Part 16

It should be known that the mortaretti (or little mortars) are nothing other than musket barrels which are sawn so as to leave them only four inches in length; this is why the peasants eagerly gather up the musket barrels which, since 1796, the politics of Europe have scattered in abundance across the plains of Lombardy. Once reduced to four inches in length, these little cannons are loaded to the muzzle, placed upright on the ground, and a trail of powder runs from one to the other; they are ranged in three lines like a battalion, and to the number of two or three hundred, in some spot near the path the procession is to follow. When the Blessed Sacrament draws near, the trail of powder is lit, and then begins a running fire of dry reports, the most uneven and most ridiculous in the world; the women are drunk with joy. Nothing is as gay as the sound of these mortaretti heard from afar upon the lake, and softened by the rocking of the waters; this singular noise, which had so often been the delight of his childhood, drove away the somewhat too serious ideas by which our hero was besieged; he went to fetch the abbot's great astronomical telescope, and recognized most of the men and women following the procession. Many charming little girls whom Fabrice had left at the age of eleven and twelve were now superb women in the full bloom of the most vigorous youth; they revived our hero's courage, and to speak with them he would have braved the gendarmes right well.

The procession having passed and re-entered the church by a side door which Fabrice could not see, the heat soon became extreme even at the top of the bell tower; the inhabitants went home and a great silence fell upon the village. Several boats took on peasants returning to Bellagio, Menaggio, and other villages on the lake; Fabrice could distinguish the sound of each stroke of the oar: this so simple detail ravished him with ecstasy; his present joy was composed of all the unhappiness, all the constraint he found in the complicated life of courts. How happy he would have been at that moment to travel a league upon that beautiful lake so tranquil and reflecting so well the depth of the heavens! He heard the door at the bottom of the tower open: it was the old servant of Abbé Blanès, bringing a large basket; he had all the trouble in the world to keep from speaking to her. "She has almost as much friendship for me as her master," he told himself, "and besides I am leaving at nine this evening; would she not keep the secret she might swear to me, for only a few hours? But," said Fabrice, "I should displease my friend! I might compromise him with the gendarmes!" And he let Ghita go by without speaking to her. He made an excellent dinner, then arranged to sleep a few minutes: he woke only at half past eight in the evening, Abbé Blanès was shaking his arm, and it was night.

Blanès was extremely tired, he had aged fifty years since the day before. He spoke no more of serious things; seated in his wooden armchair:

"Embrace me," he said to Fabrice.

He took him in his arms several times.

"Death," he said at last, "which is to end this so lengthy life, will have nothing as painful as this separation. I have a purse which I shall leave in deposit with Ghita, with orders to draw upon it for her needs, but to hand over what remains to you if ever you come to ask for it. I know her; after this charge, she is capable, out of economy for your sake, of not buying meat four times a year, if you do not give her very precise orders. You yourself may be reduced to poverty, and the mite of the old friend will serve you. Expect nothing from your brother but atrocious dealings, and try to earn money by work that makes you useful to society. I foresee strange storms; perhaps in fifty years idle men will no longer be wanted. Your mother and your aunt may fail you, your sisters will have to obey their husbands... Go, go! flee!" cried Blanès with urgency.

He had just heard a small noise in the clock which announced that ten o'clock was about to strike; he would not even allow Fabrice to embrace him one last time.

"Hurry! hurry!" he called to him; "you will take at least a minute to descend the stairs; take care not to fall, that would be of an awful omen."

Fabrice flung himself down the stairs, and, arriving on the square, began to run. He had scarcely reached in front of his father's castle when the bell struck ten o'clock; each stroke reverberated in his chest and brought a singular turmoil there. He stopped to reflect, or rather to give himself up to the passionate feelings inspired in him by the contemplation of that majestic edifice which he had judged so coldly the evening before. In the midst of his reverie, the sound of a man's steps woke him; he looked and found himself amid four gendarmes. He had two excellent pistols whose priming he had renewed at dinner; the small noise he made in cocking them drew the attention of one of the gendarmes, and all but got him arrested. He perceived the danger he ran and thought of firing first; it was his right, for it was the only way he had of resisting four well-armed men. Happily the gendarmes, who were patrolling to clear the taverns, had not shown themselves altogether insensible to the politeness they had received in several of those pleasant places; they did not decide rapidly enough to do their duty. Fabrice took flight, running at full speed. The gendarmes ran a few steps also, crying:

"Stop! stop!"

Then all fell back into silence. Three hundred paces from there, Fabrice stopped to catch his breath. "The noise of my pistols all but got me taken; this time indeed the Duchess would have told me, if ever it had been granted me to see her beautiful eyes again, that my soul takes pleasure in contemplating what will happen in ten years, and forgets to look at what is occurring at my side."

Fabrice shuddered thinking of the danger he had just avoided; he doubled his pace, but soon he could not keep from running, which was not too prudent, for he was noticed by several peasants returning home. He could not bring himself to stop until he was in the mountains, more than a league from Grianta and, even stopped, he broke into a cold sweat thinking of the Spielberg.

"There's a fine fright!" he said to himself: on hearing the sound of that word, he was almost tempted to be ashamed. "But did not my aunt tell me that the thing I most need is to learn to forgive myself? I always compare myself to a perfect model, which cannot exist. Well! I forgive myself my fear, for, on the other hand, I was quite disposed to defend my liberty, and certainly all four would not have remained standing to lead me to prison. What I am doing at this moment," he added, "is not military; instead of withdrawing rapidly, after having accomplished my object, and perhaps alerted my enemies, I am amusing myself with a fancy more ridiculous perhaps than all the predictions of the good abbot."

Indeed, instead of withdrawing by the shortest line, and gaining the shores of Lake Maggiore, where his boat awaited him, he was making an enormous detour to go see his tree. The reader may perhaps remember the love Fabrice bore to a chestnut tree planted by his mother three-and-twenty years before. "It would be like my brother," he said to himself, "to have had that tree cut down; but such beings do not feel delicate things; he will not have thought of it. And besides, it would not be of ill omen," he added with firmness. Two hours later his gaze was stricken with dismay; some evildoers or a storm had broken one of the principal branches of the young tree, which hung withered; Fabrice cut it off respectfully, with his dagger, and trimmed the cut clean, so that water could not enter the trunk. Then, though time was precious to him, for day was about to break, he spent a good hour digging the earth around the beloved tree. All these follies accomplished, he rapidly took the road to Lake Maggiore. On the whole, he was not sad, the tree was of fine growth, more vigorous than ever, and, in five years, it had almost doubled. The branch was but an accident of no consequence; once cut, it no longer harmed the tree, and even it would be more slender, its branching beginning higher.

Fabrice had not gone a league, when a bright band of whiteness outlined to the east the peaks of the Resegone di Lecco, a mountain famous in the country. The road he followed filled with peasants; but, instead of having military ideas, Fabrice let himself be moved by the sublime or touching aspects of those forests around Lake Como. They are perhaps the most beautiful in the world; I do not mean those that yield the most new crowns, as they would say in Switzerland, but those that speak most to the soul. To listen to that language in the position Fabrice was in, exposed to the attentions of the Lombard-Venetian gendarmes, was a true childishness.

"I am half a league from the frontier," he said to himself at last; "I am going to meet customs officers and gendarmes on their morning round: this fine cloth coat will make them suspicious, they will ask me for my passport; now, that passport bears in plain letters a name promised to prison; here I am in the agreeable necessity of committing a murder. If, as is customary, the gendarmes march two together, I cannot quietly wait to fire until one of the two tries to seize me by the collar; if in falling he holds me but an instant, there I am at the Spielberg." Fabrice, seized above all with horror at this necessity of firing first, perhaps at an old soldier of his uncle, Count Pietranera, ran to hide in the hollow trunk of an enormous chestnut tree; he was renewing the priming of his pistols, when he heard a man advancing in the wood, singing very well a delicious air of Mercadante, then in fashion in Lombardy.

"That is of good omen!" said Fabrice. That air, which he listened to religiously, took away the small edge of anger that was beginning to mingle with his reasoning. He looked attentively up and down the high road, he saw no one.

"The singer will come by some cross-path," he said to himself. Almost at the same instant, he saw a valet de chambre very neatly dressed in the English style, and mounted on a led horse, who advanced at a walk holding by the hand a fine thoroughbred, perhaps a little too thin.

"Ah! if I reasoned like Mosca," said Fabrice, "when he repeats to me that the dangers a man runs are always the measure of his rights over his neighbor, I would blow out this valet's brains with a pistol shot, and, once mounted on the thin horse, I should care very little for all the gendarmes in the world. Scarcely back at Parma, I would send money to this man or his widow... but that would be a horror!"

CHAPTER X

Even as he lectured himself, Fabrice jumped onto the high road which goes from Lombardy into Switzerland: at this place, it lies some four or five feet below the forest. "If my man takes fright," said Fabrice, "he sets off at a gallop, and I stand there looking like a true fool." At that moment, he found himself ten paces from the valet de chambre who no longer sang: he saw in his eyes that he was afraid; he was perhaps about to turn his horses back. Not yet decided to anything, Fabrice made a leap and seized the bridle of the thin horse.

"My friend," he said to the valet de chambre, "I am not an ordinary thief, for I am going to begin by giving you twenty francs, but I am obliged to borrow your horse; I shall be killed if I do not clear out quickly. I have the four Riva brothers on my heels, those great hunters you no doubt know; they have just surprised me in their sister's chamber, I jumped from the window and here I am. They have gone into the forest with their dogs and guns. I had hidden in that big hollow chestnut, because I saw one of them cross the road, their dogs will throw me off the scent! I am going to mount your horse and gallop a league beyond Como; I am going to Milan to throw myself at the viceroy's knees. I shall leave your horse at the post with two napoleons for you, if you consent willingly. If you make the least resistance, I shall kill you with the pistols here. If, once gone, you set the gendarmes on my trail, my cousin, the brave Count Alari, equerry to the emperor, will take care to have your bones broken."

Fabrice invented this speech as he uttered it, with a perfectly peaceful air.

"Besides," he said laughing, "my name is no secret; I am the Marchesino Ascanio del Dongo, my castle is quite near here, at Grianta. D...," said he, raising his voice, "let go the horse, will you!"

The valet de chambre, stupefied, uttered not a word. Fabrice passed his pistol into his left hand, seized the bridle the other let go, sprang to horse and set off at a gallop. When he was three hundred paces off, he noticed he had forgotten to give the promised twenty francs; he stopped: there was still no one on the road but the valet de chambre who followed him at a gallop; he signaled him with his handkerchief to advance, and when he saw him at fifty paces, he threw a handful of coin onto the road, and set off again. He saw from afar the valet de chambre pick up the silver pieces. "There is a truly reasonable man," said Fabrice laughing, "not a useless word." He sped rapidly southward, stopped at a lonely house, and set out again some hours later. At two in the morning he was on the shore of Lake Maggiore; soon he caught sight of his boat beating the water, it came at the agreed signal. He saw no peasant to whom to give the horse; he gave liberty to the noble animal, three hours later he was at Belgirate. There, finding himself in friendly country, he took some rest; he was very cheerful, he had succeeded perfectly well. Dare we indicate the true causes of his joy? His tree was of superb growth, and his soul had been refreshed by the deep tenderness he had found in the arms of Abbé Blanès. "Does he really believe," he said to himself, "all the predictions he made me; or else, since my brother has given me the reputation of a Jacobin, a man without faith or law, capable of anything, did he only wish to engage me not to yield to the temptation of blowing out the brains of some creature who had played me a bad turn?" The day after next Fabrice was at Parma, where he greatly amused the Duchess and the Count, narrating to them with the utmost exactness, as he always did, the whole story of his journey.

On his arrival, Fabrice found the porter and all the domestics of the Sanseverina palace decked with the insignia of the deepest mourning.

"What loss have we suffered?" he asked the Duchess.

"That excellent man they called my husband has just died at Baden. He leaves me this palace; it was a thing agreed upon, but as a sign of good friendship, he adds a legacy of three hundred thousand francs which embarrasses me greatly; I will not renounce it in favor of his niece, the Marquise Raversi, who plays me hanging offenses every day. You who are a connoisseur, you must find me some good sculptor; I shall erect a tomb to the Duke at a cost of three hundred thousand francs."

The Count began to tell anecdotes of the Raversi.

"It is in vain that I have sought to win her over by kindnesses," said the Duchess. "As for the Duke's nephews, I have made them all colonels or generals. In return, not a month passes but they address me some abominable anonymous letter; I have been obliged to take a secretary to read letters of that sort."

"And these anonymous letters are their least sin," resumed Count Mosca; "they keep a manufactory of infamous denunciations. Twenty times I might have had the whole clique brought before the courts, and Your Excellency may think," he added, addressing Fabrice, "whether my good judges would have condemned them."

"Well! that spoils all the rest for me," replied Fabrice with a naivety most pleasing at court; "I should have preferred to see them condemned by magistrates judging in conscience."

"You will do me a favor, you who travel to instruct yourself, to give me the address of such magistrates, I shall write to them before going to bed."

"If I were minister, this absence of honest judges would wound my pride."

"But it seems to me," replied the Count, "that Your Excellency, who loves the French so much, and who even of old lent them the aid of your invincible arm, forgets at this moment one of their great maxims: Better to kill the devil than let the devil kill you. I should like to see how you would govern these ardent souls, who read the history of the French Revolution all day long, with judges who would acquit the men I accuse. They would come to not condemning the most evidently guilty rogues and think themselves Brutuses. But I mean to pick a quarrel with you; has not your so delicate soul some remorse regarding that fine rather thin horse you just abandoned on the shores of Lake Maggiore?"

"I fully intend," said Fabrice with great seriousness, "to have what is due paid to the horse's master to reimburse him for the cost of notices and such, after which he will have had it returned by the peasants who found it; I am going to read the Milan journal assiduously, to look there for the announcement of a lost horse; I know this one's description perfectly well."

"He is truly primitive," said the Count to the Duchess. "And what would have become of Your Excellency," he went on laughing, "if, as you galloped at full speed on that borrowed horse, it had taken it into its head to make a false step? You were at the Spielberg, my dear little nephew, and all my credit would scarce have sufficed to have the weight of the chain attached to each of your legs reduced by some thirty pounds. You would have spent some ten years in that pleasant place; perhaps your legs would have swollen and gangrened, then they would have been neatly cut off..."

"Ah! pray, do not push so sad a tale further," cried the Duchess, tears in her eyes. "Here he is back..."

"And I have more joy at it than you, you may believe," replied the minister, with great seriousness; "but after all, why did this cruel child not ask me for a passport under a fitting name, since he wished to enter Lombardy? At the first news of his arrest I should have set out for Milan, and the friends I have there would gladly have closed their eyes and supposed their gendarmerie had arrested a subject of the Prince of Parma. The account of your ride is graceful, amusing, I willingly grant," replied the Count, resuming a less sinister tone; "your exit from the wood onto the high road pleases me well enough; but between ourselves, since that valet de chambre held your life in his hands, you had the right to take his. We are going to make a brilliant fortune for Your Excellency, at least here is Madame who orders me to, and I do not think my greatest enemies could accuse me of ever having disobeyed her commands. What deadly grief for her and for me if, in that kind of race to the bell tower you just ran with that thin horse, it had made a false step. It had almost been better," added the Count, "that that horse had broken your neck."

"You are very tragic this evening, my friend," said the Duchess, quite moved.

"It is that we are surrounded by tragic events," replied the Count, also with emotion; "we are not in France here, where all ends in songs or in a year or two of imprisonment, and I am really wrong to speak to you of all these things laughing. Come now! my little nephew, I suppose I find means to make you a bishop, for plainly I cannot begin with the archbishopric of Parma, as, very reasonably, Her Excellency the Duchess here present wishes; in that bishopric where you will be far from our wise counsels, tell us a little what your policy will be?"

"To kill the devil rather than let him kill me, as my friends the French say so well," replied Fabrice with ardent eyes; "to preserve by all possible means, including the pistol shot, the position you shall have made for me. I read in the genealogy of the del Dongo the story of that one of our ancestors who built the castle of Grianta. Toward the end of his life, his good friend Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, sends him to inspect a fortified castle on our lake; they feared a new invasion by the Swiss. 'I must however write a word of politeness to the commander,' said the Duke of Milan as he dismissed him; he writes and gives him a letter of two lines; then he asks for it back to seal it. 'It will be more polite,' said the prince. Vespasiano del Dongo departs, but sailing on the lake, he remembers an old Greek tale, for he was learned; he opens his good master's letter and finds the order addressed to the castle's commander, to put him to death upon arrival. The Sforza, too attentive to the comedy he was playing with our forefather, had left a space between the last line of the note and his signature; Vespasiano del Dongo writes there the order to recognize him as governor general of all the castles on the lake, and suppresses the head of the letter. Arrived and recognized in the fort, he throws the commander into a well, declares war on the Sforza, and at the end of some years exchanges his fortress for those immense lands which made the fortune of all branches of our family, and which one day will bring me four thousand pounds of rent."}

“Stories of the world, in your language.”