A striking instance of the rewards fortune almost always lavishes upon great criminals now added its support to my arguments.
We had scarce come out of the scene of horror I have just described when Borchamps’ troops rode in with six wagonloads of bullion that had been on its way to the Emperor, sent by the Venetian Republic. Only one hundred men were escorting this magnificent convoy when, in a mountain pass in the Tyrol, two hundred of our captain’s cavalry fell upon them and captured this hoard after an hour-long battle.
“There I am, rich for the rest of my life,” said Clairwil’s fortunate brother. “Notice, if you will, at what moment this happiness befalls us. ’Tis into hands soiled by wife-killing, infanticide, sodomy, multiple murders, prostitution, and infamies that heaven deposits this treasure; ’tis to reward me for these horrors heaven puts it at my disposal. And you would have me doubt that Nature is otherwise than honored by crimes? Ah, my thinking is not likely to change on this question, and I shall go on committing them forever, since the consequences are so encouraging. Carleson,” said the brigand, “before we begin the count, from the contents of one of these wagons take a hundred thousand crowns, they’re yours, the gift testifies to the satisfaction I received from your courage and purposefulness during the late scene for which you supplied the actors.”
Carleson kissed his commander’s knees in thanks.
“I see no reason to hide it, fair ladies,” Borchamps said to us, “I am exceedingly fond of this lad, and when one loves, it’s with money you must prove it. At the beginning, of course, I supposed that the enjoyment would sooner or later pall; but it has been quite the other way, the more I discharge with this delicious boy, the more attached to him I become. A thousand pardons. Mesdames, ten thousand, but ’twould perhaps not be the same thing with any of you.”
We passed several more days in Borchamps’ retreat; and then, seeing us eager to be off, he spoke to us as follows:
“My thought, good friends, was to accompany you to Naples, the prospect pleased me. But with the wish that is mine soon to quit my present calling, I ought to dedicate myself to business rather than pleasure. My sister will go with you to that noble town, and here are eight hundred thousand francs to defray the costs of your stay. Hire an appropriate mansion upon your arrival, give out that the three of you are sisters—as indeed one might be ready enough to believe, certain features in common create a kind of resemblance among you. Sbrigani will continue to look after your affairs while you make the most of the numerous sinful opportunities that magnificent city offers. Elise and Raimonde will be your chaperones. As for myself, I shall come to visit you if I can; amuse yourself, all three, and forget me not in your pleasures.”
We left. I regretted Carleson, I admit it; I had, while a guest in Borchamps’ castle, got myself prodigiously fucked by that pretty fellow, whose prick had been admirable, and it was something of a hardship for me to forego it. My feelings had nothing to do with love: I have never worshiped that god; the question was merely of the need to be well fucked, and nobody satisfied it better than Carleson. The obligation, moreover, to hide our activities in order to avoid displeasing Borchamps, very jealous of his handsome lieutenant, had lent an out-of-the-ordinary flavor to the enjoyment of him, and our last farewells were sealed by a mutual inundation of fuck.
Reaching Naples, we rented a superb house on the Chiagia quay, and passing ourselves as sisters, as the captain had advised, we gathered round us a royal entourage of domestics. First, we devoted a month to a careful appraisal of the morals and manners of this half-Spanish nation; we considered its government, its policies, its arts; its relations with the other nations of Europe. This study completed, we esteemed ourselves ready to sally forth into society. Our reputation as light ladies soon spread about. The King conceived a wish to see us; as for his wife, that spiteful woman did not look upon us with sympathy.14 Worthy sister to her who had married Louis XVI, this arrogant princess, after the example of all the other members of the House of Austria, sought to captivate her spouse’s heart solely in order to rule him politically; ambitious like Marie Antoinette, it was not the husband she cared about, it was the kingdom she wanted. Ferdinand, slow-witted, simple-minded, blind—in fine, a king, Ferdinand fancied he had a friend in that headstrong wife, when in fact he had only a spy and a rival, and the whore, like her sister, in devastating, in plundering the Neapolitan nation, toiled to the advantage of nobody except her Hapsburg tribe.
Shortly after our presentation I received a billet from the King of Naples, couched in these or very similar terms:
“To Paris, the other day, Juno, Pallas, and Venus were offered; he has made his choice, upon you he bestows the apple; come to receive it tomorrow at Portici, I shall be there alone; your refusal would disappoint me cruelly and gain you nothing. I shall therefore expect you.”
A communication so despotic, so laconic, deserved the most straightforward reply; I made it verbally, and contented myself with assuring the page boy that I would be punctual. Once the messenger has left, I fly to tell my sisters this piece of good news. All three thoroughly determined to banish the least suspicion of envy from our relations, to adopt a lightsome attitude toward human folly, to wring profit from it, to laugh at it—Olympia and Clairwil besought me not to miss the adventure. And arrayed like that very goddess who had merited the apple, I spring into a coach-and-six which, a few minutes later, brings me to the gate of the royal castle, renowned for the ruins of Herculaneum upon which it stands. Mysteriously introduced into this house’s most obscure apartments, I at last come to the King, nonchalantly reposing in a boudoir.
