Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  The grand duke wanted to cut this annoyance off quickly, as it had the potential to drag the whole city into the debate. His ministers pressed him to have an audience with the abbess of Saint Reparata, and since that young woman, with her celestial virtue and her fine character, would probably not deign to take her attention away from heavenly things and apply it to such a miserable scuffle, the grand duke could simply communicate his decision to her and she would carry it out. “But how am I supposed to make a decision,” the prince quite reasonably asked himself, “if I know nothing of what it is that makes the two sides so determined?” Moreover, he by no means wanted to make an enemy of the powerful Almieri family without good reason.

  The prince had Count Buondelmonte as an intimate friend; the count was one year younger, that is to say, he was thirty-five. They had known each other since the cradle, having had the same nurse, a rich and beautiful peasant woman from Casentino. Count Buondelmonte, very rich, very noble, and one of the handsomest men in the city, was remarkable for his air of indifference and the coldness of his character. He had rejected the plea to become the chief minister, which Grand Duke Ferdinand had made to him on the first day he arrived in Florence.

  “If I were in your place,” the count had said to him, “I would abdicate at once. Imagine it: why would I want to be minister to a prince and stir up the hatred of half the population of the city where I live!”

  Amid the discomforts that the grand duke felt at court because of the dissension about the Convent of Saint Reparata, he thought he would turn to his friend the count. The latter was spending his time on his estate, overseeing the management of his lands with great seriousness. Every day, he spent two hours hunting or fishing, depending on the weather, and he was never known to have a mistress. He was highly annoyed at the prince’s letter telling him to come to Florence, and he was even more so when he learned that the prince wanted to make him director of the Convent of Saint Reparata.

  “I would almost rather be the chief minister to Your Highness,” the count said to him. “Peace of mind is the one thing I value most, and now you want me to put myself into the middle of this flock of enraged sheep?”

  “What made me think of you, my friend, is that everyone knows that no woman has ever dominated your heart for so much as a day; I am far from being able to claim that happiness; I am always on the point of falling into the kind of follies that my brother committed over Bianca Capello.”

  At this point, the prince confided intimately to his friend—knowing that doing so would win him over.

  “You must know,” he said, “that if I see that sweet girl again, the one I made abbess of Saint Reparata, I will no longer answer for myself.”

  “And what would be so bad about that?” replied the count. “If it would make you happy to take a mistress, why not go ahead and take one? The only reason I don’t is that every woman, before three days are out, ends up boring me with her gossip and all the little pettinesses of her character.”

  “I am a cardinal,” said the grand duke. “It is true that the pope has given me permission to resign the red hat and get married, in consideration of the crown that I have come to; but I really don’t want to burn in hell, and if I marry, I’ll have to choose a woman I don’t love at all, just one who will provide successors to the crown, and I will not enjoy the ordinary pleasures of marriage.”

  “I have nothing to say to all that,” replied the count. “I do not believe that the all-powerful God would ever lower his gaze to such miseries. Just see to it that your subjects are happy and good, decent people, and then if you like, go on and have thirty-six mistresses.”

  “I don’t want to have even one,” replied the prince with a laugh, “and that’s why I’ll be in such danger if I go to see the abbess of Saint Reparata again. She is both the best girl in the world and the one least capable of governing even some little group of wise, pious, elderly devotees, much less a convent full of young girls taken away from the world against their own wishes.”

  The prince revealed so deep a fear of seeing Sister Virgilia that the count was touched. As he thought about the prince, he said to himself, “If he fails to keep the kind of vow he made, even though the pope gave him permission to marry, he’s capable of feeling unhappy for the rest of his life.” The next day, he went to the Convent of Saint Reparata, where he was received with all the honors and all the curiosity due to a new representative of the prince. Ferdinand I had sent one of his ministers to the abbess and the nuns to declare that affairs of state no longer permitted him to give his attention to their convent and that therefore he had placed full authority in Count Buondelmonte, whose decisions were to be final.

  After his first audience with the good abbess, the count was scandalized at the prince’s bad taste: she had no common sense and was hardly even pretty. As for the nuns who wanted to prevent Félize degli Almieri from taking on two new chambermaids, the count found them quite malicious. He had Félize called to the visiting room. She sent an impertinent reply that she did not have time, which amused the count, who was up till then tired of his mission and regretting that he had agreed to it for the prince.

