The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  The following day, in their conversation by alphabets, Clélia made him no reproaches; she informed him that there was less danger of poison now; Barbone had been attacked and almost killed by some men who were courting the serving-maids in the governor’s kitchen; it was likely that he would not dare reappear there. Clélia confessed that for Fabrizio’s sake she had dared steal an antidote from her father; she was sending it to him: the important thing was to refuse any food served to him which seemed to taste strange.

  Clélia had put many questions to Don Cesare, without managing to discover the provenance of the six hundred sequins Fabrizio had received; in any case, the gift was an excellent sign; the severity of his supervision was diminishing.

  This episode of the poison enormously advanced our prisoner’s interests, yet he could never obtain the least avowal which might resemble love, though he had the felicity of living on the most intimate terms with Clélia. Every morning, and frequently in the afternoons, there was a long conversation with the alphabets; each evening, at nine, Clélia accepted a long letter, and occasionally answered it with a few words; she would send him the newspaper and some books; finally Grillo had been won over to the point of permitting Fabrizio some bread and wine, which were delivered daily by Clélia’s chambermaid. The jailer had concluded from this that the Governor was not in agreement with the men who had ordered Barbone to poison the young Monsignore, and he was relieved to think so, as were all his comrades, for it had become proverbial in the prison that “you need only look into Monsignore del Dongo’s eyes for him to give you money.”

  Fabrizio had grown quite pale; the complete lack of exercise was bad for his health; with this exception he had never been so happy. The tone of his conversations with Clélia was intimate, and occasionally very merry. The only moments of Clélia’s life which were not haunted by dreadful forebodings and remorse were those which she spent in such dialogues. One day she was rash enough to tell him: “I admire your delicacy; knowing I am the Governor’s daughter, you never mention your desire to regain your freedom.”

  “That is because I am careful not to have any such nonsensical desire,” Fabrizio answered. “Once back in Parma, how would I see you again? And then life would be unendurable if I couldn’t tell you everything I think.… No, not quite everything I think, you have seen to that; but after all, despite your cruelty, living without seeing you every day would be a much worse torment than this prison! I’ve never been so happy in my life!… Isn’t it funny to discover that happiness was waiting for me in a prison?”

  “There are many things to say in that regard,” replied Clélia with an expression suddenly very serious and almost sinister.

  “What do you mean?” cried Fabrizio, suddenly alarmed. “Am I likely now to lose this tiny place which I’ve been able to win in your heart and which constitutes all the happiness I have in this world?”

  “Yes,” she told him, “I have every reason to believe that you have failed to be truthful with me, though you may be regarded in society as a man of honor; but I do not wish to discuss this subject today.”

  This singular opening cast a pall of embarrassment over their conversation, and frequently his eyes or hers filled with tears.

  Chief Justice Rassi was still aspiring to a change of name: he was quite tired of the one he had made for himself and longed to become Baron Riva. Count Mosca, for his part, was endeavoring with all the skill he possessed to strengthen this venal judge’s passion for the title, even as he sought to redouble the Prince’s mad hope of becoming Constitutional Monarch of Lombardy. These were the only means he could devise to delay Fabrizio’s death.

  The Prince said to Rassi: “Fifteen days of despair and fifteen of hope—it is by such a regime, patiently followed, that we shall succeed in overcoming the character of this haughty woman; it is by such alternating harshness and gentleness that even the fiercest steeds are tamed. Apply the caustic firmly.”

  Indeed, every fortnight a new rumor circulated in Parma announcing Fabrizio’s imminent execution. This report plunged the unhappy Duchess into the deepest despair. Loyal to her resolve not to drag the Count to his ruin, she was punished for her cruelty toward this poor man by the continual alternations of black despair in which her life was now spent. In vain Count Mosca, overcoming the cruel jealousy inspired by the handsome Count Baldi’s attentions, wrote to the Duchess whenever he was unable to see her and kept her abreast of whatever information he owed to the future Baron Riva’s zeal; the Duchess, in order to resist the terrible rumors that kept circulating about Fabrizio, would have needed to spend her every waking moment in the company of a man of heart and wit comparable to Mosca himself; Baldi’s emptiness, leaving her to her thoughts, afforded a dreadful style of existence, and the Count failed to communicate to her his own reasons for hope.

  By means of various ingenious excuses, this Minister had managed to persuade the Prince to deposit in a friendly castle near Saronno, in the very heart of Lombardy, the archives of all the highly complicated intrigues by means of which Ranuccio-Ernesto IV nourished the utterly absurd hope of becoming Constitutional Monarch of that fair region.

  More than twenty of these highly compromising documents were in the Prince’s hand or signed by him, and in the event of Fabrizio’s life being seriously threatened, the Count had planned to inform his Highness that he would communicate these documents to a great power who, by a word, could crush him.

  Count Mosca regarded himself as sure of the future Baron Riva, and feared only poison; Barbone’s attempt had greatly alarmed him, and to such a degree that he had decided to risk an action quite insane to all appearances. One morning he arrived at the Citadel gates and asked for General Fabio Conti, who came down as far as the bastion over the gates; here, strolling in a friendly fashion after a bittersweet and conventional little preface, the Count did not hesitate to remark: “If Fabrizio dies under suspicious circumstances, this death may well be laid to my account; I shall pass for a jealous man, which would be an abominable absurdity for me, one I should be determined not to accept. Therefore, and to clear myself of it, were Fabrizio to die of some sickness, I should kill you with my own hands, you may count on that.”

  General Fabio Conti made a splendid reply and spoke of his own valor, but he could not get the Count’s expression out of his mind.

  A few days later, and as if he had conspired with the Count, Chief Justice Rassi allowed himself a singular indiscretion for such a man. The public scorn attached to his name which was proverbial among the common people had sickened him ever since he had nourished some definite hopes of being able to escape such a label. He sent General Fabio Conti an official copy of the sentence condemning Fabrizio to an imprisonment of twelve years in the Citadel. According to the law, this is what should have been done the very day after Fabrizio entered the prison; but what was unheard-of in Parma, that realm of secret measures, was that the courts should permit such a step without the Sovereign’s express orders to do so. Indeed, how to encourage hopes of redoubling the Duchess’s alarm every fortnight, and of taming this proud nature, as the Prince put it, once an official copy of the sentence had left the Chancellery of Justice? The day before the day when General Fabio Conti received Chief Justice Rassi’s official communication, he learned that the clerk Barbone had been badly beaten upon returning somewhat late to the Citadel; from this he concluded that there was no longer any question in certain quarters of doing away with Fabrizio; and by a touch of prudence which saved Rassi from the immediate consequences of his folly, he made no mention to the Prince, upon the first audience he obtained with him, of the official copy of the prisoner’s sentence which had been transmitted to him. The Count had discovered, fortunately for the poor Duchess’s peace of mind, that Barbone’s clumsy attempt had been no more than an impulse of private revenge, and he had caused that clerk to be given the warning already mentioned.

  Fabrizio was quite agreeably surprised when, after one hundred and thirty-five days in prison, in a r
ather narrow cell, the good chaplain Don Cesare arrived one Thursday to take him for a stroll on the esplanade of the Farnese Tower: Fabrizio had not been there ten minutes when, overcome by the freshness of the air, he was taken ill.

  Don Cesare made the incident an excuse to grant Fabrizio half an hour’s such exercise every day. This was a piece of folly; such frequent strolls soon restored to our hero a strength which he abused.

