The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  “What the Devil!” exclaimed the Prince to the Archbishop. “One gets someone to perform such actions; but to do them oneself is hardly the thing; moreover, one does not kill an actor like this Giletti, one buys him off.”

  Fabrizio was far from suspecting what was going on in Parma. As a matter of fact, there was some question as to whether the death of this actor, who in his life earned perhaps thirty-two francs a month, would bring down the ultra ministry and with it its leader, Count Mosca.

  Upon learning of Giletti’s death, the Prince, stung by the airs of independence the Duchess was assuming, had ordered his Chief Justice Rassi to deal with the entire case as if it had concerned a Liberal. Fabrizio, for his part, supposed that a man of his rank was above the law; he did not consider that in countries where the great names are never subject to punishment, intrigue can accomplish everything, even against them. He frequently mentioned to Ludovic his “perfect innocence,” which would soon be proclaimed, his chief reason being that he was not guilty. Upon which Ludovic remarked to him one day: “I can’t understand how Your Excellency, who has so much native wit and education, can take the trouble to speak of such things to a man like myself, your devoted servant. Your Excellency is taking too many precautions. Such things had best be spoken in public or before a court.”

  “This man regards me as a murderer and loves me none the less for it,” Fabrizio realized, suddenly struck down.

  Three days after Pepe’s departure, he was quite amazed to receive an enormous letter sealed with a silk ribbon as in the days of Louis XIV and addressed to His Most Reverend Excellency Monsignore Fabrizio del Dongo, First Grand Vicar of the Diocese of Parma, Canon, and so on.

  “But am I still all that?” he said to himself, laughing. Archbishop Landriani’s epistle was a masterpiece of clarity and logic; it consisted of no less than nineteen enormous pages, and described quite accurately what had taken place in Parma on the occasion of Giletti’s death.

  A French army commanded by Marshal Ney and marching upon the town would not have produced a greater effect, wrote the good Archbishop; with the exception of the Duchess and myself, my dear son, everyone here believes that you gave yourself the pleasure of killing the actor Giletti. Had this misfortune fallen upon you, these are the sorts of things which are passed off with two hundred louis and an absence of six months; but the Raversi seeks to topple Count Mosca by means of this incident. It is not the horrible sin of murder which the public reproaches you for, but solely the clumsiness or rather the insolence of not having deigned to resort to a bulo (a sort of hired assassin). I am translating for you here into explicit terms the talk which surrounds me, for since this forever-deplorable disaster, I visit every day some three of the most considerable houses of the town in order to have occasion to justify you. And never have I believed I made a holier use of what little eloquence Heaven has consented to grant me.

  The scales fell from Fabrizio’s eyes; the Duchess’s many letters, filled with transports of friendship, never deigned to tell him such news. The Duchess swore she would leave Parma forever if he did not soon return to it in triumph.

  “The Count will do for you everything humanly possible,” she wrote him in the letter that accompanied the Archbishop’s. “As for me, you have altered my character with this fine escapade of yours; I am now as avaricious as the banker Tombone; I have dismissed all my workmen, I’ve done more, I’ve dictated to the Count the inventory of my fortune, which turns out to be much less considerable than I had thought. After the death of the excellent Count Pietranera, which, parenthetically, you would have done much better to have avenged instead of exposing your life to such a creature as Giletti, I was left with an income of twelve hundred francs and five thousand francs of debts; I recall, among other things, that I had thirty pairs of white satin slippers from Paris and one pair of shoes to wear in the street. I have virtually made up my mind to take the three hundred thousand francs the Duke left me, a sum which I wished to devote exclusively to erecting a splendid tomb for him. Moreover, it is the Marchesa Raversi who is your chief enemy, which is to say mine; if you find it tedious being alone there in Bologna, you have only to say a word, and I shall come and join you. Here are four more bills of exchange, and so on.”

  The Duchess did not breathe a word to Fabrizio of the opinion held in Parma of his affair; she wished above all to console him and, in any case, the death of so absurd a creature as Giletti hardly seemed to her of a nature to be seriously held against a del Dongo.

  “How many Gilettis have our ancestors not sent to the next world,” she asked the Count, “without its occurring to anyone to blame them for it?”

  Fabrizio, flabbergasted, and for the first time glimpsing the true state of affairs, began to study the Archbishop’s missive. Unfortunately, the Archbishop himself imagined him better informed than was actually the case. Fabrizio realized that what constituted the Marchesa Raversi’s special triumph was that it was impossible to find de visu witnesses of the fatal combat. The footman who first brought the news to Parma had been at the village inn at Sanguigna when it had occurred; little Marietta and the old woman who acted as her mother had vanished, and the Marchesa had bought the vetturino who drove the carriage and who had now made an abominable deposition.

