The Charterhouse of Parma (11 page)

Fabrizio obeyed, then told him: “They’ve taken the order.”

“They’re in a nasty mood after yesterday’s business,” the sergeant replied gloomily. “I’ll give you one of my pistols; if anyone tries to get past you again, fire into the air. I’ll come, or the colonel himself …”

Fabrizio had noticed the sergeant’s gesture of surprise when he had informed him of the stolen order; he realized that this was a personal insult, and promised himself not to let such a trick be played on him again.

Armed with the sergeant’s horse-pistol, Fabrizio had proudly returned to guard duty when he saw seven mounted hussars approaching: he took up a position barring access to the bridge and communicated the colonel’s order, which seemed to annoy them a good deal, and the boldest sought to pass. Fabrizio, following the sage precept of his friend the canteen-woman, who only that morning had told him to stab and not to slash, lowered the point of his straight saber and prepared to thrust at the man who sought to force his way past him.

“So the young fool wants to kill us!” exclaimed one of the hussars. “As if we hadn’t been killed enough yesterday!” At once all of them drew their sabers and fell on Fabrizio, who thought he was a dead man; but he remembered the sergeant’s surprise, and did not want to be shamed again. As he retreated down the bridge, he tried to give a few thrusts with his saber. He presented such an absurd spectacle wielding this huge straight cavalry saber which was much too heavy for him, that the hussars soon realized whom they were dealing with, and now attempted no longer to wound him but to cut his uniform off his body. Thus Fabrizio received three or four tiny saber wounds on his arms.
For his part, still faithful to the canteen-woman’s precept, he thrust and stabbed with all his might. Unfortunately, one of these thrusts wounded a hussar on the hand; furious at being touched by such a green soldier, he riposted by a deep thrust that wounded Fabrizio high on the thigh. What made the blow more telling was that our hero’s horse, far from fleeing the engagement, seemed to delight in flinging itself upon the assailants. These, seeing Fabrizio’s blood flow down his right leg, thought they had carried the game a little too far and, pushing him toward the left parapet of the bridge, went past at a gallop. As soon as he could, Fabrizio fired his pistol into the air to warn the colonel.

Four mounted hussars and two on foot, of the same regiment as the others, were approaching the bridge and were still two hundred paces off when the pistol was fired: they watched attentively what was happening on the bridge, and supposing that Fabrizio had fired on their comrades, the four mounted men galloped toward him, sabers high; it was a veritable charge.

Colonel Le Baron, warned by the pistol shot, opened the inn door and rushed out onto the bridge just as the galloping hussars reached it, and himself repeated the order to stop. “There is no longer any colonel here,” exclaimed one of the hussars as he spurred his horse.

The colonel in exasperation interrupted the reprimand he was making, and with his wounded right hand grasped the bridle on the off-side of the horse. “Halt, you bad soldier!” he said to the hussar. “I know you, you’re in Captain Henriet’s company.”

“And if I am, let the captain himself give me orders! Captain Henriet was killed yesterday,” he added with a sneer, “so go fuck yourself!”

And with these words, he tried to force a passage and pushed the old colonel, who fell into a sitting position on the bridge pavement. Fabrizio, who was two steps farther along on the bridge, but facing the inn, spurred his horse, and while the breastplate on the hussar’s horse knocked over the colonel, who had not released the off-side rein, Fabrizio, outraged, made a deep thrust at his assailant. Fortunately, the hussar’s horse, feeling itself pulled downward by the bridle the colonel was still holding, made a sidelong movement, so that the long blade of Fabrizio’s heavy-cavalry saber slid along the hussar’s vest and its whole
length passed in front of his face. Enraged, the hussar turned around and delivered a blow with all his strength, which cut through Fabrizio’s sleeve and entered deep into his arm: our hero fell.

One of the dismounted hussars, seeing the two defenders of the bridge on the ground, seized the opportunity, leaped onto Fabrizio’s horse, and tried to make away with it by spurring it to gallop across the bridge.

The sergeant, running out of the inn, had seen his colonel fall and supposed him to be seriously wounded. He ran after Fabrizio’s horse and thrust the point of his saber into the thief’s back: the man fell. The hussars, seeing only the sergeant standing on the bridge, galloped past and rode quickly away. The one who was on foot ran off into the fields.

The sergeant approached the wounded men. Fabrizio had already gotten to his feet; he was suffering little, but losing a great deal of blood. The colonel recovered more slowly; he was quite dazed by his fall, but had received no wound.

“I’m not hurt,” he said to the sergeant, “except from the old wound in my hand.”

The hussar stabbed by the sergeant was dying.

“To hell with him!” the colonel exclaimed. “But,” he said to the sergeant and the two other cavalrymen who had run up, “look after this young fellow whom I have exposed to such unfair risks. I’ll stay on the bridge myself and try to stop these madmen. Take the young fellow to the inn and dress his arm; use one of my shirts.”

This entire adventure had not lasted a minute; Fabrizio’s wounds were nothing; his arm was bandaged with strips cut from the colonel’s shirt. They wanted to arrange a bed for him upstairs in the inn.

“But while I’m being cared for upstairs,” Fabrizio said to the sergeant, “my horse down in the stable will be lost without me and run off with some other master.”

“Not bad for a conscript!” said the sergeant. And they installed Fabrizio on clean straw in the very manger to which his horse was tethered.

Then, as Fabrizio was feeling very weak, the sergeant brought him a bowl of mulled wine and stayed to chat awhile. A few compliments included in this conversation raised our hero to the seventh heaven.

Fabrizio did not awake till dawn the next day; the horses were neighing long and loud and making a fearful racket; the stable was filled with smoke. At first Fabrizio could make nothing of all this noise, and did not even realize where he was; finally, half-suffocated by the smoke, it occurred to him that the place was on fire; in the twinkling of an eye he was out of the stable and on his horse. He looked up; smoke was pouring out of the two windows above the stable, and the roof was covered with a layer of black smoke spiraling into the sky. A
hundred fugitives had arrived during the night at the White Horse Inn; every man was shouting and swearing. The five or six whom Fabrizio could see at close range appeared to be completely drunk; one of them tried to stop him, shouting: “Where are you going with my horse?”

When Fabrizio was a quarter of a league away, he turned around to look; no one was following him, the inn was in flames. Fabrizio glimpsed the bridge and remembered his wound—his arm felt very hot in its tight bandages. “And the old colonel, what’s happened to him? He gave up his shirt to bandage my arm.” Our hero, that morning, was the coolest man in the world; the amount of blood he had lost had freed him from the whole romantic side of his character.

“To the right!” he said to himself. “And be quick about it.” He began, quite calmly, to follow the course of a stream which, after passing under the bridge, flowed along the right side of the road. He recalled the canteen-woman’s advice. “What a friend!” he mused. “What a generous character!”

After riding an hour, he felt quite weak. “And now am I going to faint?” he wondered. “If I faint, someone will steal my horse and maybe my clothes, and with my clothes all the money I have.” He was no longer strong enough to manage his horse, and was trying to keep his balance, when a farmer digging in a field beside the road noticed his weakness and approached to offer him some bread and a glass of beer.

“When I saw you looking so pale, I thought you were one of the men wounded in the great battle!” the farmer told him. Never had help come more opportunely: just as Fabrizio took his first bite of black bread, his eyes were beginning to hurt when he looked straight ahead. When he felt a little stronger, he thanked the man.

“And where am I?” he asked. The farmer told him that three-quarters of a league farther he would find the town of Zonders, where he would be properly cared for. Fabrizio reached this town in the shakiest condition, his chief concern, at every step, being not to fall off his horse. He saw a doorway standing wide open; he went inside: this was the Currycomb Inn, and immediately the innkeeper’s good wife appeared, an enormously fat woman who called for help in a voice resonant with pity. Two girls assisted Fabrizio off his horse; no sooner
had his feet touched ground than he fainted dead away. A surgeon was fetched, and Fabrizio was bled. That day and those that followed, Fabrizio was uncertain what was being done to him; he slept almost continually.

The saber-wound in his thigh threatened to become seriously infected. When his mind had cleared somewhat, he asked them to take care of his horse, and kept repeating that he would pay properly, which offended the innkeeper’s wife and her daughters. They took good care of him for fifteen days, and he was beginning to recover his wits somewhat when he noticed one evening that his hostesses seemed quite upset. And a moment later a German officer entered his bedroom: they answered his questions in a language Fabrizio did not understand, though he realized they were talking about him; he pretended to be asleep. Soon afterward, when he believed the officer might have left, he summoned his hostesses:

“That officer came to put me on a list, and take me prisoner, didn’t he?”

The innkeeper’s wife assented, with tears in her eyes.

“Well, there’s money in my jacket!” he exclaimed, sitting up in bed. “Buy me some civilian clothes and tonight I’ll ride out of here. You’ve saved my life once by taking me in when I was on the point of falling down in the street; save it for me again by giving me the means of going back to my mother.”

At this moment the innkeeper’s daughters burst into tears; they were terrified for Fabrizio, and since they understood virtually no French, they came to his bedside to ask him questions. They argued in Flemish with their mother; but time after time they cast pitying glances his way; Fabrizio could tell they were willing to run whatever risk it was that he represented for them. He thanked them effusively, clasping his hands together. A Jew in the neighborhood would supply a suit of clothes, but when he brought it at around ten o’clock that evening these young ladies realized, comparing the suit with Fabrizio’s jacket, that they would have to take it in along every seam. They set to work at once; there was no time to lose. Fabrizio showed them several napoleons hidden in his garments and requested that his hostesses sew them into the clothes he had just purchased. With these clothes had
been brought a fine pair of new boots. Fabrizio did not hesitate to request these good girls to cut his hussar’s boots where he showed them, and to conceal his little diamonds in the lining of the new boots.

By a strange effect of his loss of blood and his consequent weakness, Fabrizio had almost entirely forgotten his French; he spoke Italian to his hostesses, who spoke a Flemish dialect, so that they communicated almost entirely by sign language. When the girls, though quite disinterested, saw the diamonds, their enthusiasm for Fabrizio knew no bounds; they believed him to be a prince in disguise. Aniken, the younger and more naïve of the two, embraced him straightaway. Fabrizio, for his part, found them both charming; and around midnight, when the surgeon had allowed him to take a little wine, on account of the distance he would have to cover, he almost yielded to an impulse to stay. “Where could I be better off than here?” he asked himself. Nonetheless, around two in the morning, he got dressed. At the moment of leaving his bedroom, his good hostess informed him that his horse had been taken by the officer who had visited the house a few hours earlier.

“Oh the swine!” Fabrizio exclaimed with an oath. “Robbing a wounded man!” Our young Italian was not sufficiently philosophical to recall the price he himself had paid for that horse.

With tears in her eyes, Aniken explained that a horse had been hired for him; she would have liked him to stay; the farewells were tender. Two tall young men, relatives of the innkeeper’s wife, lifted Fabrizio into the saddle; out on the roadway, they supported him on his horse, while a third fellow, several hundred paces ahead of the little convoy, scoured the road to be sure there was no suspicious patrol in the area. After riding for two hours, they stopped at a house belonging to a cousin of the innkeeper’s wife.

No matter what Fabrizio told them, the young men accompanying him were unwilling to leave him; they claimed that they knew the paths through the woods better than anyone. “But tomorrow morning when they find out I’ve escaped and you won’t be found in the neighborhood, your absence will get you in trouble,” Fabrizio protested.

They rode on. Fortunately, when day began to break, the plain was
covered by a dense fog. Around eight in the morning, they approached a small city. One of the young men went ahead to see if the post-horses had been stolen. The post-master had had time to conceal them, and to procure wretched nags, with which he had filled his stables. Two horses were brought out of the marshes where they had been hidden, and three hours later, Fabrizio climbed into a rickety cabriolet, harnessed however to a pair of good post-horses. He had recovered his strength. The moment of separation from these young fellows, relatives of his hostess, was extremely affecting; on no condition, whatever friendly excuse Fabrizio might find, would they consent to accept his money. “In your condition, sir, you need it more than we do,” these fine young fellows kept assuring him. Finally they left with letters in which Fabrizio, somewhat fortified by the agitation of the ride, had attempted to inform his hostesses of all that he felt for them. Fabrizio wrote with tears in his eyes, and there was certainly love in the note addressed to little Aniken.