by Stendhal
Italian Chronicles
Stendhal
ITALIAN CHRONICLES
TRANSLATED BY
RAYMOND N. MACKENZIE
Translation copyright 2017 by Raymond N. MacKenzie
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stendhal, 1783—1842, author. | MacKenzie, Raymond N., translator.
Title: Italian chronicles / Stendhal ; translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie.
Other titles: Chroniques italiennes. English
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039513 (print) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0010-6 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0011-3 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Stendhal, 1783-1842—Translations into English. | Italy—Fiction. |
BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PQ2435.A3 M33 2017 (print) | DDC 843/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20i6039513
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
STENDHAL’S PREFACES
ITALIAN CHRONICLES
1855
Vanina Vanini; or, Particulars concerning the Most Recent Gathering of a Cell of the Carbonari—Discovered in the Papal States
Vittoria Accoramboni: Duchess of Bracciano
The Cenci: 1599
The Duchess of Palliano
The Abbess of Castro
ITALIAN STORIES
The Jew
San Francesco a Ripa
Too Much Favor Is Deadly: A Tale of 1589
Suora Scolastica: A Story That Shocked All Naples in 1740
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Stendhal’s Italian tales are a unique mix of original fiction, historical reportage, and translation. They have long attracted many readers, and often for the same reasons that they have repelled some others: F. C. Green complains that the stories revel in “stabbings, poisonings, stranglings, tortures and other crude manifestations of jealousy or revenge,” but for most readers these very traits result in highly dramatic, almost operatic reading experiences, tales that become more complex and meaningful the more closely one reads them.1 And understanding what these tales meant to Stendhal—how they both shape and arise out of his own unique set of imperatives and themes—can aid a great deal in appreciating what is at stake here.
To begin with, “Stendhal” was just one of hundreds of pen names and artificial identities assumed by Henri Marie Beyle in the course of his writing life. These ranged from Louis-Alexandre-César Bombet and William Crocodile to single-name aliases like Florisse and Condotti. The literary culture of France in his day, a world of ruthlessly competing newspapers and feuilletons, demanded a steady stream of new voices, a situation that encouraged such proliferating identities. For example, in the 1840s both Charles Baudelaire and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly began using a variety of pen names; the latter wrote a great many successful pieces under feminine disguises, including Maximilienne de Syrène and Anne de Maubranches. Stendhal’s younger friend Prosper Mérimée likewise used many other names—most famously, and most successfully, Clara Gazul—and he and Stendhal seemed to revel in inventing and sometimes even trading pen names. Plagiarism was widespread, too, and pseudonyms were sometimes good cover for a writer “borrowing” someone else’s work; Stendhal’s first book was in fact heavily plagiarized, published under the Bombet alias.2 Common as the habit of using numerous pseudonyms was, though, it had a special importance for Beyle, and “Stendhal”—the name of a German town with no particularly great significance to Beyle—is the name he came to settle upon, the name he grew into, so to speak. We continue to call him by the pseudonym today because it suggests that his was a self-created identity; “Stendhal” is the man Henri Beyle shaped and sculpted, the man he chose to be. And Henri Marie Beyle was the man he wanted to leave behind. As Jean Starobinski puts it in his essay on Stendhal’s name, “[T]o adopt a pseudonym is, in the first place, whether out of a sense of shame or of resentment, to repudiate the name transmitted by the father.”3 That was abundantly true for Stendhal.
He was born into a stable and prosperous family in Grenoble in 1783, but in 1790, following the death of his beloved mother—“when my moral life truly began,” he tells us—her sister Séraphie moved into the house and took over the household in a most dominating manner. It is not surprising that the boy would resent her, but he also developed an ever-deepening contempt for his father and everything the man stood for. Even in his adulthood, this loathing remained so strong and bitter that reading about it can make a modern reader uncomfortable: Chérubin Beyle, the father, had his faults, but they do not seem that severe. Stendhal tells us, “In the old days, when I heard speak of the simple joys of childhood, of the thoughtlessness of that age, of the happiness of early youth, the one true happiness in life, my heart would contract. I experienced none of all that; what’s more, for me that age was a time of continual unhappiness, and of hatred, and of always impotent hopes of revenge.”4 He continued to refer to his mother by her maiden name, Gagnon, thus keeping her clear of the hated name Beyle.
