Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  And in our time, one can still follow, on the way to those enormous blocks, all that remains of the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, serving now as a sort of garden wall for the Capuchin monks—we can still follow the “triumphal road” traveled by the first Roman kings. It is paved with stones cut very regularly; and long fragments of the road can be found in the midst of the forest of La Faggiola.

  On the edges of the extinct crater, now filled with limpid water, is the lovely Lake Albano, about five or six miles in circumference and deeply embedded in lava rock; here once stood the city of Alba, the mother of Rome, destroyed on political grounds by those first Roman kings. But its ruins still exist. Several centuries later, a quarter of a league from Alba on the side of the mountain facing the sea, arose Albano, the modern town; but it is separated from the lake by a curtain of rocks hiding the lake from the town and the town from the lake. If one looks up at Albano from the plain, its white buildings detach themselves from the deep, dark green of that forest so dear to the brigands and so famous for that reason; it crowns the volcanic mountain on all sides.

  Albano, which counts today some five or six thousand inhabitants, had fewer than three thousand in 1540 when the powerful Campireali family flourished, a family of the highest rank of nobility and one whose misfortunes we are about to recount.

  I translate the story from two voluminous manuscripts, one Roman and the other Florentine.8 Though at my own grave peril, I will dare to reproduce their style, which is much like that of our old legends. The pointed, measured style of the present day, it seems to me, would fit poorly with the actions narrated and, above all, with the reflections of the authors. They both wrote around the year 1598. I ask the reader’s indulgence both for them and for me.

  II

  “After having written so many tragic stories,” says the author of the Florentine manuscript, “I shall conclude with the one that gives me the most pain to tell. I am going to speak of that famous abbess of the Convent of the Visitation at Castro, Elena de Campireali, whose trial and death caused so much talk in the higher levels of society in Rome and all Italy. Around 1555, the brigands ruled the countryside surrounding Rome, and the magistrates were all owned by the powerful families. In the year 1572, which was the year of the trial, Gregory XIII, Buoncompagni, ascended the throne of Saint Peter. This holy pope combined within himself all the apostolic virtues; but his civil government was open to reproach for a certain weakness: he could neither select honest judges nor crack down on the brigands; he was overwhelmed by crime, and he was unable to punish it. He felt that in passing a death sentence he was taking upon himself a terrible responsibility. The result of seeing things in that way was to people the roads leading in and out of the Eternal City with a seemingly infinite number of brigands. Anyone wishing to travel needed to make friends with the brigands. The forest of La Faggiola, on the road to Naples through Albano, had for a long time been the general headquarters of a government at enmity with that of His Holiness, and often Rome had been obliged to agree to a treaty, as if between two countries, with Marco Sciarra, one of the kings of the forest. The great power of the brigands lay in the fact that they were loved by the peasants their neighbors.

  “This pretty town of Albano, situated so close to the general headquarters of the brigands, had seen the birth, in 1542, of Elena de Campireali. Her father was considered the wealthiest patrician of the region, and, as such, he had married Vittoria Carafa, who possessed great estates in the kingdom of Naples. I could cite a number of elderly people still alive today who knew Vittoria Carafa and her daughter very well. Vittoria was a model of prudence and intelligence; but despite all her genius, she could not prevent the ruin of her family. It is a strange thing, but the horrible misfortunes that are the sad subject of my tale cannot, in my view, be blamed on or attributed to any of the actors whom I shall be introducing to the reader: I see tragic people, but I cannot find any guilty ones. Young Elena’s extreme beauty and her very tender soul were her two greatest perils, and they are the excuse of Giulio Branciforte, her lover, in the same way that the complete absence of intelligence on the part of Monsignor Cittadini, the bishop of Castro, can to a certain extent excuse him. He had owed his ecclesiastical advancement to the integrity of his conduct, and even more to his very dignified, noble demeanor and to his looks, the most perfectly handsome man one could hope to meet. I find it written that no one could look upon him without loving him.

