The Charterhouse of Parma (66 page)

“This shows how much you care about my salvation,” she exclaimed, hiding her face in her hands. “Yet you know, when my father was on the verge of death from poison, I vowed to the Madonna never to see you again. I have broken that vow only on that one day, the most wretched in all my life, when I felt bound by conscience to save you from death. It is already a great deal more than you deserve if, by some distorted and probably criminal interpretation of my vow, I consent to listen to you.”

This last remark so amazed Fabrizio that it took him several seconds to be delighted by it. He had expected to be met with the deepest anger, and to see Clélia run away from him; finally he regained his presence of mind and snuffed the one candle. Though he believed he had understood Clélia’s orders, he trembled in every limb as he walked toward the end of the salon where she had taken refuge behind a couch; he had no idea whether he would offend her by kissing her hand; she herself was quivering with love, and flung herself into his arms. “Dear Fabrizio,” she said to him, “how long it has taken you to get here! I can only speak to you for a moment, for it is certainly a great sin; and when I promised never to see you again, no doubt I also meant to promise never to speak to you. But how could you be so barbarous as to pursue my poor father’s notion of taking revenge? For after all, it was he himself who was nearly poisoned to make possible your escape. Shouldn’t you do something for me, now that I’ve jeopardized my own good name in order to save you? Besides, now you are quite committed to Holy Orders; you wouldn’t be able to marry me, even if I were to find some way of getting rid of this hateful Marchese. And then how could you dare, on the very evening of the procession, try to see me in broad daylight, thereby violating in the most outrageous way the sacred oath I’ve sworn to the Madonna?”

Fabrizio crushed her in his arms, beside himself with amazement and delight.

A conversation which began with such a quantity of things to be said was not to end for a long while. Fabrizio told Clélia the precise truth as to her father’s banishment; the Duchess had had nothing to do with it, for the simple reason that she had not for a moment supposed
that the notion of poison had occurred to General Conti; she had always assumed it was an inspiration of the Raversi faction, which sought to get rid of Count Mosca. This historical truth, developed at great length, made Clélia happy indeed; she had been wretched at having to hate anyone related to Fabrizio. Now she no longer regarded the Duchess with a jealous eye.

The happiness established by this one evening lasted only a few days.

The worthy Don Cesare arrived from Turin; plucking up courage from the perfect honesty of his own heart, he ventured to have himself presented to the Duchess. After requesting her on her word of honor not to abuse the trust he was about to place in her, he admitted that his brother, misled by a false point of honor and believing himself flouted and ruined in public opinion by Fabrizio’s escape, had felt bound to seek revenge.

Don Cesare had not spoken for two minutes before his case was won: his perfect virtue had touched the Duchess, who was quite unaccustomed to such a spectacle. He delighted her as a novelty.

“Hasten the marriage of the General’s daughter to the Marchese Crescenzi, and I promise you I shall do everything I can for the General to be received as if he were returning from a journey. I shall invite him to dinner; are you satisfied? No doubt there will be a certain chill at first, and the General must on no account be in a hurry to claim his office as Governor of the Fortress. But you know that I have a friendly feeling for the Marchese, and I shall nurse no rancor for his father-in-law.”

Armed with these words, Don Cesare came to tell his niece that she held in her own hands her despairing father’s life: for several months, he had not appeared at any Court.

Clélia determined to visit her father, hiding under an assumed name in a village near Turin; for he had imagined that the Court of Parma would require his extradition from that of Turin, in order to bring him to trial. She found him ill and half-mad. That very evening she wrote a letter to Fabrizio, breaking off with him forever. Upon receiving this letter, Fabrizio, who was developing a character quite similar
to his beloved’s, went into retreat at the Charterhouse of Velleja, in the mountains ten leagues outside Parma. Clélia wrote him a letter ten pages long; she had once sworn never to marry the Marchese without Fabrizio’s consent; now she asked it of him, and from the depths of his retreat at Velleja, Fabrizio granted it to her by a letter filled with the purest friendship.

Upon receiving this letter in which the sentiment of friendship, it must be confessed, irritated her considerably, Clélia herself decided upon the day of her marriage, the festivities surrounding which occasion enhanced still further the brilliance of the Parmesan court that winter.

Ranuccio-Ernesto V was a miser at heart; but he was desperately in love, and he hoped to attach the Duchess to his Court; he begged his mother to accept a considerable sum with which to give a number of parties. The Mistress of the Robes succeeded in making admirable use of this great increase in funds; the parties at Parma, that winter, recalled the great days of the Court of Milan and of that charming Prince Eugène, Viceroy of Italy, whose kindness has left so lasting a memory.

The Coadjutor’s duties had recalled Fabrizio to Parma; but he declared that for reasons of piety, he would continue his retreat in the little apartment which his protector, Monsignore Landriani, had obliged him to take at the Archbishop’s Palace; and he shut himself up there, accompanied by a single servant. Hence he attended none of the brilliant festivities at Court, which won him an enormous reputation for sanctity in Parma and in his future diocese. One unexpected consequence of this retreat, to which Fabrizio had been inspired entirely by his deep and hopeless melancholy, was that the worthy Archbishop Landriani, who had always loved him and who, as it happened, had had the notion of making him Coadjutor, now conceived a slight jealousy of him. The Archbishop rightly supposed that he must attend all the Court festivities, as is the custom in Italy. On these occasions, he wore his ceremonial costume, which was more or less the same as the one he wore in the choir of his own Cathedral. The hundreds of servants gathered in the series of antechambers of the palace did not fail to rise
and seek the blessing which the Monsignore was delighted to stop and bestow upon them. It was during one of these moments of solemn silence that Monsignore Landriani heard a voice saying: “Our Archbishop goes to the ball, and Monsignore del Dongo never leaves his room!”

At this moment the enormous favor Fabrizio had enjoyed at the Archbishop’s Palace came to an end; but he now could fly with his own wings. That very behavior which had been inspired solely by the despair into which Clélia’s marriage had plunged him passed for the effect of a sublime and elementary piety, and the faithful read as a work of edification that translation of his family’s genealogy which displayed no more than the most insane vanity. The booksellers produced a lithographed edition of Fabrizio’s protrait, which was sold out in a few days, particularly among the people; the engraver, out of ignorance, had reproduced around Fabrizio’s countenance several of those ornaments which should appear only in the portraits of Bishops and to which a Coadjutor has no claim. The Archbishop saw one of these portraits, and his rage knew no bounds; he summoned Fabrizio, and addressed him with the harshest observations, in terms which passion at times rendered extremely coarse. Fabrizio had no difficulty, as may easily be conceived, in conducting himself as Fénelon would have done on such an occasion; he listened to the Archbishop in all humility and with all possible respect; and when this prelate had ceased speaking, he recounted the whole history of the translation of that genealogy made on Count Mosca’s orders, at the time of Fabrizio’s first imprisonment. It had been published with worldly intentions, which he had ever regarded as unsuitable for a man of his condition. As for the portrait, he had been entirely ignorant of the second edition, as of the first, indeed; and the bookseller having sent to the Archbishop’s Palace, during his retreat, twenty-four copies of this second edition, Fabrizio had sent his own servant to purchase a twenty-fifth; and having learned by this means that his portrait was selling for thirty soldi, he had sent a hundred francs as payment for the twenty-five copies.

All these explanations, though set forth in the most reasonable tone by a man who had many other sorrows in his heart, increased the
Archbishop’s rage to the point of madness; he went so far as to accuse Fabrizio of hypocrisy.

“That is what all these common people are like,” Fabrizio said to himself, “even when they have some intelligence!”

He now had a more serious cause for worry to contend with, derived from his aunt’s letters, which absolutely insisted that he return to his apartment in the Palazzo Sanseverina, or at least that he come visit her on occasion. Fabrizio was certain to hear of the splendid parties given by the Marchese Crescenzi on the occasion of his marriage, and this was what he was not sure he could manage to endure without creating a scene.

When the wedding took place, there were eight whole days during which Fabrizio had vowed himself to complete silence, after ordering his servant and the Archbishop’s men never to utter a word to him.

When Monsignore Landriani learned of this new affectation, he summoned Fabrizio much more frequently than was his custom, and sought to engage him in extremely long conversations; he even obliged him to hold conferences with certain provincial canons who were claiming that the Archbishopric had infringed their privileges. Fabrizio responded to all these incidents with the perfect indifference of a man whose mind is on other things. “I would be better off,” he said to himself, “if I were a Carthusian; I would suffer less among the rocks of Velleja.”

He went to see his aunt, and could not restrain his tears as he embraced her. She found him so transformed—his eyes, even larger on account of his extreme thinness, seemed to be starting out of his head, and he himself seemed so pinched and wretched in his frayed little soutane of a simple priest that at first the Duchess too could not restrain her tears; but a moment afterward, when she realized that this entire transformation in the appearance of this handsome young man was caused by Clélia’s marriage, she experienced sentiments almost equal in vehemence to the Archbishop’s, though more skillfully concealed. She was cruel enough to speak at length of certain picturesque details which had characterized the delightful parties given by the Marchese Crescenzi. Fabrizio made no answer, but his eyes closed momentarily
in a convulsive movement, and he grew even paler than he had been, which at first would have seemed impossible. In such moments of intense sorrow, his pallor assumed a greenish tinge.

Count Mosca arrived, and what met his eyes, a thing which seemed to him quite incredible, finally and altogether cured him of the jealousy which Fabrizio had never ceased to inspire in him. This able man employed the most delicate and ingenious turns of phrase to attempt to revive some interest in Fabrizio for the things of this world. The Count had always regarded him with a good deal of esteem and a certain friendliness; this friendliness, no longer counterbalanced by jealousy, became at this moment something quite akin to devotion. “There’s no denying it, he’s paid dearly for his good fortune,” he said to himself, numbering his disasters. With the excuse of showing him the painting by Parmigianino which the Prince had sent to the Duchess, the Count took Fabrizio aside. “Now, my friend, let us speak man to man: can I be of some help to you? You have no questions to fear from me, but perhaps a certain sum of money can be of use to you, or a certain amount of power? You have only to say the word and I am at your service; if you prefer to write, write to me.”

Fabrizio embraced him warmly and discussed the painting.

“Your behavior is a masterpiece of diplomacy,” the Count remarked to him, returning to the easy style of polite conversation; “you are arranging a fine future for yourself—the Prince respects you, the people venerate you, your frayed little black soutane gives Monsignore Landriani some sleepless nights. I have some experience in such matters, and I can assure you I have no advice to offer which might improve what I see. Your first step in the world at the age of twenty-five has brought you to the pinnacle of perfection. You are spoken of a great deal at Court, and do you know to what you owe this distinction which is altogether unique at your age? To that frayed little black soutane. The Duchess and I possess, as you know, that old house which once belonged to Petrarch, on the woody hillside above the Po; if you are ever weary of the wretched little stratagems of the envious, it has occurred to me that you might be Petrarch’s successor there—his renown will only increase your own.”

The Count was racking his brains to produce a smile on that anchorite’s face, but was unable to do so. What made the transformation more striking was that until recently, if Fabrizio’s countenance possessed one defect, it was to present now and then, quite inappropriately, an expression of pleasure and gaiety.