THE LETTERS OF A PORTUGUESE NUN

[ii]

All rights reserved

[iii]

THE LETTERS OF A PORTUGUESE NUN (MARIANNA ALCOFORADO)

TRANSLATED BY EDGAR PRESTAGE BALLIOL COLLEGE OXFORD

LONDON Published by DAVID NUTT in the Strand 1893

[iv]

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable Printers to Her Majesty

[v]

TO THE AUTHOR OF ‘PORTUGAL CONTEMPORANEO’ J. P. DE OLIVEIRA MARTINS I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

[ix]

PREFACE

MY attempt at an English rendering of the Letters is, I think, the first since the days of Bowles’ ‘Letters from a Portuguese Nun to an Officer in the French Army,’ London, 1808.[1] But during the two centuries which have elapsed since their[x] first publication quite a small literature has grown up around them, and they have been turned into several European tongues, the French editions alone amounting to more than thirty. If the numerous so-called ‘Replies’ and ‘Imitations’ were added to this reckoning the number would be nearly doubled, and this without taking into account the critiques and studies which have appeared about them. I do not propose here to enter into a comparison of the Letters with those of Heloïse, as many writers have done, but shall content myself with referring the curious to the excellent[xi] work of Senhor Cordeiro, ‘Soror Marianna. A Freira Portugueza,’ Lisbon, 1888; 2nd edition, 1891. It is from him that I have learnt nearly all that I know about Marianna, and in my Introduction I have made a liberal use of his book,

as well as of M. Asse’s preface to the edition of the ‘Lettres Portuguises avec les Réponses,’ Paris, 1889, upon which I have based my rendering.

If my translation should arouse any interest in things Portuguese, and lead others to read and make versions of such masterpieces of the world’s literature as the ‘Frei Luiz de Sousa’ and the ‘Folhas[xii] Cahidas’ of Garrett, or the poems of João de Deus, I should be more than rewarded for any trouble the present work may have cost me. But who can hope to succeed where Burton has apparently failed? The English public—and the critics too—will probably continue to believe that there is nothing worth reading in Portuguese literature with the exception of the Lusiads. Here too there is perhaps a lesson to be learnt from the Germans, especially from such as Storck, Reinhardstoettner, and Michaëlis de Vasconcellos.

I should like to thank Mr. York Powell of Christ Church[xiii] for the kind help which he has given me in the difficult task of translation. My aim has been throughout to keep as close to the French text as possible—seeing that the original Portuguese is lost,—aided by the masterly re-translation of Senhor Cordeiro. L’Estrange’s version—‘Five Love Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier,’ London, 1678,—is somewhat free at times, but it has aided me in the Third Letter. I have followed Cordeiro in his re-arrangement of the order of the Letters, the Second and Fourth changing places.

The historical facts which concern the hero and heroine[xiv] of these Letters I have given briefly in the Introduction, and a Bibliography and Appendix will be found at the end of the volume. The text of the first French edition of 1669 has been copied in Paris purposely for this work, and will, it is hoped, add much to its interest and value.

And so I deliver poor Marianna’s passionate Epistles to the consideration of those who can appreciate them and feel for her.

EDGAR PRESTAGE.

Bowdon, 1892.

[xv]

INTRODUCTION

‘IN 1663,’ says Sainte-Beuve, ‘it became the policy of Louis XIV. to help Portugal against Spain, but the succour which he gave was indirect; subsidies were secretly furnished, the levying of troops was favoured, and a crowd of volunteers hastened there. Between this small army, commanded by Schomberg, and the feeble[4] Spanish troops which disputed the soil with it, there were each summer many marches and counter-marches with but few results, many skirmishes and small fights, and among the latter, perhaps, one victory. Who troubles himself about it now? The curious reader, however, who only looks to his own pleasure, cannot help saying that all this was good, since the “Letters of the Portuguese Nun” grew from it.

As Sainte-Beuve indicates, the subject of the ‘Letters’ forms one of the episodes of the war between Spain and Portugal which followed as a consequence of the Restoration of 1640 and the achievement of the latter’s independence under the House of Braganza. This war, which lasted for twenty-eight years, until the final peace in 1668, was intermittent, and carried on only at long intervals owing to the state of the two contending parties. Spain had now entered on the period of her decline, and Portugal was in a hardly better[5] condition after her sixty years’ captivity and the exhaustion of her forces which had taken place during the reign of Philip IV. Owing, however, to the aid of France, she had been enabled to hold her own up to 1659; but the news of the Peace of the Pyrenees seemed at first to take from her all hope of preserving her hardly won autonomy. Yet in spite of this, Mazarin, while signing the clause which bound France to abandon the Portuguese cause, determined, with his usual duplicity, that this should not prevent him from secretly aiding an ally

whom he had found so useful in the past as a thorn in the side of Spain. Hardly, indeed, had the treaty been made than he began to occupy himself in recruiting for the Portuguese service a number of French officers whom the peace had left without employment. Among these the chief was Schomberg, who went to Lisbon in 1660 as commander-in-chief and to reorganise the Portuguese army. It was not, however,[6] until 1663 that the hero of the Letters, Noel Bouton, afterwards Marquis of Chamilly and St. Leger, arrived in the country, which he was to leave four years later with the betrayal of a poor nun as his title to fame. For at the time when Schomberg was already there, we see Chamilly (as he is generally called) assisting at the marriage of his brother to Catherine le Comte de Nonant, referred to in the text (Letter II.).

Three years afterwards, finding himself without military employment in France, he came to Portugal, attracted probably, like so many others, by the reputation of the great captain, with whom he had doubtless established friendly relations during the campaign in Flanders (1656-8).

