by Stendhal
While thus toying with love, La Campobasso found herself stricken with a real passion. The chevalier likewise had felt attraction to her, but they had known each other for eight months, and the time it takes for passion to ripen for an Italian outdoes that of a Frenchman. The vanity of the chevalier consoled him in his impatience, and he had already had two or three portraits of La Campobasso sent back to Paris. Moreover, overcome by all the goods and advantages heaped upon him, so to speak, since infancy, he maintained that insouciance of his even in his own personal vanity, which is ordinarily the very thing that most troubles the hearts of people of his nation.
The eccentricities of the princess had amused him. She had admitted to him from the first month of their acquaintance that for the first time she really was in love, but it was only after several months, and after having to submit to some of the strangest proofs, that he had been able to come to a full understanding with her.
Frequently thereafter, for example, on the feast day of Saint Balbine, for whom she was named, he had to overcome a torrent of sincere and ardent pious remorse on her part. Sénecé had not made her “forget her religion,” as happens often with more vulgar women in Italy, but rather had to conquer her scruples by main force, and the combat was renewed frequently.
This obstacle—the first one that the highly favored young man had ever encountered—amused him, and it kept him in the habit of being tender and attentive regarding the princess. There was also another, and less romantic, reason. Sénecé had only one confidant, and that was his ambassador, to whom he reported a great deal that he learned from La Campobasso, who knew everything, and the importance this gave him in the eyes of the Duke of Saint-Aignan flattered him.
La Campobasso, on the other hand, had never been particularly interested in the social advantages a lover might bring. For her, being loved or not being loved was all that mattered. “I am sacrificing my eternal happiness for him,” she said to herself; “while he, a heretic and a Frenchman, has nothing of comparable value to sacrifice for me.” But the chevalier seemed so likable, his gaiety so inexhaustible and at the same time so natural and spontaneous, that her heart was touched; she was charmed. In his presence, everything she had planned to say to him evaporated, along with all her somber thoughts. And this state, so new for such a highborn, serious soul, would continue for a long time after each time Sénecé departed. Eventually, she realized she could not think, could not live away from him.
For two centuries, the Spanish were the fashionable foreigners in Rome, but lately the mode had begun to favor the French. People were beginning to understand that national type, which brought pleasure and cheer everywhere it turned up. That trait was in those days found only among the French, and since the Revolution of 1789 it has died out altogether. The reason is that such an ongoing gaiety requires a carefree attitude, and no one in France is sure of his career anymore, not even the man of genius.
War since then has been declared between men of Sénecé’s class and the rest of the nation. Rome, too, was very different then from what she is today. No one then, in 1726, could have suspected what was going to happen sixty-seven years later, when the people, paid by some clerics, slit the throat of the Jacobin Basseville, who, he said, wanted to civilize the capital city of the Christian world.2
For the first time, because of Sénecé, La Campobasso had lost her reason, suffering greatly over entertaining thoughts that reason could not approve. In such a character so severe and sincere, once Sénecé had overcome her religion, which for her had likewise been something separate from reason, it was inevitable that this love of hers should grow into the most frantic and desperate passion.
The princess, in the past, had honored one Monsignor Feraterra and had made his fortune. What must she have thought, then, when Feraterra told her not only that Sénecé had been going more often than usual to the home of the countess Orsini but also that he was the cause of her having dismissed a celebrated castrato who had nominally been her lover for several weeks!
Our story begins at this point, on the evening of the day on which La Campobasso heard this fatal bit of news.
She lay immobile in a great golden leather armchair. Around her, on a little table of black marble, were two great long-stemmed silver lamps, masterpieces crafted by the famous Benvenuto Cellini, which illuminated, or rather emphasized, the shadows of this immense room on the ground floor of her palazzo, ornamented with paintings blackened by time; for already at that time, the era of the great painters was long over.
Sitting with the princess, almost at her feet, in a little chair of ebony decorated with great golden ornaments, was the young Sénecé, who had come to stretch out his elegant person. The princess stared at him, and, far from running to him and throwing herself in his arms, she had not spoken a word to him.
In 1726, Paris was already the city most renowned for the elegances of life and for jewelry. Sénecé regularly had couriers from there bringing him everything that could further set off the graces of one of the handsomest men in France. Despite the self-assurance so natural to a man of his rank, who had made his first conquests among the beauties of the regent’s court under the direction of his uncle the celebrated Canillac, one of the regent’s roués,3 it was nonetheless possible to detect some hint of embarrassment on the features of Sénecé. The lovely blond hair of the princess was in slight disorder; her large, deep, blue eyes were fixed upon him: their expression was uncertain. Was there some mortal vengeance afoot? Or was this simply an interval of deep seriousness in her passionate love?
At last, in a weak voice, she said, “So, you don’t love me anymore?”
A long silence followed upon this declaration of war.
It was not easy for the princess to deprive herself of the charms of Sénecé’s presence; in fact, if she had not made a scene, he had been on the verge of murmuring a hundred little endearments to her; but she had too much pride to put off the matter. A coquette is jealous out of self-love; an amorous woman out of habit; a woman who loves sincerely and passionately has a clear awareness of her rights. That manner of looking at him, unique to the passion of a Roman, amused Sénecé a great deal; he found depth and incertitude in her gaze; he could, so to speak, see her soul in the nude. L’Orsini did not possess this grace.
However, as the silence continued to be prolonged, the young Frenchman, who was not very agile in penetrating the hidden feelings of an Italian heart, found in that silence an air of tranquillity and of reasonableness that put him at his ease. But then, suddenly, he felt uneasy: in traversing the cellars and subterranean passages that led from the neighboring house into this ground-floor room of the Campobasso palazzo, the charming, brand-new embroidery of his charming outfit, just arrived from Paris, had become covered in spiderwebs. These spiderwebs made him uneasy, because he had always felt a special horror for that insect.
Senece, thinking he perceived calm in the princess’s gaze, began to think of avoiding the scene by turning the tables and reproaching her for saying such a thing; but the irritation he felt made him serious. He said to himself, “Wouldn’t this be a good time to make her see the truth? She just brought the subject up herself; that’s half of the trouble already over. Clearly, I’m not made for love. I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as this woman with those remarkable eyes of hers. She has bad manners, though, and she makes me sneak through disgusting underground passages; but she is the niece of the sovereign whom my king has sent me here to work with. And then she’s blond, in a country where all the women are brunettes: that is a major distinction. Every day, I hear her beauty praised to the skies by men with impeccable taste, men who never in a thousand years would guess that they were speaking to the fortunate possessor of all those charms. As for the power a man should have over his mistress, I have no concern in that regard. If I wanted to take the trouble, with a word I could take her away from her palace, from her golden furnishings, from her uncle-monarch, and all just to carry her away to France, to live out her days
sorrowfully on one of my estates… . Good Lord, the image of that denouement inspires the strongest resolution in me never to speak such a word. L’Orsini is much less pretty: she loves me, if she actually does love me, just a little more than she loved that castrato Butafoco I made her drop the other day; but she knows how things are done, she knows how to live, one can come to her home in a carriage. And I am quite sure she will never make a scene: she doesn’t love me enough for that.”
All during this long silence, the fixed gaze of the princess never left the handsome face of the young Frenchman.
“I will never see him again,” she said to herself. And abruptly, she threw herself into his arms, covering with kisses his face and those eyes of his that would never again grow warm at the sight of her. It would be undervaluing the chevalier to think that he did not immediately forget all his plans for breaking off with her; but his mistress was too profoundly moved to forget her jealousy. A few seconds later, Sénecé looked at her with astonishment as tears of rage fell rapidly from her eyes. “What!” she exclaimed to herself under her breath. “I abased myself down to the level of accusing him of changing his affections; I reproached him—I, who swore never to notice such a thing! And all that wasn’t low enough; I had to give in to the passion that his charming face inspires in me! Oh, vile, vile princess!”
