The Charterhouse of Parma (71 page)

Once this decision was made, the Marchesa made Gonzo a happy man by saying to him: “Try to find out what day the Coadjutor is preaching, and in what church. Tonight, before you leave, I may have a little errand for you to run for me.”

No sooner had Gonzo left for the
Corso
than Clélia went to take a breath of air in the garden of her
palazzo
. She failed to consider the objection that for ten months she had not set foot out there. She was lively now, animated; there was color in her cheeks. That evening, as each boring visitor entered the salon, her heart pounded with emotion. Finally Gonzo was announced, who saw at the first glance that he was going to be an indispensable man for the next week. “The Marchesa is jealous of the Marini girl, and my word, it would be as good as a play,” he said to himself, “with the Marchesa acting the heroine, and little Anetta as the soubrette, and Monsignore del Dongo the lover! My word, the seats would be worth two francs and cheap at the price!” He was overjoyed, and for the whole evening he interrupted everyone and told the most preposterous stories (for example, about the famous actress and the Marquis de Pequigny, which he had heard the evening before from a French traveler). The Marchesa, for her part, could not sit still; she walked about the salon, passed into an adjoining gallery where the Marchese had hung no painting that cost less than twenty thousand francs. These pictures spoke so clear a language that evening that they exhausted the Marchesa’s heart with high feelings. Finally she heard the double doors open; she ran back to the salon; it was the Marchesa Raversi! However, even as she was offering her the customary compliments, Clélia felt herself losing the power of speech. The
Marchesa obliged her to ask her question twice: “What do you think of our fashionable preacher?”

“I used to think he was nothing but a petty intriguer, a worthy nephew of the illustrious Countess Mosca; but the last time he preached, you know, it was at the Church of the Visitation, just across the road there, he was so sublime that all my antagonism vanished and I found him to be the most eloquent man I have ever heard.”

“So you attended one of his sermons?” Clélia asked, trembling with happiness.

“Why, my dear,” laughed the Marchesa, “weren’t you listening to what I said? I wouldn’t miss such an occasion for anything in the world. They say his lungs are affected, and that soon he won’t be preaching anymore!”

No sooner had the Marchesa left than Clélia summoned Gonzo to the gallery. “I have almost decided,” she told him, “to hear this preacher they talk so much about. When will he be preaching?”

“Next Monday, which is to say, in three days; and it’s as though he had guessed Your Excellency’s intentions, for he’s coming to preach at the Church of the Visitation.”

Not everything was settled, but Clélia could no longer control her voice; she walked up and down the gallery five or six times, without adding another word. Gonzo said to himself: “That must be vengeance working inside her. How could anyone be so insolent as to escape from prison, especially when you have the honor to be jailed by a hero like General Fabio Conti!” And he added aloud, with splendid irony, “Moreover you must make haste; his lungs are affected. I heard Doctor Rambo say that he doesn’t have a year to live. God is punishing him for having broken his bond by treacherously escaping from the Fortress.”

The Marchesa sat down on a divan in the gallery and signaled to Gonzo to do the same. After a few moments she handed him a tiny purse in which she had put several sequins. “I want you to reserve four seats for me.”

“May poor Gonzo be permitted to slip in among Your Excellency’s suite?”

“Of course; reserve five places.… I don’t care at all,” she added,
“about being close to the pulpit; but I’d like to get a look at Signorina Marini, they say she’s so pretty.”

The Marchesa could scarcely live through the three days separating her from the famous Monday, the day of the sermon. Gonzo, for whom it was a signal honor to be seen in public in the company of so great a lady, had put on his French coat with his sword; nor was this all: taking advantage of the proximity of the Palazzo Crescenzi, he had had carried into the church a splendid gilded armchair for the Marchesa, which was regarded as the last insolence by the bourgeois parishioners. The reader may well imagine the poor Marchesa’s feelings when she caught sight of this chair, which had been placed just opposite the pulpit. Clélia was so embarrassed, lowering her eyes and shrinking back into a corner of this enormous armchair, that she had not even the courage to glance at the little Marini girl, whom Gonzo pointed out to her with an effrontery she could not get over. Any person not of noble birth was absolutely nothing in this courtier’s eyes.

Fabrizio appeared in the pulpit; he was so thin, so pale, so
consumed
, that Clélia’s eyes immediately filled with tears. Fabrizio spoke a few words, then stopped, as if his voice had suddenly failed him; in vain he attempted to begin one sentence after another; he turned away and took up a written sheet.

“Brethren,” he said, “a wretched soul and one worthy of your entire compassion implores you through my lips to pray for the end of his torments, which will cease only with his life.”

Fabrizio read the remainder of his sheet very slowly; but so expressive was his voice that before the middle of the prayer everyone was in tears, even Gonzo. “At least no one will notice me,” the Marchesa said to herself as she burst into tears.

While he was reading the writing on the sheet of paper, Fabrizio happened upon two or three ideas concerning the state of the unhappy man for whom he had come to seek the prayers of the faithful. Soon his thoughts came to him in abundance. Seeming to address the public, he was speaking only to the Marchesa. He ended his sermon a little sooner than was usual because, despite all his efforts, his tears overcame him to such a degree that he could no longer speak intelligibly. The best judges found this sermon singular but equal at least,
with regard to pathos, to the famous one preached with the lighted candles. As for Clélia, no sooner had she heard the first ten lines of the prayer read aloud by Fabrizio than she considered it as a hideous crime to have been able to spend fourteen months without seeing him. Returning home, she went to bed in order to be able to think of Fabrizio in perfect freedom; and the next day, quite early, Fabrizio received a note in the following words:

On recognizing this heavenly handwriting, Fabrizio fell to his knees and burst into tears. “At last!” he exclaimed. “After fourteen months and eight days! Farewell my sermons!”

