The Charterhouse of Parma (67 page)

The Count did not let Fabrizio leave without telling him that notwithstanding his retreat, there might be some affectation in not appearing at Court the following Saturday, which was the Princess’s birthday. These words stabbed Fabrizio to the heart. “Good God!” he thought. “What am I doing here in this Palace!” He could not think without shuddering of one encounter he might have at Court. This notion absorbed all others; he realized that his sole recourse would be to arrive at the Palace just when the doors of the salons would be opened.

And so the name of Monsignore del Dongo was one of the first to be announced on the evening of the gala reception, and the Princess received him with the greatest possible distinction. Fabrizio’s eyes were fixed on the clock, and as soon as it indicated the twentieth minute of his presence in that salon and he stood up to take his leave, the Prince entered his mother’s apartments. After paying his respects for some moments, Fabrizio by a clever stratagem once again approached the door, when there occurred, to his misfortune, one of those Court incidents which the Mistress of the Robes was so good at bringing about: the Chamberlain-in-Waiting ran after him to say that he had been chosen to make up the Prince’s whist table. In Parma, this was a signal honor, one far above what the rank of Coadjutor ordinarily received in society. To make up the Prince’s whist table was a sign of favor, even for the Archbishop. At the Chamberlain’s words, Fabrizio felt his heart give way, and though a mortal enemy of any public scene, he was about to observe that he was suffering from a sudden spell of dizziness; but he realized that he would be subject to questions and to sympathies even more intolerable than the card-game. On that day, he had a horror of speaking.

Fortunately the Father Superior of the Minorite Brothers happened to be among the great personages who had come to do honor to
the Princess. This cunning monk, a worthy emulator of
the Fontanas and the Duvoisins
, had taken up his position in a remote corner of the salon; Fabrizio went over to stand in front of him so as not to notice the doorway into the room, and began talking of theological matters. But he could not help hearing Signor the Marchese and Signora the Marchesa Crescenzi being announced. Fabrizio, to his surprise, felt a violent impulse of anger. “If I were Borso Valserra,” he said to himself (this was one of the generals of the first Sforza), “I would go over and stab that fat Marchese here and now, with the very ivory-handled dagger that Clélia gave me on a certain happy day, and that would teach him to show himself with his Marchesa in a place where I happen to be!”

His countenance changed to such a degree that the Father Superior of the Minorite Brothers inquired: “Is Your Excellency feeling unwell?”

“I have a dreadful headache … these bright lights are hurting my eyes … and I’m still here only because I’ve been asked to make up the Prince’s whist table.”

At this remark, the Father Superior of the Minorite Brothers, who was of bourgeois extraction, was so disconcerted that, no longer knowing what to do, he began to bow to Fabrizio, who, for his part, much more troubled than the Father Superior of the Minorite Brothers, began speaking with a strange volubility; he realized that a great silence was forming around him, and he did not want to look. Suddenly a bow tapped a music-stand; a
ritornello
was played, and the famous
Signora P——
sang that once-popular aria by Cimarosa:

Fabrizio withstood the first measures, but soon his anger vanished, and he felt an overpowering need to shed tears. “Good God!” he said to himself. “What an absurd scene! And in my soutane as well!” He believed it was the better part of valor to speak about himself: “These terrible headaches, when I try to resist them, as I am doing this evening,” he said to the Father Superior of the Minorite Brothers, “end
with floods of tears which might provide food for scandal in a man of our condition; in consequence, I beg Your Most Illustrious Reverence to permit me to weep as I look your way without paying me any special attention.”

“Our Father Provincial at Catanzara is afflicted with the same infirmity,” observed the Father Superior of the Minorite Brothers. And he began whispering an endless story.

The absurdity of which, including details of the evening meals of this Father Provincial, brought a smile to Fabrizio’s lips, a phenomenon which had not occurred in a long while; but soon he ceased attending to the Father Superior of the Minorite Brothers. Signora P—— was singing, with heavenly talent, an aria by Pergolesi (the Princess was fond of old-fashioned music). There was a slight noise close to Fabrizio, and for the first time that evening he looked around. The armchair which had just produced this tiny creak on the parquet floor was occupied by the Marchesa Crescenzi, whose tear-filled eyes now met Fabrizio’s, which were in no better condition. The Marchesa looked down; Fabrizio continued to look at her for a few seconds: he was studying that lovely head covered with diamonds; but his gaze expressed rage and disdain. Then, telling himself:
“… and my eyes shall never look upon you.
” he turned back to his Father Superior and said: “Now my infirmity is troubling me worse than ever.”

