The Charterhouse of Parma (16 page)

The Countess believed herself to be perfectly sincere; yet at the end, this declaration contained a little prevarication. Perhaps, if Fabrizio had been willing, he would have triumphed utterly over her heart. But Fabrizio was merely a child in Count Mosca’s eyes; he arrived in Milan three days after the young scatterbrain’s departure for Novara, and he made haste to use his influence in the boy’s favor with Baron Binder. His exile, the Count believed, was irremediable.

He had not come to Milan unaccompanied; in his carriage was the Duke Sanseverina-Taxis, a comely little old man of sixty-eight, enormously rich though not sufficiently noble. It was no one more remote than his grandfather who had amassed millions as tax-collector of the State of Parma. His father had persuaded the Prince of Parma to appoint him Ambassador to the Court of ——, as a consequence of the following argument:

“Your Highness grants thirty thousand francs to his Envoy to the Court of ——, who cuts a very mediocre figure there. If you were to deign to grant me this post, I shall accept a salary of six thousand francs. My expenditures at the Court of —— will never be less than one hundred thousand francs a year, and my steward will annually deposit twenty thousand francs in the Foreign Affairs Treasury at Parma. With this sum, you can attach to me any embassy secretary you like, and I shall show no jealousy concerning diplomatic secrets, should there be any. My goal is to give a certain luster to my house, still a new one, and to render it illustrious by one of the great positions of the realm.”

The present Duke, son of this ambassador, had been so inept as to show himself something of a Liberal, and for the last two years he had been in despair. In Napoléon’s time, he had lost two or three million by his insistence upon remaining abroad, and yet, since the re-establishment of order in Europe, he had not been able to obtain a certain Grand Cordon which embellished the portrait of his father, and the absence of which was gradually killing him.

At the degree of intimacy which in Italy follows upon love, vanity presented no further obstacle between the two lovers. Thus it was with utmost simplicity that Mosca said to the woman he adored:

“I have two or three possible schemes to offer you, each quite ingeniously worked out; I have thought of nothing else for the last three months.

“Firstly, I hand in my resignation, and we live as good bourgeois in Milan, in Florence, in Naples, or wherever you like. We have an income of fifteen thousand francs, independent of the Prince’s favors, which will last a certain interval, more or less.

“Secondly, you will consent to come to the country where I have some power; you buy an estate,
Sacca
, for instance, a charming house surrounded by a forest, overlooking the valley of the Po—you can have the bill of sale signed eight days from now. The Prince invites you to his Court. But here an enormous obstacle arises: you will be well received at Court; no one will dream of raising the slightest objection. Moreover, the Princess regards herself as ill-treated, and I have just done her some favors with an eye to your interests. But I must remind you of one capital difficulty: the Prince is utterly bigoted, and as you are well aware, fate would have it that I am a married man. Whence a million embarrassments of detail. You are a widow, a fine title which must be surrendered for another, and this brings us to the object of my third proposition.

“We might find a new and not unaccommodating husband. But first of all, he would have to be extremely advanced in years, for why should you deny me the hope of eventually replacing him? Well then! I have devised this singular arrangement with the Duke Sanseverina-Taxis, who of course knows nothing of his future Duchess’s name. All he knows is that she will make him an Ambassador and will present him a Grand Cordon possessed by his father, the absence whereof makes him the unhappiest of mortals. Apart from this, the Duke is not entirely a fool; he orders his suits and his wigs from Paris. He is not at all a man of
deliberate
ill nature; he seriously believes that honor consists in having a Cordon, and he is ashamed of his wealth. He came to me a year ago offering to fund a hospital in order to achieve that Cordon;
I laughed at him, but he by no means laughed at me when I suggested a marriage to him; my first stipulation, of course, was that he would never set foot in Parma.”

“But you realize that what you are suggesting is utterly immoral?” exclaimed the Countess.

