by Stendhal
Canon Borda explained the matter quite clearly to the two ladies. Actually, Binder was quite well disposed to their suit; he was delighted that Fabrizio had made his escape before the orders which might arrive from Vienna; for Binder had no power to determine matters, he was waiting for orders in this case as in all others; he sent to Vienna every day the exact copy of all the information he received: then he waited.
It was essential that during his exile at Romagnano, Fabrizio:
1. Must go to Mass every day, and take as his father confessor an intelligent priest devoted to the cause of the Monarchy, and in the confessional avow to him only the most irreproachable sentiments.
2. Be certain to frequent no person reputed to be intelligent, and on every occasion to speak of rebellion with horror, as a thing never to be countenanced.
3. Never allow himself to be seen at the café, never read any papers but the official gazettes of Turin and Milan; and in general betray a certain dislike of reading, and above all never read any work printed after 1720 except, if need be, the novels of Walter Scott.
4. Finally, the Canon added with a certain malice, he must pay the most observable court to some one of the attractive women of the community, of the noble class naturally; this would show that he does not possess the grim and malcontent spirit of a nascent conspirator.
Before going to bed that night, the Countess and the Marchesa wrote two endless letters to Fabrizio, in which they explained with a charming anxiety all the advice Borda had given.
Fabrizio had no desire to be a conspirator: he loved Napoléon, and, as a young nobleman, believed himself created to be happier than other men and regarded all bourgeois as absurd. He had never opened a book since leaving school, where he had read only the books prescribed by the Jesuits. He took up residence a certain distance from Romagnano, in a splendid palazzo; one of the masterpieces of the celebrated architect Sanmicheli; but no one had lived in it for thirty years, so that rain leaked into every room, and not one window closed properly. Fabrizio took possession of the steward’s horses, which he rode quite casually at any hour of the day; he spoke to no one, and brooded. The advice to take a mistress in an ultra family struck him as quite agreeable, and he followed it to the letter. He selected for his confessor an ambitious young priest who wanted to become a bishop (like the confessor of the Spielberg*); but he walked three leagues a day and wrapped himself in a mystery he believed impenetrable, in order to read the Constitutionnel, a newspaper he considered sublime. “As fine as Alfieri or as Dante!” he would frequently exclaim. Fabrizio had this in common with the young men of France, that he was much more concerned with his horse and his newspaper than with his bien-pensant mistress. But there was not yet room for the imitation of others in this naïve and resolute nature, and he made no friends in the society of the big country town of Romagnano; his simplicity passed for pride; no one knew what to make of such a character. “He’s a younger son resentful of not being the eldest,” said the parish priest.
*Silvio Pellico has made this name known throughout Europe: it is that of the street in Milan where the police headquarters and prisons are located. [Stendhal’s note.]
*See Andryane’s curious memoirs, as amusing as a novel and as relevant as Tacitus. [Stendhal’s note.]
CHAPTER SIX
We shall frankly admit that Canon Borda’s jealousy was not entirely unfounded; upon his return from France, Fabrizio seemed to Countess Pietranera’s eyes a handsome stranger she might have known well in days gone by. Had he spoken of love, she would have loved him; had she not, already, an admiration for his conduct and for his person that was passionate and, so to speak, limitless?
But Fabrizio embraced her with such an effusion of innocent gratitude and honest friendship, that she would have horrified herself had she sought any other sentiment in this virtually filial affection. “After all,” the Countess told herself, “a few friends who knew me six years ago, at Prince Eugène’s court, may still find me pretty and even young, but for him I am a respectable woman … and, to confess the whole affair without any concessions to my self-regard, an elderly one.” The Countess was deceiving herself as to the stage of life she had reached, but not in the manner of vulgar women. “At his age, moreover,” she added, “the ravages of time tend to be somewhat exaggerated; a man of riper years …”
The Countess, who was pacing up and down in her salon, stopped before a mirror, then smiled. It must be told that for some months Signora Pietranera’s heart had been attacked quite seriously and by a singular personage. Soon after Fabrizio’s departure for France, the Countess, who, without quite admitting it to herself, was already beginning to be quite preoccupied with him, had fallen into a deep depression. All her occupations seemed to her to lack pleasure, and, if we may say so, savor; she told herself that Napoléon, seeking to draw the Italian people to himself, would make Fabrizio his aide-de-camp. “He is lost to me!” she exclaimed in tears. “I’ll never see him again; he’ll write to me, but what would I be for him in ten years?”
It was in such a frame of mind that she journeyed to Milan; she was hoping to learn fresher news of Napoléon and, who knows? perhaps of Fabrizio in consequence. Without admitting it to herself, this volatile spirit was beginning to weary of the monotonous life she was leading in the country. “It’s staying alive,” she said, “not living.” Seeing these powdered creatures every day, her brother, her nephew Ascanio, their footmen! What would their strolls along the lake shore be without Fabrizio! Her one consolation was the friendship which united her with the Marchesa. But for some time, this intimacy with Fabrizio’s mother, who was older than she and a woman without hope, had begun to be less enjoyable to her.
Such was Countess Pietranera’s singular position: with Fabrizio gone, she had little hope for the future; her heart needed consolation and novelty. In Milan, she became obsessed with the latest fashionable opera; she would shut herself up all alone, for hours at a time, in the box of her old friend Colonel Scotti, at La Scala. The men she attempted to meet in order to have news of Napoléon and his army struck her as crude and vulgar. Back at home, she improvised at her piano till three in the morning. One evening, at La Scala in the box of one of her friends, where she had gone hoping for news from France, someone introduced Count Mosca, Minister of Parma: an agreeable man who spoke of France and of Napoléon in such a way as to give her heart new reasons to hope or to fear. She returned to that box the next evening: this clever person reappeared, and throughout the performance she took pleasure in speaking with him. Since Fabrizio’s departure, she had not experienced so lively an evening. This man who entertained her, Count Mosca della Rovere Sorezana, was then Minister of War, of Police, and of Finance of that famous Prince of Parma, Ernesto IV, so famous for his severities, which the Milanese Liberals called cruelties. Mosca might have been forty or forty-five; he had large features, no trace of self-importance, and a simple, cheerful manner which people found attractive; he would have appeared even more so had a whim of his Prince not compelled him to powder his hair as a pledge of sound political sentiments. Since Italians have little fear of wounding one another’s vanity, people there quite soon reach a tone of intimacy, and manage to speak quite personally. The antidote of this practice is to stop seeing one another if feelings are wounded.
“But why, then, do you powder your hair, Count?” asked Countess Pietranera the third time she encountered him. “For a man like you to wear powder, so agreeable, still young, and who fought on our side in Spain!”
“Precisely because I stole nothing in that very Spain, and because one must live. I was mad for glory; a flattering remark from the French general, Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, our commander, was everything to me, at the time. When Napoléon fell, it so happened that while I was devouring my patrimony in his service, my father, an imaginative man who already saw me a general, was building a palazzo for me in Parma. By 1813, my sole worldly possessions were a huge palazzo to finish and a pension.”
“A pension: th
irty-five hundred francs, like my husband?”
“Count Pietranera was a division-general. My pension, as a mere head of a squadron, was never more than eight hundred francs, and even that was not paid to me until I became Minister of Finance.”
Since the only other person in the box was the lady of strongly Liberal opinions to which it belonged, the conversation continued with the same degree of frankness. Count Mosca, when questioned, spoke of his life in Parma. “In Spain, under General Saint-Cyr, I faced enemy fire to win a cross and a little glory thereafter, now I dress like an actor in a comedy in order to support a great household and earn a few thousand francs. Once I began playing this sort of chess, offended by the insolence of my superiors, I sought to fill one of the highest offices; I succeeded: but my happiest days are still those I can occasionally spend in Milan; here still beats, so it seems to me, the heart of your army of Italy.”
The frankness, the disinvoltura with which this minister of so formidable a prince expressed himself, piqued the Countess’s curiosity; from his title, she had expected to find a self-important pedant, and she encountered a man who was ashamed of the gravity of his position. Mosca had promised to provide her with all the news from France he could obtain: this was a great indiscretion in Milan, during the months before Waterloo; for Italy at that moment, the question was to be or not to be; everyone was in a fever, in Milan, of either hope or fear. Amid this universal upheaval, the Countess made inquiries about a man who spoke so casually of so envied a position which was his sole means of support.
Some curious things, and of a fascinating oddness, were reported to Signora Pietranera:
—Count Mosca della Rovere Sorezana, it is said, is about to become Prime Minister and declared favorite of Ranuccio-Ernesto IV, absolute sovereign of Parma and, furthermore, one of the richest princes in Europe. The Count would have already achieved this supreme position had he consented to assume a more dignified manner; it is said that the Prince often reprimands him in this regard: “What difference does my manner make to Your Highness,” he answers boldly, “if I manage his affairs properly?”
— The felicity of this favorite, it was further reported, is not unalloyed: he must please a sovereign who is, no doubt, a man of sense and discernment, but who, since his accession to an absolute throne, seems to have lost his head and shown, for example, suspicions worthy of a silly old woman.
— Ernesto IV is courageous only in war. On the battlefield, we have seen this brave general leading a column to the attack; but after the death of his father, Ernesto III, upon returning to his territories where, to his misfortune, he wields unlimited power, he has begun ranting and raving against Liberals and liberty alike. Soon he reached the conclusion that he was hated; and finally, in a moment of bad temper, he actually ordered the hanging of two Liberals who may well have been blameless, advised in this by a wretch named Rassi, a sort of Minister of Justice.
— Since that fatal moment, the Prince’s life has been changed; he is evidently tormented by the strangest suspicions. He is not yet fifty, and fear has so diminished him, if one may say so, that as soon as he mentions the Jacobins and the plans of the Central Committee in Paris, his physiognomy becomes that of an old man of eighty; he gives way to the chimerical fears of earliest childhood. His favorite, Rassi, Presiding Magistrate (or Chief Justice), has influence only by his master’s fear; whenever he is apprehensive about his own position, he makes haste to discover some new conspiracy of the blackest and most fantastic nature. Say thirty rash fellows meet to read a number of the Constitutionnel, Rassi declares them to be conspirators and sends them as prisoners to that famous citadel of Parma, the terror of all Lombardy. Since it is built on an eminence, apparently of some hundred and eighty feet, it is visible from a great distance in the center of that vast plain; and the physical shape of this prison, of which such horrors are whispered, crowns it—by fear alone—the queen of that entire region extending from Milan to Bologna.
