by Stendhal
“Nowadays, it is better not to use the real name of that archbishop who once made all of Naples tremble until he was distressed in turn by the fatal name of Velletri. The Germans camped on the mountain around Velletri tried to surprise our great Don Carlos in the Ginetti palazzo, where he lived.
“It was a monk who is said to have written down the anecdote you mention. The young nun people call Suora Scolastica belonged to the family of the Duke of Bisignano.15 That same writer revealed a passionate hatred for the archbishop, a real politician who got deeply involved in the Canon Cybo affair. The monk, perhaps, was a protégé of the young Don Genarino, the Marquis of Las Flores, who, they say, was a rival to Don Carlos himself—an amorous king, he was—for the hand of Rosalinde, which was also being sought by the old Duke Vargas del Pardo, who was said to be the wealthiest man of his time. There were undoubtedly some things in the history of this catastrophe that could have given profound offense to someone who was still powerful in 1750, which is roughly when the monk wrote it down, because he was careful not to be too direct. The verbiage he uses is amazing: he often expresses himself in universal maxims, which are no doubt morally perfect but which tell us nothing whatsoever. Often, one has to set the manuscript aside for a time in order to reflect on what it was that the good monk wanted to say. For example, when he gets to the death of Don Genarino, you can barely understand what he is trying to convey.
“Over the next few days, I could perhaps bring you the manuscript, for it’s so frustrating that I cannot advise you to buy it. Two years ago, it sold for less than four ducats from the library of the notary B***.”
A week later, I was in possession of this manuscript, which is in fact perhaps the most frustrating one in the whole world. At every turn, the author starts up in different terms the very story he has just finished telling; and at first, the unfortunate reader believes that it’s a question of some new fact. In the end, the confusion is so great that one cannot make anything of it.
It is important to note that in 1842, a Milanese and a Neapolitan, two men who in their entire lives had never spoken more than a few words of the Florentine dialect, thought it wise to use exactly that foreign tongue when they published. The excellent General Colletta, the greatest historian of the century,16 was somewhat addicted to this same folly, and he often annoyed his reader as a result.
The terrible manuscript titled “Suora Scolastica” is some 310 pages. I recall that I copied out certain pages of it in order to be sure of the meaning.
Once I had informed myself as to the anecdote, I took care not to ask any direct questions. After having proven, by means of lengthy conversation, that I was fully aware of a fact, I would ask for certain clarifications with an air of complete indifference.
Some time after that, one of the important people who, two months earlier, had refused to answer my questions now procured a short manuscript of sixty pages for me, which provides some picturesque details about certain facts, though without entering directly into the main story. This manuscript furnished me with some genuine details concerning the insane jealousy.
It was from the lips of her chaplain that the princess Donna Ferdinanda de Bisignano learned all at once that she was not the one whom the young Don Genarino was in love with, but, on the contrary, that it was her stepdaughter Rosalinde.
She took vengeance on her rival, who she believed was loved by the king, Don Carlos, inspiring a hideous jealousy in Don Genarino de Las Flores.
March 21, 1842
Sister Scolastica
CHAPTER 1
You know that in 1711, Louis XIV, deprived of the great men who had been born at the same time as him and besotted by Madame de Maintenon, had so insane a pride as to send a child to reign over Spain, the Duke d’Anjou, later Philippe V, who was mad, brave, and pious.17 As foreigners told him, it would have been much wiser to try to reunite France with Belgium and Milan.
France had its troubles, but its king, who up until now had experienced only easy victories and a theatrical renown, now showed true grandeur in adversity. The victory at Denain and the famous glass of water spilled on the dress of the Duchess of Marlborough led to a glorious peace for France.18
Around this time, Philip V, on the Spanish throne, lost the queen, his wife. This event, together with his monastic character, nearly drove him mad. In that state of mind, he found, by dint of searching in an attic in Parma, Elisabeth Farnese and brought her to Spain to marry her.19 This great queen showed a kind of genius in the midst of all those arrogant Spanish childish tantrums which have since been so widely celebrated in Europe and which, under the venerable heading of Spanish etiquette, have been imitated by all the thrones of Europe.
This queen, Elisabeth Farnese, spent fifteen years of her life without ever letting her madman of a husband out of her sight for more than ten minutes a day. This court, a miserable one despite its artificial grandeurs, found its most brilliant painter in a man of genius, one able to see the depths of all those childish intrigues that the somber Spanish character produces, the Duke of Saint-Simon, the first great French historian.20 He provides the curious details of all the efforts that the queen, Elisabeth Farnese, made to be able to send off a Spanish army to conquer someplace so that one of the younger children she gave to Philip V could reign over it. The children that the king had had with his first wife were complete imbeciles, as you would expect of legitimate princes brought up under the Holy Inquisition. One of the favorites who would rule over whichever one of the two would become king might well have found it both necessary and wise to put Elisabeth Farnese in prison, for her good, strong sense, together with her activity, was offensive to Spanish indolence. Don Carlos, the eldest son of Queen Elisabeth, came to Italy in 17**. The battle of Bitonto, easily won by ******, put him on the throne of Naples, but in 174*, Austria attacked.21 On August 10, 1744, he found himself in the little town of Velletri, a dozen leagues from Rome, with a small Spanish army. He was at the base of Monte Artemisio, only a couple of leagues from a small Austrian army that was better situated than his.
On the fourteenth of August, at dawn, Don Carlos was surprised in his chamber by a party of Austrians. Duke Vargas del Pardo, whom the queen had ordered to accompany her son despite the efforts of the head chaplain, grabbed him by the legs and boosted him out of the window, which stood about ten feet above the ground, while Austrian grenadiers were beating down the door with their rifle butts and calling out, as respectfully as possible, for the prince to surrender himself.
Vargas leaped out of the window after his prince, found two horses, got him up on one of them, and raced off to the infantry, which was encamped a quarter of a league away.
“Your prince will be lost,” he said to the Spanish troops, “if you do not immediately remember that you are Spaniards; you need to kill about two thousand of those Austrian heretics who are trying to make a prisoner out of the son of your good queen.”
These few words were all it took to reignite Spanish valor; they began by cutting down the four companies they found at Velletri, where they tried to surprise the prince. Fortunately, Vargas found an old general, who, despite the absurd way they fought wars in 1744, avoided extinguishing the fury of the brave Spanish troops by forcing them into overly clever maneuvers. At the battle of Velletri, they dispatched some thirty-five hundred men of the Austrian army, after which Don Carlos was truly the king of Naples.
The Farnese queen sent one of her favorites to tell Don Carlos, whose only well-known passion was for hunting, that the Austrians should be seen as especially intolerable to the people of Naples because of their stinginess and their avarice.
“Spend a few more millions than are really necessary on these Neapolitans; they are always defiant but also always preoccupied with the affairs of the moment; keep them amused with their money, but do not be a mere log king.”22
Don Carlos, though he had been raised by priests and was steeped in all the rituals of church and court, surprisingly turned out not to be lacking i
n intelligence; he attracted a brilliant court around him; he sought to bind the young lords to him with special favors, the ones who had left school only since his arrival in Naples and who had been no more than twenty at the time of the battle of Velletri. Many of these young people fought at Velletri and were surprised to find that their king, who was the same age as they were, was not made prisoner. The king took advantage of all the conspiracies and attempts that the Austrians put in play. His judges declared all the fools who supported Austria infamous traitors.
Don Carlos did not have any of their death sentences carried out, but he did accept the confiscation of many fine estates; the Neapolitan spirit, which is naturally drawn to everything that is sumptuous and brilliant, led the courtiers to understand that if they wanted to please this young king, it was going to take a great deal of expense. The king let all the lords that his minister Tanucci told him were secretly devoted to Austria run themselves into financial ruin. He was thwarted only by Acquaviva, the archbishop of Naples and the only really dangerous enemy that Don Carlos found in his new kingdom.
The balls that Don Carlos gave in the winter of 1745, after the battle of Velletri, were truly magnificent, and they gained him the love of the Neapolitans as much as his victory in war did. Tranquillity and peace were suddenly everywhere. When the day of the great gala and baisemain23 celebrating his birthday arrived, Charles III handed out fine estates to the nobles he believed were most loyal to him. In private, Don Carlos ridiculed the archbishop’s mistresses and some older women who missed the ridiculous Austrian regime. The king distributed two or three ducal titles to young nobles who he knew had been spending more than their income, for Don Carlos, who was naturally grand, had a horror of people who followed the Austrian principle of pinching their pennies.
The young king had wit and elevated sentiments, and was very much his mother’s son. She loved regal fetes, and she readily accustomed herself to the taxes being distributed back among the young people for their amusement rather than being hauled off every six months to Madrid or Austria. It was in vain that the archbishop, supported by all the old men and by all the women who were no longer young, insinuated in all his sermons that the style of life exhibited at the court was an abomination, for every time that the king or the queen came out of the palace, the people burst out in joyful cheers, so robust they could be heard a quarter of a league away. How can one describe it, such cries from a people who are prone to shouting and who now found themselves genuinely happy?
CHAPTER 2
That winter following the battle of Velletri, many nobles from the French court came to Naples, nominally for their health’s sake, and they were welcomed at the castle; the wealthiest Neapolitans made it a duty to invite them to all their parties, the ancient Spanish solemnity and the rigors of ceremony—which entirely prohibited paying morning visits to young ladies, as well as entirely prohibiting the latter from receiving young men without the presence of two or three duennas chosen by their husbands—seeming to relax a bit in the presence of French customs. Eight or ten women of exceptional beauty seemed to share most of the male attention, but the young king insisted that the most beautiful creature in his court was young Rosalinde, daughter of Prince d’Atella. This prince, in the past an Austrian general, was a somber, prudent man closely allied with the archbishop, and in the four years of Don Carlos’s reign since the battle of Velletri, he had not once visited the castle. The king had not laid eyes upon Prince d’Atella except for two obligatory baisemain days—namely, the king’s name day and birthday. But the charming parties given by the king made partisans of him even within families the most devoted to Austrian rights (as they said in those days in Naples). Prince d’Atella, despite himself, had given in to the importuning of his second wife, Ferdinanda, permitting her to appear at the castle and to be followed there by her daughter, that beautiful Rosalinde who had been proclaimed the most beautiful creature in his kingdom by Don Carlos. Prince d’Atella had three sons by his first wife, and getting them established in society gave him a great deal of worry, because the titles these sons bore, all dukes or princes, seemed to him too imposing for the mediocre fortune that he would be able to leave them. These worries were only worsened when, on the occasion of the queen’s birthday, the king made many promotions of sublieutenants among his troops; the sons of d’Atella were not included, for the simple reason that they had not asked for anything. But young Rosalinde, their sister, had accompanied her stepmother on a visit that the latter made the day after the gala; the queen said to Rosalinde that she had noticed during the card games that Rosalinde had no pledge to bet with.
“Though young girls do not wear diamonds,” she said to her, “I trust that as a pledge of friendship from your queen, and by my express command, you will be willing to wear this ring.”
And the queen gave her a ring with a diamond worth many hundreds of ducats.
This ring was a cruel object of embarrassment for the old prince d’Atella; his friend the archbishop threatened to have all the priests in his diocese refuse absolution at Eastertime to his daughter Rosalinde if she wore that Spanish ring. On the advice of his old chaplain, the prince offered the archbishop a mezzo termine: he would have a ring made himself, using one of his own diamonds from the entail and looking as like the other ring as possible. This greatly irritated Donna Ferdinanda.
Irritated by this subtraction from her own jewelry box, she insisted that the queen’s diamond should replace it. The prince, supported in this by one of his duennas, argued that putting Rosalinde’s ring into the entail collection might, after his death, deprive Rosalinde of ownership, and if the queen were to discover the substitution, it would mean his daughter could not swear on the blood of San Gennaro24 that the ring had always been in her possession, which she could otherwise prove simply by coming to her father’s palazzo. This disagreement, which did not much interest Rosalinde, troubled the rest of the house for two weeks. Finally, and again upon the counsel of the old chaplain, the queen’s ring was deposited in the keeping of old Litta, the most senior of the duennas.
The mania that characterizes most noble Neapolitan families of regarding themselves as independent princes with opposed interests means that there is no real affection between brother and sister, and that their interests are always settled by means of the strictest political protocols.
In 1741, all Naples knew a young courtier called Il Francese; he was a gay, scatterbrained young man who nonetheless became friends with all the young French nobles who visited Italy. The king favored him, because this prince would never forget the fact that if the French court were to change its tone from that insouciant lightness which seemed to govern everything it did, it could, with the slightest show of force on the Rhine, attract the attention of that all-powerful Austria, which was always threatening to swallow up Naples. We will not disguise the fact that the king’s favor, while very real, also tended to encourage the frivolity in Don Genarino’s character.
One day, while he was out walking on the Madeleine Bridge, the main road to Vesuvius, with the Marquis de Charot, who had come from Versailles only two months earlier, these two young men took it into their heads to go visit the hermit’s house located about halfway up the side of Vesuvius. Going up on foot was impracticable, because it was already very hot, and sending a lackey back to Naples to get horses would take too long. Just then, Don Genarino saw a domestic on horseback about a hundred paces from them; he did not recognize the man’s livery, and he approached him, complimenting him on the beauty of the Andalusian horse he was leading by the bridle.
“Give my compliments to your master, and tell him that he has given us these two horses so we can go up to the hermit’s house. In two hours, they will be back at your master’s house, and one of the servants of the house of Las Flores25 will be declaring my thanks.”
The servant on horseback turned out to be an old Spanish soldier; he looked at Don Genarino with dislike and made no move to dismount. Don Genarino pulled him by
the tail of his jacket and grabbed hold of his shoulder so that he did not fall but came down, and at the same time Don Genarino lightly leaped up into the saddle, and he offered the magnificent Andalusian horse they had been leading to the Marquis de Charot. Just as the latter got up into the saddle, Don Genarino, who had been holding the horse by the bridle, felt the cold steel of a dagger brush his left arm.
It was the old Spanish servant, who was thus indicating his displeasure at the sudden change of route imposed on the two horses.
Don Genarino called to him with his customary gaiety, “Tell your master that I offer him my compliments, and that within two hours one of the men from the stables of Las Flores will bring back his two horses, which we will be careful not to tire overmuch. This charming Andalusian will provide a fine ride for my friend.”
As the furious servant approached Don Genarino to give him a second stab of the dagger, the two young men galloped off, laughing.
Two hours after returning from Vesuvius, Don Genarino had one of his father’s groomsmen find out the name of the owner of the two horses and return them along with his compliments and his thanks. An hour later, the groomsman returned looking very pale and reporting to Don Genarino that the horses belonged to the cardinal archbishop, who had him say that he did not accept the compliments of this impudent person.
In a few days, this little incident had become a major affair, with all Naples talking about the archbishop’s rage. There was a ball at the court, and Don Genarino, always eager for a dance, was there as usual; he gave his arm to Princess Ferdinanda d’Atella and was walking with her and her stepdaughter Rosalinde through the various salons when the king summoned him.