Recollections of an Italian Gentleman
Stendhal
Translated by John Penuel
Original title: “Souvenirs d’un gentilhomme italien”
First published in French in Bibliothèque Britannique, February 1826
English translation copyright 2012 by John Penuel
Published at Smashwords by John Penuel
Recollections of an Italian Gentleman
Recollections of an Italian Gentleman
I was born in Rome to parents of respectable standing in that city. When I was three I had the bad luck to lose my father, and my mother, still in the flower of youth and eager to contract a second marriage, entrusted my education to an uncle who had no children. He accepted willingly and even eagerly; after all, he was determined to make of his ward a devoted supporter of priests and he hoped to make the most of his role as guardian.
After the death of General Dufaon,[1] the story of which is too well known for me to go into it here, the priests, seeing that the French armies were threatening to invade the Papal States, began spreading the rumor that wooden statues of Christ and the Virgin were opening their eyes. The people, credulous, believed this white lie. Processions were held, the city was illuminated, and all of the faithful hastened to make their offerings to the Church. My uncle, curious to see for himself the miracle everybody was talking about, formed a procession of all of the people of his house and took his place at their head clad in a mourning suit and with a crucifix in hand. I, carrying a lit torch, went with him. All of us, in the firm conviction that the more humility we showed, the more the Virgin and her son would have pity on us and be willing to show us their open eyes. Lined up thus, we made our way to San Marcello al Corso, where we found a huge crowd crying without respite: Long live Maria! Long live Maria and her divine Creator! Soldiers, posted at the entrance, were barring the way to the crowd gathered around the church and letting only the processions in. We had little trouble getting in, and we soon reached the railing, where we fell to our knees before the images of the Virgin and her son. “You see,” the people were shouting, “she just opened her eyes.” Most were located in such a way that they couldn’t see anything, but they repeated their neighbors’ shouts confidently. The unbelievers, for their part, would certainly not have made a show of their incredulity, as they would have been torn to pieces. My uncle, his eyes on those holy images, and in ecstasy, burst out:
“I saw them. They opened and closed their eyes twice.”
I, a poor child, tired of standing up, and tired above all from having walked barefoot for such a long time, started crying. My uncle silenced me with a slap, adding that I should be thinking about the Virgin rather than about my feet. We were still in the church when we saw a tailor by the name of Badaschi turn up with his wife and a young child so lame he could barely use his crutches. His good parents placed their son on the predella of the altar and began crying: Grazia! Grazia! And after having repeated the same cry for half an hour, sometimes addressing Christ, sometimes the Virgin, the mother said to her son:
“Faith, my child! Faith!”
Then they walked away from the patient and abandoned him to Providence, all while crying:
“Faith, child! Throw away your crutches!”
The poor child obeyed and, thus deprived of support, fell from four steps up, hitting his head on the floor. At the sound of his fall, his mother rushed over to pick him up and took him straight to the Hospital of the Consolation to have his wound dressed, so the poor kid got himself a bruise without stopping being crippled. After this episode, we left the church, and our procession headed back home, letting out the usual cries. On our arrival I asked my uncle humbly why the Virgin had allowed that innocent creature to fall so hard.
“Do you think, my child,” he answered me, “that God and the Virgin are supposed to work miracles for everybody? Don’t believe it. To find such great favor you must have a pure and blameless conscience.”
If I were to enlarge on the subject of miracles, several volumes would not suffice. I will mention only one of them: on piazza Pollarola, in Rome, is an image people call the Madonna del Saponaro. The lamps that illuminated it were, word had it, fueled not by oil but by the milk of the Virgin herself, and so that the people would fall for this trickery a whitish substance had been put in the glass of the lamps. Priests, with their surplices and their stoles, would take the rosaries the people handed them and dip them in the sacred elixir. Having gone in procession with my uncle to pay homage to this Madonna, we took advantage of the occasion to approach the priest and ask him to take our rosaries. He agreed to after a fairly long discussion, and he gave them back us dipped not in milk but in oil so greasy we had to wait a long time before we could put them back in our pockets.
In 1797, when the French army had taken Rome to establish a republic there, a national guard was immediately organized. My uncle, whose feelings and opinions were hardly in sympathy with those of the victors, found himself, to his great regret, forced to hide his opposition and to petition for the rank of captain, which made it sadly necessary for him to take part in the celebrations commemorating the establishment of the Roman Republic[2] and to send me to the procession that came before this solemn republican ceremony, the stage for which was Vatican Square. The other children and I were dressed in an old-fashioned way. We were wearing crowns of laurel on our heads and wreaths of laurel around our necks. I got more joy out of this patriotic novelty than out of processions for the Virgin. My companions shared my joy, and the splendid dinner given on piazza San Pietro after the ceremony exhilarated us even more. But my uncle’s reprimands kept me from savoring my happiness in peace. When we got back, he lectured me to get me to feel saintly horror of these sacrilegious acts inspired, so he said, by paganism, acts whose real goal was to have debauchery and corruption rule in the capital of the Christian world. Such celebrations, he added, are days of victory for demons; all we can do is ask the heavens for forgiveness for having taken part in this ungodliness. Death seemed to him better than such infamy, and he closed by saying that he would no longer suffer our being seen among the guilty again, regardless of the violence of the means people might use to force us to appear. He kept his word bravely, and the fortunes of war, by compelling the French to leave Rome, soon put an end to his worries and brought him the sweet satisfaction of seeing papal rule restored. After this revolution, which rewarded his dearest hopes, he entrusted me to the care of a tutor who was meant to teach me the basics of Latin, because I couldn’t go to a public school—that is, to the Roman College—without knowing at least the rudiments of that language. As a result of a tedious teaching method and of the habit of stuffing the wretched schoolboy’s brain with sermons and prayers, I made very little progress. Let it not occur to the schoolboy to ask questions his masters don’t know the answers to! To think is a crime, and everything that comes out of a priest’s mouth is to be taken on faith. After two years of study, I received the first sacrament. I had had to get ready for it with three months of penitence. After this cruel ordeal, I went back home, where my uncle and his wife (who, devoted entirely to the salvation of my soul, or so they said, cared very little about how I did in my studies), kissed me with tears in their eyes, congratulating me for having ventured down the ways of religion in such saintly fashion. But—alas!—I had left the paths of knowledge, and when I went back to the college I had completely forgotten the little my solemn masters had taught me.
At the college there was a religious association known as the Brotherhood of Saint Louis. On holidays, all of the young men taking classes were forced to listen to a sermon in the morning, to confess, and to take communion. They then went to eat and came back two hours later. Later, escorted by a few priests, all of the students went to a field outside of town to play ball, and each match cost us ten Our Fathers that we said with our hands on our knees. When the hour of play was up, we went back to town, where another sermon was awaiting us. Two priests then gave each of us disciplinary blows, and we put out the lights to allow the most zealous the freedom to receive their beating from the good fathers on their bare skin. At the beginning of the psalm Miserere mei, Deus, all were flogging themselves, and the flogging went on until the song was finished. The penitents who had undressed were given the time to cover their nakedness; the lamps were lit again, and, after umpteen prayers, we were sent off, all of us filled with fear of hell and devil. This ritual undertaken for the good of our souls but to the detriment of our minds was repeated once or twice a week. Our masters had not the slightest interest in educating us; on the contrary, they did what they could to keep us ignorant and, through the unjust severity of the punishment they meted out, to quash all of our heartfelt impulses. Fortunately for me, an excess of cruelty soon put an end to my sufferings. One day, I was late to school and, unusually, I didn’t know my lesson perfectly well. Right away, my pedant summoned the examiner, a kind of constable charged by the government with enforcing the sentences handed down by schoolmasters. I got twenty blows with the ferule on my hands, which hurt terribly, and after this punishment I went back to my desk, unable to mask my pain and my indignation. It was unwise of me, because the master, seeing my disgruntlement, ordered another punishment. This supplement was not to my liking, and I refused to submit to it. But my judge threatened to resort to force if I continued to refuse. At this threat, since there was no option other than flight from danger, I grabbed pens, papers, penknife, and inkwell and hurled them all at the pedant’s head, who got away with a bit of a fright. It was thus that I bid my farewell. My classmates burst out laughing. But on the master’s orders they started running after me. Afraid I would be caught, I took shelter in a church, an inviolable sanctuary in Italy, and in front of which all further pursuit came to a halt. After this outburst, I thought about what I should do: if I appealed to my uncle, I knew he would side with my enemies. I preferred to appeal to my mother, the only person who would come to my defense. She soon arrived, terrified, convinced that I had committed some unspeakable crime. I told her the story of my misadventure, and this story reassured her somewhat. She took me to her husband, and after a lot of negotiating the injured party agreed to grant me forgiveness if I consented to ask him for it in public, on my knees, and to spend a month doing penance in the monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, a kind of prison where the inmates lived at their own expense. My uncle was delighted by this compromise, hoping that the brothers at the monastery would have a salutary influence on me.
“God is awaiting you,” he said to me. “Take advantage of His overtures, and keep in mind that hell is ready to devour you.”
He commended me to the prior, to whom he gave some money to have masses said for me; then he left me. I couldn’t say all I suffered from the brothers charged with reconciling me to God. They showed me clearly that I was damned and that my crime was unpardonable. Young and credulous, I believed everything they said, and my repentance was sincere and profound. Every morning, humbly, I offered my back up to flagellation, and so that the reparation would be proportionate to the injury I had caused I wore a hair shirt armed with small iron spikes. I submitted to everything with resignation, always thinking the devil was at my heels, since I believed everything they told me. This fear was so strong that every night my sleep was troubled by dreadful visions. I was forced to make a general confession, and I admitted that several times my classmates had lent me some fairly immoral books. The priest assured me that I would be damned and that the devil would take me away body and soul if I didn’t parry the blows by dint of prayer and charity. I had no choice. I emptied my purse into the good father’s hands and, to be done with the devil, I submitted to fasts and to all of the rigors of penitence.
“See, my son,” the confessor said to me, “for these four écus[3] you have given me I will say four messes at an altar blessed by His Holiness Pope Pius V. Your soul will be better off for it, but be sure to mortify your body.”
I promised him I would, and I kept my word. Happily, my confinement was coming to an end. The day before my deliverance, I received the sacrament, and not once during the entire ceremony could I keep from breaking into tears. The next day, my uncle arrived, and hiding his surprise, caused by the leanness of my face, he said:
“Religious discipline was good for you. You’re no longer in a state of mortal sin, and your face looks sweeter and more delicate.”
We left the monastery, and he took me by carriage to the college, where, on my knees, I offered a public apology to my teacher, who took advantage of the occasion to remind the students of the respect due his dignity and his character.