Part 20

A French army commanded by Marshal Ney and marching on the city would not have produced more of an effect, the good archbishop told him; with the exception of the duchess and myself, my very dear son, everyone believes that you have given yourself the pleasure of killing the mountebank Giletti. Had this misfortune befallen you, these are things one hushes up with two hundred louis and an absence of six months; but the Raversi wants to overthrow Count Mosca by means of this incident. It is not the dreadful sin of murder that the public blames in you, it is solely the clumsiness or rather the insolence of not having deigned to resort to a bulo (a kind of bravo, subordinate). I translate here in clear terms the discourses that surround me, for since this forever deplorable misfortune, I go every day to three of the most considerable houses in the city to have the occasion to justify you. And never did I think to make a more holy use of the little eloquence that Heaven has deigned to grant me.

The scales were falling from Fabrice's eyes; the numerous letters of the duchess, filled with transports of friendship, never deigned to tell. The duchess swore to him to leave Parma forever, if soon he did not re-enter it triumphant.

"The count will do for you," she said to him in the letter that accompanied that of the archbishop, "all that is humanly possible. As for me, you have changed my character with that fine escapade; I am now as stingy as the banker Tombone; I have sent away all my workmen, I have done more, I have dictated to the count the inventory of my fortune, which turned out to be far less considerable than I thought. After the death of the excellent Count Pietranera, who, by the way, you ought rather to have avenged, instead of exposing yourself against a being of Giletti's sort, I remained with twelve hundred livres of income and five thousand francs of debt; I remember, among other things, that I had two and a half dozen pairs of white satin shoes from Paris, and only one pair of shoes for walking in the street. I am almost decided to take the three hundred thousand francs that the duke leaves me, and which I wanted to employ entirely in raising him a magnificent tomb. For the rest, it is the Marquise Raversi who is your principal enemy, that is to say mine; if you are bored alone at Bologna, you have only to say a word, I will come join you. Here are four new bills of exchange, etc."

The duchess said not a word to Fabrice of the opinion held at Parma regarding his affair; she wished above all to console him, and, in any case, the death of a ridiculous being such as Giletti did not seem to her of a nature to be seriously reproached to del Dongo.

--How many Gilettis our ancestors sent into the other world, she said to the count, without anyone's taking it into their head to reproach them for it!

Fabrice, quite astonished, and who for the first time caught a glimpse of the true state of things, set about studying the archbishop's letter. Unfortunately the archbishop himself believed him better informed than he really was. Fabrice understood that what above all made the Marquise Raversi's triumph was that it was impossible to find eyewitnesses of that fatal combat. The valet de chambre who had first brought the news to Parma had been at the inn of the village of Sanguigna when it took place; the little Marietta and the old woman who served her as mother had disappeared, and the marquise had bought the veturino who drove the carriage and who was now making an abominable deposition.

Although the proceedings are surrounded by the most profound mystery, wrote the good archbishop in his Ciceronian style, and directed by the fiscal general Rassi, whose Christian charity alone can prevent me from speaking ill of him, but who made his fortune by hounding unfortunate accused persons like the hunting dog after the hare; although Rassi, I say, whose turpitude and venality your imagination could not exaggerate, has been charged with the direction of the trial by an irritated prince, I have been able to read the three depositions of the veturino. By a singular piece of good fortune, this wretch contradicts himself. And I shall add, because I speak to my vicar general, to him who, after me, must have the direction of this diocese, that I have summoned the curate of the parish where this misguided sinner lives. I will tell you, my very dear son, but under the seal of confession, that this curate already knows, through the veturino's wife, the number of crowns he received from the Marquise Raversi; I would not dare say that the marquise exacted of him to calumniate you, but the fact is probable. The crowns were handed over by an unhappy priest who fills rather lowly functions with this marquise, and whom I have been obliged to suspend from saying mass for the second time. I will not weary you with the account of several other steps which you might expect of me, and which besides fall within my duty. A canon, your colleague at the cathedral, and who moreover sometimes remembers a little too well the influence given him by the estates of his family of which, by divine permission, he remains the sole heir, having permitted himself to say at the house of M. the Count Zurla, Minister of the Interior, that he regarded this trifle as proven against you (he spoke of the assassination of the unhappy Giletti), I had him called before me, and there, in the presence of my three other vicars general, my chaplain, and two curates who happened to be in the waiting room, I asked him to communicate to us, his brothers, the grounds of the complete conviction he said he had acquired against one of his colleagues at the cathedral; the wretch could only utter quite inconclusive reasons; everyone rose up against him, and although I believed I ought to add but very few words, he melted into tears and made us witnesses of the full avowal of his complete error, whereupon I promised him secrecy in my name and in that of all persons who had attended this conference, on the condition, however, that he would put all his zeal into correcting the false impressions that might have been caused by the discourses uttered by him for the past fifteen days.