  ‘As I do not want to flatter anyone, I shall not hide the fact that a holy monk from the Monastery of Monte Cavi, who was often found in his cell levitating several feet above the floor, like Saint Paul, in an extraordinary state that could be possible only through divine grace,9 had predicted to Signor de Campireali that his family would become extinct with him and that he would have only two children, both of whom would perish through violence. It was because of this prediction that he could find no one in the region who would marry him, and so he went off to Naples, where he was lucky enough to come into great fortune and to find a woman capable, through her brilliant mind, of changing his unhappy fate, if such a thing had been possible. This Signor Campireali had the reputation of being a good man, and he gave much to charity, but he had no energy, which caused him gradually to retreat from his life in Rome and to end up spending practically the entire year in his palazzo at Albano. He devoted himself to cultivating his lands, situated in that rich plain between the town and the sea. Following his wife’s counsel, he arranged the finest education possible for his son Fabio, a young man very proud of his birth, and for his daughter Elena, who was of a miraculous beauty, as can be seen by her portrait, which is in the Farnese collection.10 When I began to write her story, I went to the Farnese Palace to reflect upon the mortal envelope that heaven had given this woman whose fate was the subject of so much discussion in her day and still occupies a place in the memory of men. The shape of the face is an elongated oval, the forehead large, the hair a dark blond. Her expression is somewhat gay; she has large eyes with a profound expression; her chestnut eyebrows form a perfectly drawn arc. The lips are quite thin, and one might say that her mouth looks as if it had been drawn by the famous painter Correggio. Considered in relation to the other portraits around it in the Farnese Gallery, she has the air of a queen. It is very rare to see a gay air like hers combined with true majesty.

  “After having spent eight whole years as a boarder in the Convent of the Visitation in the town of Castro, now destroyed, where the majority of Roman princes sent their daughters, Elena returned to her native region, but she did not leave the convent without first making an offering of a magnificent chalice for the great altar of the church. Soon after her return, her father brought from Rome the celebrated poet Cechino, then a very old man; he ornamented Elena’s mind with the finest verses of the divine Virgil, along with those of his famous disciples Petrarch, Aristo, and Dante.”

  At this point, the translator is obliged to omit a long dissertation on the hierarchy of fame accorded to the various great poets in the sixteenth century. It would appear that Elena knew Latin. The verse that she was made to learn spoke always of love, a love that would seem completely ridiculous to us if we were to come across it in 1839; that is, it treated of passionate love, love that was nourished by great sacrifices, love that can subsist only in an atmosphere of mystery, and love that is always found accompanying the most horrible misfortunes.

  And such was the love that Giulio Branciforte was to inspire in the barely seventeen-year-old Elena. He was one of her neighbors, and very poor; he lived in a ramshackle house built on the mountainside a quarter of a league from the town, amid the ruins of Alba, on the edge of that hundred-and-fifty-foot precipice, covered in greenery, that surrounds the lake. This house, bordering on the somber, deep shadows of the forest of La Faggiola, has since been demolished, during the time they were building the Monastery of Palazzola. The young man possessed nothing but his energy and his readiness, along with a genuine, easygoing approach to life that allowed
him to endure his bad fortune. The best thing one can say about him is that his face was expressive without being handsome. But he was known to have fought bravely under the command of Prince Colonna and among his bravi in two or three very dangerous enterprises. Despite his poverty, despite his lack of beauty, he nonetheless possessed the heart that all the girls in Albano most wanted to conquer. Received wherever he went, Giulio Branciforte had had only passing love affairs until the day that Elena returned from the convent at Castro. “When, a little after this, the great poet Cechino came from Rome to the Campireali palazzo to teach belles lettres to this girl, Giulio, who knew him, wrote him some Latin verses on the happiness that his old age must be enjoying to find such beautiful eyes always looking into his, and to see the happiness that such a pure soul as hers must feel upon receiving his praise for her thoughts. The jealousy and the anger that all the other girls felt upon seeing Giulio’s attentions wander upon the return of Elena soon rendered it impossible to hide his growing passion, and I must admit that this love between a young man of twenty-two and a girl of seventeen was conducted from the first in a manner that prudence could not approve. Three months had not passed when Signor de Campireali observed Giulio Branciforte passing far too often under the windows of his palazzo (which can still be seen halfway up the road that leads to the lake).”

  Frank speaking and harshness, qualities that naturally accompany the liberty that republics tolerate, along with passions just as frank and not yet repressed by the ways of monarchy—these can be observed in the very first steps taken by Signor de Campireali. The very day he was startled to see these frequent appearances by young Branciforte, he addressed him in these terms:

  “How dare you continue to pass back and forth by my house, casting your impertinent eyes upon the windows of my daughter, you who do not own even the clothes on your back? If I weren’t afraid that my generosity would be misinterpreted by my neighbors, I’d give you three golden sequins to go to Rome and buy yourself a jacket that actually fits you. At least then my view, and my daughter’s, would not be continually offended by the sight of your rags.”

