Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  The duchess swept out of the room in a fury, and in fact Capecce had broken the laws of prudence: he should have let it be seen and not said it. He stood there flustered, greatly fearing that the duchess would tell her husband.

  But what followed was very different from what he had feared. In the solitude of that village, the proud Duchess of Palliano could not keep herself from confiding what he had had the audacity to say to her to her favorite lady-in-waiting, Diane Brancaccio. She was a woman of thirty, torn by violent passions. She had red hair (a detail to which the historian frequently returns, as if this one circumstance explained all Diane Brancaccio’s follies). She was furiously in love with Domitien Fornari, a gentleman attached to the Marquis of Montebello. She wanted him for her husband; but would the marquis and his wife, with whom she had blood ties, ever consent to seeing her wedded to a man currently in their service? This was an insurmountable obstacle, or at least apparently so.

  There was only one possibility: she would have to obtain some help from the Duke of Palliano, the marquis’s elder brother, and Diane was not without hope that this could happen. The duke treated her more like a relative than like a domestic. He was a man with a certain degree of simplicity of heart, with some real goodness, and he cared far less than his brothers did about questions of labeling and rank. Although the duke profited, as any young man would, from the advantages his high position gave him, and was hardly faithful to his wife, he loved her tenderly and, if appearances are any guide, could not refuse her any grace if she only asked him persistently enough.

  The avowal that Capecce had dared to make to the duchess was an unexpected boon to the somber Diane. Her mistress up to that point had always been hopelessly sensible; if now she were to experience some twinge of passion, if now she were to commit some kind of slip, she would need Diane at her side every minute, and the latter could indulge unbridled hopes of a woman whose secrets she knew.

  Thus, far from reminding the duchess of the duty she owed to herself, and far from warning her of the frightening dangers to which she would expose herself among a court as keen-eyed as this one, Diane instead, impelled by her own fiery passion, spoke to her mistress about Marcel Capecce the way she spoke to herself about Domitien Fornari. During their long conversations in the solitude of exile, she found means every day of reminding the duchess of the charms and the beauty of that poor Marcel, who seemed so sorrowful; he belonged, just like the duchess, to one of the best families in Naples, his manners were as noble as his blood, and all he lacked right now was the kind of wealth (and the caprices of Fortune could provide him with that at any moment) that would make him the equal of the woman he dared to love.

  Diane perceived with delight that the first effect of talking like this was that the duchess redoubled her trust in her.

  Nor did she fail to keep Marcel Capecce informed of what was happening. During the sweltering summer days, the duchess often went for walks in the woods around Gallese. At sunset, she would go await the ocean breezes on the charming hills that rise up in the midst of the woods, from the summits of which the sea can be glimpsed two leagues distant.

  Without any severe violation of the laws of etiquette, Marcel could find himself within these woods, too: they say that he hid himself in there taking care to remain hidden from the duchess unless and until she had been well prepared by Diane Brancaccio. The latter would give Marcel a signal.

  Diane, seeing her mistress on the point of listening to the fatal passion she had caused to be born in her heart, gave in wholly to the violent love that Domitien Fornari had inspired in her. Now she could be assured of being able to marry him. But Domitien was a prudent young man with a cold, reserved character; the fiery transports of his mistress, far from inspiring him, repelled him. Diane Brancaccio was a close relative of the Carafa family; he was sure to be stabbed to death at the slightest report that reached the ears of the terrible Cardinal Carafa, who, though younger than the duke, was in fact the veritable head of the family.

  The duchess had surrendered to Capecce’s passion for some time when, one fine day, Domitien Fornari was nowhere to be found in the village where the Marquis of Montebello was exiled. He had disappeared: later, it came out that he had taken ship at the port of Nettuno; no doubt he had changed his name, and after that, no one heard any news of him.

