Part 43

Fabrice only partly guessed Clelia's misfortunes; she knew that her father, fallen into deep disgrace, could not return to Parma and reappear at court (a thing without which life was impossible for him) except on the day of her marriage to the Marchese di Crescenzi; she wrote to her father that she desired this marriage. The general was then refugeed at Turin, and sick with grief. In truth, the recoil of this great resolution had been to age her ten years.

She had very well discovered that Fabrice had a window opposite the Palazzo Contarini; but she had had the misfortune to look at him only once; as soon as she caught sight of a turn of the head or a bearing somewhat resembling his, she closed her eyes instantly. Her deep piety and her confidence in the aid of the Madonna were henceforth her only resources. She had the sorrow of not esteeming her father: the character of her future husband seemed to her perfectly flat and on a level with the sentiments of high society; finally, she adored a man she was never to see again, and who nevertheless had claims upon her. This combination of destiny seemed to her perfect unhappiness, and we shall avow that she was right. It would have been necessary, after her marriage, to go and live two hundred leagues from Parma.

Fabrice knew Clelia's profound modesty; he knew how much any extraordinary undertaking, capable of becoming an anecdote if discovered, was sure to displease her. Nevertheless, driven to extremity by the excess of his melancholy and by those looks of Clelia which constantly turned away from him, he dared to try to win over two domestics of Madame Contarini, his aunt. One day, at nightfall, Fabrice, dressed like a country bourgeois, presented himself at the palace door, where one of the bribed domestics awaited him; he announced himself as arriving from Turin, and having letters for Clelia from her father. The domestic carried his message, and had him mount to a vast antechamber on the first floor of the palace. It was in this place that Fabrice perhaps spent the quarter of an hour of his life most full of anxiety. If Clelia repulsed him, there was no longer any hope of peace for him. "In order to cut short the importunate attentions with which my new dignity overwhelms me, I shall take from the Church a bad priest, and, under an assumed name, I shall go and take refuge in some charterhouse." At length the domestic came to tell him that Mademoiselle Clelia Conti was disposed to receive him. Courage quite failed our hero; he was on the point of falling from fear as he mounted the staircase to the second floor.

Clelia was seated before a small table bearing a single candle. Scarcely had she recognized Fabrice under his disguise, than she took flight and went to hide at the far end of the salon.

--"So this is how you are careful of my salvation," she cried to him, hiding her face with her hands. "You know it, however, when my father was on the point of perishing by poison, I made a vow to the Madonna never to see you. I failed in that vow only on that day, the most unhappy of my life, when I believed in conscience I ought to withdraw you from death. It is already much that, by a forced and no doubt criminal interpretation, I consent to hear you."

This last phrase astonished Fabrice so much, that he needed some seconds to rejoice at it. He had expected the liveliest anger, and to see Clelia flee; at length presence of mind returned to him and he extinguished the single candle. Although he believed he had well understood Clelia's orders, he was all trembling as he advanced toward the end of the salon where she had taken refuge behind a sofa; he knew not whether he would not offend her by kissing her hand; she was all trembling with love, and threw herself into his arms.

--"Dear Fabrice," she said to him, "how long you delayed in coming! I can speak to you but an instant, for it is doubtless a great sin; and when I promised never to see you, doubtless I also meant to promise never to speak to you. But how could you so barbarously pursue the idea of vengeance which my poor father conceived? for after all, it was he first who was almost poisoned to facilitate your flight. Ought you not to have done something for me, who exposed my good name so much in order to save you? And besides, here you are quite bound to sacred orders; you could no longer marry me even if I found a means to send away that odious marchese. And then how did you dare, on the evening of the procession, to pretend to see me in broad daylight, and thus, in the most flagrant manner, violate the holy promise I made to the Madonna?"

Fabrice pressed her in his arms, beside himself with surprise and happiness.

A conversation which began with this quantity of things to say could not end for a long time. Fabrice told her the exact truth about her father's exile; the duchess had in no way meddled with it, for the excellent reason that she had not for an instant believed the idea of the poison belonged to General Conti; she had always thought it was a stroke of wit from the Raversi faction, who wished to drive out Count Mosca. This historical truth, long developed, rendered Clelia very happy; she was desolate to have to hate someone who belonged to Fabrice. Now she no longer looked upon the duchess with a jealous eye.

The happiness this evening established lasted but a few days.

The excellent Don Cesare arrived from Turin; and, drawing boldness from the perfect honesty of his heart, he dared to have himself presented to the duchess. After asking her for her word not to abuse the confidence he was about to place in her, he avowed that his brother, abused by a false point of honor, and who had believed himself braved and ruined in opinion by Fabrice's flight, had thought he ought to avenge himself.

