The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  It was in one of these rooms, constructed a year earlier as General Fabio Conti’s masterpiece and given the splendid name of Passive Obedience, that Fabrizio was placed. He ran to the windows; the view from these barred windows was sublime: one tiny corner of the horizon was hidden, to the northwest, by the terraced roof of the Governor’s palazzo, which was only two stories high; the ground floor was occupied by the staff offices; and immediately Fabrizio’s eyes were drawn to one of the windows of the second story, where many birds of all kind were kept in a great number of cages. Fabrizio was delighted to hear them sing and to see them greet the last rays of the setting sun, while his jailers busied themselves around him. This aviary window was not more than twenty-five feet away from his own, and was five or six feet lower, so that he gazed down upon the birds.

  There was a moon that evening, and just when Fabrizio entered his prison it was rising majestically above the horizon on the right, above the chain of the Alps, toward Treviso. It was only eight-thirty, and at the other end of the horizon, to the west, a brilliant red and orange sunset distinctly outlined the contours of Monte Viso and the other Alpine peaks which lead from Nice toward Mont-Cénis and Turin; without another thought for his misfortunes, Fabrizio was moved and delighted by this sublime spectacle. “So it is in this ravishing world that Clélia Conti lives! With that pensive, serious soul of hers, she must delight in this view more than anyone in the world; here we seem to be alone in the mountains a hundred leagues from Parma.” It was only after having spent more than two hours at the window, admiring this horizon which spoke so intimately to his soul, and often too glancing down at the attractive Governor’s palazzo, that Fabrizio suddenly exclaimed: “But is this really a prison? Is this what I have dreaded so much?” Instead of noticing at each step certain discomforts and reasons for bitterness, our hero let himself be charmed by the attractions of the prison.

  All of a sudden his attention was abruptly returned to reality by a dreadful racket: his wooden room, which closely resembled an echoing cage, was violently shaken; the barks of a dog and tiny shrill cries completed the strangest uproar. “What is this? Am I going to escape so soon?” wondered Fabrizio. A second later he laughed as perhaps no one has ever before laughed in a prison. On the General’s orders, there had been sent up, along with the jailers, a savage English dog intended to guard important prisoners; this brute was to spend the night in the passageways so ingeniously devised all around Fabrizio’s room. Dog and jailer were to sleep in the three-foot space between the stone blocks of the prison wall and the wooden planks where the prisoner could not take a single step without being heard.

  Now, upon Fabrizio’s arrival, the room of Passive Obedience happened to be occupied by some hundred enormous rats which fled in all directions. The dog, half spaniel and half fox terrier, was anything but handsome though on the other hand appeared extremely alert. It had been attached to the flagstones under the planks of Fabrizio’s cell; but upon hearing the rats running so close by, it made such extraordinary efforts that it managed to slip its head out of its collar; then occurred that splendid battle whereof the uproar awakened Fabrizio from the least melancholy reveries. The rats that had managed to escape the first attack took refuge in the wooden cell; the dog pursued them up the six steps leading from the stone floor to Fabrizio’s chamber. Then began an even more dreadful racket: the cell was shaken to its foundations. Fabrizio laughed like a madman till tears ran down his cheeks: his jailer Grillo, laughing no less, had closed the door; the dog, pursuing the rats, was not impeded by any piece of furniture, for the room was quite bare; the dog’s leaps were hampered only by an iron stove in one corner. When the beast had triumphed over all its enemies, Fabrizio called to it, petted it, and managed to win its favors: “If ever this fellow sees me jumping over some wall,” he said to himself, “he won’t be barking.” But this subtle policy was a boast on his part: in his present state of mind, he found his happiness in playing with this dog. As a result of a strange mood to which he paid no attention, a secret joy prevailed deep in his soul.

  After he had grown quite breathless from running with the dog, Fabrizio asked his jailer his name.

  “Grillo, at Your Excellency’s service in everything the regulations allow.”

  “Well then, my dear Grillo, as it happens a certain Giletti has tried to murder me on the highway, I defended myself and managed to kill him; I would kill him again if I had to; but that won’t keep me from leading the best life I can while I am your guest. Request your superiors’ permission and see if you can’t bring me some linens from the Palazzo Sanseverina; and buy me a good supply of nebiolo d’Asti while you’re at it.”

  This is quite a good sparkling wine made in Piedmont, which is Alfieri’s homeland, and highly esteemed, especially by the class of connoisseurs to which the jailers belong. Eight or ten of these gentlemen were busily transporting into Fabrizio’s wooden cell some old and heavily gilded pieces of furniture which they were bringing up from the Prince’s apartment; all of them religiously took note of this request favoring the wine of Asti. In spite of all their efforts, Fabrizio’s establishment for this first night was lamentable; but he appeared upset only by the absence of a bottle of good nebiolo.

  “He seems like a good boy …,” the jailers were saying as they left, “and there is only one thing to be hoped for, that our bosses will let money be sent to him.”

