgar set of narrative conventions—and the ways in which it achieved its effects.43 As for the basic tools of the professional novelist—words—he tells us in “The Duchess of Palliano” that words are a poor substitute for action, and that “speech is an external power that we seek out, not something that comes from within us.” As for his legacy, he knew he was ahead of his time, and often spoke of being understood only in the future: “I regard and have always regarded my works as lottery tickets. The only thing I esteem is the idea of being reprinted in 1900.”44 In his own time, few, apart from Balzac, appreciated him, but his reputation grew—as he expected it would—as the century progressed. He remains very much in print today, and it may well be that future generations will be even more inclined to appreciate his vision and values, his honesty and integrity, the sprezzatura of his art, the intensity of his feeling, the uncompromised dedication to freedom that he represents. It is only an apparent paradox that the power of his writing lies in its insistence on the inferiority of writing to living, on the need to transcend mere writing and to live more fully, less artificially, and more passionately—as some people managed to do, he suggests, in his beloved Italy.
STENDHAL’S PREFACES
The four prefaces here were not published during Stendhal’s lifetime, but they are evidence that he often thought about the possibility of a volume that would collect his various Italian tales and chronicles.
The first preface given here was written by Stendhal on April 24, 1833, as the opening to what he thought would become a collection of Italian stories. The second preface was written on May 16, 1833, another attempt for the same planned collection. The third preface was composed on July 31, 1838, as Stendhal was working on “The Duchess of Palliano.” The fourth is undated, but it was written in a notebook that includes a draft of “Too Much Favor Is Deadly,” and thus was probably written in the spring of 1839.
Preface
I admit that I have never been particularly curious about how the inhabitants of New Holland1 act and think, or those of the island of Ceylon. The traveler Franklin reports that among the Riccaras,2 the husbands and brothers think it a point of honor to offer their wives and sisters to foreigners. Reading these truthful accounts by Captain Franklin, whom I have met at the home of Monsieur Cuvier, can amuse me for a quarter of an hour, but very soon I find I am thinking about something else: these Riccaras are simply too different from the men who have been either my friends or my rivals. For the same reason, the heroes of Homer or Racine, the Achilleses and the Agamemnons have always made me yawn. True, many of my contemporary Frenchmen imagine that they love them, because they think that admiring them reflects positively upon themselves; but as for me, I am beginning to shed all the prejudices that were rooted in my early youth.
I love seeing the heart of man depicted—but the heart of the man I know, not that of the Riccaras.
Around the middle of the sixteenth century, vanity, the desire to “create an effect,” as the Baron de Faeneste put it,3 threw a thick veil in France over the actions of men, and even more so over their motives. Vanity has a different character in Italy, and I give my word of honor on this to the reader: it is a much weaker force there. In general, one thinks of one’s neighbor there only to either hate him or despise him; the only exceptions occur during three or four ceremonies per year, and at those a man throwing a fete can mathematically, so to speak, count on the approval of his neighbor. There are none of those little nuances and inferences that go on to make a man deathly uneasy and worried every fifteen minutes of his life. You do not see those anxious, haggard faces produced by an always-wounded, always-suffering vanity, the kind of visages you see in Viennet (the deputy for Hérault in 1833).4
This Italian vanity, so different from, so much feebler than ours, is what persuaded me to transcribe the anecdotes that follow. My preferences will seem baroque enough to my French contemporaries, who are accustomed to seeking their literary pleasures in the kind of depictions of the human heart that appear in the works of Messieurs Villemain, Delavigne, and ******.5 I imagine that my contemporaries of 1833 will not be very much moved by the naive and energetic traits to be found in these tales told in the style of gossips. But for me, the narratives of these trials and tortures provide some unimpeachable information on the human heart, information that gives rise to some enjoyable evening meditations now and then. I would much prefer to find stories about love and marriage and shrewd schemes for getting hold of inheritances (like those of the Duke of ****** of 1826), but even when I have found such tales, the iron fist of the justice system not playing any part in them, they have seemed less trustworthy to me. But some good people are working, at this very moment, on further research for me.
What would be needed would be a people among whom the sensations of the moment (as in Naples) or the power of meditated, ruminated passion (as in Rome) would have chased out vanity and affectation. I don’t think that one could find outside of Italy (and perhaps Spain, before the affectation of the nineteenth century set in) an epoch that was, in the first place, equally civilized so as to be more interesting than the Riccaras, and, in the second place, equally free of vanity so that the human heart can be viewed almost naked. The one thing I am sure of is that today England, Germany, and France are all too rotten with affectations and vanities, in every area, to be able to cast a light on the human heart in the way these stories can.
Rome, palazzo Cavalieri, twenty-fourth of April 1833.
Preface
The reader will find not carefully composed landscapes here but rather sights taken directly from nature, as if with the English instrument. The truth ought to take precedence over every other kind of merit, but in our time truth is not enough, is not piquant enough. I would advise every person who finds him-or herself partaking of that frame of mind to read one of these stories every week.
