from the ancien regime to hemingway

 In the Revue Critique of May 23, 1921, there was a brief notice about the death of Comte Greppi at Milan. He was more than one hundred years old. The writer of the notice, Andre M. de Poncheville, alluded to the fact that when Stendhal was the consul at Civita Vecchia, he must have run into Greppi, then a young man who was in the entourage of the ex-empress Marie-Louis. De Poncheville noted that Greppi was trained in the art of diplomacy by Metternich himself – or at least he saw how Metternich did things in the years before 1848. Although, in a small event that signaled the end of Metternich's world, Greppi resigned in 1849 and only resumed diplomacy under the government of an independent and unified Italy.

De Poncheville did not note, because he undoubtedly did not know, that Greppi had entered literature proper through another portal: Ernest Hemingway.

Here he is, under the name Greffi, in Farewell to Arms:
“Count Greffi was ninety-four years old. He had been a contemporary of Mettemich, and was an old man with white hair and moustache and beautiful manners. He had been in the diplomatic service of both Austria and Italy and his birthday parties were the great social event of Milan. He was living to be one hundred years old and played a smoothly fluent game of billiards that contrasted with his own ninety-foury ear-old brittleness. I had met him when I had been at Stresa once before out of season and while we played billiards we drank champagne. I thought it was a splendid custom and he gave me fifteen points in a hundred and beat me.”
There are few people, perhaps no other people, who are accorded this accolade by Hemingway: “and beat me.”
Hemingway’s character doesn’t mention Stendhal. Sciascia, in one of his little fait divers essays, Poor Rosetta, notices the connection. It is a human thread across a literary history in which Stendhal emerged, just as he predicted he would, in the twentieth century to be a literary force. It is a coincidence that evokes a revery, this sense of a connected world. Sciascia doesn’t mention Greppi’s typically at ease mention in Garibaldi’s memoirs. It was Greppi who introduced the rough and ready revolutionary into the higher echelons of the Milanese aristocracy.
A lovely ancien regime life.