by Stendhal
Upon his return to Albano, on the very afternoon when Giulio was dazzling everyone with the new clothes he had brought back from Rome, he learned from Scotti, his old friend, that Fabio had left town on horseback to go three leagues away to an estate that his father owned in the plain near the sea. Later, he saw the elder Campireali, along with two priests, take the fine chestnut-lined road that leads to the crater where the lake of Albano is found. Ten minutes after that, an old woman boldly entered the Campireali palazzo under the pretext of selling some fine fruit; the first person she met was the little maid Marietta, the intimate confidante of her mistress, Elena, who blushed up to the whites of her eyes upon being given a pretty bouquet. The letter hidden in the bouquet was of an extreme length: Giulio recounted in detail everything he had felt on the night of the harquebus shots; yet, due to some unusual modesty, he dared not tell her what any other young man of his era would have been proudest of: that he was the son of a captain celebrated for his adventures and that he himself had shown himself to be brave in more than one combat. He always imagined that he could hear what thoughts such a revelation would engender in old Campireali. Now, in the sixteenth century, young women with something like good republican sensibilities esteemed a man far more for what he had actually done and made of himself than for the wealth his fathers had amassed or the exploits of those fathers. But it was always, above all, the young women of the lower classes who felt this way. Those who belonged to the wealthy or noble classes were afraid of brigands and, naturally enough, felt a great attraction to nobility and opulence. Giulio ended his letter with these words:
I don’t know if the more suitable clothes I brought back from Rome have made you forget the cruel insult addressed to me by a person you respect, regarding my pathetic appearance; I could have avenged myself, and I should have, for my honor demanded it; but I did not do so out of consideration for the tears my vengeance would have cost those eyes that I adore. This should prove to you, if it is my bad luck that you still doubt the fact—that one can be very poor and still have noble sentiments. I still have one horrible secret to reveal to you; I would never have any difficulty in telling it to any other woman; I don’t know why, but I shudder at the thought of your knowing it. It might immediately destroy the love you feel for me; no protestation on your part would console me. I must read in your eyes the effect this avowal will have on you. One of these days, at nightfall, I will see you in the garden behind the palazzo. On that day, Fabio and your father will be absent; when I am sure that, despite their contempt for a poor, badly dressed man, they cannot keep us from having forty-five minutes or an hour of conversation, a man will appear below the windows of your house, showing the children a tame fox. Later, when the ‘Ave Maria” bell sounds,11 you will hear a harquebus shot far away; at that moment, come to the garden wall and, if you are not alone, sing something. If there is silence, your slave will appear trembling at your feet and will tell you some things that may horrify you. As I wait for this day, so decisive and so terrible for me, I will no longer risk presenting you a bouquet at midnight; but around two o’clock in the morning I will pass by singing and you, perhaps, stationed on the great stone balcony, will let a flower from your garden fall. And this may be the last mark of affection you ever show your unhappy Giulio.
Three days later, Elena’s father and brother had gone off on horseback to an estate the Campireali owned by the sea; they needed to leave a little before sunset if they wanted to return around two o’clock in the morning. But just when they were about to depart, not only their two horses but all the farm’s horses had disappeared. Shocked by this audacious robbery, they searched everywhere for their stolen horses, and found them only the next day in the old, thick forest by the sea. The two Campireali, father and son, were obliged to come back to Albano in a farmer’s cart, drawn by oxen.
That night, Giulio was on his knees before Elena; it was a totally black night, and the poor girl was glad of the obscurity; she appeared for the first time before this man she loved so tenderly, who knew it perfectly well, but to whom, after all, she had never actually spoken.
She noticed one thing that gave her a little courage; Giulio seemed even paler and more trembling than she was. She saw him on his knees: “Truly, I’m in a state where I can hardly speak,” he said to her. Then came some moments that seemed genuinely happy; they gazed upon each other but were unable to say a word, as motionless as a very expressive group of marble statues. Giulio was on his knees, holding Elena’s hand; she, her head bent down, was looking at him attentively.
Giulio knew very well that, according to the counsel of his friends, young Roman debauchees, he should have tried something; but the idea horrified him. At last, he was awakened from that state of ecstasy, and perhaps the highest happiness love can produce in us, by this idea: time was flying rapidly; the Campireali would be nearing their palazzo. He knew, with that scrupulous nature of his, that he would never achieve any lasting happiness until he had made his horrible avowal to his mistress, that terrible avowal which would have struck his Roman friends as the height of stupidity.
“I mentioned that there was something that I had to admit to you,” he said to Elena finally. Giulio went very pale; he added, with great difficulty, as if he had lost his breath: “Perhaps I am about to see the end of those feelings that mean everything to me. You believe I am poor; that is not all: I am a brigand, and the son of a brigand.”
At these words, Elena, daughter of a rich man and possessed of all the fears a girl of her caste is subject to, felt ill; she was afraid she was going to faint. “How miserable this will make Giulio,” she thought; “he will think I despise him.” He was on his knees. So as not to fall, she leaned upon him and then fell unconscious into his arms. As we can see, in the sixteenth century, people liked precise detail in their love stories. This is not because the intellect was passing judgment on the stories but because the imagination was feeling them, and the reader’s passion blended with that of the characters. The two manuscripts we are following, and above all the one that uses several turns of phrase that are uniquely Florentine, give in great detail the story of all the meetings that followed this one. The sense of danger eradicated any guilt or remorse the young woman might have felt. And often, the dangers were extreme ones; but they only fanned the flames of those two hearts for whom every sensation that arose out of their love was a sensation of happiness. Many times, Fabio and his father came close to discovering them. They were enraged, thinking they were being laughed at: public gossip had it that Giulio was the lover of Elena, and yet they were unable to discover them together. Fabio, an impetuous young man proud of his birth, suggested to his father that they have Giulio assassinated.
“As long as he remains alive,” he argued, “my sister’s life is in great danger. Who knows whether our honor will require us to dip our hands in the blood of that stubborn girl? She has sunk so far that now she doesn’t even deny her love for him; you have observed how her only response to our reproaches is glum silence—well then, that silence is the death warrant for Giulio Branciforte!”
Signor de Campireali replied, “But remember what his father was. Of course, it would be easy for us to spend six months in Rome, and while we were gone this Branciforte would disappear. But who can say that this father of his, who even in the midst of his crimes was brave and generous, generous to the point of enriching many of his soldiers and remaining poor himself—who can say that this father doesn’t still have friends, whether in the Duke de Monte-Mariano’s service or in that of the Colonna, who are even now in the forest of La Faggiola, half a league from our home? In that case, we would all be massacred with no mercy at all, you, me, and maybe even your unfortunate mother.”
The conversations between father and son, often repeated, were not hidden from Vittoria Carafa, the mother of Elena, and they brought her to the point of despair. These discussions between Fabio and his father eventually concluded that it was injurious to their honor to continue to peacefu
lly tolerate the gossip that was everywhere in Albano. Because it was not prudent to make this young Branciforte disappear—this young man who, every day, appeared more insolent and now, dressed in his fine new clothes, pushed things so far as to speak directly to Fabio or his father in public places—because of all this, they would have to decide on one of two alternatives, or perhaps both at once: the whole family would have to pick up and go to live in Rome, or Elena would have to be taken back to the Convent of the Visitation at Castro, where she would remain until they could find a suitable husband for her.
Elena had never really admitted her love to her mother: daughter and mother loved each other tenderly, they spent most of their daily lives together, and yet there was never a single word said on this subject that interested both of them almost equally. This one subject that was on both of their minds was finally put into words for the first time when the mother told her daughter that the question was whether the family should go live in Rome or whether the daughter herself should go spend a few years in the convent at Castro.
