Part 32

There were several serenades; the punctual governor only tolerated them because they engaged his daughter Clélia with the Marquis Crescenzi, whose character frightened him: he vaguely felt that there was no point of contact between her and himself, and always feared some rash act on her part. She might flee to a convent, and he would be left disarmed. Besides, the general feared that all this music, whose sounds could penetrate even to the deepest dungeons, reserved for the blackest liberals, might contain signals. The musicians themselves also aroused his jealousy; accordingly, scarcely was the serenade over than they were locked up in the large lower halls of the governor's palace, which by day served as offices for the staff, and the door was not opened to them until the next morning in broad daylight. It was the governor himself who, stationed on the slaves' bridge, had them searched in his presence and set them free, not without repeating several times that he would have hanged on the spot any one of them who had the audacity to take charge of the slightest message for any prisoner. And it was known that in his fear of giving offense he was a man of his word, so that the Marquis Crescenzi was obliged to pay his musicians triple, much vexed at spending the night in prison.

All that the duchess could obtain, and with great difficulty, from the faintheartedness of one of these men, was that he would take charge of a letter to be delivered to the governor. The letter was addressed to Fabrice; it deplored the fatality by which, though he had been in prison for more than five months, his friends outside had been unable to establish the slightest correspondence with him.

On entering the citadel, the bribed musician threw himself at the feet of General Fabio Conti, and confessed to him that a priest, unknown to him, had so insisted on charging him with a letter addressed to the Sieur del Dongo, that he had not dared refuse; but, faithful to his duty, he hastened to place it in His Excellency's hands.

His Excellency was much flattered: he knew the resources at the duchess's disposal, and was in great fear of being tricked. In his joy, the general went to present this letter to the prince, who was delighted.

--Thus the firmness of my administration has succeeded in avenging me! This haughty woman has been suffering for five months! But one of these days we shall have a scaffold prepared, and her foolish imagination will not fail to believe it is intended for little del Dongo.

CHAPTER XX

One night, toward one in the morning, Fabrice, lying on his window, had passed his head through the hatch cut in the window blind, and was contemplating the stars and the immense horizon visible from the top of the Farnese tower. His eyes, wandering over the country toward the lower Po and Ferrara, by chance noticed an exceedingly small but fairly bright light, which seemed to come from the top of a tower. "That light cannot be seen from the plain," said Fabrice to himself; "the thickness of the tower prevents it from being seen from below; it must be some signal to a distant point." Suddenly he noticed that this gleam appeared and disappeared at very short intervals. "It is some young girl speaking to her lover in the neighboring village." He counted nine successive appearances: "This is an I," he said. Indeed, I is the ninth letter of the alphabet. There followed, after a pause, fourteen appearances: "This is an N"; then, again after a pause, a single appearance: "It is an A; the word is Ina."

What was his joy and astonishment when the successive appearances, always separated by short pauses, went on to complete the following words:

Ina pensa a te.

Clearly: Gina thinks of you!

He answered at once by successive appearances of his lamp at the hatch he had made:

Fabrice loves you!

The correspondence continued until daybreak. This night was the hundred and seventy-third of his captivity, and he was told that for four months these signals had been made every night. But anyone might see and understand them; from that first night they began to establish abbreviations: three appearances in very rapid succession indicated the duchess; four, the prince; two, Count Mosca; two rapid appearances followed by two slow ones meant escape. They agreed henceforth to follow the old alphabet alla monaca, which, so as not to be guessed by the indiscreet, changes the ordinary number of the letters and gives them arbitrary ones; A, for example, bears the number 10; B, the number 3; that is to say, three successive eclipses of the lamp mean B, ten successive eclipses, A, etc.; a moment of darkness separates the words. They made an appointment for the next day at one hour after midnight, and the next day the duchess came to this tower, which was a quarter of a league from the city. Her eyes filled with tears on seeing the signals made by this Fabrice whom she had so often believed dead. She herself said to him by lamp appearances: I love you, courage, health, good hope! Exercise your strength in your room, you will need the strength of your arms. "I have not seen him," said the duchess to herself, "since the Fausta concert, when he appeared at the door of my salon dressed as a huntsman. Who would have told me then the fate that awaited us!"

The duchess made signals announcing to Fabrice that soon he would be delivered, thanks to the prince's goodness (these signals could be understood); then she came back to tell him tender things; she could not tear herself away from him! Only the representations of Ludovic, who, because he had been useful to Fabrice, had become his factotum, could persuade her, when day was already about to break, to discontinue signals that might attract the eyes of some ill-wisher. This announcement, repeated several times, of an early deliverance plunged Fabrice into deep sadness: Clélia, noticing it the next day, committed the imprudence of asking him the cause.

--I see myself on the point of giving the duchess a grave subject of displeasure.

--And what can she require of you that you would refuse her? cried Clélia, carried away by the liveliest curiosity.

--She wishes me to leave this place, he answered her, and that is what I shall never consent to.

Clélia could not reply; she looked at him and burst into tears. Had he been able to speak to her close at hand, perhaps then he might have obtained the avowal of sentiments whose uncertainty often plunged him into deep discouragement; he felt keenly that life, without Clélia's love, could be for him only a succession of bitter griefs or unbearable vexations. It seemed to him no longer worth living to recover those same pleasures which had seemed interesting to him before he knew love, and though suicide is not yet in fashion in Italy, he had thought of it as a resource, if fate separated him from Clélia.

The next day he received from her a very long letter.

It is necessary, my friend, that you should know the truth: often, since you have been here, it has been believed at Parma that your last day had come. It is true that you are only condemned to twelve years in the fortress; but it is, unhappily, impossible to doubt that an all-powerful hatred attaches itself to pursuing you, and twenty times have I trembled lest poison should come to end your days: seize therefore every possible means of getting out of here. You see that for you I fail in the most sacred duties; judge of the imminence of the danger by the things I dare say to you and which are so out of place in my mouth. If it is absolutely necessary, if there is no other means of safety, flee. Every instant you spend in this fortress may put your life in the greatest peril; think that there is a party at court which the prospect of a crime never stopped in its designs. And do you not see all the projects of this party constantly thwarted by the superior skill of Count Mosca? Now, a certain means has been found to exile him from Parma, which is the duchess's despair; and is one not too certain of bringing about this despair by the death of a young prisoner? This single word, which admits of no answer, should make you judge of your situation. You say you have friendship for me: think first that insurmountable obstacles oppose this sentiment ever taking a certain fixedness between us. We shall have met in our youth, we shall have given each other a helping hand in an unhappy period; fate shall have placed me in this place of severity to soften your pains, but I should reproach myself eternally if illusions, authorized by nothing and never to be authorized, should lead you not to seize every possible occasion of withdrawing your life from so frightful a peril. I have lost peace of soul by the cruel imprudence I committed in exchanging with you a few signs of good friendship. If our childish games, with alphabets, lead you to illusions so ill-founded and which may be so fatal to you, it would be in vain that, to justify myself, I should recall Barbone's attempt. I should have thrown you myself into a far more frightful, far more certain peril, believing I was withdrawing you from a danger of the moment; and my imprudences are forever unpardonable if they have given birth to sentiments which might lead you to resist the duchess's counsels. See what you force me to repeat to you; save yourself, I order you...

This letter was very long; certain passages, such as the "I order you" we have just transcribed, gave delicious moments of hope to Fabrice's love. It seemed to him that the bottom of the feelings was tender enough, if the expressions were remarkably prudent. At other moments, he paid the penalty of his complete ignorance in this kind of warfare; he saw only simple friendship, or even very ordinary humanity, in this letter of Clélia's.

For the rest, all that she told him did not make him change his purpose for an instant: supposing the perils she painted were real enough, was it too much to buy, by a few dangers of the moment, the happiness of seeing her every day? What life would he lead when he was again refuge at Bologna or Florence? for, in escaping from the citadel, he could not even hope for permission to live at Parma. And even if the prince were to change to the point of setting him free (which was so unlikely, since he, Fabrice, had become, for a powerful faction, a means of overthrowing Count Mosca), what life would he lead at Parma, separated from Clélia by all the hatred dividing the two parties? Once or twice a month, perhaps, chance would place them in the same salons; but even then, what sort of conversation could he have with her? How recover that perfect intimacy of which now he enjoyed several hours every day? what would salon conversation be, compared to that which they held with alphabets? "And, if I must buy this life of delight and this unique chance of happiness by a few small dangers, where would be the harm? And would it not be a happiness too, thus to find a slight occasion of giving her a proof of my love?"

Fabrice saw in Clélia's letter only the occasion to ask her for a meeting: it was the unique and constant object of all his desires; he had spoken to her but once, and only for an instant, at the moment of his entering prison, and that was now more than two hundred days ago.

An easy means presented itself of meeting Clélia: the excellent Abbé don Cesare allowed Fabrice half an hour's walk on the terrace of the Farnese tower every Thursday, during the day; but the other days of the week, this walk, which might be noticed by all the inhabitants of Parma and the surroundings and seriously compromise the governor, took place only at nightfall. To go up to the terrace of the Farnese tower there was no other staircase than that of the little bell-tower belonging to the chapel so lugubriously decorated in black and white marble, which the reader may perhaps remember. Grillo led Fabrice to this chapel, he opened to him the little staircase of the bell-tower: his duty would have been to follow him there, but, as the evenings were beginning to be cool, the jailer left him to go up alone, locked him in this bell-tower which communicated with the terrace, and went back to warm himself in his room. Well! could not Clélia one evening be in the black marble chapel, escorted by her maid?

The whole long letter by which Fabrice answered Clélia's was calculated to obtain this interview. For the rest, he confided to her with perfect sincerity, and as if it concerned another person, all the reasons that decided him not to leave the citadel.

"I would expose myself each day to the prospect of a thousand deaths for the happiness of speaking to you by means of our alphabets, which now do not stop us an instant, and you want me to play the fool by exiling myself to Parma, or perhaps to Bologna, or even to Florence! You want me to walk away from you! Know that such an effort is impossible for me; it would be in vain that I gave you my word, I could not keep it."

The result of this request for a rendezvous was an absence of Clélia, which lasted no less than five days; for five days she came to the aviary only at the times when she knew that Fabrice could not make use of the small opening in the window blind. Fabrice was in despair; he concluded from this absence that, despite certain looks which had made him conceive foolish hopes, he had never inspired in Clélia any sentiments other than those of simple friendship. "In that case," he said to himself, "what matters life to me? let the prince take it, he will be welcome; all the more reason not to leave the fortress." And it was with a deep sense of disgust that, every night, he answered the signals of the little lamp. The duchess believed him quite mad when she read, on the bulletin of signals that Ludovic brought her every morning, these strange words: I will not escape; I wish to die here!

During these five days, so cruel to Fabrice, Clélia was more unhappy than he; she had had this idea, so poignant to a generous soul: "My duty is to flee to a convent, far from the citadel; when Fabrice knows I am no longer here, and I shall have it told him by Grillo and by all the jailers, then he will decide on an attempt to escape." But to go to the convent was to renounce forever seeing Fabrice; and to renounce seeing him when he gave so evident a proof that the sentiments which might once have bound him to the duchess no longer existed now! What more touching proof of love could a young man give? After seven long months of prison, which had seriously impaired his health, he refused to regain his freedom. A frivolous being, such as the talk of the courtiers had depicted Fabrice to Clélia's eyes, would have sacrificed twenty mistresses to leave the citadel one day earlier; and what would he not have done to leave a prison where each day poison might end his life!

Clélia lacked courage, she committed the glaring fault of not seeking refuge in a convent, which at the same time would have given her a perfectly natural means of breaking with the Marquis Crescenzi. Once this fault was committed, how resist this young man so amiable, so natural, so tender, who exposed his life to frightful perils to obtain the simple happiness of glimpsing her from one window to the other? After five days of awful struggles, intermingled with moments of self-contempt, Clélia determined to answer the letter by which Fabrice solicited the happiness of speaking to her in the black marble chapel. True, she refused, and in rather harsh terms; but from that moment all tranquillity was lost for her, at every instant her imagination painted Fabrice succumbing to the attacks of poison; she came to the aviary six or eight times a day, she felt the passionate need to assure herself with her own eyes that Fabrice lived.

"If he is still in the fortress," she said to herself, "if he is exposed to all the horrors that the Raversi faction is perhaps plotting against him with the aim of driving out Count Mosca, it is solely because I had the cowardice not to flee to the convent! What pretext to remain here once he was certain that I had withdrawn from it forever?"

This girl, at once so timid and so haughty, came to risk a refusal on the part of the jailer Grillo; moreover, she exposed herself to all the comments this man might allow himself on the singularity of her conduct. She descended to this degree of humiliation as to have him called, and to say to him in a trembling voice that betrayed all her secret, that within a few days Fabrice was to obtain his liberty, that the Duchess Sanseverina was engaging in the most active steps in this hope, that often it was necessary to have at once the prisoner's answer to certain propositions that were made, and that she urged him, Grillo, to permit Fabrice to make an opening in the window blind that masked his window, so that she might communicate to him by signs the advisories she received several times a day from Mme Sanseverina.

Grillo smiled and gave her assurance of his respect and obedience. Clélia was infinitely grateful to him for adding no word; it was evident he knew perfectly well all that had been passing for several months.

Scarcely was this jailer out of her rooms than Clélia made the signal of which she had agreed for calling Fabrice on great occasions; she confessed to him all that she had just done.

--You wish to perish by poison, she added: I hope to have the courage one of these days to leave my father, and flee to some distant convent; that is the obligation I shall have to you; then I hope you will no longer resist the plans that may be proposed to you to get you out of here; as long as you are here, I have awful and unreasonable moments; in my life I have contributed to no one's unhappiness, and it seems to me that I am the cause that you will die. Such an idea that I might have concerning a perfect stranger would throw me into despair, judge what I feel when I come to imagine that a friend, whose unreason gives me grave cause for complaint, but whom after all I have seen every day for so long, is at this very moment prey to the pangs of death. Sometimes I feel the need to know from your own self that you live.

"It is to withdraw myself from this awful pain that I have just abased myself to ask a favor of a subordinate who might have refused me, and who may still betray me. For the rest, I should perhaps be happy if he came to denounce me to my father; at once I should depart for the convent, I should no longer be the quite involuntary accomplice of your cruel follies. But believe me, this cannot last long; you will obey the duchess's orders. Are you satisfied, cruel friend? it is I who solicit you to betray my father! Call Grillo, and give him a present."

Fabrice was so much in love, the simplest expression of Clélia's will plunged him into such fear, that even this strange communication was not for him the certainty of being loved. He called Grillo to whom he generously paid for past complaisance, and as to the future, he told him that for each day he would permit him to make use of the opening in the window blind, he would receive a sequin. Grillo was delighted with these terms.

--I am going to speak to you heart on hand, my lord: will you submit to eating your dinner cold every day? there is a very simple means of avoiding poison. But I ask of you the deepest discretion, a jailer must see all and guess nothing, etc. Instead of one dog I shall have several, and you yourself shall make them taste all the dishes you plan to eat; as for the wine, I shall give you of mine, and you shall touch only bottles I have drunk from. But if Your Excellency wishes to ruin me forever, it suffices that she confide these details even to Mlle Clélia; women are always women; if tomorrow she quarrels with you, the day after she will, to revenge herself, tell all this invention to her father, whose sweetest joy would be to have wherewith to hang a jailer. After Barbone, he is perhaps the most wicked being in the fortress, and that is what makes the true danger of your position; he knows how to handle poison, be sure of it, and he would not forgive me this idea of having three or four little dogs.

There was a new serenade. Now Grillo answered all Fabrice's questions; he had nevertheless promised himself to be prudent, and not to betray Mlle Clélia, who, according to him, while on the point of marrying the Marquis Crescenzi, the richest man in the Parma states, nonetheless made love, as far as the prison walls permitted, with the amiable Monsignore del Dongo. He was answering the latter's last questions about the serenade, when he had the foolishness to add:

--It is thought he will soon marry her.

One may judge the effect of this simple word on Fabrice. At night he answered the lamp signals only to announce that he was ill. The next morning, as early as ten o'clock, Clélia having appeared at the aviary, he asked her, in a tone of ceremonious politeness quite new between them, why she had not simply told him that she loved the Marquis Crescenzi, and was on the point of marrying him.

--Because none of that is true, answered Clélia with impatience.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”