The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  What, in this country, makes a minor nobleman, provided with an income of three or four thousand lire, worthy to figure in black stockings at the Prince’s levees is first of all never to have read Voltaire and Rousseau: this stipulation is anything but difficult to fulfill. Next, he must be capable of speaking sympathetically about the Sovereign’s cold, or of the latest crate of mineral specimens just received from Saxony. If, after this, he does not miss a single day’s Mass all year long, if he could count among the number of his intimate friends two or three fat monks, the Prince would deign to address him once a year, a fortnight before or a fortnight after New Year’s Day, which would grant him great distinction in his parish, and the tax-collector would not dare harass him excessively if he happened to be in arrears with the yearly sum of a hundred francs with which his small estates were taxed.

  Signor Gonzo was a poor devil of this sort, noble indeed, who, beyond the fact that he possessed some small fortune, had obtained through the influence of the Marchese Crescenzi a splendid post, bringing in eleven hundred and fifty thousand francs a year. This man could well have dined at home, but he had one passion: he was only at his ease and happy when he found himself in the salon of some great personage who would snap at him from time to time: “Hold your tongue, Gonzo, you’re nothing but a fool.” This judgment was prompted by bad temper, for Gonzo almost invariably had more brains than the great personage. He would speak on every topic and quite gracefully: moreover, he was ready to change opinions according to a frown from the master of the house. In truth, though quite astute with regard to his own interests, he hadn’t an idea in his head, and when the Prince happened not to have a cold, he was occasionally at a loss for words upon entering a salon.

  What had won Gonzo a reputation in Parma was a magnificent tricorne, embellished with a rather moth-eaten black plume, which he wore even with evening-dress; but you had to have seen the way he carried that plume, either on his head or in his hand; here was his talent, and his whole importance. He inquired with authentic anxiety after the the health of the Marchesa’s little dog, and had the Palazzo Crescenzi caught fire, he would have risked his life to save one of those fine gold-brocaded armchairs which for so many years had snagged his black-silk breeches, whenever it so happened that he ventured to sit down on one for a moment.

  Seven or eight individuals of this species came at seven every evening to the Marchesa Crescenzi’s salon. No sooner were they seated than a lackey magnificently appareled in daffodil-yellow livery all covered with silver braid, as well as the red waistcoat which completed such magnificence, came to collect the hats and canes of these poor devils. He was immediately followed by a footman bearing an infinitesimal cup of coffee on a silver-filigree stem, and every half-hour a majordomo, wearing a sword and a splendid coat in the French style, passed around ices.

  Half an hour after the threadbare minor courtiers, there would arrive five or six officers talking in loud voices and in a very military manner, usually discussing the number and the type of buttons which ought to be on a soldier’s uniform if the commanding general was to win victories. It would not have been discreet to allude in this salon to a French newspaper; for even when the news was found to be quite agreeable—for example, fifty Liberals shot in Spain—the bearer of such news nonetheless remained convicted of having read a French newspaper. The crowning stroke of all these people’s skill was to obtain every ten years an increase of one hundred and fifty francs in their pensions. It was in this fashion that the Prince shared with his nobles the pleasure of ruling over the peasantry and the bourgeoisie of Parma.

  The chief personage, without question, of the Crecenzi salon was Cavaliere Foscarini, an entirely honest man who had therefore been in prison, off and on, under every regime. He was a member of that celebrated Chamber of Deputies which, in Milan, had rejected the Registration Edict presented by Napoléon, an action of extremely rare occurrence in history. Cavaliere Foscarini, after having for twenty years been the friend of the Marchese’s mother, had remained the influential man of the household. He always had some amusing tale to tell, but nothing escaped his shrewd notice; and the young Marchesa, who felt herself guilty at heart, trembled before him. As Gonzo had a veritable passion for the great nobleman, who would say rude things to him and reduce him to tears once or twice a year, his compulsion was to seek to do him little services; and had he not been paralyzed by the habits of extreme poverty, he might have succeeded occasionally, for he was not lacking in a certain degree of finesse and a much greater amount of effrontery.

  Gonzo, as we know him, quite disdained the Marchesa Crescenzi, for she had never in her life spoken a rude word to him; but, after all, she was the wife of that famous Marchese Crescenzi, the Princess’s Cavaliere d’Onore, who once or twice a month would say to Gonzo: “Hold your tongue, Gonzo, you’re nothing but a fool.”

  Gonzo noticed that everything people said about little Anetta Marini momentarily drew the Marchesa out of her state of revery and indifference in which she remained habitually plunged until the stroke of eleven, when she would make tea and offer a cup to each man present, addressing him by name. Whereupon, at the moment of retiring, she seemed to find a brief spell of gaiety, which was the time people chose to recite to her certain satirical sonnets.

  Excellent things of this kind are composed in Italy: it is the only kind of literature which still shows a little life; in truth it is not subject to the censor, and the courtiers of the Casa Crescenzi would invariably preface their sonnet by these words: “Will the Signora Marchesa permit the recitation of a very poor sonnet?” And when the sonnet had met with laughter and been repeated two or three times, one of the officers never failed to exclaim: “Our Minister of Police certainly ought to see to it that the perpetrators of such infamies are hanged!”

  Bourgeois circles, on the contrary, greeted these sonnets with open admiration, and the lawyers’ clerks would sell copies of them.

  From the sort of curiosity shown by the Marchesa, Gonzo realized that the little Marini girl’s beauty had been excessively praised—after all, she had a huge fortune besides—and that the Marchesa was jealous. Since with his incessant smile and his utter effrontery toward everything that was not noble, Gonzo made his way everywhere, the very next day he entered the Marchesa’s salon carrying his plumed hat in a certain triumphant manner which was observed in him only once or twice each year, when the Prince had said to him: “Addio, Gonzo.”

  After respectfully greeting the Marchesa, Gonzo did not withdraw as was his habit to take his place on the armchair which had just been pushed forward for him. He stood in the center of the group and exclaimed abruptly: “I have seen the portrait of Monsignore del Dongo!”

  Clélia was so surprised that she was obliged to lean on the arm of her chair; she attempted to withstand the storm, but was soon compelled to abandon the salon. “You must admit, my poor Gonzo, that you are exceptionally clumsy sometimes,” haughtily exclaimed one of the officers who was finishing his fourth ice. “How could you not know that the Coadjutor, who was one of the bravest colonels in Napoléon’s army, once played a criminal trick on the Marchesa’s father by walking out of the Fortress where General Conti was in command, as if he had walked out of the Steccata?” (The Steccata is the principal church in Parma.)

  “Indeed there are many things I do not know, my dear Captain, and I am a poor imbecile who makes blunders all day long.”

  This retort, quite in the Italian style, produced laughter at the brilliant officer’s expense. The Marchesa soon returned; she had plucked up her courage and was not without some vague hope of being able herself to admire this portrait of Fabrizio, which people said was so fine. She praised the talents of its creator, Hayez. Without realizing it, she offered charming smiles to Gonzo, who was glancing slyly at the officer. Since all the other courtiers of the household were indulging in the same pleasure, the officer made his escape, vowing a deadly hatred to Gonzo, who had triumphed over him and who, when taking his leave la
ter that evening, was invited to dinner the following day.

  “And here’s another piece of news!” exclaimed Gonzo after dinner the next day, when the servants had left the room. “It seems that our Coadjutor has fallen in love with the little Marini girl!”

  One can imagine the distress which filled Clélia’s heart upon hearing such an extraordinary sentence. Even the Marchese was moved. “But Gonzo, my friend, you’re completely off the track, as usual! And you really should speak a little more discreetly about someone who has had the honor of playing whist with His Highness some eleven times!”

  “Well, Signor Marchese,” Gonzo replied with the coarseness of people of this sort, “I can assure you that he would just as soon play a game or two with the little Marini girl. But it is quite enough that such details displease you—they no longer exist for me; more than anything else in the world I would not distress my dear Marchese.”

