by Stendhal
The sergeant approached them with an air of authority: “Which of these ladies is named Clélia Conti?”
“I am,” said the girl.
“And I,” exclaimed the elderly man, “I am General Fabio Conti, Chamberlain to His Serene Highness Monseigneur the Prince of Parma; I find it quite improper that a man of my condition should be hunted down like a thief.”
“Did you not, the day before yesterday, when embarking at the harbor of Como, unceremoniously dismiss the police-inspector who asked for your passport? Well then! Today he prevents you from taking your leave.”
“My boat had already cast off, I was in a hurry, a storm was brewing; a man not in uniform shouted at me from the dock to return to port, I told him my name and continued my journey.”
“And this morning, you fled from Como?”
“A man like myself does not take a passport to leave Milan and visit the lake. This morning, at Como, I was informed I would be arrested at the town gate; I left on foot with my daughter; I hoped to find some vehicle on the way which might take me to Milan, where you may be sure my first task will be to complain to the general in command of the province.”
A great weight seemed to have been removed from the sergeant’s mind. “Very well, General, you are under arrest, and I shall take you to Milan myself. And you—who are you?” he inquired of Fabrizio.
“He is my son,” interrupted the Countess: “Ascanio, son of Division-General Pietranera.”
“Without a passport, Countess?” asked the sergeant, much more mildly.
“At his age, he has never had one; he never travels alone; he is always with me.”
During this discussion, General Conti had assumed an increasingly dignified demeanor with the police officers. “Not so much talk,” one of them snapped. “You are under arrest, that’s that.”
“You will be glad to hear,” said the sergeant, “that we are permitting you to hire a horse from some farmer—otherwise, despite the heat and the dust, and the rank of Chamberlain of Parma, you will be managing as best you can on foot among our horses.” The General began swearing. “Will you be so good as to shut up?” the sergeant continued. “Where is your general’s uniform? Anyone can come along and claim he is a general.”
The General grew even angrier. Meanwhile, matters were improving inside the carriage. The Countess ordered the police officers about as if they were her servants. She had just given one of them a scudo to find some wine and, better still, some cold water in a farmhouse visible some two hundred paces away. She had found time to calm Fabrizio, who was intent on escaping at all costs into the woods covering the hillside. “I have good pistols,” he said. She persuaded the outraged General to let his daughter ride in the carriage. On this occasion, the General, who enjoyed talking about himself and his family, informed the ladies that his daughter was but twelve years of age, having been born in 1803, on October 27 in fact; but that her perspicacity was such that everyone assumed she was fourteen or fifteen.
“Such a common man,” signaled the Countess’s eyes to the Marchesa. Thanks to the Countess, everything was settled after an hour’s discussion. An officer, who happened to have some business in the neighboring village, rented General Conti his horse, after the Countess had said to him: “You shall have ten francs.” The sergeant set off with the General; the other officers remained under a tree with four enormous wine-bottles, virtually demi-johns, which the officer dispatched to the farm had brought back, with the farmer’s help. Clélia Conti was authorized by the dignified Chamberlain to accept, for the return to Milan, a seat in the ladies’ carriage, and no one dreamed of arresting the son of the gallant Count Pietranera. After the first moments dedicated to good manners and to remarks upon the little incident just past, Clélia Conti noticed the degree of enthusiasm with which so lovely a lady as the Countess addressed Fabrizio; certainly she was not his mother. Her attention was particularly aroused by the repeated allusions to something heroic, bold, supremely dangerous he had just accomplished; but for all her intelligence, young Clélia could not guess what it might be.
With amazement she stared at this young hero whose eyes seemed still aglow with all the fire of action. For his part, Fabrizio was somewhat nonplussed by the singular beauty of this girl of twelve, and her glances made him blush.
A league before they reached Milan, Fabrizio said that he was going to see his uncle, and took leave of the ladies. “If I extricate myself from my difficulties,” he remarked to Clélia, “I shall pay a visit to your fine paintings in Parma, and then you will perhaps do me the honor of remembering this name: Fabrizio del Dongo?”
