The Charterhouse of Parma (53 page)

“A new iniquity is occurring here, of which the Tribune of the People must take cognizance,” said the lovesick man. “Moreover, acting as a private citizen,” he added, “I have nothing to give the Duchess Sanseverina but my life, and I present it to her now.”

Such sincere devotion on the part of a madman and a thief deeply touched the Duchess. She spoke a long while to this man who passed for the greatest poet of northern Italy, and wept a good deal. “Here is someone who understands my heart,” she said to herself. The following day he reappeared, again at nightfall, disguised as a footman wearing her livery. “I have not left Parma; I have been told of a horror which my lips refuse to repeat, but here I am. Consider, Signora, what you are refusing. The being you see before you is not a court doll, but a man!” He was on his knees as he spoke these words with an expression of utter conviction. “Yesterday,” he added, “I said to myself: she has wept in my presence; therefore she is a little less unhappy.”

“But Signor, just think what dangers surround you—you will be arrested in this city!”

“The Tribune will say to you: Signora, what is life when duty calls? The wretched man, who has the misfortune of no longer feeling passion for virtue now that he is burning with love, will add: Signora Duchess, Fabrizio, a man of feeling, may be about to perish; do not repulse another such man who offers himself to you! Here is a body of iron and a soul which fears nothing in the world but your displeasure.”

“If you speak to me once more of your feelings, I shall close my door to you forever.”

It occurred to the Duchess that evening to inform Ferrante that she would provide a small pension for his children, though she was afraid that he would leave her straightaway and kill himself.

No sooner had he left than she said to herself, overcome by sinister presentiments: “I too may die, and would to God I might, and soon! if I could find a man worthy of the name to whom I might entrust my poor Fabrizio.”

The Duchess had an idea: she took a piece of paper and acknowledged in a text which included whatever legal terminology she knew that she had received from Signor Ferrante Palla the Signora Sarasine and her five children. The Duchess added: “Further, I bequeath a life-annuity of some of twenty-five thousand francs, on the express condition of paying a life-annuity of fifteen hundred francs to three hundred francs to each of his five children on condition that Ferrante Palla provides
his services as a physician to my nephew Fabrizio del Dongo, and will be to him as a brother. Such is my request.” She signed the document, predated it by a year, and folded the sheet.

Two days later, Ferrante reappeared. This was at the moment when the entire city was agitated by the rumor of Fabrizio’s imminent execution. Would this sad ceremony take place in the Fortress or under the trees of the public promenade? Several men of the people went strolling that very evening in front of the Fortress gates to see whether the scaffold was being erected there: this spectacle had moved Ferrante. He found the Duchess drowned in tears, and scarcely in a condition to speak; she greeted him with a wave of her hand, and pointed to a chair. Ferrante, disguised that day as a Capuchin once again, was splendid; instead of taking a seat he flung himself on his knees and prayed to God in a devout whisper. When the Duchess seemed a little calmer, without shifting his position he interrupted his prayers a moment to murmur these words: “Once again he offers his life.”

“Just think what you are saying,” exclaimed the Duchess with that haggard look in her eyes which, after sobs, indicates that anger is overcoming tenderer feelings.

“He offers his life to avert Fabrizio’s doom, or to avenge it.”

“There is a certain circumstance,” the Duchess answered, “when I might accept the sacrifice of your life.” She stared at him attentively. A flash of joy lit up his face; he quickly rose to his feet and held his arms to Heaven. The Duchess went to find the paper hidden in the secret drawer of a great walnut cabinet. “Read this,” she said to Ferrante. It was the legacy to his children which we have mentioned. Tears and sobs kept Ferrante from reading to the end; he fell to his knees once more. “Give the paper back to me,” the Duchess said, and before his eyes she burned it in the candle. “My name,” she added, “must not appear should you be captured and executed, for this is a matter of life and death.”

“It is my joy to die for the defeat of the tyrant, and a much greater joy to die for you. Let this be understood, and kindly make no further mention of this detail concerning money; I should regard it as an insulting doubt.”

