Celebrated Crimes, Complete

A >> Alexandre Dumas, Pere >> Celebrated Crimes, Complete

CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE

BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

IN EIGHT VOLUMES




CONTENTS:

THE BORGIAS
THE CENCI
MASSACRES OF THE SOUTH
MARY STUART
KARL-LUDWIG SAND
URBAIN GRANDIER
NISIDA
DERUES
LA CONSTANTIN
JOAN OF NAPLES
THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (The Essay, not the Novel)
MARTIN GUERRE
ALI PACHA
THE COUNTESS DE SAINT GERAN
MURAT
THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS
VANINKA
THE MARQUISE DE GANGES




NOTE:

Dumas's 'Celebrated Crimes' was not written for children. The novelist
has spared no language--has minced no words--to describe the violent
scenes of a violent time.

In some instances facts appear distorted out of their true perspective,
and in others the author makes unwarranted charges. It is not within our
province to edit the historical side of Dumas, any more than it would be
to correct the obvious errors in Dickens's Child's History of England.
The careful, mature reader, for whom the books are intended, will
recognize, and allow for, this fact.




INTRODUCTION

The contents of these volumes of 'Celebrated Crimes', as well as the
motives which led to their inception, are unique. They are a series of
stories based upon historical records, from the pen of Alexandre Dumas,
pere, when he was not "the elder," nor yet the author of D'Artagnan or
Monte Cristo, but was a rising young dramatist and a lion in the literary
set and world of fashion.

Dumas, in fact, wrote his 'Crimes Celebres' just prior to launching upon
his wonderful series of historical novels, and they may therefore be
considered as source books, whence he was to draw so much of that
far-reaching and intimate knowledge of inner history which has
perennially astonished his readers. The Crimes were published in Paris,
in 1839-40, in eight volumes, comprising eighteen titles--all of which
now appear in the present carefully translated text. The success of the
original work was instantaneous. Dumas laughingly said that he thought
he had exhausted the subject of famous crimes, until the work was off the
press, when he immediately became deluged with letters from every
province in France, supplying him with material upon other deeds of
violence! The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both
historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving
the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which
existed in Europe, during the middle ages. "The Borgias, the Cenci,
Urbain Grandier, the Marchioness of Brinvilliers, the Marchioness of
Ganges, and the rest--what subjects for the pen of Dumas!" exclaims
Garnett.

Space does not permit us to consider in detail the material here
collected, although each title will be found to present points of special
interest. The first volume comprises the annals of the Borgias and the
Cenci. The name of the noted and notorious Florentine family has become
a synonym for intrigue and violence, and yet the Borgias have not been
without stanch defenders in history.

Another famous Italian story is that of the Cenci. The beautiful
Beatrice Cenci--celebrated in the painting of Guido, the sixteenth
century romance of Guerrazi, and the poetic tragedy of Shelley, not to
mention numerous succeeding works inspired by her hapless fate--will
always remain a shadowy figure and one of infinite pathos.

The second volume chronicles the sanguinary deeds in the south of France,
carried on in the name of religion, but drenching in blood the fair
country round about Avignon, for a long period of years.

The third volume is devoted to the story of Mary Queen of Scots, another
woman who suffered a violent death, and around whose name an endless
controversy has waged. Dumas goes carefully into the dubious episodes of
her stormy career, but does not allow these to blind his sympathy for her
fate. Mary, it should be remembered, was closely allied to France by
education and marriage, and the French never forgave Elizabeth the part
she played in the tragedy.

The fourth volume comprises three widely dissimilar tales. One of the
strangest stories is that of Urbain Grandier, the innocent victim of a
cunning and relentless religious plot. His story was dramatised by
Dumas, in 1850. A famous German crime is that of Karl-Ludwig Sand, whose
murder of Kotzebue, Councillor of the Russian Legation, caused an
international upheaval which was not to subside for many years.

An especially interesting volume is number six, containing, among other
material, the famous "Man in the Iron Mask." This unsolved puzzle of
history was later incorporated by Dumas in one of the D'Artagnan Romances
a section of the Vicomte de Bragelonne, to which it gave its name. But
in this later form, the true story of this singular man doomed to wear an
iron vizor over his features during his entire lifetime could only be
treated episodically. While as a special subject in the Crimes, Dumas
indulges his curiosity, and that of his reader, to the full. Hugo's
unfinished tragedy,'Les Jumeaux', is on the same subject; as also are
others by Fournier, in French, and Zschokke, in German.

