Stendhal's Italian Chronicles
These noblemen don't enjoy bloodshed but I do...
Stendhal. Italian Chronicles. Translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 402 pp.
Raymond N. MacKenzie has been re-translating the French canon of 19th century fiction, and the output has been exciting so far, especially with two major works of Balzac, but the most interesting has to be this volume of Stendhal’s Italian Stories and Chronicles.
This is actually a dense and thorough volume, binding a posthumous collection along with some hitherto untranslated pieces, and including unpublished drafts for a preface, indicating Stendhal’s conception for a volume of his Italy-set fictions during his lifetime.
We learned in the letter on Sebald’s Vertigo that the young Stendhal, or rather Henri Beyle, fell in love with the cultural richness of northern Italy, where he was a second lieutenant in the French army. Fast forward to 1814, and the end of the Napoleonic regime, and Stendhal retires to Milan, and his literary career proper begins. A travel book on Rome appearing in 1817 is the first time he signs a text with the name Stendhal.
“What Italy meant to Stendhal,” says translator MacKenzie in the introduction,
was partly of his own construction, partly what was actually there, and partly what French and European culture had been making of Italy for the preceding few generations. …[T]he eighteenth century, the age of neoclassicism, venerated Italy as the ruins of Rome, the vestiges of a grandeur that could — and even must — be recovered.
One persistent thought your host had while reading these stories was, These are certainly Stories. They all have a lot of plot, and the incidents of love affairs, secret messages, and the interminable moves of court intrigue with this bishop conspiring against that pope, all kind of blend together in the memory.
But I don’t share the disdain for the short story form that seems to have become trendy around these parts of Substack. These aren’t really short stories in that sense but miniature chronicles as in the middle ages, long chains of aristocratic doings, contextualized as documented history.
The opening story, called “Vanina Vanini” is probably the best one, or at least the most compelling narrative, and the one with the most psychology. It plays out like a Gadfly style melodrama between a young lady and a gallant soldier for unification.
The young idealistic Missirilli finds himself torn between his passions and his patriotism:
“What is this ‘country’? It is not a being to whom we owe gratitude for some benefits bestowed, some person who can be suffering and who can curse us if we abandon it. ‘Country’ and ‘liberty’ — I wear these like my cloak; they are a thing that is useful to me but a thing that I must purchase, since I did not inherit it from my father; but still, I love my country and I love liberty, because they are useful to me. If they were not useful, if they were like a heavy cloak in the month of August, what would be the point of purchasing them, and at such an enormous price?
Vanina becomes so afraid of losing her lover that she snitches on him to the Papal state authorities. But regretting her choice she enacts a caper to rescue him or at least reduce his sentence. And considering the significance of this particular plot beat in Rousseau’s Confessions, I had to take note of this moment, in which a man is seduced by Vanina while she’s in men’s clothing:
[I]n her disguise as a footman belonging to the Casa Savelli, with her tight silk stockings, her red waistcoat, her little sky-blue jacket with silver braiding, and her pistol in her hand, Vanina was simply ravishing.
This is all very amusing, especially for a curtain opener. But the real spaghetti and meatballs of Stendhal’s experiments with fiction can be found later on. The third story, called “The Cenci: 1599,” opens with a ten-page abstract on Don Juanism:
A Don Juan is possible only because of the world’s hypocrisy. In antiquity, a Don Juan was an effect without a cause; religion then was festival, and she exhorted men toward pleasure, so how could she have rejected those creatures who made a certain pleasure their whole pursuit? Only government spoke of abstaining; it forbade those things that could do harm to the nation, which is to say, to the interest of the general public, and not those that could harm only the individual who practiced them.
Every man who had a taste for women and plenty of money, therefore, could be a Don Juan in Athens, and no one would find anything wrong with that; nobody would say that this life is a vale of tears and that there is merit in making ourselves suffer.
The perversity of the Cenci knows no bounds, and horrifically enough is based on at least some fact, as Stendhal himself was checking out archives and cemeteries in the 1830s, as a kind of literary investigative journalism. He knows that the effort in research is part of the fun of third-person narrator projecting here:
The lesser vice attributed to Francesco Cenci was a propensity to an infamous form of love [i.e. homosexuality —Ed.] and the greater one was not to believe in God. During his entire life, no one had ever seen him enter a church.
[…]
(Here it becomes absolutely impossible to follow the Roman narrator in his obscure account of the strange things Francesco Cenci did to shock his contemporaries. His wife and his unfortunate daughter were, to all appearances, made the victims of these abominable acts.)
This dirty old bastard is out of control, and his own wife and daughter conspire to assassinate him, but the first attempted plot fails.
Cenci, for his part, being a shrewd and suspicious old man, never set foot outside the fortress. And, his bad temper worsening with the infirmities of age, which were intolerable to him, he increased the atrocious mistreatments to which he made the two poor women submit. He accused them of taking pleasure in his increasing weakness.
The next story, on “The Duchess of Palliano,” isn’t short on scandal either.
As soon as the duchess was dead, the two monks pleaded for her to be opened up immediately so that they could baptize the child; but the count and D. Léonard would not listen to their pleas.
The next day, the duchess was buried in the local church with some degree of pomp (I have read the records).
The historical record is worse — the duchess was in fact exhumed “to ascertain pregnancy” according to the notes!
The use of frame tales, documentary reportage, and the blending of novelistic technique with renaissance chronicling: all these are part of Stendhal’s unique take on historical fiction, perfected in The Charterhouse of Parma. There’s a funny, paradoxical idea driving his writing, that these “fictions” are more true than the real History, because of the concrete level of fiction’s rendering.
Nearly all the major period novels after World War 2 are following the path charted by Stendhal: the same revival of older Romantic forms and playful dalliance with fact and mythology.
While we take MacKenzie’s point about the culturally conservative angle of Italophilia, there is something to be said of Stendhal’s progressive liberal politics for the mid-nineteenth century. This passage from “San Francesco a Ripa” ends up ironically expressing the author’s anti-clericalism.
For two centuries, the Spanish were the fashionable foreigners in Rome, but lately the mode had begun to favor the French. People were beginning to understand that national type, which brought pleasure and cheer everywhere it turned up. That trait was in those days found only among the French, and since the Revolution of 1789 it has died out altogether. The reason is that such an ongoing gaiety requires a carefree attitude, and no one in France is sure of his career anymore, not even the man of genius.
War since then has been declared between men of Sénecé’s class and the rest of the nation. Rome, too, was very different then from what she is today. No one then, in 1726, could have suspected what was going to happen sixty-seven years later, when the people, paid by some clerics, slit the throat of the Jacobin Basseville, who, he said, wanted to civilize the capital city of the Christian world.
And while I fail to retain the details of plot, one indelible motif in these stories stands out in a strange way.
Blood and bloodshed is a huge element of these late medieval narratives, to be sure. Here it is not only the bloodline, the transmission of inheritance and all the other entitlements, but the spilling of blood itself as a storytelling decision.
The militant Missirilli is tracked by his dripping blood, like in a western. In “The Cenci,” the women succeed in killing the old man, but their coverup is exposed when the bloodstains on a bedsheet are shown to be evidence of the crime, and not of the daughter’s “exceptional flow.” A brigand in later story finds himself bleeding profusely before a statue of the Madonna (“the blood was flowing abundantly”). Whether man, woman, or divine, everybody is bleeding.