The Charterhouse of Parma

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by Stendhal


  While he was reading the writing on the sheet of paper, Fabrizio happened upon two or three ideas concerning the state of the unhappy man for whom he had come to seek the prayers of the faithful. Soon his thoughts came to him in abundance. Seeming to address the public, he was speaking only to the Marchesa. He ended his sermon a little sooner than was usual because, despite all his efforts, his tears overcame him to such a degree that he could no longer speak intelligibly. The best judges found this sermon singular but equal at least, with regard to pathos, to the famous one preached with the lighted candles. As for Clélia, no sooner had she heard the first ten lines of the prayer read aloud by Fabrizio than she considered it as a hideous crime to have been able to spend fourteen months without seeing him. Returning home, she went to bed in order to be able to think of Fabrizio in perfect freedom; and the next day, quite early, Fabrizio received a note in the following words:

  We rely upon your honor; find four bravi whose discretion you can count on and tomorrow, on the stroke of midnight at the Steccata, be waiting outside a little door at number 19 in the Strada San Paolo. Remember that you may be attacked, do not come alone.

  On recognizing this heavenly handwriting, Fabrizio fell to his knees and burst into tears. “At last!” he exclaimed. “After fourteen months and eight days! Farewell my sermons!”

  It would take too long to describe the various kinds of folly which beset, that day, the hearts of Fabrizio and Clélia. The little door indicated in the note was none other than that of the orangery of the Palazzo Crescenzi, and ten times during the day Fabrizio found a way to go look at it. He armed himself, and alone, just before midnight, walking fast, he was passing close to this door when to his inexpressible delight he heard a familiar voice say to him in almost a whisper: “Come in here, friend of my heart.”

  Cautiously Fabrizio entered and found himself in the orangery itself, but opposite a heavily barred window raised some three or four feet above the ground. The darkness was intense. Fabrizio had heard some sort of noise up in this window, and when he explored the grille with his hand, he felt a hand thrust through the bars to take his own and raise it to lips which gave it a kiss.

  “It is I,” said a beloved voice, “who have come here to tell you I love you, and to ask if you are willing to obey me.”

  The reader may imagine Fabrizio’s answer, his joy, and his amazement; after the first raptures, Clélia said to him: “I have made a vow to the Madonna, as you know, never to see you; that is why I am receiving you in this darkness. I want you to know that if you ever forced me to look at you in daylight, everything would be over between us. But first of all, I do not want you to preach before Anetta Marini, and do not imagine that I could have had so foolish an idea as to have an armchair brought into the house of God.”

  “My angel, I shall never preach again before anyone! I only preached in the hope of one day seeing you.”

  —

  Here we shall ask permission to pass, without saying a single word about them, over an interval of three years.

  At the period our story resumes, it had already been a long while since Count Mosca had returned to Parma as Prime Minister, and more powerful than ever.

  After these three years of divine happiness, Fabrizio’s soul underwent a caprice of affection which managed to change everything. The Marchesa had a charming little boy two years old, Sandrino, who was his mother’s joy; he was always at her side or in the Marchese Crescenzi’s lap; Fabrizio, on the contrary, almost never saw him; he could not bear the idea of the child’s loving another father. He conceived the notion of taking the boy away before his memories had grown quite distinct.

  In the long hours of each day when the Marchesa could not be with her lover, Sandrino’s presence consoled her; for we must confess a thing which will seem strange north of the Alps: despite her transgressions, she had remained faithful to her vow; she had promised the Madonna, it may be recalled, never to see Fabrizio; such had been her very words: consequently she received him only by night, and there was never any light in the apartment.

  But every evening, he was received by his beloved; and what is admirable, in the midst of a Court devoured by curiosity and boredom, Fabrizio’s precautions had been so skillfully calculated, that this amicizia, as it is called in Lombardy, was never even suspected. Such love was too intense for there not to have been quarrels; Clélia was too subject to jealousy, but almost invariably the quarrels proceeded from another cause. Fabrizio had taken advantage of some public ceremony in order to be in the same place as the Marchesa and to look at her; she then made some excuse to leave at once, and for a long while she banished her lover.

  Many people at the court of Parma were astonished that no intrigue should be known in connection with a woman so remarkable for her loveliness and for the loftiness of her soul; she roused passions which inspired any number of follies, and Fabrizio was frequently jealous.

  The good Archbishop Landriani had died long since; Fabrizio’s exemplary conduct and eloquence had caused him to be forgotten; his own older brother had died, and all the family property had reverted to him. It was at this time that he distributed annually, to the vicars and parish priests of his diocese, the hundred and some thousand francs which the Archbishopric of Parma brought him in.

  It would have been difficult to conceive of a life more honored, more honorable, and more useful than the one Fabrizio had created for himself, when everything was upset by this unfortunate caprice of affection.

  “Because of this vow which I respect and which nonetheless constitutes the bane of my existence, since you refuse to see me by daylight,” he said to Clélia one night, “I am obliged to live constantly alone, having no other entertainment but work; and even work fails me. Amidst this melancholy and austere way of spending the long hours of every day, one idea has come to me, which is indeed my torment and which I have vainly fought against for six months: my son will never love me; he never even hears my name. Raised amidst the agreeable luxuries of the Palazzo Crescenzi, he scarcely knows who I am. The rare occasions when I do see him, I think of his mother, of whose heavenly beauty he reminds me and whom I cannot look upon, and he must find my face a serious one, which for children means sad …”

  “Now,” said the Marchesa, “what is all this alarming speech of yours leading to?”

  “To having my son back; I want him to live with me; I want to see him every day, I want him to learn to love me; I want to love him myself, at my leisure. Since a doom unique in all the world deprives me of that happiness enjoyed by so many loving hearts, and since I do not spend my life with everything I love, at least I want to have at my side the being who recalls you to my heart, who replaces you, in some sense. Men and affairs weigh upon me in my obligatory solitude; you know that ambition has ever been an empty word for me, from the moment I had the happiness to be locked up by Barbone, and all that is not felt in the soul seems absurd to me in the melancholy which, in your absence, overwhelms me.”

  The reader can imagine the intense suffering with which her lover’s grief filled poor Clélia’s soul; her sadness was all the more intense in that she felt that Fabrizio was partly justified. She went so far as to wonder whether she ought to try breaking her vow; but she also felt that so worldly an arrangement would not put her conscience at peace, and perhaps an angry Heaven would punish her for this new crime.

  On the other hand, if she agreed to yield to Fabrizio’s entirely natural desire, if she tried not to hurt that affectionate soul she knew so well, and whose peace of mind her singular vow so strangely compromised, what likelihood was there of abducting the only son of one of the greatest noblemen in Italy without the deception being discovered? The Marchese Crescenzi would spend enormous sums, would himself lead the investigations, and sooner or later the abduction would be found out. There was only one means of warding off this danger, which was to send the boy far away—to Edinburgh, for instance, or to Paris; but to this a mother’s affection could never consent. The othe
r means suggested by Fabrizio, and indeed the more reasonable solution, had something sinister about it, and almost more alarming in this desperate mother’s eyes; they would have to feign the child’s illness, said Fabrizio; he would grow steadily worse, and finally die in the Marchese Crescenzi’s absence.

  A repugnance which, in Clélia, amounted to terror, caused a rupture which could not last.

  Clélia claimed that they must not tempt God; that this beloved son was the fruit of a crime, and that if they further roused the fire of Heaven, God would not fail to take the boy for his own. Fabrizio spoke once again of his strange destiny:

  “The station in life to which chance has called me,” he said to Clélia, “and my love compel me to an eternal solitude; I cannot, like most of my fellow men, enjoy the sweetness of an intimate society, since you will receive me only in a darkness, which reduces to no more than moments, actually, that part of my life I can spend with you …”

  Many tears were shed. Clélia fell ill, but she loved Fabrizio too greatly to refuse forever the terrible sacrifice he asked of her. To all appearances, Sandrino fell ill; the Marchese quickly summoned the most renowned physicians, and at this moment Clélia encountered a terrible difficulty she had not foreseen; she had to prevent this beloved child from taking any of the remedies prescribed by the doctors; it was no small matter.

  The child, kept in bed more than was good for his health, became really ill. How to explain to the physician the cause of this sickness? Torn by two conflicting interests both so dear to her, Clélia was on the verge of losing her mind. Must she consent to an apparent recovery, and thereby sacrifice the whole consequence of a long and painful deception? Fabrizio, for his part, could neither forgive himself for the violence with which he ruled his beloved’s heart nor renounce his plan. He had found a way to be admitted every night to the sick child’s room, which had produced a further complication. The Marchesa came to nurse her son, and on some occasions Fabrizio was compelled to see her by the light of the candles, which seemed to Clélia’s poor sick heart a terrible sin which presaged Sandrino’s death. It was in vain that the most renowned casuists, consulted as to obedience to a vow in a case where the fulfillment of that vow would obviously be harmful, had replied that the vow could not be regarded as broken in a criminal fashion, so long as the person bound by a promise to God dissolved that promise not for the idle pleasure of the senses but in order not to cause an obvious evil. Yet the Marchesa was in despair nonetheless, and Fabrizio saw the moment approaching when his strange idea would effect the deaths of both Clélia and his son.

  He had recourse to his intimate friend Count Mosca, who, old diplomat that he was, was touched by this love story, most of which was quite unknown to him.

  “I can arrange the Marchese’s absence for you for five or six days at least: when do you want this to happen?”

  Some time afterward, Fabrizio came to tell the Count that everything was in readiness for him to take advantage of such an absence.

  Two days later, as the Marchese was returning from one of his estates near Mantua, certain “brigands,” apparently hired to carry out a personal vendetta, abducted him though without in any way mistreating him, and placed him in a boat which took three days to make its way down the Po, covering the same route Fabrizio had taken so long ago after the famous Giletti business. On the fourth day, the brigands deposited the Marchese on a desert island in the Po, after being careful to rob him completely and to leave him no money or belongings of any value whatever. It took the Marchese two whole days to return to his palazzo in Parma; he found it draped with black, and his entire household in mourning.

  This abduction, so skillfully arranged, had a deadly consequence: Sandrino, established in secret in a large and splendid house where the Marchesa came to see him almost every day, died after several months. Clélia believed she had been stricken by a just punishment, for having been unfaithful to her vow to the Madonna: so often had she seen Fabrizio by candlelight, and even twice in broad daylight, and with such tender raptures during Sandrino’s illness! She survived this beloved son no more than a few months herself, though she had the sweetness of dying in her lover’s arms.

  Fabrizio was too much in love, and too much a believer, to resort to suicide; he hoped to meet Clélia again in a better world, but he was too intelligent not to feel that he had a great deal for which to atone.

  A few days after Clélia’s death, he signed several settlements by which he assured a pension of a thousand francs to each of his servants, and kept a similar pension for himself; he gave estates worth an income of nearly a hundred thousand lire to Countess Mosca; a similar sum to the Marchesa del Dongo, his mother; and whatever might remain of the paternal fortune to one of his sisters who had married impecuniously. The following day, after having sent to the proper authorities his resignation of the Archbishopric and of all the positions which the favor of Ernesto V and the friendship of his Prime Minister had successively heaped upon him, he retired to the Charterhouse of Parma, situated in the woods bordering the Po, some two leagues from Sacca.

  Countess Mosca had strongly approved, at the time, her husband’s resumption of his Ministry, but she herself had never been willing to set foot within the State of Ernesto V. She held Court at Vignano, a quarter of a league from Casalmaggiore, on the left bank of the Po, and consequently within Austrian territory. In that magnificent Palace of Vignano, which the Count had built for her, she was at home on Thursdays to all the high society of Parma, and every day to her many friends. Fabrizio would not have let a day pass without coming to Vignano. The Countess, in a word, united all the appearances of happiness, but she lived only a very short time after Fabrizio, whom she adored and who spent but one year in his Charterhouse.

  The prisons of Parma were empty, the Count enormously rich, Ernesto V adored by his subjects, who compared his government to that of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany.

  TO THE HAPPY FEW

  NOTES

  1 Parma: Stendhal probably selected Parma as the site of his novel’s chief action because he had found here the initial donnée of his narrative in an ancient chronicle concerning the origins of the greatness of the Farnese family which had ruled over Parma since the sixteenth century. Further, Stendhal had visited the city in 1811 and again in 1814; he knew it well enough to speak of it readily, little enough to feel hampered by any strict accuracy in describing its topographical details. Then, too, Parma was the city of Correggio, perhaps Stendhal’s favorite painter; in his letter of thanks to Balzac he observes: “The entire character of the Duchess Sanseverina is copied from Correggio (that is, produces on my soul the same effect as Correggio).”

  2 Gros: Antoine-Jean, Baron Gros, 1771–1835. A pupil of David, introduced in 1793 by Josephine into Napoleon’s entourage; he was made a baron by Charles X.

  3 Lieutenant Robert: Though he appears only in the novel’s first pages, this character is of great importance, since Stendhal has on three or four occasions indicated that he was Fabrizio’s real father. All of Stendhal’s young heroes have a similarly questionable paternity, perhaps a logical consequence of Stendhal’s resentment of his own father.

  4 Italian Legion: In 1797 Napoleon created an Italian Legion, consisting of some seven hundred infantry and three hundred cavalry.

  5 Directory: The Directory succeeded the Convention in October 1795 and governed until Napoleon seized power in November 1799.

  6 Marengo: In the Battle of Marengo (in Piedmont, Northern Italy) on June 14, 1800, Napoleon won a decisive victory over the Austrians.

  7 bocche di Cattaro: An inlet on the Adriatic coast south of Dubrovnik.

  8 Many serious authors: Stendhal’s ironic reference to Sterne’s procedure in Tristram Shandy.

  9 Beresina: During the retreat from Moscow (1813), Napoleon’s armies were attacked while crossing the River Beresina; some ninety thousand men were lost during this retreat. Stendhal himself, bearing dispatches from Josephine, was one of the survivors.

&
nbsp; 10 Gulf of Juan: Having escaped from Elba, Napoleon and some seven hundred French troops had landed on the southern French coast on March 1, and would reach Paris within three weeks.

  11 famous poet Monti: Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828). A classicizing poet who in the lines Fabrizio paraphrases laments the death of Mascheroni, who had welcomed the Napoleonic liberation of Italy.

  12 Piedmont: Piedmont was part of the French Empire, and its male inhabitants subject to conscription.

  13 napoleon: A gold coin worth twenty francs.

  14 Fénelon: François de La Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715), theologian, wrote a celebrated pedagogical romance Télémaque in 1699 for the grandson of Louis XIV, of whom he had been appointed tutor; in 1695, he was made Archbishop of Cambrai.

  15 Silvio Pellico (1789–1854): His account of his years of imprisonment by the Austrians, My Prisons, was published in 1832.

  16 Signor Andryane: Author of another account of imprisonment under the Austrians, Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in the Spielberg. The Spielberg was an Austrian fortress-prison in Brünn (Brno).

  17 Bayard: Chevalier de Bayard (c. 1473–1524), “le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche” (the fearless and blameless knight).

  18 Pietragrua: Stendhal lists names of women he had known in Milan, specifically Angela Pietragrua with whom he had been in love.

  19 Constitutionnel: A French newspaper representing Liberal opinion and banned throughout Austrian territory.

  20 scagliola: inlaid marble.

  21 Joseph II (1741–1790): King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor.

  22 Lafayette: Stendhal had met Lafayette on several occasions and was impressed by his “noble affability.”

  23 Canoness: An honorary title conferred on lay persons by certain religious communities.

  24 Monitore (Moniteur): A Liberal French daily founded in 1789.

 

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