The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  Fabrizio then, since the whole truth must be told, Fabrizio accompanied his mother to the port of Laveno, on the left, or Austrian, bank of Lake Maggiore, where she landed at about eight in the evening. (The lake is regarded as neutral territory, and no passport is required of those who do not set foot on shore.) But no sooner had night fallen than he had himself set ashore on this same Austrian side, in a little grove of trees that juts out into the waves. He had hired a sediola, a sort of fast rustic tilbury in which he could follow, at some five hundred yards’ distance, his mother’s carriage; he was disguised in the livery of the Casa del Dongo, and none of the customs officers or the numerous employees of the police dreamed of asking to see his passport. A quarter of a league from Como, where the Marchesa and her daughter were to stop for the night, he took a path to the left, which, skirting the town of Vico, then joined a little road recently laid along the far side of the lake. It was midnight, and Fabrizio could well hope to encounter no member of the police. The trees of the groves which the little road kept passing through silhouetted the black outlines of their foliage against a starry sky, veiled by a light mist. The waters of the lake and the sky itself were profoundly calm; Fabrizio’s soul could not resist this sublime beauty; he stopped, then sat down on a boulder jutting up out of the lake, forming a sort of tiny promontory. The universal silence was troubled only, at regular intervals, by the lapping of the little waves that expired on the beach. Fabrizio had an Italian heart; I seek no pardon for him: this defect, which will make him less lovable, consisted chiefly in this: his vanity came only in sudden bursts, and the mere aspect of such sublime beauty plunged him into tenderness and dulled the sharp ache of his sufferings. Seated on his solitary boulder, no longer having to remain on guard against the agents of the police, protected by the darkness and its immense silence, he found there, with little or no effort, the happiest moments he had known in a very long time, and his eyes filled with gentle tears.

  He resolved never to tell the Duchess any falsehoods, and it is because he loved her to the point of adoration at this moment that he swore to himself never to tell her that he loved her; never would he utter the word love to her, since the passion so called was alien to his heart. In the enthusiasms of generosity and virtue which at this moment constituted his entire happiness, he determined to tell her everything at the first opportunity: his heart had never known love. Once this courageous decision had been taken, he felt somehow relieved of an enormous weight. “She may have something to say to me about Marietta: well then! I shall never see little Marietta again,” he gaily assured himself.

  The oppressive heat that had prevailed during the day was beginning to be tempered by the morning breeze. Already dawn was outlining against a pale whitish glow the Alpine peaks rising to the north and east of Lake Como. Their masses, whitened by the snow-fields, even in June, were silhouetted against the clear blue of a sky forever pure at these great heights. A spur of the Alps thrusting south toward happy Italy separates the slopes of Lake Como from those of Lake Garda. Fabrizio gazed at all the spurs of these sublime mountains, the brightening dawn coming to mark the valleys which separate them by dissipating the faint mist which rose from the depths of the gorges.

  Some minutes before, Fabrizio had begun walking again; he passed the hill which forms the Durini peninsula, and then caught sight of that steeple of the village of Grianta, where so often he and Abbé Blanès had observed the stars. “How ignorant I was in those days! I couldn’t understand,” he reminded himself, “even the absurd Latin of those astrological treatises my master would pore over, and I believe I respected them especially because, understanding no more than a word here, a word there, my imagination undertook to grant them a meaning—the most fantastical one possible.”

  Gradually his reverie took another turn. “Might there be something real about this science? A certain number of fools and scholars agree among themselves that they know Mexican, for instance; they impose themselves upon society, which respects them, and upon governments, which pay them. They are overwhelmed with favors precisely because they have no minds to speak of, and because the powers that be need not fear that they will rouse populations and move men’s hearts by the help of generous sentiments! Take the example of Father Bari, to whom Prince Ernesto IV has just granted a pension of four thousand francs and the Cross of his Order for having restored nineteen verses of a Greek dithyramb!

