Scarpia

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘No, quite. Far better to engage those of a married woman.’

  ‘Paola . . .’

  ‘Well, it’s the custom, I suppose,’ she said, ‘so I can’t blame you, but it was painful.’

  ‘If I had known –’

  ‘You couldn’t have known because, while it is the custom for married women to make eyes at handsome young Sicilians, it is not the custom for an unmarried girl to do the same. We are expected to wait to be bartered by our parents – to make some good marriage that will somehow please the families involved and the couple in question have little say in the matter.’ She turned to face Scarpia: there were tears in her eyes. ‘But you can imagine how feeble and foppish they all are. All they think about is their figura – whether their horses and carriages are finer than those of their friends; whether they cut a dash on the Corso. None would ever fight or kill except in some stupid duel, and then they’d avoid it because the blood might stain their clothes. They wanted me to marry someone like that and have children by someone like that and the thought of it repelled me. They say it’s because I’ve been reading romantic novels, and perhaps that’s true. Perhaps the French these days have opened our eyes to a lot of things – to the importance of qualities other than a pedigree and a carriage and what people are wearing at Versailles: and you are the only man I know who is not like that and I thought I could respect and even love a man like you, even if he was a provincial, and then I thought that perhaps a man like you wasn’t to be found. That in fact it was you I could love and respect, and did love and respect, despite your absurd and abject role as the cicisbeo of the Contessa di Comastri – but it was just because it was so absurd and abject that proved you were different, and that if you had a companion, a friend, a wife who was Roman, she could . . . I don’t know . . .’ Paola’s tears had now overflowed from her lids and were making wet furrows on her cheeks.

  ‘Listen, Paola,’ said Scarpia. ‘If I did not think of you as a wife, it was because it never occurred to me that it would be possible that we should marry. Now it is possible and comes as a great blessing. Do you remember when we danced, that first time? How your mother ordered you to take me onto the floor? At once I saw that you were a girl quite unlike any other, but you were quite gauche and scrawny – straight from the convent. Now you remain a girl unlike any other, but you have also become the most beautiful woman in Rome. I would never, never have become fond of Letizia if I had imagined that you might be mine. And that, and other things, I now bitterly regret and would ask you to forgive if we are to marry.’

  ‘Other things?’ Paola gave him a look of intense scrutiny. ‘Well, best not to ask about that. A past is a past and men are allowed one and women are not. And, if I am honest with myself, I would not want to marry a man who had lived like a monk. But now I think we have looked at the Madonna for long enough. We had better rejoin the company.’

  ‘As fidanzati?’

  She smiled. ‘You haven’t asked for my hand.’

  Scarpia gave a slight bow. ‘Will you marry me, Principessa di Marcisano?’

  Paola returned his bow with a gentle curtsy. ‘I will, Baron Scarpia. It will be a great honour to be your wife.’

  PART TWO

  Seven

  1

  On 5 May 1789, the French Estates General convened at Versailles, summoned by King Louis XVI to deal with the bankruptcy of the state. It did not seem at first to Pope Pius VI or his Secretary of State, Cardinal Zelada, that there was any reason to feel concern for the interests of the Church. The First Estate was made up of Catholic clergy – rich bishops and impoverished priests, the Second of the Nobility and the Third of the commons. On 17 June, the Third Estate, which represented 96 per cent of the population of France, proclaimed itself a National Assembly. Two days later, two-thirds of the clergy from the First Estate voted to join it. A Catholic prelate, the Archbishop of Vienne, was chosen to preside over a committee appointed to draw up a new constitution.

  Reports of the proceedings of the Estates General, sent to Rome by the papal nuncio in Paris, Archbishop Antonio Dugnani, first caused a measure of alarm when, at the end of July, he described how a mob had stormed the royal fortress in Paris, the Bastille. That alarm turned to dismay as the summer turned into autumn and further dispatches from Archbishop Dugnani reported the abolition of feudal privileges, a Declaration of the Rights of Man, and, in November, the nationalisation of the property of the Church. It seemed inconceivable to Pope Pius VI that a Catholic king, Louis XVI, could countenance such measures; however, he was advised by the French ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal de Bernis, that perhaps King Louis had little choice.

