The Charterhouse of Parma (29 page)

“And how will I get the letter to her?”

“The boys at the mill where we’re heading earn twelve soldi a day; in a day and a half they can reach Parma, so four francs for the trip, two francs wear and tear on the shoes: if the job was done for a poor man like me, that would be six francs; since it’s for the service of a gentleman, I’d give them twelve.”

When they reached a resting-place in a cool, shady grove of alders and willows, Ludovic disappeared for over an hour in search of ink and paper.

“Great God, how good it is here!” Fabrizio exclaimed. “Fortune, farewell! I shall never be an Archbishop!”

Returning, Ludovic found him fast asleep and was reluctant to waken him. The boat would arrive only at sunset; as soon as Ludovic saw it coming downstream, he roused Fabrizio, who wrote two letters.

“Your Excellency knows so much more than me,” said Ludovic with a pained expression, “and I would do anything not to offend you, but I hope you’ll permit me to add a certain thing.”

“I’m not such a fool as you think,” Fabrizio answered, “and whatever you may say, in my eyes you will always be a loyal servant of my aunt, and a man who has done everything in the world to get me out of a very nasty scrape.”

Many further protestations were required to convince Ludovic to speak, and when he finally determined to do so, he began with a preface lasting a good five minutes. Fabrizio grew impatient, then reasoned with himself: “Who’s at fault here? It’s all due to our vanity, which this man has seen quite clearly from his seat on the box.” At last Ludovic’s devotion persuaded him to risk speaking plainly:

“How much the Marchesa Raversi would give to the fellow you’re going to send to Parma if she could have these two letters! They’re in your hand, and they can offer legal proof against you. Your Excellency will take me for a nosy fellow as well as an indiscreet one, and also you may be ashamed of showing Her Grace my bad coachman’s hand; but after all your safety has opened my mouth, though you may think me impertinent. Couldn’t Your Excellency dictate those two letters to me? That way I’m the only person compromised, and little enough; if need be I’ll say that you showed up in the middle of a field with an inkhorn in one hand and a pistol in the other, and that you forced me to write.”

“Give me your hand, my dear Ludovic!” exclaimed Fabrizio. “And to prove to you that I will have no secrets from a friend like you, copy these two letters just as they are.”

Ludovic understood the extent of this sign of confidence, and was extremely touched by it, but after a few lines, as he noticed the boat rapidly approaching down the river: “The letters will be finished sooner,” he said to Fabrizio, “if Your Excellency will take the trouble of dictating them to me.”

When the letters were done, Fabrizio wrote an
A
and a
B
on the last lines, and on a tiny scrap of paper which he then crumpled up, he wrote in French: “Believe A and B.” The messenger was to hide this scrap in his clothes.

The boat having come within hailing distance, Ludovic called to the boatmen by names which were not theirs; they did not answer and landed five hundred yards downstream, scouring both banks to make sure they had not been seen by some customs-officer.

“I’m at your orders,” Ludovic said to Fabrizio; “do you want me to take these letters to Parma myself? Or would you rather I accompany you to Ferrara?”

“Accompanying me to Ferrara is a service I hardly dared ask. I’ll
have to land somewhere and try to enter the city without showing a passport. I can tell you I have the greatest repugnance to traveling under the name of Giletti, and I can’t think of anyone but you who can buy me another passport.”

“Why didn’t you mention it at Casalmaggiore! I know a spy who would have sold me a first-rate passport, and cheap, for forty or fifty francs.”

One of the two boatmen who was born on the right bank of the Po, and consequently had no need of a passport in order to enter Parma, offered to take the letters. Ludovic, who knew how to handle an oar, was ready to manage the boat with the other man.

“When we reach the lower branch of the Po,” he said, “we’ll find several armed boats belonging to the police, but I’ll be able to keep out of their way.”

More than ten times they were obliged to hide among the islets at water level, covered with willows. Three times they set foot on land to let the empty boat drift past the police craft. Ludovic took advantage of these long intervals of leisure to recite several of his sonnets. Their feelings were true, but somehow blunted by their expression, and the verses were scarcely worth transcribing; oddly enough, this ex-coachman had passions and visions that were lively and picturesque; they turned cold and commonplace as soon as he wrote them down. “It’s just the opposite of what we see in society,” mused Fabrizio; “nowadays we can express anything and everything gracefully enough, but our hearts have nothing to say.” He realized that the greatest pleasure he could offer this faithful servant would be to correct the spelling of his sonnets.

“They make fun of me when I lend them my notebook,” Ludovic said; “but if Your Excellency would be good enough to show me how to spell the words letter by letter, the envious fellows would have nothing to say: spelling doesn’t make a genius.”

It was not until the third night of his journey that Fabrizio could land safely in an alder grove, one league above Pontelagoscuro. He remained hidden in a hemp-field for a whole day, and Ludovic went on ahead to Ferrara; there he rented inconspicuous lodgings from a poor Jew, who immediately understood that there was money to be made by
keeping his mouth shut. By sunset Fabrizio entered Ferrara riding on a pony; he was greatly in need of this support, for the heat had affected him on the river; the knife-wound in his thigh and Giletti’s sword-thrust in his shoulder at the start of their combat were inflamed and had brought on a fever.

The Jew, owner of their lodgings, had obtained a discreet surgeon who, realizing in his turn that there was money in someone’s purse, told Ludovic that his
conscience
compelled him to make his report to the police concerning the wounds of the young man whom Ludovic called his brother.

“The law is clear,” he added; “it is only too obvious that your brother has not wounded himself, as he claims, falling from a ladder, when he happened to be holding an open knife in his hand.”

Ludovic coldly replied that if this honest surgeon took it into his head to yield to the inspirations of his conscience, he, Ludovic, would have the honor, before leaving Ferrara, of falling on him precisely with an open knife in his hand. When he reported this incident to Fabrizio, the latter reproached him sharply, but there was no longer a moment to lose if they were to escape. Ludovic told the Jew that he wanted his brother to try the effect of some fresh air; he went to find a carriage, and our friends left the house, never to return. The reader doubtless finds overlong the narrative of all these undertakings made necessary by the absence of a passport: such preoccupations no longer exist in France; but in Italy, and especially in the region of the Po, everyone talks passports. Once Ferrara was left behind them without hindrance, as though
they were taking a ride, Ludovic dismissed the fiacre, then returned to town by another gate, and went back for Fabrizio with a
sediola
he had hired to take them a dozen leagues. On the outskirts of Bologna, our friends had themselves driven cross-country to the Florence road, spending the night in the worst inn they could find, and the next morning, Fabrizio feeling strong enough to walk a little, they strolled into Bologna. Giletti’s passport had been burned: the actor’s death was surely known, and there was less danger in being arrested as men without passports than as bearers of the passport of a murdered man.

In Bologna Ludovic knew two or three servants in great houses; it was determined that he would find out the latest news from them. He told them that he had been traveling from Florence with his young brother; the latter, overcome by the need for sleep, had let him go on ahead an hour before sunrise. He was to join him in the village, where Ludovic would stop to avoid the heat of midday. But Ludovic, not seeing his brother arrive, had decided to retrace his route; he had discovered his brother bruised by a blow from a stone and by several knife wounds, and robbed in the bargain by men who had picked a quarrel with him. This brother was a handsome fellow, knew how to groom and drive horses, as well as to read and write, and was eager to find a place in some good house. Ludovic reserved for future use, should the occasion arise, the detail that once Fabrizio had fallen, the thieves had run off with the little bag holding their linens and their passports.

Arriving in Bologna, Fabrizio, feeling extremely tired and not daring, without a passport, to present himself at an inn, had entered the vast church of San Petronio. He found it deliciously cool inside; soon he felt quite reinvigorated. “Ingrate that I am,” he immediately reproached himself, “I walk into a church and sit myself down as if it were a café!” He fell to his knees and effusively thanked God for the evident protection which had been vouchsafed him since he had had the misfortune to kill Giletti. The danger, which still made him tremble, was being recognized in the police offices of Casalmaggiore. “How,” he asked himself, “could that clerk whose eyes showed so many suspicions and who reread my passport at least three times have failed to notice that I am not five feet ten inches tall, that I am not thirty-eight years old, that I am not badly scarred by smallpox? How many
mercies I owe you, O my Lord! And I have delayed until this very moment to fling my nothingness at your feet! My pride has chosen to believe that it was to a vain human precaution that I owed the good fortune of escaping the Spielberg already yawning to swallow me up!”

Fabrizio spent over an hour in this state of extreme emotion, in the presence of God’s enormous goodness. Ludovic approached noiselessly, and took a position facing him. Fabrizio, whose forehead was buried in his hands, raised his head, and his loyal servant saw the tears that furrowed his cheeks.

“Come back in an hour,” Fabrizio told him quite harshly.

Ludovic forgave this tone, which he attributed to piety. Fabrizio recited several times the seven psalms of penitence, which he knew by heart; he lingered a long time over the verses which related to his present situation.

Fabrizio asked God’s forgiveness for many things, but—remarkably enough—it did not occur to him to include among his sins the plan to become Archbishop solely because Count Mosca was Prime Minister and regarded this situation and the splendid existence it afforded as suitable for the Duchess’s nephew. He had desired it without passion, it is true, but finally had aspired to it, exactly as if it were a position as Prime Minister or general.

It had not occurred to him that his conscience might be concerned in the Duchess’s plan. This is a remarkable feature of the religion which he owed to the teachings of the Milanese Jesuits. Such religion does away with the courage to think of inhabitual things, and above all forbids
personal examination
as the most heinous of sins; it is a step toward Protestantism. To know what it is of which one is guilty, one must question one’s priest, or read the list of sins as it may be found printed in the books entitled
Preparations for the Sacrament of Penitence
. Fabrizio knew by heart the list of sins drawn up in Latin, which he had learned at the Ecclesiastical Academy of Naples. Thus, while reciting this list, having reached the article
murder
, he had thoroughly accused himself before God of having killed a man, but in defense of his own life. He had rapidly, and without paying the slightest attention, passed over the various articles relative to the sin of
simony
(to obtain ecclesiastical offices by money). Had someone offered to give him a hundred
louis to become the First Grand Vicar of the Archbishop of Parma, he would have rejected such a notion with horror; but though he lacked neither wit nor above all logic, it never occurred to him that Count Mosca’s influence, employed in his behalf, was a form of
simony
. Such is the triumph of a Jesuitical education: to form the habit of not paying attention to matters more obvious than the nose on one’s face. A Frenchman, brought up among features of personal interest and of Parisian irony, might in good faith have accused Fabrizio of hypocrisy at the very moment when our hero was opening his heart to God with the deepest sincerity and the profoundest emotional transport.

Fabrizio left the church only after having prepared the confession he proposed to make the following day; he found Ludovic sitting on the steps of the enormous stone peristyle built on the great square in front of the façade of San Petronio. As after a great storm the air is purer, so Fabrizio’s soul was tranquil, happy and, so to speak, refreshed.

“I seem to be quite well, I scarcely feel my wounds,” he said to Ludovic as he came up to him; “but above all I want to ask your forgiveness for my harsh words when you spoke to me in church while I was examining my conscience. Well now, how have we left matters?”

“As well as can be expected: I’ve rented lodgings, in truth scarcely worthy of Your Excellency, with the wife of one of my friends, a very pretty woman quite intimately attached to one of the most powerful agents of the police. Tomorrow I shall visit him and declare that our passports have been stolen; this declaration will be taken in good faith; but I shall pay the costs of the letter the police will write to Casalmaggiore to learn whether there exists in that commune a certain Ludovic San Micheli, who has a brother, by name Fabrizio, in the service of Her Grace the Duchess Sanseverina, in Parma. Everything is arranged;
siamo a cavallo.
” (An Italian proverb meaning: we are saved.)

Fabrizio’s countenance had suddenly turned very grave: he begged Ludovic to wait for him a moment, almost ran back into the church, and no sooner was he there than he fell to his knees and humbly kissed the stone pavement. “It’s a miracle, Lord!” he exclaimed, his eyes filling with tears. “When you saw my soul prepared to assume its duties, you rescued me! Good Heavens, it is perfectly possible that someday I may be killed in some business or other: remember when I die how
my soul was disposed at this very moment!” It was with the most intense transports of joy that Fabrizio once again recited the seven psalms of penitence. Before leaving he approached an old woman sitting in front of a huge Madonna and alongside an iron triangle placed vertically on a pedestal of the same metal. The edges of this triangle bristled with a great number of nails intended for the little candles which the piety of the faithful light before the celebrated
Madonna of Cimabue
. Only seven candles were lighted as Fabrizio approached; he placed this circumstance in his memory with the intention of pondering it later at greater leisure. “How much do the candles cost?” he asked the old woman. “Two
baiocchi
apiece.”