The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  “So,” thought Clélia, “here he is a prisoner, and a prisoner of his enemies! For after all, Count Mosca, angel though one would like to believe him, will be enchanted by this capture.”

  A burst of loud laughter rang out in the guard-room.

  “Jacopo,” she said in a moved voice to the brigadier, “what’s happening now?”

  The General questioned the prisoner severely about why he had struck Barbone: Monsignore Fabrizio answered coldly: “He called me a murderer, and for that he must show me the documents which authorize him to call me by such a name”; and everyone laughed.

  A jailer who could write replaced Barbone, whom Clélia saw leave, mopping the blood streaming from his hideous face with his handkerchief; he was swearing like a trooper. “That bastard Fabrizio!” he shouted. “This is the hand that will put him out of his misery! I’ll get there before the hangman,” and so on.

  He had stopped between the office window and the General’s carriage to stare at Fabrizio, and his oaths redoubled.

  “On your way,” the brigadier said to him; “no such swearing in front of the Signorina.”

  Barbone raised his head to look into the carriage; his eyes met Clélia’s, from whom a cry of horror escaped; she had never seen at such close range so hideous an expression on a human face. “He will kill Fabrizio!” she said to herself. “I must warn Don Cesare.” This was her uncle, one of the most respected priests in the city; his brother General Conti had obtained for him the position of steward and principal chaplain of the prison.

  The General climbed back into his carriage. “Would you prefer to go to your room,” he said to his daughter, “or wait what may be a long while in the palace courtyard? I must account for all this to the Sovereign.”

  Fabrizio came out of the office escorted by three policemen; he was taken to the room selected for him. Clélia looked through the window; the prisoner was very close to her. At that moment she answered her father’s question by these words: I will go with you.

  Fabrizio, hearing these words spoken so close to him, raised his eyes and met those of the girl. He was chiefly struck by the expression of melancholy in her face. “How much lovelier she is,” he thought, “since our meeting near Como! What an expression of deep feeling!… She’s really comparable to the Duchess—an angelic countenance if there ever was one!”

  Barbone, the wounded clerk, who had intentionally taken up his place beside the carriage, made a gesture to stop the three policemen leading Fabrizio and, walking behind the carriage in order to stand at the window where the General was sitting, said to him: “Since the prisoner committed an act of violence within the Citadel, by virtue of Article One fifty-seven of the regulations, would it not be a good idea to keep him in handcuffs for the next three days?”

  “Go to the Devil!” exclaimed the General, still greatly embarrassed by this arrest. He was determined to avoid provoking either the Duchess or Count Mosca; moreover, how would the Count react to this business? Actually the murder of a Giletti was a trifle, and only political intrigue had managed to turn it into a matter of any importance.

  During this brief exchange, Fabrizio stood proudly amid these police, showing his noblest expression; his delicate, clear-cut features and the scornful smile that flickered over his lips contrasted charmingly with the coarse appearance of the policemen around him. But all this formed, in some sense, merely the external part of his physiognomy; he was delighted by Clélia’s celestial beauty, and his eyes betrayed all his astonishment. She, deep in thought, had not remembered to withdraw her head from the carriage window; he greeted her with the most respectful half-smile; then, after a moment: “I believe, Signorina, that on another occasion, beside a lake, I have already had the honor of encountering you with a police accompaniment.”

  Clélia blushed and was so taken aback that she found no words with which to reply. “How noble his expression among these coarse beings!” she said to herself at the very moment Fabrizio spoke to her. The profound pity and, we might almost say, the tender feelings which overcame her deprived her of the presence of mind necessary to utter even the most ordinary phrase; she was conscious of her own silence and blushed still more deeply. At this moment the bolts of the great gate of the Citadel were violently drawn; had not His Excellency’s carriage been waiting at least a minute? The noise was so loud under this vaulted roof that even if Clélia had managed to answer something, Fabrizio could not have heard her words.

  Swept away by the horses, which had broken into a gallop as soon as they had crossed the drawbridge, Clélia said to herself: “How silly he must have thought me!” Then all at once she added: “Not just silly; he must have decided my soul was vile—he thought I didn’t answer his greeting because he’s a prisoner and I’m the Governor’s daughter.” This idea cast the girl into despair, for she had a lofty soul. “What makes my behavior altogether degrading,” she added, “is that before, when we met the first time, also with a police accompaniment, as he said, I was the one who was a captive, and he did me a service, and released me from a very awkward situation.… Yes, I must admit it, my behavior is inexcusable, both coarse and ungrateful. Alas! The poor young man! Now that he is in misfortune, everyone will turn against him. Didn’t he say to me back then: ‘Will you remember my name in Parma?’ How he must despise me now! It was so easy to say a kind word! Yes, I must confess, my behavior with him has been dreadful. Once, without his mother’s generous offer of a carriage, I would have had to follow those police on foot in the dust of the street or, what is even worse, to ride pillion behind one of those men; then it was my father who was arrested and I who was helpless! Yes, my case is complete. And how intensely such a man as he must have felt it! What a contrast between his noble countenance and my behavior! What nobility! What serenity! He looked just like a hero surrounded by his vile foes! Now I understand the Duchess’s passion: if he conducts himself this way in the midst of such distressing circumstances which may have dreadful consequences, what might he be like when his soul is happy!”

  The Governor’s carriage had remained over an hour and a half in the palace courtyard, and nonetheless, when the General returned from his visit to the Prince, Clélia did not feel he had been gone a moment too long. “What is His Highness’s will?” she asked.

  “On his lips the word was prison! And in his eyes it was death!”

  “Death! Good Heavens!” Clélia exclaimed.

  “All right, that’s enough of that!” the General retorted crossly; “I’m a fool to answer a child’s questions.”

  Meanwhile, Fabrizio was climbing the three hundred and eighty steps leading to the Farnese Tower, a “new” prison built on the platform of the great tower, at a prodigious height. Not once did he think, distinctly at least, of the great change which had just taken place in his destiny. “What a look she gave me!” he was saying to himself; “how much it expressed, what depths of pity! She seemed to be saying: life is such a web of misfortunes! Don’t suffer too much over what is happening to you—aren’t we put on earth to be wretched? How her lovely eyes lingered on mine, even when the horses were clattering under the arch!”

  Fabrizio completely forgot to be miserable.

  Clélia followed her father through several salons; at the beginning of the evening, no one yet knew of the great criminal’s arrest, though such was the name the courtiers, two hours later, bestowed on this poor rash young man.

  That evening people noticed more animation than usual in Clélia’s face; yet animation, the look of participating in her surroundings, was precisely what this lovely creature lacked.

  When people compared her beauty to the Duchess’s, it was chiefly this appearance of being quite unmoved, this way of being somehow above everything, which tipped the balance in her rival’s favor. In England, in France, nations of vanity, people would probably have been of an entirely different opinion. Clélia Conti was a young lady still a trifle too slender who might be compared to the lovely creations of Guido Reni; we shall no
t conceal the fact that, according to the canons of Greek beauty, her features were a little too marked; for instance the lips, though filled with the most touching grace, were a little too full.

  The admirable singularity of this countenance in which shone the naïve grace and the celestial stamp of the noblest soul was that, though of the rarest beauty, she bore no resemblance whatever to the heads of Greek statues. The Duchess, on the contrary, possessed a little too much of the known beauty of the ideal, and her truly Lombard head recalled the voluptuous smile and the tender melancholy of Leonardo’s beautiful Salomes. As much as the Duchess appeared brilliant, sparkling with wit and malice, passionately attaching herself, so to speak, to every subject the course of conversation brought before the eyes of her soul, just so much Clélia showed herself to be calm and slow to catch fire, whether out of disdain for what surrounded her, or out of regret for some absent chimera. People had long supposed that she would end by embracing the religious life. At twenty she was believed reluctant to appear at balls, and if she followed her father to them, it was only out of obedience and in order not to jeopardize the interests of his ambition.

  “So it will be impossible for me,” the General’s vulgar soul had mused, “Heaven having bestowed upon me for a daughter the loveliest and the most virtuous girl in our Sovereign’s territories, to derive any advantage whatever from that fact for the advancement of my fortunes! My life is too isolated, I have nothing but Clélia in the world, and what I need is a family which will support me in the world, which will give me entrée into a certain number of salons, where my merit and above all my talents at the Ministry might be presented as unchallengeable in any political circumstance whatever. And here is my lovely, dutiful, pious daughter, who turns to stone as soon as soon as any young man properly established at Court attempts to present his respects. Once such a suitor is shown the door, her character immediately becomes less somber, and I find her almost gay, until another suitor enters the lists. The handsomest man at Court, Count Baldi, presented himself and was refused; the richest man in His Highness’s territories, Marchese Crescenzi, followed him, and she claims he would make her wretched.

  “Unquestionably,” the General had decided on other occasions, “my daughter’s eyes are finer than the Duchess’s, especially since on certain rare occasions they are capable of a deeper expression; but when is it that this magnificent expression is to be seen? Never in a salon, where she might do it honor, but more likely on the promenade, alone with me, where she will let herself be touched, for example, by the wretchedness of some hideous lout. ’Preserve some remnant of that sublime gaze,’ I sometimes tell her, ‘for the salons we shall be visiting tonight.’ No such thing: if she deigns to follow me into society, her pure and noble countenance presents the rather haughty and anything but encouraging expression of passive obedience.” The General spared no efforts, as we see, to find himself a suitable son-in-law, but what he said was true.

  Courtiers, who have nothing to examine in their souls, notice everything: they had observed that it was chiefly on days when Clélia could not bring herself to emerge from her beloved reveries and feign an interest in things that the Duchess chose to linger beside her and attempt to make her talk. Clélia had ash-blond hair, affording a gentle contrast with her delicately tinted cheeks, which were usually a little too pale. Only the form of her forehead might have indicated to an attentive observer that this noble expression, this attitude so superior to the vulgar graces, derived from a profound lack of interest in everything vulgar. It was the absence and not the impossibility of interest in anything.

  Since her father had been Governor of the Citadel, Clélia considered herself to be happy, or at least exempt from distress, in her lofty apartment. The dreadful number of steps to be climbed in order to reach the Governor’s Palace, located on the esplanade of the great tower, discouraged tedious visits, and Clélia, for this quite material reason, enjoyed the freedom of a convent; here was almost the entire ideal of happiness which, in the future, she dreamed of seeking in the religious life. She was affected by a sort of horror at the mere thought of putting her beloved solitude and her innermost thoughts at the disposition of some young man, whom the title of husband would authorize to disturb this entire inner life. If by such solitude she did not attain to felicity, at least she had managed to avoid sensations that were only too painful.

  The day when Fabrizio was taken to the Fortress, the Duchess encountered Clélia at a party given by the Minister of the Interior, Count Zurla; everyone formed a circle around the two women: that evening, Clélia’s beauty outstripped the Duchess’s. The girl’s eyes had an expression so singular and so profound that they were almost indiscreet: there was pity, and also indignation and anger in her glances. The Duchess’s gaiety and her brilliant notions seemed to cast Clélia into moments of pain reaching the point of horror. “What will be the cries and groans of the poor woman,” she asked herself, “when she learns that her lover, this young man of such a great heart and so noble a physiognomy, has just been thrown into prison! And that look in the Sovereign’s eye which condemns him to death! O absolute power, when will you cease oppressing Italy! O base and venal souls! And I am a jailer’s daughter! Nor have I belied that noble position by deigning to answer Fabrizio! Though once he was my benefactor! What must he think of me at this moment, alone in his room with his little lamp as his only companion?” Repelled by this notion, Clélia cast glances of horror upon the splendid illumination of the salons of the Minister of the Interior.

  “Never,” people were saying in the circle of courtiers forming around the two fashionable beauties, attempting to join their conversation, “never have they spoken to each other so animatedly and yet so intimately. Has the Duchess, always eager to dispel the hatreds excited by the Prime Minister, devised some great match for Clélia?” This conjecture was based on a circumstance which had hitherto never presented itself to the Court’s observation: the girl’s eyes had more fire, and even, one might say, more passion than the lovely Duchess’s. The latter, for her part, was astonished and, one might say to her credit, delighted by the new graces she was discovering in her young solitary; for an hour she observed her with a pleasure rather rarely experienced at the sight of a rival. “But what can have happened?” the Duchess was wondering. “Never has Clélia been so lovely, and even so touching: can her heart have spoken?… But in that case, surely, it is a doomed love, there is a dark distress within this new animation.… But unhappy love keeps silent. Can it be that she is summoning an inconstant lover by thus shining in society?” And the Duchess carefully observed the young men who surrounded them. Nowhere did she find a singular expression, but everywhere a pronounced complacency. “Yet there is some miracle here,” the Duchess said to herself, stung at not being able to solve the mystery. “Where is Count Mosca, that subtle soul? No, I am not mistaken, Clélia is looking at me as attentively as if I were the object of an entirely new attention for her. Can this be the effect of some order given by her father, that vile courtier? I always believed her young soul to be noble and incapable of sinking to interests of money. Has General Fabio Conti some decisive request to make of the Count?”

  Around ten o’clock, a friend of the Duchess’s approached and whispered two words into her ear; she turned excessively pale; Clélia took her hand and ventured to squeeze it.

  “I thank you, and I understand you now. You have a noble soul!” said the Duchess, making an effort to control herself. She had scarcely the strength to utter these few words. She smiled a great deal at the mistress of the house, who stood up to accompany her to the door of the last salon: such honors were due only to Princesses of the blood and made, for the Duchess, a cruel contrast with her present position. So she smiled gaily at Countess Zurla, but in spite of desperate efforts did not succeed in speaking a single word to her.

  Clélia’s eyes filled with tears as she watched the Duchess pass through these salons crowded with all that was most brilliant in the society of
Parma. “What will become of this poor woman,” she asked herself, “when she finds herself alone in her carriage? It would be an indiscretion on my part to offer to accompany her! I dare not.… Yet how much consolation it would be for the poor prisoner, sitting in some wretched room with his little lamp, if he knew how greatly he is loved! What dreadful solitude it is in which he has been cast! And we—we are here in these brilliant salons: how horrible it is! Could there be some way of getting a message to him? Good God! That would mean betraying my father; his situation between the two factions is so delicate! What would become of him if he were to expose himself to the Duchess’s impassioned hatred, controlling as she does the Prime Minister’s will, and he the master of three-quarters of the Kingdom’s affairs!

  “On the other hand the Prince is forever concerned with all that happens in the Fortress, and he will hear no jokes on this subject; fear makes him cruel.… In any case, Fabrizio”—Clélia no longer said Signor del Dongo—“is much more to be pitied!… For him it is quite another matter than the danger of losing a lucrative position!… And the Duchess!… What a terrible passion love is!… And yet all these worldly deceivers speak of it as a source of happiness! Old women are pitied because they can no longer feel or inspire love!… I shall never forget what I have just seen; what a sudden transformation! How the Duchess’s eyes—so lovely, so radiant—turned dim and lifeless after the fatal message Marchese N—— came to give her!… Fabrizio must indeed be worthy of being loved!…”

  Amid these highly serious reflections which absorbed Clélia’s whole soul, the complimentary remarks which constantly surrounded her seemed even more distasteful to her than usual. To be rid of them, she went over to an open window half-veiled by a taffeta curtain; she was hoping no one would be so bold as to follow her into this sort of retreat. The window overlooked a little grove of orange-trees planted just below it: of course each winter it was necessary to put up a roof over the trees. Rapturously Clélia breathed in the perfume of these blossoms, and this pleasure seemed to restore a little peace to her soul.… “I thought he looked so noble,” she reflected; “but to inspire such feelings in a woman of such distinction!… She has had the glory of refusing the suit of the Prince, and had she deigned to accept it, she might have been queen of his territories.… My father says that the Sovereign’s passion went so far as to promise to marry her if he ever became free!… And this love of hers for Fabrizio has lasted so long! For it must have been five years ago that we met up with them on the shores of Lake Como!… Yes, it was five years ago,” she said to herself after a moment’s reflection. “I was struck by it at the time, when so many things passed unnoticed before my child’s eyes! How much those two ladies seemed to admire Fabrizio!…”