  Elena’s father no doubt exaggerated: the clothes of young Branciforte were not rags at all but were made of the simplest materials; but no matter how carefully and how often they were brushed and cleaned, it must be admitted that their long usage was clear to all. Giulio’s feelings were so hurt by the reproaches of Signor de Campireali that he ceased appearing near the house in the daytime.

  As we have said, the two arches, the ruins of an ancient aqueduct serving as the principal walls of the house built by Branciforte’s father, stood only some five or six hundred paces from Albano. In order to descend from this elevated location to the modern town, Giulio was obliged to pass in front of the Campireali palazzo; Elena soon noticed the absence of the singular young man who, at least as her friends claimed, had abandoned all other friendships in order to consecrate himself entirely to the happiness he seemed to find in gazing upon her.

  One summer night around midnight, Elena’s window was open, and the young girl was breathing in the sea air on the breeze that made itself felt all up the hillside of Albano, even though the plain divides town from sea for three leagues. The night was dark, the silence profound; you could hear a leaf fall. Elena, leaning on her windowsill, was perhaps thinking of Giulio when she saw something like the silent wing of a night bird brush softly against her window. She drew back, frightened. The idea never entered her head that this object could be held up by some person below; the second floor of the palazzo, where this window was located, stood some fifty feet up. Suddenly, she was able to recognize that this strange object was a kind of bouquet that, in the deep silence, was passing and repassing in front of her window; her heart began to beat violently. The bouquet appeared to be fixed to the end of two or three of those canne, which are a species of thick reed, somewhat similar to bamboo, which grow in the Roman countryside, sending up stalks of twenty to thirty feet. The flimsiness of the canne, along with the strength of the breeze, made it so that Giulio had some difficulty in keeping his bouquet exactly in front of the window where he supposed Elena would be, and moreover the night was so dark that from the street no one could have seen anything up so high. Motionless behind her window, Elena was deeply troubled. To take the bouquet: would that not be a kind of avowal? She did not experience any of the feelings that an adventure like this would have aroused in the heart of a young society girl in our time, all prepared for life by a fine education. Because her father and her brother Fabio were in the house, her first thought was that the slightest noise would result in a harquebus shot being directed at Giulio; she felt pity, thinking of the danger the poor young man was putting himself in. Her second thought was that, despite how little she really knew him, he was the one being in the world she loved most after her family. Finally, after a few minutes of hesitation, she reached out and took the bouquet, and as she touched the flowers in the profound darkness, she felt that a note had been attached to the stem of one of them; she rushed out to the great staircase to read the note in the light of the lamp that shone beneath the image of the Madonna. “Reckless!” she exclaimed to herself upon reading the first lines, which made her blush with happiness; “if they see me, I am lost, and my family will persecute this young man forever.” She returned to her bedroom and lit her lamp. This moment was a delicious one for Giulio, who, embarrassed by his scheme and seeking to hide himself even further within the profound darkness, had leaned up against the enormous trunk of a great green oak, one of those which take on bizarre shapes and which can be seen yet today across from the Campireali palazzo.

  In his letter, Giulio recounted with the most perfect simplicity the humiliating reprimand Elena’s father had addressed to him. “I am poor, it is true,” he continued,

  and you would have trouble imagining the depth of my poverty. All I own is my house, which you may have seen under the ruins of the old aqueduct of Alba; around the house is my garden, which I tend myself, and what I grow there nourishes me. I also own a vineyard, which is rented for thirty ecus per year. To tell the truth, I do not know why I love you; I certainly cannot propose that you come and share my poverty. But what I do know is that if you do not love me, my life is worthless to me; it is useless to say that I would give it up a thousand times over for you. But before your return from the convent, this life was not an unfortunate one; on the contrary, it was full of the most wonderful dreams. So I can say that the sight of my happiness has made me miserable. Certainly, there is no person in the world other than your father who could have talked to me like that; my dagger would have done prompt justice. With my courage and with my weapons, I regarded myself as the equal of anyone; I lacked nothing. But now all that has changed: I know what fear is. I am writing too much; perhaps you despise me. But if, on the contrary, you feel some pity for me despite the poor clothes I wear, you will find that every midnight when the bell sounds from the Capuchin monastery, I will be found at the top of the hill under the great oak, across from that window that I gaze upon always because I believe it is that of your room. If you do not despise me as your father does, throw me down one of the flowers from this bouquet, but take care that it doesn’t get caught on one of the eaves or on one of the balconies of your palazzo.

