Chapter 9

This half of Rome accepts Pompilia's story of all that led to her flight, and Caponsacchi's statement that he assisted in it simply to save her life. It thinks the husband's intrigues sufficiently proved by the fact that the Canon owns to having received letters which the wife denies having written, and which must, therefore, have been forged. Count Guido, it declares, has had no wrongs to avenge, and supposing he had wrongs, he has adopted too convenient a mode of avenging them. "He demands protection from the law, and the moment its balance trembles against him he flies out of court, declaring that wounded honour can only be cured by the sword. At all events he has given the law plenty to do: three courts at work for him, and an appeal to the Pope besides. If any law is binding on mankind it is that such as he shall be made an end of. He is the common enemy of his fellow-men."

TERTIUM QUID sees no reason for assuming that the wrong is altogether on either side, and reviews the circumstances in such a manner as to show that there is probably right on both. He lays stress on the expediency of judging the Comparini by the morals of their class, and Count Guido by the peculiarities of his own nature; admits the punishment of the wife and parents to have been excessive, and cannot admit it to have been unprovoked; does not pretend to decide between the conflicting statements, and does not consider that Pompilia's dying confession throws much light upon them; seeing that it may be equally true, or false, or neutralized by another reserved for the priest's ear. Does not regard putting the Count to the torture as the right mode of eliciting the truth: because he may be innocent. But declares that if _he_ does not deserve to undergo the torture, no one ever did or will. Tertium Quid is sometimes flippant in tone, and his neutral attitude seems chiefly the result of indifference or of caution. He is addressing himself to a Highness and an Excellency, and is careful not to shock the prejudices of either. Still, his statement is the nearest approach to a judicial summing up of which the nature of the work admits.

Mr. Browning now enters on the constructive part of his work. He puts the personages of the drama themselves before us, allowing each to plead his or her own cause. The imaginary occasion is that of Count Guido's trial; and all the depositions which were made on the previous one are transferred to this. The author has been obliged in every case to build up the character from the evidence, and to re-mould and expand the evidence in conformity with the character. The motive, feeling, and circumstance set forth by each separate speaker are thus in some degree fictitious; but they are always founded upon fact; and the literal truth of a vast number of details is self-evident. We first hear:

COUNT GUIDO FRANCESCHINI. He has been caught red-handed from the murder of his wife. His crime is patent. He has himself confessed it under torture. His only hope of reprieve lies in the colour which he may be able to impart to it; and his speech is cunningly adapted to the nature of the Court, and to the moral and mental constitution of those of whom it is composed. His judges are churchmen: neutral on the subject of marriage; rather coarsely masculine in their idea of the destiny of women. He does not profess to have entertained any affection for his wife. He derides the idea of having ill-used her, and thinks she might have liked him better if he had done so, instead of threatening her into good behaviour like a naughty child, with hair powder for poison, and a wooden toy for a sword; has no doubt that, if she had cared to warm his heart, some smouldering embers within it might still have burst into flame; but admits once for all that there was no question of feeling in the case; it was a bargain on both sides, and a fair one as far as he was concerned.

Paternity, however, is a condition with which his hearers may be supposed to sympathize; and he is absolutely eloquent, when he describes the desire he has cherished for a son, and the burning pain which filled him when he knew that it had been defrauded. He tells the story of his wife's intrigue and flight, much as the opinion of Half-Rome has reflected it; but he laces the question of his child's legitimacy in such a manner as to extract an equal advantage from either view. In either case it was Pompilia's crowning iniquity that she gave birth to a child, and placed it beyond his reach; and in either case it was the outraged paternal feeling which inspired his act.

The whole monologue is leavened by a spirit of mock deference for religion, for the Church, and for the law which represents the Church. Count Guido is led in from the torture, a mass of mock-patient suffering: wincing as he speaks, but quite in spite of himself--grateful that his pains are not worse--begging his judges not to be too much concerned about him; "since, thanks to his age and shaken health, a fainting fit soon came to his relief--indeed, torture itself is a kind of relief from the moral agonies he has undergone." He reminds his judges that the Church was his only mistress for thirty years. He would have served her, he declares, to the end of his life, but that his fidelity had been so long ignored. He trusted to the law--in other words to the Church--to avenge his honour when he ought to have done so himself. She deceived his trust, and still he hoped and endured. When he came to Rome, in his last frenzy of just revenge, he still stayed his hand, because the Feast of the Nativity had begun: it was the period at which the Church enjoins peace and good-will towards men. The face of the heavenly infant looked down upon him; he prayed that he might not enter into temptation. But the days went by, and the Face withered and waned, and the cross alone confronted him. Then he felt that the hour had come, and he found his way to his wife's retreat.

