The Charterhouse of Parma (54 page)

Fortunately Clélia, in despair, had not the slightest suspicion of so criminal an attempt on the part of the Duchess. The confusion was such, at the moment that the litter containing the half-dead General entered the Fortress, that Ludovic and his men passed in without challenge; they were perfunctorily searched at the slave’s bridge. Once they had carried the General to his bed, they were taken to the kitchen quarters, where the servants entertained them lavishly; but after this meal, which was not over until nearly dawn, it was explained that prison rules required that they be locked in for the remainder of the night in the lower rooms of the
palazzo;
they would be released the following day by the Governor’s deputy.

These men had managed to hand Ludovic the ropes they had brought in with them, but Ludovic had great difficulty in catching Clélia’s attention, even for a moment. Finally, when she was passing from one room to the next, he showed her that he was leaving the bundles of rope in a dark corner of the first-floor salons. Clélia was greatly struck by this strange circumstance and immediately conceived the most dreadful suspicions. “Who are you?” she asked Ludovic. And on receiving his extremely ambiguous reply, she added: “I ought to have
you arrested—you or those other men of yours have poisoned my father!… Confess this instant the nature of the poison you have used, so that the Fortress doctor can administer the proper antidotes—confess this instant, or else you and your accomplices will never get out of this Fortress!”

“There is no cause for the Signorina to be alarmed,” Ludovic replied with perfect ease and politeness; “there has been nothing like poison; someone has been careless enough to give the General a dose of laudanum, and it appears that the servant accused of this crime put a few too many drops in the glass; you have our eternal apologies, but the Signorina may be assured that, Heaven be thanked, there is no danger whatever: the Governor must be treated for having, by mistake, imbibed an excessive dose of laudanum; but I have the honor to repeat to the Signorina that the servant accused of the crime made no use of real poisons, as did Barbone when he sought to poison Monsignore Fabrizio. No one has attempted to avenge the danger incurred by Monsignore Fabrizio; the clumsy servant was merely entrusted with a bottle containing some laudanum, I can swear as much to the Signorina! Of course it must be understood that if I were to be officially questioned, I should deny everything.

“Moreover, if the Signorina should speak to anyone about laudanum and poison, even to the excellent Don Cesare, Fabrizio will be done to death by the Signorina’s own hand. For she renders impossible forever any and every attempt at escape; and the Signorina knows better than I that it is not with simple laudanum that the Monsignore was to be poisoned; she also knows that someone has granted only a month for the commission of this crime, and that it has already been over a week since the fatal order was received. Therefore, if the Signorina has me arrested, or merely speaks a word of the matter to Don Cesare or anyone else, she will be delaying our enterprises by much more than a month, and I have every reason to say that she will be killing Monsignore Fabrizio with her own hand.”

Clélia was terrified by Ludovic’s strange tranquillity. “So here I am having a perfectly ordinary conversation with my father’s poisoner,” she said to herself, “who is employing polite euphemisms in order to address me! And it is love which has brought me to all these crimes …!”
Her remorse scarcely allowed her the strength to speak; she said to Ludovic: “I am going to lock you into this salon, and then I shall run to inform the doctor that it is merely laudanum; but good God! how shall I tell him that I have found this out? Afterward, I shall return to release you. But,” said Clélia, running back from the door, “did Fabrizio know anything about the laudanum?”

“Heavens no, Signorina, he would never have agreed to such an expedient. And besides, what would have been the use of such an unnecessary confidence? We are acting with the strictest discretion in order to save Monsignore’s life, who will be poisoned within the next three weeks; the order to do so has been given by someone whose wishes generally meet with no obstacle; and to tell the Signorina the whole truth, it is said that it was the terrible Chief Justice Rassi who received these instructions.”

Clélia fled, horror-stricken: she so relied on Don Cesare’s utter probity that, while taking certain precautions, she dared inform him that the General had been given laudanum and not something else. Without answering, without questioning, Don Cesare hurried to the doctor.

Clélia returned to the salon in which she had locked Ludovic, intending to question him further about the laudanum. She no longer found him there: he had managed to escape! On a table she saw a purse full of sequins, and a little box containing various kinds of poison. The sight of such things made her tremble. “Who is to say,” she thought, “that it is only laudanum that my father has been given, and that the Duchess has not sought to take revenge for Barbone’s attempt? Good God! Here I am in contact with my own father’s poisoners! And I have let them escape! And perhaps this very man, if put to the question, would have confessed to something more than laudanum!” Clélia fell to her knees, dissolved in tears, and prayed fervently to the Madonna.

Meanwhile the Fortress doctor, surprised by what Don Cesare had told him, according to whom he had no more than laudanum to deal with, gave the suitable antidotes, which soon dispelled the most alarming symptoms. The General gradually came to himself as day was breaking. His first deed indicating consciousness was to hurl insults at the colonel who was his second in command and who had taken it
upon himself to issue the simplest orders while the General was unconscious.

The Governor then went into a towering rage against a kitchenmaid who, as she served him a bowl of bouillon, happened to pronounce the word
apoplexy
.

“Am I of an age,” he shouted, “to have apoplectic fits? It is only my sworn enemies who can delight in spreading such rumors. Moreover, have I been bled, that slander itself should dare speak of apoplexy?”

Fabrizio, absorbed in the preparations for his escape, could not comprehend the strange noises that filled the Fortress at the moment the half-dead Governor was carried in. At first it occurred to him that his sentence had been changed, and that he was to be put to death. Then, seeing that no one appeared in his room, he decided that Clélia had been betrayed, that upon her return to the Fortress the ropes she was probably bringing had been taken from her, and that henceforth all his plans for escape were out of the question. At daybreak he saw an unknown man come into his room, who without a word set down a basket of fruit; under the fruit was hidden the following letter:

Fabio Conti was an ever-uneasy jailer, always troubled, always dreaming that one or another of his prisoners was escaping: he was hated by everyone in the Fortress, but, misfortune inspiring the same resolve in all men, the wretched prisoners, even those chained in the dungeons three feet high, three feet wide, and eight feet long, in which they could neither sit nor stand—all the prisoners, even these, as I say, conceived the notion of ordering a
Te Deum
sung at their own expense when they learned that their Governor was out of danger. Two or three of these wretches composed sonnets in honor of Fabio. Oh, the influence of misery upon these men! Let him who blames them be led by his fate to spend a year in a dungeon three feet high with eight ounces of bread a day and
fasting
on Fridays!

Clélia, who left her father’s bedroom only to pray in the chapel, said that the Governor had decided that the rejoicings would be limited to Sunday. That Sunday morning, Fabrizio attended Mass and the
Te Deum;
that evening there were fireworks and in the lower rooms of the
palazzo
the soldiers received a ration of wine four times the quantity the Governor had stipulated; an unknown hand had even sent several casks of brandy, which the soldiers broached. The generosity of these drunken soldiers refused to permit the five soldiers on sentry-duty
around the
palazzo
to suffer from their posting; as soon as they arrived at their sentry-boxes, a trusty servant gave them some wine, and it is not known by what hand those who were posted as sentries at midnight and for the rest of the night received a glass of brandy as well, while the bottle was in each case forgotten beside the sentry-box (as was proved in the subsequent investigation).

The confusion lasted longer than Clélia had expected, and it was only toward one in the morning that Fabrizio, who for the last eight days had sawed through two bars of his window, the one which did not face the aviary, began to take down the shutter; he was working almost directly above the sentries guarding the governor’s
palazzo
, but they heard nothing. He had made only a few new knots in the enormous rope necessary to get down from that terrible height of a hundred and eighty feet. He coiled this rope like a bandolier around his body: it hampered his movements a good deal, for its bulk was enormous; the knots kept it from forming a compact mass, and it protruded over eighteen inches from his body. “This is the main obstacle,” Fabrizio said to himself.

Once he had arranged the first rope as best he could, Fabrizio took the other one, with which he planned to get down the thirty-five feet which separated his window from the terrace where the Governor’s
palazzo
stood. But since, however intoxicated the sentries might be, he could hardly climb down over their heads, he emerged, as we have said, out of the second window of his room, the one which overlooked the roof of a sort of vast guard-room. By a sick-man’s caprice, as soon as General Fabio Conti could speak, he had posted two hundred soldiers in this former guard-room that had been abandoned for over a century. He said that after having been poisoned, he would probably be murdered in his bed, and these two hundred soldiers must be on guard against any such attack. One may imagine the effect this unforeseen measure produced upon Clélia’s heart: this pious girl was fully conscious of the extent to which she was betraying her father, and a father who had been nearly poisoned in the interests of the prisoner she loved. She almost regarded the unexpected posting of these two hundred men as an act of Providence which was keeping her from proceeding any further in Fabrizio’s liberation.

But everyone in Parma was talking about the prisoner’s imminent death. This melancholy subject had even been discussed at the party given on the occasion of Signora Giulia Crescenzi’s wedding.

Since for such a trifle as a clumsy sword-thrust given to an actor, a man of Fabrizio’s birth was not released after nine months’ imprisonment, it was evident that politics had something to do with his case. And in that event, it was futile to think further about the matter, people were saying; if it was not suitable for the authorities to execute him publicly, he would soon die of some disease. A locksmith who had been summoned to General Fabio Conti’s
palazzo
spoke of Fabrizio as of a prisoner long since despatched, and whose death was being concealed for political reasons. This man’s words caused Clélia to make up her mind.

During the day Fabrizio was beset by several serious and disagreeable reflections, but as he heard the hours strike which brought him nearer to the moment of action, he began to feel ready and cheerful. The Duchess had written him that he would be surprised by the fresh air and that once outside his prison he might find it impossible to walk; in that case, it would be better to risk being recaptured than to hurl oneself one hundred and eighty feet down a wall. “If this misfortune occurs,” Fabrizio said to himself, “I will lie down against the parapet, sleep an hour, then start all over; since I’ve given Clélia my promise, I’d rather fall from the top of the ramparts, high as they are, than forever be obliged to brood over the taste of the bread I am eating. What horrible pains one must experience before the end, when one dies of poison! Fabio Conti will not stand on ceremony; he will have me given the arsenic used to kill the rats in his Fortress.”