Other stories can be given only passing mention. The beautiful poisoner,
Marquise de Brinvilliers, must have suggested to Dumas his later portrait
of Miladi, in the Three Musketeers, the mast celebrated of his woman
characters. The incredible cruelties of Ali Pacha, the Turkish despot,
should not be charged entirely to Dumas, as he is said to have been
largely aided in this by one of his "ghosts," Mallefille.

"Not a mere artist"--writes M. de Villemessant, founder of the
Figaro,--"he has nevertheless been able to seize on those dramatic
effects which have so much distinguished his theatrical career, and to
give those sharp and distinct reproductions of character which alone can
present to the reader the mind and spirit of an age. Not a mere
historian, he has nevertheless carefully consulted the original sources
of information, has weighed testimonies, elicited theories, and . . .
has interpolated the poetry of history with its most thorough prose."




THE BORGIAS




PROLOGUE

On the 8th of April, 1492, in a bedroom of the Carneggi Palace, about
three miles from Florence, were three men grouped about a bed whereon a
fourth lay dying.

The first of these three men, sitting at the foot of the bed, and half
hidden, that he might conceal his tears, in the gold-brocaded curtains,
was Ermolao Barbaro, author of the treatise 'On Celibacy', and of
'Studies in Pliny': the year before, when he was at Rome in the capacity
of ambassador of the Florentine Republic, he had been appointed Patriarch
of Aquileia by Innocent VIII.

The second, who was kneeling and holding one hand of the dying man
between his own, was Angelo Poliziano, the Catullus of the fifteenth
century, a classic of the lighter sort, who in his Latin verses might
have been mistaken for a poet of the Augustan age.

The third, who was standing up and leaning against one of the twisted
columns of the bed-head, following with profound sadness the progress of
the malady which he read in the face of his departing friend, was the
famous Pico della Mirandola, who at the age of twenty could speak
twenty-two languages, and who had offered to reply in each of these
languages to any seven hundred questions that might be put to him by the
twenty most learned men in the whole world, if they could be assembled at
Florence.

The man on the bed was Lorenzo the Magnificent, who at the beginning of
the year had been attacked by a severe and deep-seated fever, to which
was added the gout, a hereditary ailment in his family. He had found at
last that the draughts containing dissolved pearls which the quack
doctor, Leoni di Spoleto, prescribed for him (as if he desired to adapt
his remedies rather to the riches of his patient than to his necessities)
were useless and unavailing, and so he had come to understand that he
must part from those gentle-tongued women of his, those sweet-voiced
poets, his palaces and their rich hangings; therefore he had summoned to
give him absolution for his sins--in a man of less high place they might
perhaps have been called crimes--the Dominican, Giralamo Francesco
Savonarola.

It was not, however, without an inward fear, against which the praises of
his friends availed nothing, that the pleasure-seeker and usurper awaited
that severe and gloomy preacher by whose word's all Florence was stirred,
and on whose pardon henceforth depended all his hope far another world.

Indeed, Savonarola was one of those men of stone, coming, like the statue
of the Commandante, to knock at the door of a Don Giovanni, and in the
midst of feast and orgy to announce that it is even now the moment to
begin to think of Heaven. He had been barn at Ferrara, whither his
family, one of the most illustrious of Padua, had been called by Niccolo,
Marchese d'Este, and at the age of twenty-three, summoned by an
irresistible vocation, had fled from his father's house, and had taken
the vows in the cloister of Dominican monks at Florence. There, where he
was appointed by his superiors to give lessons in philosophy, the young
novice had from the first to battle against the defects of a voice that
was both harsh and weak, a defective pronunciation, and above all, the
depression of his physical powers, exhausted as they were by too severe
abstinence.

Savonarala from that time condemned himself to the most absolute
seclusion, and disappeared in the depths of his convent, as if the slab
of his tomb had already fallen over him. There, kneeling on the flags,
praying unceasingly before a wooden crucifix, fevered by vigils and
penances, he soon passed out of contemplation into ecstasy, and began to
feel in himself that inward prophetic impulse which summoned him to
preach the reformation of the Church.

