Part 11

“I do not know,” the Count went on, “whether the horrors which the sovereign’s enemies have published about him have reached the castle of Grianta; they have made of him a monster, an ogre. The fact is that Ernest IV had a great many little good virtues, and it may be added that, had he been invulnerable like Achilles, he would have continued to be the model of potentates. But in a moment of boredom and anger, and also a little to imitate Louis XIV having a certain hero of the Fronde beheaded, whom they discovered living tranquilly and insolently on an estate next to Versailles, fifty years after the Fronde, Ernest IV one day had two liberals hanged. It appears that these imprudent men met on fixed days to speak ill of the prince and address ardent vows to heaven, so that the plague might come to Parma, and deliver them from the tyrant. The word *tyrant* has been proved. Rassi called that conspiring; he had them condemned to death, and the execution of one of them, Count L…, was atrocious. This happened before my time. Since that fatal moment,” added the Count, lowering his voice, “the prince is subject to fits of fear unworthy of a man, but which are the sole source of the favor I enjoy. Without sovereign fear, I should have a kind of merit too abrupt, too harsh for this court, where imbecility abounds. Would you believe that the prince looks under the beds in his apartments before going to sleep, and spends a million, which at Parma is as four millions at Milan, to have a good police, and you see before you, Madame la Duchesse, the chief of this terrible police. Through the police, that is to say through fear, I have become minister of war and finance; and since the minister of the Interior is my nominal chief, inasmuch as he has the police among his attributions, I had that portfolio given to Count Zurla-Contarini, a hard-working imbecile, who gives himself the pleasure of writing eighty letters each day. I just received one from him this morning on which Count Zurla-Contarini had the satisfaction of writing with his own hand the number 20,715.

The Duchess Sanseverina was presented to the sad Princess of Parma, Clara-Paolina, who, because her husband had a mistress (a rather pretty woman, the Marquise Balbi), believed herself the most unhappy person in the universe, which perhaps made her the most boring. The Duchess found a very tall and very thin woman, who was not yet thirty-six and looked fifty. A regular and noble face might have passed for beautiful, though somewhat spoiled by large round eyes that could scarcely see, had not the Princess given herself up. She received the Duchess with such marked timidity that some courtiers, enemies of Count Mosca, dared to say that the Princess looked like the woman being presented, and the Duchess like the sovereign. The Duchess, surprised and almost disconcerted, knew not where to find terms to place herself in a position inferior to that which the Princess assigned to herself. To restore some composure to this poor Princess, who at bottom was not lacking in wit, the Duchess could find nothing better than to begin and sustain a long dissertation on botany. The Princess was really learned in that field; she had very fine greenhouses with many tropical plants. The Duchess, simply seeking to extricate herself from embarrassment, forever won the heart of Princess Clara-Paolina, who, from timid and confused as she had been at the beginning of the audience, found herself toward the end so much at ease that, against all rules of etiquette, this first audience lasted no less than five quarters of an hour. The next day, the Duchess had exotic plants bought, and professed herself a great lover of botany.

The Princess spent her life with the venerable Father Landriani, Archbishop of Parma, a man of learning, even a man of wit, and perfectly honest, but who offered a singular spectacle when seated in his crimson velvet chair (it was the right of his place), opposite the Princess’s armchair, surrounded by her ladies of honor and her two ladies-in-waiting. The old prelate, with long white hair, was, if possible, even more timid than the Princess; they saw each other every day, and all audiences began with a silence of a good quarter of an hour. So much so that the Countess Alvizi, one of the ladies-in-waiting, had become a sort of favorite, because she had the art of encouraging them to speak and of making them break the silence.

To complete the course of her presentations, the Duchess was admitted to the presence of H.R.H. the Hereditary Prince, a personage of taller stature than his father, and more timid than his mother. He was deep into mineralogy, and was sixteen years old. He blushed excessively on seeing the Duchess enter, and was so disconcerted that never could he invent a word to say to this beautiful lady. He was a very handsome boy, and spent his life in the woods with a hammer in his hand. At the moment when the Duchess rose to put an end to this silent audience:

“Good heavens! Madame, how pretty you are!” cried the Hereditary Prince, which was not found in too bad taste by the lady presented.

