Part 1

Produced by Tokuya Matsumoto, HTML formatting by Walter Debeuf, Project Gutenberg Volunteer.

LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME

by Stendhal

FIRST BOOK

Gia mi fur dolci inviti a empir le carte I luoghi ameni.

Ariosto, sat. IV.

CHAPTER THE FIRST

Milan in 1796

On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had just crossed the bridge of Lodi, and had taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of bravery and genius of which Italy was witness in a few months awakened a sleeping people; eight days before the arrival of the French, the Milanese saw in them only a rabble of brigands, accustomed always to flee before the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty: at least this is what a little hand-sized newspaper, printed on dirty paper, repeated to them three times a week.

In the Middle Ages, the republican Lombards had shown a bravery equal to that of the French, and they deserved to see their city entirely razed by the emperors of Germany. Since they had become faithful subjects, their great concern was to print sonnets on little pink taffeta handkerchiefs when the marriage of a young girl belonging to some noble or rich family took place. Two or three years after this great epoch of her life, this young girl took a cavalier servant: sometimes the name of the cicisbeo chosen by the husband's family occupied an honorable place in the marriage contract. There was a far cry from these effeminate morals to the profound emotions given by the unexpected arrival of the French army. Soon new and passionate morals arose. An entire people perceived, on the 15th of May, 1796, that all it had respected until then was supremely ridiculous and sometimes odious. The departure of the last regiment of Austria marked the fall of ancient ideas: exposing one's life became fashionable; it was seen that to be happy after centuries of insipid sensations, one must love one's country with a real love and seek heroic actions. One was plunged into a profound night by the continuation of the jealous despotism of Charles V and Philip II; their statues were overthrown, and all at once one found oneself flooded with light. For some fifty years, and as the Encyclopédie and Voltaire burst forth in France, the monks cried out to the good people of Milan that learning to read or anything in the world was a most useless trouble, and that by paying the tithe exactly to one's curate, and faithfully recounting to him all one's little sins, one was almost sure of having a fine place in paradise. To finish enervating this people formerly so terrible and so reasoning, Austria had sold them cheaply the privilege of furnishing no recruits to its army.

In 1796, the Milanese army was composed of twenty-four knaves dressed in red, who guarded the city in concert with four magnificent regiments of Hungarian grenadiers. Liberty of morals was extreme, but passion very rare; besides, apart from the disagreeableness of having to tell everything to the curate, on pain of ruin even in this world, the good people of Milan were still subjected to certain little monarchical restraints which were not a little vexatious. For example the archduke, who resided at Milan and governed in the name of the Emperor, his cousin, had had the lucrative idea of trading in grain. In consequence, the peasants were forbidden to sell their grain until His Highness had filled his stores.

In May 1796, three days after the entry of the French, a young miniature painter, a little mad, named Gros, since famous, and who had come with the army, hearing related at the great café des Servi (then in fashion) the exploits of the archduke, who moreover was enormous, took the list of ices printed as a poster on a sheet of vile yellow paper. On the back of the sheet he drew the fat archduke; a French soldier was giving him a bayonet thrust in the belly, and, instead of blood, an incredible quantity of grain came out of it. The thing called jest or caricature was not known in this land of crafty despotism. The drawing left by Gros on the table of the café des Servi appeared a miracle descended from heaven; it was engraved during the night, and the next day twenty thousand copies were sold.

The same day, there was posted the notice of a war contribution of six millions, levied for the needs of the French army, which, having just won six battles and conquered twenty provinces, lacked only shoes, trousers, coats, and hats.

The mass of happiness and pleasure which burst into Lombardy with these Frenchmen so poor was such that only the priests and a few nobles noticed the heaviness of this contribution of six millions, which, soon, was followed by many others. These French soldiers laughed and sang all day long; they were under twenty-five years of age, and their commanding general, who was twenty-seven, passed for the oldest man in his army. This gaiety, this youth, this carelessness, answered in a pleasing manner the furious preachings of the monks who, for six months, had announced from the height of the sacred pulpit that the French were monsters, obliged, under pain of death, to burn everything and to cut off everybody's head. To this effect, each regiment marched with the guillotine at its head.

In the countryside one saw on the door of the cottages the French soldier occupied in rocking the little child of the mistress of the house, and almost every evening some drummer, playing the violin, improvised a ball. The country dances being found much too learned and complicated for the soldiers, who besides hardly knew them, to be able to teach them to the women of the country, it was these who showed the young Frenchmen the Monférine, the Sauteuse, and other Italian dances.

The officers had been lodged, as much as possible, with rich people; they had good need to recover. For example, a lieutenant named Robert had a billet for the palace of the Marquise del Dongo. This officer, a rather brisk young conscript, possessed as his whole fortune, on entering this palace, a six-franc crown which he had just received at Piacenza. After the crossing of the bridge of Lodi, he took from a handsome Austrian officer killed by a cannonball a magnificent pair of brand-new nankeen trousers, and never did garment come more opportunely. His officer's epaulettes were of wool, and the cloth of his coat was sewn to the lining of the sleeves so that the pieces might hold together; but there was a sadder circumstance: the soles of his shoes were in pieces of hat likewise taken on the battlefield, beyond the bridge of Lodi. These improvised soles held to the shoes by very visible strings, so that when the majordomo of the house presented himself in Lieutenant Robert's room to invite him to dine with My Lady the Marquise, the latter was plunged into mortal embarrassment. His skirmisher and he spent the two hours separating them from that fatal dinner trying to sew the coat a little and to dye black with ink the unhappy strings of the shoes. At last the terrible moment arrived. "Never in my life was I more ill at ease," Lieutenant Robert told me; "these ladies thought I was going to frighten them, and I was more trembling than they. I looked at my shoes and knew not how to walk with grace. The Marquise del Dongo," he added, "was then in all the splendor of her beauty: you knew her with her eyes so beautiful and of an angelic sweetness and her pretty hair of a dark blond which outlined so well the oval of that charming face. I had in my room a Herodias by Leonardo da Vinci which seemed her portrait. God willed that I was so struck by this supernatural beauty that I forgot my costume. For two years I had seen only ugly and miserable things in the mountains of the Genoese country: I dared address to her a few words on my rapture.

"But I had too much sense to linger long in the complimentary vein. While turning my phrases, I saw, in a dining room all of marble, twelve lackeys and valets de chambre dressed with what seemed to me then the height of magnificence. Picture to yourself that these rogues had not only good shoes, but even silver buckles. I saw from the corner of my eye all those stupid looks fixed on my coat, and perhaps also on my shoes, which pierced my heart. I could have frightened all those people with a word; but how to put them in their place without running the risk of alarming the ladies? for the Marquise, to give herself a little courage, as she has told me a hundred times since, had sent to fetch from the convent where she was a boarder at that time, Gina del Dongo, sister of her husband, who was since that charming Countess Pietranera: no one in prosperity surpassed her in gaiety and amiable wit, as no one surpassed her in courage and serenity of soul in adverse fortune.

"Gina, who might then have been thirteen, but who looked eighteen, lively and frank, as you know, was so afraid of bursting out laughing at the sight of my costume, that she dared not eat; the Marquise, on the contrary, overwhelmed me with constrained politeness; she saw very well in my eyes movements of impatience. In a word, I cut a silly figure, I chewed contempt, a thing said impossible to a Frenchman. At last an idea descended from heaven came to enlighten me: I began to relate my misery to these ladies, and what we had suffered for two years in the mountains of the Genoese country where old imbecile generals held us back. There, I said, we were given assignats which had no currency in the country, and three ounces of bread per day. I had not spoken two minutes, when the good Marquise had tears in her eyes, and Gina had become serious.

"'What, Mr. Lieutenant,' said she to me, 'three ounces of bread!'

"'Yes, mademoiselle; but on the other hand the distribution failed three times a week, and as the peasants with whom we lodged were still more miserable than we, we gave them a little of our bread.'

"On leaving the table, I offered my arm to the Marquise to the door of the salon, then, returning rapidly on my steps, I gave to the servant who had waited on me at table that single six-franc crown on the employment of which I had built so many castles in Spain.

"A week after," continued Robert, "when it was well ascertained that the French guillotined no one, the Marquis del Dongo returned from his castle of Grianta, on Lake Como, where bravely he had taken refuge at the approach of the army, abandoning to the hazards of war his young wife so beautiful and his sister. The hatred this marquis had for us was equal to his fear, that is to say immeasurable: his big pale and devout face was amusing to see when he paid me compliments. The day after his return to Milan, I received three ells of cloth and two hundred francs on the contribution of the six millions: I refitted myself, and became the knight of these ladies, for the balls began."

The history of Lieutenant Robert was nearly that of all the French; instead of mocking the misery of these brave soldiers, one pitied them, and one loved them.

This epoch of unforeseen happiness and intoxication lasted only two little years; the folly had been so excessive and so general, that it would be impossible for me to give an idea of it, save by this historical and profound reflection: this people had been bored for a hundred years.

The natural voluptuousness of southern lands had reigned formerly at the court of the Visconti and the Sforza, those famous dukes of Milan. But since the year 1635, when the Spaniards had seized the Milanese, and seized it as taciturn, suspicious, proud masters, always fearing revolt, gaiety had fled. The peoples, taking the morals of their masters, thought rather of avenging the least insult with a poignard thrust than of enjoying the present moment.

Mad joy, gaiety, voluptuousness, forgetfulness of all sad, or only reasonable, feelings, were pushed to such a point, from the 15th of May 1796, when the French entered Milan, until April 1799, when they were driven out following the battle of Cassano, that one could cite old millionaire merchants, old usurers, old notaries who, during that interval, had forgotten to be morose and to make money.

At most it would have been possible to count a few families belonging to the high nobility, who had retired to their palaces in the country, as if to sulk against the general cheerfulness and the blossoming of all hearts. It is also true that these noble and rich families had been distinguished in an unpleasant manner in the apportionment of the war contributions demanded for the French army.

The Marquis del Dongo, vexed at seeing so much gaiety, had been one of the first to regain his magnificent castle of Grianta, beyond Como, where the ladies led Lieutenant Robert. This castle, situated in perhaps a unique position in the world, on a plateau a hundred and fifty feet above that sublime lake of which it dominates a great part, had been a fortress. The del Dongo family had it built in the fifteenth century, as testified on all sides by marbles charged with its arms; one still saw drawbridges and deep moats, it is true deprived of water; but with these walls eighty feet high and six feet thick, this castle was safe from a surprise attack; and that is why it was dear to the suspicious marquis. Surrounded by twenty-five or thirty domestics whom he supposed devoted, apparently because he never spoke to them except with an insult on his lips, he was less tormented by fear than at Milan.

This fear was not quite gratuitous: he corresponded very actively with a spy placed by Austria on the Swiss frontier three leagues from Grianta, to help prisoners taken on the battlefield escape, which could have been taken seriously by the French generals.

The marquis had left his young wife at Milan: she directed the affairs of the family there, she was charged with facing the contributions imposed on the casa del Dongo, as they say in the country; she sought to have them diminished, which obliged her to see those of the nobles who had accepted public functions, and even some non-nobles very influential. A great event occurred in this family. The marquis had arranged the marriage of his young sister Gina with a very rich personage of the highest birth; but he wore powder: on that account Gina received him with bursts of laughter, and soon she was foolish enough to marry Count Pietranera. He was to be sure a very good gentleman, very well made in person, but ruined from father to son, and, to crown the disgrace, a fiery partisan of new ideas. Pietranera was a sub-lieutenant in the Italian legion, a further despair for the marquis.

After these two years of folly and happiness, the Directory of Paris, giving itself the airs of a well-established sovereign, showed a mortal hatred for all that was not mediocre. The inept generals it gave to the army of Italy lost a series of battles in those same plains of Verona, witnesses two years before of the prodigies of Arcole and Lonato. The Austrians drew near Milan; Lieutenant Robert, become a battalion chief and wounded at the battle of Cassano, came to lodge for the last time with his friend the Marquise del Dongo. The farewells were sad; Robert left with Count Pietranera who followed the French in their retreat on Novi. The young countess, to whom her brother refused to pay her portion, followed the army mounted on a cart.

Then began that epoch of reaction and return to ancient ideas, which the Milanese call "i tredici mesi" (the thirteen months), because in fact their happiness willed that this return to foolishness lasted only thirteen months, until Marengo. All that was old, devout, morose, reappeared at the head of affairs, and resumed the direction of society: soon the people remained faithful to good doctrines published in the villages that Napoleon had been hanged by the Mamelukes in Egypt, as he deserved by so many titles.

Among these men who had gone to sulk in their lands and who returned thirsty for vengeance, the Marquis del Dongo distinguished himself by his fury; his exaggeration naturally carried him to the head of the party. These gentlemen, very honest men when they were not afraid, but who always trembled, managed to circumvent the Austrian general: rather a good fellow, he let himself be persuaded that severity was high policy, and had a hundred and fifty patriots arrested: it was indeed then the best there was in Italy.

Soon they were deported to the mouths of Cattaro, and thrown into underground grottoes, dampness and above all lack of bread did good and prompt justice to all these rogues.

The Marquis del Dongo had a great post, and, as he joined a sordid avarice to a crowd of other fine qualities, he publicly boasted of not sending a crown to his sister, the Countess Pietranera: still mad with love, she would not leave her husband, and was dying of hunger in France with him. The good Marquise was in despair; at last she managed to steal a few small diamonds from her casket, which her husband took from her every evening to lock under his bed in an iron chest: the Marquise had brought eight hundred thousand francs of dowry to her husband, and received eighty francs per month for her personal expenses. During the thirteen months that the French spent outside Milan, this so timid woman found pretexts and did not leave off mourning.

We shall confess that, following the example of many grave authors, we have begun the history of our hero a year before his birth. This essential personage is none other, in fact, than Fabrice Valserra, marchesino del Dongo, as they say in Milan. He had just taken the trouble to be born when the French were driven out, and found himself, by the chance of birth, the second son of that Marquis del Dongo so great a lord, and whose already know the big pale face, the false smile, and the boundless hatred for new ideas. All the fortune of the house was settled on the eldest son Ascanio del Dongo, the worthy portrait of his father. He was eight years old, and Fabrice two, when all at once that General Bonaparte, whom all well-born people believed long since hanged, descended from Mount Saint-Bernard. He entered Milan: this moment is still unique in history; picture to yourselves a whole people madly in love. A few days after, Napoleon won the battle of Marengo. The rest is useless to tell. The intoxication of the Milanese was at its height; but, this time, it was mixed with ideas of vengeance: hatred had been taught to this good people. Soon one saw arrive what remained of the patriots deported to the mouths of Cattaro; their return was celebrated by a national festival. Their pale faces, their astonished great eyes, their emaciated limbs, made a strange contrast with the joy which burst forth on all sides. Their arrival was the signal for departure for the most compromised families. The Marquis del Dongo was among the first to flee to his castle of Grianta. The heads of the great families were full of hatred and fear; but their wives, their daughters, recalled the joys of the first stay of the French, and regretted Milan and the so gay balls, which immediately after Marengo were organized at the Casa Tanzi. A few days after the victory, the French general, charged with maintaining tranquillity in Lombardy, perceived that all the farmers of the nobles, that all the old women of the country, far from still thinking of that astonishing victory of Marengo which had changed the destinies of Italy, and reconquered thirteen fortified places in a day, had their souls occupied only with a prophecy of Saint Giovita, the first patron of Brescia. According to this sacred word, the prosperities of the French and of Napoleon were to cease thirteen weeks exactly after Marengo. What excuses a little the Marquis del Dongo and all the sulking nobles of the countryside, is that really and without pretense they believed in the prophecy. All those people had not read four volumes in their life; they made openly their preparations to re-enter Milan at the end of the thirteen weeks, but time, as it flowed, marked new successes for the cause of France. Back in Paris, Napoleon, by wise decrees, saved the revolution within, as he had saved it at Marengo against foreigners. Then the Lombard nobles, refugees in their castles, discovered that at first they had misunderstood the prediction of the holy patron of Brescia: it was not a question of thirteen weeks, but indeed of thirteen months. The thirteen months elapsed, and the prosperity of France seemed to increase every day.

We pass over ten years of progress and happiness, from 1800 to 1810; Fabrice spent the first at the castle of Grianta, giving and receiving many blows of the fist among the little peasants of the village, and learning nothing, not even to read. Later, he was sent to the college of the Jesuits at Milan. His father the marquis required that he be shown Latin, not according to those old authors who always speak of republics, but on a magnificent volume adorned with more than a hundred engravings, masterpiece of the artists of the seventeenth century; it was the Latin genealogy of the Valserra, marquises del Dongo, published in 1650 by Fabrice del Dongo, archbishop of Parma. The fortune of the Valserra being especially military, the engravings represented many battles, and always one saw some hero of that name dealing great sword blows. This book pleased the young Fabrice greatly. His mother, who adored him, obtained from time to time permission to come see him at Milan; but her husband never offering her money for these journeys, it was her sister-in-law, the amiable Countess Pietranera, who lent her some. After the return of the French, the Countess had become one of the most brilliant women of the court of Prince Eugene, viceroy of Italy.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”