The Charterhouse of Parma (3 page)

Among these men who had withdrawn to sulk on their estates and who returned to Milan thirsting for vengeance, the Marchese del Dongo was distinguished by his fury; his exaggeration naturally carried him to the leadership of his party. These gentlemen, honest enough when they were not frightened, but perpetually in a funk, managed to impose on the Austrian general, a decent enough fellow who let himself be persuaded that severity was the best policy and ordered the arrest of some hundred and fifty patriots, the best men in all Italy at the time.

Soon they were deported to the
bocche di Cattaro
, where, flung into underground caves, humidity and especially lack of bread rendered a summary justice to all such wretches.

The Marchese del Dongo occupied a high position, and, since he united sordid greed with a host of other fine qualities, publicly boasted of not sending one scudo to his sister, Countess Pietranera: still deeply in love, she was unwilling to leave her husband and was starving to death with him in France. The good Marchesa was in despair; finally she managed to filch a few little diamonds from her jewel-case, which her husband took from her every evening to keep under his bed in an iron strongbox: the Marchesa had brought her husband a dowry of eight hundred thousand francs and received eighty francs a month for her personal expenses. During the thirteen months which the French spent outside Milan, this extremely timid woman found excuses for continually wearing mourning.

We must confess that, following the example of
many serious authors
, we have begun our hero’s story a year before his birth. This essential personage is none other, indeed, than Fabrizio Valserra,
Marchesino
del Dongo, as they say in Milan.
^*
He had just taken the trouble to be born when the French were driven out, and found himself, by the chance of birth, the second son of that great nobleman the
Marchese del Dongo, with whose pale and heavy countenance, false smile, and limitless hatred of new ideas you are already familiar. The entire fortune of the house was entailed upon the elder son, Ascanio del Dongo, worthy portrait of his father. He was eight years old, and Fabrizio two, when suddenly that General Bonaparte whom all wellborn people believed long since hanged, swept down from Mont Saint-Bernard and entered Milan. This moment is still unique in history; imagine a whole people insane with love. A few days later Napoléon won the battle of Marengo. No need to tell the rest. The intoxication of the Milanese was at its peak; but this time it was mixed with notions of revenge: these good people had been taught to hate. Soon the surviving patriots deported to the
bocche di Cattaro
were brought home; their return was celebrated by a national holiday, but their pale faces, huge staring eyes, and famished limbs contrasted strangely with the joy which exploded on all sides. Their arrival was the signal for the departure of the most compromised families. The Marchese del Dongo was among the first to flee to his Castle of Grianta. The heads of the noble families were filled with hatred and fear, but their wives and daughters remembered the delights of the first French occupation and regretted Milan and the gay balls organized at the
Casa Tanzi
immediately after Marengo.

A few days after the victory, the French general in charge of maintaining peace in Lombardy discovered that all the farmers and the old women on the estates of the nobles, far from marveling over that wonderful victory of Marengo which had changed the fortunes of Italy and reconquered thirteen fortresses in one day, were preoccupied exclusively by a prophecy of Saint Giovita, first patron of Brescia. According to these holy words, the prosperity of Napoléon and the French would cease precisely thirteen weeks after Marengo. What somewhat excuses the Marchese del Dongo and all the surly nobles of the countryside is that they really and quite seriously believed in this prophecy. None of these people had read four books in all their lives; they were openly preparing to return to Milan once the thirteen weeks had elapsed; but time as it passed marked new successes for the French cause. Returning to Paris, Napoléon, by astute decrees, rescued the Revolution from within just as he had saved it from foreign
enemies at Marengo. Whereupon the Lombard nobles, having withdrawn to their castles, discovered first of all that they had misunderstood the prophecy of the patron saint of Brescia: it was not a matter of thirteen weeks, but of thirteen months. The thirteen months passed, and the prosperity of France seemed to increase with every day.

Let us skip ten years of progress and happiness, from 1800 to 1810; Fabrizio spent the first of them in the Castle of Grianta, giving and receiving many punches among the peasant boys of the village and learning nothing, not even how to read. Later, he was sent to the Jesuit College at Milan. The Marchese his father required that the Latin language be revealed to him, not according to those ancient authors who continually mentioned republics, but upon a magnificent volume embellished with over a hundred engravings, masterpieces of the artists of the seventeenth century; this was the Latin genealogy of the Valserras, Marchesi del Dongo, published in 1650 by Fabrizio del Dongo, Archbishop of Parma. The fortune of the Valserras was chiefly military, the engravings represented many a battle, and some hero of that name was invariably shown dealing mighty blows with his sword. This volume delighted young Fabrizio. His mother, who adored him, occasionally obtained permission to visit him in Milan; but since her husband never gave her money for these expeditions, it was her sister-in-law, the lovely Countess Pietranera, who loaned it to her. After the return of the French, the Countess had become one of the most brilliant ladies of the court of Prince Eugène, Viceroy of Italy.

Once Fabrizio had made his first Communion, she persuaded the Marchese, still in voluntary exile, to allow him to leave the College from time to time. She found her nephew to be singular, witty, very serious, but a fine-looking boy and by no means a liability to the
salon
of a fashionable lady; furthermore, he was quite ignorant, scarcely knowing how to write his name. The Countess, whose enthusiastic character was evident in all she undertook, promised her protection to the establishment if her nephew made remarkable progress and carried off many prizes by the year’s end. In order to afford him the means of deserving them, she sent for Fabrizio every Saturday evening and frequently returned him to his masters only the following Wednesday or Thursday. The Jesuits, though dearly beloved by the Prince-Viceroy,
were under sentence of expulsion from Italy by the laws of the realm, and the Superior of the College, a cunning fellow, perceived all the advantage he might derive from his relations with a woman omnipotent at court. He was careful not to complain of Fabrizio’s absences, and at the year’s end the boy, ignorant as ever, obtained five first prizes. On this stipulation, the brilliant Countess Pietranera, accompanied by her husband, commanding general of one of the divisions of the Guard, and by five or six of the greatest figures of the viceregal court, attended the prize-giving at the Jesuit College. The director was complimented by his superiors.

