Part 8

--I hope your brother suspected nothing of your arrival, said Mme Pietranera to her; I had scarcely spoken to him since his fine escapade, which his self-esteem did me the honor of being greatly piqued at: this evening at supper I deigned to address a word to him; I needed to find a pretext to hide the wild joy that might have aroused his suspicions. Then, when I perceived that he was quite proud of this supposed reconciliation, I took advantage of his good humor to make him drink in a disorderly fashion, and certainly he will not have thought of lying in ambush to continue his trade as a spy.

--It is in your apartment that our hussar must be hidden, said the marquise; he cannot leave at once in this first moment, we are not sufficiently mistresses of our reason, and the thing is to choose the best way to outwit that terrible police of Milan.

This idea was followed; but the marquis and his eldest son noticed, the next day, that the marquise was constantly in her sister-in-law's room. We shall not pause to depict the transports of tenderness and joy which once more that day agitated these so happy beings. Italian hearts are, much more than ours, tormented by suspicions and by the wild ideas presented to them by a burning imagination, but in return their joys are far more intense and last longer. That day the countess and the marquise were absolutely deprived of their reason; Fabrice was obliged to begin all his stories over again: at last it was resolved to go and hide their common joy at Milan, so difficult did it seem to elude any longer the police of the marquis and of his son Ascagne.

They took the ordinary boat of the house to go to Como; to do otherwise would have been to awaken a thousand suspicions; but on arriving at the port of Como the marquise remembered that she had forgotten at Grianta papers of the last importance: she hastened to send the boatmen there, and these men could make no remark upon the manner in which these two ladies employed their time at Como. Scarcely arrived, they hired at random one of those carriages which wait for custom near that high tower of the Middle Ages which rises above the gate of Milan. They set off at once, without the coachman having time to speak to anyone. A quarter of a league from the city they met a young huntsman known to these ladies, and who, out of complaisance, as they had no man with them, was good enough to serve them as cavalier as far as the gates of Milan, where he was going fowling. All was going well, and these ladies were making the most cheerful conversation with the young traveler, when, at a turn the road makes to round the charming hill and wood of San Giovanni, three disguised gendarmes sprang to the bridles of the horses.

--Ah! my husband has betrayed us! cried the marquise, and she fainted.

A sergeant who had remained a little in the rear approached the carriage staggering, and said in a voice that seemed to come from the tavern:

--I am sorry for the errand I have to do, but I arrest you, General Fabio Conti.

Fabrice thought the sergeant was playing him a bad joke in calling him general. "You shall pay for it," said he to himself; he looked at the disguised gendarmes and watched for the favorable moment to jump down from the carriage and escape across the fields.

The countess smiled, I believe, at a venture, then said to the sergeant:

--But, my dear sergeant, is this child of sixteen that you take for General Conti?

--Are you not the daughter of the general? said the sergeant.

--Behold my father, said the countess, showing Fabrice. The gendarmes were seized with wild laughter.

--Show your passports without arguing, resumed the sergeant, piqued at the general merriment.

--These ladies never take any to go to Milan, said the coachman with a cold and philosophical air; they come from their castle of Grianta. This is Mme the Countess Pietranera, that one, Mme the Marquise del Dongo.

The sergeant, quite disconcerted, passed to the heads of the horses, and there held council with his men. The conference had lasted a good five minutes, when the Countess Pietranera begged these gentlemen to permit the carriage to be advanced a few paces and placed in the shade; the heat was stifling, though it was but eleven in the morning. Fabrice, who was looking very attentively on all sides, seeking means to escape, saw issue from a little path across the fields, and come upon the high road, covered with dust, a young girl of fourteen or fifteen who wept timidly behind her handkerchief. She advanced on foot between two gendarmes in uniform, and, three paces behind her, also between two gendarmes, marched a tall spare man who affected airs of dignity like a prefect following a procession.

--Where did you find them then? said the sergeant, quite drunk at this moment.

--Escaping across the fields, and no more passports than on the hand.

The sergeant seemed to lose his head entirely; he had before him five prisoners instead of the two he needed. He moved away a few paces, leaving but one man to guard the prisoner who was playing the majestic, and another to prevent the horses from advancing.

--Stay, said the countess to Fabrice, who had already jumped to the ground, all will be arranged.

A gendarme was heard to cry:

--What matters it! if they have no passports, they are fair game all the same.

The sergeant did not seem quite so decided; the name of the Countess Pietranera gave him uneasiness, he had known the general, whose death he did not know. "The general is not a man to fail to revenge himself if I arrest his wife amiss," said he to himself.

