The Charterhouse of Parma (68 page)

This serious conversation took place the day after Fabrizio’s return to the Palazzo Sanseverina; the Duchess was still appalled by the joy so luminous in all of Fabrizio’s actions. “Incredible!” she said to herself. “That pious little ninny deceived me! She couldn’t hold out against her lover for even three months.”

The certainty of a happy outcome had inspired that cowardly creature, the young Prince, with the courage to love; he had heard something of the preparations for departure being made at the Palazzo Sanseverina; and his French valet, who put little trust in the virtue of great ladies, encouraged him with regard to the Duchess. Ernesto V permitted himself to take a step which was severely reproved by the Princess and indeed by every sensible member of the Court; by commoners it was regarded as the seal of the remarkable favor the Duchess enjoyed. The Prince came to see her in her own
palazzo
.

“You are leaving,” he said to her in a serious tone which the Duchess found odious; “you are leaving: you are betraying me and breaking your word! And yet if I had delayed ten minutes in granting you Fabrizio’s pardon, he would have been a dead man. And you leave me a wretched one! I must confess that without your promises I should never have had the courage to love you as I do! Have you no sense of honor?”

“Just think a moment, Your Highness. In your entire life has there ever been a period equal in happiness to the four months which have just passed? Your glory as a Sovereign and, I daresay, your happiness as a man of feeling have never risen to such a pitch. Here is the compact I propose: if you deign to consent to it, I shall not be your mistress for a fleeting moment and by virtue of a promise extorted from me by fear, but I shall devote every moment of my life to procuring your happiness, I shall always be what I have been the last four months, and perhaps love will come to crown friendship. I would not swear to the contrary.”

“Well then,” said the Prince, delighted, “play another part, be still more than you have been, rule both me and my Kingdom—be my Prime Minister; I offer you the kind of marriage permitted by the regrettable conventions of my rank; we have an example of such a thing close at hand: the King of Naples has just married the Duchess of Partana. I offer you all I can—a marriage of the same sort. I shall add a distressing political consideration to show you that I am no longer a child, and that I have given the matter some thought. I lay no stress on the condition which I impose on myself of being the last Sovereign of my house, and suffering the disappointment of seeing in my lifetime the Great Powers control my succession; I bless these very real disadvantages, since they offer me a further means of proving to you both my esteem and my passion.”

The Duchess did not hesitate for a second; she found the Prince tedious and the Count quite lovable; to him there was only one man in the world she could prefer. Moreover, she ruled the Count, whereas the Prince, yielding to the demands of his rank, would have ruled her, more or less. Then too, he might well turn unfaithful and take mistresses; the difference in their ages might seem, in a few years, to entitle him to take such a step.

From the very first moment, the prospect of boredom had settled the whole matter; nonetheless the Duchess, who sought to be as charming as possible, asked for time to reflect. It would take too long to record here the quasi-tender turns of phrase and the infinitely gracious terms in which she managed to swathe her refusal. The Prince lost his temper; he saw all his happiness escaping him. What would become
of him once the Duchess had left his Court? Besides, how humiliating to be rejected! “After all, what will my French valet say when I tell him of my defeat?”

The Duchess managed to calm the Prince, and little by little to bring the negotiations to her actual terms. “If Your Highness deigns not to demand the fulfillment of a fatal promise, one that is horrible in my eyes, obliging me, as it does, to incur my own contempt, I shall spend my life at his Court, and this Court will always be what it has been this winter; my every moment will be dedicated to contributing to your happiness as a man, and to your glory as a Sovereign. If Your Highness requires me to keep my promise, you will have spoiled the rest of my life, and immediately afterward will see me leave your realm, never to return. The day I shall have lost my honor will also be the last day I shall ever see you.”

But the Prince was stubborn, like all cowards; moreover, his pride as a man and as a Sovereign was vexed by the rejection of his hand; he thought of all the difficulties he would have had to gain acceptance for such a marriage, which he was nonetheless determined to vanquish.

For three hours the same arguments were repeated on either side, frequently mingled with very strong language. The Prince exclaimed: “Do you wish to persuade me, Signora, that you have no sense of honor? Had I hesitated so long the day General Fabio Conti gave poison to Fabrizio, you would even now be erecting a tomb to him in one of the churches of Parma.”

“No, not in Parma, this country of poisoners.”

“Very well then, go, Signora Duchess,” the Prince retorted angrily, “and take my contempt with you.”

As he was leaving, the Duchess said to him in a whisper: “All right, come here at ten tonight, in the strictest incognito, and you shall have your fool’s bargain. You will then have seen me for the last time, though I would have devoted my life to making you as happy as any absolute monarch can be in this Jacobin age. Just think what your Court will be like when I am no longer here to extricate it by force from the boredom and spite which are its natural conditions.”

“For your part, you reject the crown of Parma, and more than the crown, for you would not have been any ordinary Princess, married for
dynastic reasons without love; my heart is entirely yours, and you would have seen yourself ever the absolute mistress of my actions as of my government.”