His loathing for his father extended outward to the town, to Grenoble itself—a boring bourgeois town that, he felt, suited his father perfectly. When, aged sixteen, the boy was finally old enough to move to study in Paris, at the École Polytechnique, one might expect him to have been dazzled by the place, but instead he describes his arrival there by noting that the “environs of Paris had seemed to me horribly ugly; there wasn’t even a single mountain! This dislike increased rapidly during the days following.”5 His dissatisfaction and sense of alienation expanded to take in his native country as a whole, and he went on to develop a lifelong dislike for France, especially post-Napoleonic France, which he saw as having settled into being merely the home of vanity and hypocrisy and passionlessness. A man, he thought, ought to have “a certain masculine energy, constancy and depth in his ideas, etc. All things that are as rare in Paris as a coarse or even harsh tone.”6 Mérimée wrote a short, affectionate memoir of his friend in 1853, which remains one of the best possible introductions to the man; in that memoir, Mérimée described him thus: “He displayed a deep contempt for the French character, and he was eloquent in highlighting all those faults of which people—quite wrongly, no doubt—accuse our great nation: triviality, thoughtlessness, insignificance in both word and deed. But in fact he himself possessed these same faults in the highest degree.”7 Restless, unable to accept who he was and entirely uncertain as to what he wanted to do with his life, he entered the army. And soon thereafter, all those youthful strugglesthe shooting star that was Napoleon to distance himself from his family, his native town, and even his country came to a happy resolution, a resolution that can be dated precisely: the first of June 1800.
On that day, a horseman in Napoleon’s cavalry, he entered Italy, and, stopping in the small town of Ivrea, he went to the opera in the evening. He heard there a performance of Cimarosa’s II Matrimonii) Segreto, an ex
perience that hit him like a revelation, an experience of “divine happiness.” On the following days, the army moved toward Milan, and as he rode along on his horse, he says, “I thought, this was the beautiful.”8 The experience only deepened as the summer progressed: “[Milan] became for me the most beautiful place on earth. I am quite insensitive to the charms of my homeland, for the place where I was born I have a repugnance verging on a physical nausea… . Milan for me between 1800 and 1821 was the place where I wished constantly to be living.”9 And so it was that Italy—with its music, its art, its language and dialects, its women—became his adopted home. During the rest of his life, he either lived and worked in Italy or was in the process of trying to get back there. He wished, he said, to be buried there and to have his tombstone inscribed “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese.”
This is not to suggest that Stendhal became complacent or “settled” in any sense, whether in Italy or anywhere else; he remained a restless, questioning person all his life. But Italy gave him a ground, a place from which he could approach the problem of the self and all the attendant complications of life with some sense of determination and purpose. In Italy, he found that the art di godere, the art of enjoying life, was possible, a thing that would probably not be possible in Paris, he thought, for another two hundred years. He considered that this might in part be the result of the gentler, hands-off style of governing that the Austrians took with Lombardy, for, he said, contentment in larger things is necessary before we can take pleasure in smaller ones; he concluded, “[B]ut I think that one can be happy here.”10
He began thinking about the idea of happiness, reading widely in philosophers such as Pascal, Montesquieu, and Condillac, noting his thoughts and reservations about them in his journals and letters. Most important was his reading of a contemporary, Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754—1836), whose Elements of Ideology had a powerful impact on him. Harry Levin summarizes the lesson Stendhal took from Tracy:
Locke had characterized the mind as a blank tablet on which experience inscribed its lessons; Tracy emphasized the impact of the stylus, the substance of the lesson, the process of conditioning. Education was emphasized, almost to the exclusion of biological factors. It gave a new significance to external facts, and to seemingly insignificant details, if they alone determined psychological traits and motives. The implications of this determinism are so far-reaching that novelists are still engaged in working them out… . Manners, so to speak, were conditioned by scenery.11
As Levin implies, Tracy’s philosophy gives a kind of superstructure to what is the essence of fiction, at least the kind of fiction that succeeded the crumbling facade of neoclassicism: the close attention to individuals and to specificity of detail. Life as lived—not life as theorized or moralized—was where happiness was to be found, and it was also where the novelist was to turn. Levin notes that Stendhal wrote on his own copy of Le Rouge et le noir, “M. de Tracy told me that truth could only be attained through the novel.”12 The constellation of fact, truth, and fiction began to come into focus.
He slowly evolved his own vision of life as la chasse au bonheur— the search (or perhaps the more active word hunt would be better) for happiness. It became a dominant theme in his personal writing as well as in his published work. In The Life of Henry Brulard, he declared, “I call a man’s character his habitual way of going in pursuit of happiness; or in clearer but less meaningful terms, the sum of his moral habits.”13 For Stendhal himself, happiness could never be found in a staid, respectable life like that of his father back in Grenoble but instead had to involve movement, variety, intensity—the latter above all. His response to the greatness of the past—its great writers and thinkers, as well as its great works of art—could be so intense as to be overwhelming. A passage in his book Rome, Naples, et Florence, describing his first experience of Florence, illustrates this well:
Florence, January 22 1817: The day before yesterday, while descending the Apennines on my way to Florence, my heart began to beat violently. What childishness! At last, at a point where the road turned, I looked off across the plain into the distance and I could see it, like a dark mass in the distance, Santa Maria del Fiore and its famous dome, Brunelleschi’s masterpiece. I said to myself, “This is where Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci lived! This is the noble city, the queen of the Middle Ages! Civilization was reborn here within its walls, and it was here that Lorenzo de’Medici so brilliantly played the role of king, surrounded by a court that, for the first time in history since Augustus, did not give precedence to military merit.”