  In February 1790, all religious orders in France not engaged in education or charitable work were suppressed and their property sequestered by the state. Such suppressions and sequestrations had happened before under the Emperor Joseph in Austria and under Ferdinand in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: they did not endanger the practice of the Catholic religion and only frayed at the edges the authority of the Pope. More serious was the drawing up by the new Constituent Assembly in Paris of a Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July of 1790, which stated that all bishops and priests, like deputies, should be elected; and that the Church in France was to sever all links with the Pope. The clergy were obliged to take an oath of loyalty to this Civil Constitution – in other words, to abjure the Pope – with fines and imprisonment for those who refused.

  What were the priests to do? Guidance was sought from Rome. Pius temporised, hoping to placate the revolutionaries, but by March of 1791 it had become clear that no compromise was possible. Pius therefore issued an Apostolic Brief condemning the Civil Constitution: any priest who took the oath was to be suspended and, if he had already taken the oath but did not now repent and recant, would be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

  The French Foreign Minister refused to accept the brief when it was delivered by the papal nuncio, Archbishop Dugnani. Diplomatic relations between Paris and Rome were ruptured. The revolutionary government ordered the seizure of the papal city of Avignon and laws were passed condemning priests who refused to take the oath to penal servitude in Guiana. Most of the French bishops remained loyal to the Pope and so too did two-thirds of the lower clergy. In Paris, priests, monks and nuns were arrested and interned in monasteries and convents now serving as gaols. On 2 September, at three in the afternoon, a crowd broke into the Carmelite convent off the rue de Vaurigard and slaughtered one hundred and fifty priests, among them the Archbishop of Arles. The massacre spread to other prisons throughout Paris and continued for five days. Two hundred and twenty-five priests and five bishops were among the fourteen hundred killed.

  This atrocity caused consternation in Rome and increased from a trickle to a flood the flow of fugitives from revolutionary France. In the spring of 1791, the two maiden aunts of King Louis XVI, the Princesses Marie Adelaide and Victoire Marie, had sought asylum in Rome. They were followed by other aristocrats and, after the September massacres, bishops and priests. The city was overwhelmed by refugees: all religious institutions were asked by the Pope to take in their share. Treasurer Ruffo, to finance the relief, was obliged to draw 500,000 thalers from the papal reserves. And for the first time, the term ‘Jacobin’ was heard on the lips of the refugees to describe members of the political club in Paris based in a former Dominican priory on the rue Saint-Jacques – the via Jacobus. The Jacobins, led by Maximilien de Robespierre, controlled an influential faction in the National Convention and pushed through laws that appealed to the sanguinary passions of the Parisian mob.

  By the summer of 1791, it had become clear that the revolution in France could only be defeated by the intervention of outside powers. Already many aristocrats had fled across the River Rhine and in June of 1791 King Louis and his family had fled from Paris to join them. They were stopped at Varennes and brought back to Paris. The Emperor of Austria and King of Prussia warned the revolutionary government of grave consequences if any harm sho
uld come to the King and Queen of France. Enraged, the revolutionary government declared war on Austria and invaded the Netherlands, then under Austrian rule. The French army was driven back. A Prussian army invaded France from Koblenz, quickly captured the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun, and threatened Paris. However, it was stopped at Valmy and, with winter approaching, withdrew back across the Rhine.

  The revolutionaries were exultant. They had not defeated the Prussians, but checking their advance had shown that the enemy’s discipline and professionalism could be matched by fervour and zeal. The National Convention called for a general mobilisation of all male citizens: for the first time in European history a government imposed universal conscription and raised an army of 300,000 men. Led by the Jacobins, the government also turned on the enemy within. The monarchy was abolished, France proclaimed a republic and the king who had conspired against his people was tried, condemned and decapitated by the newly invented killing machine, the guillotine. His wife, Marie Antoinette, died on the same scaffold on the Place de la Revolution nine months later.