  Who could paint the despair of Diane? After having had the goodness to listen to her endless laments about fate, one day the duchess gave her to understand that she considered the topic to have been exhausted. Diane saw herself spurned by her lover: her heart was being torn apart by the cruelest forces; and when the duchess showed herself to be bored by her laments, she drew a strange conclusion. She persuaded herself that it was the duchess who had arranged for Domitien Fornari to leave her forever and, moreover, that it had been she who had furnished him with the means for traveling. This mad idea was founded solely on a few reproaches that the duchess had once addressed to her. Suspicion quickly evolved into vengeance. She requested an audience with the duke and told him everything that had passed between his wife and Marcel. The duke refused to believe it.

  “Consider,” he said to her, “that for fifteen years I have not had a thing to reproach the duchess with; she has resisted all the seductions of the court and all the attractions that her brilliant position opened up to her in Rome; the most attractive princes, including the Duke of Guise himself, found they were wasting their time with her, and you expect me to believe she gave in to a mere cavalier?”

  Bad luck would have it that the duke was miserably bored with Soriano, the village to which he had been sent, and given that it was a mere two leagues distant from the place where his wife lived, Diane was able to obtain a number of audiences without the duchess’s becoming aware. Diane had a striking intelligence, and passion had rendered her eloquent. She provided the duke with a host of details; vengeance had become her sole pleasure in life. She told the duke repeatedly that almost every night, Capecce came into the duchess’s bedchamber about eleven o’clock and did not leave until two or three in the morning. All this made so little impression on the duke that he did not even take the trouble to journey the two leagues to Gallese at midnight and appear unannounced in his wife’s bedchamber.

  But one evening, when he happened to be at Gallese, the sun had just set, though it was still light, and Diane rushed, completely disheveled, into the salon where the duke was. All the others withdrew, and she told him that Marcel Capecce had just entered the duchess’s bedchamber. The duke, no doubt in a foul mood at the moment, took his dagger and rushed to his wife’s room, which he entered by a secret door. He found Marcel Capecce there. In fact, the two lovers changed color on seeing him enter; but other than that, there was nothing untoward in the positions the two were found in. The duchess was in her bed, making a note of a small expense she had recently incurred; a waiting woman was also in the room; Marcel was standing about three paces away from the bed.

  The enraged duke gripped Marcel by the throat and dragged him into the next room, where he ordered him to throw the daggers he was carrying onto the ground. After this, the duke called for his guards, and they conducted Marcel immediately to the prison at Soriano.

  The duchess was left to stay in her palazzo, but she was closely guarded.

  The duke was really not a cruel man; it appeared that he wanted to cover up the ignominy of the thing so as not to have to take the extreme measures that honor would demand of him. He wanted to have it believed that Marcel was held in prison for some completely different reason, and, using as a pretext some enormous toads that Marcel had recently purchased, he had it spread about that the young man had intended to poison him. But the true crime was only too well known, and the cardinal his brother asked him when he was going to wash the family honor clean in the blood of the guilty ones.

  The duke enlisted the Count d’Aliffe, his wife’s brother, and Antoine Torando, a friend of the house. The three of them, forming a kind of tribunal, sat in judgment on Ma
rcel Capecce, accused of adultery with the duchess.

  The instability of all things human would have it that Pope Pius IV, who succeeded Paul IV, was of the Spanish faction. There was nothing he would refuse to King Philip II, who requested the deaths of the cardinal and of the Duke of Palliano. The two brothers were indicted before Rome’s tribunal, and the minutes of the trial that ensued tell us all the circumstances relating to the death of Marcel Capecce.

  One of the numerous witnesses deposed put it this way:

  “We were at Soriano; the duke, my master, had a long conversation with the Count d’Aliffe That night, very late, we went down to a storeroom on the ground floor, where the duke had had the ropes prepared for the questioning of the guilty man. There, we found the duke, the Count d’Aliffe, Signor Antoine Torando, and me.

