Part 2
When Fabrice had made his first communion, she obtained from the marquis, still a voluntary exile, permission to take him out of his college now and then. She found him odd, witty, very serious, but a handsome boy, and not too much a disgrace to the salon of a fashionable woman; aside from that, ignorant on purpose, and scarcely able to write. The countess, who carried her enthusiastic character into all things, promised her protection to the head of the institution if her nephew Fabrice made astonishing progress, and at the end of the year he was held in high esteem. To give him the means of deserving it, she had him fetched every Saturday evening, and often did not return him to his masters until Wednesday or Thursday. The Jesuits, though tenderly cherished by the prince viceroy, were driven from Italy by the laws of the kingdom, and the superior of the college, a clever man, saw all the advantage he might draw from his relations with a woman all-powerful at court. He took care not to complain of Fabrice's absences, who, more ignorant than ever, at the end of the year obtained five first prizes. On this condition, the brilliant Countess Pietranera, followed by her husband, a general commanding one of the divisions of the guard, and by five or six of the greatest personages of the viceroy's court, came to attend the prize-giving at the Jesuits'. The superior was complimented by his chiefs.
The countess took her nephew to all those brilliant festivities which marked the too short reign of the amiable Prince Eugene. She had created him, by her own authority, an officer of hussars, and Fabrice, aged twelve, wore that uniform. One day, the countess, delighted with his pretty figure, asked the prince for a place as page for him, which meant that the del Dongo family was rallying. The next day, she needed all her credit to obtain that the viceroy would deign not to remember this request, to which nothing was lacking but the consent of the future page's father, and that consent would have been refused with scandal. Following this folly, which made the sulking marquis shudder, he found a pretext to recall young Fabrice to Grianta. The countess sovereignly despised her brother; she looked upon him as a gloomy fool, and who would be wicked if ever he had the power. But she was mad about Fabrice, and, after ten years of silence, she wrote to the marquis to claim her nephew: her letter was left without answer.
On his return to that formidable palace, built by the most warlike of his ancestors, Fabrice knew nothing in the world but to drill and ride horseback. Often Count Pietranera, as mad about the child as his wife, had him mounted, and took him with him to the parade.
On arriving at the castle of Grianta, Fabrice, his eyes still red from the tears shed on leaving his aunt's fine salons, found only the passionate caresses of his mother and his sisters. The marquis was shut up in his study with his eldest son, the marchesino Ascanio. They were there fabricating ciphered letters which had the honor of being sent to Vienna; the father and son appeared only at mealtimes. The marquis repeated with affectation that he was teaching his natural successor to keep, in double entry, the account of the produce of each of his estates. In fact, the marquis was too jealous of his power to speak of such things to a son, necessary heir of all those entailed estates. He employed him in ciphering dispatches of fifteen or twenty pages which two or three times a week he had passed into Switzerland, whence they were forwarded to Vienna. The marquis pretended to make known to his legitimate sovereigns the interior state of the kingdom of Italy which he did not know himself, and yet his letters had much success; here is how. The marquis had some sure agent count on the highroad the number of soldiers of such French or Italian regiment which changed garrison, and, in rendering account of the fact to the court of Vienna, he took care to diminish by a full quarter the number of soldiers present. These letters, moreover ridiculous, had the merit of contradicting others more truthful, and they gave pleasure. Also, a little before Fabrice's arrival at the castle, the marquis had received the badge of a renowned order: it was the fifth which adorned his chamberlain's coat. To be sure, he had the grief of not daring to display that coat outside his study; but he never allowed himself to dictate a dispatch without having donned the embroidered costume, garnished with all his orders. He would have thought he lacked respect to act otherwise.
The marchioness was amazed at her son's graces. But she had kept the habit of writing two or three times a year to the general Count d'A***; that was the present name of Lieutenant Robert. The marchioness had a horror of lying to those she loved; she questioned her son and was appalled at his ignorance.
"If he seems little instructed to me, who know nothing," she said to herself, "Robert, who is so learned, would find his education altogether failed; now merit is needed." Another particularity which astonished her almost as much, is that Fabrice had taken seriously all the religious things which had been taught him among the Jesuits. Though very pious herself, the fanaticism of this child made her shudder. "If the marquis has the sense to divine this means of influence, he will take my son's love from me." She wept much, and her passion for Fabrice increased thereby.
The life of this castle, peopled with thirty or forty domestics, was very sad; so Fabrice spent all his days hunting or running the lake in a boat. Soon he was closely allied with the coachmen and the stablemen; all were mad partisans of the French and openly mocked the devout valets, attached to the person of the marquis or that of his eldest son. The great subject of jest against these grave personages, is that they wore powder after the fashion of their masters.
CHAPTER II
...When Vesper came to dim our eyes, All rapt with future, I contemplate the skies, Wherein God writes for us, by notes not dark, The lots and destinies of every creature. For He, from heaven's depth a mortal viewing, Sometimes moved by pity, shows the way; By heaven's stars which are His characters, Foretells to us both good and adverse things; But men, with earth and death encumbered, Scorn such writing, and do not read it. Ronsard
The marquis professed a vigorous hatred for enlightenment: "It is ideas," said he, "which have ruined Italy." He did not quite know how to reconcile this holy horror of instruction, with the desire to see his son Fabrice perfect the education so brilliantly begun among the Jesuits. To run the least possible risks, he charged the good Abbé Blanès, curate of Grianta, to have Fabrice continue his studies in Latin. It would have been necessary that the curate himself know that language; now it was the object of his contempt; his knowledge in that kind was limited to reciting by heart the prayers of his missal, of which he could render more or less the sense to his flock. But this curate was none the less much respected and even feared in the canton; he had always said that it was not in thirteen weeks nor even in thirteen months, that the famous prophecy of Saint Giovita, the patron of Brescia, would be fulfilled. He added, when speaking to sure friends, that this number thirteen must be interpreted in a way which would astonish many, if all might be told (1813).
The fact is that the Abbé Blanès, a personage of primitive honesty and virtue, and moreover a man of wit, spent all his nights at the top of his bell-tower; he was mad about astrology. After wearing out his days in calculating conjunctions and positions of stars, he employed the best part of his nights in following them in the sky. By reason of his poverty, he had no other instrument than a long telescope of cardboard tube. One may judge of the contempt for the study of languages in a man who spent his life discovering the precise epoch of the fall of empires and of the revolutions which change the face of the world. "What more do I know of a horse," said he to Fabrice, "since I have been taught that in Latin it is called equus?"
The peasants feared the Abbé Blanès as a great magician: for his part, by means of the fear inspired by his stations in the bell-tower, he kept them from stealing. His brother curates of the neighborhood, very jealous of his influence, detested him; the Marquis del Dongo despised him simply because he reasoned too much for a man of so low a station. Fabrice adored him: to please him he sometimes spent whole evenings making enormous additions or multiplications. Then he climbed to the bell-tower: it was a great favor and one the Abbé Blanès had never granted to anyone; but he loved this child for his naïveté.
"If you do not become a hypocrite," said he to him, "perhaps you will be a man."
Two or three times a year, Fabrice, intrepid and passionate in his pleasures, was on the point of drowning in the lake. He was the chief of all the great expeditions of the little peasants of Grianta and of Cadenabia. These children had procured some small keys, and when the night was very black, they tried to open the padlocks of those chains which attach the boats to some big stone or some tree near the shore. It must be known that on the lake of Como the industry of the fishermen places set lines at a great distance from the banks. The upper end of the rope is attached to a small board lined with cork, and a very flexible hazel branch, fixed on this board, supports a little bell which tinkles when the fish, taken on the line, gives jerks to the rope.
The great object of these nocturnal expeditions, which Fabrice commanded in chief, was to go visit the set lines, before the fishermen had heard the warning given by the little bells. They chose times of storm; and, for these hazardous parties, they embarked in the morning, an hour before dawn. On getting into the boat, these children believed they were throwing themselves into the greatest dangers, that was the fine side of their action; and, following the example of their fathers, they devoutly recited an Ave Maria. Now, it often happened that at the moment of departure, and in the instant following the Ave Maria, Fabrice was struck by a presentiment. That was the fruit he had drawn from the astrological studies of his friend the Abbé Blanès, in whose predictions he did not believe. According to his young imagination, this presentiment announced to him with certainty the good or ill success; and as he had more resolution than any of his comrades, little by little the whole troop took so much the habit of presentiments, that if, at the moment of embarking, they caught sight of a priest on the coast, or if they saw a crow fly off to the left, they hastened to put back the padlock on the boat's chain, and each went to lie down again. Thus the Abbé Blanès had not communicated his rather difficult science to Fabrice; but unknowingly, he had inoculated him with an unlimited confidence in the signs which may predict the future.
The marquis felt that an accident befalling his ciphered correspondence could put him at the mercy of his sister; so every year, at the time of Saint Angela, the countess Pietranera's feast, Fabrice obtained permission to go spend a week at Milan. He lived all the year in hope or regret of those eight days. On this great occasion, to accomplish this political journey, the marquis gave his son four crowns, and, according to custom, gave nothing to his wife, who took him. But one of the cooks, six footmen and a coachman with two horses, left for Como the eve of the journey, and each day, at Milan, the marchioness found a carriage at her orders, and a dinner for twelve covers.
The sulking kind of life led by the Marquis del Dongo was certainly very little diverting; but it had this advantage, that it enriched forever the families who had the goodness to give themselves up to it. The marquis, who had more than two hundred thousand livres of income, did not spend a quarter of it; he lived on hopes. During the thirteen years from 1800 to 1813, he constantly and firmly believed that Napoleon would be overthrown within six months. Judge of his rapture when, at the beginning of 1813, he learned the disasters of the Berezina! The taking of Paris and the fall of Napoleon almost made him lose his head; he then permitted himself the most outrageous remarks toward his wife and his sister. At last, after fourteen years of waiting, he had the inexpressible joy of seeing the Austrian troops re-enter Milan. According to orders come from Vienna, the Austrian general received the Marquis del Dongo with a consideration bordering on respect; they hastened to offer him one of the first places in the government, and he accepted it as the payment of a debt. His eldest son had a lieutenancy in one of the finest regiments of the monarchy; but the second would never accept a place as cadet which was offered him. This triumph, of which the marquis enjoyed with a rare insolence, lasted only a few months, and was followed by a humiliating reverse. Never had he had a talent for business, and fourteen years passed in the country, among his valets, his notary and his physician, joined to the ill humor of old age which had come on, had made him quite incapable. Now it is not possible, in Austrian lands, to keep an important place without having the kind of talent required by the slow and complicated, but very reasonable, administration of that old monarchy. The blunders of the Marquis del Dongo scandalized the employees and even arrested the march of affairs. His ultra-monarchical remarks irritated the populations which they wished to plunge into sleep and neglect. One fine day, he learned that His Majesty had deigned graciously to accept the resignation he gave of his employment in the administration, and at the same time conferred on him the place of second grand majordomo major of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom. The marquis was indignant at the atrocious injustice of which he was the victim; he had a letter to a friend printed, he who so execrated the liberty of the press. At last he wrote to the Emperor that his ministers were betraying him, and were but Jacobins. These things done, he returned sadly to his castle of Grianta. He had a consolation. After the fall of Napoleon, certain powerful personages at Milan had some fellows beat to death in the streets Count Prina, former minister of the King of Italy, and a man of the first merit. Count Pietranera exposed his life to save that of the minister, who was killed with blows of an umbrella, and whose torture lasted five hours. A priest, confessor of the Marquis del Dongo, could have saved Prina by opening to him the grating of the church of San Giovanni, before which the unhappy minister was dragged, who even for an instant was abandoned in the gutter, in the middle of the street; but he refused to open his grating with derision, and, six months after, the marquis had the happiness of procuring him a fine advancement.
He execrated Count Pietranera, his brother-in-law, who, having not fifty louis of income, dared to be quite content, took it into his head to show himself faithful to what he had loved all his life, and had the insolence to praise that spirit of justice without respect of persons, which the marquis called an infamous Jacobinism. The count had refused to take service in Austria, this refusal was made use of, and, some months after the death of Prina, the same personages who had paid the assassins obtained that General Pietranera should be thrown into prison. Whereupon the countess, his wife, took a passport and asked for post-horses to go to Vienna to tell the truth to the Emperor. The assassins of Prina were afraid, and one of them, a cousin of Mme Pietranera, came to bring her at midnight, an hour before her departure for Vienna, the order to set her husband at liberty. The next day, the Austrian general had Count Pietranera called, received him with all possible distinction, and assured him that his retirement pension would soon be settled on the most advantageous footing. The brave General Bubna, a man of wit and heart, seemed quite ashamed of the assassination of Prina and the imprisonment of the count.
After this squall, conjured by the firm character of the countess, the two spouses lived, as well as might be, on the retirement pension, which, thanks to the recommendation of General Bubna, was not long delayed.
Happily, it turned out that, for five or six years, the countess had much friendship for a young man very rich, who was also intimate friend of the count, and did not fail to place at their disposal the finest team of English horses then at Milan, his box at the Scala theater, and his castle in the country. But the count was conscious of his bravery, his soul was generous, he was easily angered, and then permitted himself strange remarks. One day when he was hunting with some young men, one of them, who had served under other flags than his, began to make jokes on the bravery of the soldiers of the Cisalpine republic; the count gave him a slap, they fought at once, and the count, who was alone on his side, in the midst of all those young men, was killed. Much was said of this kind of duel, and the persons who had been present took it into their heads to go travel in Switzerland.
That ridiculous courage called resignation, the courage of a fool who lets himself be taken without a word, was not in the use of the countess. Furious at her husband's death, she would have liked that Limercati, that rich young man, her intimate friend, should also take it into his fancy to travel in Switzerland, and to give a carbine shot or a slap to the murderer of Count Pietranera.
Limercati found this project of an accomplished ridiculousness and the countess perceived that in her contempt had killed love. She redoubled attention toward Limercati; she wished to awaken his love, and then to drop him and drive him to despair. To render this plan of vengeance intelligible in France, I shall say that at Milan, a country very far from ours, they are still in despair through love. The countess, who, in her mourning clothes, far eclipsed all her rivals, made coquetries to the young men who held the high end of the pavement, and one of them, Count N..., who, at all times, had said he found the merit of Limercati a little heavy, a little stiff for a woman of so much wit, became madly in love with the countess. She wrote to Limercati:
Will you act once like a man of wit? Imagine that you have never known me. I am, with perhaps a little contempt, your very humble servant. GINA PIETRANERA.
At the reading of this note, Limercati set out for one of his castles; his love grew excited, he went mad, and talked of blowing his brains out, a thing unheard of in hellish countries. The very next day after his arrival in the country, he had written to the countess to offer her his hand and his two hundred thousand livres of income. She sent back his letter unopened by the groom of Count N... Whereupon Limercati spent three years on his estates, returning every two months to Milan, but without ever having the courage to stay there, and boring all his friends with his passionate love for the countess, and the circumstantial account of the kindnesses she formerly had for him. At first, he added that with Count N... she was ruining herself, and that such a connection dishonored her.
The fact is that the countess had no sort of love for Count N..., and that is what she declared to him when she was quite sure of Limercati's despair. The count, who had experience, begged her not to divulge the sad truth of which she made him the confidant:
"If you have the extreme indulgence," added he, "to continue to receive me with all the outward distinctions accorded to the reigning lover, I shall perhaps find a suitable place."
After this heroic declaration the countess would have no more of the horses nor of the box of Count N... But for fifteen years she had been accustomed to the most elegant life: she had to resolve this difficult or rather impossible problem: to live at Milan on a pension of fifteen hundred francs. She left her palace, rented two rooms on a fifth floor, sent away all her people and even her lady's maid replaced by a poor old woman doing housework. This sacrifice was in fact less heroic and less painful than it seems to us; at Milan poverty is not a ridiculous thing, and consequently does not show itself to frightened souls as the worst of evils. After some months of this noble poverty, besieged by the continual letters of Limercati, and even of Count N... who also wished to marry, it happened that the Marquis del Dongo, ordinarily of an execrable avarice, came to think that his enemies might well triumph over his sister's misery. What! a del Dongo reduced to living on the pension which the court of Vienna, of which he had so much to complain, grants to the widows of its generals!
He wrote to her that an apartment and a treatment worthy of his sister awaited her at the castle of Grianta. The mobile soul of the countess embraced with enthusiasm the idea of this new kind of life; it was twenty years since she had lived in that venerable castle rising majestically amid the old chestnut trees planted in the time of the Sforza. "There," said she to herself, "I shall find rest, and, at my age, is not that happiness? (As she was thirty-one years old she believed herself arrived at the moment of retirement.) On this sublime lake where I was born, a happy and peaceful life awaits me at last."
I know not if she was mistaken, but what is sure is that this passionate soul, who had just so lightly refused the offer of two immense fortunes, brought happiness to the castle of Grianta. Her two nieces were mad with joy.
“Stories of the world, in your language.”