  Although the proceedings are surrounded by the deepest mystery, wrote the good Archbishop in his best Ciceronian style, and conducted by Chief Justice Russi, of whom Christian charity alone can restrain me from speaking evil, but who has made his fortune by oppressing the wretched victims of justice even as a greyhound pursuing a hare; though this Rassi, I say, whose turpitude and venality cannot, by your wildest imagination, be exaggerated, has been granted control of the case by a vexed Prince, I have managed to read the vetturino’s three depositions. By a signal stroke of fortune, this wretched person has contradicted himself. And I shall add, because I am speaking here to my Vicar General, to the person who, after myself, is to have the charge of this diocese, I shall add that I have sent for the curate of the parish in which this strayed sinner resides. I may tell you, my dearest son, but under the secrecy of the confessional, that this curate already knows, through the vetturino’s wife, the number of scudi he has received from the Marchesa Raversi, and I dare not say that the Marchesa has insisted that he calumniate your name, but the fact is highly likely. The scudi were sent by a wretched priest who fulfills certain venal functions for this Marchesa, and whom I have been obliged to forbid to say Mass for the second time. I shall not weary you with the account of several further proceedings which you are entitled to expect of me and which, moreover, constitute a part of my duties. A canon, your colleague at the Cathedral, and one who, moreover, occasionally recalls a bit too vividly the influence he enjoys on account of his family’s wealth, of which, by divine permission, he has remained the sole heir, having allowed himself to say, at the house of Count Zurla, Minister of the Interior, that he regarded this trifle as proved against you (he was speaking of the murder of the unfortunate Giletti), I have summoned to appear before me, and there, in the presence of my three other Vicars-General, of my Chaplain, and of two curates who happened to be in the antechamber, I requested him to communicate to us, his brethren, the elements of the complete conviction which he claimed he had acquired against one of his colleagues at the Cathedral; the wretched fellow has been able to articulate only inconclusive reasons; everyone has risen against him, and though I have not believed it necessary to add more than a very few words, he dissolved into tears and made us witnesses of the full confession of his complete error, whereupon I promised him secrecy in my name and in that of all the persons present at this meeting, though stipulating that he employ all the zeal at his command to rectify the false impressions most likely caused by the speeches made by him during the last fifteen days.

  I shall not repeat to you, my dear son, what you must have known long since, which is to say that of the thirty-four peasants who are employed in the excavations undertaken by Count Mosca and whom
the Raversi woman claims you paid to assist you in committing your crime, thirty-two were at the bottom of a ditch, entirely busy with their task, when you seized your hunting-knife and employed it to defend your life against the man who unexpectedly attacked you. The other two workmen, who were not in the excavations, shouted to the others: Monsignore is being murdered! Which cry alone reveals your innocence in all its purity. Imagine, then, that Chief Justice Rassi claims that these two men have vanished, and that moreover eight of the men who were in the ditch have been apprehended; at their first interrogation, six declared having heard the shout “Monsignore is being murdered!” By indirect means I have learned that in their fifth interrogation, which took place yesterday evening, five declared that they did not clearly recall whether they had distinctly heard this shout or if they had merely heard it described by one of their comrades. Orders have been given that I be informed as to the residence of these workmen, and their priests will make it quite clear to them that they will be damning their own souls if, in order to gain a few scudi, they permit themselves to alter the truth.

  The good Archbishop entered into an infinity of details, as may be judged by those we have just reproduced. Then he added, using the Latin tongue:

  This affair is nothing less than an attempt to effect a change of government. If you are condemned, it can only be to the galleys or to death, in which case I shall intervene declaring, from my Archiepiscopal Throne, that I know that you are innocent, that you quite simply defended your own life against a ruffian, and that finally I have forbidden you to return to Parma so long as your enemies are in triumph there; I even propose to stigmatize, as he deserves, the Chief Justice; hatred of this man is as common as esteem for his character is rare. But as a last resort, on the eve of the day that this Chief Justice pronounces so unjust a decree, the Duchess Sanseverina will leave the city and perhaps the State of Parma as well: in that case there can be no doubt that the Count will hand in his resignation. Then, most likely, General Fabio Conti will be made Prime Minister, and the Marchesa Raversi will triumph. The real difficulty with your affair is that no skilled person has been put in charge of the necessary steps to bring your innocence to light and to lay bare the attempts made to suborn the witnesses. This is a role the Count believes he can assume, but he is too much of a grand seigneur to stoop to certain details; furthermore, in his position as Minister of Police, he has been obliged, initially, to issue the severest orders against you. Lastly, dare I say it, our Sovereign Prince believes you to be guilty, or at least simulates such a belief, and that contributes a certain bitterness to this affair. (The words corresponding to our Sovereign Prince and simulates such a belief were in Greek, and Fabrizio was infinitely grateful to the Archbishop for having dared to write them at all. He took his pen-knife and cut this line out of his letter and destroyed it on the spot.)

