Although Grenoble-born, Stendhal characterized himself as a Parisian. In turn, he longed to be an Italian. He arrived in 1800 as part of Napoleon’s army. He never wanted to leave.
These nine tales compiled as Italian Chronicles, mostly written in the 1830s, display his restless style. He integrates historical records with fictional melodrama. He places rogues and heroines in stylized settings. Convents loom as fortresses. Imprisoned lovers yearn for rescue. Foes plot revenge.
Within this swirl of reporting and invention, Stendhal idealizes liberty. As Raymond MacKenzie introduces his translations (four entries appear for the first time in English), Stendhal keeps “slipping in and out of the roles of reader, translator, chronicler, and editor.” He inveighs against his native land’s endemic vanity, while he praises his adopted country for its passion, its convictions, and the “piquancy” of truth in these tales. Even if he admits “a third of these stories are scarcely worth the trouble of copying them out.”
He contrasts the necessity of literary endeavor against the situation in “young America”. There, “where all passions are subordinated to the cult of the dollar,” his efforts would find rejection. Better to remain in Italy, for Stendhal insists in his preface that there the human heart finds itself worthy of inquiries. Or it had, once upon a time.
“Vanina Vanini” begins the collection. One Missirilli youth, at age 19, “loved the way one loves when one is in love for the first time.” His Roman object of affection sniffs when her swain appears to value patriotism and freedom above his courtship. “‘Really,’ she said to him, ‘you love me like a husband; this is not what I deserve.'” This displays the feverish pace of Stendhal, matched to its plot.
However, he warns before commencing “Vittoria Accoramboni” that a “generous reader” must not “expect to find here a spicy style, fast-paced and glittering with fashionable allusions to the latest ways of feeling; above all, do not expect the kind of seductive emotions you find in a George Sand novel.” This pales next to the “hideous” portrait of the Cenci family, and a scandal that rivals today’s lurid melodrama in a true-crime documentary. Sexual abuse, exploitation of a teenage daughter, suggestions of incest, and family vengeance permeate a sordid, steamy saga of sin and death.
While “The Cenci” draws one in by its squalid tragedy and moral tension, “The Duchess of Palliano” limns the Italian “passion that seeks but its own satisfaction”. This “requires action, not words”. The French have become incapable of such sincerity, but the Italians, at least two or three centuries before, proved themselves capable of swashbuckling deeds and prosy proclamations at midnight.
Nearly a novella, “The Abbess of Castro” features the Carafa clan, a landed family entangled in the papal lands and the Vatican’s power plays. Brigands, seducers, nobles, and nuns battle it out herein.
Consider Stendhal’s summation of one Elend di Campirelli, a suitor from the 1570s: “The best that one can say about him is that his face was expressive without being handsome.” Stendhal brings a dour modern sensibility to his historical re-creations. He bemoans how standards of chivalry and chicanery have fallen since then, but he enlivens his entertaining narratives with more than one showdown that for a lesser teller might have sufficed as the climactic scene. In this installment, a night raid on a fortified convent is but the first clash. Much later in this, the titular character’s next suitor “wore a certain expression of stupidly happy triumph”, at least in the eyes of the sisterhood.
Rage, disgust, rejection, and still more boastful vanities continue in the shorter stories, some fragments, appended by MacKenzie. He labels these as displaying Stendhal’s “discontinuous style”. Scheming servants, scurrilous soldiers of fortune, and scions of the conniving dynasties of the Orsini, Colonna, and Medici rush into these inclusions, some unfinished. His editor reasons that Stendhal sought to keep the sense that they were hastily jotted down, and left for a tidying up that never came.
Those who enjoyed The Charterhouse of Parma when Richard Howard presented that novel in lively, direct English at the close of the last century may find this new contribution to the Italian Stendhal worthwhile. It remains rugged rather than polished in MacKenzie’s arch rendering. But as the author insists, the intensity of these reimagined Italian lovers, fighters, and plotters is best captured bluntly.