Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  “Signors, I am the prisoner of this gentleman,” indicating Signor Anselme, “and I am most annoyed to see what has happened, through no fault of mine.”

  The captain having ordered that his stiletto be taken away, he then leaned on a balcony and proceeded to trim his fingernails with a small pair of scissors that had been lying there.

  He was asked what persons he had in his house; he named, among others, Colonel Liveroto and Count Montemelino, of whom we have already read, adding that he would give 10,000 piastres to bring back the one, and his own blood to bring back the other. He asked to be placed in a room suited to a man such as himself. This having been done, he wrote with his own hand the order to surrender, and he enclosed his ring as a sign. He said to Signor Anselme that he was delivering up to him his sword and his musket, entreating him when he found those weapons in his house to make use of them for his friendship’s sake, as they were the arms of a gentleman and not some vulgar soldier.

  The soldiers went into the house, searching it with great care, and called out the roll of the prince’s men, who were found to number thirty-four, after which they were conducted, two by two, to the palazzo prison. The dead were left to be prey for dogs, and then a complete report was quickly sent off to Venice.

  A number of the soldiers of Prince Louis who were known to have been involved in the crime could not be found; it was forbidden to give them asylum, under pain of having one’s house demolished and one’s goods confiscated; those who turned one of them in would receive fifty piastres. By these means, many were found.

  A frigate was sent from Venice to Candia carrying orders for Signor Latino Orsini to return immediately on a matter of great importance, and people thought he would be stripped of his command.

  Yesterday morning, which was the Feast of Saint Stephen, everyone was waiting to see the death of the said Prince Louis or to hear that he had been strangled in prison; anything else would have been a great surprise, for he was not the kind of bird that could be kept in a cage for long. But that night his trial was held, and, a little before dawn on Saint John’s Day, it was learned that the said signor had been strangled and that he had made a very good death. His body was transported without delay to the cathedral, accompanied by the clergy from that church and a number of Jesuit priests. He was laid out on a table in the middle of the church all day long, to serve as a spectacle for the people and as a mirror for the inexperienced.

  The next day, his body was carried to Venice, as he had requested in his will, and he was buried there.

  On the Saturday, they hanged two of his people: the first and the more important was Furio Savorgnano, the other some common man.

  On the Monday, the penultimate day of the aforesaid year, thirteen more were hanged, among whom were a number of nobles; two others, one called Captain Spendiano and the other Count Paganello, were taken to the plaza, being lightly tortured on the way; having come to the place of execution, they were beaten, their skulls broken, and they were then torn into quarters, remaining alive throughout. These men were nobles, and before they turned to evil ways, they had been very rich. It was said that Count Paganello was the one who killed Vittoria Accoramboni with that cruelty that has already been described. But it was objected that Prince Louis, in the letter cited earlier, testified that he did the deed with his own hand, but this may have been said out of braggadocio, as when he had had Vitelli assassinated in Rome, or it may have been said to gain more favor from Prince Virginio Orsini.

  Count Paganello, before receiving his mortal blow, was stabbed a number of times with a knife below his left breast, in order to touch his heart, as he had done to that poor lady. The result was a veritable torrent of blood from his chest. He lived for another half an hour, to the great astonishment of everyone. He was a man of forty-five years, who showed a great deal of strength.

  The supports of the gibbet are still standing, ready to dispatch the nineteen remaining, on the first day that is not a feast day. But because the executioner is very fatigued and the people are in a somewhat miserable state after having seen so many deaths, their execution has been deferred for these two days. No one thinks any of them will be left alive. The only possible exception among the men of Prince Louis is Signor Filenfi, the master of his casa, who is taking all pains possible (and indeed it is a matter of some importance to him) to prove that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime.

  No one can remember, not even among the oldest here in the city of Padua, a time when, for so just a reason, so many have forfeited their lives on a single occasion, all at once. And these signors (of Venice) have acquired renown and a very good reputation among the most civilized nations.

  Added in another hand: François Felenfi, secretary and maestro di casa, was condemned to fifteen years in prison. The cupbearer (copiere), Onorio Adami de Fermo, along with two others, received one year in prison; seven others were condemned to the galleys in irons, and another seven were released.

  THE CENCI

  1599

  The Don Juan of Molière is an amorous man, no doubt, but above all he is a man among other men, a man who is good company; before giving himself up to that irresistible penchant of his that draws him toward pretty women, he first tries to conform to a certain kind of ideal. He wants to be the kind of man who would be the most admired in the court of a gallant and witty young king.

  The Don Juan of Mozart is already closer to the real thing, and less French; he thinks much less of the opinion of others; most importantly, he does not think at all about his public image or appearance, about how he appears, his parestre, as the Baron de Faeneste in the tale by d’Aubigné would have put it.1 We have only two portraits of Don Juan in Italy such as he must have appeared in that fine country in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of the renascence of civilization. Of these two portraits, there is one that I simply cannot mention; our age is too stiff and priggish; I am reminded of the great phrase I often heard Lord Byron use: “this age of cant.”2 This hypocrisy, so tedious and so ineffective at fooling anyone, has the immense advantage of giving stupid people something to say: they are scandalized when one has dared to say something or when one has dared to laugh at something, etc. The disadvantage is that it severely limits the field of history.

  But if the reader has the good taste to permit me, I will present to him, in full humility, a historic account of the second of these Don Juan figures, the one of whom it is possible to speak in 1837; his name was Francesco Cenci.

  A Don Juan is possible only because of the world’s hypocrisy. In antiquity, a Don Juan was an effect without a cause; religion then was festival, and she exhorted men toward pleasure, so how could she have rejected those creatures who made a certain pleasure their whole pursuit? Only government spoke of abstaining; it forbade those things that could do harm to the nation, which is to say, to the interest of the general public, and not those that could harm only the individual who practiced them.

  Every man who had a taste for women and plenty of money, therefore, could be a Don Juan in Athens, and no one would find anything wrong with that; nobody would say that this life is a vale of tears and that there is merit in making ourselves suffer.

  I do not believe that the Athenian Don Juan would arrive at the level of actual crime as quickly as the Don Juan of modern monarchies; much of the pleasure of the latter consists in going against popular opinion, and he begins, in his youth, believing that what he is rebelling against is hypocrisy.

  To “break the law” under the monarchy of Louis XV, to take a pistol shot at a roofer and make him tumble down from the height of his rooftop—is this not the proof that one lives in the society of a prince, that one sports the best possible tone, and that one laughs at the judge? “Laughing at the judge”: is this not the first step, the first attempt made by every little Don Juan at his debut?

  Among us, women are no longer in fashion, and this is why Don Juans are rare; but when they were more common, they always began by seeking out perfect
ly natural pleasures, all the while boasting of flouting the religious ideas not founded in reason of their contemporaries. It is only later, when he begins to become perverted, that the Don Juan finds a voluptuous pleasure in flouting those opinions that he himself finds just and reasonable.

  This transition would have been very difficult among the ancients, and it is only under the Roman emperors, after Tiberius and Capri, that one finds libertines who love corruption for its own sake, that is, for the pleasure of flouting the reasonable opinions of their contemporaries.

  Thus, it is to the Christian religion that I attribute the possibility of a satanic role for Don Juan. This is the religion that taught the world that some poor slave, some gladiator, possessed a soul absolutely equal in faculties to that of Caesar himself; thus, we must thank it for the appearance of the more delicate sentiments; but even so, I am sure that those sentiments would have made their appearance in the lives of people sooner or later anyway. The Aeneid already has a tenderness quite absent from The Iliad.

  The philosophy of Jesus was that of the Arab philosophers who were his contemporaries; the only new thing introduced into the world following the principles that Saint Paul preached was a whole corps of priests absolutely separated from the rest of the citizens and even having opposing interests.3

  The sole business of this corps was to cultivate and strengthen the “religious sentiment”; they invented distinctions and methods for inspiring the spirits of all classes, from the uneducated shepherd to the aging, blasé courtesan; they knew how to connect the memory of religion to those most charming impressions from earliest childhood; they never let the briefest plague or the least catastrophe pass without profiting from it by redoubling that “religious sentiment” or by getting a beautiful church built, like the Santa Maria della Salute of Venice.

  The existence of this corps produced that wondrous thing, the pope Saint Leon, resisting with no physical force the ferocious Attila and his waves of barbarians who had terrorized China, Persia, and the Gauls.

  Thus, religion, like that absolute power tempered by songs that we know as the French monarchy,4 has produced singular things, things the world would never have seen if it had not been for these two institutions.

  Among all things good or bad but always singular or curious, and which would have puzzled Aristotle, Polybius, Augustus, and all the other intelligent folk from antiquity, I put without hesitation the entirely modern character of Don Juan. In my view, it is the product of the ascetic institutions of the popes who came after Luther; for Leo X and his court (1506) followed pretty closely the principles of the religion of Athens.5

  The Dom Juan of Molière was performed at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV, on February 15, 1665; that king was not yet the sanctimonious man he would become, but nevertheless the ecclesiastical court censored the scene with the beggar in the forest. This was in order to help persuade the young king, so prodigiously ignorant, that the word Jansenist was synonymous with republican.6

  The original is by a Spanish writer, Tirso de Molina;7 an Italian troupe put on an imitation of his original in Paris around 1664, and it caused a furor. It is probably the most often performed comedy in the world, because it features both the devil and love, the fear of hellfire and the exalted passion for a woman, that is to say, all that is the most terrible and the most delightful in the eyes of all men, so long as they are on a level higher than that of the savage.

  It is not surprising that Don Juan was first depicted in literature by a Spanish poet. Love occupies a grand place in the life of that people; over there, it is, hands down, the most serious passion, to which one sacrifices all the others including—believe it or not!—that of vanity. It is the same in Germany and Italy. All things considered, only France is completely free of this passion, which has made so many foreigners commit so many follies: for example, marrying a poor girl on the pretext that she is pretty and that one is in love with her. Girls who lack beauty do not lack admirers in France; we are a shrewd people. In other countries, they are reduced to becoming nuns, which is why convents are so indispensable in Spain. Girls don’t need dowries in that country, and that law has kept love triumphant. In France, love takes refuge up on the fifth floor, that is, among the girls who do not marry with the intervention of the family lawyer.8

  There is no need to speak at all of the Don Juan of Lord Byron, who is nothing more than a Faublas,9 a handsome but insignificant young man against whom all sorts of unlikely pleasures hurl themselves.

  Thus, it was in Italy and only in the sixteenth century that this singular character was to appear for the first time. It was in Italy in the seventeenth century that a princess said, while tasting an iced dessert on the evening of a very hot day, “What a pity that this isn’t a sin!”

  This sentiment, in my view, forms the basis of the character of Don Juan, and as we can see, the Christian religion is essential for it.

  Upon this topic an author from Naples exclaims: “Is it nothing to flout Heaven, and to believe that at that very moment Heaven could reduce you to ashes? It is from this that the extreme voluptuous ness arises of having a nun for a mistress, and a nun filled with piety, knowing full well that she is doing evil, and passionately imploring God’s pardon while she is passionately sinning.”10

  Let us imagine an extremely perverse Christian, born in Rome at the time when Pius V had just brought back, or invented, a whole crowd of finicky little practices entirely foreign to that simple morality that considered virtue to be only “that which is useful to men.” An inexorable inquisition—so inexorable that it could not last long in Italy but took refuge in Spain—had just been given new strength11 and had everyone terrified. For several years, great penalties were the result of failing to follow, or expressing contempt for, these punctilious little practices elevated now to the level of the most sacred religious duties; our Roman would have shrugged his shoulders at the spectacle of the citizens universally trembling before the terrible laws of the Inquisition.

