by Stendhal
The prince had been gone only a few minutes when there appeared in the distance, on the road from Valmontone, a great number of men on horseback; these were the sbirri and their bargello escorting Bandini, along with all the Orsini cavalry. In the midst of them was Balthazar Bandini, surrounded by four executioners all dressed in red; they had orders to execute the sentence that the first judges had imposed, that is, to put Bandini to death if they saw Colonna partisans about to free him.
Prince Colonna’s cavalry had just arrived at the edge of the clearing or meadow farthest from the road when they could hear the first harquebus shots being fired from the ambush he had set up on the main road behind the blockade of felled trees. He immediately set his cavalry at the gallop and directed his charge at the four red-clothed executioners surrounding Bandini.
We will not follow all the details of this little business, which lasted only about three-quarters of an hour; the Orsini partisans, surprised, ran off in all directions; but at the fight with the advance guard, the brave captain Ranuccio was killed, an event that had grave repercussions for the future destiny of Branciforte. The latter had dealt out only a few thrusts with his sword, always seeking to reach the men dressed in red, when he found himself face to face with Fabio Campireali.
Mounted on a bold, spirited horse and dressed in a golden giacco (a chain-mail jacket), Fabio cried out:
“Who are these masked wretches? Cut their masks off with your sabers; watch how I do it!”
At almost the same instant, Giulio Branciforte received a horizontal slash of the saber across his face. The strike had been so perfectly executed that the part of the cowl covering his face fell away, and at the same time he felt his eyes blinded and filling with blood gushing from the wound that was otherwise not very serious. Giulio turned his horse aside to catch his breath and to wipe his face. He wanted to avoid fighting Elena’s brother at all costs, and his horse was already four paces away from Fabio, but then he felt a furious saber blow against his chest, which failed to penetrate, thanks to his giacco, though it knocked the breath out of him. At the same time, he heard a voice shouting in his ear:
“Ti conosco, porco: you swine, I recognize you! So this is how you make the money to replace the rags you wore.”
Giulio, infuriated, forgot all about his resolution and turned to Fabio:
“Ed in mal punto tu venisti!” he cried.13
After they exchanged several sword thrusts, the shirts covering their chain mail were shredded and fell away. Fabio’s chain mail was made of gold and was magnificent, whereas Giulio’s was of a more common type.
“What gutter was that giacco of yours lying in?” Fabio cried.
At that very moment, Giulio found the chance he had been waiting for: the superb chain mail of Fabio did not protect his neck, and Giulio aimed his saber right at that partly exposed neck, and the point went in. It penetrated a full six inches deep into Fabio’s throat, causing an enormous gushing of blood.
“Insolent!” exclaimed Giulio; and he galloped off toward the men dressed in red, who were still on horseback a hundred paces from him. As he neared them, the third one fell; but just when Giulio approached the fourth executioner, the latter, seeing himself surrounded by ten men on horseback, fired his pistol point-blank into the unlucky Balthazar Bandini, who fell to the ground.
“My good friends, we have nothing more to do here,” cried Branciforte; “let us kill off those damnable sbirri who are trying to escape any way they can.” They all followed him.
A half hour later, when Giulio returned to the side of Fabrizio Colonna, the prince spoke to him for the first time in his life. Giulio found him mad with rage; he had expected to see him transported with joy, because the victory was complete and it was all because of his excellent planning; for the Orsini had almost three thousand men, and Fabrizio came into the battle with no more than fifteen hundred.
“We have lost your brave comrade Ranuccio,” cried the prince to Giulio; “I just now touched his body; he is already cold. Poor Balthazar Bandini is mortally wounded. So this has been no victory. But the ghost of the brave Captain Ranuccio will come to Pluto in plenty of company. I have given orders that every one of these wretched prisoners is to be hanged. Do not fail to do it, gentlemen.” He added this last in an even firmer voice. And then, he turned and galloped off to the spot where the advance-guard battle had taken place. Giulio had been basically the second in command of Ranuccio’s troops; he followed the prince, who, having arrived at the corpse of that brave soldier who lay surrounded by more than fifty enemy corpses, got down off his horse a second time to take the hand of Ranuccio. Giulio did the same, and he wept.
“You are still young,” said the prince to Giulio, “but I see you covered in blood, and your father was a brave man who was injured more than twenty times in the service of the Colonna. Take over the command of what remains of Ranuccio’s company, and escort his body to our church in Petrella; remember that you might be attacked along the way.”
Giulio was not attacked, but he killed with a single saber thrust one of his soldiers who said he was too young to be a commander. This audacity succeeded, for Giulio was still covered with the blood of Fabio. All along the route, he saw men being hanged from the branches. That hideous spectacle, together with the deaths of Ranuccio and, even worse, of Fabio, drove him almost mad. His only hope was that no one would know who had conquered Fabio.
We shall skip over the military details. Three days after the battle, he was able to come back and spend a few hours in Albano; he told his companions that he had caught a fever in Rome and that he had had to spend the whole week in bed.
