Part 30
Throughout this third day of his imprisonment, Fabrice was beside himself with anger, but solely because he had not seen Clelia reappear. “Anger for anger, I ought to have told her that I loved her,” he cried; for he had come to that discovery. “No, it is not from greatness of soul that I give no thought to prison and make Blanès’s prophecy a lie; such honor is not mine. In spite of myself I think of that look of gentle pity which Clelia let fall upon me when the gendarmes were leading me away from the guardroom; that look has erased all my past life. Who would have told me that I should find such soft eyes in such a place! and at the very moment when my gaze was soiled by the countenances of Barbone and of the general governor. Heaven appeared amid those vile beings. And how not to love beauty and seek to see it again? No, it is not from greatness of soul that I am indifferent to all the petty vexations with which prison overwhelms me.” Fabrice’s imagination, running rapidly over all possibilities, arrived at that of being set at liberty. “No doubt the duchess’s friendship will work miracles for me. Well! I should thank her for my freedom only with my lips; such places are not those to which one returns! once out of prison, separated as we are from society, I should almost never see Clelia again! And, in fact, what harm does prison do me? If Clelia deigned not to overwhelm me with her anger, what should I have to ask of heaven?”
On the evening of that day when he had not seen his pretty neighbor, he had a great idea: with the iron cross of the rosary which is given to all prisoners on their entrance into prison, he began, and with success, to pierce the window-blind. “This is perhaps an imprudence,” he said to himself before beginning. “Did not the carpenters say before me that tomorrow they will be replaced by the painter-workmen? What will these say if they find the window-blind pierced? But if I do not commit this imprudence, tomorrow I cannot see her. What! through my own fault I should remain a day without seeing her! and moreover when she left me angry!” Fabrice’s imprudence was rewarded; after fifteen hours of labor, he saw Clelia, and, in excess of happiness, as she did not believe herself perceived by him, she remained long motionless with her gaze fixed upon that immense blind; he had all the time to read in her eyes the signs of the tenderest pity. Toward the end of her visit she even evidently neglected the care due to her birds, to remain whole minutes motionless contemplating the window. Her soul was profoundly troubled; she thought of the duchess whose extreme misfortune had inspired her with so much pity, and yet she was beginning to hate her. She understood nothing of the deep melancholy that was seizing her character; she was out of humor with herself. Two or three times, during the course of this visit, Fabrice was impatient to try to shake the blind; it seemed to him that he was not happy so long as he could not testify to Clelia that he saw her. “And yet,” he said to himself, “if she knew that I behold her with such ease, timid and reserved as she is, no doubt she would shrink from my gaze.”
He was far happier the next day (from what miseries does not love make its happiness!): while she was sadly looking at the immense blind, he managed to pass a little piece of iron wire through the opening which the iron cross had made, and he gave her signs which she evidently understood, at least in this sense, that they meant: I am here and I see you.
Fabrice had ill fortune in the following days. He wished to remove from the colossal blind a piece of board as large as the hand, which could be put back at will and which would allow him to see and be seen, that is to say, to speak, by signs at least, of what was passing in his soul; but it turned out that the noise of the little saw, very imperfect, which he had fashioned with the spring of his watch blunted by the cross, alarmed Grillo, who came to spend long hours in his room. He believed, it is true, that Clelia’s severity seemed to diminish as the material difficulties opposing all correspondence increased; Fabrice observed very well that she no longer affected to lower her eyes or look at the birds when he tried to give her a sign of presence by means of his feeble piece of iron wire; he had the pleasure of seeing that she never failed to appear in the aviary at the precise moment when a quarter to twelve sounded, and he almost presumed to believe himself the cause of such punctual exactness. Why? this idea does not seem reasonable; but love observes nuances invisible to the indifferent eye, and draws infinite conclusions from them. For example, since Clelia no longer saw the prisoner, almost immediately on entering the aviary, she raised her eyes toward his window. It was in those funereal days when no one in Parma doubted that Fabrice would soon be put to death: he alone was ignorant of it; but this dreadful idea no longer left Clelia, and how should she reproach herself for the too great interest she bore Fabrice? he was about to perish! and for the cause of liberty! for it was too absurd to put a del Dongo to death for a sword-thrust at a mountebank. It is true that this amiable young man was attached to another woman! Clelia was profoundly unhappy, and without precisely avowing to herself the kind of interest she took in his fate: “Surely,” she said to herself, “if they lead him to death, I shall flee into a convent, and from this life I shall not reappear in that court society, it fills me with horror. Polished assassins!”
