The Charterhouse of Parma

by Stendhal

  From that first day, she knew the sonnet by heart; she sang it, leaning on her window-sill, in front of the now blank window where she had so often seen a little opening appear in the shutter. That shutter had been taken down to be placed on the judge’s desk in the courtroom, to serve as evidence in an absurd trial which Rassi was instituting against Fabrizio, now accused of the crime of having escaped or, as the Chief Justice himself said with a smile, of having removed himself from the clemency of a magnanimous prince!

  Each of Clélia’s actions had been for her the object of intense remorse, and now that she was unhappy, such remorse was all the more intense. She sought to ease her self-reproach by recalling her vow never to see Fabrizio again, made to the Madonna at the time of the General’s semi-poisoning and subsequently renewed every day.

  Her father had been made ill by Fabrizio’s escape, and furthermore had come very near to losing his position when the Prince, in his rage, had cashiered all the jailers of the Farnese Tower and sent them as prisoners to the city jail. The General had been saved from this fate in part by the intercession of Count Mosca, who preferred to see him shut up on top of his Fortress rather than as an active rival maneuvering in Court circles.

  It was during the fifteen days of uncertainty concerning the disgrace of General Fabio Conti, who was really ill, that Clélia found the courage to perform the sacrifice she had announced to Fabrizio. She had had the wit to fall ill on the day of the general rejoicings, which was also the day of the prisoner’s escape, as the reader perhaps remembers; she was ill the next day as well, and, in a word, was so skillful in her behavior that with the exception of the jailer Grillo, whose special duty it was to guard Fabrizio, no one had any suspicion as to her complicity, and Grillo held his tongue.

  But though Clélia had no further anxieties in this regard, she was still cruelly wracked by her just remorse: “What argument in the world,” she would ask herself, “can diminish the crime of a daughter who betrays her father?”

  One evening, after a day spent almost entirely in the chapel and in tears, she begged her uncle Don Cesare to accompany her to the bedside of the General, whose fits of rage terrified her all the more in that any and every topic produced new imprecations against Fabrizio, that abominable traitor.

  Once in her father’s presence, she summoned the courage to tell him that if she had always refused to grant her hand to the Marchese Crescenzi, it was because she felt no inclination toward him, and that she was certain to find no happiness in such a union. At these words, the General flew into a rage, and Clélia had some difficulty continuing with what she had to say. She added that if her father, tempted by the Marchese’s great fortune, believed himself bound to give her strict orders to marry this man, she was prepared to obey. The General was quite amazed by this conclusion, which he was far from expecting; yet he managed to rejoice over it. “So,” he remarked to his brother, “I shall not be reduced to second-floor lodgings, should that scoundrel Fabrizio make me lose my place by his wicked actions.”

  Count Mosca did not fail to show himself utterly scandalized by the escape of that scoundrel Fabrizio, and repeated at every opportunity the phrase coined by Rassi concerning the base conduct of this entirely vulgar young man, as it turned out, who had removed himself from the Prince’s clemency. This witty phrase, consecrated by the best society, found no echo among the populace. Left to their own good sense, even while believing Fabrizio entirely culpable, the people of Parma admired the resolve it must have taken to have flung oneself over so high a wall. Not one creature of the Court admired such courage. As for the police, so greatly humiliated by this escape, they had officially discovered that a troop of twenty soldiers in the pay of the Duchess—a cruelly ungrateful woman whose name was no longer uttered save with a sigh—had provided Fabrizio with four ladders tied together, each one forty-five feet long: having lowered a rope tied to the ladders, Fabrizio had had no more than the extremely vulgar merit of pulling the ladders up to his cell. A few Liberals known for their imprudence, among them the physician C——, an agent paid directly by the Prince, added (though compromising themselves by doing so) that these wretched police officers had had the barbarity to execute eight of the unfortunate soldiers who had facilitated that ingrate Fabrizio’s escape. He was then blamed even by the true Liberals for having caused, by his rashness, the death of eight poor soldiers. It is thus that petty despotisms reduce to nothing the value of public opinion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Amidst this general uproar, only Archbishop Landriani appeared loyal to his young friend’s cause; he ventured to repeat, even at the Princess’s court, the legal maxim according to which, in every trial, one must keep an ear free of all prejudice in order to hear the arguments of an absent party.

