“A scrawny girl… stooped down quickly to steal some herbs to feed her family, having learned from hunger that men, too, can subsist on grass.”
Poverty and oppression in a single image. Keep this in mind when we reach the banquet at the palace of Don Rodrigo.
Manzoni introduces us to Padre Cristoforo, the champion of the poor, by giving us his back story. I’m fascinated by this interweaving of history—which in Italian is “Storia” with a capital “s”—the story of the young couple (lowercase “s”), and the past histories (capital and lowercase “s”) of individual characters.
“In his newfound leisure, the former merchant’s body was slowly penetrated by shame over all the time he had spent making a living in the world. Obsessed by this thought, he studied every possible way to make people forget that he had once had to work for a living.”
In this spirit, I wonder at the use of “bourgeois” to dismiss a class of people who earned their wealth through work. Again and again we see Manzoni, himself a noble by birth (though he refused to use his title), attacking the institution of aristocracy and its pretensions and abuses.
Page 68. The bread of forgiveness. The one little crust will accompany Padre Cristoforo until almost the end of his life (and the end of the novel).
“ but while I’ve been telling you the story of Padre Cristoforo, he has in the meantime, arrived and appeared at the door.”
What a wonderful bit of immediacy of the reading experience. As if I put my book down I’ll miss something.
The working and merchant classes belittled in Padre Cristoforo's father's circle. We saw this classism in Villette. What would become of the world if it were made up only of leisurely nobles, their servants and clergy? Perhaps this explains why Western Europe was a poor backwater for so long.
Padre Cristoforo's backstory. Is this one of what has been called the "Catholic" elements of the story? It did not feel to me to be a religious story per se. Rather, a parable about the power of redemption and recovering contentment through taking personal responsibility for misfortune--your own and others' that resulted from your actions. Indeed, even erring on the side of personal responsibility where the story is more complicated than that. It really does not abridge the theme that he may have had no choice.