On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into
Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before
crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all
these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles
of gallantry and genius of which Italy was a witness in the space
of a few months aroused a slumbering people; only a week before the
arrival of the French, the Milanese still regarded them as a mere
rabble of brigands, accustomed invariably to flee before the troops
of His Imperial and Royal Majesty; so much at least was reported to
them three times weekly by a little news-sheet no bigger than one's
hand, and printed on soiled paper.
In the Middle Ages the Republicans of Lombardy had given proof
of a valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their
city rased to the ground by the German Emperors. Since they had
become loyal subjects, their great occupation was the
printing of sonnets upon handkerchiefs of rose-coloured taffeta
whenever the marriage occurred of a young lady belonging to some
rich or noble family. Two or three years after that great event in
her life, the young lady in question used to engage a devoted
admirer: sometimes the name of the cicisbeo chosen by the
husband's family occupied an honourable place in the marriage
contract. It was a far cry from these effeminate ways to the
profound emotions aroused by the unexpected arrival of the French
army. Presently there sprang up a new and passionate way of life. A
whole people discovered, on the 15th of May, 1796, that everything
which until then it had respected was supremely ridiculous, if not
actually hateful. The departure of the last Austrian regiment
marked the collapse of the old ideas: to risk one's life became the
fashion. People saw that in order to be really happy after
centuries of cloying sensations, it was necessary to love one's
country with a real love and to seek out heroic actions. They had
been plunged in the darkest night by the continuation of the
jealous despotism of Charles V and Philip II; they overturned these
monarchs' statues and immediately found themselves flooded with
daylight. For the last half-century, as the Encyclopaedia
and Voltaire gained ground in France, the monks had been dinning
into the ears of the good people of Milan that to learn to read, or
for that matter to learn anything at all was a great waste of
labour, and that by paying one's exact tithe to one's parish priest
and faithfully reporting to him all one's little misdeeds, one was
practically certain of having a good place in Paradise. To complete
the debilitation of this people once so formidable and so rational,
Austria had sold them, on easy terms, the privilege of not having
to furnish any recruits to her army.
In 1796, the Milanese army was composed of four and twenty
rapscallions dressed in scarlet, who guarded the town with the
assistance of four magnificent regiments of Hungarian Grenadiers.
Freedom of morals was extreme, but passion very rare; otherwise,
apart from the inconvenience of having to repeat everything to
one's parish priest, on pain of ruin even in this world, the good
people of Milan were still subjected to certain little monarchical
interferences which could not fail to be vexatious. For instance,
the Archduke, who resided at Milan and governed in the name of the
Emperor, his cousin, had had the lucrative idea of trading in corn.
In consequence, an order prohibiting the peasants from selling
their grain until His Highness had filled his granaries.
In May, 1796, three days after the entry of the French, a young
painter in miniature, slightly mad, named Gros, afterwards famous,
who had come with the army, overhearing in the great Caffè dei
Servi (which was then in fashion) an account of the exploits of the
Archduke, who moreover was extremely stout, picked up the list of
ices which was printed on a sheet of coarse yellow paper. On the
back of this he drew the fat Archduke; a French soldier was
stabbing him with his bayonet in the stomach, and instead of blood
there gushed out an incredible quantity of corn. What we call a
lampoon or caricature was unknown in this land of crafty
'despotism. The drawing, left by Gros on the table of the Caffè dei
Servi, seemed a miracle fallen from heaven; it was engraved and
printed during the night, and next day twenty thousand copies of it
were sold.
The same day, there were posted up notices of a forced loan of
six millions, levied to supply the needs of the French army which,
having just won six battles and conquered a score of provinces,
wanted nothing now but shoes, breeches, jackets and caps.
The mass of prosperity and pleasure which burst into Lombardy in
the wake of these French ragamuffins was so great that only the
priests and a few nobles were conscious of the burden of this levy
of six millions, shortly to be followed by a number of others.
These French soldiers laughed and sang all day long; they were all
under twenty-five years of age, and their Commander in Chief, who
had reached twenty-seven, was reckoned the oldest man in his army.
