by Stendhal
“Just think what you are saying,” exclaimed the Duchess with that haggard look in her eyes which, after sobs, indicates that anger is overcoming tenderer feelings.
“He offers his life to avert Fabrizio’s doom, or to avenge it.”
“There is a certain circumstance,” the Duchess answered, “when I might accept the sacrifice of your life.” She stared at him attentively. A flash of joy lit up his face; he quickly rose to his feet and held his arms to Heaven. The Duchess went to find the paper hidden in the secret drawer of a great walnut cabinet. “Read this,” she said to Ferrante. It was the legacy to his children which we have mentioned. Tears and sobs kept Ferrante from reading to the end; he fell to his knees once more. “Give the paper back to me,” the Duchess said, and before his eyes she burned it in the candle. “My name,” she added, “must not appear should you be captured and executed, for this is a matter of life and death.”
“It is my joy to die for the defeat of the tyrant, and a much greater joy to die for you. Let this be understood, and kindly make no further mention of this detail concerning money; I should regard it as an insulting doubt.”
“If you are compromised, I may be as well,” the Duchess replied, “and Fabrizio after me: it is for that reason, and not because I doubt your courage, that I insist that the man who has rent my heart be poisoned and not stabbed. For the same reason that is so vital to me, I command you to do everything within your power to save your own life.”
“I shall carry out your will swiftly, faithfully, and discreetly. I foresee, Signora Duchess, that my own vengeance shall unite with yours: were it to be otherwise, I should still obey swiftly, faithfully, and discreetly. I may not succeed, yet I shall employ all the human strength I possess.”
“You must poison Fabrizio’s murderer.”
“I had guessed as much, and for the past twenty-seven months that I have been leading this abominable vagabond life, I have often conceived such an action on my own account.”
“If I am discovered and condemned, as an accomplice,” the Duchess continued in a proud tone of voice, “I do not want it to be imputed to me that I have seduced you. I command you not to attempt to see me again before the time of our revenge: there must be no question of putting the man to death before I have given you the signal to do so. His death at this moment, for instance, would be catastrophic for me, rather than useful. Most likely his death must not occur for several months, but it will occur. I insist that he die by poison, and I should prefer letting him live to seeing him shot down. For interests which I choose not to explain to you, I insist that your own life be preserved.”
Ferrante was delighted by this authoritative tone the Duchess was taking with him: his eyes glittered with joy. As we have said, he was dreadfully thin; but it was apparent that he had been extremely handsome in his early youth, and he imagined himself to be still what he had once been. “Am I mad?” he asked himself, “or can it be that the Duchess intends, on the day when I have given her this proof of my devotion, to make me the happiest of men? And indeed, why should this not be so? Am I not worth every bit as much as that doll of a Count Mosca, who when the moment came was unable to serve her in this matter, not even to enable Monsignore Fabrizio to escape?”
“I may require his death tomorrow,” the Duchess continued, still with the same expression of authority. “You know that huge reservoir at the corner of the palazzo, close by the hiding-place you have occasionally used; there is a secret means of causing all that water to flow into the street; indeed, that will be the signal of my revenge. You shall see, if you are in Parma, or you will hear, if you are living in the woods, that the great reservoir of the Palazzo Sanseverina has collapsed. Act at once, but by means of poison, and, above all, expose your own life as little as possible. No one must ever know that I am involved in this business.”
“Words are useless,” Ferrante replied with ill-concealed enthusiasm, “I have already decided upon the means I shall use. The life of this man becomes more odious to me than it was, since I shall not dare see you again so long as he lives. I shall await the signal of the reservoir’s collapse.” He bowed abruptly and left the room. The Duchess watched him leave. When he was in the next room she called him back.
“Ferrante!” she exclaimed. “You magnificent man!” He returned, as though impatient at being recalled; his face at this moment was sublime. “And your children?”
“Signora, they will be wealthier than I; you may perhaps grant them some little pension.”
“Here,” the Duchess said as she handed him a big olive-wood case, “here are all the diamonds I have left; they are worth fifty thousand francs.”
“Ah, Signora! You humiliate me!” said Ferrante, with a gesture of horror, and his expression changed completely.
“I shall never see you again before this deed is done: take this, I wish it,” the Duchess added with an arrogant expression that overwhelmed Ferrante. He put the case in his pocket and left, shutting the door behind him. Once again the Duchess called him back; he came into the room with an anxious expression: the Duchess was standing in the center of her salon; she flung herself into his arms. A moment later, Ferrante had almost fainted with happiness; the Duchess released herself from his embrace, and with her eyes indicated the door.
“There is the only man who has understood me,” she said to herself; “that is how Fabrizio would have acted, if he could have understood me.”
There were two traits in the Duchess’s character: what she wanted once she wanted forever; she never gave further thought to a decision once she had made it. In this regard she used to quote a remark of her first husband’s, the charming General Pietranera: “What insolence to myself!” he used to say. “Why should I suppose I have more sense today than when I made up my mind?”