Nevertheless, the reformation of Savonarola, more reverential than
Luther's, which followed about five-and-twenty years later, respected the
thing while attacking the man, and had as its aim the altering of
teaching that was human, not faith that was of God. He did not work,
like the German monk, by reasoning, but by enthusiasm. With him logic
always gave way before inspiration: he was not a theologian, but a
prophet. Yet, although hitherto he had bowed his head before the
authority of the Church, he had already raised it against the temporal
power. To him religion and liberty appeared as two virgins equally
sacred; so that, in his view, Lorenzo in subjugating the one was as
culpable as Pope Innocent VIII in dishonouring the other. The result of
this was that, so long as Lorenzo lived in riches, happiness, and
magnificence, Savonarola had never been willing, whatever entreaties were
made, to sanction by his presence a power which he considered
illegitimate. But Lorenzo on his deathbed sent for him, and that was
another matter. The austere preacher set forth at once, bareheaded and
barefoot, hoping to save not only the soul of the dying man but also the
liberty of the republic.

Lorenzo, as we have said, was awaiting the arrival of Savonarola with an
impatience mixed with uneasiness; so that, when he heard the sound of his
steps, his pale face took a yet more deathlike tinge, while at the same
time he raised himself on his elbow and ordered his three friends to go
away. They obeyed at once, and scarcely had they left by one door than
the curtain of the other was raised, and the monk, pale, immovable,
solemn, appeared on the threshold. When he perceived him, Lorenzo dei
Medici, reading in his marble brow the inflexibility of a statue, fell
back on his bed, breathing a sigh so profound that one might have
supposed it was his last.

The monk glanced round the room as though to assure himself that he was
really alone with the dying man; then he advanced with a slow and solemn
step towards the bed. Lorenzo watched his approach with terror; then,
when he was close beside him, he cried:

"O my father, I have been a very great sinner!"

"The mercy of God is infinite," replied the monk; "and I come into your
presence laden with the divine mercy."

"You believe, then, that God will forgive my sins?" cried the dying man,
renewing his hope as he heard from the lips of the monk such unexpected
words.

"Your sins and also your crimes, God will forgive them all," replied
Savonarola. "God will forgive your vanities, your adulterous pleasures,
your obscene festivals; so much for your sins. God will forgive you for
promising two thousand florins reward to the man who should bring you the
head of Dietisalvi, Nerone Nigi, Angelo Antinori, Niccalo Soderini, and
twice the money if they were handed over alive; God will forgive you for
dooming to the scaffold or the gibbet the son of Papi Orlandi, Francesco
di Brisighella, Bernardo Nardi, Jacopo Frescobaldi, Amoretto
Baldovinetti, Pietro Balducci, Bernardo di Banding, Francesco
Frescobaldi, and more than three hundred others whose names were none the
less dear to Florence because they were less renowned; so much far your
crimes." And at each of these names which Savonarala pronounced slowly,
his eyes fixed on the dying man, he replied with a groan which proved the
monk's memory to be only too true. Then at last, when he had finished,
Lorenzo asked in a doubtful tone:

"Then do you believe, my father, that God will forgive me everything,
both my sins and my crimes?"

"Everything," said Savonarola, "but on three conditions."

"What are they?" asked the dying man.

"The first," said Savonarola, "is that you feel a complete faith in the
power and the mercy of God."

"My father," replied Lorenzo eagerly, "I feel this faith in the very
depths of my heart."

"The second," said Savonarola, "is that you give back the property of
others which you have unjustly confiscated and kept."

"My father, shall I have time?" asked the dying man.

"God will give it to you," replied the monk.

Lorenzo shut his eyes, as though to reflect more at his ease; then, after
a moment's silence, he replied:

"Yes, my father, I will do it."

"The third," resumed Savonarola, "is that you restore to the republic her
ancient independence end her farmer liberty."

Lorenzo sat up on his bed, shaken by a convulsive movement, and
questioned with his eyes the eyes of the Dominican, as though he would
find out if he had deceived himself and not heard aright. Savonarola
repeated the same words.

"Never! never!" exclaimed Lorenzo, falling back on his bed and shaking
his head,--"never!"

The monk, without replying a single word, made a step to withdraw.

"My father, my father," said the dying man, "do not leave me thus: have
pity on me!"

"Have pity on Florence," said the monk.

"But, my father," cried Lorenzo, "Florence is free, Florence is happy."

