Part 29

It was in one of those cells built within the past year, and a masterpiece of General Fabio Conti, which had received the fine name of Passive Obedience, that Fabrice was brought. He ran to the windows; the view from these grated windows was sublime: a single small corner of the horizon was hidden, toward the northeast, by the gallery roof of the pretty governor's palace, which had only two storeys; the ground floor was occupied by the staff offices; and first Fabrice's eyes were drawn to one of the windows on the second floor, where, in pretty cages, there were a great many birds of every sort. Fabrice amused himself listening to them sing, and watching them greet the last rays of the evening twilight, while the jailers bustled about him. This aviary window was no more than twenty-five feet from one of his own, and lay five or six feet below, so that he looked down upon the birds.

There was a moon that day, and at the moment Fabrice entered his prison, it was rising majestically at the horizon to the right, above the chain of the Alps, toward Treviso. It was only half past eight in the evening, and at the other end of the horizon, in the west, a brilliant orange-red twilight perfectly outlined the contours of Mount Viso and the other Alpine peaks that run from Nice toward Mont Cenis and Turin; without further thought of his misfortune, Fabrice was moved and enraptured by this sublime spectacle. "So it is in this enchanting world that Clelia Conti lives! With her pensive and serious soul, she must enjoy this view more than another; one is here as in solitary mountains a hundred leagues from Parma." It was only after spending more than two hours at the window, admiring that horizon which spoke to his soul, and often resting his gaze upon the pretty governor's palace, that Fabrice suddenly cried out: "But is this a prison? Is this what I so greatly dreaded?" Instead of encountering at every step discomforts and causes for bitterness, our hero let himself be charmed by the sweetness of the prison.

Suddenly his attention was violently recalled to reality by a frightful uproar: his wooden chamber, rather like a cage and above all very resonant, was violently shaken: dog barks and little shrill cries completed the strangest noise. "What! so soon might I escape!" thought Fabrice. A moment later, he was laughing as perhaps one has never laughed in a prison. By order of the general, at the same time as the jailers, there had been brought up an English dog, very fierce, assigned to the guard of important prisoners, and which was to spend the night in the space so ingeniously contrived all around Fabrice's cage. The dog and the jailer were to sleep in the three-foot interval between the stone flags of the original floor of the chamber and the wooden planking upon which the prisoner could not take a step without being heard.

Now, at Fabrice's arrival, the chamber of Passive Obedience was occupied by some hundred enormous rats which fled in all directions. The dog, a sort of spaniel crossed with an English fox, was not handsome, but on the other hand showed himself very brisk. He had been tied upon the stone pavement beneath the floor of the wooden chamber; but when he felt the rats pass close by him he made such extraordinary efforts that he managed to withdraw his head from his collar; then ensued that admirable battle whose noise awoke Fabrice, launched into the least sad of reveries. The rats who had escaped the first bite, taking refuge in the wooden chamber, the dog climbed after them the six steps leading from the stone pavement to Fabrice's cabin. Then began a far more frightful uproar: the cabin was shaken to its foundations. Fabrice laughed like a madman and wept from laughing: the jailer Grillo, no less laughing, had shut the door; the dog, running after the rats, was hindered by no furniture, for the chamber was absolutely bare; there was nothing to obstruct the bounds of the hunting dog but an iron stove in a corner. When the dog had triumphed over all his enemies, Fabrice called him, petted him, succeeded in pleasing him: "If ever he sees me jumping over some wall," he told himself, "he will not bark." But this refined policy was a pretension on his part: in the state of mind he was in, he found his happiness in playing with this dog. By a strangeness he did not reflect upon, a secret joy reigned at the bottom of his soul.

After he had quite breathlessly run with the dog:

--What is your name? said Fabrice to the jailer.

--Grillo, at Your Excellency's service in all that is permitted by regulation.

--Well! my dear Grillo, a man named Giletti tried to assassinate me in the middle of a high road, I defended myself and killed him; I would kill him again if it were to do; but I am none the less disposed to lead a merry life, as long as I am your guest. Solicit the authorization of your chiefs and go ask for linen at the Sanseverina palace; further, buy me plenty of nebbiolo of Asti.

