The Charterhouse of Parma (57 page)

Though Fabrizio was mentioned in the Fortress of Parma only as an infamous traitor who had violated the most sacred duties of man, the good priest Don Cesare was nonetheless delighted by the sight of the fine volumes sent to him by some stranger; for Fabrizio had taken care to write only several days after sending the books, lest his name cause the whole bundle to be indignantly returned. Don Cesare made no mention of these kind attentions to his brother the Governor, who fell into fits of rage at the mere name of Fabrizio del Dongo; but since the latter’s escape, Don Cesare had resumed all his former intimacy with his affectionate niece; and since he had once taught her a little Latin, he now showed her the fine volumes he had received. This had been the fugitive’s hope. Suddenly Clélia blushed deeply, for she had just recognized Fabrizio’s handwriting. Long narrow strips of yellow paper had been placed as bookmarks in various parts of the volume. And just as one might say that in the midst of the sordid pecuniary interests and the insipid chill of the vulgar thoughts which fill our lives, the actions inspired by a real passion rarely fail to produce their effect; as if a propitious divinity were taking care to lead them on, so Clélia, guided by this instinct and by the thought of but one thing in the world, asked
her uncle to compare the old copy of Saint Jerome with the one he had just received. How to express her delight amid the grim melancholy into which Fabrizio’s absence had plunged her, when she found on the margins of the old Saint Jerome that sonnet we have just mentioned as well as the day-by-day memoirs of the love he had felt for her!

From that first day, she knew the sonnet by heart; she sang it, leaning on her window-sill, in front of the now blank window where she had so often seen a little opening appear in the shutter. That shutter had been taken down to be placed on the judge’s desk in the courtroom, to serve as evidence in an absurd trial which Rassi was instituting against Fabrizio, now accused of the crime of having escaped or, as the Chief Justice himself said with a smile,
of having removed himself from the clemency of a magnanimous prince!

Each of Clélia’s actions had been for her the object of intense remorse, and now that she was unhappy, such remorse was all the more intense. She sought to ease her self-reproach by recalling her vow
never to see Fabrizio again
, made to the Madonna at the time of the General’s semi-poisoning and subsequently renewed every day.

Her father had been made ill by Fabrizio’s escape, and furthermore had come very near to losing his position when the Prince, in his rage, had cashiered all the jailers of the Farnese Tower and sent them as prisoners to the city jail. The General had been saved from this fate in part by the intercession of Count Mosca, who preferred to see him shut up on top of his Fortress rather than as an active rival maneuvering in Court circles.

It was during the fifteen days of uncertainty concerning the disgrace of General Fabio Conti, who was really ill, that Clélia found the courage to perform the sacrifice she had announced to Fabrizio. She had had the wit to fall ill on the day of the general rejoicings, which was also the day of the prisoner’s escape, as the reader perhaps remembers; she was ill the next day as well, and, in a word, was so skillful in her behavior that with the exception of the jailer Grillo, whose special duty it was to guard Fabrizio, no one had any suspicion as to her complicity, and Grillo held his tongue.

But though Clélia had no further anxieties in this regard, she was still cruelly wracked by her just remorse: “What argument in the
world,” she would ask herself, “can diminish the crime of a daughter who betrays her father?”

One evening, after a day spent almost entirely in the chapel and in tears, she begged her uncle Don Cesare to accompany her to the bedside of the General, whose fits of rage terrified her all the more in that any and every topic produced new imprecations against Fabrizio, that abominable traitor.

Once in her father’s presence, she summoned the courage to tell him that if she had always refused to grant her hand to the Marchese Crescenzi, it was because she felt no inclination toward him, and that she was certain to find no happiness in such a union. At these words, the General flew into a rage, and Clélia had some difficulty continuing with what she had to say. She added that if her father, tempted by the Marchese’s great fortune, believed himself bound to give her strict orders to marry this man, she was prepared to obey. The General was quite amazed by this conclusion, which he was far from expecting; yet he managed to rejoice over it. “So,” he remarked to his brother, “I shall not be reduced to second-floor lodgings, should that scoundrel Fabrizio make me lose my place by his wicked actions.”

Count Mosca did not fail to show himself utterly scandalized by the escape of that scoundrel Fabrizio, and repeated at every opportunity the phrase coined by Rassi concerning the base conduct of this entirely vulgar young man, as it turned out, who had removed himself from the Prince’s clemency. This witty phrase, consecrated by the best society, found no echo among the populace. Left to their own good sense, even while believing Fabrizio entirely culpable, the people of Parma admired the resolve it must have taken to have flung oneself over so high a wall. Not one creature of the Court admired such courage. As for the police, so greatly humiliated by this escape, they had officially discovered that a troop of twenty soldiers in the pay of the Duchess—a cruelly ungrateful woman whose name was no longer uttered save with a sigh—had provided Fabrizio with four ladders tied together, each one forty-five feet long: having lowered a rope tied to the ladders, Fabrizio had had no more than the extremely vulgar merit of pulling the ladders up to his cell. A few Liberals known for their imprudence, among them the physician C——, an agent paid directly by
the Prince, added (though compromising themselves by doing so) that these wretched police officers had had the barbarity to execute eight of the unfortunate soldiers who had facilitated that ingrate Fabrizio’s escape. He was then blamed even by the true Liberals for having caused, by his rashness, the death of eight poor soldiers. It is thus that petty despotisms reduce to nothing the value of public opinion.

Amidst this general uproar, only Archbishop Landriani appeared loyal to his young friend’s cause; he ventured to repeat, even at the Princess’s court, the legal maxim according to which, in every trial, one must keep an ear free of all prejudice in order to hear the arguments of an absent party.

The day after Fabrizio’s escape, several persons had received a clumsy sonnet celebrating this flight as one of the finest actions of the age, and comparing Fabrizio to an angel alighting on earth with outspread wings. The following evening, all Parma was repeating a sublime poem. This was Fabrizio’s monologue as he slid down the rope, passing judgments on the various incidents of his life. This sonnet gave him an eminence in public opinion on account of two magnificent verses, in which every connoisseur recognized the style of Ferrante Palla.

But here I must seek an epic style: where else might I find colors to limn the torrents of indignation which suddenly flooded all respectable hearts when they learned of the dreadful insolence of that illumination of the villa at Sacca? There was but a single outcry against the Duchess; even the true Liberals declared that this action cruelly compromised the wretched suspects being held in the various
prisons of the realm, and needlessly exasperated the Sovereign’s heart. Count Mosca declared that the Duchess’s old friends had but one recourse, which was to forget her. The chorus of execration was therefore unanimous: a stranger passing through the city would have been struck by the vehemence of public opinion. But in this country where people know how to appreciate the pleasures of revenge, the illumination at Sacca and the splendid celebration given on the grounds to some six thousand peasants enjoyed an enormous success. Everyone in Parma was talking about how the Duchess had distributed a thousand sequins to her people; this accounted for the somewhat harsh welcome given to the thirty or so officers the police had been so foolish as to send to this little village, thirty-six hours after the sublime evening and the general intoxication which had followed it. The officers, welcomed by a shower of stones, had taken to their heels, and two of them, fallen from their horses, had been thrown into the Po.

As for the bursting of the great reservoir of the Palazzo Sanseverina, it had gone virtually unnoticed: it was during the night that several streets had been more or less flooded; the next day one would have said that it had rained. Ludovic had been careful to break the panes in one of the
palazzo
windows, to suggest that robbers had broken in.

A little ladder had even been discovered. Only Count Mosca recognized his friend’s genius.

Fabrizio was quite determined to return to Parma as soon as he could; he entrusted Ludovic with a long letter to the Archbishop, and this loyal servant returned to post at the first Piedmontese village, Sannazzaro to the west of Pavia, a Latin epistle which the worthy prelate addressed to his young protégé. We shall add one detail which, like several others no doubt, will seem tedious in countries where there is no longer a need for precautions. The name of Fabrizio del Dongo was never written; all the letters sent to him were addressed to Ludovic San Micheli, at Locarno in Switzerland, or in Belgirate in Piedmont. The envelope was made of coarse paper, the seal clumsily applied, the address barely legible, and occasionally embellished with directions worthy of a cook; all the letters were dated from Naples, six days before the actual date.

From the Piedmontese village of Sannazaro, near Pavia, Ludovic lost no time in returning to Parma: he was entrusted with a mission which Fabrizio regarded as of the greatest importance, nothing less than getting into Clélia Conti’s hands a silk handkerchief on which was printed a sonnet by Petrarch. It is true that one word of this sonnet had been altered: Clélia found it on her table two days after having received the thanks of the Marchese Crescenzi, who proclaimed himself the happiest of men, and it is unnecessary to say what impression this mark of an ever-growing remembrance produced upon her heart.

Ludovic was to try to obtain every possible detail concerning what was happening in the Fortress. It was he who gave Fabrizio the sad news that the Marchese Crescenzi’s marriage now seemed to be definitely settled; almost no day passed without some sort of party given for Clélia inside the Fortress. A decisive proof of the marriage was that the inordinately rich and consequently avaricious Marchese, as is the custom among the wealthy class of northern Italy, was making vast preparations, though he was marrying a girl
without dowry
. It is true that General Fabio Conti’s vanity, outraged by this observation, the first to occur to all his compatriots, had just purchased an estate worth over 300,000 francs, and this estate he had paid for, though he was virtually penniless, in ready money, apparently out of the Marchese’s funds. Then the General had declared that he was giving this estate as a wedding-present to his daughter. But the charges for the documents and other matters, amounting to over 12,000 francs, seemed an absurd expense to the Marchese Crescenzi, an eminently logical person. For his part he was having woven in Lyons a set of magnificent tapestries in carefully matched colors calculated to delight the eye, designed by the famous Bolognese painter Pallagi. These tapestries, each of which contained some aspect of the armorial bearings of the Crescenzis, who as the world well knows are descended from the celebrated Crescentius, the Roman Consul in the year 985, were to furnish the seventeen salons forming the ground floor of the Marchese’s palace. The tapestries, clocks, and lusters sent to Parma cost over 350,000 francs; the cost of the new mirrors, added to those the house already possessed, amounted to two hundred thousand francs. With the exception of two
salons, the work of the famous Parmigianino, the greatest painter of the region after the divine Correggio, every room on the first and second floor was now occupied by celebrated painters from Florence, Rome, and Milan, who were decorating them with frescoes throughout.
Fokelberg, the great Swedish sculptor, Tenerani
from Rome, and
Marchesi
from Milan had been working for a year on ten bas-reliefs representing as many feats of Crescentius, that truly great man. Most of the ceilings, thus frescoed, also made some allusion to his life. Particularly admired was the ceiling on which Hayez, from Milan, had represented Crescentius received in the Elysian Fields by Francesco Sforza, Lorenzo the Magnificent, King Robert, the Tribune Cola di Rienzi, Machiavelli, Dante, and the other great figures of the Middle Ages. Admiration for these distinguished spirits was taken as a witty epigram at the expense of those presently in power.

All these magnificent details monopolized the attention of the nobility and the bourgeois of Parma, and pierced our hero’s heart when he read about them, described with naïve admiration, in a long letter of over twenty pages which Ludovic had dictated to a customs-officer in Casalmaggiore.

“And I, poor wretch that I am!” Fabrizio kept saying to himself. “With a yearly income of no more than four thousand lire! What an impertinence for me to dare aspire to Clélia Conti, for whom all these miracles are being wrought!”

Only one item in Ludovic’s long letter, though this one written in his own wretched hand, informed his master that he had encountered that evening, and in the condition of a fugitive, poor Grillo his former jailer, who had been imprisoned, and then released. This man had asked for the charity of a sequin, and Ludovic had given him four in the Duchess’s name. A dozen of the former jailers, recently liberated, were preparing a little reception with knives (un
trattamento di coltellate
) to the new jailers their successors, should they ever manage to encounter them outside the Fortress. Grillo had said that serenades were given almost daily at the Fortress, that Signorina Clélia was very pale, frequently ill,
and other things of this kind
. This absurd phrase caused Ludovic to receive, by return post, orders to return to Locarno. He did
so, and the details he gave in person were even more melancholy for Fabrizio.