This conversation was imprudent on the part of Vittoria Carafa, and can be excused only by the mad tenderness she felt for her daughter. Elena, hopelessly in love, wanted to prove to her lover that she was not ashamed of his poverty and that her confidence in his honor was boundless. “Who would believe it!” exclaims the Florentine historian, “that after so many courageous meetings in the garden, each of them so close to ending in a horrible death, and even after one or two meetings in her own bedroom, Elena was still pure! Stalwart in her virtue, she suggested to her lover that she should come out of the palazzo around midnight and spend the rest of the night in his little house constructed out of the ruins of Alba, more than a quarter of a league away. They disguised themselves as Franciscan monks. Elena being rather tall, when dressed thus she seemed to be a young novice of eighteen or twenty. The part that is truly incredible, and which suggests that God’s hand was involved, is that as they took the narrow road hewn through the rock that passes the Monastery of the Capuchins, Giulio and his mistress, disguised as monks, actually encountered Signor de Campireali and his son Fabio, who were followed by four well-armed domestics and preceded by a page bearing a lit torch, on their way back from Castel Gandolfo, a town situated on the shores of the lake not far away. In order to let the two lovers pass, the Campireali and their servants moved over to the right and to the left of the path, cut out of the rock and only about eight feet wide. How lucky it would have been for Elena if she had been recognized at that moment! She would have been killed by a pistol shot by either her father or her brother, and her agony would have lasted only a moment; but heaven had ordained it otherwise (superis aliter visum).12
“A further circumstance was added to the tale of this strange encounter many years later, when Signora de Campireali, who was then much advanced in years and almost a century old, would relate it sometimes in Rome to certain important personages who, very old themselves, have passed it on to me when my insatiable curiosity led me to interrogate them on this subject and many others.
“Fabio de Campireali, a young man of great pride, courage, and arrogance, observing that the elder of the two monks did not greet his father or himself as they passed, cried out: ‘Now that’s one conceited monk for you! God knows what he’s doing outside the monastery at this unheard-of hour! I feel like pulling off their cowls; we should have a look at their faces.’ Hearing this, Giulio gripped his dagger underneath his monk’s robe and placed himself between Fabio and Elena. At this point, he was only about one foot away from Fabio; but heaven had ordained it otherwise and miraculously calmed the furor of these two young men, who would soon be seeing each other just as closely.”
In the trial of Elena much later, it was asserted that this nocturnal promenade was proof of her corruption. It was the madness of a young heart inflamed with love, but that heart remained a pure one.
III
The reader must be told that the Orsini, eternal rivals of the Colonna and all powerful in the villages closest to Rome, had recently condemned to death, via the governmental tribunal, a wealthy farmer named Balthazar Bandini, from Petrella. It would take too much time to report here all the various deeds of which Bandini was accused: many of them would indeed be considered crimes today, but such things were not always viewed so strictly in 1559. Bandini was imprisoned in a castle belonging to the Orsini, located in the mountains near Valmontone, six leagues from Albano. The bargello, or sheriff, along with 150 of his sbirri, spent a night on the high road; they came to find Bandini and escort him to Rome, to the prison of Tordinona; Bandini had appealed his death sentence to Rome. But, as we have said, he was a native of Petrella, where the fortress belonged to the Colonna; Bandini’s wife had gone to appeal publicly to Fabrizio Colonna at Petrella: “Will you let them kill one of your faithful servants?” To this, Colonna replied: “May it please God that I never be found lacking in respect for the decisions made by the tribunal of my lord the pope!” His soldiers were immediately given orders, and he notified all his partisans to hold themselves at the ready. The meeting was to take place in the neighborhood of Valmontone, a small town built at the summit of a moderately high rock, but a single, almost perfectly vertical drop of from sixty to eighty feet formed its rampart. This was the town, belonging to the pope, to which the partisans of the Orsini and the government sbirri had succeeded in transporting Bandini. Among the most zealous supporters of these powers were Signor de Campireali and his son Fabio, who were, moreover, related to the Orsini, whereas Giulio Branciforte and his father had always been attached to the Colonna.
