The Charterhouse of Parma
Page 4
It must be confessed that there were days when the Countess spoke no word to a living soul; she was seen strolling under the tall chestnut-trees, absorbed in her gloomy reveries; she had too active a mind not to feel, occasionally, the tedium which comes from a failure to exchange ideas. But the following day she was as gay as she had been the day before: it was the grievances of her sister-in-law the Marchesa which produced such dark impressions on this naturally high-spirited creature. “Then must we waste what is left of our youth in this grim castle?” the Marchesa exclaimed.
Before the Countess’s arrival, she had not had the courage to avow such regrets.
This was how they lived through the winter of 1814. Twice, despite her impecuniosity, the Marchesa went to spend a few days in Milan; once to see a sublime ballet by Viganò, given at La Scala, and the Marchese made no objection to his wife’s being accompanied by his sister-in-law. The two women went together to cash the quarterly check of the Countess’s little pension, whereupon it was the French general’s poor widow who loaned a few sequins to the wealthy Marchesa del Dongo. These excursions were delightful; old friends were invited to dinner, and the company found consolation in laughing at everything, like children. This Italian gaiety, filled with brio and impulse, conjured away the melancholy which the glares of the Marchese and the Marchesino had spread around themselves at Grianta. Fabrizio, just sixteen, admirably represented the head of the house.
On March 7, 1815, the ladies had returned two days since from an agreeable little trip to Milan; they were strolling down the fine avenue of plane-trees recently extended to the water’s edge when a boat appeared from the direction of Como, making strange signals. One of the Marchese’s agents jumped out onto the embankment: Napoléon had just landed at the Gulf of Juan. Europe was sufficiently disingenuous to be surprised by this event, which failed to surprise the Marchese del Dongo; he wrote his sovereign a heartfelt letter, offering his talents and several millions, and informing him once again that his ministers were Jacobins in league with the ringleaders in Paris.
On March 8, at six in the morning, the Marchese, wearing all his orders, was having his elder son dictate the draft of a third political dispatch and solemnly transcribing the text in his fine painstaking hand on paper watermarked with the sovereign’s effigy. At the same moment Fabrizio was shown into the Countess Pietranera’s apartment.
“I’m leaving,” he told her. “I shall join the Emperor, who is the King of Italy as well, and such a good friend to your husband! I shall travel by way of Switzerland. Tonight, at Menaggio, my friend Vasi, who sells barometers, has given me his passport; now you must give me a few napoleons, for I have only two; if you cannot, I shall go on foot.”
The Countess wept for joy and anxiety. “Good God! Whatever made you think of such a thing!” she exclaimed, seizing his hands. She stood up and took out of her linen-closet, where it was carefully hidden, a little pearl-embroidered purse; this was all she possessed in the world. “Take it,” she told Fabrizio, “but in the name of God, don’t get yourself killed. What will your unhappy mother and I do if something should happen to you? As for Napoléon’s success, my poor boy, it is impossible; our gentlemen will be sure to do away with him. Didn’t you hear, last week, in Milan, the story of twenty-three assassination plots, each more cunning than the next, from which he escaped only by a miracle? And at the time he was omnipotent! And you’ve seen that our enemies haven’t lacked the will to destroy him; France counted for nothing once he was gone.” It was with the accents of the deepest feeling that the Countess described Napoléon’s future destiny to Fabrizio. “By allowing you to join him, I am sacrificing what is dearest to me in the world,” she said. Fabrizio’s eyes filled with tears as he embraced the Countess, but his determination to leave was not shaken for a moment. He eagerly explained to this beloved friend the reasons which impelled him, and which we take the liberty of finding slightly absurd.
“Yesterday evening, at seven minutes to six, we were strolling, as you know, down the avenue of plane-trees to the lake shore above Casa Sommariva, and heading south. That was when I first saw the boat coming from Como, bringing such great news. As I was watching the boat without a thought of the Emperor, and simply envying the lot of those permitted to travel, I was suddenly seized by a powerful emotion. The boat landed, the agent whispered to my father, who turned white and took us aside to announce the terrible news. I turned toward the lake with no purpose but to conceal the tears of joy that filled my eyes. Suddenly, high in the sky to my right, I glimpsed an eagle—Napoléon’s bird; it was soaring majestically toward Switzerland, and consequently toward Paris. And I too, I then resolved, would traverse Switzerland with the speed of an eagle, in order to offer that great man little enough but all I have: whatever strength resides in my weak right arm. He sought to give us a country, and he loved my uncle. While the eagle was still in sight, my tears suddenly dried; and as proof that this notion came from on high, without a moment’s hesitation, I made my decision and discerned the means of making this journey. In the twinkling of an eye, all the sorrows which as you know poison my life, especially on Sundays, were somehow conjured away by a divine impulsion. I saw that great figure of Italy rise out of the mire in which the Germans keep her immersed, spreading her bruised and still enchainèd arms toward her king and her liberator. And I, I mused, the still unknown son of this unhappy mother, I shall depart, either to conquer or to die with this man chosen by fate, who would cleanse us of the obloquy we suffer from the vilest slaves of Europe!*
“As you know,” he added in a low voice as he came closer to the Countess, staring at her with flaming eyes, “the winter I was born my mother planted with her own hands a young chestnut-tree beside a stream in our forest, two leagues from here: before taking action I was determined to have a look it. Spring is not yet far advanced, I reasoned: if my tree has already put forth leaves, that will be a sign. I too must emerge from the state of torpor in which I languish here in this cold and melancholy castle. Don’t you see that these old and blackened walls, now the symbols and once the means of tyranny, are a true image of the melancholy winter? They are to me what winter is to my tree.
“Would you believe it, Gina? At seven-thirty last night I reached my chestnut-tree: it had leaves, lovely young leaves, already quite large! I kissed them without disturbing a single one, and respectfully spaded the soil around the beloved tree. And then and there, filled with new hopes, I crossed the mountain to Menaggio: I would need a passport in order to enter Switzerland. Time had flown, it was already one in the morning when I found myself at Vasi’s door. At my first words he exclaimed, ‘You are going to join Napoleon!’ and flung himself into my arms. The others, too, embraced me passionately. ‘Why am I a married man?’ one of them asked.”
Signora Pietranera had grown pensive; she regarded it as her duty to raise certain objections. If Fabrizio had had any experience of the world at all, he would have realized that the Countess herself did not believe in the good reasons she hastened to offer him. But though lacking such experience, he had his resolve; he did not even deign to listen to such objections. The Countess was soon reduced to making him promise that at least he would inform his mother of his plans.
“She will tell my sisters, and these women will betray me in spite of themselves!” cried Fabrizio, with a kind of heroic arrogance.
“Speak more respectfully,” said the Countess, smiling through her tears, “of the sex which will make your fortune; for you will always displease the men—you have too much spirit for prosaic souls.”
The Marchesa dissolved into tears upon learning of her son’s strange plan; she was quite indifferent to such heroism and did everything she could to keep him from leaving. When she was convinced that nothing in the world but prison walls could keep him beside her, she gave him what little money she possessed, and then remembered that the day before the Marchese had entrusted her with eight or ten little diamonds, worth perhaps ten thousand francs, to take to Milan to
be set. Fabrizio’s sisters came into their mother’s room while the Countess was sewing these diamonds into our hero’s overcoat; he restored their scanty napoleons to these poor women. His sisters were so excited by his plan and embraced him so noisily that he snatched up the few diamonds still to be concealed and tried to leave then and there.
“You will betray me without even meaning to,” he told them. “Since I am now so rich, there is no need for me to pack any clothes. I can buy them anywhere.” He embraced these persons who were so dear to him, and left immediately, without even returning to his own room. He walked so fast, constantly fearing to be pursued by men on horseback, that he reached Lugano that very evening. Thank Heaven he was in a Swiss town, and no longer in danger of being attacked on a lonely road by officers in his father’s pay. To the latter he wrote a noble letter from Lugano, a boyish weakness which added fuel to the Marchese’s fury. Fabrizio took the post through the Saint-Gothard Pass, he traveled fast, and entered France through Pontarlier. The Emperor was in Paris. Here Fabrizio’s misfortunes began; he had left with the firm intention of speaking to the Emperor; it had never occurred to him that this might be a difficult enterprise. In Milan, he had seen Prince Eugène ten times a day and could have addressed him on any occasion. In Paris, he went every morning to the courtyard of the Tuileries to watch Napoléon review his troops; but he could never approach the Emperor. Our hero supposed all Frenchmen were as deeply moved as himself by the extreme danger which threatened their country. At the hotel dining-table, he made no secret of his intentions and his devotion; the young men he met there were remarkably kind and even more enthusiastic than himself; in a few days they succeeded in relieving him of all the money he possessed. Fortunately, out of sheer modesty, he had not mentioned the diamonds his mother had given him. When he realized, one morning after a night’s orgy, that he had certainly been robbed, he purchased two fine horses, hired one of the horse-dealer’s grooms as his servant, and in his scorn of the well-spoken young Parisians, left to join the army, about which he knew nothing except that troops were mustering near Maubeuge. No sooner had he reached the frontier than he found it demeaning to stay indoors, with nothing better to do than warming himself in front of a good fire, while soldiers were in bivouac outside. Ignoring the words of his servant, a sensible man, he rashly set off for the camps that lined the road to Belgium. No sooner had he reached the first battalion bivouacked there than the soldiers began staring at this young civilian about whose clothes there was nothing to suggest a uniform. Night was falling, and a cold wind blowing. Fabrizio approached a campfire and offered to pay for hospitality. The soldiers exchanged astonished glances at the notion of payment, and kindly granted him a place at the fire; his servant made a shelter for him. But an hour later, when the regimental adjutant happened to pass by, the soldiers reported the arrival of this stranger speaking bad French. The adjutant questioned Fabrizio, who described his enthusiasm for the Emperor in his extremely noticeable accent; whereupon the adjutant requested our hero to accompany him to the colonel, billeted in a farmhouse nearby. Fabrizio’s servant followed with the two horses, the sight of which struck the adjutant so forcibly that he immediately changed his mind and began interrogating Fabrizio’s servant as well. The latter, an old soldier, instantly guessing his questioner’s intentions, alluded to his master’s influential protectors, adding that of course no one would pinch his fine horses. Immediately a soldier summoned by the adjutant collared the servant while another soldier seized the horses, and with a stern glance the adjutant ordered Fabrizio to follow him without a speaking a word.
After making him cover a good league on foot, in a night made even darker by the campfires which illuminated the horizon on all sides, the adjutant handed Fabrizio over to an officer of the gendarmerie who gave him a hard look and asked for his papers. Fabrizio produced the passport which described him as a dealer in barometers bearing merchandise.
“How stupid do they think we are?” the officer exclaimed. “This is too much!” He questioned our hero, who spoke of the Emperor and of liberty in terms of the liveliest enthusiasm; whereupon the officer burst into uncontrollable laughter.
“Now I’ve heard everything!” he exclaimed. “Who could believe they’d send us such fools!”
And though Fabrizio made every effort to explain that in reality he wasn’t a barometer dealer at all, the officer sent him to prison in B——, a nearby town our hero reached at about three in the morning, beside himself with anger and tired to death.
Fabrizio, first astounded, then enraged, understanding absolutely nothing of what was happening to him, spent thirty-three long days in that wretched jail; he wrote letter after letter to the commandant of the place, and it was his jailer’s wife, a handsome Flemish woman of thirty-six, who promised to deliver them. But since she had no desire to see such a handsome fellow shot, and since moreover he paid well, she never failed to toss every one into the fire. Late in the evening she deigned to come in and listen to the prisoner’s complaints; she had told her husband that the young fool had money, whereupon the prudent jailer had given her carte blanche. She availed herself of this advantage and received several gold napoleons, for the adjutant had stolen only the horses, and the officer of the gendarmerie had confiscated nothing at all. One June afternoon, Fabrizio heard a burst of distant cannon-fire. So they were fighting at last! His heart leaped with impatience. He also heard a lot of commotion in the town; as a matter of fact a considerable maneuver was under way, three divisions passing through B——. When, around eleven at night, the jailer’s wife came to share his woes, Fabrizio was even friendlier than usual; then, taking her hands in his: “Get me out of here—I swear on my honor to come back to this prison as soon as the fighting is over.”
“Poppycock! Do you have what it takes?”
He looked troubled, not understanding her expression. The jailer’s wife, seeing this, decided his funds were running low, and instead of stipulating gold napoleons as she had planned, now spoke only of francs. “Listen,” she said, “if you can get hold of a hundred francs, I’ll put double napoleons on the corporal’s eyes when he comes on guard duty tonight. He won’t be able to see you leave jail, and if his regiment has to march tomorrow, he’ll agree to it.”
The bargain was soon struck. The jailer’s wife even consented to hide Fabrizio in her room, from which he could easily escape the following day.
The next morning, before dawn, this woman was overcome by a tender impulse and said to Fabrizio: “My boy, you’re still much too young to go in for this nasty business: take my advice and don’t come back here.”
“Don’t come back …” repeated Fabrizio. “Then is it a crime to want to defend one’s country?”
“Enough of that. Just remember I saved your life; the case was clear—you would have been shot. But don’t tell anyone, you’ll lose both of us our jobs, my man and me. And above all, don’t go telling that silly story of a Milanese gentleman disguised as a barometer salesman—it’s too stupid! Listen to me now: I’m going to give you the uniform of a hussar who died in here a couple of days ago: don’t open your mouth if you can help it, but if some billeting sergeant or an officer asks you questions you have to answer, say you were lying sick in some farmer’s house after he found you trembling with fever in a roadside ditch and took you in out of charity. If they’re not satisfied with an answer like that, say you’re going back to your regiment. They may arrest you because of your accent, so then you say you were born in Piedmont and stayed in France last year after conscription, something like that …”
For the first time, after thirty-three days of rage, Fabrizio understood everything that had happened to him. He had been taken for a spy. He argued with the jailer’s wife, who had been so tender that morning; and finally, while she was taking in the hussar’s uniform with a needle, he managed to make sense of his story to the astonished creature. She believed it for a while, he seemed so naive and looked so handsome in his hussar’s uniform!
The jailer’s wife added a good deal of advice for the future, and finally, at dawn, let Fabrizio out of her room, after making him swear a hundred times over that he would never utter her name, whatever happened. Once Fabrizio had left the little town, walking boldly along with the hussar’s sword under his arm, he was overcome by a scruple: “Here I am,” he mused, “with the uniform and the map of a hussar who died in jail, apparently because he stole a cow and some silverware! So I’ve inherited his identity, so to speak … without wanting to or expecting anything of the kind! Beware of prison! The signs are clear: I’ll have a lot to suffer from prisons!”
Not an hour had passed since Fabrizio had parted from his benefactress, when it began raining so hard that the new hussar could barely walk, encumbered as he was by the heavy boots which were certainly not his size. He met up with a farmer riding on a sorry nag he purchased then and there with the help of sign-language; the jailer’s wife had suggested he speak as little as possible, on account of his accent.