The Charterhouse of Parma (65 page)

“Like a man, Your Most Serene Highness, dying of hunger, and having, fortunately, neither breakfasted nor dined.”

After having had the honor of thanking the Prince, he sought permission
to see the Archbishop before presenting himself at the municipal prison. The Prince had turned prodigiously pale when it became apparent to his childish mind that poison was not entirely a chimera of the Duchess’s imagination. Absorbed in this cruel thought, he at first made no answer to Fabrizio’s request to see the Archbishop; he then felt obliged to make up for his distraction by an excess of graciousness. “Go out alone, Signor, walk unguarded through my capital’s streets. At ten or eleven, you may present yourself at the prison, where I hope you will not remain for long.”

The morning after this great day, the most remarkable of his entire life, the Prince fancied himself a little Napoléon; he had read that this great man had been shown kindness by several of the beauties of his court. Once established as a Napoléon by such treatment, he recalled that he had also been a Napoléon under fire. His heart was still exalted by the decisiveness of his behavior with the Duchess. Consciousness of having done something difficult made him an altogether different man for a fortnight; he became susceptible to general ideas; he achieved some character.

He began that day by burning the patent creating Rassi a Count, which had been on his desk for over a month. He dismissed General Fabio Conti, and requested the truth about the poisoning from his successor, Colonel Lange. The latter, a fine Polish soldier, terrorized the jailers and told the Prince that there had been an attempt made to poison Signor del Dongo’s breakfast, but too many persons would have had to be made party to the secret. Measures were taken for the dinner, and had it not been for General Fontana’s arrival, Signor del Dongo was a dead man. The Prince was dismayed; but since he was deeply in love, it was a consolation to be able to tell himself: “I have actually saved Signor del Dongo’s life, and the Duchess will not dare break the promise she has given me.” Another idea occurred to him: “My calling is a good deal more difficult than I had thought; everyone agrees that the Duchess is infinitely witty, and here policy is at one with my heart. It would be divine for me were she willing to be my Prime Minister.”

That evening, the Prince was so vexed by the horrors he had discovered,
that he was unwilling to take a part in the play. “I should be overjoyed,” he told the Duchess, “if you consented to reign over my State as you do over my heart. To begin with, I shall tell you how I have spent my day.” And he then described very accurately the burning of Rassi’s patent, the appointment of Lange, his report on the poisoning, and so on. “I realize that I have very little experience as a Sovereign. The Count humiliates me by his witticisms; he even makes jokes in the Council of State, and in my court he makes remarks whose veracity you shall now contest: he says that I am a child he leads where he likes. Being a Prince, Madame, does not mean one is any less a man, and such things are a tribulation. In order to give the lie to the stories Signor Mosca may tell, I have had to appoint that dangerous scoundrel Rassi to the Ministry, and now there is this General Conti who considers Rassi still so powerful that he dares not confess that it was Rassi or Marchesa Raversi who made him order your nephew’s death; I have a good mind simply to send General Fabio Conti before the court; the judges will determine whether he is guilty of attempting murder by poisoning.”

“But Your Highness, have you such judges?”

“What do you mean?” asked the Prince in astonishment.

“You have learned jurists who walk the streets with solemn faces; moreover they will always pass the judgment which will please the ruling party of your court.”

While the scandalized young Prince uttered phrases which revealed his candor much more than his sagacity, the Duchess said to herself: “Does it really suit me to let Conti be disgraced in this fashion? Surely not, for then his daughter’s marriage to that bore Marchese Crescenzi becomes impossible.”

On this subject, there occurred an endless dialogue between the Duchess and the Prince. The Prince was overwhelmed with admiration. In consideration of Clélia Conti’s engagement to the Marchese Crescenzi, but on this sole condition, which he angrily declared to the ex-Governor, he offered him a pardon for his attempt to poison Signor del Dongo; but on the Duchess’s advice, he exiled Conti until the time of his daughter’s wedding. The Duchess believed she was no longer in
love with Fabrizio, but she still passionately desired Clélia Conti’s marriage to the Marchese; there was, in this, a vague hope that gradually she would see Fabrizio’s obsession fade away.

