by Stendhal
These women, and especially Camille, were struck with terror by tales of the strange things that people were reporting every day, things that went unpunished in the time of the pontificate of Gregory XIII, a time brimming with troubles and unheard-of plots of every kind. And they were also struck by a thought: when Marcel Accoramboni came to Rome, he was not in the habit of asking Félix to come to him, and such a request, at such an hour of the night, seemed to them to go beyond the bounds of decency.
Filled with all the fire of his youth, Félix would pay no heed to such fearful ideas; and when he learned that the letter had been de livered by Il Mancino, a man he greatly liked and to whom he had been of real service, nothing could hold him back, and he left the house.
He walked behind, as we noted, a single domestic carrying a lit torch; but the poor young man had barely walked up the first few steps of the Montecavallo palazzo when he was struck down by three harquebus bullets. The murderers, seeing him laid out on the ground, threw themselves upon him, stabbing him repeatedly with poniards until they were satisfied that he was dead. The fatal news was carried immediately to the mother and the wife of Félix, and soon to the ears of the cardinal his uncle.
The cardinal, without any change in his expression, without betraying the slightest emotion, got up at once and got himself dressed in his habit, and then commended to God both himself and that poor soul, so untimely taken away. He went straight to his niece’s and, with an admirable gravity and an air of profound calm, began to rein in the cries and feminine weeping that resounded throughout the house. His authority over those women was so effective that from that moment on, and even when the corpse was carried out of the house, nothing was seen and nothing heard that in any way went beyond what takes place within the most decorous families with the most expected deaths. As for Cardinal Montalto himself, no one could surprise in him even the most moderate signs of even the simplest grief: nothing was changed in the organization and the appearance of his outward life. Rome was soon convinced of this, after having closely observed, with her customary curiosity, every movement of the man so powerfully affronted.
By chance, it happened that the very next day after the violent death of Félix, the consistory of cardinals was convoked at the Vatican. Everyone in the town assumed that, for this first day at least, Cardinal Montalto would exempt himself from this official function. There, he would have to appear before the gaze of so many, and of so many curious onlookers! People would take careful note of the slightest signs of that natural weakness that it is always best to hide when a person of eminence is seeking a position of even greater eminence; after all, everyone would agree that it is not fitting that someone who aspires to elevate himself above all other men should reveal that he is a man like all the others.
But the people who would have thought this way would have been doubly wrong, for, in the first place, the cardinal, as was his custom, was among the first to arrive in the consistory, and then, it was impossible for even the sharpest eyes to discover in him any sign whatsoever of any human feeling. On the contrary, by the replies he made to those colleagues who, after so cruel an incident, wanted to express their words of consolation to him, he stunned everyone. The constancy and the apparent solidity of his heart and soul in the wake of such an atrocious misfortune soon became the talk of the whole town.
It is also true that within this same consistory certain men more practiced in the courtly arts attributed this apparent insensibility not to a lack of feeling but rather to an excess of dissimulation; and this way of seeing it was soon widely shared among the multitude of courtiers, on the theory that it was useful not to show oneself to be too wounded by an offense whose author might be powerful and who could perhaps at a later date bar one’s path to the supreme office.
Whatever was the cause of this apparent and complete lack of feeling, one certain fact was that it struck all of Rome and the court of Gregory XIII into a kind of stupor. But, to return to the consistory, when, the cardinals having all reunited, the pope himself came into the room, he soon turned his gaze onto Cardinal Montalto, and His Holiness could be seen to have tears in his eyes; as for the cardinal, his expression never varied from its usual impassiveness.
The general astonishment was redoubled when, during the same consistory, Cardinal Montalto went in his turn to genuflect before the throne of His Holiness, to give him a report on the tasks with which he had been charged. The pope, after letting him begin, could not help but let his own weeping be heard. When His Holiness was again able to speak, he tried to console the cardinal by promising him that so vile a murder would result in swift and severe justice. But the cardinal, after having very humbly thanked His Holiness, begged him not to order any investigations into what had happened, protesting that, for his part, he forgave whoever had done this deed, whoever he was, with all his heart. And immediately after this request, expressed in very few words, the cardinal returned again to the details of the tasks with which he had been charged, as if nothing unusual had taken place.
The eyes of all the cardinals present at the consistory were fixed on the pope and on Montalto; and although it is a difficult thing to deceive the practiced eye of a courtier, no one would have said that Cardinal Montalto’s expression had betrayed the slightest emotion upon seeing, directly in front of him, the tears of His Holiness—who was, to speak truly, quite beside himself. This startling impassiveness of Cardinal Montalto underwent no change during his entire audience with His Holiness. The pope himself was struck by it, and when the consistory had ended, he could not help but say to Cardinal San Sisto, his favorite nephew:
“Veramente, costui è ungran frate!” (No doubt about it, this man is a proud monk!)5
The behavior of Cardinal Montalto was in no way different during the following days. Thus, because it was customary, he received condolence visits from cardinals, prelates, and Roman princes, and with each of them, no matter what kind of relationship he had with them, he let slip not a single word of sorrow or lamentation. With each one, after a short reflection on the instability of all human things, confirmed and fortified by phrases and texts drawn from the scriptures or the church fathers, he quickly changed the direction of the conversation and began to speak of news from the city or the particular affairs of the individual with whom he found himself, precisely as if it were he who was doing the consoling.
