by Stendhal
“But, monsieur, when I arrived at Valence at eight in the evening, it was dark and raining; I knocked on the door of an inn; no one responded; I knocked louder; they called out that there was no lodging available for a ‘Cossack’; I knocked again, and they began throwing rocks down at me from the second floor. ‘Well, clearly,’ I said to myself, ‘I’m going to die tonight in this miserable town.’ I didn’t know where the commander in charge of the town was; no one wanted to talk to me; no one would serve as a guide for me. ‘The commandant will be in bed,’ I said to myself, ‘and won’t want to receive me.’
“Instead of dying, I saw that I would have to sacrifice some merchandise; I gave a glass of brandy to the sentinel, who was a Hungarian. Hearing me speak Hungarian, he took pity on me and told me to wait there until they came for me. I was dying of cold; finally, a corporal came for me. I gave him a drink, and then I gave one to the whole group of guards. At last, a sergeant conducted me to the commandant. Oh, what a fine man, monsieur! I did not know him, but he had me enter right away. I explained to him that, out of hatred for the king,1 no innkeeper would give me a place to stay, even for pay. He exclaimed, ‘Well, they will give you lodging for free, then!’ He procured a fine billeting for me for two nights, and four men were assigned to accompany me.
“I returned to that inn on the large plaza, where they had thrown stones at me; I knocked twice; I said in French, which I speak very well, that I had four men with me and that if they did not open up, I would break down the door; no response. So we went off to find a good, heavy board, and we set ourselves to battering the door. It was more than half broken in when a man abruptly opened it. He was a big one, about six feet tall; he had a saber in one hand and a lit candle in the other. ‘Now, there’s going to be an uproar,’ I thought, ‘and they’ll loot my wagon.’ So, even though I had been given a free billeting, I cried out: ‘Monsieur, I’ll pay in advance if you like.’
“‘Oh, it’s you, Filippo!’ cried the man, throwing down his saber and embracing me. ‘What, my friend Filippo, don’t you recognize Bonnard, the corporal of the Twentieth Regiment?’
“When I heard that name, I embraced him, too, and I sent the four soldiers back. Bonnard had lodged for six months at my father’s house in Vicence.
“‘I’ll let you have my bed,’ he said to me.
“‘I’m dying of hunger,’ I replied; ‘I’ve been walking all over Valence for the last three hours.’
“‘I’ll wake my servant, and you’ll soon have a supper.’ At that he embraced me, and he never tired of looking at me and questioning me. I accompanied him down to the cellar, where he chose an excellent wine concealed under a layer of sand. As we drank and awaited supper, a beautiful young woman of eighteen came in to us. ‘Ah, so you’re up!’ said Bonnard; ‘So much the better. My friend, this is my sister; and look here, you ought to marry her; you’re a good man, and I’ll give her a dowry of 600 francs.’
“‘But I’m already married,’ I told him.
“‘Married! Ha! I don’t believe a word of it. Besides, where is your wife?’
“‘She is in Zara, where she is tending to business.’
“‘Well, let her go to the devil along with her business; stay here in France, and you’ll marry my sister, the prettiest girl around.’
“Catherine was in fact very pretty; she gazed at me with her large eyes. ‘Monsieur is an officer?’ she asked finally, fooled by the greatcoat I was wearing, bought from the quartermaster in Dijon.
“‘No, mademoiselle; I am the chief food supplier for general headquarters, and I have on my person 200 louis; I can assure you that very few of our officers could say as much.’ In fact, I had 600 louis, but one must be prudent.
“Well, what can I say, monsieur? Bonnard kept me from going away; he rented me a handsome little shop close to the guards and close to the gate, from which I sold to the soldiers; and though I did not continue to follow the army, I still had days on which I earned my eight or ten francs. Bonnard continued to say to me, ‘You must marry my sister.’ Little by little, Catherine had taken up the habit of coming to my little shop; sometimes, she would stay there for three or four hours. At last, monsieur, I fell madly in love with her. And she was even more in love than I was; but God gave us the grace not to lose our heads. ‘How on earth can I marry you?’ I asked her. ‘I am already married.’
