by Stendhal
Vittoria Carafa spent that evening and part of the night confirming all these facts from friends of old Santi Quattro. The next morning at seven o’clock, she had herself announced at the old cardinal’s house.
“Your Eminence,” she said, “we are both quite old; it is futile to try to deceive us by giving pretty names to things that are not especially pretty; I have come to make a wild proposition to you: the best I can say about it is that it is not odious; but I admit that even I find it supremely ridiculous. When there were discussions of marriage between Don Ottavio Colonna and my daughter, I took a liking to that young man, and on the day of his marriage, I would like to give you 200,000 piastres in land or in money, which I beg you to pass on to him. But for a poor widow like me to make such an enormous sacrifice, it will be necessary for my daughter Elena, who is twenty-seven years old and has not left the convent since she was nineteen, to be made abbess of Castro; and for that to happen, the election must be delayed by six months; the thing is quite canonical.”
“What are you saying, signora?” exclaimed the old cardinal, beside himself. “His Holiness would never do what you are asking of me, an old, powerless man.”
“And this is why I told Your Eminence that the thing was ridiculous: fools will find it a mad thing; but wiser heads, those who are informed of matters at court, will know that our excellent prince the good pope Gregory XIII very much wants to recompense the long and loyal service of Your Eminence by facilitating this marriage, which all Rome would like to see. And after all, the thing is possible, it is canonical, and I can prove it; my daughter is taking the white veil tomorrow.”
“But the simony, signora!” cried the old man in a terrible voice.
Signora de Campireali got up to leave.
“What is that paper you’re leaving there?”
“This is the list of estates that I would present as being worth 200,000 piastres, if one preferred estates to simple money; the change of ownership for these estates could be kept secret for a long while; for example, the house of Colonna could sue me for something, and I could lose… .
“But the simony, signora! The frightful simony!”
“The first thing to do is to defer the election for six months; tomorrow I will return to hear Your Eminence’s wishes.”
I sense that readers born north of the Alps might need some explanation for the almost official tone of several passages in this dialogue; I would remind them that, in most of the strictly Catholic countries, most conversations on awkward or scabrous topics ultimately end in the confessional, and at that point, the question of whether one has used a respectful term or an ironic one is not a trivial matter.
In the course of the following day, Vittoria Carafa learned that, because of some serious factual error that was discovered in the list of the three women presented for the place of abbess of Castro, the election would be postponed for six months: the second woman on the list had a renegade in her family; one of her great-uncles had converted to Protestantism at Udine.
Signora de Campireali thought she ought to approach Prince Fabrizio Colonna, to whose house she was going to be offering such a dramatic augmentation of fortune. After two days of attempts, she succeeded in obtaining an interview with him in a village near Rome, but she came away from the audience quite unsettled; she had found the prince, normally such a calm man, so preoccupied with the military glory of Colonel Lizzara (Giulio Branciforte) that she decided it would be pointless to ask for his secrecy on that matter. The colonel was like a son to him, or even better, like a favorite disciple. The prince spent his day reading and rereading certain letters from Flanders. What would happen to Signora de Campireali’s pet scheme, the one to which she had devoted so much time and sacrificed so much over the last ten years, if her daughter were to learn about the glory of this Colonel Lizzara!
I believe I should pass over in silence a great many details that would in fact help depict accurately the mores of this era, but they are too saddening to go into. The author of the Roman manuscript has taken infinite pains to ascertain the exact dates of all these details that I am suppressing.
Two years after the interview between Signora de Campireali and Prince Colonna, Elena was abbess of Castro; but the old cardinal Santi Quattro was dead of remorse following this great act of simony. At that time, Castro had as its bishop one of the finest men of the papal court, Monsignor Francesco Cittadini, a nobleman from the city of Milan. This young man, notable for both his modest grace and his dignified tone, had many meetings with the abbess of Visitation, especially regarding the new cloister with which she was embellishing the convent. This young bishop Cittadini, then twenty-nine years old, fell madly in love with the beautiful abbess. At the trial that took place a year later, a great crowd of nuns were deposed as witnesses, all reporting that the bishop made as many trips to the convent as he possibly could, often saying to their abbess: “Elsewhere, I give the commands, and I must confess to my shame that doing so gives me pleasure; but with you, I obey like a slave but with a pleasure that far outweighs that of commanding elsewhere. I feel I am under the influence of a superior being; no matter how much I try, I can have no will other than yours, and I would far rather see myself the least of your slaves for all eternity than to be king somewhere out of the sight of those eyes.”
The witnesses report that in the middle of these elegant phrases, the abbess would often order him to be silent, and in harsh terms, terms that seemed to show contempt. One witness continued, “To tell the truth, the signora treated him like a servant; and when she did, the poor bishop lowered his eyes and began to weep, but he never left.” Every day he would find some new pretext for coming to the convent, which was a great scandal to the nuns’ confessors and to the enemies of the abbess. But the signora abbess was vigorously defended by the prioress, her good friend, who was in charge of the convent’s internal government under the orders of the abbess.
“My noble sisters,” the latter said, “you know that ever since that unhappy passion that our abbess felt in the early years of her youth for a soldier of fortune, she has had many bizarre ideas; but you also know that her character is marked by one important thing, that she never changes her mind regarding people for whom she once had contempt. Now, in her whole life perhaps, she has never spoken such audacious things as she has done, in our presence, in addressing Monsignor Cittadini. Every day, we have seen him submit to the kind of treatment that makes us blush for his dignity.”
“Yes,” replied the scandalized sisters, “but he came back every day; therefore, he couldn’t really have been all that mistreated, and in any case this intrigue is damaging to the reputation of the holy order of the Visitation.”
The harshest master would not heap as many insults on the most inept valet as the haughty abbess heaped every day upon the young bishop with the unctuous manners; but he was in love, and he had brought with him from his own country this maxim, that once one has begun an enterprise like this, one must focus strictly on the goal and not think too much about the means.
“When all is said and done,” said the young bishop to his confidant Cesare del Bene, “the one who really deserves contempt is the lover who abandons the attack before being forced to do so by superior powers.”
And now it is my sad task to confine myself to giving what must necessarily be a dry account of the trial that resulted in Elena’s death. The proceedings of this trial, which I read about in a library whose name I must not mention, occupy no less than eight folio volumes.20 The interrogations and the arguments are in the Latin language, the responses in Italian. I read there that during the month of November 1572, at eleven o’clock in the evening, the young bishop came alone to the door of the church, which, during the day, admits the faithful; the abbess herself opened this door and allowed him to follow her. She received him in a room that she often occupied and that had a secret door leading to the galleries over the aisles in the nave. Scarcely an hour later, the bishop, seeming nonplussed, was sent back to
his home; the abbess herself escorted him to the church door and said these exact words to him:
“Return to your palazzo and leave me at once. Farewell, signor; you horrify me; I feel as if I have given myself to a lackey.”
But then, three months later, came the time of Carnival. The people of Castro were renowned for the festivities they put on at Carnival time; the whole town resounded to the racket that the masquerades made. Everyone passed by a little window that let light into a certain stable of the convent. Everybody knew that three months before Carnival, this stable had been converted into a salon, and it was never empty during the days of masquerade. At one point in the midst of all the public rowdiness, the bishop appeared in his coach; the abbess signaled to him, and the following night, at one in the morning, he did not fail to appear in front of the church door. He entered, but less than three-quarters of an hour later, he was angrily sent away. Since the first rendezvous, in the month of November, he had continued to come to the convent every week. His face wore a certain expression of stupidly happy triumph, which everyone noticed but which seemed to be a great shock to the haughty character of the young abbess. On Easter Sunday, as on other days, she treated him like the lowest of men, and she said things to him that the poorest of the convent paupers would not have tolerated. But all the same, a few days later she signaled to him, and the fine bishop made a point of turning up outside the church door at midnight; she had had him come in order to inform him that she was pregnant. Upon hearing this news, the trial records say, the fine young man went pale with horror and became completely stupid with fear. The abbess had a fever; she had a doctor summoned and made no secret of her state to him. This doctor was acquainted with his patient’s generous character, and he promised to extricate her from the situation. He started by putting her in touch with a young, pretty peasant woman, who was not technically a midwife but had all the talents of one. Her husband was a baker. Elena enjoyed conversing with this woman, who told her that in order to carry out the scheme by which they hoped to save her, she would need to have two trusted women inside the convent.
‘A woman like you, certainly, but one of my equals? Never. Leave me.”
The midwife departed. But some hours later, Elena, realizing it would not be wise to let this woman go about talking, called back the doctor, who brought her back to the convent, where she was treated generously. The woman swore that even if she had not been called back, she would never have divulged the secret; but she also declared a second time that if there were not two women in the convent devoted to the abbess and aware of the whole situation, she would not consent to be part of it. (She was no doubt concerned about accusations of infanticide.) After a great deal of reflection, the abbess resolved to confide her terrible secret to Signora Vittoria, the prioress, from the noble family of de C***, and to Signora Bernarda, daughter of the Marchese of P***. She made them both swear on their breviaries never to say a word, even in the confessional, of what she was about to tell them. Both ladies were frozen with fear. In their interrogations, they admitted that, given the arrogant character of their abbess, they expected to hear that she had murdered someone. But the abbess spoke simply and coldly:
“I have failed in my duties, and I am pregnant.”
Signora Vittoria, the prioress, deeply moved and troubled by her years of friendship with Elena and not impelled by vain curiosity, cried out, tears in her eyes:
“Who is the wretch who has committed such a crime?”
“I have not told even my confessor, so you may gather whether I want to tell you!”
The two ladies immediately deliberated as to how this fatal secret could be kept from the rest of the convent. They decided first that the abbess’s bed should be carried from her own room, which was too central a location, to the pharmacy that had recently been established in the most remote area of the convent, up on the third floor of the great building that had been built through the generosity of Elena. It was here that the abbess was delivered of a baby boy. For three weeks, the baker’s wife had been hidden in the prioress’s rooms. Once, when this woman was walking quickly through the cloister corridor carrying the infant, it began to cry, and, in a state of terror, the woman took refuge in the cellar. One hour later, Signora Bernarda, along with the doctor, managed to open a small door to the garden, and the baker’s wife swiftly exited the convent and, soon after that, the town. Reaching the open countryside, and still in a state of panic and terror, she hid herself in a grotto that she by chance discovered among some rocks. The abbess wrote to Cesare del Bene, the confidant and chief valet to the bishop, who hurried to the grotto he had been told of; he was on horseback: he took the infant in his arms and left at a gallop for Montefiascone. The baby was baptized in the church of Santa Margherita and given the name Alexander. The hostess of the inn there procured a wet nurse, to whom Cesare gave eight ecus: many women assembled at the church during the baptism ceremony cried out to Signor Cesare loudly, demanding the name of the child’s father.
“He is a great Roman lord,” he said to them, “who has let himself take advantage of a poor village girl like one of you.” And with that, he disappeared.
VII
Everything was going well in that huge convent, inhabited by more than three hundred curious women; no one had seen anything, and no one had heard anything. But the abbess had paid the doctor with several handfuls of sequins that had been newly minted in Rome. The doctor gave several of those coins to the baker’s wife. This woman was pretty, and her husband jealous; he rummaged around in her trunk, discovered those shiny pieces of gold, and, believing them to have been the price of his own dishonor, forced her, his knife at her throat, to tell him where they came from. After trying some evasive answers, she told him the truth, and the two made peace. The couple went on to discuss what to do with such a large sum. The baker’s wife wanted to pay off some debts; but the husband thought it a better idea to purchase a mule, which is what they did. The mule caused a lot of talk in their neighborhood, as everyone knew how poor they were. All the town gossips, both friends and enemies, came along in succession asking the baker’s wife who her generous lover was who had made it so they could buy a mule. The woman, irritated at this, replied in various ways, sometimes telling the truth. One day, when Cesare del Bene had gone to see the infant and returned to make a report to the abbess, the latter, though very unwell at the moment, dragged herself over to the grilled window and heaped him with reproaches over the indiscretions of the men he employed. For his part, the bishop was so frightened that he fell ill; he wrote to his brothers in Milan to tell them about the unjust accusations being leveled against him; he called upon them to come to his aid. Though seriously ill, he resolved to leave Castro; but before leaving, he wrote to the abbess:
You know by this time that everything is now a matter of public knowledge. So if you have any interest in saving not just my reputation but perhaps even my life, and in order to avoid an even greater scandal, you could lay the blame on Gian Battista Doleri, who died a few days ago; and if by this means you do not save your own honor, you will at least have kept me from serious danger.
The bishop called Don Luigi, the confessor for the Monastery of Castro.
“Deliver this,” he told him, “directly into the hands of the abbess herself.”
She, upon reading that foul letter, cried out in front of all those who happened to be in her chamber at the time:
“And so it is that the foolish virgins deserve to be treated, for preferring the beauty of the body to that of the soul!”21
Rumors of what was going on at Castro quickly reached the ear of the terrible cardinal Farnese (he had given himself that epithet several years back, because he hoped, at the next conclave, to have the support of the “zealot” cardinals). He immediately ordered the podesta
of Castro to arrest Bishop Cittadini. All the bishop’s servants, fearing being put to the question, took flight.22 Only Cesare del Bene remained faithful to his master, swearing to him
that he would die from torture rather than reveal anything that could harm him. Cittadini, seeing himself surrounded by guards in his palazzo, wrote again to his brothers, who arrived from Milan in great haste. They found he was being held in the prison of Ronciglione.
I read in the first interrogation of the abbess that although she fully admitted her own sin, she denied having any relationship with the bishop; her accomplice was Gian Battista Doleri, the convent’s lawyer.
On September 9, 1573, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the trial to be undertaken with the greatest of urgency and the greatest of rigor. A criminal judge, a fiscal, and a commissioner came from Rome to Castro and Ronciglione. Cesare del Bene, chief valet to the bishop, would admit only that he had brought a baby to a wet nurse. They interrogated him in the presence of the two women Vittoria and Bernarda, putting him under torture two days in a row; he suffered horribly; but, true to his word, he admitted only to facts that were impossible to deny, and the fiscal could get nothing out of him.