Rome was especially curious to hear what passed during the visit paid to him by Prince Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, to whom rumor attributed the death of Félix Peretti. The vulgar thought that Cardinal Montalto would not be able to remain in a personal conversation with the prince without showing some hint of his feelings.
At the moment when the prince came to the cardinal’s, the crowd outside in the street and around the door was enormous; there were many courtiers present in every room in the house, so great was the curiosity to see the faces of the two interlocutors. But not a one of them was able to see anything out of the ordinary. Cardinal Montalto conformed in every way to the expected proprieties; he even showed a remarkable expression of hilarity on his face, and his manner of addressing the prince was entirely affable.
A moment after the audience, upon getting back into his coach and finding himself alone with his intimates, Prince Paolo could not help but laugh and exclaim: “In fatto, è vero che costui è un gran frate!” (By heaven it is true, the man is a proud monk!). It was as if he wanted to confirm the report of the pope’s remark some days earlier.
Wise observers thought that the conduct of Cardinal Montalto in this incident smoothed out his path to the throne; for many people formed the opinion that, whether it was by nature or by his virtue, he either could not or would not do anyone any harm, even when he had had the greatest provocation to be angered.
Félix Peretti had left no written testament regarding his wife, and as a result, she was returned to the home of her parents. Cardinal Montalto ensured that when she left, she had all the clothes, jewels, and various gifts t
hat she had received while she had been his nephew’s wife.
On the third day after the death of Félix Peretti, Vittoria, accompanied by her mother, went to live in the palazzo of Prince Orsini. Some said that the women were brought to this decision out of fear for their own personal safety, the corte having threatened to charge them with “consent” to the homicide, or at least to prior knowledge of it.6 Others thought (and what followed seemed to confirm this idea) that the move was made to bring about a marriage, the prince having promised to marry Vittoria as soon as she no longer had a husband.
In any case, neither then nor later was it known who murdered Félix, though everyone had their various suspicions. Most people, though, attributed his death to Prince Orsini; everyone knew he had been in love with Vittoria, for there had been unequivocal signs of it, and the marriage that followed served as the great proof, for the woman was of such an inferior social position that only the tyranny of passion could have raised her up to the level of an equal’s rank for the purpose of marriage.7 The vulgar were not shaken from this view by a letter addressed to the governor of Rome, which had been widely distributed a few days after the murder. This letter was signed with the name of César Palantieri, a fiery-spirited young man who had been banished from the city.
In the letter, Palantieri said that it was not necessary for the illustrious signori to give themselves the trouble of looking elsewhere for the man responsible for the murder of Félix Peretti, because he himself had had him killed following certain differences of opinion that had arisen between them some time before.
Many thought that this assassination could not have happened without the consent of the Accoramboni family. Vittoria’s brothers were suspected of having been seduced into it by their ambitions to forge close ties with a prince so powerful and rich. Marcel especially was suspected, on the basis of the letter that had made the unlucky Félix leave his house. People even spoke ill of Vittoria herself, when she was seen consenting to go live in the Orsini palazzo, and so soon after the death of her husband. Gossip maintained that it was highly unlikely that two people would start using their short blades so soon if they had not already, for some time, been using weapons of a longer reach.8
The inquiry into the murder was led by Monsignor Portici, governor of Rome, as ordered by Gregory XIII. All that one finds there is that Dominique, nicknamed Il Mancino, having been arrested by the corte, confesses, without being put to the question (tormentato), in his second interrogation, dated February 24, 1582:
“That Vittoria’s mother was the cause of everything, and that she was seconded by the cameriera from Bologna, who took refuge immediately after the murder in the citadel of Bracciano (belonging to Prince Orsini, and a place the corte dared not enter), and that the underlings who executed the crime were Machione de Gubbio and Paolo Barca de Bracciano, lancie spezzate (soldiers) in the employ of a lord whose name, for reasons of his status, is not inserted here.”
To these “reasons of status” were added, I imagine, the entreaties of Cardinal Montalto, who asked repeatedly that the investigation stop here, and in fact there was now no more question of a trial. Il Mancino was released from prison with the precetto (order) to return immediately to his home region, under pain of death, and never to leave it without express permission. The man was released in 1583 on Saint Louis’s Day, and because that day was also the birthday of Cardinal Montalto, the circumstance confirmed me more and more in the belief that it was at his insistence that the affair was terminated in this way. Under a government as feeble as that of Gregory XIII, such a trial could have had the most disagreeable consequences, without any kind of compensatory advantages.
The actions of the corte were thus brought to a halt, but Pope Gregory XIII did not want to give his consent to the marriage of Prince Paolo Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, and the widow Accoramboni. His Holiness, after having sentenced the latter to a kind of imprisonment, gave a precetto to the prince and the widow stating that they were by no means to marry each other without express permission from himself or his successors.