  “The first witness called was Captain Camille Grifone, an intimate friend and confidant of Capecce. The duke spoke to him thus:

  “‘Tell the truth, my friend. What do you know about what Marcel was doing in the duchess’s bedchamber?’

  “‘I don’t know anything; Marcel and I quarreled about three weeks ago.’

  “When he stubbornly refused to say anything more, my lord the duke called for some of his guards to come in. Grifone was tied up with the ropes by the podesta of Soriano. The guards pulled on the ropes, and by this means they raised Grifone about four fingers’ height off the ground. After the captain had hung there for a good quarter of an hour, he said:

  “‘Let me down; I’ll tell you what I know.’

  “When they lowered him, the guards retired and we remained alone with him.

  “‘It is true that I accompanied Marcel up to the bedchamber of the duchess many times, but I don’t know anything more, because I waited outside in a neighboring courtyard until one in the morning.’

  “Then they called the guards back in, and on the orders of the duke, they raised him up by the ropes again so that his feet did not touch the ground. Soon the captain cried out:

  “‘Let me down, and I’ll tell the truth. It is true,’ he continued, ‘that I knew for several months that Marcel was making love with the duchess, and I wanted to tell either Your Excellency or D. Léonard. The duchess sent every morning to ask about Marcel; she gave him little gifts, confitures prepared with great care and very expensive, among other things; and I have seen Marcel wearing thin gold chains of marvelous workmanship, which he could have had only from the duchess.’

  “After that deposition, the captain was taken back to prison. They brought in the duchess’s porter, who said that he knew nothing about it; they tied him up in the ropes, and he was raised up in the air. After half an hour, he said:

  “‘Let me down; I’ll tell you what I know.’

  “Once back on the ground, he pretended not to know anything; he was raised up again. After half an hour they lowered him; he explained that he had not been in service to this particular duchess for very long. Because it was possible that the man knew nothing, they took him back to prison. All these things took a long time, because the guards had to be sent out every time. They wanted the guards to think that it was a matter of an attempted poisoning with the venom extracted from some toads.

  “The night was already well advanced when the duke had Marcel Capecce brought in. When the guards had left and the door had been locked:

  “‘What have you been doing,’ he asked him, ‘in the duchess’s bedchamber that you would stay there until one, two, and sometimes even four o’clock in the morning?’

  “Marcel denied everything; they called the guards, and he was suspended in the ropes; the rope dislocated his arms; unable to endure the pain, he asked to be lowered; he was placed on a chair; but once he was there, his speech was muddled, and he clearly did not know what he was saying. The guards were called back, and he was suspended anew; after a long time, he asked to be lowered.

  “‘It is true,’ he said, ‘that I have been in the duchess’s apartment at those unwarranted hours; but I was courting Signora Diane Brancaccio, one of Her Excellency’s ladies, and I was engaged to marry her; she allowed me everything, except those things that would stain her honor.’

  “Marcel was returned to prison, where they confronted him with the captain and with Diane, who denied everything.

  “Then they brought Marcel back into the storeroom; when we were near to the door, before entering:

  “‘My Lord Duke,’ Marcel said, ‘Your Excellency will recall that you promised to save my life if I told the whole truth. It is not necessary to put me in the ropes again; I will tell you everything.’

  “Then he approached the duke and, with a trembling, barely articulated voice, he admitted that he had obtained the duchess’s favors. At these words, the duke leaped upon Marcel and bit into his cheek; then he drew his dagger, and I could see that he was about to stab the guilty man. At that moment, I said that it would be best if Marcel would write down in his own hand what he had just admitted, and that this document would serve as justification for His Excellency. We went into the storeroom, where they found writing materials; but the ropes had so injured Marcel’s arms and hands that he could write only these few words: ‘Yes, I have betrayed my Lord; yes, I have dishonored him!’

  “The duke read as Marcel was writing. The minute he was finished, he leaped upon him and stabbed him three times, taking his life. Diane Brancaccio was there, three steps away, more dead than alive and no doubt repenting a thousand times over what she had done.