Indeed, Fabrizio wept bitter tears for over half an hour. Fortunately, a Mozart symphony, dreadfully mangled, as is the custom in Italy, came to his rescue and helped him dry his tears.

He stood fast, and did not glance at the Marchesa Crescenzi; but Signora P—— sang once again, and Fabrizio’s soul, relieved by tears, achieved a state of perfect repose. Life then appeared to him in a new light: “How can I claim,” he asked himself, “to be utterly forgetting her in these very first moments? Could such a thing be possible?” This notion occurred to him: “Can I be any more unhappy than I have been these last two months? And if nothing can increase my sufferings, why resist the pleasure of seeing her? She has forgotten the vows she has made; she is frivolous—are not all women like that? But who could deny her heavenly beauty? The look in her eyes fills me with ecstasy,
while I must force myself to pay any attention to women who are considered the loveliest in Parma! Then why not let myself be enchanted; at least it will be a momentary relief.”

Fabrizio had some knowledge of men, but no experience of the passions, otherwise he would have realized that this momentary pleasure, to which he was about to yield, would render futile all the efforts he had been making to forget Clélia for the past two months.

The poor girl had come to this party only because her husband had obliged her to; after half an hour, she declared she was not feeling well and wanted to leave, but the Marchese told her that to send for his carriage to take her departure, when so many were still arriving, would be quite unprecedented and might even be interpreted as an indirect criticism of the Princess’s party. “As
Cavaliere d’Onore
,” he added, “I must remain at the Princess’s orders here in her salon until everyone has left: there may be, and indeed there doubtless will be, all kinds of orders to be given to the servants, they are so careless! And would you have a mere Equerry usurp that honor?”

Clélia resigned herself; she had not yet seen Fabrizio and still hoped he had not come to this party. But at the moment the music was about to begin, the Princess having permitted the ladies to be seated, Clélia, who paid no attention to such matters of precedence, let all the best chairs near the Princess be taken and was obliged to look for a place at the back of the room, in the very corner where Fabrizio had taken refuge. As she reached her chair, the singular costume in such a place of the Father Superior of the Minorite Brothers caught her eye, and at first she did not notice the slender man wearing a simple black soutane who was talking to him; yet a certain secret movement attracted her glance to this person. “Everyone here has uniforms or gold-embroidered coats: who can this young man in black be?” She was giving him a closer look when a lady, coming to take a seat beside her, caused her chair to move. Fabrizio looked around: she did not recognize him, so changed was his countenance. At first she said to herself: “There’s someone who looks like him, it could be his older brother; but I thought he was only a few years older, and this is a man of forty.” Suddenly she recognized him from a twitch of his lips. “How the poor
fellow must have suffered!” she said to herself, and she looked down in distress—not in order to keep her vow. Her heart was overcome by pity. “He didn’t look anything like that after nine months in prison!” She did not look at him again; but without exactly turning her eyes in his direction, she noticed all his movements.

After the concert, she saw him go over to the Prince’s card table, placed a few steps from the throne; she breathed again when Fabrizio was now some distance away from her.

But the Marchese Crescenzi had been deeply offended to see his wife relegated to a place so far from the throne; all evening he had been busily persuading a lady who was sitting three chairs away from the Princess and whose husband owed him money that she would do well to change places with his wife. When the poor lady resisted, as was only natural, he went to look for the indebted husband, who enabled his better half to hear the sad voice of reason, and at last the Marchese had the pleasure of effecting the exchange, and went to find his wife. “You’re always too self-effacing,” he told her; “why walk that way with your eyes down? People will take you for one of those middle-class women who is surprised to find herself here and whom everyone else is surprised to see here as well! That madwoman of a Mistress of the Robes is always doing such things! Yet people talk of keeping Jacobinism down! You must realize that your own husband occupies the first position among gentlemen at the Princess’s Court; and even if the Republicans managed to suppress the Court, and the nobility as well, your husband would still be the richest man in the country! That is a notion you never keep sufficiently in mind.”

The chair in which the Marchese had the pleasure of installing his wife was only six paces away from the Prince’s card-table; she could see only Fabrizio’s profile, but she found him grown so thin, and above all seeming to be so far above anything likely to happen in this world, he who once let no incident pass without commenting upon it, that Clélia ended by coming to this dreadful conclusion: Fabrizio had altogether changed; he had forgotten her; if he was now so thin, that was the effect of the severe fasting to which his piety subjected him. She was confirmed in this sad conclusion by the conversation of everyone around her: the Coadjutor’s name was on everyone’s lips; everyone
speculated as to the signal favor of which he was the object, young as he was, to make up the Prince’s whist party! People admired the polite indifference and the look of pride with which he tossed down his cards, even when he was trumping His Highness. “That’s really incredible!” exclaimed some old courtiers. “His aunt’s favor has completely turned his head … but thanks be to Heaven, it will not last; our Sovereign hates people to assume those little airs of superiority.”

The Duchess approached the Prince; the courtiers who were standing at a respectful distance from the card-table, unable to hear more than a few random words of the Prince’s conversation, noticed that Fabrizio was blushing a good deal. “His aunt must be teaching him a lesson,” they were thinking, “about those grand airs of his.” Fabrizio had just heard Clélia’s voice; she was answering the Princess, who, in making the rounds of the ballroom, had addressed the wife of her
Cavaliere d’Onore
. The moment came when Fabrizio had to change places at the whist table; he now found himself directly opposite Clélia, and abandoned himself repeatedly to the pleasure of looking at her. The poor Marchesa, feeling his eyes upon her, was quite embarrassed. Several times she forgot about her vow altogether: in her desire to discover what was happening in Fabrizio’s heart, she fixed her eyes upon him.

Now that the Prince’s game of whist was finished, the ladies stood up to proceed into the room where supper was being served. There was a moment of confusion. Fabrizio found himself close to Clélia; he was still quite determined, but he happened to recognize a very faint fragrance which she used on her gowns; this sensation overcame all his resolutions. He approached her and repeated in a whisper, as though to himself, two lines of that sonnet by Petrarch which he had sent her from Lake Maggiore, printed on a silk handkerchief:

“So he has not forgotten me,” Clélia exulted, in a transport of joy. “That beautiful soul has never wavered!” And she ventured to murmur to herself two more lines of
Petrarch
:

The Princess withdrew immediately after supper; the Prince had followed her to her apartments, and did not return to the reception rooms. As soon as this became known, everyone sought to leave at the same time; there was utter confusion in the antechambers; Clélia found herself standing quite close to Fabrizio; the deep melancholy ingrained in his features moved her to pity. “Let us forget the past,” she said to him, “and keep this souvenir of
friendship.
” And with these words, she put out her fan so that he could take it from her.

Everything changed in Fabrizio’s eyes; in an instant he was another man; the very next day he declared that his retreat was concluded, and he returned to occupy his splendid apartment in the Palazzo Sanseverina. The Archbishop said and believed that the favor the Prince had shown him in inviting him to his whist-table had completely turned this new saint’s head; the Duchess realized that he had come to some agreement with Clélia. This thought, coming to redouble the misery afforded by the memory of a fatal promise, quite determined her to absent herself from Court. Her caprice was marveled at: What! Leave the Court just when the favor she was enjoying seemed to have no bounds! The Count, entirely happy since he believed that there was no such thing as love between Fabrizio and the Duchess, said to his friend: “Our new Prince is virtue incarnate, but I used to call him
that child—
will he ever forgive me? I see only one way of returning to his good graces, which is to disappear. I shall show myself to be a model of good manners and the deepest respect, after which I shall be ill and request a leave of absence. You will allow me this, since Fabrizio’s fortunes are now assured. But will you make this great sacrifice for me,” he added with a laugh, “of exchanging the sublime title of Duchess for a much inferior one? For my own amusement, I am leaving affairs here in incredible confusion; I had four or five workmen in my various Ministries—I have pensioned them off during the last two months, for reading the French newspapers, and they have been replaced by incredible dummies.… Following our departure, the Prince will find himself in such difficulties that despite his horror of Rassi’s character,
I have no doubts he will be compelled to recall him, and I myself am merely awaiting orders from the tyrant who disposes of my fate to write a letter of tender friendship to my friend Rassi, informing him that I have every reason to hope that justice will soon be done to his true merits.”