  *

  Giovanni Angelo Braschi, now seventy-five years old, had reigned as Pope Pius VI for seventeen years. In the course of his long term of office, he had had his differences with obstreperous monarchs, but nothing had prepared him for the calamities that had overcome the Church in France. The Pope could but hope and pray that the coalition of powers formed against revolutionary France – Austria, Prussia and Britain – would prevail, restoring both the monarchy and the rights of the Church. He did not join the coalition – there was as yet no threat to the Papal States – but he saw with alarm that French troops, at war with Savoy, had taken the town of Nice on the Mediterranean coast. The road was now open into Italy. What if a revolutionary army should march on Rome? Who would defend the city and the Vicar of Christ? The garrison of the Castel Sant’Angelo? His Swiss Guard?

  Hopes were raised in Rome when French royalists seized Toulon and opened the port to a British fleet under Admiral Hood; but then, in December 1793, after a three-month siege by the French republicans, a young Corsican artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, had retaken the city. The British navy withdrew, leaving the French masters of the Mediterranean. The supply of grain to Civitavecchia was now disrupted. Bread became scarce and what was available was adulterated. Discontent was directed against Treasurer Ruffo, who had spent so much money on useless defences. What was the point of making Civitavecchia impregnable if ships carrying supplies upon which Rome depended could be intercepted by the French on the open sea?

  In September, a French fleet under Admiral La Touche-Tréville had sailed into the Bay of Naples and, under threat of bombardment, King Ferdinand had been forced to recognise the government that had so recently executed his wife’s sister, Marie Antoinette. Would the Pope be obliged to do the same? Pope Pius wrote to the Russian tsarina, Catherine, begging her to send a Russian navy into the Mediterranean: ‘We have neither troops nor ships.’ Some cardinals urged him to prepare to flee from Rome. He refused. ‘My post is by the tomb of St Peter.’ Nor would he recognise a republic that had murdered so many bishops and priests.

  The pontiff, however, could not avoid the realities of the changed balance of power. When two French artists living in Rome were arrested by the papal police for wearing the tricolour cockade and erecting a statue entitled Liberty overcoming Fanaticism, the new French ambassador who had replaced Cardinal de Bernis protested. The artists were released. The ambassador then demanded that French warships should be allowed to put in for provisions at Civitavecchia. The Pope could not but comply, and French sloops flying the tricolour passed beneath the walls of the Michelangelo Fortress so recently strengthened by Ruffo at such great expense.

  2

  Marriages in Rome at the end of the eighteenth century were private affairs. On occasions, a princely family might give a lavish reception some weeks after the wedding, but the Prince and Princess di Marcisano did not feel that the marriage of their daughter merited a celebration. They bore no grudge against their son-in-law, Baron Scarpia; they knew that he had done nothing to ensnare their daughter; nor could they blame him for acquiescing in her demand that he be her husband: it would have been preposterous for anyone in his position to refuse. However, while the marriage had not caused a scandal, the Marcisanos had been embarrassed, and the Romans entertained, by some mocking pasquinades.

  After their wedding, the Scarpias had sailed to Palermo where Vitellio introduced his young wife to his parents, whom he had not seen for seven years. They had spent a month in Sicily – Scarpia showing his bride the Byzantine mosaics in the cathedral of Monreale, the Greek temple at Segesta and the ruined keep at the family’s estates at Castelfranco. They had then sailed to Naples, staying with Vitellio’s brother Domenico and sister-in-law Sabina. The young couple were received at court by King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina: the gossip about Vitellio’s escapades in Spain had been forgotten or, if remembered, had been smothered by the renown he had won in Rome. After their presentation to their Sicilian majesties, General Acton had taken Scarpia aside and questioned him about the fortifications at Civitavecchia and the state of the papal fleet.

  During the weeks which followed, Vitellio and Paola got to know their nephews and nieces, the children of Domenico and Sabina, and those of Scarpia’s sister Angelina and her husband Leonardo Partinico. They visited the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, spent two nights on the island of Capri, went to the theatre and the San Carlo opera, and contemplated a visit to the family’s estates at Barca in Basilicata: Scarpia hoped to show Paola that his mother’s family, while not to be compared with the Marcisanos, was nevertheless of some standing in the Kingdom of Naples. However, by now Paola had become pregnant and suffered from morning sickness. After six weeks in Naples, they returned to Rome.

  Again, as was customary in a princely family, Vitellio and Paola had been given their own quarters in the Palazzo Marcisano. This suited Scarpia, but not the Prince and Princess di Marcisano. As an unmarried daughter, Paola had been unmanageable; with the new-found liberties of a married woman she became intolerably imperious, and Paola, with her mother fussing because she was pregnant, felt that she was still being treated as a child. They were therefore given a villa belonging to the family beyond the Aventine Hill but within the Aurelian walls – built into the ruins of an ancient temple – a pleasant house with pretty gardens and a small vineyard named after a nymph to whom the temple had been dedicated, Larunda. The young couple moved to the Villa Larunda with a staff to suit their station – a cook, a lady’s maid, two housemaids, two footmen, a major-domo, two grooms, three gardeners and Guido Spoletta, the baron’s servant.

  Paola disliked Spoletta. She found him ugly and coarse and, though he behaved correctly in her presence, he showed a nonchalance that bordered on insolence. She heard from her maid Nunzi that he remained aloof from the other servants, showed contempt for the major-domo, and spent his spare time in Trastevere, where he kept the company of low women and got into drunken brawls. Paola found his presence in her home obnoxious. She liked to see a pleasant image of herself reflected in those around her. When she dressed for a ball, Nunzi took as much pleasure as she did in her fine appearance. The housemaids, the footmen, the coachmen, all looked with unfeigned admiration at the splendour of their young mistress. Only Spoletta eyed her coldly: You may fool them, but you don’t fool me.

  In the early days of her marriage, Paola had intimated to her husband that he might find a better-looking and more congenial manservant. At first gently, then more emphatically, Scarpia made it clear that it was impossible. ‘He has been with me for all these years through thick and thin. Without him at my side, in Spain, in Algiers, I would be a corpse.’

  Paola did not like to think of her Vitellio as a corpse. He was not just her husband, he was her lover and as such had exceeded all the vague, girlish expectations of sexual love. Imperious with everyone else – with her parents, her brother – she was meek with Sca
rpia. On those first nights after their wedding, she had offered her soft, draped white body as if on an altar, glimpsing with a delicious terror his dark, lean figure, looking up into his determined eyes, her hands fluttering, not daring to touch or grasp until overwhelmed by ecstatic sensation she clasped his back. He was her stern warrior, her Achilles, her Odysseus returned to the arms of his Penelope.

  Paola’s pregnancy brought on sickness and lassitude but also a still more powerful cleaving to Scarpia and she had become tormented by doubts. Making love less because of the sickness and lassitude, she began to fear that his affection was waning; that he found her unattractive because of her bulging belly, or perhaps he had never found her attractive and had only married her to further his ambition. Were his endearments sincere? Did he find her dull? Had Letizia di Comastri been more amusing? More passionate? More skilled in the arts of love?

  And always there was Spoletta, unavoidable each morning and night, passing her silently with an ironic bow. Did he know better than she did the true feelings of his master, Scarpia? You bought him. He feels degraded. He longs to escape this pampered life. Could these be the thoughts that were passing through the head of her beloved Vitellio? Yet when Scarpia himself followed his manservant out of his bedroom, his waistcoat buttoned up, his wig in place, there was only kindness with perhaps a touch of amusement in his eyes.

  The birth of a son changed Paola once again. Though still only twenty-two years old, she was now a mother and so decidedly a woman – no longer a girl. When she resumed sexual relations with her husband, it was just as pleasant but less momentous, more routine. Her anxiety was dissipated and her imperiousness returned, but it was that of a matron, not a wilful child. Scarpia, now an equerry to the Treasurer Ruffo, went each day to the Quirinale Palace: Paola reigned alone and unchallenged in the Villa Larunda. But there remained Spoletta – in and out of the villa, she never knew when. Her dislike of him increased. She still dared not press Scarpia to dismiss him, but his presence slowly affected her feelings for her husband. He was a reminder of Scarpia’s humble Sicilian origins – a smudge on his escutcheon. Spoletta must go.