The Charterhouse of Parma (5 page)

Fabrizio’s elder brother, the Marchesino Ascanio, attempted to join the ladies in their excursions, but his aunt splashed water on his powdered hair, and each day had some new trick to play on his solemnity. Finally the merry group who dared no laugh in his presence was spared the sight of his fat, pale face. They realized he was spying for his father the Marchese, a severe and constantly raging despot who had to be placated ever since his obligatory resignation.

Ascanio swore to be revenged on Fabrizio.

There was a storm during which the boat was in some danger; although there was so little money, the two boatmen were paid to say nothing to the Marchese, who had already evidenced a great deal of bad temper at their taking his two daughters along. A second storm came up, unexpectedly severe on this lovely lake: squalls of wind suddenly emerged from opposite directions out of two mountain gorges,
and waged battle over the waters. Despite the peals of thunder, the Countess wanted to disembark in the midst of the tempest; she claimed that, standing on a solitary crag about as high as a little room in the middle of the lake, she could witness a singular spectacle, assailed on all sides by the raging waves; but as she sprang out of the boat she fell into the water. Fabrizio instantly plunged in after her, and both were swept some distance away. Doubtless it is no pleasure to drown, yet for the time being boredom, taken by surprise, was banished from the feudal redoubt. The Countess was filled with enthusiasm for the Abbé Blanès, his primitive character and his astrological lore. What little money remained to her after the purchase of the boat had been used to buy a small second-hand telescope, and almost every evening, with her nieces and Fabrizio, she would climb up to the platform of one of the castle’s Gothic towers. Fabrizio was the most knowledgeable of the party, and many pleasant hours were spent on those heights, far from prying eyes.

It must be confessed that there were days when the Countess spoke no word to a living soul; she was seen strolling under the tall chestnut-trees, absorbed in her gloomy reveries; she had too active a mind not to feel, occasionally, the tedium which comes from a failure to exchange ideas. But the following day she was as gay as she had been the day before: it was the grievances of her sister-in-law the Marchesa which produced such dark impressions on this naturally high-spirited creature. “Then must we waste what is left of our youth in this grim castle?” the Marchesa exclaimed.

Before the Countess’s arrival, she had not had the courage to avow such regrets.

This was how they lived through the winter of 1814. Twice, despite her impecuniosity, the Marchesa went to spend a few days in Milan; once to see a sublime ballet by Viganò, given at La Scala, and the Marchese made no objection to his wife’s being accompanied by his sister-in-law. The two women went together to cash the quarterly check of the Countess’s little pension, whereupon it was the French general’s poor widow who loaned a few sequins to the wealthy Marchesa del Dongo. These excursions were delightful; old friends were invited to dinner, and the company found consolation in laughing at
everything, like children. This Italian gaiety, filled with
brio
and impulse, conjured away the melancholy which the glares of the Marchese and the Marchesino had spread around themselves at Grianta. Fabrizio, just sixteen, admirably represented the head of the house.

On March 7, 1815, the ladies had returned two days since from an agreeable little trip to Milan; they were strolling down the fine avenue of plane-trees recently extended to the water’s edge when a boat appeared from the direction of Como, making strange signals. One of the Marchese’s agents jumped out onto the embankment: Napoléon had just landed at the
Gulf of Juan
. Europe was sufficiently disingenuous to be surprised by this event, which failed to surprise the Marchese del Dongo; he wrote his sovereign a heartfelt letter, offering his talents and several millions, and informing him once again that his ministers were Jacobins in league with the ringleaders in Paris.

On March 8, at six in the morning, the Marchese, wearing all his orders, was having his elder son dictate the draft of a third political dispatch and solemnly transcribing the text in his fine painstaking hand on paper watermarked with the sovereign’s effigy. At the same moment Fabrizio was shown into the Countess Pietranera’s apartment.

“I’m leaving,” he told her. “I shall join the Emperor, who is the King of Italy as well, and such a good friend to your husband! I shall travel by way of Switzerland. Tonight, at Menaggio, my friend Vasi, who sells barometers, has given me his passport; now you must give me a few napoleons, for I have only two; if you cannot, I shall go on foot.”

The Countess wept for joy and anxiety. “Good God! Whatever made you think of such a thing!” she exclaimed, seizing his hands. She stood up and took out of her linen-closet, where it was carefully hidden, a little pearl-embroidered purse; this was all she possessed in the world. “Take it,” she told Fabrizio, “but in the name of God, don’t get yourself killed. What will your unhappy mother and I do if something should happen to you? As for Napoléon’s success, my poor boy, it is impossible; our gentlemen will be sure to do away with him. Didn’t you hear, last week, in Milan, the story of twenty-three assassination plots, each more cunning than the next, from which he escaped only by a miracle? And at the time he was omnipotent! And you’ve seen that our enemies haven’t lacked the will to destroy him; France counted for
nothing once he was gone.” It was with the accents of the deepest feeling that the Countess described Napoléon’s future destiny to Fabrizio. “By allowing you to join him, I am sacrificing what is dearest to me in the world,” she said. Fabrizio’s eyes filled with tears as he embraced the Countess, but his determination to leave was not shaken for a moment. He eagerly explained to this beloved friend the reasons which impelled him, and which we take the liberty of finding slightly absurd.

“Yesterday evening, at seven minutes to six, we were strolling, as you know, down the avenue of plane-trees to the lake shore above Casa Sommariva, and heading south. That was when I first saw the boat coming from Como, bringing such great news. As I was watching the boat without a thought of the Emperor, and simply envying the lot of those permitted to travel, I was suddenly seized by a powerful emotion. The boat landed, the agent whispered to my father, who turned white and took us aside to announce the
terrible news
. I turned toward the lake with no purpose but to conceal the tears of joy that filled my eyes. Suddenly, high in the sky to my right, I glimpsed an eagle—Napoléon’s bird; it was soaring majestically toward Switzerland, and consequently toward Paris. And I too, I then resolved, would traverse Switzerland with the speed of an eagle, in order to offer that great man little enough but all I have: whatever strength resides in my weak right arm. He sought to give us a country, and he loved my uncle. While the eagle was still in sight, my tears suddenly dried; and as proof that this notion came from on high, without a moment’s hesitation, I made my decision and discerned the means of making this journey. In the twinkling of an eye, all the sorrows which as you know poison my life, especially on Sundays, were somehow conjured away by a divine impulsion. I saw that great figure of Italy rise out of the mire in which the Germans keep her immersed, spreading her bruised and still enchainèd arms toward her king and her liberator. And I, I mused, the still unknown son of this unhappy mother, I shall depart, either to conquer or to die with this man chosen by fate, who would cleanse us of the obloquy we suffer from the vilest slaves of Europe!
^*

“As you know,” he added in a low voice as he came closer to the Countess, staring at her with flaming eyes, “the winter I was born my mother planted with her own hands a young chestnut-tree beside a stream in our forest, two leagues from here: before taking action I was determined to have a look it. Spring is not yet far advanced, I reasoned: if my tree has already put forth leaves, that will be a sign. I too must emerge from the state of torpor in which I languish here in this cold and melancholy castle. Don’t you see that these old and blackened walls, now the symbols and once the means of tyranny, are a true image of the melancholy winter? They are to me what winter is to my tree.

“Would you believe it, Gina? At seven-thirty last night I reached my chestnut-tree: it had leaves, lovely young leaves, already quite large! I kissed them without disturbing a single one, and respectfully spaded the soil around the beloved tree. And then and there, filled with new hopes, I crossed the mountain to Menaggio: I would need a passport in order to enter Switzerland. Time had flown, it was already one in the morning when I found myself at Vasi’s door. At my first words he exclaimed, ‘You are going to join Napoleon!’ and flung himself into my arms. The others, too, embraced me passionately. ‘Why am I a married man?’ one of them asked.”

Signora Pietranera had grown pensive; she regarded it as her duty to raise certain objections. If Fabrizio had had any experience of the world at all, he would have realized that the Countess herself did not believe in the good reasons she hastened to offer him. But though lacking such experience, he had his resolve; he did not even deign to listen to such objections. The Countess was soon reduced to making him promise that at least he would inform his mother of his plans.

“She will tell my sisters, and these women will betray me in spite of themselves!” cried Fabrizio, with a kind of heroic arrogance.

“Speak more respectfully,” said the Countess, smiling through her tears, “of the sex which will make your fortune; for you will always displease the men—you have too much spirit for prosaic souls.”

The Marchesa dissolved into tears upon learning of her son’s strange plan; she was quite indifferent to such heroism and did everything
she could to keep him from leaving. When she was convinced that nothing in the world but prison walls could keep him beside her, she gave him what little money she possessed, and then remembered that the day before the Marchese had entrusted her with eight or ten little diamonds, worth perhaps ten thousand francs, to take to Milan to be set. Fabrizio’s sisters came into their mother’s room while the Countess was sewing these diamonds into our hero’s overcoat; he restored their scanty napoleons to these poor women. His sisters were so excited by his plan and embraced him so noisily that he snatched up the few diamonds still to be concealed and tried to leave then and there.

“You will betray me without even meaning to,” he told them. “Since I am now so rich, there is no need for me to pack any clothes. I can buy them anywhere.” He embraced these persons who were so dear to him, and left immediately, without even returning to his own room. He walked so fast, constantly fearing to be pursued by men on horseback, that he reached Lugano that very evening. Thank Heaven he was in a Swiss town, and no longer in danger of being attacked on a lonely road by officers in his father’s pay. To the latter he wrote a noble letter from Lugano, a boyish weakness which added fuel to the Marchese’s fury. Fabrizio took the post through the Saint-Gothard Pass, he traveled fast, and entered France through Pontarlier. The Emperor was in Paris. Here Fabrizio’s misfortunes began; he had left with the firm intention of speaking to the Emperor; it had never occurred to him that this might be a difficult enterprise. In Milan, he had seen Prince Eugène ten times a day and could have addressed him on any occasion. In Paris, he went every morning to the courtyard of the Tuileries to watch Napoléon review his troops; but he could never approach the Emperor. Our hero supposed all Frenchmen were as deeply moved as himself by the extreme danger which threatened their country. At the hotel dining-table, he made no secret of his intentions and his devotion; the young men he met there were remarkably kind and even more enthusiastic than himself; in a few days they succeeded in relieving him of all the money he possessed. Fortunately, out of sheer modesty, he had not mentioned the diamonds his mother had given
him. When he realized, one morning after a night’s orgy, that he had certainly been robbed, he purchased two fine horses, hired one of the horse-dealer’s grooms as his servant, and in his scorn of the well-spoken young Parisians, left to join the army, about which he knew nothing except that troops were mustering near Maubeuge. No sooner had he reached the frontier than he found it demeaning to stay indoors, with nothing better to do than warming himself in front of a good fire, while soldiers were in bivouac outside. Ignoring the words of his servant, a sensible man, he rashly set off for the camps that lined the road to Belgium. No sooner had he reached the first battalion bivouacked there than the soldiers began staring at this young civilian about whose clothes there was nothing to suggest a uniform. Night was falling, and a cold wind blowing. Fabrizio approached a campfire and offered to pay for hospitality. The soldiers exchanged astonished glances at the notion of payment, and kindly granted him a place at the fire; his servant made a shelter for him. But an hour later, when the regimental adjutant happened to pass by, the soldiers reported the arrival of this stranger speaking bad French. The adjutant questioned Fabrizio, who described his enthusiasm for the Emperor in his extremely noticeable accent; whereupon the adjutant requested our hero to accompany him to the colonel, billeted in a farmhouse nearby. Fabrizio’s servant followed with the two horses, the sight of which struck the adjutant so forcibly that he immediately changed his mind and began interrogating Fabrizio’s servant as well. The latter, an old soldier, instantly guessing his questioner’s intentions, alluded to his master’s influential protectors, adding that of course no one would
pinch
his fine horses. Immediately a soldier summoned by the adjutant collared the servant while another soldier seized the horses, and with a stern glance the adjutant ordered Fabrizio to follow him without a speaking a word.

After making him cover a good league on foot, in a night made even darker by the campfires which illuminated the horizon on all sides, the adjutant handed Fabrizio over to an officer of the
gendarmerie
who gave him a hard look and asked for his papers. Fabrizio produced the passport which described him as a dealer in barometers
bearing merchandise
.