During this deliberation, which was long, the countess had entered into conversation with the young girl who was on foot in the road and in the dust beside the calash; she had been struck by her beauty.

--The sun will hurt you, mademoiselle; this brave soldier, added she, speaking to the gendarme placed at the heads of the horses, will surely permit you to mount the calash.

Fabrice, who was prowling around the carriage, drew near to help the young girl to mount. She was already springing upon the step, her arm supported by Fabrice, when the imposing man, who was six paces in the rear of the carriage, cried in a voice swollen by the will to be dignified:

--Stay on the road, do not mount a carriage that does not belong to you.

Fabrice had not heard this order; the young girl, instead of mounting the calash, would have got down again, and Fabrice continuing to support her she fell into his arms. He smiled, she blushed deeply; they remained an instant looking at one another after the young girl had disengaged herself from his arms.

"She would be a charming companion in prison," said Fabrice to himself: "what depth of thought beneath that brow! she would know how to love."

The sergeant approached with an air of authority:

--Which of these ladies is named Clélia Conti?

--I, said the young girl.

--And I, cried the aged man, I am General Fabio Conti, chamberlain of His Serene Highness the Prince of Parma; I find it most unseemly that a man of my sort should be tracked like a thief.

--The day before yesterday, on embarking at the port of Como, did you not send packing the inspector of police who asked you for your passport? Well! today he prevents your taking a walk.

--I was already moving off with my boat, I was in haste, the weather being stormy; a man without uniform cried to me from the quay to return to port, I told him my name and continued my journey.

--And this morning you fled from Como?

--A man like me takes no passport to go from Milan to see the lake. This morning, at Como, I was told I should be arrested at the gate, I went out on foot with my daughter; I hoped to find some carriage on the road to take me to Milan, where certainly my first visit shall be to lay my complaints before the general commanding the province.

The sergeant seemed relieved of a great weight.

--Well! general, you are arrested, and I am going to conduct you to Milan. And you, who are you? said he to Fabrice.

--My son, resumed the countess: Ascagne, son of the divisional general Pietranera.

--Without passport, madame la comtesse? said the sergeant, much softened.

--At his age he has never taken any; he never travels alone, he is always with me.

During this colloquy, General Conti was putting on more and more offended dignity with the gendarmes.

--Not so many words, said one of them to him, you are arrested, enough!

--You will be only too happy, said the sergeant, that we consent to your hiring a horse from some peasant; otherwise, despite the dust and the heat, and the rank of chamberlain of Parma, you will march very well on foot in the midst of our horses.

The general began to swear.

--Will you hold your tongue! resumed the gendarme. Where is your general's uniform? Can not any chance comer say he is a general?

The general grew angrier. Meanwhile things were going much better in the calash.

The countess was ordering the gendarmes about as if they had been her own people. She had just given a crown to one of them to go for wine and above all fresh water at a cassina which was visible two hundred paces off. She had found time to calm Fabrice, who, by all means, would have escaped into the wood which covered the hill. "I have good pistols," said he. She obtained of the irritated general that he would let his daughter mount the carriage. On this occasion, the general, who liked to talk of himself and his family, informed these ladies that his daughter was but twelve years old, being born in 1803, on the 27th of October; but everyone gave her fourteen or fifteen, so much sense she had.

"Quite a common man," said the eyes of the countess to the marquise. Thanks to the countess, all was arranged after an hour's colloquy. A gendarme, who happened to have business in the neighboring village, hired his horse to General Conti, after the countess had said to him:

--You shall have 10 francs.

The sergeant set off alone with the general; the other gendarmes remained under a tree in company with four enormous bottles of wine, a sort of little demijohns, which the gendarme sent to the cassina had brought back, aided by a peasant. Clélia Conti was authorized by the worthy chamberlain to accept, for her return to Milan, a place in the carriage of these ladies, and no one thought of arresting the son of the brave general Count Pietranera. After the first moments given to politeness and to comments on the little incident which had just ended, Clélia Conti remarked the shade of enthusiasm with which so beautiful a lady as the countess spoke to Fabrice; certainly she was not his mother. Her attention was especially excited by repeated allusions to something heroic, bold, dangerous in the supreme degree, which he had done of late; despite all her intelligence, the young Clélia could not guess what it was.

She looked with astonishment at this young hero whose eyes seemed still to breathe all the fire of the action. For his part, he was a little abashed by the so singular beauty of this girl of twelve, and his glances made her blush.

A league before arriving at Milan, Fabrice said he was going to see his uncle, and took leave of the ladies.

--If ever I get out of this scrape, said he to Clélia, I will go to see the fine pictures of Parma, and then will you deign to remember this name: Fabrice del Dongo?

--Bravo! said the countess, that is how you know how to keep incognito! Mademoiselle, deign to remember that this naughty boy is my son and is named Pietranera and not del Dongo.

In the evening, very late, Fabrice re-entered Milan by the Renza gate, which leads to a fashionable promenade. The sending of the two servants into Switzerland had exhausted the very small savings of the marquise and her sister; happily, Fabrice still had a few napoleons, and one of the diamonds, which it was resolved to sell.

These ladies were beloved and knew the whole town; the most considerable personages in the Austrian and devout party went to speak in Fabrice's favor to Baron Binder, chief of police. These gentlemen could not conceive, they said, how one could take seriously the freak of a child of sixteen who quarrels with an elder brother and deserts the paternal roof.

--My business is to take everything seriously, answered gently Baron Binder, a wise and sad man; he was then establishing that famous police of Milan, and had engaged to prevent a revolution like that of 1746, which drove the Austrians from Genoa. This police of Milan, since become so celebrated through the adventures of MM. Pellico and d'Andryane, was not precisely cruel, it reasonably and without pity executed severe laws. Emperor Francis II wished to strike with terror those Italian imaginations so bold.

--Give me day by day, repeated Baron Binder to the protectors of Fabrice, the proved indication of what the young marchesino del Dongo has done; take him from the moment of his departure from Grianta, March 8, to his arrival, last evening, in this city, where he is hidden in one of the rooms of his mother's apartment, and I am ready to treat him as the most amiable and the most roguish of the young men of the city. If you cannot furnish me the itinerary of the young man during all the days following his departure from Grianta, whatever the greatness of his birth and the respect I bear to the friends of his family, is it not my duty to have him arrested? Ought I not to keep him in prison until he has given me proof that he did not go to carry words to Napoleon on the part of some malcontents who may exist in Lombardy among the subjects of His Imperial and Royal Majesty? Remark further, gentlemen, that if the young del Dongo succeeds in justifying himself on this point, he remains guilty of having passed abroad without a regularly delivered passport, and moreover in taking a false name and making knowing use of a passport delivered to a simple workman, that is to say to an individual of a class so far below that to which he belongs.

This declaration, cruelly reasonable, was accompanied by all the marks of deference and respect which the chief of police owed to the high position of the Marquise del Dongo and to that of the important personages who came to intercede for her.

The marquise was in despair when she learned Baron Binder's answer.

--Fabrice is going to be arrested, she cried weeping, and once in prison, God knows when he will come out! His father will disown him!

Mme Pietranera and her sister-in-law took counsel with two or three intimate friends, and, whatever they might say, the marquise absolutely insisted on having her son leave that very next night.

--But you see plainly, said the countess, that Baron Binder knows your son is here; that man is not wicked.

--No, but he wants to please Emperor Francis.

--But if he thought it useful to his advancement to throw Fabrice into prison, he would be there already, and to make him escape is to show him an injurious distrust.

--But for him to avow that he knows where Fabrice is, is to tell us: send him away! No, I shall not live while I can repeat to myself: In a quarter of an hour my son may be within four walls! Whatever the ambition of Baron Binder, added the marquise, he believes it useful to his personal position in this country to display considerations for a man of my husband's rank, and I see a proof of it in this singular openness of heart with which he confesses that he knows where to take my son. More than that, the baron complaisantly details the two offenses with which Fabrice is charged according to the denunciation of his unworthy brother; he explains that these two offenses carry imprisonment; is not that telling us that if we prefer exile, it is for us to choose?

--If you choose exile, still repeated the countess, in this life we shall never see him again. Fabrice, present at the whole conversation, with one of the old friends of the marquise now counselor at the tribunal formed by Austria, was strongly of opinion to take to the open fields. And, in fact, that very evening he left the palace hidden in the carriage which took his mother and aunt to the Scala theater. The coachman, of whom they were suspicious, went as usual to make a stop at the tavern, and while the footman, a sure man, held the horses, Fabrice, disguised as a peasant, slipped out of the carriage and left the city. The next morning he crossed the frontier with the same good fortune, and a few hours later he was installed in an estate his mother had in Piedmont, near Novara, precisely at Romagnano, where Bayard was killed.

One may imagine with what attention these ladies, arrived in their box at the Scala, listened to the spectacle. They had gone there only to be able to consult several of their friends belonging to the liberal party, and whose appearance at the del Dongo palace might have been ill interpreted by the police. In the box, it was resolved to make a new step toward Baron Binder. It could not be a question of offering a sum of money to this magistrate, a perfectly honest man, and besides these ladies were very poor, they had forced Fabrice to carry off all that remained of the product of the diamond.

It was however of great importance to have the last word of the baron. The friends of the countess reminded her of a certain Abbé Borda, a very amiable young man, who formerly had wished to pay court to her, and with rather ugly ways; not being able to succeed, he had denounced his friendship for Limercati to General Pietranera, whereupon he had been dismissed like a knave. Now this abbé made every evening the baroness Binder's game of tarots, and naturally was the intimate friend of the husband. The countess decided on the horribly painful step of going to see this abbé; and the next morning early, before he left his house, she had herself announced.

When the abbé's single servant pronounced the name of Countess Pietranera, the man was moved to the point of losing his voice; he sought not to repair the disorder of a very simple negligee.

--Show her in and go away, said he in a faint voice.

The countess entered; Borda threw himself on his knees.

--It is in this posture that an unhappy fool should receive your orders, said he to the countess who that morning, in her half-disguised negligee, was of an irresistible piquancy.

The deep sorrow of Fabrice's exile, the violence she did herself to appear before a man who had acted treacherously toward her, all united to give her glance an incredible brilliance.

--It is in this posture that I wish to receive your orders, cried the abbé, for it is evident that you have some service to ask of me, otherwise you would not have honored with your presence the poor house of an unhappy fool: formerly transported with love and jealousy, he behaved toward you like a coward, once he saw he could not please you.

These words were sincere and the more beautiful in that the abbé now enjoyed great power: the countess was touched to tears; humiliation, fear froze her soul, in an instant tenderness and a little hope succeeded them. From a very unhappy state she passed in the twinkling of an eye almost to happiness.

--Kiss my hand, said she to the abbé, presenting it, and rise. (It must be known that in Italy the familiar "thou" indicates good and frank friendship quite as much as a tenderer sentiment.) I come to ask you grace for my nephew Fabrice. Here is the whole truth without the least disguise as one tells it to an old friend. At sixteen and a half he has just committed a signal folly; we were at the castle of Grianta, on the lake of Como. One evening, at seven, we learned, by a boat from Como, of the Emperor's landing in the gulf of Juan. The next morning Fabrice left for France, after having himself given the passport of one of his friends of the people, a barometer merchant named Vasi. As he does not precisely look like a barometer merchant, scarcely had he made ten leagues in France, when on his good looks he was arrested; his bursts of enthusiasm in bad French seemed suspicious. After some time he escaped and managed to reach Geneva; we sent to meet him at Lugano...

--That is to say at Geneva, said the abbé smiling.

The countess finished the story.

--I shall do for you all that is humanly possible, resumed the abbé with effusion; I place myself entirely at your orders. I shall even commit imprudences, added he. Say, what must I do at the moment when this poor salon shall be deprived of that celestial apparition, which makes an epoch in the history of my life?

--You must go to Baron Binder and tell him that you have loved Fabrice since his birth, that you saw this child born when you came to our house, and that finally, in the name of the friendship he grants you, you beseech him to employ all his spies to verify whether, before his departure for Switzerland, Fabrice had the least interview with any of those liberals he keeps watch on. If the baron is but well served, he will see that here it is solely a true youthful thoughtlessness. You know that I had, in my fine apartment in the Dugnani palace, the prints of the battles won by Napoleon: it is in reading the legends of these engravings that my nephew learned to read. From the age of five my poor husband explained these battles to him; we put my husband's helmet on his head, the child dragged his great sabre. Well! one fine day, he learns that the god of my husband, that the Emperor is back in France; he sets off to rejoin him, like a heedless one, but he does not succeed. Ask your baron with what punishment he would punish this moment of madness.

--I forgot one thing, cried the abbé, you shall see that I am not quite unworthy of the pardon you grant me. Here, said he, searching among his papers on the table, here is the denunciation of that infamous coltorto (hypocrite), see, signed Ascanio Valserra del Dongo, who began this whole affair; I took it last evening from the police offices, and went to the Scala, in hope of finding someone going usually to your box, by whom I might have it communicated to you. Copy of this piece has been at Vienna this long while. There is the enemy we must combat. The abbé read the denunciation with the countess, and it was agreed that during the day he would have a copy of it delivered to her by a sure person. It was joy in her heart that the countess returned to the del Dongo palace.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”