  Once he was alone and a little recovered from all this uproar: “Can this be a prison?” Fabrizio said to himself, staring at that vast horizon from Treviso to Monte Viso, the long chain of the Alps, the snow-covered peaks, the stars, and so on. “And my first night in prison as well. I imagine that Clélia Conti delights in this lofty solitude; here we are a thousand leagues above the pettiness and the nastiness which occupy us down below. If those birds which are here under my window belong to her, I shall be seeing her.… Will she blush when she catches sight of me?” It was in the articulation of this great question that the prisoner found sleep at a very advanced hour of the night.

  On the day following this night, the first spent in prison and during which he did not feel a moment’s impatience, Fabrizio was reduced to making conversation with Fox, the English dog; his jailer Grillo gave him any number of friendly looks, but new orders made him keep silent, and he brought neither linens nor nebiolo.

  “Shall I see Clélia?” Fabrizio asked himself, as he awoke. “But are those birds hers?” The birds were beginning to utter little cries and to sing, and at this altitude that was the only sound that could be heard upon the air. It was a sensation full of novelty and pleasure for Fabrizio, this vast silence that reigned at this height: he listened with delight to the intense little irregular cheeping by which his neighbors the birds greeted the day. “If they belong to her, she will appear for a moment in that room, right under my window,” and even as he considered the enormous chains of the Alps, opposite the first hills of which the Citadel of Parma seemed to rise like a redoubt, his glances kept returning to the fine cages of orange-wood and mahogany, embellished with gilded wires, that filled the bright room which served as an aviary. What Fabrizio learned only later was that this room was the only one on the second floor of the palazzo which had shade from eleven till four in the afternoon; it was sheltered then by the Farnese Tower.

  “How disappointed I shall be,” Fabrizio said to himself, “if instead of that heavenly and thoughtful face I am expecting, and which may blush a little if she catches sight of me, I should see coming the vulgar countenance of some ordinary chambermaid, assigned the task of tending the birds! But if I do see Clélia, will she deign to see me? Upon my soul, I’ll have to do something out of the ordinary to be noticed; my situation ought to have some privileges; besides, we’re both alone here and so far away from the world! I’m a prisoner, apparently what General Conti and the other such wretches call one of their inferiors.… But she has so much sense, or I should say so much soul, as the Count imagines, that perhaps, according to what he says, s
he despises her father’s profession; hence her melancholy! A noble source of sadness! But after all, I am not quite a stranger to her. With what modest grace she greeted me last night! I remember well how during our meeting near Como I told her: Some day I’ll come and look at your fine paintings in Parma, will you remember this name: Fabrizio del Dongo? Will she have forgotten? She was so young back then!

  “But that reminds me,” Fabrizio said to himself, suddenly astonished and interrupting the course of his thoughts, “I was forgetting to be angry! Could I be one of those courageous men of the kind antiquity has revealed to the world? Am I a hero without suspecting it? What! I who was so afraid of prison—here I am, and I don’t even recall being melancholy! How true it is that fear has been a hundred times worse than its object. So! I need to reason with myself to be distressed by this prison which, as Blanès used to say, can last ten years as easily as ten months? Might it be the amazement of all these new circumstances which distracts me from the pain I should be feeling? Perhaps this good humor independent of my will and quite without reason will suddenly vanish, perhaps in an instant I shall fall into the black despair that I ought to be feeling.

  “In any case, it is quite surprising to be in prison and to have to reason with myself in order to be sad. My word, it brings me back to my supposition—perhaps I have a great character.”

  Fabrizio’s reveries were interrupted by the carpenter of the Citadel, who had come to take the measurements for a window-blind; this was the first time that this prison had been used, and the authorities had forgotten to complete it down to this essential detail.

  “So,” Fabrizio said to himself, “I shall be deprived of this sublime view,” and he tried to feel sad about this privation. “But what are you doing?” he suddenly exclaimed to the carpenter. “Am I no longer to see those pretty birds?”

  “Oh, the Signorina’s birds that she’s so fond of!” the man said good-naturedly. “Hidden, eclipsed, overshadowed like all the rest.”

  The carpenter, like the jailers, was strictly forbidden to speak, but this man had taken pity on the prisoner’s youth: he told him that these enormous shutters, placed over the sills of the two windows and slanting away from the wall, would block out everything but the prisoners’ view of the sky.

  “This is done to effect their morale,” he told him, “in order to increase a salutary sadness and the desire for self-correction in the prisoners’ souls; the General,” the carpenter added, “has also devised a way of removing the panes of glass and having the windows replaced by oiled paper.”

  Fabrizio greatly appreciated the epigrammatic turn this conversation was taking, a rare phenomenon in Italy.

  “I’d like to have a bird to distract me here, I love their songs; buy me one from Signorina Clélia Conti’s chambermaid.”

  “You mean you know her?” exclaimed the carpenter. “You say her name so readily.”

  “Who has not heard of this famous beauty? But I’ve had the honor of meeting her several times at Court.”

  “The poor young lady leads a very dull life here,” the carpenter added; “she spends all her time down there with her birds. This morning she’s just bought some splendid orange-trees which she’s ordered planted at the gates of the tower under your window; if it weren’t for the cornice you could see them.”

  These were precious words for Fabrizio in this observation, and he found a tactful way of giving the carpenter some money.

  “I’m committing two sins at once,” this man said to him. “I’m speaking to Your Excellency and I’m taking money. The day after tomorrow, when I come back for the blinds, I’ll bring a bird in my pocket, and if I’m not alone, I’ll pretend to let it fly away; if I possibly can, I’ll bring you a missal; you must be suffering from not being able to say your prayers.”

  “So,” Fabrizio said to himself once he was alone, “these birds are hers, but in two days’ time, I shall no longer be seeing them!” With this observation, his thoughts took on a sorrowful tinge. But at last, to his inexpressible delight, after such a long wait and so much gazing, toward noon Clélia came to tend her birds. Fabrizio stood motionless, hardly daring to breathe as he leaned against the huge bars of his window. He noticed that she did not look up toward him, but her gestures had the awkwardness of someone who feels watched. Had she wished to, the poor girl could not have forgotten the faint smile that she had seen flickering over the prisoner’s lips, the evening before, when the police were taking him out of the guard-room.

  Although, from all appearances, she was paying close attention to her actions, at the moment she approached the aviary window she blushed very noticeably. Fabrizio’s first thought, leaning against the iron bars of his window, was to indulge in the child’s play of tapping against these bars, which would produce a faint noise; then the mere notion of this indelicacy horrified him. “I should deserve eight days of having her send her chambermaid to tend her birds.” This delicate notion would scarcely have occurred to him at Naples or at Novara.

  He eagerly followed her with his eyes: “Certainly,” he said to himself, “she’ll leave without deigning to glance up at this poor window, and yet she’s just opposite …” But in returning from the rear of the room which Fabrizio, thanks to his higher position, could see quite clearly, Clélia could not keep herself from glancing up, as she was walking, and this was enough for Fabrizio to consider himself authorized to greet her. “Are we not alone in the world here?” he said to himself to work up his courage. Upon this gesture, the girl stood stock-still and lowered her eyes; then Fabrizio saw them look up very slowly; and obviously making a great effort to control herself, Clélia greeted the prisoner with the most serious and distant movement, but she could not impose silence upon her eyes; probably without her being aware of it, they expressed for a moment the deepest compassion. Fabrizio noticed that she was blushing so deeply that the pink hue rapidly spread to the upper part of her shoulders, from which the warm air had just caused her to remove, upon entering the aviary, a black lace shawl. The involuntary glance by which Fabrizio responded to her greeting redoubled the girl’s confusion.

  “How happy that poor woman would be,” she was saying to herself, thinking of the Duchess, “if only for a moment she could see him as I am seeing him now.”

  Fabrizio had had some faint hope of greeting her again upon her departure; but in order to avoid this new salutation, Clélia made a cunning retreat by stages, from cage to cage, as if, ultimately, she had had to tend the birds placed closest to the door. Finally she left the room; Fabrizio stood motionless staring at the door through which she had just vanished; he was another man.

  From this moment the sole object of his thoughts was to know how he might manage to continue seeing her, even when this horrible blind had been put in place over the windows which overlooked the Governor’s palazzo.

  The previous evening, before going to sleep, he had given himself the tedious obligation of concealing the best part of what gold he had in the various rat-holes which embellished his wooden cell. “And tonight I must hide my watch. Haven’t I heard it said that with patience and a jagged watch-spring, you can cut through wood and even iron? So I might be able to saw through that blind …” This labor of hiding his watch, which lasted two long hours, did not seem long at all to him; he brooded over the various ways of achieving his goal, especially over what he knew about carpentry. “If I could manage it,” he said to himself, “I might cut out a square of the oak board that will form the shutter, near the part that will rest on the window-sill; I could remove and replace this piece depending on the circumstances; I’ll give everything I have to Grillo so that he’ll be good enough not to notice this little stratagem.” Henceforth all of Fabrizio’s happiness was attached to the possibility of performing this task, and he could think of nothing else. “If I can just manage to see her, I’m a happy man.… No,” he said to himself, “she must also see that I see her.” All night long, his head was filled with carpentry stratagems, and he may not
have thought even once of the Court of Parma, of the Prince’s anger, and so on. We confess that he also did not think of the sufferings that must be overwhelming the Duchess. He waited impatiently for the next day, but the carpenter did not reappear: apparently he was regarded in the prison as a Liberal; it was found necessary to send someone else, a mean-faced fellow who made no reply except to grumble ominously in response to all the agreeable things Fabrizio could think up to say. Some of the Duchess’s many attempts to correspond with Fabrizio had been discovered by the Marchesa Raversi’s numerous agents, and by her General Fabio Conti was daily informed, alarmed, and put on his mettle. Every eight hours, six soldiers of the guard relieved those in the great hall with the hundred columns; moreover, the Governor posted a special jailer at each of the three iron gates along the corridor, and poor Grillo, the only man who actually saw the prisoner, was condemned to leaving the Farnese Tower only every eight days, which distressed him a good deal. He revealed his ill humor to Fabrizio, who had the wit to reply by no more than these words: “Plenty of nebiolo d’Asti, my friend,” and gave him some money.