The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  “Yes, I must very publicly break off relations with the Count, for I do not wish to involve him in my ruin, that would be infamous; the poor man has loved me so sincerely! My mistake has been to believe that a true courtier would retain enough soul to be capable of love. Very likely the Prince will find some pretext to throw me in prison; he will fear that I might pervert public opinion concerning Fabrizio. The Count is a man of honor; immediately he will commit what the sycophants of this Court, in their astonishment, will call a folly, he will leave the Court. I have flouted the Prince’s authority the evening of that letter, I can expect anything and everything from his wounded vanity: does a man born a Prince ever forget the sensation I afforded him that evening? Moreover the Count separated from me is in a better position to be useful to Fabrizio. But if the Count, whom my resolve will bring to the point of despair, sought revenge?… Now there is a notion that will never occur to him; he lacks the fundamentally base nature of a man like the Prince: the Count might, with a sigh, countersign a vile decree, but he is a man of honor. And then, what would he be taking revenge for? For the fact that, after having loved him five years without committing the slightest act of damage to his love, I say to him: ‘Dear Count, I had the happiness to love you: well, this flame has died, I no longer love you! But I know the depths of your heart, and I preserve the deepest esteem for you, and we shall always be the best of friends.’ What can a man of honor reply to so sincere a declaration? I shall take a new lover, or at least that is what people in society will believe. I shall tell him: ‘Actually the Prince is right to punish Fabrizio’s folly; but on his saint’s-day our gracious Sovereign will doubtless grant him his liberty.’ That way I gain six months. The new lover selected by prudence would be that forsworn judge, that infamous hangman, that Rassi … he would find himself ennobled, and in point of fact, I should be giving him entrée into good society. Forgive me, dear Fabrizio! Such an effort is beyond my powers. What! That monster, still covered with the blood of Count P—— and of D——! I would faint with horror the minute he approached me, or rather I would snatch up a knife and plunge it into his infamous heart. Do not ask me to do impossible things!

  “Yes, above all forget Fabrizio! And not the shadow of vexation shown to the Prince, resume my usual gaiety of manner, which will appear agreeable enough to these wretched souls, first of all because I will seem to be submitting with a good grace to their Sovereign, and second because, far from mocking them, I shall take care to play up all their pretty little virtues; for instance, I shall compliment Count Zurla on the beauty of the white feather in his hat which he has imported by courier from Lyons and which constitutes his chief happiness …

  “To choose a lover from the Raversi faction.… If the Count goes, that will be the Ministerial party, and the power will be there. It will be a friend of the Marchesa Raversi’s who will rule over the Citadel, for Fabio Conti will move up to the Ministry. How can the Prince, a man of good society, a man of intelligence, accustomed to the Count’s delightful collaboration—how can the Prince conduct affairs with the assistance of this ox, this prize fool who has spent his whole life worrying one crucial problem: should His Highness’s soldiers wear seven buttons on their jackets or nine? These are the creatures, and all insanely jealous of me, who constitute your danger, dear Fabrizio! These are the animals who will decide my fate and yours! So we must not permit the Count to resign his post! Let him remain, even though he must suffer certain humiliations! If he still supposes that handing in his resignation is the greatest sacrifice a Prime Minister can make; and each time that his mirror tells him he is growing older, he offers me that sacrifice: hence, complete break; yes, and reconciliation only in the case where there will be no other means of keeping him from leaving his post. Naturally I shall give him his dismissal in the friendliest way possible; but after the diplomatic omission of the words unjust proceedings in the letter to the Prince, I feel that in order not to hate him, I need to spend some months without seeing him. On that decisive evening, I had no need of his cleverness; all he had to do was to write what I dictated to him, just that message, which I had obtained by my own character: his courtier manners carried him away. He told me the next day that he had not been able to make his Prince sign anything so absurd, that was what was needed was a letter of pardon: well, good Lord! With such people, such monsters of vanity and rancor known as the Farnese, you take what you can get.”

  At the thought of this, all the Duchess’s rage revived. “The Prince has deceived me,” she said to herself, “and in such a cowardly fashion!… There is no excuse for this man: he has wit, discernment, the capacity to reason; it is his passions which are the vile part of him. Twenty times the Count and I have noticed it—his mind becomes vulgar only when he imagines someone has tried to offend him. Well! Fabrizio’s crime has nothing to do with politics; it was one of those little murders that are counted by the hundreds in these happy territories, and the Count has sworn to me that he has obtained the most exact information, and that Fabrizio is innocent. That Giletti was not without courage: finding himself two steps away from the border, he was suddenly tempted to rid himself of an all too attractive rival.”

  The Duchess paused a long while to consider if it was possible to believe in Fabrizio’s guilt: not that she considered it much of a sin, on the part of a gentleman of her nephew’s rank, to rid himself of an actor’s impertinence; but in her despair, she was beginning to feel somehow that she would be obliged to do battle in order to prove Fabrizio’s innocence. “No,” she said to herself at last, “here is a decisive proof; he is like poor Pietranera; he always has weapons in all his pockets, and on that day he was carrying only a miserable single-barreled rifle, and even that was borrowed from one of the workmen.