The door opened to the name of Caponsacchi. His worst fears were thus confirmed. Even so, had he been admitted by Pompilia, weak from her recent sufferings, he might have paused in pity--by Pietro, he might have paused in contempt; but it was the hag Violante who opened to him: the cheat, the mock-mother, the source of all his wrongs. The impulse to stamp out that one detested life involved all three. And now he triumphs in the deed. He has cast a foul burden from his life. He can look his fellow-men in the face again. Far from admitting that he deserves punishment, he claims the sympathy and the approval of those who have met to judge him: for he has done their work--the work of Divine justice and of natural law. In a final burst of rhetoric he challenges his judges to restore to him his life, his name, his civil rights, and best of all, his son; and together, he declares, they will rebuild the family honour, and revive the old forgotten tradition of domestic purity and peace. And if one day the son, about to kiss his hand, starts at the marks of violence upon it, he will smile and say, "it was only an accident--

"... just a trip O' the torture-irons in their search for truth,-- Hardly misfortune, and no fault at all." (vol. ix. p. 82.)

GIUSEPPE CAPONSACCHI next tells his story. It includes some details of his earlier life, which throw light on what will follow. He is not a priest from choice. He had interest in the Church, and grew up in the expectation of entering it. But when the time came for taking his vows, he recoiled from the sacrifice which they involved, and yielded only to the Bishop's assurance that he need make no sacrifice; there were two ways of interpreting such vows, and he need not select the harder; a man of polish and accomplishments was as valuable to the Church as a scholar or an ascetic. Her structure stood firm, and no one need now-a-days break his back in the effort to hold her up. Let him write his madrigals (he had a turn for verse-making) and not become a fixture in his seat in the choir through too close an attendance there. The terms were easy, and Caponsacchi became a priest, no worse and no better than he was expected to be; but with the feelings and purposes of a truer manhood lying dormant within him. These Pompilia was destined to arouse.

He relates that he first saw her at the theatre. His attention was attracted by her strange sad beauty: and a friend who sat by him, and was a connection of the husband's, threw comfits at her to make her return his gaze, warning him at the same time to do nothing which could compromise her. He accepted the warning, but could not forget the face. He felt a sudden disgust for the light women and the light pleasures which were alone within his reach, and determined to change his mode of life, and leave Arezzo for Rome.

At this juncture a love-letter was brought to him. It purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;[27] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. The bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in Count Guido's household. Caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, which would punish him in the probable case of its passing directly into his hands. The next day the same messenger appeared with a second letter, reproaching him for his cruelty; he answered in the same strain. But the letters continued, now dropped into his prayer-book, now flung down to him from a window. At length they changed their tone. He had been begged to come: he was now entreated to stay away. The husband, before absent, had returned: indifferent, had become jealous. His vengeance was aroused; and the sooner Caponsacchi escaped to Rome, the better. This challenge to his courage had the intended effect. He wrote word that the street was public if the house was not, and he would be under the lady's window that evening.

He went. She was standing there, lamp in hand, like Our Lady of Sorrows on her altar. She vanished, reappeared on a terrace close above his head, and spoke to him. He had sent her letters, she said, which she could not read; but she had been told that they spoke of love. She thought at first that he must be wicked, and then she felt that he could not be so wicked as to have meant what that woman said; and now that she saw his face she knew he did not write it. Still, he meant her well when no one else did. Her need was sore; he alone in the world could help her; she had determined to call to him. If he had some feverish fancy for what was not her's to give, he would be cured of it so soon as he knew all. She told him her story, and entreated him to take her to Rome, and consign her to her parents' care. He promised, and then his heart misgave him. Would it be right in him? Would it be good for her? He passed two days in a ceaseless internal conflict, and then determined to see her once more, but only to comfort and advise.

She stood again awaiting him at her window. Again she spoke, reproaching him for the suspense she had undergone. Her manner dispelled all doubt, and he did for her what she desired. The journey, which he describes in detail, was to him one spontaneous and continued revelation of her purity and truth. Then came the trial and his banishment. He was compelled to leave her to the protection of the law; to the good offices of the Court which confronts him now--of the men who, as he reminds them, laughed in their sleeve at the young priest's escapade, and at the transparent excuses with which he had taxed their credulity,--of the men who, in consideration for his youth, merely sent him to disport himself elsewhere, leaving the woman he had striven to protect, to the husband who was to murder her.

The news which summons him from Civita Vecchia has fallen on him like a thunderbolt. His being is shaken to its foundations. He strives to contain himself in outward deference to the Court, but a storm of suppressed sorrow and indignation rages beneath all his words: now uttering itself in pitying tender reverence for Pompilia's memory; now in scorn of those who would defame her; now in anger at himself, who is casting suspicion on her innocence by the very passion with which he defends it, now in defiance of those who choose to call the passion by the vulgar name of love. He tears up the flimsy calumnies which have been launched against her and himself; flinging them back in short, contemptuous utterances in the teeth of whosoever may believe them; begs his judges to forget his violence; and makes a last attempt to convince himself and them that no selfish desire underlies it. Pompilia is dying: he too is dead--to the world. What can she be to him but a dream--a thinker's dream--of a life not consecrated to the Church, but spent, as with her, in one constant domestic revelation of the eternal goodness and truth--a dream from which he will pass content.... And here the whole edifice of self-control and self-deception breaks down, and the agonized heart sends forth its cry:--

"O great, just, good God! Miserable me!" (vol. ix. p. 166.)

The third speaker is POMPILIA. Her evidence is the story of her life. It is given from her deathbed; and its half-dreamy reminiscences are uttered with the childlike simplicity with which she may have opened her heart to her priest. She is full of strange pathetic wonder at the mystery of existence; at the manner in which the thing we seem to grasp eludes us, and the seemingly impossible comes to pass. "Husbands are supposed to love their wives and guard them. See how it has been with her! That other man--that friend--they say _he_ loves her; his kindness was all love! She is a wife and he a priest, and yet they go on saying it! Her boy, she imagined, would be hers for life: and he is taken from her. He, too, becomes a dream; and in that dream she sees him grown tall and strong, and tutoring his mother as an imprudent child, for venturing out of the safe street into the lonely house where no help could reach her. It all reminds her of the day when she and a child-friend played at finding each other out in the figures on the tapestry; and Tisbe recognized her in a tree with a rough trunk for body, and her five fingers blossoming into leaves. Things are, and are not at the same time."

One thing, however, is real amidst the unreality: her joy and pride in finding herself a mother. The event proved that when she left Arezzo the hope of maternity was already dawning upon her; and Mr. Browning has combined this fact with the latent maternal sentiment of all true women, and read it into every impulse of her remaining life. She was wretched. She had vainly sought for help. She had resigned herself to the inevitable. She had lain down at night with the old thought--

"... 'Done, another day! How good to sleep and so get nearer death!'-- When, what, first thing at day-break, pierced the sleep With a summons to me? Up I sprang alive, Light in me, light without me, everywhere Change!" (vol. ix. p. 216.)

From this moment, as she tells us, everything was transformed. For days, for weeks, Caponsacchi's name had been ringing in her ears: in jealous explosions on her husband's part; in corrupting advice on the part of the waiting-woman who brought letters supposed to be sent to her by him; in declarations of love which her first glance at his face told her he could not have written. This, too, has all seemed a grotesquely painful dream. But when she awoke on the April morning in that bounding of the spirit towards an unknown joy, the name assumed a new meaning for her, and she said, "Let Caponsacchi come."

She remembers little after that, but the enfolding tenderness which secured the fulfilment of her hope. She describes nothing after the "tap" at the door, which was the beginning of the end. She has attained the crown of her woman's existence, and she can bear no resentment towards him whose cruelty embittered, and whose vengeance has cut it short. The motherly heart in her goes out to the wicked husband who was also once a child, and strives to palliate what he has done. "He was sinned against as well as sinning. Her poor parents were blind and unjust in their mode of retaliating upon him. She was blind and foolish in doing nothing to heal the breach. Her earthly goods have been a snare to Guido; she herself was an importunate presence to him. By God's grace he will be the better for having swept her from his path. She thanks him for destroying in her that bodily life which was his to pollute, and for leaving her soul free. Her infant shall have been born of no earthly father. It is the child of its mother's love."

And this love for her child overflows in gratitude to him who saved her for it--a gratitude which is also something more. She has recoiled from the idea of being united to a priest by any bond of earthly affection; but the knowledge is growing upon her that her bond to Caponsacchi _is_ love, though it assumes an ideal character in her innocence, her ignorance, and the exaltation of feeling which denotes her approaching death. She has recalled the incidents of her flight, but only to bear witness to Caponsacchi's virtues: his watchful kindness, his chivalrous courage, the unselfishness which could risk life and honour without thought of reward, the priestly dignity which he never set aside. Her last words contain an invocation to himself which has all the passion of earthly tenderness, and all the solemnity of a prayer. She addresses him as her soldier-saint--as the friend "her only, all her own," who is closest to her now on her final journey; whose love shall sustain, whose strong hand shall guide her, on the unknown path she is about to tread. She thinks he would not marry if he could. True marriage is in heaven, where there is no making of contracts, with gold on one side, power or youth or beauty on the other, but one is "man and wife at once when the true time is." Would either of them wish the past undone? Her soul says "No."

"So, let him wait God's instant men call years; Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, Do out the duty! Through such souls alone God stooping shows sufficient of His light For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise." (vol. ix. p. 241.)

We have now the written pleadings of two advocates who figure largely in the records of the case; the one enlisted on the Count's side, the other on Pompilia's They are

DOMINUS HYACINTHUS DE ARCHANGELIS (procurator of the poor)

JURIS DOCTOR JOHANNES BAPTISTA BOTTINIUS (fisc, or public prosecutor).

The subject of these pleadings is the possible justification of the crime for which Count Franceschini is on trial, but not otherwise the crime itself; for he has owned to its commission; and though the avowal has been drawn from him by torture, it is justly accepted as decisive. All the arguments for and against him hinge therefore on the evidence of Pompilia's guilt or innocence as established by the previous enquiry; and as we have seen, the _formal_ result of this enquiry was unfavourable to her. The Count obtained his verdict, though the subsequent treatment of the offenders made it almost nugatory; and de Archangelis rings the changes on the stock arguments of his client's outraged honour, and his natural if not legal right to avenge it.

Bottinius, on the other hand, does not admit that the husband's honour has been attacked; but he defends the wife's conduct, more by extenuating the acts of which she is accused, than by denying them. His denials are generally parenthetic: and imply that the whether she did certain things is much less important than the why and the how; and though he professes to present her as a pearl of purity, he shows his standard of female purity to be very low.

Mr. Browning might easily have composed a more genuine defence from the known facts of the case; but he represents these quibblings and counter-quibblings as equally beside the mark. The question of the murderer's guilt was being judged on broader grounds; and the supposed talkers on either side are aware of this. De Archangelis and Bottinius both know that their cleverness will benefit no one but themselves, and for this reason they are as much concerned to show how good a case they can make out of a doubtful one, as to prove that their case is in itself good. Each is thinking of his opponent, and how best to parry his attack; and their arguments are relieved by a brisk exchange of personalities, in which "de Archangelis" includes his subordinate "Spreti"--"advocate of the poor"--whose learned contribution to this paper warfare has probably aroused his jealousy.

Mr. Browning has also displayed the hollowness of the proceedings by making "de Archangelis" the very opposite of his saturnine and blood-thirsty client: the last person we could think of as in sympathy with him. He is a coarse good-natured paterfamilias, whose ambitions are all centred on an eight-year-old son, whose birthday it is; and his defence of the murder is concocted under frequent interruptions, from the thought of Cinuncino (little Giacinto, or Hyacinth), and the fried liver and herbs which are to form part of his birthday feast. Bottinius is a vain man, occupied only with himself, and regretting nothing so much as that he may not display his rhetorical powers, by delivering his speech instead of writing it.

Count Guido, with his accomplices, has been condemned to death. His friends have appealed from the verdict, on the ground of his being, though in a minor degree, a priest. The answer to this appeal rests with the head of the Church. The next monologue is therefore that of

THE POPE. The reflections here imagined grow out of a double fact. Innocent the Twelfth refused to shelter Count Franceschini with his accomplices from the judgment of the law, and thus assumed the responsibility of his death. He had reached an age at which so heavy a responsibility could not be otherwise than painful. As Mr. Browning depicts him, his decision is made. From dawn to dark he has been studying the case, piecing together its fragmentary truths, trying its merits with "true sweat of soul." There is no doubt in his mind that Guido deserves to die. But he has to nerve himself afresh before he gives the one stroke of his pen, the one touch to his bell, which shall send this soul into eternity; and that is what we see him doing.

As he says to himself, he is weighed down by years. He lifts the cares of the whole world on a "loaded branch" for which a bird's nest were a "superfluous burthen." Yet this strong man cries to him for life: and he alone has the power to grant it. How easy to reprieve! How hard to deny to this trembling sinner the moment's respite which may save his soul. He wants precedent for such a deed; and he seeks it in the records of the Papacy. It is from the Popes his predecessors that he must learn how to dare, to suffer, and--to judge. But these records tell him how Stephen cursed Formosus; how Romanus and Theodore reinstated the sanctity of Formosus and cursed Stephen; and how John reinstated Stephen and cursed Formosus. They could not all be right. There is no guarantee for infallibility--no test of justice--to be found here.

How, then, would he defend his condemnation of Guido if he himself were now summoned to the judgment-seat? The question is self-answered: no defence would be needed; for God sees into the heart. He appraises the seed of act, which is its motive; not "leafage and branchage, vulgar eyes admire." The Pope knows that his motives will stand the scrutiny of God. How, finally, could he plead his cause with a man like himself: with the man Antonio Pignatelli, his very self? He must, once for all, marshal the facts, and let them plead for him.