by Stendhal
And when Elena appeared dismayed by this plan, Giulio added:
“The prince orders me to return to him; honor and all sorts of other reasons oblige me to go. My plan is the only one that will assure our future together; if you do not consent, let us part forever, right now, right here. I will leave feeling remorse at my own rashness. I believed in your word of honor; you are being unfaithful to your most sacred oath, and I hope that eventually the just contempt I feel about your lack of integrity will help cure me of this love that, for too long now, has been the misery of my life.”
Elena burst into tears:
“Good God!” she exclaimed as she wept. “What horror for my mother!”
At last, she did consent to the plan that he had outlined.
“But,” she added, “we might be discovered, either leaving or returning; think what a scandal that would be and the horrible position it would put my mother in; let us wait until she leaves, a few days from now.”
“You have succeeded in making me doubt the one thing that to me was the holiest, the most sacred: my trust in your word. Tomorrow night we will be married, or else we are right now seeing each other for the last time on this side of the grave.”
Poor Elena could answer only with tears, she was so hurt by the cruel, decided tone Giulio had taken. Did she really deserve his contempt? And this was the lover who had been so meek and so tender! Finally, she did consent to what he demanded. Giulio departed. Immediately, Elena began to await the next night, with one dreadful anxiety giving rise to another. If she had been preparing for certain death, her misery would have been less poignant; she could have found some courage in the idea of her love for Giulio and her tender affection for her mother. The rest of the night was passed in making one painful resolution after another. There were moments when she wanted to tell her mother everything. The next day, she was so pale when she appeared before her mother that the latter, forgetting all her own wise resolutions, took her daughter in her arms and exclaimed:
“What is going on? Great God! Tell me what you have done, or what it is you’re about to do. If you took a dagger and plunged it into my heart, you would make me suffer less than this cruel silence you observe with me.”
Her mother’s extreme tenderness was so clear to Elena, and she could see so clearly that her mother, far from exaggerating her feelings, was doing her best to repress them, that at last her own feelings overwhelmed her; she fell to her knees. As her mother was trying to learn what this fatal secret could be and exclaiming that Elena was trying to avoid her, Elena replied that the next day and every day after that, she would spend her life close to her, but she begged her now not to ask her anything more.
That ill-considered phrase was soon followed by a complete confession. Signora de Campireali was horrified to learn that the murderer of her son was so close by. But that sorrow was followed by a burst of powerful, pure joy. Who could describe the rapture she felt when she learned that her daughter had never failed in her moral duty?
Immediately, the prudent mother changed all her plans; she felt she would be blameless in deploying a ruse against a man who meant nothing to her. Elena’s heart was battered by all the cruelest feelings possible: the sincerity of her confession was as profound as it could be; her soul, racked by remorse, desperately needed to unburden itself. Signora de Campireali, who now felt that everything was permitted, invented a whole series of arguments too lengthy to repeat here. She easily proved to her unhappy daughter that instead of a clandestine wedding, which always leaves some stain upon a woman’s reputation, she would instead have a public and perfectly honorable one, but only if she would be willing to put off for one week the act of obedience she owed to so generous a lover.
She, Signora de Campireali, was going to return to Rome; she would tell her husband that Elena had been married to Giulio well before the fatal battle of Ciampi. The ceremony had taken place on the very night that she, disguised as a monk, had encountered her father and brother by the lake on that path hewn out of the rock face that forms the walls of the Capuchin monastery. The mother was careful not to leave her daughter alone all that day, and finally, when evening came, Elena wrote her lover an innocent and, in our view, a very touching letter, in which she narrated the conflicts that had so racked her heart. She concluded by asking him, on her knees, for a delay of one week: “As I write this letter to you now,” she added,
which my mother’s messenger is waiting for, I feel that I did the worst possible thing in telling her everything. I imagine you angry, imagine your eyes looking upon me with hatred; my heart is riven with the bitterest remorse. You will say that my character is too weak, too fainthearted, even contemptible, and I admit it all, my dear angel. But picture it, please: my mother reduced to tears and practically on her knees. At that point, it was impossible for me not to give her some reason for why I could not do what she wanted; and once I had stumbled and said that imprudent thing, I don’t know what came over me, but it somehow became impossible not to tell her everything that had happened between us. As best I can understand it now, I think it was a matter of my heart being so weakened that it simply needed counsel. I was hoping to find it in a mother’s words… . And I forgot only too completely, my friend, that this beloved mother’s interests are entirely opposed to yours. I forgot my primary duty, which is to obey you, and evidently I am incapable of feeling true love, which they say conquers all obstacles. Despise me, Giulio, but in God’s name, do not stop loving me. Carry me off if you wish, but do me the justice to think that if it had not been for my mother’s presence here at the convent, the most horrible dangers, shame itself, nothing in the world could have stopped me from obeying your command. But this mother of mine is so good! She is so intelligent! She is so generous! Remember what I told you back then; when my father had gone into my bedroom, she rescued those letters of yours that I had no means of hiding; and then, when the danger had passed, she returned them to me without reading them and without uttering a single word of reproach! Well—all my life, she has been to me like that, just the way she was at that supreme moment. You can see that I ought to love her, but, as I write to you now (this is a horrible thing to say) I feel as if I hate her. She told me that, because of the heat, she wants to sleep in a tent out in the garden; I can hear the hammers at work, setting up a tent for her; it is impossible for us to meet tonight. I am afraid that they are even locking the boarders’ dormitory tonight, along with the two doors that lead to the spiral staircase, which is never done. All these precautions make it impossible for me to come down to the garden, even if I thought that such a thing would help soothe your anger. Oh, how completely would I give myself to you right now, if only there was some way! How I would run to that church where they are going to marry us!