—Would you believe, another traveler asked the Countess, that at night, on an upper floor of his palace, guarded by eighty sentries who shout out an entire sentence every quarter of an hour, Ernesto IV trembles in his private apartments? All the doors are sealed with ten bolts, and the adjoining rooms, on the floors above and below as well, are filled with soldiers: he is terrified of the Jacobins. If a floorboard creaks, he reaches for his pistols, convinced that a Liberal is hidden under his bed. Immediately all the alarm-bells of the castle are set off, and an aide-de-camp goes to waken Count Mosca. Once in the castle, this Minister of Police is very careful not to deny the conspiracy; on the contrary, once he is alone with the Prince, and armed to the teeth, he visits every corner of the apartments, peers under the beds, and in a word performs a host of absurd actions worthy of an old woman. All these precautions would have seemed quite degrading to the Prince himself in the happy days when he was waging war and had killed no one save by musket-fire. Since he is a man of considerable intelligence, he is ashamed of these very precautions; they seem absurd to him, even at the very moment he is taking them, and the source of Count Mosca’s enormous influence is that he employs all his skill in managing to spare the Prince any embarrassment in his presence. It is himself, Mosca, who in his rank as Minister of Police, insists on looking under the furniture and, it is said in Parma, even in the cases of the orchestra’s doublebasses. It is the Prince who raises objections, and teases his Minister on his excessive puntiglio. “It is a choice,” Count Mosca answers him. “Think of the satirical verses with which the Jacobins would overwhelm us if we were to permit you to be killed. It is not only your life we are protecting here, it is your honor.” But it appears that the Prince is only half duped, for if someone in the city should take it into his head to say that no one has slept a wink last night at the castle, Chief Magistrate Rassi sends the wretched joker to the citadel; and once in this lofty structure and up in the air, as people say in Parma, it takes a miracle for anyone to remember the prisoner’s very existence. It’s because he is a soldier, and because in Spain he managed a score of escapes, pistol in hand, from one tight corner after another, that the Prince prefers Count Mosca to Rassi, who is much more flexible and less principled. Those wretched prisoners in the citadel are in the strictest confinement imaginable, and all kinds of stories are spread about them. According to the Liberals, it is one of Rassi’s ideas that the jailers and confessors are under order to convince them that virtually every month, one of them is put to death. On that day the prisoners are allowed to climb up onto the platform of the huge tower and from there to watch the procession with a spy playing the part of a poor devil being marched to his death …
These tales and a score of others of the same sort, and of no less authenticity, deeply interested Countess Pietranera; the following day she sought certain details from Count Mosca himself, whom she teased mercilessly. She found him entertaining, and kept insisting to him that in his heart of hearts he was a monster without suspecting it. One day, returning to his lodgings in an inn, the Count said to himself, “Not only is the Countess Pietranera a delightful woman, but when I spend the evening in her box, I manage to forget certain matters in Parma, the very thought of which pierces me to the heart.”
This Minister, despite his frivolous manner and his brilliant remarks, did not possess a soul à la française; he was not able to forget his griefs and grievances. When his pillow revealed a thorn, he was compelled to snap it off and blunt its point against his own throbbing limbs. (I apologize for this paragraph, translated from the Italian.)
Soon after making this discovery, the Count realized that despite the business which had summoned him to Milan, the day was inordinately long; he could not stay in one place; he exhausted his carriage-horses. Toward six in the evening, he took a horse to ride in the Corso, where he had some hopes of encountering Signora Pietranera; not having found her there, he recalled that the theater of La Scala would open at eight; he went in and found no more than ten persons in that enormous hall. He
suffered a certain embarrassment at being there. “Is it possible,” he said, “that at the age of forty-five, I should be indulging in follies that would make a sub-lieutenant blush! Fortunately no one suspects them.” He made his escape and attempted to pass the time strolling through those attractive streets around the theater, lined with cafés which at that hour are overflowing with people; in front of each one, crowds of onlookers are perched on chairs in the middle of the street, taking ices and commenting on the passers-by, among whom the Count was remarkable; hence he enjoyed the pleasure of being recognized and greeted. Three or four importunate souls, of those who cannot be avoided, seized this occasion to have an audience with so powerful a Minister. Two of these tendered petitions; the third confined himself to addressing him with extensive advice on his political behavior. Intelligence, he reminded himself, is not taken unawares; nor does high office appear in the streets. He returned to the theater, where it occurred to him to rent a third-tier box; from here he could observe, without fear of detection, the second-tier box where he hoped to find the Countess. A wait of two whole hours did not seem too long to this lover; certain of not being seen, he happily abandoned himself to the full extent of his folly. “After all,” he told himself, “isn’t old age precisely the time when one is no longer capable of such delicious childishness?”
At last the Countess appeared. Armed with his opera-glasses, he examined her in a transport of delight. “Young, brilliant, light as a bird,” he said to himself, “she can’t be twenty-five. Her beauty is the least of her charms: where else to find a soul ever sincere, which never acts with discretion, which abandons itself wholly to the impression of the moment, which asks only to be swept away by some new object? How well I understand Count Nani’s follies!”
