The Charterhouse of Parma (42 page)

“Since we’ve met here,” he said to the religious, “will you be so good as to spare my gout the mortal fatigue of climbing the stairs to His Grace the Archbishop. I should be infinitely grateful to him if he would deign to come down to the sacristy.”

This message delighted the Archbishop, who had a thousand things to tell the Minister concerning Fabrizio. But the Minister guessed that these things were merely fine phrases, and would not hear a word.

“What sort of man is Dugnani, the Vicar of San Paolo?”

“A small mind and a great ambition,” the Archbishop replied, “few scruples and extreme poverty, for we too have our vices!”

“Indeed, Monsignore!” exclaimed the Minister. “You depict the man like Tacitus himself.” And he took his leave, laughing.

No sooner had he returned to the Ministry than he had the Abbé Dugnani summoned. “You are the spiritual director of my excellent friend Chief Justice Rassi. Would he have nothing to say to me?”

And without another word or further ceremony, he dismissed Dugnani.

The Count regarded himself as out of office. “Let us calculate,” he said to himself, “how many horses we’ll be able to have after my disgrace, for that is what my resignation will be called.” The Count reckoned up his fortune: he had entered the Ministry with eighty thousand francs to his name; to his considerable astonishment, he found that, all told, his present holdings did not come to five hundred thousand francs: “At most it’s an income of twenty thousand lire,” he mused. “What a fool I am, it must be confessed! Every bourgeois in Parma believes I have an income of a hundred and fifty thousand; and the Prince, on this subject, is more bourgeois than any of them. When they see me in the gutter, they’ll say that I know how to hide my fortune. Damn it all, if I’m still Minister three months from now, we’ll see that fortune of mine doubled.” In this notion he found the occasion to write to the Duchess, and seized it greedily; but to be forgiven for a letter, considering the terms they were now on, he filled this one with figures and calculations. “We shall have no more than twenty thousand a year,” he wrote her, “for the three of us to live on in Naples—Fabrizio, you, and myself. Fabrizio and I will share a saddle-horse between us.” No sooner had the Minister sent off his letter than Fiscal General
Rassi was announced; the Count received him with a hauteur that verged on rudeness.

“What is this, sir?” he inquired. “You manage to seize in Bologna a so-called conspirator who is under my protection, and furthermore you intend to cut off his head, and you tell me nothing about it! At least you must know the name of my successor? Is it General Conti, or perhaps you yourself?”

Rassi was dumbfounded; he was insufficiently accustomed to good society to guess whether the Count was speaking seriously: he blushed deeply, stammered a few unintelligible words; the Count stared at him, delighting in his embarrassment. Suddenly Rassi pulled himself together and exclaimed with considerable ease and the expression of Figaro caught red-handed by
Almaviva
: “My word, Signor Count, I won’t beat about the bush with Your Excellency: what will you give me if I answer all your questions as I would those of my confessor?”

“The Cross of San Paolo”—the Parmesan Order—“or money, if you can give me an excuse for granting it to you.”

“I’d prefer the Order, since it gives me some rank as a noble.”

“My dear Fiscal, you don’t mean you still set some store by our wretched nobility?”

“If I had been born noble,” Rassi replied with all the insolence of his métier, “the relatives of the men I’ve had hanged would hate me, but they wouldn’t scorn me.”

“Very well, I shall save you from scorn,” said the Count; “cure me of my ignorance. What do you plan to do with Fabrizio?”

“My word, the Prince is in a terrible pickle: he fears that, seduced by the fine eyes of
Armida
—forgive these rather racy terms, they are the Sovereign’s very words—he fears that, seduced by the very fine eyes which have rather stirred him himself, you might abandon him, and there is no one but you to manage the affairs of Lombardy. I’ll go so far as to say,” Rassi added, lowering his voice, “that you might make a good thing out of this occasion, something well worth the Cross of San Paolo you’re going to give me. The Prince would grant you, as a national recompense, a nice estate worth six hundred thousand francs which he will set apart from his own domains, or a gratuity of three
hundred thousand scudi, if you agree not to concern yourself with the fate of Fabrizio del Dongo, or at least to mention it to him only in public.”

