The Jew
(Filippo Ebreo)
Stendhal
Translated by John Penuel
Original title “Le Juif (Filippo Ebreo)”
English translation copyright 2012 by John Penuel
Published at Smashwords by John Penuel
Cover image: Piazzetta di San Marco, Francesco Guardi
Trieste, 14 and 15 January 1831
Not having anything to read, I write. It’s the same kind of pleasure, only more intense. The stove is bothering me a lot. Cold feet and a headache.
“I was a very handsome man then. . . .”
“But you’re still strikingly nice looking.”
“What a difference! I’m forty-five years old. I was only thirty then; it was 1814. All I had going for me was my height and a rare beauty. Besides, I was Jewish, scorned by you Christians, and even by Jews, because for a long time I had been hideously poor.”
“We are altogether wrong to scorn. . . .”
“Don’t proffer polite phrases: I’m in the mood to talk this evening, and, for me, either I am sincere or I don’t talk. Our boat is making good progress. The breeze is delightful; tomorrow morning we will be in Venice. . . . But to get back to the story of the curse we were talking about and my trip to France, I really liked money in 1814: it’s the only passion I have ever known.
“I would spend the entire day in the streets of Venice with a little case displaying gold jewelry; but, in a secret drawer, I had cotton stockings, handkerchiefs, and other smuggled English merchandise. On the death of my father, and after his burial, one of my uncles said that each of us—there were three of us—was left an estate of only five francs; this good uncle gave me a napoleon (twenty francs). That night, my mother cleared out, taking twenty-one francs with her; I had only four francs left. From one of my neighbors I stole a violin case I knew she had put in the attic; I went to buy eight red handkerchiefs. They cost me forty centimes; I sold them for fifty-five. The first day I sold my entire stock four times. I sold my handkerchiefs to sailors near the Arsenal. The merchant, astonished by my activity, asked me why I didn’t buy a dozen handkerchiefs at a time: it was a good half a league from his shop to the Arsenal. I confessed to him that four francs was all I had in the world, that my mother had stolen twenty-one francs from me. . . . He gave me a huge kick that sent me flying out of his shop.
“At eight o’clock the next morning I was back at his place all the same: I had already sold the eight handkerchiefs from the evening before. Since it was hot, I had slept beneath the Procuratie [1]; I had lived, I had drunk wine from Chios, and I had twenty-five centimes saved from my business of the evening before. . . . Such was the life I led from 1800 to 1814. I seemed to have God’s blessing.”
And the Jew took off his hat with tender respect.
“Business was so good to me that several times I managed to double my capital in a single day. I often took a gondola and went to sell socks to sailors on board their vessels. But as soon as I had put some money aside my mother or my sister would find a pretext to make up with me and steal it from me. Once they took me to a goldsmith’s store, took earrings and a necklace, went out as if just for an instant, and didn’t come back, leaving me as security. The goldsmith asked me for fifty francs; I started crying. I had only fourteen francs on me. I told him where my case was: he sent for it, but while I was wasting time at the goldsmith’s she had stolen my case, too. . . . The goldsmith gave me a good thrashing.
“When he grew tired of beating me, I explained to him that if he were willing to lend me a little desk drawer I could make a false bottom in I would be able to pay him fifty centimes a day: something I never failed to do. The goldsmith ended up entrusting to me earrings worth as much as twenty francs; but he never allowed me to make more than twenty-five centimes on each piece.
“In 1805 I had capital of one thousand francs. I reflected then that our law commands us to marry; I thought about doing this duty. I had the misfortune to fall in love with a girl of my nation by the name of Stella. She had two brothers, one of whom was a quartermaster with the French troops and the other a cashier at the paymaster’s office. At night, they would often throw her out of a ground-floor room the three of them shared in the vicinity of San Polo. I ran into her crying one night. I took her for a young girl; I thought she was pretty. I offered to buy her fifty centimes of wine from Chios. She cried even harder. I told her she was a birdbrain and went my way.
“But how pretty she had seemed to me! The next day, at the same time, ten at night, my sales on Saint Mark’s Square having finished, I went back by the spot where I’d seen her the night before: she wasn’t there. Three days later, I was more fortunate: I talked to her for a long time: she rejected me in horror.
“‘She must have seen me go by with my case full of gold jewelry,’ I thought; ‘she wants me to give her one of my necklaces, and—needless to say—that’s exactly what I won’t do!’ I forced myself to stop taking that street; but, in spite of myself, and nearly without admitting it to myself, I stopped drinking wine, and every day I would put that extra money by. I committed the much greater folly of not doing business with those funds. In those days, Monsieur, my funds were tripling by the week.
“When I had saved twelve francs—that was the price of my most common gold necklaces—I went several times down Stella’s street. I finally found her; she rejected my flirtatious remarks with horror. But I was the best-looking young man in Venice. In the conversation, I told her I had been depriving myself of wine for three months to save up the price of one of my necklaces and be able to give it to her. She didn’t answer, but she consulted me about the misfortune that had befallen her since she had last seen me.