“Yes, but the Princess your mother would have been in a position to regard me as a vile scheming woman.”

“In that case I would have banished the Princess with a pension.”

There followed another three-quarters of a hour of sharp exchanges. The Prince, who had a sensitive soul, could not bring himself either to use his rights or to allow the Duchess to leave. He had been told that after a first success was obtained, no matter how, all women come round.

Dismissed by the indignant Duchess, he ventured to reappear, trembling and altogether wretched, at three minutes to ten. At ten-thirty, the Duchess stepped into her carriage and left for Bologna. She wrote to the Count once she was beyond Parma’s borders:

Eight days later, the wedding was celebrated in Perugia, in a church where the Count’s ancestors have their tombs. The Prince was in despair. The Duchess had received three or four couriers from him, and had not failed to return his letters, in fresh envelopes, with their seals unbroken. Ernesto V had granted the Count a magnificent pension, and awarded the Grand Cordon of his order to Fabrizio.

“That is what pleased me most in his farewells. We parted,” said the Count to the new Countess Mosca della Rovere, “the best of friends; he awarded me a Spanish Grand Cordon, and gave me some diamonds worth every bit as much as the Cordon. He told me he would make me a Duke, but wanted to keep that in reserve in case he might tempt you
back to his realm. So I have the responsibility of informing you—a fine mission for a husband—that if you deign to return to Parma, even if only for a month, I shall be made a Duke, under any name you choose, and you will have a fine estate.”

Which the Duchess refused with every appearance of horror.

After the scene which had occurred at the Court ball, and which seemed quite decisive, Clélia seemed no longer to remember the love she had appeared to share so briefly; the most violent remorse had seized this virtuous and pious soul. This Fabrizio understood quite well, and despite all the hopes he attempted to sustain, the blackest misery filled his soul. This time, however, such misery did not lead him into retreat, as at the period of Clélia’s marriage.

The Count had requested
his nephew
to keep him well informed as to what was happening at Court, and Fabrizio, who was beginning to realize all he owed him, had promised to carry out this mission in all good faith.

Like everyone in town and at court, Fabrizio had no doubt that his friend intended to return to the Ministry, and with even more power than he had previously wielded. The Count’s anticipations very soon proved to be accurate: less than six weeks after his departure, Rassi was Prime Minister; Fabio Conti, the Minister of War; and the prisons, which the Count had nearly emptied, were teeming once again. The Prince, summoning such men to power, believed he was taking his revenge on the Duchess; he was madly in love and especially detested Count Mosca as his rival.

Fabrizio had a great deal to do; Monsignore Landriani, at the age of seventy-two, had fallen into a dreadful lethargy, and almost never left his Palace, so that it was up to his Coadjutor to perform virtually all his functions.

The Marchesa Crescenzi, overwhelmed with remorse, and alarmed by her spiritual director, had found an excellent way of avoiding Fabrizio’s attentions. Taking as an excuse the last months of her first confinement, she had turned her own Palace into a sort of prison; but this Palace had an enormous garden. Fabrizio managed to make his way there, and placed on Clélia’s favorite path bouquets of flowers arranged
such a way as to convey a message, just as she had once done for him on his last evenings of imprisonment in the Farnese Tower.

The Marchesa was extremely annoyed by this effort; her emotions were swayed now by remorse, now by passion. For several months she did not permit herself to venture into her own Palace garden; she even had scruples about looking down into it.

Fabrizio was beginning to believe he was separated from her forever, and despair seized his soul as well. The world in which he was spending his life seemed to him mortally offensive, and had he not been intimately convinced that the Count could find no peace of mind outside the Ministry, he would have withdrawn to his little apartment in the Archbishop’s Palace. He would have found it sweet to live alone with his thoughts, and no longer to hear human voices, save in the official exercise of his functions. “But,” he said to himself, “in the interests of Count and Countess Mosca, no one can take my place.”

The Prince continued treating him with a distinction which placed him in the first rank at Court, and such favor he owed in large part to himself. The extreme reserve which, in Fabrizio, derived from an indifference mounting almost to disgust for all the affectations or the petty passions which fill men’s lives, had pricked the young Prince’s vanity; he frequently said that Fabrizio was quite as witty as his aunt. The Prince’s candid nature half realized the truth: which is that no one approached him with the same feelings at heart as Fabrizio. What even the most vulgar courtiers could not help noticing was that the consideration accorded Fabrizio was not at all what was due to a mere Coadjutor but even surpassed the attentions which the Sovereign granted the Archbishop. Fabrizio wrote to the Count that if ever the Prince had wit enough to recognize the chaos to which his Ministers Rassi, Fabio Conti, Zurla, and others of that ilk had reduced his affairs, he, Fabrizio, would be the natural channel by which he might alter the situation without excessively compromising his self-esteem.