  Fabrizio interrupted his reading of this letter a score of times, seized as he was by transports of the deepest gratitude: he immediately replied by a letter of some eight pages. Frequently he was obliged to turn aside his head so that his tears might not fall upon his paper. The following day, just as he was sealing this letter, he read it over and found it too worldly. “I shall write it in Latin,” he said to himself, “that will make it appear seemlier to the worthy Archbishop.” But in attempting to construct his fine suitably extended Latin sentences in the manner of Cicero, he recalled that one day the Archbishop, referring to Napoléon, chose to call him Buonaparte; instantly all the emotion which had touched him to the point of tears disappeared. “O King of Italy!” he exclaimed. “That loyalty which so many have sworn to you in your lifetime I shall perpetuate even after your death. He cares for me, no doubt, but because I am a del Dongo and he the son of the bourgeoisie.” In order that his fine letter in Italian not be wasted, Fabrizio made a few necessary alterations in it and addressed it to Count Mosca.

  That very day, Fabrizio met up with little Marietta in the street; she blushed with happiness and gestured to him to follow her without speaking. She rapidly made for a deserted archway, where she tightened the black lace shawl which, according to the custom of the country, covered her head, in order that she not be recognized; then, quickly turning around: “How can it be,” she said to Fabrizio, “that you are walking freely in the street like this?”

  Fabrizio told her his story. “Good heavens, you were in Ferrara! I was there, looking for you everywhere! You must know that I quarrelled with the old woman because she wanted to take me to Venice, where I was sure you would never go, since you are on the Austrians’ blacklist. I sold my gold chain to come to Bologna, since I had a feeling I would be lucky enough to meet you here, as I have; the old woman got here two days after I did. So I will not ask you to come to where we live; she would make more of her base requests for money which cause me so much shame. We have lived quite comfortably since the fatal day you recall, and we have not spent a quarter of what you gave her. I don’t want to visit you at the Albergo del Pellegrino, that would be a pubblicità. Try to rent a little room in an empty street somewhere, and at the Ave Maria”—nightfall—“I will be here, under this same archway.”

  With these words, she ran off.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Every serious idea was forgotten upon the unexpected appearance of this charming person. Fabrizio took up life in Bologna in the profoundest joy and security. This naïve tendency to be happy with whatever filled his life was quite apparent in the letters he wrote to the Duchess, to such an extent that she took offense. Fabrizio scarcely noticed; he wrote, however, in a sort of code on the face of his watch: “When I wrote to the D. never say when I was prelate, when I was in the Church; that annoys her.” He had bought two little horses with which he was highly pleased; he harnessed them to a hired carriage whenever little Marietta wanted to visit one of those delightful spots in the environs of Bologna; almost every evening he drove her to the Cascata del Reno, and upon their return he would call on that agreeable fellow Crescentini, who regarded himself as Marietta’s father, more or less.

  “My word, if this is the vie de café I used to consider so unworthy of a gentleman, I was quite wrong to reject it,” Fabrizio said to himself. He was forgetting that he never went to a café except to read the Constitutionnel, and that since he was a complete stranger to anyone in Bologna’s high society, the delights of vanity counted for nothing in his present happiness. When he was not with little Marietta, he might be seen at the Observatory, where he attended lectures on astronomy; the professor had taken a great liking to him, and Fabrizio would lend him his horses on Sundays so that he might cut a figure with his wife on the Corso della Montagnola.

  He hated the very idea of doing harm to anyone at all, however disagreeable he might be. Marietta insisted that he not see the old woman; but one day when she was in church he went up to visit the mammaccia, who flushed with rage when she saw him come in. “Now is the time to act the del Dongo,” Fabrizio said to himself.

  “How much does Marietta earn a month, when she has a theatrical engagement?” he inquired, with the air of a self-respecting young man entering the balcony of the Bouffes Parisiens.

  “Fifty scudi.”

  “You’re lying as usual; tell me the truth, or by God you’ll not get one centesimo.”

  “All right, she made twenty-two scudi in our company while we were in Parma, when we had the misfortune of meeting you; myself I earned twelve scudi, and we each gave Giletti, our protector, a third of whatever we made. Out of which, almost every month, Giletti used to give Marietta a present as well, and that was easily worth two scudi.”

  “You’re still lying; you never made more than four scudi in your life. But if you’re good to Marietta, I’ll hire you as if I were an impresario; every month you’ll receive twelve scudi for yourself and twenty-two for her; but if I see that she’s been crying, I’ll cut you off without a centesimo.”

  “Hoity-toity, but your generosity will be the ruin of us,” the old woman answered angrily; “w
e’re losing our avviamento” (our custom). “When we suffer the enormous misfortune of being deprived of Your Excellency’s protection, there won’t be a troupe in Italy that knows us, they’ll all be full up; we won’t find any work, and all on account of you we’ll starve to death!”

  “Go to the devil!” Fabrizio exclaimed as he left the room.

  “I shall not go to the devil, you impious villain, but only to the police office, where they shall hear from me that you are a Monsignore who has thrown his cassock in a ditch and that you’re no more Joseph Bossi than I am.”

  Fabrizio was already half-way down the stairs; he returned.

  “First of all the police know better than you what my real name happens to be; but if you take it into your head to give me away, if you do anything so infamous,” he told her with the greatest seriousness, “Ludovic will have something to say to you, and it will not be six little cuts with a knife that your old carcass will get, but two dozen, and you’ll find yourself in the hospital for six months at least, and not a pinch of snuff.”