The Countess included her nephew in all those brilliant parties which marked the too brief reign of the lovable Prince Eugène. She had created him, by her authority, Officer of the Hussars, and Fabrizio, at twelve, wore their uniform. One day the Countess, delighted by his fine turnout, requested that the Prince give him a page’s functions, which would mean that the del Dongo family was recovering its position. The following day she needed all her influence to keep the Viceroy from remembering this request, which lacked nothing but the consent of the future page’s father, and this consent would have been vehemently refused. After this folly, which made the surly Marchese shudder, he found a pretext to recall young Fabrizio to Grianta. The Countess felt sovereign contempt for her brother; she regarded him as a grim fool who would commit any wickedness within his power. But she was wildly devoted to Fabrizio, and after ten years of silence, she wrote to the Marchese in order to reclaim her nephew: her letter was left unanswered.

On his return to that formidable castle built by the most bellicose of all his ancestors, Fabrizio knew of nothing better to do than to drill and to ride. Count Pietranera, as fond of the boy as his wife, had often put him on horseback and had taken him along on parade.

Arriving at the Castle of Grianta, Fabrizio, eyes still red with tears shed upon leaving behind his aunt’s splendid
salon
, met with nothing but the passionate caresses of his mother and his sisters. The Marchese was shut up in his study with his elder son, the Marchesino Ascanio. Here they concocted letters in code which had the honor to be sent to Vienna; father and son appeared only at mealtimes. The Marchese
repeated meaningfully that he was teaching his natural successor to keep double-entry accounts of what his estates produced. In fact, the Marchese was too jealous of his power to speak of such things to a son who was the inevitable heir to all these entailed properties. He kept him busy coding despatches of fifteen or twenty pages, which he forwarded to Switzerland two or three times a week, whence they made their way to Vienna. The Marchese claimed to inform his legitimate sovereigns of the internal condition of Italy, of which he himself knew nothing, though his letters enjoyed a great success. This is the reason: the Marchese’s trustworthy agent counted the soldiers changing garrison in every French or Italian regiment, and in reporting this fact to the Austrian court, he scrupulously diminished by at least a quarter the number of soldiers in the field. Absurd as they were, these letters had the merit of giving the lie to more accurate ones, and they pleased their recipients. Hence, shortly before Fabrizio’s arrival at the castle, the Marchese had received the Star of a renowed Order; it was the fifth one to embellish his Chamberlain’s coat. True, he suffered the chagrin of not daring to sport this garment outside his study; but he never allowed himself to dictate a despatch without having first put on the coat embroidered with gold lace and embellished with all his decorations. He would have felt he was lacking in respect had he proceeded otherwise.

The Marchesa was astonished by her son’s graceful manners. But she was still in the habit of writing two or three times a year to General-Count d’A—— (the current name of Lieutenant Robert). The Marchesa had a horror of lying to those she cared for; she questioned her son and was appalled by his ignorance.

“If he seems uneducated to me, ignorant as I am,” she mused, “Robert, who is so learned, would find his education absolutely inadequate; yet nowadays it is true ability that counts.” Another peculiarity which amazed her almost as much was that Fabrizio had taken seriously all the religious notions he had learned from the Jesuits. Though quite pious herself, her son’s fanaticism made her tremble; “If the Marchese has the wit to divine this source of influence, he will rob me of my son’s love.” She shed a great many tears, and her passion for Fabrizio was thereby increased.

Life in this castle, inhabited by thirty or forty servants, was gloomy indeed; hence Fabrizio spent all his days hunting or rowing on the lake. Soon he was closely attached to the coachmen and the grooms; all were wild partisans of the French and openly derided the pious lackeys serving the Marchese or his elder son. The principal excuse for their mockery of these solemn personages was that they powdered their hair in imitation of their masters.

The Marchese professed a robust hatred of the Enlightenment: “It is ideas,” he would say, “which have corrupted Italy.” And he was uncertain how to reconcile his pious horror of learning with a desire to see his son Fabrizio perfect the education so brilliantly begun among the Jesuits. In order to incur the fewest possible risks, he entrusted the worthy Abbé Blanès, parish priest of Grianta, with the task of helping Fabrizio continue his studies in Latin. It would have been necessary that the Abbé himself possess some knowledge of this language, which happened to be the object of his scorn; his attainments in this realm were confined to reciting by heart the prayers of his missal, whose sense he could communicate, more or less, to his flock. Yet for all that this priest was deeply respected and even dreaded throughout the canton; he had always said it was not in thirteen weeks nor even in thirteen months that the famous prophecy of San Giovita, patron saint of Brescia, would be fulfilled. He would add, when speaking to friends he could trust, that this number thirteen must be interpreted in a manner which would astonish many, were he permitted to tell all (1813).

The fact is that Abbé Blanès, a figure of
primitive
virtue and honesty,
and moreover a clever man, spent every night at the top of his belfry; he was obsessed with astrology. Having devoted his days to the calculation of the stars’ conjunctions and positions, he employed the better part of his nights following them across the sky. Consequent upon his poverty, his only instrument was a lens in a long pasteboard tube. One may conceive his disdain for the study of languages, a man whose life was dedicated to the discovery of the precise date of the fall of empires, and of the revolutions changing the face of the earth! “Do I know more about a horse,” he would remark to Fabrizio, “when I am told that its Latin name is
equus
?”