by Stendhal
Immobile, somber, La Campobasso stood like a statue of basalt in the midst of that chattering, gesticulating crowd. People came in, people went out; all the racket was irritating to her. But imagine the change in her feelings when she heard the servant announcing the entry of Monsieur de Sénecé! In the early days of their relationship, it had been agreed that he would speak very little to her in society, as was suitable for a foreign diplomat who would encounter only two or three times a month the niece of the sovereign to whom he was assigned.
Senece greeted her with the respect and seriousness to which they were both accustomed; then, turning to the countess Orsini, he switched to that gaiety of tone, verging on intimacy, that you use when you find yourself with a clever woman who welcomes you into her home on a daily basis. La Campobasso was devastated. “The countess shows me what I ought to have been,” she said to herself. “There—that’s what I ought to be, and that’s exactly what I shall never be!” She left in the deepest misery a human can feel, nearly resolved to go home and take poison. All the pleasures of love that Sénecé had given her could not begin to equal the surfeit of grief into which she was plunged all that long night. One might say that these Roman souls have enormous treasuries of energy, unknown to other women, which they spend on suffering.
In the morning, Sénecé passed the house and again saw the negative signal. He was about to go on his way happily enough; however, he felt nettled. “So, it was my dismissal she was giving me the other day.” He got out of his coach and went down into the underground passage, intending to force open the door of the great room on the ground floor where the princess would receive him.
“What! You dare to show your face here!” said the startled princess.
The young Frenchman thought, “This surprise of hers is not quite sincere; she never comes to this room unless she’s expecting me.”
The chevalier took her hand, and she trembled. Her eyes welled up with tears; she was so pretty at that moment that the chevalier felt love for her. As for her, she forgot all the sermons that religion had been providing her for two days. She threw herself into his arms, perfectly happy: “And this is the happiness that L’Orsini will enjoy from now on… .” Sénecé, misunderstanding the Roman mind as usual, believed she wanted to break off with him but remain on friendly terms. “It would not be good for me, attached as I am to the king’s ambassador, to have a mortal enemy (and mortal she would certainly be) in the niece of the sovereign to whom I am assigned.” Quite pleased with the way things were turning out, he began to speak reasonably to her.
They would go on, enjoying the most agreeable friendship. Why shouldn’t they both be happy? What had either one done to merit reproach? Love would give way to a fine, strong friendship. He would retain the right to come often to this place; their relationship would be a smooth and pleasant one… .
At first, the princess did not understand. When she did finally understand, with horror, she remained standing, immobile, her eyes fixed. Finally, at the phrase “smooth and pleasant relationship,” she interrupted him with a voice that seemed to be torn from the very bottom of her chest, and she pronounced her words slowly:
“That is to say that, after all, you find me pretty enough to retain as a girl at your service!”
“Oh, my dear, good friend, isn’t our reputation perfectly safe?” replied Sénecé, shocked in turn. “How can you possibly complain? Fortunately, no one has any suspicion of our relationship. I am a man of honor; I give you my word that no living soul will ever hear a word about the happiness I have enjoyed.”
“Not even L’Orsini?” she asked in a tone so cold that its import escaped the chevalier.
“Have I ever named anyone,” he said naively, “with whom I was in love before I became your devoted slave?”
“Despite my great respect for your word of honor, it is still a risk that I do not choose to run,” said the princess in a resolute voice, which had finally begun to startle the young Frenchman. “Farewell, Chevalier… .” And then, when he remained standing there as if undecided, she added, “Come, embrace me. Give me that one grace. Speak seriously; answer me seriously.”
“I swear it.”
“Is your conscience in a good state?”
“Oh, threats!” said the chevalier, stifling a laugh. “Farewell, princess. Personal threats are not the way to reach a Frenchman’s heart… .” And then, the ambition within the young diplomat made him add, “I believe you are too generous to try to hurt me through my ambassador.”
“You have absolutely nothing to fear in that regard,” the princess said with an air and a smile dripping with irony. Their embrace was long and silent. He left. “And there goes the happiness that L’Orsini will be enjoying,” the princess said to herself.
“There was an example of determined hatred,” thought the chevalier. “The meeting began so sweetly, and then turned so tedious.” He leaped through the doorway and disappeared.
Monsignor Feraterra shuddered when the princess told him about the interview. “I cannot trust the promises of this princess,” he thought; “I’ll need to compromise her.”
Two days later, the heat had been overwhelming, and so Sénecé went out to the court to take the air around midnight. There, he found all of Roman high society. When he was ready to get back into his coach, his lackey could barely reply to him: he was drunk; the coach had disappeared; the lackey told him, barely able to get the words out, that the coachman had been in some dispute with an “enemy.”
“Ah, so my coachman has ‘enemies’!” laughed Sénecé.
Walking back to his lodgings, he was only two or three streets past the Corso when he realized he was being followed. A group of men, some four or five, stopped when he stopped, walked on when he walked on. “I could take a detour and get to the Corso by another street,” thought Sénecé. “Bah! These louts aren’t worth the trouble; I’m well armed.” He had his dagger unsheathed and in his hand.
Thinking thus, he crossed two or three streets more and more solitary and deserted. He could hear the men increasing their pace. He raised his eyes and happened to see right in front of him the walls of a small church through whose windows a remarkably bright light was shining. He hurried to the door, banging on it with the butt of his dagger. The men pursuing him were fifty paces away. They began running toward him now, and at the last moment a monk opened the door; Sénecé hurled himself into the church; the monk lowered the bar and locked the door. At that moment, the men reached the door, knocking and kicking at it. “Ungodly men!” exclaimed the monk. Sénecé gave him a gold sequin. “They were definitely after me,” he said.
The church was illuminated by at least a thousand candles.
“What? A service at this hour?” he asked the monk.
“Excellency, we have approval for it from His Eminence the cardinal vicar.”
The entire forecourt of the Church of San Francesco a Ripa was occupied by a magnificent mausoleum; the office of the dead was being chanted.
“Who has died? Some prince?” asked Sénecé.
The priest replied, “Doubtless, because no expense has been spared; but all this is so much silver and wax wasted; our director has told us that the deceased died impenitent.”
Senece stepped forward; he saw insignia that appeared to be French; his curiosity redoubled; he stepped up close and recognized the arms! There was a Latin inscription:
Nobilis homo Johannes Norbertus Sénecé eques decessit Romae.
“The high and mighty lord Jean Norbert de Sénecé, chevalier, dead in Rome.”
“I must be the first man,” Sénecé thought, “to have the honor of attending his own funeral… . I believe only Charles V was granted this pleasure… .4 But it isn’t safe for me in this church.”
He gave a second sequin to the sacristan. “Father,” he said, “let me out by a door at the rear of the church.”
“Certainly,” said the monk.
As soon as he was in the street, Sénecé, who now had a p
istol in each hand, began to run as fast as he could. Soon, he could hear his pursuers behind him. As he approached his hotel, he saw the door closed and a man standing in front of it. “This is the moment for attack,” the young Frenchman thought; he was preparing to kill the man with a pistol shot when he recognized his valet.
“Open the door!” he cried.
It was opened; they ran in quickly and locked it behind them.
“Ah, monsieur, I’ve been looking everywhere for you; I have some very sad news: poor Jean, your coachman, was stabbed to death. The princess Campobosso is in an extreme state; the pope has sent the grand confessor to her.” The valet added, lowering his voice: “They say she was poisoned by the countess Orsini. And they told me at the princess’s house that you had been assassinated.”
“As you can see!” said the chevalier, laughing.
While they were speaking, eight musket shots rang out, breaking through the garden window, laying out both him and the valet. Their bodies had been pierced by more than twenty bullets each.5
Excuse the faults of the author. Moral: One must always understand the facts as they are in the country one visits.
PROSPER MERIMEE6
TOO MUCH FAVOR IS DEADLY
A TALE OF 1589
Such is the title that a Spanish poet gave to this story, from which he crafted a tragedy. I have taken great care to avoid borrowing any of the ornaments that the Spaniard deployed in trying to embellish this sad picture from the interior of a convent; many of those ornaments would certainly enhance the tale’s interest, but, faithful to my intent—which is to make known the simple, passionate people of the sixteenth century, from which springs the civilization of our time—I will present the story without ornament just as one might, assuming one had the proper permissions, be able to read it in the archives of the bishop of ***, where all the original documents can be found, making up the curious tale of Count Buondelmonte.
In a Tuscan town that I will not name, there existed in 1589, and still exists today, a somber, magnificent convent.1 Its black walls, at least fifty feet tall, make the whole neighborhood a depressing place; these walls form a border along three streets, and on the fourth side the convent garden stretches out all the way to the town’s ramparts. The wall encircling the garden is not as high. This abbey, to which we shall give the name Saint Reparata, takes in only girls of the highest ranks of the nobility. On the twentieth of October 1587, all the abbey’s bells were ringing; the church, open to the faithful, was hung with magnificent tapestries of red damask richly fringed with gold. The saintly Sister Virgilia, mistress of Ferdinand I, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, had been named abbess of Saint Reparata the previous evening, and now the local bishop, accompanied by all his clergy, had come to install her formally. The whole town was in such commotion that it was impossible to make your way through the streets near Saint Reparata.
The cardinal Ferdinand de Medici, who had recently succeeded his brother François to the crown—without renouncing the cardinal’s hat—was thirty-six years old and had been a cardinal for twenty-five, having been elevated to that great honor at the age of eleven. The reign of François, celebrated even in our time for his love for Bianca Capello, had been marked by all the follies that the love of pleasure can inspire in a prince not particularly noted for strength of character. Ferdinand, for his part, could reproach himself for some of the same kinds of weaknesses as his brother’s; his love for the sister oblate Virgilia was widely celebrated in Tuscany, but, it must be added, it was celebrated for its innocence. Given that the Grand Duke François—who was somber, violent, and led entirely by his passions—never imagined there was any scandal in this love, no one ever questioned the virtue of Sister Virgilia. The Order of Oblates, to which she belonged, having given its sisters permission to pass some two-thirds of the year in the homes of their relations, she saw Cardinal de Medici on a daily basis whenever he was in Florence. Two things were subjects of surprised talk in that town given to exquisite pleasures, two things concerning a prince who was young, rich, and given a kind of sanction by the example of his brother: Sister Virgilia was sweet-natured, shy, and possessed of a remarkable intelligence, but she was by no means pretty; and the young cardinal had seen her only ever in the presence of two or three devout women of the noble Respuccio family—the family to whom belonged that remarkable mistress of the young prince of the blood.
Grand Duke François died on October 19, 1587, in the evening. On the twentieth, before noon, the greatest signors of his court and the richest merchants—for, it must be recalled, the Medici were originally only merchants; their relatives and the most influential persons at their court were still engaged in commerce, which had the effect of preventing their courtiers from being quite as absurd as their peers at other courts—the first-rank courtiers, the richest merchants all came, on that morning of October 20, into the modest house of Sister Oblate Virgilia, who was startled to see such a spectacle.
The new grand duke, Ferdinand, wanted to be good and reasonable, to work for the good of his people, and to these ends he wanted above all to eliminate all intrigue from his court. Upon coming to power, he found that the richest convent in his realm, the one which served as a refuge for all those noble daughters whose parents wanted to sacrifice them to enhance the luster of the family and to which we have given the name of the Abbey of Saint Reparata, currently had no abbess; he named, without hesitation, the woman he loved to the position.
The Abbey of Saint Reparata belonged to the Order of Saint Benedict, the rule of which forbade sisters from leaving their cloister. To the great surprise of the good people of Florence, the prince cardinal did not go to see the new abbess, but, on the other hand, through a sort of delicacy of the heart, which was noted but, we might add, rather criticized by all the women at court, he never allowed himself to be alone with any woman. While he conducted himself in this manner, the courtiers’ attentions would turn to seek out Sister Virgilia, even in her convent, and they thought that they could see, despite her extreme modesty, that she was not averse to this attention, the only kind that the virtue of the new sovereign would permit.
The Convent of Saint Reparata had often had to deal with affairs of an extremely delicate nature: those young daughters of the richest families in Florence did not allow themselves to be exiled from the brilliant society of so rich a city, of that city which was then the very capital of European commerce, without casting a regretful gaze upon that which they had to leave behind; often, they complained at the tops of their voices of the injustice of their parents, and sometimes they sought out the consolations of love, and so it sometimes happened that the hatreds and rivalries of the convent came to roil the higher society of Florence. One result of this state of things was that the abbess of Saint Reparata had frequent audiences with the reigning grand duke. In order to effect the least possible violation of the rule of Saint Benedict, the grand duke would send one of his carriages with two of the ladies from his court in it, and they would accompany the abbess right up to the audience chamber in the grand duke’s palace on the great Via Larga. The two “enclosure witnesses,” as they were called, would take their places on chairs next to the door while the abbess went in alone to speak to the prince, who awaited her at the far end of the chamber so that the enclosure witnesses could hear nothing of what passed in this conference.
At other times, the prince would go to the Church of Saint Reparata; the choir grillwork would be opened for him, and the abbess would come out to speak with His Highness.
Neither of these two methods of audience was satisfactory to the grand duke; indeed, they may have fanned the flames of certain feelings that he wished to allow to fade away. And affairs of a quite delicate nature never failed to arise at the Convent of Saint Reparata: the tender sentiments of Sister Félize degli Almieri were the latest to disturb the tranquillity of the place. The Almieri family was one of the most powerful and richest in Florence. Two of the brothers—for whose sake the young Félize was
sacrificed—having recently died and the third remaining childless, the family believed themselves to be suffering some affliction from heaven. The mother and the surviving brother sent Félize, despite the vow of poverty she had taken, little presents, some of the goods of which she had been deprived in order to stoke the vanity of her brothers.
The Convent of Saint Reparata had at this time forty-three sisters. Each of them had her own maid, her camériste noble: these were young women who came from the ranks of impoverished nobility; they ate at a separate table and received one ecu per month from the convent treasurer for their expenses. But because of a singular custom, one that was not favorable to the peace of the convent, no one could be a camériste noble after thirty years of age; having arrived at that stage of life, these girls either married or were admitted into the sisterhood in the convents of some inferior order.
The most noble ladies of Saint Reparata could have up to five maids, but Sister Félize degli Almieri claimed she had the right to eight. All of the more gallant sisters, and these numbered fifteen or sixteen, supported the claims of Félize, whereas the twenty-six others made a show of being profoundly scandalized and spoke among themselves of appealing to the prince.
The good Sister Virgilia, the new abbess, by no means had the kind of mind suited to adjudicating such serious business; the two parties seemed to demand that she submit the matter to the prince.
Already at court, all the friends of the Almieri family were beginning to talk, saying how strange it was that anyone would want to deprive a daughter of such high birth, and especially one who had been so barbarously sacrificed by her family, of making whatever use she chose of her fortune, especially when the usage was so innocent. On the other side, the families of the older sisters and those less rich did not fail to point out that it was at the least quite singular to see a sister who had taken a vow of poverty unable to content herself with five maids.
