Part 28

The next day was a day of gloom; it was generally rumored that Fabrice was to be put to death, and the town was moved. It was added that the prince, having regard to his high birth, had deigned to decide that he should have his head cut off.

"It is I who am killing him," said the count to himself; "I can no longer hope ever to see the duchess again." Despite this rather simple reasoning, he could not help passing three times by her door; to be sure, so as not to be noticed, he went to her house on foot. In his despair, he even had the courage to write to her. He had sent for Rassi twice; the fiscal had not appeared. "The scoundrel is betraying me," said the count to himself.

The next day, three great pieces of news agitated the high society of Parma, and even the bourgeoisie. The putting to death of Fabrice was more certain than ever; and, a most strange complement to this news, the duchess did not appear to be too much in despair. According to appearances, she accorded only rather moderate regrets to her young lover; nevertheless she made use with infinite art of the pallor which a rather serious indisposition had just given her, which had come on at the same time as Fabrice's arrest. The bourgeois plainly recognized in these details the hard heart of a great lady of the court. By decency, however, and as a sacrifice to the manes of the young Fabrice, she had broken with Count Mosca.

"What immorality!" cried the Jansenists of Parma.

But already the duchess, incredible thing! appeared disposed to listen to the flatteries of the handsomest young men of the court. It was remarked, among other singularities, that she had been quite gay in a conversation with Count Baldi, the present lover of the Raversi, and had much teased him about his frequent rides to the castle of Velleja. The petty bourgeoisie and the people were indignant at the death of Fabrice, which these good folk attributed to the jealousy of Count Mosca. The court society also occupied itself much with the count, but it was to mock him. The third of the great pieces of news we have announced was none other, in fact, than the count's resignation; everyone mocked a ridiculous lover who, at the age of fifty-six, sacrificed a magnificent position to the grief of being left by a heartless woman who, for a long time, had preferred a young man to him. Only the archbishop had the wit, or rather the heart, to guess that honor forbade the count to remain prime minister in a country where, without consulting him, they were going to cut off the head of a young man, his protégé. The news of the count's resignation had the effect of curing General Fabio Conti of his gout, as we shall relate in its place, when we speak of the way in which poor Fabrice passed his time in the citadel, while the whole town inquired as to the hour of his execution.

The following day, the count saw again Bruno, that faithful agent whom he had dispatched to Bologna; the count was moved when the man entered his study; his sight recalled to him the happy state he was in when he had sent him to Bologna, almost in accord with the duchess. Bruno arrived from Bologna where he had discovered nothing; he had not been able to find Ludovic, whom the podestà of Castelnovo had kept in the prison of his village.

"I am going to send you back to Bologna," the count said to Bruno: "the duchess will cling to the sad pleasure of knowing the details of Fabrice's misfortune. Apply to the brigadier of gendarmes who commands the post at Castelnovo..."

"But no!" cried the count, interrupting himself; "set off this instant for Lombardy, and distribute money, and in great quantity, to all our correspondents. My aim is to obtain from all those people reports of the most encouraging nature."

Bruno having well understood the purpose of his mission, set about writing his letters of credit; as the count was giving him his final instructions, he received a perfectly false but very well written letter; one would have said a friend writing to his friend to ask a favor. The friend who wrote was none other than the prince. Having heard speak of certain projects of retirement, he besought his friend, Count Mosca, to keep the ministry; he asked it of him in the name of friendship and the dangers of the fatherland; and ordered it of him as his master. He added that the King of *** having just placed at his disposal two ribbons of his order, he was keeping one for himself, and sending the other to his dear Count Mosca.

"That animal is the ruin of me!" cried the count furiously, before the stupefied Bruno, and thinks to seduce me by those same hypocritical phrases which so often we arranged together to catch some fool in our snare.

He refused the order offered him, and in his reply spoke of the state of his health as leaving him but very little hope of being able to discharge the painful labors of the ministry much longer. The count was furious. An instant after, the fiscal Rassi was announced, whom he treated like a negro.

"Well! because I made you a noble, you begin to give yourself airs! Why did you not come yesterday to thank me, as was your strict duty, you pedant?"

Rassi was quite above insults; it was in this tone that he was daily received by the prince; but he wished to be a baron and justified himself with wit. Nothing was easier.

"The prince kept me pinned to a table yesterday the whole day; I could not leave the palace. His Highness made me copy, in my poor attorney's hand, a quantity of diplomatic papers so silly and so garrulous that I believe, in truth, his sole aim was to keep me prisoner. When at last I could take leave, toward five o'clock, dying of hunger, he gave me the order to go home directly, and not to leave it for the evening. Indeed, I saw two of his private spies, well known to me, walking in my street until midnight. This morning, as soon as I could, I had a carriage brought which conveyed me to the cathedral door. I got down from the carriage very slowly, then, taking to my heels, I crossed the church and here I am. Your Excellency is at this moment the man in the world whose good pleasure I desire to win with the most passion."

"And I, you knave, am not taken in by all these more or less well-built tales! You refused to speak to me of Fabrice the day before yesterday; I respected your scruples, and your oaths touching the secret, though oaths for a being such as you are at most but means of evasion. Today I want the truth: What are these ridiculous rumors which condemn this young man to death as the assassin of the comedian Giletti!"

"No one can render better account to Your Excellency of these rumors, since it is I myself who set them going by order of the sovereign; and, now I think of it! it is perhaps to prevent me from apprising you of this incident that yesterday, the whole day, he kept me prisoner. The prince, who does not think me a fool, could not doubt that I should come to bring you my cross and beg you to fasten it to my buttonhole."

"To the point!" cried the minister, "and no phrases."

"No doubt the prince would be well pleased to hold a death sentence against M. del Dongo, but he has, as you doubtless know, only a sentence to twenty years in irons, commuted by him, the very day after the sentence, to twelve years in a fortress with fasting on bread and water every Friday, and other religious fooleries."

"It is because I knew this sentence to imprisonment only, that I was alarmed by the rumors of imminent execution spreading through the town; I remember the death of Count Palanza, so neatly made away with by you."

"That was when I ought to have had the cross!" cried Rassi, unabashed; "one should have pinned the button while I held it, and the man was wishing for that death. I was a fool then, and it is armed with that experience that I dare counsel you not to imitate me today." (This comparison seemed in the worst possible taste to his interlocutor, who had to restrain himself from kicking Rassi.)

"First," resumed the latter with the logic of a jurisconsult and the perfect assurance of a man whom no insult can offend, "first, there can be no question of the execution of the said del Dongo; the prince would not dare! times are much changed! and finally, I, a noble and hoping through you to become a baron, would not lend a hand to it. Now, it is only from me, as Your Excellency knows, that the executioner of high works can receive orders, and, I swear to you, Knight Rassi will never give any against the said del Dongo."

"And you will do wisely," said the count, eyeing him severely.

"Let us distinguish!" resumed Rassi with a smile. "I am only for official deaths, and if M. del Dongo happens to die of a colic, do not go attributing it to me! The prince is outraged, and I know not why, against the Sanseverina" (three days before Rassi would have said the duchess, but, like all the town, he knew of the break with the prime minister).

The count was struck by the suppression of the title in such a mouth, and one may judge of the pleasure it gave him; he cast at Rassi a glance charged with the liveliest hatred. "My dear angel!" he said to himself then, "I can show my love for you only by obeying your orders blindly."

"I will confess to you," he said to the fiscal, "that I do not take a very passionate interest in the various caprices of Madame the Duchess; nevertheless, as she had presented me with that bad subject Fabrice, who would have done well to stay at Naples, and not come here to embroil our affairs, I am bent on his not being put to death in my time, and I am willing to give you my word that you shall be a baron within the eight days following his leaving prison."

"In that case, Monsieur le Comte, I shall be a baron only after twelve years are fulfilled, for the prince is furious, and his hatred against the duchess is so lively that he seeks to hide it."

"His Highness is very good! what need has she to hide her hatred, since her prime minister no longer protects the duchess? Only I will not have myself accused of baseness, nor above all of jealousy: it was I who brought the duchess into this country, and if Fabrice dies in prison, you shall not be a baron, but you may perhaps be stabbed. But let us leave this trifle: the fact is that I have reckoned up my fortune; I scarce found twenty thousand livres of income, whereon I have the project of addressing my resignation most humbly to the sovereign. I have some hope of being employed by the King of Naples: that great city will offer me the distractions I need at this moment, and which I cannot find in a hole such as Parma; I should stay only so long as you got me the hand of Princess Isota, etc."

The conversation was endless in this vein. As Rassi rose, the count said to him with a very indifferent air:

"You know it has been said that Fabrice was deceiving me, in that he was one of the duchess's lovers; I do not accept this rumor, and to give it the lie, I wish you to have this purse passed to Fabrice."

"But Monsieur le Comte," said Rassi, alarmed, and looking at the purse, "there is an enormous sum there, and the regulations..."

"For you, my dear, it may be enormous," resumed the count with the air of the most sovereign contempt: "a bourgeois such as you, sending money to his friend in prison, thinks himself ruined in giving him ten sequins: I wish Fabrice to receive these six thousand francs, and above all that the castle know nothing of this sending."

As the alarmed Rassi would have replied, the count shut the door on him with impatience. "These people," he said to himself, "see power only behind insolence." That said, this great minister gave himself up to an action so ridiculous that we have some reluctance in reporting it; he ran to take from his study a miniature portrait of the duchess, and covered it with passionate kisses. "Pardon, my dear angel," he cried, "if I did not throw that pedant out the window with my own hands for daring to speak of you with a shade of familiarity, but, if I act with this excess of patience, it is to obey you! and he shall lose nothing by waiting!"

After a long conversation with the portrait, the count, who felt his heart dead in his breast, had the idea of a ridiculous action and gave himself up to it with a child's eagerness. He had a coat with orders brought him, and went to pay a visit to old Princess Isota; in his life he had never presented himself at her house except at New Year. He found her surrounded by a quantity of dogs, and decked in all her finery, and even with diamonds as if she were going to court. The count, having testified some fear of disturbing the plans of Her Highness, who was probably going out, the Highness answered the minister that a princess of Parma owed it to herself to be always thus. For the first time since his misfortune the count had a movement of gaiety. "I did well to appear here," he said to himself, "and from today I must make my declaration." The princess had been delighted to see arrive at her house a man so renowned for wit and a prime minister; the poor old maid was little accustomed to such visits. The count began with an adroit preface, relative to the immense distance which must always separate a simple gentleman from the members of a reigning family.

"One must make a distinction," said the princess: "the daughter of a King of France, for example, has no hope of ever attaining the crown; but things do not go thus in the family of Parma. That is why we Farnese must always preserve a certain dignity in our exterior; and I, poor princess as you see me, cannot say that it is absolutely impossible that one day you should be my prime minister."

This idea, by its unexpected oddity, gave the poor count a second instant of perfect gaiety.

On leaving Princess Isota, who had greatly reddened on receiving the avowal of the prime minister's passion, he met one of the palace ushers: the prince was sending for him in all haste.

"I am ill," answered the minister, delighted to be able to do a dishonest thing to his prince.

"Ah! ah! you push me to the limit," he cried with fury, "and then you want me to serve you! but know, my prince, that having received power from Providence is no longer enough in this century; much wit and a great character are needed to succeed in being a despot."

After sending away the palace usher, much scandalized at the perfect health of this sick man, the count found it amusing to go see the two men of the court who had most influence over General Fabio Conti. What above all made the minister shudder and took away all his courage, was that the governor of the citadel was accused of having formerly disposed of a captain, his personal enemy, by means of the aquetta of Perugia.

The count knew that for eight days the duchess had been spreading mad sums to secure intelligences in the citadel; but, in his view, there was little hope of success, all eyes were still too open. We shall not relate to the reader all the attempts at corruption tried by this unhappy woman: she was in despair, and agents of every sort and perfectly devoted seconded her. But there is perhaps only one kind of business which is perfectly well discharged in the small despotic courts, namely the guarding of political prisoners. The gold of the duchess produced no other effect than to get eight or ten men of every rank dismissed from the citadel.

