Part 14
He was going mad; it seemed to him that, as they leaned toward each other, they were exchanging kisses there, before his very eyes. “This is impossible in my presence,” he told himself; “my reason is wandering. I must calm myself; if I behave roughly, the duchess is capable, out of mere vanity, of following him to Belgirate; and there, or during the journey, chance may bring about a word that will give a name to what they feel for each other; and then, in an instant, all the consequences follow.
“Solitude will make that word decisive, and besides, once the duchess is far from me, what is to become of me? And if, after many difficulties overcome on the prince’s side, I go to show my old and careworn face at Belgirate, what part should I play amid these people who are mad with happiness?
“Even here, what am I but the terzo incomodo (that beautiful Italian tongue is made for love)! Terzo incomodo (an intruding third party)! What pain for a man of wit to feel that he is playing that execrable role, and to be unable to take it upon himself to rise and leave!”
The count was about to burst, or at least betray his pain through the distortion of his features. As he was walking up and down the salon, he found himself near the door, and he fled, crying out in a familiar, friendly tone:
—Farewell, you others!
“Bloodshed must be avoided,” he said to himself.
The day after that horrible evening, after a night spent now in dwelling on Fabrice’s advantages, now in the dreadful transports of the cruellest jealousy, the count had the idea of summoning to him a young valet; this man was courting a girl named Chékina, one of the duchess’s chambermaids and her favourite. Fortunately this young servant was very steady in his conduct, even miserly, and he desired a concierge’s post in one of the public establishments of Parma. The count ordered the man to bring Chékina, his mistress, instantly. The man obeyed, and an hour later the count appeared unexpectedly in the room where the girl was with her suitor. The count frightened them both by the quantity of gold he gave them, then addressed these few words to the trembling Chékina, looking her straight in the eyes.
—Does the duchess make love with Monsignore?
—No, said the girl, after a moment’s silence, taking her resolution; … no, not yet, but he often kisses Madame’s hands, laughing it is true, but with transports.
This testimony was completed by a hundred replies to as many furious questions from the count; his anxious passion made these poor people earn well the money he had thrown them: he ended by believing what he was told, and was less unhappy.
—If the duchess ever suspects this interview, he said to Chékina, I shall send your suitor to spend twenty years in the fortress, and you will not see him again until he is white-haired.
Several days passed, during which Fabrice in his turn lost all his gaiety.
—I assure you, he said to the duchess, that Count Mosca has an antipathy for me.
—So much the worse for His Excellency, she answered with a sort of ill humour.
This was not the true subject of unease that had made Fabrice’s gaiety disappear. “The position chance places me in is untenable,” he told himself. “I am quite sure she will never speak of it; she would have a horror of too significant a word as of incest. But if one evening, after an imprudent and mad day, she comes to examine her conscience, if she believes I may have guessed the taste she seems to take for me, what role shall I play in her eyes? Exactly that of the casto Giuseppe (an Italian proverb, alluding to the ridiculous role of Joseph with the wife of the eunuch Potiphar).
“To let her understand by some fine confidence that I am not susceptible of serious love? I have not enough steadiness of mind to state this fact in a way that does not resemble, like two drops of water, an impertinence. There remains to me only the resource of a great passion left at Naples; in that case, to return there for four-and-twenty hours: this course is wise, but it is a great deal of trouble! There would remain a low little love-affair at Parma, which may give offence; but anything is preferable to the frightful role of the man who will not guess. This last course might, it is true, compromise my future; I should have to diminish the danger by great prudence and by buying discretion.”
What was cruel amid all these thoughts was that Fabrice really loved the duchess far more than any being in the world. “One must be very clumsy,” he said to himself angrily, “to dread so much being unable to persuade of what is so true!” Lacking skill to extricate himself from this position, he became sombre and melancholy. “What would become of me, great God, if I quarrelled with the only being in the world for whom I have a passionate attachment?” On the other hand, Fabrice could not resolve to spoil so delicious a happiness by an indiscreet word. His position was so full of charms! the intimate friendship of so amiable and pretty a woman was so sweet! In the more vulgar relations of life, her protection gave him so agreeable a standing at this court, whose great intrigues, thanks to her who explained them to him, amused him like a comedy! “But at the first moment I may be awakened by a thunderbolt!” he told himself. “These evenings so gay, so tender, passed almost tête-à-tête with so piquant a woman, if they lead to something better, she will think to find in me a lover; she will ask for transports, for madness, and I shall always have to offer her only the liveliest friendship, but without love; nature has deprived me of that kind of sublime madness. What reproaches have I not had to endure on this score! I still think I hear the Duchess d’A…, and I mocked the duchess! She will believe that I lack love for her, whereas it is love that is lacking in me; never will she care to understand me. Often, after an anecdote of the court told by her with that grace, that madness which she alone in the world possesses, and which is besides necessary to my instruction, I kiss her hands and sometimes her cheek. What is to become of me if that hand presses mine in a certain way?”
Fabrice appeared each day in the most considerable and the least gay houses of Parma. Directed by the duchess’s skilful counsels, he paid a studied court to the two princes, father and son, to Princess Clara-Paolina, and to my lord the archbishop. He had successes, but they did not console him for the mortal fear of quarrelling with the duchess.
CHAPTER VIII
Thus less than a month after his arrival at court, Fabrice had all the cares of a courtier, and the intimate friendship that made the happiness of his life was poisoned. One evening, tormented by these ideas, he left the duchess’s salon, where he too much resembled a reigning lover; wandering at random through the city, he passed before the theatre, which he saw illuminated; he went in. It was a gratuitous imprudence in a man of his cloth, and one he had firmly promised himself to avoid at Parma, which after all is but a little town of forty thousand inhabitants. True, from the first days he had freed himself from his official costume; in the evening, when he did not go into the great world, he was simply dressed in black like a man in mourning.
At the theatre he took a box in the third tier so as not to be seen; they were giving La Giovane Ostessa (The Young Hostess), by Goldoni. He was looking at the architecture of the house: he scarcely turned his eyes to the stage. But the numerous audience burst out laughing at every moment; Fabrice cast his eyes on the young actress playing the hostess, and found her funny. He looked more attentively; she seemed to him quite pretty and above all full of naturalness: she was a naïve young girl who laughed first at the pretty things Goldoni put into her mouth, and who seemed quite astonished to pronounce them. He asked her name; he was told:
—Marietta Valserra.
“Ah!” he thought, “she has taken my name; that is singular.” Despite his resolutions, he did not leave the theatre until the end of the play. The next day he returned; three days later he knew the address of the Marietta Valserra.
On the very evening of the day he had procured this address with some difficulty, he noticed that the count was making him a charming face. The poor jealous lover, who had all the trouble in the world to keep within the bounds of prudence, had set spies on the young man’s heels, and his theatre escapade pleased him. How to paint the count’s joy when, on the morrow of the day he had been able to bring himself to be amiable with Fabrice, he learned that the latter, it is true half-disguised by a long blue greatcoat, had mounted to the wretched apartment that Marietta Valserra occupied on the fourth floor of an old house behind the theatre? His joy redoubled when he learned that Fabrice had presented himself under a false name, and had had the honour of exciting the jealousy of a worthless rogue named Giletti, who in the town played third-footman parts, and in the villages danced on the rope. This noble lover of Marietta was pouring out insults against Fabrice, and said he meant to kill him.
Opera troupes are formed by an impresario who engages here and there the performers he can pay or finds free, and the troupe thus casually assembled stays together a season or two at most. It is not the same with comic companies; even while running from town to town and changing residence every two or three months, they none the less form a sort of family whose members all love or hate one another. There are in these companies established households that the fine gentlemen of the towns where the troupe goes to play sometimes find great difficulty in breaking up. This is precisely what happened to our hero: little Marietta liked him well enough, but she had a horrible fear of Giletti, who claimed to be her sole master and watched her closely. He protested everywhere that he would kill the monsignore, for he had followed Fabrice and managed to discover his name. This Giletti was indeed the ugliest being and the least made for love: disproportionately tall, he was horribly thin, much pitted with smallpox and a little squint-eyed. Otherwise, full of the graces of his trade, he commonly entered the wings where his comrades were gathered, turning cartwheels on hands and feet or some other pretty trick. He triumphed in roles where the actor must appear with face whitened with flour and receive or give an infinite number of cudgellings. This worthy rival of Fabrice had thirty-two francs a month wages and thought himself quite rich.
It seemed to Count Mosca that he was returning from the gates of the tomb, when his watchers gave him certainty of all these details. His amiable spirit reappeared; he seemed gayer and better company than ever in the duchess’s salon, and took good care to say nothing to her of the little adventure that restored him to life. He even took precautions so that she should be informed of all that was happening as late as possible. At length he had the courage to listen to reason, which for a month had cried to him in vain that whenever a lover’s merit pales, that lover must travel.
An important affair called him to Bologna, and twice a day couriers from the cabinet brought him far less the official papers of his offices than news of the loves of little Marietta, of the anger of the terrible Giletti, and of Fabrice’s enterprises.
One of the count’s agents several times asked for Arlecchino scheletro e pasticcio (Skeleton and Pasty Harlequin), one of Giletti’s triumphs (he comes out of the pasty at the moment his rival Brighella begins to eat it and cudgels him); this was a pretext to pass him a hundred francs. Giletti, overwhelmed with debts, took good care not to speak of this windfall, but became of an astonishing pride.
Fabrice’s fancy turned into a point of self-esteem (at his age, cares had already reduced him to having fancies!). Vanity led him to the spectacle; the little girl played very gaily and amused him; on leaving the theatre he was in love for an hour. The count returned to Parma on the news that Fabrice was running real dangers; Giletti, who had been a dragoon in the fine regiment of the Napoleonic Dragoons, spoke seriously of killing Fabrice and was taking measures to flee afterwards into the Romagna. If the reader is very young, he will be scandalised at our admiration for this fine trait of virtue. It was nevertheless no small effort of heroism on the count’s part to return from Bologna; for, after all, often in the morning he had a weary complexion, and Fabrice had so much freshness, so much serenity! Who would have thought to reproach him for Fabrice’s death, occurring in his absence, and for so silly a cause? But he had one of those rare souls that make an eternal remorse of a generous action they might have done and did not do; besides, he could not bear the idea of seeing the duchess sad, and by his fault.
He found her, on his arrival, silent and gloomy; here is what had happened: the little chambermaid, Chékina, tormented by remorse, and judging the importance of her fault by the enormity of the sum she had received to commit it, had fallen ill. One evening, the duchess, who loved her, went up to her chamber. The little girl could not resist this mark of kindness; she melted into tears, wished to return to her mistress what she still had of the money she had received, and at length had the courage to confess to her the questions put by the count and her answers. The duchess ran to the lamp and extinguished it, then said to little Chékina that she forgave her, but on condition that she never say a word of this strange scene to anyone:
—Poor count, she added lightly, fears ridicule; all men are so.
The duchess hastened down to her own rooms. Scarcely locked in her chamber, she melted into tears; she found something horrible in the idea of making love with this Fabrice whom she had seen born, and yet what did her conduct mean?
Such had been the first cause of the black melancholy in which the count found her plunged; he arrived, and she had fits of impatience against him, and almost against Fabrice; she could have wished never to see either of them again; she was vexed at the ridiculous role, in her eyes, that Fabrice was playing with little Marietta; for the count had told her all, like a true lover incapable of keeping a secret. She could not accustom herself to this misfortune: her idol had a defect; at length, in a moment of good friendship, she asked the count’s advice, and for him this was a delicious instant and a fair reward of the honourable impulse that had brought him back to Parma.
—What could be simpler! said the count, laughing; young men want to have all women, then the next day think no more of them. Must he not go to Belgirate, to see the Marquise del Dongo? Well! let him depart. During his absence I shall beg the comic troupe to take its talents elsewhere; I shall pay the travelling expenses; but soon we shall see him in love with the first pretty woman chance throws in his way: that is in the order of things, and I should not wish to see him otherwise… If needful, have the marquise write.
This idea, given with an air of complete indifference, was a ray of light for the duchess; she was afraid of Giletti. That evening the count announced, as if by chance, that there was a courier who, going to Vienna, passed through Milan; three days later Fabrice received a letter from his mother. He set out much piqued at not having been able, thanks to Giletti’s jealousy, to profit by the excellent intentions of which little Marietta had him assured by a mammacia, an old woman who served her as mother.
Fabrice found his mother and one of his sisters at Belgirate, a large Piedmontese village on the right bank of Lake Maggiore; the left bank belongs to the Milanese, and consequently to Austria. This lake, parallel to Lake Como, and also running from north to south, is situated some twenty leagues further west. The mountain air, the majestic and tranquil aspect of that superb lake which recalled to him the one near which he had passed his childhood, all conspired to change into sweet melancholy the sorrow of Fabrice, akin to anger. It was with infinite tenderness that the memory of the duchess now presented itself to him; it seemed to him that from afar he conceived for her that love he had never felt for any woman; nothing would have been more painful to him than to be separated from her for ever, and in these dispositions, had the duchess deigned to have recourse to the least coquetry, she would have conquered that heart, for example, by opposing a rival to him. But far from taking so decisive a course, it was not without sharp self-reproach that she found her thought ever attached to the footsteps of the young traveller. She reproached herself with what she still called a fancy, as if it were a horror; she redoubled her attentions and kindnesses to the count, who, seduced by so many graces, did not listen to sound reason, which prescribed a second journey to Bologna.
The Marquise del Dongo, pressed by the nuptials of her eldest daughter, whom she was marrying to a Milanese duke, could give but three days to her beloved son; never had she found in him so tender a friendship. Amid the melancholy that more and more took possession of Fabrice’s soul, a bizarre and even ridiculous idea had presented itself and all at once been followed up. Shall we dare say that he wished to consult the Abbé Blanès? That excellent old man was perfectly incapable of understanding the sorrows of a heart torn by puerile passions almost equal in force; besides, it would have taken eight days merely to make him glimpse all the interests Fabrice had to manage at Parma; but in thinking of consulting him Fabrice recovered the freshness of his sensations at sixteen. Will it be believed? It was not simply as a wise man, as a perfectly gifted friend, that Fabrice wished to speak to him; the object of this journey and the feelings that agitated our hero during the fifty hours it lasted are so absurd that no doubt, in the interest of the tale, it had been better to suppress them. I fear Fabrice’s credulity may deprive him of the reader’s sympathy; but after all, he was thus, why flatter him rather than another? I have flattered neither Count Mosca nor the prince.
Fabrice then, since all must be told, Fabrice reconducted his mother to the port of Laveno, left bank of Lake Maggiore, Austrian bank, where she landed toward eight in the evening. (The lake is considered neutral territory, and no passport is asked of one who does not land.) But scarcely was night come than he had himself put ashore on that same Austrian bank, in the midst of a little wood that advances into the waves. He had hired a sediola, a sort of rustic and rapid tilbury, by means of which he could follow, at five hundred paces’ distance, his mother’s carriage; he was disguised as a servant of the casa del Dongo, and none of the numerous police or customs officers had the idea of asking him for his passport. A quarter of a league from Como, where the marquise and her daughter were to stop for the night, he took a path to the left, which, skirting the village of Vico, afterwards joins a little road recently made on the extreme edge of the lake. It was midnight, and Fabrice could hope to meet no gendarme. The trees of the copses the little road crossed at every instant traced the black outline of their foliage against a starry sky, but veiled by a light mist. The waters and the sky were of a profound tranquillity; Fabrice’s soul could not resist this sublime beauty; he stopped, then sat upon a rock that advanced into the lake, forming a sort of little promontory. The universal silence was troubled, at equal intervals, only by the little wave of the lake that came to expire on the shore. Fabrice had an Italian heart; I ask pardon for him: this defect, which will make him less amiable, consisted chiefly in this: he had vanity only by fits, and the mere aspect of sublime beauty moved him to tenderness, and took from his sorrows their bitter and hard edge. Seated on his isolated rock, no longer having to guard against police agents, protected by the deep night and the vast silence, gentle tears moistened his eyes, and he found there, at little cost, the happiest moments he had tasted for a long time.
He resolved never to tell lies to the duchess, and it is because he loved her to adoration at that moment that he swore to himself never to tell her he loved her; never would he pronounce the word love near her, since the passion so called was foreign to his heart. In the enthusiasm of generosity and virtue that made his felicity at that moment, he took the resolution to tell her all at the first opportunity: his heart had never known love. Once this courageous course was well adopted, he felt as if delivered of an enormous weight. “She will perhaps say a few words to me about Marietta: well! I shall never see little Marietta again,” he answered himself gaily.
The oppressive heat that had reigned during the day was beginning to be tempered by the morning breeze. Already the dawn, by a faint white gleam, traced the peaks of the Alps that rise north and east of Lake Como. Their masses, whitened by snows even in the month of June, stand out against the clear azure of a sky ever pure at those immense heights. A branch of the Alps advancing south toward happy Italy separates the slopes of Lake Como from those of Lake Garda. Fabrice followed with his eye all the branches of these sublime mountains; the dawn, as it brightened, came to mark the valleys that separate them by lighting the light mist that rose from the depths of the gorges.
For some moments Fabrice had resumed his walk; he crossed the hill that forms the peninsula of Durini, and at length there appeared to his eyes the steeple of the village of Grianta, where so often he had made star observations with the Abbé Blanès. “How great was my ignorance in those days!” he told himself. “I could not understand, even the ridiculous Latin of those astrology treatises my master leafed through, and I believe I respected them chiefly because, understanding only a few words here and there, my imagination undertook to lend them a meaning, and the most romantic possible.”
“Stories of the world, in your language.”