She brushed away her tears and seemed to have regained some tranquillity.
“Chevalier, we must come to an end,” she said calmly. “You regularly visit the countess… .” Here, she went extremely pale. “If you love her, go there every day, fine; but never return here… .” Here, she stopped despite herself. She waited for some word from the chevalier; no words were spoken. With a slight, convulsive motion, she continued, her teeth somewhat clenched: “It will be the end of my life, and of yours.”
This threat made up the chevalier’s mind; until now, his only reaction was surprise at such an unexpected outburst after such a bout of tenderness, but now he began to laugh.
The subtle red on the cheeks of the princess turned scarlet. “She’s going to suffocate from her rage,” the chevalier thought; “she’s going to have a stroke.” He leaned forward to unlace her dress; she pushed him back with a resolve and a force to which he was not accustomed. Sénecé recalled later that as he tried to take her in his arms, he could hear her talking to herself. He drew back a little: a pointless discretion, because she seemed not to see him any longer. In a low, intense voice, as if she were speaking to her confessor, she was saying to herself: “He insults me, and he mocks me. Considering his age and the indiscretion natural to men of his country, he will no doubt go tell L’Orsini all the depths of indignity to which I’ve sunk… . I cannot rely on my own judgment, not even trust myself to remain unmoved in the sight of that beautiful face… .” Here, there was a new silence, which irritated the chevalier anew. Finally, the princess arose and repeated, in an even more somber tone, “We must come to an end.”
Senece had interpreted this as a resolution, which he assumed meant there was no longer an opportunity for coming to a serious understanding, and he hazarded a few light remarks on a bit of news everyone was talking about in Rome… .
“Leave me now, chevalier,” the princess interrupted; “I am not feeling well.”
“The lady is bored,” said Sénecé to himself as he hurried to obey; “and there is nothing more contagious than boredom.”
The princess watched him as he made his way to the other end of the room… . “And I was about to make a fool of myself over him!” she exclaimed to herself with a bitter smile. “Fortunately, his inappropriate pleasantries brought me back to myself. What a fool he is! How could I love someone who understands so little? He wants to amuse me with some little story, when it’s a question of my life, and of his!
“Ah, I recognize it, this dark, sinister disposition of mine that causes me such misery!” And at that she rose up out of her chair in a fury. “How lovely his eyes looked when he started telling that anecdote… . I have to admit that the poor chevalier’s intention was benign. He recognized this dark trait in my personality, and he simply wanted to pull me out from the somber mood that was tormenting me instead of asking me the cause of it… . That sweet Frenchman! To tell the truth, had I ever really been happy before falling in love with him?”
She began to think again of all the delicious perfections of her lover. And from there, she slowly moved to contemplating the graces of the countess Orsini. Now, everything began to blacken. The most tormenting jealousy seized her heart. Indeed, a grim foreboding had been bothering her for two months now, and her only lighthearted moments had been those she had passed with the chevalier; yet whenever she was not in his arms, she spoke to him with bitterness.
Her evening was hideous. Exhausted and even a little calmed by her sorrow, she had the idea of speaking with the chevalier. “After all, he saw me angry, but he does not really know the cause of my feelings. Perhaps he doesn’t love the countess; perhaps he goes to her only because a traveler must partake of the society in which he finds himself, and above all when it is a matter of the sovereign’s family. Perhaps if I were to formally introduce Sénecé, if he could openly be seen visiting me, he would spend as much time here as he does with Orsini.”
“But no,” she cried angrily. “I will only debase myself by speaking; he will despise me, and that will be the only result. That empty-headed giddiness of Orsini’s character, which I’ve so despised, fool that I’ve been, is in fact more appealing than my own, and especially in the eyes of a Frenchman. What can be more absurd than to always be serious, as if life were not serious enough anyway? What will become of me when I no longer have my chevalier to give me life, to ignite a little fire in my cold heart?”