“Not more immoral than many another thing that is done at our Court and at twenty others. Absolute power has the advantage that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the people; now, what is an absurdity which no one perceives? Our policy, for twenty years, will consist in fearing the Jacobins, and what a fear that will be! Each year we shall believe ourselves on the eve of ’93. You will hear, I trust, the observations I shall make thereupon at my dinner-parties! A fine affair! Everything that might somewhat diminish this fear will be
sovereignly moral
in the eyes of the nobles, and of the religious. Now, in Parma, whatever is not noble or religious is in prison, or is preparing to go there; be persuaded that such a marriage will appear strange in my country only on the day I am disgraced. Such an arrangement is an offense to no one; that, I believe, is the essential point. The Prince, on whose favor we are trading, has set but one condition to his consent, which is that the future Duchess be of noble birth. Last year, my position, all calculations made, earned me a hundred and seven thousand francs; my income must have amounted
in toto
to one hundred and twenty-two thousand. I have invested twenty thousand at Lyons. Very well! Choose: either a splendid existence based on a hundred and twenty-two thousand francs to spend, which, in Parma, would amount to at least something like four hundred thousand in Milan; but with this marriage which gives you the name of a decent man whom you will never set eyes on except at the altar. Or else the meager bourgeois life on fifteen thousand francs in Florence or in Naples, for I agree with you, you have been excessively admired in Milan; envy would persecute you there, and perhaps manage to spoil our dispositions. The splendid existence at Parma will have, I trust, certain aspects of novelty, even in your eyes which have seen the Court of Prince Eugène; it would be politic to experience it before rejecting it forever. Do not suppose I am attempting to influence your choice. My own decision is clear—I prefer to live with you in an attic than to continue this splendid existence alone.”

The possibility of this strange marriage was discussed daily by the two lovers. The Countess saw the Duke Sanseverina-Taxis at the Ball of La Scala, and he struck her as quite presentable. In one of their last conversations, Mosca summarized his proposition as follows:

“You must make a decision, if we wish to spend the rest of our lives in an agreeable fashion, and not turn old before our time. The Prince has given his approval; Sanseverina has a number of advantages to his credit; he possesses the finest palazzo in Parma, and a limitless fortune; he is sixty-eight years old, and obsessed by the Grand Cordon; only one defect shadows his life—he once commissioned a bust of Napoléon from Canova for ten thousand francs. His second sin, which will cause his death if you fail to come to his rescue, is to have loaned twenty-five napoleons to Ferrante Palla, a madman of our country, though something of a genius, whom we have subsequently condemned to death, fortunately
in absentia
. This Ferrante has produced two hundred verses in his entire life, quite beyond compare; I shall recite them for you, they are as fine as Dante. The Prince is sending Sanseverina to the Court of ——, he will marry you the day of his departure, and the second year of his journey, which he will call an Embassy, he will receive that Cordon of ——, without which he cannot survive. In him you will have a brother by no means unpalatable, one who will sign in advance all the papers I request, and moreover you will see him seldom or never, as you choose. He asks nothing better than never to show his face in Parma, where his tax-collector grandfather and his professed Liberalism embarrass him. Rassi, our hangman, claims that the Duke has been a secret subscriber to to the
Constitutionnel
through Ferrante Palla, the poet, and this calumny has long constituted a serious obstacle to the Prince’s consent.”

Why should the historian who faithfully follows the least details of the narrative supplied him be held responsible? Is it his fault if the characters, seduced by passions he does not share, unfortunately for himself, descend to profoundly immoral actions? It is true that such things are no longer done in a country where the sole passion surviving all the rest is for money, the means of vanity.

Three months after the events hitherto recounted, the Duchess Sanseverina-Taxis astonished the Court of Parma by her easy affability
and by the noble serenity of her mind; her house was incomparably the most agreeable in the city. This was what Count Mosca had promised his master, Ranuccio-Ernesto IV, the ruling Prince, and the Princess, his wife, to whom the Duchess was presented by two of the greatest ladies of the realm, received her with every mark of distinction. The Duchess was curious to see this Prince who was master of the fate of the man she loved; she sought to please him and succeeded all too well. She encountered a man of more than average height, though inclined to stoutness; his hair, his moustaches, and his enormous sideburns were of a splendid golden color, according to his courtiers; elsewhere they would have provoked, by their pallor, the ignoble word
flaxen
. Out of the center of his broad countenance jutted a tiny, almost feminine nose. But the Duchess noticed that in order to realize all these ugly points it was necessary to catalogue the Prince’s features one by one. The general impression was that of a man of lively intelligence and firm character. His bearing, his movements were not without majesty, though he frequently sought to impress his interlocutor; then he grew embarrassed himself and would begin shifting from one foot to the other almost continually. Furthermore, Ernesto IV had a penetrating and commanding gaze; his arm gestures implied a certain nobility, and his words were at once measured and concise.