“Fine!” exclaimed the Countess. “That’s how you manage to keep your incognito! Signorina, do us the honor of remembering that this young scamp is called Pietranera and not del Dongo.”
Very late that evening, Fabrizio re-entered Milan through the Porta Renza, which leads to a fashionable promenade. Sending their two servants to Switzerland had exhausted the modest savings of the Marchesa and her sister-in-law; fortunately, Fabrizio still had a few napoleons, and one of the diamonds, which it was decided he would sell.
The ladies were extremely popular, and knew everyone in town; the most notable personages in the Austrian and clerical party put in a word for Fabrizio with Baron Binder, the chief of police. These gentlemen could not imagine, they said, how anyone could take seriously the escapade of a boy of sixteen running away from home after a dispute with his older brother.
“It is my profession to take everything seriously,” was the mild reply of Baron Binder, a man as melancholy as he was astute, who was then establishing the famous Milanese police, and determined to forestall a revolution like the one of 1746, which had driven the Austrians out of Genoa. This Milanese police, rendered subsequently so famous by the exploits of Silvio Pellico and Signor Andryane, was not precisely cruel in its rational and pitiless execution of harsh laws. Emperor Francis II sought to strike terror into these bold Italian imaginations. “Give me, day by day,” repeated Baron Binder to Fabrizio’s protectors, “a proven evidence of what the young Marchesino del Dongo has done; let us begin with the moment of his departure from Grianta, on March eighth, down to his arrival last night in this very city, where he has taken cover in one of the bedrooms of his mother’s apartment, and I am ready to treat him as the most amiable and ingenious young man in town. If you cannot supply me with the young man’s itinerary for every day following his departure from Grianta, whatever the grandeur of his birth and my respect for the friends of his family, is it not my duty to have him arrested? Must I not keep him in prison until I receive proof that he has not taken certain messages to Napoléon from certain malcontents who may exist in Lombardy among the subjects of His Royal and Imperial Majesty? Note further, gentlemen, that if young del Dongo manages to exculpate himself on this point, he still remains guilty of having gone abroad without a properly issued passport, and further of traveling under a false name and knowingly utilizing a passport issued to an ordinary workingman, that is, to an individual belonging to a class greatly beneath the one to which he belongs.”
This cruelly reasonable declaration was accompanied by every mark of deference and respect which the chief of police owed to the high position of the Marchesa del Dongo and to that of the important personages who had intervened on her behalf.
The Marchesa was in despair when she learned of Baron Binder’s response. “Fabrizio will be arrested,” she exclaimed in tears, “and once in prison, God knows when he will get out! His own father will disown him!”
Countess Pietranera and her sister-in-law took counsel with two or three intimate friends, and whatever they advised, it was the Marchesa’s determination that her son leave that very night. “But as you see,” the Countess remonstrated, “Baron Binder knows your son is here; he is not a bad man.”
“No, but he wants to please the Emperor.”
“But if he felt that throwing Fabrizio into prison would advance his career, your son would be there alr
eady, and it will be seen as an insulting defiance of the Baron to help Fabrizio escape.”
“But to tell us he knows Fabrizio’s whereabouts is to authorize his escape! No, I shall not live another moment, so long as I can tell myself: ‘In a quarter of an hour my son might well be behind bars!’ Whatever Baron Binder’s ambition,” added the Marchesa, “he regards it as useful to his personal position in this country to publicize his concessions to a man of my husband’s rank, and I see a proof of it in the singular frankness with which he admits he knows where to find my son. Moreover, the Baron has been so good as to describe the two offenses of which Fabrizio was accused by his wretched brother’s denunciation, he has explained that either one of these involves prison—isn’t that the same as telling us that if we prefer exile, we have the choice?”
“If you choose exile,” the Countess kept repeating, “we shall never see him again in all our lives.”
Fabrizio, present for this entire discussion, along with one of the Marchesa’s old friends, now a councillor on the tribunal established by Austria, was strongly in favor of making his escape. And indeed he left the palazzo that very evening, concealed in the carriage in which his mother and his aunt were driven to the theater La Scala. The coachman, whom they mistrusted, spent his evening in a tavern as usual, and while the footman, who had their confidence, kept an eye on the horses, Fabrizio, disguised as a peasant, slipped out of the carriage and left the city. The next morning he crossed the border with the same good fortune, and a few hours later he was established on an estate of his mother’s in Piedmont, near Novara, more exactly at Romagnano, where Bayard was slain.
It may be imagined with what attention these ladies, having entered their box at La Scala, listened to the performance. They had come to the theater only to be able to consult several of their friends belonging to the Liberal party whose appearance at the Palazzo del Dongo might have raised official suspicions. In the box, it was determined to make a further appeal to Baron Binder. There could be no question of offering money to this honest magistrate, and moreover these ladies were quite without means, having compelled Fabrizio to take with him whatever remained from the sale of the diamond.
It was nonetheless of the utmost importance to keep on the Baron’s good side. The Countess’s friends reminded her of a certain Canon Borda, an agreeable young man, who had once pressed his attentions upon her, though in a distinctly unpleasant fashion; unable to succeed, he had betrayed her friendship for Limercati to General Pietranera, whereupon he had been dismissed from their circle as unworthy of their society. Now it so happened that this very Canon went to Baroness Binder’s every evening to play tarocchi, and naturally was an intimate friend of the husband’s. The Countess determined to take the horribly painful step of going to see this Canon, and early the next morning, before he had left his apartments, she had herself announced.
When his one servant pronounced the name of the Countess Pietranera, the Canon was moved to the point of losing his voice; and he made no attempt to conceal the disorder of his extremely simple domestic attire. “Show her in, and leave us,” he said in a whisper.
The Countess entered; Borda flung himself at her feet. “It is in this posture that a wretched madman must receive your commands,” he said to the Countess, who, in a simple morning dress that seemed almost a disguise, was irresistibly attractive. Her despair over Fabrizio’s exile, the violence she was doing her own feelings by appearing in the apartments of a man who had treated her so treacherously—everything combined to give her appearance an incredible charm. “It is in this posture that I wish to receive your commands,” exclaimed the Canon, “for it is obvious you have some favor to ask of me, otherwise you would not have honored with your presence the humble house of a wretched madman: once transported by love and jealousy, he behaved toward you as a coward, when he discovered he could not win your favor.”
These words were sincere and all the more pleasing, since the Canon now enjoyed a great power: the Countess was touched to the point of tears; humiliation and fear had gripped her soul; in an instant, pity and hope succeeded them. From a profoundly wretched state she passed in the twinkling of an eye to something very much like happiness.
“You may kiss my hand,” she murmured to the Canon, offering it to him, “and please stand up.” (She employed the intimate form of address, which in Italy, you must know, indicates a frank and sincere friendship quite as much as a tenderer sentiment.) “I have come to ask your help for my nephew Fabrizio. Here is the whole truth, without the least concealment, as one might offer it to an old friend. At sixteen and a half, he has just committed a signal indiscretion; we were at the Castle of Grianta, on Lake Como. One evening, at seven o’clock, we were informed by a boat from Como that the Emperor had landed on the shore of the Gulf of Juan. The next morning Fabrizio left for France, after having obtained the passport of one of his friends among the common people, a barometer-dealer by the name of Vasi. Since he does not look much like a barometer-dealer, he had scarcely ventured ten leagues into France when his fine features brought about his arrest; his enthusiastic forays into bad French appeared suspicious. In a short time however he made his escape and managed to reach Geneva; we sent to meet him at Lugano …”
“You mean Geneva,” said the Canon, smiling.
The Countess finished her story.
“I shall do everything humanly possible for you,” the Canon responded effusively; “I am entirely at your command. I shall even commit indiscretions,” he added. “Tell me, what must I do, when this poor salon is deprived of the celestial apparition which has marked such an epoch in the history of my life?”
