by Stendhal
It was in this village that the Duchess permitted herself an action not only dreadful in the eyes of morality but also fatal to her peace of mind for the rest of her life. A few weeks before Fabrizio’s escape, and on a day when all Parma was at the Fortress gates trying to glimpse the scaffold being erected in his honor in the courtyard, the Duchess had revealed to Ludovic, now the factotum of her household, the secret by means of which one could remove, from a quite inconspicuous little iron frame, a stone forming part of the pavement of the famous reservoir of the Palazzo Sanseverina, a thirteenth-century structure of which we have already spoken. While Fabrizio was asleep in this village trattoria, the Duchess sent for Ludovic, who supposed she had gone mad, so strange were the glances she kept darting at him. “You must be expecting,” she told him, “that I’m going to give you many thousands of francs. Well, not at all! I know you, you’re a poet and you’d run right through such an amount of money. I’m going to give you the little estate of La Ricciarda, a league outside Casalmaggiore.”
Ludovic flung himself at her feet, wild with joy, and protested with heartfelt accents that it was not in hope of gain that he had helped save Monsignore Fabrizio; that he had always loved him dearly since he had had the honor of driving him, once, in his office as the Signora’s third coachman. When this man, who was genuinely warm-hearted, believed he had occupied such a great lady’s attention long enough, he took his leave; but she, with tears in her eyes, cried: “Wait!”
She was pacing back and forth, silent now, in that village inn, occasionally glancing at Ludovic with incredible eyes. At last this man, realizing that there was to be no end to this strange exercise, decided to address his mistress. “The Signora has given me so extravagant a gift, one so much beyond anything a poor man like myself could imagine, worth so much more than the poor service I have had the honor to perform, that I believe in all conscience I cannot keep her estate of La Ricciarda for myself. I have the honor to return it to the Signora, and to request that she grant me a pension of four hundred francs.”
“How many times in your life,” she asked him with the grimmest hauteur, “how many times have you ever heard that I have abandoned a plan once I have decided upon it?” After this sentence, the Duchess paced a few more minutes; then, suddenly coming to a halt, she exclaimed: “It is by accident, and because he managed to attract that young girl, that Fabrizio’s life has been saved! If he hadn’t been so lovable, he would be dead. Can you deny it?” she asked, walking up to Ludovic, her eyes glittering with the blackest fury.
Ludovic recoiled a few steps and was now certain she was mad, which gave him the liveliest anxiety for the proprietorship of his estate of La Ricciarda.
“Well?” continued the Duchess in the gentlest and gayest tone of voice, utterly transformed. “I want my good people of Sacca to have a holiday, one they won’t forget for a long time. You will return to Sacca now, if you don’t mind. Do you imagine you’ll be running any risk?
“None to speak of, Signora: no one in Sacca will ever admit that I was in Monsignore Fabrizio’s service. Besides, if I may say as much to the Signora, I am burning to see my property of La Ricciarda: it seems so strange to think of myself as a landowner!”
“Your high spirits please me. The present tenant of La Ricciarda, I believe, owes me three or four years’ rent; I’ll make him a present of half of what he owes me, and the other half of his arrears I’ll give to you, but on one condition: that you’ll go to Sacca, that you’ll say that the day after tomorrow is the feast of one of my patron saints, and that the evening after you arrive you’ll have my palazzo illuminated in the most splendid fashion. Spare neither money nor effort—just consider that it will all be for the greatest happiness of my life! I have been preparing this illumination for a long while; over the last three months I have collected in the palazzo cellars everything that might serve for this noble festival; I’ve put in the gardener’s hands all the fireworks necessary for a magnificent display—you must have it take place on the terrace overlooking the Po. I have eighty-nine barrels of wine in those cellars; I want eighty-nine fountains of wine flowing in my grounds; if there is a single bottle that has not been drunk the next day, I shall say you do not truly love Fabrizio. When the wine-fountains, the illuminations, and the fireworks are all under way, you will take care to make yourself scarce, for it is possible—indeed, it is my hope—that all these splendid things will be regarded, in Parma, as an act of insolence.”
“Indeed it is not merely possible, it is certain—as it is certain that Chief Justice Rassi, who has signed Monsignore’s death sentence, will explode with rage. And in fact …,” Ludovic added timidly, “if the Signora would choose to give more pleasure to her poor servant than by granting him half the arrears of La Ricciarda, she might allow me to play a trick on the Chief Justice …”
“You are a fine fellow!” exclaimed the Duchess rapturously. “But I absolutely forbid you to do anything to Rassi; I have plans to have him publicly hanged, later on. As for yourself, try to keep from being arrested at Sacca; everything will be ruined if I lose you.”
“Lose me, Signora! Once I’ve said I’m celebrating the feast of one of the Signora’s patron saints, even if the police were to send thirty officers to spoil our plans, you can be sure that before they reached the red cross in the middle of the village, not one would still be on his horse. They’re no fools back there in Sacca—past-masters at smuggling, every one, and all of them worship the Signora …”
“Well then,” the Duchess continued with a singularly detached expression, “if I give wine to my good people of Sacca, I want to give water to the inhabitants of Parma; the same evening my house is illuminated, take the best horse in my stable and gallop to my palazzo in Parma and … open the reservoir!”
“Ah, what a splendid idea of the Signora’s!” cried Ludovic, laughing like a madman. “Wine for the good people of Sacca and water for the bourgeois of Parma, who were so certain, the wretches, that Monsigore Fabrizio would be poisoned like poor L——” Ludovic was beside himself with delight; the Duchess complacently watched his fits of laughter; he kept repeating: “Wine for the good people of Sacca, and water for the bourgeois of Parma! No doubt the Signora knows better than I that when they were rash enough to drain the reservoir twenty years ago, there was at least a foot of water in several streets of the city.”
“And water for the bourgeois of Parma,” the Duchess echoed, laughing. “The promenade in front of the Fortress would have been filled with people if they had beheaded Fabrizio.… Everyone calls him the great culprit.… But be sure you do this carefully; no one alive must realize that the flood was caused by you, and ordered by me. Fabrizio and the Count himself must know nothing of this little joke of ours.… But I was forgetting the poor of Sacca: go and write a letter to my agent, and I’ll sign it; tell him that for the festival of my patron saint, he is to distribute a hundred sequins to the poor of Sacca, and that he must do whatever you ask with regard to the illumination, the fireworks, and the wine; and above all, there must not be one full bottle left in my cellars the next day.”
“The Signora’s agent will have no difficulties except on one point: in the five years since the Signora has had the villa, she has not left ten poor people in Sacca.”
“… And water for the bourgeois of Parma,” crooned the Duchess. “How will you manage this joke of ours?”
“My plans are all made: I leave Sacca around nine, at half-past ten my horse is at the inn of the Three Simpletons on the road to Casalmaggiore and to my estate of La Ricciarda; at eleven I’m in my room at the palazzo, and at a quarter past eleven: water for the bourgeois of Parma, and more than they’ll need to drink to the health of the great culprit. Ten minutes later I leave town by the Bologna road. I make a deep bow as I pass the Fortress, which Monsignore’s courage and the Signora’s wit have just dishonored; I take a path through the fields, one I know well, and make my entry into La Ricciarda.” Ludovic glanced at the Duchess and was alarmed:
she was staring fixedly at the bare wall six paces in front of her, and it must be confessed that her gaze was horrible. “Ah, my poor estate!” Ludovic reflected. “No doubt about it, the lady is mad!”
The Duchess looked at him and guessed his thoughts. “Ah, Signor Ludovic, great poet as you are, you’d like a deed in writing: run and find me a sheet of paper.”
Ludovic had no need to be told twice, and the Duchess wrote out a long deed of gift, predated by a year, in which she acknowledged receipt from Ludovic San Micheli of the sum of eighty thousand francs, and as security for said sum gave him in pledge the estate of La Ricciarda. If after the interval of twelve months the Duchess had not returned the said eighty thousand francs to Ludovic, the estate of La Ricciarda would remain his property.
“It is a fine thing,” the Duchess mused, “to give a faithful retainer nearly a third of what I have left for myself.… Now then,” she said to Ludovic, “after the entertainment of the reservoir, I’m giving you only ten days to relax at Casalmaggiore. For the deed to be valid, you must say that it’s a transaction which dates back more than a year. I want you to join me at Belgirate, and as soon as you can; Fabrizio may be going to England, and you’ll be with him.” Early the next day, the Duchess and Fabrizio were at Belgirate.
