The Charterhouse of Parma (14 page)

The Canon and the Countess read the denunciation together, and they determined that in the course of the day, he would obtain for her a copy of it made by a person in his confidence. It was with joy in her heart that the Countess returned to the Palazzo del Dongo. “Impossible to be more of a
galant’uomo
than this reformed rake,” she observed to the Marchesa; “tonight at La Scala, and ten forty-five by the theater clock, we shall send everyone away from our box, we shall snuff the candles, we shall shut our door, and at eleven the Canon himself will come to tell us what he has managed. That will be the least compromising arrangement for him.”

This Canon was a very shrewd man; he was careful not to break his appointment; once there he gave evidence of great kindness and an utterly
open heart, such as is found only in those countries where vanity does not prevail over all other sentiments. His denunciation of the Countess to her husband General Pietranera was one of the greatest regrets of his life, and now he was finding the means of abolishing it.

That morning, when the Countess had left his apartment: “So she’s making love with her nephew,” he told himself bitterly, for he had by no means recovered. “Proud as she is, to have come to me!… When that poor wretch Pietranera died, she repulsed with horror my offers of service, polite and nicely presented as they were by Colonel Scotti, her former lover. The lovely Countess Pietranera, living on fifteen hundred francs a year!” added the Canon, striding up and down his room. “And then going to live in the Castle of Grianta with an abominable
seccatore
like the Marchese del Dongo!… Now I see it all! Indeed, young Fabrizio has all the graces—tall, well built, a smiling face … and better still, a certain voluptuous charm in his glance.… A Correggio countenance,” the Canon added bitterly.

“The difference in age … not too great … Fabrizio born after the French came in, around ‘98, I would guess; the Countess might be twenty-seven or twenty-eight, impossible to be more charming, more adorable; in this country rich in beauties, she outdoes them all, Marini, Gherardi, Ruga, Aresa,
Pietragrua
: she transcends all these women.… And so they lived happy together, hidden on that lovely Lake Como when the young fellow wanted to join his Napoléon.… There are still souls in Italy! And no matter what we do! Beloved country!… No,” continued this heart inflamed by jealousy, “how else to account for that submission to a life of boredom in the country, with the horror of seeing every day, at every meal, the hideous face of the Marchese del Dongo, and that wretched pale physiognomy of the
Marchesino
Ascanio, who will be worse than his father!… Well, I shall serve her turn, at least that way I shall have the pleasure of seeing her closer than through my opera-glasses.”

Canon Borda explained the matter quite clearly to the two ladies. Actually, Binder was quite well disposed to their suit; he was delighted that Fabrizio had made his escape before the orders which might arrive from Vienna; for Binder had no power to determine matters, he
was waiting for orders in this case as in all others; he sent to Vienna every day the exact copy of all the information he received: then he waited.

It was essential that during his exile at Romagnano, Fabrizio:

Before going to bed that night, the Countess and the Marchesa wrote two endless letters to Fabrizio, in which they explained with a charming anxiety all the advice Borda had given.

Fabrizio had no desire to be a conspirator: he loved Napoléon, and, as a young nobleman, believed himself created to be happier than other men and regarded all bourgeois as absurd. He had never opened a book since leaving school, where he had read only the books prescribed by the Jesuits. He took up residence a certain distance from Romagnano, in a splendid palazzo; one of the masterpieces of the celebrated architect Sanmicheli; but no one had lived in it for thirty years, so that rain leaked into every room, and not one window closed properly. Fabrizio took possession of the steward’s horses, which he rode quite casually at any hour of the day; he spoke to no one, and brooded. The advice to take a mistress in an
ultra
family struck him as
quite agreeable, and he followed it to the letter. He selected for his confessor an ambitious young priest who wanted to become a bishop (like the confessor of the Spielberg
^*
); but he walked three leagues a day and wrapped himself in a mystery he believed impenetrable, in order to read the
Constitutionnel
, a newspaper he considered sublime. “As fine as Alfieri or as Dante!” he would frequently exclaim. Fabrizio had this in common with the young men of France, that he was much more concerned with his horse and his newspaper than with his
bien-pensant
mistress. But there was not yet room for the
imitation of others
in this naïve and resolute nature, and he made no friends in the society of the big country town of Romagnano; his simplicity passed for pride; no one knew what to make of such a character. “He’s a younger son resentful of not being the eldest,” said the parish priest.

We shall frankly admit that Canon Borda’s jealousy was not entirely unfounded; upon his return from France, Fabrizio seemed to Countess Pietranera’s eyes a handsome stranger she might have known well in days gone by. Had he spoken of love, she would have loved him; had she not, already, an admiration for his conduct and for his person that was passionate and, so to speak, limitless?

But Fabrizio embraced her with such an effusion of innocent gratitude and honest friendship, that she would have horrified herself had she sought any other sentiment in this virtually filial affection. “After all,” the Countess told herself, “a few friends who knew me six years ago, at Prince Eugène’s court, may still find me pretty and even young, but for him I am a respectable woman … and, to confess the whole affair without any concessions to my self-regard, an elderly one.” The Countess was deceiving herself as to the stage of life she had reached, but not in the manner of vulgar women. “At his age, moreover,” she added, “the ravages of time tend to be somewhat exaggerated; a man of riper years …”

The Countess, who was pacing up and down in her salon, stopped before a mirror, then smiled. It must be told that for some months Signora Pietranera’s heart had been attacked quite seriously and by a
singular personage. Soon after Fabrizio’s departure for France, the Countess, who, without quite admitting it to herself, was already beginning to be quite preoccupied with him, had fallen into a deep depression. All her occupations seemed to her to lack pleasure, and, if we may say so, savor; she told herself that Napoléon, seeking to draw the Italian people to himself, would make Fabrizio his aide-de-camp. “He is lost to me!” she exclaimed in tears. “I’ll never see him again; he’ll write to me, but what would I be for him in ten years?”

It was in such a frame of mind that she journeyed to Milan; she was hoping to learn fresher news of Napoléon and, who knows? perhaps of Fabrizio in consequence. Without admitting it to herself, this volatile spirit was beginning to weary of the monotonous life she was leading in the country. “It’s staying alive,” she said, “not living.” Seeing these
powdered
creatures every day, her brother, her nephew Ascanio, their footmen! What would their strolls along the lake shore be without Fabrizio! Her one consolation was the friendship which united her with the Marchesa. But for some time, this intimacy with Fabrizio’s mother, who was older than she and a woman without hope, had begun to be less enjoyable to her.

Such was Countess Pietranera’s singular position: with Fabrizio gone, she had little hope for the future; her heart needed consolation and novelty. In Milan, she became obsessed with the latest fashionable opera; she would shut herself up all alone, for hours at a time, in the box of her old friend Colonel Scotti, at La Scala. The men she attempted to meet in order to have news of Napoléon and his army struck her as crude and vulgar. Back at home, she improvised at her piano till three in the morning. One evening, at La Scala in the box of one of her friends, where she had gone hoping for news from France, someone introduced Count Mosca, Minister of Parma: an agreeable man who spoke of France and of Napoléon in such a way as to give her heart new reasons to hope or to fear. She returned to that box the next evening: this clever person reappeared, and throughout the performance she took pleasure in speaking with him. Since Fabrizio’s departure, she had not experienced so lively an evening. This man who entertained her, Count Mosca della Rovere Sorezana, was then Minister of War, of Police, and of Finance of that famous Prince of Parma,
Ernesto IV, so famous for his severities, which the Milanese Liberals called cruelties. Mosca might have been forty or forty-five; he had large features, no trace of self-importance, and a simple, cheerful manner which people found attractive; he would have appeared even more so had a whim of his Prince not compelled him to powder his hair as a pledge of sound political sentiments. Since Italians have little fear of wounding one another’s vanity, people there quite soon reach a tone of intimacy, and manage to speak quite personally. The antidote of this practice is to stop seeing one another if feelings are wounded.

“But why, then, do you powder your hair, Count?” asked Countess Pietranera the third time she encountered him. “For a man like you to wear powder, so agreeable, still young, and who fought on our side in Spain!”

“Precisely because I stole nothing in that very Spain, and because one must live. I was mad for glory; a flattering remark from the French general, Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, our commander, was everything to me, at the time. When Napoléon fell, it so happened that while I was devouring my patrimony in his service, my father, an imaginative man who already saw me a general, was building a
palazzo
for me in Parma. By 1813, my sole worldly possessions were a huge
palazzo
to finish and a pension.”

“A pension: thirty-five hundred francs, like my husband?”

“Count Pietranera was a division-general. My pension, as a mere head of a squadron, was never more than eight hundred francs, and even that was not paid to me until I became Minister of Finance.”

Since the only other person in the box was the lady of strongly Liberal opinions to which it belonged, the conversation continued with the same degree of frankness. Count Mosca, when questioned, spoke of his life in Parma. “In Spain, under General Saint-Cyr, I faced enemy fire to win a cross and a little glory thereafter, now I dress like an actor in a comedy in order to support a great household and earn a few thousand francs. Once I began playing this sort of chess, offended by the insolence of my superiors, I sought to fill one of the highest offices; I succeeded: but my happiest days are still those I can occasionally
spend in Milan; here still beats, so it seems to me, the heart of your army of Italy.”

The frankness, the
disinvoltura
with which this minister of so formidable a prince expressed himself, piqued the Countess’s curiosity; from his title, she had expected to find a self-important pedant, and she encountered a man who was ashamed of the gravity of his position. Mosca had promised to provide her with all the news from France he could obtain: this was a great indiscretion in Milan, during the months before Waterloo; for Italy at that moment, the question was to be or not to be; everyone was in a fever, in Milan, of either hope or fear. Amid this universal upheaval, the Countess made inquiries about a man who spoke so casually of so envied a position which was his sole means of support.

Some curious things, and of a fascinating oddness, were reported to Signora Pietranera: