The Charterhouse of Parma (12 page)

The remainder of the journey was ordinary enough. Once in Amiens he suffered a good deal from the saber cut in his thigh; it had not occurred to the country surgeon to lance the wound, and despite the bleedings an abscess had formed. During the fifteen days Fabrizio spent in the Amiens inn, kept by an obsequious and greedy family, the Allies were invading France, and Fabrizio became an entirely different man, so many and so deep were his reflexions upon the things which had just happened to him. He remained a child only on this one point: had what he had seen been a battle and, furthermore, had this battle been Waterloo? For the first time in his life, he took pleasure in reading; he still hoped to find in the newspapers or in the accounts of battle some description that might allow him to recognize the places he had passed through with Marshal Ney’s escort, and later with the other general. During his stay in Amiens, he wrote to his dear friends at the Currycomb almost every day. Once he had recovered, he came to Paris; at his former lodgings he found twenty letters from his mother and his aunt imploring him to return as soon as possible. A last letter from Countess Pietranera had a certain enigmatic turn of phrase which dismayed him, and dissolved all his tender reveries. Such was
his character that a single word could inspire the greatest disasters; his imagination then compelled him to depict these disasters in the most horrible detail.

“Be sure never to sign the letters you write about what is happening to you,” the Countess told him. “When you return, don’t come to Lake Como right away: stop at Lugano, in Swiss territory.” He was to arrive in this little town under the name of Cavi; he would find the Countess’s footman at the main inn, who would explain what must be done. His aunt ended with these words: “Use every means possible to keep your foolish escapade from being known, and above all do not keep about your person any printed or written documents; in Switzerland you will be surrounded by the friends of Santa Margherita.
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If I have enough money,” the Countess continued, “I shall send someone to the Hotel des Balances in Geneva, and you shall have the details I cannot write and which you must nevertheless learn before you arrive. But in God’s name, not one day more in Paris; you will be recognized there by our spies.” Fabrizio’s imagination began projecting the strangest things, and he was incapable of any pleasure but that of trying to guess what strange information his aunt might have to give him. Twice, crossing France, he was arrested, though both times he managed to escape; these inconveniences he owed to his Italian passport and the peculiar description of its owner as a barometer-dealer, which scarcely matched his youthful appearance and his arm in a sling.

Finally, in Geneva, he found the man in the Countess’s service, who gave him her message: Fabrizio had been denounced to the Milanese police as having taken to Napoleon certain proposals from a huge conspiracy organized in the former Kingdom of Italy. If this had not been the purpose of his journey, ran the report, why had he bothered to use an assumed name? His mother was attempting to establish the truth,
i.e.
, first, that he had never left Switzerland; second, that he had left the castle unexpectedly, following a dispute with his older brother.

Hearing this, Fabrizio felt a thrill of pride. “I’m regarded as a sort of
ambassador to Napoléon!” he mused. “I am supposed to have had the honor of speaking to that great man—would to God I had!” He recalled that his ancestor seven generations ago, the grandson of the one who came to Milan in the service of the Sforzas, had had the honor of being decapitated by the Duke’s enemies, who surprised him crossing into Switzerland bearing propositions to the Free Cantons and attempting to recruit soldiers. In his mind’s eye he saw the engraving of this episode, placed in the family annals. Questioning this footman, Fabrizio discovered that he had been shocked by one detail, which he was finally persuaded to reveal, despite the Countess’s repeated orders not to reveal it: it had been his older brother, Ascanio, who had denounced Fabrizio to the Milanese police. This cruel news nearly drove our hero out of his mind. In order to reach Italy from Geneva, one must pass through Lausanne; Fabrizio wanted to leave immediately, and on foot, thereby covering ten or twelve leagues, although the coach from Geneva to Lausanne would be leaving in two hours. Before leaving Geneva, he picked a fight in one of those dreary Swiss cafés with a young man who stared at him, he declared, peculiarly. Which was indeed the case, since the phlegmatic young Genevan, a rational creature with nothing but money on his mind, believed him to be mad; Fabrizio, entering the café, had glared furiously all around him, and then had upset the cup of coffee served him all over his trousers. In this dispute, Fabrizio’s first impulse was quite that of the sixteenth century: instead of challenging the young Genevan to a duel, he drew his dagger and flung himself upon the fellow in order to stab him to the heart. In this moment of passion, Fabrizio had forgotten all he had learned concerning the rules of honor and returned to instinct or, to put it better, to the memories of earliest childhood.

The man in the Countess’s service whom he found in Lugano increased his rage by supplying him with new details. Since Fabrizio was much loved at Grianta, no one would have spoken his name, and without his brother’s kind intervention, everyone would have pretended to believe he was in Milan, and police attention would never have been drawn to his absence.

“Certainly the customs officers have your description,” his aunt’s
employee told him, “and if we take the high road, you will be arrested at the Lombardo-Venetian border.”

Fabrizio and his people were acquainted with the smallest paths across the mountain separating Lugano from Lake Como: they disguised themselves as hunters, that is as poachers, and since there were three of them of very determined aspect, the customs inspectors they encountered made no move beyond a greeting. Fabrizio arranged matters so as to arrive at the castle around midnight; at that hour, his father and all the powdered footmen had long been in bed. He easily climbed down into the moat, and entered the castle through a cellar window: here he was awaited by his mother and his aunt; soon his sisters ran in. The transports of affection and the fits of tears followed one another for a long while, and everyone was just beginning to speak rationally when the first hours of dawn came to warn these beings who imagined themselves so unfortunate that time was flying.

“I hope your brother has no suspicion of your arrival,” observed Signora Pietranera; “I haven’t spoken to him since that fine trick he played on you, and his conceit has done me the honor of being offended by my silence: tonight at supper I managed a few words—I needed some pretext for concealing my excitement, which might have roused his suspicions. Then, when I noticed how proud he was of our apparent reconciliation, I took advantage of his delight to make him drink too much, so there’s no question of his lurking somewhere to continue his profession of spying.”

“We must hide our hussar in your apartments,” the Marchesa decided. “He can’t leave right away; in these first moments we are not sufficiently in command of our reason, and we have to find the best way of misleading those terrible Milanese police.”

This plan was followed; but the Marchese and his elder son noticed, the following day, that the Marchesa was constantly in her sister-in-law’s bedroom. We shall not pause to depict the transports of tenderness and delight which all that day agitated these happy beings. Italian hearts are, much more than ours, tormented by the suspicions and wild notions afforded them by a volcanic imagination, but on the other hand their joys are much more intense, and last much longer. On that day the
Countess and the Marchesa were quite out of their minds; Fabrizio was obliged to tell all his stories over and over: finally it was decided to conceal their mutual joy in Milan, so difficult did it appear to avoid any longer the espionage of the Marchese and his son Ascanio.

They took the household boat to reach Como; any other behavior would have awakened a thousand suspicions; but upon reaching the harbor, the Marchesa recalled that she had left some papers of the greatest importance at Grianta—she instantly sent the boatmen back for them, so that no observation could be made as to how these two ladies spent their time in Como. Once there, they rented at random one of those carriages stationed for hire near the tall medieval tower rising over the Milan gate. They left at once, without giving the coachman time to speak to a living soul. A quarter of a league out of town, they met a young huntsman of the ladies’ acquaintance, who quite readily, since they had no man with them, undertook to escort them to the gates of Milan, where his sport was taking him anyway. All was going well, and the ladies were having the most delightful conversation with the young sportsman, when at a turn the road makes to circumscribe the delightful hill and wood of San Giovanni, three policemen in plain clothes sprang at the bridles of their horses. “Ah! My husband has betrayed us!” the Marchesa exclaimed, and fainted.

A sergeant who had stayed a little behind his men approached the carriage, staggering a little, and said in a voice that seemed to emanate from the tavern: “I apologize for the duty I must now perform, but I arrest you, General Fabio Conti.”

Fabrizio thought the sergeant was making a bad joke by calling him
General
. “You’ll pay for this,” he promised himself; he stared at the plain-clothes policemen and waited for the right moment to jump down out of the carriage and escape through the fields.

