Part 19

--I am not as foolish as you think, answered Fabrice, and, whatever you may say, you will always be in my eyes a faithful servant of my aunt, and a man who did everything in the world to get me out of a very ugly fix.

Many further protests were needed before Ludovic could be persuaded to speak, and when at last he had made up his mind to it, he began with a preface that lasted a good five minutes. Fabrice grew impatient, then he said to himself: "Whose fault is it? Our vanity's, which this man saw perfectly well from his seat." Ludovic's devotion at last moved him to run the risk of speaking plainly.

--How much would the Marquise Raversi not give to the footman you are about to send to Parma to obtain those two letters! They are in your handwriting, and consequently constitute judicial evidence against you. Your Excellency will take me for an indiscreet busybody; in the second place, she may perhaps be ashamed to show my poor coachman's hand to Her Grace the Duchess; but in short your safety opens my mouth, however much you may think me an impertinent fellow. Could not Your Excellency dictate those two letters to me? Then I alone am compromised, and even that but little; I would say, if need be, that you appeared to me in the middle of a field with a horn inkstand in one hand and a pistol in the other, and that you ordered me to write.

--Give me your hand, my dear Ludovic, cried Fabrice, and to prove to you that I wish to have no secret from a friend such as you, copy these two letters exactly as they are.

Ludovic understood the full extent of this mark of confidence and was extremely touched by it, but after a few lines, seeing the boat advancing rapidly upon the river:

--The letters will be finished sooner, he said to Fabrice, if Your Excellency will take the trouble to dictate them to me.

The letters finished, Fabrice wrote an A and a B on the last line, and, on a small scrap of paper which he then crumpled up, he wrote in French: *Believe* *A and B*. The footman was to hide this crumpled paper in his clothes.

The boat coming within call, Ludovic hailed the boatmen by names that were not theirs; they made no answer and landed five hundred toises lower down, looking all about to see whether they were observed by any customs officer.

--I am at your orders, said Ludovic to Fabrice; do you wish me to carry the letters to Parma myself? Do you wish me to accompany you to Ferrara?

--To accompany me to Ferrara is a service I hardly dared ask of you. We shall have to land and try to enter the city without showing the passport. I must tell you I have the greatest repugnance to travelling under the name of Giletti, and I see no one but you who can buy me another passport.

--Why did you not speak at Casal-Maggiore! I know a spy who would have sold me an excellent passport, and cheap, for forty or fifty francs.

One of the two boatmen, who was born on the right bank of the Po, and consequently needed no passport abroad to go to Parma, undertook to carry the letters. Ludovic, who knew how to handle an oar, undertook to row the boat with the other.

--We shall find on the lower Po, said he, several armed boats belonging to the police, and I shall know how to avoid them. More than ten times they were obliged to hide among small islands level with the water, covered with willows. Three times they landed to let the empty boats pass before the police vessels. Ludovic profited by these long leisure moments to recite several of his sonnets to Fabrice. The sentiments were fairly just, but as if blunted by the expression, and not worth the trouble of writing; the singular thing is that this ex-coachman had lively and picturesque passions and ways of seeing; he became cold and commonplace as soon as he wrote. "That is the reverse of what we see in the world," said Fabrice to himself; "people now know how to express everything gracefully, but hearts have nothing to say." He understood that the greatest pleasure he could give this faithful servant would be to correct the spelling of his sonnets.

--They make fun of me when I lend my notebook, said Ludovic; but if Your Excellency deigned to dictate to me the spelling of the words letter by letter, the envious would have nothing more to say: spelling does not make genius.

It was only the day after next, in the night, that Fabrice could land in full safety in a wood of alders, a league before reaching Ponte Lago Oscuro. All day he remained hidden in a hemp-field, and Ludovic went on ahead to Ferrara; there he rented a small lodging from a poor Jew, who understood at once that there was money to be made if one knew how to hold one's tongue. In the evening, at nightfall, Fabrice entered Ferrara mounted on a small horse; he had great need of this help, the heat had struck him on the river; the knife wound he had in his thigh and the sword cut Giletti had given him in the shoulder, at the beginning of the fight, had become inflamed and gave him fever.

CHAPTER XII

The Jew, master of the lodging, had procured a discreet surgeon, who, understanding in his turn that there was money in the purse, said to Ludovic that his conscience obliged him to make his report to the police concerning the wounds of the young man whom he, Ludovic, called his brother.

--The law is clear, added he; it is too evident that your brother did not wound himself, as he relates, by falling from a ladder, at the moment when he held an open knife in his hand.

Ludovic answered this honest surgeon coldly that, if he ventured to yield to the inspirations of his conscience, he would have the honour, before leaving Ferrara, of falling upon him precisely with an open knife in his hand. When he reported this incident to Fabrice, the latter blamed him severely, but there was not an instant to lose in decamping. Ludovic told the Jew he wished to try to give his brother some air; he went to fetch a carriage, and our friends left the house never to return. The reader no doubt finds all these proceedings, made necessary by the absence of a passport, exceedingly tedious: this kind of preoccupation no longer exists in France; but in Italy, and above all in the neighbourhood of the Po, everyone talks passport. Once out of Ferrara without hindrance, as if for a drive, Ludovic sent the cab away, then re-entered the city by another gate, and came back for Fabrice with a *sediola* which he had hired to go twelve leagues. Arrived near Bologna, our friends had themselves taken across country onto the road which leads from Florence to Bologna; they passed the night in the most wretched inn they could discover, and, the next day, Fabrice feeling strength to walk a little, they entered Bologna as strollers. They had burned Giletti's passport: the comedian's death must be known, and there was less danger in being arrested as men without passports than as bearers of the passport of a murdered man.

Ludovic knew at Bologna two or three servants of great houses; it was agreed that he should go and sound them out. He told them that, coming from Florence and travelling with his young brother, the latter, feeling the need to sleep, had let him set out alone an hour before sunrise. He was to rejoin him in the village where he, Ludovic, should stop to pass the hours of great heat. But Ludovic, seeing his brother not arrive, had determined to retrace his steps; he had found him wounded by a blow of a stone and several knife thrusts, and, moreover, robbed by men who had picked a quarrel with him. This brother was a pretty fellow, knew how to groom and drive horses, read and write, and would like well to find a place in some good house. Ludovic reserved the right to add, when occasion offered, that, Fabrice having fallen, the thieves had fled carrying off the small bag in which were their linen and their passports.

On arriving at Bologna, Fabrice, feeling very tired, and not daring, without a passport, to present himself at an inn, had entered the immense church of San Petronio. He found there a delicious coolness; soon he felt quite revived. "Ungrateful that I am," he said to himself suddenly, "I enter a church, and it is to sit there, as in a café!" He threw himself on his knees, and thanked God with effusion for the evident protection with which he had been surrounded since he had had the misfortune to kill Giletti. The danger that still made him shudder was that of being recognised in the police office at Casal-Maggiore. "How is it," said he to himself, "that this clerk, whose eyes showed so much suspicion and who reread my passport three times over, did not perceive that I am not five feet ten inches tall, that I am not thirty-eight years old, that I am not much marked with smallpox? How many graces I owe you, O my God! And I could delay until this moment to lay my nothingness at your feet! My pride would fain believe that it was to a vain human prudence I owed the happiness of escaping the Spielberg which already opened to swallow me up!"

Fabrice passed more than an hour in this extreme tenderness, in presence of the immense goodness of God. Ludovic approached without his hearing him come, and placed himself opposite. Fabrice, who had his brow hidden in his hands, raised his head, and his faithful servant saw the tears that furrowed his cheeks.

--Come back in an hour, he said to Ludovic rather harshly.

Ludovic pardoned this tone because of the piety. Fabrice recited several times the seven penitential psalms, which he knew by heart; he lingered long over the verses that had bearing on his present situation.

Fabrice asked God's pardon for many things, but, what is remarkable, it did not occur to him to count among his faults the project of becoming archbishop, solely because Count Mosca was prime minister, and found this place and the great existence it gives suitable for the duchess's nephew. He had desired it without passion, it is true, but after all he had thought of it, exactly as of a post of minister or general. It had not entered his mind that his conscience could be concerned in this project of the duchess's. This is a remarkable trait of the religion he owed to the teachings of the Milanese Jesuits. This religion takes away the courage to think of unusual things, and above all forbids personal examination, as the most enormous of sins; it is a step towards Protestantism. To know of what one is guilty, one must question one's curate, or read the list of sins, such as it is printed in the books entitled: *Preparation for the Sacrament of Penitence*. Fabrice knew by heart the list of sins drawn up in the Latin tongue, which he had learned at the Ecclesiastical Academy of Naples. Thus, in reciting this list, come to the article of murder, he had very well accused himself before God of having killed a man, but in defending his life. He had passed rapidly, and without the least attention, over the various articles relating to the sin of simony (procuring ecclesiastical dignities by money). If anyone had proposed to him to give a hundred louis to become first grand vicar of the Archbishop of Parma, he would have rejected the idea with horror; but though he lacked neither wit nor above all logic, it never once entered his head that the credit of Count Mosca, employed in his favour, was a simony. Such is the triumph of Jesuit education: to give the habit of not paying attention to things clearer than day. A Frenchman, brought up amid the traits of self-interest and the irony of Paris, might, without being in bad faith, have accused Fabrice of hypocrisy at the very moment when our hero opened his soul to God with the utmost sincerity and the deepest tenderness.

