The Charterhouse of Parma (50 page)

This girl, at once so timid and so proud, reached the point of risking a rejection on the part of the jailer Grillo; furthermore, she exposed herself to all the observations the man might have made on the strangeness of her behavior. She sank to that degree of humiliation where she sent for him, and told him in a tremulous voice which betrayed her whole secret, that in a few days Fabrizio would be receiving his order of release, that the Duchess Sanseverina was engaging with this intention in the most active enterprises, that often it was necessary to have the prisoner’s immediate reply to certain propositions that were being made to him, and that she was requesting him, Grillo, to permit Fabrizio to cut an opening in the shutter which covered his window, in order that she might communicate with him by certain signs the instructions which she was receiving from the Duchess several times a day.

Grillo smiled and assured her of his respect and his obedience. Clélia was infinitely grateful to him for not adding another word; it was obvious
that he was quite aware of everything that had been going on for the last few months.

No sooner had this jailer left her quarters than Clélia gave the signal which had been agreed upon to call Fabrizio on important occasions; she confessed to him all that she had just done.

“You want to die by poison,” she added; “I hope to have the courage one of these days to leave my father and to bury myself in some faraway convent; that is what I shall be indebted to you for; then I hope that you will no longer resist the plans which may be made to assure your release from this place; so long as you are here, I suffer dreadful and irrational torments; in all my life I have never intentionally harmed a living soul, and it seems to me that I am the reason for your death here. Such a notion with regard to a perfect stranger would reduce me to despair; imagine my feelings when I conceive that a friend, whose irrationality gives me grave reasons for distress, but whom after all I have seen every day for such a long period, is at this moment subject to the pains of death! Sometimes I feel the need of hearing from your own lips that you are still alive …

“It is in order to free myself from this dreadful suffering that I have just sunk to asking for a favor from a servant who might well refuse me, and who may even betray me. Furthermore, I should perhaps be glad if he were to denounce me to my father; at that moment I should leave for some convent, no longer the involuntary accomplice of your cruel follies. But believe me, this cannot last long, you will obey the Duchess’s orders. Are you satisfied, cruel friend? It is I who am urging you to betray my own father! Call Grillo and pay him off!”

Fabrizio was so deeply in love, the simplest expression of Clélia’s will plunged him into such terror, that even this strange communication afforded him no certainty that he was loved. He summoned Grillo, whose past favors he had rewarded generously, and, as for the future, told him that for each day he permitted the use of the opening cut in the shutter, he would receive a sequin. Grillo was delighted with these conditions.

“Monsignore, I’m going to speak to you quite frankly: are you willing to eat a cold dinner every day? That is a simple enough means of
avoiding poison. But I must ask you for the greatest discretion—a jailer must see all and acknowledge nothing, and so on. Instead of one dog, I shall employ several, and you yourself will let them taste each dish you plan to eat; as for the wine, I shall give you my own, and you will drink only out of the bottles I have already begun. But if Your Excellency wants to ruin me forever, you need merely confide these same arrangements to Signorina Clélia; women are women always and if she were to quarrel with you tomorrow, she would take her revenge by disclosing these stratagems to her father, whose dearest pleasure would be to have some reason to have one of his jailers hanged. After Barbone, he is perhaps the nastiest customer in the whole fortress, and this is what constitutes the true danger of your position; he knows how to handle poison, you can be sure of that, and would not forgive me for this notion of employing three or four little dogs.”

There was to be another serenade. This time Grillo answered all of Fabrizio’s questions; he had determined, however, to be discreet on all occasions, and not to betray Signorina Clélia, who, according to him, while on the verge of marrying the Marchese Crescenzi, the richest man in the State of Parma, was nonetheless making love, insofar as prison walls permitted it, with the generous Monsignore del Dongo. He had answered all the latter’s questions concerning the serenade, when he was stupid enough to add: “They say he’ll be marrying her soon.”

It is easy enough to imagine the effect of this sentence upon Fabrizio. That night he answered the lamp signals only by reporting that he was ill. At ten the next morning, Clélia having appeared in the aviary, he asked her with a ceremonious tone quite new between them, why she had not frankly told him that she loved the Marchese Crescenzi and that she was about to marry him.

“Because there is not a word of truth in the whole story,” Clélia replied with some impatience.

It is also true that the rest of her answer was less categorical: Fabrizio pointed this out to her and took advantage of the occasion to repeat his request for a meeting. Clélia, who saw her good faith being doubted, granted it almost immediately, though informing him that she would be dishonoring herself forever in Grillo’s eyes. That evening, after dark, she appeared, accompanied by her chambermaid, in the
black marble chapel; she stopped in the middle of the chapel, beside the sanctuary lamp; Grillo and the chambermaid retreated some thirty paces toward the door. Clélia, trembling in every limb, had prepared a fine speech; her intention was to avoid any compromising avowal, but the logic of passion is urgent; its burning interest in learning the truth forbids all vain pretense, while at the same time its extreme devotion to its objects allays any fear of giving offense. At first Fabrizio was dazzled by Clélia’s beauty; in nearly eight months he had not been so close to anyone but his jailers. But the name of the Marchese Crescenzi revived all his anger, which increased when he distinctly observed that Clélia replied with no more than tactful evasions; the girl herself realized that she was intensifying his suspicions instead of dispelling them. This sensation was too cruel for her to bear.

