IN MAY 1956 Lampedusa’s novel was sent to the Milanese publishers Mondadori. The ‘Histoire sans nom’ at last had a name, Il Gattopardo,* but it still lacked half its chapters; only the first two and the last couple were sent at this stage. They were accompanied by a letter from Lucio Piccolo, who knew an editor at the publishing house, in which he described them curiously as ‘a cycle of short stories’. ‘On reading them,’ he added, ‘it seemed to me that they might have a certain interest as they present not without vividness an aspect of the Sicilian past, which though not distant has something legendary about it, seen from inside an aristocracy faced by problems it did not suspect …’415
During the summer Lampedusa added two Donnafugata chapters, containing some of the most important passages in the book, and in October Lucio sent these to the editor, Federico Federici, asking him to insert them as chapters three and four in the original typescript. In his previous reply Federici had warned Lucio that there would be a long delay before the publishers could make a decision and now he apologised for the ‘extreme slowness’ with which they functioned. Not until 10 December, when Federici was on holiday, did Mondadori reply, announcing ‘with intense regret’ that they had turned down Il Gattopardo. ‘The book has interested us a lot, and has had more than one reading. Nevertheless, the opinions of our advisers, though favourable, were not without reservations, and for that reason, bearing in mind our current burdensome commitments, we have come to the decision that it is not possible for us to publish the book …’416
Lucio brought the letter of rejection to Lampedusa at Bebbuzzo’s house in Palermo. Gioacchino noticed that the prince was disappointed although, typically, he did not show it.417† Licy noted bitterly in her diary, ‘Refus de ce cochon de Mondadori’.419
Lucio was puzzled by the rejection and in January 1957 he wrote to Basilio Reale, a young Sicilian friend living in Milan, requesting more information. Mondadori, he said, had alluded to the work’s merit and to ‘some reservations of its readers’ which had left him with ‘extreme curiosity’ to know more. Reale replied that negative judgements of three readers had been submitted to Elio Vittorini, the Sicilian novelist working as a consultant for Mondadori, who had subsequently noted down that the text, though worthy, lacked unity and completeness. Nevertheless, Vittorini had advised the publishers to suggest that the author should revise the novel before sending it back to them. Mondadori accepted the advice about not publishing the book as it stood but not the recommendation that they should consider a revised version.420
This episode has led to accusations that Lucio falsified the contents of Mondadori’s letter and that he was secretly pleased about Il Gattopardo’s rejection. The first, by a writer who had not seen the rejection letter, is untrue.421 The second, made by Reale himself, seems to be an exaggeration. It may be true that Lucio was ‘maliciously curious’ about the reasons for Mondadori’s rejection, but it is unlikely that he had hoped the book would be turned down. Perhaps there was an ambivalence in Lucio’s attitude which was close to love-hate (though Lampedusa was probably unaware of it).422 Certainly Lucio later became jealous of Lampedusa’s posthumous reputation (the writer Leonardo Sciascia sympathised with Lucio’s feeling that Lampedusa ought to be known as Piccolo’s cousin instead of Lucio always being referred to as Lampedusa’s cousin).423 But although they were rivals and had scoffed at each other for forty years, Lucio cannot have wanted his cousin to fail completely.
A few days after receiving Mondadori’s rejection, Lampedusa adopted Gioacchino Lanza as his son. For many years he had been thinking of adoption as a means of preserving the family name and titles.‡ His first choice had probably been Giuseppe, the son of his uncle Francesco and the only first cousin on his father’s side. But Giuseppe had died young in 1945 and Lampedusa next considered a more distant cousin, Alvaro Caravita, whose father had inherited much of the Lampedusa wealth in the 1920s.§ At some time, probably around 1950, Francesco Caravita took his wife and son to Palermo to meet the Lampedusas. The visit was not a success. To his mother’s dismay, the boy was offered chocolate by Licy which had become bleached with age. ‘You think I should allow my son to be adopted by people who give sweets like that?’ she hissed afterwards to her husband. ‘Because of my usual cowardly love of peace,’ Caravita recorded later, ‘I let the matter drop.’425
Although there might have been a certain historical aptness in the adoption of Alvaro Caravita, it would have been done merely for dynastic reasons. Gioacchino’s adoption, on the other hand, was a more sentimental matter for Lampedusa because he already thought of him as the son that he had not been able to have. Writing to a friend, he even pointed out that Gioacchino was ‘exactly the same age as our first child would have been, had there been one’. Furthermore, he added, Gioacchino was very like himself, with both his merits and his defects: ‘He is sarcastic and indolent, has a vivid curiosity for intellectual matters, is full of spirit, has much superficial malice and a good deal of fundamental kindness. Besides, more than with me, one can see a mile off that he is a “gentleman”. In short my wife and I are mad about him.’426
This affection for Gioacchino was extended to his fiancée Mirella who, coming from a difficult and unstable family background, really did need adoptive parents.¶ For the Lampedusas the young couple managed to combine the attributes of friends, pupils and children. ‘The good that these two young ones have done for us,’ the prince told a friend, ‘is inestimable. We are getting a bit old and wizened, and the constant presence of these two fine twenty-year-olds has rejuvenated us.’428 During his last years he saw them nearly every day, at the Mazzara or the Via Butera or for a meal in a restaurant. His diary records these meetings followed by affectionate comments in English: ‘Mazzara – Giò [as he used to call him] and Mirella, “Both charming”,’ and that evening, ‘Giò, Mirella and Licy to the pizzeria, “Delightful people”.’ Sometimes Gioacchino’s name is followed by the words ‘more charming than ever’, occasionally abbreviated to ‘m c t e’. When Giò went away or failed to turn up, Lampedusa was despondent. ‘Sorrowful glimpse’, he wrote in English in his diary one evening after putting him on the train to Venice. On one occasion, when Giò did not arrive punctually at the Via Butera, the older man was so upset that he went out and took a bus all the way to the end of the line; when he finally returned home, he found that Gioacchino had been waiting there for hours.429
After he had decided to adopt Giò, Lampedusa hoped to persuade the Piccolos to adopt Mirella, a scheme which would have served the interests of Capo d’Orlando much better than Lucio’s quest to beget an heir. He was confident of success, he wrote to Guido Lajolo, because the Piccolos had been ‘conquered by the aristocratic charm of Gioacchino and by the extraordinary beauty of’ Mirella. But the project came to nothing, perhaps because of Lucio’s ambivalent feelings for his cousin, perhaps because his sister Giovanna was not entirely ‘conquered’ by the couple’s attractions. She was ‘an old spinster’, Lampedusa told Lajolo, ‘more rigid than ever in her moral principles. She keeps to the old rule that engaged couples must not sleep under the same roof; so when we are there poor Giò has to get in his car at midnight and drive off to sleep in the nearest hotel which is thirteen kilometres away!’430
The diaries of both Lampedusas record that on 15 January 1956, at Renato’s restaurant, Licy suggested that her husband should adopt Gioacchino. Giuseppe was enthusiastic about the idea and so was Giò. A potential obstacle was the boy’s family because Gioacchino’s parents and brothers were living happily in the Mazzarino palace and found the plan bizarre. But in the end they did not object. In May Licy noted that Conchita (his mother) was happy about it while Lampedusa recorded ‘Fabrizio Mazzarino’s unexpected enthusiasm’.431 In August the adoption documents were organised and by the end of the year the arrangements were finished. Shortly before the adoption Lampedusa put in an unusual appearance at the Bellini Club – ‘a lunch of unspeakable boredom’ – to assist Gioacchino’s election as a member. Three days before Christmas the ceremony took place, a simple affair in a lawyer’s office followed by champagne at the Via Butera. Licy gave Giò a gold watch and Lampedusa handed him a box of visiting cards bearing the title ‘Duke of Palma’. In the evening the Lanza family gave a large cocktail party in the Mazzarino palace at which Mirella appeared. Gioacchino’s parents had originally opposed the marriage but now she was presented as his fiancée, ‘her brilliance’, reported Lampedusa, ‘overwhelming all the other girls who stood around, jealous but subdued’.432
The Christmas of 1956 was celebrated, as usual, by Licy’s rendering of Russian carols. A panettone was delivered to their house as a Christmas cake and its arrival gave Lampedusa an idea. ‘I want to write something about this,’ he told his wife; ‘a short story about a panettone.’433 He may have been disappointed by Mondadori’s rejection, but it did not prevent him from writing. He had at last discovered his vocation and was determined to write as much as he could. The story about the panettone, ‘La Gioia e la Legge’ (‘Joy and the Law’) was written in a few days over Christmas. It was unlike anything else he wrote, a sad and compassionate tale about a poor clerk and his family in Palermo. There seem to be traces of autobiography in the bus ride (‘through streets where rustic baroque fronts hid a wretched hinterland which emerged at each street corner in the yellow light of eighty-year-old shops’), in the protagonist’s clumsiness on the bus, and in the district he inhabits (‘a decrepit street to which the bombardments of fifteen years previously had given the finishing touches’). But the other vicissitudes of the little clerk were entirely outside his own experience.
Girolamo is on his way home from the office with a huge panettone, weighing seven kilos, which he has been given as a reward for hard work. Neither the complaints on the bus nor the realisation that the reward was ‘an act of rather condescending pity from his fellow-employees’ disturbs his happiness. He can only think of the delight of presenting his family with ‘seven kilos of luxury food’ when provisions in the household usually came in hectograms and half-litres. But when he gives her the cake, his wife Maria insists on sending it, despite Girolamo’s objections, to a lawyer to whom they are under a minor obligation. The clerk then has to buy a smaller panettone for the children and after Christmas a third cake, ‘which, disguised by slicing, he took to his colleagues who were teasing him because they hadn’t been offered a morsel of the sumptuous trophy’. Meanwhile, Girolamo has received no acknowledgement of their gift and goes anxiously to the agency to make sure it has been delivered. ‘Just after Twelfth Night a visiting card arrived “with sincerest thanks and best wishes”. Honour was saved.’
It is a short and unambitious story about the hardships of lower-middle-class society in Sicily which were made harsher by the absurd code of honour with which people were forced to live. There is no reference to the Mafia or hint of violence but more pacific aspects of Sicilian corruption (patronage and exploitation) are handled with skill. So is the description of Girolamo’s humiliation on the bus and his attempt to deal with it: when the clerk hears a three-syllabled word (cornuto) ‘alluding to his presumed marital disgrace, his sense of honour compelled him to turn his head [towards the back of the bus] and make his exhausted eyes assume what he imagined to be a threatening expression’. Maria is also a well-drawn character: ‘only the soul of a saint survived within her, inflexible and bereft of tenderness; deep-seated virtue expressing itself in rebukes and restrictions’.434
After ‘La Gioia e la Legge’ Lampedusa wrote a second story that could hardly have been more different. Instead of focusing on a single banal incident of provincial life, ‘Lighea’ (translated into English as ‘The Professor and the Siren’) is a fable about death and immortality which spans the classical Mediterranean and the world of the twentieth century. The earlier tale, told with some of the simplicity of Verga, is reminiscent of the verismo (‘realism’) movement that had dominated southern literature two generations earlier. Nothing could be further from Verga than ‘Lighea’, its themes inspired by pagan mythology, its language allusive, complicated and lyrical. The writing is as beautiful as in The Leopard, particularly the descriptions of landscape and the Sicilian sea, and Lampedusa was justly proud of it. He was even persuaded by Gioacchino to read ‘Lighea’ aloud into a microphone; the tape, which records Lampedusa reading with great expression in a clear, rather high-pitched voice, still exists.435
The story deals with the relationship of two Sicilians, Paolo Corbera and Rosario La Ciura, living in Turin during the fascist period, and ends with La Ciura’s revelations about his encounter with a siren fifty years earlier. Corbera is a young journalist who, after being deserted by his mistresses, spends his free time in a café in the Via Po, ‘a kind of Hades peopled by bloodless shades of lieutenant colonels, magistrates and professors’. There he meets a cross, elderly gentleman who occupies the next-door table, constantly smoking and spitting during his reading of foreign magazines. On discovering that this is Rosario La Ciura, ‘the must illustrious Hellenist’ of his time and famed for his ‘almost carnal sense of classical antiquity’, Corbera tries to get to know him. The old professor, however, almost rebuffs him. Arrogant, rude, dismissive of his colleagues, contemptuous of Sicily (‘a lovely land, though inhabited by donkeys’), he seems at first ‘just an ordinary academic priest-baiter with a dash of Nietzschean fascism added’. But Corbera perseveres and eventually La Ciura warms to him. He remains dogmatic and patronising but accepts that the young journalist, ‘as happens with a few Sicilians of the better kind’, has ‘succeeded in achieving a synthesis between’ his senses and his reason. La Ciura therefore decides to tell him the story of the siren.
Fifty years before, La Ciura had been lent a hut near Augusta where he could study for the competition to gain the chair in Greek literature at Pavia University. After some days of ‘sun, solitude, nights spent beneath rotating stars, silence, sparse feeding [and the] study of remote subjects’, he is surprised in his rowing boat by a girl emerging from the sea with a smile that ‘expressed nothing but itself, that is an almost animal joy, an almost divine delight in existence’. She climbs aboard, the scales of blue and mother-of-pearl on her lower half revealing her as a siren.|| La Ciura has already told Corbera that the story of Odysseus is untrue. It was ‘all nonsense’, ‘petty-bourgeois poets’ tales’, that the sirens had flung themselves on the rocks after allowing their prey to elude them: ‘no one ever escapes the sirens, and even if someone did they would never have died for so little’. Later he says: ‘The song of the sirens does not exist, Corbera: the music from which there is no escaping is that of their voices.’
The siren declares herself to be Lighea, daughter of Calliope. ‘Don’t believe in the tales invented about us,’ she pleads: ‘we kill no one, we only love.’ For three weeks she visits him and during that time La Ciura ‘loved as much as a hundred … Don Juans put together in their whole lives’. Yet it was a true and immortal love, ‘quite the opposite of dreary animal lust’ and immune to ‘the rage of commendatori and the trivialities of Leporello’. Like la Belle Dame sans Merci of Keats’s poem, she keeps him enthralled and, like the knight in his dream, he learns of all the lovers she has had during her ‘millennial adolescence’. Lighea abandons him when her companions call her for the storm festival but, unlike Keats’s lady, she leaves him hope. La Ciura’s contentment in the modern world has been destroyed – ‘she had shown me the way … towards an asceticism derived not from renunciation but from an incapacity to accept other inferior pleasures’ – but she has offered him the escape of death together with immortality. Fifty years later, he eventually accepts that offer, throwing himself from a ship steaming towards Naples. In his will he leaves his books to Catania University; a recent codicil bequeaths a Greek vase with siren figures and a photograph of the Koré on the Acropolis to Corbera. But none of them survive. There is no money for shelves in the university and the books rot away in the cellars, while the vase is smashed and the photograph burnt in the looting of Corbera’s Palermo home during the Second World War.
The decay and destruction in the final paragraph are a deliberate contrast to the life-giving force of Lighea. ‘I am everything,’ she declares, ‘because I am simply the current of life, with its detail eliminated; I am immortal because in me every death meets, from that of the fish [she has just eaten] to that of Zeus, and conjoined in me they turn again into a life that is no longer individual and determined but Pan’s and so free.’ Another theme is the corruption of the classical Mediterranean world by subsequent history. Lighea may have been ‘ignorant of all culture, unaware of all wisdom, contemptuous of any moral inhibitions, [but] she belonged, even so, to the fountainhead of all culture, of all wisdom, of all ethics, and could express this primigenial superiority of hers in terms of rugged beauty’. She was part of an ancient, innocent and, above all, vital world, the archaic Sicily of the first Greek colonists, the fertile, wooded and primeval island of the pagan deities. Lucio Piccolo would have endorsed this view of mythological Sicily as ‘real’ Sicily, ‘nature’s Sicily’, its vocation ‘that of serving as pasturage for the herds of the sun’. All this had been swept away, though, in the accumulating centuries of man’s progress. The Leopard describes the decay of a noble family and the destruction of a certain society; ‘Lighea’ has a grander theme, the ruin of the Mediterranean and the classical world over more than two thousand years. Both express a part of Lampedusa’s view of history.
The author put much of himself into ‘Lighea’. Like Paolo Corbera, he had been in Augusta as a recruit and in Turin as a young man; although not a professional journalist, he had written those three essays on literature for a Genoese review. Like Corbera, too, he was an aristocrat whose house had been destroyed by ‘liberators’ in the Second World War. He also gave the character the same family name as Don Fabrizio in The Leopard and the same family situation as his own: ‘I confessed myself to be indeed a Corbera di Salina, in fact the only surviving specimen of that family; all the splendours, all the sins, all the unexacted rents, all the unpaid bills, all the Leopard’s ways in fact, were concentrated in me alone.’ Rosario La Ciura may have been based on a classical scholar Lampedusa once met, but he shares many of the tastes and characteristics of his creator. If the dogmatism and irritability are more pronounced, they come from the same sources: a distaste for academics, a hatred of melodrama, a dislike of H. G. Wells (mainly for having written such a bad story about a siren), a contempt for the ‘donkeys’ who inhabit Sicily (‘I imagine nothing good ever happens there, as it hasn’t for three thousand years’). La Ciura even shares some of Lampedusa’s enthusiasms. ‘He examined my few books. “Good, good, maybe you’re less ignorant than you seem. This man here,” he added, taking up my Shakespeare, “this man here did understand something. ‘A sea change into something rich, and strange.’ ‘What potions have I drunk of siren tears?’”’437**
The third short work Lampedusa wrote in the weeks after Christmas 1956 contains no autobiographical character. It is the first chapter of a novel he intended to call I gattini ciechi (‘the blind kittens’) and was probably written in March 1957. The first few pages describe the rise of the Ibba family, within the space of two generations, from illiterate share-croppers to large (but still uncivilised) landowners. They have gobbled up the estates of foolish nobles as well as ecclesiastical lands sold after the Risorgimento for a tenth of their value. The whole operation had been ‘an epic of cunning and perfidy, of ruthlessness and defiance of law, of luck too and of daring’. Extortionate loans have been one of the principal weapons and violence the other. There had been some difficulty over a corpse which the Bourbon authorities had inconveniently investigated, but incriminating papers disappeared during Garibaldi’s campaign and Gaspare Ibba was able to return home to enjoy his ill-gotten properties. These were subsequently extended with the same single-minded avarice by his son. For all his wealth though, Don Batassano Ibba remains ignorant, mean, brutal (he kicks his horse when it throws him) and vulgar (although he has a fine English saddle, he uses twisted ropes instead of stirrups). For Lampedusa there is nothing to be said in the Ibbas’ favour: as E. M. Forster describes them in the preface of the English edition, ‘they stumble blindly into a world which they cannot understand but are capable of damaging’.438
The scene changes to the aristocratic club in Palermo where a group of fatuous nobles is discussing the Ibba phenomenon with dogmatic ignorance. Their conversation is prefaced with some observations from the author on the upper classes of those days (1901), their ‘frothy and infantile imaginations’ and their ‘low consumption of general ideas’. But their silly talk with its absurd exaggerations is ‘anything but comic’: it is a pitiful spectacle, ‘the tragic jerking of a class’ a few minutes from oblivion. Among this group is Fabrizio Salina, the grandson of Don Fabrizio who appears briefly in The Leopard as the ‘odious’ Fabrizietto. On his deathbed Don Fabrizio had reflected that the Salina heirlooms – the tapestries, the almond groves, even the fountain of Amphitrite – ‘might suffer a grotesque metamorphosis [when Fabrizietto succeeds him] from the age-old muted things they had been into pots of quickly-swallowed foie gras, or can-can girls transient as their own rouge’. In I gattini ciechi, placed eighteen years after the old prince’s death, Lampedusa seems to confirm this prediction with references to Fabrizietto’s most treasured dishes at Prunier’s and the Pré-Catelan. Whether or not these were the favourite Parisian restaurants of Lampedusa’s own father, it is clear that Fabrizietto is partly based on Don Giulio just as Paolo resembles Lampedusa’s grandfather and the astronomer is taken from his great-grandfather. In short, I gattini ciechi suggests little piety on Lampedusa’s part for his father, his father’s family or the society in which he was brought up.