  “I hate the Prince because he has deceived me, and deceived me in the most dastardly fashion; after his letter of pardon, he had the poor boy captured in Bologna, and so on. But these accounts will be settled.” Toward five in the morning, the Duchess, overwhelmed by this long fit of despair, rang for her serving-women, who shrieked when they saw her lying on her bed fully dressed, with all her diamonds, pale as her sheets and with her eyes closed: it was as if they were seeing her laid out on her bier after her death. They would have supposed her quite unconscious had they not remembered that she had just rung for them. A few scattered tears occasionally ran down her lifeless cheeks; her serving-women understood by a gesture that she wished to be put to bed.

  Twice that evening after Count Zurla’s party, the Count had called at the Duchess’s palazzo: refused admittance each time, he wrote her that he needed her advice for some business of his own: “Should he keep his position after the affront they had dared to offer him?” The Count added: “The young man is innocent; but, even guilty, should they have arrested him without informing me, his acknowledged protector?” The Duchess did not see this letter until the next day.

  The Count had no principles; one might even add that what the Liberals mean by principles (seeking the happiness of the greatest number) seemed to him a deceit; he considered himself obliged to seek above all the happiness of Count Mosca della Rovere; but he was altogether honorable and perfectly sincere in speaking of his resignation. In all his life he had never told the Duchess a lie; she herself, for that matter, paid no attention whatever to this letter; her decision, painful as it was, was taken: to pretend to forget Fabrizio; after this effort, everything was a matter of indifference to her.

  The next day, around noon, the Count, who had passed in front of the Palazzo Sanseverina some ten times, was finally admitted; he was astounded by the sight of the Duchess.… “She is forty!” he said to himself. “And yesterday she was so brilliant! So young!… Everyone told me that during her long conversation with Clélia Conti, she looked every bit as young and much more seductive.”

  The Duchess’s voice and manner were as strange as the aspect of her person. This manner, divested of all passion, of all human interest, of all anger, made the Count turn pa
le; he remembered the behavior of one of his friends who, a few months ago, on the point of death, and having already received the Sacraments, had asked to speak to him.

  After a few moments, the Duchess was able to speak. She looked at him, and her eyes remained lifeless: “Let us part, my dear Count,” she said to him, in a faint but clearly articulated voice which she attempted to make agreeable, “let us part, as we must! Heaven is my witness that for the last five years, my conduct toward you has been irreproachable. You have given me a brilliant existence, instead of the tedium which would have been my mournful lot at the Castle of Grianta; without you I should have encountered old age several years sooner.… For my part, my sole occupation has been to try to make it possible for you to find happiness. It is because I love you that I am suggesting this separation à l’aimable, as they would say in France.”

  The Count did not understand; she was obliged to repeat her words several times. He turned pale as death, and flinging himself on his knees beside her bed, he said everything which the deepest astonishment, and then the most intense despair can inspire in an intelligent man who is passionately in love. He kept offering to hand in his resignation and to follow his beloved to some place of retreat a thousand leagues from Parma.

  “You dare speak to me of leaving, and Fabrizio is here!” she exclaimed, half rising.

  But when she realized that Fabrizio’s name produced a painful impression, she added after a moment’s silence, and faintly pressing the Count’s hand:

  “No, dear friend, I shall not say that I have loved you with that passion and those transports which one no longer feels, I believe, after thirty, and I am already much older than that. People will have told you that I loved Fabrizio, for I know that such rumors have run through this wicked court.” Her eyes shone for the first time in this conversation, when she uttered the word wicked. “I swear to you before God, and on Fabrizio’s life, that there has passed between him and myself not the smallest thing which the eye of a third person might not have tolerated. Nor shall I tell you that I love him altogether like a sister; I love him by instinct, if I may put it that way. I love in him his courage, so simple and so perfect that one might say that he is not even aware of it himself; I recall that this sort of admiration began upon his return from Waterloo. He was still a child, despite his seventeen years; his great anxiety was to know if he had truly participated in the battle, and in case he had, if he could say he had fought, since he had marched to the attack of no enemy battery or column. It was during the serious discussions we had together on this important subject that I began to discern a perfect grace in my nephew. His great soul revealed itself to me; how many knowing lies would a well brought up young man have proffered in his place! In short, if he is not happy I cannot be happy. There, that is the phrase which perfectly describes the state of my heart; if it is not the truth, at least it is all the truth I can perceive.”

  Encouraged by this tone of frankness and intimacy, the Count attempted to kiss the Duchess’s hand: she pulled it away from him with a sort of horror. “Those times are past,” she said; “I am a woman of thirty-seven, I stand on the threshold of old age, and already I feel all of its discouragements, and perhaps I am even close to the grave. This is a terrible moment, people say, and yet it seems to me that I desire it. I am feeling the worst symptom of old age: my heart is stifled by this dreadful misfortune, I can no longer love. In you, dear Count, I see nothing, now, but the shadow of someone who once was dear to me. What’s more, it is gratitude alone which makes me speak to you in this fashion.”

