by Stendhal
The Count gave himself excellent reasons for his extravagance, completely absorbed in conquering the felicity he saw under his gaze. He found none so good when he came to consider his own age and the occasionally melancholy cares which filled his existence.
“A capable man whose wit is overpowered by his fears affords me a superior style of life and a great deal of money to be his Minister; but if he were to dismiss me tomorrow, I should be left old and poor, in other words, everything the world most despises; a fine figure of a man to offer the Countess!” Such thoughts were too somber, and his gaze returned to Signora Pietranera; he could not tear his eyes away, and to keep his mind focused upon her, he decided not to go down to her box. “She accepted Nani, I am told, only to put that imbecile Limercati in his place for his reluctance to take up a sword, or a dagger, against her husband’s murderer. I would do battle for her twenty times over,” the Count exclaimed in a transport. From one moment to the next he consulted the theater clock, which in luminous figures against a black background informed the audience, every five minutes, of the time when it was permissible to visit a friend’s box. “I cannot,” the Count mused, “spend more than half an hour in her box, recent acquaintance as I am; were I to remain longer, I should be making a spectacle of myself, and thanks to my age and worse still to this damned powdered hair, I should have all the attractions of the old fool in the commedia dell’arte.” But a further reflection made up his mind for him: “If she were to leave that box to visit another, I should be paid as I deserve for the greed with which I am hoarding such pleasure.” He stood up to go down to the Countess’s box, when all of a sudden he felt no further desire to present himself there. “Ah, now here’s a pretty mess!” he exclaimed, laughing at himself and stopping on the stairs. “An impulse of authentic timidity—it’s been twenty-five years since I’ve experienced such a thing.”
He entered the box with a certain effort of will, and taking advantage, as a man of intelligence, of what had just occurred to him, he made no effort to seem at ease or to be clever by telling some entertaining story; he had the courage to be shy, he employed his wit in revealing his disturbance without being ridiculous. “If she takes it amiss,” he told himself, “I’m lost for good. So! Timid with powdered hair which would be gray without it! But it’s all true, so it can only be ridiculous if I exaggerate the fact or boast about it.” The Countess had so often been bored to death at the Castle of Grianta by the powdered heads of her brother, her nephew, and several respectable bores of the neighborhood that it never occurred to her to concern herself with her new admirer’s coiffure.
The Countess’s mind being shielded from the notion of deriding his entrance, she was entirely concerned with the news from France which Mosca always brought when he appeared in her box; no doubt he made it up. In discussing such matters with him this evening, she noticed his warm and benevolent expression.
“I suppose,” she said, “that in Parma, among your slaves, you would not permit yourself such a friendly aspect—it would spoil everything and give them some hope of not being hanged.”
The complete absence of self-importance in a man who was regarded as the leading diplomat in all Italy struck the Countess as singular; she actually found him to possess a certain charm. Finally, since he spoke so well and so passionately, she was not distressed that he had felt it appropriate to assume, for an evening, and without further consequence, an admirer’s part.
This was a great step forward, and a very dangerous one; fortunately for the Minister, to whom in Parma no lady was cruel, the Countess had arrived from Grianta only a few days before; her mind was still stiff with the tedium of country life. She had virtually forgotten the spirit of mockery, and all those things which belong to an elegant and frivolous style of life had assumed in her eyes a tincture of novelty which made them virtually sacred; she was not disposed to make fun of anything, not even a timid lover of forty-five. Eight days later, the Count’s temerity might have been welcomed quite differently.
At La Scala, it is customary for these little visits to the boxes to last only some twenty minutes; the Count spent the whole evening in the box where he had the happiness of finding Signora Pietranera. “This is a woman,” he told himself, “who gives me back all the follies of my youth!” But he sensed the danger: “Will my rank as lord and master some forty leagues from here gain forgiveness for this nonsense? I’m so bored with life in Parma!” Nonetheless, every quarter of an hour he promised himself he would take his leave.
“I must confess, Madame,” he said to the Countess, smiling, “that at Parma I am perishing of tedium, and I must be allowed to intoxicate myself with pleasure when I find it in my path. So, without ulterior consequences and for this one evening, permit me to play a suitor’s part with you. Alas! in a few days I shall be far away from this box which dispels all problems and even, you may say, all proprieties!”
Eight days after this scandalously extended visit to the box at La Scala, and in the wake of several minor incidents of which a narrative might seem tedious, Count Mosca was absolutely mad with love, and the Countess already thinking that his age should be no objection, if in other respects she found him attractive. Matters had reached this stage when Mosca was recalled to Parma by a courier. It appeared that his Prince, left to himself, was in a state of fear. The Countess returned to Grianta; now that her imagination no longer embellished that lovely spot, it seemed to her a desert. “Can I have become attached to this man?” she wondered. Mosca wrote and had no need for pretence, absence having deprived him of the source of all his thoughts; his letters were entertaining, and, prompted by a little eccentricity to which no exception was taken, in order to avoid the remarks of the Marchese de Dongo, who did not like having to pay for the delivery of letters, Mosca sent couriers who posted his at Como, at Lecco, at Varese, or some other charming little town in the environs of the lake. This was done in hopes that the courier might bring back her replies; he did so.
Soon the courier-days became an event for the Countess; these couriers brought flowers, fruit, trifling little gifts which diverted her, and her sister-in-law as well. Recollections of the Count mingled with the notion of his great power; the Countess had become interested in everything that was said of him; even the Liberals paid tribute to his talents.
The chief source of the Count’s ill repute was that he was regarded as the leader of the ultra party at the court of Parma, and that the Liberal party was headed by a schemer capable of anything, even of succeeding, the Marchesa Raversi, an immensely rich woman. The Prince took great care not to discourage this opposition party; he was well aware that he would always be the master, even with a Ministry formed in Signora Raversi’s salon. A thousand details were discussed at Grianta concerning her schemes; the absence of Count Mosca, whom everyone described as a Minister of extraordinary talent and a man of action, permitted the abandonment of powdered hair, symbol of everything sad and dull; it was a trivial detail, one of the obligations of the court at which he played, moreover, so important a part.
“A court is absurd,” the Countess said to the Marchesa, “but entertaining; it’s a game that interests me, though one must play by the rules. Who ever thought to protest the absurdity of the rules of whist? Yet once one has grown used to the rules, it is great fun to take your adversary’s tricks.”
The Countess often thought about the writer of so many amusing letters; the day they were delivered was a pleasure for her; she took her boat and went to read them in the beauty-spots along the lake shore, at Pliniana, at Belan, in the Sfondrata woods. These letters seemed to console her somewhat for Fabrizio’s absence. At least she could not forbid the Count to be head over heels in love; a month had not passed before she was thinking of him with the tenderest feelings. On his side, Count Mosca was almost sincere when he offered to present his resignation, to leave the Ministry, and to come spend his life with her in Milan or somewhere else.
“I have four hundred thousand francs,” he added, “whi
ch will always afford us an income of fifteen thousand.”
“A box at the theater once again, horses! and so on,” the Countess told herself; these were sweet dreams. The sublime beauties of the shores of Lake Como began to delight her once again. She went to daydream there about this return of a brilliant and exceptional life, which, despite all appearances, would once more become possible for her. She saw herself on the Corso, in Milan, happy and gay, as in the days of the Viceroy. “Youth, or at least a life of activity, would begin again for me!”
Sometimes her eager imagination concealed things from her, but she never entertained those deliberate illusions produced by cowardice. Above everything else, she was a woman honest with herself. “If I am a little too old to indulge such follies,” she reminded herself, “envy, which creates as many illusions as love, can poison life in Milan. After my husband’s death, my noble poverty enjoyed a certain success, as did the rejection of two great fortunes. My poor little Count Mosca hasn’t the twentieth part of the wealth which those two wretches Limercati and Nani laid at my feet. The pathetic widow’s pension so arduously obtained, the dismissal of the servants which produced a certain effect, the little room on the fourth floor which brought twenty carriages to the door—all this once produced a remarkable show. But I shall have some unpleasant moments, whatever my skill, if all I have is my widow’s pension with which to return to life in Milan with the nice little bourgeois comforts supplied by the fifteen thousand francs which are all Mosca will have left after he resigns. A powerful objection, which will constitute a terrible weapon in envy’s armory, is that the Count, though long separated from his wife, is a married man. Everyone knows about that separation in Parma, but it will be news in Milan, and attributed to me. So, my lovely theater of La Scala, my divine Lake Como … adieu! adieu!”
Despite all these anticipations, if the Countess had had any fortune at all, she would have accepted Mosca’s offer of resignation. She regarded herself as an older woman, and the court alarmed her; but what will seem highly unlikely on this side of the Alps is that the Count would have gladly handed in his resignation. At least so he managed to convince his dear friend; in all his letters he sought with mounting urgency a second meeting in Milan; it was granted.
“To promise you I feel a mad passion for you,” the Countess observed to the Count, one day in Milan, “would not be the truth; I should be only too happy to love today, at thirty-some years, as I once loved at twenty-two! But I have seen the collapse of so many things I once believed eternal! For you I feel the tenderest friendship, I trust you completely, and of all men, you are the one I prefer.”
The Countess believed herself to be perfectly sincere; yet at the end, this declaration contained a little prevarication. Perhaps, if Fabrizio had been willing, he would have triumphed utterly over her heart. But Fabrizio was merely a child in Count Mosca’s eyes; he arrived in Milan three days after the young scatterbrain’s departure for Novara, and he made haste to use his influence in the boy’s favor with Baron Binder. His exile, the Count believed, was irremediable.
He had not come to Milan unaccompanied; in his carriage was the Duke Sanseverina-Taxis, a comely little old man of sixty-eight, enormously rich though not sufficiently noble. It was no one more remote than his grandfather who had amassed millions as tax-collector of the State of Parma. His father had persuaded the Prince of Parma to appoint him Ambassador to the Court of ——, as a consequence of the following argument:
“Your Highness grants thirty thousand francs to his Envoy to the Court of ——, who cuts a very mediocre figure there. If you were to deign to grant me this post, I shall accept a salary of six thousand francs. My expenditures at the Court of —— will never be less than one hundred thousand francs a year, and my steward will annually deposit twenty thousand francs in the Foreign Affairs Treasury at Parma. With this sum, you can attach to me any embassy secretary you like, and I shall show no jealousy concerning diplomatic secrets, should there be any. My goal is to give a certain luster to my house, still a new one, and to render it illustrious by one of the great positions of the realm.”
The present Duke, son of this ambassador, had been so inept as to show himself something of a Liberal, and for the last two years he had been in despair. In Napoléon’s time, he had lost two or three million by his insistence upon remaining abroad, and yet, since the re-establishment of order in Europe, he had not been able to obtain a certain Grand Cordon which embellished the portrait of his father, and the absence of which was gradually killing him.
At the degree of intimacy which in Italy follows upon love, vanity presented no further obstacle between the two lovers. Thus it was with utmost simplicity that Mosca said to the woman he adored:
“I have two or three possible schemes to offer you, each quite ingeniously worked out; I have thought of nothing else for the last three months.
“Firstly, I hand in my resignation, and we live as good bourgeois in Milan, in Florence, in Naples, or wherever you like. We have an income of fifteen thousand francs, independent of the Prince’s favors, which will last a certain interval, more or less.
“Secondly, you will consent to come to the country where I have some power; you buy an estate, Sacca, for instance, a charming house surrounded by a forest, overlooking the valley of the Po—you can have the bill of sale signed eight days from now. The Prince invites you to his Court. But here an enormous obstacle arises: you will be well received at Court; no one will dream of raising the slightest objection. Moreover, the Princess regards herself as ill-treated, and I have just done her some favors with an eye to your interests. But I must remind you of one capital difficulty: the Prince is utterly bigoted, and as you are well aware, fate would have it that I am a married man. Whence a million embarrassments of detail. You are a widow, a fine title which must be surrendered for another, and this brings us to the object of my third proposition.