I will not repeat to you, my dear son, what you must have known for a long time, that is to say that of the thirty-four peasants employed in the excavation undertaken by Count Mosca and whom the Raversi pretends were paid by you to assist you in a crime, thirty-two were at the bottom of their ditch, wholly occupied with their work, when you seized the hunting knife and used it to defend your life against the man who attacked you unawares. Two of them, who were out of the ditch, cried to the others: They are murdering Monseigneur! That cry alone shows your innocence in all its brightness. Well! the fiscal general Rassi pretends that these two men have disappeared; moreover, eight of the men who were at the bottom of the ditch have been found again; in their first interrogation six declared having heard the cry They are murdering Monseigneur! I know, by indirect means, that in their fifth interrogation, which took place last evening, five declared that they did not well remember whether they had heard this cry directly or whether it had merely been related to them by one of their comrades. Orders are given that I be made acquainted with the dwelling of these labourers, and their curates will make them understand that they damn themselves if, to gain a few crowns, they allow themselves to alter the truth.

The good archbishop entered into infinite details, as may be judged by those we have just reported. Then he added, using the Latin language:

This affair is nothing less than an attempt at a change of ministry. If you are condemned, it can only be to the galleys or to death, in which case I would intervene by declaring, from the height of my archiepiscopal chair, that I know you are innocent, that you have simply defended your life against a brigand, and that finally I forbade you to return to Parma as long as your enemies triumph there; I even propose to stigmatize, as he deserves, the fiscal general; hatred against this man is as common as esteem for his character is rare. But in the end, on the eve of the day this fiscal pronounces that so unjust a sentence, the Duchess Sanseverina will leave the city and perhaps even the States of Parma: in that case no doubt is entertained that the count will hand in his resignation. Then, most probably, General Fabio Conti arrives at the ministry, and the Marquise Raversi triumphs. The great evil of your affair is that no man of understanding is charged in chief with the steps necessary to bring your innocence to light and to foil the attempts made to suborn witnesses. The count believes himself filling this role; but he is too great a lord to descend to certain details; moreover, in his capacity as minister of police, he had to give, in the first moment, the most severe orders against you. Finally, shall I dare say it? Our sovereign lord believes you guilty, or at least simulates this belief, and brings some acrimony into this affair.

(The words corresponding to *our sovereign lord* and *simulates this belief* were in Greek, and Fabrice was infinitely grateful to the archbishop for having dared to write them. He cut this line from his letter with a penknife, and destroyed it on the spot.)

Fabrice interrupted himself twenty times in reading this letter; he was agitated by transports of the liveliest gratitude: he replied at once with a letter of eight pages. Often he was obliged to raise his head so that his tears might not fall upon his paper. The next day, at the moment of sealing this letter, he found its tone too worldly. "I shall write it in Latin," said he to himself, "it will seem more fitting to the worthy archbishop." But in seeking to construct fine Latin sentences, very long, very imitated from Cicero, he recalled that one day the archbishop, speaking to him of Napoleon, affected to call him Buonaparte; instantly all the emotion that the evening before had moved him to tears disappeared. "O King of Italy," he cried, "this fidelity that so many others swore to you in your lifetime, I shall keep it to you after your death. He loves me, no doubt, but because I am a del Dongo and he the son of a bourgeois." So that his fine letter in Italian might not be lost, Fabrice made some necessary changes to it, and addressed it to Count Mosca.

That very day, Fabrice met the little Marietta in the street; she turned red with happiness, and signalled him to follow her without accosting her. She rapidly gained a deserted portico; there, she advanced further the black lace which, according to the fashion of the country, covered her head, so that she could not be recognized; then, turning quickly:

--How does it happen, she said to Fabrice, that you walk thus freely in the street?

Fabrice told her his story.

--Good heavens! you have been to Ferrara! I who searched for you there so much! You should know that I quarrelled with the old woman because she wanted to take me to Venice, where I well knew you would never go, since you are on Austria's black list. I sold my gold necklace to come to Bologna, a presentiment announced to me the happiness I have in meeting you there; the old woman arrived two days after me. Thus I shall not urge you to come to our place, she would again make you those ugly demands for money that shame me so. We have lived quite respectably since the fatal day you know of, and we have not spent a quarter of what you gave her. I would not like to come see you at the Pellegrino inn, that would be publicity. Try to rent a small room in a deserted street, and at the Ave Maria (nightfall), I shall be here, under this same portico.