  Regularly, after dinner, the Marchese would retire to take a nap. Today he had no such intention; but Gonzo would rather have cut out his tongue than have added a single word concerning the little Marini girl; and each time he began to speak, he managed it so that the Marchese might hope he was returning to the Marini girl’s amours. Gonzo possessed to a superior degree that Italian form of wit which consists in exquisitely postponing all mention of the longed-for word. The poor Marchese, dying of curiosity, was obliged to make the advances; he said to Gonzo that, when he had the pleasure of dining with him, he invariably ate twice as much. Gonzo failed to understand, and began describing a splendid gallery of paintings being collected by the Marchesa Balbi, the mistress of the late Prince; three or four times he mentioned Hayez, with the deliberate accents of the profoundest admiration. The Marchese said to himself: “All right, now he’s coming to the portrait commissioned by the Marini girl!” But this was precisely what Gonzo was careful not to do. The clock struck five, which greatly vexed the Marchese, who was in the habit of ordering his carriage at five-thirty, after his nap, to drive to the Corso.

  “This is where your stupid chatter takes you,” he said harshly to Gonzo; “you’re making me get to the Corso after the Princess, whom I serve as Cavaliere d’Onore and who may have orders to give me. All right, be quick about it! Tell me in so many words, if you can, about this so-called love-affair of Monsignore the Coadjutor!”

  But Gonzo wanted to keep this story for the ears of the Marchesa, who had invited him to supper; hence he rushed in a very few words through the episode asked of him, and the Marchese, half asleep, hurried off to take his nap. Gonzo assumed a very different manner with the poor Marchesa. She had remained so young and naïve amidst her high estate, that she supposed it was her obligation to make up for the rudeness with which the Marchese had just spoken to Gonzo. Charmed by this success, the latter recovered all his eloquence, and made it a pleasure, no less than a duty, to enter with her into an infinity of details.

  Little Anetta Marini would give as much as a sequin for each seat that was reserved for her at the sermons; she always came with two of her aunts and her father’s old bookkeeper. These seats, which she had reserved the night before, were usually chosen almost facing the pulpit, but slightly to one side of the high altar, for she had noticed that the Coadjutor frequently turned toward the altar. Now, what the public had also noticed, was that not infrequently the young Coadjutor’s eloquent eyes readily paused as they encountered the piquant beauty of the young heiress, apparently quite attentively, for once he had met her eyes, his sermon became more learned, the quotations abounded, and there were no longer those gestures that come from the heart; and the ladies, for whom the sermon’s interest ceased almost at once, began staring at the Marini girl and speaking unkindly about her.

  Clélia insisted on hearing all these singular details three times over. At the third repetition, she became quite dreamy; she was calculating that it had been precisely fourteen months since she had seen Fabrizio. “Would there be anything so terribly wrong,” she asked herself, “in spending an hour in church, not in order to see Fabrizio but to hear a famous preacher? Besides, I’ll take a seat far away from the pulpit, and I’ll look only once at Fabrizio when I come in, and then one other time at the end of the sermon.… No,” Clélia said to herself, “it’s not Fabrizio I’m going to see, I’m going to hear the remarkable preacher!” Amidst all these rationalizations, the Marchesa suffered some remorse; her behavior had been so irreproachable for fourteen months! “Well,” she said to herself in order to gain some peace of mind, “if the first woman who comes tonight has been to hear Monsignore del Dongo preach, I’ll go too; if she hasn’t gone, then I’ll stay away.”

  Once this decision was made, the Marchesa made Gonzo a happy man by saying to him: “Try to find out what day the Coadjutor is preaching, and in what church. Tonight, before you leave, I may have a little errand for you to run for me.”

  No sooner had Gonzo left for the Corso than Clélia went to take a breath of air in the garden of her palazzo. She failed to consider the objection that for ten months she had not set foot out there. She was lively now, animated; there was color in her cheeks. That evening, as each boring visitor entered the salon, her heart pounded with emotion. Finally Gonzo was announced, who saw at the first glance that he was going to be an indispensable man for the next week. “The Marchesa is jealous of the Marini girl, and my word, it would be as good as a play,” he said to himself, “with the Marchesa acting the heroine, and little Anetta as the soubrette, and Monsignore del Dongo the lover! My word, the seats would be worth two francs and cheap at the price!” He was overjoyed, and for the whole evening he interrupted everyone and told the most preposterous stories (for example, about the famous actress and the Marquis de Pequigny, which he had heard the evening before from a French traveler). The Marchesa, for her part, could not sit still; she walked about the salon, passed into an adjoining gallery where the Marchese had hung no painting that cost less than twenty thousand francs. These pictures spoke so clear a language that evening that they exhausted the Marchesa’s heart with high feelings. Finally she heard the double doors open; she ran back to the salon; it was the Marchesa Raversi! However, even as she was offering her the customary compliments, Clélia felt herself losing the power of speech. The Marchesa obliged her to ask her question twice: “What do you think of our fashionable preacher?”

  “I used to think he was nothing but a petty intriguer, a worthy nephew of the illustrious Countess Mosca; but the last time he preached, you know, it was at the Church of the Visitation, just across the road there, he was so sublime that all my antagonism vanished and I found him to be the most eloquent man I have ever heard.”

  “So you attended one of his sermons?” Clélia asked, trembling with happiness.

  “Why, my dear,” laughed the Marchesa, “weren’t you listening to what I said? I wouldn’t miss such an occasion for anything in the world. They say his lungs are affected, and that soon he won’t be preaching anymore!”

  No sooner had the Marchesa left than Clélia summoned Gonzo to the gallery. “I have almost decided,” she told him, “to hear this preacher they talk so much about. When will he be preaching?”

  “Next Monday, which is to say, in three days; and it’s as though he had guessed Your Excellency’s intentions, for he’s coming to preach at the Church of the Visitation.”

  Not everything was settled, but Clélia could no longer control her voice; she walked up and down the gallery five or six times, without adding another word. Gonzo said to himself: “That must be vengeance working inside her. How could anyone be so insolent as to escape from prison, especially when you have the honor to be jailed by a hero like General Fabio Conti!” And he added aloud, with splendid irony, “Moreover you must make haste; his lungs are affected. I heard Doctor Rambo say that he doesn’t have a year to live. God is punishing him for having broken his bond by treacherously escaping from the Fortress.”

  The Marchesa sat down on a divan in the gallery and signaled to Gonzo to do the sa
me. After a few moments she handed him a tiny purse in which she had put several sequins. “I want you to reserve four seats for me.”

  “May poor Gonzo be permitted to slip in among Your Excellency’s suite?”

  “Of course; reserve five places.… I don’t care at all,” she added, “about being close to the pulpit; but I’d like to get a look at Signorina Marini, they say she’s so pretty.”

  The Marchesa could scarcely live through the three days separating her from the famous Monday, the day of the sermon. Gonzo, for whom it was a signal honor to be seen in public in the company of so great a lady, had put on his French coat with his sword; nor was this all: taking advantage of the proximity of the Palazzo Crescenzi, he had had carried into the church a splendid gilded armchair for the Marchesa, which was regarded as the last insolence by the bourgeois parishioners. The reader may well imagine the poor Marchesa’s feelings when she caught sight of this chair, which had been placed just opposite the pulpit. Clélia was so embarrassed, lowering her eyes and shrinking back into a corner of this enormous armchair, that she had not even the courage to glance at the little Marini girl, whom Gonzo pointed out to her with an effrontery she could not get over. Any person not of noble birth was absolutely nothing in this courtier’s eyes.

  Fabrizio appeared in the pulpit; he was so thin, so pale, so consumed, that Clélia’s eyes immediately filled with tears. Fabrizio spoke a few words, then stopped, as if his voice had suddenly failed him; in vain he attempted to begin one sentence after another; he turned away and took up a written sheet.

  “Brethren,” he said, “a wretched soul and one worthy of your entire compassion implores you through my lips to pray for the end of his torments, which will cease only with his life.”

  Fabrizio read the remainder of his sheet very slowly; but so expressive was his voice that before the middle of the prayer everyone was in tears, even Gonzo. “At least no one will notice me,” the Marchesa said to herself as she burst into tears.