Part 47

Two days later, as the marquis was returning on horseback from one of his estates near Mantua, brigands—apparently hired by some private vengeance—abducted him, without offering him the least maltreatment, and placed him in a boat which took three days to descend the Po and to make the same journey Fabrice had once made after the famous Giletti affair. On the fourth day, the brigands set the marquis down on a deserted island in the Po, having taken care to rob him completely, leaving him neither money nor any possession of the slightest value. The marquis spent two full days before he could make his way back to his palace in Parma; he found it draped in black and all his household in despair.

This abduction, very adroitly carried out, had a most fatal consequence: Sandrino, secretly established in a large and handsome house where the marchioness came to see him almost every day, died after a few months. Clelia imagined that she was struck by a just punishment for having been unfaithful to her vow to the Madonna: she had seen Fabrice so often by lamplight, and even twice in broad daylight, with such tender transports, during Sandrino's illness! She survived that beloved son by only a few months, but she had the sweetness of dying in the arms of her friend.

Fabrice was too much in love and too religious to have recourse to suicide; he hoped to find Clelia again in a better world, but he had too much sense not to feel that he had much to atone for.

A few days after Clelia's death, he signed several deeds by which he secured a pension of a thousand francs to each of his servants, and reserved an equal pension for himself; he gave lands yielding roughly a hundred thousand livres in income to Countess Mosca; a like sum to the Marquise del Dongo, his mother; and whatever might remain of the paternal fortune to one of his ill-married sisters. The next day, having addressed to the proper authorities his resignation from the archbishopric and from all the posts with which he had been successively loaded by the favor of Ernest V and the friendship of the prime minister, he withdrew to the charterhouse of Parma, situated in the woods near the Po, two leagues from Sacca.

Countess Mosca had strongly approved, at the time, of her husband's resuming the ministry, but she had never consented to return to the states of Ernest V. She held her court at Vignano, a quarter-league from Casal-Maggiore, on the left bank of the Po, and consequently in the Austrian states. In that magnificent palace of Vignano which the count had had built for her, she received every Thursday all the high society of Parma, and every day her numerous friends. Fabrice would not have missed a single day of coming to Vignano. The countess, in a word, united all the appearances of happiness, but she survived only a very short time the Fabrice whom she adored, and who spent but one year in his charterhouse.

The prisons of Parma were empty, the count immensely rich, Ernest V adored by his subjects, who compared his government to that of the grand dukes of Tuscany.

TO THE HAPPY FEW

“Stories of the world, in your language.”