by Stendhal
Clélia noticed with delight that none of the young men who had spoken to her so ardently had dared approach her balcony. One of them, Marchese Crescenzi, had taken several steps toward her, then had stopped beside a gaming-table. “If only,” she was thinking, “if only under my little window in the Fortress palace, the only one that ever gets any shade, I had the view of some pretty orange-trees like these, my thoughts would not be so sad! But the only view I have is of the enormous stone blocks of the Farnese Tower.… Ah!” she exclaimed, making a sudden gesture, “maybe that’s where they’ve put him! I must lose no time in speaking to Don Cesare! He will be less severe than the General. My father will certainly tell me nothing when we return to the Fortress, but I’ll find out everything from Don Cesare.… I have some money; I could buy some orange-trees and plant them under the window of my eyrie, that would keep me from seeing that huge wall of the Farnese Tower. How much more hateful it will seem to me now that I know one of the prisoners it hides from the light of day! … Yes, that was only the third time I have seen him; once at Court, at the Prince’s birthday ball; today, surrounded by three policeman while that horrible Barbone was requesting handcuffs for him; and then the time at Lake Como.… That was five years ago; what a naughty boy he looked like then! What stares he gave the police, and what looks his aunt and his mother gave him! Surely there was some secret that day, something special between them; at the time it seemed to me that he too was afraid of the police …” Clélia shuddered. “But how ignorant I was! Doubtless, even back then, the Duchess had taken an interest in him.… How he made us laugh after a few moments, when those ladies, despite their evident concern, had become somewhat accustomed to a stranger’s presence! … And tonight I could not reply to his greeting!… O ignorance and timidity, how often you resemble all that is worst in us! And that’s how I behave when I’m over twenty!… I was quite right to long for the cloister; truly I am good for nothing but retirement from the world! Worthy daughter of a jailer! he will be saying. He scorns me, and as soon as he can write to the Duchess, he will mention my lack of concern, and the Duchess will think of me as a deceitful little girl; for finally tonight she was able to see me as full of sympathy for her troubles.”
Clélia realized that someone was approaching, apparently with the intention of taking a place beside her on the iron balcony of this window; she was annoyed, though she reproached herself for it; the daydreams from which she was about to be torn were not without their sweetness. “Here comes some importunate fellow, and I’ll give him a fine reception!” she thought. She turned her head with a haughty expression, when she glimpsed the timid countenance of the Archbishop approaching her balcony by tentative little movements. “This holy man has no manners,” Clélia mused; “why come and disturb a poor girl like me? My peace and quiet is all I have.” She was greeting the Archbishop respectfully, but with a certain remoteness, when the prelate said to her:
“Signorina, have you heard the dreadful news?”
The girl’s eyes had already assumed a very different expression; but in accordance with the instructions her father had repeated a hundred times, she answered with a look of ignorance, which the language of her eyes clearly contradicted: “I have heard nothing, Monsignore.”
“My First Grand Vicar, poor Fabrizio del Dongo, who was no more guilty of that ruffian Giletti’s death than I am, has been captured in Bologna, where he was living under the assumed name of Joseph Bossi; he has been imprisoned in your Citadel; he arrived there chained to the very carriage he was riding in. Some jailer or other named Barbone, who was pardoned not long ago after having murdered one of his own brothers, sought to inflict an act of personal violence upon Fabrizio; but my young friend is not the man to suffer an insult. He flung his wretched adversary to his knees, after which he himself was handcuffed and cast into a dungeon twenty feet underground.”
“Not handcuffs, no.”
“Ah, you’ve heard something!” the Archbishop exclaimed, and the old man’s features lost their intense expression of discouragement. “But right now someone might come over to this balcony and interrupt us: would you be so charitable as to see to it yourself that this pastoral ring of mine is put in Don Cesare’s hands?”
The girl had taken the ring, but had no idea where to put it to avoid losing it.
“Put it on your thumb,” said the Archbishop, and he placed it there himself. “May I count on you to convey this ring?”
“Yes, Monsignore.”
“And will you promise me to keep secret what I shall now tell you, even should you not find it easy to fulfill my request?”
“Certainly, Monsignore,” the girl replied, trembling as she saw the somber and serious expression the old man had suddenly assumed.… “Our worthy Archbishop,” she continued, “can give me no orders unworthy of himself and of me.”
“Tell Don Cesare that I commend my adopted son to his care: I know that the sbirri who captured him have not given him time to take his missal, and I beg Don Cesare to let him have his own, and if your good uncle will be so good as to send to the Archiepiscopal Palace tomorrow, I shall take it upon myself to replace the book he has given to Fabrizio. And I request Don Cesare to pass on as well the ring worn by this pretty hand to Signor del Dongo.”
The Archbishop was interrupted by General Fabio Conti, who was coming to collect his daughter for the carriage-ride home; there was a moment of conversation which was not unskillfully managed by the prelate. Without in any way alluding to the new prisoner, he succeeded in turning the conversation so that he was able to utter quite appropriately certain moral and political observations; for instance: There are moments of crisis in Court life which determine for long periods the existence of the greatest figures; it would be notably imprudent to transform into personal hatred the state of political distance which is frequently the very simple consequence of contrary positions. The Archbishop, letting himself be somewhat carried away by his deep distress caused by an unexpected arrest, went so far as to say that certainly it was correct to maintain the positions of one’s choice, but that it would be a quite gratuitous imprudence to bring down upon oneself furious hatreds that would be the consequence of certain deeds not to be forgotten.
Once the General was in his carriage, he said to his daughter:
“Now that is what I call threats—threats to a man of my position!”
No other words were exchanged between father and daughter for some twenty minutes.
On receiving the Archbishop’s pastoral ring, Clélia had certainly intended to speak to her father, once in the carriage, of the little favor the prelate had asked of her. But after the word threats, so angrily spoken, she was convinced that her father would intercept the commission; she covered the ring with her left hand and squeezed it hard. During the whole time it took to drive from the Ministry of the Interior to the Citadel, she wondered if it would be a crime on her part not to speak to her father. She was a very pious, very timid girl, and her heart, usually so tranquil, was beating with unaccustomed violence; but finally the Who goes there? of the sentry on the ramparts above the gate rang out at the approach of the carriage, before Clélia had found words likely to incline her father not to refuse, so fearful was she of being refused! As she climbed the three hundred and sixty steps to the Governor’s Palace, Clélia could think of nothing to say.
She hastened to speak to her uncle, who scolded her and refused to lend himself to anything.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Well!” exclaimed the General, catching sight of his brother Don Cesare, “here is the Duchess about to spend a hundred thousand scudi to make a fool of me and help our prisoner escape!”
But for the moment we are obliged to leave Fabrizio in his prison, at the very top of the Citadel of Parma; he is well guarded, and perhaps we shall find him, when we return to him, somewhat changed. Meanwhile we shall concern ourselves chiefly with the Court, where some extremely complicated plots, and above all the passions of an unhappy woman, will deter
mine his fate. As he climbed the three hundred and eighty steps to his prison in the Farnese Tower, under the Governor’s eyes, Fabrizio, who had so dreaded this moment, discovered that he had no time to brood over his misfortunes.
Returning home after Count Zurla’s party, the Duchess dismissed her serving-women with a gesture; then, collapsing fully dressed onto her bed: “Fabrizio is in the power of his enemies,” she exclaimed aloud, “and perhaps on my account they will poison him!”
How to describe the despairing moment which followed this account of the situation, in a woman so little swayed by reason, so much the slave of the present sensation, and, without confessing it to herself, so wildly in love with the young prisoner? There were inarticulate cries, transports of rage, convulsive movements, but not a single tear. She had dismissed her serving-women for the sake of concealment, expecting to burst into sobs as soon as she was alone, but the tears, that first relief of great sufferings, failed her completely. Rage, indignation, the sense of her inferiority when matched with the Prince, overwhelmingly ruled this proud spirit.
“Am I not humiliated enough!” she kept exclaiming. “I am being flouted and, worse still, Fabrizio’s life is in danger! And I have no way of seeking revenge! Stop there, my Prince! Kill me, if you like, you have the power; but afterward I shall have your life. But alas, poor Fabrizio, what good will that do you? How different from that day when I sought to leave Parma! And yet then I believed I was unhappy … what blindness! I was about to break all the habits of a pleasant life: alas, without knowing it, I was on the brink of an event which would decide my fate forever. If, by his miserable habits of a fawning courtier, the Count had not removed the phrase unjust proceedings from that fatal leter the Prince’s vanity granted me, we would be saved. I had had the luck (rather than the skill, it must be confessed) to involve his vanity with regard to his beloved Parma. When I threatened to leave is when I was free! Good God! What a slave I am now, stuck here in this wretched sewer, and Fabrizio chained in the Citadel, that prison which for so many great spirits has been the antechamber of death! And I can no longer restrain that tiger by the fear of seeing me leave his den!
“He is too clever not to realize I shall never leave behind that infamous tower where my heart is imprisoned. Now the man’s injured vanity can inspire him with the oddest notions; their strange cruelty will merely encourage his amazing conceit. If he brings up his old notions of stale gallantry, if he goes back to saying ‘Accept the homage of your slave, or else Fabrizio dies,’ then we have the old story of Judith.… Yes, but if that is no more than a suicide for me, it is a murder for Fabrizio; that idiot heir to the throne our Crown Prince and the vile executioner Rassi will see to it that Fabrizio is hanged as my accomplice.”
The Duchess screamed aloud: this apparently inescapable alternative tormented her wretched heart. Her troubled brain could find no other likelihood in the future. For ten whole minutes she struggled like a madwoman; finally a sleep of exhaustion replaced this horrible condition for a few moments; life was overwhelmed. Minutes later, she wakened with a start, and found herself sitting on her bed; she seemed to be seeing the Prince ordering Fabrizio’s execution in her very presence. What wild glances the Duchess cast around her! When at last she managed to persuade herself that she was seeing neither the Prince nor Fabrizio, she fell back on her bed and was on the point of losing consciousness. Her physical debility was such that she no longer felt strong enough to change her position. “Good God! If I could only die!” she murmured.… “But what cowardice! To abandon Fabrizio in his wretchedness! I am raving.… Come now, let us get back to reality, with a cool head let us consider the dreadful position in which I have thrust myself as though of my own free will. What a fatal mistake—to take up residence in the Court of an absolute monarch! A tyrant who knows every one of his victims! To whom their every glance seems a test of his power. Alas! Neither the Count nor I saw as much when I left Milan: I was thinking of the pleasures of an agreeable court life; something of lesser quality, it is true, but something in the style of the happy days of Prince Eugène!
“From a distance, we can have no notion of the powers of a despot who knows all his subjects by sight. The outer form of such despotism is the same as that of other governments: there are judges, for instance, but they are Rassis; the monster would find nothing remarkable about having his father hanged if the Prince were to order him to do it … he would call that his duty.… To seduce Rassi! What a wretch I am! There is no way for me to do it. What can I offer him? Maybe a hundred thousand francs! And they claim that, during the last dagger-thrust which Heaven’s wrath against this miserable country allowed him to escape, the Prince sent him a chest filled with ten thousand gold sequins! Moreover, what mere sum of money could seduce the man? This base soul, which has never seen anything but scorn in men’s eyes, now has the pleasure of seeing fear and even respect—he may become Minister of Police, and why not? Then three-quarters of the country’s inhabitants will be his vile toadies and will tremble before him as basely as he himself trembles before the Sovereign.
“Since I cannot flee this hateful place, I must at least be useful to Fabrizio while I am in it: what can I do for him living alone, in solitude and in despair? Come now, Forward, march, wretched woman! Do your duty, go into society, pretend you no longer have Fabrizio on your mind.… Pretend to forget you, beloved angel!…”
At this word, the Duchess dissolved in tears; at last she was able to weep. After an hour granted to this human weakness, she saw with a degree of consolation that her mind was beginning to clear. “If I had a magic carpet,” she said to herself, “if I could carry Fabrizio off from the Citadel and take refuge with him in some happy country out of reach of our pursuers. Paris, for instance. We would live, at first, on the twelve hundred francs his father’s notary allows me with such pleasing exactitude. I might gather together a hundred thousand francs from the ruins of my fortune!” The Duchess’s imagination reviewed with moments of inexpressible pleasure all the details of the life she would lead three hundred leagues from Parma. “There,” she said to herself, “he could enlist under some assumed name.… As an officer in some regiment of these brave French, young Valserra would soon win a reputation; at last he would be a happy man.”
These rosy images brought back her tears all over again, but this time they were gentle ones. Then happiness did exist somewhere! This last state persisted a long time; the poor woman was in terror of returning to the contemplation of the dreadful reality. Finally, as the dawn was beginning to mark the summit of the trees in her garden with a white line, she struggled violently to rouse herself. “In a few hours, I shall be on the battlefield; it will be a question of taking action; and if something vexing should happen to me, if the Prince should take it into his head to say something to me about Fabrizio, I am not sure of being able to keep my wits about me. Therefore I must, without wasting another moment, make plans.
“If I am declared a State criminal, Rassi will seize everything in this palazzo. On the first of this month the Count and I burned, as is the custom, all the papers the police might have turned to advantage, and he is the Minister of Police—that’s the joke. I have three diamonds worth something: tomorrow Fulgenzio, my old boatman from Grianta, will set off for Geneva, where he will put them in a safe place. If ever Fabrizio manages to escape (Lord, be good to me now!)”—here she crossed herself—“the Marchese del Dongo’s unspeakable cowardice will discover that it is a sin to send bread to a man pursued by a legitimate Prince, though then, at least, he will find my diamonds and he will have bread.
“Dismiss the Count.… Being alone with him, after what has just happened, is the one thing impossible for me. The poor man! He is not a bad sort, quite the contrary; he is merely weak. That common soul is not up to our level. Poor Fabrizio! If only you could be here with me for a moment, to talk over our dangers!
“The Count’s meticulous prudence will ruin all my plans, and besides I must not destroy him in my wake.… F
or what’s to prevent this tyrant’s vanity from throwing me into prison as well? For ‘conspiring.’ … What could be easier to prove? If he sent me to his Citadel and I could buy my way to a conversation with Fabrizio, if only for a moment, how bravely we would stride together toward death! But enough of such madness; his Rassi would advise him to get rid of me by poison; my presence in the streets, standing on a tumbril, might trouble the sensibility of his beloved Parmesans.… But what is this? More romantic dreams! Alas, such follies must be forgiven a poor woman whose actual fate is so sad! The truth of all this is that the Prince will never send me to death; but what could be easier for him than to throw me into prison and keep me there; he will secrete in some corner of my palazzo all sorts of damning papers, as was done in the case of that poor L——. Then three judges, not even too corrupt, for there will be what are called documentary proofs, and a dozen false witnesses will suffice. So I can be sentenced to death as a conspirator, and the Prince, in his infinite mercy, considering that in the past I have had the honor to be admitted to his Court, will commute my sentence to ten years in the Fortress. But as for me, not to betray that violent character which has led the Marchesa Raversi and my other enemies to say so many stupid things, I shall bravely take poison. At least the public will be kind enough to believe it; but I wager that Rassi will appear in my cell, gallantly bringing me, on the Prince’s behalf, a little flask of strychnine, or Perugia opium.