From this moment, a sort of gaiety reappeared in the Duchess’s nature. Before the fatal decision, at each step that her mind had taken, at each new thing she saw, she had the feeling of her inferiority with regard to the Prince, of her weakness and her gullibility; the Prince, she believed, had pusillanimously deceived her, and Count Mosca, in accord with his courtier’s genius, however innocently, had furthered the Prince’s designs. Once her vengeance was determined, she felt her strength; each step her mind had taken gave her a certain happiness. I am inclined to think that the immoral delight Italians experience in taking revenge is a consequence of their power of imagination; people of other countries do not, strictly speaking, forgive; they forget.
The Duchess did not see Palla again until the last days of Fabrizio’s imprisonment. As the reader may have guessed, it was he who came up with the plan of escape: there existed in the forest, some two leagues from Sacca, a half-ruined medieval tower over a hundred feet high; before mentioning escape a second time to the Duchess, Ferrante begged her to send Ludovic, with picked men, to arrange a series of ladders around this tower. In the Duchess’s presence, he climbed up by means of these ladders, and came down with a simple knotted rope; he repeated the experiment three times, then he again explained his plan. Eight days later, Ludovic too was willing to climb down this old tower by a knotted rope: it was then that the Duchess communicated this plan to Fabrizio.
In the final days before this attempt, which might well lead to the prisoner’s death in more ways than one, the Duchess could find no moment of rest unless Ferrante was at her side; this man’s courage electrified her own; but it was evident that she must conceal this singular companionship from the Count. She feared not that he would object but that she would be distressed by his objections, which would have doubled her anxieties. What, to take as her most intimate adviser an acknowledged lunatic and a man under sentence of death as well! “And,” the Duchess added, speaking to herself, “a man who subsequently might do such strange things!” Ferrante happened to be in the Duchess’s salon just when the Count came to inform her of the conversation the Prince had had with Rassi; and when the Count had left, it was all she could do to keep Ferrante from pro
ceeding then and there to carry out a frightful plan! “I am strong now!” exclaimed this madman. “I no longer have any doubt as to the legitimacy of the deed!”
“But in the moment of rage which will inevitably follow, Fabrizio will be put to death!”
“But thereby he would be spared the danger of that terrible descent: it is possible, it is even easy,” he added, “but the young fellow lacks experience.”
The wedding of Marchese Crescenzi’s sister was celebrated, and it was at the party given on this occasion that the Duchess encountered Clélia and was able to speak to her without awakening suspicions among the fashionable onlookers. The Duchess herself handed Clélia the bundle of ropes in the garden, where these ladies had gone to take a breath of air. These ropes, woven with the greatest care, half of hemp and half of silk, with knots at regular intervals, were very slender and quite flexible; Ludovic had tested their strength, and, throughout their length, they could bear a load of eight hundredweight without breaking. They had been coiled up to form several bundles in the shape of a quarto volume; Clélia took it from the Duchess and promised that everything that was humanly possible would be accomplished to bring these bundles inside the Farnese Tower.
“Yet I fear the timidity of your nature; and furthermore,” the Duchess added politely, “what interest can you have in the fate of a man who is a stranger to you?”
“Signor del Dongo is in distress, and I promise you that he shall be saved by me!”
But the Duchess, relying very little upon the presence of mind of a young person of twenty, had taken other precautions she was determined not to share with the Governor’s daughter. As it was only natural to suppose, this Governor happened to be at the party given for the wedding of the Marchese Crescenzi’s sister. The Duchess said to herself that if she could administer a strong narcotic to him, it would initially be supposed that he was suffering an attack of apoplexy, and then instead of employing his own carriage to return him to the Fortress, she might, with a little skillful management, be able to suggest a better idea, that he be put into a litter which just happened to be in the house where the party was being given. Here there would also be a number of picked men dressed as servants for the party who in the general confusion would obligingly offer to carry the sick man to his lofty residence. These men, under Ludovic’s direction, would be carrying a considerable quantity of ropes, cunningly concealed under their uniforms. It is evident that the Duchess was quite out of her senses since she had seriously envisaged Fabrizio’s escape. The danger of this beloved being was too great for her soul, and in addition was lasting too long. By an excess of precautions she nearly caused this escape to fail, as we shall see. Everything proceeded according to her plan, with the one difference that the drug produced too powerful an effect; everyone believed, even those of the medical profession, that the General had had an apoplectic stroke.
Fortunately Clélia, in despair, had not the slightest suspicion of so criminal an attempt on the part of the Duchess. The confusion was such, at the moment that the litter containing the half-dead General entered the Fortress, that Ludovic and his men passed in without challenge; they were perfunctorily searched at the slave’s bridge. Once they had carried the General to his bed, they were taken to the kitchen quarters, where the servants entertained them lavishly; but after this meal, which was not over until nearly dawn, it was explained that prison rules required that they be locked in for the remainder of the night in the lower rooms of the palazzo; they would be released the following day by the Governor’s deputy.
These men had managed to hand Ludovic the ropes they had brought in with them, but Ludovic had great difficulty in catching Clélia’s attention, even for a moment. Finally, when she was passing from one room to the next, he showed her that he was leaving the bundles of rope in a dark corner of the first-floor salons. Clélia was greatly struck by this strange circumstance and immediately conceived the most dreadful suspicions. “Who are you?” she asked Ludovic. And on receiving his extremely ambiguous reply, she added: “I ought to have you arrested—you or those other men of yours have poisoned my father!… Confess this instant the nature of the poison you have used, so that the Fortress doctor can administer the proper antidotes—confess this instant, or else you and your accomplices will never get out of this Fortress!”
“There is no cause for the Signorina to be alarmed,” Ludovic replied with perfect ease and politeness; “there has been nothing like poison; someone has been careless enough to give the General a dose of laudanum, and it appears that the servant accused of this crime put a few too many drops in the glass; you have our eternal apologies, but the Signorina may be assured that, Heaven be thanked, there is no danger whatever: the Governor must be treated for having, by mistake, imbibed an excessive dose of laudanum; but I have the honor to repeat to the Signorina that the servant accused of the crime made no use of real poisons, as did Barbone when he sought to poison Monsignore Fabrizio. No one has attempted to avenge the danger incurred by Monsignore Fabrizio; the clumsy servant was merely entrusted with a bottle containing some laudanum, I can swear as much to the Signorina! Of course it must be understood that if I were to be officially questioned, I should deny everything.
“Moreover, if the Signorina should speak to anyone about laudanum and poison, even to the excellent Don Cesare, Fabrizio will be done to death by the Signorina’s own hand. For she renders impossible forever any and every attempt at escape; and the Signorina knows better than I that it is not with simple laudanum that the Monsignore was to be poisoned; she also knows that someone has granted only a month for the commission of this crime, and that it has already been over a week since the fatal order was received. Therefore, if the Signorina has me arrested, or merely speaks a word of the matter to Don Cesare or anyone else, she will be delaying our enterprises by much more than a month, and I have every reason to say that she will be killing Monsignore Fabrizio with her own hand.”
Clélia was terrified by Ludovic’s strange tranquillity. “So here I am having a perfectly ordinary conversation with my father’s poisoner,” she said to herself, “who is employing polite euphemisms in order to address me! And it is love which has brought me to all these crimes …!” Her remorse scarcely allowed her the strength to speak; she said to Ludovic: “I am going to lock you into this salon, and then I shall run to inform the doctor that it is merely laudanum; but good God! how shall I tell him that I have found this out? Afterward, I shall return to release you. But,” said Clélia, running back from the door, “did Fabrizio know anything about the laudanum?”
“Heavens no, Signorina, he would never have agreed to such an expedient. And besides, what would have been the use of such an unnecessary confidence? We are acting with the strictest discretion in order to save Monsignore’s life, who will be poisoned within the next three weeks; the order to do so has been given by someone whose wishes generally meet with no obstacle; and to tell the Signorina the whole truth, it is said that it was the terrible Chief Justice Rassi who received these instructions.”
Clélia fled, horror-stricken: she so relied on Don Cesare’s utter probity that, while taking certain precautions, she dared inform him that the General had been given laudanum and not something else. Without answering, without questioning, Don Cesare hurried to the doctor.
Clélia returned to the salon in which she had locked Ludovic, intending to question him further about the laudanum. She no longer found him there: he had managed to escape! On a table she saw a purse full of sequins, and a little box containing various kinds of poison. The sight of such things made her tremble. “Who is to say,” she thought, “that it is only laudanum that my father has been given, and that the Duchess has not sought to take revenge for Barbone’s attempt? Good God! Here I am in contact with my own father’s poisoners! And I have let them escape! And perhaps this very man, if put to the question, would have confessed to something more than laudanum!” Clélia fell to her knees, dissolved in tears, and prayed fervently to the M
adonna.
Meanwhile the Fortress doctor, surprised by what Don Cesare had told him, according to whom he had no more than laudanum to deal with, gave the suitable antidotes, which soon dispelled the most alarming symptoms. The General gradually came to himself as day was breaking. His first deed indicating consciousness was to hurl insults at the colonel who was his second in command and who had taken it upon himself to issue the simplest orders while the General was unconscious.
The Governor then went into a towering rage against a kitchenmaid who, as she served him a bowl of bouillon, happened to pronounce the word apoplexy.
“Am I of an age,” he shouted, “to have apoplectic fits? It is only my sworn enemies who can delight in spreading such rumors. Moreover, have I been bled, that slander itself should dare speak of apoplexy?”
Fabrizio, absorbed in the preparations for his escape, could not comprehend the strange noises that filled the Fortress at the moment the half-dead Governor was carried in. At first it occurred to him that his sentence had been changed, and that he was to be put to death. Then, seeing that no one appeared in his room, he decided that Clélia had been betrayed, that upon her return to the Fortress the ropes she was probably bringing had been taken from her, and that henceforth all his plans for escape were out of the question. At daybreak he saw an unknown man come into his room, who without a word set down a basket of fruit; under the fruit was hidden the following letter: