Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  13.Stendhal used this same pseudonym when he published “The Abbess of Castro.” Three of his acquaintances also used the pseudonym at times.

  THE ABBESS OF CASTRO

  “The Abbess of Castro” was drafted in two separate sessions: September 12—13, 1838, and February 19—21, 1839. Between those two sessions, Stendhal wrote his great novel La Chartreuse de Parme. “The Abbess” was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes for February—March 1839, using the same pseudonym, F. de Lagenevais, that he used for “The Duchess of Palliano.” “The Abbess” was published in book form in December 1839 in a collection with “Vittoria Accoramboni” and “The Cenci.”

  1.[Gasparone, the last brigand, came to terms with the government in 1826; he was imprisoned in the citadel of Civitavecchia along with thirty-two of his men. It was the absence of water in the Apennine heights where they had their hideout that forced him to negotiate. He was a man of spirit, with a face one does not forget.—Stendhal’s note]. When Stendhal served as consul at Civitavecchia, if not before, he certainly would have met the famous Gasparone. In a letter of January 29, 1840, he wrote with some amusement that “out of every hundred foreigners who come here, fifty want to see Gasparone, and only four or five Monsieur Stendhal.” Gas parone, who became the subject of an opera and numerous films, also wrote his memoirs, which were highly popular.

  2.The French ecu was a coin worth five francs; it was obsolete by Stendhal’s time, but the term was still used. Stendhal is inconsistent in that he freely refers to both French currencies (ecus and francs) and Italian and Spanish ones (piastres, doubloons); this translation preserves the inconsistency of the original.

  3.Stendhal is in error about the date of the death of Pietro Giannone (1678—1748), who wrote a history of Naples that argued for reduced papal influence on the state, as well as increased religious tolerance; he was excommunicated and later imprisoned.

  4.[Paul Jove, bishop of Como, Aretino, and a hundred others less amusing than they, have been saved from infamy only because their writings are so dull, whereas Robertson and Roscoe are both packed with lies. Guiccardini sold himself to Cosimo I, who made mock of him. In our time, Coletta and Pignotti have told the truth, the latter with constant fear of losing his place (as Rector of the University of Pisa), though he did not want his work published until after his death.—Stendhal’s note]

  5.Ludovico Muratori (1672—1750) wrote a compilation of ancient inscriptions as well as a host of historical and critical works.

  6.One of Jupiter’s many epithets, “Feretrius” referred to his role as guardian of oaths and contracts.

  7.Stendhal’s term, moines noirs, literally “black monks,” is generally synonymous with Benedictines, but elsewhere in the story he identifies this order as Capuchins.

  8.The Roman manuscript is only about thirty-five pages and is located in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Florentine one is a fiction.

  9.[Even today this bizarre position is regarded as a sure sign of holiness by the people who live in the Roman countryside. Around the year 1826, a monk from Albano was observed levitating off the ground by means of divine grace several times. Many miracles were attributed to him; people hurried from many leagues away to seek his blessing; some women from the first ranks of society had seen him floating three feet above the floor in his cell. Then all at once he disappeared.—Stendhal’s note]

  10.The portrait is evidently fictional, like the Florentine manuscript; nothing like it exists in the Farnese Gallery in Rome.

  11.That is, the evening Angelus bell, at which one recites the “Ave Maria” (Hail Mary) prayer.

  12.The Latin phrase—meaning “heaven has ordained it otherwise”—gives the flavor of a sixteenth-century text to Stendhal’s story.

  13.[“Your bad luck: you’ve come at a bad time!”—Stendhal’s note]

  14.Stendhal is guilty of an anachronism here: the Order of the Visitation was not established until 1610.

  15.Giulio shrewdly misquotes from Matthew 19:5: “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.”

  16.[In Italy, the manner of addressing someone by tu, by vol, or by lei reveals the degree of intimacy. The tu, a remnant of Latin, is not used in the same way as it is in our language.—Stendhal’s note]

  17.Stendhal is either misremembering or simply fictionalizing; there are no frescoes with this subject matter in the Cloister of Santa Maria Novella.

  18.His name means “four saints.” There is a basilica, Santi Quattro Coronati, in Rome; it is a titular church, meaning that it is headed by a cardinal.

  19.To “take the white veil” is to enter the novitiate, to take the initial step toward becoming a nun.

  20.The library and the eight volumes are fictional.

  21.The reference is to the parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins in Matthew 25:1—13.

  22.The podesta was the chief magistrate of an Italian town in this era. To be “put to the question” means to be put to torture.

  23.The tourière sister: Stendhal employs a term that originally meant the guardian of a tower, but (according to the 1872 edition of Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française) was sometimes used to mean the porter or portress. The narrative is not clear as to the identity of this sister.

  THE JEW

  This story was written during Stendhal’s brief period as consul in Trieste (November 1830—February 1831). Trieste was then under Habsburg control, and Stendhal had always been viewed as having anti-Austrian sentiments by the imperial police, so he was denied the permits necessary to do his job properly. The result was a great deal of inactivity and boredom, as the epigraph suggests; Stendhal had to mark time waiting for the French foreign ministry to find a new post elsewhere for him.