  There were several more serenades; the punctilious Governor permitted them only because they involved the Marchese Crescenzi with his daughter Clélia, whose character now alarmed him; he vaguely realized that there was no point of contact between her and himself, and still feared some action on her part. She might take refuge in a convent, and he would be quite helpless to prevent it. Furthermore, the General feared that all this music, whose sounds could penetrate to the deepest dungeons reserved for the blackest Liberals, might contain signals. The musicians themselves roused his jealousy for their own sake; hence no sooner was the serenade over than they were confined in the great lower halls of the Governor’s palazzo, which by day served as staff offices, and released only the next morning in broad daylight. It was the Governor himself who, standing on the slave’s bridge, had them searched in his presence and restored their liberty, not without repeating several times that he would immediately hang any man who might have the audacity to bear messages of any kind to any prisoner. And it was known that in his fear of giving offense he was a man to keep his word, so that the Marchese Crescenzi was obliged to pay his musicians three times their usual fee, so distressed had they been to spend the night in prison.

  All that the Duchess could obtain, and this with the greatest difficulty, from the cowardice of one of these men, was that he would take a letter which would be delivered to the Governor. The letter was addressed to Fabrizio, and in it the writer deplored the fatality which so arranged matters that after he had spent more than five months in prison, Fabrizio’s friends in the world outside had been unable to establish any correspondence with him whatsoever.

  Upon entering the Citadel, this bribed musician flung himself at General Conti’s feet and confessed that a priest unknown to him had so insisted that he take a letter to Signor del Dongo that he had not dared refuse; but that knowing his duty, he now made haste to put it into His Excellency’s hands.

  His Excellency was highly flattered: he knew the resources at the Duchess’s disposal, and was terrified of being hoaxed. In his delight, the General went so far as to present this letter to the Prince, who was delighted.

  “So, the firmness of my administration has afforded me my revenge! This haughty woman has been suffering for five months! But one of these days we’ll have a scaffold built, and her wild imagination will not fail to believe that it is intended for young del Dongo!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  One night, toward one o’clock in the morning, Fabrizio, leaning on his window-sill, had pushed his head through the opening cut in the shutter, and was contemplating the stars and the vast horizon to be enjoyed from the top of the Farnese Tower. His eyes, sweeping the countryside toward the lower Po and Ferrara, happened to notice an extremely small but rather bright light apparently emanating from the top of another tower. “That light cannot be visible from the plain,” Fabrizio said to himself, “the tower’s thickness keeps it from being seen from down below—it must be some signal for a distant point.” Suddenly he noticed that this light appeared and vanished at very close intervals. “It must be some girl communicating with her lover in the next village.” He counted nine successive flashes: “That’s an I,” he decided, “since I is the ninth letter of the alphabet. And then, after a pause, there were fourteen flashes. “That’s an N”; then, after another pause, a single flash: “That’s an A; the word is Ina.”

  What were his delight and his amazement when the successive flashes, always separated by brief pauses, then completed the following words: INA PENSA A TE. Evidently, “Gina is thinking of you!” He immediately answered with successive flashes of his lamp through the opening in his shutter: FABRIZIO T AMA (“Fabrizio loves you!”) The communication continued until daybreak. This night was the hundred and seventy-third of his captivity, and he now learned that for four months these signals had been made every night. But anyone could see and decipher them; from this night on, abbreviations were devised: three flashes in rapid succession indicated the Duchess; four, the Prince; two, Count Mosca; two quick flashes followed by two slow ones meant escape. It was agreed that in the future they would use the old alphabet alla monaca, which in order not to be understood by outsiders changes the usual order of the letters and gives them an arbitrary numbering; A, for instance, is represented by ten; B by three; in other words, three successive flashes of the lamp means B, ten flashes means A, etc.; a moment’s darkness constitutes the space between words. An appointment was made for the following night at one o’clock, and the following night the Duchess came to this tower, which was a quarter of a league outside the town. Her eyes filled with tears seeing the signals made by the very Fabrizio whom she had so often believed to be dead. She told him herself by flashing her lamp: I love you Courage Keep up your hopes Exercise within your room You will need the strength of your arms. “I have not seen him,” the Duchess said to herself, “since that concert of Fausta’s, when he appeared at my salon doors in a footman’s livery. Who could have guessed then what Fate held in store for us all!”

