by Stendhal
Filled with the keenest remorse for what has been done, not, Heaven be thanked, with my consent, but on the occasion of an idea that had occurred to me, I have vowed to the Blessed Virgin that if, by her holy intercession, my father is saved, I shall never refuse to obey any of his orders; I shall marry the Marchese as soon as he tells me to, and I shall never see you again. Nonetheless, I believe it is my duty to complete what has been begun. Next Sunday, upon return from the Mass to which you will be taken by my request (remember to prepare your soul, you may meet death in the difficult undertaking that is to come), upon return from Mass, as I was saying, delay your return to your room as much as you can; you will find what you require for the enterprise you have in mind. If you perish, my heart will be broken! Could I be accused of having contributed to your death? Did not the Duchess herself repeat to me on several occasions that the Raversi party is gaining the upper hand? They seek to bind the Prince by a cruel deed which will separate him forever from Count Mosca. The Duchess, through her tears, swore to me that this one resource remains: you will perish if you do not make the attempt. I cannot look at you again, I have made my vow; but if, on Sunday evening, you see me dressed all in black at the usual window, that will be the signal that the following night everything will be in readiness, insofar as my means allow. After eleven, perhaps only at midnight or at one in the morning, a little lamp will appear at my window, this will be the decisive moment; commend yourself to your Patron Saint, make haste to put on the priest’s clothes you will be provided, and be off.
Farewell, Fabrizio, I shall be at my prayers, and shedding the bitterest tears, you may be certain of that, while you incur such great dangers. Should you die, I shall not survive you; good God! What am I saying? But if you make your escape, I shall never see you again. On Sunday, after Mass, you will find in your prison the money, the poisons, the ropes sent by that terrible woman who loves you so passionately and who has told me three times over that this is what must be done. May God and the Blessed Madonna preserve you!
Fabio Conti was an ever-uneasy jailer, always troubled, always dreaming that one or another of his prisoners was escaping: he was hated by everyone in the Fortress, but, misfortune inspiring the same resolve in all men, the wretched prisoners, even those chained in the dungeons three feet high, three feet wide, and eight feet long, in which they could neither sit nor stand—all the prisoners, even these, as I say, conceived the notion of ordering a Te Deum sung at their own expense when they learned that their Governor was out of danger. Two or three of these wretches composed sonnets in honor of Fabio. Oh, the influence of misery upon these men! Let him who blames them be led by his fate to spend a year in a dungeon three feet high with eight ounces of bread a day and fasting on Fridays!
Clélia, who left her father’s bedroom only to pray in the chapel, said that the Governor had decided that the rejoicings would be limited to Sunday. That Sunday morning, Fabrizio attended Mass and the Te Deum; that evening there were fireworks and in the lower rooms of the palazzo the soldiers received a ration of wine four times the quantity the Governor had stipulated; an unknown hand had even sent several casks of brandy, which the soldiers broached. The generosity of these drunken soldiers refused to permit the five soldiers on sentry-duty around the palazzo to suffer from their posting; as soon as they arrived at their sentry-boxes, a trusty servant gave them some wine, and it is not known by what hand those who were posted as sentries at midnight and for the rest of the night received a glass of brandy as well, while the bottle was in each case forgotten beside the sentry-box (as was proved in the subsequent investigation).
The confusion lasted longer than Clélia had expected, and it was only toward one in the morning that Fabrizio, who for the last eight days had sawed through two bars of his window, the one which did not face the aviary, began to take down the shutter; he was working almost directly above the sentries guarding the governor’s palazzo, but they heard nothing. He had made only a few new knots in the enormous rope necessary to get down from that terrible height of a hundred and eighty feet. He coiled this rope like a bandolier around his body: it hampered his movements a good deal, for its bulk was enormous; the knots kept it from forming a compact mass, and it protruded over eighteen inches from his body. “This is the main obstacle,” Fabrizio said to himself.
Once he had arranged the first rope as best he could, Fabrizio took the other one, with which he planned to get down the thirty-five feet which separated his window from the terrace where the Governor’s palazzo stood. But since, however intoxicated the sentries might be, he could hardly climb down over their heads, he emerged, as we have said, out of the second window of his room, the one which overlooked the roof of a sort of vast guard-room. By a sick-man’s caprice, as soon as General Fabio Conti could speak, he had posted two hundred soldiers in this former guard-room that had been abandoned for over a century. He said that after having been poisoned, he would probably be murdered in his bed, and these two hundred soldiers must be on guard against any such attack. One may imagine the effect this unforeseen measure produced upon Clélia’s heart: this pious girl was fully conscious of the extent to which she was betraying her father, and a father who had been nearly poisoned in the interests of the prisoner she loved. She almost regarded the unexpected posting of these two hundred men as an act of Providence which was keeping her from proceeding any further in Fabrizio’s liberation.
But everyone in Parma was talking about the prisoner’s imminent death. This melancholy subject had even been discussed at the party given on the occasion of Signora Giulia Crescenzi’s wedding.
Since for such a trifle as a clumsy sword-thrust given to an actor, a man of Fabrizio’s birth was not released after nine months’ imprisonment, it was evident that politics had something to do with his case. And in that event, it was futile to think further about the matter, people were saying; if it was not suitable for the authorities to execute him publicly, he would soon die of some disease. A locksmith who had been summoned to General Fabio Conti’s palazzo spoke of Fabrizio as of a prisoner long since despatched, and whose death was being concealed for political reasons. This man’s words caused Clélia to make up her mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
During the day Fabrizio was beset by several serious and disagreeable reflections, but as he heard the hours strike which brought him nearer to the moment of action, he began to feel ready and cheerful. The Duchess had written him that he would be surprised by the fresh air and that once outside his prison he might find it impossible to walk; in that case, it would be better to risk being recaptured than to hurl oneself one hundred and eighty feet down a wall. “If this misfortune occurs,” Fabrizio said to himself, “I will lie down against the parapet, sleep an hour, then start all over; since I’ve given Clélia my promise, I’d rather fall from the top of the ramparts, high as they are, than forever be obliged to brood over the taste of the bread I am eating. What horrible pains one must experience before the end, when one dies of poison! Fabio Conti will not stand on ceremony; he will have me given the arsenic used to kill the rats in his Fortress.”
Toward midnight, one of those dense white fogs the Po occasionally flings over its banks spread first through the city and then reached the terrace and the bastions in the center of which rose the huge tower of the Fortress. Fabrizio estimated that from the terrace parapet, the young acacia-trees surrounding the gardens planted by the soldiers at the base of the hundred-and-eighty-foot wall would no longer be visible. “Which is a good thing,” he realized.
Shortly after half-past twelve had struck, the signal of the little lamp appeared at the aviary window. Fabrizio was ready to act; he crossed himself, then tied to his bed the shorter rope intended to lower him the thirty-five feet separating him from the terrace on which the Governor’s palazzo stood. He landed without difficulty on the roof of the guard-room, occupied since the night before by the reinforcement of two hundred soldiers we have already mentioned. Unfortunately, these soldiers, by a
quarter to one, had not yet fallen asleep; while he was tip-toeing across the curved-tile roof, Fabrizio could hear them saying that the Devil was up there on the roof, and that they ought to try killing him with a round of musket-fire. Several voices claimed that this enterprise would be a great impiety, others that if a shot were fired without killing something the Governor would throw them all in jail for having alarmed the garrison to no purpose. The whole argument sent Fabrizio scurrying across the roof as fast as he could go, making even more noise. The fact is that at the very moment when, dangling from his rope, he passed in front of the windows—luckily at a distance of four or five feet because of the roof’s projection—they were bristling with bayonets. Some people have claimed that Fabrizio, mad as ever, had conceived the notion of playing the Devil’s part and that he tossed these soldiers a handful of sequins. What is certain is that he had scattered sequins on the floor of his room, and also on the terrace on his way from the Farnese Tower to the parapet, in order to distract the soldiers who might have come in pursuit of him.
Having landed on the terrace, where he was surrounded by sentries who normally called out every fifteen minutes the one sentence All’s well around my post, Fabrizio made for the western parapet and began looking for the new stone.
What seems incredible and might make one doubt the facts, if the result had not had an entire city for witness, is that the sentries posted along the parapet did not see and arrest Fabrizio; as it happened, the fog just mentioned was beginning to rise, and Fabrizio has said that when he was on the terrace, the fog already seemed to have reached half-way up the Farnese Tower. But this fog was not thick, and he could see the sentries quite clearly, some of whom were walking back and forth. He added that, impelled as though by a supernatural force, he boldly took up a position between two sentries quite close to him. He calmly unwound the long rope which was coiled round his body and which twice became tangled; it took him a long time to straighten it out and spread it on the parapet. He heard the soldiers talking all around him and determined to stab the first man who approached. “I wasn’t at all worried,” he added; “it seemed to me I was performing a ceremony.”
He attached his rope, once it was disentangled, to an opening cut in the parapet for the release of rain-water, climbed up onto this same parapet, offered God a fervent prayer, and then, like a hero of the age of chivalry, thought for a moment of Clélia. “How different I am,” he said to himself, “from the frivolous libertine who entered this prison nine months ago!” At last he began to descend that dizzying height. He was acting quite mechanically, he said, and as if he were climbing down in broad daylight, in full view of friends, to win a wager. About half-way down, he suddenly felt his arms losing their strength; he even thinks he let go of the rope for a second, but immediately recovered it; perhaps, he says, he grabbed onto the bushes which he was dropping through and which were scratching him. Now and then he felt a searing pain between his shoulders, which nearly took his breath away. There was an extremely uncomfortable swaying motion; he was constantly swung against the bushes and was even brushed by several large birds which he had wakened and which flew right at him. The first times, he imagined he was being seized by men pursuing him down the Fortress wall in the same fashion he was descending, and he prepared to defend himself. Finally he landed at the base of the huge tower with no worse problem than bleeding hands. He says that the slope of the lower half of the tower walls was very helpful—he brushed against the wall as he came down, and the plants growing between the stones greatly retarded his descent. Landing in the soldiers’ gardens at the bottom, he fell into an acacia-tree which from above seemed four or five feet high and which was actually fifteen or twenty. A drunken man lying asleep there took him for a thief. Falling out of that tree, Fabrizio nearly dislocated his right arm. He began running toward the parapet but, according to him, his legs seemed to have turned to cotton-wool; he had no strength left. Despite the danger, he sat down and drank a little of the brandy which remained. He dozed off for a few minutes and lost consciousness of where he was; waking, he could not understand how he could be seeing trees in his room. At last the terrible truth returned to his memory; immediately he walked over to the rampart and climbed up onto it by a broad flight of steps. The sentry posted quite close by was snoring in his box. Fabrizio found a cannon lying in the grass; to this he tied his third rope, though it was a little too short, and dropped into a muddy ditch where there might have been a foot of water. While he was climbing out and trying to discover where he was, he felt himself seized by two men: for a moment he was terrified, but he soon heard a voice close to his ear whispering: “Ah, Monsignore! Monsignore!”
He vaguely realized that these were the Duchess’s men, and immediately fainted dead away. Some time later he sensed that he was being carried by men walking very fast and in complete silence; then they stopped, which caused him great anxiety. But he had no strength to speak or even to open his eyes; he felt he was being embraced; suddenly he recognized the scent of the Duchess’s garments. This fragrance revived him; he opened his eyes and managed to utter the words “Ah, dear friend!!” Then he fainted dead away once again.
