Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  The abbess Angela Custode assembled a panel consisting of seven nuns elected by all the others who were over seventy years old. Sister Scolastica refused to respond to them, and she was put into a room whose only window looked out onto a very high wall. There, she was required to observe total silence and was watched over by two lay sisters.

  The strange incident befalling the Convent of San Petito, where all the great families of Naples had relatives living, was soon public knowledge. The cardinal archbishop asked the abbess for a report, and she told him everything but in such a way as to avoid any stain on the reputation of the noble convent. Because the family of Prince d’Atella was connected to everything that mattered in the kingdom, the archbishop, who could transfer the trial to his arch episcopal court (the Curia Arcivescovile), thought he had better find out what the king’s orders would be. This monarch, always a friend to order, became furious when he heard the archbishop’s report, and people said afterward that the Duke Vargas del Pardo, who was present during this report, said he had heard talk of the behavior of a nun named Dona Scolastica and, though she was unknown to him, he counseled the young prince to employ the greatest severity.

  “After all, Your Majesty must always remember that he who does not fear God does not fear his king.”

  Upon his return to his palace, the archbishop convoked his arch episcopal tribunal on this sad matter: a vicar general, two lawyers, and a secretary went to the Convent of San Petito to begin the interrogation and inquiry. These gentlemen were never able to get anything more out of Sister Scolastica than this:

  “There is nothing wicked in my actions. They are innocent. I can say nothing more than that, and I will say nothing more than that.”

  Following the schedule prescribed by law, and even extended on account of the abbess, who toward the end of the trial wanted to avoid at any price any scandal attaching to her convent, the arch episcopal tribunal considered that there was no corpus delicti, that is, that, following the deposition of the abbess, the witnesses had not seen Sister Scolastica and the man “in the same room,” and in fact they had seen only a man fleeing from a neighboring, separate room, and so they ruled that this sister was condemned to remaining in the in pace until she agreed to provide the name of the man who was in the neighboring room and with whom she was conversing.

  The next day, when Scolastica appeared to hear her sentence pronounced in front of the “elders,” presided over by the abbess, the latter seemed to have a new way of thinking about the affair. She thought that it would be dangerous for the convent to try to manage the perceptions of a shrewd public with regard to the convent’s inner disorder. She told the elders that that public would say: “‘You are punishing an inept intrigue, but we know that there are hundreds of others.’ Because we are dealing with a young king who wants to be seen as having character and who wants to have his laws observed, something unheard of in this country, we can profit from this fleeting moment; we can obtain something that will be far more useful to the convent than the solemn condemnation of ten poor nuns before the archbishop of Naples and all the canons he would have assembled to make up his presidial tribunal. I want to see us punish the man who dared to penetrate our convent, to have just one fine, handsome young man from the court be thrown into some fortress prison for several years; this will do more than the condemnation of a hundred nuns—and anyway, it would be true justice, because, after all, the offense was carried out by a male. Now, Scolastica did not receive him, strictly speaking, in her room, and may God grant that all the other nuns in the convent have at least that much prudence as well. She will tell us who this imprudent young man was, give us the name of the one I will hunt down at the court, and, since, after all, she is guilty of very little, we will condemn her to only a light punishment.”

  The abbess had a great deal of difficulty in getting the “elders” to see it her way, but in the end her birth and, above all, her relations at court were so superior to theirs that they were obliged to give in, and the abbess thought that the judgment interview would take only a moment. But it turned out quite otherwise.

  Scolastica, having recited her prayers on her knees before the tribunal, as was the custom, added only these few words:

  “I do not consider myself in any way a nun; I have known a young man in the world outside, and though we are both poor, we have the intention of marrying.”

  This open disrespect of the convent’s basic values was the gravest crime one could commit in the aristocratic Convent of San Petito.

  “But the name, the name of the young man!” cried the abbess, impatiently interrupting what she assumed would be a lengthy discourse by Scolastica on the superiority of the married state.

  Scolastica replied, “You will never have that name; I will never say something to injure the man who should be my spouse.”

  Though the abbess and the “elders” continued to try, the young novice would never give them the name of Genarino. The abbess went so far as to say:

  “You will be entirely pardoned and I will send you immediately back to your own apartment if you simply tell us this one thing.”

  The young woman made the sign of the cross, bowed deeply, and signaled that she could say no more; she knew very well that Genarino was the nephew of this terrible abbess. “If I name him,” she said to herself, “I will be pardoned and my offense forgotten, but he will undergo some awful punishment like being sent away to Sicily or even to Spain, and I will never see him again.”

  The abbess was so irritated with the invincible silence of the young Scolastica that she forgot all her plans of clemency and hastened to give a report to the cardinal archbishop of Naples on what had happened at the convent the earlier night. Always aiming to please the king, who desired strictness, the cardinal archbishop took the affair to heart, but, being unable to discover anything, even using the intervention of every curé in the capital and all the spies dependent on the archdiocese, the cardinal spoke to the king, who in turn hastened to bring in his minister of police, and the latter said to the king:

  “It seems to me that Your Majesty, without having recourse to bloodshed, which will long be remembered, can scarcely make an example of this man who got into the storeroom of San Petito, unless he is found to belong to the court or to one of the first families of Naples.”

