The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  Despite the lateness of the hour, the Duchess had the Count summoned; he was observing the fire at the Palace, but soon appeared with the news that it was all over. “The little Prince actually showed a good deal of courage, and I offered him my warmest compliments.”

  “Give a quick look at these depositions, and then burn them at once.”

  The Count read and turned pale. “My word, they were getting quite close to the truth; this business is cleverly put together, they’re right on Ferrante Palla’s heels; and if he talks, we’re in a tight spot.”

  “But he won’t talk!” the Duchess exclaimed. “He is a man of honor, that Ferrante. Burn them, burn them!”

  “Not yet. Allow me to copy out the names of twelve or fifteen dangerous witnesses, whom I shall take the liberty of removing, if our Rassi ever tries to begin again.”

  “May I remind Your Excellency that the Prince has given his word to say nothing to his Minister of Justice concerning our nocturnal escapade.”

  “Out of cowardice and fear of a scene, he will most likely keep it.”

  “Now, my friend, this has been a night which brings our wedding a good deal closer; I would not have chosen to bring you a criminal file as a dowry, and especially for a sin which my interests in another man have made me commit.”

  The Count was a man in love; he took the Duchess’s hand and uttered a great cry; there were tears in his eyes.

  “Before leaving, give me some advice as to how I must behave with the Princess; I am dying of fatigue, I acted on the stage for an hour, and for five in that woman’s study.”

  “You have taken sufficient revenge for the Princess’s nasty remarks, which were no more than weakness, by the impertinence of your departure just now. Tomorrow you will resume with her the tone you employed this morning; Rassi is not yet in prison or in exile, we have not yet torn up Fabrizio’s sentence. You were asking the Princess to reach a decision, which always makes Princes and even Prime Ministers cross; after all, you are her Mistress of the Robes, which is to say, her servant. By a reaction which is infallible in weak people, in three days Rassi will be in higher favor than ever; he’ll try to have someone hanged: so long as he hasn’t compromised the Prince, he’s sure of nothing.… There was a man hurt in the fire tonight, a tailor who showed, upon my word, extraordinary bravery. Tomorrow I shall oblige the Prince to take my arm and accompany me on a visit to that tailor; I’ll be armed to the teeth and I’ll keep my eyes open; moreover this young Prince is not yet hated. But I want to get him used to walking in the streets—it’s a trick I’m playing on Rassi, who will certainly succeed me and who will no longer be able to indulge in such rashness. On our way back from the tailor, I shall have the Prince pass in front of his father’s statue; he will notice the places where stones have broken the Roman toga that imbecile sculptor has wrapped around him; and finally the Prince will be quite a fool indeed if he doesn’t make this reflection on his own: ‘That’s what one gains by hanging Jacobins.’ To which I shall reply: ‘You must hang ten thousand or none: Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre destroyed the Protestants in France.’ … Tomorrow, dear friend, before my promenade with the Prince, have yourself announced at his Palace and tell him: ‘Last night I served you as a Minister and gave you certain advice, and on your orders I have incurred the Princess’s displeasure; you must pay me for that.’ He will be expecting a request for money, and will frown; you will leave him plunged in this misery as long as you can, then you will say: ‘I beg Your Highness to order Fabrizio to be judged in contraddittorio’—which means he himself will be present—’by the twelve most respected judges in your Realm.’ And without wasting any time, you will ask him to sign a little text written in your own lovely hand, and which I shall dictate to you; I shall include in it, of course, the clause to the effect that the former sentence is quashed. There can be only one objection to this; but, if you proceed swiftly enough, it will not occur to the Prince. He may say to you: ‘Fabrizio must be made a prisoner in the Fortress.’ To which you will reply: ‘He will give himself up to the municipal prison.’ (You know that I am master there, and your nephew will come to see you every evening.) If the Prince answers you: ‘No, his escape has tainted the honor of my Fortress, and for form’s sake, I must have him return to the room where he was,’ you will answer in your turn: ‘No, for there he will be at the mercy of my enemy Rassi.’ And by one of those womanly phrases which you know how to insinuate so well, you will lead him to understand that in order to make Rassi yield, you might indeed tell him about tonight’s auto-da-fé; if the Prince insists, you will inform him that you are going to spend a fortnight on your Sacca estate.… You will have Fabrizio summoned and will consult him about this procedure which may put him back in prison. Let us anticipate all possibilities: if, while your nephew is under lock and key, Rassi has me poisoned in a fit of impatience, Fabrizio may run certain dangers. But that is highly unlikely; you know that I have hired a French cook, the merriest of men and inclined to punning; now, punning is incompatible with murder. I’ve already told our friend Fabrizio that I’ve collected all the witnesses of his fine and courageous action; it was clearly Giletti who wanted to kill him. I haven’t mentioned these witnesses to you because I wanted to surprise you, but that plan fell through; the Prince refused to sign. I told our Fabrizio that of course I would obtain a high ecclesiastical office for him; but I shall have great difficulties if his enemies can provide the papal court with an accusation of murder.… You realize, Signora, that if he is not tried and judged quite formally, the name Giletti will cause him trouble for the rest of his life. It would be a great piece of cowardice not to be tried and judged, when one is certain of one’s innocence. Moreover, even if he were guilty, I would get him off. When I spoke to him, the hot-headed young man did not even let me finish; he took up the official almanac, and together we chose the twelve most learned and honorable judges; the list is drawn up, and we have erased six names, which we replaced by six learned attorneys, my personal enemies, and since we could discover only two such enemies, we have filled the list by four rascals devoted to Rassi.”

  This proposal of the Count’s greatly alarmed the Duchess, and with good cause; at last she saw reason, and at the Minister’s dictation, wrote the document naming the judges.

  The Count did not leave her until six in the morning; she attempted to sleep, but in vain. At nine o’clock, she breakfasted with Fabrizio, whom she found burning with a desire to be tried; at ten o’clock she waited on the Princess, who was not to be seen; at eleven she saw the Prince, who was holding his levee, and who signed the document without the slightest objection. The Duchess sent the document to the Count, and retired to bed.

  It would perhaps be amusing to describe Rassi’s rage, when the Count compelled him to countersign, in the Prince’s presence, the document the latter had signed earlier that day; but the pressure of events forbids …

  The Count discussed the merit of each judge, and offered to change the names. But the reader is perhaps a trifle weary of these procedural details, no less than of these Court intrigues. From all such matters, the moral can be drawn that the man who approaches a Court compromises his happiness, if he is happy, and in any case risks making his future depend on the intrigues of some chambermaid.

  On the other hand, in America, in the Republic, one must waste a whole day in paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the streets, and must become as stupid as they are; and over there, no opera.

  The Duchess, at her evening levee, had a moment of intense anxiety: Fabrizio was not to be found; finally, around midnight, at the Court performance, she received a letter from him. Instead of committing himself to the municipal prison, where the Count was master, he had gone back to his old room in the Fortress, only too happy to be living a few feet away from Clélia.

  This was an event of enormous importance: in such a place he was more exposed to poisoning than ever. This folly reduced the Duchess to despair; she forgave the cause of it, the passionate lo
ve for Clélia, because in a few days’ time the girl would be marrying the rich Marchese Crescenzi. This mad action restored to Fabrizio all his old influence over the Duchess’s heart.

  “It is that cursed paper which I obliged the Prince to sign which will cause Fabrizio’s death! How insane these men are with their notions of honor! As if there was any reason to consider honor under absolute governments in realms where a Rassi is Minister of Justice! We ought to have accepted there and then the pardon the Prince would have signed just as readily as he signed the order convening that extraordinary tribunal. After all, what does it matter if a man of Fabrizio’s birth is more or less accused of having taken up a sword and killed an actor like that Giletti with his own hand!”

  No sooner had she received Fabrizio’s letter than the Duchess ran to the Count, whom she found pale as death.

  “Good God! My dear Duchess, I have an unlucky touch with that boy, and you’ll be angry with me all over again. I can prove to you that I summoned last night the jailer of the municipal prison; every day, your nephew could have come to take tea with you. The dreadful thing is that it is impossible for you and for me to tell the Prince that we fear poison, and poison administered by Rassi; such suspicion would seem to him the height of immorality. Yet if you insist upon it, I am ready to go to the Palace; but I am sure of the answer. I can tell you more; I offer you a means which I would not employ for myself: since I have held power in this realm, I have not put a single man to death, and you know that I am so sensitive in this regard that sometimes, at dusk, I still think of those two spies I had shot a little too lightheartedly in Spain. Well! Do you want me to get rid of Rassi for you? The danger he represents to Fabrizio is limitless; he has there a sure means of getting rid of me …”

  The Duchess was greatly tempted by this proposal, but she did not accept it. “I cannot endure,” she said to the Count, “under that beautiful Neapolitan sky of ours, that you should suffer from such dark thoughts when night comes on.”

  “But my dear friend, it seems to me that we have no choice except among dark thoughts. What will become of you, what would become of me indeed, if Fabrizio is carried off by some sickness?”

  The discussion continued anew on this point, and the Duchess brought it to a close with this remark: “Rassi owes his life to the fact that I love you more than Fabrizio; no, I would not poison all the evenings of the old age we are going to spend together.”

  The Duchess hurried to the Fortress; General Fabio Conti was delighted to present her with the formal text of the military regulations: no one can enter a State prison without an order signed by the Prince.

  “But Marchese Crescenzi and his musicians come to the Fortress every day …”

  “That is because I have obtained an order for them from the Prince.”

  The poor Duchess was not aware of all her misfortunes. General Fabio Conti had considered himself personally dishonored by Fabrizio’s escape: when he saw him arrive back at the Fortress, he ought not to have admitted him, for he had no orders to do so. “But,” he said to himself, “it is Heaven which sends him to me to reconstruct my honor and save me from the ridicule which would spoil my military career. Here is an opportunity which must not be missed: no doubt he will be acquitted, and I have only a few days for my revenge.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Our hero’s arrival filled Clélia with despair: the poor girl, pious and sincere as she was, could not conceal from herself that she would never find happiness apart from Fabrizio; yet she had vowed to the Madonna, at the time of her father’s near poisoning, that she would offer him the sacrifice of marrying the Marchese Crescenzi. She had vowed never to see Fabrizio again, and already she was prey to the cruelest remorse for the admission she had been led to make in the letter she had written to Fabrizio on the eve of his escape. How to describe what occurred in that melancholy heart, so sadly occupied with watching her birds fluttering to and fro and habitually and tenderly glancing up toward the window from which Fabrizio used to gaze at her, when she saw him there once again, greeting her with tender respect?

  She imagined it to be a vision Heaven granted for her punishment; then the cruel reality dawned upon her reason. “They have recaptured him,” she said to herself, “and he is lost!”

  She recalled the remarks made in the Fortress following that escape; the humblest of the jailers regarded himself as mortally offended. Clélia looked at Fabrizio, and in spite of herself that gaze depicted the whole of the passion which filled her with despair.

  “Do you suppose,” she seemed to be saying to Fabrizio, “that I shall find happiness in that sumptuous Palace they are making ready for me? My father never tires of telling me that you are as poor as we are; but good God! how eagerly I should share that poverty! Yet alas! we must never see one another again.”

  Clélia lacked the strength to make use of their alphabets: as she gazed at Fabrizio she suddenly felt ill and sank into a chair next to the window. Her chin was resting on the sill and, since she had sought to glimpse him until the last moment of consciousness, her face was turned toward Fabrizio, who could see her clearly. When she opened her eyes again, after a few seconds, her first glance was for Fabrizio: she saw tears in his eyes, but these were the effect of extreme joy; he was discovering that absence had not made her forget him. The two poor young people remained some while as though enchanted by the sight of each other. Fabrizio even dared to sing, as though he were accompanying himself on the guitar, a few improvised verses, which said: “It is to see you once more that I have returned to prison; I am to be tried and sentenced.”

