Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  Giulio told himself that, during church services, behind that gilded grill would be found the nuns and the boarders. And when a nun or a boarder felt the need to pray, at any hour, she would come to that interior church; and it was upon that circumstance, perfectly well known to everybody, that the hopes of the poor lover were founded.

  It was true that an immense black curtain covered the inner side of the grill; “but that curtain,” Giulio said to himself, “must not really obscure the view of the exterior church from the boarders, because I, even though I’m some distance away, can very clearly see the windows that give the choir light, and I can even see the slightest architectural details.” Every bar of that magnificent gilded grill was ornamented with a strong spike that pointed out toward the worshipers.

  Giulio picked out a very obvious spot across from the left-hand side of the grill, in the brightest part of the church; and there he proceeded to attend masses. Since he was always surrounded only by peasants, he hoped he would be noticed, even through the black curtain that covered the inner side of the grill. For the first time in his life, the young man sought out how to make the right effect; his clothes were carefully chosen; he made a show of distributing alms both coming in the church and leaving it. He and his friends did many thoughtful turns for all the merchants and craftsmen who had any working relationship with the convent. But it was only on the third day that he had some hope of getting a letter in to Elena. He had ordered his men to follow the two lay sisters who were in charge of buying supplies for the convent; one of them had a relationship with a local merchant. One of Giulio’s soldiers, who had been a monk, made friends with the man and promised him a sequin for every letter delivered to the boarder Elena de Campireali.

  “What?” exclaimed the merchant when the topic was first broached, “a letter to the wife of the brigand?” The name had already been well established in Castro, and it had been only two weeks since Elena’s arrival—which shows how quickly anything that catches the imagination circulated among these people, who had such a love for precise details.

  The merchant added:

  “Well, at least this one is married! But plenty of the other ladies have no such excuse, and they receive a lot more than letters.”

  In that first letter, Giulio told in great detail everything that had happened on the fatal day of battle that led to Fabio’s death. He ended the letter by asking, “Do you hate me?”

  Elena responded in only a line that, without hating anybody, she was going to spend the remainder of her life trying to forget the man at whose hands her brother had perished.

  Giulio wrote back quickly; after opening with several lamentations about fate, the kind of thing inspired by Plato and quite in fashion at the time:

  So you want me to forget the word of God transmitted to us through the Holy Scriptures? God said, “The woman shall quit her family and follow her husband.”15 Do you dare to pretend that you are not my wife? Remember the night of Saint Peter’s Day. Just as dawn appeared behind Monte Cavi, you threw yourself down at my feet; I wanted to be merciful toward you; you were mine, if I had chosen to take you; you could no longer resist the love you felt for me. Just then, the idea struck me that if I had offered you the sacrifice of my life and of everything I held dearest in the world, as I had often told you, perhaps you might think that all these sacrifices were only imaginary, that I had performed no concrete act to prove it. Now an idea, a cruel one to me but profoundly right, illuminated everything for me. I thought that it was no accident that fate had offered me this chance to demonstrate my sacrifice by giving up, for your sake, what would have been the greatest happiness I could ever have imagined. You were already in my arms and defenseless, remember; even your lips could not refuse. And at just that moment, the morning ‘Ave Maria” rang out from the church of Monte Cavi, and by a miraculous chance the sound reached all the way to us. You said to me: “Make this sacrifice for the Holy Madonna, the mother of all purity.” I had already, just the moment before, conceived the idea of this supreme sacrifice, the only real thing I had had occasion to give up. I found it wonderful that the same idea had come to you. The distant sound of that “Ave Maria” touched me, I admit it; I agreed with what you asked for. My sacrifice was not entirely for you; I had the idea of putting our future union under the protection of the Madonna. At that time, I thought that any obstacles would come not from you—faithless you—but from your rich and noble family. If there was no supernatural intervention, how could that Angelus so far away possibly have reached us, through the obstruction of half the trees in the forest, all agitated at that moment by the morning winds? And then—do you remember?—you knelt before me; I rose up, and I took from my neck this cross I wear, and you swore on that cross, which is before me as I write this, and on pain of eternal damnation, that no matter where you were, no matter what might have happened, whenever I called for you, you would come and be mine entirely, just as you were at the moment the “Ave Maria” from Monte Cavi came from so far away to strike your hearing. We then said two “Aves” and two “Pater Nosters.” Well then! By the love you then felt for me and, in case you have forgotten, which I fear that maybe you have, by your eternal damnation, I command you to receive me tonight, in your room or in the garden of the Convent of the Visitation.

  The Italian historian provides in detail many long letters written by Giulio Branciforte after this one; but he gives only extracts of the replies by Elena de Campireali. But now that 278 years have passed, we are so far from the kind of love and religious sentiments that fill these letters that I fear they would only be tedious.

  It would appear from her replies that Elena did obey the order given in the letter we have just translated in an abbreviated form. Giulio found a means of getting inside the convent; it seems, in short, that he disguised himself as a woman. Elena did receive him, but only through a grate in a ground-floor window looking out on the garden. To his inexpressible sorrow, Giulio found that this young woman, so tender and even so passionate before, had become like a stranger to him; she treated him almost politely. In letting him into the garden, she had given in to the oath she had made. Their meeting was brief: after a few moments, Giulio’s pride, excited perhaps by the events of the last couple of weeks, overcame his deep sorrow. He said to himself, “I see before me only the tomb of that Elena who, in Albano, seemed to give herself to me for life.”

  But right now, the important thing for Giulio was to hide the tears streaming down his face at the polite phrases Elena was using with him. When she had finished speaking and justifying what she called so natural a change after the death of her brother, Giulio replied very slowly:

  “You are not fulfilling your vow; you are not welcoming me in this garden; you are by no means on your knees before me the way you were when we heard that ‘Ave Maria’ from Monte Cavi. Forget your promise if you can; as for me, I shall never forget any of it. May God help you!”

  Saying this, he turned away from the window’s grate, where he could have remained for almost an hour longer. Who would have predicted a few minutes earlier that he would voluntarily cut short this meeting that he had so desired! This new sacrifice was like a wound in his soul; but he thought he would deserve Elena’s contempt if he responded to those polite phrases of hers in any way other than leaving her alone with her remorse.

  He exited the convent before dawn. He quickly mounted his horse, giving his soldiers the order to remain and await him in Castro for one whole week and at that point, if he was not back, to return to the forest; he was mad with despair. First, he headed toward Rome. “What am I doing—I’m going further away from her!” he exclaimed to himself at every step; “how can it be—we have become strangers to each other! Oh, Fabio, how well you are avenged!” The sight of other men on the road with him only heightened his rage; he turned his horse off the road and rode across the fields, heading toward the wild, uncultivated, and deserted seashore. When he was no longer troubled by the sight of calm and happy peasants whose
lives he envied, he stopped to breathe; the sight of that savage tract of land accorded well with his despair and helped diminish his rage; he slowly turned to contemplating his sad destiny.

  “At my age,” he said to himself, “I have one recourse: fall in love with another woman!” But that unhappy thought only deepened his despair; he could see very well that there was really only one woman in the world for him. He imagined the torture it would be to try to speak of love to someone other than Elena; the idea tore at him.

  He was seized by a sudden bitter laughter. “Here I am,” he thought, “just like one of the heroes in Ariosto who journey off alone into desert countries trying to forget that they have discovered their traitorous mistresses in the arms of some other knight… . But she is not guilty like that.” And with that, his outburst of mad laughter turned into one of tears. “Her infidelity doesn’t go so far as to involve loving someone else. That pure, vibrant soul has let herself be blinded by the horrible stories they tell her about me; they no doubt depict me as picking up my weapons that day only because I had hopes of finding the chance to kill her brother. They would have gone even further, telling her that I was capable of making sordid calculations, figuring that once her brother was dead, she would inherit great wealth… . And I was stupid enough to leave her alone for two whole weeks, alone and at the mercy of the seductions of my enemies! I have to admit that, unfortunate as I am, heaven also deprived me of the basic intelligence I ought to have in leading my life! I am completely miserable, completely detestable! My life has been no good to anyone, and even less to myself.”

  At that, young Branciforte had a sudden inspiration of a kind rare in that century; his horse was walking along the edge of the water, its hooves sometimes hidden under the waves; he had the idea of turning and walking into the sea, thus putting an end to the horrible fate that preyed upon him. What would he do from now on, after the only creature in the world who could give him any happiness had abandoned him? Then, suddenly, a different idea took hold of him: “What are the sufferings I’m enduring now,” he asked himself, “compared to the ones I’ll be enduring in a moment, after I’ve ended my miserable life? Then, Elena will no longer be just indifferent to me, as she is now; then, I will see her in the arms of some rival, some young Roman noble, rich and ‘respected’; because, in order to lash my soul effectively, the demons will go off and seek out the cruelest possible images, which is their duty. So I will never be able to forget Elena, even in death; even worse, my passion for her will only grow, because that is the surest means the eternal powers will be able to find to punish me for the hideous mortal sin I have committed.” To chase away the temptation, Giulio began reciting the “Ave Maria.” It was in hearing the “Ave Maria,” that prayer consecrated to the Madonna, when it sounded that morning, that he had been seduced and had been pulled into an action so generous that he now regarded it as the greatest mistake of his life. But out of a sense of respect, he did not go further now and fully express the idea that was forming in his mind. “If it was through the inspiration of the Madonna that I fell into this fatal error, doesn’t she owe it to her infinite justice to create some circumstance that will make me happy again?” This thought of the Madonna’s infinite justice began to dissipate his despair. He raised his head and saw before him, behind Albano and the forest, that same Monte Cavi, covered by its dark verdure, and the holy convent from which the morning “Ave Maria” had led him into what he now regarded as vile gullibility. The unexpected sight of that holy place consoled him. “No,” he cried; “it is impossible that the Madonna will abandon me. If Elena had been my wife, as her love impelled her to be and as my male dignity demanded, hearing of her brother’s death would have awakened in her only memories of the bonds linking her to me. She would have told herself that she belonged to me long before that fatal chance that put me face-to-face with Fabio on a battlefield. He was two years older than me; he was more expert in arms, bolder in every respect, stronger. A thousand thoughts would have crowded into my wife’s mind to convince her that I had not sought out this combat. She would have remembered that I had never felt the slightest bit of hatred for her brother, not even when he had aimed his harquebus and shot at me. I remember that when we first met after my trip to Rome, I said to her, ‘What do you expect? Honor required it; I cannot blame a brother!’” Thus returned to hope through his devotion to the Madonna, Giulio spurred his horse and in a few hours arrived at the quarter occupied by his company. He found them taking up arms: they were going toward the road from Naples to Rome that passes by Monte Cassino. The young captain changed horses and went off with his soldiers. There was to be no battle that day. Giulio did not even ask why they were on the march; it didn’t matter to him. When he saw himself at the head of his soldiers, he had a new vision of his destiny. “I really am a fool,” he said to himself; “I was wrong to leave Castro; Elena is probably less guilty than she seemed in my anger. No, she could not have ceased being mine, that soul so innocent, so pure, in which I’ve seen the first feelings of love stir and grow! She was penetrated through and through with a sincere passion for me. Didn’t she offer, a dozen times, to run off with me, poor as I was, and to go have a monk from Monte Cavi marry us! At Castro, I should have arranged a second meeting and spoken reason to her. Oh, these passions whirl me around as if I were a child! God! If only I had a friend I could turn to for advice! The same idea seems execrable one minute and excellent the next!”

