But much later, quite towards the end of the book, the author has to tell how Fabrice again and Clélia "forgot all but love" in one of their stolen meetings to arrange his escape.
(He has, by the way, told a lie to make her think he is poisoned)
She was so beautiful—half-dressed and in a state of extreme passion as she was—that Fabrice could not resist an almost involuntary movement. No resistance was opposed.[132]
Now I am not (see Addenda and Corrigenda of the last volume) avid of expatiations of the Laclosian kind. But this is really a little too much of the "Spanish-fleet-taken-and-burnt-as-per-margin" order.
L'Abbesse de Castro, etc.
Much the same characteristics, but necessarily on a small scale, appear in the short stories usually found under the title of the first and longest of them, L'Abbesse de Castro. Two of these, Mina de Wangel and Le Philtre, are historiettes of the passion which is absent from La Chartreuse de Parme; but each is tainted with the macabre touch which Beyle affected or which (for that word is hardly fair) was natural to him. In one a German girl of high rank and great wealth falls in love with a married man, separates him from his wife by a gross deception, lives with him for a time; and when he leaves her on finding out the fraud, blows her brains out. In the other a Spanish lady, seduced and maltreated by a creole circus-rider of the worst character, declares to a more honourable lover her incurable passion for the scoundrel and takes the veil. The rest are stories of the Italian Renaissance, grimy and gory as usual. Vittoria Accoramboni herself figures, but there is no evidence that Beyle (although he had some knowledge of English literature[133]) knew at the time our glorious "White Devil," and his story dwells little on her faults and much on the punishment of her murderers. L'Abbesse de Castro itself, La Duchesse de Palliano, San Francesco à Ripa, Vanina Vanini are all of the same type and all full of the gloomier items seen by the Dreamer of Fair Women—
Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes,
Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates,
and blood everywhere. And these unmerry tales are always recounted ab extra; in fact, many of them are real or pretended abstracts from chronicles of the very kind which furnished Browning with the matter of The Ring and the Book. It is, however, more apt and more curious to compare them with the scenes of Gerard's experiences with the princess in The Cloister and the Hearth, as instances of different handling of the same matter by two novelists of talent almost, if not quite, reaching genius.
Le Rouge et le Noir.