  “But good God! Am I entitled to regard such things as absurdities? Have I the right to complain?” he suddenly asked himself, stopping where he stood. “Hasn’t that same Cross just been bestowed upon my tutor in Naples?” Fabrizio experienced a feeling of profound uneasiness; the fine enthusiasm of virtue that had just made his heart beat faster turned into the vile pleasure of sharing in the spoils of a theft. “Well then!” he said to himself at last, with the lusterless gaze of a man dissatisfied with himself. “Since my birth gives me the right to benefit by such abuses, it would be a signal imbecility not to avail myself of my share; but I must not permit myself to denounce them in public.” Such reasoning had its good points, but how far Fabrizio had fallen from that height of sublime felicity to which he had been transported an hour before. The thought of privilege had withered that ever-delicate plant known as happiness.

  “If I am not to believe in astrology,” he continued, seeking to divert his mind, “if this science is, like three-quarters of all the non-mathematical sciences, a collection of enthusiastic fools and clever hypocrites paid by those they serve, how is it that I think so often and so intensely of this one fatal circumstance: I did escape from the prison at B——, but in the uniform and with the marching orders of a soldier thrown into jail for good reason.”

  Fabrizio’s reasoning could never penetrate further; he approached the difficulty in a hundred ways without managing to overcome it. He was still too young; in his leisure moments, his soul was delighted to enjoy the sensations produced by the romantic circumstances his imagination was ever ready to provide. He was far from devoting his time to patient consideration of the real particularities of things in order to divine their true causes. Reality still seemed to him flat and muddy; I can agree that one is not fond of considering it, but then one ought not to reason about it. Above all, one ought not to raise objections against it with the various fragments of one’s ignorance.

  It was in this fashion that, without lacking intelligence, Fabrizio could not succeed in seeing that his half-belief in omens was a religion for him, a profound impression received upon his entrance into life. To think of this belief was to feel, was a happiness. And he persisted in questioning how astrology could be a true proven science, like geometry, for example. He ardently ransacked his memory for all the circumstances when omens he had observed had not been followed by the fortunate or unfortunate consequences they had seemed to foretell. But even while believing he was reasoning properly and heading in the direction of truth, his attention halted delightedly over the memory of those cases where the omen had been amply followed by the fortunate or unfortunate accident which it had seemed to predict, and his spirit was filled with reverence and affection; he would have felt an invincible repugnance for anyone who might have denied the omens, and especially if he had employed irony in so doing.

  Fabrizio walked on without realizing the distance he was covering, and he was at this point in these impotent reasonings when, looking up, he saw the wall of his father’s garden. This wall, which supported a splendid terrace, rose to a height of more than forty feet above the road, to the right. A row of rough-hewn stones at the very top, near the balustrade, gave it a monumental appearance. “Not bad,” Fabrizio mused coldly, “the design is good, almost Roman in taste.” He was applying his new knowledge of antiquities. Then he turned away in disgust; the severities of his father and especially his brother Ascanio’s denunciation of him upon his return from France came to mind.

  “This unnatural denunciation was the origin of my present way of life; I might hate it, I might despise i
t, but after all it has changed my destiny. What would I have become, back there at Novara, being no more than tolerated by my father’s man of business, if my aunt had not made love with a powerful minister at court? If that same aunt had happened to have a dry and ordinary soul, say, instead of that tender and passionate spirit devoted to me with a sort of enthusiasm which amazes me still? Where would I be now if the Duchess had had the soul of her brother the Marchese del Dongo?”

