The Leopard

THE LEOPARD

Guiseppe Di Lampedusa

Copyright, 1960

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Palermo in 1896, Giuseppe di Lampedusa was a cosmopolitan Sicilian prince who married a Baltic noblewoman and had
lived in London and Paris, but who nevertheless was tied strongly to the island of his birth. He knew several languages well and
had read in the original the best of all European literature. In his palace in Palermo he met regularly with a group of young
friends to study French literature, and, to the last, his days were spent in readings and discussions with his wife and friends.
For twenty-five years Lampedusa meditated a novel based on the figure of his paternal great-grandfather and set in Sicily during
the Garibaldian era. Yet he was sixty before he finally began to write it, and he completed it only a few months before his death.
Shortly before he died in 1957, he was told by an Italian editor that his novel was unpublishable. It was not until many months
later that an unsigned copy of his manuscript reached an enthusiastic editor, whose prompt inquiries brought to light the story
behind the prince who never published anything in his lifetime, but left a masterpiece after his death.

This book opens when the Bourbon state of Naples and Sicily, called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was about to end. King Ferdinand II ("Bomba") had just died; and the whole Italian peninsula would soon be one state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Risorgimento, as this movement for unification came to be known, had been gathering strength since the occupation of the North by the Austrians after the Napoleonic Wars, and had already come to a head once, in 1848Leadership had now fallen mainly to Piedmont, the socalled Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, with Cavour as his Prime Minister.

Early in May, 186o, the popular hero Garibaldi, acting against Cavour's wishes, sailed from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers for Sicily, to win the island from the Bourbons. The Redshirts, or "Garibaldini," landed at Marsala, defeated the Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, and within three weeks had occupied the capital, Palermo. Garibaldi, hailed as "Dictator" of Sicily, gathered more volunteers, crossed to the mainland, swept up the coast, and entered Naples in triumph. That autumn the Bourbon armies were defeated on the Volturno, the Pledmontese besieged the last Bourbon King, Francis II, in Gaeta, and Garibaldi handed over southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel; he then withdrew to private life. Plebiscites were held; every state in the peninsula agreed to join the new united Kingdom, except the Papal States, which were occupied, for reasons of internal French politics, by troops of Napoleon III. In 1862 Garibaldi tried to force this issue and march on Rome. But on the slopes of Aspromonte in Calabria his men were routed and he himself was wounded by Piedmontese troops. This action by Italian government forces ended the revolutionary phase of the Risorgimento, which culminated officially ;n the declaration of Rome as capital of Italy in 1870.

CONTENTS

I

Introduction to the Prince

2

Donnafagata

3

The Troubles of Don Fabrizio

4

Love at Donnafugata

5

Father Pirrone Pays A Visit

6

A Ball

7

Death Of a Prince

8

Relics

1

Introduction to the Prince

Rosary and introduction to the Prince - The garden and the dead soldier - Royal audiences - Dinner - A carriage to Palermo -
Going to Mariannina's - Conversation with Tancredi - In the office; estates and politics - In the observatory with Father Pirrone -
Relaxation at luncheon Don Fabrizio and the peasants - Don Fabrizio and his son Paolo - News of the landing, and Rosary again
MAY, 1860

NUNC ET IN HORA MORTIS NOSTRAE. AMEN.

The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Glorious and the Sorrowful Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word: love, virginity, death; and during that hum the whole aspect of the rococo drawing room seemed to change; even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed; even the Magdalen between the two windows looked a penitent and not just a handsome blonde lost in some dubious daydream, as she usually was. Now, as the voices fell silent, everything dropped back into its usual order or disorder. Bendico, the great Dane, vexed at having been shut out, came barking through the door by which the servants had left. The women rose slowly to their feet, their oscillating skirts as they withdrew baring bit by bit the naked figures from mythology painted all over the milky depths of the tiles. Only an Andromeda remained covered by the soutane of Father Pirrone, still deep in extra prayer, and it was some time before she could sight the silvery Perseus swooping down to her aid and her kiss.

The divinities frescoed on the ceiling awoke. The troops of Tritons and Dryads, hurtling across from hill and sea amid clouds of cyclamen pink toward a transfigured Conca d'Oro, (literally "Golden Shell," is the name of the hills encircling Palermo) and bent on glorifying the House of Salina, seemed suddenly so overwhelmed with exaltation as to discard the most elementary rules of perspective; meanwhile the major Gods and Goddesses, the Princes among Gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, had already preceded the mob of minor deities and were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and a half hours they would be lords of the villa once again. On the walls the monkeys went back to pulling faces at the cockatoos.

Beneath this Palermitan Olympus the mortals of the House of Salina were also dropping speedily from mystic spheres. The girls resettled the folds in their dresses, exchanged blue-eyed glances and snatches of schoolgirl slang; for over a month, ever since the

"riots" of the Fourth of April, they had been home for safety's sake from their convent, and regretting the canopied dormitories and collective coziness of the Holy Redeemer. The boys were already scuffling with each other for possession of a medal of San Francesco di Paola; the eldest, the heir, the young Duke Paolo, was longing to smoke and, afraid of doing so in his parents'

presence, was fondling the outside of his pocket in which lurked a braided-straw cigar case. His gaunt face was veiled in brooding melancholy; it had been a bad day: Guiscard, his Irish sorrel, had seemed off form, and Fanny had apparently been unable (or unwilling) to send him her usual lilac-tinted billet-doux. Of what avail then, to him, was the Incarnation of his Saviour?

Restless and domineering, the Princess dropped her rosary brusquely into her jet-fringed bag, while her fine crazy eyes glanced around at her slaves of children and her tyrant of a husband, over whom her diminutive body vainly yearned for loving dominion. Meanwhile he himself, the Prince, had risen to his feet; the sudden movement of his huge frame made the floor tremble, and a glint of pride flashed in his light blue eyes at this fleeting confirmation of his lordship over both human beings and their works. Now he was settling the huge scarlet missal on the chair which had been in front of him during his recitation of the Rosary, putting back the handkerchief on which he had been kneeling, and a touch of irritation clouded his brow as his eye fell on a tiny coffee stain which had had the presumption, since that morning, to fleck the vast white expanse of his waistcoat. Not that he was fat; just very large and very strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals -his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith's for the mending of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop, But those fingers could also stroke and handle with the most exquisite delicacy, as his wife Maria Stella knew only too well; and up in his private observatory at the top of the house the gleaming screws, caps, and studs of the telescopes, lenses, and "comet-finders" would answer to his lightest touch.

The rays of the westering sun, still high on that May afternoon, lit up the Prince's rosy skin and honey-colored hair; these betrayed the German origin of his mother, the Princess Carolina, whose haughtiness had frozen the easygoing Court of the Two Sicilies thirty years before. But in his blood also fermented other German strains particularly disturbing to a Sicilian aristocrat in the year 1860, however attractive his fair skin and hair amid all that olive and black: an authoritarian temperament, a certain rigidity in morals, and a propensity for abstract ideas; these, in the relaxing atmosphere of Palermo society, had changed respectively into capricious arrogance, recurring moral scruples, and contempt for his own relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to him mere driftwood in the languid meandering stream of Sicilian pragmatism.

In a family which for centuries had been incapable evenof adding up their own expenditures and subtracting their own debts he was the first (and last) to have a genuine bent for mathematicsi this he had applied to astronomy, and by his work gained a certain official recognition and a great deal of personal pleasure. In his mind, now, pride and mathematical analysis were so linked as to give him an illusion that the stars obeyed his calculations too (as, in fact, they seemed to be doing) and that the two small planets which he had discovered ("Salina" and "Speedy" he had called them, after his main estate and a shooting dog he had been particularly fond of) would spread the fame of his family through the empty spaces between Mars and Jupiter, thus transforming the frescoes in the villa from the adulatory to the prophetic.

Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his jovelike frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it.

That half-hour between Rosary and dinner was one of the least irritating moments of his day, and for hours beforehand he would savor its rather uncertain calm.

With a wildly excited Bendico' bounding ahead of him he went down the short flight of steps into the garden. Enclosed between three walls and a side of the house, its seclusion gave it the air of a cemetery, accentuated by the parallel little mounds bounding the irrigation canals and looking like the graves of very tall, very thin giants. Plants were growing in thick disorder on the reddish clay i flowers sprouted in all directions, and the myrtle hedges seemed put there to prevent movement rather than guide it. At the end a statue of Flora speckled with yellow-black lichen exhibited her centuries-old charms with an air of resignation; on each side were benches holding quilted cushions, also o~ gray marble; and in a corner the gold of an acacia tree introduced a sudden note of gaiety. Every sod seemed to, exude a yearning for beauty soon muted by languor.