The Countess smiled quite at random, I believe, then remarked to the sergeant: “But my dear sergeant, can it be that you take this boy of sixteen for General Conti?”

“Aren’t you the General’s daughter?” asked the sergeant.

“Just take a look at my father,” said the Countess, pointing to Fabrizio. The policemen were seized by fits of laughter.

“Show your passports without arguing,” the sergeant intervened, annoyed by the general hilarity.

“These ladies never take passports to go to Milan,” said the coachman in a cold and philosophical tone of voice; “they’re coming from their Castle at Grianta. This is Madame the Countess Pietranera, and that is Madame the Marchesa del Dongo.”

The sergeant, quite disconcerted, went forward to the horses’ heads, where he took counsel with his men. The conference had lasted for some five minutes when the Countess Pietranera begged these gentlemen to permit the carriage to move a few feet forward so as to be placed in the shade; the heat was overwhelming, though it was but eleven in the morning. Fabrizio, who was staring intently all around him for a means of escape, saw the opening of a little path through the fields and, arriving along it at the highway, covered with dust, a girl of fourteen or fifteen who was weeping timidly into her handkerchief. She was walking along between two uniformed policemen, and three paces behind her, also between two policemen, came a tall, lean fellow assuming the dignified manner of a prefect following a procession.

“Where did you find them?” asked the sergeant, now completely drunk.

“Running across the fields, and no sign of a passport anywhere.”

The sergeant seemed to lose his head completely; he had before him five prisoners instead of the two required. He withdrew a few paces, leaving but one man to guard the dignified prisoner and another to keep the horses from advancing.

“Stay where you are,” said the Countess to Fabrizio, who had already jumped to the ground, “everything’s going to be all right.”

They heard a policeman exclaiming: “So what! If they have no passports, they’re fair game anyhow.”

The sergeant seemed not to be quite as certain; the name of the Countess Pietranera was worrying him; he had known the general, whose death he had not heard of. “The general is not a man to overlook his revenge if I arrest his wife by mistake,” he said to himself.

During this extended deliberation, the Countess had entered into a conversation with the girl standing in the dust of the road beside the
carriage; she had been struck by the child’s beauty. “The sun will do you harm, Signorina; this good soldier,” she added, speaking to the policeman stationed at the horses’ heads, “will certainly allow you to get into the carriage.”

Fabrizio, prowling around the carriage, approached to help the girl up into it. She had already stepped onto the footboard, her arm supported by Fabrizio, when the imposing old fellow, who was some six paces behind the carriage, cried out in a voice made louder by the desire to be dignified: “Stay down on the road, don’t get into a carriage which doesn’t belong to you.”

Fabrizio had not heard this order; the girl, instead of climbing into the carriage, tried to get back down, and since Fabrizio continued to support her, she fell into his arms. He smiled, she blushed crimson; they remained a moment staring at each other, after which the girl released herself from his arms. “What a fellow-prisoner she would make,” he thought, “what deep thoughts behind that forehead! She would know how to love.”

The sergeant approached them with an air of authority: “Which of these ladies is named Clélia Conti?”

“I am,” said the girl.

“And I,” exclaimed the elderly man, “I am General Fabio Conti, Chamberlain to His Serene Highness Monseigneur the Prince of Parma; I find it quite improper that a man of my condition should be hunted down like a thief.”

“Did you not, the day before yesterday, when embarking at the harbor of Como, unceremoniously dismiss the police-inspector who asked for your passport? Well then! Today he prevents you from taking your leave.”

“My boat had already cast off, I was in a hurry, a storm was brewing; a man not in uniform shouted at me from the dock to return to port, I told him my name and continued my journey.”

“And this morning, you fled from Como?”

“A man like myself does not take a passport to leave Milan and visit the lake. This morning, at Como, I was informed I would be arrested at the town gate; I left on foot with my daughter; I hoped to find some vehicle on the way which might take me to Milan, where you may be
sure my first task will be to complain to the general in command of the province.”