  Overcome by these cruel memories, Fabrizio began to walk hesitantly; he reached the edge of the moat just opposite the castle’s splendid façade. Yet he scarcely cast a glance at this great time-blackened structure. The noble language of architecture found him quite unresponsive; the memory of his father and his brother closed his soul to any sensation of beauty, and he was conscious only of maintaining his vigilance in the presence of hypocritical and dangerous foes. He stared a moment, but with an evident disgust, at the little window of the third-floor bedroom he had occupied before 1815. His father’s character had stripped the memories of early childhood of all their charm. “I have not come back here,” he thought, “since March seventh at eight o’clock in the evening. I left to take possession of Vasi’s passport, and the next day the fear of spies made me hasten my departure. When I passed by again after the journey to France, I had no time to go up there, even to have another look at my print collection, and all thanks to my brother’s denunciation of me.”

  He turned his head away in horror. “Abbé Blanès is over eighty-three years old,” he realized sadly; “he almost never comes to the castle anymore, according to what my sister tells me; the infirmities of old age have produced their effect. That resolute and noble heart has been chilled by the years. God knows how long it’s been since he’s been up in his steeple! I’ll hide in the cellar, under the casks or the wine-press until he wakes up; I don’t want to trouble the good old man’s sleep; he will probably have forgotten what I look like, six years can do such a lot at that age! I shall find in him no more than the tomb of a friend! Indeed it is a piece of childishness,” he added, “to have come here to face the disgust inspired by my father’s castle.”

  Fabrizio then entered the little square in front of the church; it was with an amazement bordering on delirium that he saw, on the second floor of the ancient steeple, the long narrow window illuminated by the Abbé Blanès’s little lantern. The Abbé was in the habit of setting it there when he climbed up to the cage of planks which formed his observatory, so that the light would not keep him from reading his plani-sphere. This star-map was hung on a huge terra-cotta pot which had once belonged to an orange-tree of the castle grounds. In the opening, at the bottom, burned the tiniest of lamps, its smoke led by the slenderest of tin pipes out of the pot, and the shadow of the pipe marking north on the star-map. All these memories of such simple things flooded Fabrizio’s soul with emotions and filled it with happiness.

  Almost unconsciously he made between his hands the tiny low whistle which used to be his signal to be let in. Immediately he heard the rope being drawn up by several tugs, opening the latch of the steeple door from up in the observatory. He rushed up the stairs, moved to the point of rapture; he found the Abbé sitting in his wooden armchair in the usual place, his eye pressed against the tiny glass of a mural quadrant. With his left hand, the Abbé gestured not to interrupt him in his observation; a second later he wrote a figure on a playing card, then, turning in his chair, he opened his arms to our hero, who flung himself into them, dissolved in tears. Abbé Blanès was his true father.

  “I was expecting you,” he said, after the first words of tender affection. Was the Abbé speaking in his professional character of a savant; or else, since he frequently thought of Fabrizio, had some astrological sign announced his return by pure chance? “And now my death is close at hand,” said Abbé Blanès.

  “What!” exclaimed Fabrizio, with deep emotion.

  “Yes,” the Abbé went on in a serious tone of voice, though not at all sadly: “five and a half months or six and a half after I have seen you again, my life, having found its fulfillment of happiness, will … go out.

  “Come face al mancar dell’alimento

  [Like the little lamp when the oil runs dry]

  Before that supreme moment, I shall probably live a month or two without speaking, after which I shall be received into our Father’s bosom, if it so happens that I have fulfilled my duties in the post where he has placed me as a sentry.

  “But you, you must be exhausted, your feelings have prepared you for sleep. Since I was expecting you, I have hidden away some bread and a bottle of brandy in the chest where I keep my instruments. Give yourself some sustenance, and try to gain strength enough to listen to me for a few moments more. It is in my power to tell you certain things before the night is quite overcome by day; I see them now, such things, more clearly than I may see them tomorrow. For my child, we are always weak, and we must always take our weakness into account. Tomorrow perhaps the old man, the man of this earth, will be concerned with preparations for my death, and tomorrow night at nine o’clock, you must leave me.”

  Fabrizio had obeyed in silence, as was his habit. “So, is it true,” the old man continued, “that when you tried to see Waterloo, the first thing you found was a prison?”

  “Yes, Father,” Fabrizio replied, astonished.

