Part 27

--Shall I confess something to you, dear friend: talking of love bores me, and seems indecent. Come, she said, trying to smile, but in vain, courage! Be a man of wit, a man of judgment, a man of resources in emergencies. Be with me what you really are in the eyes of indifferent people, the most skillful and greatest politician that Italy has produced in centuries.

The count rose and walked in silence for a few moments.

--Impossible, dear friend, he said to her at last: I am prey to the torments of the most violent passion, and you ask me to consult my reason! There is no more reason for me!

--Let us not speak of passion, I beg you, she said in a dry tone.

And this was the first time, after two hours of conversation, that her voice took on any expression at all. The count, in despair himself, sought to console her.

--He deceived me, she cried, without in any way responding to the reasons for hope that the count set before her; he deceived me in the most cowardly fashion!

And her deathly pallor ceased for an instant; but, even in this moment of violent excitement, the count noticed that she had not the strength to raise her arms.

"Great God! would it be possible," he thought, "that she is merely ill? In that case, however, it would be the beginning of some very grave illness." Then, filled with anxiety, he proposed to send for the celebrated Rozari, the foremost physician of the country and of Italy.

--You wish then to give a stranger the pleasure of knowing the full extent of my despair?... Is that the counsel of a traitor or of a friend?

And she looked at him with strange eyes.

"It is over," he said to himself in despair, "she has no more love for me, and what is more, she no longer even ranks me among ordinary men of honor."

--I will tell you, the count added, speaking with eagerness, that above all I wished to have details concerning the arrest that plunges us into despair, and strange thing! I still know nothing positive; I have had the gendarmes of the neighboring station questioned, they saw the prisoner arrive by the Castelnovo road, and received the order to follow his sediola. I at once sent Bruno back, whose zeal you know as well as his devotion; he has orders to go back from station to station to learn where and how Fabrice was arrested.

On hearing this name of Fabrice pronounced, the duchess was seized with a slight convulsion.

--Forgive me, my friend, she said to the count as soon as she could speak; these details interest me greatly, give them all to me, make me understand the smallest circumstances perfectly.

--Well! madam, the count resumed, attempting a little air of lightness to try to distract her a little, I am inclined to send a trusted clerk to Bruno and to order the latter to push on as far as Bologna; it is there, perhaps, that our young friend was carried off. What is the date of his last letter?

--Tuesday, five days ago.

--Had it been opened at the post?

--No trace of opening. I must tell you it was written on horrible paper; the address is in a woman's hand, and this address bears the name of an old washerwoman, a relation of my chambermaid. The washerwoman believes it is a love affair, and Chékina reimburses her for the postage without adding anything.

The count, who had taken on quite the tone of a man of business, tried, in discussing with the duchess, to discover what might have been the day of the carrying-off at Bologna. He only then perceived, he who ordinarily had so much tact, that this was the tone he ought to have adopted. These details interested the unhappy woman and seemed to distract her a little. Had the count not been in love, he would have had this so simple idea on entering the room. The duchess sent him away so that he might without delay dispatch new orders to the faithful Bruno. As they were incidentally occupied with the question whether there had been a sentence before the moment when the prince signed the note addressed to the duchess, the latter seized with a sort of eagerness the occasion to say to the count:

--I shall not reproach you for having omitted the words <i>unjust procedure</i> in the note you wrote and which he signed; it was the instinct of a courtier that seized you by the throat; without suspecting it, you preferred your master's interest to that of your friend. You have placed your actions at my orders, dear count, and that for a long time, but it is not in your power to change your nature; you have great talents for being a minister, but you also have the instinct of that trade. The suppression of the word <i>unjust</i> ruins me; but far be it from me to reproach you for it in any way, it was the fault of instinct and not of the will.

"Remember," she added, changing her tone and with the most imperious air, "that I am not too afflicted by the carrying-off of Fabrice, that I have not had the slightest wish to withdraw from this country, that I am filled with respect for the prince. That is what you are to say, and this, myself, is what I wish to tell you: As I intend to direct my conduct alone in future, I wish to part from you amicably, that is to say as a good old friend. Count me as sixty years old; the young woman is dead within me, I can no longer exaggerate anything in the world, I can no longer love. But I should be even more unhappy than I am were I to compromise your destiny. It may enter into my plans to give the appearance of having a young lover, and I should not wish to see you afflicted. I can swear to you on Fabrice's happiness"—she paused half a minute after this word—"that never have I been unfaithful to you, and that in five years' time. It is a long while, she said; she tried to smile; her so pale cheeks moved, but her lips could not part. I swear to you even that never have I had the project or the desire. That being well understood, leave me."

The count left the Sanseverina palace in despair: he saw in the duchess a firmly settled intention to part from him, and never had he been so wildly in love. This is one of those things I am obliged often to return to, because they are improbable outside of Italy. On reaching home, he dispatched as many as six different persons upon the Castelnovo and Bologna road, and charged them with letters. "But that is not all," said the unhappy count, "the prince may take a fancy to have this poor child executed, and that to avenge himself for the tone the duchess took with him on the day of that fatal note. I felt that the duchess was overstepping a limit that must never be crossed, and it was to mend matters that I had the incredible folly to suppress the words <i>unjust procedure</i>, the only ones that bound the sovereign... But bah! are such men bound by anything? This is no doubt the greatest fault of my life; I have put at hazard all that can give it value for me: it is a matter of repairing this thoughtlessness by sheer activity and skill; but in short, if I can obtain nothing, even by sacrificing a little of my dignity, I leave the man; with his dreams of high policy, with his ideas of making himself constitutional king of Lombardy, we shall see how he replaces me... Fabio Conti is but a fool, Rassi's talent reduces itself to having legally hanged a man who displeases those in power."

Once this resolution was firmly taken, to renounce the ministry if the severities toward Fabrice went beyond those of simple detention, the count said to himself: "If a caprice of vanity in this man, imprudently defied, costs me my happiness, at least honor remains to me... By the way, since I care nothing for my portfolio, I may allow myself a hundred actions which, this morning still, would have seemed impossible. For example, I am going to attempt all that is humanly feasible to help Fabrice escape... Great God!" cried the count, interrupting himself, his eyes opening excessively as at the sight of unforeseen happiness, "the duchess did not speak to me of escape; would she have lacked sincerity once in her life, and would the quarrel be but the wish that I betray the prince? Upon my word, it is done!"

The count's eye had recovered all its satirical finesse. "This amiable fiscal Rassi is paid by the master for all the sentences that dishonor us in Europe, but he is not a man to refuse to be paid by me for betraying the master's secrets. That animal has a mistress and a confessor, but the mistress is of too vile a sort for me to be able to speak to her; the next day she would tell the interview to all the greengrocers of the neighborhood." The count, revived by this gleam of hope, was already on the way to the cathedral; astonished at the lightness of his step, he smiled despite his sorrow: "What a thing it is," said he, "to be no longer minister!" This cathedral, like many churches in Italy, serves as a passage from one street to another; the count saw from afar one of the archbishop's grand vicars crossing the nave.

--Since I meet you, he said to him, you will be good enough to spare my gout the deadly fatigue of climbing up to my lord the archbishop's. He would lay me under the greatest obligation if he would condescend to come down to the sacristy.

The archbishop was delighted with this message; he had a thousand things to say to the minister concerning Fabrice. But the minister guessed that these things were but phrases and would listen to nothing.

--What sort of man is this Dugnani, vicar of Saint-Paul?

--A small mind and a great ambition, answered the archbishop, few scruples and extreme poverty, for we have vices of that kind!

--Good heavens, my lord! cried the minister, you paint like Tacitus.

And he took leave of him laughing. Scarcely back at the ministry, he had the abbé Dugnani summoned.

--You direct the conscience of my excellent friend the attorney-general Rassi; would he have nothing to say to me?

And, without other words or more ceremony, he dismissed Dugnani.

CHAPTER XVII

The count looked upon himself as out of the ministry. "Let us see a little," said he, "how many horses we shall be able to have after my disgrace, for that is what my retirement will be called." The count drew up the state of his fortune: he had entered the ministry with eighty thousand francs of property; to his great astonishment, he found that, all counted, his present worth did not amount to five hundred thousand francs: "That is twenty thousand livres of income at the most," said he. "One must admit I am a great scatterbrain! There is not a bourgeois in Parma who does not believe me to have a hundred fifty thousand livres of income; and the prince, on this subject, is more bourgeois than another. When they see me in the gutter, they will say I know well how to hide my fortune. Pardieu," he cried, "if I am still minister three months, we shall see that fortune doubled." He found in this idea the occasion to write to the duchess, and seized it with avidity; but to excuse a letter in the terms things stood between them, he filled this one with figures and calculations. "We shall have but twenty thousand livres of income," he told her, "to live all three at Naples, Fabrice, you, and I. Fabrice and I shall have one saddle-horse between us." The minister had scarcely sent his letter when the attorney-general Rassi was announced; he received him with a haughtiness bordering on impertinence.

--How now, sir, he said to him, you have a conspirator I protect carried off at Bologna, and what is more you wish to cut his head off, and you tell me nothing! Do you at least know the name of my successor? Is it General Conti, or yourself?

Rassi was thunderstruck; he had too little habit of good company to guess whether the count spoke seriously: he blushed much, mumbled a few unintelligible words; the count looked at him and enjoyed his embarrassment. Suddenly Rassi shook himself and cried with perfect ease and the air of Figaro caught in the act by Almaviva:

--Upon my word, Monsieur le Comte, I shall not go round about with Your Excellency: what will you give me to answer all your questions as I would those of my confessor?

--The cross of Saint-Paul (it is the order of Parma), or money, if you can furnish me a pretext to grant you one.

--I prefer the cross of Saint-Paul, because it ennobles me.

--How, dear fiscal, you still set some store by our poor nobility?

--Had I been born noble, answered Rassi with all the impudence of his trade, the relations of the men I have had hanged would hate me, but they would not despise me.

--Well! I shall save you from contempt, said the count; cure me of my ignorance. What do you mean to do with Fabrice?

--Upon my word, the prince is much embarrassed: he fears that, seduced by the beautiful eyes of Armide—pardon this somewhat lively language, they are the sovereign's precise terms; he fears that, seduced by very beautiful eyes which have somewhat touched himself, you will leave him in the lurch, and there is none but you for the affairs of Lombardy. I shall even tell you, added Rassi lowering his voice, that there is a fine opportunity for you there, and one well worth the cross of Saint-Paul you give me. The prince would grant you, as a national reward, a pretty estate worth six hundred thousand francs which he would detach from his domain, or a gratuity of three hundred thousand francs in crowns, if you would consent not to meddle with the fate of Fabrice del Dongo, or at least to speak of him only in public.

--I expected better than that, said the count; not to meddle with Fabrice is to quarrel with the duchess.

--Well! that is again what the prince says: the fact is he is horribly worked up against Madame la Duchesse, between ourselves be it said; and he fears that, by way of indemnity for the quarrel with that amiable lady, now that you are a widower, you will ask him for the hand of his cousin, the old Princess Isota, who is but fifty years of age.

--He has guessed right, cried the count; our master is the cleverest man in his states.

Never had the count had the baroque idea of marrying this old princess; nothing could have suited a man who was bored to death by court ceremonies worse.

He began to play with his snuffbox upon the marble of a small table near his armchair. Rassi saw in this gesture of embarrassment the possibility of a good stroke of luck; his eye sparkled.

--For mercy's sake, Monsieur le Comte, he cried, if Your Excellency will accept, either the estate of six hundred thousand francs, or the gratuity in money, I beg him to choose no other negotiator than me. I would undertake, added he lowering his voice, to have the gratuity in money increased or even to have a fairly considerable forest joined to the domain land. If Your Excellency would deign to put a little gentleness and management into the way he speaks to the prince of that sniveler they have locked up, one might perhaps erect into a duchy the land the national gratitude would offer him. I repeat to Your Excellency; the prince, for the moment, abhors the duchess, but he is much embarrassed, and even to the point that I have sometimes thought there was some secret circumstance he dared not confess to me. At bottom one may find here a gold mine, I selling you his most intimate secrets quite freely, for I am believed to be your sworn enemy. At bottom, if he is furious against the duchess, he also believes, as we all do, that you alone in the world can bring to success all the secret steps relating to the Milanese. Does Your Excellency permit me to repeat to him textually the sovereign's words? said Rassi warming up; there is often a physiognomy in the placing of words that no translation can render, and you may see in them more than I do.

--I permit all, said the count, continuing, with a distracted air, to strike the marble table with his gold snuffbox; I permit all, and I shall be grateful.

--Give me letters of nobility transmissible, independently of the cross, and I shall be more than satisfied. When I speak to the prince of ennoblement, he answers me: 'A scoundrel like you, noble? We should have to close shop the next day; no one in Parma would any longer wish to be ennobled.' To return to the Milanese affair, the prince was saying to me, not three days ago: 'There is none but that rogue to follow the thread of our intrigues; if I dismiss him or if he follows the duchess, I may as well renounce the hope of one day seeing myself the liberal and adored chief of all Italy.'"

At this word the count breathed: "Fabrice will not die," said he to himself.

Never in his life had Rassi been able to arrive at an intimate conversation with the prime minister: he was beside himself with happiness; he saw himself on the eve of being able to quit the name of Rassi, become in the country the synonym of all that is base and vile; the common people gave the name of Rassi to mad dogs; of late soldiers had fought a duel because one of their comrades had called them Rassi. Finally there passed not a week without this unhappy name being set in some atrocious sonnet. His son, a young and innocent schoolboy of sixteen, was turned out of the cafés on his name.

It was the burning memory of all these amenities of his position that made him commit an indiscretion.

--I have an estate, he said to the count, drawing his chair near the minister's armchair; it is called Riva, I should like to be Baron Riva.

--Why not? said the minister.

Rassi was beside himself.

--Well! Monsieur le Comte, I shall permit myself to be indiscreet, I shall dare to guess the object of your desires; you aspire to the hand of Princess Isota, and that is a noble ambition. Once related, you are safe from disgrace, you have our man in a vise. I shall not hide from you that he has this marriage with Princess Isota in horror; but if your affairs were entrusted to someone adroit and well paid, one might not despair of success.

--I, my dear baron, despaired of it; I disavow in advance all the words you may carry in my name; but the day this illustrious alliance shall at last crown my wishes and give me so high a position in the State, I shall offer you, myself, three hundred thousand francs of my own money, or else I shall advise the prince to grant you a mark of favor which you yourself will prefer to that sum of money.

The reader finds this conversation long; yet we spare him more than half of it; it lasted two hours more. Rassi left the count's house wild with happiness; the count remained with great hopes of saving Fabrice, and more resolved than ever to give his resignation. He found that his credit ought to be renewed by the presence in power of men such as Rassi and General Conti; he enjoyed with delight a possibility he had just glimpsed of revenging himself upon the prince: "He may send the duchess away," he cried, "but, by Jove, he will renounce the hope of being constitutional king of Lombardy." (This chimera was ridiculous: the prince had much wit, but, by dint of dreaming of it, he had become madly in love with it.)

The count was beside himself with joy as he ran to the duchess to report his conversation with the fiscal. He found the door closed to him; the porter hardly dared confess this order received from his mistress's own mouth. The count sadly regained the ministry palace; the misfortune he had just met eclipsed entirely the joy his conversation with the prince's confidant had given him. Having no heart to occupy himself with anything, the count was wandering sadly in his picture gallery, when, a quarter of an hour later, he received a note worded thus:

Since it is true, dear and good friend, that we are no more than friends, you must come to see me only three times a week. In fifteen days we shall reduce these visits, still so dear to my heart, to two a month. If you would please me, give publicity to this sort of rupture; if you would restore to me almost all the love I once had for you, you would choose a new friend. As for me, I have great projects of dissipation: I mean to go much into society, perhaps even I shall find a man of wit to make me forget my misfortunes. Doubtless as a friend the first place in my heart will always be reserved for you; but I wish no longer that it be said my steps were dictated by your wisdom; I wish above all that it be well known I have lost all influence over your determinations. In a word, dear count, believe that you will always be my dearest friend, but never anything else. Keep, I pray you, no idea of return, all is quite finished. Count forever on my friendship.

This last touch was too much for the count's courage: he wrote a fine letter to the prince to give his resignation from all his offices, and addressed it to the duchess with a request to forward it to the palace. An instant after, he received his resignation, torn in four, and, on one of the blank sides of the paper, the duchess had deigned to write: No, a thousand times no!

It would be difficult to describe the despair of the poor minister. "She is right, I grant," he said to himself each instant; "my omission of the words <i>unjust procedure</i> is an awful misfortune; it may bring about Fabrice's death, and that will bring about mine." It was with death in his soul that the count, who would not appear at the sovereign's palace before being summoned there, wrote with his own hand the word <i>u proprio</i> which named Rassi knight of the order of Saint-Paul and conferred upon him transmissible nobility; the count joined to it a report of half a page which set before the prince the reasons of State that counseled this measure. He found a sort of melancholy joy in making two fair copies of these pieces which he addressed to the duchess.

He lost himself in suppositions; he sought to guess what hereafter would be the plan of conduct of the woman he loved. "She knows nothing of it herself," he said to himself; "one thing alone remains certain, which is that, for nothing in the world, would she fail the resolutions she had once announced to me." What added still to his unhappiness was that he could not manage to find the duchess blameworthy. "She did me a grace in loving me, she ceases to love me after a fault involuntary, it is true, but which may bring about a horrible consequence; I have no right to complain." The next morning, the count learned that the duchess had begun again to go into society; she had appeared the evening before in all the houses that received. What would have become of him had he met her in the same salon? How speak to her? In what tone address her? And how not speak to her?

“Stories of the world, in your language.”