  These words appeared to waken all of Clélia’s virtue: she swiftly stood up, hid her eyes, and by sudden gestures sought to convey to him that she was never to look upon him again; she had vowed as much to the Madonna, and it was in a moment of forgetfulness that she had just looked at him. When Fabrizio dared express his love once more, Clélia fled, offended, swearing to herself that she would never look at him again, for such were the precise terms of her vow to the Madonna: My eyes shall never look upon him again. She had written them on a slip of paper which her uncle Don Cesare had allowed her to burn upon the altar at the moment of the offertory, while he was saying Mass.

  Yet despite all these vows, Fabrizio’s presence in the Farnese Tower had reawakened all of Clélia’s old habits and actions. Usually she spent all her days by herself, in her room. No sooner had she recovered from the unexpected agitation which the sight of Fabrizio had provoked in her than she began to move about the palazzo and renew acquaintance, so to speak, with all her humble friends. One garrulous old woman who worked in the kitchen said to her with an air of mystery: “This time, Signor Fabrizio will not leave the Fortress.”

  “He will not repeat the mistake of climbing over the walls,” Clélia said, “but he will leave by the door, if he is acquitted.”

  “I am telling Your Excellency, and I have good reason for saying so, that he will not leave the Fortress except feet first.”

  Clélia turned as pale as death, which was noticed by the old woman, who cut short her eloquence there and then. She said to herself that she had been wrong to speak in such a fashion before the Governor’s daughter, whose duty it would be to say to the world that Fabrizio had died of some disease. On her way back to her room, Clélia encountered the prison doctor, an honest man if a timid one, who said to her with a frightened expression that Fabrizio was quite ill. Clélia could scarcely keep on her feet; she searched everywhere for her uncle, the kind Abbé Don Cesare, and found him at last in the chapel, where he was praying quite fervently; his expression seemed quite troubled. The dinner-bell rang. At table, not one word was exchanged between the two brothers until the end of the meal, when the General spoke quite sharply to his brother. Don Cesare glanced at the servants, who left the room.

  “General,” Don Cesare said to the Governor, “I must inform you that I shall be leaving the Fortress; this is my resignation.”

  “Bravo! Bravissimo! To
make me the object of suspicion!… And your reason, if you please?”

  “My conscience.”

  “Why, you are no more than a cassock—what do you know about honor?”

  “Fabrizio is a dead man,” Clélia said to herself; “he has been poisoned at his dinner tonight, or tomorrow at the latest.” She ran to her aviary, determined to sing, accompanying herself on the piano. “I shall go to confession,” she said to herself, “and I shall be forgiven for having broken my vow in order to save a man’s life.” Imagine her consternation when, at her aviary, she saw that the shutters had been replaced by boards fastened to the iron bars! Overwhelmed, she attempted to warn the prisoner by a few words screamed rather than sung. There was no reply of any kind; a deathly silence already reigned in the Farnese Tower. “Everything is over,” she said to herself. She ran downstairs, beside herself, then back up in order to supply herself with what money she had, and some little diamond earrings; she also snatched up, in passing, the bread that remained from dinner which had been set on a sideboard. “If he is still alive, it is my duty to save him.” She walked on with a proud expression toward the little door of the Tower; it was open, and eight soldiers had just been posted in the pillared hall of the ground floor. She stared quite boldly at these soldiers; Clélia intended to speak to the sergeant in command: the man was not there. Clélia dashed up the narrow iron staircase that spiraled around a column; the soldiers watched her in amazement, but apparently because of her lace shawl and bonnet, dared say nothing. On the first landing, there was no one, but when she reached the second floor, at the entrance to the corridor which, the reader may recall, was sealed by three iron-barred doors and led to Fabrizio’s room, she found a turnkey unknown to her who told her in a terrified tone of voice, “He has not yet eaten.”

  “I am quite aware of that,” Clélia said haughtily. The man dared not stop her.