Gregory XIII came to die at the beginning of 1585, and the specialists in law, consulted by Paolo Orsini, having concluded that in their view the precetto had been annulled by the death of him who had imposed it, the prince resolved to marry Vittoria before the election of a new pope. But the marriage could not be brought off as quickly as the prince wanted, in part because he wanted to have the consent of Vittoria’s brothers, and as it turned out, Octave Accoramboni, bishop of Fossombrone, would never give his; and in part because no one believed that the successor to Gregory XIII would be elected so quickly. The fact is that the wedding took place on the same day as the election of Cardinal Montalto, so involved in this affair, to the papacy, that is to say on April 24, 1585, which may have been mere chance or may have been because the prince wanted to show that he was no more afraid of the corte under this new pope than he had been under Gregory XIII.
This marriage was a profound affront to the soul of Sixtus V (for that was the name chosen by Cardinal Montalto); he had already cast aside his monklike ways of thinking, and his soul had mounted up, reaching the higher status to which God had just raised him.
The pope, however, showed no signs of anger; but when Prince Orsini was presented to him that same day, among the crowd of Roman lords, to kiss his foot, and with the secret intention of reading behind the features of the Holy Father just what he should expect or fear from this man hitherto so little known, he perceived that the time for pleasantries had passed. The new pope stared at the prince with a singular expression, not having responded to the compliment addressed to him by even a single word, and the prince made up his mind that he needed to determine immediately what the intentions of His Holiness were with regard to him.
Through the intervention of Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici (the brother of his first wife) and of the Catholic ambassador, he asked for and obtained from the pope an audience in his chamber. There, he addressed a carefully planned speech to His Holiness in which he, without mentioning anything that had happened in the past, rejoiced with him on the occasion of his new office and offered him, like a very faithful vassal and servant, all his possessions and all his power.
The pope9 listened with an extraordinary seriousness and in the end replied that no one desired more than he did that the life and acts of Paolo Giordano Orsini would be in the future worthy of the Orsini name and of a true Christian knight; and that as for what he had been in the past in his relations with the Holy See and with the person of the pope, no one but his own conscience could say; but that he, the prince, could be absolutely sure of one thing, that although he willingly forgave him for what he had done against Félix Peretti and against himself, Cardinal Félix Montalto, he would never forgive him for anything he might do against Pope Sixtus; and that, in consequence, he now tasked him with returning immediately to his house and expelling from it and from all his estates all the brigands (exiles) and evildoers to whom up to now he had been giving asylum.
Sixtus V had an exceptionally effective manner of speaking when he chose to use a certain tone; but when he was angered and threatening, people said his eyes seemed to shoot lightning. One thing certain is that Prince Paolo Orsini, having been accustomed all his life to striking fear into popes, was now led to think very seriously about his own situation by the way the pope had just spoken to him, a manner whose like he had not heard for thirteen years, so that as soon as he left the palazzo of His Holiness, he hurried to Cardinal de Medici to tell him what had just happened. Upon the cardinal’s counsel, he resolved to dismiss with no delay all the men fleeing arrest to whom he had given asylum in his palazzo and on his estates, and he began to think as quickly as he could of some honorable pretext he could use for immediately departing the lands under the power of so resolute a pope.
Now, it is important to know that Prince Paolo Orsini had become extremely fat; his legs themselves were thicker than the whole body of an ordinary man, and one of these enormou
s legs was afflicted with what is called lupa (“the wolf”), a term that comes from the fact that the limb must have a great deal of fresh meat applied to the diseased part. If this is not done, the violent disease, finding dead flesh insufficient for its nourishment, falls upon the surrounding living flesh and devours it.
The prince used this malady as a pretext for going to the celebrated baths at Albano, near Padua, a region under the rule of the Republic of Venice; he left with his new spouse around the middle of June. Albano was a safe haven for him, for the Orsini for a great many years had forged close ties with the Venetian republic through mutual services.
Once arrived in this secure region, the prince thought only of how to combine the pleasures of several different residences, and to this end he rented three magnificent palazzos: one in Venice, the Dandolo palazzo, in the Rue de la Zecca; the second at Padua, the palazzo Foscarini, on the magnificent plaza they call the Arena; and the third at Salo, on the delicious banks of Lake Garda. This last in earlier times had belonged to the Sforza Pallavicini family.
The Venetian signori (the government of the republic) were pleased to learn of the arrival of such a prince, and they quickly offered him a very noble condotta (that is, a considerable sum, paid annually, to be employed by the prince in raising a force of two or three thousand men over whom he would assume command). The prince nimbly got himself out of this entanglement; he responded to the senators by saying that, although he felt both a natural and a hereditary inclination to serve the Serene Republic with all his heart, nonetheless, finding himself presently attached to the Catholic Majesty, it did not seem appropriate for him to accept any other engagement. Such a resolute response cooled the ardor of the senators. At first they had planned to give him, upon his arrival in Venice, a very honorable reception in the name of the entire people; now, upon his reply, they determined to let him arrive in the city like any other private person.