  “What will become of me?” the Count kept repeating. “I, who feel that I am attached to you even more passionately than those first days when I saw you at La Scala!”

  “Shall I tell you something, dear friend? This talk of love bores me and seems indecent to me. Come now,” she said, attempting to smile, though in vain. “Courage! Be a man of sense, a man of judgment, a man of resource on this occasion. Be with me what you really are in the eyes of strangers, the most skillful man and the greatest politician Italy has produced in centuries.”

  The Count stood up and walked back and forth in silence for a few moments. “Impossible, dear friend,” he said at last; “I am struggling with the lacerations of the most violent passion, and you ask me to consult my reason! There is no longer any such thing as reason for me!”

  “Let us not speak of passion, I implore you,” the Duchess said dryly. And this was the first time, after two hours of conversation, that her voice assumed any expression whatever.

  The Count, in despair himself, sought to console her.

  “He has deceived me!” she exclaimed without making any reply to the reasons for hope the Count set before her. “He has deceived me in the most dastardly fashion!” And her deadly pallor left her for a moment, but even in a moment of violent excitement the Count noticed that she lacked the strength to raise her arms.

  “Good God! Could it be possible,” he wondered, “that she is merely indisposed? But in that case it would be the onset of some very serious illness.” Then, filled with anxiety, he suggested calling in the famous Rasori, the best physician in the State and in all Italy.

  “Do you wish to give a stranger the pleasure of knowing the whole extent of my despair?… Is this the behavior of a friend or of a traitor?” And she stared at him with unseeing eyes.

  “It is all over,” he said to himself in despair, “she has no love left for me! And even worse, she no longer even considers me among the men of ordinary honor.

  “I may tell you,” the Count added, speaking carefully, “that above all I have wanted to obtain the details concerning the arrest which has brought us to despair, and strangely enough, I still know nothing distinct; I have had the police in the neighboring station questioned; they saw the prisoner coming on the Castelnovo road, and they received orders to follow his sediola. I immediately sent off Bruno once again—you know his zeal no less than his devotion—with orders to proceed backward from station to station until he finds out where and how Fabrizio was arrested.”

  Hearing the name Fabrizio, the Duchess suffered a slight convulsion. “Forgive me, my friend,” she said to the Count once she was able to speak; “such details are of the greatest interest, tell me everything, let me understand even the most minor circumstances.”

  “Well, Madame,” the Count went on, attempting a certain lightness of tone in the attempt to distract the Duchess a little, “I have a notion to send a confidential messenger to Bruno and to order him to proceed to Bologna; it is there, perhaps, that our young friend was seized. What is the date on his last letter?”

  “Tuesday, five days ago.”

  “Had it been opened in the post?”

  “No trace of tampering. I must tell you that it was written on dreadful paper; the address is in a woman’s hand, and this address bears the name of an old laundress related to my chambermaid. The laundress thinks it has to do with a love affair, and my Cecchina pays her for the cost of the letters without giving her anything more.”

  The Count, who had now assumed the tone of a man of business, tried to learn, in his discussion with the Duchess, what could have been the day Fabrizio was seized in Bologna. Only then did he realize, he who ordinarily was so subtle, so tactful, that this was the one tone to take. Such details interested the wretched woman and seemed to distract her somewhat. If the Count had not been in love, this simple notion would have occurred to him upon entering the room. The Duchess gave him leave to go so that he could immediately send new orders to the faithful Bruno. When in passing the question arose as to whether there had been a sentence before the moment when the Prince had signed the letter addressed to the Duchess, the latter eagerly seized the occasion to say to the Count: “I shall not reproach you for having omitted the words unjust proceedings from the letter you wrote and he signed—that was the courter’s instinct which controlled your hand; without realizing it, you preferred your master’s interest to your mistress’s. You have subm
itted your actions to my orders, dear Count, and have done so for a long time, but it is not in your power to change your nature; you have great talents for being a Minister, but you also have the instincts of the profession. Suppressing the word unjust has ruined me; but far be it from me to reproach you in any way: this was the fault of instinct, and not of will.

  “Bear in mind,” she added, changing her tone and with the most imperious expression, “that I am not overly suffering because of Fabrizio’s abduction, that I have not had the slightest impulse to leave this country, that I am full of respect for the Prince. That is what you must say, and this is what, for my part, I want to say to you: since I plan in the future to manage my own affairs, I wish to separate from you à l’aimable, that is, as a good old friend. Think of me as sixty; the young woman in me is dead, and I can no longer consider anything in the world with exaggerated feelings, I can no longer love. But I would be even more wretched than I am if I were to compromise your destiny. It may enter into my plans to appear to have a young lover, and I do not want to see you distressed by such a thing. I can swear to you on the happiness of Fabrizio”—and she paused an instant after this word—”that I have never been unfaithful to you, and this for five whole years. A long time,” she said, and tried to smile; her pale cheeks trembled, but her lips could not manage to part. “I even swear to you that I had never had any such intention or desire. And now that this is understood, leave me.”