Part 36

This rope having been arranged as best he could, Fabrice took the one with which he meant to descend the thirty-five feet that separated his window from the esplanade where the governor's palace stood. But since, however drunk the sentinels might be, he could not come down exactly on their heads, he went out, as we have said, by the second window of his room, the one that looked out onto the roof of a sort of vast guardhouse. In a sick man's whim, as soon as General Fabio Conti had been able to speak, he had had two hundred soldiers brought up into this old guardhouse, abandoned for a century. He said that after having been poisoned, they wanted to assassinate him in his bed, and these two hundred soldiers were to guard him. One may judge the effect this unforeseen measure produced upon Clelia's heart: this pious girl felt only too well to what extent she was betraying her father, and a father who had just been all but poisoned in the interest of the prisoner she loved. She saw almost in the unforeseen arrival of these two hundred men a decree of Providence forbidding her to go further and to restore Fabrice to freedom.

But everyone in Parma was speaking of the prisoner's approaching death. This sad subject had again been discussed at the very festival given on the occasion of the marriage of the signora Giulia Crescenzi. Since for such a trifle, an awkward sword-thrust given to a comedian, a man of Fabrice's birth was not set free after nine months of imprisonment and with the protection of the prime minister, it was clear there was politics in his case. Then, it was said, there was no use concerning oneself further with him; if it did not suit those in power to have him die in the public square, he would soon die of illness. A locksmith workman who had been called to the palace of General Fabio Conti spoke of Fabrice as a prisoner long since dispatched and whose death was being kept silent for political reasons. The words of this man decided Clelia.

CHAPTER XXII

During the day Fabrice was attacked by some serious and unpleasant reflections, but as he heard the hours strike that brought him nearer to the moment of action, he felt lively and ready. The duchess had written to him that he would be surprised by the open air, and that hardly outside his prison he would find himself unable to walk; in that case it was better, however, to risk being recaptured than to throw himself down from a wall a hundred and eighty feet high. "If this misfortune befalls me," said Fabrice, "I shall lie down against the parapet, I shall sleep an hour, then begin again; since I have sworn it to Clelia, I had rather fall from the top of a rampart, however high it may be, than always be making reflections on the taste of the bread I eat. What horrible pains one must suffer before the end, when one dies poisoned! Fabio Conti will not stand on ceremony, he will have me given arsenic with which he kills the rats of his citadel."

Toward midnight one of those thick white fogs which the Po sometimes throws upon its banks spread first over the city, and then gained the esplanade and the bastions amid which rises the great tower of the citadel. Fabrice thought he saw that from the parapet of the platform the little acacias surrounding the gardens made by the soldiers at the foot of the wall a hundred and eighty feet high were no longer visible. "This is excellent," he thought.

A little after half past midnight had struck, the signal of the little lamp appeared at the window of the aviary. Fabrice was ready to act; he made the sign of the cross, then fastened to his bed the little rope intended to let him down the thirty-five feet that separated him from the platform where the palace stood. He arrived without hindrance on the roof of the guardhouse occupied since the day before by the two hundred additional men of whom we have spoken. Unfortunately the soldiers, it then being a quarter to one, were not yet asleep; while he walked on tiptoe on the roof of large hollow tiles, Fabrice heard them say that the devil was on the roof, and that they must try to kill him with a musket-shot. Some voices maintained that this wish was of great impiety, others said that if one fired a shot without killing something, the governor would put them all in prison for having alarmed the garrison uselessly. All this fine discussion made Fabrice hasten as much as possible as he walked on the roof, and made a great deal more noise. The fact is that at the moment when, hanging from his rope, he passed before the windows, fortunately four or five feet distant because of the projection of the roof, they were bristling with bayonets. Some have pretended that Fabrice, ever mad, had the idea of playing the devil's part, and that he threw a handful of sequins to these soldiers. What is certain is that he had strewn sequins on the floor of his room, and he also strewed some on the platform in his passage from the Farnese tower to the parapet, in order to give himself the chance of distracting any soldiers who might set out to pursue him.

Arrived on the platform and surrounded by sentinels who ordinarily cried out every quarter of an hour a whole phrase: All is well around my post, he directed his steps toward the western parapet and sought the new stone.

What seems incredible and might make one doubt the fact if the result had not had a whole city for witness, is that the sentinels placed along the parapet did not see and stop Fabrice; to be sure, the fog of which we have spoken was beginning to rise, and Fabrice said that when he was on the platform, the fog seemed to him to have already reached halfway up the Farnese tower. But this fog was not thick, and he saw the sentinels very well, some of whom were walking about. He added that, impelled as by a supernatural force, he went boldly to place himself between two rather near sentinels. He quietly untied the great rope he had around his body and which got tangled twice; it took him a long time to untangle it and lay it on the parapet. He heard the soldiers talking on all sides, fully resolved to stab the first who advanced toward him. "I was not at all troubled," he added, "it seemed to me that I was performing a ceremony."

He attached his finally untangled rope to an opening made in the parapet for the draining of water, he climbed onto this same parapet, and prayed to God fervently; then, like a hero of the age of chivalry, he thought for an instant of Clelia. How different I am, he said to himself, from the light and libertine Fabrice who entered here nine months ago! At last he began to descend this astonishing height. He acted mechanically, he said, and as he would have done in broad daylight, descending before friends, to win a wager. Toward the middle of the height, he suddenly felt his arms lose their strength; he even believes he let go the rope for an instant; but soon he took it up again; perhaps, he said, he held onto the brambles over which he was sliding and which tore his skin. He felt from time to time an atrocious pain between his shoulders, it went so far as to take away his breath. There was an extremely inconvenient undulating motion; he was ceaselessly thrown from the rope to the brambles. He was struck by several rather large birds which he was waking and which threw themselves upon him as they flew off. The first times he thought he was being reached by people descending from the citadel by the same way as he to pursue him, and he prepared to defend himself. At last he arrived at the foot of the great tower with no other inconvenience than having his hands in blood. He relates that from the middle of the tower, the slope it forms was very useful to him; he rubbed against the wall as he descended, and the plants growing between the stones held him back considerably. On arriving below in the soldiers' gardens he fell on an acacia which, seen from above, seemed to him to be four or five feet high, and which really was fifteen or twenty. A drunkard who happened to be there asleep took him for a thief. In falling from this tree, Fabrice almost dislocated his left arm. He set off to flee toward the rampart, but, as he said, his legs seemed to him like cotton; he had no strength left. Despite the peril, he sat down and drank a little of the brandy he had left. He fell asleep for some minutes to the point of no longer knowing where he was; on waking he could not understand how, finding himself in his room, he saw trees. At last the terrible truth came back to his memory. Immediately he walked toward the rampart; he climbed it by a great staircase. The sentinel, who was placed quite near, was snoring in his box. He found a piece of cannon lying in the grass; he attached his third rope to it; it proved a little too short, and he fell into a muddy ditch where there might have been a foot of water. While he was getting up and trying to get his bearings, he felt himself seized by two men: he was afraid for an instant; but soon he heard pronounced near his ear and in a low voice:

--Ah! monsignore! monsignore!

He vaguely understood that these men belonged to the duchess; immediately he fainted deeply. Some time after he felt that he was being carried by men who walked in silence and very fast; then they stopped, which gave him much uneasiness. But he had neither the strength to speak nor to open his eyes; he felt that he was being held tight; suddenly he recognized the perfume of the duchess's clothes. This perfume revived him; he opened his eyes; he was able to pronounce the words:

--Ah! dear friend!

Then he fainted again deeply.

The faithful Bruno, with a squad of police agents devoted to the count, was in reserve two hundred paces off; the count himself was hidden in a small house quite near the place where the duchess waited. He would not have hesitated, had it been necessary, to draw sword with some half-pay officers, his intimate friends; he considered himself obliged to save the life of Fabrice, who seemed to him greatly exposed, and who formerly would have had his pardon signed by the prince, if he Mosca had not been foolish enough to wish to avoid a folly written to the sovereign.

Since midnight the duchess, surrounded by men armed to the teeth, had been wandering in profound silence before the ramparts of the citadel; she could not keep still, she thought she would have to fight to snatch Fabrice from those who would pursue him. This ardent imagination had taken a hundred precautions, too long to detail here, and of an incredible recklessness. It has been calculated that more than eighty agents were afoot that night, expecting to fight for something extraordinary. Fortunately, Ferrante and Ludovic were at the head of all this, and the minister of police was not hostile; but the count himself remarked that the duchess was betrayed by no one, and that as minister he knew nothing of it.

The duchess lost her head completely on seeing Fabrice again; she clasped him convulsively in her arms, then was in despair on finding herself covered with blood: it was that of Fabrice's hands; she believed him dangerously wounded. Aided by one of her people, she was taking off his coat to dress his wounds, when Ludovic, who fortunately was there, authoritatively put the duchess and Fabrice into one of the small carriages which were hidden in a garden near the city gate, and they set off at full speed to cross the Po near Sacca. Ferrante, with twenty well-armed men, formed the rear guard, and had promised on his head to stop any pursuit. The count, alone and on foot, did not leave the vicinity of the citadel until two hours later, when he saw that nothing stirred. "Here I am in high treason!" he said to himself, drunk with joy.

Ludovic had the excellent idea of placing in a carriage a young surgeon attached to the duchess's household, and who bore a strong resemblance to Fabrice.

--Take flight, he said to him, toward Bologna; be very clumsy, try to get yourself arrested; then be curt in your answers, and finally confess that you are Fabrice del Dongo; above all gain time. Put skill into being clumsy, you will get off with a month in prison, and Madame will give you 50 sequins.

--Does one think of money when one serves Madame?

He set off, and was arrested a few hours later, which caused a very pleasant joy to General Fabio Conti and to Rassi, who, with the danger to Fabrice, saw his barony flying away.

The escape was not known at the citadel until six in the morning, and it was only at ten that they dared inform the prince. The duchess had been so well served that, despite the deep sleep of Fabrice, which she took for a mortal faint, so that three times she stopped the carriage, she was crossing the Po in a boat as four o'clock was striking. There were relays on the left bank; they went two more leagues with extreme rapidity, then were stopped more than an hour for the verification of passports. The duchess had all sorts of them for herself and for Fabrice; but she was mad that day, she took it into her head to give ten napoleons to the Austrian police clerk, and to take his hand while melting into tears. This clerk, much frightened, began the examination again. They took the post; the duchess paid in so extravagant a fashion, that everywhere she aroused suspicion in this country where every stranger is suspect. Ludovic came to her aid again; he said that Madame the duchess was mad with grief, because of the continual fever of the young Count Mosca, son of the prime minister of Parma, whom she was taking with her to consult the doctors of Pavia.

It was only ten leagues beyond the Po that the prisoner awoke completely; he had a dislocated shoulder and many scratches. The duchess still had such extraordinary ways that the master of a village inn, where they dined, believed he had to do with a princess of the imperial blood, and was about to have her rendered the honors he thought due her, when Ludovic told this man that the princess would infallibly put him in prison if he ventured to ring the bells.

At last, about six in the evening, they arrived at Piedmontese territory. Only there was Fabrice entirely safe; he was taken to a little village off the main road; his hands were dressed, and he slept some more hours.

It was in this village that the duchess gave herself up to an action not only horrible in the eyes of morality, but which was still very fatal to the peace of the rest of her life. A few weeks before Fabrice's escape, and on a day when all Parma had gone to the citadel gate to try to see in the courtyard the scaffold being erected in his honor, the duchess had shown Ludovic, become the factotum of her household, the secret by means of which one caused to come out of a small iron frame, very well hidden, one of the stones forming the bottom of the famous water reservoir of the Sanseverina palace, a work of the thirteenth century, and of which we have spoken. While Fabrice was sleeping in the trattoria of this little village, the duchess had Ludovic called; he thought her gone mad, so singular were the looks she cast at him.

--You must expect, she said to him, that I am going to give you some thousands of francs: well! no; I know you, you are a poet, you would soon have eaten that money. I give you the little estate of the Ricciarda, a league from Casal-Maggiore.

Ludovic threw himself at her feet, wild with joy, and protesting with heartfelt accent that it was not to gain money that he had helped save monsignore Fabrice; that he had always loved him in a particular way since he had had the honor of driving him once in his capacity as third coachman to Madame. When this man, who really had heart, believed he had occupied a great lady with himself long enough, he took leave; but she, with sparkling eyes, said to him:

--Stay.

She walked without a word in this tavern room, looking from time to time at Ludovic with incredible eyes. At last this man, seeing that this strange walk had no end, thought he ought to address his mistress.

--Madame has made me a gift so exaggerated, so far above all that a poor man such as I could imagine, so superior above all to the slight services I have had the honor to render, that I believe in conscience I cannot keep her estate of the Ricciarda. I have the honor to return this estate to Madame, and to beg her to grant me a pension of four hundred francs.

--How many times in your life, she said to him with the darkest pride, how many times have you heard it said that I deserted a project once stated by me?

After this sentence, the duchess walked again for some minutes; then, stopping suddenly, she cried:

--It is by chance and because he knew how to please that little girl, that Fabrice's life was saved! If he had not been amiable, he would have died. Can you deny me this? she said, advancing on Ludovic with eyes where the darkest fury blazed.

Ludovic stepped back a few paces and thought her mad, which gave him lively anxieties for the ownership of his estate of the Ricciarda.

--Well! resumed the duchess in the gentlest and gayest tone, and changed entirely, I want my good inhabitants of Sacca to have a mad day, and one they will long remember. You are going back to Sacca, have you any objection? Do you think you run some danger?

--Very little, Madame: none of the inhabitants of Sacca will ever say that I was of monsignore Fabrice's suite. Besides, if I dare say so to Madame, I burn to see my estate of the Ricciarda: it seems so droll to be a proprietor!

--Your gaiety pleases me. The farmer of the Ricciarda owes me, I think, three or four years of his rent: I make him a gift of half of what he owes me, and the other half of all these arrears, I give to you, but on this condition: you are to go to Sacca, you will say that the day after tomorrow is the feast of one of my patronesses, and, the evening following your arrival, you will have my castle illuminated in the most splendid fashion. Spare neither money nor trouble: think that the greatest happiness of my life is at stake. Long since I prepared this illumination; for more than three years I have gathered in the castle cellars everything that can serve this noble fete; I have given in deposit to the gardener all the pieces of fireworks necessary for a magnificent display: you will have it fired from the terrace overlooking the Po. I have eighty-nine great barrels of wine in my cellars, you will have eighty-nine wine fountains established in my park. If on the morrow there remains a bottle of wine not drunk, I shall say that you do not love Fabrice. When the wine fountains, the illumination and the fireworks are well underway, you will prudently slip away, for it is possible, and it is my hope, that at Parma all these fine things will seem an insolence.

--That is not only possible, that is sure; as it is certain also that the fiscal Rassi, who signed monsignore's sentence, will burst with rage. And even... added Ludovic timidly, if Madame wished to give more pleasure to her poor servant than to give him half the arrears of the Ricciarda, she would permit me to play a little joke on this Rassi...

--You are a brave man! cried the duchess with transport, but I absolutely forbid you to do anything to Rassi; I have the project of having him hanged in public, later. As for you, try not to get yourself arrested at Sacca, all would be spoiled if I lost you.

--I, Madame! When I shall have said that I am feting one of Madame's patronesses, if the police sent thirty gendarmes to disturb anything, be sure that before arriving at the red cross which is in the middle of the village, not one of them would be on horseback. They do not blow their noses with their elbows, no, the inhabitants of Sacca; all finished smugglers and who adore Madame.

--Finally, resumed the duchess with a singularly easy air, if I give wine to my brave people of Sacca, I want to flood the inhabitants of Parma; the same evening that my castle is illuminated, take the best horse in my stable, run to my palace, at Parma, and open the reservoir.

--Ah! the excellent idea Madame has! cried Ludovic, laughing like a madman, wine for the brave people of Sacca, water for the bourgeois of Parma who were so sure, the wretches, that monsignore Fabrice was going to be poisoned like poor L...

Ludovic's joy knew no end; the duchess looked with complaisance upon his mad laughs; he repeated ceaselessly:

--Wine for the people of Sacca and water for those of Parma! Madame knows doubtless better than I that when the reservoir was imprudently emptied, some twenty years ago, there was as much as a foot of water in several of the streets of Parma.

--And water for the people of Parma, replied the duchess laughing. The walk before the citadel would have been full of people if Fabrice's head had been cut off... Everyone calls him the great culprit... But, above all, do this with skill, that never any living soul may know that this inundation was made by you, nor ordered by me. Fabrice, the count himself, must ignore this mad jest... But I forgot the poor of Sacca; go write a letter to my man of business, which I will sign; you will tell him that for the feast of my holy patroness he distribute a hundred sequins to the poor of Sacca and that he obey you in everything for the illumination, the fireworks and the wine; that on the morrow above all there remain not a full bottle in my cellars.

--Madame's man of business will find himself embarrassed on but one point: since the five years Madame has had the castle, she has not left ten poor in Sacca.

--And water for the people of Parma! resumed the duchess singing. How will you execute this jest?

--My plan is all made: I leave Sacca about nine o'clock, at half past ten my horse is at the inn of the Three Ganaches, on the road from Casal-Maggiore and my estate of the Ricciarda; at eleven I am in my room at the palace, and at a quarter past eleven water for the people of Parma, and more than they could want, to drink to the health of the great culprit. Ten minutes later I leave the city by the Bologna road. I make, in passing, a deep bow to the citadel, which the courage of monsignore and the wit of Madame have just dishonored; I take a path in the country, well known to me, and I make my entry at the Ricciarda.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”