They took up residence in that enchanting village; but a deadly grief awaited the Duchess on the shores of that lovely lake. Fabrizio was altogether transformed; from the first moments when he awakened, still somewhat lethargic from his sleep, the Duchess noticed that something extraordinary was taking place within him. The deep feeling he so carefully concealed was quite strange, for it was nothing less than this: he was in despair at being out of prison. He took pains to conceal this source of his melancholy, for it would have led to questions he had no desire to answer.
“Can you explain it to me?” the startled Duchess asked him. “That horrible sensation when hunger forced you to eat in order to remain alive, swallowing one of those hateful dishes furnished by the prison kitchens—the sensation that perhaps at this very moment I am poisoning myself—didn’t that fill you with horror?”
“I thought of death,” Fabrizio answered, “the way I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possibility I was certain I could avoid by using my wits.”
What anxiety, then, what suffering for the Duchess! This adored, singular, lively, original being was henceforth, before her very eyes, a prey to some impenetrable reverie; he even preferred solitude to the pleasures of frank discussion with the best friend he had in the world. Yet he was polite, attentive, grateful to the Duchess; as before, he would have sacrificed his life for her a hundred times over; but his soul was elsewhere. Often they would stroll four or five leagues along that sublime lake without speaking a word to each other. Their conversation, the exchange of the cold thoughts henceforth possible between them, might have seemed pleasant to others; but they still remembered, the Duchess particularly, what such conversation had been before that fateful fight with Giletti, which had separated them from each other. Fabrizio owed the Duchess an account of his nine months in that dreadful prison, yet he had only a few brief and fragmentary remarks to make concerning his entire sojourn there.
“Well, it had to happen sooner or later,” the Duchess would tell herself grimly. “Distress has aged me, or else he is truly in love, and I have no more than second place in his heart.” Humiliated, overwhelmed by this greatest of all possible sufferings, the Duchess would sometimes reflect: “Had it been the will of Heaven that Ferrante had gone quite mad or lost his courage, it seems to me I should be less miserable than I am.” From that moment, this semi-remorse poisoned the Duchess’s esteem for her own character. “There it is,” she said to herself bitterly, “I am repenting a resolution I have already made: then I am no longer a del Dongo! It must be Heaven’s will,” she continued; “Fabrizio is in love, and what right have I to want him not to be? Has a single word of real passion ever been exchanged between us?”
Reasonable as it was, this notion deprived her of sleep, and in fact what revealed that age and a flagging heart had come upon her along with the prospect of an illustrious revenge was that she was a hundred times more unhappy at Belgirate than at Parma. As for the person who might be the cause of Fabrizio’s strange reverie, it was scarcely possible to entertain reasonable doubts: Clélia Conti, that pious child, had betrayed her father by consenting to make the garrison drunk, and Fabrizio never mentioned Clélia! “But,” the Duchess added, striking her breast in despair, “if the garrison had not been made drunk, all my ingenuities, all my schemes would have been useless; so it is she who has saved him!”
It was with the greatest difficulty that the Duchess obtained from Fabrizio details concerning the events of that night, “which,” as she said to herself, “would in the old days have constituted the subject of an endless discussion! In those happy times he would have talked all day long and with what ever-renewed verse and gaiety about the merest trifle I might have brought up.”
As it was necessary to anticipate every possibility, the Duchess had installed Fabrizio at the port of Locarno, a Swiss town at the end of Lake Maggiore. Every day she would call for him in a boat, and they would make long excursions around the lake. Well! Once when she had determined to visit his apartment, she found the walls covered with views of Parma he had sent for from Milan or from Parma itself, a city he ought to have held in abomination. His little sitting-room, transformed into a studio, was crowded with all the apparatus of a water-color painter, and she found him completing a third view of the Farnese Tower and the Governor’s palazzo.
“The one thing you must do now,” she said to him with a frown, “is to paint from memory the portrait of that friendly Governor who wanted nothing better than to poison you. But now that I think of it,” the Duchess continued, “you ought to write him a letter of apology for having taken the liberty of escaping and making a mockery of his Fortress.”
