The Charterhouse of Parma (55 page)

Toward midnight, one of those dense white fogs the Po occasionally flings over its banks spread first through the city and then reached the terrace and the bastions in the center of which rose the huge tower of the Fortress. Fabrizio estimated that from the terrace parapet, the young acacia-trees surrounding the gardens planted by the soldiers at
the base of the hundred-and-eighty-foot wall would no longer be visible. “Which is a good thing,” he realized.

Shortly after half-past twelve had struck, the signal of the little lamp appeared at the aviary window. Fabrizio was ready to act; he crossed himself, then tied to his bed the shorter rope intended to lower him the thirty-five feet separating him from the terrace on which the Governor’s
palazzo
stood. He landed without difficulty on the roof of the guard-room, occupied since the night before by the reinforcement of two hundred soldiers we have already mentioned. Unfortunately, these soldiers, by a quarter to one, had not yet fallen asleep; while he was tip-toeing across the curved-tile roof, Fabrizio could hear them saying that the Devil was up there on the roof, and that they ought to try killing him with a round of musket-fire. Several voices claimed that this enterprise would be a great impiety, others that if a shot were fired without killing something the Governor would throw them all in jail for having alarmed the garrison to no purpose. The whole argument sent Fabrizio scurrying across the roof as fast as he could go, making even more noise. The fact is that at the very moment when, dangling from his rope, he passed in front of the windows—luckily at a distance of four or five feet because of the roof’s projection—they were bristling with bayonets. Some people have claimed that Fabrizio, mad as ever, had conceived the notion of playing the Devil’s part and that he tossed these soldiers a handful of sequins. What is certain is that he had scattered sequins on the floor of his room, and also on the terrace on his way from the Farnese Tower to the parapet, in order to distract the soldiers who might have come in pursuit of him.

Having landed on the terrace, where he was surrounded by sentries who normally called out every fifteen minutes the one sentence
All’s well around my post
, Fabrizio made for the western parapet and began looking for the new stone.

What seems incredible and might make one doubt the facts, if the result had not had an entire city for witness, is that the sentries posted along the parapet did not see and arrest Fabrizio; as it happened, the fog just mentioned was beginning to rise, and Fabrizio has said that when he was on the terrace, the fog already seemed to have reached
half-way up the Farnese Tower. But this fog was not thick, and he could see the sentries quite clearly, some of whom were walking back and forth. He added that, impelled as though by a supernatural force, he boldly took up a position between two sentries quite close to him. He calmly unwound the long rope which was coiled round his body and which twice became tangled; it took him a long time to straighten it out and spread it on the parapet. He heard the soldiers talking all around him and determined to stab the first man who approached. “I wasn’t at all worried,” he added; “it seemed to me I was performing a ceremony.”

He attached his rope, once it was disentangled, to an opening cut in the parapet for the release of rain-water, climbed up onto this same parapet, offered God a fervent prayer, and then, like a hero of the age of chivalry, thought for a moment of Clélia. “How different I am,” he said to himself, “from the frivolous libertine who entered this prison nine months ago!” At last he began to descend that dizzying height. He was acting quite mechanically, he said, and as if he were climbing down in broad daylight, in full view of friends, to win a wager. About half-way down, he suddenly felt his arms losing their strength; he even thinks he let go of the rope for a second, but immediately recovered it; perhaps, he says, he grabbed onto the bushes which he was dropping through and which were scratching him. Now and then he felt a searing pain between his shoulders, which nearly took his breath away. There was an extremely uncomfortable swaying motion; he was constantly swung against the bushes and was even brushed by several large birds which he had wakened and which flew right at him. The first times, he imagined he was being seized by men pursuing him down the Fortress wall in the same fashion he was descending, and he prepared to defend himself. Finally he landed at the base of the huge tower with no worse problem than bleeding hands. He says that the slope of the lower half of the tower walls was very helpful—he brushed against the wall as he came down, and the plants growing between the stones greatly retarded his descent. Landing in the soldiers’ gardens at the bottom, he fell into an acacia-tree which from above seemed four or five feet high and which was actually fifteen or twenty. A drunken man lying asleep there took him for a thief. Falling out of that tree, Fabrizio
nearly dislocated his right arm. He began running toward the parapet but, according to him, his legs seemed to have turned to cotton-wool; he had no strength left. Despite the danger, he sat down and drank a little of the brandy which remained. He dozed off for a few minutes and lost consciousness of where he was; waking, he could not understand how he could be seeing trees in his room. At last the terrible truth returned to his memory; immediately he walked over to the rampart and climbed up onto it by a broad flight of steps. The sentry posted quite close by was snoring in his box. Fabrizio found a cannon lying in the grass; to this he tied his third rope, though it was a little too short, and dropped into a muddy ditch where there might have been a foot of water. While he was climbing out and trying to discover where he was, he felt himself seized by two men: for a moment he was terrified, but he soon heard a voice close to his ear whispering: “Ah, Monsignore! Monsignore!”

He vaguely realized that these were the Duchess’s men, and immediately fainted dead away. Some time later he sensed that he was being carried by men walking very fast and in complete silence; then they stopped, which caused him great anxiety. But he had no strength to speak or even to open his eyes; he felt he was being embraced; suddenly he recognized the scent of the Duchess’s garments. This fragrance revived him; he opened his eyes and managed to utter the words “Ah, dear friend!!” Then he fainted dead away once again.

The faithful Bruno and a squad of police loyal to the Count were waiting two hundred paces away; the Count himself was hidden in a tiny house very close to the place where the Duchess was waiting. He would not have hesitated, had it been necessary, to wield his sword alongside several retired officers, his intimate friends; he considered himself somehow obliged to save Fabrizio, whose life seemed to him in great jeopardy and who would have had his pardon signed by the Prince had he, Mosca, not been so foolish as to attempt to spare his Sovereign from writing an indiscreet document.

Since midnight the Duchess, surrounded by men armed to the teeth, had been pacing up and down in deep silence close to the Fortress ramparts; she could not stand still and believed she would have to fight in order to rescue Fabrizio from his pursuers. Her ardent
imagination had taken a hundred precautions too complicated to describe here, each of an incredible rashness. It has been estimated that over eighty agents were on duty that night, all in readiness to fight for an extraordinary purpose. Fortunately, Ferrante and Ludovic were leading this party, and the Minister of Police was not hostile; yet the Count himself observed that the Duchess had not been betrayed by anyone, and that as a Minister he himself knew nothing of these arrangements.

The Duchess lost her head completely upon seeing Fabrizio again; she hugged him convulsively, then despaired upon seeing him covered with blood: it had come from his hands, but she imagined him to be seriously wounded. With the help of one of her men, she had removed his coat to bandage him when Ludovic, who fortunately happened to be there, insisted on putting Fabrizio and the Duchess into one of the little carriages which had been concealed in a garden near the city gates, and they crept away in order to cross the Po near Sacca. Ferrante, with twenty armed men, made up the rear guard and had faithfully promised to stop any pursuers. The Count, alone and on foot, left the neighborhood of the Fortress only two hours later, when he saw that no one was stirring. “Here I am, committing high treason!” he said to himself, wild with joy.

Ludovic had the inspired idea of putting in another carriage a young surgeon attached to the Duchess’s household who happened to have a build similar to Fabrizio’s. “Make your escape,” he told this man, “in the direction of Bologna; be clumsy about it, try to get yourself arrested; then contradict yourself in your answers, and at the end confess that you are Fabrizio del Dongo; do everything you can to gain time. Be clever at being clumsy, you’ll get off with a month in prison, and the Signora will give you fifty sequins.”

“Who thinks of money in the Signora’s service?”

He set off and was arrested several hours later, affording great joy to General Fabio Conti and to Chief Justice Rassi, who, along with Fabrizio’s danger, saw his baronage taking flight.

The escape was discovered at the Fortress only around six that morning, and it was not until ten that anyone dared inform the Prince of the matter. The Duchess had been so well served that despite Fabrizio’s
deep sleep, which she took for a dead faint and made the carriage stop three times, she crossed the Po in a boat as the hour of four was striking. There were relays of horses on the left bank which covered another two leagues with great speed, until they were stopped for over an hour for the inspection of passports. The Duchess had every kind of passport for herself and for Fabrizio, but she was quite irrational that day and took it into her head to give ten napoleons to the Austrian police-clerk, and to take his hand as she burst into tears. This clerk, greatly alarmed, began the inspection all over again. They then traveled by post; the Duchess paid so extravagantly that she aroused suspicion everywhere in a country where any stranger is suspect. Ludovic again came to her aid, saying that Signora the Duchess was overcome with grief on account of the protracted fever of young Count Mosca, son of the Prime Minister of Parma, whom she was taking to consult doctors in Pavia.

It was only when they were some ten leagues beyond the Po that the prisoner fully recovered consciousness; he had a dislocated shoulder and a good many scratches and bruises. The Duchess was still behaving so oddly that the innkeeper of the village where they stopped for a meal imagined he was dealing with a Princess of the Imperial House, and proceeded to offer her the honors he believed were her due, when Ludovic told the man that the Princess would surely send him to prison if he undertook to have the church bells rung.

Finally, around six that evening, they reached Piedmontese territory. Here for the first time Fabrizio was in complete safety; he was taken to a tiny village off the main road; his hands were bandaged, and he slept a few hours more.

It was in this village that the Duchess permitted herself an action not only dreadful in the eyes of morality but also fatal to her peace of mind for the rest of her life. A few weeks before Fabrizio’s escape, and on a day when all Parma was at the Fortress gates trying to glimpse the scaffold being erected in his honor in the courtyard, the Duchess had revealed to Ludovic, now the factotum of her household, the secret by means of which one could remove, from a quite inconspicuous little iron frame, a stone forming part of the pavement of the famous reservoir of the Palazzo Sanseverina, a thirteenth-century structure of
which we have already spoken. While Fabrizio was asleep in this village
trattoria
, the Duchess sent for Ludovic, who supposed she had gone mad, so strange were the glances she kept darting at him. “You must be expecting,” she told him, “that I’m going to give you many thousands of francs. Well, not at all! I know you, you’re a poet and you’d run right through such an amount of money. I’m going to give you the little estate of La Ricciarda, a league outside Casalmaggiore.”

Ludovic flung himself at her feet, wild with joy, and protested with heartfelt accents that it was not in hope of gain that he had helped save Monsignore Fabrizio; that he had always loved him dearly since he had had the honor of driving him, once, in his office as the Signora’s third coachman. When this man, who was genuinely warm-hearted, believed he had occupied such a great lady’s attention long enough, he took his leave; but she, with tears in her eyes, cried: “Wait!”

She was pacing back and forth, silent now, in that village inn, occasionally glancing at Ludovic with incredible eyes. At last this man, realizing that there was to be no end to this strange exercise, decided to address his mistress. “The Signora has given me so extravagant a gift, one so much beyond anything a poor man like myself could imagine, worth so much more than the poor service I have had the honor to perform, that I believe in all conscience I cannot keep her estate of La Ricciarda for myself. I have the honor to return it to the Signora, and to request that she grant me a pension of four hundred francs.”

“How many times in your life,” she asked him with the grimmest hauteur, “how many times have you ever heard that I have abandoned a plan once I have decided upon it?” After this sentence, the Duchess paced a few more minutes; then, suddenly coming to a halt, she exclaimed: “It is by accident, and because he managed to attract that young girl, that Fabrizio’s life has been saved! If he hadn’t been so lovable, he would be dead. Can you deny it?” she asked, walking up to Ludovic, her eyes glittering with the blackest fury.

Ludovic recoiled a few steps and was now certain she was mad, which gave him the liveliest anxiety for the proprietorship of his estate of La Ricciarda.

“Well?” continued the Duchess in the gentlest and gayest tone of voice, utterly transformed. “I want my good people of Sacca to have a
holiday, one they won’t forget for a long time. You will return to Sacca now, if you don’t mind. Do you imagine you’ll be running any risk?