The faithful Bruno and a squad of police loyal to the Count were waiting two hundred paces away; the Count himself was hidden in a tiny house very close to the place where the Duchess was waiting. He would not have hesitated, had it been necessary, to wield his sword alongside several retired officers, his intimate friends; he considered himself somehow obliged to save Fabrizio, whose life seemed to him in great jeopardy and who would have had his pardon signed by the Prince had he, Mosca, not been so foolish as to attempt to spare his Sovereign from writing an indiscreet document.
Since midnight the Duchess, surrounded by men armed to the teeth, had been pacing up and down in deep silence close to the Fortress ramparts; she could not stand still and believed she would have to fight in order to rescue Fabrizio from his pursuers. Her ardent imagination had taken a hundred precautions too complicated to describe here, each of an incredible rashness. It has been estimated that over eighty agents were on duty that night, all in readiness to fight for an extraordinary purpose. Fortunately, Ferrante and Ludovic were leading this party, and the Minister of Police was not hostile; yet the Count himself observed that the Duchess had not been betrayed by anyone, and that as a Minister he himself knew nothing of these arrangements.
The Duchess lost her head completely upon seeing Fabrizio again; she hugged him convulsively, then despaired upon seeing him covered with blood: it had come from his hands, but she imagined him to be seriously wounded. With the help of one of her men, she had removed his coat to bandage him when Ludovic, who fortunately happened to be there, insisted on putting Fabrizio and the Duchess into one of the little carriages which had been concealed in a garden near the city gates, and they crept away in order to cross the Po near Sacca. Ferrante, with twenty armed men, made up the rear guard and had faithfully promised to stop any pursuers. The Count, alone and on foot, left the neighborhood of the Fortress only two hours later, when he saw that no one was stirring. “Here I am, committing high treason!” he said to himself, wild with joy.
Ludovic had the inspired idea of putting in another carriage a young surgeon attached to the Duchess’s household who happened to have a build similar to Fabrizio’s. “Make your escape,” he told this man, “in the direction of Bologna; be clumsy about it, try to get yourself arrested; then contradict yourself in your answers, and at the end confess that you are Fabrizio del Dongo; do everything you can to gain time. Be clever at being clumsy, you’ll get off with a month in prison, and the Signora will give you fifty sequins.”
“Who thinks of money in the Signora’s service?”
He set off and was arrested several hours later, affording great joy to General Fabio Conti and to Chief Justice Rassi, who, along with Fabrizio’s danger, saw his baronage taking flight.
The escape was discovered at the Fortress only around six that morning, and it was no
t until ten that anyone dared inform the Prince of the matter. The Duchess had been so well served that despite Fabrizio’s deep sleep, which she took for a dead faint and made the carriage stop three times, she crossed the Po in a boat as the hour of four was striking. There were relays of horses on the left bank which covered another two leagues with great speed, until they were stopped for over an hour for the inspection of passports. The Duchess had every kind of passport for herself and for Fabrizio, but she was quite irrational that day and took it into her head to give ten napoleons to the Austrian police-clerk, and to take his hand as she burst into tears. This clerk, greatly alarmed, began the inspection all over again. They then traveled by post; the Duchess paid so extravagantly that she aroused suspicion everywhere in a country where any stranger is suspect. Ludovic again came to her aid, saying that Signora the Duchess was overcome with grief on account of the protracted fever of young Count Mosca, son of the Prime Minister of Parma, whom she was taking to consult doctors in Pavia.
It was only when they were some ten leagues beyond the Po that the prisoner fully recovered consciousness; he had a dislocated shoulder and a good many scratches and bruises. The Duchess was still behaving so oddly that the innkeeper of the village where they stopped for a meal imagined he was dealing with a Princess of the Imperial House, and proceeded to offer her the honors he believed were her due, when Ludovic told the man that the Princess would surely send him to prison if he undertook to have the church bells rung.
Finally, around six that evening, they reached Piedmontese territory. Here for the first time Fabrizio was in complete safety; he was taken to a tiny village off the main road; his hands were bandaged, and he slept a few hours more.