  He said that he would like to speak to the chambermaids just as much as to Félize herself, and he sent for five of them to come to the visiting room. Only three came, declaring in the name of their mistress that she could not do without the presence of the other two, upon which the count, making use of his rights as the representative of the prince, had two of his men go into the convent and bring the two recalcitrant maids to him, and he amused himself for an hour listening to the chatter of those five young, pretty girls, who all tended to talk at the same time. It was only then, through what they revealed without knowing it, that the prince’s representative began to understand what was going on in this convent. Only five or six of the nuns were old; twenty, though young, were devout, but all the others, young and pretty, had lovers in the city. Of course they could see them only rarely. But how did they manage to see them? The count did not want to ask this of the chambermaids of Félize, but he swore to himself that he would find out soon by placing spies around the convent.

  He learned, to his great surprise, that intimate friendships formed among the nuns, and that these were the major cause of all the hatreds and internal dissension. For example, Félize had Rodelinde de P*** as a close friend; Céliane, the most beautiful one in the convent after Félize, was best friends with the young Fabienne. Each of these women held her camériste noble in greater or lesser favor. For example, Martona, the camériste noble of the abbess, had gained her favor by being even more devout than she was. She would pray on her knees next to the abbess for five or six hours every day—but, according to the chambermaids, those hours seemed awfully long to her.

  The count learned, moreover, that Rodéric and Lancelot were the names of two of the women’s lovers, apparently of Félize and Rodelinde, though he did not want to raise the question directly.

  The hour he spent with the maids did not seem long at all to him, but to Félize, it seemed eternal; she saw her dignity being outraged by this representative of the prince, who was depriving her, at one fell swoop, of the services of all five of her maids. She could not endure it, and, straining to hear the considerable volume of chatter coming from the visiting room, she burst in, even though her dignity warned her that appearing like this, clearly inflamed by a transport of impatience, might make her appear ridiculous, particularly after having refused the official invitation of the prince’s envoy. “But I’ll be taking this little man down a peg,” Félize, the most imperious of women, said to herself. She thus burst into the visiting room and, barely acknowledging the prince’s envoy, she ordered one of her maids to follow her.

  “Madame, if this girl obeys you, I will have my men go back into the convent and immediately bring her back here to me.”

  “I shall take her by the hand, and will your men dare to do me violence?”

  “My men will bring both her and you back h
ere to the visiting room, madame.”

  “And me?”

  “And you yourself, and if I feel like it, I shall have you carried away from this convent, and you can continue to labor for your salvation in some poor little convent up on the summit of some mountain in the Apennines. I can do that—and many other things as well.”

  The count noticed that the five maids had all gone pale; even the cheeks of Félize herself had taken on a pale cast that only made her more beautiful.

  The count said to himself, “This is without a doubt the most beautiful person I have seen in my entire life. I have to make this scene last.”

  And in fact it lasted for three-quarters of an hour. During that time, Félize demonstrated a spirit and, more importantly, a hauteur of character that hugely amused the prince’s envoy. By the end of the conference, when the tone of the conversation had mellowed, it seemed to the count that Félize was rather less pretty.

  “She has to be put into a fury,” he thought. He reminded her that she had taken a vow of obedience, and if in the future she showed even the slightest resistance to the commands of the prince that he was charged with bringing to the convent, he thought it would be a good thing for her salvation if she were to be sent to spend six months in one of the dullest convents in the Apennines.

  At this, Félize became superb in her rage. She told him that the holy martyrs had suffered more than that from the Roman emperors.

  “I am not an emperor, madame, just as those holy martyrs did not put their entire society into an uproar over having two additional maids, when they already had five as amiable as these young ladies.”

  He bowed coldly and left without giving her the chance to reply, leaving her furious.

  The count remained in Florence and did not return to his estates, being curious to know what was really going on in the Convent of Saint Reparata. The observers given him by the grand duke’s police, who had been stationed around the convent and its immense gardens, were quick to tell him everything they knew. Rodéric L***, one of the richest and most dissipated young men in town, was the lover of Félize, and her friend Rodelinde was making love with Lancelot P***, a young man who had greatly distinguished himself in Florence’s war against Pisa. These young men had surmounted great difficulties in order to get into the convent. The severity of the rule there had redoubled, or rather, the old laxness had been suppressed since Ferdinand had ascended to the throne of the grand duke. The abbess Virgilia was anxious for the rule to be followed in all its strictness, but her abilities and her character were not a match for her good intentions, and the observers reporting to the count informed him that there rarely passed a whole month without Rodéric, Lancelot, and two or three other young men with relationships within the convent succeeding in getting in to see their mistresses. The great size of the gardens of the convent had obliged the bishop to tolerate the existence of two doors that opened onto the deserted space behind the rampart, to the north of the city. The nuns who were faithful to their duties—and they were the great majority of the convent—knew these details far less well than the count did, but they suspected something of the kind and made use of the existence of such abuses to excuse their failing to obey the orders of the abbess when it suited them.

  The count could see clearly that it would not be at all easy to restore order in this convent so long as a woman as weak as the abbess was in charge. He said as much to the grand duke, who told him to go ahead and use the utmost severity, but at the same time he did not seem disposed to have his old love transferred to some other convent on account of her lack of ability.

  The count returned to Saint Reparata determined to use the greatest rigor in order to get himself quit of the chore he had been foolish enough to take on. Félize, for her part, still stinging from the manner in which the count had spoken to her, was determined to profit from their very first talk together by regaining and using the haughty tone that suited a member of her family and her position in the world. Upon his arrival at the convent, the count had Félize sent for at once, in order to get through the most difficult part of the chore first. As for Félize, she arrived at the visiting room already throbbing with the greatest indignation, but the count found her very beautiful, being something of a connoisseur in this genre. “Before we disturb this superb physiognomy,” he said to himself, “let’s take the time to gaze upon it fully.” Félize wondered at the rational and cool tone of this man who, wearing the entirely black suit that he had thought best to wear, given the tasks he had before him at the convent, was really quite remarkable. “I had thought,” Félize said to herself, “that since he was over thirty-five he would be a ridiculous old man like our confessors, but I find on the contrary a man truly worthy of the name. He doesn’t wear those exaggerated outfits that in fact make up most of Rodéric’s attraction, and that of the other young men I have known; he is much inferior to them in terms of the quantity of velour and golden ornaments, but if he wanted to, he could in an instant assume that sort of merit, whereas the others, I think, would be hard put to imitate the wise, reasonable, and genuinely interesting conversation of Count Buondelmonte.”

  Although very careful to avoid anything that might irritate her, the count was far from ceding to her on every point, as had every other man who had had any relations with that so lovely girl with so imperious a character, and he knew of her lovers. Because the count was a man without any pretention, he was simple and natural with her; he avoided going into detail only on the topics that would arouse her anger. But still, he had to confront the demands of the proud nun; the subject of the disorders at the convent was raised.

  “In fact, madame, the cause of all the trouble here is the claim, perhaps justifiable up to a certain point, of having two maids more than the others, and this has placed one of the most remarkable persons in this convent at the center of things.”

  “The cause of all the trouble here is the weak character of our abbess, who wants to treat us with an absolutely new severity that none of us had ever heard of before. There may well be convents full of genuinely pious women who love their isolation and who have always dreamed of taking vows of poverty and obedience, etc., etc., ever since they were seventeen; but as for us, our families have placed us here in order to give all the wealth of the house to our brothers. The only vocation we had was our inability to flee and go live somewhere other than a convent, since our fathers will no longer receive us in their palazzos. And anyway, when we had taken those vows that are so obviously null and void in the eyes of any rational person, we had already been pensioners in the convent for one or several years, and each of us thought we would enjoy the same degree of liberty that we had seen in the nuns of our time. Now, I can tell you, monsieur envoy, the gate to the rampart was open till dawn, and all of these women saw their lovers in complete liberty within the garden. Nobody even dreamed of criticizing this mode of life, and we all thought, becoming nuns, we would have a life as happy as those of our sisters whom the avarice of our families allowed to marry. Everything has changed, it is true, since we have had a prince who was a cardinal for twenty-five years of his life. Monsieur envoy, you can have soldiers or even servants brought into the convent, as you did the other day. They can do violence, as your servants did violence to my women, and they can do that for one single, grand reason—that they are stronger than them. But your pride should not make you think you have any rights over us. We were brought here to this convent by force, where we were forced to swear and take vows at the age of sixteen; and, finally, the miserable way of life you want us to submit to is not at all the one we saw the nuns practicing here when we took our vows, and, even supposing those vows were legitimate, we were vowing to live as they did, and now you want us to live in a way they never knew. I will admit, monsieur envoy, that I desire the esteem of my fellows here. During the days of the republic, they would not have allowed this horrible oppression to be exercised on poor girls who have done no wrong beyond having been born to rich families with sons.
I would like the chance to be able to say all this in public, or to a reasonable man. As for the number of my maids, I do not care that much. Two, and not five or seven, would be all I need; I could persist in demanding seven until such time as someone took the trouble to do away with the absurdities that are victimizing us, such as the ones I have described. But because your habit of black velour suits you so well, monsieur envoy, I declare to you that I renounce, for this year, the right to have as many domestics as I can afford to pay.”

  Count Buondelmonte was much amused by this sustained outcry; he made it last longer by making the most foolish objections one could imagine. Félize responded to them with fiery charm. The count could see in her eyes all the astonishment the twenty-year-old girl felt in hearing such absurdities coming from the mouth of a man who seemed so reasonable in appearance.

  The count took his leave of Félize, had the abbess sent for and gave her some sage advice, announced to the prince that the turmoil at the Saint Reparata Convent was now calmed, received many compliments on his deep wisdom, and, finally, returned to farming on his estates. But from time to time he said to himself, “So there actually exists a twenty-year-old girl who would be considered the most beautiful person in the whole city if she were to move in society, and whose thinking in no way resembles that of a doll.”

  But great events were taking place in the convent. Not all the nuns thought things through as clearly as Félize had, and most of the young ones were bored to death. Their only consolation was in drawing caricatures and writing satirical sonnets against a prince who, after having spent twenty-five years as a cardinal, could, upon succeeding to the throne, find nothing better to do than hide his beloved away as an abbess and oppress poor young girls who had been thrown into the convent by their greedy parents.

  As we have said, the lovely Rodelinde was Félize’s intimate friend. Their friendship had doubled in strength when Félize had confided to her that, ever since her conversations with Count Buondelmonte, that old man who was over thirty-six, her lover Rodéric had come to seem a rather boring creature. To put the matter in as few words as possible, Félize had fallen in love with the serious count; the constant conversations she had on the subject with her friend Rodelinde sometimes lasted until two or three in the morning. Now, according to the rule of Saint Benedict, which the abbess was seeking to reestablish in all its strictness, every nun was supposed to be in bed one hour after sundown, at the sound of a certain bell that called them to their rest. The good abbess, wishing to provide a good example, never failed to close herself up in her room as soon as the bell sounded, thinking piously that all the other nuns were following her example. Among the prettiest and the richest of these women were Fabienne, nineteen years old and perhaps the most scatterbrained girl in the whole convent, and her close friend, Céliane. Both of them were angry with Félize, who, they said to themselves, treated them with contempt. The fact was that ever since Félize had had so interesting a subject for conversation with Rodelinde, she could not disguise her impatience well, or at all, when it came to the other nuns. She was the prettiest, the richest, and clearly the smartest of all of them. It does not take much, in a convent steeped in boredom, to ignite a great hatred. Fabienne, with her excitability, went to tell the abbess that Félize and Rodelinde sometimes stayed out in the garden until two in the morning. The abbess had got the count to leave her one of the prince’s soldiers to be placed as a guard at the door of the garden, the door that opened up onto the dark space beyond the north rampart. She had enormous locks put on this door, and every night, the youngest of the gardeners—an old man of sixty—on coming to the end of the working day, brought the key to the abbess. She then sent an old portress, detested by the nuns, to lock the second lock. But despite all these precautions, staying out in the garden until two in the morning was a very great crime in her eyes. She sent for Félize and treated that noble daughter, now the heir of her family, with a haughty tone that she perhaps would never have permitted herself if she were not sure of the prince’s favor. Félize was all the more wounded by the bitterness of her reproaches because ever since she had met the count, she had met her lover Rodéric only once, and that was only to make fun of him. In her indignation, she grew eloquent, and although the abbess refused to say who had denounced her, it was easy enough for Félize to determine that she owed all this to Fabienne.