The central figures in the novel, however, were intended to be the Ibbas: Lampedusa planned to describe their future rise to the ranks of the minor nobility and their decline shortly afterwards, when land reforms following the Second World War reduced their so greedily accumulated estates. The theme, based on the family history of a friend (who did not find it funny),439 is a meagre one compared to those which animated The Leopard or ‘Lighea’. Although it is difficult to judge the quality of a novel from the first chapter, it seems unlikely that I gattini ciechi would have been in the same class as its predecessor. One of the problems was that it had no character Lampedusa could identify with, a protagonist of the intelligence or sensibility of La Ciura or Don Fabrizio. The first chapter, wholly devoid of human sympathy, is written in an irritable and almost cantankerous style: it reads like the overture to a novel in which the Ibbas and the nobles would merely compete as targets for Lampedusa’s unceasing sarcasm.
The early months of 1957 were the most productive of Lampedusa’s life. He wrote not only the two stories and the opening of I gattini ciechi, but also two further chapters of The Leopard and a new draft of the whole novel. Further attempts were made to find a publisher and an anonymous copy of the typescript was sent to Benedetto Croce’s daughter, Elena, who worked as a literary agent. She does not seem to have read it at this stage, however, and did not bother to reply. Another copy was read by Flaccovio, the Palermitan bookseller and publisher, who could not accept it himself because he did not publish fiction. In March, though, he sent the typescript to Vittorini, who was a director of Einaudi as well as an adviser for Mondadori, suggesting that the novel might be published in Einaudi’s series ‘I Gettoni’. The accompanying letter from Flaccovio was sensible and understanding of the book’s merits, but directed to a wholly inappropriate person. It is astonishing that Flaccovio, who worked in the literary world, should have considered Vittorini as a suitable recipient for a novel like The Leopard. Presumably he felt that the Einaudi director, as a Sicilian, would welcome a novel about Sicily, but anyone with the slightest knowledge of Vittorini’s own writing should have anticipated his reaction. A man who saw himself as a moulder of post-war Italian literature, a prophet of neo-realism and experiment, was bound to find The Leopard reactionary and regressive. If Lampedusa and Flaccovio were searching for a literary figure to promote the book, it is curious they did not think of Eugenio Montale, who had met the prince at San Pellegrino and who had been responsible for Lucio’s success. Montale, who later became one of The Leopard’s foremost defenders, would certainly have recommended its publication.
