The Convent of the Conception at Beja was founded in 1467 by the parents of King Emanuel the Fortunate, and, favoured successively by royal and private devotion, it had become one of the most important and wealthy institutions of its kind in Portugal. It was situated at the extreme south of the city, near to the ancient walls, and looked on to the gates still called ‘of Mertola,’ because they are on the side of the city towards Mertola, distant fifty-four kilometres to the south-west on the right bank of the Guadiana. There is still to be seen the remains of the balcony or verandah from which Marianna first caught sight of Chamilly, probably during some military evolutions (cf. Letter II.), and from it a good view may be obtained over the plains of Alemtejo as they stretch away to the south. Curiously enough, the tradition of Marianna and her fatal love has been perpetuated in the convent, in spite of the attempts, natural enough, on the part of monastic chroniclers and such like to hide all traces of it.
In this as in most other convents there were two kinds of cells—the dormitories, divided into cubicles, and rooms forming independent abodes dispersed throughout the edifice. These latter the nuns of the seventeenth century called their ‘houses,’—as suas casas,—and it was one of these which Marianna possessed. The former were in accordance with the Constitutions, while the latter, though strictly forbidden, nevertheless existed. These separate abodes were, it is true, often necessitated by the growth of the convent population, and generally appertained to nuns of a better position, while the dormitories served for those who were either poorer or of an inferior rank. Many of these casas, too, were built by private individuals who had some connection or other with the particular convent, and there are indications that the father of Marianna had caused some to be erected in that of the Conception.[3]
From the year 1665 to 1667, then, Beja was, as we have said, the centre of the various military movements in which Chamilly took part under the leadership of Schomberg, and there is no doubt that he spent much of his time there. Marianna was twenty-five years old. She had been intrusted to the Cloister when a child,[4] as she herself tells us, and her renunciation of the world must have been little more than a form. She had probably made her ‘profession’ too at the age of sixteen, that provided for by the Constitutions, if not at an earlier date.
The dull routine of her life was suddenly broken in upon by the sight of a man surrounded with all the prestige of military glory—one who was the first to awaken in her a consciousness of her own beauty—the first to tell her that he loved her, one, moreover, who was ready to throw all his greatness, his present and his future, at her feet.
‘I was young; I was trustful. I had been shut up in this convent since my childhood. I had only seen people whom I did not care for. I had never heard the praises which you constantly gave me. Methought I owed you the charms and the beauty which you found in me, and which you were the first to make me perceive. I heard you well talked of; every one spoke in your favour. You did all that was necessary to awaken love in me.’[5] Such is her simple confession, and, comments Cordeiro, nothing more natural.
Their first meeting was probably due to the relations which Chamilly, an officer of rank, had entered into with the Alcoforados, one of the chief families in Beja. There are indications, indeed, that Chamilly and Marianna’s eldest brother had met, doubtless in the field, for the latter also followed the profession of arms; and this brother, named Balthazar Vaz Alcoforado, is probably the same as the ‘brother’ referred to in the Letters as the lovers’ go-between. It was for his benefit that Marianna’s father had striven for years to build up an estate which was to be entailed on his offspring. But in the year 1669, just at the very time of the great sensation caused by the publication of the Letters in Paris, Balthazar abandoned his military career and all his brilliant prospects in the world to enter the priesthood. It is impossible not to hazard a guess, although we know nothing for certain on the point, that his motive for so doing was connected in some way with the almost tragic ending of the liaison between his sister and the French captain. But to return:—The customs of the time, curiously enough, allowed a greater relative liberty to nuns as regards the visits which might be paid them than to married women,[6] or, as the Bishop of Gram Para puts it, ‘the liberty of the grating was wide in those miserable times.’[7]
We cannot of course be expected to give an account of the progress of this liaison, nor do we wish to indulge in romantic hypotheses.
Chamilly was thirty at the time when he first saw Marianna. Brought up as he had been to war as a trade, a man of small intelligence and few scruples, the intrigue would be a pleasant diversion, a means pour passer le temps which he would otherwise have found dull enough in a Portuguese provincial town after the Paris of ‘Le Grand Monarque.’ The seduction and desertion of a poor nun must have seemed all so perfectly natural to one brought up in contact with the loose morality of camp life and in the France of Louis XIV.
In June 1667 the authorities of Beja received an answer from the new King, Don Pedro, to the complaint which they had made of ‘the oppression which the French cavalry continued to exercise on this people.’[8] Already, on account of similar complaints, Schomberg had been ordered to move his cavalry from the town and district, but he had disobeyed these orders for strategic reasons. Now, we have already seen that it was between 1665 and 1667 that Chamilly carried on his intrigue with Marianna, and it is just in 1667 that the scandal must have attained greater proportions, coinciding with and ending, not in the withdrawal of the French cavalry, but in the sudden retirement of Chamilly to France. But what, it may be asked, was the reason for the King’s order, and what could those ‘oppressions’ have been in an important city where presumably there was a regular and well-appointed police administration? Has it not a relation, asks Cordeiro, with the incident in the ‘Letters,’ which would both afflict and irritate the influential family of the nun and the good burgesses of Beja? The special situation of the French captain, on the other hand—his interest in not aggravating the scandal, and the peril for the religious herself in the adoption of violent means, would all naturally counsel the withdrawal of Chamilly.[9]