The Marquise Balbi, a young woman of twenty-five, might still have passed for the most perfect model of pretty Italian, two or three years before the arrival of the Duchess Sanseverina at Parma. Now they were still the most beautiful eyes in the world and the most graceful little airs; but, seen close, her skin was sprinkled with an infinite number of fine little wrinkles, which made the Marquise like a young old woman. Seen at a certain distance, for example at the theatre, in her box, she was still a beauty; and the people in the pit found the prince of very good taste. He spent all his evenings at the Marquise Balbi’s, but often without opening his mouth, and the boredom in which she saw the prince had brought this poor woman to an extraordinary thinness. She laid claim to boundless finesse, and always smiled with malice; she had the most beautiful teeth in the world, and, just in case, having little sense, she wished, by a cunning smile, to convey something other than what her words said. Count Mosca said that it was these continual smiles, while she yawned inwardly, that gave her so many wrinkles. The Balbi meddled in all affairs, and the State did not make a contract of a thousand francs without there being a remembrance for the Marquise (it was the honest word at Parma). Public rumor would have it that she had placed ten millions of francs in England, but her fortune, of recent date in truth, did not really amount to fifteen hundred thousand francs. It was to be safe from her finesses, and to have her in his dependence, that Count Mosca had made himself minister of finance. The Marquise’s only passion was fear disguised as sordid avarice: “I shall die on the straw,” she sometimes said to the prince, who was outraged by this remark. The Duchess noticed that the antechamber, resplendent with gilding, of the Balbi palace, was lit by a single candle dripping onto a table of precious marble, and the doors of her salon were blackened by the fingers of the lackeys.

“She received me,” the Duchess said to her friend, “as if she expected a gratuity of fifty francs from me.”

The course of the Duchess’s successes was somewhat interrupted by the reception given her by the most cunning woman of the court, the celebrated Marquise Raversi, a consummate intriguer who was at the head of the party opposed to that of Count Mosca. She wanted to overthrow him, and all the more these past few months, since she was niece of Count Sanseverina, and feared to see the inheritance attacked by the graces of the new Duchess.

“Raversi is not a woman to be despised,” the Count said to his friend; “I hold her as so capable of anything that I separated from my wife solely because she obstinately insisted on taking as lover the Chevalier Bentivoglio, one of Raversi’s friends.”

This lady, a great virago with very black hair, remarkable for the diamonds she wore from the morning on, and for the rouge with which she covered her cheeks, had declared herself in advance the enemy of the Duchess, and in receiving her at her house took it upon herself to begin the war. Duke Sanseverina, in the letters he wrote from ***, appeared so enchanted with his embassy and above all with the hope of the grand cordon, that his family feared he might leave part of his fortune to his wife, whom he overwhelmed with little gifts. Raversi, though regularly ugly, had for lover Count Balbi, the handsomest man of the court: in general she succeeded in all she undertook.

The Duchess kept the greatest state of household. The Sanseverina palace had always been one of the most magnificent of the city of Parma, and the Duke, on the occasion of his embassy and his future grand cordon, spent very large sums to embellish it: the Duchess directed the repairs.

The Count had guessed right: a few days after the Duchess’s presentation, the young Clelia Conti came to court, she had been made a canoness. In order to parry the blow that this favor might seem to deal to the Count’s credit, the Duchess gave a fête under pretext of inaugurating the garden of her palace, and, by her graceful manners, she made of Clelia, whom she called her young friend of Lake Como, the queen of the evening. Her cipher was found, as if by chance, on the principal transparencies. The young Clelia, though a little pensive, was amiable in her ways of speaking of the little adventure near the lake, and of her lively gratitude. She was said to be very devout and a great friend of solitude.

“I would wager,” said the Count, “that she has enough wit to be ashamed of her father.”

The Duchess made a friend of this young girl, she felt an inclination for her; she did not wish to appear jealous, and included her in all her pleasures; in short, her system was to seek to diminish all the hatreds of which the Count was the object.

All smiled upon the Duchess; she amused herself with this court existence where the storm is always to be feared; it seemed to her to begin life again. She was tenderly attached to the Count, who literally was mad with happiness. This agreeable situation had procured her a perfect composure for all that concerned only her ambitions. Thus scarcely two months after the Duchess’s arrival, he obtained the patent and honors of first minister, which approach very nearly those rendered to the sovereign himself. The Count could do all with the mind of his master; there was proof of this at Parma which struck all minds.

To the southeast, and ten minutes from the city, rises that famous citadel so renowned in Italy, and whose great tower is a hundred eighty feet high and is seen from so far. This tower, built on the model of the mausoleum of Hadrian, at Rome, by the Farnese, grandsons of Paul III, toward the beginning of the sixteenth century, is so thick that on the esplanade which tops it they were able to build a palace for the governor of the citadel and a new prison called the Farnese tower. This prison, constructed in honor of the eldest son of Ranuce-Ernest II, who had become the loved lover of his stepmother, passes for beautiful and singular in the country. The Duchess had the curiosity to see it; on the day of her visit, the heat was stifling at Parma, and up there, in that elevated position, she found air, at which she was so delighted that she spent several hours there. They hastened to open the halls of the Farnese tower to her.

The Duchess met on the esplanade of the great tower a poor liberal prisoner, who had come to enjoy the half-hour of walk granted him every three days. Returned to Parma, and not yet having the discretion necessary in an absolute court, she spoke of this man who had told her his whole story. The party of the Marquise Raversi seized upon these remarks of the Duchess and repeated them much, hoping strongly that they would offend the prince. Indeed, Ernest IV often repeated that the essential thing was above all to strike the imagination.

“Always is a great word,” he said, “and more terrible in Italy than elsewhere.”

Accordingly, in his life he had never granted pardon. A week after her visit to the fortress, the Duchess received a letter of commutation of punishment signed by the prince and the minister, with the name left blank. The prisoner whose name she should write was to obtain restitution of his goods, and permission to go spend the rest of his days in America. The Duchess wrote the name of the man who had spoken to her. Unfortunately this man turned out a half-rogue, a weak soul; it was on his confessions that the famous Ferrante Palla had been condemned to death.

The singularity of this pardon crowned the agreeableness of Mme Sanseverina’s position. Count Mosca was mad with happiness; it was a beautiful epoch of his life, and it had a decisive influence on the destinies of Fabrice. The latter was still at Romagnan near Novara, confessing, hunting, reading not at all and paying court to a noble woman as his instructions directed. The Duchess was still a little shocked by this last necessity. Another sign which boded nothing good for the Count, was that, being with him of the last frankness on all the world, and thinking aloud in his presence, she never spoke to him of Fabrice except after considering the turn of her phrase.

“If you wish,” the Count said to her one day, “I will write to that amiable brother you have on Lake Como, and I shall well force that Marquis del Dongo, with a little trouble for me and my friends at ***, to ask the pardon of your amiable Fabrice. If it is true, as I should take good care not to doubt, that Fabrice is a little above the young men who walk their English horses in the streets of Milan, what a life is that which at eighteen does nothing and has the prospect of never doing anything! If heaven had granted him a true passion for something, were it only for line-fishing, I should respect it; but what will he do at Milan even after his pardon is obtained? He will mount a horse he will have had brought from England at a certain hour, at another idleness will lead him to his mistress whom he will love less than his horse… But if you give me the order, I shall try to procure this kind of life for your nephew.”

“I should like him to be an officer,” said the Duchess.

“Would you advise a sovereign to entrust a post which, on a given day, may be of some importance, to a young man 1º susceptible of enthusiasm; 2º who has shown enthusiasm for Napoleon, to the point of going to rejoin him at Waterloo? Think what we should all be if Napoleon had conquered at Waterloo! We should have no liberals to fear, it is true, but the sovereigns of the old families could reign only by marrying the daughters of his marshals. Thus the military career for Fabrice is the life of the squirrel in the turning cage: much movement to advance not at all. He will have the chagrin of seeing himself surpassed by all plebeian devotions. The first quality in a young man today, that is to say perhaps for fifty years, as long as we are afraid and religion is not re-established, is not to be susceptible of enthusiasm and to have no wit.

“I have thought of something, but which will make you cry out at first, and which will give me infinite troubles for more than a day, it is a folly I wish to do for you. But tell me, if you know it, what folly would I not do to obtain a smile.”

“Well?” said the Duchess.

“Well! we have had as archbishops at Parma three members of your family: Ascanio del Dongo who wrote, in 16…, Fabrice in 1699, and a second Ascanio in 1740. If Fabrice wishes to enter the prelacy and distinguish himself by first-order virtues, I shall make him bishop somewhere, then archbishop here, if my influence lasts. The real objection is this: shall I remain minister long enough to realize this fine plan which requires several years? The prince may die, he may have the bad taste to dismiss me. But in short it is the only means I have to do for Fabrice something worthy of you.”

They discussed it long: this idea was very repugnant to the Duchess.

“Convince me,” she said to the Count, “that every other career is impossible for Fabrice.”

The Count proved it.

“You regret,” he added, “the brilliant uniform; but for that I know not what to do.”

After a month which the Duchess had asked to reflect, she yielded sighing to the wise views of the minister.

“To mount stiffly an English horse in some great city,” the Count repeated, “or to take a state which does not clash with his birth; I see no middle ground. Unfortunately, a gentleman can be neither doctor nor lawyer, and the century belongs to the lawyers.

“Remember always, Madame,” the Count repeated, “that you are giving your nephew, on the pavement of Milan, the lot enjoyed by young men of his age who pass for the most fortunate. His pardon obtained, you give him fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand francs; little matters to you, neither you nor I pretend to make savings.

The Duchess was sensible to glory; she did not wish Fabrice to be a mere money-eater; she returned to her lover’s plan.

“Observe,” the Count said to her, “that I do not pretend to make of Fabrice an exemplary priest such as you see so many of. No; he is a great lord before all; he may remain perfectly ignorant if he pleases, and will none the less become bishop and archbishop, if the prince continues to regard me as a useful man.

“If your orders deign to change my proposition into an immutable decree,” added the Count, “Parmo must not see our protégé in a small fortune. His will shock, if he has been seen here as simple priest: he must appear at Parma only with violet stockings and in a suitable equipage. Every one will then guess that your nephew is to be a bishop, and no one will be shocked.

“If you believe me, you will send Fabrice to do his theology, and spend three years at Naples. During the vacations of the Ecclesiastical Academy, he will go, if he wishes, to see Paris and London; but he shall never show himself at Parma.”

This word gave the Duchess something like a shudder.

She sent a courier to her nephew, and gave him rendezvous at Piacenza. Need it be said that this courier carried all means of money and all necessary passports?

Arrived first at Piacenza, Fabrice ran to meet the Duchess, and embraced her with transports that made her melt into tears. She was happy that the Count was not present; since their loves, it was the first time she had felt this sensation.

Fabrice was deeply touched, and then afflicted by the plans the Duchess had made for him; his hope had always been that, his Waterloo affair arranged, he would end by being a soldier. One thing struck the Duchess and increased still the romantic opinion she had formed of her nephew; he absolutely refused to lead the café life in one of the great cities of Italy.

“Do you see yourself at the corso of Florence or Naples,” said the Duchess, “with purebred English horses! For the evening, a carriage, a pretty apartment, etc.”

She insisted with delight upon the description of this vulgar happiness which she saw Fabrice reject with disdain. “He is a hero,” she thought.

“And after ten years of this agreeable life, what shall I have done?” said Fabrice; “what shall I be? A mature young man who must yield the upper pavement to the first handsome adolescent who debuts in the world, he too on an English horse.”

Fabrice at first thrust far from him the party of the Church; he spoke of going to New York, of making himself citizen and republican soldier in America.

“What an error is yours! You will not have war, and you fall back into the café life, only without elegance, without music, without loves,” replied the Duchess. “Believe me, for you as for me, America would be a sad life.”

She explained to him the cult of the god dollar, and that respect one must have for the artisans of the street, who by their votes decide all. They returned to the party of the Church.

“Before getting angry,” the Duchess said to him, “understand what the Count asks of you: it is not at all a matter of being a poor priest more or less exemplary and virtuous, like Abbé Blanès. Recall what your uncles the archbishops of Parma were; reread the notices on their lives, in the supplement to the genealogy. Before all it befits a man of your name to be a great lord, noble and generous, protector of justice, destined in advance to find himself at the head of his order… and in all his life committing but one piece of roguery, but that one very useful.”

“Thus all my illusions are down the river,” said Fabrice, sighing deeply; “the sacrifice is cruel! I confess it, I had not reflected on this horror of enthusiasm and wit, even exercised to their profit, which henceforth is to reign among absolute sovereigns.”

“Think that a proclamation, that a caprice of the heart precipitates the enthusiastic man into the party contrary to that which he has served all his life!”

“I enthusiastic!” repeated Fabrice; “strange accusation! I cannot even be in love!”

“How so?” cried the Duchess.

“When I have the honor of paying court to a beauty, even of good birth, and devout, I can think of her only when I see her.”

This avowal made a strange impression on the Duchess.

“I ask you a month,” Fabrice resumed, “to take leave of Mme C. of Novara and, what is yet more difficult, of the castles in Spain of all my life. I shall write to my mother, who will be good enough to come see me at Belgirate, on the Piedmontese shore of Lake Maggiore, and the thirty-first day after this one, I shall be incognito in Parma.”

“Guard against it well!” cried the Duchess.

She did not wish Count Mosca to see her speak with Fabrice.

The same persons met again at Piacenza; the Duchess this time was much agitated; a storm had arisen at court, the party of the Marquise Raversi was near triumph; it was possible that Count Mosca be replaced by General Fabio Conti, head of what was called at Parma the liberal party. Except the name of the rival who grew in the prince’s favor, the Duchess told all to Fabrice. She discussed anew the chances of his future, even with the perspective of lacking the all-powerful protection of the Count.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”