Part 12

--I am going to spend three years at the Ecclesiastical Academy of Naples, cried Fabrice; but since I must above all be a young gentleman, and you are not binding me to lead the austere life of a virtuous seminarian, this stay in Naples does not frighten me in the least, that life will be as good as the one at Romagnano; the good society of the place had begun to find me a Jacobin. In my exile I have discovered that I know nothing, not even Latin, not even spelling. I had the plan of remaking my education at Novara; I shall willingly study theology at Naples: it is a complicated science.

The duchess was delighted.

--If we are banished, she said to him, we shall come to see you in Naples. But since you accept, until further orders, the party of the purple violets, the count, who knows present-day Italy well, has charged me with an idea for you. Believe or disbelieve what they teach you, but never make any objection. Imagine they are teaching you the rules of whist; would you raise objections to the rules of whist? I told the count that you believed, and he rejoiced at it; that is useful in this world and the next. But if you believe, do not sink into the vulgarity of speaking with horror of Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal, and all those scatterbrained Frenchmen who were the forerunners of the two chambers. Let those names rarely be found on your lips; but after all when need be, speak of those gentlemen with calm irony; they are men long since refuted, and whose attacks are of no consequence any longer. Believe blindly all that they shall tell you at the Academy. Bear in mind that there are people who will keep faithful note of your slightest objections; they will forgive you a little gallant intrigue if it is well managed, but not a doubt; age does away with the intrigue and increases the doubt. Act on this principle in the tribunal of penance. You shall have a letter of recommendation for a factotum bishop of the cardinal archbishop of Naples; to him alone you must confess your escapade in France, and your presence, on the 18th of June, in the environs of Waterloo. As for the rest, abbreviate greatly, diminish this adventure, confess it only so that you cannot be reproached with having hidden it; you were so young then!

"The second idea that the count sends you is this: If there comes to you a brilliant reason, a victorious retort that changes the course of the conversation, do not yield to the temptation to shine, keep silent; subtle people will see your wit in your eyes. It will be time enough to have wit when you are a bishop.

Fabrice made his debut in Naples with a modest carriage and four domestics, good Milanese, whom his aunt had sent him. After a year of study no one said that he was a man of wit, he was regarded as an industrious nobleman, very generous, but a little libertine.

This year, rather amusing for Fabrice, was terrible for the duchess. The count was three or four times within two fingers of his ruin; the prince, more timorous than ever because he was ill that year, believed that by dismissing him he would rid himself of the odium of the executions carried out before the count's entry into the ministry. The Rassi was the favorite of the heart that one wished above all to keep. The count's perils attached the duchess to him passionately; she no longer thought of Fabrice. To give a color to their possible retirement, it turned out that the air of Parma, somewhat humid indeed, like that of all Lombardy, suited her health not at all. Finally, after intervals of disgrace, which for the count, prime minister, went so far as sometimes to pass twenty whole days without seeing his master in private, Mosca carried the day; he had the general Fabio Conti, the pretended liberal, named governor of the citadel where the liberals judged by Rassi were imprisoned. If Conti uses indulgence toward his prisoners, said Mosca to his friend, he will be disgraced as a Jacobin whose political ideas make him forget his duties as a general; if he shows himself severe and pitiless, and it seems to me that is the side he will incline to, he ceases to be the head of his own party, and alienates all the families who have one of their own in the citadel. This poor man knows how to assume an air all steeped in respect at the approach of the prince; if need be he changes costume four times in a day; he can discuss a question of etiquette, but he is not a head capable of following the difficult path by which alone he can save himself; and in any case I am there.

The day after the nomination of General Fabio Conti, which terminated the ministerial crisis, it was learned that Parma would have an ultra-monarchical journal.

--What quarrels this journal will give rise to! said the duchess.

--This journal, whose idea is perhaps my masterpiece, answered the count laughing, little by little I shall, despite myself, be stripped of its direction by the ultra-furious. I have had fine salaries attached to the posts of editor. From all sides they will solicit these posts: this affair will keep us busy a month or two, and they will forget the perils I have just run. The grave personages P. and D. are already in the running.

--But this journal will be of a revolting absurdity.

--I count on it well, replied the count. The prince will read it every morning and admire my doctrine, mine who founded it. As for the details, he will approve or be shocked; of the hours he devotes to work, there are two seized. The journal will get itself into scrapes, but at the time when the serious complaints arrive, in eight or ten months, it will be entirely in the hands of the ultra-furious. It will be that party which hampers me that will have to answer; I shall raise objections against the journal; at bottom, I prefer a hundred atrocious absurdities to a single hanged man. Who remembers an absurdity two years after the issue of the official journal? Whereas the sons and family of the hanged man devote to me a hatred that will last as long as I do and may perhaps shorten my life.

The duchess, always passionate for something, always active, never idle, had more wit than all the court of Parma; but she lacked the patience and impassibility to succeed in intrigues. However, she had come to follow with passion the interests of the various coteries, and was beginning even to have a personal credit with the prince. Clara-Paolina, the reigning princess, surrounded with honors, but imprisoned in the most antiquated etiquette, regarded herself as the most unhappy of women. The Duchess Sanseverina paid her court, and undertook to prove to her that she was not so unhappy. It must be known that the prince saw his wife only at dinner: this meal lasted thirty minutes and the prince passed whole weeks without addressing a word to Clara-Paolina. Mme Sanseverina tried to change all that; she amused the prince, and all the more because she had known how to preserve all her independence. Had she wished it, she could not have failed to wound some of the fools who swarmed at this court. It was this perfect inability of hers that made her execrated by the vulgar of the courtiers, all counts or marquises, enjoying in general five thousand livres of income. She understood this misfortune from the first days, and attached herself exclusively to pleasing the sovereign and his wife, who absolutely dominated the hereditary prince. The duchess knew how to amuse the sovereign and profited from the extreme attention he accorded to her slightest words to give good ridiculous airs to the courtiers who hated her. Since the follies that Rassi had made him commit, and follies of blood are not repaired, the prince was sometimes afraid, and often bored, which had led him to a sad envy; he felt that he was scarcely amused, and became gloomy when he believed he saw others amused; the sight of happiness rendered him furious. "We must hide our loves," said the duchess to her friend; and she let the prince guess that she was no longer more than very moderately smitten with the count, a man moreover so estimable.

This discovery had given His Highness a happy day. From time to time, the duchess let fall a few words of the project she might have, to give herself each year a leave of some months which she would employ in seeing the Italy she did not know: she would go visit Naples, Florence, Rome. Now, nothing in the world could give more pain to the prince than such an appearance of desertion: that was one of his most marked weaknesses; proceedings that might be imputed to contempt for his capital city pierced his heart. He felt that he had no means of retaining Mme Sanseverina, and Mme Sanseverina was by far the most brilliant woman of Parma. Unique thing with Italian laziness, they came back from the surrounding countryside to attend her Thursdays; they were veritable fetes; almost always the duchess had something new and piquant there. The prince was dying to see one of these Thursdays; but how to go about it? Go to the house of a mere private person! that was a thing neither his father nor he had ever done!

One certain Thursday, it was raining, it was cold; at every instant of the evening the duke heard carriages that shook the paving of the palace square, going to Mme Sanseverina's. He had a movement of impatience: others amused themselves, and he, sovereign prince, absolute master, who should amuse himself more than anyone in the world, he knew boredom! He rang for his aide- de-camp; it took the time to place a dozen trusted men in the street that led from His Highness's palace to the Sanseverina palace. Finally, after an hour that seemed a century to the prince, and during which he was twenty times tempted to brave the daggers and go out rashly and with no precaution, he appeared in the first salon of Mme Sanseverina. Thunder might have fallen in that salon and it would not have produced such a surprise. In a blink of an eye, and as the prince advanced, there established itself in those salons so noisy and so gay a silence of stupor; all eyes, fixed on the prince, opened excessively. The courtiers seemed disconcerted; the duchess alone had not the air astonished. When at last one had recovered the force to speak, the great preoccupation of all persons present was to decide this important question: had the duchess been warned of this visit, or is she surprised like everyone else?

The prince amused himself, and one will judge of the wholly first-impulse character of the duchess, and of the infinite power that the vaguely adroitly cast ideas of departure had left her take.

In seeing the prince off, who addressed her with very kind words, there came to her a singular idea which she dared well to tell him quite simply, and as a most ordinary thing.

--If Your Most Serene Highness would address to the princess three or four of those charming phrases that she lavishes on me, she would make my happiness much more surely than by telling me here that I am pretty. For I would not wish for the world that the princess could see with an evil eye the signal mark of favor with which Your Highness has just honored me.

The prince looked at her fixedly and replied with a dry air:

--Apparently I am master to go where it pleases me.

The duchess blushed.

--I only wished, she resumed at once, not to expose His Highness to make a useless trip, for this Thursday will be the last; I am going to spend a few days at Bologna or Florence.

As she re-entered her salons, everyone believed her at the height of favor, and she had just hazarded what within memory of man no one had dared at Parma. She made a sign to the count who left his whist table and followed her into a little lighted but solitary salon.

--What you have done is bold, he said to her; I would not have advised it; but in hearts truly smitten, he added laughing, happiness increases love, and if you leave tomorrow morning, I follow you tomorrow evening. I shall be delayed only by that chore of the ministry of finance of which I had the stupidity to charge myself, but in four hours well employed one can make the transfer of many a coffer. Let us return, dear friend, and make ministerial fatuity in all liberty, and without any restraint, it is perhaps the last performance we give in this city. If he believes himself braved, the man is capable of anything; he will call that making an example. When this world has left, we shall consider the means of barricading you for tonight; the best would perhaps be to depart without delay for your house at Sacca, near the Po, which has the advantage of being only half an hour from the Austrian states.

The love and the self-love of the duchess had a delicious moment; she looked at the count, and her eyes filled with tears. A minister so powerful, surrounded by that crowd of courtiers who overwhelmed him with homages equal to those they addressed to the prince himself, to quit everything for her and with this ease!

On re-entering the salons, she was wild with joy. Everyone prostrated before her.

"How happiness changes the duchess," said the courtiers on all sides, "it is hardly to recognize her. At last this Roman soul, above all, deigns yet to appreciate the exorbitant favor of which she has just been the object on the part of the sovereign!"

Toward the end of the evening, the count came to her:

--I must tell you news.

Straightway the persons who were near the duchess drew away.

--The prince on returning to the palace, continued the count, had himself announced to his wife. Judge of the surprise! I come to give you an account, he said to her, of a very agreeable evening, in truth, that I passed at the Sanseverina's. It is she who asked me to give you the detail of how she has arranged that old smoke-blackened palace. Then the prince, after seating himself, set about making the description of each of your salons.

"He spent more than twenty-five minutes with his wife who wept for joy; despite her wit, she could not find a word to sustain the conversation on the light tone His Highness deigned to give it.

This prince was not a wicked man, whatever the liberals of Italy might say. In truth, he had had a fair number of them thrown into prisons, but it was out of fear, and he repeated sometimes as to console himself for certain memories: Better kill the devil than let the devil kill us. The day after the evening of which we have just spoken, he was all joyful, he had done two fine actions: go to the Thursday and speak to his wife. At dinner, he addressed the word to her; in a word, that Thursday of Mme Sanseverina brought about a revolution in the interior of which all Parma resounded; the Raversi was consternated, and the duchess had a double joy: she had been able to be useful to her lover and had found him more smitten than ever.

--All that because of an imprudent idea that came to me! she said to the count. I should be more free no doubt at Rome or at Naples, but should I find there a play so absorbing? No, in truth, my dear count, and you make my happiness.

CHAPTER VII

It is of small court details as insignificant as the one we have just related that one would need to fill the history of the four years that followed. Each spring, the marchioness came with her daughters to spend two months at the Sanseverina palace or at the estate of Sacca, on the banks of the Po; there were very sweet moments, and they spoke of Fabrice; but the count never would permit her a single visit to Parma. The duchess and the minister had well to repair some thoughtless acts, but in general Fabrice followed rather wisely the line of conduct that had been indicated to him: a nobleman who studies theology and who does not count absolutely on his virtue to make his advancement. At Naples, he had taken a very vivid taste for the study of antiquity, he made excavations; this passion had almost replaced that of horses. He had sold his English horses to continue excavations at Misenum, where he had found a bust of Tiberius, still young, which had taken rank among the finest remains of antiquity. The discovery of this bust was almost the keenest pleasure he had met with at Naples. He had too high a soul to seek to imitate other young men, and, for example, to wish to play with a certain seriousness the role of lover. No doubt he lacked not mistresses, but they were of no consequence to him, and, despite his age, one could say of him that he knew not love; he was only the more loved for it. Nothing prevented him from acting with the finest coolness, for to him a young and pretty woman was always the equal of another young and pretty woman; only the last known seemed to him the most piquant. One of the most admired ladies at Naples had made follies in his honor during the last year of his stay, which at first had amused him, and had ended by wearying him to excess, so much so that one of the happinesses of his departure was to be delivered from the attentions of the charming Duchess d'A... It was in 1821, that, having passably undergone all his examinations, his director of studies or governor had a cross and a gift, and he set off to see at last this city of Parma, of which he often thought. He was a monsignor, and he had four horses to his carriage; at the post before Parma, he took only two, and in the city had stop before the church of Saint-Jean. There was found the rich tomb of the archbishop Ascanio del Dongo, his great-great-uncle, the author of the Latin genealogy. He prayed by the tomb, then arrived on foot at the duchess's palace who expected him only some days later. She had a great company in her salon, soon they left her alone.

--Well! are you content with me? he said to her, throwing himself into her arms: thanks to you, I have passed four rather happy years at Naples, instead of being bored at Novara with my mistress authorized by the police.

The duchess could not get over her astonishment, she would not have recognized him seeing him pass in the street; she found him what he was in fact, one of the handsomest men of Italy; he had above all a charming physiognomy. She had sent him to Naples with the bearing of a bold dare-devil; the riding crop he always carried then seemed an inherent part of his being: now he had the most noble and measured air before strangers, and in private, she found in him all the fire of his first youth. He was a diamond that had lost nothing by being polished. There was not an hour that Fabrice had arrived, when Count Mosca came in; he arrived a little too soon. The young man spoke to him in such good terms of the cross of Parma granted to his governor, and he expressed his lively gratitude for other benefits of which he dared not speak so clearly, with so perfect a measure, that at first glance the minister judged him favorably.

--This nephew, he said low to the duchess, is made to adorn all the dignities to which you may wish to raise him hereafter.

All went marvelously well up to there, but when the minister, very content with Fabrice, and until then attentive uniquely to his deeds and gestures, looked at the duchess, he found her eyes singular. "This young man makes a strange impression here," said he to himself. This reflection was bitter; the count had reached his fifties, it is a cruel word and of which perhaps only a man desperately in love can feel all the reverberation. He was very good, very worthy of being loved, his severities as minister apart. But, in his eyes, this cruel word the fifties cast a gloom over all his life and would have been capable of making him cruel for his own part. Since the five years that he had decided the duchess to come to Parma, she had often excited his jealousy especially in the first times, but never had she given him subject of real complaint. He believed even, and he was right, that it was with the design of better securing his heart that the duchess had had recourse to those appearances of distinction in favor of some young beaux of the court. He was sure, for example, that she had refused the homages of the prince, who even, on this occasion, had said an instructive word.

--But if I accepted the homages of Your Highness, said the duchess laughing, with what face should I dare reappear before the count?

--I should be almost as disconcerted as you. The dear count! my friend! But it is an embarrassment very easy to turn and to which I have given thought: the count would be put in the citadel for the rest of his days.

At the moment of Fabrice's arrival, the duchess was so transported with happiness, that she thought not at all of the ideas her eyes might give the count. The effect was deep and the suspicions without remedy.

Fabrice was received by the prince two hours after his arrival; the duchess, foreseeing the good effect that this impromptu audience must produce in the public, had solicited it for two months: this favor put Fabrice out of comparison from the first instant; the pretext had been that he was only passing through Parma to go see his mother in Piedmont. At the moment when a little charming billet from the duchess came to say to the prince that Fabrice awaited his orders, His Highness was bored. "I am going to see," said he to himself, "some little very silly saint, a flat or sneaking look." The commandant of the place had already rendered account of the first visit to the tomb of the uncle archbishop. The prince saw enter a tall young man, whom, but for his purple violets, he would have taken for some young officer.

This little surprise chased away the boredom: "Here is a fine fellow," said he to himself, "for whom they are going to ask me Lord knows what favors, all those of which I can dispose. He arrives, he must be moved: I am going to make some Jacobin politics; we shall see a little how he answers."

After the first gracious words on the part of the prince:

--Well! Monsignor, said he to Fabrice, are the peoples of Naples happy? Is the king loved?

--Most Serene Highness, answered Fabrice without hesitating an instant, I was admiring, in passing through the street, the excellent bearing of the soldiers of the various regiments of H.M. the King; good society is respectful toward its masters as it ought to be; but I shall avow that in my life I have never suffered the lower-class people to speak to me of anything but the work for which I pay them.

--Pest! said the prince, what a sermon! here is a bird well tutored, it is the wit of the Sanseverina.

Piqued at the game, the prince employed much adroitness to make Fabrice speak on this so scabrous subject. The young man, animated by the danger, had the happiness to find admirable answers:

--It is almost insolence to parade love for one's king, said he, it is blind obedience that is due him.

At the sight of so much prudence the prince had almost ill humor. "It appears that here is a man of wit who arrives to us from Naples, and I do not like that breed; a man of wit may walk in the best principles and even in good faith, still by some side he is cousin-german to Voltaire and Rousseau."

“Stories of the world, in your language.”