Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  she locked the door of her bedroom that opened onto her mother’s antechamber, and then she planted herself at the window, on the floor, in such a way that no one from below could see her. The reader can judge the anxiety with which she heard the hours sounding; it was no longer a question of reproaching herself for the rapidity with which she had become attached to Giulio, which might make her less worthy of love in his eyes. That day advanced the affairs of the young man more than six months of constancy and protestations would have. “Why should I lie?” Elena thought to herself. “Do I not love him with all my soul?”

  At eleven-thirty, she could see her father and brother perfectly well as they placed themselves in their ambush behind the great stone balcony beneath her window. Two minutes after the Capuchin convent sounded midnight, she heard the footsteps of her lover, also perfectly well, as they came to a halt beneath the great oak; she noted with joy that her father and brother seemed to have heard nothing: such slight sounds can be heard only through the anxiety of love.

  Now, she said to herself, they are going to kill me, but at all costs they must not get hold of tonight’s letter; they would persecute poor Giulio forever. She made the sign of the cross, and then, holding on to the ironwork of her balcony with one hand, she leaned outside as far as she possibly could toward the street. Only a few seconds passed before the bouquet, attached as always to the long canne, flapped against her arm. She seized hold of the bouquet; but, in pulling it vigorously from the canne to which it had been fixed, she made that canne flap against the stone balcony. Immediately two harquebus shots sounded out, followed by perfect silence. Her brother Fabio, not knowing in the darkness whether what flapped against the balcony might be a rope to help Giulio descend from his sister’s room, had fired up at her balcony; the next day, she found the mark the bullet had made when it flattened against the ironwork. Signor de Campireali had fired toward the street, because Giulio had made some sound in pulling back the canne as it fell. Giulio, for his part, hearing the noise above his head, had divined what was about to follow and quickly hid himself beneath the balcony’s overhang.

  Fabio quickly reloaded his harquebus and, regardless of what his father might have been saying to him, ran off into the house’s garden, silently opening the little door that opened onto a side street, and then came around, on tiptoe, to see who the people were who were walking below the balcony of the palazzo. At that moment Giulio, who was not alone that evening, found himself twenty paces away and flattened himself against a tree trunk. Elena, bent forward over her balcony and trembling for her lover, suddenly began a conversation with her brother at the top of her voice; she called to him down in the street and asked if he had killed the thieves.

  “Don’t think I’m falling for your criminal tricks!” he cried from the street that he was searching carefully; “but get your tears ready, because I am going to kill the insolent dog who dares to attack your window.” He had barely finished when Elena heard her mother beating on the door to her room.

  Elena hastened to open it, saying she could not imagine how it had come to be locked.

  “No acting with me, my angel,” said her mother; “your father is furious and may kill you; come and get into my bed next to me; and if you have a letter, give it to me, and I’ll hide it for you.”

  Elena said, “Here is the bouquet; the letter is hidden among the flowers.” The mother and daughter had scarcely got into the bed when Signor de Campireali came into his wife’s room; he was coming from her oratory, where he had overturned all the furniture. What particularly struck Elena was that her father, pale as a ghost, was moving about slowly and deliberately, like a man who has perfectly made up his mind. “I am dead,” Elena said to herself.

  “We are so happy when we have children,” said her father as he passed his wife’s bed on his way into his daughter’s room, trembling with fury but affecting a calm and icy demeanor. “We are so happy when we have children, but we ought to weep tears of blood when those children are girls. Great God! Is it possible! Their loose morality can steal away the honor of a man who for sixty years has never let anyone have the slightest hold over him.”

  “I am lost,” said Elena to her mother; “the letters are under the pedestal of the crucifix, next to the window.” At that, her mother leaped out of bed and rushed to her husband; she began exclaiming the most irrational things possible, in an effort to redouble his anger: she succeeded brilliantly. The old man turned furious, breaking everything in his daughter’s room; but the mother had snatched up the letters without being seen. One hour later, when Signor de Campireali was back in his own bedroom, next to his wife’s, and the house was finally quiet, the mother said to her daughter:

  “Here are your letters; I don’t want to read them; you see what they have almost cost us! In your place, I would burn them. Adieu; kiss me.”

  Elena returned to her room, bursting into tears; it seemed somehow that after what her mother had just said, she no longer loved Giulio. Then she prepared to burn the letters; but before destroying them, she could not keep herself from rereading them. She reread them so much and so thoroughly that the sun was already high in the sky when she finally decided to follow that salutary advice.