These words said, she took flight.

CHAPTER XIII

All serious ideas were forgotten at the unforeseen appearance of this amiable person. Fabrice began to live at Bologna in a profound joy and security. This naive disposition to find himself happy with all that filled his life showed through in the letters he addressed to the duchess; to such a point that she took umbrage at it. Scarcely did Fabrice notice it; only he wrote in abbreviated signs on the dial of his watch: "When I write to the D. never say when I was a prelate, when I was a man of the church; that angers her." He had bought two little horses of which he was very fond: he harnessed them to a hired calash whenever the little Marietta wanted to go see one of those ravishing spots in the environs of Bologna; almost every evening he drove her to the Fall of the Reno. On the return, he stopped at the house of the amiable Crescentini, who considered himself a little the father of Marietta.

"My faith! if this is the café life that seemed so ridiculous to me for a man of some worth, I was wrong to reject it," said Fabrice to himself. He forgot that he never went to the café except to read *Le Constitutionnel*, and that, perfectly unknown to all the fine society of Bologna, the enjoyments of vanity entered for nothing in his present felicity. When he was not with the little Marietta, he was seen at the Observatory, where he followed a course in astronomy; the professor had taken him into great friendship and Fabrice lent him his horses on Sundays to go shine with his wife at the Corso of the Montagnola.

He held in abhorrence the causing of unhappiness to any being whatsoever, however little estimable. Marietta absolutely would not have him see the old woman; but one day when she was at church, he went up to the mammacia who blushed with anger at seeing him enter. "This is a case for playing the del Dongo," said Fabrice to himself.

--How much does Marietta earn per month when she is engaged? he cried in the air with which a young man who respects himself enters at Paris the balcony of the Bouffes.

--Fifty crowns.

--You lie as always; tell the truth, or by God you shall not have a centime.

--Well, she earned twenty-two crowns in our company at Parma, when we had the misfortune to know you; I earned twelve crowns, and we gave to Giletti, our protector, each a third of what came to us. Whereupon, almost every month, Giletti made a gift to Marietta; that gift might well be worth two crowns.

--You lie again; you, you received only four crowns. But if you are good with Marietta, I engage you as if I were an impresario; every month you shall receive twelve crowns for you and twenty-two for her; but if I see her eyes red, I go bankrupt.

--You put on airs; well! your rebellious generosity ruins us, replied the old woman in a furious tone; we lose the avviamento (the custom). When we have the enormous misfortune of being deprived of Your Excellency's protection, we shall be known to no troupe, all shall be at full complement; we shall find no engagement, and through you, we shall die of hunger.

--Go to the devil, said Fabrice as he left.

--I shall not go to the devil; ugly impious one! but simply to the police bureau, who shall learn from me that you are a monsignore who has thrown his frock to the nettles, and that you are no more called Joseph Bossi than I am.

Fabrice had already descended some steps of the staircase, he came back.

--First of all the police know better than you what my true name may be; but if you venture to denounce me, if you have that infamy, he said with great seriousness, Ludovic will speak to you, and it will not be six knife thrusts your old carcass receives, but two dozen, and you shall be six months in the hospital, and without tobacco.

The old woman grew pale and threw herself upon Fabrice's hand, which she wished to kiss:

--I accept with gratitude the fate you make for us, for Marietta and me. You have such a good air, that I took you for a ninny; and think well on it, others than I may commit the same error; I advise you to habitually have the air of more of a great lord.

Then she added with an admirably impudent air:

--You will reflect on that good advice, and as winter is not far off, you will make us a gift, to Marietta and me, of two good suits of that fine English cloth sold by the fat merchant who is on the Piazza San Petronio.

The love of the pretty Marietta offered Fabrice all the charms of the sweetest friendship, which made him think of the happiness of the same kind he might have found with the duchess.

"But is it not a very pleasant thing," he sometimes said to himself, "that I am not susceptible of that exclusive and passionate preoccupation they call love? Among the connections chance gave me at Novara or at Naples, did I ever meet a woman whose presence, even in the first days, was preferable to me than a walk on an unknown pretty horse? What they call love," he added, "would that then be still a lie? I love no doubt, as I have a good appetite at six o'clock! Would that be this somewhat vulgar propensity of which those liars would have made the love of Othello, the love of Tancred? or must one believe that I am organized differently from other men? My soul would lack a passion, why so? that would be a singular destiny!"

At Naples, above all in the last times, Fabrice had met women who, proud of their rank, their beauty, and the position occupied in the world by the admirers they had sacrificed to him, had pretended to lead him. At the sight of this design, Fabrice had broken off in the most scandalous and rapid fashion. "Now," said he to himself, "if I ever let myself be transported by the pleasure, no doubt very lively, of being well with this pretty woman called the Duchess Sanseverina, I am exactly like that French scatterbrain who one day killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It is to the duchess that I owe the only happiness I have ever felt through tender sentiments; my friendship for her is my life, and besides, without her what am I? a poor exile reduced to living painfully in a dilapidated castle in the environs of Novara. I remember that during the great autumn rains I was obliged, in the evening, for fear of accident, to adjust a parasol over the canopy of my bed. I rode the horses of the man of business, who was willing to suffer it out of respect for my blue blood (for my high power), but he was beginning to find my stay a little long; my father had assigned me a pension of twelve hundred francs, and believed himself damned for giving bread to a Jacobin. My poor mother and my sisters went without dresses so as to put me in a state to make some little gifts to my mistresses. This way of being generous pierced my heart. And, moreover, people were beginning to suspect my misery, and the young nobility of the environs were going to take pity on me. Sooner or later, some fop would have let show his contempt for a poor and unfortunate Jacobin in his designs, for, in the eyes of those people, I was nothing else. I would have given or received some good sword thrusts that would have led me to the fortress of Fenestrelles, or else I would again have gone to take refuge in Switzerland, always with twelve hundred francs of pension. I have the happiness of owing to the duchess the absence of all those ills; moreover, it is she who feels for me the transports of friendship that I ought to experience for her.

"Instead of that ridiculous and paltry life which would have made of me a sad animal, a fool, for four years I have lived in a great city and I have an excellent carriage, which has prevented me from knowing envy and all the base feelings of the province. This too amiable aunt always scolds me for not taking enough money from the banker. Do I wish to spoil forever this admirable position? Do I wish to lose the only friend I have in the world? It suffices to utter a lie, it suffices to say to a charming woman and perhaps unique in the world, and for whom I have the most passionate friendship: I love you, I who do not know what it is to love with love. She would spend the day making a crime of the absence of those transports that are unknown to me. Marietta, on the contrary, who sees not into my heart and takes a caress for a transport of the soul, believes me mad with love, and counts herself the happiest of women.

"In fact I have known a little this tender preoccupation called, I believe, love, only for that young Aniken of the inn at Zonders, near the Belgian frontier."

It is with regret that we are going to place here one of Fabrice's worst actions: in the midst of this tranquil life, a miserable pique of vanity seized this heart rebellious to love, and led it very far. At the same time as him there was at Bologna the famous Fausta F***, unquestionably one of the first singers of our epoch, and perhaps the most capricious woman ever seen. The excellent poet Burati, of Venice, had made on her account that famous satirical sonnet which was then in the mouth of princes as of the last street urchins.

To will and not to will, to adore and detest in a single day, to be content only in inconstancy, to scorn what the world adores, while the world adores her, Fausta has these faults and many others besides. Therefore never see this serpent. If you see her, rash one, you forget her caprices. If you have the happiness to hear her, you forget yourself, and love makes of you, in a moment, what Circe once made of the companions of Ulysses.

For the moment this miracle of beauty was under the charm of the enormous whiskers and the high insolence of the young Count M***, to the point of not being revolted by his abominable jealousy. Fabrice saw this count in the streets of Bologna, and was shocked by the air of superiority with which he occupied the pavement, and deigned to show his graces to the public. This young man was very rich, believed all permitted to him, and as his prepotenze had drawn threats upon him, he showed himself scarcely otherwise than surrounded by eight or ten buli (a kind of cut-throat), clothed in his livery, and whom he had brought from his lands in the environs of Brescia. Fabrice's glances had met those of this terrible count once or twice, when chance made him hear Fausta. He was astonished at the angelic sweetness of that voice: he imagined nothing like it; he owed to it sensations of supreme happiness, which made a fine contrast with the placidity of his present life. "Would this at last be love?" said he to himself. Very curious to experience this sentiment, and besides amused by the action of braving this Count M***, whose mien was more terrible than that of any drum-major, our hero gave himself up to the childishness of passing far too often before the Palazzo Tanari, which Count M*** had rented for Fausta.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”