Meanwhile, Lampedusa had been adding to his novel. The two new chapters, ‘Father Pirrone Pays a Visit’ (1861) and ‘A Ball’ (1862), eventually became chapters five and six. A further chapter, describing the growing-up of the Salina children and their father’s passion for Angelica, was planned to go between ‘A Ball’ and ‘Death of a Prince’ (now dated 1883 instead of 1885), but Lampedusa abandoned it after a few pages.440 He also had doubts, shared by Licy, about the chapter on Father Pirrone because it seemed an ‘explicit’ apology for aristocracy justified not by Don Fabrizio’s behaviour but by the words of the priest.441
At the beginning of April 1957 Lampedusa read the two new chapters to Francesco Orlando and asked him to type them out. But Orlando, who had typed the rest of the novel, had various student commitments at that time and asked for a postponement.442 In the meantime the prince had been writing a whole new draft of the novel, including chapters on Pirrone and the ball, which he gave Gioacchino before leaving for Rome in May. Entitled Il Gattopardo (completo), it was written in a large, hard-backed notebook in dark blue biro; the handwriting is tiny and barely legible, many of the words running into each other. The existence of this manuscript provoked an angry dispute many years later between those who felt that this was the authentic text of Il Gattopardo and those who preferred Orlando’s typescript (plus the extra chapters).443 The differences between the two versions have a certain scholarly interest but they are not really important. As Gioacchino Lanza pointed out, there are hundreds of variations but all except thirty are trivial, minute changes such as Don Fabrizio for il Principe or vice versa.444 And even those thirty are of limited importance. Two of the most significant changes are descriptive passages of a few lines: the typescript’s list of various items from Don Fabrizio’s bathroom, such as his soap and his sponge, has been omitted in the manuscript; and later on, the hand-written version gains a few lines in the description of the sadistic instruments found in the abandoned rooms at Donnafugata.
* A gattopardo is not in fact a leopard in Italian. It can mean either an ocelot, a cat found in central and southern America, or a serval, another member of the cat family, which lives in Africa south of the Sahara. It is unlikely, though, that the author had either of these creatures in mind when he was thinking of an animal to represent the prince. His family’s coat of arms contained a leopard, which people at Torretta used to refer to as a ‘gattupardu’ in the local dialect, and the title presumably derives from this.414 Lampedusa certainly envisaged Don Fabrizio as a proud and massive leopard rather than one of the more meagre cats, but probably thought Il Leopardo was an inferior title to Il Gattopardo.
The choice caused much perplexity among the book’s translators. The English and Germans played safe with The Leopard and Der Leopard, but the Dutch and French went for entirely different animals: the French chose Le Guépard (a cheetah) while the Dutch selected De Tijger Kat, a margay or tiger cat, which looks like an ocelot but has a longer tail.
† It was probably because Lampedusa had been so sure of Mondadori’s acceptance that he had written to Lajolo the previous summer to say that the publishers had already sent him a contract. After the rejection he told Lajolo that Mondadori were making ‘a heap of difficulties’ and he was therefore sending the typescript to other publishers.418
‡ Noble titles had officially been abolished after the establishment of the Republic in 1946, but many people continued – and continue today – to use them. In fact titles seem to have proliferated since their abolition: according to Luigi Barzini, writing in the late sixties, there were then about ten times as many titles in use as there had been during the monarchy.424
§ Francesco Caravita di Sirignano was the heir of Stella Caravita e Tomasi, daughter-in-law of the astronomer, who had received the inheritance of four of Prince Giulio’s children (Concetta, Carolina, Caterina and her own husband Francesco Paolo) and a half share in a fifth (Filomeno).
¶ The Lampedusas’ treatment of Mirella Radice was a more loving and caring version of Professor Higgins’s programme for Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion: ‘By now her manners are perfect,’ wrote Lampedusa in January 1957. ‘As for culture, she has three weekly lessons of French, two of English and two of history, given by my wife. As she is intelligent she is making progress and, by the time she marries, she will be ready.’427
|| The ancient Homeric sirens were in fact bird-women, similar to Egyptian harpies. Lampedusa’s siren, however, had to be a mermaid and thus he accepted the creature’s metamorphosis which, according to Norman Douglas, took place at about the time of Saint Augustine. In Italian the word sirena can be translated by either siren or mermaid, and Lampedusa himself translated Shakespeare’s Mermaid Tavern as the Taverna della Sirena.436
** Quotations from the first act of The Tempest and the 119th sonnet.