Italian Chronicles
Page 39
28.Philippe Berthier, “Histoire et roman,” in Stendhal, 139.
29.There is no evidence that Stendhal had read Shelley’s version, though he did express admiration for his other poetry. See Berthier’s discussion of the genesis of the text in Oeuvres romanesques completes, 2:1448ff.
30.Pierre Laforgue, “Traduttore, traditore, ou l’art de la fiction et de la mystification dans les Chroniques italiennes,” in Stendhal à Cosmopolis: Stendhal et ses langues, ed. Marie-Rose Corredor (Grenoble: ELLUG, Université Stendhal, 2007), 151.
31.Mérimée, Henri Beyle, 16.
32.D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), xv.
33.Yvon Houssais, “Les Chroniques Italiennes: Stendhal à la recherché d’une forme,” Anales de Filologia Francesa 14 (2005—2006): 140.
34.The point is made in a seminal analysis by Béatrice Didier, “Stendhal chroniquer,” Littérature 5 (1972): 11—25. Didier notes also an intricate relation between the temporal dimension in the tales and their spatial dimensions.
35.Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract” (1762), trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella, in Rousseau’s Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1988), 85.
36.Michal Peled Ginsburg, Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 66.
37.Italo Calvino, “Stendhal’s Knowledge of the ‘Milky Way,’” in The Uses of Literature: Essays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 282.
38.Di Maio, Frontières du romanesque, 54.
39.Stendhal, Memoirs of an Egotist, 91.
40.Mérimée, Henri Beyle, 16.
41.Stendhal, jottings in his copy of the recently published novel La Chartreuse de Parme, quoted in Jonathan Keates, Stendhal (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 418—19.
42.Stendhal, Memoirs of an Egotist, 88.
43.See Lawrence R. Schehr, “Stendhal’s Pathology of the Novel,” French Forum 15, no. 1 (January 1990): 53—72. A more recent analysis of Stendhal’s struggles with the genre is Daniel Sangsue, Stendhal et l’empire du récit (Paris: Sedes, 2002).
44.Stendhal, Memoirs of an Egotist, 52.
STENDHAL’S PREFACES
1.New Holland: Australia.
2.Riccaras refers to natives of Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka). John Franklin (1786—1847) was a British explorer.
3.Les Aventures du Baron de Faeneste (1617—30) was a satire in four installments by the Protestant writer Agrippa dAubigné (1552—1630). The title character is a young Catholic whose ignorance and hypocrisy are unmasked in the course of a series of dialogues.
4.Jean-Pons-Guillaume Viennet (1777—1868), prolific writer and successful politician, despised by Stendhal.
5.The references are to Abel-François Villemain (1790—1870), writer, professor, and minister of education; and to Casimir Delavigne (1793—1843), a highly popular poet and dramatist. Stendhal expresses scorn for them a number of times in his journals as well.
6.“I will see you tomorrow, during the day.”
7.The episode of the Massimi family comes up only briefly in Stendhal’s version of “The Cenci.” One of the Massimi sons poisoned his elder brother, and four of the brothers, acting together, murdered their stepmother.
8.The term ultra, in both France and Italy, refers to an extreme conservative or reactionary.
9.Stendhal often asserted that Italy’s best years had been under Napoleon and that the Napoleonic conquest had in fact been a kind of liberation for Italy; here, he implicitly credits Napoleon with having inspired the later drive for Italian unification.
10. Adolph Thiers (1797—1877) published his ten-volume history of the French Revolution between 1822 and 1827. It saw republicanism as having been the central idea, and central legacy, of the Revolution. Stendhal implies that Thiers is an inspiration for the contemporary Italian movements.
11.A number of annual prizes were established by the philanthropist Antoine Jean Baptiste Robert Auget, Baron de Montyon (1733—1820), including an annual one for the book that did the greatest good for humanity, and one for the most virtuous act of the year. Stendhal misspells Montyon’s name slightly, and he implies that modern members of the Académie française were motivated more by cash prizes than by anything else.
VANINA VANINI
“Vanina Vanini” was first published in the Revue de Paris of December 13, 1829. Carbonari is a collective term for various secret revolutionary groups sprouting up in Italy since the time of Napoleon; the 1820s were an especially fertile decade. Their assemblies were secret, held often in forests. The entire subtitle apparently was added by the editor of the Revue de Paris, and is not by Stendhal.
1.The Roman emperor Sulla abdicated his dictatorship in 79 BCE.
2.That is, lights were being arranged in a decorative manner to show off the building. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française for 1835 defines illumination, in this sense, as a great number of lights arranged symmetrically, often as part of a celebration.
3.The carbonari were organized into venti, or cells of twenty members.
4.The term amour-passion is one Stendhal uses in his essay De l’Amour (1822). In the first chapter, he distinguishes among the four types: passion-love, such as that of Héloïse and Abelard; love based on refined taste; physical love; and love based on vanity.
5.Joachim-Napoléon Murat (1767—1815) had been maréchal of France under Napoleon; after Waterloo, he fled to Italy and tried to stir up a revolt in Naples, but he was captured and executed there.
6.[Deliver Italy from the barbarians: this was Petrarch’s motto in 1350, repeated since then by Jules II, by Machiavelli, and by Count Alfieri.—Stendhal’s note]
7.The sequin, or zecchino, was a Venetian gold piece.
8. [Near Rimini, in the Romagna. It was in this castle that the famous Cagliostro perished, strangled to death, they say.—Stendhal’s note]
9.“To take the hat” is to be named cardinal.
10.[It is no doubt true that a Roman prelate would be incapable of commanding an army corps with valor, as we have seen a number of times when the general of a military division was the minister of police in Paris, during the Malet plot; but he would never let himself be caught so easily like this in his own house. He would have to endure far too many witticisms from his colleagues. A Roman who knows he is hated always goes about well armed. It was not thought necessary here to explain other little differences between the way people speak and act in Paris and the ways they do in Rome. Far from minimizing such differences, we have thought it best to depict them vividly. The Romans we are describing do not have the honor of being French.—Stendhal’s note]. General Claude François de Malet (1754—1812) attempted a coup against Napoleon in 1812, during which he and his men quickly and easily overcame the then-current minister of police, the Duke of Rovigo; the police were seen as having capitulated too readily.
11.A writ of motuproprio (which means “on his own impulse”) is a document the pope himself issues, a direct decree.
VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI
This story was first published anonymously in the Revue de Deux Mondes for March 1, 1837.
1.Charles V invaded Florence in 15 30, having taken Rome in 1527, and brought an end to Florence’s republic.
2.[The Italian manuscript is deposited at the offices of the Revue des Deux Mondes.—Stendhal’s note]
3.[As I recall, one can see, in the Ambrosian library in Milan, some sonnets of grace and feeling along with other bits of verse, written by Vittoria Accoramboni. There were a great many well-made sonnets written at the time she came to meet her strange destiny. It would seem that she had an intellect to match her graces and her beauty.—Stendhal’s note]
4.[This was the armed body charged with maintaining public safety, the police and police agents of the year 1580. Their commander was a man named Bargello, who was personally res
ponsible for carrying out the orders of monsignor the governor of Rome (that is, the chief of police).—Stendhal’s note]
5.[An allusion to the hypocrisy that wicked wits believe is common among monks. Sixtus V had been a mendicant monk, and persecuted in his order. See his biography by Gregorio Leti, an amusing historian and no more of a liar than all the others.—Stendhal’s note]
6.[The corte dared not enter the palazzo of a prince.—Stendhal’s note]
7.[The first wife of Prince Orsini, with whom he had a son named Virginio, was the sister of François I, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and of Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici. He had her put to death, with the consent of her brothers, because she had had an affair. Such were the laws of honor imported into Italy by the Spanish. The illegitimate loves of a wife were as much an offense to her brothers as they were to her husband.—Stendhal’s note]
8.[The allusion is to the custom of fighting with a sword and a dagger.—Stendhal’s note]
9.[Sixtus V made pope in 1585 at sixty-eight years of age, reigned for five years and four months; there are striking parallels between him and Napoleon.—Stendhal’s note]
10.[About 2 million francs in 1837.—Stendhal’s note]
11.That is, Venetians.