It would take too long to describe the various kinds of folly which beset, that day, the hearts of Fabrizio and Clélia. The little door indicated in the note was none other than that of the orangery of the Palazzo Crescenzi, and ten times during the day Fabrizio found a way to go look at it. He armed himself, and alone, just before midnight, walking fast, he was passing close to this door when to his inexpressible delight he heard a familiar voice say to him in almost a whisper: “Come in here, friend of my heart.”

Cautiously Fabrizio entered and found himself in the orangery itself, but opposite a heavily barred window raised some three or four feet above the ground. The darkness was intense. Fabrizio had heard some sort of noise up in this window, and when he explored the grille with his hand, he felt a hand thrust through the bars to take his own and raise it to lips which gave it a kiss.

“It is I,” said a beloved voice, “who have come here to tell you I love you, and to ask if you are willing to obey me.”

The reader may imagine Fabrizio’s answer, his joy, and his amazement; after the first raptures, Clélia said to him: “I have made a vow to the Madonna, as you know, never to see you; that is why I am receiving
you in this darkness. I want you to know that if you ever forced me to look at you in daylight, everything would be over between us. But first of all, I do not want you to preach before Anetta Marini, and do not imagine that I could have had so foolish an idea as to have an armchair brought into the house of God.”

“My angel, I shall never preach again before anyone! I only preached in the hope of one day seeing you.”

—

Here we shall ask permission to pass, without saying a single word about them, over an interval of three years.

At the period our story resumes, it had already been a long while since Count Mosca had returned to Parma as Prime Minister, and more powerful than ever.

After these three years of divine happiness, Fabrizio’s soul underwent a caprice of affection which managed to change everything. The Marchesa had a charming little boy two years old,
Sandrino
, who was his mother’s joy; he was always at her side or in the Marchese Crescenzi’s lap; Fabrizio, on the contrary, almost never saw him; he could not bear the idea of the child’s loving another father. He conceived the notion of taking the boy away before his memories had grown quite distinct.

In the long hours of each day when the Marchesa could not be with her lover, Sandrino’s presence consoled her; for we must confess a thing which will seem strange north of the Alps: despite her transgressions, she had remained faithful to her vow; she had promised the Madonna, it may be recalled,
never to see
Fabrizio; such had been her very words: consequently she received him only by night, and there was never any light in the apartment.

But every evening, he was received by his beloved; and what is admirable, in the midst of a Court devoured by curiosity and boredom, Fabrizio’s precautions had been so skillfully calculated, that this
amicizia
, as it is called in Lombardy, was never even suspected. Such love was too intense for there not to have been quarrels; Clélia was too subject to jealousy, but almost invariably the quarrels proceeded from another cause. Fabrizio had taken advantage of some public ceremony in
order to be in the same place as the Marchesa and to look at her; she then made some excuse to leave at once, and for a long while she banished her lover.

Many people at the court of Parma were astonished that no intrigue should be known in connection with a woman so remarkable for her loveliness and for the loftiness of her soul; she roused passions which inspired any number of follies, and Fabrizio was frequently jealous.

The good Archbishop Landriani had died long since; Fabrizio’s exemplary conduct and eloquence had caused him to be forgotten; his own older brother had died, and all the family property had reverted to him. It was at this time that he distributed annually, to the vicars and parish priests of his diocese, the hundred and some thousand francs which the Archbishopric of Parma brought him in.

It would have been difficult to conceive of a life more honored, more honorable, and more useful than the one Fabrizio had created for himself, when everything was upset by this unfortunate caprice of affection.

“Because of this vow which I respect and which nonetheless constitutes the bane of my existence, since you refuse to see me by daylight,” he said to Clélia one night, “I am obliged to live constantly alone, having no other entertainment but work; and even work fails me. Amidst this melancholy and austere way of spending the long hours of every day, one idea has come to me, which is indeed my torment and which I have vainly fought against for six months: my son will never love me; he never even hears my name. Raised amidst the agreeable luxuries of the Palazzo Crescenzi, he scarcely knows who I am. The rare occasions when I do see him, I think of his mother, of whose heavenly beauty he reminds me and whom I cannot look upon, and he must find my face a serious one, which for children means sad …”

“Now,” said the Marchesa, “what is all this alarming speech of yours leading to?”

“To having my son back; I want him to live with me; I want to see him every day, I want him to learn to love me; I want to love him myself, at my leisure. Since a doom unique in all the world deprives me
of that happiness enjoyed by so many loving hearts, and since I do not spend my life with everything I love, at least I want to have at my side the being who recalls you to my heart, who replaces you, in some sense. Men and affairs weigh upon me in my obligatory solitude; you know that
ambition
has ever been an empty word for me, from the moment I had the happiness to be locked up by Barbone, and all that is not felt in the soul seems absurd to me in the melancholy which, in your absence, overwhelms me.”

The reader can imagine the intense suffering with which her lover’s grief filled poor Clélia’s soul; her sadness was all the more intense in that she felt that Fabrizio was partly justified. She went so far as to wonder whether she ought to try breaking her vow; but she also felt that so worldly an arrangement would not put her conscience at peace, and perhaps an angry Heaven would punish her for this new crime.