This is a rather good sparkling wine made in Piedmont in the homeland of Alfieri and much esteemed especially by the class of amateurs to which jailers belong. Eight or ten of these gentlemen were occupied in transporting into Fabrice's wooden chamber some antique and highly gilded pieces of furniture which were being removed from the first floor in the prince's apartment; all religiously gathered in their thoughts the word in favor of the wine of Asti. Whatever might be done, Fabrice's establishment for this first night was pitiful; but he seemed shocked only by the absence of a bottle of good nebbiolo.

--That one has the air of a good lad... said the jailers as they went off... and there is but one thing to wish, which is that our gentlemen let some money pass to him.

When he was alone and somewhat recovered from all that noise: "Is it possible that this is the prison," said Fabrice to himself, looking at that immense horizon from Treviso to Mount Viso, the so extended chain of the Alps, the snow-covered peaks, the stars, etc., and a first night in prison besides! I conceive that Clelia Conti should delight in this aerial solitude; one is here a thousand leagues above the pettinesses and the spitefulness that occupy us down there. If these birds that are there beneath my window belong to her, I shall see her... Will she blush on perceiving me?" It was in debating this great question that the prisoner found sleep at a very late hour of the night.

From the very next day of that night, the first spent in prison, and during which he did not grow impatient a single time, Fabrice was reduced to making conversation with Fox the English dog; Grillo the jailer indeed still gave him very friendly looks, but a new order kept him silent, and he brought neither linen nor nebbiolo.

"Shall I see Clelia?" said Fabrice to himself on waking. "But do these birds belong to her?" The birds were beginning to utter little cries and to sing, and at that elevation it was the only sound heard in the air. It was a sensation full of novelty and pleasure for Fabrice, that vast silence reigning at this height: he listened with rapture to the little warblings, interrupted and so lively, by which his neighbors the birds saluted the day. "If they belong to her, she will appear an instant in that chamber, there beneath my window," and while examining the immense chains of the Alps, opposite the first floor of which the citadel of Parma seemed to rise like an outwork, his glances returned every instant to the magnificent cages of lemon-tree and mahogany wood which, furnished with gilded wires, rose in the middle of the very bright chamber, serving as an aviary. What Fabrice did not learn until later, was that this chamber was the only one on the second floor of the palace that had shade from eleven o'clock to four; it was sheltered by the Farnese tower.

"What grief will be mine," said Fabrice to himself, "if instead of that celestial and pensive countenance which I await and which will perhaps blush a little if she perceives me, I see arrive the fat face of some very common chambermaid, charged by proxy with caring for the birds! But if I see Clelia, will she deign to perceive me? Upon my word, one must be forward to be noticed; my situation must have some privileges; besides, we are both alone here and so far from the world! I am a prisoner, apparently what General Conti and the other wretches of that sort call one of their subordinates... But she has so much wit, or rather so much soul, as the count supposes, that perhaps, as he says, she despises her father's trade; thence would come her melancholy! Noble cause of sadness! But after all, I am not precisely a stranger to her. With what grace full of modesty she saluted me last evening! I remember very well that at our meeting near Como I said to her: 'One day I shall come to see your fine pictures at Parma; will you remember this name: Fabrice del Dongo?' Will she have forgotten it? she was so young then!

"But apropos," said Fabrice, astonished, suddenly interrupting the course of his thoughts, "I forget to be angry! Should I be one of those great courages such as antiquity has shown some examples of to the world? Am I a hero without suspecting it? How! I who was so afraid of prison, I am in it, and I do not remember to be sad! It is truly the case of saying that fear was a hundred times worse than the evil. What! I need to reason with myself to be afflicted by this prison, which, as Blanes says, may last ten years as well as ten months? Would it be the wonder of all this new establishment that distracts me from the pain I ought to feel? Perhaps this independent good humor, beyond my will and scarcely reasonable, will cease suddenly, perhaps in an instant I shall fall into the black unhappiness I ought to experience.

"In all cases, it is very astonishing to be in prison and to have to reason with oneself to be sad! Upon my word, I come back to my supposition, perhaps I have a great character."

Fabrice's reveries were interrupted by the citadel carpenter, who came to take measure for window-blinds; it was the first time this prison was used, and they had forgotten to complete it in this essential part.

"Thus," said Fabrice to himself, "I am going to be deprived of this sublime view," and he sought to sadden himself at this privation.

--But what! he cried suddenly, speaking to the carpenter, shall I no longer see those pretty birds?

--Ah! Miss's birds! which she loves so much! said the man with an air of kindness; hidden, eclipsed, annihilated like all the rest.

Speaking was forbidden the carpenter as strictly as the jailers, but this man pitied the prisoner's youth: he told him that those enormous blinds, placed on the sill of the two windows, and moving away from the wall as they rose, were to leave the detainees only the view of the sky.

--They do that for morality, he said to him, in order to increase a salutary sadness and the desire to amend in the souls of the prisoners; the general, added the carpenter, has also invented withdrawing the panes from them, and having oiled paper put in their windows instead.

Fabrice much liked the epigrammatic turn of this conversation, very rare in Italy.

--I should like very much to have a bird to amuse me, I love them to madness; buy one from the chambermaid of Mademoiselle Clelia Conti.

--What! you know her, cried the carpenter, you who say her name so well?

--Who has not heard speak of that so celebrated beauty? But I have had the honor of meeting her several times at court.

--The poor young lady is much bored here, added the carpenter; she passes her life there with her birds. This morning she has just had fine orange-trees bought which by her order have been placed at the door of the tower beneath your window; but for the cornice you could see them.

There were in this answer words very precious to Fabrice; he found an obliging way to give some money to the carpenter.

--I commit two faults at once, the man said to him, I speak to Your Excellency and I take money. The day after tomorrow, on returning for the blinds, I shall have a bird in my pocket, and if I am not alone, I shall pretend to let it fly; if I can even, I shall bring you a prayer-book: you must suffer greatly from not being able to say your offices.

"Thus," said Fabrice to himself, as soon as he was alone, "these birds are hers, but in two days I shall see them no more!" At this thought, his glances took a tint of unhappiness. But at last, to his inexpressible joy, after so long a wait and so many looks, toward noon Clelia came to care for her birds. Fabrice remained motionless and breathless; he was standing against the enormous bars of his window and quite near. He noticed that she did not raise her eyes to him, but her movements seemed constrained, like those of someone who feels himself looked at. Had she wished it, the poor girl could not have forgotten the so subtle smile she had seen wander on the prisoner's lips the evening before, at the moment the gendarmes led him from the guardroom.

Although, as all appearance went, she watched over her actions with the greatest care, at the moment she approached the aviary window, she blushed very sensibly. Fabrice's first thought, pressed against the iron bars of his window, was to give himself up to the childishness of tapping a little with his hand on those bars, which would produce a small noise; then the mere idea of this want of delicacy filled him with horror. "I should deserve that for eight days she send her chambermaid to care for her birds." This delicate idea would not have come to him at Naples or at Novara.

He followed her ardently with his eyes: "Certainly," he said to himself, "she is going to go away without deigning to cast a glance upon this poor window, and yet it is quite opposite." But, in returning from the back of the chamber which Fabrice, thanks to his higher position, saw very well, Clelia could not help looking at him askance, while walking, and that was enough for Fabrice to think himself authorized to salute her. "Are we not alone in the world here?" he said to himself to give himself the courage. At this salute, the young girl remained motionless and lowered her eyes; then Fabrice saw hers raised very slowly; and evidently, making an effort upon herself, she saluted the prisoner with the gravest and most distant movement, but she could not impose silence upon her eyes; without her probably knowing it, they expressed for an instant the liveliest pity. Fabrice noticed that she blushed so much that the pink tint rapidly spread even to the top of her shoulders, whose warmth had just dispelled, on arriving at the aviary, a black lace shawl. The involuntary glance by which Fabrice answered her salute redoubled the young girl's confusion. "How happy that poor woman would be," she said to herself, thinking of the duchess, "if for but an instant she could see him as I see him!"

Fabrice had had some slight hope of saluting her again at her departure; but, to avoid this new politeness, Clelia made a skillful retreat by stages, from cage to cage, as if, in finishing, she ought to care for the birds placed nearest the door. She went out at last; Fabrice remained motionless looking at the door by which she had just disappeared; he was another man.

From that moment the sole object of his thoughts was to know how he might manage to continue to see her, even when they should have placed that horrible blind before the window looking onto the governor's palace.

The evening before, before going to bed, he had imposed upon himself the very long boredom of hiding the best part of the gold he had, in several of the rat-holes that adorned his wooden chamber. "Tonight I must hide my watch. Have I not heard that with patience and a notched watch-spring one can cut wood and even iron? I shall therefore be able to saw this blind." This work of hiding the watch, which lasted two long hours, did not seem long to him; he mused upon the different means of attaining his end, and upon what he knew how to do in joinery. "If I know how to go about it," he said to himself, "I shall be able to cut quite squarely a compartment of the oak board that will form the blind, toward the part that will rest on the window-sill; I shall remove and replace this piece according to circumstances; I shall give all I possess to Grillo so that he may be willing not to notice this little maneuver." All Fabrice's happiness was henceforth attached to the possibility of executing this work, and he thought of nothing else. "If I only manage to see her, I am happy... Not so," said he; "she must also see that I see her." During the whole night, his head was full of joinery inventions, and he perhaps did not think a single time of the court of Parma, of the prince's anger, etc. We shall confess that he no more thought of the grief into which the duchess must be plunged. He awaited the morrow with impatience, but the carpenter did not reappear: apparently he passed for liberal in the prison; they took care to send another of forbidding mien, who never answered but with an ill-omened grunt to all the agreeable things Fabrice's wit sought to address to him. Some of the numerous attempts of the duchess to establish a correspondence with Fabrice had been detected by the numerous agents of the marchioness Raversi, and, by her, General Fabio Conti was daily warned, frightened, piqued in his self-love. Every eight hours, six soldiers on guard relieved each other in the great hall of a hundred columns on the ground floor; further, the governor established a jailer on guard at each of the three successive iron doors of the corridor, and poor Grillo, the only one who saw the prisoner, was condemned to leave the Farnese tower only every eight days, at which he showed himself much vexed. He let his ill humor be felt by Fabrice, who had the good sense to answer only with these words: "Plenty of nebbiolo of Asti, my friend," and he gave him money.

--Why, even that, which consoles us for all ills, cried Grillo indignantly, in a voice scarcely loud enough to be heard by the prisoner, they forbid us to receive it and I ought to refuse it, but I take it; besides, lost money; I can tell you nothing of anything. Come, you must be mightily guilty, the whole citadel is upside down because of you; the fine intrigues of Her Excellency the duchess have already got three of us dismissed.

"Will the blind be ready before noon?" Such was the great question that made Fabrice's heart beat during that long morning; he counted all the quarter-hours that sounded on the citadel clock. At last, as the three quarters after eleven sounded, the blind had not yet arrived; Clelia reappeared giving care to her birds. The cruel necessity had made such great strides in Fabrice's boldness, and the danger of no longer seeing her seemed to him so far above all else, that he dared, looking at Clelia, to make with his finger the gesture of sawing the blind; it is true that, as soon as she perceived this so seditious gesture in prison, she half-saluted, and withdrew.

"What!" said Fabrice, astonished, "would she be so unreasonable as to see a ridiculous familiarity in a gesture dictated by the most imperious necessity? I wished to beg her to deign, always, in caring for her birds, to look sometimes at the prison window, even when she finds it masked by an enormous wooden shutter; I wished to indicate to her that I shall do all that is humanly possible to manage to see her. Great God! will she not come tomorrow because of this indiscreet gesture?" This fear, which troubled Fabrice's sleep, was completely verified; the next day Clelia had not appeared at three o'clock, when they finished placing before Fabrice's windows the two enormous blinds; the several pieces had been raised, starting from the esplanade of the great tower, by means of ropes and pulleys attached from outside to the iron bars of the windows. It is true that, hidden behind a shutter of her apartment, Clelia had followed with anguish all the movements of the workmen; she had very well seen Fabrice's deadly uneasiness, but had nonetheless had the courage to keep the promise she had made herself.

Clelia was a little sectary of liberalism; in her earliest youth she had taken seriously all the liberal talk she heard in her father's society, who thought only of making a position for himself; she had proceeded from there to hold in contempt and almost in horror the flexible character of the courtier: thence her antipathy to marriage. Since Fabrice's arrival, she was tormented by remorse: "See here," she said to herself, "my unworthy heart is taking the side of those who would betray my father! It dares make at me the gesture of sawing a door!... But," she said to herself at once, her soul wounded, "all the town speaks of his near death! Tomorrow may be the fatal day! with the monsters who govern us, what thing in the world is not possible! What sweetness, what heroic serenity in those eyes which perhaps are about to close! God! what must be the anguishes of the duchess! They say she is quite in despair. I should go stab the prince, like the heroic Charlotte Corday."

“Stories of the world, in your language.”