Change is a constant undercurrent in The Leopard. When the novel opens, a revolutionary vanguard is preparing to sweep through Sicily. However, the Prince repeatedly convinces himself that change won’t happen—or that, if it can’t be completely ignored, it can be manipulated to his own ends. The Prince assumes that by marrying his nephew Tancredi to a member of the rising class, and by displaying superficially democratic attitudes in order to placate the lower classes, he can stay ahead of social changes and even turn them to his own advantage, thereby avoiding real upheaval. By showing how the Prince stubbornly ignores change—maintaining an illusion of stability while trying to postpone change through empty gestures—Lampedusa argues that societal change is inevitable; in fact, people’s very efforts to resist change often end up facilitating it instead.
The Prince is stubbornly resistant to change, escaping from his troubles through hobbies and memories that focus on the unchanging. The Prince has a special love for astronomy because of its reliance on precise calculations: “Supported, guided, it seemed, by calculations which were invisible at that hour yet ever present, the stars cleft the ether in those exact trajectories of theirs […] a triumph of the human mind’s capacity to project itself and to participate in the sublime routine of the skies.” The Prince, in other words, escapes his changing environment by “projecting” his mind as far away as possible: into the skies, which seem to be controlled by predictable, never-varying mathematical formulae. Additionally, when the Prince and his friend Tumeo go hunting in the wilderness, the Prince finds comfort in the ancient landscape of Sicily: “the scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily […] They saw the same objects, their clothes were soaked with just as sticky a sweat, the same indifferent breeze blew steadily from the sea[.]” The Prince chooses not to think about Sicily’s uncertain future; instead, he projects himself into the past, associating himself and his physical environment with his ancient ancestors. Much like his fascination with astronomy, this is just an illusion—but nevertheless, these diversions allow the Prince to distance himself from the present political instability in Sicily.
The Prince’s self-deluding resistance to change extends to the marriage alliances he supports, which undermine his own noble status in the long run. When the Prince talks with Tancredi about the revolutionary undercurrent in Sicily, Tancredi tells his uncle, “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?” Tancredi attempts to make change palatable to the Prince by paradoxically describing revolutionary action as the only way to ensure that life in Sicily remains the same. For the time being, the Prince accepts Tancredi’s statement at face value. Later on, however, the Prince agrees to marry Tancredi off to the daughter of an up-and-coming politician who isn’t from the nobility. He justifies this move to himself by claiming that it won’t taint the Salina family line, but will in fact be strategically useful—“perhaps good tactics to insert himself into the new [political] movement, make at least part use of it for a few members of his own class.” He even goes so far as to tell himself that “this marriage was not the end of everything, but the beginning of everything. It was in the very best of traditions.” The Prince, in other words, sees Tancredi as he chooses to see him—as an extension of himself and thus as a representative of his own desire for things to stay the same. However, Tancredi, aided by his politically calculating wife Angelica, will ultimately become a major figure in a new generation of Italian politics, not a perpetuation of the old Sicilian noble class. The Prince’s efforts to bring about their marriage, despite his self-assurances to the contrary, end up undermining his own noble status—as well as the entire Salina family legacy.
Despite his resistance to change, the Prince’s—and his family’s and social class’s—place within history is ultimately out of his hands. When the Salina family arrives at their summer palace at Donnafugata, their entrance into town is marked by a time-honored greeting: “Beyond the short bridge leading into the town the authorities, surrounded by a few dozen peasants, were waiting. […] ‘Thanks be to God, everything seems as usual,’ thought the Prince as he climbed out of his carriage.” A short time later, the Prince extends a general invitation to those gathered on the town square: “‘And after dinner, at nine o’clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends.’ For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words […] for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.” What the Prince intends as a passing gesture, a vague concession to the more democratic social customs of the day, the townspeople interpret as more. This leads to the undermining of the Prince’s revered position as powerful benefactor of Donnafugata. It marks a subtle decline of the Salina family’s noble status in the minds of the villagers, which takes hold more firmly as the nobility exercise less and less political power in the coming years. This proves that the Prince doesn’t have control over others’ perceptions of his or his family’s reputation, nor can he determine Sicily’s future. The Prince’s efforts to ignore change only highlight the fact that change is inevitable.
Later, a resigned Prince reflects, “I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both. […] We of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque.” The Prince suspects that the ways of his generation are coming to an end, regardless of his efforts to conceal this truth even from himself. The younger generation is not invested in things remaining the same (belying Tancredi’s earlier words about changing for stability’s sake) and will obliviously celebrate the decline of the dying generation.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Inevitability of Change ThemeTracker
The Inevitability of Change Quotes in The Leopard
The lad had one of those sudden serious moods which made him so mysterious and so endearing. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?”