But everyone suddenly treated him with a very marked respect; even the most influential citizens were the first to greet him; a few of the more imprudent types even went so far as to address him as “Signor Captain.” He walked past the Campireali palazzo several times, finding it entirely shut up, and, given that the new captain was very timid when it came to asking certain questions, it was not until the middle of the day that he was able to bring himself to say to Scotti, the old man who had always been kind to him:
“But where are the Campireali? I see their home is closed up.”
“My friend,” replied Scotti with a suddenly sad expression, “that is a name you should never speak again. Your friends are completely convinced that he was the one who attacked you, and they will say so everywhere they go; but still, he was the principal obstacle to your marriage, and, after all, his death leaves a sister immensely rich, a sister in love with you. One might add, since indiscretion is actually a virtue in this situation—one might add that she loved you to the point of going and visiting you at night in your little house in Alba. And thus, one might say, speaking as one on your side, that therefore you two were husband and wife before the fatal battle of Ciampi” (the name people in the area gave to the place where the battle we have described took place). The old man stopped here, because he saw that Giulio was in tears.
“Let’s go up to the inn,” Giulio said. Scotti went with him; they were given a room, and after they locked the door, Giulio asked the old man if he could tell him the tale of everything that had happened over the past week. Once that long narration was over:
“I can tell by your tears,” said the old man, “that nothing was premeditated in your behavior; but Fabio’s death is nonetheless a very cruel event for you. Elena absolutely must tell her mother that she was your spouse for some time before that.”
Giulio was silent, which the old man attributed to a praiseworthy discretion. Lost in a profound reverie, Giulio asked himself if Elena, wounded by the death of her brother, would be able to appreciate his delicacy in the matter; he repented what had happened. Then, upon being asked, the old man told him frankly everything that had happened in Albano on the day of the battle. Fabio was killed at about six-thirty in the morning, some six leagues away from Albano, and yet—incredible though it seems—by nine o’clock, people were already talking about the death.
Around noon, they saw the elder Campireali, weeping bitterly and leaning on his servants for support, betake himself to the Capuchin monastery. A little later, three of those good priests, mounted on the best horses Campireali owned and followed by a great many servants, took the road to the village of Ciampi close to where the battle had taken place. The elder Campireali wanted badly to accompany them, but they persuaded him not to, arguing that Fabrizio Colonna was in a rage (though no one knew why) and could very well do him harm if he were taken prisoner.
That night around midnight, the forest of La Faggiola looked as if it were on fire: but it was the great number of monks and all the poor of Albano, each with a lighted candle, going to recover the corpse of Fabio.
“I won’t hide one other thing from you,” said the old man, lowering his voice as if he were afraid of being overheard; “on the road leading to Valmontone and to Ciampi …”
“Well?” said Giulio.
“Well! This road passes in front of your house, and they say that when the corpse of Fabio reached that spot, blood spurted out of a ghastly wound in his neck.”
“Horrible!” exclaimed Giulio, rising up out of his chair.
“Calm down, my friend,” said the old man; “you understand that you must hear everything. And now I must tell you that your presence here today seems a little premature to me. If you do me the honor of asking my advice, captain, I would add that it would be best for you to absent yourself from Albano for a month. I don’t need to add that it would be very imprudent for you to be seen in Rome. No one knows what action the Holy Father might decide to take against the Colonna; some think he will agree to accept Fabrizio’s declaration that all he knows about the battle of Ciampi is what he has heard from public rumor; but the governor of Rome, who is a true-blue Orsini, is enraged and would be delighted to hang one of those brave soldiers of Fabrizio, and the latter could not really complain, since he swears he had no part in the battle. I will go even further, and even though you have not asked me for it, I will take the liberty of offering you some military advice: you are loved in Albano; otherwise you would not be safe here. Consider that you have been walking around the town for several hours while some Orsini supporter might think you are daring him to do something or maybe at least begin to think that you are giving him the opportunity to earn a healthy reward. The elder Campireali has said a thousand times that he would give his finest estate to the person who kills you. You should have brought along some of the soldiers you have at your house.”
“But I don’t have any soldiers in my house.”
“In that case, you are a madman, my captain. This inn has a garden; let us leave through the garden and slip off across the vineyard; but if we encounter anyone with bad intentions, I will try to talk to them and at least buy you some time.”
Giulio’s soul was devastated. Dare we reveal the insane thought he had been entertaining? As soon as he had learned that the Campireali palazzo was closed and that all the family had gone to Rome, he had begun to plan a visit to the garden where he had so often met with Elena. He was hoping also to revisit her bedroom, where he had met her when her mother had been absent. He needed to reassure himself, as a kind of defense against her anger, by seeing again those places where she had felt so tenderly toward him.
Branciforte and the good-hearted old man had no unpleasant encounters as they followed the narrow pathways across the vineyard and up toward the lake.
Giulio had him recount again the details of young Fabio’s funeral. The brave young man’s body, escorted by many priests, was conducted to Rome and buried in his family’s chapel in the Convent of Sant’Onofrio, on the summit of the Janiculum. People especially remarked on one unusual thing: the day before the ceremony, Elena was taken by her father to the Convent of the Visitation at Castro; this was taken as confirmation of the rumor that she had been secretly married to the soldier of fortune who had had the bad luck to kill her brother.