This gaiety, this youthfulness, this irresponsibility furnished a
jocular reply to the furious preachings of the monks, who, for six
months, had been announcing from the pulpit that the French were
monsters, obliged, upon pain of death, to burn down everything and
to cut off everyone's head. With this object, each of their
regiments marched with a guillotine at its head.
In the country districts one saw at the cottage doors the French
soldier engaged in dandling the housewife's baby in his arms, and
almost every evening some drummer, scraping a fiddle, would
improvise a ball. Our country dances proving a great deal too
skilful and complicated for the soldiers, who for that matter
barely knew them themselves, to be able to teach them to the women
of the country, it was the latter who shewed the young Frenchmen
the Monferrina, Salterello and other Italian
dances.
The officers had been lodged, as far as possible, with the
wealthy inhabitants; they had every need of comfort. A certain
lieutenant, for instance, named Robert, received a billeting order
on the palazzo of the Marchesa del Dongo. This officer, a
young conscript not over-burdened with scruples, possessed as his
whole worldly wealth, when he entered this palazzo, a
scudo of six francs which he had received at Piacenza. After the
crossing of the Bridge of Lodi he had taken from a fine Austrian
officer, killed by a ball, a magnificent pair of nankeen
pantaloons, quite new, and never did any garment come more
opportunely. His officer's epaulettes were of wool, and the cloth
of his tunic was stitched to the lining of the sleeves so that its
scraps might hold together; but there was something even more
distressing; the soles of his shoes were made out of pieces of
soldiers' caps, likewise picked up on the field of battle,
somewhere beyond the Bridge of Lodi. These makeshift soles were
tied on over his shoes with pieces of string which were plainly
visible, so that when the major-domo appeared at the door of
Lieutenant Robert's room bringing him an invitation to dine with
the Signora Marchesa, the officer was thrown into the utmost
confusion. He and his orderly spent the two hours that divided him
from this fatal dinner in trying to patch up the tunic a little and
in dyeing black, with ink, those wretched strings round his shoes.
At last the dread moment arrived. "Never in my life did I feel more
ill at ease," Lieutenant Robert told me; "the ladies expected that
I would terrify them, and I was trembling far more than they were.
I looked down at my shoes and did not know how to walk gracefully.
The Marchesa del Dongo," he went on, "was then in the full bloom of
her beauty: you have seen her for yourself, with those lovely eyes
of an angelic sweetness, and the dusky gold of her hair which made
such a perfect frame for the oval of that charming face. I had in
my room a Herodias by Leonardo da Vinci, which might have
been her portrait. Mercifully, I was so overcome by her
supernatural beauty that I forgot all about my clothes. For the
last two years I had been seeing nothing that was not ugly and
wretched, in the mountains behind Genoa: I ventured to say a few
words to her to express my delight.
"But I had too much sense to waste any time upon compliments. As
I was turning my phrases I saw, in a dining-room built entirely of
marble, a dozen flunkeys and footmen dressed in what seemed to me
then the height of magnificence. Just imagine, the rascals had not
only good shoes on their feet, but silver buckles as well. I could
see them all, out of the corner of my eye, staring stupidly at my
coat and perhaps at my shoes also, which cut me to the heart. I
could have frightened all these fellows with a word; but how was I
to put them in their place without running the risk of offending
the ladies? For the Marchesa, to fortify her own courage a little,
as she has told me a hundred times since, had sent to fetch from
the convent where she was still at school Gina del Dongo, her
husband's sister, who was afterwards that charming Contessa
Pietranera: no one, in prosperity, surpassed her in gaiety and
sweetness of temper, just as no one surpassed her in courage and
serenity of soul when fortune turned against her.
"Gina, who at that time might have been thirteen but looked more
like eighteen, a lively, downright girl, as you know, was in such
fear of bursting out laughing at the sight of my costume that she
dared not eat; the Marchesa, on the other hand, loaded me with
constrained civilities; she could see quite well the movements of
impatience in my eyes. In a word, I cut a sorry figure, I chewed
the bread of scorn, a thing which is said to be impossible for a
Frenchman. At length, a heaven-sent idea shone in my mind: I set to
work to tell the ladies of my poverty and of what we had suffered
for the last two years in the mountains behind Genoa where we were
kept by idiotic old Generals. There, I told them, we were paid in
assignats which were not legal tender in the country, and
given three ounces of bread daily. I had not been speaking for two
minutes before there were tears in the good Marchesa's eyes, and
Gina had grown serious.
"'What, Lieutenant,' she broke in, 'three ounces of bread!'
"'Yes, Signorina; but to make up for that the issue ran short
three days in the week, and as the peasants on whom we were
billeted were even worse off than ourselves, we used to hand on
some of our bread to them.'
"On leaving the table, I offered the Marchesa my arm as far as
the door of the drawing-room, then hurried back and gave the
servant who had waited upon me at dinner that solitary scudo of six
francs upon the spending of which I had built so many castles in
the air.
"A week later," Robert went on, "when it was satisfactorily
established that the French were not guillotining anyone, the
Marchese del Dongo returned from his castle of Grianta on the Lake
of Como, to which he had gallantly retired on the approach of the
army, abandoning to the fortunes of war his young and beautiful
wife and his sister. The hatred that this Marchese felt for us was
equal to his fear, that is to say immeasurable: his fat face, pale
and pious, was an amusing spectacle when he was being polite to me.
On the day after his return to Milan, I received three ells of
cloth and two hundred francs out of the levy of six millions; I
renewed my wardrobe, and became cavalier to the ladies, for the
season of balls was beginning."
Lieutenant Robert's story was more or less that of all the
French troops; instead of laughing at the wretched plight of these
poor soldiers, people were sorry for them and came to love
them.
This period of unlooked-for happiness and wild excitement lasted
but two short years; the frenzy had been so excessive and so
general that it would be impossible for me to give any idea of it,
were it not for this historical and profound reflexion: these
people had been living in a state of boredom for the last hundred
years.
The thirst for pleasure natural in southern countries had
prevailed in former times at the court of the Visconti and Sforza,
those famous Dukes of Milan. But from the year 1524, when the
Spaniards conquered the Milanese, and conquered them as taciturn,
suspicious, arrogant masters, always in dread of revolt, gaiety had
fled. The subject race, adopting the manners of their masters,
thought more of avenging the least insult by a dagger-blow than of
enjoying the fleeting hour.
This frenzied joy, this gaiety, this thirst for pleasure, this
tendency to forget every sad or even reasonable feeling, were
carried to such a pitch, between the 15th of May, 1796, when the
French entered Milan, and April, 1799, when they were driven out
again after the battle of Cassano, that instances have been cited
of old millionaire merchants, old money-lenders, old scriveners
who, during this interval, quite forgot to pull long faces and to
amass money.
At the most it would have been possible to point to a few
families belonging to the higher ranks of the nobility, who had
retired to their palaces in the country, as though in a sullen
revolt against the prevailing high spirits and the expansion of
every heart. It is true that these noble and wealthy families had
been given a distressing prominence in the allocation of the forced
loans exacted for the French army.
The Marchese del Dongo, irritated by the spectacle of so much
gaiety, had been one of the first to return to his magnificent
castle of Grianta, on the farther side of Como, whither his ladies
took with them Lieutenant Robert. This castle, standing in a
position which is perhaps unique in the world, on a plateau one
hundred and fifty feet above that sublime lake, a great part of
which it commands, had been originally a fortress. The del Dongo
family had constructed it in the fifteenth century, as was
everywhere attested by marble tablets charged with their arms; one
could still see the drawbridges and deep moats, though the latter,
it must be admitted, had been drained of their water; but with its
walls eighty feet in height and six in thickness, this castle was
safe from assault, and it was for this reason that it was dear to
the timorous Marchese. Surrounded by some twenty-five or thirty
retainers whom he supposed to be devoted to his person, presumably
because he never opened his mouth except to curse them, he was less
tormented by fear than at Milan.
This fear was not altogether groundless: he was in most active
correspondence with a spy posted by Austria on the Swiss frontier
three leagues from Grianta, to contrive the escape of the prisoners
taken on the field of battle; conduct which might have been viewed
in a serious light by the French Generals.