THE CENCI
This story was first published, anonymously, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July 1, I837.
1.Les Aventures du Baron de Faeneste (16I7—1630), by Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, had returned to fashion in the early nineteenth century.
2.In English in the original. Stendhal had met Byron in Milan in 1816.
3.[See Montesquieu: Politique des Romains dans la religion.—Stendhal’s note]
4.Philippe Berthier, in Oeuvres romanesques complètes, ed. Yves Ansel, Philippe Berthier, and Xavier Bourdenet (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 2:i458, points out that the witticism of France as an absolute monarchy tempered by popular songs is taken from Chamfort’s Maxims (1795).
5.Stendhal’s date is wrong: Leo X came to the throne of Saint Peter’s in 1513.
6.[Saint-Simon, Mémoires de l’abbé Blache.—Stendhal’s note]
7.[This name was adopted by a monk and a man of intelligence, fray Gabriel Téllez. He belonged to the Order of Mercy, and a number of his plays have scenes of genius, including Il Timido á la Corte. Téllez wrote three hundred comedies, of which some sixty to eighty survive. He died around 1610.—Stendhal’s note.] Stendhal’s date is wrong: Téllez died in 1648.
8.The fifth floor: like the attic, the least appealing place to live, typically reserved for domestics.
9.A libertine, like the main character of Louvet de Couvray’s 1787 novel, Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas. The name has become synonymous with “seducer” since Stendhal’s time.
10.[D. Dominico Paglietta.—Stendhal’s note] Berthier, in Oeuvres romanesques complètes, 2:1458, speculates that this is Stendhal’s friend Domenico Fiore.
11.[Saint Pius V Ghislieri, a Piedmontese, whose thin and severe face can be seen on the tomb of Sixtus the Fifth, at Santa Maria Maggiore, had been the grand inquisitor when he was called to the throne of Saint Peter in 1556. He governed the church for six years and twenty-four days.—See his letters, edited by Monsieur de Potter, the only man among us who knows about this moment of history. The work of Monsieur de Potter, a vast mine of facts, is the fruit of fourteen years of conscientious study in the libraries of Florence, Venice, and Rome.—Stendhal’s note]
12.Modern critics have proved that the Guido portrait shows a sibyl and not Beatrice Cenci, as many generations of viewers, like Stendhal, had assumed. There is evidently no contemporary portrait of Beatrice.
13.[This pride is not a function of social rank, as it is in the portraits of Van Dyck.—Stendhal’s note]
14.Vincenzo Monti’s Galeoto Manfredi, Prince of Faenza was published in 1788.
15.In fact, Leo X was elected pope in 1513, and died in 1521.
16.The infamous (infâme) love is homosexuality, which was hinted at earlier in the reference to Cenci’s pursuit of peripezie.
17.[In Rome, people are buried below the churches.—Stendhal’s note]
18.[Most of the monsignori have not taken the vows of holy orders and are allowed to marry.—Stendhal’s note]
19.[All these details were given at the trial.—Stendhal’s note]
20.[See the treatise De Suppliciis by the famous (Prospero) Farinacci, a legal expert of the time. It includes some details so horrible to our nineteenth-century sensibilities that we can scarcely bear to read them, but which were actually endured by a sixteen-year-old Roman girl who had been abandoned by her lover.—Stendhal’s note]
21.[In Farinacci there are a number of Beatrice’s avowals; I find them touching in their simplicity.—Stendhal]
22.In this case, five of the sons of Lelio Massimo believed their father’s new bride brought dishonor on the family, and they killed her; later, one of the brothers poisoned another.
23.[A note on the manuscript reads, “Later made cardinal for a singular reason.”—Stendhal’s note]. Ferrante Taverna was responsible for the execution of Paolo Santa Croce, the “singular reason” that accounts for the pope’s gratitude to him.
24.These confortatori, or “comforters,” were devoted to providing the condemned with both physical and spiritual help during their final hours; they also arranged for burial of the bodies after execution.
25.The tenailler torture involved using pincers, often red hot, to tear the victim’s flesh.
26.[A contemporary author says that Clement VIII was greatly concerned for the salvation of Beatrice’s soul; because he knew she was unjustly condemned, he feared she would show some impatience. At the moment when she placed her head on the mannaja, the fortress of Sant’Angelo, from which viewpoint the mannaja could easily be seen, shot off a cannon. The pope who was in prayer at Monte-Cavallo and awaiting this signal, immediately gave the girl his papal absolution in articulo mortis. This accounts for the cruel delay that our chronicler mentions.—Stendhal’s note]
27.The mazzolato method was especially gruesome, involving the use of a large mace to bludgeon the condemned.
28.[This is the hour reserved for the obsequies of princes in Rome. The procession for a bourgeois takes place at sundown; the lesser nobility are taken to the church at the first hour of the night, and cardinals and princes at two and a half hours of the night, which, on September 11, corresponded to nine forty-five.—Stendhal’s note]
29.“All were condemned to the ultimate penalty except for Bernardo, who was condemned to the galleys and the confiscation of all his goods, as well as attending the executions of the others, which he did attend.”
THE DUCHESS OF PALLIANO
“The Duchess of Palliano” was first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes of August 15, 1838, under the pseudonym of F. De Lagenevais. The editor of the Revue prefaced the story by saying, “One of our friends, who has been travelling in Italy for some time, has found some manuscripts in both public and private libraries, and is sending them on to us, and we will publish them successively. ‘The Duchess of Palliano’ is the first in this series.”
The Palermo heading is fictional; Stendhal had never gone to Sicily.
1.Armand de Vignerot du Plessis (March 13, 1696—August 8, 1788), Duke de Richelieu, followed a military career by becoming a powerful courtier and notorious libertine.
2.Carlo Broschi (1705—1782) took the stage name of Farinelli. Castrated at the age of twelve, he became the most celebrated opera singer in Europe. In the 1730s he did, as Stendhal says, give nightly performances to the Spanish king Philippe V.
3.Anne Radcliffe’s three-volume Gothic romance The Italian was published in 1797; it was translated into French almost immediately, and Stendhal admired the book and the author.
4.As elsewhere with Stendhal’s Italian tales, the assertion of an “exact translation” must be treated as a convention or outright fiction rather than the truth. In the case of this story, Stendhal does follow two Italian m
anuscripts closely, but he combines material freely, omits quite a lot, and invents quite a lot. And of course his “translation” only occasionally attempts to mirror the style of the original; instead, the material is reworked into his own style and tone.
Giovanni Pietro Carafa (1476—1559) became Pope Paul IV in 1555. Stendhal often mixes French with Italian and even Spanish versions of proper names (Giovanni is sometimes “Jean” and sometimes “Juan,” Carlo is sometimes “Charles”), and the translation follows suit.
5.Pope Paul IV was an inveterate enemy of the Colonna, one of the most illustrious of Italian noble families.
6.The “cardinal nephew” (in Latin, cardinalis nepos) had been an accepted institution in the papacy for some centuries; it is the origin of the word nepotism.
7.The Seggio di nido was the most aristocratic quarter in Naples.
8. The Pecorone is a fourteenth-century collection of tales by Giovanni Fiorentino; one of the tales is the source for Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. These literary details about the duchess are Stendhal’s invention.
9. Here, Stendhal softens the original manuscript, which has the duke and his thugs bringing mistresses and prostitutes into the marriage bed in order to do more outrage to the duchess.
10.Again, Stendhal softens his manuscript material here, omitting grisly details of the body’s being exhumed and opened up to ascertain pregnancy.
11.The phrase “armed escort” translates Stendhal’s term barigel, which the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française for 1835 glosses as the head of the archer corps in Rome and other Italian cities. The same dictionary glosses fiscal as an officer charged with carrying out the decrees of a court of justice.
12.[The scholar M. Sismondi bungles this whole story. See the article “Carafa” in the Michaud biography; he claims that the Count of Montorio was beheaded on the day the cardinal died. The count was the father of the cardinal and of the Duke of Palliano. The sage historian confuses the father with the son.—Stendhal’s note]