Italian Chronicles

by Stendhal

  “Try to get the big door opened,” he said to Ugone. Giulio himself came smoothly to the iron door. There, he encountered the good portress, who told him that, because it was past midnight, if he wanted to enter the convent, the abbess would be obliged to write first to the bishop, and so she politely asked him to give his written orders to a little nun who had been sent by the abbess to pick them up. To this Giulio replied that in the confusion and disorder accompanying the unforeseen agony and impending death of Signor de Campireali, he had been given only a short letter of credit from the doctor, and he was told to communicate all the details orally to the dying man’s wife or daughter, if those two ladies were still in the convent, and in any case to the signora abbess. The portress went off to deliver the message. The only person remaining at the door was the young sister sent by the abbess. Giulio, chatting and flirting with her, passed his hands over the thick iron bars of the door and, laughing the whole time, tried to open it. The sister, who was quite timid, was becoming afraid and did not take this pleasantry well; then Giulio, realizing how much time had passed, was rash enough to offer the girl a handful of sequins while entreating her to open the gate for him, saying he was too tired to keep waiting outside. Our historian says that Giulio could see that he was doing something stupid: he needed to use steel, not gold, at this point, but he did not have the heart to do so: nothing would have been easier than to seize hold of the girl, who was standing only a foot away from him on the other side of the gate. But the offer of the sequins put her in a state of alarm. She since has said that from the way Giulio spoke, she could tell he was no simple courier: “He’s the lover of one of the sisters,” she thought, “who has come for a rendezvous”; and she was pious. Gripped by horror, she began to pull with all her might the rope of a small bell that was out in the great courtyard, making a racket that would have awakened the dead.

  “The war is on,” said Giulio to his men; “guard yourselves!” He took his key and, reaching his arm through the iron gate, opened the door, to the despair of the young sister, who fell to her knees and began reciting ‘Ave Marias” and shouting out “Sacrilege!” For a second time, Giulio should have silenced the girl, but he did not have the courage; one of his men took hold of her and put his hand over her mouth.

  At the same time, Giulio heard a gunshot in the passage behind him. Ugone had opened the great door; the remainder of the soldiers had entered noiselessly when one of the guardsmen, less drunk than the others, came over to one of the grilled windows, and in his astonishment at seeing so many men in the passage, he cursed and forbade them to go any farther. They made no response and continued walking toward the iron door, and this was exactly what the soldier in the lead did, but the one in the rear, who was one of the peasants recruited that afternoon, shot his pistol at the guardsman talking from the window, killing him. That pistol shot, in the middle of the night, along with the shouts of the drunken guardsmen when they saw their comrade fall, awoke the convent soldiers, who were all in their beds but without having tasted any of Ugone’s wine. Eight or ten of the convent bravi leaped down into the passage half-dressed and began to attack Branciforte’s soldiers.

  As we have said, the noise began the moment Giulio opened the iron door. Along with his two soldiers, he swiftly entered the garden, running toward the little door leading to the boarders’ staircase; but he was greeted by five or six pistol shots. His two soldiers fell, and he took a bullet in his right arm. These shots came from the men of Signora de Campireali, who were spending the night in the garden as she had ordered them to, having obtained authorization for it from the bishop. Giulio ran toward the little door, so well known to him, leading from the garden to the boarders’ staircase. He tried everything to open it, but it was solidly locked shut. He looked around for his men, who did not reply; they were dying; in the deep darkness, he encountered three Campireali servants, and he defended himself against them with his dagger.

  He ran back into the vestibule, toward the iron door, to call his soldiers; he found the door closed: the two great, heavy iron bars had been swung into place and padlocked by the old gardeners, who had been awakened by the bell the little sister had rung.

  “I am cut off,” Giulio said to himself. He said it to his men too; in vain he tried to pry open the lock with his sword: if he had succeeded, he could have pushed up one of the iron bars and opened one side of the gate. His sword broke in the padlock; at the same instant, he was wounded in the shoulder by one of the servants from the garden; he turned, his back against the iron door, and found himself attacked by several men. He defended himself with his dagger; fortunately, in the total darkness, most of their sword thrusts struck only his chain mail. He was grievously wounded in his knee; he hurled himself upon one of the men who had lunged too far forward in trying to stab him, killing the man with a dagger thrust in the face, and he was lucky enough to be able to grab hold of his sword. Now he felt he was safe; he took his stance on the left side of the door, on the courtyard side. His men came running toward him and fired five or six pistol shots through the iron bars of the door, frightening off the servants. They could make each other out only in the flashes given off by their pistols.

  “Don’t shoot toward me,” cried Giulio to his men.

  “Here you are, caught like a mouse in a mousetrap,” said the corporal coolly, speaking through the iron bars. “We have three men dead. We are going to break down the door jamb on the side opposite to you; stay where you are, because they will be firing on us. So there are enemies in the garden?”

  “Some damnable servants of Campireali,” said Giulio.

  He was still speaking to the corporal when they were fired upon; several pistol shots were aimed at the sound of their voices and came from the part of the vestibule leading out to the garden. Giulio took cover in the portress’s lodge, which was to the left as one entered; to his great joy, he found there a tiny lamp burning in front of an image of the Madonna; he took it up with great care so as not to extinguish it; and he noticed, to his chagrin, that he was trembling. He looked down at the wound in his knee, which was giving him great pain; the blood was flowing abundantly.

  Casting a glance around him, he was startled to recognize a woman who had fainted on a wooden chair: it was little Marietta, the chambermaid who was confidante to Elena. He shook her vigorously to bring her to.

  “Oh, Signor Giulio,” she exclaimed in tears, “do you want to kill your friend Marietta?”

  “Far from it; tell Elena that I ask her pardon for disturbing her sleep, and tell her to remember the Ave Maria’ from Monte Cavi. Here is a flower I picked from her garden in Albano; but it’s a little stained with blood; wash it off before giving it to her.”

  Just then, he heard harquebus shots from the direction of the passage; the convent’s bravi were attacking his men.

  “Tell me where the key is to this door,” he said to Marietta.

  “I don’t see it; but here are the keys to the padlocks on the iron bars holding the great door shut. You can get out.”

  Giulio took the keys and hurried out of the lodge.

  “Don’t bother with the wall anymore,” he said to his men; “I finally have the key to the door.”

  There was a moment of complete silence while he tried to open a padlock with one of the little keys; he had the wrong one, and tried another; finally, he got the padlock open, but just as he was raising up the iron bar, he took another bullet in his right arm from a pistol shot fired point-blank. His arm refused to work.

  “Lift up this iron valet bar,” he cried to his men; but there was no need to say it. In the flashes of pistol fire, they could see the curved end of the iron bar half hanging out of the ring attached to the door. Immediately, three or four hands could be seen vigorously pushing up the bar; once it was free of the ring, they let it drop onto the floor. At that point, they could push away one side of the door; the corporal came in and spoke quietly to Giulio:

  “There’s no more hope; only three of four
of us aren’t wounded, and five are dead.”

  “I’ve lost too much blood,” Giulio replied; “I feel I might pass out; tell them to carry me.”

  As Giulio was talking with the brave corporal, the guardsmen fired off three or four shots with their harquebuses, and the corporal fell down dead. Luckily, Ugone had heard the order Giulio had just given, and he called by name two soldiers to lift up their captain. He had not in fact passed out, and he told them to take him to the side of the garden where the little door was. This made the soldiers curse, but they obeyed nonetheless.

  “One hundred sequins to anyone who can open this door!” cried Giulio.

  But it resisted the furious efforts of three men. One of the old gardeners, at a window up on the second floor, was firing down at them with a pistol, the flashes of which gave light for their work.

  After their futile attempts with the door, Giulio did pass out; Ugone ordered the soldiers to carry him off as quickly as possible. As for himself, he ran into the portress’s lodge, pushing little Marietta out, ordering her in the most terrible voice to run and save herself and never to tell whom she had recognized that night. He ripped the straw out of the mattress, broke several chairs, and set fire to the room. When he saw the fire was well started, he ran as fast as his legs would carry him, right through the gunshots being fired by the convent’s bravi.

  Only when he was some 150 feet away from the Visitation Convent did he find the captain, completely unconscious, being carried away with all speed. A few minutes outside the town, Ugone had them halt: he had only four soldiers with him; he sent two of them back to the town with the order to fire their guns every five minutes. “Try to find your wounded comrades,” he told them, “and get out of the town before sunrise; we’re going to go in the direction of Croce-Rossa. If you can start fires anywhere, do so.”

  When Giulio regained consciousness, they were about three leagues outside the town, and the sun was already high up over the horizon. Ugone gave him a report: “Your troop is reduced to five men, of whom three are wounded. Two peasants survived, and I gave them two sequins each; they’ve fled; I have sent the two men who aren’t wounded into the nearest town to find a surgeon.” The surgeon, an old man trembling all over, soon arrived riding a magnificent donkey; they had had to threaten to burn his house down to convince him to come. His fear was so great that they had to make him drink brandy just to get him ready to work; he told Giulio that his wounds were minor. “This knee wound is not dangerous,” he added; “but you’ll walk with a limp for the rest of your life if you don’t take absolute bed rest for two or three weeks.” The surgeon bandaged the wounded soldiers. Ugone signaled to Giulio; they gave the surgeon two sequins, leaving him confounded with gratitude; then, under the pretext of thanking him, they made him drink so much brandy that he fell into deep sleep. This is exactly what they wanted. They carried him over to a neighboring meadow and wrapped up four sequins in a piece of paper and put it in his pocket: that was the price of his donkey, upon which they placed Giulio and one of the soldiers, who had been wounded in the leg. They went over to an ancient ruin bordering a lake to wait out the hottest part of the day; then they marched all night long, avoiding villages, which were pretty scarce on that route, and finally, two days later at sunrise, Giulio, carried there by his men, awoke in the forest of La Faggiola, in the charcoal burner’s hut that served as his headquarters.

  VI

  The day after the battle, the sisters of Visitation Convent found, to their horror, nine dead bodies in their garden and in the passage that led from the exterior door to the iron-barred door; eight of their bravi had been wounded. There had never been such fear in the convent: of course from time to time they had heard a harquebus shot out in the outer square, but never so many gunshots within their garden, amid their buildings, and under the sisters’ windows. The battle had lasted an hour and a half, and during that time, there was total disorder within the convent. If Giulio Branciforte had had any kind of understanding with any one of the sisters or the boarders, he would have succeeded: all that would have been needed was for someone to open one of the doors leading in from the garden; but instead, carried away as he was with indignation and rage over what he considered young Elena’s perjury, Giulio wanted to carry her off solely using force. He felt he owed it to himself to ensure that no one could possibly tell Elena about his plan. One word, though, even one to little Marietta, would have led to success: she could have opened one of the garden doors, and even a single man appearing suddenly in the sleeping quarters of the convent would have been obeyed to the letter. At the first sound of gunfire, Elena had trembled for the safety of her beloved, and from that moment, she thought of nothing but fleeing with him.

  Imagine, then, her despair when little Marietta told her about the frightful wound Giulio had received in his knee, with all the blood she had seen gushing from it. Elena detested her own cowardice and weakness: “I was weak enough to say something to my mother, and Giulio has shed blood; he could have died in that sublime assault, where his great courage was responsible for everything.”

  The bravi who had been admitted to the parlor had told the nuns, who were eager to hear everything, that they had never in their lives seen bravery comparable to that of the young man dressed as a courier, who directed the efforts of the brigands. If all the others listened to their stories with the sharpest possible interest, imagine the extreme passion with which Elena questioned these bravi for details about the young leader of the brigands. Following the long narratives that she coaxed out of them and the old gardeners, fully impartial observers, she began to feel that she no longer loved her mother. There was in fact a moment of a harsh exchange of words between these two women, who had loved each other so tenderly on the day before the battle; Signora de Campireali had been shocked to find traces of blood on the flowers of a certain bouquet that Elena kept close to her at all times.

  “You need to throw out those flowers with the blood on them.”

  “I am the one who caused this generous blood to flow, and it was shed because I was weak enough to speak to you.”

  “You still love the man who murdered your brother?”

  “I love my husband, who, to my eternal unhappiness, was attacked by my brother.”

  After these words, nothing more whatever was said between Signora de Campireali and her daughter for the entire three days that the signora remained at the convent.

  The day after her departure, Elena succeeded in escaping, taking advantage of the confusion that had developed at the convent’s two gates on account of a great number of masons who had come into the garden and who were working on building new fortifications. Little Marietta and she were disguised as workers. But the bourgeois had erected a strict guard at the town’s gates. This presented Elena with major difficulty in getting out of the town. Eventually, the same small merchant who had got letters to her from Branciforte agreed to have her pass as his daughter and to accompany her to Albano. Once there, Elena was able to find refuge with her old nurse, who, through Elena’s earlier generosity, had been able to open up a small shop. As soon as she arrived, she wrote to Branciforte, and the nurse found, not without serious difficulties, a man who was willing to go into the forest of La Faggiola without knowing the password used by the soldiers of Colonna.

  The messenger returned after three days in a state of fright; to begin with, it had been impossible to locate Branciforte, and then his endless questions about him eventually made him seem suspicious, and he had been obliged to flee.

  “There is no doubt that poor Giulio is dead,” Elena said to herself, “and I am the one who killed him! This was the inevitable result of my cowardly weakness; he should have been loved by a strong woman, the daughter of one of the Colonna captains.” The nurse feared that Elena was going to die. She went up to the Capuchins’ monastery near the pathway hewn through the rock face, that place where Fabio and his father had encountered the two lovers in the middle of the night long ago. The nurs
e spoke to her confessor a long time and, under the seal of the confessional, told him that young Elena de Campireali wanted to rejoin Giulio Branciforte, her husband, and that she was ready to make a donation to the church of a silver lamp, valued at one hundred Spanish piastres.

  “One hundred piastres!” snorted the indignant monk. ‘And what will happen to our monastery if we incur the hatred of Signor de Campireali? He gave us not one hundred piastres but thousands for going to the battlefield of Ciampi and collecting the body of his son, and that’s not counting all the candles.”

  It must be said for the honor of the monastery that two elderly monks, having learned exactly where young Elena was, came down to Albano to see her with the intention of getting her to agree to take up lodging in her family’s palazzo; they knew very well that they would be richly rewarded for this by Signora de Campireali. All Albano was talking about Elena’s flight and the magnificent rewards being promised by the signora to anyone who could bring her news of her daughter. But the two monks were so touched by poor Elena’s despair, thinking Giulio dead, that, far from betraying her by telling her mother where she was, they agreed to escort her to the fortress of Petrella. Elena and Marietta, as always disguised as laborers, went on foot and by night to a certain spring within the forest of La Faggiola, a league from Albano. The monks had brought their mules there, and at daybreak they were all on the road to Petrella. The monks, who were known to be under the prince’s protection, were greeted with respect by the soldiers they encountered in the forest, but this was not the case with the two short men who accompanied them: the soldiers regarded them with suspicion and came up close to them and then broke out into laughter, complimenting the monks on their charming mule drivers.