by Stendhal
Clélia’s character was a profoundly rational one; her whole life long, she had never had to reproach herself for a single rash action, and her behavior in the present case was the height of irrationality: imagine her sufferings!… They were all the worse in that she permitted herself no illusions. She was attached to a man who was wildly loved by the handsomest woman at Court, a woman who, on so many counts, was Clélia’s superior! And this very man, had he been free, was incapable of a serious attachment, while she, as she felt all too well, would never have but one attachment in all her life.
So it was with a heart agitated by the deepest remorse that Clélia, every day, came to the aviary: compelled to this place as if in spite of herself, her anxiety changed its object and became milder, her remorse vanished for a while; she waited, her heart pounding, for the moment when Fabrizio might open the sort of transom he had made in the huge shutter covering his window. Often the presence of the jailer Grillo in his room kept him from conversing with her by sign-language.
One night, at about eleven, Fabrizio heard the strangest noises in the Citadel: after dark, lying on the window-sill and poking his head through the transom, he could manage to distinguish the louder noises made on the great staircase known as the three hundred steps, leading from the first courtyard inside the round tower to the stone platform on which the governor’s palazzo and the Farnese prison had been built.
About half-way up, at a height of a hundred and twenty-five steps, this staircase crossed from the south side of a huge courtyard to the north, where there was a very narrow iron catwalk, in the center of which a turnkey was posted. This man was relieved every six hours, and he was obliged to stand up and move to one side in order to let anyone pass on the catwalk which he was guarding and which was the only way to get into the Governor’s palazzo and the Farnese Tower. It sufficed to give two turns to a spring, the key of which the Governor kept in his possession, to cast this iron catwalk into the courtyard more than a hundred feet below; this simple precaution taken, since there was no other staircase in the whole Citadel and since every midnight a sergeant brought to the Governor’s residence, and put in a cabinet reached through his bedroom, the ropes of all the wells, he remained quite inaccessible in his palazzo, and it would have been equally impossible for anyone to reach the Farnese Tower. This is what Fabrizio had distinctly noticed the day he had entered the Citadel, and what Grillo, who, like all the jailers, loved boasting about his prison, had explained to him several times: thus he had little hope of escaping. However he recalled one of Abbé Blanès’s sayings:
A lover thinks more often how to reach his mistress than a husband how to protect his wife; a prisoner thinks more often how to escape than a jailer how to lock his cell; thus, whatever the obstacles, lover and prisoner will triumph.
That night, Fabrizio quite distinctly heard a large number of men crossing the iron catwalk known as the slave’s bridge, because once a Dalmatian slave had managed to escape by throwing the catwalk guard down into the courtyard.
“They’re coming to take someone away, maybe they’re going to take me out to be hanged; but there may be some disorder, and I must make the most of it.” He had armed himself, and was already taking his money out of its various hiding-places, when suddenly he stopped. “What a funny creature man is!” he exclaimed, “There’s no denying it: what would an invisible spectator say, watching these preparations? Would I be thinking of making my escape? What would happen to me the day after I managed to get back to Parma? Would I not do anything in the world to return to Clélia? If there’s some disorder, let’s take advantage of it to slip into the governor’s palazzo; maybe I’ll be able to speak to Clélia, maybe under cover of the confusion I’ll manage to kiss her hand. General Conti is as suspicious as he is vain, and keeps five sentries guarding his palazzo, one at each corner of the building and a fifth at the main door, but luckily it’s a very dark night.” Stealthily, Fabrizio went over to see what his jailer Grillo and his dog were up to: the jailer was sound asleep in an oxhide slung from the ceiling by four ropes and encased in a coarse netting; the dog Fox opened his eyes, stood up, and crept toward Fabrizio to lick his hand.
Softly our prisoner went back up the six steps leading to his wooden chamber; the noise at the foot of the Farnese Tower, and right in front of the door, was becoming so loud that he was sure Grillo would wake up. Fabrizio, armed to the teeth and ready for action, was imagining he was destined, this very night, for great adventures, when all of a sudden he heard the opening bars of the loveliest symphony in the world: a serenade being played for the General, or for his daughter. Fabrizio fell into a fit of hysterical laughter: “And I was planning to use my dagger! As if a serenade were not infinitely more commonplace an event than a rebellion or an abduction requiring the presence of eighty men in a prison!” The music was excellent, and sounded delicious to Fabrizio, whose spirit had not had distraction of this sort for so many weeks; it caused him to shed many gentle tears; in his delight, he made the most irresistible speeches to lovely Clélia. But the next day, at noon, he found her so deeply melancholy, and so pale, and in her glances he read such flashes of rage, that he did not feel sufficiently justified in questioning her about the serenade; he was afraid of seeming discourteous.