  “Well, that was a rare piece of luck, for warned by my voice, your soul may now prepare itself for another prison, one much harsher and more terrible! Most likely you will escape it only by a crime, but thanks be to Heaven, this crime will not be committed by you. Never succumb to crime, however violently you are tempted; I believe I can see that there will be some question of killing an innocent person who, without realizing it, has usurped your rights; if you resist the violent temptation that will seem justified by the laws of honor, your life will be very happy in men’s eyes … and reasonably happy in those of the wise man,” he added, after a moment’s reflection; “you will die like me, my son, seated on a wooden chair, far from all luxury, and disabused of such things, and like me with no serious reproach to lay upon your soul.

  “Now that the affairs of a future state have ended between us, I can add nothing more of any importance. It is in vain that I have tried to see how long that imprisonment will last; can it be for six months, for a year, for ten years? I have no way of knowing; apparently I have committed some sin, and Heaven wishes to punish me by the suffering of this uncertainty. I have seen only that after prison—but I do not know if it is at the very moment of escape—there will be what I am calling a crime, but fortunately I believe I can be certain that it will not be committed by you. If you have the weakness to involve yourself in this crime, all the rest of my calculations are no more than one long error. Then you will not die with peace upon your soul, sitting upon a wooden chair and dressed in white.”

  As he spoke these words, Abbé Blanès attempted to stand up; it was then that Fabrizio noticed the ravages of time; it took the old man almost a minute to stand up and to turn around to face Fabrizio, who remained motionless and without a word. The Abbé took him in his arms several times; he embraced him very tenderly. After which he continued with all his old cheerfulness:

  “Try to find a place among my instruments to sleep in some comfort, take my fur blankets; you will find several very costly ones which the Duchess Sanseverina sent me four years ago. She asked me for some prediction about you, which I was careful not to send her, though I kept her furs and her fine quadrant. Any prediction of the future is a breach of the rule, and incurs the danger of possibly changing the outcome, in which case all our knowledge falls to the ground like a veritable child’s toy; and besides there were things hard to say to that Duchess, still so lovely a woman.… By the way, don’t be alarmed in your sleep by the bells, which will be making a dreadful racket right next to your ears when they ring for seven o’clock mass; later, down below, they will set the great tenor bell ringing, the one that shakes up all my instruments. Today i
s the feast of San Giovita, martyr and soldier. You know the little village of Grianta has the same patron saint as the great city of Brescia, which, by the way, so amusingly misled my illustrious master Giacomo Marini of Ravenna. On more than one occasion he told me that I would enjoy some splendid ecclesiastical fortune, he supposed I would be the priest of the magnificent church of San Giovita in Brescia; I was parish priest of a little village of seven hundred and fifty hearth-fires! But all has been for the best. I have seen, and not ten years from that prediction, that if I had been a priest at Brescia, my fate was to be shut up in the Spielberg, a prison on a hill of Moravia. Tomorrow I’ll bring you all kinds of delicacies stolen from the great banquet I am giving for all the priests of the countryside who are coming to sing at my high mass. I will put them downstairs, but don’t try to come to see me, nor come down to take possession of these good things until you have heard me leave. You must not see me again by daylight, and the sun setting tomorrow evening at seven twenty-seven, I shall come to embrace you only around eight, and you must leave while the hours are still numbered singly, that is, before the clock has sounded ten. Take care not to be seen at the steeple windows: the police have your description and they are, in a manner of speaking, under the orders of your brother, who is a famous tyrant. The Marchese del Dongo is weakening,” Blanès added sadly, “and if he were to see you again, he might give you something from his hand to yours. But such benefits, tainted by fraudulence, do not suit a man like yourself, whose strength will one day be in his conscience. The Marchese abhors his son Ascanio, and it is to this son that the five or six million he possesses will pass. That is justice. You, upon his death, will have a pension of four thousand francs, and fifty ells of black cloth for your servants’ mourning.”