The Charterhouse of Parma (31 page)

The good Archbishop entered into an infinity of details, as may be judged by those we have just reproduced. Then he added, using the Latin tongue:

Fabrizio interrupted his reading of this letter a score of times, seized as he was by transports of the deepest gratitude: he immediately replied by a letter of some eight pages. Frequently he was obliged to turn aside his head so that his tears might not fall upon his paper. The following day, just as he was sealing this letter, he read it over and found it too worldly. “I shall write it in Latin,” he said to himself, “that will make it appear seemlier to the worthy Archbishop.” But in attempting to construct his fine suitably extended Latin sentences in the manner of Cicero, he recalled that one day the Archbishop, referring to Napoléon, chose to call him Buonaparte; instantly all the emotion which had touched him to the point of tears disappeared. “O King of Italy!” he exclaimed. “That loyalty which so many have sworn
to you in your lifetime I shall perpetuate even after your death. He cares for me, no doubt, but because I am a del Dongo and he the son of the bourgeoisie.” In order that his fine letter in Italian not be wasted, Fabrizio made a few necessary alterations in it and addressed it to Count Mosca.

That very day, Fabrizio met up with little Marietta in the street; she blushed with happiness and gestured to him to follow her without speaking. She rapidly made for a deserted archway, where she tightened the black lace shawl which, according to the custom of the country, covered her head, in order that she not be recognized; then, quickly turning around: “How can it be,” she said to Fabrizio, “that you are walking freely in the street like this?”

Fabrizio told her his story. “Good heavens, you were in Ferrara! I was there, looking for you everywhere! You must know that I quarrelled with the old woman because she wanted to take me to Venice, where I was sure you would never go, since you are on the Austrians’ blacklist. I sold my gold chain to come to Bologna, since I had a feeling I would be lucky enough to meet you here, as I have; the old woman got here two days after I did. So I will not ask you to come to where we live; she would make more of her base requests for money which cause me so much shame. We have lived quite comfortably since the fatal day you recall, and we have not spent a quarter of what you gave her. I don’t want to visit you at the Albergo del Pellegrino, that would be a
pubblicità
. Try to rent a little room in an empty street somewhere, and at the Ave Maria”—nightfall—“I will be here, under this same archway.”

With these words, she ran off.

Every serious idea was forgotten upon the unexpected appearance of this charming person. Fabrizio took up life in Bologna in the profoundest joy and security. This naïve tendency to be happy with whatever filled his life was quite apparent in the letters he wrote to the Duchess, to such an extent that she took offense. Fabrizio scarcely noticed; he wrote, however, in a sort of code on the face of his watch: “When I wrote to the D. never say
when I was prelate, when I was in the Church;
that annoys her.” He had bought two little horses with which he was highly pleased; he harnessed them to a hired carriage whenever little Marietta wanted to visit one of those delightful spots in the environs of Bologna; almost every evening he drove her to the
Cascata del Reno
, and upon their return he would call on that agreeable fellow Crescentini, who regarded himself as Marietta’s father, more or less.

“My word, if this is the
vie de café
I used to consider so unworthy of a gentleman, I was quite wrong to reject it,” Fabrizio said to himself. He was forgetting that he never went to a café except to read the
Constitutionnel
, and that since he was a complete stranger to anyone in Bologna’s high society, the delights of vanity counted for nothing in his present happiness. When he was not with little Marietta, he might be seen at the Observatory, where he attended lectures on astronomy;
the professor had taken a great liking to him, and Fabrizio would lend him his horses on Sundays so that he might cut a figure with his wife on the
Corso della Montagnola
.

He hated the very idea of doing harm to anyone at all, however disagreeable he might be. Marietta insisted that he not see the old woman; but one day when she was in church he went up to visit the
mammaccia
, who flushed with rage when she saw him come in. “Now is the time to act the del Dongo,” Fabrizio said to himself.

“How much does Marietta earn a month, when she has a theatrical engagement?” he inquired, with the air of a self-respecting young man entering the balcony of the
Bouffes Parisiens
.

“Fifty scudi.”

“You’re lying as usual; tell me the truth, or by God you’ll not get one centesimo.”

“All right, she made twenty-two scudi in our company while we were in Parma, when we had the misfortune of meeting you; myself I earned twelve scudi, and we each gave Giletti, our protector, a third of whatever we made. Out of which, almost every month, Giletti used to give Marietta a present as well, and that was easily worth two scudi.”

“You’re still lying; you never made more than four scudi in your life. But if you’re good to Marietta, I’ll hire you as if I were an
impresario;
every month you’ll receive twelve scudi for yourself and twenty-two for her; but if I see that she’s been crying, I’ll cut you off without a centesimo.”

“Hoity-toity, but your generosity will be the ruin of us,” the old woman answered angrily; “we’re losing our
avviamento
” (our custom). “When we suffer the enormous misfortune of being deprived of Your Excellency’s protection, there won’t be a troupe in Italy that knows us, they’ll all be full up; we won’t find any work, and all on account of you we’ll starve to death!”

“Go to the devil!” Fabrizio exclaimed as he left the room.

“I shall not go to the devil, you impious villain, but only to the police office, where they shall hear from me that you are a Monsignore who has thrown his cassock in a ditch and that you’re no more Joseph Bossi than I am.”

Fabrizio was already half-way down the stairs; he returned.

“First of all the police know better than you what my real name happens to be; but if you take it into your head to give me away, if you do anything so infamous,” he told her with the greatest seriousness, “Ludovic will have something to say to you, and it will not be six little cuts with a knife that your old carcass will get, but two dozen, and you’ll find yourself in the hospital for six months at least, and not a pinch of snuff.”

The old woman turned pale and grabbed at Fabrizio’s hand, which she tried to kiss. “I thankfully accept the provisions you have made for Marietta and for me. You have such a kindly face that I took you for a simpleton; and you ought to realize that others besides myself might make the same mistake; my advice to you is to look more like a nobleman.” And then she added with splendid impudence: “It’s good advice—you’d better think it over. And since winter is coming soon, suppose you make us each a present, Marietta and me, of a good coat of that fine English cloth they sell in the big shop in the Piazza San Petronio.”

The love of pretty Marietta afforded Fabrizio all the delights of the sweetest friendship, which soon reminded him of the same sort of felicity he might have met with at the Duchess’s hands.

“But how odd it is,” he would occasionally tell himself, “that I’m not susceptible to that exclusive and impassioned preoccupation known as love? Among all the relationships chance has bestowed upon me at Novara or in Naples, have I ever met a woman whose presence, even in the first days, I preferred to a ride on a fine new horse? Is what they call love,” he added, “only one more lie? Doubtless I love the way I have a good appetite at six o’clock! And could it be this rather vulgar propensity which our liars have made into Othello’s jealousy and
Tancred
’s passion? Or must I assume I am constituted differently from other men? Why should it be that my soul lacks this one passion? What a singular fate is mine!”

In Naples, especially toward the end of his visit, Fabrizio had encountered women proud of their rank, their beauty, and their position in the society of the suitors they had given up for him, women who had tried to dominate him. No sooner had he realized their intentions than Fabrizio had broken with them in the swiftest and most scandalous
fashion. “Now,” he said to himself, “if I ever let myself be carried away by the doubtless intense pleasure of being intimate with that pretty woman known as the Duchess Sanseverina, I shall be precisely like that idiot Frenchman who one day killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It is to the Duchess that I owe the only happiness I have ever derived from tender sentiments; my friendship for her is my very life, and besides, without her what am I? A poor exile reduced to a pathetic existence in a crumbling castle outside Novara. I remember how during the terrible autumn rains I would have to fasten an umbrella over my bed to avoid an accident. I rode the horses of our notary, which he permitted me to do out of respect for my
blue blood
(for my high birth), but he was beginning to find my stay a bit extended; my father had granted me an allowance of twelve hundred francs and considered himself damned for supporting a Jacobin. My poor mother and my sisters did without dresses to enable me to make a few little presents to my mistresses. This way of being generous pierced me to the heart. And furthermore, people were beginning to suspect I was a poor man, and the young nobles of the region were taking pity on me. Sooner or later some fool would have revealed his scorn for the poor Jacobin whose plans had come to nothing, for in the eyes of such people that is precisely what I was. I would have given or received a good saber-thrust, which would have landed me in the Fortress of Fenestrelles, or else I would once again have fled to Switzerland, with no more than an income of those same twelve hundred francs. I have the good fortune to owe the Duchess the absence of all these miseries; moreover it is she who feels for me the transports of friendship which I should be feeling for her …

“Instead of this absurd and mean existence which would have made of me a melancholy mindless beast, I have lived the last four years in a great city and kept an excellent carriage, which has prevented me from suffering envy and all the low emotions characteristic of the provinces. This over-indulgent aunt always complains that I never take enough money from her banker. Would I ruin forever this admirable position? Would I lose the one friend I have in the world? All I need do is utter a single lie, merely say to a charming and perhaps incomparable woman for whom I feel the warmest friendship, “I love
you,” though I haven’t the faintest notion of what it is to feel love. She would spend her days reproaching me for the lack of precisely those transports which are unknown to me. Marietta, on the other hand, who knows nothing of my heart and who takes a caress for a rapture of the soul, believes I am madly in love and regards herself as the happiest of women.

“As a matter of fact, all I have ever known, I believe, of that tender preoccupation known as love was what I felt for young Aniken in that inn at Zonders, near the Belgian border.”

It is with regret that we shall record here one of Fabrizio’s worst actions: in the midst of this tranquil life, a wretched
pique
of vanity seized this heart so refractory to love and led it far astray. At the same time as Fabrizio, there happened to be in Bologna the celebrated Fausta F——, one of the finest singers of our day, and perhaps the most capricious woman the world has ever seen. That splendid Venetian poet
Burati
had made her the subject of a famous satirical sonnet which was to be heard in those days on the lips both of princes and of the poorest street urchins: