Part 37

Ludovic looked up at the duchess and was frightened: she was staring fixedly at the bare wall six paces from her, and, it must be admitted, her gaze was terrible. "Ah! my poor estate!" thought Ludovic; "the fact is, she is mad!" The duchess looked at him and guessed his thought.

--Ah! Monsieur Ludovic the great poet, you want a written deed of gift: run and fetch me a sheet of paper.

Ludovic did not wait to be told twice, and the duchess wrote with her own hand a long acknowledgment backdated by a year, whereby she declared having received from Ludovic San Micheli the sum of 80,000 francs, and having given him in pledge the estate of the Ricciarda. If after twelve months had elapsed the duchess had not returned the said 80,000 francs to Ludovic, the estate of the Ricciarda should remain his property.

"It is a fine thing," the duchess said to herself, "to give a faithful servant about a third of what remains for myself."

--Well now! said the duchess to Ludovic, after the reservoir joke, I give you only two days to enjoy yourself at Casal-Maggiore. For the sale to be valid, say it is a matter going back more than a year. Rejoin me at Belgirate, and that without the least delay; Fabrice will perhaps go to England, where you will follow him.

The next day at an early hour the duchess and Fabrice were at Belgirate.

They settled in that enchanting village; but a deadly sorrow awaited the duchess on that beautiful lake. Fabrice was entirely changed; from the first moments when he had awakened from his sleep, in some sort lethargic, after his flight, the duchess had perceived that something extraordinary was passing within him. The deep feeling he hid with much care was rather bizarre, it was nothing less than this: he was in despair at being out of prison. He took good care not to confess this cause of his sadness, for it would have brought on questions he did not wish to answer.

--But what! said the duchess, astonished, that horrible sensation when hunger forced you to nourish yourself, so as not to fall, with one of those detestable dishes supplied by the prison kitchen, that sensation, is there here some singular taste, am I poisoning myself at this moment, does not that sensation fill you with horror?

--I was thinking of death, Fabrice answered, as I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing which I thought to avoid well enough by my skill.

Thus what anxiety, what pain for the duchess! This adored being, singular, lively, original, was henceforth before her eyes given over to a deep reverie; he preferred solitude even to the pleasure of speaking of all things, and with an open heart, to the best friend he had in the world. Always he was good, attentive, grateful toward the duchess; he would, as of old, have given his life a hundred times for her; but his soul was elsewhere. They often made four or five leagues upon that sublime lake without exchanging a word. Conversation, the exchange of cold thoughts now possible between them, might perhaps have seemed agreeable to others: but they still remembered, the duchess above all, what their conversation had been before that fatal duel with Giletti which had separated them. Fabrice owed the duchess the history of the nine months passed in a horrible prison, and it turned out that of that sojourn he had only brief and incomplete words to utter.

"This is what had to happen sooner or later," the duchess said to herself with gloomy sadness. "Sorrow has aged me, or else he truly loves, and I have but the second place in his heart." Debased, cast down by this greatest of all possible sorrows, the duchess sometimes said to herself: "If heaven had willed that Ferrante had become quite mad or lacked courage, it seems to me I should be less unhappy." From that moment this half-remorse poisoned the esteem the duchess had for her own character. "Thus," she said to herself with bitterness, "I repent of a resolution taken: I am no longer a del Dongo!

"Heaven willed it," she resumed: "Fabrice is in love, and by what right should I wish him not to be in love? Has a single word of true love ever passed between us?"

This so reasonable idea robbed her of sleep, and at last, what showed that old age and the weakening of soul had come upon her with the prospect of an illustrious vengeance, she was a hundred times more unhappy at Belgirate than at Parma. As for the person who could cause Fabrice's strange reverie, it was hardly possible to have reasonable doubts: Clelia Conti, that so pious girl, had betrayed her father since she had consented to make the garrison drunk, and never did Fabrice speak of Clelia! "But," added the duchess, striking her breast with despair, "if the garrison had not been made drunk, all my inventions, all my cares became useless; thus it is she who saved him!"

It was with extreme difficulty that the duchess obtained from Fabrice details of the events of that night, "which," said the duchess to herself, "would formerly have formed between us the subject of an ever-renewed conversation! In those fortunate times, he would have talked a whole day, with a verve and gaiety ever renewed, about the least trifle I chanced to bring forward."

As all had to be foreseen, the duchess had established Fabrice at the port of Locarno, a Swiss town at the extremity of Lake Maggiore. Every day she went to fetch him by boat for long promenades on the lake. Well! once when she thought to go up to his rooms, she found his chamber hung with a quantity of views of the city of Parma which he had had brought from Milan or from Parma itself, a country he ought to have held in abhorrence. His little salon, changed into a workshop, was cluttered with all the apparatus of a watercolour painter, and she found him finishing a third view of the Farnese tower and the governor's palace.

--You lack only, she said to him with a piqued air, to make from memory the portrait of that amiable governor who only wished to poison you. But I think of it, the duchess continued, you ought to write him a letter of apology for having taken the liberty of escaping and bringing ridicule upon his citadel.

The poor woman did not believe she spoke so truly: hardly arrived in a place of safety, Fabrice's first care had been to write to General Fabio Conti a perfectly polite letter and in a certain sense quite ridiculous; he begged his pardon for having escaped, alleging as excuse that he might have believed some subordinate of the prison had been charged with administering poison to him. Little did it matter to him what he wrote; Fabrice hoped that Clelia's eyes would see this letter, and his face was covered with tears as he wrote it. He ended with a quite pleasing phrase: he dared to say that, finding himself at liberty, often it happened to him to regret his little chamber in the Farnese tower. This was the capital thought of his letter; he hoped Clelia would understand it. In his writing mood, and in the hope of being read by someone, Fabrice addressed thanks to Don Cesare, that good chaplain who had lent him books of theology. A few days later, Fabrice engaged the little bookseller of Locarno to make the journey to Milan, where this bookseller, friend of the celebrated bibliophile Reina, bought the most magnificent editions he could find of the works lent by Don Cesare. The good chaplain received these books and a fine letter which told him that, in moments of impatience, perhaps pardonable in a poor prisoner, one had charged the margins of these books with ridiculous notes. He was accordingly entreated to replace them in his library with the volumes which the liveliest gratitude permitted itself to present to him.

Fabrice was very good to give the simple name of notes to the infinite scrawlings with which he had charged the margins of an in-folio copy of the works of Saint Jerome. In the hope that he might send this book back to the good chaplain, and exchange it for another, he had written day by day in the margins an exact journal of all that befell him in prison; the great events were nothing other than ecstasies of divine love (this word divine replaced another which one dared not write). Sometimes this divine love led the prisoner to a deep despair, other times a voice heard through the air restored some hope and caused transports of happiness. All this, happily, was written with a prison ink, made of wine, chocolate and soot, and Don Cesare had but cast a glance at it as he replaced the volume of Saint Jerome in his library. Had he followed its margins, he would have seen that one day the prisoner, believing himself poisoned, congratulated himself on dying less than forty paces from what he had loved best in this world. But another eye than that of the good chaplain had read this page since the flight. This fine idea: To die near what one loves! expressed in a hundred different ways, was followed by a sonnet wherein one saw that the soul, separated after atrocious torments from that fragile body it had inhabited for three-and-twenty years, driven by that instinct of happiness natural to all that ever existed, would not mount to heaven to mingle with the choirs of angels as soon as it was free and in the case where the terrible judgment should grant it pardon for its sins, but that, happier after death than it had been during life, it would go a few paces from the prison, where so long it had groaned, to reunite with all it had loved on earth. And thus, said the last verse of the sonnet, I shall have found my paradise on earth.

Although Fabrice was spoken of in the citadel of Parma only as an infamous traitor who had violated the most sacred duties, nonetheless the good priest Don Cesare was delighted by the sight of the fine books an unknown person conveyed to him; for Fabrice had taken care to write only a few days after the sending, for fear his name might cause the whole parcel to be returned with indignation. Don Cesare spoke not of this attention to his brother, who flew into a rage at the mere name of Fabrice; but since the flight of the latter he had resumed all his former intimacy with his amiable niece; and as he had formerly taught her a few words of Latin, he showed her the fine works he received. Such had been the hope of the traveller. Suddenly Clelia blushed extremely; she had just recognised Fabrice's handwriting. Great very narrow pieces of yellow paper were placed as markers in divers places of the volume. And as it is true to say that amid the petty money interests, and the discoloured coldness of vulgar thoughts which fill our life, the steps inspired by a true passion rarely fail to produce their effect; as if a favourable divinity took care to lead them by the hand, Clelia, guided by this instinct and by the thought of a single thing in the world, asked her uncle to compare the old copy of Saint Jerome with the one he had just received. How tell her ravishment amid the gloomy sadness wherein Fabrice's absence had plunged her, when she found upon the margins of the old Saint Jerome the sonnet of which we have spoken, and the day-by-day memoirs of the love felt for her!

From the first day she knew the sonnet by heart; she sang it, leaning on her window, before the now solitary window where she had so often seen a little opening unmask itself in the blind. That blind had been taken down to be placed on the tribunal's desk and serve as evidence in a ridiculous suit that Rassi was conducting against Fabrice, accused of the crime of having escaped, or, as the fiscal himself laughing said, of having withdrawn from the clemency of a magnanimous prince!

Each of Clelia's steps was for her the object of a lively remorse, and since she had been unhappy the remorses were livelier. She sought to appease a little the reproaches she addressed herself, by recalling the vow never to see Fabrice again, made by her to the Madonna at the half-poisoning of the general, and since renewed each day.

Her father had been made ill by Fabrice's escape, and, moreover, he had been on the point of losing his place, when the prince, in his anger, dismissed all the jailers of the Farnese tower, and had them passed as prisoners into the town prison. The general had been saved in part by the intercession of Count Mosca, who preferred to see him shut up at the summit of his citadel than an active and intriguing rival in the court circles.

It was during the fifteen days that lasted the uncertainty relative to the disgrace of General Fabio Conti, really ill, that Clelia had the courage to execute the sacrifice she had announced to Fabrice. She had had the sense to be ill on the day of the general rejoicings, which was also that of the prisoner's flight, as the reader may perhaps remember; she was ill also the next day, and, in a word, so well conducted herself that, with the exception of the jailer Grillo, charged specially with the guard of Fabrice, no one had suspicions of her complicity, and Grillo held his tongue.

But as soon as Clelia had no more anxieties on this side, she was yet more cruelly agitated by her just remorses. "What reason in the world," she said to herself, "can diminish the crime of a daughter who betrays her father?"

One evening, after a day passed almost wholly in the chapel and in tears, she prayed her uncle, Don Cesare, to accompany her to the general, whose fits of fury frightened her the more in that he mixed into them at every turn imprecations against Fabrice, that abominable traitor.

Arrived in presence of her father, she had the courage to tell him that if always she had refused to give her hand to Marquis Crescenzi, it was that she felt no inclination for him, and that she was assured of not finding happiness in that union. At these words the general flew into a rage; and Clelia had much trouble to resume speech. She added that if her father, seduced by the great fortune of the marquis, believed he ought to give her the precise order to marry him, she was ready to obey. The general was quite astonished at this conclusion, which he was far from expecting; he ended, however, by rejoicing at it. "Thus," he said to his brother, "I shall not be reduced to lodging on a second floor, if that scamp Fabrice makes me lose my place by his ill conduct."

Count Mosca failed not to show himself profoundly scandalised at the escape of that good-for-nothing Fabrice, and repeated on occasion the phrase invented by Rassi upon the flat proceeding of that young man, moreover quite vulgar, who had withdrawn from the prince's clemency. This witty phrase, consecrated by good society, took no hold among the people. Left to their good sense, and while believing Fabrice quite guilty, they admired the resolution that had been needed to launch oneself from so high a wall. Not a being at court admired this courage. As for the police, much humiliated by this check, it had officially discovered that a troop of twenty soldiers gained by the money-distributions of the duchess, that woman so atrociously ungrateful, and whose name was no longer pronounced but with a sigh, had stretched to Fabrice four ladders tied together, and of forty-five feet in length each: Fabrice having thrown a rope which had been tied to the ladders had had only the quite vulgar merit of drawing these ladders to him. Some liberals known for their imprudence, and among others the physician C***, agent paid directly by the prince, added, but compromising themselves, that this atrocious police had had the barbarity to have shot eight of the unhappy soldiers who had facilitated the flight of that ungrateful Fabrice. Then he was blamed even by true liberals, as having by his imprudence caused the death of eight poor soldiers. Thus do little despotisms reduce to nothing the value of opinion 7.

CHAPTER XXIII

Amid this general outburst, the sole Archbishop Landriani showed himself faithful to the cause of his young friend; he dared repeat, even at the court of the princess, the maxim of law according to which, in every suit, one must reserve a pure ear from all prejudice to hear the justifications of an absent person.

From the day after Fabrice's escape, several persons had received a rather mediocre sonnet which celebrated that flight as one of the fine actions of the century, and compared Fabrice to an angel arriving on earth with wings outspread. The evening after next, all Parma repeated a sublime sonnet. It was Fabrice's monologue letting himself slide along the rope, and judging the diverse incidents of his life. This sonnet gave him rank in opinion by two magnificent verses; all connoisseurs recognised the style of Ferrante Palla.

But here I should need to seek the epic style: where find colours to paint the torrents of indignation which suddenly submerged all well-thinking hearts, when there was learned the frightful insolence of that illumination of the castle of Sacca? There was but one cry against the duchess; even true liberals found that it was to compromise in a barbarous fashion the poor suspects held in the diverse prisons, and to exasperate uselessly the sovereign's heart. Count Mosca declared that there remained but one resource to the duchess's old friends, which was to forget her. The concert of execration was therefore unanimous: a stranger passing through the town would have been struck by the energy of public opinion. But in this country where one knows how to appreciate the pleasure of vengeance, the illumination of Sacca and the admirable fete given in the park to more than six thousand peasants had an immense success. Everyone repeated at Parma that the duchess had had a thousand sequins distributed to her peasants; they explained thus the rather harsh reception given to some thirty gendarmes that the police had had the silliness to send into that little village, thirty-six hours after the sublime evening and the general drunkenness that followed it. The gendarmes, received with stones, had taken to flight, and two of them, fallen from horse, had been thrown into the Po.

As for the breaking of the great water reservoir of the Sanseverina palace, it had passed almost unnoticed: it was during the night that some streets had been more or less flooded; the next day one would have said it had rained. Ludovic had taken care to break the panes of a palace window, so that the entry of thieves was explained.

There had even been found a little ladder. Only Count Mosca recognised the genius of his friend.

Fabrice was perfectly decided to return to Parma as soon as he could; he sent Ludovic to carry a long letter to the archbishop, and this faithful servant returned to post at the first village of Piedmont, at Sannazaro, west of Pavia, an epistle in Latin which the worthy prelate addressed to his young protege. We shall add a detail which, like several others no doubt, will seem long in countries where one no longer needs precautions. The name of Fabrice del Dongo was never written; all letters destined for him were addressed to Ludovic San Micheli, at Locarno in Switzerland, or at Belgirate in Piedmont. The envelope was made of a coarse paper, the seal ill-applied, the address barely legible, and sometimes ornamented with recommendations worthy of a cook; all the letters were dated from Naples six days before the true date.

From the Piedmontese village of Sannazaro, near Pavia, Ludovic returned in all haste to Parma: he was charged with a mission to which Fabrice attached the greatest importance; it was nothing less than to convey to Clelia Conti a silk handkerchief on which was printed a sonnet of Petrarch. It is true that a word was changed in that sonnet; Clelia found it on her table two days after having received the thanks of Marquis Crescenzi who called himself the happiest of men, and it is needless to say what impression this mark of a constantly enduring remembrance produced upon her heart.

Ludovic was to seek to procure all possible details on what passed in the citadel. It was he who learned for Fabrice the sad news that the marriage of Marquis Crescenzi seemed henceforth a decided thing; scarcely a day passed without his giving a fete to Clelia, within the citadel. A decisive proof of the marriage is that this marquis, immensely rich and consequently very avaricious, as is the custom among the opulent folk of northern Italy, was making immense preparations, and yet he was marrying a dowerless girl. It is true that the vanity of General Fabio Conti, much offended by this remark, the first that had presented itself to the mind of all his compatriots, had just bought an estate of more than 300,000 francs, and this estate, he who had nothing, he had paid for in cash, apparently with the marquis's money. Also the general had declared that he gave this estate in marriage to his daughter. But the costs of deed and others, amounting to more than 12,000 francs, seemed a quite ridiculous expense to Marquis Crescenzi, eminently logical. For his part he was having made at Lyons magnificent hangings of colours, very well arranged and calculated for the pleasure of the eye, by the celebrated Pallagi, painter of Bologna. These hangings, each of which contained a part taken from the arms of the Crescenzi family, which, as all the world knows, descends from the famous Crescentius, consul of Rome in 985, were to furnish the seventeen salons forming the ground floor of the marquis's palace. The hangings, clocks and lustres delivered at Parma cost more than 350,000 francs; the price of the new mirrors, added to those the house already possessed, rose to 200,000 francs. With the exception of two salons, celebrated works of the Parmesan, the great painter of the country after the divine Correggio, all the rooms of the first and second floors were now occupied by the celebrated painters of Florence, Rome and Milan, who adorned them with fresco paintings. Fokelberg, the great Swedish sculptor, Tenerani of Rome, and Marchesi of Milan, had for a year been working at ten bas-reliefs representing as many fine actions of Crescentius, that truly great man. Most of the ceilings, painted in fresco, offered also some allusion to his life. One generally admired the ceiling where Hayez, of Milan, had represented Crescentius received in the Elysian Fields by Francesco Sforza; Lorenzo the Magnificent, King Robert, the tribune Cola di Rienzi, Machiavelli, Dante and the other great men of the Middle Ages. Admiration for these elect souls is supposed to make epigram against those in power.

All these magnificent details occupied exclusively the attention of the nobility and bourgeoisie of Parma, and pierced the heart of our hero when he read them related, with a naive admiration, in a long letter of more than twenty pages which Ludovic had dictated to a customs officer of Casal-Maggiore.

"And I am so poor!" said Fabrice to himself, "four thousand livres of income in all and for all! it is truly an insolence in me to dare to be in love with Clelia Conti, for whom all these miracles are wrought."

“Stories of the world, in your language.”