When he approached his house, Giulio found his company’s corporal, along with four of his soldiers; they told him that their former captain had never left the forest without taking some of his men with him. The prince had often said that anyone who wanted to get himself killed through his own imprudence must first resign his commission so as to free him from having another death to avenge.
Giulio Branciforte understood the point of such ideas, though until now he had never encountered them. He had believed, just as primitive peoples do, that war consists simply in fighting bravely. He immediately obeyed the prince’s orders; he took the time only to embrace the wise old man who had had the generosity of accompanying him to his house.
But a few days later, Giulio, half mad with melancholy, returned to gaze upon the Campireali palazzo. At nightfall, he and three of his soldiers, disguised as Neapolitan merchants, sneaked into Albano. He went by himself to the house of Scotti; he learned that Elena was still sequestered in the Castro convent. Her father, who believed that she was married to the murderer of his son, had sworn never again to lay eyes upon her. He had not even looked at her when he took her to the convent. But her mother’s love seemed only to grow, and she often left Rome in order to spend a day or two with her daughter.
IV
“If I fail to justify myself to Elena,” Giulio said to himself at night as he returned to the area of the forest his company occupied, “she will end up believing I am a murderer. God only knows what stories they have made up and told her about that fatal combat!”
He went to be given his orders from the prince at his stronghold in Petrella and asked him then for permission to go to Castro. Fabrizio Colonna frowned:
“The subject of this little battle has not yet been settled with His Holiness. You should know that I have told him the whole truth, that is to say, that I remain perfectly ignorant of the whole matter, and I heard about it only the next day, here in my castle at Petrella. I have every reason to believe that His Holiness eventually will grant credit to this sincere avowal. But the Orsini are powerful, and everyone tells me that you distinguished yourself in that little skirmish. The Orsini go so far as to claim that many prisoners were hanged from the branches of the trees. You know very well how false that story is; but one can predict that there will be reprisals.”
The profound astonishment playing across the face of the naive young captain amused the prince; he soon saw that it would be useful for him to speak somewhat more directly.
“I can see in you,” he continued, “that total bravery which has made all Italy recognize the name of Branciforte. I hope that you will have the fidelity to me and my house that made your father so dear to me and that I would like to reward in you. Here is the one command that my company is always to follow: never tell the truth about anything that has anything to do with me or my soldiers. If, in the moment when you are forced to speak, you cannot find any useful lie to tell, then speak lies at random, and avoid telling even the most trivial truth as you would avoid a mortal sin. That trivial truth, you know, could be combined with others and put people on my track, or on the track of my projects. And of course I know that you have a beloved in the Convent of the Visitation at Castro; you may go ahead and waste a couple of weeks in that small town, where the Orsini are bound to have friends and even agents. Go on to my steward, who will give you 200 sequins. The friendship I had for your father,” added the prince, smiling, “makes me feel like giving you some advice as to how best to manage this amorous and military affair. You and three of your soldiers should disguise yourselves as merchants; make it a point to quarrel with one of your men, who will pretend to always be drunk and who will make a great many friends by paying for drinks for all the idlers in Castro… . Then,” added the prince, changing his tone, “if you are taken by the Orsini and put to death, never admit what your true name is, and even less whom you belong to. I don’t have to remind you to go the long way around every village and to enter from the side opposite to that you’re coming from.”
Giulio was touched by this pater
nal counsel, coming from a man who was ordinarily so severe. The prince smiled at the tears he saw coming from the eyes of the young man; then his voice, too, altered. He removed one of the numerous rings he wore; as he received the gift, Giulio kissed the hand that had performed so many grand actions.
“My father never spoke to me like this!” said the young man glowingly.
The next day, a little before dawn, he entered the walls of the little town of Castro; five soldiers were with him, disguised in the same manner as he was: two of them made up their own unit, acting as if they did not know either him or the others. Before they had even entered the town, Giulio saw the Convent of the Visitation, a huge building surrounded by blackened walls, looking more like a fortress than a convent. He hurried to the church; it was splendid. The nuns, all aristocratic and most of them from wealthy families, vied among themselves out of pride to see who could contribute more to enriching this church, the only part of the convent that the public was allowed to see. A tradition had evolved that the woman the pope named as abbess, chosen from a list of three names presented to him by the cardinal protector of the Order of the Visitation,14 would make a considerable donation meant to eternize her name. Anyone who made an offering inferior to that of the preceding abbess was despised, along with her family.
Giulio advanced, trembling, into this magnificent edifice, resplendent in marble and gold. In truth, though, he was hardly thinking of marble or gold; he felt as if Elena’s eyes were upon him. The great altar, it was said, had cost more than 800,000 francs; but his gaze, disdainful of the altar’s riches, was directed instead to a gilded grill, some forty feet tall and separated into three parts by two marble pillars. This grill, its massiveness making it seem somehow a thing of terror, rose up behind the great altar, separating the choir area, where the nuns would sit, from the rest of the church, open to all the faithful.