  The next day, which was a Sunday, Elena walked to the parish church with her mother; fortunately, her father did not follow them. The first person she saw in the church was Giulio Branciforte. She quickly assured herself that he had not been injured. Her happiness was at its peak; the events of the preceding night seemed a thousand miles away. She had prepared five or six little notes on small scraps of paper, each one rubbed with a little dirt and water so as to appear like the kind of scrap one might find on the floor of a church; each of these notes contained the same announcement:

  They have discovered everything, except for his name. He must not come back to the street; one will return here often.

  Elena let one of these scraps of paper fall; a glance signaled Giulio, who picked it up and vanished. Upon returning home an hour later, she found on the grand staircase a fragment of paper that attracted her attention, as it resembled those she had employed that morning. She picked it up without her mother’s noticing; she read:

  In three days he will return from Rome, where he is forced to go. One will sing in broad daylight, in the midst of the peasants’ market, around ten o’clock.

  This departure for Rome seemed unusual to Elena. She asked herself sadly if it was because he feared her father’s harquebus. Love can pardon anything except voluntary absence; that is the worst of all possible tortures. Instead of passing the day in a sweet reverie, going over all the reasons why one loves one’s lover, one is tossed and turned by cruel doubts all day long. “But after all,” she asked herself during the three long days of Branciforte’s absence, “is it possible that he no longer loves me?” Then, suddenly, all her sorrows were transformed into a wild joy: it was the third day, and she saw him in broad daylight, walking down the street in front of her father’s palazzo. He was wearing new and almost magnificent clothing. Never had the nobility of his carriage and the gay, courageous naïveté of his expression shown to better advantage; and also never had there been so much talk in Albano of Giulio’s poverty. The men, and above all the young men, were the ones spreading the cruel talk; the women, and above all the young women, never ceased praising his good looks.

  Giulio spent the whole day walking around the town; he appeared to be compensating for that long period of seclusion to which his poverty had condemned him. As is appropriate for a young man in love, Giulio was well armed underneath his new jacket. Apart from his dagger and his poniard, he had put on his giacco (which is a kind of chain-mail shirt, very awkward to wear, but one that cures Italian hearts of a sad malady that in that period gave people many sharp attacks—I mean the fear of being killed at any corner by one of the enemies one knew were on the lookout). On this day, Giulio hoped to run into Elena somewhere, and in any case, he did not feel like going home and being alone in his s
olitary house: this is why Ranuccio, a former soldier friend of his father’s, after having gone through ten campaigns with him under various condottieri and, most recently, under Marco Sciarra, had followed his captain when the wounds of the latter forced him to retire. Captain Branciforte had his reasons for not living in Rome; he always ran the risk there of running into the sons of men he had killed; even in Albano he avoided allowing himself to be completely at the mercy of the duly constituted authorities. Instead of buying or renting a house in the town, he preferred to build one someplace where he could see who his visitors were from a great distance. He found a perfect spot among the ruins of Alba: here, he could hide, without being seen by any indiscreet visitors, in the forest where his old friend and chief Prince Fabrizio Colonna reigned. Captain Branciforte did not bother himself worrying about his son’s future well-being. When he retired from service, only fifty years old but riddled with wounds, he calculated that he might live another ten years, and therefore, once his house was built, he proceeded to spend, each year, a tenth of the sum he had amassed when he had had the honor of helping pillage nearby towns and villages.

  He bought a vineyard that brought in thirty ecus in rent for his son as a kind of response to the ugly gibe a bourgeois in Albano had made one day when they were heatedly arguing about the competing interests of honor and town, to the effect that a wealthy landowner like himself was just the sort of person to give advice to the “elders” of Albano. The captain went off and purchased the vineyard, announcing that he planned to buy many more; then, when he met the sneering bourgeois in a secluded spot, he shot him dead with his pistol.

  After eight years of this kind of life, the captain died; his aide-decamp Ranuccio loved Giulio; sometimes, out of boredom, he would go back into service under Prince Colonna for a time. Often, he came back to visit “his son Giulio,” as he called him, and on the eve of a dangerous assault that the prince had to fight off in his fortress at Petrella, he had brought Giulio to fight alongside him. Seeing how brave the young man was, he said:

