Part 45

Fabrice had no mind to obey: the mere letter he wrote every day to the count or the countess seemed to him an almost unbearable chore. He will be forgiven when it is known that a whole year passed thus, without his being able to address a single word to the marchioness. All his attempts to establish some correspondence had been repelled with horror. The habitual silence which, out of boredom with life, Fabrice maintained everywhere, except in the exercise of his duties and at court, joined to the perfect purity of his morals, had placed him in such extraordinary veneration that he finally resolved to obey his aunt's advice.

The prince has such veneration for you, she wrote to him, that you must soon expect a disgrace; he will heap upon you marks of inattention, and the atrocious contempt of the courtiers will follow his own. These little despots, honest though they may be, are changeable as fashion, and for the same reason: boredom. You can find strength against the sovereign's caprice only in preaching. You improvise so well in verse! try to speak for half an hour on religion; you will utter heresies at first; but pay a learned and discreet theologian who will attend your sermons and warn you of your errors, and you will repair them the next day.

The kind of unhappiness borne in the soul by a thwarted love makes all things requiring attention and action become an atrocious burden. But Fabrice told himself that his credit with the people, if he acquired any, might one day be useful to his aunt and to the count, for whom his veneration increased every day, as affairs taught him to know the wickedness of men. He determined to preach, and his success, prepared by his thinness and his threadbare habit, was without example. There was found in his discourses a perfume of deep sadness, which, united to his charming figure and to the accounts of the high favor he enjoyed at court, won all women's hearts. They invented that he had been one of the bravest captains of Napoleon's army. Soon this absurd fact was beyond doubt. Places were kept in the churches where he was to preach; the poor established themselves there by speculation as early as five in the morning.

The success was such that Fabrice finally had the idea which changed everything in his soul, that, were it only from simple curiosity, the Marquise Crescenzi might well one day come to attend one of his sermons. Suddenly the delighted public perceived that his talent redoubled; he permitted himself, when moved, images whose boldness would have made the most practiced orators tremble; sometimes, forgetting himself, he gave way to moments of passionate inspiration, and the whole audience melted in tears. But it was in vain that his aggrottato eye sought among so many faces turned toward the pulpit the one whose presence would have been for him so great an event.

"But if ever I have this happiness," he said to himself, "either I shall fall ill, or I shall be utterly at a loss." To guard against this latter inconvenience, he had composed a sort of tender and passionate prayer which he always placed in his pulpit, on a stool; he had the plan of beginning to read this piece, if ever the marchioness's presence should put him beyond the power of finding a word.

He learned one day, from those of the marquis's domestics who were in his pay, that orders had been given to prepare for the next day the box of the Casa Crescenzi at the grand theatre. It was a year since the marchioness had appeared at any spectacle, and it was a tenor who was all the rage and filled the house every evening who made her break her habits. Fabrice's first movement was one of extreme joy. "At last I shall be able to see her for a whole evening! They say she is very pale." And he tried to picture to himself what that charming head could be, with colors half effaced by the struggles of the soul.

His friend Ludovic, quite dismayed at what he called his master's folly, found, but with much difficulty, a box in the fourth row, almost opposite that of the marchioness. An idea occurred to Fabrice: "I hope to give her the idea of coming to the sermon, and I shall choose a very small church, so as to be able to see her well." Fabrice usually preached at three o'clock. From the morning of the day when the marchioness was to go to the spectacle, he had it announced that a duty of his office detaining him at the archbishop's palace the whole day, he would preach exceptionally at half past eight in the evening, in the small church of Santa Maria della Visitazione, situated precisely opposite one of the wings of the Crescenzi palace. Ludovic presented on his behalf an enormous quantity of wax tapers to the nuns of the Visitation, with the request to illuminate their church by daylight. He had a whole company of guard grenadiers, and a sentry was placed, bayonet at the muzzle of his musket, before each chapel, to prevent thefts.

The sermon was announced only for half past eight, and at two o'clock the church being entirely full, one may imagine the uproar there was in the solitary street dominated by the noble architecture of the Crescenzi palace. Fabrice had had it announced that, in honor of Our Lady of Pity, he would preach on the pity a generous soul ought to have for an unhappy man, even were he guilty.

Disguised with all possible care, Fabrice gained his box at the theatre at the opening of the doors, and when nothing was yet lit. The spectacle began toward eight o'clock, and a few minutes after he had that joy which no mind can conceive if it has not felt it, he saw the door of the Crescenzi box open; shortly after, the marchioness entered; he had not seen her so well since the day she had given him her fan. Fabrice thought he would suffocate with joy; he felt such extraordinary motions that he said to himself: "Perhaps I am going to die! What a charming way to end this so sad life! Perhaps I shall fall into that box; the faithful gathered at the Visitation will not see me arrive, and tomorrow they will learn that their future archbishop forgot himself in an Opera box, and moreover, disguised as a servant and covered with a livery! Farewell all my reputation! And what is my reputation to me!"

However, toward a quarter to nine, Fabrice made an effort upon himself; he left his box in the fourth tier and had all the trouble in the world to reach on foot the place where he was to leave off his half-livery and take a more suitable garment. It was only toward nine o'clock that he arrived at the Visitation, in a state of paleness and weakness such that the rumor spread in the church that M. the coadjutor would not be able to preach that evening. One may judge of the care the nuns lavished upon him, at the grille of their inner parlor where he had taken refuge. These ladies talked much; Fabrice asked to be alone a few moments, then he ran to his pulpit. One of his aides-de-camp had announced to him toward three o'clock that the church of the Visitation was entirely full but of people belonging to the lowest class and apparently attracted by the spectacle of the illumination. On entering the pulpit, Fabrice was agreeably surprised to find all the chairs occupied by young men of fashion and by persons of the highest distinction.

A few phrases of excuse began his sermon and were received with compressed cries of admiration. Then came the passionate description of the unhappy man for whom one must have pity in order worthily to honor the Madonna of Pity, who herself suffered so much on earth. The orator was much moved; there were moments when he could scarcely pronounce the words so as to be heard in all parts of that small church. In the eyes of all the women and of a good number of the men, he had the air himself of the unhappy man for whom one must take pity, so extreme was his paleness. A few minutes after the excusing phrases with which he had begun his discourse, it was perceived that he was out of his usual composure: he was found that evening of a deeper and tenderer sadness than customary. Once he was seen with tears in his eyes: instantly there rose in the audience a general and so noisy sob that the sermon was quite interrupted.

This first interruption was followed by ten others; cries of admiration were uttered, there were bursts of tears; one heard at every instant cries such as: Ah! holy Madonna! Ah! great God! The emotion was so general and so invincible in that select public, that no one was ashamed to utter cries, and those carried away by them seemed not ridiculous to their neighbors.

At the pause which it is customary to take in the middle of the sermon, Fabrice was told that absolutely no one remained at the spectacle; a single lady was still seen in her box, the Marquise Crescenzi. During this moment of rest there was suddenly heard much noise in the hall: it was the faithful voting a statue to M. the coadjutor. His success in the second part of the discourse was so mad and worldly, the bursts of Christian contrition were so entirely replaced by quite profane cries of admiration, that he thought fit to address, on leaving the pulpit, a sort of reprimand to the listeners. Whereupon all went out at once with a movement that had something singular and stiff; and, on reaching the street, all began to applaud furiously and to cry:

--Long live del Dongo!

Fabrice consulted his watch hastily, and ran to a small grated window which lit the narrow passage of the organ inside the convent. Out of politeness toward the incredible and unusual crowd that filled the street, the porter of the Crescenzi palace had placed a dozen torches in those iron hands which one sees projecting from the front walls of palaces built in the Middle Ages. After a few minutes, and long before the cries had ceased, the event Fabrice awaited with so much anxiety arrived, the marchioness's carriage returning from the spectacle appeared in the street; the coachman was obliged to stop, and it was only at the slowest pace, and by dint of shouting, that the carriage could gain the door.

The marchioness had been touched by the sublime music, as unhappy hearts are, but far more by the perfect solitude of the spectacle when she learned its cause. In the middle of the second act, and the admirable tenor being on stage, even the people of the pit had suddenly deserted their places to go try their fortune and attempt to enter the church of the Visitation. The marchioness, seeing herself stopped by the crowd before her door, melted in tears. "I had not made a bad choice!" she said to herself.

But precisely because of that moment of tenderness she resisted firmly the instances of the marquis and of all the friends of the house, who could not conceive that she should not go see so astonishing a preacher. "Why, he even surpasses the best tenor in Italy!" it was said. "If I see him, I am lost!" said the marchioness to herself.

It was in vain that Fabrice, whose talent seemed more brilliant each day, preached again several times in that same small church, neighbor to the Crescenzi palace; never did he catch sight of Clelia, who indeed at last took umbrage at that affectation of coming to trouble her solitary street, after having already banished him from her garden.