Clélia had good reason to be melancholy; the serenade was being given her by the Marchese Crescenzi: so public an action was a kind of official announcement of their engagement. Until the very day of the serenade, and until nine that evening, Clélia had put up the best possible resistance, but she had had the weakness of yielding to her father’s threat of sending her immediately to a convent.
“Then I should never see him again!” she had said to herself through her tears. It was in vain that her reason added: “I should never again see this person who would be my downfall in any case; I should never again see the Duchess’s lover; I should never again see a man who has had ten known mistresses in Naples and who has betrayed them all; I should never see this young careerist who, if he does survive the sentence that hangs over his head, will take holy orders anyway! It would be a crime for me to see him again once he is outside the Citadel, and his natural frivolity will spare the temptation to do so; for what am I to him? An excuse for distracting himself for a few hours of each of his days in prison.” Amidst all this abuse, Clélia managed to remember the smile with which Fabrizio had observed the police surrounding him when he left the turnkey’s office to climb up to the Farnese Tower. Tears filled her eyes: “Dear friend, what wouldn’t I do for you! You will ruin me, I know you will, it is my fate, I am ruining myself by listening to this dreadful serenade this evening; but tomorrow, at noon, I shall see your eyes once more!”
It was precisely on the day after that day when Clélia had made such great sacrifices for the young prisoner whom she loved so passionately; it was the day after that day when, realizing all his faults, she had sacrificed her life to him, that Fabrizio was cast into despair by her coldness. If even by employing no more than the imperfect language of signs, he had done the slightest violence to Clélia’s soul, she probably would not have been able to restrain her tears, and Fabrizio would have obtained a confession of all that she felt for him; but he lacked boldness, he was too mortally afraid of offending Clélia; she might inflict too severe a punishment upon him. In other words, Fabrizio had no experience of the kind of emotion produced by a woman one loves; it was a sensation he had never felt, even in its faintest nuance. It took him eight days, after the night of the serenade, to return to the familiar footing of simple friendship with Clélia. The poor girl armed herself with severity, dying of fear lest she betray herself; and to Fabrizio it seemed that he was more remote from her each day that passed.
One day—some three months since Fabrizio had been in prison without having any communication with the outside world, and yet without feeling particularly unhappy—Grillo remained late into the morning in his room; Fabrizio did not know how to get rid of him; he was in despair; finally the second quar
ter after noon had already chimed when he was able to open the two little trap-doors about a foot high which he had cut into the fatal shutter.
Clélia was standing at the aviary window, her eyes fixed on Fabrizio’s transom; her drawn features expressed the most violent despair. No sooner had she caught sight of him than she signaled that all was lost: she rushed to her piano and, pretending to sing a recitative from an opera popular at the moment, she told him, in phrases interrupted by despair and fear of being understood by the sentries parading under the window: “Good God, and are you still alive? Thanks be to Heaven! Barbone, that jailer whose insolence you punished the day you came here, had vanished, was no longer in the Citadel: the night before last he returned, and since yesterday I have reason to believe he is attempting to poison you. He comes prowling into the private kitchens of the palazzo, which supply your meals. I know nothing for certain, but my chambermaid believes that this hideous person never enters the kitchens except with the intention of taking someone’s life. I was perishing with anxiety, and not seeing you appear, I believed you dead. Refrain from all nourishment until further notice; I shall do everything possible to send you a little chocolate. In any case, at nine tonight, if it is Heaven’s will that you possess a piece of string, or that you can form the strips of your sheets into a ribbon, let it down from your window to the orange-trees, I shall attach a cord to it which you will pull up to yourself, and by means of this cord I shall be able to supply you with some bread and chocolate.”
Fabrizio had preserved as a treasure the piece of charcoal he had found in the stove of his room; he hurriedly took advantage of Clélia’s emotion and wrote on his hand a series of letters which, taken in order, spelled out these words:
I love you, and life is precious to me only because I see you; above all things, send me some paper and a pencil.
As Fabrizio had hoped, the extreme terror he had read in Clélia’s features kept the girl from breaking off the interview after this bold expression I love you; she was content merely to show a good deal of annoyance. Fabrizio had the wit to add:
The high winds blowing today keep me from hearing clearly the advice you have sung to me, the sound of the piano drowns out your voice. What is that poison, for instance, that I believe you mentioned?
At this word, the girl’s terror reappeared full strength; hastily she began drawing huge letters in ink on the pages she tore out of a book, and Fabrizio was transported with delight to see established at last, after three months of attempts, this means of correspondence he had so vainly sought. He took care not to abandon the little ruse which had worked so well for him; he hoped to write real letters, and kept pretending not to grasp the words of which Clélia was showing him the successive letters.
She was obliged to leave the aviary to join her father; above all she was in terror he might come looking for her; his suspicious genius had been quite dissatisfied with the close proximity of this aviary window and the shutter masking the prisoner’s. Clélia herself had had the notion a few moments earlier, when Fabrizio’s non-appearance had plunged her into such anxiety, that it would be possible to throw a pebble wrapped in a piece of paper toward the upper part of this shutter; if Chance would have it that the jailer in charge of Fabrizio at that moment did not happen to be in his room, then this would be a sure means of correspondence.
Our prisoner made haste to construct a ribbon out of strips of his sheets, and that evening, shortly after nine, he clearly heard some tapping on the tubs of the orange-trees under his window; he let down his ribbon, which brought him back a very long slender cord, by which he was first able to pull up a supply of chocolate and then, to his inexpressible satisfaction, a roll of paper and a pencil. It was in vain that he let down the cord again; he received nothing more; apparently the sentries had come near the orange-trees. But he was intoxicated with joy. He hastened to write an endless letter to Clélia; no sooner was it finished than he fastened it to his cord and sent it down. For over three hours he waited in vain for it to be collected, and several times drew it up again to make changes in his text. “If Clélia does not see my letter tonight,” he said to himself, “while she is still moved by her ideas about poison, tomorrow morning she may well have nothing to do with the idea of receiving a letter from me.”
The fact is that Clélia had not been able to avoid going down into the city with her father: Fabrizio had virtually guessed as much when he heard the General’s carriage returning, two quarters after midnight; he recognized the sound of the horses’ hooves. What was his joy when, a few minutes after having heard the General cross the esplanade and the sentries present arms, he felt a tug on the cord, which he kept wrapped around his arm! A heavy weight was attached to this cord; two little tugs gave him the signal to pull it up. He had some difficulty in getting the heavy object he was pulling up around the jutting cornice under his window. This refractory object proved to be a carafe filled with water and wrapped in a shawl. It was with ecstasy that this poor young man, who had lived so long in such complete solitude, covered this shawl with kisses. But we must abandon describing his emotion when at last, after so many days of vain hopes, he discovered a tiny piece of paper pinned to the shawl:
Drink only this water, live on chocolate; tomorrow I will do all I can to send you some bread, I will mark it all around with little ink crosses. It is horrible to say, but you must know: Barbone may be assigned to poison you. How could you help knowing that the subject you mention in your penciled letter is certain to displease me? Therefore I should not be writing you, were it not for the extreme danger which threatens you. I have just seen the Duchess; she and the Count are both very well, but she has grown much thinner; do not write to me again on this subject: are you trying to make me angry?
It was a great effort of virtue, on Clélia’s part, to write the penultimate line of this letter. Everyone was claiming, in court circles, that Signora Sanseverina was becoming very friendly with Count Baldi, that handsome man, the former lover of the Marchesa Raversi. What was certain was that he had broken with the latter in the most scandalous fashion, though for six years she had been more than a mother to him and had established him in society.
Clélia had been obliged to begin this hastily written little note over again, because her first version betrayed something of these new amours which public malice attributed to the Duchess.
“How vile of me!” she had reproached herself, “to say something bad to Fabrizio about the woman he loves …!”
The next morning, long before daybreak, Grillo entered Fabrizio’s room, set down a heavy package, and vanished without saying a word. This package contained a good-sized loaf of bread speckled on all sides with tiny ink crosses. Fabrizio covered them with kisses; he was in love. Next to the loaf was a roll of something wrapped in many folds of paper; it held six thousand francs in sequins; and last of all, Fabrizio found a handsome brand-new missal: a hand he was beginning to know had written these words in the margin:
Poison! Be careful about water, wine, any kind of food; live on chocolate, try to make the dog eat the dinner you won’t touch; if you reveal that you suspect something, the enemy will try some other means. Nothing foolish, in God’s name! No frivolity.
Fabrizio hurriedly effaced these beloved words which might compromise Clélia, and tore out a great many pages of the missal, with the help of which he made several alphabets; each letter was carefully drawn with crushed charcoal soaked in wine. These alphabets were dry when at three-quarters past eleven Clélia appeared two steps back from the aviary window. “The great thing now,” Fabrizio said to himself, “is to get her to use them.” But luckily it so happened that she had many things to say to the young prisoner concerning the attempted poisoning: a dog belonging to one of the serving-girls had died from having eaten a dish intended for him. Clélia, far from offering objections to using the alphabets, had prepared a splendid one with ink. The conversation undertaken by this means, quite inconvenient in its initial phrases, lasted no less than
an hour and a half, in other words all the time Clélia could remain in the aviary. Two or three times when Fabrizio permitted himself forbidden subjects, she did not answer, and left for a moment to give her birds the care they needed. Fabrizio had persuaded her that after dark, when she sent him water, she should include one of the alphabets which she had drawn in ink and which was much easier to read. He lost no time in writing a very long letter in which he was careful not to express any tender thoughts, at least not in a fashion which might give offense. This stratagem succeeded; his letter was accepted.