  That evening, as they left the main road to go off into the forest, Giulio approached the prince and asked if it would be all right for him to spend a few more days at that place he knew of.

  “Oh, a thousand devils take you!” Fabrizio cried. “Do you really think this is the right moment for me to be preoccupied with this childishness?”

  An hour later, Giulio set off for Castro. He found his men there; but he did not know how to write to Elena after leaving her the way he had. His first letter consisted only of these words: “Would you see me tomorrow night?”

  “You may come” was the entirety of her response.

  After Giulio’s departure, Elena believed herself to have been permanently abandoned. And it was then that she felt the full force of his logic, that unhappy young man; she had been his wife before he had the bad fortune of encountering her brother on a battlefield.

  This time, Giulio was not treated with those merely polite turns of phrase that had seemed so cruel to him on their first meeting. Elena, true, appeared to him only behind the grating of her window; but she was trembling, and, because Giulio had adopted the very reserved tone and language16 that one would use with a stranger, it was Elena’s turn to feel how cruel such formal, official-sounding language was when it replaces that of sweet intimacy. Giulio, who greatly feared having his heart broken by some cold word from Elena, had taken on the tone of a lawyer to prove to her that she had been his wife well before the fatal battle of Ciampi. Elena let him speak, because she feared becoming overwhelmed by tears if she replied in anything other than monosyllables. Soon, finding herself about to betray her true state, she asked Giulio to return the next day. That evening, which was the eve of a major feast day, matins was to be sung early, and thus they had to be concerned that someone might see them. Giulio, who was reasoning the way lovers do, left the garden deep in thought; he was not certain whether he had been received well or not well; and because of his conversations with his friends, military ideas were now beginning to form in his mind. “One day,” he said to himself, “I may have to come here and carry Elena off.” And he began to examine ways one might fight one’s way into the garden. Because the convent was very rich and contained much to tempt thieves, it employed a great many servants, the majority of whom were former soldiers; they were lodged in a sort of barracks with barred windows opening onto the narrow passage, hewn out of a blackened wall more than eighty feet tall that led from the convent’s exterior door to the interior door, which was guarded by a sister who acted as portress. To the left of this narrow
passage stood the barracks, and to the right the garden wall, more than thirty feet high. The convent’s facade, on the city square, was a rough wall blackened with age, offering no openings except the exterior door and a single small window through which the soldiers could keep watch on the square. One can imagine the somber feeling aroused by the sight of that great black wall pierced only by a single door, reinforced with broad steel bands attached by enormous nails, and by a single little window about four feet high and eighteen inches wide.

  We will not follow our original historian in his long recitation of the successive conversations Giulio had with Elena. The tone of the two lovers gradually reverted to one of perfect intimacy, as it had been in the garden at Albano; but Elena never consented to come out into the garden. One night, Giulio found her deeply thoughtful: her mother had arrived from Rome and was going to spend several days at the convent. Her mother was so tender, and she had always shown such delicacy and tact regarding what she thought were her daughter’s affections, that Elena felt a deep remorse at having to dupe her; for, after all, did she dare tell her that she was receiving visits from the man who had killed her son? Elena admitted frankly to Giulio that if her mother, who was so good to her, asked her certain questions, she would be unable to lie to her. Giulio felt the danger of his position; his fate depended on the chance that someone might say something to Signora de Campireali. The next night, he said, with a resolute air:

  “Tomorrow I will come earlier; I will detach one of the bars from this grill; you will come down into the garden, and I will conduct you to a church in the town, where a priest friendly to me will marry us. Before daylight, you will be back in this garden. Once you are my wife, I will have no fear, and if your mother demands some kind of expiation for the horrible misfortune that we all equally deplore, I will consent to anything, even if it is to not see you for several months.”