“Will you be pleased,” she said to him with a degree of anger and with tears in her eyes, “to have made me exceed the bounds of all that I owe myself? Until August third of last year, I had felt nothing but aversion for the men who were my suitors. I had a limitless and probably exaggerated contempt for the nature of all courtiers, and everything that was acceptable at this Court was repellent to me. On the other hand, I recognized remarkable virtues in a prisoner who on August third was brought into this fortress. I experienced, without at first realizing what it was, all the torments of jealousy. The attractions of a charming woman, and one quite familiar to me, were so many dagger-thrusts in my heart, for I believed, and still tend to believe, that this prisoner was attached to her. Soon the persecutions of the Marchese Crescenzi, who had asked for my hand, redoubled; he is extremely wealthy and we have no fortune at all; I was quite prepared to reject him when my father uttered the fatal word
convent;
I realized that if I were to leave the fortress I could no longer protect the life of the prisoner whose fate so interested me. The triumph of my stratagems had been that until this moment he suspected none of the dreadful dangers which threatened his life. I had promised myself never to betray either my father or my secret; but this woman so resolved upon such admirable action, of a superior intelligence and a terrible determination, who was protecting this prisoner, offered him, as I imagined it, means of escape; he rejected them and sought to convince me that he
was refusing to leave the Fortress in order not to lose me. Then I made a great mistake; I struggled for five days, when I should have instantly left the Fortress and taken refuge in a convent: this step would have offered me a ready means of breaking with the Marchese Crescenzi. I lacked the courage to do so, and I am now a lost soul; I have declared an attachment to a frivolous man: I know how he lived in Naples; and what reasons would I have for supposing that he has altered his character? Confined in a harsh prison, he has paid court to the only woman he could see, she has been a distraction for his tedium. Since he could speak to her only with certain difficulties, this amusement has assumed the false appearance of a passion. This prisoner having made a name for himself in the world by his courage, he supposes he can prove that his love is something more than a passing fancy by exposing himself to such great dangers in order to continue seeing the person he imagines he loves. But once he is at liberty in the city, surrounded once again by all the seductions of society, he will return to being what he has always been, a man of the world given over to dissipations, to gallantry, and the poor companion of his imprisonment will end her days in a convent, forgotten by this frivolous man, and suffering the mortal regret of having made him this confession.”

This historic speech, of which we are presenting only the principal features, was, as may well be supposed, twenty times interrupted by Fabrizio. He was desperately in love, as well as quite convinced that he had never loved before having seen Clélia, and that his life’s destiny was to live for her alone.

The reader can doubtless imagine the fine things he was saying when the chambermaid warned her mistress that the clock had just struck half-past eleven, and that the General might return at any moment; their separation was cruel.

“I may be seeing you for the last time,” said Clélia to the prisoner: “A measure in the interest of the Raversi faction may afford you a cruel way of proving that you are not unfaithful.”

Clélia left Fabrizio choking with sobs and dying with shame at being unable to conceal them altogether from her chambermaid or, especially, from the jailer Grillo. A second conversation was possible only when the General would announce his intention of spending another
evening at court; and since Fabrizio’s imprisonment and the interest it had inspired in the courtiers’ curiosity, he had found it a matter of discretion to suffer an almost continual fit of the gout, and his excursions into town, subject to the demands of a vigilant policy, were often decided only at the moment of getting into his carriage.

Since that evening in the marble chapel, Fabrizio’s life had been a series of joyous raptures. Great obstacles, of course, still seemed to stand in the way of his happiness; but finally he knew the supreme unhoped-for joy of being loved by the divine creature who occupied all his thoughts.

The third day after this interview, the lamp signals ended quite early, virtually at the stroke of midnight; the moment they ended, Fabrizio’s skull was nearly cracked by a huge ball of lead which, hurled through the upper part of his window-shutter, came crashing through its paper panes and fell into his room.

This huge ball was not nearly so heavy as its size suggested; Fabrizio easily managed to open it and found a letter from the Duchess. Through the intervention of the Archbishop, whom she had skillfully flattered, she had won over a soldier in the Fortress garrison. This man, expert in the use of a catapult, managed to evade the notice of the sentries posted at the corners and the door of the Governor’s Palace, or else had come to some sort of agreement with them.

Fabrizio hastened to obey, and sent the arranged signals, which were followed by the indicated replies; then he went on reading the letter.