The Prince, in a transport of happiness, wanted to disgrace Rassi publicly that very evening. The Duchess laughed and said to him: “Do you know Napoléon’s saying?
A man in a high position, on whom all eyes are fixed, ought never to allow himself violent impulses
. But it is too late for such things tonight in any case. Let us put off all business until tomorrow.”

She wanted to give herself time to consult the Count, to whom she described quite precisely the evening’s dialogue, though suppressing the Prince’s frequent allusions to a promise which was poisoning her life. The Duchess flattered herself that she would make herself so necessary to the Prince that she might obtain an indefinite postponement by saying: “If you have the barbarity of seeking to submit me to this humiliation, for which I shall never forgive you, I shall leave your realm the very next day.”

Consulted by the Duchess as to Rassi’s fate, the Count showed himself highly philosophical: General Conti and he would go on a long journey through Piedmont.

A singular difficulty arose for Fabrizio’s trial: the judges wished to acquit him by acclamation, and at the first session. The Count had to employ threats to make the trial last at least eight days and the judges take the trouble to hear all the witnesses. “These people are always the same,” he said to himself.

The day after his acquittal, Fabrizio del Dongo at last took possession of the office of Grand Vicar to the worthy Archbishop Landriani. That same day, the Prince signed the dispatches necessary to have Fabrizio named Coadjutor with eventual succession, and less than two months afterward, he was installed in that position.

Everyone complimented the Duchess on her nephew’s solemn demeanor; the fact is that he was in despair. The day after his release, followed by the dismissal and exile of General Fabio Conti and of the Duchess’s rise to the highest favor, Clélia had taken refuge with her aunt, Countess Contarini, an extremely elderly and extremely rich woman solely concerned with the condition of her health. Had she wished to do so, Clélia might have seen Fabrizio, but anyone who had
known of her previous commitments and who saw how she now behaved, might have supposed that her love for Fabrizio had ceased with her lover’s dangers. Not only did Fabrizio pass as often as he decently could in front of the Palazzo Contarini, but he had even managed, with infinite difficulty, to rent a little apartment opposite its first-floor windows. On one occasion, Clélia, having thoughtlessly gone to the window to watch a procession pass, immediately withdrew, as though terror-stricken; she had noticed Fabrizio, dressed in black but as a poor workman, watching her from one of the windows of the wretched lodgings which had oiled paper for windowpanes, like his room in the Farnese Tower. Fabrizio would have liked to persuade himself that Clélia was evading him as a consequence of her father’s disgrace, which people attributed to the Duchess; but he knew all too well another cause for this remoteness of hers, and nothing could distract him from his melancholy.

He had been moved neither by his acquittal nor by his installation in high office, the first which he had filled in his entire life, nor by his splendid position in society, nor finally by the assiduous court paid to him by all the ecclesiastics and all the devout laity of the diocese. The charming apartment reserved for him in the Palazzo Sanseverina was no longer found to be adequate. To her delight, the Duchess was obliged to offer him the entire second story of her Palace and two fine salons on the first, which were constantly filled with persons awaiting the moment to pay court to the young Coadjutor. The clause of
eventual succession
had produced a surprising effect in the region; people now counted as virtues all those firm qualities in Fabrizio’s character which once had so scandalized the poor, foolish courtiers.

It was a great lesson in philosophy for Fabrizio to find himself quite indifferent to all these honors, and much more unhappy in that splendid apartment, with ten footmen wearing his livery, than he had been in his wooden chamber in the Farnese Tower, surrounded by ugly jailers and constantly in fear for his life. His mother and his sister, Duchess V——, who came to Parma to see him in his glory, were struck by his deep sadness. The Marchesa del Dongo, now the least romantic of women, was so profoundly upset that she imagined that he had been given some sort of slow poison in the Farnese Tower. Despite
her extreme discretion, she felt she must speak to him about this extraordinary melancholy of his, and Fabrizio answered her only with tears.