On the eighth day of Fabrice’s imprisonment, she had great cause for shame: she was looking fixedly, absorbed in her sad thoughts, at the blind which hid the prisoner’s window; that day he had as yet given no sign of presence: suddenly a small piece of the blind, larger than the hand, was withdrawn by him; he looked at her with a gay air, and she saw his eyes saluting her. She could not sustain this unexpected trial; she turned quickly toward her birds and began to tend them; but she trembled so that she spilled the water she was giving them, and Fabrice could perfectly see her emotion; she could not bear the situation, and took to flight running.
That moment was the finest of Fabrice’s life, beyond all comparison. With what transports would he have refused liberty, had it been offered him at that instant!
The next day was the day of great despair for the duchess. Everyone in the town held it as certain that it was all over with Fabrice; Clelia had not the sad courage to show him a hardness that was not in her heart, she spent an hour and a half at the aviary, looked at all his signs, and often answered him, at least by the expression of the liveliest and most sincere interest; she left him for instants to hide her tears. Her woman’s coquetry felt very keenly the imperfection of the language employed: if they had spoken, in how many different ways might she not have sought to divine precisely the nature of the sentiments Fabrice had for the duchess! Clelia could almost no longer deceive herself; she had hatred for Madame Sanseverina.
One night Fabrice came to think somewhat seriously of his aunt: he was astonished, he could hardly recognize her image, the memory he preserved of her had totally changed; to him, at that hour, she was fifty years old.
“Great God!” he cried with enthusiasm, “how well inspired I was not to tell her that I loved her!”
He had reached the point of scarce being able to understand how he had found her so pretty. In this regard, little Marietta made a less sensible impression of change upon him: that is because he had never imagined that her soul was anything in the love for Marietta, whereas often he had believed his whole soul belonged to the duchess. The Duchess of A... and Marietta now seemed to him like two young doves whose whole charm would lie in weakness and innocence, while the sublime image of Clelia Conti, seizing all his soul, went so far as to give him terror. He too well felt that the eternal happiness of his life was going to force him to reckon with the governor’s daughter, and that it was in her power to make of him the most unhappy of men. Each day he mortally feared to see suddenly terminated, by an unappealable caprice of her will, that singular and delicious kind of life he found beside her; nevertheless, she had already filled with felicity the first two months of his imprisonment. It was the time when, twice a week, General Fabio Conti said to the prince:
“I can give Your Highness my word of honor that the prisoner del Dongo speaks to no living soul, and passes his life in the overwhelm of the deepest despair, or in sleep.”
Clelia came two or three times a day to see her birds, sometimes for instants only: if Fabrice had not loved her so much, he would have well seen that he was loved; but he had mortal doubts on that score. Clelia had had a piano placed in the aviary. While striking the keys, so that the sound of the instrument might give account of her presence and occupy the sentinels walking under her windows, she answered with her eyes the questions of Fabrice. On a single subject she never made answer, and even on great occasions took flight, and sometimes disappeared for a whole day; it was when Fabrice’s signs indicated sentiments of which it was too difficult not to understand the avowal: she was inexorable on that point.
Thus, though closely shut up in a rather small cage, Fabrice had a very busy life; it was wholly employed in seeking the solution of this so important problem: “Does she love me?” The result of thousands of observations ever renewed, but also ever called in doubt, was this: “All her voluntary gestures say no, but what is involuntary in the movement of her eyes seems to avow that she is taking a liking to me.”
Clelia hoped well never to arrive at an avowal, and it was to ward off that peril that she had repulsed, with excessive anger, a prayer Fabrice had addressed to her several times. The wretchedness of the resources employed by the poor prisoner ought, it seems, to have inspired Clelia with more pity. He wished to correspond with her by means of characters which he traced on his hand with a piece of charcoal whose precious discovery he had made in his stove; he would have formed the words letter by letter, successively. This invention would have doubled the means of conversation in that it would have permitted saying precise things. His window was distant from Clelia’s by about twenty-five feet; it would have been too chancy to speak to each other over the heads of the sentinels walking before the governor’s palace. Fabrice doubted being loved; had he had some experience of love, no doubt would have remained with him: but never had a woman occupied his heart; he had, moreover, no suspicion of a secret which would have thrown him into despair had he known it; there was grand question of the marriage of Clelia Conti with Marquis Crescenzi, the richest man at court.
CHAPTER XIX
The ambition of General Fabio Conti, exalted to madness by the embarrassments which came to place themselves in the midst of the career of the prime minister Mosca, and which seemed to announce his fall, had led him to make violent scenes with his daughter; he repeated to her incessantly, and with anger, that she was breaking his fortune if she did not at last determine to make a choice; at past twenty it was time to take a course; that cruel state of isolation, into which her unreasonable obstinacy plunged the general, must cease at last, etc.
It was first to escape these fits of humor of every instant that Clelia had taken refuge in the aviary; one could only get there by a little wooden staircase very inconvenient, and of which the gout made a serious obstacle for the governor.
For some weeks, Clelia’s soul was so agitated, she so little knew herself what she ought to desire, that, without precisely giving her father a promise, she had almost let herself be engaged. In one of his fits of anger, the general had cried out that he would well know how to send her to be bored in the saddest convent of Parma, and that there he would leave her to mope until she deigned to make a choice.
“You know that our house, though very ancient, does not unite six thousand livres of income, whereas the fortune of Marquis Crescenzi rises to more than a hundred thousand écus a year. Everyone at court agrees in recognizing him the gentlest character; never has he given anyone cause for complaint; he is very handsome, young, very well thought of by the prince, and I say that one must be mad as a hatter to repulse his homage. If this refusal were the first, I might perhaps bear it; but here are five or six matches, and of the first at court, which you refuse, like a little fool that you are. And what would become of you, pray, if I were put on half-pay? what a triumph for my enemies, if I were seen lodged in some second floor, I of whom there has been so often question for the ministry! No, zounds! here is time enough that my goodness makes me play the role of a Cassandra. You are going to furnish me some valid objection against this poor Marquis Crescenzi, who has the goodness to be in love with you, to wish to marry you without dowry, and to assign you a jointure of thirty thousand livres of income, with which at least I shall be able to lodge; you are going to speak to me reasonably, or, zounds! you shall marry him in two months!
A single word of all this discourse had struck Clelia, it was the threat of being put in the convent, and consequently removed from the citadel, and at the very moment when Fabrice’s life seemed to hang but by a thread, for there passed no month without the rumor of his approaching death running anew through the town and the court. Whatever reasoning she made to herself, she could not determine to run that chance: To be separated from Fabrice, and at the moment when she trembled for his life! that was in her eyes the greatest of evils, it was at least the most immediate.
It is not that, even without being removed from Fabrice, her heart found the prospect of happiness; she believed him loved by the duchess, and her soul was torn by mortal jealousy. Constantly she thought of the advantages of that woman so generally admired. The extreme reserve she imposed upon herself toward Fabrice, the language of signs in which she had confined him, for fear of falling into some indiscretion, all seemed to unite to take from her the means of arriving at some explanation of his manner of being with the duchess. Thus, each day, she felt more cruelly the affrighting misfortune of having a rival in Fabrice’s heart, and each day she dared less expose herself to the danger of giving him occasion to tell the whole truth of what passed in that heart. But what charm nevertheless to hear him make avowal of his true sentiments! what happiness for Clelia to be able to clear up the dreadful suspicions that poisoned her life!
Fabrice was light; at Naples, he had the reputation of changing mistress rather easily. Despite all the reserve imposed by the role of a young lady, since she had been a canoness and went to court, Clelia, without ever questioning, but listening with attention, had learned to know the reputation acquired by the young men who had successively sought her hand; well! Fabrice, compared to all those young men, was he who carried the most lightness into his heart-affairs. He was in prison, he was bored, he paid court to the only woman to whom he could speak; what more simple? what even more common? and that was what desolated Clelia. Even if, by a complete revelation, she had learned that Fabrice no longer loved the duchess, what confidence could she have in his words? even if she had believed in the sincerity of his discourse, what confidence could she have had in the duration of his sentiments? And finally, to crown the despair in her heart, was not Fabrice already far advanced in the ecclesiastical career? was he not on the eve of binding himself by eternal vows? Did not the greatest dignities await him in that kind of life? If there remained to me the least glimmer of good sense, the unhappy Clelia said to herself, ought I not to take flight? ought I not to beseech my father to shut me up in some far distant convent? And to complete her misery, it is precisely the fear of being removed from the citadel and shut up in a convent which directs all my conduct! It is that fear which forces me to dissimulate, which obliges me to the hideous and dishonoring lie of feigning to accept the public cares and attentions of Marquis Crescenzi.
Clelia’s character was profoundly reasonable; in all her life she had not had to reproach herself with an inconsiderate step, and her conduct in this occurrence was the height of unreason: one may judge of her sufferings!... They were the more cruel in that she deceived herself with no illusion. She attached herself to a man who was distractedly loved by the most beautiful woman of the court, a woman who, by so many titles, was superior to her, Clelia! And this man himself, were he free, was not capable of a serious attachment, while she, as she too well felt, would never have but one attachment in life.
It was therefore with a heart agitated by the most affrighting remorse that every day Clelia came to the aviary: borne to that place as despite herself, her uneasiness changed object and became less cruel, remorse disappeared for some instants; she watched, with unspeakable heartbeats, the moments when Fabrice could open the sort of skylight he had made in the immense blind which masked his window. Often the presence of the jailer Grillo in his room prevented her from conversing by signs with her friend.
One evening, toward eleven o’clock, Fabrice heard noises of the strangest nature in the citadel: by night, on lying upon the window and putting his head out of the skylight, he managed to distinguish the somewhat loud noises made in the great staircase, called of the three hundred steps, which led from the first court into the interior of the round tower, to the stone esplanade upon which had been built the governor’s palace and the Farnese prison where he was.
Toward the middle of its ascent, at a height of a hundred and eighty steps, this staircase passed from the southern side of a vast court to the northern side; there was found a very light and very narrow iron bridge, in the middle of which was established a porter. This man was relieved every six hours, and was obliged to rise and draw himself aside so that one might pass over the bridge he guarded, and by which alone one could reach the governor’s palace and the Farnese tower. It sufficed to give two turns to a spring, of which the governor carried the key upon him, to precipitate this iron bridge into the court, to a depth of more than a hundred feet; this simple precaution taken, as there was no other staircase in all the citadel, and as every evening at midnight an adjutant carried back to the governor’s house, and into a cabinet entered by his chamber, the ropes of all the wells, he remained completely inaccessible in his palace, and it would have been equally impossible for anyone whatsoever to arrive at the Farnese tower. This Fabrice had perfectly well remarked on the day of his entrance into the citadel, and which Grillo, who like all jailers loved to boast of his prison, had several times explained to him: thus he had scarce any hope of escaping. Nevertheless he remembered a maxim of Abbé Blanès:
The lover thinks more often of reaching his mistress than the husband of guarding his wife; the prisoner thinks more often of escaping than the jailer of locking his door; therefore, whatever the obstacles, the lover and the prisoner must succeed.
That evening Fabrice heard very distinctly a great number of men pass over the iron bridge, called the slave’s bridge, because formerly a Dalmatian slave had succeeded in escaping, by precipitating the guardian of the bridge into the court.
“They are coming to make an abduction here, perhaps they are going to lead me off to be hanged; but there may be disorder, it is a matter of profiting by it.” He had taken his arms, he was already drawing gold from some of his hiding-places, when suddenly he stopped.
“Man is a droll animal,” he cried, “one must admit it! What would an invisible spectator say who saw my preparations? Is it by chance that I wish to escape? What should become of me the day after I was back at Parma? should I not do all in the world to return to Clelia? If there is disorder, let us profit by it to slip into the governor’s palace; perhaps I shall be able to speak to Clelia, perhaps authorized by the disorder I shall dare to kiss her hand. General Conti, very suspicious by nature, and no less vain, has his palace guarded by five sentinels, one at each angle of the building, and a fifth at the entrance door, but happily the night is very dark.” On tiptoe, Fabrice went to verify what the jailer Grillo and his dog were doing: the jailer was profoundly asleep in an oxhide suspended from the floor by four cords, and surrounded by a coarse net; the dog Fox opened his eyes, rose, and advanced gently toward Fabrice to caress him.
“Stories of the world, in your language.”