“If you are compromised, I may be as well,” the Duchess replied,
“and Fabrizio after me: it is for that reason, and not because I doubt your courage, that I insist that the man who has rent my heart be poisoned and not stabbed. For the same reason that is so vital to me, I command you to do everything within your power to save your own life.”

“I shall carry out your will swiftly, faithfully, and discreetly. I foresee, Signora Duchess, that my own vengeance shall unite with yours: were it to be otherwise, I should still obey swiftly, faithfully, and discreetly. I may not succeed, yet I shall employ all the human strength I possess.”

“You must poison Fabrizio’s murderer.”

“I had guessed as much, and for the past twenty-seven months that I have been leading this abominable vagabond life, I have often conceived such an action on my own account.”

“If I am discovered and condemned, as an accomplice,” the Duchess continued in a proud tone of voice, “I do not want it to be imputed to me that I have seduced you. I command you not to attempt to see me again before the time of our revenge: there must be no question of putting the man to death before I have given you the signal to do so. His death at this moment, for instance, would be catastrophic for me, rather than useful. Most likely his death must not occur for several months, but it will occur. I insist that he die by poison, and I should prefer letting him live to seeing him shot down. For interests which I choose not to explain to you, I insist that your own life be preserved.”

Ferrante was delighted by this authoritative tone the Duchess was taking with him: his eyes glittered with joy. As we have said, he was dreadfully thin; but it was apparent that he had been extremely handsome in his early youth, and he imagined himself to be still what he had once been. “Am I mad?” he asked himself, “or can it be that the Duchess intends, on the day when I have given her this proof of my devotion, to make me the happiest of men? And indeed, why should this not be so? Am I not worth every bit as much as that doll of a Count Mosca, who when the moment came was unable to serve her in this matter, not even to enable Monsignore Fabrizio to escape?”

“I may require his death tomorrow,” the Duchess continued, still with the same expression of authority. “You know that huge reservoir
at the corner of the
palazzo
, close by the hiding-place you have occasionally used; there is a secret means of causing all that water to flow into the street; indeed, that will be the signal of my revenge. You shall see, if you are in Parma, or you will hear, if you are living in the woods, that the great reservoir of the Palazzo Sanseverina has collapsed. Act at once, but by means of poison, and, above all, expose your own life as little as possible. No one must ever know that I am involved in this business.”

“Words are useless,” Ferrante replied with ill-concealed enthusiasm, “I have already decided upon the means I shall use. The life of this man becomes more odious to me than it was, since I shall not dare see you again so long as he lives. I shall await the signal of the reservoir’s collapse.” He bowed abruptly and left the room. The Duchess watched him leave. When he was in the next room she called him back.

“Ferrante!” she exclaimed. “You magnificent man!” He returned, as though impatient at being recalled; his face at this moment was sublime. “And your children?”

“Signora, they will be wealthier than I; you may perhaps grant them some little pension.”

“Here,” the Duchess said as she handed him a big olive-wood case, “here are all the diamonds I have left; they are worth fifty thousand francs.”

“Ah, Signora! You humiliate me!” said Ferrante, with a gesture of horror, and his expression changed completely.

“I shall never see you again before this deed is done: take this, I wish it,” the Duchess added with an arrogant expression that overwhelmed Ferrante. He put the case in his pocket and left, shutting the door behind him. Once again the Duchess called him back; he came into the room with an anxious expression: the Duchess was standing in the center of her salon; she flung herself into his arms. A moment later, Ferrante had almost fainted with happiness; the Duchess released herself from his embrace, and with her eyes indicated the door.

“There is the only man who has understood me,” she said to herself; “that is how Fabrizio would have acted, if he could have understood me.”

There were two traits in the Duchess’s character: what she wanted
once she wanted forever; she never gave further thought to a decision once she had made it. In this regard she used to quote a remark of her first husband’s, the charming General Pietranera: “What insolence to myself!” he used to say. “Why should I suppose I have more sense today than when I made up my mind?”

From this moment, a sort of gaiety reappeared in the Duchess’s nature. Before the fatal decision, at each step that her mind had taken, at each new thing she saw, she had the feeling of her inferiority with regard to the Prince, of her weakness and her gullibility; the Prince, she believed, had pusillanimously deceived her, and Count Mosca, in accord with his courtier’s genius, however innocently, had furthered the Prince’s designs. Once her vengeance was determined, she felt her strength; each step her mind had taken gave her a certain happiness. I am inclined to think that the immoral delight Italians experience in taking revenge is a consequence of their power of imagination; people of other countries do not, strictly speaking, forgive; they forget.

The Duchess did not see Palla again until the last days of Fabrizio’s imprisonment. As the reader may have guessed, it was he who came up with the plan of escape: there existed in the forest, some two leagues from Sacca, a half-ruined medieval tower over a hundred feet high; before mentioning escape a second time to the Duchess, Ferrante begged her to send Ludovic, with picked men, to arrange a series of ladders around this tower. In the Duchess’s presence, he climbed up by means of these ladders, and came down with a simple knotted rope; he repeated the experiment three times, then he again explained his plan. Eight days later, Ludovic too was willing to climb down this old tower by a knotted rope: it was then that the Duchess communicated this plan to Fabrizio.

In the final days before this attempt, which might well lead to the prisoner’s death in more ways than one, the Duchess could find no moment of rest unless Ferrante was at her side; this man’s courage electrified her own; but it was evident that she must conceal this singular companionship from the Count. She feared not that he would object but that she would be distressed by his objections, which would have doubled her anxieties. What, to take as her most intimate adviser an acknowledged lunatic and a man under sentence of death as well!
“And,” the Duchess added, speaking to herself, “a man who subsequently might do such strange things!” Ferrante happened to be in the Duchess’s salon just when the Count came to inform her of the conversation the Prince had had with Rassi; and when the Count had left, it was all she could do to keep Ferrante from proceeding then and there to carry out a frightful plan! “I am strong now!” exclaimed this madman. “I no longer have any doubt as to the legitimacy of the deed!”

“But in the moment of rage which will inevitably follow, Fabrizio will be put to death!”

“But thereby he would be spared the danger of that terrible descent: it is possible, it is even easy,” he added, “but the young fellow lacks experience.”

The wedding of Marchese Crescenzi’s sister was celebrated, and it was at the party given on this occasion that the Duchess encountered Clélia and was able to speak to her without awakening suspicions among the fashionable onlookers. The Duchess herself handed Clélia the bundle of ropes in the garden, where these ladies had gone to take a breath of air. These ropes, woven with the greatest care, half of hemp and half of silk, with knots at regular intervals, were very slender and quite flexible; Ludovic had tested their strength, and, throughout their length, they could bear a load of eight hundredweight without breaking. They had been coiled up to form several bundles in the shape of a quarto volume; Clélia took it from the Duchess and promised that everything that was humanly possible would be accomplished to bring these bundles inside the Farnese Tower.

“Yet I fear the timidity of your nature; and furthermore,” the Duchess added politely, “what interest can you have in the fate of a man who is a stranger to you?”

“Signor del Dongo is in distress,
and I promise you that he shall be saved by me!”

But the Duchess, relying very little upon the presence of mind of a young person of twenty, had taken other precautions she was determined not to share with the Governor’s daughter. As it was only natural to suppose, this Governor happened to be at the party given for the wedding of the Marchese Crescenzi’s sister. The Duchess said to herself that if she could administer a strong narcotic to him, it would
initially be supposed that he was suffering an attack of apoplexy, and then instead of employing his own carriage to return him to the Fortress, she might, with a little skillful management, be able to suggest a better idea, that he be put into a litter which just happened to be in the house where the party was being given. Here there would also be a number of picked men dressed as servants for the party who in the general confusion would obligingly offer to carry the sick man to his lofty residence. These men, under Ludovic’s direction, would be carrying a considerable quantity of ropes, cunningly concealed under their uniforms. It is evident that the Duchess was quite out of her senses since she had seriously envisaged Fabrizio’s escape. The danger of this beloved being was too great for her soul, and in addition was lasting too long. By an excess of precautions she nearly caused this escape to fail, as we shall see. Everything proceeded according to her plan, with the one difference that the drug produced too powerful an effect; everyone believed, even those of the medical profession, that the General had had an apoplectic stroke.