The letter goes on with two more pages of wild expressions, in which I detect some impassioned ideas that seem to me to stem from Plato’s philosophy. I have suppressed many elegant passages of that type in the letter translated here.
Giulio Branciforte was stunned to receive the letter just one hour before the evening “Ave Maria”; he had just finished making arrangements with the priest. He flew into a rage. “She has no reason to worry about me carrying her off, that weak, feeble creature!” And he quickly left for the forest of La Faggiola.
And what was Signora de Campireali’s state at this time? Her husband was on his deathbed, for his inability to avenge himself on Branciforte had eaten at him and had been slowly conducting him to his grave. In vain had he offered rich rewards to Roman bravi; no one had wanted to try to attack one of the caporali, as people called them, attached to Prince Colonna; it was only too certain that anyone who tried would be exterminated, along with his whole family. Less than a year ago, an entire village had been burned to the ground as punishment for the death of one of the Colonna soldiers, and all the inhabitants, men and women, though they tried to flee into the countryside, had had their hands and feet tied up with ropes, and then they were all thrown into the bu
rning houses.
Signora de Campireali owned some large estates in the kingdom of Naples; her husband had ordered her to call up some assassins from there, but she only pretended to obey him: she believed her daughter was irrevocably connected to Giulio Branciforte. With that assumption in mind, she thought that Giulio should go join a campaign or two with the armies of Spain, which were then making war on some rebels in Flanders. If he were to survive, she thought, that would be a sign that God did not disapprove of a necessary marriage; in that case, she would give one of her Naples estates to her daughter; Giulio Branciforte could adopt the name of the estate, and he with his wife could go spend several years in Spain. After all these trials, perhaps, she would have the courage to see him. But now everything had changed, with her daughter’s confession: the marriage was no longer necessary; far from it, and while Elena was writing the letter that we have translated, Signora Campireali was writing to Pescara and Chieti, ordering her farmers there to send a group of trustworthy men capable of bold action to Castro. And she did not hide the fact that it was a matter of avenging the death of her son Fabio, their young master. The courier carrying these letters left before the end of the day.
V
But two days after that, Giulio had returned to Castro, and he brought with him eight soldiers who had been willing to follow him, even at the risk of arousing the anger of the prince, who sometimes had had men executed for engaging in this kind of enterprise. Giulio already had five men in Castro, and he brought another eight, but fourteen soldiers, no matter how brave they were, seemed to him to be too few for this enterprise, for the convent was like a strong fortress.
First, it was a matter of getting through the first of the convent’s gates, by force or by skill; then, it was a matter of following a passage of some fifty paces. On the left of this passage, as we have already described, arose the grilled windows of a sort of barracks, where the nuns had stationed thirty or forty servants, former soldiers. From these windows intense gunfire could be expected once the alarm had been raised.
The current abbess, who was no fool, was afraid of the exploits of the Orsini chiefs, of Prince Colonna, of Marco Sciarra, and of all the other chiefs who reigned in the vicinity. How could the convent resist 800 determined men once they had occupied a small town like Castro thinking the convent was filled with gold?
Normally, the Visitation of Castro had fifteen or twenty bravi in the barracks on the left of the passage leading to the convent’s second door; to the right of this passage stood an impregnable wall; at the end of the passage was an iron door that opened upon a vestibule with pillars; after this vestibule came the convent’s great courtyard, with the garden on the right. The iron door was guarded by a portress.
When Giulio and his eight men were three leagues from Castro, he stopped at an out-of-the-way inn to sit out the heat of the day. Only there did he reveal his project to the men; he then drew in the sand a map of the convent he was going to attack.
“At nine o’clock in the evening,” he told his men, “we will dine outside of the town; at midnight, we enter; there we will find your five comrades, who will be waiting for us near the convent. One of them will be on horseback, and he will be playing the role of a courier just arrived from Rome to call Signora de Campireali back home, where her husband is dying. We will try to get through the first door silently, here, next to the barracks,” he said, pointing to the map. “If we have to begin fighting at this first gate, the nuns’ bravi will find it easy to shoot at us with their harquebuses either while we are still outside in the little square, here, or as we traverse the narrow passage that leads to the second door. This second door is made of iron, but I have a key.
