The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  Why should the historian who faithfully follows the least details of the narrative supplied him be held responsible? Is it his fault if the characters, seduced by passions he does not share, unfortunately for himself, descend to profoundly immoral actions? It is true that such things are no longer done in a country where the sole passion surviving all the rest is for money, the means of vanity.

  Three months after the events hitherto recounted, the Duchess Sanseverina-Taxis astonished the Court of Parma by her easy affability and by the noble serenity of her mind; her house was incomparably the most agreeable in the city. This was what Count Mosca had promised his master, Ranuccio-Ernesto IV, the ruling Prince, and the Princess, his wife, to whom the Duchess was presented by two of the greatest ladies of the realm, received her with every mark of distinction. The Duchess was curious to see this Prince who was master of the fate of the man she loved; she sought to please him and succeeded all too well. She encountered a man of more than average height, though inclined to stoutness; his hair, his moustaches, and his enormous sideburns were of a splendid golden color, according to his courtiers; elsewhere they would have provoked, by their pallor, the ignoble word flaxen. Out of the center of his broad countenance jutted a tiny, almost feminine nose. But the Duchess noticed that in order to realize all these ugly points it was necessary to catalogue the Prince’s features one by one. The general impression was that of a man of lively intelligence and firm character. His bearing, his movements were not without majesty, though he frequently sought to impress his interlocutor; then he grew embarrassed himself and would begin shifting from one foot to the other almost continually. Furthermore, Ernesto IV had a penetrating and commanding gaze; his arm gestures implied a certain nobility, and his words were at once measured and concise.

  Mosca had warned the Countess that the Prince kept, in the grand bureau where he held audiences, a full-length portrait of Louis XIV, and a very fine inlaid-marble table from Florence. The imitation, she found, was striking, evidently he had tried for the gaze and the noble distinction of the Sun King, and he leaned upon the scagliola table in such a fashion as to assume the pose of Joseph II. He seated himself immediately after the first words he addressed to the Duchess, in order to give her an occasion to employ the tabouret befitting her rank. At this court, only Duchesses, Princesses, and the wives of the Grandees of Spain are entitled to seat themselves; all the other ladies wait until the Prince or the Princess invite them to sit, and to mark the differences in rank, these august personages are always careful to allow a certain interval of time to pass before inviting those ladies not Duchesses to be seated. The Duchess Sanseverina-Taxis found that now and again the Prince’s imitation of Louis XIV was a little too marked; for instance, in his manner of smiling benevolently, tipping back his head.

  Ernesto IV wore an evening-coat of the latest fashion from Paris; he was sent, every month, from this city he abhorred, an evening-coat, a frock coat, and a hat. But by a strange mixture of outfits, the day the Duchess was received at court the Prince had put on red knee-breeches, silk stockings, and very close-fitting shoes, models for which might be found in the portraits of Joseph II.

  He received the Duchess Sanseverina graciously; he made several witty and delicate remarks; but she immediately discerned that there was nothing excessive in the warmth of his reception.

  “Do you know why?” Count Mosca explained to her after the audience, “It is because Milan is a larger and more beautiful city than Parma. He might have feared, granting you the welcome I expected and which he had led me to hope for, that he would seem a provincial overwhelmed by the manners of a lovely lady from the capital. Doubtless too he is still vexed by a detail which I dare not tell you: the Prince sees no woman at his court who might rival you for beauty. That was the sole subject of his conversation, last night when he retired to bed, with Pernice, his chief valet, who is well-disposed toward me. I foresee a little revolution in court etiquette: my greatest enemy here is a fool known as General Fabio Conti. Just imagine an eccentric who has seen perhaps a day’s service on the field of war in his whole life, and who thereby considers himself entitled to imitate the bearing of Frederick the Great. Furthermore, he insists on posing with all the noble affability of General Lafayette, and this because he is the leader, here, of the Liberal party. (God knows what kind of Liberals!)”

  “I know this Fabio Conti of yours,” said the Duchess. “I had a glimpse of him not far from Como; he was having an argument with the police.” She described the episode, which the reader may well remember.

  “You shall someday know, Madame, if your mind ever succeeds in penetrating the depths of our protocol, that young ladies appear at Court only after their marriage. Well then! The Prince has for the superiority of his Parma over all other cities a patriotism so intense that I wager he will find some way of having little Clélia Conti, our Lafayette’s daughter, presented at Court. She is, I must say, quite charming, and a week ago passed for the loveliest person in the Prince’s domain.

  “I don’t know,” the Count continued, “if the horrors which my sovereign’s enemies have spread about him have reached as far as the Castle of Grianta; he passes for a monster, an ogre. The fact is that Ernesto IV was filled to bursting with many little virtues, and it might be added that if he had been as invulnerable as Achilles, he would have continued to be a model potentate. But in a moment of tedium and vexation, and also somewhat to imitate Louis XIV cutting off the head of some Frondist hero discovered living peacefully and impudently on his estate close by Versailles, fifty years after the Fronde, Ernesto IV managed one day to hang two Liberals. It appeared that these indiscreet fellows foregathered on a certain day to speak ill of the Prince and to address eager hopes to heaven that the plague might come to Parma and deliver them from the tyrant. The word tyrant was textual evidence. Rassi called this conspiring; he had them condemned to death, and the execution of one of them, Count L——, was a horror. This occurred before my time. Since that fatal moment,” added the Count, lowering his voice, “the Prince is subject to fits of terror unworthy of a man, but which are the sole source of the favor I enjoy. Without such sovereign fear, I should have a variety of distinction all too sudden, too harsh for this Court, where imbecility is rampant. Would you believe that the Prince looks under the beds of his apartment before retiring, and expends a million, which in Parma is the equivalent of four million in Milan, to have a powerful police force, and you see before you, my lady Duchess, the chief of this dread force. By police, that is, by fear, I have become Minister of War and of Finance; and since the Minister of the Interior is my nominal chief, insofar as he has the police on his staff, I have had this portfolio given to Count Zurla-Contarini, an idiot who is greedy for such labors as the pleasure of writing eighty letters a day. I received one just this morning, in which Count Zurla-Contarini has had the satisfaction of writing in his own hand the number 20,715.”

  The Duchess Sanseverina was presented to the melancholy Princess of Parma, Clara-Paolina, who because her husband had a mistress (the Marchesa Balbi, rather a pretty woman), regarded herself as the most unfortunate person in the universe, which may well have made her the most tedious. The Duchess found herself confronting a very tall, angular woman who was not yet thirty-six and looked a good fifty. A regular and noble countenance might have passed for beautiful, though somewhat marred by huge round eyes that were half blind, if the Princess had not given up on herself. She received the Duchess with so marked a timidity that some of the courtiers hostile to Count Mosca ventured to say that the Princess had the look of the woman being presented, and the Duchess of the Sovereign. The Duchess, surprised and virtually disconcerted, desperately sought words to assume a position inferior to that which the Princess assigned to herself. In order to restore some self-possession to this wretched Princess who did not altogether lack a certain native intelligence, the Duchess could find nothing better than to start in on and to continue a long lecture on botany. The Princess was in fact quite
learned in the matter; she had several fine hothouses with many tropical plants. The Duchess, quite simply trying to escape an awkward situation, made the permanent conquest of Princess Clara-Paolina, who from her initial timidity and silence at the beginning of the audience found herself at its end so at ease that, against all the rules of etiquette, this first audience lasted no less than an hour and a quarter. The following day, the Duchess sent for some exotic plants, and described herself as a great lover of all things botanical.

  The Princess passed her life with the venerable Father Landriani, Archbishop of Parma, a man of learning and even of intelligence, and a thoroughly decent person who nonetheless presented a singular spectacle when he sat in his crimson velvet chair (to which his office entitled him), opposite the Princess’s armchair, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting and her two lady-companions. The old prelate with his long white hair was even more timid, if possible, than the Princess; they saw each other every day, and every audience began with a silence that lasted a good quarter of an hour. It was only natural that the Countess Alvizi, one of the lady-companions, had become a sort of favorite, since she had the art of encouraging them to speak to each other and of making them break the silence.

  In order to end the series of presentations, the Duchess was admitted to the presence of His Serene Highness the Crown Prince, a personage taller than his father and more timid than his mother whose strong point was mineralogy and who was sixteen years old. He blushed violently when he saw the Duchess come in, and was so disoriented that he could never find a word to say to this lovely lady. He was a fine-looking boy, and spent his life in the woods, hammer in hand.

  At the moment the Duchess stood up to bring this silent audience to a close: “My Lord, Madame, how pretty you are!” exclaimed the Crown Prince, an observation not regarded as being in excessively bad taste by the lady presented.

  The Marchesa Balbi, a young woman of twenty-five, could still have passed, two or three years before the Duchess Sanseverina’s arrival in Parma, for the ideal type of Italian beauty. Now she still possessed the finest eyes in the world, and the most charming little airs and graces; but at close range, her skin was reticulated with countless tiny wrinkles which made the Marchesa into a young grandmother. Glimpsed at a certain distance, for example in her box at the theater, she was still a beauty; and people in the pit commended the Prince’s excellent taste. He spent every evening at the Marchesa Balbi’s, though frequently without opening his lips, and the boredom she observed in the Prince had caused this poor woman to decline into an extraordinary thinness. She laid claim to limitless subtlety, her constant smile tinged with malice; she had the finest teeth in the world, and on every occasion, though without any meaning, she sought by a cunning smile to suggest much more than what her mere words expressed. Count Mosca used to say that it was her continual smiles, even as she was inwardly yawning, that gave her so many wrinkles. Countess Balbi was a party to everything that was going on, and the State did not make a contract for a thousand francs without there being a souvenir (that was the polite expression in Parma) for the Marchesa. According to common gossip, she had invested six million francs in England, but in reality her fortune, quite recent in fact, did not amount to more than 1,500,000 francs. It was to be protected from her subtleties, and to be sure of her dependence upon himself, that Count Mosca had had himself appointed Minister of Finance. The Marchesa’s sole passion was fear masked as sordid greed: “I shall die in the poorhouse,” she occasionally remarked to the Prince, who was shocked by this prophecy. The Duchess noticed that the antechamber of the Palazzo Balbi, resplendent with gilding, was lit by a single candle that guttered on a precious marble table, and that the doors of her salon were blackened by the footmen’s fingers.

  “She received me,” the Duchess remarked to her friend, “as if she were expecting me to give her a tip of fifty francs.”

  The Duchess’s triumphal progress was to some degree interrupted by her treatment at the hands of the cleverest woman at court, the famous Marchesa Raversi, a consummate schemer who headed the faction opposed to Count Mosca’s. She intrigued for his destruction, especially in the last few months, since as the niece of Count Sanseverina she feared to see her inheritance jeopardized by the charms of the new Duchess.

  “Marchesa Raversi is not a foe to be despised,” the Count observed to his mistress. “I believe her to be so dangerous that I separated from my wife solely because she insisted on taking as her lover Cavaliere Bentivoglio, one of Marchesa Raversi’s friends.”

  This lady, a tall virago with coal-black hair, remarkable for the diamonds she wore all day, and for the rouge with which she covered her cheeks, had declared herself the Duchess’s enemy from the start and opened hostilities immediately upon receiving her in her own home. The Duke Sanseverina, in the letters he sent from——, seemed so delighted by his embassy, and especially by his expectation of the Grand Cordon, that his family feared he would leave a share of his fortune to the wife upon whom he was now lavishing so many trifling gifts. Marchesa Raversi, homely as she was, had for a lover Count Balbi, the best-looking man at court: in general she succeeded at whatever she undertook.

  The Duchess maintained a splendid establishment. The Palazzo Sanseverina had always been one of the finest in the city of Parma, and the Duke, on the occasion of his embassy and of his future Grand Cordon, expended enormous sums upon its embellishment: the Duchess was in charge of the alterations.

  The Count had guessed correctly: a few days after the Duchess was presented, young Clélia Conti came to court, having been made a Canoness. In order to parry the blow this mark of favor might seem to strike at the Count’s credit, the Duchess gave a party on the pretext of opening her palace gardens, and, by her charming manners, she made young Clélia, whom she called her little friend from Lake Como, the queen of the evening. Her monogram appeared as though by accident upon all the principal lanterns of the garden. Though somewhat pensive, young Clélia had a charming way of referring to their little adventure beside the lake, and to her deep gratitude. She was said to be very religious and a lover of solitude.

  “I’ll wager,” said the Count, “that she’s bright enough to be ashamed of her father.”

  The Duchess made this young girl her friend, feeling attracted to her; she did not want to seem jealous, and included her in all her social occasions; ultimately her scheme was to try to diminish all the hostilities of which the Count was the object.

  Everything smiled upon the Duchess, who was delighted by this court life where a storm is always to be feared; she felt as if she was beginning to live again. She was tenderly devoted to the Count, who was literally mad with happiness. This agreeable situation had afforded him a perfect sang-froid with regard to everything concerning his professional interests. Hence scarcely two months after the Duchess’s arrival, he obtained the patent and honors of Prime Minister, which closely approach those paid to the Sovereign himself. The Count had complete control over his master’s spirit, as all Parma was to learn in the most striking manner.

  To the southwest, and ten minutes from the city, rises that citadel so famous throughout Italy; its huge tower a hundred and eighty feet high can be seen from a great distance. This tower, built in imitation of Hadrian’s mausoleum in Rome by the Farnese family, grandsons of Paul III, early in the sixteenth century, is so large in diameter that on its upper platform has been built a palace for the governor of the Citadel and a new prison known as the Farnese Tower. This prison, built in honor of Ranuccio-Ernesto II, who had become the cherished lover of his step-mother, was regarded throughout the region as singularly beautiful. The Duchess was curious to see it; on the day of her visit, it was overpoweringly hot in Parma and up there, in that elevated position, she found refreshment, and was so delighted by doing so that she spent several hours in the place. A point was made of showing her all the rooms of the Farnese Tower.

  On the platform of the big tower, the Duchess encountered a wretched Liberal prisoner, who had e
merged to take the half-hour’s exercise granted him every three days. Having come back down to Parma, and not yet in possession of that discretion requisite in an absolute monarchy, she mentioned this man who had told her his entire history. The faction of the Marchesa Raversi seized upon these remarks of the Duchess and repeated them widely, hoping they would distress the Prince. Indeed, Ernesto IV frequently repeated that it was crucial to impress the imagination of the people. “Perpetual is a big word,” he would say, “and more terrible in Italy than elsewhere.”

  Consequently, he had never once in his life granted a pardon. Eight days after her visit to the fortress, the Duchess received a letter of commutation, signed by the Prince and the Minister, with the name left blank. The prisoner whose name she would write in this space was to obtain restitution of his possessions and permission to spend the rest of his days in America. The Duchess wrote the name of the man who had spoken to her. Unfortunately, this person turned out to be something of a rogue, and a weak spirit as well; it was upon his confession that the famous Ferrante Palla had been condemned to death.