Italian Chronicles by Stendhal

Author:Stendhal
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2017-05-02T05:00:00+00:00

V

But two days after that, Giulio had returned to Castro, and he brought with him eight soldiers who had been willing to follow him, even at the risk of arousing the anger of the prince, who sometimes had had men executed for engaging in this kind of enterprise. Giulio already had five men in Castro, and he brought another eight, but fourteen soldiers, no matter how brave they were, seemed to him to be too few for this enterprise, for the convent was like a strong fortress.

First, it was a matter of getting through the first of the convent’s gates, by force or by skill; then, it was a matter of following a passage of some fifty paces. On the left of this passage, as we have already described, arose the grilled windows of a sort of barracks, where the nuns had stationed thirty or forty servants, former soldiers. From these windows intense gunfire could be expected once the alarm had been raised.

The current abbess, who was no fool, was afraid of the exploits of the Orsini chiefs, of Prince Colonna, of Marco Sciarra, and of all the other chiefs who reigned in the vicinity. How could the convent resist 800 determined men once they had occupied a small town like Castro thinking the convent was filled with gold?

Normally, the Visitation of Castro had fifteen or twenty bravi in the barracks on the left of the passage leading to the convent’s second door; to the right of this passage stood an impregnable wall; at the end of the passage was an iron door that opened upon a vestibule with pillars; after this vestibule came the convent’s great courtyard, with the garden on the right. The iron door was guarded by a portress.

When Giulio and his eight men were three leagues from Castro, he stopped at an out-of-the-way inn to sit out the heat of the day. Only there did he reveal his project to the men; he then drew in the sand a map of the convent he was going to attack.

“At nine o’clock in the evening,” he told his men, “we will dine outside of the town; at midnight, we enter; there we will find your five comrades, who will be waiting for us near the convent. One of them will be on horseback, and he will be playing the role of a courier just arrived from Rome to call Signora de Campireali back home, where her husband is dying. We will try to get through the first door silently, here, next to the barracks,” he said, pointing to the map. “If we have to begin fighting at this first gate, the nuns’ bravi will find it easy to shoot at us with their harquebuses either while we are still outside in the little square, here, or as we traverse the narrow passage that leads to the second door. This second door is made of iron, but I have a key.

“Now, it is true that there are huge iron

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