Chapter Chapter 1 · Chapter One

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 Cæsar 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 _Encyclopædia_ 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.

_MILAN IN 1796_

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 majordomo 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, Gina 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 airs 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 in 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

men 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.[6] 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 Giovita, 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 him 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 three 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.

[Footnote 6: By the local custom, borrowed from Germany, this title is

given to every son of a Marchese; _Contino_ to the son of a Conte,

_Contessina_ to the daughter of a Conte, etc.]