  The Duchess had signals sent which told Fabrizio that soon he would be released, thanks to the Prince’s kindness (these signals could be read); then she went back to sending messages of affection; she could not tear herself away from him! Only the remonstrances of Ludovic, who because he had been of use to Fabrizio had become her own factotum, could convince her, when day was dawning, to break off the signals which might attract the attention of someone hostile. This announcement of an imminent release, repeated several times, cast Fabrizio into a deep melancholy: Clélia, noticing this the next day, was so indiscreet as to ask him the reason.

  “I am about to give the Duchess serious grounds for annoyance.”

  “What could she ask of you that you would deny her?” exclaimed Clélia, carried away by the most burning curiosity.

  “She wants me to leave this place,” he answered, “and that is something I shall never consent to do.”

  Clélia could not answer, she stared at him and dissolved into tears. If he had been able to speak to her at close range, perhaps then he might have obtained the avowal of feelings concerning which his uncertainty frequently plunged him into the deepest discouragement; how intensely he felt that life, without Clélia’s love, could be nothing for him but an endless round of bitter disappointments or unbearable tedium. It seemed to him that it was no longer worth living to rediscover those same delights which had seemed so interesting before he had known love, and although suicide had not yet become fashionable in Italy, he had thought of it as a last resort, if fate were to separate him from Clélia.

  The following day he received a very long letter from her:

  My friend, you must know the truth: very often, since you have been here, all Parma has supposed that your last day was upon you. It is true that you were condemned to no more than twelve years’ imprisonment in the Fortress; but unfortunately it is beyond doubt that an all-powerful animosity is still determined to pursue you, and I have twenty times dreaded lest poison put an end to your days on this earth: therefore take advantage of any possible means of escape from this place. You see that on your behalf I am failing in my most sacred duties; judge the imminence of the danger by the things I venture to tell you, and which are so out of place on my lips. If it is absolutely essential, if there is no other means of safety, then flee. Every minute that you spend in this fortress can put your life in the greatest danger; you must realize that there is a faction at Court which the prospect of crime will never turn from its intentions. And don’t you see all the schemes of this faction constantly foiled by Count Mosca’s sup
erior skill?

  Now, however, a sure means of exiling the Count from Parma has been found, to the Duchess’s despair; and is it not all too certain that this despair will be intensified by the death of a certain young prisoner? This word alone, which is unanswerable, ought to make you see your situation clearly. You say that you regard me with affection: consider first of all that insurmountable obstacles stand between this sentiment and any firm basis for it between us. We may have met in our youth, we may have held out a helping hand to each other during an unfortunate period; fate may have placed me in this place of punishment in order to reduce your sufferings; but I should never forgive myself if certain illusions, which nothing warrants nor shall ever warrant, were to lead you to fail to grasp any possible occasion to release your life from such a dreadful danger. I have lost my peace of mind by the cruel indiscretions I have committed by exchanging with you certain signs of true friendship: if our childish games with alphabets were to lead you to such ill-founded illusions which, indeed, might have such fatal effects, it would be useless for me to justify myself by recalling Barbone’s attack on you. I shall have cast you myself into a much more serious danger and a much more certain one, by imagining I was shielding you from a momentary peril; and my indiscretions are eternally unforgivable if they have generated in you sentiments which might lead you to resist the Duchess’s advice.

  Look what you compel me to say to you once more; make your escape, I command you …

  This letter was very long; certain passages, such as the I command you …, which we have just transcribed, afforded moments of delicious hope to Fabrizio’s love. It seemed to him that the basis of the feelings it expressed were quite tender, for all the remarkable discretion of their phrasing. At other moments, he paid the penalty for his complete ignorance in this sort of combat; he saw no more than friendship, or even simple humanity, in this letter from Clélia.