The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  Twenty paces farther on, Clélia found sitting on the first of the six wooden steps leading up to Fabrizio’s room another turnkey, elderly and very red in the face, who said to her firmly, “Signorina, do you have an order from the Governor?”

  “Don’t you know who I am?” At this moment Clélia was inspired by a supernatural strength, and was quite beside herself. “I am going to save my husband,” she said to herself.

  While the old turnkey exclaimed: “But my duty doesn’t permit …” Clélia ran up the six steps; she flung herself against the door: an enormous key stood in the keyhole; it required all her strength to make it turn. At this moment, the half-drunk old turnkey grabbed the hem of her dress; she rushed into the room, closed the door behind her, tearing her dress, and as the turnkey was pushing against it to enter after her, she shot the bolt that was under her hand. She glanced around the room and saw Fabrizio sitting in front of a tiny table, where his dinner was laid. She dashed to the table, knocked it over, and, seizing Fabrizio’s arm, asked him: “My love, have you eaten anything?”

  This form of address enchanted Fabrizio. In her agitation, Clélia was forgetting, for the first time in her life, all feminine discretion, and revealing her true feelings.

  Fabrizio had been on the point of beginning this fatal meal; he took her in his arms and covered her with kisses. “This dinner was poisoned,” he thought; “if I tell her I have not touched it, her religious feelings will overcome her again and Clélia will run away. If on the other hand she believes I am dying, I shall convince her not to leave me. She wants to find a way to get out of her dreadful engagement—fate has granted it to us: the jailers will come up here and break down the door, and there will be such a scandal that the Marchese Crescenzi will surely be offended, and the marriage broken off.” During the moment of silence filled by these reflections, Fabrizio felt that already Clélia was attempting to free herself from his embrace. “I feel no pains as yet,” he told her, “but soon they will cast me at your feet; help me to die.”

  “O my only friend!” she answered him, “I shall die with you,” and she clasped him in her arms with a convulsive movement.

  She was so lovely just then, her gown slipping off her shoulders and in such a state of extreme passion, that Fabrizio could not resist an almost involuntary movement. Which met with no resistance …

  In the enthusiasm of passion and of generosity which followed extreme rapture, he murmured to her quite foolishly: “No unworthy falsehood must cast a shadow over the first moments of our happiness: had it not been for your courage, I should be no more than a corpse, or be in the throes of the cruelest agony; but I was just about to begin dining, when you came in, and I have not yet touched this food.” Fabrizio dwelt on these these dreadful images in order to dispel the indignation he was already reading in Clélia’s eyes. She gazed at him for a few seconds, overcome by two violent and opposing emotions, then flung herself into his arms. There was a loud noise in the corridor; the three iron-barred doors were opened and shut with great violence; men were shouting as they ran.

  “Oh, if I had weapons!” Fabrizio exclaimed. “They took mine from me when I turned myself in. Now they must be coming to end my life! Farewell, my Clélia, I bless my death, since it has been the occasion of my happiness.”

  Clélia kissed him and slipped into his hand a tiny ivory-handled dagger, whose blade was scarcely longer than that of a pen-knife. “Don’t let them kill you,” she said, “defend yourself to the very end; if my uncle the Abbé hears all this noise, he has the courage and the virtue to come to your rescue; I shall appeal to them …”

  And with these words, she rushed to the door. “If you are not killed,” she said with exaltation, keeping the bolt closed with her hand and turning to face him, “let yourself starve to death rather than touching any food whatever. Keep this bread with you always.”

  The noise was coming closer. Fabrizio put his arm around her, stood beside her at the door, and, yanking it open, rushed down the six wooden steps. In his hand he held the tiny ivory-handled dagger, and he was on the point of stabbing the waistcoat of General Fontana, the Prince’s aide-de-camp, who quickly stepped back, exclaiming in terror: “But I’m coming to rescue you, Signor del Dongo!”

  Fabrizio ran back up the six steps and cried into the room, “It’s Fontana, he’s come to rescue me.” Then, returning to the General on the wooden steps, he discussed the situation with him quite coolly. First, and at great length, he begged him to forgive his initial impulse of anger. “I was about to be poisoned by this dinner, which is here before me; I had the wit not to touch it, but I confess that such an undertaking has given me a shock. When I heard you coming up the stairs, I imagined that someone was coming to finish me off with a dagger.… Signor General, I request you to give orders that no one is to enter this room: we shall remove this poison, and our good Prince shall be informed of everything.”

  Pale and abashed, the General transmitted the orders Fabrizio had suggested to the picked jailers who had followed him: these men, crestfallen at the discovery of the poison, hurriedly ran back down the stairs; they seemed to be hurrying ahead in order not to delay the Prince’s aide-de-camp on the narrow staircase, but they actually wanted to make their escape and disappear. To General Fontana’s great amazement, Fabrizio stopped for a good quarter of an hour on the little iron staircase that spiraled down to the ground floor; he wanted to give Clélia time to hide on the first floor.

  It was the Duchess who, after several wild attempts, had managed to send General Fontana to the Fortress; it was quite by accident that she had succeeded. As she left Count Mosca, who was certainly as alarmed as she was, she had run to the Palace. The Princess, who regarded with marked repugnance any display of energy, which she found vulgar, thought she had gone mad and scarcely seemed disposed to engage in any unusual measures on her behalf. The Duchess, beside herself, was weeping bitter tears, unable to do anything but repeat over and over: “But Signora, in a quarter of an hour, Fabrizio will be poisoned!” Observing the Princess’s perfect composure, the Duchess went mad with grief. It did not occur to her to make that moral reflection which would not have escaped a woman brought up in one of those Northern religions which encourage self-scrutiny: “I was the first to use poison, and now it is I who shall be destroyed by poison.” In Italy, such reflections, in moments of passion, are taken as the sign of a vulgar sensibility, much as a pun would be regarded in Paris in similar circumstances.

  The Duchess, in desperation, risked going into the salon where the Marchese Crescenzi, who was in attendance that day, happened to be. On the Duchess’s return to Parma, he had effusively thanked her for the title of Cavaliere d’Onore, to which, without her intervention, he would never have had any claim. There had been no lack of protestations of limitless devotion on his part. The Duchess addressed him with these words: “Rassi is prepared to poison Fabrizio, who is in the Fortress! I want you to put some chocolate in your pocket, and a bottle of water which I shall give you. Go up to the Fortress and save my life by telling General Fabio Conti that you’ll break off your engagement to his daughter if he does not allow you to give Fabrizio this water and this chocolate with your own hands.”

  The Marchese turned pale and his face, far from being animated by these words, revealed the crassest embarrassment; he could not believe in so dreadful a crime in a city so law-abiding as Parma, ruled by so great a Prince, etc.; moreover he uttered these platitudes with singular deliberation. In a word, the Duchess was confronting an honest man but a very weak one unable to bring himself to act. After twenty such phrases interrupted by the Duchess’s shrieks of impatience, he hit upon an excellent notion: the oath he had taken as Cavaliere d’Onore forbade him to take part in any actions against the government …

  Who could conceive the Duchess’s anxiety and her despair, conscious as she was that time was flying?

  “But at least go see the Governor, tell him I shall pursue Fabrizio’s murderers to hell itself!”
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  Despair seconded the Duchess’s natural eloquence, but all her intensity merely alarmed the Marchese further and increased his irresolution; after an hour, he was less disposed to take action than at the first moment.

  The wretched woman, now in the extremities of desperation and realizing that the Governor would refuse nothing to so wealthy a son-in-law, went so far as to kneel at his feet, whereupon the Marchese Crescenzi’s cowardice seemed to increase further; he himself, viewing this strange spectacle, feared to be unwittingly compromised; but a singular thing happened: the Marchese, a good man at heart, was touched by the tears and by the position at his feet of so lovely and especially so powerful a woman. “I myself, noble and rich as I am,” he said to himself, “may one day also be at some Republican’s feet!” The Marchese began to shed tears, and finally it was agreed that the Duchess, in her capacity as Mistress of the Robes, would present the Marchese to the Princess, who would grant permission for him to give Fabrizio a little basket, the contents of which, he would declare, he was entirely ignorant.

  The previous evening, before the Duchess knew of Fabrizio’s folly of presenting himself at the Fortress, there had been a commedia dell’arte performance at court, and the Prince, who always insisted on playing the lover’s part with the Duchess, had spoken of his feelings with such passion that he would have been quite ridiculous if, in Italy, a passionate man or a Prince could be any such thing!

  The Prince, quite shy yet invariably taking any matter concerning love with the greatest seriousness, happened at that moment to encounter the Duchess in one of the corridors of the Palace; she was accompanying the Marchese Crescenzi, who appeared to be quite upset, to the Princess’s apartments. So dazzled was he by the beauty, heightened by despair, of the Mistress of the Robes that for the first time in his life the Prince showed some character: with a more than imperious gesture, he dismissed the Marchese and proceeded to make the Duchess a formal declaration of love. No doubt the Prince had arranged his words long in advance, for some of them were fairly sensible.

  “Since the conventions of my rank forbid me to grant myself the supreme happiness of marrying you, I swear to you on the Blessed Sacrament never to marry any other woman without your written permission. I am quite aware,” he added, “that I am causing you to forfeit the hand of a Prime Minister, a clever and agreeable man; but after all, he is fifty-six years old, and I am not yet twenty-two. I should be offering you an insult and deserving your refusal were I to refer to certain advantages which have nothing to do with love; but all who take some interest in money matters at my court speak admiringly of the proof of his love which the Count bestows upon you by making you the custodian of all he possesses. I would be only too happy to imitate him in this regard. You will make better use of my fortune than I myself, and you shall have the entire disposition of the annual amount which my Ministers hand over to the Intendant-General of my Crown; so that it shall be you, my dear Duchess, who will determine the sums I shall expend each month.”

  The Duchess found all these details very long; Fabrizio’s perils were piercing her to the heart. “But don’t you understand, my dear Prince,” she exclaimed, “that at this very moment Fabrizio is being poisoned in your own Fortress? Save him! I believe all you say!”

  Everything about this little speech was ill-advised. At the mere mention of poison, all the enthusiasm and good faith which this poor high-principled Prince had put into his words vanished in a twinkling; the Duchess realized her blunder only when there was no longer time to remedy her words, and her desperation increased, a phenomenon she would have imagined impossible. “If I had not mentioned poison,” she said to herself, “he would have granted Fabrizio his freedom for my sake. O beloved Fabrizio!” she added. “It is fated, then, that I must be the one to stab you to the heart by my stupidity!”

  It took the Duchess a long time and a great many coquetries to bring the Prince back to his speeches of impassioned love; but he remained deeply offended. It was his mind alone that was speaking; his heart had been frozen by the notion of poison first of all, and then by that other notion, quite as unflattering as the first was terrible: “Poison is being used in my realm, and without my being informed of it! Rassi intends to disgrace me in the eyes of all Europe! And God knows what I shall be reading next month in the Paris newspapers!”

  Suddenly this shy young man’s soul fell silent within him; an idea had occurred to him. “My dear Duchess! You know how attached to you I am. Your horrid notions about poison are quite unfounded, I like to think; but at least they lead me to certain conclusions, they almost make me forget, for a moment, my passion for you, which is the only one I have felt in all my life. I feel that I am not attractive; I am no more than a boy who is deeply in love; but at least put me to the test.” The Prince grew quite animated in using such language.

  “Save Fabrizio, and I shall believe it all! No doubt I have been carried away by maternal feelings; but send for Fabrizio at this very moment, have him taken from the Fortress so that I may see him. If he is still alive, send him from this Palace to the municipal prison, where he will remain for months on end, should Your Highness require it, until the date of his trial.”

  With despair, the Duchess saw that the Prince, instead of immediately granting so simple a request, had turned quite morose; he blushed deeply, stared at the Duchess; then he lowered his eyes and his cheeks grew pale. The inopportune mention of poison had suggested an idea worthy of his father or of Philip II, though he dared not put it into words.

  “Listen to me, my dear Duchess,” he said at last as though against his will and in a tone that was anything but gracious, “I am quite aware that you regard me as no more than a boy, and a graceless one to boot: I am now going to say something horrible to you, but something suggested to me at this very moment by my true and deep passion for you. If I believed for an instant in this matter of poison, I should already have taken action, as my duty commands; but I can see nothing in your request but a caprice of passion, of which, if I may say so, I do not entirely comprehend the significance. You want me to take action without consulting my Ministers, though I have been reigning for no more than three months! You ask me to make a great exception to my usual mode of conduct, which I have always regarded as quite reasonable. It is you, Signora, who are Absolute Sovereign at this moment, it is you who give me hopes for the matter which is everything to me; but in an hour, when this fantasy of poison—when this nightmare—will have vanished, my presence will become importunate to you, and you will withdraw your favor from me. So I must have a promise: swear to me, Duchess, that if Fabrizio is restored to you safe and sound, I shall obtain from you, within the next three months, all the felicity my love can desire; you shall guarantee the happiness of my whole life by putting an hour of your own at my disposal, and you shall be wholly mine.”

  At that moment, the Palace clock struck two. “Ah! It may be too late,” thought the Duchess. “I swear it,” she exclaimed, with a wild look in her eyes.

  At once the Prince became a different man; he ran to the far end of the gallery, which led to the room of his aides-de-camp. “General Fontana, go to the Fortress immediately; as fast as you can, get up to the room where Signor del Dongo is being held, and bring him here to me, I must speak to him within twenty minutes—in fifteen if possible.”

  “Ah, General!” exclaimed the Duchess, who had followed the Prince. “A single minute may determine my whole life. No doubt it is a false report which makes me fear that Fabrizio is being poisoned: shout to him as soon as you are within hearing that he is to eat nothing. If he has begun his meal, make him vomit—tell him I wish it, use force if necessary; tell him that I am following close behind you, and I shall be in your debt for life.”

  “Your Grace, my horse is saddled, I am regarded as something of a horseman, and I am off at a gallop. I shall be at the Fortress eight minutes ahead of you.”

  “And I, dear Duchess,” the Prince exclaimed, “ask you for four of those eight min
utes.” The aide-de-camp had vanished, a man whose sole merit was knowing how to ride. No sooner had the door closed behind him than the young Prince, who appeared to have acquired some character, seized the Duchess’s hand. “Consent, Madame,” he said in a passionate tone of voice, “to accompany me to the chapel.” At a loss for the first time in her life, the Duchess followed him without uttering a word. She and the Prince hurried along the whole length of the Grand Gallery, the chapel being at the far end. Once inside the chapel, the Prince fell to his knees, almost as much in front of the Duchess as before the altar. “Repeat your oath,” he said passionately. “If you had been fair, if this unfortunate accident of princely rank had not been my undoing, you would have granted out of pity for my love what you now owe me because you have sworn it.”

  “If I see Fabrizio again, and not poisoned, if he is still alive in eight days, if His Highness appoints him Coadjutor and next in succession to Archbishop Landriani, I shall give up my honor, my dignity as a woman—I shall sacrifice everything and give myself to His Highness.”

  “But dear friend,” said the Prince with a mixture of timid anxiety and tenderness which was quite appealing, “I fear some unforeseeable stratagem which might destroy my happiness—that would be the death of me. If the Archbishop opposes me with one of those ecclesiastical arguments which postpone such matters for years on end, what will become of me? You see that I am acting in entire good faith; are you playing the little Jesuit with me?”

  “No, in good faith, if Fabrizio is rescued, if with all your powers you make him Coadjutor and eventually Archbishop, I shall dishonor myself and belong to you.… Your Highness undertakes to write approved in the margin of a request that Monsignore the Archbishop will present to you within eight days.”

  “I shall sign a blank sheet for you—rule me and my country as well!” exclaimed the Prince, blushing with happiness and truly beside himself.