The poor woman had no idea how truly she spoke; no sooner had he reached a place of safety than Fabrizio’s first concern had been to write an altogether polite and in some sense absurd letter to General Fabio Conti, in which he asked pardon for having escaped, offering as an excuse his discovery that a certain prison underling had been ordered to give him poison. Little though he cared what he wrote, it was Fabrizio’s hope that his letter would fall under Clélia’s eyes, and his face was wet with tears as he wrote it. He ended with a rather amusing sentence, venturing to say that, finding himself a free man, he often had occasion to regret his little room in the Farnese Tower. This was the main burden of his letter, which he hoped Clélia would understand. While the writing fit was still upon him, and in hopes of being read by someone, Fabrizio addressed his thanks to Don Cesare, that kind chaplain who had lent him books on theology. A few days later Fabrizio commissioned the little bookseller of Locarno to travel to Milan where, as the friend of the famous bibliophile Reina, he purchased the most magnificent editions he could find of the works Don Cesare had lent Fabrizio. The kind chaplain received these volumes and a fine letter informing him that in moments of impatience, pardonable perhaps in a wretched prisoner, the margins of his books had been covered with absurd notes. He was requested, consequently, to replace them on his library shelves by these volumes, which the deepest gratitude took the liberty of offering.
It was quite modest of Fabrizio to give the simple name of notes to the endless scribbling with which he had filled the margins of a folio copy of the works of Saint Jerome. In hopes that he might return this book to the kind chaplain and exchange it for another one, he had written in the margins day by day a very specific journal of all that had happened to him in prison; the great events were nothing but the ecstasies of divine love (this word divine was the substitute for another he dared not write). Sometimes this divine love led the prisoner to deep despair, sometimes a voice in the spaces above him offered some hope and produced transports of happiness. All this, fortunately, was written in prison ink, consisting of wine, cho
colate, and soot, and Don Cesare had merely glanced at it as he replaced the volume of Saint Jerome on his shelves. Had he perused those margins, he would have seen that one day the prisoner, believing himself poisoned, congratulated himself on dying less than forty paces away from what he loved most in all the world. But eyes other than those of the kind chaplain had read this page since Fabrizio’s escape. That fine notion—to die near what one loves best!—expressed in a hundred different ways, was followed by a sonnet in which it appeared that the soul, separated after cruel sufferings from the fragile body it had inhabited for twenty-three years, impelled by that instinct for happiness natural to all that once knew life, would not mount to Heaven to mingle with the angelic choirs as soon as it was free, and supposing that God’s terrible judgment granted pardon for its sins; but rather, happier after death than it had been in life, it would go only a few paces from the prison, where it had languished so long, to be united with all it had loved in this world. “And thus,” the last line of the sonnet asserted, “I shall have found my paradise on earth.”
Though Fabrizio was mentioned in the Fortress of Parma only as an infamous traitor who had violated the most sacred duties of man, the good priest Don Cesare was nonetheless delighted by the sight of the fine volumes sent to him by some stranger; for Fabrizio had taken care to write only several days after sending the books, lest his name cause the whole bundle to be indignantly returned. Don Cesare made no mention of these kind attentions to his brother the Governor, who fell into fits of rage at the mere name of Fabrizio del Dongo; but since the latter’s escape, Don Cesare had resumed all his former intimacy with his affectionate niece; and since he had once taught her a little Latin, he now showed her the fine volumes he had received. This had been the fugitive’s hope. Suddenly Clélia blushed deeply, for she had just recognized Fabrizio’s handwriting. Long narrow strips of yellow paper had been placed as bookmarks in various parts of the volume. And just as one might say that in the midst of the sordid pecuniary interests and the insipid chill of the vulgar thoughts which fill our lives, the actions inspired by a real passion rarely fail to produce their effect; as if a propitious divinity were taking care to lead them on, so Clélia, guided by this instinct and by the thought of but one thing in the world, asked her uncle to compare the old copy of Saint Jerome with the one he had just received. How to express her delight amid the grim melancholy into which Fabrizio’s absence had plunged her, when she found on the margins of the old Saint Jerome that sonnet we have just mentioned as well as the day-by-day memoirs of the love he had felt for her!