CHAPTER XVIII

Thus, with a complete devotion to the prisoner, the duchess and the prime minister had been able to do for him but very little. The prince was angry, the court as well as the public were piqued against Fabrice and delighted to see misfortune befall him; he had been too happy. Despite the gold thrown with full hands, the duchess had not been able to make a step in the siege of the citadel; not a day passed without the Marquise Raversi or the Chevalier Riscara having some new advice to communicate to General Fabio Conti. They supported his weakness. As we have said, the day of his imprisonment Fabrice was first conducted to the governor's palace: It is a pretty little building constructed in the last century on the designs of Vanvitelli, who placed it at a hundred and eighty feet high, on the platform of the immense round tower. From the windows of this little palace, isolated on the back of the enormous tower like the hump of a camel, Fabrice discovered the countryside and the Alps far off; he followed with his eye, at the foot of the citadel, the course of the Parma, a kind of torrent, which, turning to the right four leagues from the town, goes to throw itself into the Po. Beyond the left bank of this river, which formed like a series of immense white patches amid the green countryside, his ravished eye distinctly perceived each of the summits of the immense wall which the Alps form to the north of Italy. These summits, always covered with snow, even in the month of August in which it then was, give like a sort of freshness by remembrance amid these burning countryside; the eye can follow their slightest details, and yet they are more than thirty leagues from the citadel of Parma. The so extended view of the pretty governor's palace is intercepted toward a southern angle by the Farnese tower, in which they were hastily preparing a chamber for Fabrice. This second tower, as the reader may perhaps remember, was raised on the platform of the big tower, in honor of an hereditary prince who, very different from the Hippolytus son of Theseus, had not repulsed the politenesses of a young stepmother. The princess died in a few hours; the prince's son recovered his liberty only seventeen years later on mounting the throne at his father's death. This Farnese tower, into which, after three quarters of an hour, they took Fabrice up, very ugly on the outside, is raised some fifty feet above the platform of the big tower and furnished with a quantity of lightning rods. The prince, displeased with his wife, who had this prison built visible from all sides, had the singular pretension of persuading his subjects that it had existed for many years: that is why he gave it the name of Farnese tower. It was forbidden to speak of this construction, and from all parts of the town of Parma and the neighboring plains one perfectly saw the masons place each of the stones composing this pentagonal edifice. In order to prove that it was ancient, they placed above the door, two feet wide and four high, by which one enters it, a magnificent bas-relief representing Alexander Farnese, the celebrated general, forcing Henry IV to withdraw from Paris. This Farnese tower, placed in so fine a view, is composed of a ground floor at least forty paces long, proportionately wide and quite filled with very squat columns, for this disproportionately vast room is not more than fifteen feet high. It is occupied by the guard, and, from the center, the staircase rises turning around one of the columns: it is a little iron stair, very light, scarce two feet wide and built in filigree. By this stair, trembling under the weight of the jailers who escorted him, Fabrice arrived at vast rooms more than twenty feet high, forming a magnificent first floor. They were formerly furnished with the greatest luxury for the young prince who passed the seventeen finest years of his life there. At one of the extremities of this apartment, they showed the new prisoner a chapel of the greatest magnificence; the walls and the vault are entirely faced with black marble; black columns also, of the noblest proportion, are placed in lines along the black walls, without touching them, and these walls are adorned with a quantity of death's heads in white marble, of colossal proportions, elegantly sculpted and placed on two crossed bones. "That is indeed an invention of hatred which cannot kill," said Fabrice to himself, "and what the devil of an idea to show me that!" A stair in iron and very light filigree, likewise arranged around a column, gives access to the second floor of this prison, and it is in the rooms of this second floor, some fifteen feet high, that for a year General Fabio Conti had been displaying genius. First, under his direction, they had solidly grated the windows of these rooms formerly occupied by the prince's servants and which are more than thirty feet from the stone flags forming the platform of the big round tower. It is by an obscure corridor placed at the center of the building that one arrives at these rooms, which all have two windows; and in this very narrow corridor, Fabrice remarked three successive iron doors formed of enormous bars and rising to the vault. It is the plans, sections and elevations of all these fine inventions, which for two years had won the general an audience of his master each week. A conspirator placed in one of these rooms could not complain to opinion of being treated in an inhuman fashion, and yet could have no communication with anyone in the world, nor make a movement without being heard. The general had had placed in each room great oak planks forming like benches three feet high, and that was his capital invention, that which gave him rights to the ministry of police. Upon these benches he had had erected a cabin of planks, very resonant, ten feet high, and which touched the wall only on the side of the windows. On the three other sides there reigned a little corridor four feet wide, between the primitive wall of the prison, composed of enormous cut stones, and the plank walls of the cabin. These walls, formed of four thicknesses of walnut, oak and fir planks, were solidly bound by iron bolts and by countless nails.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”