“You must go to Baron Binder and tell him that you have loved Fabrizio since his birth, that you saw him in his cradle when you came to our house, and that in the name of the Baron’s friendship for you, you implore him to utilize every spy in his employ to verify that, before his departure for Switzerland, Fabrizio had not the slightest contact with any of those Liberals under his scrutiny. If indeed the Baron is properly served, he shall realize that what is involved here is entirely an escapade of extreme youth. You know that I had, in my private apartments in the Palazzo Dugnani, the engravings of the battles won by Napoleon: it was by studying the captions of these engravings that my nephew learned to read. When Fabrizio was five years old, my poor husband would describe those battles to him; we would put my husband’s helmet on the child’s head, and the boy would drag about my husband’s huge saber. And then, of course, one fine day he learns that my husband’s idol, the Emperor himself, has returned to France; he runs off to join him like a madman, but of course he fails utterly. Ask your Baron what penalty he would propose to chastise such a moment of folly.”
“I was forgetting one thing,” exclaimed the Canon. “You shall see that I am not altogether unworthy of the forgiveness you are extending to me. Here,” he said, shuffling his papers on the desk, “here is the denunciation of that wretched coltorto”—hypocrite—”you see, signed Ascanio Valserra del Dongo, which is at the bottom of this whole business; I took it last night from police headquarters, and I went to La Scala in hopes of finding someone accustomed to visiting your box by whom I could pass it on to you. A copy of this document has been in Vienna a long while. Such is the enemy with whom we must do battle.”
The Canon and the Countess read the denunciation together, and they determined that in the course of the day, he would obtain for her a copy of it made by a person in his confidence. It was with joy in her heart that the Countess returned to the Palazzo del Dongo. “Impossible to be more of a galant’uomo than this reformed rake,” she observed to the Marchesa; “tonight at La Scala, and ten forty-five by the theater clock, we shall send everyone away from our box, we shall snuff the candles, we shall shut our door, and at eleven the Canon himself will come to tell us what he has managed. That will be the least compromising arrangement for him.”
This Canon was a very shrewd man; he was careful not to break his appointment; o
nce there he gave evidence of great kindness and an utterly open heart, such as is found only in those countries where vanity does not prevail over all other sentiments. His denunciation of the Countess to her husband General Pietranera was one of the greatest regrets of his life, and now he was finding the means of abolishing it.
That morning, when the Countess had left his apartment: “So she’s making love with her nephew,” he told himself bitterly, for he had by no means recovered. “Proud as she is, to have come to me!… When that poor wretch Pietranera died, she repulsed with horror my offers of service, polite and nicely presented as they were by Colonel Scotti, her former lover. The lovely Countess Pietranera, living on fifteen hundred francs a year!” added the Canon, striding up and down his room. “And then going to live in the Castle of Grianta with an abominable seccatore like the Marchese del Dongo!… Now I see it all! Indeed, young Fabrizio has all the graces—tall, well built, a smiling face … and better still, a certain voluptuous charm in his glance.… A Correggio countenance,” the Canon added bitterly.
“The difference in age … not too great … Fabrizio born after the French came in, around ‘98, I would guess; the Countess might be twenty-seven or twenty-eight, impossible to be more charming, more adorable; in this country rich in beauties, she outdoes them all, Marini, Gherardi, Ruga, Aresa, Pietragrua: she transcends all these women.… And so they lived happy together, hidden on that lovely Lake Como when the young fellow wanted to join his Napoléon.… There are still souls in Italy! And no matter what we do! Beloved country!… No,” continued this heart inflamed by jealousy, “how else to account for that submission to a life of boredom in the country, with the horror of seeing every day, at every meal, the hideous face of the Marchese del Dongo, and that wretched pale physiognomy of the Marchesino Ascanio, who will be worse than his father!… Well, I shall serve her turn, at least that way I shall have the pleasure of seeing her closer than through my opera-glasses.”