“My choice has created jealousies, naturally?” the fool says, speaking French with a villainous accent.
“No, Sire,” I answer him, “my sisters noted this preference with equanimity, as did I, no more touched, in honor, not to be included therein than am I by the vast honor you perhaps fancy it does me.”
He stares. “A singular reply, bless my soul.”
“Ah, though full aware that to please kings one must always flatter them, I, who in them perceive nought but ordinary mortals, never speak to them save it be to tell them the truth.”
“But if that truth is harsh?”
“You wonder why they deserve to hear it? But why should they suppose themselves less entitled than other men to the naked truth? Because they have a yet greater need of it?”
“They dread it more.”
“Tush. Let them then behave justly, let them renounce an empty pride out of which they strive to enslave men, and a liking for truth will replace their fear of it.”
“But, Madame, such speeches—”
“They startle you, Ferdinand, I see it. You doubtless thought that, flattered by your choice, I was going to approach you on my hands and knees; that I was going to bow down before you, serve you. No; a Frenchwoman, the pride that my sex and nationality inspire in me lends itself ill to such usages. Ferdinand, if I have been willing to grant you the interview you solicited, ’tis because I consider myself perhaps a little better equipped to enlighten you regarding your veritable interests. So forget for a moment the frivolous pleasures you promised yourself with an ordinary woman, and listen to one who knows you well, who knows your kingdom still better, and who can, concerning these subjects, speak to you in a manner your courtesans do not dare.”
Seeing that the King, slackjawed from surprise, bewildered, was paying all possible attention to me, I addressed him thus:
“My friend, you will permit me to dispense with those vainglorious nicknames and titles which tell only of the impertinence in him who receives them and of the shameless baseness in him who mouths them; my friend, I say, I have lately been examining your nation with utmost care, and have found it extremely difficult to put my finger upon its genius; I have been studying it since coming to Naples, and I confess I as yet see nothing there. Nevertheless, I think I have detected the reason for the trouble I have been having. Your people have lost track of their origins
; successive misfortunes, foreign domination after foreign domination, have left them limp, spineless, habituated to a slavery which has drained them of their one-time energy, rendered them unrecognizable. This nation, which sought liberators for so long, managed every time, through incredible blundering, to end up with another master. A great lesson for any people eager to break their shackles: let them learn from the Neapolitans’ example that success lies not in imploring protectors, but in shattering the throne and laying low the tyrants who sit upon it. Every other people has used the Neapolitans to establish a power; they alone have remained weak-willed and listless. One seeks for the genius of the Neapolitans, and as in the case of every population accustomed to slavery, one encounters nothing but the genius of their sovereign. Be sure of it, Ferdinand, the faults I perceive in your nation are not so much hers as your own. But something more surprising still: the very excellence of your people’s territory is perhaps the unique cause of their poverty: a more barren soil, a climate less mild, and the Neapolitans would have been forced to be industrious, and from meeting the challenge of adverse conditions they would have developed the vigor that eludes them owing to the fertility of their land. Thus it is that this fine country, with the advantages of a meridional location, is inhabited by a people who would be better off in the north.
“Since coming into your States I have looked everywhere for your kingdom, and all I discover is your city: a pit that swallows up all the wealth of the nation, and thereby impoverishes it. I cast an eye about this capital, what do I see? Everything ostentation and opulence can display of the most magnificent, and that cheek to jowl with the most afflicting evidence of indigence and idleness. On the one hand, noblemen living like kings; on the other, citizens in a worse case than serfs. And the vice of inequality everywhere, that all-destroying poison; and all the more difficult to root out, since the political order is built upon the enormous disparity between classes. Hereabouts, you either see men who own whole provinces or else drudges without even an acre; and between these two extremes, nothing. As a result, everything divides each man from his fellow. If these rich folk had some virtues, at least—but they arouse my pity, they make a dazzling show of themselves and possess none of the qualities which offset the ridiculous in such displays; they are proud without being urbane, tyrants without civility, magnificently appareled without elegance, libertines without any subtlety. In my opinion, they all resemble your Vesuvius: so many beauties before which one recoils. All their means for distinguishing themselves boil down to subsidizing convents and keeping actresses, to feeding horses, valets, and hounds.
“When in the course of my considerations I came upon your people’s formal refusal to adopt the tribunal of the Inquisition, I was impressed favorably; yet, I realized, this did not make the Neapolitans one whit less weak, although they did something that calls for strength.