Now he had penetrated all the hidden meanings: the enigmatic words of Tancredi, the rhetorical ones of Ferrara, the false but revealing ones of Russo, had yielded their reassuring secret. Much would happen, but all would be playacting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. […] He felt like saying to Russo, but his innate courtesy held him back, “I understand now; you don’t want to destroy us, who are your ‘fathers.’ You just want to take our places. Gently, nicely, putting a few thousand ducats in your pockets meanwhile. […] For all will be the same. Just as it is now: except for an imperceptible shifting about of classes.”
Supported, guided, it seemed, by calculations which were invisible at that hour yet ever present, the stars cleft the ether in those exact trajectories of theirs. The comets would be appearing as usual, punctual to the minute, in sight of whoever was observing them […] their appearance at the time foreseen was a triumph of the human mind’s capacity to project itself and to participate in the sublime routine of the skies.
At the bottom of the steps the authorities took their leave, and the Princess […] invited the Mayor, the Archpriest, and the notary to dine that same evening. […] And [the Prince] added, turning to the others, “And after dinner, at nine o’clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends.” For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the Prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.
No laugh […] came from the Prince, on whom, one might almost say, this news had more effect than the bulletin about the landing at Marsala. That had been an event not only foreseen but also distant and invisible. Now, with his sensibility to presages and symbols, he saw revolution in that white tie and two black tails moving at this moment up the stairs of his own home. Not only was he, the Prince, no longer the major landowner in Donnafugata, but he now found himself forced to receive, when in afternoon dress himself, a guest appearing in evening clothes.
The soul of the Prince reached out toward them, toward the intangible, the unattainable, which gave joy without laying claim to anything in return; as many other times, he tried to imagine himself in those icy tracts, a pure intellect armed with a notebook for calculations: difficult calculations, but ones which would always work out. “They’re the only really genuine, the only really decent beings,” thought he, in his worldly formulae. “Who worries about dowries for the Pleiades, a political career for Sirius, matrimonial joy for Vega?”
[T]he scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily […] Don Fabrizio and Tumeo […] saw the same objects, their clothes were soaked with just as sticky a sweat, the same indifferent breeze blew steadily from the sea, moving myrtles and broom, spreading a smell of thyme. […] Reduced to these basic elements, its face washed clear of worries, life took on a tolerable aspect.
Don Ciccio’s negative vote, fifty similar votes at Donnafugata, a hundred thousand “noes” in the whole Kingdom, would have had no effect on the result, would in fact have made it, if anything, more significant; and this maiming of souls would have been avoided. Six months before they used to hear a rough despotic voice saying, “Do what I say or you’ll catch it!” Now there was an impression already of such a threat being replaced by the soapy tones of a moneylender: “But you signed it yourself, didn’t you? Can’t you see? It’s quite clear. You must do as we say, for here are the IOUs; your will is identical with mine.”
Don Calogero’s heraldic impromptu gave the Prince the incomparable artistic satisfaction of seeing a type realized in all its details […] [Don Calogero] was accompanied through two of the drawing rooms, embraced again, and began descending the stairs as the Prince, towering above him, watched this little conglomeration of astuteness, ill-cut clothes, money, and ignorance who was now to become almost a part of the family getting smaller and smaller.
Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight […] that sometimes more can be obtained by saying “I haven’t explained myself well” than “I can’t understand a word”; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield[.]
It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learned; he did try to shave a little better and complain a little less about the waste of laundry soap; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenseless gentry.
“In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.”
“This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both. And what is more, as you must have realized by now, I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for wanting to guide others? We of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque.
Chevalley thought, “This state of things won’t last; our lively new modern administration will change it all.” The Prince was depressed: “All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always,’ of course, a century, two centuries…and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us. Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”
“It’s a class difficult to suppress because it’s in continual renewal and because if needs be it can die well, that is it can throw out a seed at the moment of death. […] I say as before, because it’s differences of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble […] And I can tell you too, Don Pietrino, that if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straightaway with the same qualities and the same defects; it might not be based on blood any more, but possibly on . . . on, say, the length of time lived in a place, or on greater knowledge of some text
They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.
It was useless to try to avoid the thought, but the last of the Salinas was really he himself, this gaunt giant now dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families […] the meaning of his name would change more and more to empty pomp […] He had said that the Salinas would always remain the Salinas. He had been wrong. The last Salina was himself. That fellow Garibaldi […] had won after all.
To her the removal of those objects was a matter of indifference; what did touch her, the day’s real thorn, was the appalling figure the Salina family would now cut with the ecclesiastical authorities, and soon with the entire city. […] And the Church’s esteem meant much to her. The prestige of her name had slowly disappeared; the family fortune, divided and subdivided, was at best equivalent to that of any number of other lesser families and very much smaller than that of some rich industrialists. But in the Church, in their relations with it, the Salinas had maintained their pre-eminence. What a reception His Eminence had given the three sisters when they went to make their Christmas visit! Would that happen now?
As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, that are being annulled. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.