Don Cesare had not spoken two minutes, when his cause was won: his perfect virtue had touched the duchess, who was not accustomed to such a spectacle. He pleased her as a novelty.

--"Hasten the marriage of the general's daughter with Marchese Crescenzi, and I give you my word that I shall do all in my power so that the general be received as if he were returning from a journey. I shall invite him to dinner; are you satisfied? Doubtless there will be coldness at the beginning, and the general must not hasten to ask for his post of governor of the citadel. But you know I have friendship for the marchese, and I shall keep no grudge against his father-in-law."

Armed with these words, Don Cesare came to tell his niece that she held her father's life in her hands, he being sick with despair. For several months he had appeared at no court.

Clelia wished to go see her father, refugeed, under an assumed name, in a village near Turin; for he had imagined that the court of Parma was demanding his extradition from that of Turin, to bring him to trial. She found him sick and almost mad. That very evening she wrote Fabrice a letter of eternal rupture. On receiving this letter, Fabrice, who displayed a character quite similar to that of his mistress, went to retire in the convent of Velleja, situated in the mountains ten leagues from Parma. Clelia wrote him a letter of ten pages: she had once sworn to him never to marry the marchese without his consent; now she asked it of him, and Fabrice granted it her from the depths of his retreat at Velleja, by a letter filled with the purest friendship.

On receiving this letter, whose friendship (it must be owned) irritated her, Clelia herself fixed the day of her marriage, whose festivities came further to increase the brilliance with which the court of Parma shone that winter.

Ranuce-Ernest V was avaricious at bottom; but he was madly in love, and he hoped to fix the duchess at his court: he begged his mother to accept a very considerable sum, and to give fetes. The grand mistress knew how to draw admirable profit from this increase of wealth; the fetes of Parma that winter recalled the fine days of the court of Milan and of that amiable prince Eugene, viceroy of Italy, whose goodness leaves so long a memory.

The duties of coadjutor had recalled him to Parma but he declared that, for motives of piety, he would continue his retreat in the small apartment which his protector, Monsignor Landriani, had forced him to take in the archiepiscopal palace; and he went to shut himself up there, followed by a single domestic. Thus he attended none of the brilliant fetes of the court, which won him at Parma and in his future diocese an immense reputation for sanctity. By an unexpected effect of this retreat inspired in Fabrice solely by his deep and hopeless sadness, the good Archbishop Landriani, who had always loved him, and who, in fact, had had the idea of making him coadjutor, conceived a little jealousy against him. The archbishop rightly believed he ought to go to all the court fetes, as is the custom in Italy. On these occasions, he wore his grand ceremonial costume, which, with little difference, is the same as that one saw him in within the choir of his cathedral. The hundreds of domestics gathered in the colonnaded antechamber of the palace did not fail to rise and ask his blessing of Monsignor, who deigned to stop and give it to them. It was in one of these moments of solemn silence that Monsignor Landriani heard a voice saying:

--"Our archbishop goes to the ball, and Monsignore del Dongo does not leave his room!"

From that moment ended at the archiepiscopal palace the immense favor Fabrice had enjoyed there; but he could fly on his own wings. All this conduct, which had been inspired only by the despair into which Clelia's marriage plunged him, passed for the effect of a simple and sublime piety, and the devout read, as a book of edification, the translation of the genealogy of his family, where the most foolish vanity showed through. The booksellers made a lithographed edition of his portrait, which was carried off in a few days, and above all by common people; the engraver, through ignorance, had reproduced around Fabrice's portrait several of the ornaments which should be found only on bishops' portraits, and to which a coadjutor could not pretend. The archbishop saw one of these portraits, and his fury knew no bounds; he had Fabrice called, and addressed to him the hardest things, and in terms which passion sometimes rendered very coarse. Fabrice, as may well be believed, had no effort to make to conduct himself as Fenelon would have in like circumstance; he listened to the archbishop with all possible humility and respect; and, when the prelate had ceased speaking, he told him the whole story of the translation of that genealogy made by order of Count Mosca, at the time of his first imprisonment. It had been published for worldly ends, and had always seemed to him little befitting a man of his state. As for the portrait, he had been perfectly unconnected with the second edition, as with the first; and the bookseller having sent to the archiepiscopal palace, during his retreat, twenty-four copies of this second edition, he had sent his domestic to buy a twenty-fifth; and, having learned by this means that this portrait sold for thirty sous, he had sent a hundred francs as payment for the twenty-four copies.

All these reasons, though exposed in the most reasonable tone by a man who had quite other griefs in his heart, drove the archbishop's anger to distraction; he went so far as to accuse Fabrice of hypocrisy.

"That is what comes of common people," said Fabrice to himself, "even when they have wit!"

He then had a more serious care; it was his aunt's letters, who absolutely required that he come take up his apartment in the Sanseverina palace again, or at least that he come see her sometimes. There Fabrice was certain to hear spoken of the splendid fetes given by Marchese Crescenzi on the occasion of his marriage: now, this was what he was not sure he could bear without making a spectacle of himself.

When the marriage ceremony took place, it was a full eight days that Fabrice had vowed himself to the most complete silence, after ordering his domestic and the people of the archiepiscopal palace with whom he had dealings never to address a word to him.

Monsignore Landriani having learned this affected behavior, had Fabrice called much more often than usual, and wished to have with him very long conversations; he even obliged him to conferences with certain country canons, who pretended the archiepiscopal palace had acted against their privileges. Fabrice took all these things with the perfect indifference of a man who has other thoughts. "It would be better for me," he thought, "to make myself a Carthusian; I should suffer less among the rocks of Velleja."

He went to see his aunt, and could not hold back his tears in embracing her. She found him so changed, his eyes, still enlarged by extreme thinness, had so much the air of starting from his head, and he himself had so puny and unhappy an appearance, with his little shabby black habit of a simple priest, that at this first sight the duchess, she also, could not hold back her tears; but an instant after, when she had said to herself that all this change in the appearance of this handsome young man was caused by Clelia's marriage, she had feelings almost equal in vehemence to those of the archbishop, though more skillfully contained. She had the barbarity to speak at length of certain picturesque details which had marked the charming fetes given by Marchese Crescenzi. Fabrice did not answer; but his eyes closed a little by a convulsive movement, and he became still paler than he was, which at first would have seemed impossible. In these moments of lively pain, his paleness took a greenish tint.

Count Mosca arrived, and what he saw, and which seemed to him incredible, cured him at last completely of the jealousy which Fabrice had never ceased to inspire in him. This able man employed the most delicate and ingenious turns to seek to give Fabrice back some interest in the things of this world. The count had always had much esteem and enough friendship for him; this friendship, no longer counterbalanced by jealousy, became in this moment almost devoted. "Indeed, he has well bought his fine fortune," he said to himself, recapitulating his misfortunes. Under pretext of showing him the painting of the Parmigiano which the prince had sent to the duchess, the count took Fabrice aside:

--"Ah there! my friend, let us speak as men: can I be good for anything to you? You must not fear questions on my part; but finally, can money be of use to you, can power serve you? Speak, I am at your orders; if you prefer to write, write to me."

Fabrice embraced him tenderly and spoke of the painting.

--"Your conduct is the masterpiece of the finest policy," the count said to him, returning to the light tone of conversation; "you are securing yourself a very agreeable future, the prince respects you, the people venerate you, your little shabby black habit makes bad nights for Monsignore Landriani. I have some habit of affairs, and I can swear to you that I should not know what counsel to give you to perfect what I see. Your first step in the world at twenty-five years of age makes you attain perfection. Much is spoken of you at court; and do you know to what you owe this distinction unique at your age? to the little shabby black habit. The duchess and I dispose, as you know, of the old house of Petrarch on that fine hill in the midst of the forest, in the environs of the Po: if ever you are weary of the little ill turns of envy, I thought you might be the successor of Petrarch, whose renown will increase yours."

The count put his mind to the torture to bring a smile upon that anchorite face, but could not succeed. What made the change more striking, is that before these last times, if Fabrice's face had a fault, it was to present sometimes, out of place, the expression of voluptuousness and gaiety.

The count did not let him depart without telling him that, despite his state of retreat, there would perhaps be affectation in not appearing at court the following Saturday, it was the princess's birthday. This word was a dagger stroke for Fabrice. "Great God!" he thought, "what have I come to do in this palace!" He could not think without shuddering of the encounter he might have at court. This idea absorbed all others; he thought that the only resource left him was to arrive at the palace at the precise moment when the salon doors would be opened.

In fact, the name of Monsignore del Dongo was among the first announced at the grand gala evening, and the princess received him with all possible distinction. Fabrice's eyes were fixed on the clock, and, at the instant it marked the twentieth minute of his presence in that salon, he was rising to take leave, when the prince entered his mother's apartment. After paying his court to her some instants, Fabrice was approaching the door by a skillful maneuver, when there burst at his expense one of those little nothings of court which the grand mistress knew so well how to arrange: the chamberlain on duty ran after him to tell him he had been designated to make the prince's whist. At Parma, this is a signal honor and far above the rank the coadjutor occupied in the world. To make the whist was an honor marked even for the archbishop. At the chamberlain's word, Fabrice felt his heart pierced, and though a mortal enemy of all public scene, he was on the point of going to tell him he had been seized with a sudden dizziness; but he thought he would be exposed to questions and compliments of condolence, yet more intolerable than the play. That day he had a horror of speaking.

Happily the general of the minor friars was among the great personages who had come to pay court to the princess. This monk, very learned, worthy emulus of the Fontana and the Duvoisin, had placed himself in a remote corner of the salon: Fabrice took his stand before him so as not to perceive the entrance door, and spoke theology to him. But he could not prevent his ear from hearing announced Mr. the Marchese and Madame the Marchesa Crescenzi. Fabrice, contrary to his expectation, felt a violent movement of anger.

--"If I were Borso Valserra," he said to himself (it was one of the generals of the first Sforza), "I would go stab this heavy marchese, precisely with that little ivory-handled dagger Clelia gave me that happy day, and I would teach him whether he ought to have the insolence to present himself with that marchesa in a place where I am!"

His physiognomy changed so much, that the general of the minor friars said to him:

--"Is Your Excellency feeling unwell?"

--"I have a furious headache... these lights hurt me... and I stay only because I was named for the prince's whist party."

At this word, the general of the minor friars, who was a bourgeois, was so disconcerted, that, knowing no longer what to do, he began to bow to Fabrice, who, for his part, much more troubled than the general of the minors, fell to speaking with a strange volubility; he understood that a great silence was forming behind him and did not wish to look. Suddenly a bow struck a music desk; they played a ritornelle, and the celebrated Madame P... sang that once so celebrated air of Cimarosa:

Quelle pupille tenere!

Fabrice held firm through the first measures, but soon his anger vanished, and he felt an extreme need to shed tears. "Great God!" he said to himself, "what a ridiculous scene! and with my habit still on!" He thought it wiser to speak of himself.

--"These excessive headaches, when I contradict them, as this evening," he said to the general of the minor friars, "end in fits of tears which might give food to slander in a man of our state; thus I pray Your Most Illustrious Reverence to permit me to weep while looking at you, and to pay it no further attention."

--"Our father provincial of Catanzara is afflicted with the same indisposition," said the general of the minors.

And he began in a low voice an endless story.

The ridiculousness of this story, which had brought in the detail of the evening meals of that provincial father, made Fabrice smile, which had not happened to him for a long time; but soon he ceased to listen to the general of the minors. Madame P... was singing, with divine talent, an air of Pergolesi (the princess loved old-fashioned music). A little noise arose three steps from Fabrice; for the first time that evening he turned his eyes away. The armchair which had just caused this little creaking on the parquet was occupied by the Marchesa Crescenzi, whose eyes filled with tears met full those of Fabrice, which were in little better state. The marchesa lowered her head; Fabrice continued to look at her some seconds: he was making acquaintance with that head laden with diamonds; but his glance expressed anger and disdain. Then, saying to himself: "And my eyes shall never look upon you," he turned back toward his father general, and said to him:

--"Here is my indisposition taking me more strongly than ever."

In fact, Fabrice wept hot tears for more than half an hour. Happily, a symphony of Mozart, horribly mangled, as is the custom in Italy, came to his aid and helped him dry his tears.

He held firm and did not turn his eyes toward the Marchesa Crescenzi; but Madame P... sang again, and Fabrice's soul, relieved by tears, arrived at a state of perfect rest. Then life appeared to him in a new light. "Do I pretend," he said to himself, "to be able to forget her entirely from the first moments? would that be possible for me?" He arrived at this idea: "Can I be more unhappy than I have been for two months? and if nothing can increase my anguish, why resist the pleasure of seeing her. She has forgotten her oaths, she is fickle: are not all women so? But who could refuse her a celestial beauty? She has a glance which ravishes me in ecstasy, while I am obliged to make an effort upon myself to look at the women passed off as the most beautiful! well then! why not let myself be ravished? it will be at least a moment of respite."

Fabrice had some knowledge of men, but no experience of passions, otherwise he would have said to himself that this pleasure of a moment, to which he was about to yield, would render useless all the efforts he had been making for two months to forget Clelia.

This poor woman had come to this fete only forced by her husband; she wished at least to withdraw after half an hour, under pretext of health, but the marchese declared to her that to have her carriage brought forward to depart, when many carriages were still arriving, would be a thing quite out of usage, and which might even be interpreted as an indirect criticism of the fete given by the princess.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”