  1.In English in the original. The king would be Louis XVIII, restored to the throne after the fall of Napoleon and ruling 1814—1824.

  SAN FRANCESCO A RIPA

  The Church of San Francesco a Ripa is located next to the Tiber (hence a ripa, or “on the bank”) in the Trastavere section of Rome. Saint Francis is said to have lived there during his Rome visits. The epigraph’s function here seems primarily to set a historical tone: Ariste, Dorante, and Éraste all sound like characters in seventeenth-century French literature, such as in Dominque Bouhours’s Entretiens d’Ariste et Eugène (1671). Dorante is a character in Pierre Corneille’s Le Menteur (1643) as well as Marivaux’s Les Fausses confidences (1731), and Éraste appears in Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669).

  1.If there was such a source for Stendhal, it has never been discovered.

  2.Nicolas Jean Hugon de Basseville (1743—1793) came to Rome from Paris at the height of the Revolution in search of reactionaries and émigrés to denounce, and while there he was reputed to have openly insulted priests and churchmen. He was dragged from his coach and lynched by a mob. Stendhal, fiercely anticlerical himself, takes Basseville’s side here.

  3.The Marquis de Canillac, Pierre Charles de Beaufort-Montboissier (1694—1759), was one of a group of noblemen close to the French regent; he said of them, jokingly, that they were such a wicked group that they all deserved to be broken on the wheel (la roué), and hence they were known as the regent’s roués.

  4.Charles V the Holy Roman emperor, ended his days in 1558 at the Monastery of Saint Yuste, where he took elaborate measures to prepare himself for death, including rehearsals for his own funeral ceremonies.

  5.In the edition by Dominque Fernandez (Chroniques italiennes, Paris: Folio, 1973), this paragraph follows: “Two years later, Princess Campobasso was venerated in Rome as the model of the highest piety, and Monsignor Feraterra had long been made cardinal.” Philippe Berthier, however, argues that this paragraph was written by Stendhal’s cousin and executor Romain Colomb, not by the author himself. Oeuvres romanesques complètes, ed. Yves Ansel, Philippe Berthier, and Xavier Bourdenet (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 2:1172.

  6.Mérim
ée and Stendhal were friendly rivals, each publishing similar kinds of tales in similar publications, so signing the other’s name to his own work is meant as a kind of joke. Several of Mérimée’s plays end with a formula similar to this one’s “excuse the faults of the author,” and there are several other points of contact between this story and Mérimée’s works.

  TOO MUCH FAVOR IS DEADLY

  This unfinished tale, “Trop de faveur tue,” was drafted in the spring of 1839, immediately after the novel La Chartreuse de Parme was published. It remained unpublished until 1912.

  [“Too Much Favor Is Deadly” dramatis personae: the prince, grand duke, and cardinal; Count Buondelmonte; the abbess Virgilia; Félize, mistress to Rodéric; Rodelinde, mistress to Lancelot, Félize’s friend; Fabienne, seventeen years old, gay, unreflective, mistress to … ; Céliana, somber mistress to … , friend of Fabienne’s; Martona, confidante of the abbess Virgilia; Rodéric; Lorenzo R—, lover of Fabiana; she loves him madly and has just broken off with D. César, knight of Malta; Pierantonio D—, in love with Céliana but only for physical pleasure; Livia, noble maid of Rodelinde.—Stendhal’s note]

  1.The Tuscan town is obviously Florence; Stendhal names it in the following pages. The events on which the story is based, however, took place near Naples.

  2.Stendhal’s draft ends here with this note: “Abandoned, for the moment, April 15, 1839.” But we know from another note, reproduced in the Dominique Fernandez edition (Chroniques italiennes [Paris: Folio, 1973]), what the conclusion would have been: “The count wants to save Félize, but she will not abandon Rodelinde. The count’s esteem for her only grows at this. But Rodelinde dies of a chest ailment, and Félize escapes. The count establishes her in Bologna and spends the rest of his life making frequent journeys from Tuscany to Bologna” (370). Stendhal’s story is based on events at the Convent of Sant’Arcangelo in Baiano, and the outcome of those events was the destruction of the convent and the execution of the characters whom Stendhal calls Fabienne and Céliane.

  SUORA SCOLASTICA

  “Suora Scolastica” has been translated once before—but in a composite version of the two drafts—by Maurice Magnus and printed in a journal titled The International, where it was serialized in August—October 1914.

  1. Philip V of Spain was the grandson of Louis XIV; ascending to the throne at the age of seventeen, he reigned from 1700 to his death, in 1746.

  2.Don Carlos is better known as Charles III of Spain (1716—1788), son of Philip V and Elizabeth Farnese.

  3.The Masaniello revolt of 1647 was a tax revolt led by a Neapolitan fisherman calling himself Masaniello; it involved much bloodshed. Stendhal’s ironic point is that highly imprudent Spanish tax policies led to the uprising.

  4.The Via Toledo today is the Via Roma.