"Florence is a slave, Florence is poor," cried Savonarola, "poor in
genius, poor in money, and poor in courage; poor in genius, because after
you, Lorenzo, will come your son Piero; poor in money, because from the
funds of the republic you have kept up the magnificence of your family
and the credit of your business houses; poor in courage, because you have
robbed the rightful magistrates of the authority which was
constitutionally theirs, and diverted the citizens from the double path
of military and civil life, wherein, before they were enervated by your
luxuries, they had displayed the virtues of the ancients; and therefore,
when the day shall dawn which is not far distant," continued the mark,
his eyes fixed and glowing as if he were reading in the future, "whereon
the barbarians shall descend from the mountains, the walls of our towns,
like those of Jericho, shall fall at the blast of their trumpets."

"And do you desire that I should yield up on my deathbed the power that
has made the glory of my whole life?" cried Lorenzo dei Medici.

"It is not I who desire it; it is the Lord," replied Savonarola coldly.

"Impossible, impossible!" murmured Lorenzo.

"Very well; then die as you have lived!" cried the monk, "in the midst of
your courtiers and flatterers; let them ruin your soul as they have
ruined your body!" And at these words, the austere Dominican, without
listening to the cries of the dying man, left the room as he had entered
it, with face and step unaltered; far above human things he seemed to
soar, a spirit already detached from the earth.

At the cry which broke from Lorenzo dei Medici when he saw him disappear,
Ermolao, Poliziano, and Pico delta Mirandola, who had heard all, returned
into the room, and found their friend convulsively clutching in his arms
a magnificent crucifix which he had just taken dawn from the bed-head.
In vain did they try to reassure him with friendly words. Lorenzo the
Magnificent only replied with sobs; and one hour after the scene which we
have just related, his lips clinging to the feet of the Christ, he
breathed his last in the arms of these three men, of whom the most
fortunate--though all three were young--was not destined to survive him
more than two years. "Since his death was to bring about many
calamities," says Niccolo Macchiavelli, "it was the will of Heaven to
show this by omens only too certain: the dome of the church of Santa
Regarata was struck by lightning, and Roderigo Borgia was elected pope."




CHAPTER I

Towards the end of the fifteenth century--that is to say, at the epoch
when our history opens the Piazza of St. Peter's at Rome was far from
presenting so noble an aspect as that which is offered in our own day to
anyone who approaches it by the Piazza dei Rusticucci.

In fact, the Basilica of Constantine existed no longer, while that of
Michael Angelo, the masterpiece of thirty popes, which cost the labour of
three centuries and the expense of two hundred and sixty millions,
existed not yet. The ancient edifice, which had lasted for eleven
hundred and forty-five years, had been threatening to fall in about 1440,
and Nicholas V, artistic forerunner of Julius II and Leo X, had had it
pulled down, together with the temple of Probus Anicius which adjoined
it. In their place he had had the foundations of a new temple laid by
the architects Rossellini and Battista Alberti; but some years later,
after the death of Nicholas V, Paul II, the Venetian, had not been able
to give more than five thousand crowns to continue the project of his
predecessor, and thus the building was arrested when it had scarcely
risen above the ground, and presented the appearance of a still-born
edifice, even sadder than that of a ruin.

As to the piazza itself, it had not yet, as the reader will understand
from the foregoing explanation, either the fine colonnade of Bernini, or
the dancing fountains, or that Egyptian obelisk which, according to
Pliny, was set up by the Pharaoh at Heliopolis, and transferred to Rome
by Caligula, who set it up in Nero's Circus, where it remained till 1586.
Now, as Nero's Circus was situate on the very ground where St. Peter's
now stands, and the base of this obelisk covered the actual site where
the vestry now is, it looked like a gigantic needle shooting up from the
middle of truncated columns, walls of unequal height, and half-carved
stones.

On the right of this building, a ruin from its cradle, arose the Vatican,
a splendid Tower of Babel, to which all the celebrated architects of the
Roman school contributed their work for a thousand years: at this epoch
the two magnificent chapels did not exist, nor the twelve great halls,
the two-and-twenty courts, the thirty staircases, and the two thousand
bedchambers; for Pope Sixtus V, the sublime swineherd, who did so many
things in a five years' reign, had not yet been able to add the immense
building which on the eastern side towers above the court of St.
Damasius; still, it was truly the old sacred edifice, with its venerable
associations, in which Charlemagne received hospitality when he was
crowned emperor by Pope Leo III.

All the same, on the 9th of August, 1492, the whole of Rome, from the
People's Gate to the Coliseum and from the Baths of Diocletian to the
castle of Sant' Angelo, seemed to have made an appointment on this
piazza: the multitude thronging it was so great as to overflow into all
the neighbouring streets, which started from this centre like the rays of
a star. The crowds of people, looking like a motley moving carpet, were
climbing up into the basilica, grouping themselves upon the stones,
hanging on the columns, standing up against the walls; they entered by
the doors of houses and reappeared at the windows, so numerous and so
densely packed that one might have said each window was walled up with
heads. Now all this multitude had its eyes fixed on one single point in
the Vatican; for in the Vatican was the Conclave, and as Innocent VIII
had been dead for sixteen days, the Conclave was in the act of electing a
pope.

Rome is the town of elections: since her foundation down to our own
day--that is to say, in the course of nearly twenty-six centuries--she
has constantly elected her kings, consuls, tribunes, emperors, and popes:
thus Rome during the days of Conclave appears to be attacked by a strange
fever which drives everyone to the Vatican or to Monte Cavallo, according
as the scarlet-robed assembly is held in one or the other of these two
palaces: it is, in fact, because the raising up of a new pontiff is a
great event far everybody; for, according to the average established in
the period between St. Peter and Gregory XVI, every pope lasts about
eight years, and these eight years, according to the character of the man
who is elected, are a period either of tranquillity or of disorder, of
justice or of venality, of peace or of war.

Never perhaps since the day when the first successor of St. Peter took
his seat on the, pontifical throne until the interregnum which now
occurred, had so great an agitation been shown as there was at this
moment, when, as we have shown, all these people were thronging on the
Piazza of St. Peter and in the streets which led to it. It is true that
this was not without reason; for Innocent VIII--who was called the father
of his people because he had added to his subjects eight sons and the
same number of daughters--had, as we have said, after living a life of
self-indulgence, just died, after a death-struggle during which, if the
journal of Stefano Infessura may be believed, two hundred and twenty
murders were committed in the streets of Rome. The authority had then
devolved in the customary way upon the Cardinal Camerlengo, who during
the interregnum had sovereign powers; but as he had been obliged to
fulfil all the duties of his office--that is, to get money coined in his
name and bearing his arms, to take the fisherman's ring from the finger
of the dead pope, to dress, shave and paint him, to have the corpse
embalmed, to lower the coffin after nine days' obsequies into the
provisional niche where the last deceased pope has to remain until his
successor comes to take his place and consign him to his final tomb;
lastly, as he had been obliged to wall up the door of the Conclave and
the window of the balcony from which the pontifical election is
proclaimed, he had not had a single moment for busying himself with the
police; so that the assassinations had continued in goodly fashion, and
there were loud cries for an energetic hand which should make all these
swords and all these daggers retire into their sheaths.

Now the eyes of this multitude were fixed, as we have said, upon the
Vatican, and particularly upon one chimney, from which would come the
first signal, when suddenly, at the moment of the 'Ave Maria'--that is to
say, at the hour when the day begins to decline--great cries went up from
all the crowd mixed with bursts of laughter, a discordant murmur of
threats and raillery, the cause being that they had just perceived at the
top of the chimney a thin smoke, which seemed like a light cloud to go up
perpendicularly into the sky. This smoke announced that Rome was still
without a master, and that the world still had no pope; for this was the
smoke of the voting tickets which were being burned, a proof that the
cardinals had not yet come to an agreement.

Scarcely had this smoke appeared, to vanish almost immediately, when all
the innumerable crowd, knowing well that there was nothing else to wait
for, and that all was said and done until ten o'clock the next morning,
the time when the cardinals had their first voting, went off in a tumult
of noisy joking, just as they would after the last rocket of a firework
display; so that at the end of one minute nobody was there where a
quarter of an hour before there had been an excited crowd, except a few
curious laggards, who, living in the neighbourhood or on the very piazza
itself; were less in a hurry than the rest to get back to their homes;
again, little by little, these last groups insensibly diminished; for
half-past nine had just struck, and at this hour the streets of Rome
began already to be far from safe; then after these groups followed some
solitary passer-by, hurrying his steps; one after another the doors were
closed, one after another the windows were darkened; at last, when ten
o'clock struck, with the single exception of one window in the Vatican
where a lamp might be seen keeping obstinate vigil, all the houses,
piazzas, and streets were plunged in the deepest obscurity.