“‘Didn’t you leave your wife in Zara with all that merchandise? Let her live on then, her in Zara and you here with us. Go into business with my brother, or keep your trade separate from his; you’re doing a good business, and you will do even better.’
“I should mention, monsieur, that I acted as a bank in Valence, and, by buying up solid letters of exchange on the Lyon bank, signed by businessmen whom Bonnard knew, I sometimes made 100 or a 120 francs per week.
“I stayed in Valence until the autumn. I didn’t know what to do; I was dying with desire to marry Catherine, and toward that end I had given her a dress and a hat from Lyon. When the three of us went walking, her brother, she, and I, all eyes were on Catherine; she really was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She would often say to me, ‘If you don’t want me as your wife, I’ll stay with you as your servant; but please, never leave me.’
“She would go to the shop ahead of me, to spare me the trouble of opening up for business. In short, monsieur, I was absolutely mad with love for her, and she was in a similar state, though we both continued to keep our heads.
“Toward the end of the autumn (of 1814), the ‘allies’ left Valence. I said to Bonnard, ‘The other merchants in this town are going to kill me; they know about how I’ve made my money here.’
“‘Leave if you like,’ Bonnard replied with a sigh; ‘I don’t want to force anyone to do anything. But if you stay with us and marry my sister, I’ll give her half of my holdings; and if anyone so much as speaks ill of you, I’ll handle them.’
“I put off the day of my departure three times. At last, the final troops of the rear guard had moved on to Lyon, and I resolved on leaving. Catherine, her brother, and I spent a night in tears. What can I say, monsieur? I was turning my back on my happiness by leaving this family; God did not want me to be a happy man.
“I finally left on November 7, 1814. I will never forget that day; I could not drive my wagon; I was obliged to hire a man to drive halfway from Valence to Vienna.
“Two days after my departure, as I was hitching my horse in Vienna, whom should I see arriving at the same inn? Catherine. She rushed over to embrace me. They knew her at the inn; she told them that she had come to visit an aunt in Vienna. She kept repeating, as she wept hot tears, ‘I want to be your servant; but if you don’t want me, I will throw myself into the Rhone without going to see my aunt.’
“Everyone at the inn came out and crowded around us. She who was so reserved, who normally remained silent in front of strangers, now was speaking and weeping without restraint, embracing me in front of everyone. I quickly got her to mount up into my wagon, and we drove off. A quarter of a league outside the town, I stopped. ‘We must say goodbye to each other,’ I told her. She said nothing further. She held on to me tightly, with convulsive motions. I was afraid: I could imagine her going to throw herself into the Rhone if I sent her away. I repeated it again: ‘I am married, married in the eyes of God.’
“‘Yes, I know that; I will be your servant.’ I had to stop my wagon maybe ten different times on the way from Vienna to Lyon; but she would never agree to leaving. ‘If I cross a bridge on the Rhone with her,’ I said to myself, ‘that will be a sign of God’s will.’
“Well, monsieur, to tell the truth, without observing it myself, I found we had crossed the Guillotière Bridge and arrived in Lyon. At the inn, they took us for husband and wife and gave us just one room.
“In Lyon, there were a great number of merchants fighting over customers; I went among them and began selling watches and diamonds; I made 10 francs a day, and thanks to the admirable economy of Catherine, we spent only 4. I h
ad taken lodgings that we furnished nicely. At that time, I had 13,000 francs, which, because of my banking business, brought in from 1,500 to 1,800 francs. I had never been so rich as during those eighteen months I spent with Catherine. I was so rich that I bought a little luxury coach, and every Sunday we would take drives outside the city.
“One day, a Jew of my acquaintance came to see me and got me to take my coach and accompany him a couple of leagues outside Lyon. There, he stopped me and said, ‘Phillipe, you have a wife and a child; they are very unhappy… .’ Then he gave me a letter from my wife and departed. I came back to Lyon alone.
“Those two leagues seemed endless to me. The letter from my wife was full of reproaches, but they touched me less than the thought of the son I had abandoned! I saw from her letter that my business in Zara was going well enough… . But my son, whom I had abandoned! … The thought was killing me.
“That night, I was unable to speak, and Catherine noticed it. But she had such a good heart, such a sense of delicacy… . Three weeks passed without her asking the cause of my unhappiness; when she did, I said at once, ‘I have a son.’
“‘I guessed it. Let’s go,’ she said. ‘I’ll pose as your servant in Zara.’
“‘Impossible: my wife knows everything; look at her letter.’
“The insults my wife used in the letter made Catherine redden, as did the contemptuous tone she used in speaking of her, whom she had never met. I embraced her and consoled her as best I could. But what can I say, monsieur? After that fatal letter, the three months I spent in Lyon were hellish; I could not decide which side I was on.
“One night: ‘What if I left right now?’ I asked myself. Catherine was sleeping deeply by my side. Once the idea came to me, it was like a kind of balm spreading through my soul. I thought, ‘This must be an inspiration from God!’ And as I looked at Catherine, I began to say to myself, ‘What madness! I cannot do it.’
“And so the grace of God abandoned me, and I fell back into my bitter state of mind. But then, without quite knowing what I was doing, I began to get dressed quietly, keeping my gaze fixed on Catherine.
“I dared not open the desk; everything I had was hidden in the bed; there were 500 francs in the chest of drawers for a payment she was to make the next day in my absence. I took the money; I went downstairs; I went to the shed where my wagon was, I paid to rent a horse, and I left.
“I constantly kept turning around to look behind me. ‘Catherine will come running after me,’ I thought to myself; ‘if I see her, I am lost.’
“For a moment of peace, at two leagues outside of Lyon, I stopped at a posthouse. In my difficulties, I arranged with a driver to get my wagon and meet me at Chambéry; I would clearly have no further use for it; I can’t recall what made me think this was a good idea. Once I arrived in Chambéry, I felt all the bitterness of my loss. I went to a notary and made out a document signing over everything I owned to ‘Madame Catherine Bonnard, my wife’; I was thinking of her honor, and of our neighbors.
“When I had paid the notary and found myself outside holding the document, I felt I didn’t have the strength to write to Catherine. I went back in the notary’s and had him write to her in my name; one of his clerks accompanied me to the post office and mailed the packet in front of me. In a dark tavern, I had another letter written to Bonnard in Valence. I notified him of the transfer in my name, which amounted to 14,000 francs at least. I added that his sister was very ill in Lyon and was awaiting him there. I stamped and mailed this second letter myself. Since then, I have never heard anything about either of them.
“I found my wagon at the foot of Mount Cenis. I cannot recall why I was so attached to this vehicle, which was the immediate cause of my troubles, as you will see.
“The real cause was, no doubt, the terrible curse that Catherine had hurled at me. Young and impassioned as she was (she was just twenty years old), beautiful, innocent—because she had had no other lovers before me, a man she wanted to serve and honor as her husband—because of all this, her voice no doubt found ready access to the ear of God, and she entreated him to punish me severely.
“I bought a passport and a horse. I don’t know how I came to think of it, but when I realized at the foot of Mount Cenis that I was on a border, I had the idea of moving a bit of contraband with the help of my 500 francs; I bought some watches and put them in a secret compartment. I proceeded bravely right up to the border guards; the guards headed straight for my wagon; probably the watchmaker had sold me out; they seized my watches; I incurred also a fine of 100 ecus; I gave them 50 francs, and they let me go; I now had no more than 100 francs.
“This bad fortune woke me up. I said to myself, ‘So this is how one is reduced from 500 to 100 francs in a single moment! I would happily sell off the horse and the wagon, but I’m a long way from Zara.’
“While this sinister thought was racking me with remorse, a guard came running up behind me, crying out and making me stop. ‘You need to give me twenty francs, you dog of a Jew; the others back there tricked me, and I got only five francs while they got ten, and now I’ve had to go to all the trouble of chasing you here.’ It was almost nightfall; the man was drunk and insulting me.
“‘What!’ I exclaimed to myself: ‘now I have to reduce my poor hundred francs even further!’
“The guard gripped me by the collar; the demon tempted me; I stabbed him and threw him into the river, fifteen or twenty feet below the road; this was the first crime I ever committed. ‘Now I’m lost!’ I said to myself.
“As I neared Suze, I heard some noise behind me; I spurred my horse to a gallop; he took off so fast that I could not control him; the wagon tipped over, and I broke a leg. I thought, ‘Catherine has cursed me; heaven is just; I’ll be captured and hanged within two months.’
“None of that happened.”
SAN FRANCESCO A RIPA
Ariste and Dorante have written on this subject, which gave Éraste the idea of writing on it, too.
I am translating here, from an Italian chronicler, the details concerning the love affair of a Roman princess with a Frenchman.1 In 1726, at the beginning of the preceding century, all the abuses associated with nepotism flourished at Rome. Never had the papal court been so brilliant. Pope Benedict XIII (Orsini) reigned—or, more accurately, it was his nephew Prince Campobasso, in his uncle’s name, who oversaw all matters, from the greatest to the smallest. Foreigners from all corners of the world flocked to Rome; Italian princes, Spanish nobles still rich from the New World’s gold—they all crowded together there. All the rich and powerful men considered themselves above the laws. Gallantry and magnificence seemed the sole occupations of all those foreigners from so many nations.
The two nieces of the pope, the countess Orsini and the princess Campobasso, shared in their uncle’s power and received all the homage the court had to offer. Their beauty would have distinguished them in even the highest ranks of society. L’Orsini, as people in Rome called her informally, was lighthearted and disinvolta, whereas La Campobasso was tender and pious; but that tender soul was susceptible to the most violent transports. Without quite being declared enemies, and while encountering each other on a daily basis at the papal court and in their own homes, the two ladies were rivals in everything: beauty, consideration, and wealth.
Countess Orsini, less pretty but brilliant, clever, busy, and scheming, had lovers to whom she paid scarcely any attention and who reigned in her heart for no more than a day. Happiness to her was to see two hundred people in a salon and find herself the center of attention. She laughed at her cousin La Campobasso, who had been seen for three years straight in the company of a Spanish duke but in the end had commanded him to leave Rome within twenty-four hours on pain of death. “Ever since that great dispatch,” L’Orsini said, “my sublime cousin has never smiled. Now, some months later, it’s clear that the poor woman is dying of boredom, or of love, and her husband, a man of some sophistication, will manage to have this ennui of hers taken for the
highest kind of piety in the eyes of our uncle the pope. I suspect that this piety will lead her to undertake a Spanish pilgrimage.”
La Campobasso, however, was far from regretting her Spaniard, who had mortally bored her for two years. If she missed him, she would have sent to find him. Hers was one of those characters at once natural and naive in their indifference and in their passion, a type common enough in Rome. Out of a state of exalted devotion, and although scarcely over twenty-three years of age and in the very flower of her beauty, she came to throw herself on her knees before her uncle, beseeching him to grant her the “papal benediction,” which, as should be more widely known, absolves all sins, with the exception of two or three atrocious ones, even without confession. The good Benedict XIII wept with tenderness. “Stand up,” he said to his niece; “you don’t need my benediction; you are worth more than I am in the eyes of God.”
Infallible though he may have been, he was wrong about that—as was all of Rome. La Campobasso was wildly romantic; she had a lover but was deeply unhappy. It had been several months since she had been seeing, almost every day, the chevalier de Sénecé, nephew to the Duke of Saint-Aignan, then the ambassador for Louis XV in Rome.
The son of one of the mistresses of the regent of France, Philippe d’Orléans, the young Sénecé enjoyed the highest favor in France, a longtime colonel though he was scarcely twenty-two, with the habits of the utterly self-assured as well as the wherewithal to justify them, though he did not always seem that way. Taking into account his gaiety, his tendency to find amusement in everything at all times, a certain carelessness, his bravery, his good nature: putting all these traits together, one would have praised France by saying of him that he was the very pattern of that nation.
Princess Campobasso fell in love with him at first sight. “But,” she had said to him, “I do not trust you, because after all, you are French; on the day that people around my uncle in Rome say that I am in love with you, I will be convinced that you were the one to make it known, and on that day I will no longer love you.”