“Now, it is true that there are huge iron arms called valets attached to the wall, and these can be swung into place to prevent the two panels of the door from opening. But these two iron bars are too heavy for the portress sister to operate, and I have never seen them in place; and I have passed through that iron gate ten times. I am counting on our passing through it again tonight with no mishaps. You understand that I have spies in the convent; my aim is to carry off a boarder and not a nun; we will not need to show our arms, except as a very last resort. If we have started fighting before getting to that second door with its iron bars, the portress will certainly call up two old gardeners, seventy-year-olds, who sleep inside the convent, and these old men will put the iron arms I described in place. If this misfortune befalls us, in order to get past that door we will have to break through the wall, which will take us ten minutes; in any case, I will be the one who goes to the door first. One of these gardeners is in my pay; but I have been careful, as you can imagine, not to tell him about my project of abduction. Once we are through this second door, we turn to the right, which takes us into the garden; and once we are in the garden, the real war begins, so we must rush immediately on everyone we see. Make use of only your swords and daggers, of course, because any shot from a harquebus will be heard all over town, and the whole village may rise up to attack us as we leave. Not that I would have any fear of cutting my way through a puny little town like that with thirteen men like yourselves; nobody would dare to show himself in the street; but quite a few of the bourgeois own harquebuses, and they would fire on us from their windows. In that case, we would have to stick close to the walls of the houses; all of this I say only in passing. Now, once you’re in the convent garden, say quietly to every person you meet: ‘retire now’; and you should use your daggers to kill anyone who does not obey immediately. I will go up into the convent via the little garden door with those of you who are closest to me, and three minutes later I will return with one or two women, whom we will be carrying in our arms without letting them walk. We will then immediately leave the convent and the town. I will post two of you near the door, to fire off twenty harquebus shots, to frighten the bourgeois and keep them at a distance.”
Giulio repeated the whole plan twice.
“Does everybody understand?” he asked his men. “It will be completely dark in that vestibule: the garden on the right, the courtyard on the left; no mistakes.”
“Count on us!” cried the soldiers. Then they went off to drink; but the corporal stayed behind and asked permission to speak with the captain.
“Nothing simpler,” he said, “than Your Lordship’s plan. I have already raided two convents in my day, and this will be my third; but we are too few. If the enemy forces us to destroy the wall supporting the hinges of the second door, you have to assume that the bravi in the barracks will not be idle during that long process; they will kill seven or eight of our men by gunfire, and then they will be able to get the lady away from us when we come back out. This is what happened to us in a convent near Bologna: they killed five of us, and we killed eight of them, but the captain did not get his lady. I would propose two things to Your Lordship: I know four peasants living near this inn where we are now, men who fought bravely under Sciarra, and for a sequin each they will battle all night long like lions. Now, they might make off with some silver from the convent; but that shouldn’t concern you—the sin is on their consciences; you, now, you hired them only to help you get the lady, and that’s all there is to it. My second proposition is this: Ugone is an educated, capable sort; he was a doctor when he killed his brother-in-law and took off for the machia (the forest). You could send him to the convent an hour before sundown; he could say he’s looking for work, and he would manage it so well that he’d get into the guardhouse; he would get the nuns’ servants drunk; and on top of that, he’s quite capable of wetting the fuses of their harquebuses.”
Unfortunately, Giulio consented to the corporal’s ideas. As the latter was leaving, he added:
“We are about to attack a convent. That means major excommunication, and besides, this convent is under the direct protection of the Madonna… .”
“I understand!” cried Giulio as if startled by these last words. “Stay here with me.” The corporal closed the door and began to say
the rosary with Giulio. Their prayer lasted a full hour. When night came, they resumed their journey.
As the bells tolled midnight, Giulio, who had entered the town of Castro alone at eleven o’clock, returned to the city gate to meet his men. He reentered the town with his eight soldiers, to whom were added three well-armed peasants; they rejoined the five soldiers already in the town, and now he found himself at the head of sixteen determined men; two were disguised as servants, wearing a loose shirt of black cloth in order to disguise their giacco (chain mail), and their hats had no plumes.
At half past midnight, Giulio, who had taken on the role of the courier, arrived at a gallop at the convent door, making a great deal of noise and shouting out for them to open up right away for a courier sent by the cardinal. He noted with pleasure that the soldiers who responded to him through the small window, next to the first door, were more than half drunk. As was the procedure, he gave his name to them on a slip of paper; one soldier went off to give the name to the portress, who had the key to the second door and was supposed to awaken the abbess on important occasions. Getting the official response took an endless three quarters of an hour; during that time, Giulio had difficulty keeping his troops silent: a few bourgeois were beginning timidly to open their windows, when at long last a favorable response came from the abbess. Giulio entered into the guardroom by means of a five-or six-foot ladder let down from the small window, because the convent’s bravi did not want to give themselves the trouble to open the large door; he climbed up, followed by two of his soldiers dressed as servants. Upon hopping down into the guardroom, he exchanged a glance with Ugone; all the guards were drunk, thanks to him. Giulio told the leader that three servants from the house of Campireali, whom he had armed like soldiers to escort him on his way, had come across some fine brandy for sale and were now asking to come in so as not to be all alone on the city square; they were unanimously invited in. Giulio, accompanied by his two men, went down the stairs that led from the guardroom to the passage.
