Part 26
--Well! exclaimed the general, catching sight of his brother don Cesare, there is the duchess who is about to spend a hundred thousand crowns to make a fool of me and get the prisoner rescued!
But for the moment, we are obliged to leave Fabrice in his prison, at the very top of the citadel of Parma; he is well guarded, and we shall perhaps find him there somewhat changed. We are going to occupy ourselves first and foremost with the court, where intrigues of a highly complicated kind, and above all the passions of an unhappy woman, are about to decide his fate. In mounting the three hundred and ninety steps from his prison to the Farnese tower, under the eyes of the governor, Fabrice, who had so greatly dreaded this moment, found that he had no time to think of his misfortune.
On returning home after the evening at Count Zurla's, the duchess dismissed her women with a gesture; then, letting herself fall, fully dressed, upon her bed:
--Fabrice, she cried aloud, is in the power of his enemies, and perhaps, because of me, they will give him poison!
How to depict the moment of despair that followed this statement of the situation, in a woman so lacking in reason, so much a slave to the present sensation, and, without admitting it to herself, desperately in love with the young prisoner? There were inarticulate cries, transports of rage, convulsive movements, but not a single tear. She had sent away her women so as to hide them; she thought she would burst into sobs as soon as she found herself alone; but tears, that first relief of great sorrows, were altogether wanting to her. Anger, indignation, the sense of inferiority with respect to the prince, too strongly dominated that haughty soul.
'Am I not humiliated enough!' she cried every instant; 'I am outraged, and, worse still, Fabrice's life is put at risk! and I shall not avenge myself! Halt there, my prince! you are killing me, very well, you have the power to do so; but afterwards I shall have your life. Alas! poor Fabrice, what good will that do you? What a difference from that day when I wished to leave Parma! and yet then I thought myself unhappy... what blindness! I was about to break all the habits of an agreeable life: alas! without knowing it, I was touching upon an event that was to decide my fate forever. If, through his infamous habits of base courtiership, the count had not suppressed the words <i>unjust procedure</i> in that fatal note which the prince's vanity granted me, we were saved. I had had the good fortune rather than the skill, it must be admitted, to set his self-love in motion regarding his beloved city of Parma. Then I threatened to depart, then I was free! Great God! how much of a slave am I! Now here I am nailed in this infamous sink, and Fabrice chained in the citadel, in that citadel which for so many distinguished persons has been the antechamber of death! and I can no longer keep this tiger in check by the fear of seeing me quit his den!
'He has too much wit not to feel that I shall never withdraw from the infamous tower where my heart is chained. Now the piqued vanity of this man may suggest to him the strangest ideas; their bizarre cruelty would only spur on his astonishing vanity. If he returns to his former talk of insipid gallantry, if he says to me: Accept the homage of your slave, or Fabrice perishes: well! the old story of Judith... Yes, but if that is only a suicide for me, it is a murder for Fabrice; the booby of a successor, our royal prince, and the infamous executioner Rassi would hang Fabrice as my accomplice.'
The duchess uttered cries: this alternative, from which she saw no means of escape, tortured that unhappy heart. Her troubled head saw no other probability in the future. For ten minutes she agitated like a madwoman; at last a sleep of exhaustion replaced for some instants that horrible state, life was spent. A few minutes later, she awoke with a start, and found herself sitting on her bed; it seemed to her that, in her presence, the prince wished to have Fabrice beheaded. What distracted eyes the duchess cast about her! When at last she had convinced herself that she had before her eyes neither the prince nor Fabrice, she fell back on her bed, and was on the point of fainting. Her physical weakness was such that she did not feel the strength to change position. 'Great God! if I could die!' she said to herself... 'But what cowardice! I abandon Fabrice in his misfortune! I am losing my mind... Come, let us return to reality; let us view with cold blood the execrable position into which I have plunged myself as if for pleasure. What a fatal thoughtlessness! to come and dwell at the court of an absolute prince! a tyrant who knows all his victims! each of their glances seems to him a bravado against his power. Alas! that is what neither the count nor I saw when I left Milan: I thought of the graces of an amiable court; something inferior, it is true, but something in the style of the fine days of Prince Eugene!
'From afar we had no idea of what the authority of a despot is who knows all his subjects by sight. The outward form of despotism is the same as that of other governments: there are judges, for example, but they are Rassis; the monster would find nothing extraordinary in hanging his father if the prince ordered him to... he would call that his duty... To seduce Rassi! unhappy woman that I am! I possess no means of doing so. What can I offer him? a hundred thousand francs perhaps! and it is said that, at the time of the last stab which the anger of heaven toward this unhappy country let him escape, the prince sent him ten thousand gold sequins in a casket! Besides, what sum of money could seduce him? That soul of mud, who has never seen anything but contempt in men's glances, has here the pleasure of seeing now fear in them, and even respect; he may become minister of police, and why not? Then three quarters of the inhabitants of the country will be his low courtiers, and will tremble before him as servilely as he himself trembles before the sovereign.
'Since I cannot flee this detested place, I must be useful to Fabrice there: to live alone, solitary, in despair! what then can I do for Fabrice? Come, walk, unhappy woman, do your duty; go into society, pretend to think no more of Fabrice... To pretend to forget you, dear angel!'
At this word, the duchess melted into tears; at last, she could weep. After an hour given to human weakness, she saw with some consolation that her ideas were beginning to clear. 'To have the magic carpet,' she said to herself, 'to carry Fabrice off from the citadel, and take refuge with him in some happy country, where we cannot be pursued, Paris for example. We should live there at first on the twelve hundred francs which his father's man of business sends me with such amusing punctuality. I could well scrape together a hundred thousand francs from the wreck of my fortune!' The duchess's imagination reviewed, with moments of ineffable delight, all the details of the life she would lead three hundred leagues from Parma. There, she told herself, he could enter the service under an assumed name... Placed in a regiment of those brave Frenchmen, soon the young Valserra would have a reputation; in short he would be happy.'
These fortunate images brought back tears a second time, but these were gentle tears. Happiness then still existed somewhere! This state lasted a long time; the poor woman had a horror of returning to the contemplation of the dreadful reality. At last, as the dawn of day began to mark the top of her garden trees with a white line, she forced herself. 'In a few hours,' she said to herself, 'I shall be on the battlefield; there will be question of acting, and if anything irritating happens to me, if the prince takes it into his head to address some word to me relating to Fabrice, I am not sure of being able to keep all my coolness. It is necessary then here and without delay to take resolutions.
'If I am declared a state criminal, Rassi seizes everything found in this palace; on the 1st of this month, the count and I burned, according to custom, all papers of which the police might make ill use, and he is the minister of police, that is the pleasant part. I have three diamonds of some value: tomorrow, Fulgence, my former boatman from Grianta, will leave for Geneva where he will put them in safety. If ever Fabrice escapes (great God! be favorable to me! and she made the sign of the cross), the immeasurable cowardice of Marquis del Dongo will find that there is sin in sending bread to a man pursued by a legitimate prince, then at least he will find my diamonds, he will have bread.
'To send the count away... to find myself alone with him, after what has just happened, is what is impossible for me. The poor man! He is not wicked, on the contrary; he is only weak. That vulgar soul is not on the level of ours. Poor Fabrice! why can you not be here an instant with me, to take counsel on our perils!
'The count's meticulous prudence would hinder all my plans, and besides he must not be dragged into my ruin... For why should not this tyrant's vanity throw me into prison? I shall have conspired... what easier to prove? If it were to his citadel that he sent me and that I could, by force of gold, speak to Fabrice, were it but an instant, with what courage we should march together to death! But let us leave these follies; his Rassi would advise him to finish with me by poison; my presence in the streets, placed on a cart, might move the sensibility of his dear Parmesans... But what! always the romance! Alas! one must pardon these follies to a poor woman whose real fate is so sad! The truth of all this is that the prince will not send me to death; but nothing easier than to throw me into prison and keep me there; he will have all sorts of suspicious papers hidden in a corner of my palace as was done for that poor L... Then three judges not too rascally, for there will be what they call probative pieces, and a dozen false witnesses suffice. I may then be condemned to death as having conspired; and the prince, in his infinite clemency, considering that formerly I had the honor of being admitted to his court, will commute my punishment to ten years in a fortress. But I, so as not to fall below that violent character which has caused Marquise Raversi and my other enemies to say so many foolish things, shall bravely poison myself. At least the public will have the kindness to believe it; but I wager that Rassi will appear in my dungeon to bring me gallantly, on behalf of the prince, a small flask of strychnine or Perugia opium.
'Yes, I must very ostentatiously quarrel with the count, for I will not drag him into my ruin, that would be an infamy; the poor man has loved me with such candor! My foolishness was to believe that enough soul remained in a true courtier to be capable of love. Very probably the prince will find some pretext to throw me into prison; he will fear that I may pervert public opinion relative to Fabrice. The count is full of honor; instantly he will do what the boors of this court, in their profound astonishment, will call a folly, he will leave the court. I braved the prince's authority the evening of the note, I may expect anything from his wounded vanity: does a man born a prince ever forget the sensation I gave him that evening? Besides the count quarreled with me is in a better position to be useful to Fabrice. But if the count, whom my resolution will drive to despair, were to take revenge?... There, for example, is an idea that will never come to him; he has not the fundamentally base soul of the prince: the count may, groaning, countersign an infamous decree, but he has honor. And then, of what to take revenge? of this, that, after having loved him five years, without doing the least offense to his love, I say to him:
“Stories of the world, in your language.”