Our hero, if hero he may be called, was the eleventh son of Nicholas Bouton, Lord of Chamilly, Charangeroux, and, later on, St. Leger, properties of modest size in Burgundy. His family was good, but its attachment to the Princes of[7] Condé during the Fronde had compromised its position and damaged its fortunes. Noel, the future marquis, was born in 1636, and as soon as his age allowed he entered on a military career. He served through the Flanders campaign under Turenne, and in 1658 was made captain, under the name of the Count of Chamilly, in Mazarin’s regiment of cavalry. Reaching Portugal at the end of 1663, or the commencement of 1664, he was given the same rank in a regiment commanded by a French officer of note, Briquemault. Although his name is not mentioned in any of the contemporary notices of the war, we know that he was present at the Siege of Valença de Alcantara (June 1664), at the battle of Castello Rodrigo (in the same month and year), at that of Montes Claros (June 1665), and at the principal sieges which occupied the next two years. In 1665, he was promoted

to the rank of colonel, and two years later a diploma of Louis XIV., issued,[8] perhaps, at the instance of his brother, the Governor of Dijon, gave Chamilly a similar post in the French army, with the evident intention of enabling him to leave the Portuguese service when he liked, even though the war with Spain should not be ended. This, taken together with the fact that in the document the space for the month is left blank, is extremely significant, and, as will be seen later on, certainly connects itself with the episode of the ‘Letters,’ even if it does not enter into their actual history.[2] The diploma of Louis XIV., it may be added, is dated 1667, and the sudden departure of Chamilly took place at the end of that year, so that it seems probable that the French captain, fearing future annoyance or even danger to himself from his liaison, had determined to secure a safe retreat.

But let us look for a moment at the authoress of the famous ‘Portuguese Letters.’

[9]

Marianna Alcoforado was born of a good family in the city of Beja and province of Alemtejo in the year 1640. Her father appears to us in the first years of the Restoration as a man in an influential position, well related, and discharging important commissions both administrative and political. He possessed a large agricultural property, which he administered with attention and even zeal, and was a Cavalier of the Order of Christ, besides being intimate with some of the principal men of the time. He had six children, of whom Marianna, according to Cordeiro, was the second. Life in Beja at that time seems to have been sufficiently insecure, owing to the fact that the province of which it was one of the chief cities formed the theatre of the war, and Beja itself was the chief garrison town. Tumults were constantly arising from quarrels between the various parts of the heterogeneous mass which then composed the Portuguese army, and hence increased care would[10] be necessary on the part of Francisco Alcoforado in order that the education of his daughters might be conducted in

such a manner as their position demanded. Hence, too, probably, the reason why Marianna and her sister Catherine entered the Convent of the Conception at an earlier age than was usual. Their father, occupied with administrative and military work on the frontier, would be unable to give them the oversight and attention which quieter times would have allowed.

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[11] 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.[12] 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[13] 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[14] 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 im[15]possible 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[16] 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[17] 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]

The danger of remaining longer in[18] Beja was not in the nature of those which the French colonel could confront with his recognised courage. If he were surprised in the convent, if he were denounced as its violator and as the seducer of a nun, the daughter of a well-known family, and one, too, which was on excellent terms with the new sovereign, neither his own position nor the protection of Schomberg would avail him, since both the one and the other began to lose their importance with the approach of peace.[10]

However this may be, certain it is that Chamilly’s own excuses for departure, referred to in the ‘Letters,’ were merely empty pretexts, and a reference to the history of the time will show this. If Louis XIV. needed his presence so much for the invasion of Franche Comté, why not, it may be asked, for the important campaign in Flanders in 1667?

He seems to have left Portugal, too, a[19] little clandestinely, for no notice is to be met with, as in the case of other French officers, of his asking and obtaining leave from the Portuguese Government, and he probably did not even embark in Lisbon. Already, in the beginning of February 1668, we find him with Louis XIV. in Dijon, so that he must have quitted Beja and the seat of war quite at the end of the preceding year.

It is now that the ‘Letters’ enter into the history of the lives of Marianna and Noel Bouton de Chamilly. As is well known, they were all written after the latter’s retirement from Portugal, and probably between the December of 1667 and the June of 1668, and they express better than any remarks which we could make the stages of faith, doubt, and despair through which poor Marianna passed. As a piece of unconscious, though self-made, psychological analysis they are unsurpassed; as a product of the Peninsular heart they are unrivalled. If they are not, as Theophilo Braga calls[20] them, the only beautiful work produced by his countrymen in the seventeenth century, they are, at any rate, by far the most beautiful. To compare them, as regards literary form, with those of Heloïse would be manifestly unfair, the situation of the two women was so different.[11] Think of the Abbess of the Paraclete, mistress of all the learning of the time, and surrounded by things to console her, or at least to divert her attention, and then regard poor Marianna, persecuted by her

family, and liable to the tender mercies of the Inquisition, with none of the comforts, none of the consolations of the former. But if the ‘Letters’ of Heloise are superior to those of Marianna from the point of view of correctness of expression and style, they are inferior in all else. The nun’s are far more natural, and[21] therefore more beautiful, and the very confusion of feelings and ideas which we should expect from one in her position rather adds to their charm. Finally, the moral character of Heloïse as displayed in her epistles cannot certainly, be placed beside that of the Portuguese nun with any advantage.

Henceforth, we only meet with the name of Marianna at intervals—once in 1668, again in 1676 and 1709, and lastly in an obituary notice in 1723.