  The day after Fabrizio’s escape, several persons had received a clumsy sonnet celebrating this flight as one of the finest actions of the age, and comparing Fabrizio to an angel alighting on earth with outspread wings. The following evening, all Parma was repeating a sublime poem. This was Fabrizio’s monologue as he slid down the rope, passing judgments on the various incidents of his life. This sonnet gave him an eminence in public opinion on account of two magnificent verses, in which every connoisseur recognized the style of Ferrante Palla.

  But here I must seek an epic style: where else might I find colors to limn the torrents of indignation which suddenly flooded all respectable hearts when they learned of the dreadful insolence of that illumination of the villa at Sacca? There was but a single outcry against the Duchess; even the true Liberals declared that this action cruelly compromised the wretched suspects being held in the various prisons of the realm, and needlessly exasperated the Sovereign’s heart. Count Mosca declared that the Duchess’s old friends had but one recourse, which was to forget her. The chorus of execration was therefore unanimous: a stranger passing through the city would have been struck by the vehemence of public opinion. But in this country where people know how to appreciate the pleasures of revenge, the illumination at Sacca and the splendid celebration given on the grounds to some six thousand peasants enjoyed an enormous success. Everyone in Parma was talking about how the Duchess had distributed a thousand sequins to her people; this accounted for the somewhat harsh welcome given to the thirty or so officers the police had been so foolish as to send to this little village, thirty-six hours after the sublime evening and the general intoxication which had followed it. The officers, welcomed by a shower of stones, had taken to their heels, and two of them, fallen from their horses, had been thrown into the Po.

  As for the bursting of the great reservoir of the Palazzo Sanseverina, it had gone virtually unnoticed: it was during the night that several streets had been more or less flooded; the next day one would have said that it had rained. Ludovic had been careful to break the panes in one of the palazzo windows, to suggest that robbers had broken in.

  A little ladder had even been discovered. Only Count Mosca recognized his friend’s genius.

  Fabrizio was quite determined to return to Parma as soon as he could; he entrusted Ludovic with a long letter to the Archbishop, and this loyal servant returned to post at the first Piedmontese village, Sannazzaro to the west of Pavia, a Latin epistle which the worthy prelate addressed to his young protégé. We shall add one detail which, like several others no doubt, will seem tedious in countries where there is no longer a need for precautions. The name of Fabrizio del Dongo was never written; all the letters sent to him were addressed to Ludovic San Micheli, at Locarno in Switzerland, or in Belgirate in Piedmont. The envelope was made of coarse paper, the seal clumsily applied, the address barely legible, and occasionally embellished with directions worthy of a cook; all the letters were dated from Naples, six days before the actual date.

  From the Piedmontese village of Sannazaro, near Pavia, Ludovic lost no time in returning to Parma: he was entrusted with a mission which Fabrizio regarded as of the greatest importance, nothing less than getting into Clélia Conti’s hand
s a silk handkerchief on which was printed a sonnet by Petrarch. It is true that one word of this sonnet had been altered: Clélia found it on her table two days after having received the thanks of the Marchese Crescenzi, who proclaimed himself the happiest of men, and it is unnecessary to say what impression this mark of an ever-growing remembrance produced upon her heart.

  Ludovic was to try to obtain every possible detail concerning what was happening in the Fortress. It was he who gave Fabrizio the sad news that the Marchese Crescenzi’s marriage now seemed to be definitely settled; almost no day passed without some sort of party given for Clélia inside the Fortress. A decisive proof of the marriage was that the inordinately rich and consequently avaricious Marchese, as is the custom among the wealthy class of northern Italy, was making vast preparations, though he was marrying a girl without dowry. It is true that General Fabio Conti’s vanity, outraged by this observation, the first to occur to all his compatriots, had just purchased an estate worth over 300,000 francs, and this estate he had paid for, though he was virtually penniless, in ready money, apparently out of the Marchese’s funds. Then the General had declared that he was giving this estate as a wedding-present to his daughter. But the charges for the documents and other matters, amounting to over 12,000 francs, seemed an absurd expense to the Marchese Crescenzi, an eminently logical person. For his part he was having woven in Lyons a set of magnificent tapestries in carefully matched colors calculated to delight the eye, designed by the famous Bolognese painter Pallagi. These tapestries, each of which contained some aspect of the armorial bearings of the Crescenzis, who as the world well knows are descended from the celebrated Crescentius, the Roman Consul in the year 985, were to furnish the seventeen salons forming the ground floor of the Marchese’s palace. The tapestries, clocks, and lusters sent to Parma cost over 350,000 francs; the cost of the new mirrors, added to those the house already possessed, amounted to two hundred thousand francs. With the exception of two salons, the work of the famous Parmigianino, the greatest painter of the region after the divine Correggio, every room on the first and second floor was now occupied by celebrated painters from Florence, Rome, and Milan, who were decorating them with frescoes throughout. Fokelberg, the great Swedish sculptor, Tenerani from Rome, and Marchesi from Milan had been working for a year on ten bas-reliefs representing as many feats of Crescentius, that truly great man. Most of the ceilings, thus frescoed, also made some allusion to his life. Particularly admired was the ceiling on which Hayez, from Milan, had represented Crescentius received in the Elysian Fields by Francesco Sforza, Lorenzo the Magnificent, King Robert, the Tribune Cola di Rienzi, Machiavelli, Dante, and the other great figures of the Middle Ages. Admiration for these distinguished spirits was taken as a witty epigram at the expense of those presently in power.

  All these magnificent details monopolized the attention of the nobility and the bourgeois of Parma, and pierced our hero’s heart when he read about them, described with naïve admiration, in a long letter of over twenty pages which Ludovic had dictated to a customs-officer in Casalmaggiore.

  “And I, poor wretch that I am!” Fabrizio kept saying to himself. “With a yearly income of no more than four thousand lire! What an impertinence for me to dare aspire to Clélia Conti, for whom all these miracles are being wrought!”

  Only one item in Ludovic’s long letter, though this one written in his own wretched hand, informed his master that he had encountered that evening, and in the condition of a fugitive, poor Grillo his former jailer, who had been imprisoned, and then released. This man had asked for the charity of a sequin, and Ludovic had given him four in the Duchess’s name. A dozen of the former jailers, recently liberated, were preparing a little reception with knives (un trattamento di coltellate) to the new jailers their successors, should they ever manage to encounter them outside the Fortress. Grillo had said that serenades were given almost daily at the Fortress, that Signorina Clélia was very pale, frequently ill, and other things of this kind. This absurd phrase caused Ludovic to receive, by return post, orders to return to Locarno. He did so, and the details he gave in person were even more melancholy for Fabrizio.

  One may judge of the latter’s consideration for the poor Duchess; he would have suffered a thousand deaths rather than utter Clélia Conti’s name in her hearing. The Duchess held Parma in abhorrence; while for Fabrizio, all that betokened this city was at once sublime and touching.

  Less than ever had the Duchess forgotten her revenge; she had been so happy before the incident of Giletti’s death! And now what was her fate—she was living in expectation of a dreadful event of which she was determined not to utter a word to Fabrizio, she who once, during her transactions with Ferrante, had supposed she would delight Fabrizio by telling him that one day he would be avenged.

  One can now form some notion of the amenity of Fabrizio’s conversations with the Duchess: a gloomy silence reigned between them almost all the time. To increase the pleasures of their intercourse, the Duchess had yielded to the temptation of playing a little trick on this all too beloved nephew. The Count was writing her almost daily; apparently he was sending couriers as in the time of their amours, for his letters invariably bore the stamp of some Swiss canton or other. The poor man was tormenting his wits to avoid speaking too openly of his feelings, and attempting to make his letters entertaining; they were scarcely glanced at by a distracted pair of eyes. What avails, alas! the faithfulness of an esteemed lover, when one’s heart is riven by the coldness of the man one prefers to him?

  In two months’ time the Duchess answered him only once, and that was to ask him to determine the Princess’s susceptibilities and to see whether, despite the insolence of the fireworks display, a letter from the Duchess would be well received. The letter he was to deliver, if he judged it suitable, asked the Princess for the position of Lord-in-Waiting, which had fallen vacant recently, for the Marchese Crescenzi, and requested that it be awarded him in consideration of his marriage. The Duchess’s letter was a masterpiece of the tenderest and the most eloquent respect; this courtly style did not admit the slightest word of which any consequence, however remote, might not be agreeable to the Princess. Hence the reply breathed a tender friendship to which separation was a torment.

  My son and I, the Princess told her, have not spent a single tolerable evening since your abrupt departure. Does my dear Duchess no longer remember that it is she who effected my participation in choosing the officers of my household? Does she then believe herself obliged to give me reasons for the Marchese’s position, as if any desire of hers were not the best of reasons for me? The Marchese will have the position, if I have any say in the matter; and there will always be a place in my heart, a prominent one, for my beloved Duchess. My son employs just the same expressions, however strong they may sound from the lips of a great boy of twenty-one, and asks you for samples of the minerals of the Val d’Orta, near Belgirate. You may address your letters, frequent as I hope they will be, to the Count, who is still vexed with you and whom I particularly cherish on account of such sentiments. The Archbishop too has remained faithful to you. We all hope to see you again one of these days: remember that it is your duty. The Marchesa Ghisleri, my Mistress of the Robes, is preparing to leave this world for a better one: the poor woman has given me a great deal of trouble; she is giving me more by departing so inopportunely; her illness reminds me of the name I would have put with such pleasure where hers is now, if only I could have obtained that sacrifice of independence from the one woman who, by leaving us, has taken with her all the joy of my little court, and so on.

  Hence it was with the awareness of having sought to hasten, as much as it lay within her power, the wedding which was filling Fabrizio with despair that the Duchess saw him every day. Sometimes, therefore, they would spend four or five hours sailing around the lake, without exchanging a single word. Fabrizio’s good will was complete, but he was thinking of other things, and his naïve and simple soul afforded him nothing to say. The Duchess saw this
, and it was agony to her.

  We have forgotten to mention, in its proper place, that the Duchess had taken a house in Belgirate, a charming village which keeps the promise of its name (i.e., a fine turn around the lake). From the French windows of her salon, the Duchess could step out into her boat, quite an ordinary one which she had rented and for which four oarsmen would have sufficed; she hired a dozen, and managed to include a man from each of the villages around Belgirate. The third or fourth time she found herself in the middle of the lake with all these carefully selected men, she ordered them to stop rowing. “I regard you all as my friends,” she told them, “and I want to entrust you with a secret. My nephew Fabrizio has escaped from prison; and perhaps, treacherously, an attempt will be made to recapture him, right here on your lake, that country of freedom. Keep your ears cocked, and inform me of anything you happen to learn. I authorize you to enter my rooms by day or night.”

  The oarsmen responded enthusiastically; the Duchess knew how to make herself loved. But she did not believe there was any question of recapturing Fabrizio: it was for herself that she was taking all these precautions, and before the fatal order to open the reservoir of the Palazzo Sanseverina, she would not have dreamed of such a thing.