The Marchese had left his young wife at Milan; she looked after
the affairs of the family there, and was responsible for providing
the sums levied on the casa del Dongo (as they say in
Italy) ; she sought to have these reduced, which obliged her
to visit those of the nobility who had accepted public office, and
even some highly influential persons who were not of noble birth. A
great event now occurred in this family. The Marchese had arranged
the marriage of his young sister Gina with a personage of great
wealth and the very highest birth; but he powdered his hair; in
virtue of which, Ghia received him with shouts of laughter, and
presently took the rash step of marrying the Conte Pietranera. He
was, it is true, a very fine gentleman, of the most personable
appearance, but ruined for generations past in estate, and to
complete the disgrace of the match, a fervent supporter of the new
ideas. Pietranera was a sub-lieutenant in the Italian Legion; this
was the last straw for the Marchese.
After these two years of folly and happiness, the Directory in
Paris, giving itself the ate of a sovereign firmly enthroned, began
to shew a mortal hatred of everything that was not commonplace. The
incompetent Generals whom it imposed on the Army of Italy lost a
succession of battles on those same plains of Verona, which had
witnessed two years before the prodigies of Arcole and Lonato. The
Austrians again drew near to Milan; Lieutenant Robert, who had been
promoted to the command of a battalion and had been wounded at the
battle of Cassano, came to lodge for the last time in the house of
his friend the Marchesa del Dongo. Their parting was a sad one;
Robert set forth with Conte Pietranera, who followed the French in
their retirement on Novi. The young Contessa, to whom her brother
refused to pay her marriage portion, followed the army, riding in a
cart.
Then began that period of reaction and a return to the old
ideas, which the Milanese call i tredici mesi (the
thirteen months), because as it turned out their destiny willed
that this return to stupidity should endure for thirteen months
only, until Marengo. Everyone who was old, bigoted, morose,
reappeared at the head of affairs, and resumed the leadership of
society; presently the people who had remained faithful to the
sound doctrines published a report in the villages that Napoleon
had been hanged by the Mamelukes in Egypt, as he so richly
deserved.
Among these men who had retired to sulk on their estates and
came back now athirst for vengeance, the Marchese del Dongo
distinguished himself by his rabidity; the extravagance of his
sentiments carried him naturally to the head of his party. These
gentlemen, quite worthy people when they were not in a state of
panic, but who were always trembling, succeeded in getting round
the Austrian General: a good enough man at heart, he let himself be
persuaded that severity was the best policy, and ordered the arrest
of one hundred and fifty patriots: quite the best man to be found
in Italy at the time.
They were speedily deported to the Bocche di Cattaro, and, flung
into subterranean caves, the moisture and above all the want of
bread did prompt justice to each and all of these rascals.
The Marchese del Dongo had an exalted position, and, as he
combined with a host of other fine qualities a sordid avarice, he
would boast publicly that he never sent a scudo to his sister, the
Contessa Pietranera: still madly in love, she refused to leave her
husband, and was starving by his side in France. The good Marchesa
was in despair; finally she managed to abstract a few small
diamonds from her jewel case, which her husband took from her every
evening to stow away under his bed, in an iron coffer: the Marchesa
had brought him a dowry of 800,000 francs, and received 80 francs
monthly for her personal expenses. During the thirteen months in
which the French were absent from Milan, this most timid of women
found various pretexts and never went out of mourning.
We must 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 than Fabrizio
Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, as the style is at Milan. [1]
He had taken the trouble to be born just when the French were
driven out, and found himself, by the accident of birth, the second
son of that Marchese del Dongo who was so great a gentleman, and
with whose fat, pasty face, false smile and unbounded hatred for
the new ideas the reader is already acquainted. The whole of the
family fortune was already settled upon the elder son, Ascanio del
Dongo, the worthy image of his father. He was eight years old and
Fabrizio two when all of a sudden that General Bonaparte, whom
everyone of good family understood to have been hanged long ago,
came down from the Mont Saint-Bernard. He entered Milan: that
moment is still unique in history; imagine a whole populace madly
in love. A few days later, Napoleon won the battle of Marengo. The
rest needs no telling. The frenzy of the Milanese reached its
climax; but this time it was mingled with ideas of vengeance: these
good people had been taught to hate. Presently they saw arrive in
their midst all that remained of the patriots deported to the
Bocche di Cattaro; their return was celebrated with a national
festa. Their pale faces, their great startled eyes, their shrunken
limbs were in strange contrast to the joy that broke out on every
side. Their arrival was the signal for departure for the families
most deeply compromised. The Marchese del Dongo was one of the
first to flee to his castle of Grianta. The heads of the great
families were filled with hatred and fear; but their wives, their
daughters, remembered the joys of the former French occupation, and
thought with regret of Milan and those gay balls, which,
immediately after Marengo, were organised afresh at the casa
Tanzi. A few days after the victory, the French General
responsible for maintaining order in Lombardy discovered that all
the farmers on the noblemen's estates, all the old wives in the
villages, so far from still thinking of this astonishing victory at
Marengo, which had altered the destinies of Italy and recaptured
thirteen fortified positions in a single day, had their minds
occupied only by a prophecy of San Giovila, the principal Patron
Saint of Brescia. According to this inspired utterance, the
prosperity of France and of Napoleon was to cease just thirteen
weeks after Marengo. What does to some extent excuse the Marchese
del Dongo and all the nobles sulking on their estates is that
literally and without any affectation they believed in the
prophecy. Not one of these gentlemen had read as many as four
volumes in his life; quite openly they were making their
preparations to return to Milan at the end of the thirteen weeks;
but time, as it went on, recorded fresh successes for the cause of
France. Returning to Paris, Napoleon, by wise decrees, saved the
country from revolution at home as he had saved it from its foreign
enemies at Marengo. Then the Lombard nobles, in the safe shelter of
their castles, discovered that at first they had misinterpreted the
prophecy of the holy patron of Brescia; it was a question not of
thirteen weeks, but of thirteen months. The thirteen months went
by, and the prosperity of France seemed to increase daily.
We pass lightly over ten years of progress and happiness, from
1800 to 1810. Fabrizio spent the first part of this decade at the
castle of Grianta, giving and receiving an abundance of fisticuffs
among the little contadini of the village, and learning
nothing, not even how to read. Later on, he was sent to the Jesuit
College at Milan. The Marchese, his father, insisted on his being
shewn the Latin tongue, not on any account in the works of those
ancient writers who are always talking about Republics, but in a
magnificent volume adorned with more than a hundred engravings, a
masterpiece of seventeenth-century art; this was the Lathi
genealogy of the Valserra, Marchesi del Dongo, published in 1650 by
Fabrizio del Dongo, Archbishop of Parma. The fortunes of the
Valserra being pre-eminently military, the engravings represented
any number of battles, and everywhere one saw some hero of the name
dealing mighty blows with his sword. This book greatly delighted
the young Fabrizio. His mother, who adored him, obtained
permission, from time to time, to pay him a visit at Milan; but as
her husband never offered her any money for these journeys, it was
her sister-in-law, the charming Contessa Pietranera, who lent her
what she required. After the return of the French, the Contessa had
become one of the most brilliant ladies at the court of Prince
Eugène, the Viceroy of Italy.
When Fabrizio had made his First Communion, she obtained leave
from the Marchese, still in voluntary exile, to invite him out, now
and again, from his college. She found him unusual, thoughtful,
very serious, but a nice-looking boy and not at all out of place in
the drawing-room of a lady of fashion; otherwise, as ignorant as
one could wish, and barely able to write. The Contessa, who carried
her impulsive character into everything, promised her protection to
the head of the establishment provided that her nephew Fabrizio
made astounding progress and carried off a number of prizes at the
end of the year. So that he should be in a position to deserve
them, she used to send for bun every Saturday evening, and often
did not restore him to his masters until the following Wednesday or
Thursday. The Jesuits, although tenderly cherished by the Prince
Viceroy, were expelled from Italy by the laws of the Kingdom, and
the Superior of the College, an able man, was conscious of all that
might be made out of his relations with a woman all-powerful at
court. He never thought of complaining of the absences of Fabrizio,
who, more ignorant than ever, at the end of the year was awarded
five first prizes. This being so, the Contessa, escorted by her
husband, now the General commanding one of the Divisions of the
Guard, and by five or six of the most important personages at the
viceregal court, came to attend the prize-giving at the Jesuit
College. The Superior was complimented by his chiefs.
The Contessa took her nephew with her to all those brilliant
festivities which marked the too brief reign of the sociable Prince
Eugène. She had on her own authority created him an officer of
hussars, and Fabrizio, now twelve years old, wore that uniform. One
day the Contessa, enchanted by his handsome figure, besought the
Prince to give him a post as page, a request which implied that the
del Dongo family was coming round. Next day she had need of all her
credit to secure the Viceroy's kind consent not to remember this
request, which lacked only the consent of the prospective page's
father, and this consent would have been emphatically refused.
After this act of folly, which made the sullen Marchese shudder, he
found an excuse to recall young Fabrizio to Grianta. The Contessa
had a supreme contempt for her brother, she regarded him as a
melancholy fool, and one who would be troublesome if ever it lay in
his power. But she was madly fond of Fabrizio, and, after ten years
of silence, wrote to the Marchese reclaiming her nephew; her letter
was left unanswered.
On his return to this formidable palace, built by the most
bellicose of his ancestors, Fabrizio knew nothing in the world
except how to drill and how to sit on a horse. Conte Pietranera, as
fond of the boy as was his wife, used often to put him on a horse
and take him with him on parade.
On reaching the castle of Grianta, Fabrizio, his eyes still red
with the tears that he had shed on leaving his aunt's fine rooms,
found only the passionate caresses of his mother and sisters. The
Marchese was closeted in his study with his elder son, the
Marchesino Ascanio; there they composed letters in cipher which had
the honour to be forwarded to Vienna; father and son appeared in
public only at meal-times. The Marchese used ostentatiously to
repeat that he was teaching his natural successor to keep, by
double entry, the accounts of the produce of each of his estates.
As a matter of fact, the Marchese was too jealous of his own power
ever to speak of these matters to a son, the necessary inheritor of
all these entailed properties. He employed him to cipher despatches
of fifteen or twenty pages which two or throe times weekly he had
conveyed into Switzerland, where they were put on the road for
Vienna. The Marchese claimed to inform his rightful Sovereign of
the internal condition of the Kingdom of Italy, of which he himself
knew nothing, and his letters were invariably most successful, for
the following reason: the Marchese would have a count taken on the
high road, by some trusted agent, of the number of men in a certain
French or Italian regiment that was changing its station, and in
reporting the fact to the court of Vienna would take care to reduce
by at least a quarter the number of the troops on the march. These
letters, in other respects absurd, had the merit of contradicting
others of greater accuracy, and gave pleasure. And so, a short time
before Fabrizio's arrival at the castle, the Marchese had received
the star of a famous order: it was the fifth to adorn his
Chamberlain's coat. As a matter of fact, he suffered from the
chagrin of not daring to sport this garment outside his study; but
he never allowed himself to dictate a despatch without first
putting on the gold-laced coat, studded with all his orders. He
would have felt himself to be wanting in respect had he acted
otherwise.
The Marchesa was amazed by her son's graces. But she had kept up
the habit of writing two or three times every year to General Comte
d'A——, which was the title now borne by Lieutenant Robert. The
Marchesa had a horror of lying to the people to whom she was
attached; she examined her son and was appalled by his
ignorance.
"If he appears to me to have learned little," she said to
herself, "to me who know nothing, Robert, who is so clever, would
find that his education had been entirely neglected; and in these
days one must have merit." Another peculiarity, which astonished
her almost as much, was that Fabrizio had taken seriously all the
religious teaching that had been instilled into him by the Jesuits.
Although very pious herself, the fanaticism of this child made her
shudder; "If the Marchese has the sense to discover this way of
influencing him, he will take my son's affection from me." She wept
copiously, and her passion for Fabrizio was thereby increased.
Life in this castle, peopled by thirty or forty servants, was
extremely dull; accordingly Fabrizio spent all his days in pursuit
of game or exploring the lake in a boat. Soon he was on intimate
terms with the coachmen and grooms; these were all hot supporters
of the French, and laughed openly at the pious valets, attached to
the person of the Marchese or to that of his elder son. The great
theme for wit at the expense of these solemn personages was that,
in imitation of their masters, they powdered their heads.