The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  The admirable and especially sincere accent with which these words were spoken made the Prince shudder; for a moment he feared seeing his dignity compromised by an even more direct accusation, but on the whole his sensation soon turned to one of pleasure: he was admiring the Duchess; the whole of her person at this moment attained to a sublime beauty. “Great God! How lovely she is,” the Prince said to himself; “something must be conceded to a woman so unique—there may not be another like her in all of Italy.… Well now, with a little diplomacy it shouldn’t be impossible to make her my mistress one of these days; what a difference between such a creature and that doll of a Marchesa Balbi, who every year still manages to steal at least three hundred thousand francs from my poor subjects.… But did I hear her correctly?” he suddenly realized. “She said sentenced to death my nephew and so many others.”

  Whereupon rage overcame him, and it was with an hauteur worthy of his supreme rank that the Prince said, after a silence: “And what must be done to keep Your Grace from leaving us?”

  “Something of which you are incapable,” the Duchess retorted with the accent of the bitterest irony and the most ill-concealed scorn.

  The Prince was beside himself, but he owed it to the habit of his position as absolute sovereign that he had the power to resist a first impulse. “I must have this woman,” he said to himself, “I owe it to myself, and then I must kill her with contempt.… If she leaves this room, I shall never see her again.” But, intoxicated with rage and hatred as he was at this moment, how was he to find the words which might satisfy what he owed himself and at the same time convince the Duchess not to abandon his court that very moment? “A gesture,” he said to himself, “a gesture can neither be reported nor made into a joke,” and he went over to stand between the Duchess and the door of his study. At that moment he heard someone scratching at that very door.

  “Who is the damned idiot,” he roared at the top of his lungs, “who is the damned idiot who is foisting his imbecile presence upon me here?”

  Poor General Fontana showed his pale and agonized countenance, and it was with the expression of a man in his final agony that he uttered these barely audible words: “His Excellency Count Mosca requests the honor to be introduced.”

  “Have him come in!” shouted the Prince. And as Mosca was bowing: “All right, all right, here is Her Grace the Duchess Sanseverina, who says she is leaving Parma this moment for Naples, and who is offering me any amount of insolence!”

  “What’s that?” asked Mosca, turning pale.

  “You mean you knew nothing of this plan of hers?”

  “Not the first syllable; I left Her Grace at six o’clock, happy and, I believe, satisfied.”

  This remark produced an incredible effect upon the Prince. First he stared at Mosca, whose growing pallor revealed that he was speaking the truth and was no accomplice in the Duchess’s enterprise. “In which case,” the Prince said to himself, “I am losing her forever; pleasure and revenge, everything is vanishing at the same time. In Naples, she will be composing epigrams with her nephew Fabrizio on the great wrath of the little Prince of Parma.” He stared at the Duchess; the most violent contempt was disputing with the most violent anger for possession of her heart; her eyes at this moment were fixed upon Count Mosca, and the delicate contours of that lovely mouth expressed the bitterest disdain. Her entire countenance said: Vile courtier! “So,” thought the Prince, after scrutinizing her, “I am losing this means of getting her back in my court. At this very moment, if she leaves the room, she is lost to me. God knows what she will say about my judges in Naples.… And with that wit and that divine power of persuasion Heaven has given her, she will make the whole world believe her. To her I shall owe my reputation as an absurd tyrant who gets up in the middle of the night to look under his bed …” Then, by an adroit gesture, as though attempting to stride back and forth in the room to diminish his agitation, the Prince once again put himself in front of the door; the Count was three paces to his right, pale, undone, and trembling so greatly that he was obliged to lean on the back of the armchair the Duchess had occupied at the beginning of the audience and which the Prince, in an impulse of rage, had pushed away. The Count was in love. “If the Duchess leaves, I shall follow her,” he was saying to himself; “but will she want me in her entourage? That is the question.”

  To the Prince’s left, the Duchess was standing, arms crossed and pressed against her breast, staring at him with a splendid insolence; a complete and profound pallor had succeeded the vivid colors which just now had animated this sublime countenance.

  The Prince, unlike the other two persons in the room, was red-faced and evidently anxious; his left hand toyed convulsively with the Cross attached to the Grand Cordon of his Order which he wore under his coat; with his right hand he stroked his chin. “What is to be done?” he said to the Count, without quite knowing what he himself was doing and carried away by his habit of consulting him on every occasion.

  “I have no idea, Your Serene Highness,” the Count replied with the look of a man in the last agonies. He could barely speak the words of his answer. The tone of his voice gave the Prince the first consolation his wounded pride had been able to find in this entire audience, and this grain of happiness afforded him a phrase that did his vanity good.

  “Well then,” he said, “I am the most sensible of the three of us; I am quite willing to set aside my position in the world; I shall speak here as a friend.” And he added, with a fine smile of condescension carefully imitated from the happy days of Louis XIV: “As a friend speaking to friends. Your Grace,” he went on, “what must be done in order to make you forget such an untimely resoluion?”

  “I have no idea,” the Duchess replied with a deep sigh. “To tell the truth, I have no idea, so greatly do I hold Parma in horror.”

  There was no epigrammatic impulse in this remark; it was evident that sincerity itself was speaking through her mouth.

  The Count suddenly turned to one side; his courtier’s soul was scandalized; then he cast an imploring glance at his Prince. With great dignity and sang-froid, the Prince let a moment pass; then he addressed the Count: “I see,” he said, “that your charming friend is quite beside herself; it is simple enough: she adores her nephew.” And, turning toward the Duchess, he added, with a glance filled with gallantry and at the same time with the kind of expression assumed for quoting a line from a play: “What is to be done to please these fine eyes?”

  The Duchess had had time to reflect; in a slow and steady tone of voice, as if she were dictating her ultimatum, she replied: “Your Highness would write me a gracious letter of the kind you know so well how to compose; it would tell me that, not convinced of the guilt of Fabrizio del Dongo, the Archbishop’s First Grand Vicar, you will not sign the sentence when it is presented to you, and that this unjust procedure will have no future consequences.”

  “What do you mean unjust!” exclaimed the Prince, reddening to the whites of his eyes and growing angry all over again.

  “Nor is that all,” the Duchess replied with a Roman pride; “as of this evening, and,” she added glancing at the clock, “it is already a quarter past eleven, as of this evening Your Serene Highness will send word to the Marchesa Raversi that she is advised to proceed to the country to recover from the fatigue which must have been caused by a certain trial of which she was speaking in her salon earlier this evening.”

  The Prince was walking back and forth like a man in a fury. “Whoever saw such a woman …?” he exclaimed. “She has no respect for me.”

  The Duchess replied with complete equanimity, “In all my life it has never occurred to me to lack respect for Your Serene Highness; your Highness has had the extreme condescension to say that you were speaking as a friend to friends. Moreover, I have no desire to remain in Parma,” she added, glancing at the Count with utter contempt.

  This glance galvanized the Prince, hitherto quite uncertain, though these words might have seemed to herald a commitm
ent; little he cared for words.

  A few more remarks were exchanged, but finally Count Mosca received orders to write the gracious letter sought by the Duchess. He omitted the phrase this unjust procedure will have no future consequences. “It suffices,” the Count said to himself, “that the Prince promise not to sign the sentence which will be presented to him.” The Prince thanked him, as he signed, with a glance.

  The Count was greatly mistaken, for the Prince was tired and would have signed anything; he believed he was well out of the episode, and in his eyes the entire situation was dominated by these words: “If the Duchess leaves, I shall find my court a bore before the week is out.” The Count noticed that his master corrected the date, and substituted that of the following day. He glanced at the clock, which showed that the time was nearly midnight. The Minister saw in this corrected date no more than the pedantic desire to give proof of exactitude and good government. As to the Marchesa Raversi’s banishment, it was of no special account; the Prince took a special pleasure in banishing people.

  “General Fontana!” he exclaimed, opening the door.

  The general appeared, his face so amazed and so inquisitive that there was a lively glance exchanged between the Count and the Duchess, and this glance made peace between them.

  “General Fontana,” said the Prince, “you will take my carriage waiting in the colonnade, you will go to the Marchesa Raversi’s, you will have yourself announced; if she is in bed, you will add that you come on my behalf, and once you are in her bedroom, you will say these very words and no others: ‘Marchesa Raversi, His Serene Highness advises you to leave tomorrow, before eight in the morning, for your Castle at Velleja; His Highness will inform you when you may return to Parma.’ ”

  The Prince’s eyes sought those of the Duchess, who, without thanking him as he expected, made a deep and extremely respectful curtsy and quickly left the room.

  “What a woman!” said the Prince, turning toward Count Mosca.

  The Count, delighted by the banishment of Marchesa Raversi, which would facilitate all his functions as Minister, spoke for a good half-hour as the consummate courtier he was; he sought to console his Sovereign’s vanity and took his leave only when he saw the Prince was indeed convinced that the anecdotal history of Louis XIV had no finer page than the one he himself had just furnished his future historians.

  Returning to her palace, the Duchess closed her door and gave orders that no one was to be admitted, not even the Count. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts, and to determine how she should regard the scene which had just occurred. She had acted impulsively and to grant herself the pleasure of the moment; but whatever she had been led to do, she had done it with a certain steadiness of manner. She had nothing to reproach herself for, and she recovered her usual sang-froid with the notion that there was even less to regret: such was the character she owed it to herself to display as the prettiest woman at court at the age of thirty-six.

  She speculated at this moment as to what Parma might have to offer by way of entertainment, as she might have done upon returning from a long journey, so deeply had she been convinced, between nine and eleven, that she would be leaving this country forever.

  “The poor Count cut a funny figure when he learned, in the Prince’s presence, that I was leaving.… Well, he’s a lovable man and a true heart! He would have abandoned his ministries to follow me.… But it’s also true that for five long years he hasn’t had a single distraction to reproach me for. What women married at the altar could say as much to their lord and master? It must be admitted that the Count is neither self-important nor pedantic; he never tempts me to deceive him; in my presence he always seems to be ashamed of his own powers.… What a figure he cut in the presence of his lord and master; if he were here I would throw my arms around him.… But for nothing in the world would I take it upon myself to console a Minister who has lost his portfolio—that is a sickness cured only by death … and the cause of death as well. What a misfortune it would be to be a young Minister! I must write him, that’s one of those things he should know officially before quarreling with his Prince.… But I am forgetting my good servants.”

  The Duchess rang. Her women were still busy packing her trunks; the carriage had come to the door and was being loaded; all the servants who had no work to do were standing around this carriage, tears in their eyes. Cecchina, who on great occasions was the only one entitled to enter the Duchess’s bedroom, informed her of all these details. “Have them come upstairs,” said the Duchess.

  A moment later, she walked into the antechamber. “I have been promised,” she told them, “that the sentence against my nephew will not be signed by the Sovereign”—this is the word used in Italy—“I am postponing my departure; we shall see if my enemies will have the power to change this resolution.”

  After a brief silence, the servants began exclaiming, “Long live Her Grace the Duchess!” and applauding furiously. The Duchess, already in the next room, reappeared like an actress taking a bow, curtsied gracefully to her people, and said, “My friends, I thank you.”

  Had she said the word, all of them, at that moment, would have marched upon the Palace to attack it. The Duchess beckoned to a postilion, a former smuggler and a devoted servant, who followed her.

  “You will dress as a prosperous farmer, you will leave Parma any way you can, you will hire a sediola and go as fast as you can to Bologna. You will enter the town as a stroller, and through the Florence gate, and you will hand Fabrizio, who is at the Pellegrino, a package which Cecchina will give you. Fabrizio is in hiding and is known there as Joseph Bossi; do not betray him by some stupidity, and don’t appear to know who he is; my enemies may set spies on your heels. Fabrizio will send you back here in a few hours or a few days: it is especially on the return journey that you must redouble your precautions not to betray him.”

  “Ah! the Marchesa Raversi’s people!” the postilion exclaimed. “We’ll be waiting for them, and if Your Grace gives the word, we shall exterminate them all.”

  “Some day, perhaps! But promise on your life to do nothing without my orders.”

  It was a copy of the Prince’s letter which the Duchess intended to send to Fabrizio; she could not resist the pleasure of entertaining him, and added a word concerning the scene which had produced the letter; this “word” became a letter of ten pages. She called back the postilion. “You cannot leave,” she told him, “until four in the morning, when the gates are opened.”

  “I was going to make my way out through the main sewer, there would be water up to my chin, but I’d get through …”

  “No,” the Duchess said, “I don’t want to expose to a fever one of my most faithful servants. Do you know anyone in Monsignore the Archbishop’s household?”

  “The second coachman is a friend of mine.”

  “Here is a letter for that saintly prelate: make your way into his Palace without any fuss, get yourself taken to his footman; I don’t want Monsignore to be awakened. If he’s already in his bedroom, spend the night in the Palace, and since he usually gets up at dawn, at four tomorrow morning have yourself announced on my behalf, ask for the holy Archbishop’s blessing, and give him this package, and take whatever letters he may give you for Bologna.”

  The Duchess was sending the Archbishop the original of the Prince’s letter; since this letter concerned his First Grand Vicar, she requested him to deposit it in the archiepiscopal archives, where she hoped that the Grand Vicars and the canons, her nephew’s colleagues, would be so good as to become familiar with it; all under conditions of the profoundest secrecy.

  The Duchess wrote to Monsignore Landriani with a familiarity which would enchant this good bourgeois; her signature alone took up three lines; the letter, an extremely agreeable one, was followed by these words: Angelina-Cornelia-Isola Valserra del Dongo, Duchess Sanseverina.

  “I haven’t written so much, I suspect,” the Duchess said to herself with a smile, “since my marriage contract with t
he poor Duke; but these people can only be managed by such things, and in the eyes of the bourgeois, it is a caricature which constitutes beauty.” She could not end the evening without yielding to the temptation of writing a letter of persiflage to the poor Count; she informed him officially, for his guidance, she said, in his relations with crowned heads, that she did not feel herself capable of consoling a Minister in disgrace. “The Prince frightens you; when you can no longer see him, will I be the one to frighten you?” She had this letter delivered immediately.

  For his part, at seven the next morning, the Prince summoned Count Zurla, Minister of the Interior. “Once again,” he said, “give the strictest orders to all the magistrates that they must arrest Signor Fabrizio del Dongo. We are informed that he may venture to reappear in our territories. While this fugitive from justice is in Bologna, where he appears to defy the pursuits of our tribunals, post sbirri who are personally acquainted with him: (1) on the road from Bologna to Parma; (2) around the Duchess Sanseverina’s castle, at Sacca, and around her house at Castelnovo; (3) around Count Mosca’s castle. I venture to hope that your sagacity, my dear Count, will manage to conceal these orders of your Sovereign from the penetration of Count Mosca. Understand that I want Signor Fabrizio del Dongo arrested.”

  As soon as this Minister had left, a secret door admitted into the Prince’s study Chief Justice Rassi, who advanced bent double, bowing still lower at every step. The countenance of this rascal was a picture: it did justice to the entire infamy of his role, and, while the rapid and chaotic movements of his eyes betrayed what knowledge he had of his merits, the arrogant and grimacing assurance of his mouth showed that he was well able to measure himself against contempt.