In scanning the faces of the women who listened to him, Fabrice had for some time remarked a small, very pretty dark face, whose eyes shot flames. Those magnificent eyes were ordinarily bathed in tears by the eighth or tenth phrase of the sermon. When Fabrice was obliged to say things long and wearisome to himself, he rather willingly rested his gaze upon that head whose youth pleased him. He learned that this young person was called Anetta Marini, only daughter and heiress of the richest cloth-merchant of Parma, dead some months before.

Soon the name of this Anetta Marini, daughter of the cloth-merchant, was on every lip; she had become desperately in love with Fabrice. When the famous sermons began, her marriage was settled with Giacomo Rassi, eldest son of the minister of justice, who was not displeasing to her; but scarcely had she heard Monsignore Fabrice twice, than she declared she would marry no more; and, when asked the cause of so singular a change, she answered that it was not worthy of an honest girl to marry a man while feeling desperately enamored of another. Her family first sought without success who this other might be.

But the burning tears Anetta shed at the sermon put them on the track of the truth; her mother and uncles having asked her if she loved Monsignore Fabrice, she answered with boldness that, since the truth was discovered, she would not degrade herself by a lie; she added that, having no hope of marrying the man she adored, she wished at least no longer to have her eyes offended by the ridiculous figure of the contino Rassi. This ridicule cast upon the son of a man pursued by the envy of all the bourgeoisie became, in two days, the talk of the whole town. Anetta Marini's answer seemed charming, and everyone repeated it. It was spoken of at the Crescenzi palace as it was everywhere.

Clelia took good care not to open her mouth on such a subject in her salon; but she questioned her chambermaid, and, the following Sunday, after hearing mass at the chapel of her palace, she had her chambermaid mount her carriage, and went to seek a second mass at Mlle Marini's parish. There she found gathered all the fine gentlemen of the town attracted by the same motive; these gentlemen stood near the door. Soon, at the great stir made among them, the marchioness understood that this Mlle Marini was entering the church; she found herself very well placed to see her, and, despite her piety, gave little attention to the mass. Clelia found in this bourgeois beauty a little decided air which, in her opinion, could at most suit a woman married several years. Otherwise she was admirably set off in her small figure, and her eyes, as they say in Lombardy, seemed to hold conversation with the things they looked upon. The marchioness fled before the end of the mass.

From the next day, the friends of the Crescenzi house, who came every evening to spend the evening, related a new ridiculous trait of the Anetta Marini. As her mother, fearing some folly on her part, left only a little money at her disposal, Anetta had gone to offer a magnificent diamond ring, a gift from her father, to the celebrated Hayez, then at Parma for the salons of the Crescenzi palace, and to ask him for the portrait of M. del Dongo; but she wished this portrait to be clad simply in black, and not in priest's attire. Now, the evening before, little Anetta's mother had been much surprised, and still more scandalized, to find in her daughter's chamber a magnificent portrait of Fabrice del Dongo, surrounded by the finest frame that had been gilded at Parma for twenty years.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Carried away by events, we have not had time to sketch the comic race of courtiers who swarm at the court of Parma and made droll comments upon the events we have related. What renders in that country a little nobleman, furnished with his three or four thousand livres of income, worthy to figure in black stockings at the prince's levees, is first never to have read Voltaire and Rousseau: a condition not hard to fulfill. It was then needful to know how to speak with tenderness of the sovereign's cold, or of the last mineralogy case he had received from Saxony. If after that one missed mass not a single day of the year, if one could count among one's intimate friends two or three fat monks, the prince deigned to address you once a year, fifteen days before or fifteen days after the first of January, which gave you great relief in your parish, and the tax-collector dared not too much vex you if you were behind on the annual sum of a hundred francs to which your little properties were assessed.

M. Gonzo was a poor wretch of this sort, very noble, who, besides possessing some small property, had obtained through the credit of the Marquis Crescenzi a magnificent place, bringing in eleven hundred and fifty francs a year. This man might have dined at home, but he had a passion: he was at ease and happy only when he found himself in the salon of some great personage who from time to time said to him:

--Be silent, Gonzo, you are but a fool.

This judgment was dictated by humor, for Gonzo almost always had more wit than the great personage. He spoke to the purpose of everything and with some grace: moreover, he was ready to change his opinion at a grimace of the master of the house. To tell the truth, though of a profound address for his interests, he had not an idea, and when the prince was not in a cold, he was sometimes embarrassed at the moment of entering a salon.

What in Parma had won Gonzo a reputation was a magnificent three-cornered hat garnished with a somewhat battered black plume, which he wore even with a dress-coat; but one must have seen the way he carried this plume, whether on the head or in the hand; there lay the talent and the importance. He inquired with genuine anxiety after the state of health of the marchioness's little dog, and had fire taken in the Crescenzi palace, he would have exposed his life to save one of those fine gilt-brocade armchairs which for so many years had caught his black silk breeches when by chance he dared sit in it a moment.

Seven or eight personages of this kind arrived every evening at seven o'clock in the salon of the Marquise Crescenzi. Scarcely seated, a lackey magnificently clad in a jonquil livery all covered with silver lace, as was the red waistcoat which completed its magnificence, came to take the hats and canes of the poor devils. He was immediately followed by a valet de chambre bearing a very small cup of coffee, supported by a silver filigree foot; and every half-hour a majordomo, wearing sword and magnificent French habit, came to offer ices.

A half-hour after the shabby little courtiers, one saw arrive five or six officers speaking loud and with a wholly military air and usually discussing the number and kind of buttons the soldier's coat must bear so that the commander-in-chief might win victories. It would not have been prudent to cite in that salon a French newspaper; for, even if the news had been of the most agreeable, for example fifty liberals shot in Spain, the narrator would none the less have remained convinced of having read a French newspaper. The masterpiece of the skill of all these people was to obtain every ten years a pension increase of a hundred and fifty francs. Thus does the prince share with his nobility the pleasure of reigning over peasants and burghers.

The principal personage, beyond doubt, of the Crescenzi salon, was the Chevalier Foscarini, a perfectly honest man; accordingly he had been a little in prison under every regime. He was a member of that famous chamber of deputies which, at Milan, rejected the registration law presented by Napoleon, a rare deed in history. The Chevalier Foscarini, after having been twenty years the friend of the marquis's mother, remained the influential man in the house. He always had some pleasant tale to tell, but nothing escaped his finesse, and the young marchioness, who felt guilty at heart, trembled before him.

As Gonzo had a genuine passion for the great lord, who said rude things to him and made him cry once or twice a year, his mania was to seek to render him little services; and, had he not been paralyzed by the habits of extreme poverty, he might sometimes have succeeded, for he was not without a certain dose of finesse and a much greater one of effrontery.

The Gonzo, such as we know him, rather despised the Marquise Crescenzi, for in his life she had never addressed him an impolite word; but after all she was the wife of that famous Marquis Crescenzi, knight of honor to the princess, and who, once or twice a month, said to Gonzo:

--Be silent, Gonzo, you are but a beast.

Gonzo remarked that all that was said of the little Anetta Marini drew the marchioness, for an instant, out of the state of reverie and carelessness in which she remained habitually plunged until the hour of eleven struck, then she made tea, and offered it to each man present, calling him by his name. After which, at the moment of retiring to her rooms, she seemed to find a moment of gaiety; it was the instant chosen to recite satirical sonnets to her.

Excellent ones are made in Italy: it is the only kind of literature which still has a little life; to be sure it is not subject to the censor, and the courtiers of the Casa Crescenzi always announced their sonnet with these words:

--Will Madame the Marchioness permit that one recite before her a very bad sonnet?

And when the sonnet had made them laugh and had been repeated two or three times, one of the officers never failed to cry:

--The minister of police should well busy himself with hanging a little the authors of such infamies.

Bourgeois societies, on the contrary, receive these sonnets with the most frank admiration, and lawyers' clerks sell copies.

From the sort of curiosity shown by the marchioness, Gonzo fancied that too much had been praised before her of the beauty of the little Marini who besides had a million fortune, and that she was jealous of her. As with his continual smile and his complete effrontery toward all that was not noble, Gonzo penetrated everywhere, the next day he arrived in the marchioness's salon, bearing his plumed hat in a certain triumphant fashion seldom seen on him more than once or twice a year, when the prince had said to him:

--Farewell, Gonzo.

After respectfully saluting the marchioness, Gonzo did not move away as usual to go take his place on the armchair that had just been brought forward for him. He placed himself in the middle of the circle, and cried brutally:

--I have seen the portrait of Mgr del Dongo.

Clelia was so surprised that she was obliged to lean on the arm of her chair; she tried to face the storm, but soon was obliged to desert the salon.

--One must agree, my poor Gonzo, that you are of a rare awkwardness, cried with haughtiness one of the officers who was finishing his fourth ice. How is it you do not know that the coadjutor, who was one of the bravest colonels of Napoleon's army, formerly played a hanging trick on the marchioness's father, in leaving the citadel where General Conti commanded as he would have left the Steccata (the principal church of Parma)?

“Stories of the world, in your language.”