“Your clergy is accused of having accumulated great wealth. In my eyes, this is not something to blame them for: their greed, matching that of the nation’s rulers, redresses the balance somewhat: the latter throw money about, the priests hoard it. When the day comes to seize the kingdom’s treasures, one will at least know where they are to be found.15
“Closely analyzing your nation, I see that it contains but three estates, all three of them either useless or poverty-ridden: the people surely belong to that latter class, the priests and courtesans form the other two. One of the major shortcomings from which this little empire of yours suffers, my friend, is that in it there exists but one power to which everything else is subsidiary: the King, here, is the State; the minister is the government. As a consequence, no possible emulation save that to which the sovereign or the sovereign’s agent gives rise—what greater flaw could any system have?
“Though Nature lavishes much upon your people, their circumstances are strait. But this is not the effect of their laziness; this general paralysis has its source in your policy which, from maintaining the people in dependence, shuts them out from wealth; their ills are thus rendered beyond remedy, and the political state is in a situation no less grave than the civil government, since it must seek its strength in its very weakness. Your apprehensiveness, Ferdinand, lest someone discover the things I have been telling you leads you to exile arts and talents from your realm. You fear the powerful eye of genius, that is why you encourage ignorance. ’Tis opium you feed your people, so that, drugged, they do not feel their hurts, inflicted by you. And that is why where you reign no establishments are to be found giving great men to the homeland; the rewards due knowledge are unknown here, and as there is neither honor nor profit in being wise, nobody seeks after wisdom.
“I have studied your civil laws, they are good, but poorly enforced, and as a result they sink into ever further decay. And the consequences thereof? A man prefers to live amidst their corruption rather than plead for their reform, because he fears, and with reason, that this reform will engender infinitely more abuses than it will do away with; things are left as they are. Nevertheless, everything goes askew and awry, and as a career in government has no more attractions than one in the arts, nobody involves himself in public affairs; and for all this compensation is offered in the form of luxury, of frivolity, of entertainments. So it is that among you a taste for trivial things replaces a taste for great ones, that the time which ought to be devoted to the latter is frittered away on futilities, and that you will be subjugated sooner or later and again and again by any foe who bothers to make the effort.
“In view of its situation, your State needs a fleet for its defense. I have seen a few soldiers in your country, but not one warship. With this insouciance, with this unpardonable apathy, your nation foregoes the possibility of becoming the sea power which by all rights it ought to be, and as your forces on the land do not make up for your lack of a navy, you will finish by amounting to nothing. Expanding nations will laugh at you, and if ever a revolution were to regenerate some one or other among them, you will be rightly deprived of the honor of constituting a weight on the scales. Anyone at all could make you tremble, even the Pope if he cared to bestir himself.
“Well, Ferdinand! It is not worth dominating a nation if one rules it in such a way. And do you think a sovereign, even a despot, can be happy when his people do not flourish? Where are the economic principles in your State? I have searched for them high and low, and uncovered none anywhere. Are you promoting agriculture? Encouraging the growth of population? Protecting trade? Aiding the arts? Not only is there no sign hereabouts of anything others are doing elsewhere, but everything I see points in the opposite direction. The outcome of it all? Your pallid monarchy languishes in indigence; you yourself become a nullity in the concert of European powers; your downfall is not far off.
“Shall I examine your city from the inside? Shall I analyze its manners? Nowhere do I perceive those simple virtues that provide the bedrock to society. Company is kept out of snobbery, friendship goes on through habit, marriage is determined by material need; and as vanity is foremost among the Neapolitans’ vices, a fault they acquired from the Spanish under whose heel they lived for so long; as, I say, pride is a vice inherent in your nation, its members prefer to avoid close scrutiny for fear lest the face of horror appear once the mask is removed. Your aristocracy, ignorant and stupid as it is everywhere else, brings disorder to its peak by placing its trust in lawyers, melancholy and dangerous breed swollen now to such ridiculous proportions there is practically no justice anymore. The little there is costs its weight in gold; and among all the countries I have visited, this is perhaps the only one where I have seen more wit exercised absolving a guilty man than is elsewhere devoted to justifying an innocent.
“I had imagined your court would offer me some ideas of polite behavior and gallantry, I see it contains nothing but boors or imbeciles. Weary of monarchical vices, I had the hope, in coming here, of finding a few antique virtues: instead, in your government I discover only the result of all the disorders to be encountered in the various kin
gdoms of Europe. Each individual, in your country, seeks to appear somehow larger than life-size; and as nobody has the qualities requisite to acquiring wealth, fraud is substituted for them; dishonesty thus becomes ingrained, congenital, and foreigners can no longer have confidence in a nation that has none in itself.
“After having glanced at the nobility, I take a look at your common people. Without exception, I find them uncouth, stupid, indolent, thieving, bloodthirsty, insolent, and possessing not a single virtue to redeem any of those vices.
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