  This letter was read over many times; bit by bit, Elena’s eyes were filled with tears; she gazed tenderly upon that magnificent bouquet whose flowers had been bound together with a strong silken thread. She tried to pull out a flower, but she could not get it out; and then she was seized with remorse. Young Roman girls believe that to pluck out a flower, mutilating in some way a bouquet given in love, is to expose the lover to death. She feared that Giulio would be growing impatient, and she rushed to the window; but when she got there, she feared that she could be seen all too well because of the lamp she had lit in her bedroom. Elena did not know what kind of sign she could permit herself to give him; it seemed to her that any sign at all would say too much.

&n
bsp; Ashamed, she rushed back into her bedroom. Then some time passed; suddenly she had an idea that filled her with indescribable anxiety: Giulio was going to think that she, like her father, despised him for his poverty! She saw a little piece of precious marble on her table; she knotted it up in a handkerchief and threw the handkerchief toward the foot of the oak across from her window. Then she made a gesture that he should go away; she heard Giulio obey her, because he now no longer took the trouble to walk softly. When he had reached the summit of the circle of rocks that separate the lake from the last houses of Albano, she could hear him singing words of love; she made him a sign of farewell, this time less timidly, and then she sat down to reread his letter.

  The next day, and the days after that, there were similar letters and similar interchanges; but because there are no secrets in an Italian village, and because Elena was from what was by far the richest family in the region, Signor de Campireali was soon informed that every night at midnight a light could be seen in his daughter’s room and, just as extraordinary, the window was open, and Elena acted as if she had no fear at all of zanzare (an extremely bothersome kind of gnat that ruins a great many otherwise fine soirees in Rome. And here I would beg the indulgence of the reader. When one wishes to understand the customs of foreign countries, one must be tolerant of ideas that seem quite crazy, quite different from our own). Signor de Campireali prepared his harquebus and that of his son. That evening, when eleven o’clock struck, he alerted Fabio, and the two of them slipped out, making as little sound as possible, onto a great stone balcony that stood on the first floor of the palazzo, directly beneath Elena’s window. The massive pillars of the balustrade protected them up to chest level from any harquebus fire that might be aimed at them from outside. Midnight sounded; father and son could hear very clearly a light sound coming from beneath the trees that bordered the road across from their palazzo, but surprising them greatly, there was no light coming from Elena’s window. This girl, so simple up to now, so childlike in her vivacity, had changed her character with the onset of love. She knew that the slightest imprudence could threaten the life of her beloved; if some lord of the rank of her father killed a poor man like Giulio Branciforte, he would have to disappear for only three months, which he could spend in Naples; during that time, his friends in Rome would arrange matters, and everything would be paid for with the offering of a silver lamp costing a few hundred ecus for the altar of whatever Madonna was in fashion at the moment. That morning, at luncheon, Elena had divined from her father’s expression that he was barely concealing a great rage, and from the way he looked at her when he thought he was not being observed, she divined that she had much to do with this rage. She quickly went off and sprinkled a thin layer of dust on the wooden stocks of the five superb harquebuses that her father kept on a rack near his bed. She also sprinkled a light layer of dust on his daggers and his swords. All day long, she put on a front of wild good spirits, rushing about the house from top to bottom; she constantly was at one of the windows, determined to make a negative signal to Giulio if she had the good luck to catch sight of him. But she never saw him: the poor boy had been so profoundly humiliated by the rich Campireali’s insults that he never appeared in Albano during the daytime; only duty brought him there on Sunday for the parish Mass. Elena’s mother, who adored her and could refuse her nothing, accompanied her out of doors three times that day, but it was all in vain; Elena never saw Giulio. She was in despair. And how much worse did she feel that evening when she returned to examine her father’s weapons and saw that two of the guns had been loaded and nearly all the daggers and swords had been brought out. Her only distraction from mortal anxiety was the need to appear as if she suspected nothing. Upon retiring, at ten o’clock,