  “You must be mad, or even worse, a fool, to live up here outside of Albano like the lowest and poorest of its inhabitants when, given what I’ve just seen, along with your father’s name and reputation, you could be a brilliant ‘soldier of fortune’ with us, and you could easily make your fortune.” This tormented Giulio; he knew Latin, having been taught it by the priest, but because his father had always mocked everything the priest said apart from Latin, Giulio had had no other education whatsoever. On the other hand, being despised for his poverty and living alone in his isolated house, he had developed a certain good sense that was hardy enough to have surprised the scholars. For example, before he fell in love with Elena and without knowing why, he loved warfare but detested pillaging, which, in the eyes of his father the captain and Ranuccio, was like the delightful little comic scene that comes after the noble tragedy. Since falling in love with Elena, that good sense which his solitary life had developed in him now tortured him. His soul, once so carefree, now dared not consult anyone about its doubts and fears, and as a result it was a soul racked by passion and misery. What would Signor de Campireali say if he heard he was a “soldier of fortune”? That would make his reproaches even more well founded. Giulio had always counted on an eventual profession of soldiering, once he had cashed in all the gold chains and other trinkets he had found in his father’s iron chest. If Giulio had no compunction about carrying off, poor as he was, the daughter of the rich Signor de Campireali, it was because in those days, fathers disposed of their wealth as they saw fit, and Signor de Campireali could very well decide to leave his daughter a thousand ecus for her fortune. But another problem kept Giulio very much occupied: (i) Where and in what town would he and Elena set up their home, after he had married and carried her off from her father? (2) And upon exactly what money would they live?

  When Signor de Campireali had spoken those painful words to him, those words he felt so deeply, Giulio spent two days in the deepest rage and misery: he could not decide whether to kill the insolent old man or allow him to live. He spent entire nights weeping; finally, he decided to consult Ranuccio, the only friend he had in the world: but would this friend understand it? Vainly he searched for Ranuccio all through the forest of La Faggiola, and he was obliged to take the road to Naples, beyond Velletri, where Ranuccio was in charge of an ambush: he, along with a considerable company, was lying in wait for Ruiz d’Avalos, a Spanish general who was headed to Rome by land, having forgotten that recently he had spoken before a large group expressing contempt for the Colonna soldiers of fortune. His chaplain reminded him of this detail with some urgency, and Ruiz d’Avalos decided it would be best to equip a vessel and go to Rome by sea after all.

  When Captain Ranuccio had heard Giulio’s story, “Describe this Signor de Campireali precisely,” he said, “so that his foolishness does not end up costing the life of some innocent inhabitant of Albano. As soon as our business here is finished one way or another, you should go to Rome, where you should make it a point to be seen in the inns and other public spots at all different hours of the day; we must not allow anyone to suspect you because of your love for the daughter.”

  Giulio had all he could do to calm his father’s old companion down. Eventually, he lost his temper:

  “Do you think I’m here to ask for your sword?” he said. “Look, I have a sword of my own! I’m asking for your thoughtful advice.”

  Ranuccio kept repeating these words: “You are young; you are unwounded; the insult was a public one; now, a man who is dishonored is despised even by women.”

  Giulio told him that he wanted time to think about what his heart really desired, and despite Ranuccio’s insistence that he stay and take part in the attack on the Spanish general and his escort, in which, he said, there would be honor to be won, not to mention the doubloons, Giulio went back alone to his little house. It was there, on the day before the one on which Signor de Campireali fired on him with his harquebus, that he received Ranuccio and his corporal, who had come from the neighborhood of Velletri. Ranuccio used force to pry open the little iron chest where his former captain, Branciforte, had locked up the gold chains and other trinkets that he had not cashed in immediately after an expedition. Ranuccio found two ecus in it.

  “I would advise you to become a monk,” he said to Giulio; “you have all the virtues: love of poverty, the proof of which is here; humility, because you let yourself be pushed around in public by some rich man in Albano; all you need are hypocrisy and gluttony.”

  Ranuccio insisted on putting fifty doubloons in the iron chest. He said to Giulio, “I give you my word that if one month from now this Signor de Campireali is not buried with all the honors due to his nobility and his high station, my corporal here will come back with thirty men and demolish your little house and burn your pathetic furniture. The son of Captain Branciforte must not appear a dishonorable figure in the world just because he is in love.”

  When Signor de Campireali and his son took their two harquebus shots, Ranuccio and his corporal had taken up a position beneath the stone balcony, and Giulio had all he could do to keep them from killing Fabio when the latter imprudently came out through the garden, as we have narrated in its proper place. The reason that calmed Ranuccio was this: it would not be right to kill a young man who might one day become something and be useful, not while an aged sinner much worse than him is still walking the earth unburied.

  The day after this adventure, Ranuccio took refuge in the forest and Giulio left for Rome. The delight he felt in buying his new clothes with the doubloons that had been given him was cruelly tempered by an idea quite unusual for that century, one that foreshadowed the elevated destiny that awaited him: “I must be sure that Elena knows who I really am.” Any other young man of his age and his era would have no other thought beyond his love and carrying Elena off with him, and would never worry about what she would become six months later, nor of the opinion she might have of him.

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