A host of advantages, the consequence of his brilliant position, produced no effect on him save to put him out of temper. His brother, that vain soul gangrened by the vilest selfishness, wrote him a more or less official letter of congratulation, to which was attached a draft for fifty thousand francs, so that he might, said the new Marchese, purchase horses and a carriage worthy of his name. Fabrizio sent this money to his younger sister, who had married disadvantageously.

Count Mosca had had a splendid translation made, in Italian, of the genealogy of the Valserra del Dongo family, originally published in Latin by that Archbishop of Parma, Fabrizio del Dongo. He had it printed magnificently with the Latin text
en face;
the engravings had been replaced by splendid lithographs made in Paris. The Duchess had wanted a fine portrait of Fabrizio to be bound opposite that of the original Archbishop. This translation was published as the work of our Fabrizio during his first imprisonment. But every source of pleasure was poisoned for our hero, even the vanity so natural to all mankind; he did not venture to read a single page of this work attributed to his labors. His position in the world made it an obligation for him to present a splendidly bound copy of it to the Prince, who, feeling that he owed some compensation for the cruel death to which he had come so close, granted him the right of entry to his Grand Levees, a favor which confers the title of
Excellency
.

The only moments when Fabrizio had some chance of emerging from his deep melancholy were those he spent hidden behind a pane of glass he had substituted for a square of oiled paper in the window of his apartment opposite the Palazzo Contarini, where as we know Clélia had taken refuge; the few times he had seen her since he had emerged from the Fortress, he had been deeply distressed by a striking change, one which seemed to him to bode no good. Since her lapse, Clélia’s countenance had assumed a quality of nobility and seriousness that was quite remarkable; she looked like a woman of thirty. In this extraordinary transformation Fabrizio perceived the reflection of some fierce resolve. “At every moment of the day,” he said to himself, “she is swearing to be faithful to that vow she made to the Madonna, and never to lay eyes on me again.”

Fabrizio guessed only a part of Clélia’s misfortunes; aware that her father, now deeply in disgrace, could return to Parma and reappear at Court (without which life for him would be impossible) only on the day she married the Marchese Crescenzi, she wrote her father that she desired this marriage. The General had at this time retired to Turin, quite prostrated with grief. In truth, the effect of this heroic resolve had been to add ten years to her age.

She soon discovered that Fabrizio had a window opposite the Palazzo Contarini; but she had had the misfortune to glimpse him only once; as soon as she saw a turn of the head or a man’s figure at all resembling his, she immediately shut her eyes. Her deep piety and her confidence in the Madonna’s aid were henceforth her only resource. She had the pain of feeling no esteem for her father; her future husband’s character struck her as entirely commonplace and appropriate to the sentiments of worldly society; finally, she adored a man she must never see again, though he had certain rights over her. This accumulation of disasters struck her as the worst of fates, and we must confess she was right: after her marriage, she would have to go and live two hundred leagues from Parma.

Fabrizio was aware of Clélia’s profound modesty; he knew how much any extraordinary undertaking—one that, if discovered, might constitute a subject of gossip—was certain to distress her. Yet impelled to extremity by the depths of his melancholy and by those glances of Clélia’s which kept turning away from him, he ventured to bribe two of the servants of Signora Contarini, Clélia’s aunt. One day, at nightfall, Fabrizio, dressed as a country gentleman, presented himself at the door of the Palace, where he was awaited by one of the servants he had bribed; he had himself announced as arriving from Turin with letters for Clélia from her father. The servant went to deliver the message, and showed him upstairs into an enormous antechamber on the first floor of the Palace. It was in this room that Fabrizio passed perhaps the most anxious quarter of an hour in his entire life. If Clélia rejected him, he would know no further peace nor hope. “In order to cut short the importunate cares my new dignities have heaped upon me, I shall spare the Church a bad priest and, under an assumed name, go bury myself in some Carthusian monastery!” Finally the servant came to inform him that Signora Clélia Conti was willing to see him. Our hero’s courage quite failed him; he was on the point of collapsing with fear as he made his way up the staircase to the second floor.

Clélia was sitting at a little table on which stood a single candle. No sooner had she recognized Fabrizio under his disguise than she took flight and hid at the far end of the salon.