I love the style of these stories; it is the style of the people, full of redundancies, and always determined to make the reader know that, when something horrible is named, it truly is horrible. But it is by such means that the narrator, whether intending to do so or not, depicts his century and its ways of thinking.
Most of these stories were written shortly after the death of the poor devils who are their subjects.
I have made a few editorial changes to make the style a little less obscure and to keep the reader from becoming impatient.
Obscurity is the great weakness of the Italian language. The fact is, there are eight or ten Italian languages, and none has succeeded in killing off the others; in France, the language of Paris killed off the language of Montaigne. In Rome, they say, “Vi vedrò domain all giorno.”6 No one in Florence would understand this. I would much rather read a story in English than in Italian; it would be much clearer to me.
The story that has the most piquancy is that of the Massimi, page 16.7
I would like to exclude the siege of Genoa, which has no interest beyond ensuring that the entire manuscript given to me has been copied out; I am afraid of being accused of having neglected a ******.
About a third of these stories are scarcely worth the trouble of copying out, being of the 1600 kind of bad, though this is to my eyes less annoying than the 1833 kind, with quite different kinds of ideas. For example, a Roman prince (Santacroce) comes to believe that his aged mother has a lover, because he ha
s seen her waistline expanding; he believes his honor has been insulted, and he stabs the poor hydropic woman to death. Spanish pride grafted onto Italian creates a son who believes his mother has a lover.
Even in the least interesting of these stories, one can find some reflection of the mores of the time.
In 1833, in France and even more in England, people kill in order to get hold of money. Two poor devils were executed the other day here, one twenty-three and the other twenty-seven: one named Vivaldi had killed his wife, because he had fallen in love with another woman, and the second one had shot and killed an ultra doctor,8 a man who had probably betrayed his country—and in both cases, there was no trace of a money motive.
Crimes based on money are boring, and one will find very little of that kind of thing here.
Preface
People often speak about Italian passion, that unbridled passion which sprang up in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but has died out today under the influence of French mores and the desire to imitate the fashionable life of Paris.
Preface
Around the year 1350, Petrarch made ancient manuscripts fashionable in Italy, and that resulted in people’s conserving even contemporary manuscripts—and this in a century when knowing how to read and write would have been considered shameful for a fashionable Frenchman. And so it is that in 1839 there are so many treasures in the libraries of Italy. And to make our good fortune even greater, Italy having been divided up into a great many small states, each of which was headed by wise leaders, the Venetian ambassador to Florence couldn’t care less about what was going on in Florence, while the Medici’s ambassador to Venice couldn’t care less about what the doge was up to.
But a strange thing happened once the two voting chambers were established (just as well and just as badly as they are established in France), following Napoleon’s victories, which had inspired Italians with an enthusiasm at having been given a real country for several years;9 and above all, given that all Italy has been studying Monsieur Thiers’s history of the Revolution,10 the legitimate sovereigns in Italy have concluded that they have a considerable advantage in staying out of the archives. Political thinking in 1500 was completely ridiculous; back then, they had not even invented representatives who would vote for greater taxes on the people who had elected them, and moreover they thought that all good political thinking could be found in the pages of Plato, though badly translated for so long. But the men of those times, and consequently the writers—who were by no means members of the Academy with their eyes on a Monthion prize11—were filled with a fierce energy, and they knew what it was to live in a small town under the watchful eye of a tyrant who had recently succeeded in suppressing the Republic.
So, one goes into the protected archives of Italy not to find passable arguments but instead for the occasional sublime poems in the style of Michelangelo, the kind of thing that can cast a unique light into the depths of the human heart. For even the most baroque and hideous government has one good thing about it, that it can tell us something about the human heart—something we would search for in vain in young America, where all passions are subordinated to the cult of the dollar.
Among the archives, the ones I was most anxious to get entrée to, where I presented myself as a civilized and inoffensive scholar who was interested only in Greek manuscripts—these were the archives of the bishops’ tribunals, the authority of which has weakened only in our own time, following the shooting star that was Napoleon.
ITALIAN CHRONICLES
1885
VANINA VANINI
OR, PARTICULARS CONCERNING THE MOST RECENT GATHERING OF A CELL OF THE CARBONARI—DISCOVERED IN THE PAPAL STATES
It was an evening in the spring of 182*. All Rome was talking about it: Monsieur the Duke of B***, that famous banker, was giving a ball in his new palazzo on the piazza di Venezia. All the most magnificent items that the arts of Italy and the luxuries of Paris and London could provide were brought together here to embellish this palazzo. The crowd was enormous. The blond, cool beauties of noble England had intrigued for the honor of attending this ball; they streamed in by the dozen. The loveliest women of Rome competed with them for the title of greatest beauty. One young woman, whose striking eyes and ebony hair proclaimed her to be Roman, entered, escorted by her father; all eyes were on her. Her every movement seemed to radiate an extraordinary hauteur.
Foreigners could be seen marveling at the magnificence of the ball. “None of the fetes given by the kings of Europe can compare with this,” they said to each other.
But those kings do not possess a palazzo of Italian architecture, and they are always obliged to invite the great ladies of the court; Monsieur the Duke of B***, on the other hand, invited only pretty ones. And on this particular evening, he had been especially lucky with his invitations; the men in attendance seemed stunned. Among so many remarkable women, the question to decide was which one was the most beautiful; the decision remained uncertain for a time; but at last the princess Vanina Vanini—the same young girl with the fiery eyes and the ebony hair—was proclaimed queen of the ball. Soon, both foreigners and young Romans abandoned the rooms they had been in and crowded into the one where she was.
Her father, Prince Asdrubal Vanini, had wanted her to dance first with two or three German princes. After that, she accepted the invitations of some especially handsome, especially noble Englishmen; but their stiff, starched air bored her. She appeared to take more pleasure in tormenting young Livio Savelli, who appeared to be desperately in love with her. This was the most splendid youth in Rome, and he was moreover a prince; but if you had handed him a novel, he would have tossed the book aside after twenty pages, saying that it gave him a headache. This was a serious disadvantage in the eyes of Vanina.
Toward midnight, a rumor spread throughout the ball, creating a powerful effect. A young carbonaro, imprisoned at Castel Sant’An-gelo, had just this night escaped with the aid of a disguise, and then, out of an excess of romantic audacity, encountering the very last set of prison guards, he attacked them with a dagger; but he had been wounded as well, and now the guards were pursuing him through the streets, tracking him by the bloodstains, and they were expected to have him soon.
As this anecdote was being related, Don Livio Savelli, dazzled by the graces and the successes of Vanina, with whom he had just danced, and mad with love for her, conducted her back to her place, saying to her:
“But for pity’s sake, tell me: just what kind of man would please you?”
“That young carbonaro who just escaped,” Vanina replied; “at least he has done something more than just give himself the trouble of being born.”
Prince Asdrubal came up to his daughter. He was a very rich man who, for twenty years, had failed to keep accounts with his steward; the latter lends the prince back his own money and charges him high interest for it. If you were to meet the prince in the street, you would take him for an old actor; you wouldn’t notice that his hands are adorned with five or six rings, each with a huge diamond. His two sons became Jesuits, and they both died mad. He has forgotten them; but he is annoyed that his only daughter, Vanina, doesn’t want to get married. She is already nineteen and has refused some of the most stunning offers. And her reason? The same one Sulla used for abdicating: her contempt for Romans.1
The day after the ball, Vanina noticed that her father, the most negligent of men, one who never in his whole life bothered with keys, had very carefully locked the doorway to a little stairway leading to an apartment situated on the third floor of the palazzo. The apartment had windows looking out onto a terrace with orange trees. Vanina went off to pay some calls in Rome; when she returned, the main gate to the palazzo was blocked because of the preparations for an illumination,2 so her carriage took her around to the courtyard in back. Vanina raised her eyes and was surprised to see that the windows her father had closed with such care were now open. She slipped away from her waiting woman and ascended to the upper floors
of the palazzo, where, by dint of searching, she found a little grilled window that looked out onto the terrace with the orange trees. The open window she had seen was now just a few paces away from her. Clearly, the room was inhabited; but by whom? The next day, Vanina succeeded in getting hold of the key to a little door that opened up onto the orange-tree terrace.
On tiptoes, she approached the still-open window, which was partly screened by a louvered shutter. At the back of the room was a bed, and there was someone on it. Her first instinct was to withdraw, but then she saw a woman’s dress that had been thrown across a chair. Peering more closely at the person on the bed, she could see that she was blond, and evidently quite young. She had no doubt that it was a woman. The dress hanging from the chair was bloody; there was blood also on a pair of women’s slippers on the table. The unknown made a movement; Vanina could see that she was wounded. Her chest was covered by a bloody bandage; the bandage was tied on only with ribbons; this was not the work of any surgeon. Vanina remembered that every day at four o’clock, her father locked himself in his apartment and then went in the direction of the unknown; he would soon come down and then get into his carriage and go to the countess Vittelleschi. As soon as he had gone, Vanina went up to the little terrace, from which she could observe the unknown. Her feelings were greatly moved for the unfortunate young woman; she strove to know what her story could be. The bloody dress hanging from the chair seemed to have been pierced by dagger thrusts. Vanina could count the tears in the dress. One day, she could see the unknown more distinctly: her eyes were blue and were fixed heavenward; she seemed to be in prayer. Soon, her lovely eyes filled with tears; the young princess had all she could do to keep herself from speaking to her. The next day, Vanina dared to hide herself on the little terrace before her father came. She saw Don Asdrubal enter the unknown’s room; he was carrying a little basket with provisions. The prince seemed disturbed, and he said little. He spoke so quietly that, even though the window was open, Vanina could not make out the words. He soon took his leave.