“We might find a new and not unaccommodating husband. But first of all, he would have to be extremely advanced in years, for why should you deny me the hope of eventually replacing him? Well then! I have devised this singular arrangement with the Duke Sanseverina-Taxis, who of course knows nothing of his future Duchess’s name. All he knows is that she will make him an Ambassador and will present him a Grand Cordon possessed by his father, the absence whereof makes him the unhappiest of mortals. Apart from this, the Duke is not entirely a fool; he orders his suits and his wigs from Paris. He is not at all a man of deliberate ill nature; he seriously believes that honor consists in having a Cordon, and he is ashamed of his wealth. He came to me a year ago offering to fund a hospital in order to achieve that Cordon; I laughed at him, but he by no means laughed at me when I suggested a marriage to him; my first stipulation, of course, was that he would never set foot in Parma.”
“But you realize that what you are suggesting is utterly immoral?” exclaimed the Countess.
“Not more immoral than many another thing that is done at our Court and at twenty others. Absolute power has the advantage that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the people; now, what is an absurdity which no one perceives? Our policy, for twenty years, will consist in fearing the Jacobins, and what a fear that will be! Each year we shall believe ourselves on the eve of ’93. You will hear, I trust, the observations I shall make thereupon at my dinner-parties! A fine affair! Everything that might somewhat diminish this fear will be sovereignly moral in the eyes of the nobles, and of the religious. Now, in Parma, whatever is not noble or religious is in prison, or is preparing to go there; be persuaded that such a marriage will appear strange in my country only on the day I am disgraced. Such an arrangement is an offense to no one; that, I believe, is the essential point. The Prince, on whose favor we are trading, has set but one condition to his consent, which is that the future Duchess be of noble birth. Last year, my position, all calculations made, earned me a hundred and seven thousand francs; my income must have amounted in toto to one hundred and twenty-two thousand. I have investe
d twenty thousand at Lyons. Very well! Choose: either a splendid existence based on a hundred and twenty-two thousand francs to spend, which, in Parma, would amount to at least something like four hundred thousand in Milan; but with this marriage which gives you the name of a decent man whom you will never set eyes on except at the altar. Or else the meager bourgeois life on fifteen thousand francs in Florence or in Naples, for I agree with you, you have been excessively admired in Milan; envy would persecute you there, and perhaps manage to spoil our dispositions. The splendid existence at Parma will have, I trust, certain aspects of novelty, even in your eyes which have seen the Court of Prince Eugène; it would be politic to experience it before rejecting it forever. Do not suppose I am attempting to influence your choice. My own decision is clear—I prefer to live with you in an attic than to continue this splendid existence alone.”
The possibility of this strange marriage was discussed daily by the two lovers. The Countess saw the Duke Sanseverina-Taxis at the Ball of La Scala, and he struck her as quite presentable. In one of their last conversations, Mosca summarized his proposition as follows:
“You must make a decision, if we wish to spend the rest of our lives in an agreeable fashion, and not turn old before our time. The Prince has given his approval; Sanseverina has a number of advantages to his credit; he possesses the finest palazzo in Parma, and a limitless fortune; he is sixty-eight years old, and obsessed by the Grand Cordon; only one defect shadows his life—he once commissioned a bust of Napoléon from Canova for ten thousand francs. His second sin, which will cause his death if you fail to come to his rescue, is to have loaned twenty-five napoleons to Ferrante Palla, a madman of our country, though something of a genius, whom we have subsequently condemned to death, fortunately in absentia. This Ferrante has produced two hundred verses in his entire life, quite beyond compare; I shall recite them for you, they are as fine as Dante. The Prince is sending Sanseverina to the Court of ——, he will marry you the day of his departure, and the second year of his journey, which he will call an Embassy, he will receive that Cordon of ——, without which he cannot survive. In him you will have a brother by no means unpalatable, one who will sign in advance all the papers I request, and moreover you will see him seldom or never, as you choose. He asks nothing better than never to show his face in Parma, where his tax-collector grandfather and his professed Liberalism embarrass him. Rassi, our hangman, claims that the Duke has been a secret subscriber to to the Constitutionnel through Ferrante Palla, the poet, and this calumny has long constituted a serious obstacle to the Prince’s consent.”