  “Well then,” he would have said to himself, “I am the richest man in Rome, capital of the world, and I am going to be the bravest also; I will publicly mock everything that these people respect and that seems so little worthy of respect”; for a Don Juan, in order to be one, must be a man of some courage, a man with a quick, sharp intellect, capable of clearly divining men’s motives for their actions.

  Francesco Cenci would have said to himself: “By what meaningful actions can I, a Roman born in 1527, precisely during those six months when the Lutheran soldiers of the Bourbon commander were committing the most hideous profanations on holy things—by what actions could I demonstrate my courage and give myself the pleasure of going against public opinion? How can I shock my idiot contemporaries; How can I give myself the intense pleasure of knowing that I am different from this vulgar mob?”

  It would never have entered the head of a Roman, and a Roman of the Middle Ages, to stop himself short at words. There is no country where brave words are more despised than Italy.

  The man who dared to say these things to himself was named Francesco Cenci; he was killed in the sight of his daughter and his wife on September 15, 1598. Nothing likable about this Don Juan has come down to us; his character was not sweetened and diminished by the idea of being, like Molière’s Don Juan, good company above all else. The only time he gave any thought to other men was in making note of his superiority to them, or making use of them in his schemes, or hating them. A Don Juan finds no pleasure in sympathies, in sweet reveries, or in the illusions of a tender heart. What he needs above all are triumphs that can be seen by others, triumphs that cannot be denied; what he needs is the long list that the insolent Leporello reads out to the sorrowing Elvire.

  The Roman Don Juan carefully avoids the blunder of giving away the key to his character by taking a lackey into his confidence, as Molière’s Don Juan does; he lives with no confidant, and the only words he speaks are words that are of use in furthering his designs. No one has
ever observed in him any of those moments of real tenderness and charming gaiety that lead us to pardon Mozart’s Don Juan; in a word, the portrait I am about to paint is hideous.

  If the choice had been up to me, I would not have written about this character and would have been content to study him, for the subject is more horrific than curious; but I must admit that I have been asked to by some travel companions whom I cannot refuse. In 1823, I had the pleasure of seeing Italy with these delightful people, and I shall never forget them; I was seduced, as they were, too, by the fine portrait of Beatrice Cenci that can be seen at Rome in the Barberini palazzo.

  The gallery there now contains only seven or eight paintings, but four of them are masterpieces, first among them the portrait of the celebrated Fornarina, Raphael’s mistress, painted by himself. This portrait, the authenticity of which admits of no doubt because contemporary copies can be found, is entirely different from the figure that in the Florence gallery is called Raphael’s mistress, and the one that was engraved under that title by Morghen. The portrait in Florence is not even by Raphael. In the name of that great painter, would the reader be willing to pardon me this brief digression?

  The second precious portrait in the Barberini gallery is by Guido; this is the portrait of Beatrice Cenci from which so many poor engravings have been made.12 The great painter has hung a bit of insignificant drapery over the throat of Beatrice; he has put a turban on her; he was afraid it would have been following the truth all the way to the horrific to reproduce exactly what she was made to wear for her execution, together with the wild hair of a poor sixteen-year-old girl who had given herself up to despair. The face is sweet and beautiful, the gaze gentle and the eyes very large: they seem to be the eyes of a person who has just been surprised in the act of weeping hot tears. The hair is blond and very lovely. This head has none of that Roman pride, that awareness of her own powers, which one often comes upon in the assured gaze of a “daughter of Tiber,” “di una figlia del Tevere,” as they would say themselves, proudly. Unfortunately, the halftones have turned to a brick red during the long interval of the 238 years that separate us from the catastrophe about to be narrated.