The Charterhouse of Parma (52 page)

Once the Prince was put at his ease, the conversation went on endlessly; he concluded it by granting his Chief Justice a month in which to act; Rassi sought two. The next day he received a secret gift of a thousand sequins. For three days he reflected; on the fourth he reverted
to his original notion, which to him seemed self-evident: “Only Count Mosca will have the heart to keep his word to me,
primo
, since by making me a Baron he is giving me nothing he respects;
secundo
, by warning him, I am probably saving myself from a crime for which I am more or less paid in advance;
tercio
, I shall be taking revenge for the first humiliating blows ever received by Cavaliere Rassi.”

The following night, he informed the Count of his entire conversation with the Prince.

The Count was secretly paying his court to the Duchess; it was quite true that he still did not see her at her own house more than once or twice a month, but almost every week, and whenever he could manage to create occasions for speaking of Fabrizio, the Duchess, accompanied by Cecchina, would come, late in the evening, to spend a few moments in the Count’s garden. She was even able to deceive her own coachman, who was devoted to her and imagined she was visiting in a house nearby.

The reader can imagine whether the Count, having received the Chief Justice’s terrible confidence, immediately gave the signal that had been prearranged with the Duchess. Though it was very late at night, she had Cecchina request him to come to her immediately. The Count, delighted as a lover by this appearance of intimacy, nonetheless hesitated to tell the Duchess everything: he feared seeing her driven mad by grief.

After casting about for veiled expressions by which to mitigate the fatal announcement, he nonetheless ended by telling her everything; it was not in his power to keep a secret which she sought from him. In the last nine months, extreme misfortune had had a great influence upon this ardent spirit; it had strengthened her, and the Duchess no longer burst into sobs or lamentations.

The next night she had Fabrizio sent the signal of great danger:

The castle is on fire.

He answered quite properly:

Are my books burned?

That same night she fortunately managed to get a letter to him inside a ball of lead. This was eight days after the marriage of the Marchese Crescenzi’s sister, where the Duchess committed an enormous indiscretion of which we shall give an account in its proper place.

Almost a year before the period of her misfortunes, the Duchess had made a singular acquaintance: one evening when she was, as they say in these regions, moonstruck, she had taken it into her head to visit her villa at Sacca, on a hillside beyond Colorno, overlooking the Po. She enjoyed improving this estate; she loved the great forest which crowned the hill and reached the villa; she busied herself laying out paths in picturesque directions.

“You’ll get yourself carried off by brigands, my lovely Duchess,” the Prince had said to her one day. “It’s impossible that a forest you are known to walk in should remain deserted.” The Prince glanced at the Count, whose jealousy he hoped to arouse.

“I have no fear, Your Serene Highness,” the Duchess replied with an innocent look, “when I walk in my woods; I am reassured by this thought: I have never done harm to anyone—who could hate me?” The remark was considered a bold one, for it recalled the insults offered by the Liberals of the country, an insolent lot if ever there was one.

The day of the stroll in question, the Prince’s words came back to the Duchess’s mind as she noticed an extremely ill dressed man following her at a distance through the woods. At a sudden turn she took
as she went on with her walk, this stranger came so close to her that she was alarmed. Her first impulse was to call her game-keeper, whom she had left about half a mile behind, in a flower-bed near the villa. The stranger had time to approach and flung himself at her feet. He was young, extremely handsome, but wretchedly dressed; his clothes were in rags, with rents in them a foot long, but his eyes burned with the fire of an ardent soul. “I am under sentence of death, I am Doctor Ferrante Palla, and my five children and I are dying of hunger.”

The Duchess had noticed how dreadfully thin he was, but his eyes were so fine and filled with so tender an exaltation that they obliterated any notion of crime from her mind. “
Pallagi
,” she thought, “might have given such eyes to the
Saint John in the Desert
he has just painted in the Cathedral.” The idea of Saint John was suggested to her by Ferrante’s incredible attenuation. The Duchess gave him the three sequins that were in her purse, apologizing for offering him so little, having just paid her gardener his wages. Ferrante thanked her effusively. “Alas!” he exclaimed. “I once lived in the city, and I would see elegant women; since I performed my duties as a citizen, I have lived in the forests, and I was following you not to ask for charity or to rob you, but like a savage fascinated by angelic beauty. It has been so long since I’ve seen a pair of lovely white hands!”

“Please get up,” the Duchess said to him, for he had remained on his knees.

“Allow me to remain as I am,” Ferrante said to her; “this posture proves to me that I am not at this present moment engaged in stealing, and that calms me; for you must know that I rob others in order to live ever since I have been forbidden to practice my profession. But at this moment I am a simple mortal who worships sublime beauty.”

The Duchess realized that the man was slightly mad, but she was not at all frightened; she saw in this man’s eyes that he possessed a good and ardent soul, and moreover she was anything but indifferent to remarkable countenances.

“You see, I am a doctor and I was in the habit of making love to the wife of Sarasine the apothecary, in Parma; he took us by surprise and drove her out of his house, along with three children he rightly suspected were mine and not his. We have had two more since then. The
mother and our five children live in the most abject poverty in a shack I built with my own hands here in the forest, about a league away. For I must avoid the police, and the poor woman chooses to remain with me. I was sentenced to death, and quite justly; I was conspiring. I loathe the Prince, who is a tyrant. I did not take flight for lack of money. My woes are much greater than that, and I ought to have killed myself a thousand times over; I no longer love the unfortunate woman who has given me these five children and has ruined herself for my sake: I love someone else. But if I do away with myself, the mother and the five children will literally starve to death.” The man spoke with the accents of sincerity.

“But how do you manage to live?” the Duchess asked, moved by his story.

“The children’s mother spins; the oldest daughter has been brought up on a farm belonging to Liberals, where she tends the sheep; myself, I steal from people on the road from Genoa to Piacenza.”

“How do you reconcile robbery with your Liberal principles?”

“I keep track of the people I rob, and if I ever have any money, I return what I have taken from them. I consider that a Tribune of the People like myself performs a labor which, by reason of its danger, is worth a good hundred francs a month; so I am careful never to take more than twelve hundred francs a year. No, that’s wrong; I do steal a little more than that, for with this extra sum I pay to have my works printed.”

“What works are those?”

“Will —— Ever Have a Chamber and a Budget?”

“What!” exclaimed the Duchess in amazement. “Then you, Signor, are one of the greatest poets of the age—you are the famous Ferrante Palla!”

“Famous, perhaps, but most unfortunate, that is for certain.”

“And a man of your talents, Signor, must steal in order to live!”

“That may be the reason I have any talent. Hitherto all our authors who have become well known were people paid by the government or by the religion they sought to undermine. Myself,
primo
, I risk my life;
secundo
, Signora, imagine the feelings that wrack my soul when I am about to commit a robbery! Am I justified in doing this, I ask myself. Is
a Tribune’s office really worth a hundred francs a month? I have two shirts to my name, the suit you see on my back, a few worthless weapons, and I am sure to end my days on the gallows: yet I dare to believe I am an honest man. I would be a happy one without this fatal love which now permits me to find only misery at the side of my children’s mother. Poverty weighs upon me by its ugliness: I am fond of fine clothes, of white hands …” He stared so intensely at the Duchess’s that she was alarmed.

“Farewell, Signor,” she said to him. “Can I do anything for you in Parma?”

“Think, on occasion, of this dilemma: his job is to rouse hearts and to waken them from that false and altogether material happiness afforded by Monarchies. Does the service he renders his fellow citizens deserve a hundred francs a month?… My misfortune is to be in love,” he said very softly, “and for nearly two years my heart has been filled with you alone, though hitherto I have gazed upon you without frightening you.” And he took to his heels with a prodigious speed which amazed and also reassured the Duchess.

“The police would have a hard time catching him,” she mused; “he really is a madman.”

“He’s a madman,” her servants informed her; “we’ve all known for a long time that the poor fellow has been in love with the Signora; when the Signora is here, we see him wandering in the high ground of the woods, and once the Signora leaves, he invariably comes to sit in the same places where you have been; he is sure to pick up the flowers that might have fallen from your bouquet, and he keeps them fastened in that dreadful hat of his.”

“And you’ve never mentioned these follies to me,” the Duchess said, almost reproachfully.

“We were afraid the Signora might tell the Minister Count Mosca. Poor Ferrante is such a good fellow—he’s never done any harm to anyone, and just because he loves our Napoléon they’ve sentenced him to death.”

The Duchess did not say a word to the Count about this encounter, and since this was the first secret she had kept from him in four years,
she found herself obliged to stop short in the middle of a sentence ten times over. She returned to Sacca with gold, but Ferrante did not appear. She returned fifteen days later: Ferrante, having followed her for some time, hiding from tree to tree, at a distance of a hundred paces, burst upon her with the celerity of a sparrow-hawk, and once again flung himself at her feet.

“Where were you fifteen days ago?”

“In the mountains beyond Novi, robbing a mule-team coming back from Milan, where they had been selling olive oil.”

“Take this purse.” Ferrante opened the purse, took out a sequin, which he kissed and thrust into his bosom, then gave it back to her.

“You give back my purse and you commit highway robberies!”

“Certainly; it is my rule never to have more than a hundred francs in my possession; now at this moment the mother of my children has eighty francs and I have twenty-five; I am five francs over, and if I were hanged right now I would feel remorse. I have accepted this sequin because it comes from you and because I love you.” The intonation of this simple speech was perfect.

“He really does love,” the Duchess said to herself.

That day he seemed quite distracted. He said that there were people in Parma who owed him six hundred francs, and that with such a sum he would repair the shack where his poor children now were catching cold.

“But I’ll lend you those six hundred,” said the Duchess, deeply moved.

“But as a man in public life, the opposing party could slander me and say I’ve sold myself out.”

Won over, the Duchess offered him a hiding-place in Parma if he would promise her that for the time being he would not exercise his magistrature in Parma and that above all he would carry out none of the death-sentences which he claimed to have passed
in petto
. “Supposing I were hanged as a consequence of my carelessness,” Ferrante said quite seriously; “all these enemies of the people would live on for years, and whose fault would that be? What would my father say to that, when he greets me in Heaven?”

The Duchess spoke to him at length about his children, to whom the damp might cause some fatal illness, and he ended by accepting her offer of a hiding-place in Parma.

In the only half-day the Duke Sanseverina had spent in Parma since his marriage, he had shown the Duchess a remarkable hiding-place in the southern corner of his
palazzo
. The outer wall, which dates from the Middle Ages, is eight feet thick; it has been hollowed out to create a hiding-place some twenty feet high, but only two feet wide. It is right beside the splendid reservoir mentioned in all the travel literature, a famous construction of the twelfth century, built during the siege of Parma by
the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund
, and later enclosed within the walls of the Palazzo Sanseverina.

This hiding-place is entered by sliding aside a huge block of stone on an iron pivot which runs through its center. The Duchess was so touched by Ferrante’s madness and by the fate of his children, for whom he stubbornly rejected any present having some value, that she allowed him the use of this hiding-place for some time. She saw him next the following month, once again in the Sacca woods, and since on that day he was a little calmer, he recited to her one of his sonnets, which she found equal or superior to the finest produced in Italy in the last two hundred years. Ferrante obtained several interviews; but his exalted affections became importunate, and the Duchess realized that this passion followed the laws of all loves granted the possibility of conceiving a glimmer of hope. She sent him back to the forest and forbade him to speak to her again: he obeyed at once and with utter docility.

This was how matters stood when Fabrizio was arrested. Three days afterward, at nightfall, a Capuchin appeared at the door of the Palazzo Sanseverina; he had, he claimed, an important secret to communicate to the mistress of the place. The Duchess was so wretched by then that she had the man brought in: it was Ferrante.