Mosca had warned the Countess that the Prince kept, in the grand bureau where he held audiences, a full-length portrait of Louis XIV, and a very fine inlaid-marble table from Florence. The imitation, she found, was striking, evidently he had tried for the gaze and the noble distinction of the Sun King, and he leaned upon the
scagliola
table in such a fashion as to assume the pose of
Joseph II
. He seated himself immediately after the first words he addressed to the Duchess, in order to give her an occasion to employ the
tabouret
befitting her rank. At this court, only Duchesses, Princesses, and the wives of the Grandees of Spain are entitled to seat themselves; all the other ladies wait until the Prince or the Princess invite them to sit, and to mark the differences in rank, these august personages are always careful to allow a certain interval of time to pass before inviting those ladies not Duchesses to be seated. The Duchess Sanseverina-Taxis found that now and again
the Prince’s imitation of Louis XIV was a little too marked; for instance, in his manner of smiling benevolently, tipping back his head.

Ernesto IV wore an evening-coat of the latest fashion from Paris; he was sent, every month, from this city he abhorred, an evening-coat, a frock coat, and a hat. But by a strange mixture of outfits, the day the Duchess was received at court the Prince had put on red knee-breeches, silk stockings, and very close-fitting shoes, models for which might be found in the portraits of Joseph II.

He received the Duchess Sanseverina graciously; he made several witty and delicate remarks; but she immediately discerned that there was nothing excessive in the warmth of his reception.

“Do you know why?” Count Mosca explained to her after the audience, “It is because Milan is a larger and more beautiful city than Parma. He might have feared, granting you the welcome I expected and which he had led me to hope for, that he would seem a provincial overwhelmed by the manners of a lovely lady from the capital. Doubtless too he is still vexed by a detail which I dare not tell you: the Prince sees no woman at his court who might rival you for
beauty
. That was the sole subject of his conversation, last night when he retired to bed, with Pernice, his chief valet, who is well-disposed toward me. I foresee a little revolution in court etiquette: my greatest enemy here is a fool known as General Fabio Conti. Just imagine an eccentric who has seen perhaps a day’s service on the field of war in his whole life, and who thereby considers himself entitled to imitate the bearing of Frederick the Great. Furthermore, he insists on posing with all the noble affability of General
Lafayette
, and this because he is the leader, here, of the Liberal party. (God knows what kind of Liberals!)”

“I know this Fabio Conti of yours,” said the Duchess. “I had a glimpse of him not far from Como; he was having an argument with the police.” She described the episode, which the reader may well remember.

“You shall someday know, Madame, if your mind ever succeeds in penetrating the depths of our protocol, that young ladies appear at Court only after their marriage. Well then! The Prince has for the superiority of his Parma over all other cities a patriotism so intense that
I wager he will find some way of having little Clélia Conti, our Lafayette’s daughter, presented at Court. She is, I must say, quite charming, and a week ago passed for the loveliest person in the Prince’s domain.

“I don’t know,” the Count continued, “if the horrors which my sovereign’s enemies have spread about him have reached as far as the Castle of Grianta; he passes for a monster, an ogre. The fact is that Ernesto IV was filled to bursting with many little virtues, and it might be added that if he had been as invulnerable as Achilles, he would have continued to be a model potentate. But in a moment of tedium and vexation, and also somewhat to imitate Louis XIV cutting off the head of some Frondist hero discovered living peacefully and impudently on his estate close by Versailles, fifty years after the Fronde, Ernesto IV managed one day to hang two Liberals. It appeared that these indiscreet fellows foregathered on a certain day to speak ill of the Prince and to address eager hopes to heaven that the plague might come to Parma and deliver them from the tyrant. The word
tyrant
was textual evidence. Rassi called this conspiring; he had them condemned to death, and the execution of one of them, Count L——, was a horror. This occurred before my time. Since that fatal moment,” added the Count, lowering his voice, “the Prince is subject to fits of terror
unworthy of a man
, but which are the sole source of the favor I enjoy. Without such sovereign fear, I should have a variety of distinction all too sudden, too harsh for this Court, where imbecility is rampant. Would you believe that the Prince looks under the beds of his apartment before retiring, and expends a million, which in Parma is the equivalent of four million in Milan, to have a powerful police force, and you see before you, my lady Duchess, the chief of this dread force. By police, that is, by fear, I have become Minister of War and of Finance; and since the Minister of the Interior is my nominal chief, insofar as he has the police on his staff, I have had this portfolio given to Count Zurla-Contarini, an idiot who is greedy for such labors as the pleasure of writing eighty letters a day. I received one just this morning, in which Count Zurla-Contarini has had the satisfaction of writing in his own hand the number 20,715.”