  “‘Woman, unworthy of your birth in a noble family!’ cried the duke; ‘sole cause of my dishonor, you have schemed in the service of your own immoral pleasures, and I must now give you the recompense all your treasons have earned.’

  “And saying this, he pulled her toward him by the hair and slashed her throat with his knife. The miserable woman’s blood poured out copiously, and at last she fell down dead.

  “The duke had the two corpses thrown into a cesspit that was near the prison.”

  The young cardinal Alphonse Carafa, son of the Marquis of Montebello, was the only one of the family who remained with Paul IV; he thought it best to tell the pope of these events. The pope responded in these words:

  “And the duchess? What has been done with her?”

  In Rome, it was generally believed that these words must lead to the death of that unfortunate woman. But the duke was unable to make up his mind for this great sacrifice, whether because she was with child or because of the great tenderness he had once felt for her.

  Three months after the great virtuous act that the holy pope Paul IV had accomplished in cutting his family off from him, he fell ill, and after three months’ sickness, he died, on August 18, 1559.

  The cardinal wrote letter after letter to the Duke of Palliano, repeating incessantly that their honor demanded the death of the duchess. Seeing that their uncle was dead, and not knowing what the thoughts of the newly elected pope would be on the matter, he wanted to have everything finished during the brief interval.

  The duke, a simple man, decent and far less scrupulous than the cardinal regarding points of honor, could not bring himself to decide what to do about the terrible extremes that were now demanded of him. He reminded himself that he had been often unfaithful to the duchess, and without giving himself the slightest trouble to keep those infidelities secret, and that such infidelities may have moved a woman with as elevated a spirit as hers to seek revenge. Upon entering the conclave, and after having attended Mass and received Holy Communion, the cardinal wrote him again, saying he felt tortured by these continual postponements and that if the duke did not resolve to do what the honor of their house required, he declared that he would have nothing more to do with him and would never seek to be useful to him, neither during the conclave nor with the new pope. A reason having nothing to do with points of honor finally determined the duke. While the duchess was guarded, she nonetheless found a way, people said, to get word to Marc-Antoine Colonna—the duke’s mortal enemy, because Pall
iano had been Colonna’s before it was wrested away from him and given to the duke—she said that if Marc-Antoine could find a way to save her life and make her escape, she, on her part, would put him in possession of the fortress of Palliano, the commander of which was loyal to her.

  On the twenty-eighth of August 1559, the duke sent two companies of soldiers to Gallese. On the thirtieth, D. Léonard del Cardine, the duke’s relative, and D. Ferrant, the Count d’Aliffe, brother to the duchess, arrived at Gallese and entered into the duchess’s apartments in order to kill her. They told her she was to die, an announcement she heard without the slightest reaction. She wanted first to confess and to attend Holy Mass. Then, as these two lords approached, she observed that they did not seem to be quite in accord with each other. She asked if they had a written order from the duke, her husband, commanding her death.

  “Yes, Madame,” replied D. Léonard.

  The duchess asked to see it; D. Ferrant showed it to her.

  (I find the depositions of the monks who assisted in this terrible action in the report of the Duke of Palliano’s trial. These depositions are greatly superior to those of other witnesses, a fact that proves, at least as I see it, that the monks were free from fear when speaking before the court of justice, whereas all the other witnesses were more or less complicit with their master.)

  Brother Antoine de Pavie, a Capuchin, testified as follows:

  “After that Mass, at which she devoutly received Holy Communion, and while we sought to comfort her, the Count d’Aliffe, brother to my lady the duchess, entered the room with a rope and a hazel stick that was as thick as a thumb and half an ell in length. He covered the duchess’s eyes with a kerchief, and she in a very calm manner let it settle over her eyes so as not to see. The count put the rope around her neck; but when it did not settle smoothly, he removed it and stepped back a few paces; the duchess, hearing him walk away, removed the kerchief from her eyes and said: