Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  “But you were speaking of the garden,” said Genarino; “it seems small to me.”

  “Small?” said everyone at once. “Obviously you haven’t looked at it very carefully; it covers more than thirty acres, and Master Beppo, the head gardener, sometimes employs more than twelve workers.”

  “Well, this head gardener must be a good-looking young man,” said Genarino with a laugh.

  Everyone laughed and exclaimed, “You don’t know the abbess of Castropignano; she’s exactly the kind of woman to put up with that kind of thing! Signor Beppo had to prove that he was over seventy; he used to work for the Marquis of Las Flores, who has that fine garden at Ceri.”

  Genarino gave a little leap of joy.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked his new friends.

  “Oh, nothing; I’m just tired.”

  He had realized that Signor Beppo had in fact been his father’s gardener. In the course of the conversation, he smoothly inquired as to where this Signor Beppo, head gardener, lived and how one could encounter him. And in fact he saw him the very next day. The old gardener shed tears of joy when he recognized the younger son of his old master the Marquis de Las Flores; he had often held the child in his arms, and there was nothing he could refuse him. Genarino complained about his father’s avarice and implied that a hundred ducats would be all he needed to extricate himself from a serious problem.

  Two days later, the novice Rosalinde—who now was called Sister Scolastica—was walking by herself alongside a lovely flowerbed situated on the right side of the garden, when the old man Beppo approached her:

  “I have been very familiar with the noble family of the d’Atella princes,” he said to her. “In my youth, I was employed in their garden, and if mademoiselle will permit me, I will give her a beautiful rose I have wrapped in vine leaves, but only on condition that mademoiselle will not unwrap it until she is in her room and alone.”

  Rosalinde took the rose, barely saying thank you, put it in her bosom, and strode off pensively to her cell. Because she was the daughter of a prince and destined to become a nun of the first class, this cell was composed of three rooms. As soon as she entered, Rosalinde lit her lamp; she began to take the rose out of her bosom, but in doing so the calyx detached from the stem, and under the surrounding leaves she found the following letter; her heart beating powerfully, she did not scruple to read it immediately:

  I do not have much in the way of riches, just like you, beautiful Rosalinde, because just as you have been sacrificed to the advancement of your brothers, so I can never forget that I am the third son of the Marquis de Las Flores. Since I lost you, the king has made me a standard-bearer in his guard, and on that occasion my father informed me that I, my people, and my horses may all be lodged and fed at the family palazzo but that beyond that I must plan to live on an income of 10 ducats per month, a sum that in our family has always been given the younger brothers; therefore, my dear Rosalinde, we are both of us poor, both of us equally disinherited; but consider whether this means we must remain unhappy for the rest of our lives. The desperate situation in which you and I are placed is what gives me the boldness to say openly to you that we love each other and that we should not let ourselves become accomplices in the cruel avarice of our parents. I will eventually marry you; a man of my birth will always find some means of supporting himself. I will pay my court [illegible words] without forgetting one or two friends of the family. The only thing I fear is your own extreme piety: as we begin a correspondence together, do not see yourself as a nun being unfaithful to her vows—far from it: you are a young woman whom they’re trying to separate from the man her heart has chosen. Be brave, and do not be irritated with me; I don’t want to shock you with my boldness, but my heart is desolate when I think of going two weeks without seeing you, and I am so much in love. At those balls and events where we met, in those bygone days, the happiest days of my life, my respect for you kept me from speaking in so frank a manner, but who knows if I will have the chance of writing you a second letter? My cousin, Sister ******, whom I’m going to see as often as I can, told me that it might be another two weeks before you have permission to come up onto the belvedere again. I will be at the same place on the Via Toledo every day, perhaps wearing some disguise so I am not recognized and so the guards of the regiment do not start making jests about me. If you only knew how different and how unpleasant my life has become since I lost you! I have danced only once, and that was because Princess d’Atella came to where I was sitting and sought me out. Our poverty makes us dependent upon everyone, so be very polite and even friendly with the domestics; the old gardener Beppo has been useful to me solely because he was in my father’s employ for twenty years in our gardens at Ceri. Will you be horrified at what I am about to say? By the seaside, in Calabria, eighty leagues from Naples, my mother owns an estate with a farm that costs 600 ducats to run. My mother has a tenderness for me, and if I asked her very seriously, she would arrange it so that the steward there would farm it for me for that same figure of 600 a year. Now, since they have told me I will have a pension of 120, I would have to pay only 480, and we would have all the benefits of the farm. It is true, though, that since this proposition is somewhat dishonorable, I would have to adopt the name of that farm, which is called ******. But I dare not go on: the idea I am leaving you with may be shocking to you; what, give up life in the noble city of Naples forever? I am being foolhardy even to think of it. Consider also that I may expect the death of my elder brothers at some point. Farewell, dear Rosalinde; you must find me awfully serious, but you have no idea of the kind of things that have been running through my head during these weeks that I have been so far away from you; I feel like I haven’t really been alive. In any case, pardon these follies of mine.

