Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Leopard, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cultural Survival and Decline
The Inevitability of Change
Class Conflict and Revolution
Love vs. Sensuality
Summary
Analysis
Father Pirrone is from a tiny village that’s four or five hours from Palermo by cart. The priest’s father had been the overseer of two abbey properties there, a position that left his widow and three children fairly well off upon his death. At that time, he had owned a small almond grove and a small, square, blue-and-white house near the village’s entrance. Father Pirrone left at age 16 for seminary, but he visits every so often. In February 1861, he returns for the 15th anniversary of his father’s death.
After the turning point of the Prince’s speech to Chevalley, the scene shifts to Father Pirrone’s humble roots. This contrast in environments further illustrates the Prince’s claims about the Sicilian character, albeit in a very different setting: peasant instead of noble.
Themes
The journey takes five hours by horse-cart, and Father Pirrone arrives to a joyful reunion with his mother, sisters, and nephews. He’s annoyed, however, by his nephew’s tricolor cockade. The place is filled with warm childhood memories, the aroma of tomato sauce, and peace. After Mass and a tearful visit to Father Pirrone’s father’s tombstone, the family returns to a cozy macaroni dinner. Afterward, Father Pirrone and a handful of his friends gather in his old bedroom to talk. The friends include the two Shirò brothers and an old herbalist named Don Pietrino.
Remnants of revolution are visible no matter where one goes in Sicily, even though Father Pirrone’s old village looks largely unchanged. In this way, Father Pirrone’s reunion with his family is quite similar to the Prince’s arrival at Donnafugata. Both men find their beloved villages unchanged on the surface, though change is stirring underneath.
Themes
The talk quickly turns to politics, and the villagers are dismayed by Father Pirrone’s news from his life among the nobles. He warns them of an atheistic and greedy new Italian State that will take away what little they have. The herbalist is upset because he must now pay 20 lire per year in order to sell his potions—made from herbs that God made, which he harvests himself. As the conversation goes on, Father Pirrone says that church properties will be confiscated, and that the abbey’s benevolence to the village’s poor will inevitably dry up.
Father Pirrone’s view of the revolution is a little different from the Prince’s. For him, its main offense is upsetting the social order, trying to erase the traditional role of the Catholic Church in guiding the people and providing for their poor. His village friends see the new government as too invasive, interfering in traditional pursuits in which the government previously had no role.
Themes
Before Don Pietrino heads off to harvest rosemary under the new moon, he asks what the Prince of Salina has to say about all these new developments. Father Pirrone finds it a difficult question to answer. He tells the herbalist that nobles live in a world of their own. It's different from the world of either priests, who are concerned about eternal life, or herbalists, who are concerned with the natural world. Nobles, unlike them, have so many earthly goods that they have become indifferent to such things. They’re concerned about different matters than those that concern villagers, and they have fears that the priest and the herbalist don’t share. But Father Pirrone says that they’re neither better nor worse than other people; they’ll be lost or saved according to the rules of their own world.
Father Pirrone is an outsider to the nobility—but after watching the Salinas closely for years, he has a unique insight into their mindset. He believes that the nobility are essentially different from the clergy, or from simple village folk. Their lives have not been concerned with bare survival, like the herbalist’s, or with eternity, like the priest’s. Rather, their efforts focus on the accumulation and maintenance of wealth. But Father Pirrone doesn’t condemn this, instead seeing it as just another mode of human life. In his view, each station of life has its own strengths and its own susceptibilities.
Themes
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Don Pietrino falls asleep at this point, so Father Pirrone takes the opportunity to keep talking. He muses that the nobility also do a lot of good—for example, they shelter the homeless without asking anything in return. The grandeur of their homes and parties gives them a kind of intrinsic generosity. After all, the Prince sheltered Tancredi, an orphan who would have been helpless otherwise. It’s true that the nobles are contemptuous toward those who are lower than themselves. But this is a universal fault—priests, for example, look down on the laity, and herbalists look down on tooth-pullers.
Because of the nobility’s excess wealth, they’re in a position to do good in ways that other classes aren’t—being able to shelter the poor, for instance. Father Pirrone implies, in other words, that traditional Sicilian society is structured in such a way that different classes may benefit one another. But this implies that when this structure is disrupted, the balance is undone, and people fall through the cracks.
Themes
The nobility, furthermore, will always be around because the class constantly renews itself just when it seems to be dying. This is also because nobility has more to do with attitude than with property. If all Sicilian nobles disappeared tomorrow, they’d soon be replaced by an equivalent class with similar characteristics, even if the new nobility were based on something besides blood.
Father Pirrone goes on to predict that, even if it’s true that the nobility is currently in decline, that won’t be the case forever. The nobility will just reappear in a different form; social hierarchies, he suggests, are self-renewing, naturally finding new ways to reorganize themselves. Hierarchy, no matter what the revolution says, is natural.
Themes
Soon after, Father Pirrone wakes the sleeping herbalist and accompanies him out into the chilly night. He sums up the foregoing speech by telling Don Pietrino that the Prince of Salina thinks there has been no revolution, and that life will continue as before. The herbalist thinks this is absurd. Obviously, the world has changed if the mayor is forcing him to pay for the herbs God created.
The Prince’s noble status makes him blind to the effects of the revolution in ways that the poor are not. The herbalist can’t help seeing change, because the government’s demands impact his livelihood. The Prince, by contrast, is more insulated from such demands and is therefore able to delude himself that things are the same—at least for a while.
Themes
The next morning, Father Pirrone finds his sister, Sarina, in tears. She explains that her 18-year-old daughter, ‘Ncilina, has gotten in trouble with a lover. Sarina fears that her husband, Vicenzino, will kill the couple. Father Pirrone coaxes the story out of his sister: ‘Ncilina was seduced and is now pregnant, Sarina explains, by Santino Pirrone, a cousin of theirs whose father is their uncle Turi. Santino did this out of spite—the two branches of the family are estranged after a brotherly quarrel 20 years ago. The quarrel took place because Turi claims that he rightfully owns half of the almond grove belonging to Gaetano Pirrone, their father, but only Gaetano’s name appears on the deeds. Father Pirrone realizes that this is all vengeance with no real passion involved. He promises Sarina that he will fix things.
The priest’s reflections on the nature of nobility shift to a domestic matter. ‘Ncilina and Santino’s affair is meant to be a pointed contrast to Angelica and Tancredi’s. It looks very different on the surface: Santino allegedly got ‘Ncilina pregnant, and there was no carefully orchestrated courtship and engagement. Yet Santino’s father, Turi, seems to have had similarly ambitious aims (though on a smaller scale), which are carried out in a cruder way than Don Calogero’s or the Prince’s aims for their children.
Themes
After Mass, Father Pirrone goes to his uncle Turi’s house, a wretched-looking shack. Father Pirrone says that he is happy to hear of Santino and ‘Ncilina’s engagement, which will end the family quarrel. Turi gives a look of fake surprise and says that he’s heard of no such engagement. When Father Pirrone mentions the supposed dowry of half the almond grove, though, Turi’s look turns greedy, and he yells for Santino, who comes in looking shamefaced. Father Pirrone invites the men to come to his sister’s later that evening.
Despite his impoverished surroundings, Turi Pirrone is savvy, clearly having had his eyes on the almond grove from the beginning of the affair and using the children in order to assert what he believes is his rightful place in the world. The same could almost be said of the Prince and Don Calogero’s arrangement, though their properties are greater, and their negotiations were carried out with more subtlety and charm.
Themes
When Father Pirrone gets home, he finds Sarina’s husband, Vicenzino, already there. When he takes his brother-in-law aside to explain the situation, Vicenzino shows little concern for his daughter’s honor but becomes enraged at the mention of the almond grove as dowry. Father Pirrone calms him by promising to send along his own inheritance as a contribution to Angelica’s settlement. Later that day, Turi and Santino make the promised visit. Santino and ‘Ncilina appear to be pleased with themselves, and everyone accepts the situation.
Though ‘Ncilina and Santino don’t seem to be in love, they are happy enough with an arrangement that will at least ensure their material prosperity—which is also true of Angelica and Tancredi. Peace is restored within the family, on the basis of a property transfer. This affair suggests that, no matter the class, people are easily motivated by money—love is seldom the sole reason for marriage and can even be done without.
Themes
Father Pirrone returns to Palermo two days later. During the journey, he reflects that the affair between ‘Ncilina and Santino isn’t that different from something else he’s witnessed recently. Things play out differently in the peasant and noble worlds, but the devil’s influence is the same. When Father Pirrone gets home, he visits the Archbishop in order to get a dispensation for the wedding.
Though Father Pirrone has argued that the nobility are different from other groups in Sicilian society, in some ways, human nature makes them all quite similar. “The devil’s influence”—pride and greed, in other words—is at work everywhere, shaping the decisions that govern people’s happiness. (A dispensation refers to special church permission to marry, since Santino is ‘Ncilina’s first cousin once removed. This was technically forbidden by the church, but dispensations weren’t hard to gain with the right connections.)
Themes
