The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  “Well! Even this, which consoles us for every ill,” exclaimed the outraged Grillo, his voice barely audible to the prisoner, “we’re forbidden to take, and I should refuse it, but I’m going to take it; besides, it’s a waste of money; there’s nothing I can tell you about anything. You must be nice and guilty; the whole Citadel is in a frenzy on account of you; the Duchess’s goings-on have managed to get three of us dismissed already.”

  “Will the shutter be ready before noon?” Such was the great question which made Fabrizio’s heart pound all that long morning; he counted every quarter of an hour which chimed from the Citadel’s clock-tower. Finally, when the last quarter before noon was striking, the blind had not yet arrived; Clélia reappeared to tend her birds. Cruel necessity had given wings to Fabrizio’s boldness, and the danger of no longer seeing her seemed so overpowering that he dared, as he stared at her, to make the gesture of sawing the shutter with his finger; it is true that immediately after having perceived this gesture, so seditious in a prison, she faintly bowed and withdrew.

  “What is this?” exclaimed Fabrizio. “Can she be silly enough to see an absurd familiarity in a gesture dictated by the most imperious necessity? I wanted to ask her to deign, whenever she comes to tend her birds, to glance occasionally at the prison window, even when she finds it covered by an enormous wooden shutter; I wanted to show her that I would do whatever is humanly possible to manage to see her. Good God! Can it be that she won’t come tomorrow because of this one indiscreet gesture?”

  This fear, which troubled Fabrizio’s sleep, was completely justified; the next day Clélia had not appeared by three o’clock in the afternoon, when the huge blinds were put in place over Fabrizio’s windows; the various planks had been raised, starting from the esplanade of the great tower, by means of ropes and pulleys attached outside to the iron bars of the windows. It is true that, hidden behind a shutter in her own apartment, Clélia had followed in anguish every action of the workmen; she had clearly seen Fabrizio’s mortal anxiety, but had nevertheless had the courage to keep the promise she had made to herself.

  Clélia was a little devotee of Liberalism; in her childhood she had taken quite seriously all the Liberal notions she had heard in the company of her father, whose only thoughts were of establishing his position in society; she had then gone on to hold in scorn and virtually in horror the courtier’s supple character: hence her antipathy to marriage. Since Fabrizio’s arrival, she was filled with remorse: “Now,” she said to herself, “my unworthy heart sides with people who seek to betray my father! And he dares make me a gesture of sawing through a door!… But,” she immediately said to herself, her soul overwhelmed, “the whole town is talking of his imminent death! Tomorrow may well be the fatal day! With the monsters who govern us now, anything in the world is possible! What sweetness, what heroic serenity in those eyes which may be about to close forever! Lord! What agonies the Duchess must be suffering! They say she’s in complete despair. If I were she, I’d go stab the Prince, like that heroine Charlotte Corday …”

  During this whole third day of his imprisonment, Fabrizio was crazed with anger, but solely for not having seen Clélia reappear.

  “Anger for anger, I should have told her that I loved her,” he exclaimed to himself, for he had arrived at this discovery. “No, it’s not out of greatness of soul that I am ignoring my prison and belying Blanès’s prophecy; such honor does not fall to me. In spite of myself I am dreaming of that sweet glance of pity Clélia cast upon me when the police were taking me out of the guard-room; that glance has erased my entire past life. Who could have told me that I should find such gentle eyes in such a place! And just when I had my own eyes sullied by the physiognomy of a Barbone and by that of Signor Governor-General. Heaven appears amidst these vile creatures. And what am I to do if I am not to love beauty and seek to see it again? No, it is not by greatness of soul that I am indifferent to all the little vexations with which prison overwhelms me.” Fabrizio’s imagination, rapidly considering all the possibilities, arrived at that of being restored to liberty. “No doubt the Duchess’s friendship will work miracles for me. Well! I shall thank her for my freedom with no more than my lips; these places are not the sort to which one returns! Once out of prison, separates socially as we are, I shall probably never see Clélia again! And as a matter of fact, what harm has prison done me? If Clélia deigned not to overwhelm me with her anger, what else would I have to ask of Heaven?”

  The evening of that day when he had not seen his lovely neighbor, a great idea occurred to him: with the iron cross of the rosary given to each prisoner upon entering prison, he began, and successfully, to bore a hole in the blind. “This may be rash,” he said to himself before he began. “Have the carpenters not said in my presence that after tomorrow they will be replaced by painters? What will these workmen say if they find a hole in the shutter over the window? But if I do not commit this rash act, tomorrow I cannot see her. Can it be by my own fault that I shall pass a single day without seeing her! And especially when she left me in anger!” Fabrizio’s rash act was rewarded; after fifteen hours of labor, he saw Clélia, and to complete his happiness, since she did not suspect she was being watched by him, she remained motionless for a long time at her window, staring fixedly at the enormous blind; he had plenty of time to read in her eyes the signs of the tenderest pity. At the end of her visit she even obviously neglected to tend her birds, remaining for whole minutes motionlessly staring at his window. Her heart was profoundly troubled; she was thinking of the Duchess whose extreme misfortunes had inspired such pity in her, and yet she was beginning to hate her. She understood nothing about the deep sadness which was overwhelming her spirit; she was annoyed with herself. Two or three times, during this visit, Fabrizio was so impatient as to try shaking the blind; it seemed to him that he was not happy so long as he could not indicate to Clélia that he had seen her. “Still,” he said to himself, “if she knew that I saw her so easily, timid and reserved as she is, no doubt she would remove herself from my sight.”

  He was much happier the next day (out of what miseries does love not create its happiness!): while she was sadly staring at the huge blind, he managed to thrust a tiny piece of wire through the hole his iron cross had made, and with it made signs which she obviously understood, at least insofar as they meant: I am here and I see you.

  Fabrizio was unlucky on the days that followed. He wanted to cut out of the enormous blind a piece of wood the size of his hand, which he could replace at will and which would allow him to see and be seen, in other words to speak, by signs at least, of what was occurring in his heart and soul; but it so happened that the noise of the very imperfect little saw he had made out of his watch-spring serrated by the iron cross aroused Grillo, who came to spend long hours in his room. He imagined he noticed, it is true, that Clélia’s severity seemed to diminish in inverse proportion to the material difficulties which opposed any communication; Fabrizio could see quite well that she no longer pretended to lower her eyes or to look at her birds when he tried to give her some sign of his presence with the help of his wretched bit of iron wire; he had the pleasure of seeing that she never failed to appear in the aviary precisely when the last quarter-hour before noon chimed from the clock-tower, and he was nearly presumptuous enough to regard himself as the cause of this regular punctuality. Why? This idea seems scarcely rational, but love observes nuances invisible to the indifferent eye, and from them draws infinite consequences. For instance, since Clélia no longer saw the prisoner, almost immediately upon entering the aviary she looked up toward his window. This was during those funereal days when no one in Parma doubted that Fabrizio would soon be put to death: he alone was unaware of it, but this dreadful idea never left Clélia’s mind, and how could she have blamed herself for her excessive interest in Fabrizio? He was going to die! And for the cause of freedom! For it was too absurd to execute a del Dongo for running through a mere player. It is true that this lovable young man was attached to anot
her woman! Clélia was profoundly unhappy, and without precisely admitting to herself the sort of interest she was taking in his fate. “Of course,” she said to herself, “if he is put to death, I shall withdraw to a convent and never again participate in court life—how it horrifies me! Fine-mannered murderers!”

  The eighth day of Fabrizio’s imprisonment, she had a good cause for shame: she was staring fixedly and quite absorbed in her sad thoughts at the shutter concealing the prisoner’s window; that day he had not yet given any sign of his presence; suddenly a tiny piece of the shutter, slightly bigger than a man’s hand, was removed: Fabrizio stared at her with a happy expression, and she met the greeting in his eyes. She could not sustain this unexpected ordeal, and quickly turned back to her birds and began tending them; but she was trembling so violently that she spilled the water she was giving them, and Fabrizio could see her emotion quite clearly; she could not endure this situation, and decided to run out of the room.

  This moment was incomparably the finest in Fabrizio’s life. With what transports he would have rejected freedom, had it been offered to him then!

  The following day was the day of the Duchess’s great despair. The entire city was convinced that it was all over with Fabrizio: Clélia lacked the mournful courage to show him a hardness which was not in her heart; she spent an hour and a half in the aviary, stared at all his signs, and frequently answered them, at least by the expression of the liveliest and sincerest interest; she left him at certain moments in order to hide her tears. Her woman’s coquetry was intensely aware of the imperfection of the language employed: had they managed to speak, in how many different ways might she not have sought to divine the precise nature of Fabrizio’s feelings for the Duchess! Clélia was now almost unable to deceive herself; she hated Signora Sanseverina.

  One night, Fabrizio happened to think somewhat seriously about his aunt: he was amazed, and scarcely recognized her image, so completely had his memory of her altered; for him, at this moment, she was fifty years old.

  “Good God!” he exclaimed with enthusiasm. “How right I was not to tell her I loved her!”

  He had reached the point of virtually no longer being able to understand how he had come to find her so pretty. In this regard, little Marietta made an altered impression that was less distinct: the fact was that he had never imagined that his soul counted for anything in his love for Marietta, while frequently he had imagined that his whole soul belonged to the Duchess. The Duchess of A—— and Marietta now had the effect on him of two young doves whose entire charm was in their weakness and innocence, while the sublime image of Clélia Conti, in seizing his whole soul, reached the point of inspiring him with terror. He was all too aware that the eternal happiness of his life would oblige him to reckon with the Governor’s daughter, and that it was within her power to make of him the most wretched of men. Each day he was in mortal fear of seeing end, abruptly, by a whim without appeal from his own will, this sort of singular and delicious life which he found himself living so close to her; yet she had already filled with happiness the first two months of his imprisonment. This was the period when, twice a week, General Fabio Conti would say to the Prince: “I can give Your Highness my word of honor that the prisoner del Dongo is not speaking to a living soul, and is spending his days overcome by the deepest despair or in sleep.”

  Clélia came two or three times a day to tend her birds, occasionally for only moments at a time: if Fabrizio had not loved her so much, he would certainly have perceived that he was loved; but he had mortal doubts in this regard. Clélia had had a piano moved into the aviary. While touching the keys, so that the sound of the instrument might acknowledge her presence and beguile the sentries who paraded under her windows, her eyes responded to Fabrizio’s questions. On only one subject did she make no reply, and even, on certain great occasions, took to flight and occasionally vanished for a whole day; this was when Fabrizio’s signs indicated sentiments the import of which it was too difficult not to understand: on this point she was inexorable.

  Thus, although closely confined in a rather narrow cage, Fabrizio was leading a very busy life; it was entirely given over to seeking the solution to this terribly important problem: “Does she love me?” The result of thousands of constantly renewed observations, though also constantly cast into doubt, was this: “All her deliberate gestures say no, but everything that is involuntary in the movement of her eyes seems to admit that she feels a certain friendship for me.”

  Clélia was indeed hoping never to reach the point of an avowal, and it was to defray this danger that she had repelled, with excessive anger, a plea Fabrizio had made to her on several occasions. The wretchedness of the resources employed by the poor prisoner ought, it would seem, to have inspired greater pity in Clélia. He sought to communicate with her by means of letters he drew on his palm with a piece of charcoal of which he’d made the precious discovery in his stove; he would have formed the words letter by letter, in succession. This invention would have doubled the means of conversation in that it would have permitted saying specific things. His window was about twenty-five feet away from Clélia’s; it would have been too risky to speak to each other over the heads of the sentries parading in front of the Governor’s palazzo. Fabrizio doubted whether he was loved; had he had some experience of love, no such doubts would have remained; but no woman had ever occupied his heart; moreover he had no suspicion of a secret which would have reduced him to despair had he known it: there was serious question of the marriage of Clélia Conti to the Marchese Crescenzi, the richest man at Court.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  General Fabio Conti’s ambition, exalted to madness by the difficulties which had just arisen in Prime Minister Mosca’s career and which appeared to herald his fall, had led him to create violent scenes with his daughter. He repeated to her incessantly, and angrily, that she would be the ruin of his fortunes if she did not finally decide upon a husband; at over twenty, it was time to make a match; this state of cruel isolation into which her unreasonable stubbornness had plunged the General must be brought to an end, and so forth.

