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Updated: May 24, 2025
This story of Vittoria Accoramboni's life and tragic ending is drawn, in its main details, from a narrative published by Henri Beyle in his 'Chroniques et Novelles. He professes to have translated it literally from a manuscript communicated to him by a nobleman of Mantua; and there are strong internal evidences of the truth of this assertion.
No doubt they were interesting to her in her capacity of a novelist; but, as they were all of the same colour, and as their tendency was absolutely to destroy any belief she might have in virtue as an inherent quality in highly developed woman or honour in man, Augusta soon wearied of these chroniques scandaleuses.
So that was Monsieur le Duc d'Orléans, the King's cousin, the King's enemy, as many already knew, the wildest, the most dissolute of all the wild, dissolute youth of Paris, the boon companion of the Duke of York, the destroyer of the unfortunate Prince de Lamballes, the hero of a thousand chroniques scandaleuses of the day!
And it was in the last two years, when I began to write French verse and occasional chroniques in the papers, that the great damage was done. I remember very well indeed one day, while arranging an act of a play I was writing with a friend, finding suddenly to my surprise that I could think more easily and rapidly in French that in English; but with all this I did not learn French.
Her ladyship's little knot of associates and scandal-bearers elderly roues and ladies of the world, whose business it was to know all sorts of noble intrigues and exalted tittle-tattle; what was happening among the devotees of the exiled court at Frobsdorf; what among the citizen princes of the Tuileries; who was the reigning favourite of the Queen Mother at Aranjuez; who was smitten with whom at Vienna or Naples; and the last particulars of the chroniques scandaleuses of Paris and London; Lady Kew, I say, must have been perfectly aware of my Lord Farintosh's amusements, associates, and manner of life, and yet she never, for one moment, exhibited any anger or dislike towards that nobleman.
The brief sentences of mediæval annalists bring them less near to us than the chroniques scandaleuses of good-for-nothing scoundrels, whose vulgar adventures might be revived at the present hour with scarce a change of setting. Such is the force of intimité in literature. And yet Baffo and Casanova are as much of the past as Doria and Pisani.
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