  5.The name Angela Custode means “guardian angel.”

  6.That is, the rule of Saint Benedict, the set of guidelines for how a convent or monastery should be run.

  7.An in pace (“in peace”) was a dungeonlike cell designed for lifelong confinement, typically used for nuns or monks who had broken their vows of chastity. The full name, used later in the story, is vade in pace: “go in peace.”

  8.The figures here are different from the ones in Genarino’s letter. The discrepancy may be Scolastica’s, or it may be that Stendhal had not yet come back and revised his draft to make the numbers line up.

  9.As the reader will see, this version of the story, especially the version in the section titled “Plan,” is extremely different; Stendhal was turning his materials this way and that, trying out possibilities. This translation has made characters’ names consistent with those in the first manuscript.

  10.Bernardo Tanucci (1688—1783), a major statesman of his era. Stendhal here leaves what ought to be a footnote in the main text of his draft.

  11.Stendhal wrote in the margin here: “I do not believe that repellant scenes like this ever took place. I attribute them entirely to the wickedness of the narrator.”

  12.Philippe Berthier notes in his edition of the Oeuvres romanesques complètes, ed. Yves Ansel, Philippe Berthier, and Xavier Bourdenet (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 3:1492, that Stendhal read the outlines of the story in a history by the Italian general Pietro Colletta, translated into French as Histoire àu royaume de Naples depuis Charles VII jusqu’à Ferdinand IV (Paris: Baudry, 1835).

  13.The French army under General Championnet invaded Naples in 1799, welcomed by the nobility but fiercely resisted by the people (known as the Lazzaroni), who remained loyal to their king. Championnet overthrew the monarchy and announced the new Parthenopean Republic. This lasted only six months, and during its overthrow, a number of French nobles were arrested and executed.

  14.Charles VII of Naples was a Farnese on his mother’s side. His son Ferdinand I (the monarch who had been briefly unseated in 1799) was nicknamed Re Nasone on account of his large nose.

  15.The Duke of Bisignano is changed to Prince d’Atella in most other parts of the manuscript.

  16.Pietro Colletta (1775—1831) rose to the rank of general in the Neapolitan army; he wrote an important history of the times of Charles VII and Ferdinand I.

  17.In the margin, Stendhal noted: “16 March / Dictated these three pages 23 March 1842.” It was on the night of March 22—23 that he suffered an apoplectic attack, dying on the twenty-third.

  18.The battle of Denain, in 1712, concluded the War of the Spanish Succession and was a major victory for France. Stendhal here is confused about the incident of the Duchess of Marlborough (whom he erroneously calls the Duchess of Marl-brouck, corrected in the translation): the story goes that she was the one who deliberately spilled a glass of water on the dress of a rival at the English court; this may or may not have ever happened, but it was widely repeated during the eighteenth century and was taken to show how a trivial and personal matter can blow up into a major political issue. Stendhal would have had his attention drawn to the story by Eugène Scribe’s 1840 play La Verre d’eau; ou, Les Effets et les causes (The Glass of Water; or, Effects and Causes). The story was turned into a musical comedy and given a film treatment in 1960 by the German director Helmüt Käutner (Das Glas Wasser).

  19.Elisabeth Farnese (1692—1766), niece of the Duke of Parma, had in fact been raised in near seclusion in a small set of rooms (which Stendhal reduces to “an attic”) in the palace. She married Philip V in 1714.

  20.The great memoirist Louis de Rouvroy (1675—1755), Duc de Saint-Simon, was made ambassador to Spain in 1721. Stendhal often refers enthusiastically to him and his works, seeing in him a fellow realist.

  21.The battle of Bitonto, in May 1734, was a Spanish victory over the Austrian Habsburgs.

  22.The “log king” (roi soliveau) was the artificial king sent down to the frogs in La Fontaine’s Fables (3.4). The term refers to a powerless king lacking in authority.

  23.A baisemain is an occasion, dating back to feudal times, in which subjects are required to pay tribute to (literally, to kiss the hand of) their sovereign.

  24.San Gennaro is the patron saint of Naples. His blood, preserved in a vial, is said to liquefy on his feast day (September i9); swearing on his blood is thus a long-standing solemn oath.

  25.Stendhal mistakenly refers here to the house of Prince d’Atella, which the translation corrects. The names of characters are frequently changed and are sometimes confused in the manuscripts.

  26. Stendhal notes in the margin “21 March 42 / Sent to B.” The initial B refers to Félix Bonnaire, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Stendhal here lets the editor know what he has in mind; in the actual letter, he promises a collection of contes et romans (stories and novels), to be ready in about a year’s time.

  27. Capo le Case is a street in Rome, but the identity of Boca is unclear.

  STENDHAL the pseudonym of Henri-Marie Beyle (1783—1842), is best known for his major novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. He was a prolific writer in many genres, including novellas and tales
.

  RAYMOND N. MACKENZIE has published translations of works by Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola, and Montesquieu. His translation of Barbey D’Aurevilly’s Diaboliques: Six Tales of Decadence was published by the University of Minnesota Press. He is professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.