The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

There could be no purer form of “slow reading,” on which we are about to embark together, than translation.

The original title page. Pictures! (More on these later.) The heroine caught between good and evil, death and disease. And beneath the author’s name, “Edizione Riveduta dall’Autore” (Edition Revised by the Author). Those revisions, of the original 1827 edition, were to emend occasional regionalisms and archaic usage and make the language more purely Tuscan, as I mention in the Preview.

So much for the decrees! “The moment a decree appeared, the violent found new, more opportune means, through their power, to continue doing exactly what the decrees had sought to repress.”

Chapter 2 opens with this comparison between the greater war outside—the War of the Mantuan Succession that will consume the area—and the war inside Don Abbondio’s head.

Manzoni is very elliptical when it comes to sexual matters. His reluctance to describe Don Rodrigo’s harassment of Lucia corresponds to her own decision not to tell anyone, except for her confessor. We learn about her through her thoughts, her inner life, rather than anything she says aloud. Padre Cristoforo’s advice to her? “He told me to get married as quickly as we could, and in the meantime to stay home and pray to God.” You could say it was another era, but it still sounds kind of… cringe.

“A scrawny girl… stooped down quickly to steal some herbs to feed her family, having learned from hunger that men, too, can subsist on grass.” Poverty and oppression in a single image. Keep this in mind when we reach the banquet at the palace of Don Rodrigo.

The palace of Don Rodrigo seems like something straight out of an English Gothic novel. (The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe—who had never been to Italy—was wildly popular throughout Europe.) Manzoni acknowledges the theatricality of this scene immediately. “The palace of Don Rodrigo rose, isolated and severe, like a fortress atop one of the hills scattered along and rising above the lakeshore. The anonymous author (who should have simply told us the name of the place)…” And what a place. Grotesque villagers. An almost windowless façade. The dead vultures nailed to the door.

Don Rodrigo’s audacity pushes Padre Cristoforo over the edge, by claiming that Lucia can find protection in his palace. At that point the friar explodes. In Italian, “l'uomo vecchio si trovò d'accordo col nuovo; e, in que' casi, fra Cristoforo valeva veramente per due.” A rough translation would read, “the older man reached a pact with the younger; and in instances like that, Fra Cristoforo was truly two men in one.” I struggled with that first clause, which in a baggy literal version would be hard to decipher. So I adopted the militaristic vocabulary bandied around the table earlier and settled on the more compact but powerful, “His old self joined with the new.”

A couple of side notes as we begin week two: A word about the Capuchins, aka, The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. They were founded in 1525 to reform the Franciscan Order, which they felt had veered too far away from the life of solitude and penance exemplified by St. Francis of Assisi.

“The next morning Don Rodrigo woke up as Don Rodrigo again. The dread planted in his bones by that warning, “The day will come,” had vanished together with the dreams of the night. All that remained was his anger, exacerbated by shame over his momentary weakness.”

The Italians refer to this episode as “La notte degli imbrogli”—The night of [question mark]. I struggled to find an equivalent for “imbroglio,” which in Italian refers to a tangled mess. The English “imbroglio” is too cute for the series of mishaps and misunderstandings that occur on this night.

One of the first instances of Manzoni describing a crowd scene. Not even Dickens captured the chaotic energy of the mob so effectively.

In this second part of the novel, the action shifts to two locations south of Lake Como. First, to Monza, where Lucia and her mother seek refuge in a convent. Manzoni has some fun with the convention of not giving the name of real places or persons in a fictional work.

“The Signora, who in the presence of the seasoned Capuchin had measured her actions and her words, no longer worried once she was alone with the naïve peasant girl. The things she said became stranger and stranger. Rather than report them, we think it best to briefly relate the background of this unhappy woman.” Finally we begin. 

“The Prince (at a moment like this I don’t have the heart to call him her father)... ” Manzoni himself was father to 13 children, almost all of whom he outlived.

Gertrude discovers that it is easier to tell someone what they want to hear—to lie—than to relate the messy truth.

"Like a pack of bloodhounds that, having chased a hare in vain, return to their master, humiliated, heads hanging and tails between their legs, the bravi returned to Don Rodrigo’s palace on that night of tricks and treachery."

A little more scheming from Don Rodrigo on how to rid himself of Renzo. 

“The particular circumstances I am describing here were like the sudden spike of a chronic illness.” Foreign occupation as a “chronic illness.”

Ha! A leap from fiction to nonfiction in a single sentence. Manzoni drawing attention both to the illusions of fiction and the deceptions of historians.

The Tower of… babble. At the beginning of this chapter Renzo is intoxicated by the crowd. At the end he is just plain intoxicated.

The pinch of the cheek as a sign of affection.

Renzo’s flight from the authorities, with the encouragement of the passersby, echoes the much earlier flight of Ludovico to the monastery.

This chapter is perhaps the novel’s deepest dive into Renzo’s conscience.

We the readers know exactly what Renzo did, but the people of the village are hearing only official reports that they know in their hearts to be untrue.

The opening to this chapter could have been written by the Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe.

Now we enter into the moral heart of the novel, which interrogates the concept of God and of “the good.”

“At this point in our story, I cannot resist lingering for a moment..."

This chapter is filled with quotes from the New Testament, in line with its theme that salvation is possible for even the greatest sinner.

The Nameless One returns to his castle, a changed man.

“If you asked them to repeat exactly what [the Cardinal Archbishop] said, they wouldn’t be able to fish out a word. But they have the feeling inside.”

We’re back to Pescarenico, where the villagers now feel free to gossip about Don Rodrigo. Or do they.

There seems to be a shifting of sympathies here, starting with Manzoni’s own interjection.

The War of the Mantuan Succession.

Manzoni turns now to what he calls “a rough account of public events,” which will take us through the next few chapters.

The lazaretto, a living hell, whose name is taken from the Venetian island of Santa Maria di Nazareth, which in antiquity was called “Nazarethum.”

A brief reprieve from the march of history.

Notice how Manzoni depicts mass movements, from the mob in Milan attacking the bakeries to the sea of refugees fleeing their homes.

This chapter opens with an image of the grim reaper, a trigger warning.

“Anointers,” with its religious connotations, does not quite carry the foul overtones of the Italian “untori.”

“As crime grew, so did madness.”

Don Rodrigo’s nightmares as the fever of the plague sets in. 

The return to Pescarenico.

“But what city was this?”

Amid so much horror, Manzoni depicts one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the novel.

Renzo enters the lazaretto, a place that can only be compared to Dante’s Inferno.

Do we dare hope for a happy ending?

Not only does the rain wash away the pain of the past two years, it also washes away the plague.

Although I was relieved when I finally finished my translation, a cloud of melancholy descends upon me as we conclude the novel and our reading together.