  Rosalinde did not reply to this first letter, and it was soon followed by many others. The greatest favor she accorded to Genarino during this period was to send him a flower via the old gardener Beppo, who had become a friend to Sister Scolastica, perhaps because he always had some little anecdote about Genarino as a child. The latter spent his days prowling around outside the convent walls; he never went out into society, and he was never seen at court except when his military duty required it; his life had become quite sad, and he did not have to exaggerate much to convince Sister Scolastica that he wished for an early death. This strange love that had taken over his heart had left him so miserable that he dared to write to his beloved to say that this cold correspondence no longer afforded him any pleasure and that he needed to speak out loud with her, and right away, for he had a thousand things to tell her. He suggested that she allow him to come in and stand in the garden beneath her window, accompanied by Beppo. After much persuading, Rosalinde softened, and he was admitted into the garden. These interviews had so much charm for both parties that they were repeated much more often than prudence would dictate; soon, the presence of Beppo was considered no longer useful; sharing in the natural laziness of all Neapolitans, he left the little service gate to the garden open, and Genarino would close the gate when he left, in keeping with the custom established by Saint Benedict himself in a troubled century when everyone had to be careful. At three o’clock in the morning, the hour when nuns betake themselves to the chapel to sing their matins, they need to pass through the convent’s courtyards and the garden; and here is how that custom played out in the Convent of San Petito: the aristocratic nuns by no means arose at three in the morning, instead paying poor girls to take their places and sing the matins for them, and at this time the door to a little building in the garden was opened; this building housed three old soldiers, all over seventy. These well-armed soldiers were supposed to go through the garden and rouse up several big dogs that stayed chained up all day long. Ordinarily, these visits went off quite calmly, but one fine night, the dogs made such a racket that the whole convent was awakened. The soldiers, who had gone back to bed after having left the dogs, ran in quickly to prove that they were present, and they let
off a number of gunshots. The abbess was afraid for her family’s ducal prospects. It was all because of Genarino, who had lost track of the time in conversing outside Rosalinde’s window and now just barely had time to make his escape, followed so closely by the furious dogs that he was unable to get the gate closed, and the next day, the abbess Angela Custode5 was deeply scandalized to learn that the convent dogs had traversed the whole forest of Arenella and half the plain of Vomero. It was clear to her that the garden gate had been found open at the very moment that the dogs started their racket. Ever concerned for the honor of the convent, the abbess declared that thieves had got into the garden because of the old gardeners’ negligence, and she fired the latter, replacing them with others, a measure that caused a kind of revolt within the convent, because several of the nuns found this tyrannical. This garden was by no means unpopulated during the night, but most people were content simply to pass through, not to stay there. It was only Don Genarino, too much the honorable lover to ask his mistress to let him into her room, who was on the point of compromising all the convent’s love affairs. The very next day, he succeeded in getting a letter to her begging her permission to let him climb up into her room, but Rosalinde would not agree until she was able to find a way to quiet the voice of her conscience; as we have explained, her cell, like all the cells of all the princesses destined to become nuns of the first class, was composed of three rooms. The last of these three rooms, into which no one ever went, was separated from a laundry storeroom by a simple wooden partition. Genarino succeeded in replacing one of the panels of this partition with one of a similar size; almost every night after getting into the convent via the garden, he entered headfirst through this species of window and had long meetings with his beloved; this happy state went on for a long time, and Genarino was already beginning to solicit further favors when two nuns, who were already of a certain age and who also received their lovers via the garden, were struck by the young marquis’s handsome face and resolved to steal him away from this insignificant novice. These ladies spoke to Genarino, and, in order to give a higher tone to their conversation, they reproached him for his habit of getting himself inside a sacred convent of young women through its garden. Genarino had just realized what their intentions were when he declared that he was making love not as a penance but for his own amusement, and he begged them to mind their own business. This unpleasant response, one given in a place where no one would dare to do such a thing today, ignited such a blind rage in the two aging nuns that, despite the unheard-of hour—it was two o’clock in the morning—they went straight off to awaken the abbess. Luckily for the young marquis, the two denouncing nuns had not recognized him; the abbess was his great-aunt, younger sister of his grandfather, passionately devoted to the glory and advancement of her family, and knowing that Charles III, the young king, was a courageous and severe devotee of the “rule,”6 she would have denounced the dangerous follies of Genarino to the prince, her nephew, and he would probably have been sent off to serve in Spain or at least in Sicily. The two nuns had a lot of trouble getting to the abbess and awakening her, but the minute the pious and zealous abbess understood what horrible crime was afoot, she ran off to Sister Scolastica’s cell. Genarino, meanwhile, had not said anything to his beloved about his encounter with the two aging nuns, and he was conversing tranquilly with her in the room adjoining the storeroom when they heard the bedroom door of her little apartment being noisily opened; the only light in the room where the two lovers were together was the flickering light of the stars, and so their eyes were blinded when suddenly confronted by the eight or ten illuminated lamps that accompanied the abbess. Genarino knew, like everyone in Naples, the extreme perils to which a nun or a simple novice would be exposed if she were convicted of having received a man into the little apartment they called a cell. He did not hesitate to leap out into the garden through the laundry-room window.

  Abbess Angela Custode interrogated her on the spot. The crime was obvious; Scolastica could say nothing to justify herself. The abbess, a tall woman, pale, forty years of age and belonging to the highest level of aristocracy in the kingdom, had exactly the kind of moral qualities that those characteristics might suggest. She had all the courage necessary to have all the severity of the rule imposed everywhere, now that the young king, who had understood his vocation to be that of absolute monarch, had declared proudly that “he wanted the rule followed in all things,” the rule in all its exactitude; moreover, the abbess Angela Custode belonged to the family of Castropignano, enemies to the family of Prince d’Atella.

  Poor Scolastica, discovered in the middle of the night in her room with a young man by such a crowd of people, and with all those lights, hid her face behind her hands and was so overwhelmed by shame that she failed to observe, at this first moment, which would be so decisive for her, the things that might turn out to be of great importance. The few things she was able to say were not favorable to her cause; she repeated twice:

  “But that young man is my spouse.”

  This phrase, giving rise to thoughts of things that were not true, gave a great deal of joy to the two denouncing sisters, and it was the abbess who, out of a spirit of justice, declared that, given the layout of the rooms, it was clear that the wicked libertine who had dared to violate the convent’s cloister was at least not found in the same room with the foolish novice; he had only got into the laundry storeroom; having removed part of the wooden partition that separated that storeroom from the cell of the novice Scolastica, he had no doubt spoken with her, but he had clearly not yet got into her room by the time he had been surprised, for when they had all come into the second room of Scolastica’s cell, they could see the libertine in the storeroom, and it was from that room that he fled.

  Poor Scolastica was so forlorn that she let herself be led down into a subterranean prison cell connected to the in pace7 of this noble convent, hewn out of the great soft rock on which today we see the magnificent Palazzo degli Studi. The only people imprisoned in this cell were nuns or novices who were condemned or who had been found in flagrante. That condition was engraved above the doorway, but that condition did not apply to the novice Scolastica. The abbess was aware of the abuse she was committing, but it was believed that the king wanted severity, and the abbess, always having her family’s dukedom in mind, thought that she had already done enough for the young woman by declaring that the hideous libertine who had so wanted to dishonor this noble convent had not been admitted directly into her room.

  Scolastica, left alone in a little cell dug out of the rock just five or six feet below a neighboring one that had been created by hollowing out the soft rock face, found herself somewhat comforted by the fact that she was now alone and not facing all those bright lamps that had blinded her and plunged her into shame. “And in fact,” she said to herself, “which of these so-holy sisters can really feel so superior to me? I received into my room, but not into my bedroom, the young man I love and hope to marry. Everyone has heard the gossip that many of these women who seem so strongly linked to heaven itself by their vows have night visitors, and since I’ve been in the convent, I’ve seen many things that make me believe the gossip is correct. These women say publicly that San Petito is not a convent like the kind the holy Council of Trent intended but simply a decent place of retreat where impoverished daughters of high birth, if they are unlucky enough to have brothers, can live economically. No one asks of them abstinence nor self-denial nor any inner miseries that would aggravate the bad luck of having no fortune to offer. As for me, the truth is that I came here with the intention of obeying my parents, but then Genarino came and told me he loved me, and I loved him, and even though we are both poor, we planned to marry and go live in the country on a little estate twenty leagues from Naples beside the sea beyond Salerno; his mother told him that she would give him the little farm that costs the family only 500 ducats a year, and his allowance as a younger son is 40 ducats a month, and they could not possibly refuse me the m
oney that my family pays to keep me here in order to get rid of me, and that’s another 10 ducats per month.8 We have gone over our calculations twenty times, and with all the little sums of money we could come up with, we could live, though without servants in livery but with what is really necessary for physical survival. The real difficulty is the attitude of our parents, who should let us live like ordinary bourgeois. Genarino thinks that all he would need to do to smooth everything out would be to adopt a name other than that of the duke his father.”

  These thoughts and others like them came to the aid of poor Scolastica, but the nuns in the convent, numbering almost 150, thought of the drama that had played out the night before as having added to the convent’s reputation. Everybody in Naples said that these women received their lovers in the rooms at night: well, here we have a young girl of high birth who cannot defend herself and who can be punished with all the severity called for by the rule, so long as one condition was met—that she could have no communication with her family for the entire duration of the proceedings. When the judgment was final and declared, the family would be unable to do anything to halt the strict and severe punishment, which would reverberate throughout Naples, and the reputation of the noble convent, which had been a little besmirched, would be revived throughout the kingdom.