  The king, having seen the minister’s point, presented him with a list of 247 persons, any one of whom could, without much improbability, be suspected of having penetrated the noble convent.

  One week later, Genarino was arrested, following the simple observation that for the past six months, he had fallen into a thriftiness bordering on avarice, and that since the night in question, his behavior seemed to have changed markedly.

  To determine the degree of confidence he could assume, the minister involved the abbess, who had Sister Scolastica taken up from the half-underground prison where she lived and brought to her parlor. She was exhorted to reply truthfully, and then the minister of police came into the parlor, telling the abbess in the presence of Scolastica that the young Genarino had just been killed by the guards he was fleeing. Scolastica fainted and fell on the floor.

  “There is our proof,” cried the minister triumphantly; “I’ve learned more with six words than Your Reverence would have learned with six months of effort.”

  But he was surprised by the extreme coldness with which the abbess received his exclamation. The minister, as was the custom at this court, was a bourgeois, and as a consequence of this, the abbess thought it right to use her haughtiest manner with him. Genarino was her nephew, and she feared that this imputation, which would be directly put before the king’s eyes, would do harm to her noble family. The minister, knowing himself to be despised by the nobility and having no hopes except in the king, followed up on the information he had just obtained and, despite all the appeals made to the Prince [missing words]. The affair began to be talked about at court, and the minister, who would normally try to avoid scandal, in this case sou
ght to ignite it.

  It was a fine spectacle, one to which all the ladies of the court flocked, this formal confrontation of Genarino, standard-bearer of the guards, with the young Rosalinde d’Attella, now Sister Scolastica, novice at San Petito; the inner and outer areas of the convent chapel were magnificently decorated for the occasion, and it was through the minister himself that invitations to the ladies were distributed, to attend the opening of the trial of Genarino de Las Flores, standard-bearer of the guards. The minister let it be known that the trial entailed capital punishment for the young Genarino and an eternal imprisonment in the in pace for Sister Scolastica. But everyone knew perfectly well that the king would not dare have someone executed for so minor an offense, especially a member of the illustrious house of Las Flores. To the great displeasure of the ladies, [missing words]

  The interior of the San Petito church was ornamented and gilded with the greatest magnificence. Many of the noble nuns, if it had not been for their vows of poverty, would have inherited all their families’ holdings. In such cases, the conscientious families would leave them a quarter or a sixth of the revenues that might have been due them, and this would be theirs for the rest of what was never a very long life.

  All these sums were now employed for the decoration of the outer area of the church, which was open to the public, and for the inner area, where the nuns came to pray and carried out their offices. The inner church at San Petito, or the nuns’ choir section, was separated from the rest by a gilded grill sixty feet high. For the ceremony of the confrontation, the immense door of this grill, which can be opened only in the presence of the archbishop of Naples, had been opened, and all the titled women had been admitted into the choir, whereas the outer church had been arranged with the throne of the archbishop in the forefront, then the ladies without titles, then the men; and finally, a chain had been extended across the width of the church, and behind that were crowded all the rest of the faithful.

  The immense curtain of green silk that hung over the sixty-foot grill from on high had at its center a Madonna, framed with thick braid, and this curtain had been moved to the back of the choir area. There, after having been attached to the vaulted ceiling, it had been hung. The prie-dieu where Sister Scolastica knelt was placed a little behind the spot on the ceiling where the great curtain had been attached, and at the moment when her sentence was declared, the great veil descended, separating her entirely from the public and terminating the ceremony in the most imposing fashion, filling the heart of every spectator with fear and sadness. It was as if the poor girl had just been separated forever from the living.

  To the great displeasure of the fine ladies from the court of Naples, the ceremony of confrontation itself lasted only a moment. Never had the young Rosalinde—to use the language of the ladies of the court—appeared better to her advantage than she did in her simple novice’s habit; she was just as beautiful as she had been in other days, when she had accompanied her stepmother, Princess d’Atella, to court balls, though now her features were even more touching, for she had grown much thinner and paler. Her voice could scarcely be heard when, following a “Veni Creator,” composed by Pergolese and sung by all the voices in the convent, Scolastica, half-mad with love and happiness upon seeing her beloved again after an absence of more than a year, said these words:

  “I do not know this gentleman; I have never met him.”

  The minister of police reacted furiously upon hearing this and seeing the great curtain fall abruptly, which put a somewhat ridiculous end to the great spectacle he had hoped to present to the court. As he left the convent, he was heard to mutter dark threats. As he was being brought back to prison, Don Genarino was told everything the minister said. His friends had not deserted him; but it was not his love for her that gave him such worth in their eyes, for if we believe in the passionate love that our friend has confided to us, we are jealous of him, and if we don’t believe in it, we find him ludicrous. Don Genarino, in his despair, told his friends that he was now committed, in the way that circumstances sometimes require a man of honor to commit himself, to delivering Sister Scolastica from the dangers into which he had plunged her. This kind of thinking made a deep impression on Don Genarino’s friends. The jailer at Genarino’s prison had a young and pretty wife; she approached her husband’s superior, reminding him that her husband had long been requesting repairs be done to the prison’s exterior walls. The fact was well known, and there could be no doubt about it.

  “Well then,” the pretty wife continued, “Your Excellency could make use of this well-known fact to get us a gift of a thousand ducats, which would make our fortune. The friends of young Don Genarino de las Flores, who is in prison, suspected of having penetrated into the Convent of San Petito, where, as you know, the great lords of Naples have their mistresses, the great lords who are much more than suspected of such penetration—well, the friends of Don Genarino, you see, are offering a thousand ducats to my husband to let him escape. My husband will be put in prison for two weeks or maybe a month, and we are asking your protection to ensure that he is not fired and that he will get his position back again afterward.”

  The superior found granting such a request eminently reasonable, and he consented. And this was not the only service the prisoner’s friends did for him. They all had relatives in the Convent of San Petito; they redoubled their affection for their relatives, and in doing so, they were able to keep Don Genarino perfectly informed about everything concerning Sister Scolastica. Their good offices led up to a stormy night, toward one o’clock in the morning, when the winds were at their most furious and the rain threatened to drown the city of Naples; at this moment, Genarino exited his prison quite simply, walking out through the door while the jailer was busy wrecking the outer terrace, so that it would be assumed he had escaped through that route. Don Genarino, accompanied by just one man—a Spanish deserter, fearless, who in Naples made it his profession to lend aid to young men in their more scabrous enterprises—Don Genarino, we were saying, taking advantage of the universal uproar caused by the wind and storm, and aided moreover by Beppo, whose friendship did not flag when it came to hazardous circumstances, made his way into the convent garden. Despite the frightful noise caused by the rain and the wind, the convent dogs sensed his presence and were quickly chasing him. If he had been alone, they would probably have succeeded in stopping him, for they were powerful dogs, but he and the Spanish deserter stood back to back and managed to kill two of them and wound the third. The howls of the wounded dog awoke one of the guards. It was in vain that Don Genarino offered him a purse and tried to make him see reason; the man was very religious, with a keen sense of hellfire, and did not lack for courage. In the struggle, he was wounded, and they gagged him with a handkerchief and tied him to a thick olive tree. These two combats had taken quite a bit of time, and now the storm was beginning to quiet, yet the most difficult task remained ahead of them: they had to get into the vade in pace. He found that the two lay sisters who were charged with going down once a day to deliver the bread and a pitcher of water that were allotted to Sister Scolastica had been, on this night, so frightened by the storm that they had bolted shut two huge, iron-framed doors that Genarino had hoped to open by picking the lock or by using a skeleton key. The Spanish deserter was very agile when it came to climbing walls, and he helped Genarino get up on the top of a pavilion that stood over the rock-hewn in pace of the Convent of San Petito.

  The terror of the two lay sisters was not lessened when they suddenly saw descending from the upper story these two men covered in mud, who threw themselves upon them, gagging and tying them. All that remained now was to penetrate the in pace, but this was no easy task. Genarino had taken a huge ring of keys from the lay sisters, but there were several cells locked with trapdoors, and the two lay sisters refused to indicate which one held Sister Scolastica confined. The Spaniard had taken out his dagger to prick them and force them to talk, but Genarino, who knew Scolastica’s sweet and gentle c
haracter, was afraid of displeasing her by such violence. The Spaniard kept on saying, “Signor, we are losing time, and soon we will have to start shedding blood anyway,” but Genarino obstinately continued trying one key after another on one door after another, always calling out for Scolastica. At last, after three-quarters of an hour of fruitless labor, he heard a feeble “Deo Gratias” in response to his cries. Don Genarino hurried down a winding stair of eighty steps cut out of the soft rock, a narrow and steep pathway. Sister Scolastica had not seen a light in thirty-seven days, since the confrontation ceremony with Genarino, and she was blinded by the little lamp the Spaniard was carrying. She could understand nothing of what was happening to her; eventually, when she recognized Don Genarino, covered with mud and stained with blood, she fainted in his arms. This frightened the young man.

  “There is no time to lose!” cried the more experienced Spaniard.

  They both picked up the fainted Sister Scolastica, carrying her up the rough, half-destroyed winding steps. It was the Spaniard who had the clever idea, once they were back in the little room with the two lay sisters, of covering Scolastica—who had only barely come out of her faint—with a great gray cloak they found there. They opened the doors that led to the garden. The Spaniard went first, with his sword in his hand. Genarino followed, supporting Scolastica, but they could hear a great noise ahead that augured ill: soldiers. The Spaniard had wanted to kill the guard, but Genarino rejected the idea with horror.

  “But Excellency, we are in a condition of sacrilege now that we have broken into the cloister, and we’re condemned to death even more surely than we would be if we had killed him. This man can ruin us; we have to sacrifice him.”

  But no argument would convince Genarino. Now, the man had loosened the ropes holding him and had gone to awaken the other guards and to send for soldiers posted on the Via Toledo.