  It was initially to avoid these constant fits of rage that Clélia had sought refuge in the aviary, which could be reached only by a steep and narrow wooden staircase constituting a serious obstacle for the General’s gout.

  For several weeks, Clélia’s soul was so agitated, she was so uncertain of what she ought to want, that without quite making any promises to her father, she had virtually allowed herself to become engaged. In one of these fits of rage, the General had exclaimed that he might well send her to cool her heels in the gloomiest convent in Parma, where he would leave her to sulk until she deigned to make up her mind.

  “You know that our family, old as it is, cannot muster an income of six thousand lire a year, while the Marchese Crescenzi’s annual fortune amounts to over a hundred thousand scudi. Everyone at court agrees that he has the best disposition; he has never given anyone reason for complaint; he’s handsome, young, in favor with the Prince, and you would have to be mad to reject his advances. If this rejection were the only one, I might tolerate it; but here are five or six suitors, among the first men at Court, whom you refuse, like the little fool that you are. And what would become of you, pray tell, were I to be retired on half-pay? What a victory for my enemies if I were seen living in some second-floor apartment, often as I was considered for the Ministry! No, a thousand times no! My good nature has led me to play the part of a Cassandra long enough. Either you’ll give me some good reason for turning down this poor Marchese Crescenzi, who’s had the kindness to fall in love with you, to agree to marry you without a dowry, and to make you a settlement of thirty thousand lire a year, on which at least I could have a roof over my head—you’ll give me a reason or by God you’ll marry him in two months …”

  One phrase in this whole speech caught Clélia’s attention: the threat of being sent to a convent and consequently removed from the Citadel, and just when Fabrizio’s life seeme
d to be hanging by no more than a thread, for not a month passed without the rumor of his imminent death running once again through Court and town alike. No matter how she reasoned, she could not bring herself to take such a risk: to be separated from Fabrizio, and just when she was trembling for his life! That in her eyes was the greatest misfortune of all, or at least the most immediate.

  Not that, even were she not separated from Fabrizio, her heart foresaw any prospect of happiness; she believed him loved by the Duchess, and her soul was lacerated by a deadly jealousy. She kept brooding over the advantages enjoyed by this woman, so universally admired. The extreme reserve she imposed upon herself with regard to Fabrizio, the sign-language to which she had confined him, lest she fall into some indiscretion—everything seemed to combine to deprive her of the means of reaching some clear understanding of his relations with the Duchess. So every day she felt ever more cruelly the dreadful misfortune of having a rival in Fabrizio’s heart, and every day she dared less and less to expose herself to the peril of giving him the chance to tell the whole truth about what was going on in his heart. But what a delight it would be to hear him confess his true feelings! What happiness for Clélia to be able to dispel the terrible suspicions poisoning her life.

  Fabrizio was fickle; in Naples, he had the reputation of charming mistresses quite readily. Despite all the reserve imposed upon the role of a young lady, ever since she had become a Canoness and attended Court, Clélia, without ever asking questions but by listening attentively, had managed to learn the reputations of the young men who had, one after the next, sought her hand in marriage; well then, Fabrizio, compared to all the others, was the one who was least trustworthy in affairs of the heart. He was in prison, he was bored, he paid court to the one woman he could speak to—what could be simpler? What, indeed, more common? And this was what plunged Clélia into despair. Even if, by some full revelation, she might have learned that Fabrizio no longer loved the Duchess, what confidence could she have in his words? Even if she could have believed in the sincerity of his speeches, what confidence could she have had in the lasting nature of his feelings? And finally, to complete the prospect of despair in her heart, was not Fabrizio already far advanced in an ecclesiastical career? Was he not on the verge of committing himself to eternal vows? Did not the greatest dignities await him if he adopted such a life? “If the slightest gleam of sense still remained in my heart,” the wretched Clélia was telling herself, “should I not beg my father to lock me up in some faraway convent? And the last stroke of misery, it is precisely the fear of being taken away from the Citadel and being shut up in a convent which governs everything I do! It is this terror which obliges me to dissimulate, which compels me to the hideous and shameful lie of pretending to accept the arrangements and the public attentions of Marchese Crescenzi.”