He made his way to the church of Santa Croce, where he saw the tombs of Michelangelo, Alfieri, Machiavelli, and Galileo, and said, “My emotion was so deep that it approached piety. The somber religiosity of the church, its simple roof line, its unfinished façade—all of it spoke vividly to my soul.” A monk offered to show him the ceiling frescoes of sibyls painted by Volterrano, and as he sat down and tilted his head back to contemplate them, the experience nearly overwhelmed him:
I was already in a near-ecstatic state simply by virtue of the idea of actually being in Florence, and being so near to those great men whose tombs I had just seen. Absorbed entirely in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I saw it from up close, I was able to touch it, so to speak. I had arrived at that emotional height where the celestial sensations a work of art gives us are joined with the passionate sentiments. As I left Santa Croce, my heart was pounding, and I was in what they call a nervous state in Berlin; life was all but extinguished within me, and I walked along in fear of falling.14
This intense response to art has come to be called the Stendhal syndrome, and though he was hardly the only person to have such intense responses, something important about the man himself is implicit in such intensity, as is something important about the kind of happiness he was always seeking.
And this brings us back to the topic of Italy. What Italy meant to Stendhal was partly of his own construction, partly what was actually there, and partly what French and European culture had been making of Italy for the preceding few generations. In an extensive study of the topic, Élodie Saliceto reminds us that the eighteenth century, the age of neoclassicism, venerated Italy as the ruins of Rome, the vestiges of a grandeur that could—and even must—be recovered. For the French of Stendhal’s generation, she says, “the neoclassical dream of a new resurgence of Antiquity was incarnated in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte himself, that giant of modern times fashioned on the model of the ancients.”15 Napoleon to some extent tried to associate himself in the public mind with the greatness of the Caesars, and many artists of the time—notably Jacques-Louis David in such compositions as Napoleon Crossing the Alps—helped to make that image a vivid and convincing one. Stendhal served in Napoleon’s army and was present at the disastrous retreat from Moscow, but he remained a fervent believer in the man’s greatness—or at least in the idea of such greatness, such modern heroism. He drafted a biography of Napoleon in 1817, though he did not publish it, where he distinguished between a tyrant and a despot. The despot (as Saliceto summarizes) represses and chains down liberty, but the tyrant is a positive figure for Stendhal, because he unleashes great energy, great change, great upheavals. Stendhal’s Vie de Napoleon asserts, “Napoleon is thus the tyrant of the 19th century. To say ‘tyrant’ is to say ‘superior spirit.’”16 Napoleon’s glory was greatly enhanced by the ways it reflected—or could be made to reflect—the glory of ancient Rome.17
Stendhal was not a classical scholar, but he took the classical literature and history he read seriously, and it clearly affected his views of the present, in two primary ways: first, the classical past was a constant reminder of how decayed and banal the present had become; and, second, Italy retained for him more echoes of that great past than anywhere else. As Philippe Berthier puts it, “[I]n Italy, every step he took called up illustrious ghosts from the past, memories of grandeur.”18
Stendhal’s Italy, the Italy we encounter in the tales in this volume,
is of course a personal construction, but it is also based firmly on documented history, on reality; it owes much, too, however, to the cultural inheritance, the way Italy had been seen and depicted in art and literature in the centuries before him. Violent, vengeful, passionate, sincere, the literary Italians of the generations leading up to Stendhal—and to some extent one can include characters like Shakespeare’s Shylock, Iago, and Romeo in the list—abhorred the dedication to work, the profit motive, and the bourgeois quality of modernity. Stendhal contrasted England with Italy: “I felt … how ridiculous it is for the English worker to have to labour for eighteen hours. The poor Italian in his ragged clothes is much closer to happiness. He has time to make love, he gives himself up eighty or a hundred days of the year to a religion that is all the more entertaining in that it frightens him a bit, etc., etc.”19 If England was the bourgeois utopia—the nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon had put it—then Italy was the promised land of freedom, and perhaps especially of freedom from the suffocating present. Mariella Di Maio calls Stendhal’s Italy an “archaic anachronism, a kind of gap in civilization, where the triumph of the individual is not oppressed by social life.”20 But this gap, this space apart, was precisely the space where literature could occur, a space in which stories could bloom.
The stories in the present volume all, in differing ways, call up that grandeur and are set in a strange but compelling antimodernity, and all are concerned with la chasse au bonheur—though the happiness in most cases is extremely fleeting. They were all written between 1829 and 1842—that is, when Stendhal was between forty-five and fifty-nine years of age. They are thus mature works, dating from the era when he had turned, belatedly, to fiction: his first novel, Armance, was published in 1827, and his masterpieces, Le Rouge et le noir and Le Chartreuse de Parme, in 1830 and 1839 respectively. The dates of composition and publication are as follows: