The Charterhouse of Parma (33 page)

After repeatedly looking around the church in every direction, Fausta would let her loving gaze rest on the dark corner where Count M—— had concealed himself. In an impassioned heart, love is likely to exaggerate the slightest nuances, to draw from them the most absurd consequences, and so poor Count M—— ended by convincing himself that Fausta had seen him, that despite all his efforts she had perceived his mortal jealousy, and that she sought to blame and at the same time console him for it by these tender glances.

The cardinal’s tomb, behind which Count M——had taken up his observation post, was four or five feet above the church’s marble pavement. The fashionable Mass was over at one, and most of the faithful were leaving, when Fausta dismissed the town
beaux
on the excuse of her devotions; remaining on her knees against a chair, she fixed her eyes, ever more brilliant and tender, on Count M——; since there were now only a few people left in the church, her glances no longer bothered to move about the building before coming to rest so happily upon the cardinal’s effigy. “What delicacy!” thought Count M——, believing himself observed. Finally Fausta stood up and suddenly left the church, after making several peculiar movements with her hands.

Count M——, intoxicated with love and almost entirely disabused of his mad jealousy, had left his post in order to rush to his mistress’s palazzo and thank her a thousand times when, as he passed in front of the cardinal’s tomb, he noticed a young man all in black; this funereal being had remained there all this time, kneeling against the epitaph of the tomb so that the jealous lover’s gaze seeking him out might have passed over his head and never discovered him.

This young man stood up, walked quickly, and was instantaneously surrounded by seven or eight rather clumsy persons of odd appearance who seemed to be in his service. Count M——hurried after him but, without there being anything too noticeable, he was halted in the passageway formed by the wooden drum of the entrance-door by these clumsy men who were protecting his rival; finally, when he reached the street after them, all he could see was the closing door of a rather shabby carriage, which, by a strange contrast, was harnessed to two excellent horses, and which in a moment was out of sight.

He returned home breathless with rage; soon his spies arrived, reporting coldly that today the mysterious lover, disguised as a priest, had knelt quite piously against a tomb placed at the entrance to a dim chapel in the church of San Giovanni. Fausta had remained in the church until it was nearly empty, and then had rapidly exchanged certain signs with this stranger; she seemed to be making some sort of crosses with her hands. Count M—— hastened to his inconstant mistress, who for the first time could not conceal from him her perturbation;
she told him with all the lying innocence of a passionate woman that as usual she had gone to San Giovanni, but that she had not seen there this man who was persecuting her. Upon these words Count M——, beside himself, called her the vilest names and told her all that he himself had seen, and since the boldness of her lies increased with the intensity of his accusations, he seized his dagger and flung himself upon her. With great composure Fausta said to him:

“All right, then, everything you accuse me of is quite true, though I have tried to conceal it from you in order not to force your audacity into mad plots of vengeance which might ruin both of us; for you should know once and for all, according to my observation, the man who is persecuting me with his attentions is not likely to find any obstacles to his intentions, at least in this country.”

Having skillfully reminded Count M—— that after all he had no rights over her, Fausta ended by saying that she would probably never return to the Church of San Giovanni. Count M—— was head over heels in love, a little coquetry had managed to add itself to the prudence in this young woman’s heart, and he felt completely disarmed. It occurred to him that he might leave Parma; the young Prince, powerful though he might be, could scarcely follow him, or if he did so would no longer be anything but his equal. But pride once again reminded him that such a departure would always seem a retreat, and Count M—— forbade himself to think of such a thing.

“He doesn’t suspect my little Fabrizio’s presence,” the singer realized with delight, “and now we can make a perfect fool of him!”

Fabrizio never guessed his good luck, finding the singer’s windows sealed tight the next day; catching no glimpse of Fausta he was beginning to find the joke a little long. He was having second thoughts. “In what position am I putting poor Count Mosca, who after all is the Minister of Police! He will be thought to be my accomplice, and I will be supposed to have come here to destroy his fortunes! But if I abandon a plan made so long ago, what will the Duchess say when I tell her of my attempts at love?”

One evening, ready to throw up the game, he was reasoning matters thus to himself as he prowled under the big trees dividing Fausta’s
palazzo from the Citadel. He noticed that he was being followed by a spy of extremely small stature; it was in vain that in order to shake him he turned into one street after another; nonetheless this microscopic being seemed glued to his footsteps.

Impatient, he ran down a solitary street along the River Parma, where his men were waiting in ambush; on a sign from him they leaped upon the poor little spy, who flung himself at their feet; this was
Bettina
, Fausta’s chambermaid; after three days of boredom and seclusion, disguised as a man in order to escape Count M——’s dagger, of which both she and her mistress were terrified, she had undertaken to come and tell Fabrizio that he was passionately loved and that her mistress was burning to see him; but they could no longer appear in the church of San Giovanni. “Just in time,” Fabrizio said to himself. “Hurrah for persistence!”

The little chambermaid was quite pretty, which did away with Fabrizio’s moral reveries. She informed him that the promenade and all the streets through which he had passed that evening were cunningly watched, without his having to appear there, by Count M——’s spies. They had rented rooms on the ground floor or the first floor; hidden behind the blinds and maintaining absolute silence, they watched everything that was happening in the street, apparently so lonely, and heard everything that was said there.

“If these spies had recognized my voice,” said little Bettina, “I would be repeatedly stabbed upon returning home, and perhaps my poor mistress with me.”

Her terror rendered her charming, in Fabrizio’s eyes.

“Count M——,” she continued, “is furious, and Madame knows that he is capable of anything.… She has asked me to tell you that she wishes she were a hundred leagues away from here—with you!”

Then Bettina described the scene of the Feast of San Stefano and Count M——’s fury, having missed none of the glances and signs of love which Fausta, madly in love with Fabrizio that day, had made to him. The Count had drawn his dagger, had seized Fausta by the hair, and without her presence of mind she would have been lost.

Fabrizio took pretty Bettina upstairs into a little apartment he kept nearby. He told her that he was from Turin, the son of a great figure
who for the moment was staying in Parma, which obliged him to exercise the utmost discretion. Bettina answered with a laugh that he was a much greater gentleman than he chose to appear. Our hero required a little time to realize that the charming girl was taking him for no less a personage than the Crown Prince himself. Fausta was beginning to be afraid and to love Fabrizio; she had determined not to reveal his name to her chambermaid, and to speak of him as the Prince. Fabrizio ended by confessing to this pretty girl that she had guessed correctly:

“But if my name is mentioned,” he added, “despite the grand passion I have revealed so many times to your mistress, I shall be forced to stop seeing her, and immediately my father’s ministers, those wicked scarecrows I shall one day get rid of myself, will not fail to send her orders to leave the country, which hitherto she has so embellished by her presence.”

Toward morning, Fabrizio and the pretty chambermaid worked out several plans enabling him to meet Fausta: he sent for Ludovic and another of his cunning servants, who came to an understanding with Bettina while he was writing the most extravagant letter to Fausta; the situation involved all the exaggerations of tragedy, and Fabrizio made good use of them. It was only at dawn that he parted from the little chambermaid, herself quite satisfied with the manners of the young Prince.

It had been repeated a hundred times over that, Fausta having now reached an understanding with her lover, the latter was no longer to pass beneath the windows of the little palazzo except when he could be received there, and at those times a signal would be given. But Fabrizio, infatuated with Bettina and believing himself on the verge of a
dénouement
with Fausta, could scarcely remain in his village two leagues away from Parma. Toward midnight the following evening, he arrived on horseback, and with a considerable escort, to sing under her windows a serenade fashionable at the time, though he altered the words. “Isn’t this how those gentlemen the lovers behave?” he asked himself.

Ever since Fausta had shown a desire to meet him, this entire pursuit seemed quite tedious to Fabrizio. “No, I am certainly not in love,” he said to himself, singing rather badly beneath the windows of the little
palazzo; “Bettina strikes me as infinitely preferable to Fausta, and it’s with her I’d rather be at this moment.” Quite bored, Fabrizio was returning to his village when at five hundred paces from Fausta’s palazzo fifteen or twenty men threw themselves upon him, four of them seizing his horse’s bridle, two others holding his arms. Ludovic and Fabrizio’s own
bravi
were attacked but managed to escape; a few pistol-shots were fired. It was all the affair of a moment: fifty lighted torches appeared in the street in the twinkling of an eye and as if by magic. All these men were well armed. Fabrizio had leaped down from his horse, despite the men holding him; he attempted to break away, and even wounded one of the men holding his arms in a vise-like grip; but he was astounded to hear this man say in the most respectful tone of voice:

“Your Highness will grant me a good pension for this wound, which will be worth more to me than committing the crime of
lèse-majesté
by drawing my sword against my Prince.”

“This is the just punishment for my foolishness,” Fabrizio said to himself, “I shall have damned myself for a sin which didn’t even seem attractive to me.”

No sooner was the little skirmish over when several lackeys in full livery appeared with a gilded and brightly painted sedan-chair, one of those grotesque chairs the maskers use during Carnival. Six men, daggers drawn, requested His Highness to go inside, observing that the cool night air might do harm to his voice; the most respectful forms of address were employed, the title of Prince was repeated several times over, almost at a shout. The procession began to move past. Fabrizio counted more than fifty men in the street carrying lighted torches. It might have been one in the morning; people were at every window; the whole episode occurred with a certain gravity. “I was afraid of dagger-thrusts from Count M——,” Fabrizio said to himself; “he is satisfied with making a fool of me; I didn’t think he had so much taste. But does he really think he’s dealing with the Prince? If he knows that I am only Fabrizio, watch out for daggers!”

These fifty men bearing torches and the twenty armed men, after having stood for a long time under Fausta’s windows, proceeded to parade
in front of the finest palaces of the town. Major-domos walking on either side of the sedan-chair occasionally asked His Highness if he had orders to give them. Fabrizio kept his head; by the light of the torches, he saw that Ludovic and his men were following the procession as closely as they could. Fabrizio said to himself: “Ludovic has only eight or ten men and dares not attack.” From inside the sedan-chair, Fabrizio saw clearly that the men carrying out this bad joke were armed to the teeth. He pretended to laugh with the major-domos assigned to look after him. After over two hours of triumphal procession, he saw that they were about to pass the end of the street where the Sanseverina palazzo was situated.

As they were turning the corner of the street that led to it, he quickly opened the door in the front of the sedan-chair, leaped over one of the poles, and with a blow of his dagger felled one of the bullies who thrust his torch in his face; he received a dagger-cut in the shoulder; a second bully burned his beard with his lighted torch, and finally Fabrizio reached Ludovic, to whom he shouted:

“Kill! Kill anyone carrying a torch!”

Ludovic wielded his sword and released Fabrizio from the two men determined to pursue him. He raced to the door of the Sanseverina palazzo; out of curiosity, the porter had opened the little door three feet high that was cut into the main door and was watching in astonishment as this huge number of torches went by. Fabrizio leaped inside and slammed this tiny door behind him; he ran to the garden and escaped through a gate which opened onto a deserted street. An hour later, he was outside the city; by daybreak he had crossed the frontier of the State of Modena and was safe. That evening he reached Bologna. “Here’s a fine expedition,” he said to himself; “I haven’t even been able to speak to my lovely.” He hastily wrote letters of apology to the Duchess and Count Mosca, prudent letters which, describing what was transpiring in his heart, could give no information to an enemy. “I was in love with love,” he wrote to the Duchess; “I did everything possible to gain knowledge of it, but it seems that nature has not granted me a heart with which to love and be melancholy; I cannot raise myself higher than vulgar pleasures, and so on.”

The effect of this incident in Parma was indescribable. The mystery excited curiosity: any number of people had seen the torches and the sedan-chair. But who was this man who had been carried off and toward whom every form of respect had been shown? The next day, no person of note was missing from town.