“I was expecting something better than that,” said the Count; “not to concern myself with Fabrizio means a quarrel with the Duchess.”

“Well, that’s just what the Prince says: as a matter of fact he’s horribly annoyed with the Duchess, just between ourselves; and he’s afraid that to compensate yourself for the break with this lovely lady, now that you are a widower, you might request the hand of his cousin, old Princess Isotta, who is no more than fifty.”

“He’s guessed right!” the Count exclaimed. “Our master is the subtlest man in his own territories.”

The Count had never had the fantastic notion of marrying this ancient Princess; nothing would have less suited a man whom the Court ceremonies bored to death. He began playing with his snuffbox on the marble top of a little table next to his armchair. Rassi regarded this nervous gesture as the chance of a windfall; his eyes gleamed.

“Forgive me, Signor Count,” he cried; “if Your Excellency will accept either the estate or the gratuity in cash, I beg you not to choose any other intermediary but myself. I shall do everything possible,” he added, speaking still lower, “to increase the gratuity, or even to add a good-sized forest to the estate. If Your Excellency deigned to instill a little amiability and tact into his way of speaking to the Prince of this puppy they’ve put away, it is quite possible that the estate offered as a national recompense might be elevated to a Duchy. I repeat to Your Excellency, the Prince, for the time being, loathes the Duchess, but he is dreadfully embarrassed, even to the point where I have sometimes supposed that there was some secret circumstance he dared not acknowledge to me. As a matter of fact, there may be a gold mine here, I selling you my most intimate secrets and with all the good will in the world, for I am believed to be your sworn enemy. Actually, even if he is furious with the Duchess, he also believes, as do we all, that only you in all the world can carry out the secret negotiations having to do with the Milanese. Will Your Excellency permit me to repeat to him the very words of our Sovereign?” Rassi inquired, warming to his theme. “There is often a physiognomy in the position of the words which no
translation can depict, and Your Excellency may see more in them than I.”

“I permit everything,” said the Count, continuing, quite coolly, to tap the marble tabletop with his gold snuffbox, “I permit everything and I shall be grateful.”

“Grant me a patent of hereditary nobility independent of the Order, and I shall be more than satisfied. When I mention ennoblement to the Prince, he replies: ‘A rascal like you, noble! We’d have to shut up shop tomorrow; no one in Parma would ever wish to be ennobled again!’ To return to the matter of the Milanese, the Prince was telling me, not three days back: ‘There’s no one but that scoundrel to follow the thread of our intrigues; if I drive him away or if he follows the Duchess, I might as well abandon all hope of someday seeing myself the liberal and adored leader of all Italy.’ “

At this expression the Count breathed again: “Fabrizio will not die,” he said to himself.

In all his life Rassi had not been able to hold so intimate a conversation with the Prime Minister: he was beside himself with happiness; he saw himself on the eve of being able to abandon the name Rassi, which had become synonymous the country over with everything low and vile; the peasants called mad dogs
Rassi;
only recently some soldiers had fought a duel because one of their comrades had called them
Rassi
. Indeed, not a week passed without this wretched name managing to embellish some cruel sonnet or other. His son, a young and innocent schoolboy of sixteen, was driven out of the cafés on account of his name.

It was the burning memory of all these amenities of his position that made him commit an imprudence. “I have an estate,” he said to the Count, drawing his chair closer to the Minister’s armchair, “called Riva—I’d like to become Baron Riva.”

“Why not?” said the Minister.

Rassi was beside himself. “Well then, Signor Count, I shall permit myself an indiscretion, I’ll make so bold as to divine the goal of your desires: you aspire to the hand of Princess Isotta, and that is a noble ambition. Once you are related, you are sheltered from disgrace, you
tie our man’s hands
. I shall not conceal from you that he regards such a
marriage with Princess Isotta with horror; but if your affairs were entrusted to someone skillful and
well paid
, we might not despair of success.”

“Myself, dear Baron, I should despair; I disavow in advance any words that you might repeat in my name; but the day when this illustrious alliance finally manages to fulfill my hopes and to afford me so high a position in the State, I myself shall offer you three hundred thousand francs of my own money, or else I shall advise the Prince to grant you a sign of favor which you yourself will prefer to this sum.”

The reader finds this conversation lengthy: yet we are sparing him over half of it; it went on for another two hours. Rassi emerged from the Count’s chambers wild with happiness; the Count remained with high hopes of saving Fabrizio, and more determined than ever to hand in his resignation. He found that his credit had need of being renewed by the presence in the government of such men as Rassi and General Conti; he delighted in the possibility he had just glimpsed of being revenged on the Prince: “He can force the Duchess out,” he exclaimed, “but by God he will give up all hope of being a constitutional monarch of Lombardy.” (This chimera was absurd: the Prince was a clever man, but by dint of dreaming of it, had fallen madly in love with the notion.)

The Count could not contain his joy as he hurried to the Duchess to tell her of his conversation with the Fiscal. He found her door closed to him; the porter scarcely dared tell him of this order received from his mistress’s own lips. The Count sadly returned to the Ministerial
palazzo;
the misfortune he had just experienced entirely eclipsed the joy he had been given by his conversation with the Prince’s confidant. No longer having the heart to concern himself with anything, the Count was wandering sadly through his picture gallery when, a quarter of an hour having passed, he received a message which ran as follows:

This last stroke was too much for the Count’s courage: he indited a fine letter to the Prince resigning from all his posts, and addressed it to the Duchess with a request to send it on to the Palace. A moment later, he received his resignation torn into four pieces and, on one of the blank scraps of the paper, the Duchess had deigned to write:
No, a thousand times no!

It would difficult to describe the poor Minister’s despair. “She is quite right, I see that,” he kept saying to himself; “my omission of the words
unjust proceedings
is a dreadful misfortune; it may cause Fabrizio’s death, and that will lead to my own.” It was with death in his heart that the Count, who was reluctant to appear at the Sovereign’s Palace before being summoned there, wrote in his own hand the
motu proprio
which created Rassi a Knight of the Order of San Paolo and conferred upon him hereditary nobility; to this the Count joined a report of half a page in length which explained to the Prince the reasons of State which favored such a measure. He took a sort of melancholy pleasure in making two fair copies of these documents, which he sent to the Duchess.

He lost himself in suppositions; he tried to guess the future plans of the woman he loved. “She knows no more than I,” he told himself; “only one thing remains certain; nothing in the world would make her go back on the resolutions she has told me she made.” What intensified his suffering was that he could not find it in his heart to blame the Duchess. “She was good enough to love me; she has ceased doing so after a mistake that was unintentional, it is true, but one that may involve horrible consequences; I have no right to complain.” The next
morning, the Count learned that the Duchess had begun going into society once again; she had appeared the evening before in all the houses which used to receive her. What would he have done had he encountered her in the same salon? How would he speak to her? What tone would he use? And how could he avoid speaking to her?

The next day was a gloomy one; everyone was saying that Fabrizio would be put to death, and the whole city was moved. It was observed that the Prince, out of regard for his high birth, had deigned to order this decapitation.

“I’m responsible for his death,” the Count said to himself; “I can no longer hope to see the Duchess ever again.” Despite this rather elementary reasoning, he couldn’t keep from passing her door some three times; in truth, in order not to be noticed, he went there on foot. In his despair, he even had the courage to write her. He had sent for Rassi twice; the Fiscal had not shown up. “The scoundrel has betrayed me,” the Count said to himself.