She had commanded her doors to be shut, but that command did not apply to Monsignor Feraterra, who had come, at about one in the morning, to narrate to her what he had observed at L’Orsini’s. Up until now, this prelate had served the princess and her love affair in good faith, but he had no doubt that Sénecé would soon come to an understanding with countess Orsini, if he had not done so already.
He thought, ‘A pious princess is of more use to me than a woman of society. There will always be someone she prefers to me—her lover. And if one day this lover is a Roman, he might find favor with her uncle the cardinal. But if I can convert her, she will think of me, her spiritual director, before everyone else, and she will do so with all the fiery passion of her character. Then, is there any limit to what I can hope for from her uncle?” The ambitious prelate let his thoughts wander, lost in visions of his delicious future. He pictured the princess going down on her knees before her uncle to plead for the red hat for him… . The pope would be very appreciative of what he was about to undertake. Once the princess was converted, he would bring irrefutable proofs to the pope of her intrigue with the young French man. Pious, sincere, and abhorring the French as he did, His Holiness would feel eternal gratitude toward the agent who managed to bring so distasteful an intrigue to an end. Feraterra’s origins were in the highest level of nobility in Ferrara; he was rich, and he was over fifty… . Animated by the prospect of gaining the red hat so quickly, he accomplished miracles; he dared to change his behavior around the princess abruptly. During the two months that Sénecé had toyed with her, it clearly would have been dangerous to attack him, for the prelate, misunderstanding Sénecé, believed him to be ambitious.
The reader will have found these diatribes by the young princess, who was out of her mind with love, and the prelate, who was out of his with ambition, tedious enough. Feraterra began with a simple avowal that what he was about to tell her was no more than the sad truth. After a startling beginning like that, he found it quite easy to revive in her all those religious and passionately pious sentiments that had been only half-asleep in the heart of the young Roman; hers was a sincere faith. “Every unholy passion must end in misery and dishonor,” the prelate told her. It was broad daylight by the time he exited the Campobasso p
alazzo. He had obtained a promise from the new convert not to receive Sénecé that day. The promise cost the princess little; she believed herself to be a pious woman, and in any case, she was afraid of making herself contemptible in the eyes of the chevalier.
The resolution was firmly held, until four o’clock; that was the time the chevalier would normally arrive. He went through the street behind the Campobasso palazzo, saw the signal announcing the impossibility of seeing her that day, and, perfectly content, went directly on to the home of the countess Orsini.
La Campobasso felt she was slowly going mad. One strange idea or resolution after another raced through her mind. Suddenly, she came down the great staircase of the palazzo like a woman insane, leaped up into her coach, and cried out to the coachman: “To the Orsini palazzo!”
Her extreme misery was pushing her, almost against her will, to go and see her cousin. She found her there, among some fifty guests. All the wits in Rome, all the social climbers, unable to penetrate the Campobasso palazzo, flowed naturally into the Orsini one. The arrival of the princess was an event; everyone moved back out of respect; she did not condescend to notice them: she stared straight ahead at her rival, wondering at her. Every one of her cousin’s charms was like a dagger in her heart. After some opening compliments, L’Orsini, seeing she was quiet and preoccupied, turned back to the sparkling, disinvolta conversation she had been engaged in.
“Her gaiety is so much better suited to the chevalier than my insane, boring passion!” she exclaimed to herself.
In an inexplicable moment of transport, composed of both admiration and hatred, she rushed over and embraced the countess. She could see nothing but her cousin’s charms; from afar or from close up, they seemed equally adorable. She compared her hair to her own, her eyes, her skin. This examination ended in her feeling a sense of horror and disgust for herself. Everything about her rival seemed adorable, everything seemed superior.