Fabrice did not leave the church until he had prepared the confession he proposed to make the next day; he found Ludovic seated on the steps of the vast stone peristyle which rises on the great square before the façade of San Petronio. As after a great storm the air is purer, so Fabrice's soul was calm, happy, and as if refreshed.

--I feel very well, I scarce feel my wounds any more, said he to Ludovic as he came up to him; but before all I must ask your pardon; I answered you peevishly when you came to speak to me in the church; I was making my examination of conscience. Well! how go our affairs?

--They go as well as possible: I have taken a lodging, to be sure very little worthy of Your Excellency, at the house of the wife of one of my friends, who is very pretty and moreover intimately connected with one of the chief agents of the police. Tomorrow I shall go and declare that our passports were stolen from us; this declaration will be taken in good part; but I shall pay the postage of the letter that the police will write to Casal-Maggiore, to know whether there exists in that commune one Ludovic San-Micheli, who has a brother named Fabrice, in the service of Her Grace the Duchess Sanseverina, at Parma. All is finished, *siamo a cavallo*. (Italian proverb: we are saved)

Fabrice had suddenly assumed a very serious air: he begged Ludovic to wait a moment, re-entered the church almost running, and no sooner was he there than again he threw himself on his knees; he humbly kissed the stone flags. "It is a miracle, Lord," he cried, tears in his eyes, "when you saw my soul disposed to return to duty, you saved me. Great God! it is possible that one day I may be killed in some affair: remember at the moment of my death the state my soul is in at this moment." It was with the transports of the liveliest joy that Fabrice recited anew the seven penitential psalms. Before going out he approached an old woman who was seated before a great madonna and beside a triangle of iron placed vertically on a foot of the same metal. The edges of this triangle were bristling with a great number of points destined to hold the little wax tapers which the piety of the faithful light before the famous madonna of Cimabue. Only seven tapers were lighted when Fabrice approached; he lodged this circumstance in his memory with the intention of reflecting on it more at leisure afterwards.

--How much do the tapers cost? said he to the woman.

--Two baiocchi apiece.

Indeed they were scarce thicker than a quill, and not a foot long.

--How many more tapers can you place on your triangle?

--Sixty-three, since there are seven lighted.

"Ah!" said Fabrice to himself, "sixty-three and seven make seventy: this too is to be noted." He paid for the tapers, placed and lighted the first seven himself, then knelt to make his offering, and said to the old woman as he rose:

--It is for a grace received.

--I am dying of hunger, said Fabrice to Ludovic, as he rejoined him.

--Let us not enter a tavern, let us go to the lodging; the mistress of the house will go and buy what is needed for breakfast; she will steal twenty sous and will be all the more attached to the new arrival.

--This tends to nothing less than making me die of hunger a good hour longer, said Fabrice laughing with the serenity of a child, and he entered a tavern near San Petronio. To his extreme surprise, he saw at a table near that where he was placed, Pépé, the first valet de chambre of his aunt, the very one who formerly had come to meet him as far as Geneva. Fabrice signalled him to be silent; then, having breakfasted rapidly, a smile of happiness wandering on his lips, he rose; Pépé followed him, and, for the third time, our hero entered San Petronio. Out of discretion, Ludovic remained walking about the square.

--Oh! my God, my lord! How are your wounds? Her Grace the Duchess is horribly anxious: a whole day she believed you dead and abandoned on some island of the Po; I am going to send a courier to her this very instant. I have been seeking you for six days, I spent three at Ferrara, running through all the inns.

--Have you a passport for me?

--I have three different ones: one with the names and titles of Your Excellency; the second with your name only, and the third under an assumed name, Joseph Bossi; each passport is in duplicate, according as Your Excellency may wish to arrive from Florence or from Modena. It is only a matter of taking a walk outside the city. My lord the Count would be pleased to see you lodged at the inn del Pelegrino, whose master is his friend.

Fabrice, seeming to walk at random, advanced into the right nave of the church to the place where his tapers were lighted; his eyes fixed upon the madonna of Cimabue, then he said to Pépé, kneeling:

--I must render thanks a moment.

Pépé imitated him. On leaving the church, Pépé noticed that Fabrice gave a twenty-franc piece to the first poor man who asked him alms; this beggar uttered cries of gratitude which drew upon the charitable being the swarms of poor of every sort who ordinarily adorn the square of San Petronio. All wanted their share of the napoleon. The women, despairing of penetrating the throng that surrounded him, fell upon Fabrice, crying to him whether it was not true that he had wished to give his napoleon to be divided among all the poor of the good God. Pépé, brandishing his cane with a gold head, ordered them to leave His Excellency in peace.

--Ah! Excellency, resumed all these women in a shriller voice, give also a gold napoleon for the poor women! Fabrice doubled his pace, the women followed crying, and many poor males, coming from all the streets, made a sort of little sedition. All this horribly dirty and energetic crowd cried:

--Excellency.

Fabrice had much trouble to free himself from the mob; this scene brought his imagination back to earth. "I have only what I deserve," said he to himself, "I have rubbed shoulders with the rabble."

Two women followed him to the Porta Saragozza by which he left the city; Pépé stopped them by seriously threatening them with his cane, and throwing them some small coin. Fabrice mounted the charming hill of San Michele in Bosco, made the tour of part of the city outside the walls, took a path, arrived five hundred paces onto the Florence road, then re-entered Bologna and gravely handed to the police clerk a passport where his description was noted in a very exact fashion. This passport named him Joseph Bossi, student in theology. Fabrice noticed a small red ink stain thrown, as if by chance, at the bottom of the sheet towards the right-hand corner. Two hours later he had a spy on his heels, because of the title of Excellency which his companion had given him before the poor of San Petronio, though his passport bore none of the titles which give a man the right to be called excellency by his servants.

Fabrice saw the spy, and laughed greatly at him; he thought no more of passports or police, and amused himself with everything like a child. Pépé, who had orders to remain near him, seeing him very content with Ludovic, preferred to carry himself such good news to the duchess. Fabrice wrote two very long letters to the persons dear to him; then he had the idea of writing a third to the venerable Archbishop Landriani. This letter produced a marvellous effect, it contained a very exact account of the fight with Giletti. The good archbishop, quite touched, failed not to go read this letter to the prince, who consented to listen to it, rather curious to see how this young monsignore went about excusing so frightful a murder. Thanks to the numerous friends of the Marquise Raversi, the prince as well as all the city of Parma believed that Fabrice had had himself helped by twenty or thirty peasants to beat out the brains of a wretched comedian who had the insolence to dispute little Marietta with him. In despotic courts, the first clever intriguer disposes of the truth, as fashion disposes of it in Paris.

--But, the devil! said the prince to the archbishop, one has these things done by another; but to do them oneself, that is not the custom; and then one does not kill a comedian such as Giletti, one buys him.

Fabrice had not the least suspicion of what was passing at Parma. In fact, it was a question of knowing whether the death of this comedian, who in his lifetime earned thirty-two francs a month, would bring about the fall of the ultra ministry and of its chief Count Mosca.

On learning the death of Giletti, the prince, piqued at the independent airs the duchess gave herself, had ordered the fiscal general Rassi to treat the whole case as if it had been a liberal. Fabrice, for his part, believed that a man of his rank was above the laws; he did not reckon that in countries where great names are never punished, intrigue can do all, even against them. He often spoke to Ludovic of his perfect innocence which would soon be proclaimed; his great reason was that he was not guilty. Whereupon Ludovic said to him one day:

--I cannot conceive how Your Excellency, who has so much wit and learning, takes the trouble to say such things to me who am his devoted servant; Your Excellency uses too many precautions, such things are good to say in public or before a tribunal.

"This man believes me an assassin and loves me no less for it," said Fabrice, utterly taken aback.

Three days after Pépé's departure, he was much astonished to receive an enormous letter sealed with a silk twist as in the time of Louis XIV, and addressed to His Most Reverend Excellency Mgr Fabrice del Dongo, first grand vicar of the diocese of Parma, canon, etc.

"But, am I still all that?" said he laughing. The epistle of Archbishop Landriani was a masterpiece of logic and clarity; it had no fewer than nineteen large pages, and related very well all that had passed at Parma on occasion of the death of Giletti.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”