When a situation made it awkward for the Colonna to be seen operating openly, they made use of a very simple strategy: most wealthy Roman peasants, in those days just as in our own, belonged to some order of penitents. Penitents never appeared in public without their heads’ being covered by a cloth cowl that also hides their faces, with two eyeholes cut out of it. When the Colonna did not want to admit their role in some enterprise, they invited their partisans to put on the penitents’ habit before joining them.
After lengthy preparations, the transfer of Bandini, who had been the topic of gossip for two weeks, was planned for a Sunday. That day, at two o’clock in the morning, the governor of Valmontone had the alarm bells rung in all the villages of the forest of La Faggiola. Peasants came rushing out in great numbers from each village. (In the medieval republics, people would fight for the things they wanted, and this custom meant that the peasants’ hearts retained a very real courage; in our day, the bell would ring and no one would so much as budge.)
On that particular day, one might have noticed one unusual thing: as soon as a little band of armed peasants left each village and went into the forest, their numbers were reduced by half; the partisans of Colonna broke off and headed for the meeting place that Fabrizio had designated. Their leaders seemed convinced there would be no battle that day: they had spread the word to that effect. Fabrizio traversed the forest with an elite group of his partisans, whom he had mounted on young, half-wild horses chosen from his own stud. He performed a kind of review of the various detachments of peasants; but he did not speak a word, for fear of its being compromising. Fabrizio was a tall, thin man with an incredible agility and strength: though he was just forty-five, his hair and mustache were a bright white, which was an annoyance to him; it made him too easy to recognize in places where he would rather have been incognito. Whenever the peasants caught sight of him, they would shout, “Vive Colonna!” and begin to cover themselves with their cloth cowls. The prince himself had his cowl at the ready, hanging on his chest, so that he could quickly don it as soon as they caught sight of the enemy.
He did not have long to wait: the sun had barely risen when something like a thousand men could be seen, all on the Orsini side, coming into the forest from Valmontone and passing only about three hundred paces from the spot where the partisans of Fabrizio Colonna had been stationed hiding prone on the ground. A few minutes after the
last of the Orsini men had filed past, the prince set his men in motion: he had resolved to mount his attack on the Bandini escort fifteen minutes after they had entered the forest. In this area, the forest is dotted with rocks some fifteen or twenty feet high: these are the results of lava flow, more or less ancient, upon which chestnut trees have taken root and grown up wonderfully, practically shutting out the sky entirely. And as these rocks, more or less eroded by time, make the ground very uneven, in order to avoid the main road’s being a constant set of ascents and descents, the road has been formed by cutting into the lava so that it often sits three or four feet lower than the forest floor.
Near the spot Fabrizio had chosen for his attack, there was a grassy clearing, crossed at one end by the main road. Thereafter, the road reenters the forest, which at this point becomes almost impenetrable, so thickly do the brambles and underbrush grow. Fabrizio stationed his foot soldiers one hundred paces deep into the forest on both sides of the road. At a signal from the prince, every peasant donned his cowl and took up his post with his harquebus behind a chestnut tree, with the prince’s soldiers taking up posts behind the trees closest to the road. The peasants had strict orders not to fire until the soldiers had, and the soldiers were not to fire until the enemy was within twenty paces. Fabrizio had quickly had twenty trees cut down and thrown with all their branches across the road, which was narrow at that point and cut three feet below ground level, so as to block the road entirely. Captain Ranuccio, with five hundred men, took the advance guard; his orders were not to attack until he heard the first harquebus shots from the rampart of felled trees across the road. When Fabrizio Colonna saw his soldiers and his partisans all stationed behind their trees and all filled with determination, he took off at a gallop with his mounted men, among whom was Giulio Branciforte. The prince followed a path to the right of the main road, which led them to the side of the clearing farthest from the road.